Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 00:00.384

Everyone out there listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, today we are talking with Pete Self, Vice President of Information Technology Security for the Nordum Group, if I pronounced that right. All right, this is actually a really good topic that I don’t think we’ve ever talked about. What makes a good conference? You said there’s only three worth anything. So, all right, so you said Black Hat, Gartner, surprisingly.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 00:23.023

And DEF CON, they go together.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 00:24.044

DEF CON, okay.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 00:24.464

Black Hat and DEF CON go together, yeah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 00:26.165

What is the criteria? What is the criteria for a good conference? I want to know. And how can we make it better? And maybe I’ll do one.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 00:34.266

Absolutely. Bringing something home that’s of value. We go to these conferences, like I said, and there’s, you know, two or 300 people, and it’s the same topics over and over and over again. And so I think people are kind of worn out on the conference front. We’ve just come out of COVID a couple of years ago where everything was a phone conference. And so we got to hear the same things over and over every month. But really what makes that conference is. what is everyone else’s experiences and what are they, where their pain points got to listen to the FBI a couple of weeks ago in, in Oklahoma city. And they brought in a really good, this hack happened. This is how it happened. A little bit more details on, on what they were looking at and what’s coming back their direction, what they’re seeing in the industry so that we know which way we should be going as far as tool purchases, training and things like that. So it’s just, The entire world’s really not about ransomware as far as the security side of the house is concerned.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 01:28.812

We need to teach and walk away with actual real case studies. We need to do these types. What do you think is the best format? Like a smaller roundtable thing? Where do you get the most value out of?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 01:41.703

I think so. I think that typically the best conferences I’ve been to as far as our local ones here have about 20 to 30 people in them. They do have roundtables and breakouts where they talk about. how they’re solving artificial intelligence, how they’re, what they’re doing in that direction. So those are, those are the big hitter pieces. But, you know, some of the interest from that cyber side is I would really like to know what happened on the CDK, I think it is, which is the automotive group that got breached. I’d like to know what happened to them. How did it happen to them and things like that so that I know I need to do X to protect my company against that happening to me. So.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 02:19.980

like lessons learned are the valuable pieces and that lessons learned is what you bring home with you from this call are there any uh secret unheard of groups that um share this type of information under nda or anything like that that would be like a that you know of i mean sounds like an idea not really i think uh if you had enough information and

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 02:39.725

you could de-identify it you know like pi pi where you have some some sort of an event that would happen uh don’t necessarily say who it was But let’s talk about how they got in. Did they come in through the firewalls? Did they come in through the cloud? Did somebody click a link in an email? Let’s kind of walk through, do a structured walkthrough of the events and how they were uncovered and then how they address the finding. So I think those are the important pieces that people need to take away so that we know what we should be working on. It just seems like this building of fear all the time rather than preparation for war type.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 03:15.995

Okay, I like that. What do you see? What can you teach the audience right now? What do you see? What can we teach? Because I like how you just broke that all down. How did they come in? Did they get in through here? Did they get in through the firewall, email, all that type of stuff? Do we have like a teaching moment that we have here for say maybe an IT director that has to wear multiple hats and security is one of those hats and it’s kind of like, well, we’re going to buy this product and buy that product and we’re going to put this tool in and hope for the best and educate people and tell them not to be idiots and don’t click on that type of thing.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 03:46.552

That’s perfect.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 03:49.893

That’s how I would attack it. You know what I mean? Like, oh, this is, you know, but no, for real.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 03:55.415

The way I would talk to the folks that are just kind of coming in or the folks that are trying to climb into different types of roles, my approach, and I’ve always followed this approach, I have what I call Pete’s package. So when I come into a new organization, I’m looking to see what they have in the organization that solves. the solution that I’m trying to solve. At the same time, I’m evaluating what size the team is. If it’s a small team, I want less products that do more. If it’s a larger team on the IT side of the house, we can have more applications. But I try to address the layers of the onion, so to call, to make sure that I’ve got protections on the outside, protections on the inside, and then the final protection layer, which is the data itself. I like Pete’s. So really,

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 04:41.831

do you have like Pete’s, Pete’s like, Pete’s like. gold package pete’s um piece uh like you know uh what a platinum package and you’re like good better best do we have do we have very variations of pete’s package i’d call it the survival package i think is what i would think is what i would call it Yeah, survival knife, ramble.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 05:04.791

Right. What I’m trying to solve is I’m trying to solve less things to look at during the day because in cybersecurity, hygiene is more important than anything. And that’s patching, making sure all your agents on the endpoints are up to date, making sure all of your OSs are up to date, things like that. So you have a foundational hygiene that you have to follow. And that’s busy work. Nobody wants to do that after two or three rounds of upgrading a new endpoint agent. Kind of boring. It’s kind of a drag. So people go, well, let’s go look for something else that’s more interesting to do. But the unfortunate piece is you can’t do that. So the less of that you have to do because you have less applications and less packages, the more apt you are to be able to continue to do them, knowing that, yeah, Monday, Tuesday is going to be pretty miserable this week because I’ve got to deploy these new agents to the endpoint. But after that, I can get on to the other things I like to do versus spending 10 days a month. updating all these different applications and all these different solutions that you have put in place.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 06:05.452

Does Pete’s package come with a cover sheet that has a standard security matrix profile or standardized process?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 06:16.361

Yeah, so what I have is I’ve got a solution that I use. It’s a vendor. They do 80% of what I need them to do in one window. And so you kind of follow the Pareto law of 80-20. If the package can do 80% of what I want to do and what I need to do, the other 20 we can continue to work on over time and hone it. But really, I’m looking for something that I can use one vendor to do 80% of my work on.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 06:45.039

Will you refer me to that vendor? And we’ll put a pause in the episode right here, and we’ll let them advertise.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 06:53.061

Yeah. And I think I may be able to do that for you.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 06:55.442

We’re going to keep that a secret. We’re going to keep that a secret. And if you want to know, if you want to know who that is, Pete’s package, 80% of Pete’s package is this vendor. You just need to click and buy. Sounds like it. Yeah, I need to know who that is. No one’s going to know. No one’s going to know unless you want to find out somehow. We’re definitely going to share that. We’re definitely going to share that with the IT Elite group, a.k.a. all the fans of the show. But yes, I definitely want to know who that is. Okay. Okay, great. What else do we got? Let’s fire away. How’d you get into this whole thing anyways? What was, I mean, what was your first computer? Where’d we start out? What’s your fondest memory of technology? We got to go back in time at least once per episode.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 07:38.316

Very good. Very good. Yeah. I failed up my entire life, Phil. So when I got out of, it’s a great story. You’ll appreciate it.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 07:47.283

We have so much in common.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 07:52.487

So I got out of high school. I kind of wandered through life. My parents were the absolute dumbest people on the planet until I turned 21. And then for some strange reason, overnight, they became the smartest people I ever met.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 08:06.996

Isn’t it weird how that works?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 08:08.077

Yeah, yeah. And I can see it in my kids.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 08:10.538

Hey, kids. I have kids, by the way. If they ever listen to this show, can you listen to this part? Go ahead.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 08:17.082

So I moved to Texas to live by myself at 18 and kind of wandered through life down there. Got myself into all kinds of trouble you can imagine an 18, 19-year-old living. that far away from home. So I moved back home. My dad came down, kind of helped me get everything back together and move it back home and met my wife. And so she kind of brought the stability that I was missing in my life. So we got married, we were 22, 23 and went into the Air Force. So went on, told my dad I was going to be a reservist and that just wasn’t enough. So I went full-time, full-time active duty Air Force where I was an air traffic controller for eight years. And a cool life, a lot of fun, you know, private air show every day, that kind of a life. And while I was in, I had decided I wanted to be a pilot. So they said, well, you’re going to have to get this science degree. And these are your options in science. And it was like, become a doctor, become a this, become a that. And I’m like, I’ll try computer science. I have no idea really what that is, but I’ll give it a shot anyway. Little did I know, 39 hours of college level math was a destructive force to me. But. I wandered through it, did really well. By the time I finished everything up, though, the Air Force had decided that I was too old to become an officer. And so I had a great person that I worked for, an awesome commander who pulled me aside and said, hey, man, you can apply as much as you’d like. I’m not going to deter you from applying, but I’m telling you that you’re too old. They’re just not going to take you. And so he said, I want you to make the decision that is best for you and your family with that thought in the back of your mind. And so I went ahead and got out and started in the IT side of the house. I’m the guy that… made sure that my friends’new computers could use the higher level of RAM. so they could play the video games they wanted to play that the games were actually more advanced than the computer. So I was that guy that fixed the RAM to work properly and bought my first Pentium computer, you know, $3,100. I brought it home only to get the alert a couple of days later that there was a flaw in the chip and my whole world fell apart. I couldn’t believe how disastrous I had wasted all of that money. When in reality, it really didn’t matter. The flaw was such a non-entity.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 10:29.682

What was the flaw?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 10:30.883

Pentium 60, they had a mathematics flaw on the 11th numeric to the right of the decimal point. So they couldn’t use them for science activities and things like that. But they started busting all the chips out of the machines at that point. They made necklaces. They made the best of it they could.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 10:50.660

But it worked fine for Doom and whatever.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 10:54.363

Yeah, it was not going to touch anything that I wanted to do.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 10:57.958

So the moral of this whole story, I guess, is go get married.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 11:02.041

That was my story, yeah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 11:03.783

A lot of people are going to be like, no, that’s the worst advice. Other people are like, no, for me it was too. I was, yeah, pretty much a bum until I got married and started having kids. And then I realized, wait a second, I got to provide for these people and do stuff. You know what I mean? Maybe call me old fashioned. You know what I mean? Biggest IT challenges right now. We were speaking about that the last time and you said seeking to understand. which is kind of key, but it goes deep, right? So it’s kind of like we can’t just, I don’t know, put the paddles to the body with technology and just, you know, I don’t know what the metaphor is there, but what do you mean by that?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 11:46.073

Yeah. So there’s a, I would say for anybody that’s on their way up in the IT side of the house, there’s a book called The CIO Paradox. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember who wrote that book. but I would highly suggest that people read that book because it tells you what kind of a difficult position you’re going to be in as far as a technology lead in the non-technology world. So the seek to understand piece for me is if you think about the role of the CIO, their responsibility is to understand the business, the processes, the technology, the finance teams. the marketing, right? Because we have to provide the systems to the business to be functional. And in order to be functional, you have to understand what the business does and how it operates and how it functions. And the most important piece is how it generates revenue. When you look at somebody, and I’m going to use an example in finance, they don’t have to know how our business works. They don’t have to know how the technology works at all. They just have to know how finance works, how to convert cash, how to do the different types of things that are important to them. Look at the manufacturing folks. They have to understand production numbers, you know, the impacts of the system when it’s out, all those different things. But nobody has to know technology. So the expectation of the CIO or the IT leader is you have to understand the business and your trade, whereas the other departments don’t necessarily have to understand the IT stuff. They just have to understand their central piece. So it’s a lot more difficult to run an IT team. And then I’m just kind of. Speaking off the cuff here, it’s a lot more difficult to manage IT when you come into an organization. There’s technical debt, so you’re trying to solve the technical debt piece. You’re trying to put the company in the best future light that you can. At the same time, ramp up your understanding of how the company functions. Whereas if you come in, as an example, on the finance side, you just got to understand the numbers. You have to understand how CapEx, how OpEx worked. from the person that was there before you so that you don’t throw up any red flags and things like that. But you really don’t have to understand the technology. So I’d seek to understand what I’m asking the other departments to do is give me as the leader an opportunity to explain to you why things either are not working, will be a challenge to work through, or where we’re going in a more understanding manner than just make it work.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 14:13.203

Yes. And be patient with the outcomes. You may have a vision of like, make it do this. But you can’t make it do that. You can kind of make it do that sometimes with technology. And I understand you want it to come out like this. We’re going to do our best to make it come out that way, but it might be a little bit different. The report may show a linear bar graph here rather than a pie graph because the data doesn’t come through that way through our disparate, imperfect technology systems. Correct. Kind of what you’re talking about. Yeah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 14:44.680

Yeah. Why does the wireless not work when I unplug my computer from my docking station? and walk into a conference room, I expect to have connectivity all the way. Well, there’s things that are happening behind the scene with DNS changes, with things like that where your machine has to be able to recognize its new wireless network because you have to wire those types of things. The biggest challenge IT has that I see is We have imperfect people using imperfect technology with the expectation of a perfect outcome when you combine those two together. And that just doesn’t exist. You can’t have two imperfects and end up in the perfect center.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 15:17.959

It’s like that home, like the station or whatever. You know what I mean? Like someday we’re just going to like arrive at the end of life and everyone’s going to be there cheering for us. And now we will have arrived at the station. Right. I mean,

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 15:34.226

a lot of work to get there.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 15:36.147

Yeah, you know what I mean? It’s like, someday I’m going to come in, put my feet up on the desk, and all systems are going to be running perfectly together, fully unified, push-button execution. And you have to love the journey of IT, because if you think that you’re ever going to arrive, if you’re ever going to arrive at the station, forget about it. And I have many stressful moments wrestling with this.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 16:04.087

Yeah, that’s perfectly stated. And I believe a little bit of vaporware is being sold right now with artificial intelligence, right? Because artificial intelligence is supposedly the station.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 16:16.972

Yeah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 16:19.253

Machine learning was the station five years ago. And before that, quantum computing was the station.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 16:25.335

Oh,

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 16:25.455

quantum computing. The station just keeps moving further and further away. So as we go down the path, right?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 16:31.518

I forgot about quantum computing. Is that still a thing? Is that still, they have to like, in like, you know, like quantum computing and like the, you know, like the frozen environment of like, you know, that’s pretty wild actually, quantum computing.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 16:45.398

Yeah, they just sold some of the last parts off from the desert in New Mexico or something like that.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 16:50.079

So that’s dead?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 16:51.960

No, it’s not because they have to, in order for AI to function, they have to have quantum computing. If they don’t have those two combinations, right, they’re just going to have real fast if-then state.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 17:01.707

This is why I’m very skeptical that we landed on the moon. I’ll just be honest with you. I know you have a plane in the background, but this is why I’m very skeptical that we landed on the moon. Don’t you think we should have like vacation spots on the moon by now? I mean, for real, with the amount of… Go ahead.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 17:16.119

I was going to say my aha moment on the moon thing was who exactly took the pictures of the person landing on the moon from outer space?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 17:23.865

It’s on the side of the other lunar deploy capsule. lander rover thing there’s a lot i mean i really you see you sound kooky you sound really kooky when you don’t know what you’re talking about but if you actually get into like what people like what the science it’s the science but if you actually get into rocket science and and the amount of weight that has to be lifted from a rocket i think it was however many million pounds and you actually get into the f1 rocket builds you And you get into the speed of reentry of the capsule and how absurd that is. I think it’s, I think it was 33,000 feet per second. Does anyone have any clue how fast 33,000 feet per second is coming in in a tri… In the 60s. In the 60s, where there’s no cell phones yet. I mean, we had ARPANET, DARPANET maybe, whatever that was called. Like to really like fathom, and then I speak with my… you know my son-in-law who’s a master’s degree in in engineering and mechanical engineering and you know i talked to him and i just asked the question because he thinks i’m a kook too you know like what do you mean on the moon you shut up it’s science you know like you know and then i’m like okay but then like then i’ll catch him on a day because i’ll just ask some questions i’m like hey man just out of curiosity like 33 000 feet per second like um can we start can we stop that with like a parachute he’s like no what are you talking about you can’t stop that with you’d have to have rockets and you’d have to have a reverse propulsion in the opposite direction you know and he starts going into like this big thing i was like what about friction though and like air friction and like you know plates on the bottom of the thing and that’s how it would you know it gets pretty wild and then you start looking at what’s the fastest plane and what’s the fastest sniper bullet and what’s the what is the fastest sniper bullet it’s like 5 600 feet per second you know and then you start thinking about it and you’re like man that’s pretty wild but you know if they did it they did it

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 19:21.087

But if we don’t have conspiracies, what do we have, right? If everything is just fact, what would we talk about?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 19:29.950

I’ve had a couple of people absolutely refuse, absolutely refuse to come on the show. Absolutely refuse to come on the show because I’ve even brought up the topic. They were so offended. They were so offended that I would even question reality, that I would even question 33,000 people. Like just so offended that I would just even bring it up because I used to like that too. I’m not an apologist. Absolutely not. You know, I think this is the problem with the world today is, you know, people like you, Phil Howard, even questioning.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 19:58.326

I question everything. I never. I don’t believe it. So I think that’s your entry in the age is what that is. But I like to raise the bull, you know, the BS flag as much as I can.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 20:12.460

Something smelly. Yeah. The so but no, the seeking to understand the seeking to understand or getting the that is the battle. The battle is not only from IT leadership seeking to understand the business development struggles and problems and how we can fit IT into help solve those problems. But then. And also, yes, speaking reality around what IT can do with the budget they give us, right? Because there is a certain curve of we can throw as much money as we want at IT as possible, but you’re still only going to get a certain return. You can’t, as much as you want perfection, you probably won’t ever get it. And that’s where we have to live with. And there also is the opposite is true as well, which is we can… We can… throw some money at it and probably get a very significant return um it doesn’t have to just be a two to three percent line item on on on the budget it should maybe be up there with you know it should maybe be up there with a significant chunk like marketing so um and then what was the word you used for the ai what was the word you used for the ai guys a lot of what was that selling dreams baby

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 21:26.050

selling the history.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 21:26.770

Vaporware. That is going in the Urban Dictionary. We have an Urban Dictionary of terms. I’m starting to, everyone should follow it on, I just started the page on LinkedIn. I didn’t use the Urban Dictionary because I didn’t know if that was like, you know, I would get copyright infringement or something. So I changed it. So everyone, if you want to start following the Popular Nerds Dictionary of IT Terminology. It is a page on LinkedIn right now. And we’re going to start taking these terms from the, they come up in the show and we’ll post it. I’m trying to stay up on it. We’re going to, this is along with all there are other dreams of, of grandeur or visions of grandeur. Right. But vaporware has must go in there, must go in there. AI.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 22:09.501

I have a question for you, right?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 22:12.862

So this is far away. I would love to be interviewed. I love going.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 22:16.484

So whenever, whenever you go to work for an organization, I’m going to be interviewed. Where you report to, I believe, can show you the battle ahead. So if I’m the chief information security officer for an organization and I report to finance, the CFO, my battle is going to be long. It’s going to be tough because ROI is expected on everything you do from a financial perspective or it’s not worth spending, right? If you report to the CEO, that can be some challenge also. without, except for, how would I put that? You’re getting access to the source, but you’re getting access to someone who may not really want to seek to understand because their spectrum is massively wide. They’re concerned about manufacturing, finance, marketing, all the things together. So you’re a piece of that puzzle. Whereas if you report to the board of directors, it can be another. challenging piece because you’re reporting outside the organization so or you report to legal right legal is going to be a little bit more of a challenge because they’re going to be audit focused they’re going to be um focused on the grc pieces of what it does so do you don’t you think that where you report because that’s that’s one of the big conversations is where do technology people report to make sure that the speed and functionality is there to deliver the end product yes

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 23:45.154

I mean, I think they should. It depends on the role, I guess. It depends on the company and the role that IT takes inside the company, right? If you’re in a real old school, old school kind of like company where it’s like we’re still alive, but we’re probably going to like pass away in the next five years. And, you know, you look around the company and when you walk into the boardroom, it has that kind of like. old wooden library smell to it and the same carpet on the floor from the 60s you know what i mean law firms and then you realize you’re a nassau and then you realize you’re a nassau and then you know no you’re in a you’re in a lawyer you’re in a law firm or a cpa firm yeah you know it depends now a law firm i mean geez i’ve seen a ton of them working in dc for years so it’s kind of like is it the law firm that’s the quick turn up because uh we released obamacare you 3.5 and now we’re going to like, you know, we need as many lawyers in here as possible, you know, smiling, dialing or something. I mean, it really depends. So I think from, if we look at your, if we look at yours, I mean, Cherokee, Cherokee nation, I mean, who are you reporting to there? You know what I mean? Like if it’s, if it’s state and local government, then you’re reporting to your, uh, probably a board of your peers and you’re all fighting for money. Right? So it becomes the, it becomes the relationship building. It becomes the relationship building job. It’s not, it’s not a job of keeping the, of the blinky lights on. And that’s kind of like the whole premise of this whole thing is, is like, how do we build relationships through technology or how do we build better relationships with? technology? How do we help people do their job better? So if you’re reporting to the CFO, which you say might be the hardest one, because it is all about return on investment and everything, then I would be having the conversations around how does my department affect all the other departments that you have to manage? Or how does my department make your job easier? How can I divide everything up into account codes from my providers so that they give you the account codes just the way that you want them right from day one, clean so that you can get it right into whatever your ledger or whatever the heck.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 25:55.378

Yeah, we’re talking about chargebacks. We’re talking about everybody paying their way.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 25:59.340

Yeah, yeah. So

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 26:00.781

IT is not just a call center at that point. They’re a revenue generating center from within those organizations.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 26:05.443

So that would be my answer to the CFO. He’s like my best friend. I’m sitting down with him. How do I make your miserable life better? Because you decided to be an accountant and you love it. I don’t know. I’ve seen accountants that become IT people.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 26:23.233

Yeah. Absolutely.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 26:24.422

There’s a ton of them that have been on the show. So they’re kind of like, that would be great. So how do you make the accountant love IT? Or how do you make the accountant wish they had your job? I guess that would be really cool. So I’m thinking me, I’m thinking account codes, making their life easier. How do we consolidate things so it shows up on a line item a lot easier?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 26:50.863

It all goes back to seek to learn. You have to, from the IT perspective, you have to seek to understand how the finance department works so that whenever you have a conversation, there’s a common channel between you. You have to talk about OpEx, CapEx, EBITDA. You have to talk about all those things because those are the things they understand. The question I have for you on the seek to understand is what do they have to ask you?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 27:16.568

Oh, that’s real deep.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 27:18.489

Right. They don’t have to ask you anything. They just expect that it functions. I’m just saying that’s the way that it is. I’m not saying that’s the way that it should be, right? They should be asking you, if we’re using this kind of software, what can we do better by not having all the hardware on premise? What can we do better moving to the cloud? How can I maximize my Microsoft licensing by buying the right version? Those types of conversations, right? But some of them won’t even understand the questions to ask. So it’s up to you to teach.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 27:51.246

I have an aha moment. I just had an aha moment of where we need to take this show. We need to secretly inject weird things into like the, all these people are in the organization that are not in IT from the show to make them like ask questions. We need, we need to be like, yeah, how do we flip the script on that one?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 28:08.393

Yeah. Ask us. How do you, how do we have a,

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 28:11.554

just a last time you’ve asked your answer. Yeah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 28:12.955

Well, and what did you ask them? Have you spent, have you spent an hour talking about their problems?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 28:19.510

so that they can explain to you that man we’re just the network not what yeah that’s not what your director can do for you ask what you can do for your it director that’s beautiful that is beautiful definitely was not assassinated because of the moon landing or anything like that or any or trying to bring the dollar back or gold standard back or whatever that was yes so it’s just interesting right i mean you start thinking about

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 28:45.474

You know, the CIO and the CISO, they’ve been fighting for a chair at the table for so long to try to get there. But the question that always comes around is, what have you done to deserve to get there? What is it? I mean, is it just because you have a C title you expect to be able to do that? Or have you had enough conversations with the other departments to make sure they understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it? Not just, we’re going to class. That can’t be the answer. It’s got to be, this is why we are going to the class.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 29:15.494

Yeah, it sounds very imposter syndrome. I was struggling with imposter syndrome the other day. I was like, do I really deserve to be here? Do I not? No, you’re not. You don’t deserve here. No, you’re not good enough. And meanwhile, like the guy that started out in the cafeteria, which we’ve had on the show, the guy that started out in the cafeteria walks up on stage as the CTO. And that’s just a real thing that happens. Why? Because he’s good at talking and interacting with people. Yeah, I was. I started out in a coffee shop, literally. a coffee shop. I was everyone’s local psychologist. I know who went to jail, who was out of jail. who was cheating on whose wife, who was married to who, who had gastric bypass surgery, who was on a deep tox cleanse. I remember I had to kick a guy out of the… I had to kick the Pilates instructor out of the store one day because he was putting his hands unnecessarily on some of the girls. I mean, that was the most awkward. You had to kick one of your number one customers out and he pretty much was like, okay, giving you the finger as he drove off. the rich doctor who stole a newspaper every day didn’t need to steal a newspaper, but for whatever reason, like she just had this, like, I don’t know if it was like a psychological thing. Like I just need this rush of trying to like sneak in New York times off the shelf or the Sunday newspaper. I mean, I used to learn every, there was good people too. Don’t get me wrong. But these are the ones that stick in your mind. You know what I mean? Like I can still remember everyone’s drink. I can still remember, you know, connect, discover, respond back in the day at Starbucks, you know, and like, yeah, you learn to like talk and memorize everyone’s drinks and who their family is. And I can still remember Scott iced venti six pump raspberry, you know, white mocha like twice a day, like, you know, and like, you know, other people’s like, you know, a half calf venti three and a half pump sugar free 180 degree, you know, a lot. It’s not like that at Starbucks anymore. It’s gone downhill now. It’s like very, it’s very like, you know, just fast food now. You know what I mean? It lost, it’s, it’s not there anymore, but that’s how it was.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 31:21.437

Yeah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 31:21.558

But the cool thing about all that,

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 31:23.879

cool thing about all that is Phil is like, we’re this, we’re these toolboxes, right?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 31:28.463

So am I getting it? I feel like I’m not getting it though. I feel like I’m not answering your question. Like, no, no, no,

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 31:33.527

you’re fine. You’re fine.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 31:34.628

Am I getting it?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 31:36.089

Yeah. So really the point that I was trying to get to on, on my question is, do you believe the structure of the organization determines success or the failure of the ITT?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 31:46.402

Oh, no, I don’t think anyone can ever. I mean, it can, it can affect it, but I, from a leadership standpoint, from a person in it, you have to, as a human period, as a human being, you have to take complete responsibility for yourself at all times. Even if you chose the wrong organization to enter into, because you yourself didn’t ask the right questions from the beginning. Like, who will I be writing? Who will I be reporting to? What will this? And then you get in and if you find out they all lied, it’s still your fault. you still maybe didn’t do it well enough or you didn’t ask enough other people. You didn’t say, Hey, can I just sit in here for a couple of days before I actually accept this role? Can I come in as an internment or earn my, I don’t know. You know what I mean? So I’m like a huge, like responsibility guy. My kids hate it. You know what I mean? They’re like, Oh my gosh, here goes dad again on, you know, like, you know, like, you know, so I do think that it can absolutely not be successful due to, um, the organization. I think you have to pick winners. I think as an individual, you have to pick winners and you have to be able to see an organization and pick one of my, one of my keys to success in life that I’ve looked at when working in corporate America is I was able to pick winning corporate jobs. I knew if it was a job that was just a, like the last guy left and they just needed to fill a vacancy and there was something wrong going on there. I could sniff it. It was almost like you can, you can just tell, you know what I mean? But a lot of people will take a job just because they need a job.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 33:17.880

Absolutely.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 33:18.400

Do that. If you do that, you won’t be, you’ll have less success and you’ll have less, um, personal influence, or you’ll be less, you’ll have less to leverage when you go need to go get another job that you want to be a real job this time around. So you have to do the best you can and you have to create. some sort of revolutionary, unique change in whatever role and whatever place that you are in, no matter what, you’ve got to stand out, right? But you need to pick, you need to be, you need to pick good roles. You need to not just take the next job that’s available and you need to use your network and you need to kind of use your network and recruiters and different people to put good words in for you. And you need to find that spot where you can go in. If I was going out and I was looking for an IT director role or a CTO job right now, I would be looking for a place where I could make the biggest impact and that there’s the most amount of low hanging fruit. I would go in and it would just be like, how can I just get the biggest wins right away and then put that as like feathers in my cap and then use it and grow there and then either stay there because I love it and I love the team and get some sort of stock ownership and ownership in the company or move on. or grow myself to a certain point in my career where I would run off and do consulting, which is really kind of what I did. And now I don’t know really, people consider me retired, I think right now, because I run this podcast and do consulting gigs that I choose to do because I want to work with the person, not because. I need to.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 34:56.292

You know, everything you said is real interesting. And I’m going to go back to what you said a minute ago about Starbucks. So your time at Starbucks, you got to see all these different people, talk to all these different people. You learn that you couldn’t respond to one person the way that you would respond to the one other person that was taking the newspaper, right? So all the time you’re working there, you’re just thinking, man, this is a grind. No pun intended. It’s a Starbucks thing. But you’re gathering these tools. on how you’re going to interact with people.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 35:26.824

Oh, it was a grind.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 35:28.405

Yeah. No pun intended, right? Let’s not go down that road. So as we go through our careers, we should consider ourselves a tool chest, right? I’m pulling in wrenches. I’m pulling in hammers. I know how to use this wrench. I know how to use this hammer. So in the last 25 years, I’ve worked for about eight different companies. So my resume says job hopper right off the bat, right? When I go to a company, I have eight different sets of tools to use for their company, not just the one that I’ve worked for in the past 25 years. So my toolbox is much fuller, much more capable, and much more able to deliver what they need, giving them decisions to make. Not just saying, this is the way we’re doing it. Well, we can do this. We can do this. We can do this. So you’re a very different person than a lot of people in IT who just want to go somewhere and camp. Right. And I’m just going to go in there and work for my 30 years and man out the door. I go,

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 36:27.593

they’re actually the worst ones.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 36:29.553

They’re,

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 36:30.754

they can, I don’t want to say they have a challenge,

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 36:32.734

right?

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 36:33.314

They can be some of the worst ones because the last person I knew in it, that I can think of that comes to my head right now, 34 years in it. Right. And this was, maybe I sat down with this person in 2015, 2016, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s changed much since then. Yeah. They were on Lotus notes.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 36:51.980

Yeah. Oh gosh. The database is nasty.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 36:54.941

Okay. So, and I don’t see job hoppers to me are like one year and a month and under, um, because most people will get rid of you after that year, if you’re not meeting the requirement. So if you’re, if you’re at like the three to four year mark or somewhere close to that, it’s fine. And in IT, like you said, it might be different. Now you have a different set of tools and standards and the thing, and IT is just different. it’s a little bit different than kind of like where I was. I was more in the like, um, business development, you know, uh, in channel, channel, inside sales, outside sales, um, you know, channel development. And then early on in my career was like direct sales as well. So,

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 37:36.846

um, tools aren’t any different though, right? Phil, they’re the same tool. You’re having to interact with people. You’re having to explain what your, what your subject is and what your objective is. All that stuff. really the same. It’s just a different tool. So instead of I have a crescent wrench, you would have an open-end wrench. So we just have different tools, but they’re all built for the same thing. And you pick these up as you go along. So really at the end, it really matters. What matters most is who’s marketable based on the tool chest. What have you had access to? Have you dealt with, for example, Palo Alto Firewalls? Yep. Ford in that? Yep. Cisco? Yep. You go to one company, they’re going to ask you, have you dealt with Ford in that? No, I haven’t. What do you use? We use Cisco. It’s all we’ve ever used.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 38:17.165

Lotus Notes.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 38:18.126

Yeah, right. So the same thing. Yeah, it’s the same. Lotus Notes,

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 38:20.888

Avaya. Let’s see. What other things? Lotus Notes, Avaya. Oh, yeah. AS-400. That’s actually useful.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 38:31.456

That’s the one that comes in the drywall.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 38:35.259

No, I think I need an all-encompassing quote from you to summarize all of this up. And I think, and I’ve had other people say it on the show before is if you want to be successful in it leadership and transforming a company, right. Business wise. And you already mentioned CapEx, uh, zero CapEx, uh, EBITDA. Like if you want to, if you want to speak that language, the language of business and of the language of business, it, everyone get the book. Um, you need to be well-rounded.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 39:06.781

That’s right. That’s excellent. Excellent. Very, very accurate.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 39:09.923

And so if you. You’re not the first person to bring that up. It’s just, yeah. Yeah, you need experience in all kinds of different.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 39:18.350

The other message that I would have is you have three things that you can give an organization. Time, talent, and treasure, right? So those are the three things you have. Time, meaning how many hours does my team have? If I have four people on my team, I have 2,080 hours a year. of actual usability of each of those. I have a bank of 8,000, 9,000 hours. If I have 30,000 hours of projects ahead of me and I only have 9,000 hours, I’ve got to do something else. Well, you can spend treasure to bring somebody in. You can improve your talent. or buy outside talent with the treasure. So those three pieces have to work together with your team to make sure that you are a functional IT department. So time, talent, or treasure, you can have two, but you’re rarely going to get all three.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 40:11.427

It’s, man, so now I got to pick?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 40:13.188

The team matters, right? Yeah. I’m going to pick. Well, so you can’t pick. No, you don’t.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 40:18.350

Oh, yeah. That’s the…

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 40:20.652

Yeah, let’s play the game. Go ahead, and we’ll walk through it.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 40:23.894

Time, talent, treasure. Is that what we got? Time, talent, and treasure?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 40:26.796

Time, talent, or treasure, yeah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 40:28.237

Oh, man. Time and treasure, baby. I want time and treasure. Forget talent. Screw that. Forget talent. I need time and I need treasure. That’s all I need. Talent? Nah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 40:41.366

Bill, this is not about your personal. This is about the team.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 40:45.008

No, I get it. I get it. I get it. I get it. So I got to balance between the two then. So I need some talented people that can create time. I need some talented people that can create time. And once we do that, we need some talented people that can speak to executive management in a way that makes them ask us what we need to help them. Did I summarize this correctly?

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 41:11.000

Absolutely. Yeah, because you’re only going to get so much treasure. The treasure is limited. The time and the time and the treasure, they’re all three limited. You’re only going to get so many talented people. You’re only going to get so much treasure and only so much time. So you have to, it’s a bank. It’s really just a bank.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 41:27.849

If you look at it from a bank perspective.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 41:30.030

Yeah.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 41:30.570

This would be a fun, this would be a fun debate. Like we, this actually would like, this would be good because now you’re making me think like, well, are you sure? Because we could just go buy a bunch of Bitcoin miners from like China, right? Like that Bitcoin guy and like, you know, turn them up in Atlanta and like, now we’re making money. Right. But we do, but we need time and we need energy to run those Bitcoin miners.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 41:50.141

You got to have the people to run it.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 41:51.382

And then we’ve got to fend off all these people that are trying to probably, you know, never know. Yeah. It has been a pleasure, an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Do you have any final words of wisdom? Time? I mean, time, time, your talent and treasure is, is enough. The three T’s, the three T’s of Pete self, along with the package. You can get the Pete package and the three T’s today. For 20 hours a week.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 42:17.039

It’s been, it’s been really cool. I mean, I appreciate this. It’s you rarely do you ever get to even even with the companies that you work with, do you ever get to really speak about what do you think? What do you believe? Right. Because time is limited. You’re not going to get you’re going to get so much time in front of somebody before you have to move on. And the higher you go in the organization, the less time you get. So you’ve got to get your message across efficiently and effectively in a very short amount of time. So events like these where you can talk to somebody else and kind of. give you a little bit of a look behind the curtain on what you are. It’s very helpful. So for me, I appreciate it. I appreciate you doing this.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 42:58.066

Yes. Thank you so much, sir, for being on dissecting popular it nerds. And yes, it was, it was, it was great. So we’re going to have, and for anyone out there that would like to reach out to Pete self, you can, you can find him on LinkedIn. We’ll have a link to your profile on the show as well. And some motivational quotes surrounding time, talent, and treasure.

Channel 1 | Speaker 1 | 43:22.093

Great. Thanks, Phil.

Channel 1 | Speaker 0 | 43:23.156

Thank you.