Michael Weening Keeps the Student’s Seat

Before Michael Weening had a company to run, he had a call to make. He wanted to learn from Paul Shearstone, a successful salesman at Canon. He left a message. Then another. The silence continued; so did Weening. Eventually, Shearstone invited him over. Persistence had earned him something rather more useful than a sale: an education.

He remembers driving a Volkswagen Fox and making a thousand dollars a month plus commission. Business books went onto cassettes. The young salesman had ambitions larger than his budget, and an older salesman had agreed to help. Long before customer success became a department on his organization chart, Weening had experienced its personal equivalent: someone spending time making another person better.

Today he is president and chief executive officer of Calix, with a seat on its board. The distance between those two positions is considerable. What makes the journey interesting is his repeated decision to put himself back in a position where he has something to learn.

A salesman learns to ask

His early career included selling corrugated cardboard. He later moved through Microsoft, Bell Mobility and Salesforce, accumulating responsibilities across software, telecommunications and cloud services. Each business put him somewhere different in the relationship between a technology company and the people who buy from it.

The official career sequence is tidy. At Bell Mobility, he led business sales from 2009 to 2012. At Salesforce, his responsibilities first covered Japan and Asia Pacific, then global customer success and services. Calix recruited him in 2016. It is the sort of résumé that makes a career look inevitable once all the uncertainty has been removed from the page.

Weening’s own stories restore some of that uncertainty. The important people tend to be teachers. Shearstone supplied an early example. Carl Russo would supply a later one. Becoming senior did not, in Weening’s telling, remove the appeal of working near somebody whose judgment he wanted to understand.

“Invest in the success of others to be successful.”

Michael Weening

The education moves overseas

His years abroad gave that education a geographical dimension. He held Microsoft sales leadership roles in Canada and the United Kingdom. His Salesforce career took him to Tokyo. A leadership method developed in one country now had to survive contact with another.

He has described Tokyo as an experience that changed his perspective. The attraction of that story is how little it resembles an executive victory lap. Moving abroad requires learning things that people around you already know. Experience remains useful, but local knowledge belongs to someone else. For a leader willing to listen, that is a productive arrangement.

The later global Salesforce role placed customer success near the center of his work. Selling software creates a continuing obligation: people have to make use of it. The purchase begins a relationship in which training, service and the customer’s own decisions influence the result. That experience would become relevant at a company with a much older association with network equipment.

An apprenticeship inside a public company

Calix was already pursuing a change when Weening arrived. Its leadership had begun laying the groundwork in 2012 for a business organized around software and cloud services. The challenge was to carry customers into that business along with the company.

A broadband provider can be good at construction, network reliability and keeping connections running. Selling continuing services asks for additional skills: understanding households, explaining products and maintaining relationships after installation. Weening’s Salesforce experience gave him a practical place to start. Helping customers learn belonged inside the business plan.

The transition was expensive. In 2017, Calix’s annual loss widened beyond $80 million as it invested in the change. By 2023, the company appeared on Fortune’s list of 100 fastest-growing companies. Revenue fell and losses returned in 2024. Those turns matter: a change in business model does not excuse a company from difficult years.

Weening advanced through operations roles, became president in 2021 and took the CEO job in 2022. Russo continued as chairman. The arrangement preserved a relationship Weening valued when he joined: the chance to work with, and learn from, a more experienced business builder.

Ten priorities, and the argument that gets you there

The mechanics of running the company can sound less theatrical. In one planning exercise Weening described, leaders had 172 proposed priorities. They needed ten. Reducing the list took two days of discussion and voting. In later years, the process took six hours, then two.

The shortening meeting was a useful result. People had developed a better shared understanding of what deserved attention. Weening said he participated in the debate and did not overrule the vote. A priority had to survive comparison with other people’s priorities.

There is a modest comedy in a room full of leaders discovering that their organization has 172 things it must do first. There is also a recognizable management problem. Agreement becomes harder when every function can produce an excellent reason to come first.

His preference for remote work makes that clarity especially consequential. In a home office, a leader has fewer opportunities to confuse seeing somebody with understanding their work. Expectations have to travel well. People need to know what they own and how their decisions connect to the company’s direction.

He also writes about culture in unusually ordinary terms. A brief encounter in an elevator stayed with him: he introduced himself to a senior sales executive, received a minimal greeting and was left feeling dismissed. A corporate value has little shelter from an interaction like that.

For Weening, people make culture through daily behavior. His sons gave him a placard for his desk: “I am still learning.” He has written about returning repeatedly to Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days. Both details bring a large topic down to something a person can actually do: read, reconsider and notice how one treats someone else.

The camera comes out

There is another Weening available on his personal blog. He travels with a camera. In Havana, he photographed old American cars and worried about whether the architecture would survive new investment. His favorite car picture from that visit was taken in the parking lot at Hemingway’s estate.

The 2017 safari entry is more expansive. He had been away from blogging, which he described as a way to spend half an hour reflecting on thoughts, pictures and observations. Now there were African photographs to sort. Even after deleting images, he still had about 4,000, excluding Istanbul. The backlog was, apparently, international.

He admitted being out of practice with his Canon 5D Mark IV. He liked its GPS and battery life, but wished he had learned more about the video functions before leaving. The photographs were close encounters with wildlife; the accompanying prose was an encounter with the instruction manual he might have studied sooner.

He also noticed that the Serengeti’s wide plains reminded him of Alberta, where he grew up. That is a lovely, specific connection: a distant landscape becoming recognizable through an earlier one. The executive who talks about transformation can still be found enjoying a picture and acknowledging the settings he has yet to master.

The next lesson has an AI budget

By 2026, Weening’s public arguments had moved firmly into AI. In a June essay, he urged leaders to organize its adoption around people. He objected to presenting the technology chiefly as a rationale for reducing staff. His preferred ambition was to give teams more capacity to grow a business.

That argument comes with a management burden. He described the need to communicate a vision, practical steps, timelines and measures. Buying access to a tool leaves all of those decisions waiting. The leader still has to explain what employees are trying to accomplish and how they will recognize progress. For a small provider, the questions can be very concrete: who answers a subscriber’s question, who checks a suggested action, and who takes responsibility when a process needs changing? Those are useful questions to carry into a sales demonstration. They also give the buyer a way to distinguish an appealing presentation from something a team can put to work on Monday.

At ConneXions in October 2026, Calix announced additions to its Agent Workforce, including a Control Center and expanded workflows. A Workflow Studio remained planned. The distinction matters: a product available now and a capability promised for later place different demands on a customer’s plans.

Calix described the Control Center as a workspace where teams could direct AI using their roles and permissions. The planned studio would let providers adapt workflows to their businesses. The everyday test rests on what employees and customers accomplish with the tools. The people answering service calls and planning local campaigns will have their own view of what helps. Their questions may be less polished than a conference presentation, and more useful. Weening has spent much of his career on the customer side of that conversation. Now the feedback comes back to him as the chief executive.

Weening’s next chapter therefore returns him to familiar work: helping people use something unfamiliar. He can explain the platform, set expectations and make the case for change. Then comes the part no keynote can complete for him: listening to the people doing the work, and finding out what he still needs to learn.