Black & Veatch stands at the center of a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity that will shape the next decade and beyond. As AI, data centers, and the energy transition converge to drive unprecedented demand for critical infrastructure, Mike Adams, the company’s chief digital technology officer, has a leading role in this once-in-a-generation inflection point.
Over two decades, Adams has held numerous leadership roles, with responsibility for strategy development, technology transformation, business continuity and disaster recovery, and cloud engineering and automation. One of his most powerful leadership tools is his ability to not just communicate but connect, as evidenced by his signature “Mike Drops.” In these dynamic, town hall-style conversations, Adams keeps his global organization aligned and engaged by distilling complex challenges into plain language, inviting real dialogue and galvanizing action.
Adams joined me on a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast for our “Critical Infrastructure for Critical Infrastructure (CI4CI)” mini-series to unpack his leadership story as well as the strategies and insights he’s gained leading technology at the heart of critical infrastructure. We spent more time afterwards digging into how he uses language as a leadership superpower. That conversation, edited below for length and clarity, offers practical takeaways for CIOs and technology leaders who want to sharpen their communication edge.
Dan Roberts: When you communicate with stakeholders inside and outside the company, how do you describe infrastructure opportunities and make these complex topics inspire people to act?
Mike Adams: A big part of what we have to do as leaders is story-tell. I talk about how the work we do in building critical infrastructure now requires us to ensure we’re also building the digital capability necessary to run, secure, and ensure resilience of that critical infrastructure. To illustrate the point, we use examples from North America and globally where resilience didn’t exist and where there were security issues.
When we create that analogous relationship to some of the challenges we’re seeing in an increasingly dangerous world — geopolitically, but also from a cybersecurity standpoint — that helps us convey to our clients the importance of things like operating assets, securing those assets, and bringing knowledge from a cyber advisory and consulting standpoint alongside of the critical infrastructure, engineering, and construction work we do that’s core to our being.
It really helps us introduce Black & Veatch to clients beyond just the EPC [engineering, procurement, and construction] work we do. A lot of what we’re trying to do now is create recurring, consistent opportunities to recognize and realize operating profit and income. We want to lessen the reliance on large projects and start to build annuity benefits as well. When we tell these stories and align the need with real-life examples of why these services are important, that allows us to extend our relationships strategically with our clients.
We have to do some of that selling within our own organization as well, because it’s a new paradigm for structural, mechanical, and civil engineers who are used to working in a project mindset. We need to stretch that a little bit. On the front end, what can we do to help
companies pave the new frontier relative to some of the analysis work we do? On the back end, how do we sustain those relationships by ensuring the critical infrastructure is maintained and operated in a secure and efficient way?
This is how we’re shifting and extending the value proposition Black & Veatch employee-owners can bring to our clients and customers. And that storytelling is necessary, both internally — because not all of us are used to living it — and to our clients, particularly our strategic ones.
How did you develop your storytelling ability, and why do you think clear, memorable language is so important for CIOs today?
Developing it takes practice. But first, you must identify that there’s an opportunity to get better. To me, the best leaders are really good at introspection. They are self-aware. And they’re willing to devote the calories and investment in getting better in areas that just aren’t natural sometimes.
My approach early in my career was very different. I was very focused on execution and outcomes. I was very ‘bull in a china shop.’ But the reality is, you can only make it so far by leveraging positional leadership. People will check out. You may get a few things done, but over time you’re going to lose the people you need most. I saw that effect and realized I needed to evaluate what I was doing to contribute to it. I became more self-aware. I did some research, read some books, had a coach — a sounding board. All of that together allowed me to put different concepts into practice.
I’ve always liked the quote, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.’ This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. Certainly, we need to move fast at times, be agile, and recognize change is a constant. But if we want to go far, we need to build followership. We must influence the change of hearts and minds. The minds contribute to behaviors and behaviors contribute to habits. It is a continuum of how we need to manage influence — even if we’re a positional leader — to ensure that we’re driving the sustainable human change that allows us to realize some of these huge unlocks with technology.
Yes, we’re making tons of technological advances. But the human element is as important, if not more important, to unlock the value associated with that technology.
Your ‘Mike Drops’ have become well-known inside Black & Veatch as a way to cut through the noise and rally your organization amid rapid change. What would we experience if we were to watch a video of one of those?
You’d experience a little bit of fun. We have a very omnichannel approach to communicating both within D&IT and also with the broader employee ownership base. These Mike Drops are intended to help keep the broader company engaged and aware of how we’re advancing against our strategy, but in a fun way.
I lead off with welcoming everyone to the Mike Drop, and I literally drop a mic at the end of each one. We have a guy in our human resources organization who helps us put it all together, and he includes what I call ‘word-overs,’ where he injects some funny captions at different times when I’m speaking just to keep the audience engaged. We introduce quirky, different formats. Sometimes it’s an interview, sometimes a podcast format, and sometimes it’s just me providing a recap, like I did for the tech showcase, which was a big hit. It reinforced the key principles of the tech showcase and how we want to make sure we continue to build on the momentum. During that particular Mike Drop I played three different characters, and they made me do some wardrobe changes, so it was pretty comical.
I laugh at myself and make fun of myself a little bit, and, hopefully, that helps with getting people engaged and feeling comfortable with the fact that we can all poke a little fun at ourselves. We don’t all have the answers, and we can all participate in the journey together. That’s really what the Mike Drops are all about.
Your communication toolkit is filled with memorable leadership expressions, such as ‘build a beach head’ and ‘core versus non-core.’ Can you share the stories behind those?
‘Build a beach head’ is an analogy for how we think about building competency. What’s our starting point? Is it nascent? Do we have a beach head of capability to build from? Being a Jersey Shore guy, it’s something that resonated in my mind, and it relates to ‘core versus non-core.’ When we think about strategy, we have to think about core competency and non-core. Non-core doesn’t mean unimportant; it means important in a different way. We’re not going to invest BV resources in non-core because it’s been commoditized to a degree, and there are other companies that have professionalized the work, built the depth of competency, can manage turnover and attrition, and deliver a service.
A lot of what I talk about related to core versus non-core integrates with our partnership strategy. I view it as a normal distribution, with the center being very much the core competencies we invest in that evolve over time. The front end of the distribution represents partners we’re going to work with where we have nascent capability, or it’s a nascent capability on the market. There we have the opportunity to build know-how and learn in partnership with an IP provider like a Microsoft or Salesforce, but also with their strategic solution integrators. Those partners are different than the partners that fall on the other side of the normal distribution, which starts to get into commoditized managed service, but both are important for different reasons.
The point I make with strategic partners is that their role is not to help us introduce a capability and maintain a staff augmentation position. Their job is to help us evaluate the opportunity and the capability and help us define an operating model and the core competencies we need to build, sustain, and scale over time. Then they move on to the next opportunity. They’re really working themselves out of a role so that they can help us advance on the next frontier. As those services become commoditized, the landing spot for most IT services is with our managed service providers, who we tend to scale more significantly. We’re looking for economies of scale, and their opportunity is, optimizing and automating those commodity services.
Another one of your memorable expressions is ‘sacred cow tipping,’ which blends the idea of challenging untouchable assumptions with the image of tipping things over to spark change. How did you come up with this expression, and how do you use it to encourage your teams to question the status quo and drive innovation?
I come from southern New Jersey, where it’s almost all farmland with a lot of cows. I think we all know what a sacred cow is: an approach or idea that is deemed untouchable to change. In my opinion, those cows aren’t always the most helpful, because they impact people’s ability to think unanchored to current ways of doing things. So I said, ‘It sounds like we need to do some sacred cow tipping.’
This is about challenging the status quo. We talk a lot about psychological safety at Black & Veatch as an element of holistic safety, and there are stages to psychological safety that build on each other. There’s inclusion safety, where people feel comfortable enough to speak up. There’s learning safety, where they feel like they can learn and make mistakes and not be ridiculed for not understanding something. Then there’s contribution safety, where people feel like they’re engaged and a part of problem-solving and that their contributions are going to be considered.
Then, ultimately, there’s challenger safety. If you’ve reached challenger safety, you’ve reached a point where you’ve really started to establish a culture of innovation where people can challenge the status quo. You get into that intellectual conflict without impacting the underlying social foundation of the team or the organization, and people know you’re coming from a place of positive intent.
Talk about how you balance communicating immediate priorities with inspiring long-term vision. This relates to your expression of ‘anchoring back to the strategy.’
I think we can do things very quickly and effectively and focus on critical risk and priorities
without decoupling that from strategy. One of the things we are doing now as we are thinking about the operating model, ways of working, and competencies we need to be successful is going through what I call the ‘3-1-2 process.’
That means, strategically, we set aside the reality of what we’re working on, the challenges, the risk, and what currently exists — the 1. Instead, we ask ourselves what would an ideal state be, based on what we know about the business strategy, critical capabilities, and other external factors — the 3. What would horizon 3 look like relative to business and IT strategy, architecture, process, and people competency? Then anchor back to where we are currently. That helps to ensure we are not defining a future based on current constraints.
We shouldn’t ignore our current state but must always consider it within a broader context and direction. Sometimes, immediate priorities lay the groundwork for future progress — the 2. These foundational steps should align with our strategy; otherwise, we risk focusing on areas where maturity gaps are acceptable as opposed to others that must be addressed because they are critical to our work.
For more of Mike Adams’ leadership wisdom and insights, tune in to the Tech Whisperers podcast.
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