What I've been working on recently is the question, 'how do we get business leadership on board?' And here's what I think the problem statement is:

Great CEO's and board directors know how to run great companies. They're fearless about insisting on process excellence, whether it be the sales pipeline forecasts, product market fit, etc. They even have the confidence and intuition to do things like firing the top salesperson because they know that principles, process, and repeatability are more important than any one individual.

And yet, some CEO's are much less confident about holding R&D accountable, so we treat it like a black box. (And I love this phrase,) "When things go wrong, I don't know why. When things go right, I don't know why. So better just leave it alone, rather than deal with it and have it blow up."

The claim that I'm making now is that you don't have to be a technologist to hold R&D accountable. The same intuitions that make you successful in sales, marketing, operations, or finance, can be applied to R&D.

I had the opportunity to present to a hundred CEOs of software companies to make the case for DevOps - this is not what I presented to them. In fact, my first turn at bat was to 50 software company CEOs ranging from $100 million revenue to $2 billion, and I don't think I did that well. Chris O'Malley, CEO of Compuware, a $1 billion software company, even pulled me to the side and said, "Gene, you really blew it. They totally didn't get it."

I've been so grateful to Chris along with Joe Payne, CEO of Code42, who have been kind enough to coach Mik Kersten and myself and teach us how to communicate better with CEOs.

Mik Kersten also introduced me to a fascinating model that I think is very useful in terms of framing our challenge.

This is a post from Ben Horowitz. He's the founder of the famous investment firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and author of the book, "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." Ben also wrote this famous blog post about, 'Ones and the Twos.' In this post, he's categorized founding CEOs as either "Ones" or "Twos," saying that you really need both, but he really favors the Ones.

The Ones are the product visionaries. They love gathering information, they love the strategic planning process, they love ideation, they love creation. The archetypes for this would be like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and so forth.

On the other hand, we have the Twos. Twos love process excellence. They love holding people accountable. They love sales calls, budgeting. All those things that create processes.

In my mind, in this community, we are like the Ones. We are the ones who see a better way, and often the people that are in our way are the conservative leadership, the orthodoxies, the people who are trying to enforce the status quo.

For years, within the program committee, we've searched for the right person who could teach us how to understand the Twos with the goal or being able to communicate with them, influence them, and in the worst case, survive their opposition.

We debated this endlessly within the program committee, but when one person's name came up and we studied their background and skills, something really interesting happened. Everyone on the program committee was super excited. I think it was because of his unique background. He's someone who has a Computer Science Degree, someone who was VP of Sales at CA, and is now a CEO of a billion dollar company. In various parts of his career, he has been both a One and a Two.

This person is Chris O'Malley, who I feel has so many important things to teach us. He's someone that I continue to learn from in almost every interaction I have with him. But, let me just get this on the table. Some of you may be wondering why I would invite the CEO of a software company, a vendor, to speak to us.

I'll tell you this directly, head-on: If we can't convince as a community, the CEOs of software companies how important our work is, where you live and die by the software that you sell, there is no hope of convincing a CEO of a retailer, insurance company, hospitality, or any other industry.