John Miles
speaker
649 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard 18 Jun
John Miles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I kind of saw myself being out there and living this life of exhilaration, et cetera. And for me, that's exactly how my life was going up until about the age 28. I had gone to the Naval Academy, had spent time as a military officer where I was working at the counter-drug mecca for the United States.
And in this command, we had all these different law enforcement entities and intelligence entities, and they all asked me to apply. And here I am making this choice of, do I want to go to the DEA, NSA, FBI, et cetera? And I ended up taking the route of becoming an FBI agent.
And it was literally a few days from going to Quantico when my detailer called me out of the blue and said, I've got some unfortunate news for you. Congress can't get their act together. You use stronger words than that. And your class has unfortunately been recycled. And to my nativity, I thought,
He was telling me I had a couple month delay and it ended up being closer to a four year, three and a half to four year delay. And by the time that the opportunity represented itself, I had been forced to take a plan B when this plan A vanished in front of me and that plan B.
B ended up becoming then the next 20 to 25 years of my career, a career that I never thought I was going to get into and was kind of forced to go into because of circumstances beyond my control.
Well, I think when we get immersed in it, we don't really think that way. I guess I always had this mentality, regardless of what I did, I always aspired to do the best job that I possibly could. So before long, I had really excelled at what I was doing and was on this rocket ship climb to the top, so to speak.
Yeah, well, it's funny. I think almost everyone who goes to the Naval Academy is an athlete. Yeah, I was highly recruited to be a cross-country and track runner, and that's where I got my start.
I would like to even go a little bit before I went to the Naval Academy. Please. When I was coming out of middle school, going into high school, I had always been kind of this chubby kid. And my salvation from that was I had always been a hard worker. My family kind of gave us the basics and anything beyond that. We were kind of called upon to find our own way.
And so when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I actually started a paper route. And having to do that paper route every day and get that exercise in kind of reshaped my trajectory. But I still wasn't where I wanted to be going into high school. And so I thought, I'll try this cross-country thing, never expecting to be any good at it. When I first started, the seniors on the team had...
no dedication or wherewithal to make us a top performing team. And yet there was this group of sophomores and juniors on the team who were really serious about what they were doing. And I started to watch them and wanted to be like them. And the more I started to enter their circle, which was difficult because they were faster than me.
So it meant that if I were going to go out on a training run with them, it was really difficult trying to keep up. I stuck with it. And the more I stuck with it, the more I started learning that not only were they working out there, but they were also doing things outside of practice, such as trying to get good sleep, trying to eat well, and were really so supportive of each other.
So they were trying to make Hmm. I had a huge issue at first where I was psyching myself out so much before races to the point that I would get physically sick. And I started to approach practice as if it was a race. And it completely changed. The way I've lived my life up until this day, because if you start treating every day as if it's a game day, you don't have that anxiety anymore.
So those things were kind of a foundation that when I went to the Naval Academy, I was so glad I had.
Well, I started out at Booz Allen and then Anderson Consulting. So I got to work in a lot of large companies, ExxonMobil, Halliburton, companies of that size. But I was also, by the time I got to Anderson, I started practice focused on high growth mid-market companies. So I was also working on WebMD in the very early days and other startups like that mid-sized companies.
So I was lucky enough that I had experience doing both. I started a company called Lendlease, headquartered out of Australia. And when I started with them, they had about a $15 billion revenue. They were part financial institution. They own the second largest bank in Australia. They had a whole portfolio of mutual funds.
They also had a real estate investment trust area that fueled the other side of their business, which was property management and construction. And then from there, I went to Lowe's, where I initially was brought in to fix what had preceded me as the largest hacking incident in retail history.
and went on from that to lead all application development and then eventually all big data and integration for them. And then that led me to becoming a CIO at Dell.
So I'll take us all back to 2011. I was in the process of leaving Dell because so much of our business model was wed to Microsoft. I had met Steve Ballmer a number of times, who's the former CEO of Microsoft. And When Steve heard I was leaving, he asked me to come to Microsoft to become the CIO. And as any of these things are, it's not as easy a process as Steve says.
He wants you in this position, and it just happens. So for me, this amounted into something like 16 to 20 interviews that I had to go through. And what I found was that Microsoft at that time had a very fixed mindset. And they really couldn't see how to do things a different way.
And on top of that, Balmer had this leadership style where he used his size, he's a large man, his large voice and his intimidation to get things done. So that's how the rank and file were treating many of the employees underneath them was really an era of intimidation to get things done. And I met this man who had been there for...
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