00:00:02

So I had mentioned, uh, what yesterday, what I had been working on recently, which is how do you get business leadership on board? And here's what I think the problem statement is. Uh, great CEOs and board directors know how to make, uh, run great companies. Uh, they're fearless about insisting on process excellence, whether it's sales, pipelines, forecasts, product market fit. They even have the confidence, um, and intuition to do things like firing the top sales person because they know that principal's process repeatability are more important than any one individual. Um, and yet some CEOs, um, are much less confident about holding RD 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 <laugh> than to middle with it and have it blow up.

00:00:48

And so my claim that I'm making now is that you don't have to be a technologist to hold RD accountable. It's the same sort of intuitions that made you successful in sales, marketing, operations, or finance can be applied to RD. Um, and I, so this is, um, I mentioned yesterday that I had the opportunity to present, um, 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 companies, uh, CEOs, ranging from $100 million revenue to 2 billion. And I don't think I did that well. In fact, Chris O'Malley, CEO of Compuware, a $1 billion software company, took me aside and said, gene, you really blew it. They totally didn't get it <laugh>. And I am so grateful that he's been kind enough to coach me along with Joe Payne, CEO code 42, and work with Mick, Kirsten and me to teach us how to, uh, communicate better with CEOs.

00:01:42

Mick Kirsten introduced me to, uh, a fascinating model that I think is very useful in terms of, uh, framing our challenge. So this is a post, uh, from, uh, Ben Horowitz. Uh, he's the famous investment. Uh, he's the founder of the famous investment firm, Andreesen Horowitz. And there's a famous blog post that talks about, uh, he also wrote this book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things, but he also wrote this famous blog post about the ones and the twos. So in this post, he describes, uh, for their founding companies, they, um, categorize the, the founding CEOs as either ones or twos, and saying that you really need both, but they really favor the ones. So the ones are the product visionaries, right? They, uh, they love gathering information. They love the strategic planning process. Uh, they love ideation. They love creation. And so, you know, the archetypal archetypes for this, I think would be like Elon Musk, uh, Steve Jobs and so forth.

00:02:33

On the other hand, we have the twos, the twos love process excellence. They love holding people accountable. They love sales calls, budgeting right now, they love all those things. They maybe create processes. And, um, so those are the twos. And in my mind, uh, 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 have, uh, are really trying to enforce status quo. So for years, uh, within the programing committee, we've searched for the right person who could teach us better how to understand the twos with the goal of better to be able to communicate with them, influence them, and in the worst case, survive their opposition. Uh, we debated this endlessly within the program committee for months. Um, but when one person's name came up and their background and skills, uh, we studied something really interesting happened.

00:03:27

Everyone on the program committee was super excited. And I think it's because of his unique background, someone who has a computer science degree, someone who was VP of sales, a ca and is now, uh, a CEO, um, of a billion dollar company. So in various parts of his career, he has both been a one and a two. And this person is Chris O'Malley, who I feel has so many important things to teach us. He's someone that I've learned, um, <laugh> in every interaction I have with him. I learned something including backstage an hour ago. So lemme just get this on, 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. And I'll tell you this directly, head on, if we can't convince the, as a community CEOs of software com companies about how important our work is, where you live and die by the softwares that you sell, there is no hope of convincing a CEO of a retailer insurance company, uh, hospitality, any industry. So I'm convinced that we need to be able to talk and think more like Chris. So with no further ado, Chris O'Malley.

00:04:29

Thank you, Chris.

00:04:31

Glad to be here.

00:04:32

So, uh, first off, I realized that in my introduction, I may have pigeonholed you as a two, but, uh, a

00:04:37

Loser <laugh>,

00:04:38

Right? Uh, and as you once said to me, you two once had dreams, <laugh>. Uh, so, um, can you tell us about, uh, you know, your life both as a two and a one?

00:04:48

Yeah. So I started on the right path. So was a computer science major outta college, uh, which is a good thing to be, right, uh,

00:04:57

<laugh>. But I quickly went to the dark side and went into sales. Uh, and then about 10 years ago, I took a unique job, which really gave me the perspective of it too. So 10 years ago, I took the ma the general manager mainframe job for CA Technologies. And if you think back 10 years ago, you know, that was the middle of the recession. Uh, so companies generally were doing incredibly poorly, you know, the mainframe business, uh, you know, today it's going through Renaissance, but 10 years ago there was, uh, a lot of mainframe names, naysayers that were controlling basically the airwaves. So there was a lot of negative energy around the mainframe. Uh, ca itself, uh, was going through some difficult times. There was a accounting scandal that put, uh, actually some people into to jail. Uh, there was a Fortune article that came out that said that, uh, you know, computer Associates is actually the most dysfunctional company in the United States.

00:05:52

So those are a lot of things that are working against you. Sounds like a fun job. Yeah, it is a fun, it's, it's like working your whole life to be a, a head coach and you find out that you're the head coach of the Cleveland Browns or something, <laugh>. So it's, uh, I'm a Vikings fan, I can't help myself. But it's important for you to understand that. 'cause when you get a job like that, I mean, you don't get a pass. Uh, there's this expectation from shareholders specifically through the board, that they want you to create value. Uh, they didn't put you in that job to make excuses. So, uh, you know, you see these scenarios that, that happen, that, you know, sometimes a person causes these situations that are like these type two, but sometimes the situation caused the person, uh, and if you're gonna influence these people you didn't understand, it's, it's not a situation where they don't get it.

00:06:40

Trust me. Uh, I didn't sleep a lot of nights when I had that job. They get it. But when you think that there's so few avenues for you to actually get things to improve between a, a spectrum of growth to value, you tend to focus on the value side. And that's usually cutting costs. And it's usually looking at things that are gonna have a long-term return horizon as something that you're cynical towards. So again, we're talking about trying to influence these people. You gotta understand kind of the motives and where they come from. My second job that I had, or not second job, a job after, uh, ca was actually the other extreme. I was a startup, CEO, and I started the, the job by actually going out and getting money. Uh, you see in that kind of scenario where you're trying to get your first customer a sense of purity in terms of having to have a strong vision of a changed future, uh, that you've gotta have a disruptive mission, that you're actually trying to change the way that jobs are done so that you can make a case for selling new technologies.

00:07:34

So you get a sense of, you know, having to be these extremes in terms of zealots and passion, but you also get to see the value of things like a DevOps and Agile, uh, and that these things become an essential part of actually the birth of innovation within these companies. In fact, in

00:07:49

That, uh, startup, uh, it was almost all PhDs,

00:07:51

Right? It was all PhDs. You know, it's, it's one thing to be a computer science major, it's another to be a PhD. So I was, uh, subordinate to them, but I learned an enormous amount from them about how critical what you all do are if these companies, these large enterprises are actually gonna succeed. So from there, I went to Ware, uh, and I became the CEO of Ware four years ago, which is a mainframe software company. And what excited me about that job was that, you know, ware at that moment, uh, was in a lot of trouble. It was in a chronic state of decline. Some people thought it was in a pace to basically go out of business. It hadn't come out with a product for 15 years, you know, it was associated with the mainframe market. It was a sense of, of decline.

00:08:31

But my thesis was is that if you could take what I learned as a startup, CEO, you know, the passion of a vision, you know, a mission that gave a sense of purpose to the company and apply, you know, these techniques like DevOps and Agile, that you could restart a company and create something new and different and actually disrupt the market generally, but definitely change the fate of comper. So the effect of that was that, you know, in January of this coming coming year have for a company that hadn't come out with a new product in 15 years and had done, you know, waterfall for 40, and then our backlog was dominated by maintenance and basically compliance issues. And the com you know, the complaints of the largest customers. We will come out in January where our 16th consecutive quarter of new capabilities upgrades to our classic offerings, integration with leading def op ops tools and improvements in the customer experience.

00:09:16

We were a company in a state of decline to a company that's now in fact growing. And what's interesting for a type two person that you know is constantly looking at short list of, of cost cuts is the answer to everything. The way that Ware did that was one where, you know, we had no restructuring costs of any nature. Um, we had basically no negative effects in terms of cash flow. So those are financial kind of mumbo jumbo. But what it really means when you double click it is that the people changed. We went and had people that basically had that outcome for 40 years that wasn't nearly as successful, was leading to basically failure of the organization, reset themselves, reinvent themselves, embrace things like DevOps, embrace things like Agile and get basically a successful outcome almost immediately. So when you look at the core people within Copy word today, it's basically the same people there over the data I started.

00:10:07

And I say that to you 'cause you know, a lot of leadership believes you gotta purge and start again. You need restructuring cross the consequence of cash flow. And, and, you know, type two people hate that. 'cause in the short term, it creates a, a decrease in value of the firm. To think that we changed the tire in a moving car and actually created that outcome and bent the curve so fast is incredible testament to what you're trying to do and the importance of what you're trying to do to basically help the businesses you serve.

00:10:34

And you paint this picture, uh, of the setting, right? It's, it's 70 year olds, uh, working side by side with, uh, people fresh outta college. That's right.

00:10:42

That's right. So,

00:10:43

Uh, so you also told me something very surprising, uh, and this is actually cha resulted in the way I cha talk about DevOps. I mean, I've changed that. Uh, you said DevOps, people talk about things that business people don't care about, uh, <laugh> and, uh, and uh, so tell us more about, uh, how bad, uh, we are at communicating, um, value to people like you.

00:11:07

I don't think that's exactly the way I think about it, <laugh>, but, uh, first, you know, what I'm about to say is that there, there's, the DevOps story is an incomplete story. That there is two sides to the story. And one side is, is not being told. So I do want you to know as a CEO that you know, lives and dies by the DevOps efforts of my own organization, that what you're trying to do or are doing is incredibly important. But I wanna set the context for the other side of the story that's not told enough, uh, if at all. And I'll use a an example of a discussion that I had with a CIO of a large financial services company. And I was having a discussion with him and, you know, the, the subject of DevOps came up and he got a little bit upset, actually, actually not a little bit upset, you know, really upset.

00:11:50

And he, his, his perspective on it was that I'm tired of people coming in my office and talk about improvements of a release frequency, that MTTR is getting better, you know, that we're less and less bugs are going into the wild, oops, when those things are placebos in the eyes of our customers. And, and his point that he was making is that the ideation, the ideas are as important as how you do it, and they have to be made in balance. And you've probably heard in the course of these few days of, you know, change of mindset and being product minded rather than project or something like that. And that doesn't mean that much to me, but I want to kind of double click on this idea of ideation. 'cause it's important for you to understand it. So one of the, you know, the greatest successes in, in this modern digital age, obviously he's Amazon and Jeff Bezos is, is amazing.

00:12:43

Uh, and he is a person though that shares his successes. He's not hiding it. He's not like Charlie Walk or Charlie Wonka and his chocolate factory and keeping everything secret in terms of what goes on. He, he shares the ways that make Amazon different. And a couple years ago, as a shareholder or a letter to the shareholders that he wrote as part of his annual report, he talked about a bunch of things that makes Amazon different. But the first one he talked about was customer obsession and how important that is to what's made Amazon what it is today. And he goes, what's, what's amazing about being obsessed about customers is that customers are always wonderfully and beautifully dissatisfied. No matter when things are good and they think things are all right, there's always something more that they want. And your earnestness to try to understand those things will drive you to invent on their behalf. And that cycle, that virtuous cycle of being better at building customer experiences, customer journeys, eventually will separate for you from your competition. So it's incredibly important just as you are trying to do all these efforts to, you know, improve throughput, quality, velocity, efficiency, that you counterbalance that with the discussions about what ideas you're harvesting and finding and turning those into deliverables that are actually making a difference to your customers. You

00:14:00

Had this great Beatles analogy to describe that partnership. Tell us about that.

00:14:04

Yeah, so, um, internally at copier, you know, I talk about product management and engineering, both report actually direct directly to me as CEO, as Lenin and McCartney, uh, that the two of them have to challenge one another. Um, you know, I, the ideation side of it needs to challenge the, the efforts of engineering to get the sequence of getting those ideas to market in a quality state as fast as you can and get more and more throughput. The ideation side is we gotta have awesome ideas, not maintenance, you know, not compliance stuff, but awesome ideas that are gonna transform, you know, the company in the eyes of our customers and, and, and you know, the market generally. So you need those two to kind of, you know, make sweet music together, but they also gotta fight. You know, that, that combativeness as Lennon and McCartney had when you didn't see the music when they were sitting in the studio, is important for all of them to both of them, to escalate in their efforts.

00:15:02

And when you think about, you know, these, these type twos and trying to change their minds, you know, there's not a pill you can give them. I mean, they, they're, they're sitting there thinking about how do I create value? And almost always the short list is on cost cutting. So you in partnership with, you know, product management needs to start becoming storytellers. And at Compuware what we do is every two weeks, you know, at the same time, every two weeks we do a town hall. And in that town hall, if you came and listened to it, you're gonna hear product managers talking about ideas that we've harvested, that we're fashioning into deliverables that make a difference, and how customers are reacting to it. We're showing the fact that we're evolving, you know, the products that we have to nail the jobs that our customers are trying to do.

00:15:50

You are also hearing engineering, you know, talking about their progress and basically throwing out constraints and getting the flow of work to go faster. And they're saying it in authentic ways, you know, we're not just, everything's wonderful and beautiful. I mean, they're talking about the good and the bad and the ugly. You know, there was times when we had significant quality issues, but we'd put it front and center and we worked it through. And if you listen to those discussions every week, it gives you a sense of two things that are really important in trying to kind of tune into these type twos. One is, as you're showing them efficiency, right? You're showing your turn change, changing a tire and a moving a car because you're a culture that's constantly looking about at constraints and trying to think about how do I improve them? How do I get them faster?

00:16:33

How do I get the throughput to be better? Which is music to their ears, right? I mean, that's greater return from the assets within the business without adding more to it. But you are also showing 'em something that's equally important, which is resilience. All these ideas that are coming in, allowing the company to bob and weave and always have the days matter in terms of better serving customers. And that's critically important because as much as these type twos think about, I gotta cut costs, I gotta cut costs, I gotta make these decisive decisions as to what we're gonna do, they also fear making a mistake. You know, what if they make a huge decision and they can't unwind it, and they put the company into a cul-de-sac, that scares the crap out of 'em. Uh, and you know, I read a recent article, uh, on business, uh, insiders or business investors, uh, and they have this article about 50 companies that are retailers that have gone out of business in near history.

00:17:25

And anybody that's older than 30 years old will recognize most of the names. And it makes you wanna cry. And, you know, I think about what makes that happen. And to a certain degree, it's type twos chasing profitability without thinking about resilience, you know, and that you've got to, in the digital age, Bob and weave, you gotta get a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. So trust me, it's not like they're oblivious to this fact. All of them have cell phones, <laugh>, all of them see that shopping malls are closing, all of them shop on Amazon. They, they, they get that side of it. They just dunno how to get that to happen within their own business. So this two week cadence, or whatever cadence you have where you've got Lenon and McCartney, and I'm talking about it like it's one person or two people, it, it could be organizations, but giving that messaging, you know, throughput, you know, and, and efficiency along with, you know, these, these, taking these ideas and keeping us in this resilient state is something that over time, it may not catch 'em in a moment.

00:18:27

And they might not just have this epiphany, but trust me, they're getting beat on by boards. They're listening to Mackenzie and Bain. Everybody's telling 'em they gotta transform. At some point the aperture will open and they'll have to start learning and understanding. And it's everything that you've done up until that point that makes us spark something where you become the flywheel to take the business to the next level. So this idea of Lenon McCartney, I think is really important. And you need to look at it not as something that you do independent. 'cause again, you'll look like a placebo. You're talking head that's doing things that are different ways that may be important to you, but not to our customers. You need that partner, that ideation person to basically give you those stereo sound that makes people that are, you know, both type one and type two start to listen to you. So

00:19:12

Let's talk about the scenario. And I love the, uh, uh, the analogy of, uh, Lenin and McCartney. So what if I'm the Lenin and I can't find any McCartney's? Like what advice do you have? And you had something about, uh, passion explorers.

00:19:24

Yeah. So, uh, you know, I'll, I'll digress just for a minute. 'cause I think it's important. 'cause it tells you, it teaches you about the headwinds you face. I mean, you're, you're trying to be, you know, you're trying to help your company go on a journey. I mean, it's a revolution. I mean, like, to, to steal from the Beatles, you're trying to do something that's pretty heavy lifting and it's always important to appreciate how hard it is to do what you're trying to achieve. 'cause you gotta have will and you gotta have courage and it's kind of gotta measure up to, you know, what you're up against. So I, and I digress for a second, but I think it'll be helpful. So, uh, there was somebody that presented to me at one point, and they showed this slide, and the slide had GDP, uh, divided by hours work in the United States over the last five years.

00:20:04

And it was flat and it was, and I'm looking at it and I'm like, how can that possibly be, you know, you know, all the robotics in this world that are, that's coming into the country, companies like Amazon, all this technology, how can GDP versus our work be flat? There's a lot of reasons that economists talk about it that are way too complex for a kid that went to a public school <laugh>. Uh, but there's a, there is something that I saw that made sense to me. So, so Gallup does this survey on engagement, an employee engagement. They've been doing it for like 30 years and they do it every year or two, and every year for 30 years, it's had the exact same outcome, which it blows my mind. But what it's found is that a third of the people in organizations of scale are engaged.

00:20:51

50% of the people are what they'd term to be not engaged. And then they're remaining 17% are what is called actively disengaged. They actually sabotage the efforts of the companies that they serve. So when you do the quick math on it, you know, if you're this engaged employee that's actually trying to be part of an effort to transform two thirds of the company is working against you, they want things to remain in the status quo. They want things to be in a steady state. And that aligns to human nature. Human nature does not want to take risks. We'd rather be miserable in the known than take a chance in the fact that changing will create, you know, a better outcome. So you need to be conscious of that being the headwinds that you face. So I tell people when I see these people that are really good at DevOps, like Gene, they're passionate, they're excited, they're pumped, they're consistent in terms of kind of that, that mantra that they give.

00:21:45

'cause they understand any vacuum you create, gravity will pull that organization back so fast. So you gotta be on your game all the time. So what we talk about a lot within, within copywriters is this subset of engaged people called passionate explorers. Those are the people that, you know, you see that come on stage here, that you know, are pumped up. They fear nothing. You know, they're gonna go after the world. And you as a, as a person on your side, you know who those people are, right? You know, that there's people that feel frustrated within the business, that they see a better path forward and they're trying to basically get people to join this journey. There are other people within the business that are equally frustrated. You know, they see the problems that the business has got. You know, I tell people that, you know, you can't tell me that everybody at Sears is stupid and that everybody at Kmarts stupid.

00:22:41

I mean, there are smart people on the business side of the organization, but they gotta have the equal, you know, courage and desire to elevate themselves to be your equal. So you gotta find those people, and they're gonna be not like Lenon or McCartney yet, probably at the outset. They're gonna be more like Peter Best, which is the fifth Beatle. They got fired <laugh>. But you gotta help them to learn through the journey that you went through. I mean, you guys read the Phoenix project, right? And, and you use that as a, as a means of kind of getting everybody to understand why we gotta change and the fundamental things that have gotta be different. I mean, there's books like that on the other side, you know, like Marty Kagan's book inspired Building products that customers love and you've gotta help them to build product management skills so that they can go into that DMZ zone between customers and your value prop and understand that dissatisfaction, right?

00:23:29

That beautiful and wonderful dissatisfaction and think of creative ideas, not that aren't p that aren't prejudice, but are innovative to make it better so that they become a source of really awesome backlogs that aren't maintenance, that aren't compliance, but are gonna take the company to be more competitive in the digital age. So those people exist, you gotta go find them. You can't have them be, you know, somebody that you kind of talk to now and then you gotta hug them, you gotta get involved with them. You gotta teach 'em exactly what you did on your journey for them to do the same from a product management standpoint. So

00:24:02

Suppose we find our partner, uh, Lennon finds a McCartney, so, you know, putting your two hat on. So how do we start appealing successfully to the top levels of leadership?

00:24:12

Yeah, again, you, you have to have some sense of, there's gotta be a little bit of faith here, right? Um, you know, you, you, your, your management, you know, I just went to a CEO event in Manhattan.

00:24:23

That's the one I flew

00:24:24

Days. Yeah, no, no, just two days ago you, you did fine <laugh>. Um, but you know, Bain was there and, and, uh, you know, your, your, your CEOs and co CEOs are getting bombarded with this transformed state that the economy's being disrupted, you know, acceleration pace of that disruption's getting quicker. I mean, it, it, it is all centered on software and, and software being delivered faster and going in rates and speeds. So they're hearing that, right? And it's hard, right? Because if you are a, a type two, it's incongruent 'cause it feels like investment <laugh>, it feels like, you know, things that we, I haven't mastered as part of my career path if I've come up through the CFO, right? I don't know these things, right? So it is really important that you do, as we've talked about, that you find a partner, you know, that that lenon ir McCartney, that that becomes in a sense your equal contributors.

00:25:23

That you get a platform that communicates constantly, right? Whether it's weekly or biweekly, but you're always on stage and you're always talking about ideas that we're, you know, incredibly important to our customers, that we got into the backlog and we figured out a way to turn those into deliverables that make a difference. And you tell those story and the, the issues and the problems that you've got. And then through it also in, in doing that and having them watch that movie unfold and understanding it a little bit more, a little bit, making a difference, and they're getting this external stimulus. You gotta go digital, you gotta do this digital transformation. You know, those things will get them eventually to the right place. But one trick that I think is important for you to kind of draw them in, and you should target, you know, these, these, you know, type twos, is that in the course of this journey, and again, it doesn't happen in two weeks.

00:26:17

It, it's gonna be quarter, it could be years, you know, that's why you gotta have a lot of energy, you know, and a lot of will and determination. But eventually you're gonna get defining moments, right? That is either a catastrophe was a massive mistake, but we learned, man, we, we learned so much as a result of that. And it's basically moved the ball 20 yards. Having put that in the, the category of, of, of a deep lesson learned. And you wanna put that on stage, celebrate the person that took the risk and celebrate the person that, you know, made a difference in, in a mistake. And have that type two on stage being part of that celebration. 'cause what you're doing is you're showing what this passion and explorer likes look, looks like in the flesh. It's a face, it's a person man that's, I wanna be like Gary, I wanna be like Judy, you're putting that person out and you're getting a type two person to confirm that that's that, you know, subset of engaged people that we need.

00:27:19

You wanna use the others examples too. If you get a defining moment that's just an outrageous success. We delivered something that, you know, moved the needle massively in the eyes of customers. Get that person on stage and get that type two person on there, draw them in to this journey and these people that are basically pulling the organization forward. So I, you know, it, it's, it's a long road. There's no silver bullets, there's no drugs. You can give these people <laugh>, but you've got a set of chemistry, you know, both macro, right? And then all these things that they're being told by Mackenzie and Bain and, you know, Boston Consulting Group, you know, you've gotta show that you are changing, you're working on efficiency, you're working on resilience, and eventually it'll happen. I mean, I, trust me, that spark will occur. They'll engage and you'll look, you know, five years from now and see you can directly correlate with what you've, you know, doing right now to, you know, making your business turn around

00:28:17

Much better. One of our, uh, conversations you said, it's like Horton hears a who one that one voice, uh, will maybe create that aha moment for someone and the tide will turn. Yeah.

00:28:26

And I think, uh, you know, what's, you know, interesting, you know, I've, I've lived in the kind of the old enterprise software world with large enterprises and uh, you know, especially over time, the secrecy of it all is like, we don't talk to the press, we don't talk to anybody. And, and that's terrible. Uh, because, you know, the leaders that are in this room, you know, being a leader is lonely. You know, it it, and it's, it's scary and you gotta come up pumped up and you gotta look like you got no fear and you gotta have courage. And part of the, the means by which you kind of regather yourself, if you stumbled and you have made a mistake, and I'm sure you've all been in this mode where you know, something bad happened and those two thirds of the organization that are either not engaged or actively disengaged, she's on it and say, oh my God, I told you we shouldn't change. You know, we should keep it doing it the old way and, and you, you muscle through it. But when you go home at night, I mean, you gotta, you got empty feeling in your stomach. And so what makes it work is getting everybody to support the cause and get the cacophony is something right. Oh, no, no,

00:29:29

No. I just reminded me something. Yeah,

00:29:31

You gotta get the cacophony going, right? And, you know, I think using things like social media, you know, and, and not Twitter, 'cause it's transient. I think, you know, things like LinkedIn are looked at by your executives, you know, your CEOs and CIOs are certainly trying to use that platform to, you know, cultivate their own brand. But you being visible in social media and showing those successes and getting other companies to ch to chime in, and that sense of building on something that creates momentum is incredibly important. So your voice matters. I mean, what you have to say matters, contribute to that conversation publicly. You know, not just to, you know, your buddies at lunch. I mean, those are important things in terms of getting, you know, this thing to move.

00:30:16

In fact, I I wanna acknowledge, uh, something that you had said that actually changed the programming for this morning. And you said, you know, uh, you know, show the CEOs excited about a different way to engage with the customer, right? That that would actually generally excite them. And that's why we actually had Alice Reya from Kaiser Permanente, where they're actually working on a dramatically way to reengage, uh, and how, what patient care could look like. Uh, so, you know, thanks for that. That's why Alice went before you. So, um, what do we do when we're getting started? And I'm putting your two hat back on. How do we get people like you not to kill us, kill the program when we're 80% through?

00:30:50

Yeah. And I think, you know, you've gotta, it goes back to what I've said. I mean, you can't in the moment fix a situation like that. I mean, if you've, if you've, if you've been quiet about the effort, uh, and it's been a skunk works project, and then you get to a decision point and the, you know, you had a bad quarter or something bad has happened, which you know, gives the type two a very short list of what to do at this moment in time. I mean, you're, you've created a, a, a trap, uh, that's very difficult to get out of. Um, so it's everything that you've done through the course of time before that moment occurs that creates the greater degree of, of likelihood of a successful outcome. You know, in business, you know, no matter how good you are, there is good luck and there is bad luck, right?

00:31:38

It's just the way it works. Uh, and you know, it's a game of luck to a certain degree. So a good leader understands that they're doing things in terms of, you know, messaging, efficiency, messaging, resilience. There's, there's a crank being turned and there's a continuous degree of, of improvement that's being happening every day, every week, every month. And that they get to now a decision point of what you've just said. They're gonna say, this one stays <laugh>. We keep this thing going 'cause I've seen it for what it's done and what it can do and the promise of it. But you've gotta involve them in the story. So I know you work, a lot of, you work for very large organizations and this idea of, you know, two week town halls seems, uh, how are we gonna do that? I mean, you know, don't, you know, when I talked about the fact that people are engaged and not engaged and actively disengaged, you know, everybody wants to believe they're in the first category.

00:32:33

I've never presented to an audience and everybody thought, oh, I'm not the engaged, or I'm not the, I mean, they don't think that everybody thinks they're engaged, engaged. I mean, everybody thinks I'm the passionate explorer, <laugh>, but if you're sitting in the audience right now and saying things like that, you know, doing a town hall, that's hard. I mean, I mean, that's a lot of content. I mean, that's a lot. You are actively disengaged. You are sabotaging the effort. I mean, you, you are, you are basically, you yourself, the problem. I'm not saying anybody feels that way, but you're the problem. So, you know, it's everything that you do up until that moment that determines what's gonna happen when the, the decision has to be made. So what, final advice, advice.

00:33:11

No, no, no, no, it's great. No, I wanna make sure that, uh, you have a great piece of final advice for this, uh, community.

00:33:16

Yeah, I, you know, the first thing you know, you're on a quest, a revolution crusade in any of those things. What's important at the outset is that truth is on your side. You are doing the right thing and it is essential to the success of your companies. So get that in your psyche. You know, get that in your, your mindset. It is crucial that you come from a, a dispo a disposition of courage. 'cause things will go bad, you'll fail. I mean, it's, it, it's, you know, it, it's, it's part of getting better is failing, but you need to know at your heart that you're doing the right thing. And as a CEO of a company that went from, you know, a a, a nose dive to turning itself around and not creating growth in ways that, you know, investors look at it as being extraordinary.

00:34:10

Is somebody asking me the question how we did it? Core to it is DevOps core could not have possibly done. We've done a copy without, you know, DevOps and agile methods impossible. So have that in your mind all the time, even when you're lonely and things got bad and you had a bad day. Second thing is, you need an alter ego. It's your only half the story. You need your McCartney, you need your Lenin, you don't need Peter Best. You know, you know, you need somebody who's your equal and help them to paint a collective story as much as you need them to make you successful, right? That, that they're an advocate for the fact that what you've done is, is a means of taking these awesome ideas we've got and turn them into deliverables that make a difference. And they, they need to have you give the support to them that you are giving them a way to iterate, to experiment, to learn things.

00:35:04

Never go down a cul-de-sac. Always going maybe on a meandering path, but we're always getting to a place where customer sat is getting better. You know, you know, engagement is getting better. So that second part of it, two, the third thing is you gotta talk together. You gotta communicate, you know, that message as an ongoing storyline and promote in this mindset an idea of efficiency. I mean, that plays to, to, you know, the, the type two, but also resiliency. They may not be able to take that leap to innovation 'cause that's just a, a bridge too far. But they do understand resiliency 'cause they fear making the wrong decision. And you are giving them a way to basically give a net that if they do make the wrong choice, they can back outta this cul-de-sac and take it on a, on a different path. And then lastly I'll just say is, you know, be inspired.

00:35:53

When I, when I look at, you know, the travels that we have that, you know, we're, we're seeing a lot more, you know, DevOps and agile happen on the mainframe. So I'm getting introduced to more and more DevOps people and they're kind of a of a consistent breed. They're inspired, they're fired up. They get, you know, they get the troops going. I mean, you gotta have that kind of relentless disposition about you. 'cause gravity is so hard and always keep in your mind that two thirds of the people want you dead <laugh>. I mean, they, they, uh, they don't want you to succeed. But do not fear that anything that is great in any company that's been achieved, that's been worthy, right, that's really made a difference is 'cause it overcame that gravity. And I guarantee if you just keep that chin up and that and those arguments going, that you're gonna see five years ago that you were the core, you were the spark that turned your company around and got to a level of, of, of growth and ability to compete in the digital age that no one thought was possible today. So thank you Chris

00:36:51

O'Malley, thank you so much for teaching us some very important things that we've never been taught before. You're welcome. Thank.