Speaker 0 | 00:09.672
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. This is your OG original host, Phil Howard. I’ve been gone for… It might be a year now. It might actually be a year. I’ve had Michael and numerous other people doing shows. So I’m going to welcome myself back, I guess. And I hope everyone’s happy for that. We’ll find out if the ratings go down now, if the original host coming back does any good or bad. But anyways, we’ve got Kenny. Is it Rotunda? Am I pronouncing your last name correctly?
Speaker 1 | 00:48.626
Yeah, you got it. Exactly. That’s actually…
Speaker 0 | 00:51.956
Pretty awesome. I mean, that’s pretty, that’s pretty rotund. Yeah. You know, so let’s just do it the old school way that, you know, we’ve got it leadership. That wasn’t a thing back in the day. How the, how the heck did you get into it? Well, what was, we’ll do the old school question. What was your very first computer?
Speaker 1 | 01:14.476
That is a good question. Well, as a, as a.
Speaker 0 | 01:18.796
somebody just kind of getting in we have to change that too we have to change it to like what if it was like my kids nowadays would be like what’s your what was your very first tablet it would have to be like what was your first device like you know so anyways do you remember or what was your first fond memory of playing
Speaker 1 | 01:36.123
on a keyboard that clicked or something what what was it yeah yeah it’d have to be you know i don’t remember the model but it was one of those atari keyboards basically you plug into a uh uh into a CRT and you could do some basic programming or something like that and for the model of it at all I ended up dropping it on the ground one day and it broke so that was the end of my career but somehow I still ended in IT.
Speaker 0 | 02:02.924
What did you program?
Speaker 1 | 02:04.704
Nothing. I was amazing and like things would appear on the screen.
Speaker 0 | 02:15.207
I was looking up the other day kind of the history of video games a little bit because i remember really kind of like falling in love with video games the first time i saw them i remember i remember the atari we were at i think like ricky longbottom’s house which was my brother’s like friend in high school and he had an atari and anytime someone had video games i just wanted to say like would you please just let me play this and like can everyone just leave me alone and let me just sit here and zone out because my my father you know god bless him he uh he wouldn’t let me have you know video games like for you it just wasn’t it was one of those things that we just didn’t have in the house i don’t know what it was for a long time until i think i eventually begged um my you know, my parents eventually to get me an NES, the original NES, but I can clearly remember that Atari thing, this kind of like, and if you looked at it nowadays, it’s so archaic, it would just seem so, you know, you’ve got to like use a screwdriver to like plug it into the, so anyways, my, my first computers was Texas Instruments, probably the same thing. I think we had to use, you know, the RF switch or whatever it was to, you know, plug it back in and had, that was a computer that had cartridges. That’s, that’s kind of interesting. I mean,
Speaker 1 | 03:41.388
professional exposure to a computer would have to be like a Macintosh SE30 though. And I still have one of those.
Speaker 0 | 03:49.412
Was it the square one? The little square box one? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 03:52.034
Black.
Speaker 0 | 03:52.414
The OG Mac. The OG Mac.
Speaker 1 | 03:55.036
Yeah. Off the disc.
Speaker 0 | 03:58.337
Yeah. The mouse with us. Yeah. I was trying to explain that to my son the other day. He’s like, so how was like, you know, what could you do on a computer? Or it was my son-in-law actually. He was like, how? we were talking about hard drives and how expensive they were and moving ram around to make a game work and he was asking me because he was born in 94 i graduated high school in 95 and we kind of just laughed and um we are you know he was just like well how did you do this i was like we used to have to boot the computer with a boot disk but like people don’t understand like you don’t just like you didn’t just hit power like you know you don’t just hit power and like it works you know like we’d have to No, you had to use a boot disk and then you pull that out and put another disk in to run the next program. You could save a couple papers, a couple fourth grade papers on a floppy disk and then you’d have to go to disk two. you’d write your papers on it. So I love the, you know, the walk down memory lane is not. So anyways, fast, fast forward. What did you go to school for? Did you go to school? How’d you end up where you are?
Speaker 1 | 05:07.539
Yeah, no, good question. So, you know, geez, back in that day. So I was really going towards, you know, a career in graphic art. Yeah, I had an interest in art. And that’s kind of where I wanted to be. I went to a two year diploma mill.
Speaker 0 | 05:22.724
type of school um complete ripoff we call yeah i admit it i’m wearing my jujitsu t-shirt right now and we say like in jujitsu like you know careful where you take your knowledge from like you don’t just go to like any youtube place or whatever we used to like joke around about you know karate and in in uh you know any karate person’s gonna be mad or what are we in karate uh yeah and um what else did we have taekwondo we call them belt churns like i say that like you just go in and show up and you’ll eventually get a belt and then and jiu-jitsu is different you know because you actually have to like fight people every day you know throughout the class so you used to like laugh at the like we’d have some black belts that came in and correct well i’m a black belt and crying like okay yeah get on the mat and there’d be like a bunch of white belts beating them up you know anyway um so yeah so we went through it so we went through a graphic artist uh yeah didn’t you call it again what was your diploma mill diploma mill yeah yeah What did you see yourself doing? What did you, cause I always, you know, I was pre-med for a while. Then I was something else. I ended up getting a degree in creative writing. Um, I remember going to biology classes and chemistry classes and realizing that it was, you know, everyone in my family is a doctor. So it was a dying breed for us. Like you don’t just become a doctor because everyone else did like you there’s, you’ll never make it. You just, you won’t have the drive. It’s too much work. So what did you visualize yourself doing as a
Speaker 1 | 06:51.512
visual graphic artists yeah i mean so even when i was going to school i mean we had one course with a computer in it and you know you had to like um uh really compete for that time uh so the rest of it annual you know very cut and paste you know literally cut and paste not computer cut and paste like cutting things out with an exacto knife and you know uh putting it on there doing billboards and all that kind of stuff so that’s where i saw myself going just getting out there creating art to sell products and services whatever but it was interesting because you know i graduated from from that place and i landed at a very large coupon manufacturing place direct marketing place nice it was that place what was the coupon place yeah valpak coupons yo
Speaker 0 | 07:39.230
valpak is the best yeah right that was they still it works yeah it literally it’s something about that big thick envelope that you get it should be and you know how the direct direct mail which i have a theory is going to make a comeback yeah well i’m going to use i i think dissecting popular it nerds i think we should do marketing through direct mail and i have i’m going to tell you about there’s a story about that but you know how they have the a pile b pile c pile mail do you know you know the a pile and the b pile so the a pile of mail is like when you go to the and this is a you This is like an old school, like I think, is it Dan Kennedy or Gary Halbert? Like an old direct mail marketing, the famous dudes in direct mail marketing, right? So you go to the mailbox, you get this pile of crap out of your mailbox, right? There’s the A pile and the B pile. And you immediately sort through and the B pile is like, or there’s a C pile too. I think the C pile is, I’m not really sure, but there’s all this stuff that immediately gets thrown into the trash. It’s all the junk mail, like right away. You get that. If someone makes it into the A pile, that’s… in in direct in the direct marketing world direct mail world if you make it into the apop that’s like a big deal in my household valpak definitely made it into the ape definitely made it an ace that it’s just a thick envelope there’s gotta there could be something in here that i need i mean it could be like free five dollars to like ihop or something i don’t know but valpac you went to valpac that’s kind of a big deal you went to a belt churn graphic artist churn and you got a job at Valpac. That’s pretty good.
Speaker 1 | 09:19.867
It was great. Really good company back in the day. It still is. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It was back in the, gosh, mid-90s.
Speaker 0 | 09:27.534
Black Jack Pizza’s got a coupon in there. That’s right. I’m sorry. Go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 09:31.157
The funny thing too is we’re all just a bunch of young guys working there. The guy I reported to for a short period of time, awesome guy, he’s now the CEO of Valpac. just he stuck with it for a long time tremendous respect for the guy he’s a career career he’s a career belt pack yeah he’s not good all the way through
Speaker 0 | 09:55.016
people say that about me and in the industry that i’m into they’re like you’re still there and other guys are like i don’t know in real estate or something i don’t know go ahead so uh so it was interesting i applied for this job called an opaque artist and
Speaker 1 | 10:10.230
i thought what the heck is an opaque artist is that invisible what does that mean so i thought okay it has artists at the end of this so this i gotta apply for this right This is slightly above minimum wage. Okay, this is going to be my foot in the door. You know, I show up at the interview with this big old portfolio full of art and stuff, you know. And I’m displaying my portfolio to this hiring manager who’s clearly not interested. She was like, okay, yeah, that looks good. That looks good. Now let me explain the job. I ended up taking the job, but here’s what the job was basically. So back in that time, we didn’t have computers to speak of. We had some tandem computers sort of. quasi mean frame sort of stuff but we didn’t have personal computers anywhere so we’re doing you know um linotype and um developing film and that sort of stuff had a huge camera room so the opaque artists would take these negatives and we’d literally be in this room with light tables put the negative on a light table excuse me and um and take a little sharpie and just fill in where any imperfections were that’s an opaque artist now the icing on the cake is back in that time uh everybody had an ashtray on their desk it was dimly lit people cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and stuff so my first art job and my last art job because after that they started getting some computers in for like all the se 30s and that sort of thing and And they said, hey, you seem to have some sort of aptitude. You want to take this on? And I said, sure, I’ll try it out. And lesson learned for anybody listening to this as well, like really take advantage of those opportunities that are out there.
Speaker 0 | 12:02.415
Don’t be afraid to back low. Yeah, you can use, no matter where you are, take the opportunity to do your best. Yes. Whatever that is. And I think it’s a matter of, it’s probably a matter of attitude and responsibility, right? I’m in this dead end job. I’m this and that. No, but there’s, it’s when I think about my years at Starbucks, which I would, anytime I’m tired of doing whatever I’m doing on a daily basis, I just have to go back in time and think about that. And then I’m like, oh, oof. But I took it as kind of like a free MBA, right? Because when I worked for Starbucks, it was back in the day when they were really, really growing fast and they threw all kinds of training at us. They threw business training at us. I mean, people at Starbucks knew what gross, at least the store managers, assistant store managers would know how to read a P&L. They would know what gross margin is. They would know flow through profit. They would know all these different things that, and honestly, there’s not many colleges in that, not many. courses in college where you would learn that level of or get that level of business terminology business experience and then how to go through and actually you know change management and then you know make all these numbers actually work so so how do we go from dimly lit could be in a movie smoking ashtrays and inking in different things a graphic artist job to you to it leadership and uh how did we uh digitally transform i’m trying to take how do we did how do we take all these keywords you know that we get thrown out on a daily basis and let’s just give them a new definition how did you digitally transform yourself
Speaker 1 | 13:59.782
yeah good question so you know i was you know that that geek system administration unix windows whatever you know through a lot of my career But eventually it came to a point at one of the companies that worked for 20 years, Travelport, awesome company as well. Fantastic. Where I will say IT became a problem for the business because they were doing things in a very old school way. Right. They were working through problems and creating solutions in a vacuum. They weren’t connecting to the business areas. And once you get into that sort of situation where you don’t have that trust. from the business, the business side of IT, that’s a downward spiral. It’s really hard to come back from that.
Speaker 0 | 14:46.514
Let’s dig in on that just a little bit because I find that fascinating. When you say they were working or fixing solutions in a vacuum, can you just paint a picture there?
Speaker 1 | 14:56.203
what that means was there just no communication outside of it it was in their own little uh silo and the rest of the business was siloed or what was going on there yeah exactly when you think of if you were to to create a person called it that person is generally uh pretty introverted right they’re not very effective at communications generally speaking stereotyping yes i i know but that’s what we’ve seen a lot of right well if
Speaker 0 | 15:25.611
If 95% of the industry is, here’s another stereotype that’s true. 95% of the industry or more. And I believe that I am being generous there by giving 5% of IT to women.
Speaker 1 | 15:43.740
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 15:44.801
I believe 95% of the IT professionals are men.
Speaker 1 | 15:49.944
Yeah, that’s true.
Speaker 0 | 15:51.985
Yep. Is that because they’re nerds and not cool and women are cooler? I don’t know. Like, why, why is that? You know, call us cooler. You chauvinist. Anyways.
Speaker 1 | 16:07.584
So just to paint that picture though. So for instance, the finance organization say, Hey, we want this cool new finance finance system, or we want something we need. So basically what they would do is they would go through the process of figuring out their solution for themselves. Because they didn’t have that trust in IT. They didn’t think that IT could be creative enough or really address their specific needs. So that’s one problem right away, right? So a finance organization doesn’t generally understand technology like an IT organization does. So you got first step of misalignment. So they’re going to say, okay, IT, this is what we want. It’s an XYZ solution. It costs X number of dollars. And we want you to implement it in six months. And And then it comes to IT, and IT’s like, well, okay, wait a minute. It’s going to take us 10 months to implement this. Well, no, we need it in six months. All right, next thing then. So now IT is set up for failure because they can’t deliver it in the time they know that it should be delivered. They’re going to be over budget. And effectively, when they deliver this thing that finance said they want, It’s going to have shortcomings. It’s not really what finance wants because finance doesn’t know.
Speaker 0 | 17:25.507
So we’ve talked about this a lot. I guess you could call it modern day shadow IT decisions or top down. Top down. IT doesn’t have a seat at the executive round table. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What’s to dig into to kind of go even a little bit deeper then on this would be your. piece of fixing solutions in a vacuum or implementing even implementing solutions in a vacuum so let’s say we did have that happen um what okay so they handed something down what happened after that so then well there was no communication to begin with so there’s probably going to be very little communication during the entire implementation process as well exactly so you um what do we do if that happens and we have to deal with it do we like should there be like a coup uh should we throw our you know should we then you know it it’s going to happen to somebody today like every 60 seconds an it guy has is thrown a is thrown something he has to implement you know of shadow it or someone makes a shadow every 60 seconds someone makes a shadow it decision we should actually figure out that statistic that would be a good blurb The,
Speaker 1 | 18:49.168
I mean,
Speaker 0 | 18:49.989
so how do we fix, I guess, fix, but keep going, you know, go ahead. I think, I think many people are aware of this, um, juggernaut of, you know, kind of, I wonder how much has happened in five years or four years since we’ve been doing this show. I wonder how much the actual landscape has changed. I think it’s changed a lot. I think people have more respect for.
Speaker 1 | 19:15.247
you know it now because we have things like the amazon effect and and i don’t know um yeah i mean i think it depends i think it depends on the company um so i think there’s still pockets of companies that are working kind of in an old school way but the fix of the problem is oil and gas oil and gas right i just imagine a bunch of guys out in texas like hey we need to get it in here yeah yeah and so let’s let’s skip over just for a second and look at oil and gas and how this same model applies to them right so coming in bro um i knew what i was coming into i knew it was going to be a bit more old school A bit of, okay, IT is just laptops and wires and stuff. And that’s it, right?
Speaker 0 | 20:05.945
Drills.
Speaker 1 | 20:07.046
Yes, drills and stuff.
Speaker 0 | 20:09.667
Pickaxes.
Speaker 1 | 20:11.748
That’s right. You guys are working. It’s understandable that technology isn’t in the forefront of their mind, but it’s my job to help them understand that technology can work in their favor.
Speaker 0 | 20:24.642
but it’s like why if it’s a it’s the classic if it ain’t broke don’t fix it mentality it’s not just i’m joking around about you know well and uh the uh every picture taken of george bush either of them ever fishing by the way was taken from my dad’s boat so i know a little bit about texans but uh you’ve nailed it as far as an industry right don’t
Speaker 1 | 20:50.509
fix it but yeah but Getting closer to the business is the key to that. It’s about the BRM discipline, business relationship management. It’s also about taking the best in breed on Agile and combining those two. That truly is where you can really connect the dots.
Speaker 0 | 21:11.841
I’m all ears, please. First, knockout business relationship, so BRM. What is that best and best in breed agile and how do we bring them together and what is it?
Speaker 1 | 21:26.151
So back at my previous company where we had this big IT problem, what I did is create a BRM organization. And business relationship management is a relatively new discipline, but it really is the glue between your business analyst, your project manager, your strategic thinker. It really kind of glues all this stuff together. So effectively, there’s a lot in it. And you can get certifications and all that kind of stuff. But in a nutshell, it aligns. So I specifically had business relationship managers that I assigned to different areas of the business. And their job specifically is to sit with those folks, sit with the finance team, sit with the HR team, sit with the commercial sales team, and understand how they do business from the ground up. Because for IT to be truly effective, we’ve got to understand the business. And we need that. not just understand the business and how they operate, but provide that guidance along the way.
Speaker 0 | 22:24.119
Yeah. Okay. I’ll be honest with you. I did not know there was like a certification type of program that was this BRM. This is, to me, I always thought this was, oh no, this is just what good IT leaders do. They sit in on meetings, sit in on the project management meetings, sit in with finance, sit in with sales, sit in with marketing. and ask you know just sit there and be a fly on the wall and listen and and find out what their problems are and see what they’re trying to accomplish and then you know then ask a few questions to see how technology can fit in but keep going I want to know about the actual real
Speaker 1 | 23:00.852
way of doing this it’s been scientifically proven so yeah the real way of doing it is it’s you know it started with starts simple right it starts just with that conversation um and I will say to be effective at the BRM discipline, you’re there all the times to the point that like the finance organization forgets that you’re part of IT and not part of their own organization. And I’ve actually had that as a compliment to me when I put myself in that position. I was at a seat at the table during all their meetings. And, you know, the CFO at that time actually forgot that I wasn’t part of his organization. And that’s huge, right? So now you’re part of that team. You understand what they do. And you can provide that guidance along the way.
Speaker 0 | 23:44.755
So when they say CFO, did you say CFO? Yeah. Yeah. That’s really good.
Speaker 1 | 23:49.797
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 23:50.338
That’s really, that’s because a lot of people are, one of the questions comes up a lot is like, how do I get something approved? Right. Well, do you know the CFO? When’s the last time you’ve had a conversation with him? That’s right. No. You know, or it comes down to, you know, people complaining about the budget, complaining about different things like this. Well, when’s the last time you’ve sat down with the CFO?
Speaker 1 | 24:12.110
Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s, that’s good. That’s a good point. You know, and I’m always working with all those that, you know, that, that area of the business, but imagine as well, like for instance, now that you’ve earned their trust as an individual, as an IT individual within that team, you’ve earned the trust of that team. You’ve earned the trust of that CFO to your point. Now you’re going to have a better path forward on getting approval for the project as well and support, right? Because you’re all aligned. IT is aligned with finance and you’re setting the direction. You also have a seat at the table to say, hey, you know what? This is actually going to be 10 months worth of development, not six. And they’ll listen.
Speaker 0 | 24:55.626
Is that where the agile comes in or where’s the agile coming?
Speaker 1 | 24:58.874
So what we’ll do then is we start to clean agile a little bit. Let me say one thing about agile as well. So I came from a very large, very structured, agile, safe environment. You know, PI planning, the whole deal, lots and lots of money spent on agile. I’m a big fan of agile, right? But not all companies can afford to do true agile. So I’m okay when I hear people say, yeah, we use like a variation of agile or we use agile fall. or those sort of things, those hybrid things. Because effectively what they’re saying is, look, they don’t want to invest like a tremendous amount of money in Agile, but they want to adopt the best parts of Agile. Okay. And that’s kind of where I’m at as well. So what we’ll do is we’ll take that demand coming from the business and we’ll feed that into a backlog for prioritization. Okay. And then, and then really, you know, we’ll figure out what things we should focus on based on the prioritization. And I use like a variation of weighted shortest job first to figure out how to prioritize the work. Then what we’ll do is continue down the agile path and make sure we develop sprints, make sure we have effective communication that we’re,
Speaker 0 | 26:12.253
you know. What’s a time period for a sprint?
Speaker 1 | 26:17.277
Yeah. So, you know, typically we’re going to be between a week to two weeks, but I like to lean on the two week period for a sprint.
Speaker 0 | 26:24.944
Why is agile expensive?
Speaker 1 | 26:27.810
Well, because a lot of times with Agile, you need like all those different roles, right? You need a scrum master and a product donor and a product manager. And all those different roles have to be filled if you’re doing true Agile, right? That’s just a lot of overhead. Now, I’ve seen tremendous value come out of an Agile machine. So it’s worth the investment if you have the money to invest and you know you’re going to get the value on the other end.
Speaker 0 | 26:51.579
But you break that down. Let’s break it down for the person that may not. be there yet, or they are there, and it would actually make a difference from a return on investment standpoint. Let’s say we’ve got, no, we’ve got project managers, we’ve got project management software, we’ve got this. How would you come in and say, no, no, you should implement this? Where would you start? What would be the basic framework? And can you just break that down for that IT team that might be sitting out there with five people that this could make a big difference?
Speaker 1 | 27:26.313
Yeah. So. It might be best just to start with understanding what are the problems with waterfall, what are the problems with old school project management. So briefly, using waterfall method, you know, your requirements come at the top of this thing, this machine, if you will, this process. Once they get into IT, and this is more of the siloed view of IT where they’re not communicating, it goes all the way through, you know, the standard SDLC, the development, testing, deployment, all that kind of stuff. At the end of that, for instance, If you have a big project, and let’s say it’s a 12-month project, requirements go in, the work starts. The stakeholder, the sponsor may not hear from IT for many, many months until it’s ready to be delivered. And so, okay, here’s your solution. And now the stakeholder and the sponsor is like, well, this isn’t exactly what we wanted. So there’s a huge disconnect right there. So that’s one of the biggest problems of waterfall. There’s no communication in the middle, or at least not much. right? It’s very little. Sometimes you have those project management meetings and that’s all good, but you know how those go. You know, they’re just going through a checklist. They’re going through this project plan that nobody’s paying attention to. You got to break it down into actual human information for crying out loud. It’s not all about tasks. You know, let’s, let’s demonstrate the work that’s been done. Let’s help the stakeholder and the sponsor understand where we are and, and, and give them a voice. Does this look good? Is this what you want? Or should we pivot and do something a little bit different before it’s too late? Because if you deliver something 12 months later and they don’t like it and you’ve got to do some redevelopment, you’re already in trouble.
Speaker 0 | 29:08.073
I guess my point is, do we need to label a lot of this stuff agile? Or do we need to label this stuff business relationship management? Or is this just another marketing scam that’s going to come at, or am I going to get a… Should we have a ValPak coupon for Agile? You know what I mean? Should we have a ValPak coupon for that? Because I guess when you think back to all of it, is a lot of this stuff deservingly, does it deserve to be called Agile? Great name, by the way. Does it deserve to be called this or could we just rebrand it something else and now it’s a new methodology or is this, do you understand what I’m saying?
Speaker 1 | 29:50.845
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean.
Speaker 0 | 29:52.926
In other words, is a lot of this stuff, I don’t want to say like…
Speaker 1 | 29:57.684
it should be common sense we should know this but it’s not but we need to map it out and just you know it’s like the blueprint i guess absolutely i mean a lot of it is common sense right take the roles and all this stuff aside um a lot of this is absolutely common sense and it’s at the center of this it’s all about communication constant communication right there’s a little bit of structure behind it to support your communication but it’s about communicating your stakeholders your sponsors getting feedback and being able to pivot quickly
Speaker 0 | 30:27.144
before it becomes a costly mistake yes change your direction if you need to we’re going to pause for the section of the show called i don’t know we have two we have two routes we can do i’ll let you pick one it’s um conspiracy theories that you may believe in okay or what did you do back in the
Speaker 1 | 30:54.592
for fun before the internet was invented um uh we can probably go down the route of what did i do for fun conspiracy this conspiracy theory thing is probably way too deep and way too long on the list but top
Speaker 0 | 31:13.146
one top worst one i’ll tell you mine mine is um mine is um and i i am I have a stack of books right now that I am reading. Yeah. And it’s, it’s not just the typical, I’ll look at the pictures and the shadows. It’s did we really land on the moon?
Speaker 1 | 31:32.441
Oh, wow.
Speaker 0 | 31:33.281
It’s, it’s, it’s absolutely wild. And everyone might laugh at me and this might actually kill the show and no one’s going to listen to it anymore. But I’m reading right now, like the whole Apollo, like V, like the whole rocket project and the, you know, the. you know propulsion and how the actual rockets worked and design and cooling and and all this stuff it’s really fascinating and then you’ve got a whole group of russians on the other side they were like no the americans never did this because it wouldn’t be possible that the rocket lift should in the amount of weight that it had to carry and so anyways um i’ve been reading up on this for a long time and the more that i think about it the more for example the apollo 11 capsule everyone’s gonna like if anyone actually gets this far in the show and is listening this long i’ll probably get you know well first of all um 223 assault rifle bullet when it leaves leaves the muzzle of the gun how fast is it going feet per second any idea no just take a guess it’s like it’s 3 500 feet per second okay mock six the fastest plane right now i believe is the f 15 something right it goes like mock 5.2 how fast is that Mach six is like, I believe, 6,000 feet per second. Right. Okay, so it’s going to be, that’s faster than a speeding bullet. Okay. How fast was the reverse triangular Apollo 11 space capsule going when it reentered Earth’s atmosphere? This is reentry. This is not going up in a rocket. This is reentering backwards with the… you know, whatever plates on the bottom that were supposed to slow it down and melt away to keep the astronauts from like burning alive inside. Okay. Any clue how fast that was going?
Speaker 1 | 33:23.271
I don’t know, but that’s a big flat area too, which isn’t very aerodynamic coming in.
Speaker 0 | 33:28.775
Let me just give you a hint. It’s faster than Mach 6. Wow. 35,000, a little bit over 35,000. 35,000 miles per hour is what we have been told. Wow. This, I might actually get killed. I probably should not have brought this up on this show. But that’s just one statistic. That’s just one statistic. And what slowed it down eventually, those plates and then three parachutes. So I can understand why we did it during the whole, you know, JFK and race against the Russians and everything like that. Still waiting for us to put some more people on the moon. Anyways, that’s just one conspiracy theory. I’m not saying, I am not saying that we did not land men on the moon. What I’m saying is, is if I just Googled the laughable stuff that everyone says, like, oh, these, these, you know, crocs of, you know, you know, there’s anyways, if you actually look at what it would take to put someone on the moon, 220,000 miles away in the speed that we had to get there and the logistics behind it. That’s an agile project. Oh yeah. 1967 or 69. What did we have back then? This was before the internet. What did we do before the internet? And that’s a great segue to, we landed men on the moon. That’s what we did before the internet. After the internet, we did not land men on the moon.
Speaker 1 | 34:58.522
Yeah, because Google will do a take and it didn’t turn out very well.
Speaker 0 | 35:02.925
Anyways, I just have to throw that out there for fun. Hopefully that’ll create a huge argument about dissecting popular IT nerds and it’ll go viral. The show host said that’s possible. Anyways, what do you do for fun?
Speaker 1 | 35:18.613
It’s always good to think open-mindedly about this stuff. And the second we close our minds to the possibilities or even the conspiracies. then we’re really shutting ourselves off because it’s important to just keep the open mind. One thing I want to say, you touched on the internet and then I’ll come back to it, but I’ll give you an idea of keeping an open mind and where I was when the internet was quasi quote unquote invented, right?
Speaker 0 | 35:44.762
Yep.
Speaker 1 | 35:45.403
So I was at Valpak coupons back in the day and I was doing my IT stuff. And I remember a bunch of people gathered around this computer. And, you know, I walk over there and there’s a programmer and they’re doing something, you know, and everybody’s oohing and aahing. And so I talked to the person next to me and said, what’s going on over here? What’s this? And they said, well, that’s the internet.
Speaker 0 | 36:11.411
That’s a messaging board.
Speaker 1 | 36:13.073
Right. So, yeah. So it was like mosaic and it was just words and stuff and, you know, no text whatsoever. And for the younger crowd, it’s going to be hard to visualize.
Speaker 0 | 36:22.140
No Google. No, Google, nothing. That’s like, yeah, I don’t even know how to, cause you’re right for the younger. How, what do you mean? Like, yeah, like, no, there’s this modem thing and like a telephone and keep going, keep going.
Speaker 1 | 36:40.189
Yeah, exactly. So that’s like,
Speaker 0 | 36:42.410
or something, you know,
Speaker 1 | 36:44.510
what’s it used for? It’s like, Oh, it’s for communication and stuff. You communicate with people across the world and I said, wow, just through this words and stuff. Yeah. And I thought, okay, well, all right. So I actually went home that night and I was talking to the family and, you know, how was, how was the work today? It was great. You know, I saw this thing, it was like called the internet and a lot of stuff. And I specifically said, you know, I said, you know, I don’t think it’s going to take off. So key point there is, you know,
Speaker 0 | 37:17.863
it’s going to crash.
Speaker 1 | 37:19.144
Yeah. It’s going to crash. Like I didn’t get it. i didn’t understand it and i it’s self-defeating for me to say this on this podcast but it’s that’s where i was at the time since then i said okay i gotta keep an open mind about all this stuff going forward including ai and everything else yeah everything that i’ve ever said in my life and this is a blessing in disguise it’s
Speaker 0 | 37:41.431
just a blessing everything that i’ve said i will never do has happened to me right everything I’ll never work in a fast food joint. Heck no. First job out of college, headset on, working at Fazoli’s, fast casual Italian, asking people if they wanted breadsticks with their order.
Speaker 1 | 38:01.435
Awesome.
Speaker 0 | 38:02.716
I will never marry a cheerleader and he’s like, you know, you’ll never do that. No, I’m married to the, my wife is the captain of the cheerleading team. Like, I’ll never get married. I’ll never have kids. I have eight kids. Okay, that’s what happened to me. Yeah, I ended up with eight kids. And that was just, you know, like, and even when I was like, Nope, we’re only going to, we’re going to have five kids. You know, that’s what I remember. Like, I’m always, let’s have five kids. You know, we got to four and I was like, nah, then pretty much this is crazy. We’re done. And then like, well, you always want five, honey. Okay. We’re going to have five kids. No. And we had twins. So never had five. This one from four to six. So that’s what happens. By the way, it was six. 36,303 feet per second. Wow. Entering the atmosphere. 223 assault rifle, sniper, bullet, whatever, right? That was 3,000 feet per second, leaving the muzzle of the gun, right? Yeah. 36,000 miles per hour in feet per second is 51,000. 333 feet per second just let that sink in that’s nuts that’s not even to say faster than a speeding bullet i mean that’s fast that’s you know make believe superman character right 53 000 feet per second hmm just just gives just you know some i don’t know food for that um okay so okay so there was this thing called the internet uh we saw this you know it was we were traveling at bod whatever um the space capsule was traveling faster than internet back then i love this this is entertaining for me um so oh cool i saw this thing at the internet today okay great well then what did you do what did kids do for fun back then can you remember like i can remember shooting an old sand you know in my you know sandbox uh truck with a bb gun at one time people freely played with bb guns back then and probably firecrackers and other things like What do you remember as a kid doing? Because nowadays kids just sit, you know, they might just sit inside on a tablet or something.
Speaker 1 | 40:33.045
Exactly. Safety was not a thing. You know, it was like you just went out and had fun. Didn’t matter what it was. But I will say, so what I did as a kid, pretty dang boring. So I’ll keep it super short because of that. But, you know, I would just draw constantly. And I would draw and watch TV. That was my thing.
Speaker 0 | 40:53.752
you know happy days laverne and shirley all the reruns gilligan’s island that’s how i was raised yeah you could still see that like conveyor belt laverne and shirley like opening thing you know yeah yeah yeah definitely yeah um wait what was the other what was it oh yeah gilligan’s island gilligan’s island don’t forget that who didn’t want to grow up in mayberry come on you know
Speaker 1 | 41:22.264
So,
Speaker 0 | 41:22.784
so now I guess the next question is what’d you do before the TV for some of us, you know, like we, that’s amazing though. We have, um, I mean, my parents, you know, before TV, my grandfather was born 1900.
Speaker 1 | 41:38.788
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 41:39.709
That was prior to penicillin. He was a doc. He was, he was a pediatrician. He was born prior to penicillin. Wow. Um, That’s how much has happened in a very short period of time. The business relationship management, back to actually IT. This is an IT show. Best piece of advice for people listening to the show that to start those conversations and create change. How do we start those? Do you have any things that you do that makes starting a conversation with someone easy?
Speaker 1 | 42:19.768
the key thing is you know if you’re going to drive change is that change going to happen are they going to be supportive are you going to get tremendous resistance and so they’ve been embracing the change at lone bro i mean coming into the company you know didn’t have an hr system 1300 Didn’t have a CRM, Salesforce, what we have now, right? All this kind of stuff. It goes on and on the list. Right now, we’re implementing an intranet, right? So we have separate divisions across Lone Brow. And they all work very siloed. They used to be separate companies. They’re kind of all kind of brought together under this one umbrella. How do you bring all these divisions together? And I know I’m off track a little bit. This is important, though. So how you bring all those divisions together is you can do it really effectively with an intranet. They’re regionally separated and you can create an internet that’s not just a file, a glamorous file sharing device, but more of something that brings people together. Like, you know, CEO videos, you can have information about weather, local weather when they’re on the field, useful information. You can even have like amazing like pictures and videos and stuff of some of the events they’ve had at some of the divisions. But take a step back. The key thing, the key way to start this. is to work in the areas of the business. So tomorrow I’m going to be on site at one of the sites. I just bought some steel-toed boots. Never had any before. Nashed. I’ll be made fun of. Really, it’s about getting out there, getting in the field, and understanding the primary aspect of the business. Work with the people that are doing the real work out there. And that’s the best way to build trust too, right? So, you know, respect what they do and they respect you. And then you’ll find that the other key aspect of this, especially in this sort of industry where IT hasn’t typically been elevated to the point it should be, data is so important. Figure out ways to get the data into the back office so you can have proper analysis of the data that drives it.
Speaker 0 | 44:35.272
what’s in it for them know who know your audience know who you’re talking to if you’re talking to ceo cfo show me the numbers uh give them some valuable information to show you know basically show me the money um from that standpoint right when you’re working out in the field how do you make someone’s job easier better right different things and then how do we kind of intertwine i.t into this are you guys a microsoft shop or what uh what do you guys yeah shop for sure do you use teams or anything like that what do we do for inter inter office communication hey are you on teams what the heck’s that uh well it’s actually this kind of cool little tool where we can uh chat and you can connect with different people um find me on teams here i’ll show you how to do it right now pull up your phone download this app um yeah i’m just as far as project management like how i’m managing projects i’m not a fan of like the heavy bloatware stuff like
Speaker 1 | 45:27.920
microsoft project not a fan of it i like a thinner project management application um that you can customize and use like smart sheet works great love it customized at dashboards i downloaded uh um i just implemented asana the other day for um the podcast um production
Speaker 0 | 45:48.028
and stuff like that and various different things and i’m uh quite blown away at um some other how it changed my life and how my team’s interacting quite quickly. It actually removed a lot of insane stress off my head, you know, out of like, oh, great, get rid of this form and get rid of this and get rid of this and just, you know, assign tasks here and do that. And, and wow, I don’t have to work with these other two people on WhatsApp anymore because, you know, anyways, um, it’s kind of. you know sometimes we talk about this stuff all day but then we don’t take our own medicine when it comes to you know yeah anywho the um this has been uh outstanding um in in a lot of fun the as far as um i don’t know you know people out in the field and just last thing like um piece of advice uh to anyone out there in i.t if there is you know any aha moments or things that, you know, when you think back, this just made such a difference in my life. What would that one piece of advice be?
Speaker 1 | 47:01.342
Yeah, for me, I still think it’s just understanding business relationship management. And I would say that anybody that wants to learn more about it, if you don’t have to get certified, but you can go to the Business Relationship Management Institute. It’s a website out there. And you’ll find some valuable information. And you can really cover the…
Speaker 0 | 47:19.944
the whole premise and really what it is understand it adopt it uh if anybody wants to reach out to me as well i’m happy to give some advice to anybody who needs it any rotunda will give you some rotund advice find him on uh on linkedin or any other are there any other social media channels that you’re on that are like if you had to pick your favorite social media channel what would that be i’m
Speaker 1 | 47:43.213
not a big fan of social media i don’t like my data to be sold to anybody um but i do like link
Speaker 0 | 47:48.932
so it’d be linkedin okay okay oh that’s um yes yes well i i don’t know what to say to that um i’m only on i’m only on linkedin too but yes like i don’t want my data to be sold to anyone but data is everything and you need to basically farm all that data and give it to your cfo and and grind it down into some stuff that’s useful for him and let’s see that’s a different yeah yeah we need to go back to uh valpac oh yes and i forgot too so soon sometime soon if I can push my team and if we can get agile with it too, we have the book coming out, um, speaking the language of business it, which is really, yes, all about this. It’s taking technology and bridging that gap to, um, speaking the language of business, which has a lot to do with a business relationship management. So, um, Kenny, thank you so much for being on the show. Uh, it has been a pleasure and we hope to have you back again soon. Great.
Speaker 1 | 48:46.879
Thanks Phil. Thank you.
