Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
Tommy serves as the President at ThreeWill. In this role, he works with his leadership team to hire the best people, find the right business opportunities, and ensure that ThreeWill delivers for our clients on projects.
Find this Podcast “Coming Soon – Two Bald Brothers and a Microphone” on the ThreeWill Soundcloud, Stitcher, and iTunes.
Transcript
| Danny: | Hello and welcome to the ThreeWill podcast. This is your host, Danny Ryan. I’m here with co-host Tommy Ryan. I said co-host-
|
| Tommy: | You did.
|
| Danny: | You’re not a guest, you’re a co-host.
|
| Tommy: | I didn’t get demoted again.
|
| Danny: | No, no demotion for you. Today’s going to be a fun topic. We have been talking about this for a while, which is sort of rebranding what we’re doing and focusing in on a new podcast. The name for the podcast is, I guess we’ll do a drum roll, please. That’ll work. Two Bald Brothers and a Microphone.
|
| Tommy: | And a Microphone.
|
| Danny: | So, it’s going to be-
|
| Tommy: | Where it’s at.
|
| Danny: | So, Two Bald Brothers and a Microphone. We’ll see, and we’re going to talk about similar things to what we’ve talked about on the ThreeWill podcast, but we’re going to break it off and talk specifically about enterprise collaboration, AKA work together better, AKA people process technology; sort of what we’re seeing with regards to collaboration, and just having conversations.
|
| Not only between you and I, because I love sitting and chatting with you, but also want to pull in some of our customers and pull in some of the people we’re seeing in the industry who are doing some innovative things and hearing from them and learning from them, and pulling them into the conversation. So, look forward to doing that. You excited about this, Tom?
| |
| Tommy: | Yeah, yeah. I think it is the topic. It’s the thing that we’re passionate about and I think honing in on that and talking more about collaboration and what works, what doesn’t work, and what are we kicking the tires with in our organization, how’s that translating to what our customers do, and depending on the type of customer. It is a situational thing. Not every tool is the right tool for an organization and Microsoft’s got quite an array of collaborative technologies to leverage.
|
| Danny: | I think it’s going to be good. You know, part of who I am is trying to be as authentic as I can be about what works well, what doesn’t work well, what don’t I understand, what am I trying to learn about. I think in this podcast, it’ll be … you know, we’re not trying to sell something, per se. We’re really just trying to have a good dialog about collaboration and really stick to what are some of our wants, what are some of our needs, what are we hearing from people, and just sharing like, where are we really, where it’s at.
|
| Where are people at with all this stuff, you know? Are people still just primarily using email? How are people collaborating? How are people dealing with generational … you know, different people, different generations. All that sort of stuff. Just diving in to it, not only with just you and I, but also with folks we get to work with.
| |
| Tommy: | Yeah, and it’s a thing that you see, marketing of these different tools and demos of these different tools, and things look great on the surface and then, you really want to know what’s working. What really gets traction, what’s providing value, what seems to be a distraction, what gets people engaged.
|
| Because it’s all about the number of people that are on that network, on that platform that provides the value, so if it’s not becoming an adopted solution, then it’s not going to be something that’s going to provide value at the end of the day because it is a factor of the number of people and how often they get on the network to share and contribute to solving problems in an organization.
| |
| Danny: | Some of the goals for this new podcast that I wanted to sort of talk through with you, it seems like it’s really pretty difficult … like this is a one-way conversation. It’s you and I and someone’s listening to this. I really want to figure out how to better incorporate input from people who are listening to the podcast, so-
|
| Tommy: | Are we going to do this live and have a chat room?
|
| Danny: | Oh, jeez. Do we really want to do that? Well, we could, I guess. We’ll do it like on the Facebook 360 things where you can give the [crosstalk 00:04:35]
|
| Tommy: | Yeah, on the Twitter stream. You know, a hashtag: Three Bald Brothers and a Microphone.
|
| Danny: | You want to try something like that? It’s going to-
|
| Tommy: | I’m just giving you ideas. I’m too busy. I’m the idea guy. Back off, buddy.
|
| Danny: | If you don’t know Tommy and I very well, I start things. Tommy finishes things. Thank goodness for the two of us. We’re a mean team here.
|
| Tommy: | Right.
|
| Danny: | I think what we’ve done in the past with having discussed comments, it’s just not seeing very much engagement there. We’ve had some really good … as we posted it up into the iTunes store, we’ve got some good ratings which, hey, love that. Keep that coming, but not really a whole lot of interaction.
|
| That’s one of the things I would hope for is just the sort of learning together, that type of idea. I think it’s always better when … if you’re sort of all mulling on similar ideas, all mulling together on similar topics, not similar ideas but something where we’re working together to learn something new.
| |
| Tommy: | Yeah, and we could get ideas like soliciting for questions from the audience, finding ways for people to easily contribute to the conversation. That’s hard to do, it takes effort but hopefully we can get some momentum with that because we know at the end of the day, we’re talking about collaboration, and it’s always better to have more people in the conversation, so it’ll be interesting to see how we can get that kind of kicked up a notch.
|
| Danny: | The things that Tommy and I have to add to the conversation, when I look at sort of what … as we’re starting these discussions and coming up with topics and whatnot, Tommy and I, are both of our backgrounds are we’ve been doing collaborative apps since the beginning of the company. Even before then, so 2001. It’s been primarily Microsoft focused, although there’s been a couple of other products that we’ve been working with through the years, but a lot of our background is around the Microsoft collaboration products.
|
| A lot of our process-wise is around Scrum and talking about how we’re using Scrum on projects. If we’re talking about collaborating, if we’re talking about working together, we have to talk about the process. We have to talk about how do you decide what you’re going after and how do you do that as a group of people. The other thing is, is you and I, we’re small business owners, so you and I could talk for a long time about running a small business, some of the different things that are just a part of a small business.
| |
| I think we’ll incorporate some of that stuff, but I think more that what we’ll be doing is learning from our larger enterprise clients and also trying to share what we’ve learned from them, hopefully through interviews and hopefully through conversations that we’re having with people.
| |
| Tommy: | Yeah, yeah. I think if we can hone in that work together better, and help people understand how collaboration works at different scales, and really try to get feedback on what is working, either through community feedback or interviews that we do, because it’s always better if we work together as a team outside of ThreeWill with other people in the space, other consulting companies, other companies that are building collaborative type solutions and products, and customers that are out there that try to get this to work in their organization.
|
| What are the barriers of adoption, and what is the right level of investment, and how do you keep it simple? We know there’s always not a lack of tools, it’s what are the right combination of tools that are going to maximize the impact of collaboration in the organization.
| |
| Danny: | If you’re somebody who is interested in doing an upcoming episode together where you get to talk to Two Bald Brothers, that’s something that will … I’ll start to put some more information out there. Obviously, a lot of this will be channeled through the ThreeWill website. I’ll break this off into its own separate podcast, so you’ll go to ThreeWill.com/podcast and once we’ve got the things up and running, you’ll see another option for the Two Bald Brothers podcast.
|
| I can’t wait to hear the intro/outro music for this that we’re working on, I’m looking forward to the new graphics that we’ll be putting together, but maybe ending with this is, along with sort of the theme of Two Bald Brothers is taking things a little lightly, is having a little bit of fun with this too. If every once in a while, since we’re brothers, we could break out into a good fist fight, that would be nice.
| |
| Tommy: | I’ve been working out a lot, Danny. I’m not sure if I’d encourage that.
|
| Danny: | Oh crap, [crosstalk 00:09:46] oh no, oh no. So yes, if you hear a mic drop to the floor and then all of a sudden you hear “thud-thud-thud-thud-thud,” and then maybe some nice language, it might be that Tommy and I are just, you know, getting the stress out. We’re just working the stress out. It’s really stressful being in a small business. Just kidding. I just want to have some fun with it as well, because I think it’s always more enjoyable to listen to somebody who’s having a good time.
|
| Tommy: | That’s right. I do my best, Danny.
|
| Danny: | Okay, I’ll tickle you every once in a while, Tommy.
|
| Tommy: | I thought I was just here for the facts.
|
| Danny: | No, I wanted to tease you more than the facts. Yeah, for a good time, you can cut back and relax. You can go with the best-
|
| Tommy: | Yeah, look at my socks.
|
| Danny: | Look at your socks. Yeah, I think that’s the thing, why I was thinking about video is because we’ve got to show off our socks, we can’t sit here and talk to them … Either I’ve got to take a picture of them, or do something to be able to-
|
| Tommy: | You keep on threatening to do that.
|
| Danny: | I know, it’s threatening. Like people really want to look at our faces, but who knows, maybe we’ll work it out. You were always the better looking brother, although I joke about it nowadays because it really does hurt, but … You won best looking, right? Did you win best looking in high school?
|
| Tommy: | I don’t say that too often.
|
| Danny: | Oh, you did. You did. You won best looking, right?
|
| Tommy: | Yeah. And then I went bald.
|
| Danny: | Then you went bald. Well, you know, you used that to your advantage. You married a beautiful woman-
|
| Tommy: | Yes.
|
| Danny: | You did what you needed to do. Folks, you’ll be seeing more come out on this, and appreciate you taking the time today just to learn about things. Things are very busy here at ThreeWill, lots of stuff going on, especially with the Jive getting purchased this past week, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.
|
| Definitely if you’re looking to do a Jive-to-Microsoft migration, we know a great company you should reach out and talk to, because they’re really good at that. With that, we’ll call it a day. Thank you so much everybody for listening, thanks Tommy.
| |
| Tommy: | Goodbye, and adios.
|
| Danny: | Goodbye, and adios.
|
