How NetApp CEO George Kurian Turns Disruption into Opportunity

George Kurian: The prevailing philosophy is companies are great for one era and then that era concludes, and they essentially become the walking dead. The most important thing that you've gotta get the organization through is that when the model of the world around you changes, it's an opportunity, not a threat.

David Young: George, welcome to the conversation today. Very delighted to have you joining us.

George Kurian: Thank you so much for having me, Davey. It's good to meet you and good to speak with you.

David Young: So George, let's start by talking about your leadership journey and the experiences that have shaped the way you lead. Your career has taken you from software engineering to product management at Oracle to leadership positions, including leadership roles at Cisco and ultimately now to NetApp.

You joined NetApp in 2011, initially leading its storage solutions group, and you became CEO in 2015. Tell us a little bit more about this incredible career journey, George, and the experiences along the way that have prepared you to lead NetApp.

George Kurian: My life's journey, of which my professional journey is a part, was shaped by my early mentors, of course my parents and my teachers, who I learned the importance of personal discipline and accountability and the values that I have.

With regard to my professional career, it began when I was at college, where I worked to pay my way through college, both undergraduate school and business school, and I worked a lot. I worked about 35 to 40 hours a week. And it taught me the importance of time management, of teamwork, of team management, and the first steps into kind of leadership.

I learned at Oracle the importance of customer empathy. You could build a lot of technology solutions and products, but if you didn't build them with the soul of the customer and their challenge that you're trying to help them address, you would miss the mark. And then at McKinsey, yeah, I learned the importance of very quickly understanding what was most important in a particular situation and then aligning the organization to work together to address that. And all of those experiences have helped me in my journey to be here at NetApp.

David Young: George, it's really interesting how you talk about time management, teamwork, also customer empathy, and we'll get into that momentarily. You've also spoken about making difficult decisions before the answers are obvious, and I think that's probably a pivotal role of being a successful CEO.

But also listening carefully and this point of showing empathy for people who have to make those decisions, but also people that are affected by those decisions. How do you know when it's time to make the tough decisions, and how do you balance decisiveness and having empathy for the people affected by some of the decisions you have to make?

George Kurian: It's a great question. I think in our industry, especially when things move fast, we look at three or four things. The first is you've got to decide what the strategic relevance is of a particular disruption or a trend or a request from a client to our business. And if it's not relevant, you need to be clear about why it's not relevant, right?

And then if it is relevant, even if it's difficult for our business to absorb, if it's the right long-term thing for our clients, you've gotta lean into it. I think with regard to uncertainty, what we look at is it truly uncertain what the outcome is, or is there a point in time where it becomes more clear?

For example, if there is legislation or regulation, you wait for a degree of clarity on that. And sometimes the most important thing is not to do something. You just want to wait, right? And then there's also no regrets moves that you can make regardless of what the outcome is to move the ball down the field. And so we have a portfolio of techniques we use to decide under uncertainty what's the right path forward.

And then I think the two other steps are, one is that the hardest thing is when you have to say no, and I think for the CEO, that is the most important responsibility, that you have to be able to say no to things that teams have worked on or no to things that teams want to start to work on.

And I think there, the most important thing is not to spin it, right? To be authentic. To be able to connect with people. I've had those situations where I've worked on something for a long time and it hasn't come to fruition, and to be able to connect emotionally with what people feel like. And I think the more authentic you are and the more clear you can be in terms of explaining why you had to make that decision, the more people can understand it.

David Young: Yeah. Fantastic lessons, not to spin it and be authentic and identify the strategic relevance, which kind of connects to the importance of prioritization as you move forward. That's right. I'm really curious to this. So you've led NetApp through enormous technological change, both internally and the broader macro environment, from the rise of cloud computing to now today's AI revolution.

What have you learned about leading an established company, an established brand through times of disruption? And I guess my question here is how do you protect yourself from not getting carried away with technological change while preserving the historical core and values and mission and purpose of kind of the foundations underpinning NetApp? Because surely it pulls you in two different ways. I'm just super curious as to how do you balance the two?

George Kurian: It's one of the hardest questions. And I think in the tech industry, the prevailing philosophy is companies are great for one era and then that era concludes, and they essentially become the walking dead, right?

They can still be profitable but they're not part of the future. When I joined NetApp, it was important to me that, my children went to Quaker school, and one of the things I learned from the Quakers was the importance of stewardship and the importance of being able to curate what was once beautiful and renew it for the future.

And so I thought I'd bring that to our organization. We were dominant and really great at one era and then things had changed. And I think the two or three important things that we had to grapple with was, one, we knew cloud computing was really important to our clients and they wanted to use the cloud.

The second was we had to really understand our role in the cloud. Many of our competitors decided that the cloud providers were their enemies or that they were going to build a complete cloud stack to compete with them. And we were very disciplined about how we thought about our relevance. We said, "Hey, we are going to deliver our software on the cloud to serve our clients."

And so we decided to partner with the big cloud providers. And because we were really the best in the world at a specific set of things, they chose to partner with us. And then I think the most important thing that you've gotta get the organization through is that when the model of the world around you changes, it's an opportunity, not a threat, right?

I think people in organizations that have been super successful in one era have their ego, their personal identities tied up with that era, and you have to coax people through it. And I think there is a freedom and a sense of liberation and this youthfulness that the new era creates that you can embrace. And so those are all the things that we had to do.

David Young: George, AI is obviously creating another profound period of disruption. At the heart of that transformation is data: how companies organize it, protect it, and ultimately how they turn that data into a business value that can be operationalized and used.

You've encouraged CEOs to begin not necessarily with the technology itself but where AI can have the greatest impact on their business, and then how can they build the data, organize it, and also the importance of the governance foundation needed to support the data moving forward. As CEOs race to capitalize now on AI, where do you think they should start focusing to create real business value?

Connected to this question, what do they risk getting wrong if they move ahead without the right data and governance foundations and potentially moving too quickly without proper prioritization and thoughtfulness?

George Kurian: Yeah, it's a discussion we have with our clients and also internally at NetApp every single day. I think the first and most important thing is that AI-led transformation of businesses and society and is really about leadership and values, right? It really is a leadership challenge. And so when you start with thinking about it that way, the technology becomes an enabler, but you really got to think about your strategy as a fundamental part of it.

You need to think about whether AI fundamentally transforms the industry value chain and disrupts your own business. And so that has implications for how you think about AI or whether AI changes the work, how work gets done in your organization and/or both, and multiple other aspects of it.

And so the first thing that you need to think about is you cannot really say AI changes everything in the business. That's an easy strategic position to take. But the reality is to accomplish transformation, you need to pick one or two big ideas, right? Maybe it is, "I'm going to help build products and solutions that help our customers use AI effectively," or, "I'm going to transform one or two big functions, the way the work gets done, so that I can learn and be empathetic to how customers apply AI in my ability to serve them," right? So those could be two pivots. Yeah. I think the second is you need to be able to set up the operating model that allows you to experiment, learn, and move fast.

And there you generally say you've got to have a functional stakeholder as the sponsor. You've got to have a center of excellence so that you can experiment with technologies, get compliance and governance to move fast. And then two other important elements, right?

One is the reason data is really important is models hallucinate if they don't understand the context of your business, if you don't have them use curated data that your business provides. And if they don't have that special training on your data, they can make big mistakes in the recommendations they make or the actions they take. So that's really important.

And then associated with that, you've got to be sure that you've got the right controls around your data, right? These models are able to exploit vulnerabilities, not because of their own sort of sense of agency, but really because the humans that have built those models have not put the right sandboxes and guardrails around them.

And so we work with our clients on both. How do you get your data organized and curated so that the models don't hallucinate, and how do we help as part of a multi-layer framework to govern and control access to your data?

David Young: I heard a saying recently that resonates, George, with what you said here. Someone said to me, a CEO said recently, "AI is not a strategy."

George Kurian: Right. Correct.

David Young: Which got me smiling.

George Kurian: That's exactly right.

David Young: And so my follow-on question here connects to what you've just said. Data is obviously becoming more valuable, therefore protecting it becomes more consequential and arguably more important.

Cyber attacks and ransomware are continuing to disrupt operations and compromising sensitive information and threatening trust in institutions, and it's hard to see the importance of addressing cybersecurity not increasing. You guys have increasingly integrated security and ransomware protection into your data infrastructure strategy.

Curious here, when you sit down with your partners and your clients, and you're sitting down with fellow CEOs and your peers looking at best ways to collaborate, how are you helping CEOs think differently about what comes next in terms of how should they start approaching cyber resilience today? And maybe not today. How should it be approached tomorrow, and what does it take to build an organization that can withstand and recover from increasingly sophisticated threats?

George Kurian: Yeah, I think there's three or four things we talk to the, you know, executives that are clients.

The first is you cannot pass on your responsibility for safety, security, governance, and control of your assets on behalf of your stakeholders, right? The model builders and the regulators are responsible for making sure that their part of the bargain is supervised and done well, but that doesn't preclude the enterprise from having its own responsibility, and that's the first thing.

You have to say, "Hey, listen, we as a enterprise leadership group have a responsibility." The second is what we talk to our clients about is the importance of moving from a cybersecurity posture, where you're building a fortress around you, to a cyber resilience posture, which says that even if I build a fortress, I'm likely going to get compromised.

And so how do I recover from being compromised as opposed to saying I won't get compromised? And that's an important set of strategic posture changes that our clients need to go through, and we're not the only ones talking to them about it. And then the third elements are to recognize that the speed of the attack is much faster, right?

It used to be that it would take days for an attacker to figure out what's vulnerable and then compromise you. That number has come down inexorably to now where it could happen in a few minutes. And so what we tell clients is the identity systems that you built your security posture around can be compromised because an AI-enabled phishing attack is way more likely to succeed than not.

And so your response has to be to protect your assets, whether it's your data, your customer identification, or whatever it is, right when and where it's created, or right when and where it's being accessed. And we have built threat protection mechanisms to instantly detect and to kinda block access to data that shouldn't be accessed.

David Young: George, you mentioned protecting assets. I've long thought that culture of a company should also be considered an asset-

George Kurian: Absolutely ...

David Young: And is critical to any and all strategic operations of a business. NetApp has long been known for its distinctive, innovative culture. The company emphasizes belonging, a growth mindset, and creating an environment where employees can challenge one another, but do so respectfully and to solve problems together.

You've also identified risk taking as essential to innovation, recognizing that trying new things inevitably means people will sometimes make mistakes. How do you find that balance? How do you create a culture where people from different backgrounds feel empowered to contribute, take risks, and inevitably sometimes fail, while also maintaining high expectations for individual and company performance?

George Kurian: It's one of the hardest things you have to do. I think that on the first topic, our view is that it takes a team to succeed, right? It takes a team of multiple people from multiple backgrounds and functional expertise to really build the right solution for customers. And so everyone has an opportunity to contribute, because every idea can help improve the outcome.

And so that's my belief set and we try to have our organization as a whole reflect that. I think one source of pride for us is we have done acquisitions in the past. We haven't been a massive acquirer but we have done quite a few. And so many of those acquired companies' employees stay at netApp for a very long time because they feel that they are part of the company, right? I think the second is to innovate you have to take some amount of risk. We think hard about what types of risk to take but it's inherent in the nature of innovation. And so what we look at is it's okay to make mistakes but it's important to learn from them.

And I think the people that either don't do their best or have a huge ego and are not willing to learn from their mistakes, they're the ones that we have a really tough discussion with and sometimes ask them to leave because it's okay to make mistakes so long as you're doing your best, you understand the landscape and are adjusting appropriately, and that you're willing to acknowledge and learn from it.

And listen, I've made my share, and I think people have been willing to tolerate their CEO making mistakes, and so I've got in turn to be able to be respectful of people trying and making mistakes on their end.

David Young: Yeah, leading by example. It's hard, George, to have a conversation around AI without talking about workforce and the potential workforce. It's a big worry out there in society at the moment. As AI continues to transform jobs and roles and the skills companies need, what responsibility do business leaders have to help people adapt to this new, somewhat unfamiliar environment, and to ensure that technological progress creates broader opportunities and new opportunities rather than leaving it behind? And how are you navigating some of these really tremendous challenges?

George Kurian: Yeah, I think first of all that there's a role for values, for humility, for leadership at moments like this. I think that when you are the leader of a technology company, you've got to be careful about what you say unless you really have the facts to support your opinions, right?

Because otherwise you create, how would I say it? You would create concerns that may not happen. You create disruption in the broader community. And so I think there is a role for measured leadership and judgment and values. I think the second is, as a leader of an institution, you've got to curate the institution and build it for a tenure that is much longer than your own, right?

And so you are a steward to whom this institution is given as part of a team, but that institution needs to endure long after you are there. So if you put that mindset on, you really think hard about the fact that you need young people to be part of this institution because I'm not going to be here forever, right?

And so you've got to think about the generations of the future. And I think that, to be transparent, I think that the ideas that our future is all about autonomous agents without people and young people who know them and can govern them, I think is just misguided, right? And so it's important to do that and it's important that we have the ability to curate that pipeline of future employees who know how to work with these tools.

And so we have a robust intern program. We encourage our technologists to go with the universities in the locations that we operate to teach them about, "Hey, how do you use AI to do product development?" Or, "How does AI affect the kind of systems that clients want?" So that there's a future generation of technologists to come.

And then we also work with the K through 12 schools with a program called Data Explorers that helps them, young kids, learn how data can be used to understand the weather or to think about sports teams and so on. And it's been a privilege to see these young kids really grapple with data problems.

And so I do think that we have a responsibility as an industry, you have a responsibility as a leader of an institution, and you have a responsibility as a member of society. And it's Important that we play our roles properly at this point in time.

David Young: Yeah. Very well said, George. I have a two-part closing reflection question for you.

Over more than a decade now, you've been the CEO at NetApp. You've led the organization through multiple waves of technological change, yet throughout your career you've emphasized that leadership is ultimately about helping the broader team in order to move the company forward. So two, a two-part, with that kind of prelude, a two-part question for you.

What have you learned about leadership that you wish you had understood when you first took the job? And as you look ahead, what gives you optimism about the future?

George Kurian: I think that on the first topic, what have I learned about leadership is that to get to leadership positions, people are often chosen because of their capability, individual contribution, and their expertise at a particular topic.

And I've learned, especially as I've grown more and more senior in my role, that at the top of a company, and frankly at the top of a team, you really need to be the least expert in the room. You need to surround yourself with people who are stronger than yourself. And the wisdom that you bring is either from experience or from the ability to hold multiple conflicting perspectives in your head and be okay with it so that you can get the right outcome from everybody involved.

And I think the humility to realize that you're not the expert on any topic is something that's important to get right early and to be okay with it. And so that's probably the biggest leadership lesson, that the success of the team matters enormously far more than the success of an individual, right?

There's nothing more exciting for me than to see our team on stage at our customer events, showcasing the things we've built or to see the delight in our field teams who meet with clients, being able to explain how they've helped solve a really important client problem. And so that's important to get right, that your success is really to make the people around you better and more successful.

And I think with regard to what gives me optimism. Listen, I look at the young kids, I have two of my own, and I look at their generation, and I think they have a lot of perspectives about the world as a community and about bringing more social justice and bringing the rewards of success and the technologies that we have to everybody in a way that our generation probably was more focused on competition and individual institutional success.

And I think that's actually a really healthy outlook. And I wish for them that I think they will be better stewards of the world to come than we have been.

David Young: Yeah, very encouraging words to end on. If the next generation can become better stewards of the world moving forward, it would be a wonderful place to be.

George Kurian, CEO of NetApp. George, thank you so much for your insights, reflections, and thoughts, and just your openness and general honesty. Having got to know you recently, you're a remarkable man. You've had an incredible leadership journey. We wish you all the best moving forward, and especially many congratulations from all of us at The Conference Board on being a recipient of our distinguished leadership awards. We look forward to celebrating you and the entire NetApp family in New York this October. Many congratulations, George, and thank you for joining us today.

George Kurian: Thank you for having me.