Lead In 30 Podcast

The Memphis Plant & The Leader Who Transformed It

• Russ Hill

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Have we lost our sense of urgency? That's the uncomfortable question at the heart of this eye-opening episode featuring an exclusive preview from Lone Rock Leadership's upcoming book "Deliver."

Step into the cracked pavement and broken windows of an abandoned factory outside Memphis where something extraordinary happened. In just 122 days, a team transformed this derelict appliance plant into the world's most powerful AI supercomputer—a feat industry standards suggested should take 18-24 months minimum.

"We need to think back to the 22 or 25-year-old version of us—how hungry we were, what we were willing to do, the drive and speed at which we worked," Russ challenges. As we navigate the second half of the year, whether we hit our annual goals depends on our leadership approach, mentality, and sense of urgency.

Ready to transform your team's pace and execution? Listen now to this behind-the-scenes preview of the book that promises to change how leaders think about delivering results. Then share this episode with a colleague who needs to hear this message of momentum and possibility.

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About the podcast:
The Lead In 30 Podcast with Russ Hill is for leaders of teams who want to grow and accelerate their results. In each episode, Russ Hill shares what he's learned consulting executives. Subscribe to get two new episodes every week. To connect with Russ message him on LinkedIn!



Speaker 1:

What they accomplished outside of Memphis in just 122 days is a message to the rest of us that we and the organizations we lead are moving way too slow.

Speaker 2:

This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill. You cannot be serious. Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes You're listening to.

Speaker 3:

Lead in 30. Lead through change. Choose to be powerful. Make decisions faster and with buy-in. Check out the new 30-day leadership courses now available from Lone Rock Leadership. You can watch the preview videos right now at lonerockio.

Speaker 1:

Yes, you can. Three new courses Adapt in 30, power in 30, decide in 30. They join our foundational course of Lead in 30 at lonerockio. If you want more information, go there and check it out. We've got a video for each one. It's like a minute or two long. That give you a summary of it. Check it out, see if it's something that you think the mid-level managers in your organization need to, um, need to participate in.

Speaker 1:

Okay, um, welcome in to the lead in 30 podcast. In less than 30 minutes, we give you something to think about, a framework, an example, a story, something to help upgrade the way that you lead others. Nothing has a more more broad, broader impact on your life, your legacy, your lifestyle, your ability to deliver results than your ability to lead others. So we're working on it. We're upgrading it each, each episode. I make my living coaching, consulting senior executive teams at some of the world's biggest companies. I'm just one of the members of the team at Lone Rock Leadership and so excited to be able to share some of what we're learning. Okay, here's what we're doing in this episode. I'm actually going to play for you a clip of the audio book our new book deliver. Our new book deliver. That's coming out.

Speaker 1:

Um, as uh, as I'm recording this, we're getting ready. By the time actually this goes out, we will have the um they call it the advanced copy of the manuscript. It hasn't been um edited down yet, like it. It still needs to go through copy editor, still needs to be typeset all these fancy terms in the publishing industry before it actually gets printed by the publisher and sent out and available on Amazon and everywhere else, which is that's just weeks away, like we're in. I mean, basically we're like week 38, uh, and the baby's coming in week 40. Right, so we are getting ready and we are feeling well not that we would know as men what it feels like uh, we just get to watch our spouses, partners, wives, whomever, give birth. I've done it four times, uh, in our family and I all I know is that looks like discomfort and nobody's happy at that period, and we're just ready for this thing to come out, this baby to be born, and that's the way we feel as the coauthors on this book. So, um, I'm going to set up a little bit and then set it up a little bit and I'm just going to play a clip for you.

Speaker 1:

So we've got the advanced manuscript in the hands of like 40 or 50 executives, different, different, uh folks in different industries. Right now they're reading it at the time that this episode is going to go out and they give us feedback on it like, hey, this, this part of the book was insanely good, this part dragged a little bit, this was, oh my gosh, or they call the whole thing ugly. And then we just cry and we pretend this episode never happened and that we didn't work on a book for four years. Um, so, anyway, the advanced copies out, then what the process is. Then we go in, we make some final adjustments to it. Um, we should have the cover done, um, any day now, which I'm super excited about. We're going through different rounds of edits on that and then, and then you get the book typeset. They make the design and all that, and through copy editors making sure that the grammar and duplications all fixed and then, boom, it's out.

Speaker 1:

So, um, the backstory on deliver our next book is that this is the one skill we are failing to teach mid-level managers. We've taught them all these soft skills about how to build trust, how to discover their why, what their personality profile or letters are E, w, n, j, whatever. We teach them how to have difficult conversations, we teach them about how to get above the line. We teach them about all these things, and the one thing that we're failing in most organizations to teach them about, train them on, develop them around, is how to stink and deliver, because they are promoted or let go if based on their ability to deliver results, outcomes, right. And yet you look at the whole training industry, of which you know, we launched a company five years ago. We were doing executive executive consulting forever, but then we launched this.

Speaker 1:

Uh, this years ago, we were doing executive consulting forever, but then we launched this company with just off-the-shelf training solutions, and now we've put tens of thousands of people through Lead in 30. And now these other core competencies that dip into the frameworks and models we've been using with our executive team clients forever. Now we make that available to mid-level managers, which is like insane, it's awesome. And so we've had using with our executive team clients forever. Now we make that available to mid-level managers, which is like insane, it's awesome. And so we've had the team working literally for a year now, non-stop, night and day, weekends, around the clock. They can tell you about it, um, and we've shot over, I mean, just a gazillion videos. I think we're up to like 80. I think we'll cross the 20, 40. I think we'll cross the hundred video mark shot in less than four months, within within a week, of this episode coming out. We've been massively ramping up to be able to make all of this. We've had these, we've been teaching these core concepts forever, but we haven't made them available off the shelf until now and we've had little courses and this, that and the other. But now we're upgrading all of that and massively refreshing it and getting it out Anyway.

Speaker 1:

So Deliver is our book about delivering results. It really is the book that accompanies Lead in 30, clarity, alignment and Movement. So I'm going to play for you the audio book of maybe a third or fourth of chapter 14. This is deep in the book and it's a story that we uncovered in the research that that happened outside of memphis, an ai company and uh, and so I'm not going to say much more other than this is way deep. Obviously, chapter 14 we've already established different leadership modes. We've already talked about clarity and alignment in depth, and now we're in movement, which I've been talking about a lot in the last few episodes of this podcast and, uh, and I'm going to play for you a chapter or a part of a chapter and this is read you all. Um, you would, I shouldn't even tell you this, actually, I'm going to tell you after you listen to it. So I'm going to play the audio for you. This is, um, a story. We go pretty in depth on it.

Speaker 1:

You can listen to it in a in a little faster speed If you want to, if that's your style with audio books. You know 1.25 or or two, two times speed. I really like like 1.25 or 1.5 to always like way too fast for me. I can't even, I can't even comprehend it. Um, I get the gist of it, but I'm not going to apply anything at 2.0 speed. So 1.25 or 1.5 is really good for me. So you might want to up the speed. Listen to this portion of the book on movement and I'll come back and say a few things after it. Here we go, chapter 14,.

Speaker 3:

Building the AI Supercomputer. Weeds sprout from cracks in the asphalt, like nature reclaiming what industry abandoned. Broken windows stare across the Mississippi Delta, reflecting nothing but emptiness. This parking lot once held thousands of cars belonging to workers who built America's washing machines and dishwashers. Now it hosts only windblown debris and the occasional scavenging bird. Inside the cavernous facility, machinery sits frozen mid-assembly, as if workers vanished mid-shift, leaving behind the industrial archaeology of a more optimistic time. A single figure walks across the cracked pavement, boots crunching on broken glass and decades of accumulated debris. He's not seeing the decay or mourning what was lost. He's seeing the future of AI. His phone buzzes with an incoming text Timeline. He types back without breaking stride. We'll figure it out the race for digital intelligence.

Speaker 3:

Our journey to this point has been about creating clarity and building alignment. Now we shift to movement. Everything we've done up to this point is designed to harness the power of collaborative effort To showcase what's possible. We picked Brent Mayo because what he and his team accomplished in just 122 days at that abandoned Memphis compound happened quietly, yet the whole world needs to know about it. When discussions stop, excuses die and waiting for perfect conditions ends, disciplined execution becomes unstoppable. The scale defied comprehension. It wasn't just that they built the most powerful computer the world had ever seen. It was that they did it with speed. That shows just how painfully slow the rest of us have become, weighed down by discussion, meetings, planning, coordination, more meetings, additional discussion and an endless swirl that get in the way of the very thing we, as leaders, were hired to create Movement the war for silicon.

Speaker 3:

The first obstacle wasn't engineering or construction, it was supply chain warfare. Xai needed 100,000 specialized computer chips, each one more powerful than the computers that sent humans to the moon, cured diseases and decoded the human genome. But these weren't just any chips. They were NVIDIA H100 GPUs, the most coveted piece of technology on Earth. The global demand was so intense that tech giants like Google, microsoft and Meta had essentially declared economic war on each other, with billion-dollar purchase orders used as weapons in a battle for computational supremacy. Every major AI company needed these chips, but NVIDIA's fabrication capacity was finite. Securing 100,000 of them meant acquiring roughly 20% of the world's entire annual supply. The mathematics were staggering. Each server rack containing just eight of these processors cost over $300,000, more than most people's homes. A single row of racks could cost $10 million. The total hardware bill would exceed $7 billion, representing one of the largest technology purchase orders in business history.

Speaker 3:

Most companies would approach this challenge through established protocols form procurement committees, analyze vendor relationships, negotiate phased delivery schedules spanning multiple years, secure board approval for capital expenditures and build risk mitigation strategies for supply chain disruptions. Xai gave themselves 16 weeks the challenge building a silicon brain. They chose the abandoned Tennessee warehouse because building the ideal facility would take too long. That would save them years of work. Xai was the underdog in the artificial intelligence industry. Chatgpt, google and China all had a massive head start In AI. Being six months behind might as well be six years. The first company to achieve artificial general intelligence wouldn't just win market share, they would fundamentally alter the balance of global power. Xai's team literally searched every city in America looking for the largest existing empty structure they could find. Finding and securing the 785,000 square foot monster outside Memphis would have taken most companies more than a year to locate, form a committee to evaluate the pros and cons of purchasing it, interview dozens of firms to represent them in negotiations and then go back and forth with red lines on proposed contracts for months. Xai did it all in a couple of weeks. Once they were the proud owners of the dilapidated compound. Now they had to figure out how in the world they'd keep it cool.

Speaker 3:

Engineers faced a problem that paralyzes most organizations 100,000 processors running at full capacity would generate over 100 million watts of heat. To put that in perspective, that's enough thermal energy to power a small city concentrated in a single building. The heat density would be approximately 100 times greater than a typical office building. If you've ever noticed your laptop getting warm when working hard, imagine that problem multiplied by 100,000. Except, laptop overheating means slower performance, while data center overheating means billions of dollars of equipment literally melting. Traditional data center air conditioning would not just be inadequate, it was physically impossible. The volume of air required to cool this facility through conventional methods would create hurricane-force winds inside the building with air velocities that would be dangerous to humans and destructive to equipment.

Speaker 3:

They had to figure out a different way to keep their billions of dollars of the fastest chips on Earth cool and functional. The only solution was direct-to-chip liquid cooling on a scale never before attempted in human history. This wasn't just an engineering challenge. It was a physics problem that pushed the boundaries of thermal management science. The system they designed resembled the cooling infrastructure of a nuclear power plant more than a typical computer facility. Miles of precision-welded, leak-proof piping would carry coolant directly to each processor. Thousands of sensors would monitor temperature and flow rates in real time. Automated shutoff systems would respond in milliseconds to prevent catastrophic failures. Dr Sarah Chen, leading the thermal engineering team, captured the challenge with brutal simplicity. It turns out it's just really hard work the 24-7 War Machine.

Speaker 3:

What followed was construction warfare. Unlike anything the industry had ever seen, the 785,000-square-foot plant buzzed with activity that never stopped, a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation that transformed abandonment into cutting-edge technology infrastructure. Three shifts of electricians, plumbers and technicians worked around the clock in a carefully choreographed dance of construction, installation and testing. The power requirements alone demanded infrastructure typically reserved for small cities. The local Tennessee Valley Authority grid, while robust, couldn't deliver the massive electrical load they needed fast enough to meet their timeline. Traditional utility infrastructure development takes years of planning, environmental review and construction. So they built their own power plant. In the parking lot, 35 mobile gas turbines arrived on flatbed trucks like an invasion force, transforming the broken asphalt into an industrial power station. Each turbine was the size of a shipping container, capable of generating multiple megawatts of electricity. Together they would push 72 megawatts of power enough electricity to supply 60,000 homes into a single building.

Speaker 3:

The site was surreal and somehow prophetic an abandoned appliance factory surrounded by a convoy of generators humming day and night like mechanical insects, feeding enormous amounts of energy into a structure that would contain the world's most powerful supercomputer. It looked like a scene from a science fiction movie about humanity's technological future, except it was happening in real time in Memphis. The impossible timeline, mayo's philosophy, became the team's operational mantra. Why spend two to three years engineering and planning than two to three years building when you can do it all in less than one year? While competitors around the world held planning meetings about data center requirements, xai was retrofitting an appliance factory. While others formed committees to study cooling solutions and debate thermal management strategies, xai was welding miles of precision piping. While others negotiated vendor partnerships over months and analyzed cost-benefit ratios, xai was installing server racks and running tests.

Speaker 3:

The numbers that emerged were staggering and would have been dismissed as impossible just months earlier 122 days from site selection to operational industry standard. 18 to 24 months. 19 days from hardware arrival to AI training start. 100,000 processors deployed initially, doubled to 200,000 within 92 additional days. Miles of liquid cooling infrastructure installed with zero tolerance for failure. Seven billion dollars in hardware deployed faster than any comparable project in history. 785,000 square feet of abandoned factory space converted to cutting-edge technology infrastructure.

Speaker 3:

In September 2024, history switched on. The largest number of physically connected computer chips ever assembled drew their first collective breath. Cooling fluid began its endless circulation through miles of precisely welded pipes, while the humans who had worked so hard to create the most powerful thinking machine in human history stood and watched. Temperature sensors throughout the facility registered numbers that would have been science fiction six months earlier. Everything holding steady in optimal ranges, everything held. They had done the unthinkable and in one moment, pulled ahead, at least temporarily, in the global AI race. All because of one team led by one person who saw what was possible standing on the broken pavement of the abandoned appliance plant.

Speaker 3:

Leaders who create movement on teams create remarkable accomplishments. They deliver while others dream, discuss and debate. The leader operating system isn't designed to just create clarity and alignment on teams. Those are means to the end. None of it matters. If you don't deliver In the pages that follow, we'll break down the process and show you how to create end. None of it matters. If you don't deliver In the pages that follow, we'll break down the process and show you how to create movement, but first we need to show you what you're up against the digital surveillance that exposed the problem.

Speaker 3:

While XAI was achieving the impossible in Memphis, teams at Microsoft were watching what was happening in every other organization around the world. Dr Jaime Teevan, chief Scientist at Microsoft, and Dr Shamsi Iqbal, principal Researcher in Microsoft's Productivity and Intelligence Group, sit in a global command center in Redmond, washington. Their screens show the activity of 250 million workers in real time through data streams that map every click, every app switch, every moment of distraction happening in offices and home offices around the world. They can see every meeting you schedule in Outlook, every Teams message you send at 10.47 pm, every time you open Excel while your boss talks during a Teams meeting. T-van and Iqbal can see the productivity spiral that's been happening since work became virtual and hybrid.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that is where we're going to stop. I can't play too much for you, right, you got to buy the book. No, we got to finish it. Actually, again, you all, that's a draft. That's one of the final drafts. So you probably have feedback on certain parts like, oh my gosh, that's an amazing story, but tighten it up a little bit. Yeah, that will all happen, uh, when it goes through the copy, editors and the final process. So, um, what you think I'd be so, so curious.

Speaker 1:

It's so interesting when you write a book because you spend so much time and energy. This book right now is sitting at over 70 000 words. My fort, uh, 15 year old, our youngest son, was complaining the other day about a school assignment. He had to write 1200 words for english class or something I don't know what, and he was like, oh, is this so much? I'm like, uh, hey, listen to me like 1200, like try 70 000, but, uh, he didn't really care that much, but it made me feel better saying it anyway. Um, so it's, it's wild as you, you finish it up and now people get to start consuming it and you're just like, oh, like I. Like one of the things that I learned when we first wrote, when I wrote wrote my first book decide to lead is that you have to just publish at some point, because you can hear all the edits that you want to make and all the things you want to do different. You can be critical of it and this and that. Why did you put that sentence in and take that out and shorten this and expand on that? And it's a never-ending process and uh and so at some point you just got to ship and that's what we're getting ready to do.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, one other unique thing Most of you some of you I don't know how many of you probably already guessed this, but the narrator on that was AI. That voice you were listening to you might have picked up on it Not human, isn't that amazing, you all? One of my favorite AI tools right now is 11labsio. Favorite AI tools right now is 11labsio 11, not the numeric one one, but 11. The word spelled out 11labsio, and you ought to check that out if you're into AI tools. Here's what I love about it and it's got a lot of different features and now songwriting and all these different things.

Speaker 1:

I don't use it for that. What I use it for is documents that I want to listen to. So if someone on the team sends me something, or I get a report back from an AI tool, a research thing, or I find an article that I really like, or whatever, I go over and I copy and I paste it into 11 labs and then I export the audio and I pick certain narrators that I like some of them are terrible, um, and and the one you just heard is one of my favorites, and they're ai and then I download the audio, I airdrop it over my phone or whatever, and then on my way to the airport, uh, or at the gym, on the treadmill or rowing machine or whatever else, I'm listening to this. I don't know what you're like, but I love audio because I can do other things while I'm listening to it and I can accelerate the speed and whatever else. So, um, we plugged our whole book into 11 labs and, um, that's one of the features it has, but you can use it just for whatever if you're into audio, okay, so, um, let me.

Speaker 1:

Let me make a few comments and then wrap this episode up. So, um, hopefully, you enjoyed getting a little preview of our upcoming book. You're only getting that because you listen to the podcast. I'm taking you behind the scenes on it and um, that that chapter needs to be refined. I feel like I need to keep saying that because it's a draft version. You might have heard something that didn't make sense or might have thought something took too long or was too incomplete. Don't worry about that. But the the um. I wanted to give you that, behind the scenes, as a podcast listener, access to the book. The whole thing's coming out.

Speaker 1:

I think it's I'm biased and I could be totally wrong you all, because I'm so close to the project, but we've hired such a big team, such a world-class team to help us with this one that I, uh, I'm really, really excited. This feels like, like, like part of life's work, part of your legacy. This book, I feel like people who read it will, will get uh, I feel like it's a uh like five college courses in the business school wrapped up into one that will propel the reader for not just a nice book or interesting or whatever. I like literally think this will impact a ton of careers, that it will impact organizations in a profound way. We've tried to take Jared Tanner and I as the co-founders of the firm. We try to take all this experience with executive teams and really not put something out super quick, but just hire a team to pick our brains, get the best stories put it in a way that people could understand. That's what it is, okay. So enough about that.

Speaker 1:

Let me give you a takeaway of just the chapter what XAI did, that story that we talked about. And then the next piece was Microsoft. There's a whole section of the chapter that has incredible data you all on the productivity slump that we're in since COVID. And then it's become way too easy to schedule meetings. It's become way too easy to fill people's inboxes, to DM them nonstop. We've got way too much discussion happening in most organizations.

Speaker 1:

If you listen to this podcast on a regular basis, this is a drum that I keep hitting because we see this disease spreading in so many organizations. One of your jobs as an executive, as a leader of a team, is efficiency. We've got to get movement, and what XAI did at that abandoned warehouse outside Memphis is remarkable, unbelievable. It's just an absolute reminder that the rest of us are moving too slow. How have we got used to this speed?

Speaker 1:

All of complacency, and I have to, I have to say this I think that a lot of us who have been around for more than a minute. We're not helping the organizations. We're at like I think maybe we're making too much money, maybe we've got too much money in the bank account. We're not hungry enough, we're not starved enough. We've achieved too much money in the bank account. We're not hungry enough, we're not starved enough. We've achieved too much success to where I don't know if we're driven enough. Like we need to think back to the 22 or 25 or 28 year old version of us how hungry we are or we were, what we were willing to do, the amount of hours we were willing to put in the drive and the speed at which we worked.

Speaker 1:

And now I'm not advocating that we all become workaholics and zombies and, just, you know, don't have a life outside of work. That's not what I'm advocating, what I am saying, and maybe it's just me and that's been dealing with this and and seeing it around me, but I just see it in so many organizations because most of our executives are in their 40s, 50sifties, whatever, right, and and some of us are really driven, but others we've like we're part of the problem. We're not moving nimble enough. We got people leading departments, business units, areas that like well, let's the, the startup mentality, the disruptor, um urgency. We need some more of that in our organization and you saw that in that example from XAI. So we had to share it in the movement section of our book. So I just would have you what. So what would I have you do? I'd have you again. I know I've been talking about this a lot recently. I'll get off of this a little bit in the next few episodes, but I just especially you all at the time this episode's coming out.

Speaker 1:

We're deep in now the second half of the year. Whether or not we're going to hit our annual plan or not depends on you, your leadership team, your approach, your mentality, your drive, your urgency. Sit up, lean forward, take less time for the meeting, demand efficiency. Let's go. Let's think of that team at XAI. Let's think about them walking across the broken glass. We tried to paint that picture for you so dramatically in that chapter. You might've thought we took too long to tell the story or too many words, but we wanted you to be there. That's what we need, all of us, to be doing Transform these organizations, kick it up a notch, as they say, so that we finished the year remarkably strong. That's what I want you thinking about after listening to this episode of the Lead in 30 podcast.

Speaker 2:

Share this episode with a colleague, your team or a friend. Tap on the share button and text the link. Thanks for listening to the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill.