Speaker 0 | 00:09.667
Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’re talking with Phil. And Phil, even though I asked you just literally two seconds ago how to pronounce your name, I’m probably going to screw it up again yet. But Vulture, Vulture. Voltrauer, yeah, Voltrauer Voltrauer, see, I did screwed it up again, but two fills this is, actually no, this might be the second time in the history of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds I did have another fill on before but welcome to the show Chief Information Officer and you’re in oil, is that correct?
Speaker 1 | 00:50.386
Oil and gas,
Speaker 0 | 00:50.966
yeah Oil and gas, you know we don’t say those are the same things over there, do we?
Speaker 1 | 00:56.340
No, no, no. It’s actually liquefied natural gas.
Speaker 0 | 01:00.823
Ah, yes, yes, yes. So let’s just start off with how long you’ve been in IT. What was your first computer?
Speaker 1 | 01:10.689
Yeah. You know, interestingly, I got into IT, I started my career as a mechanical engineer. And my college roommate who works for Amazon told me I could probably walk circles around some of the folks where he was working. So he convinced me to jump ship from… from mechanical engineering into it and call it like 97 or so.
Speaker 0 | 01:30.902
Okay. Why, why were you able to, well, 97, how much technology did we have back then? Just paint a picture. Let’s just paint a picture. Yeah. How are you running circles around people or how could you have,
Speaker 1 | 01:46.769
I think it was just the state of it at the time, to be honest with you. It was if you had a pulse and you could spell Microsoft, then you probably could get a job in IT. So it wasn’t too hard for me, being technically savvy, to step into IT and learn how to do the basics. It was just simple support and sort of sysadmin stuff that we were doing at the time, so nothing too advanced. And the first computer was, I had a Texas Instruments computer when I was a kid. My first real PC was a 386SX that I got when I got to college in 92.
Speaker 0 | 02:28.189
Wow. Two Phils had the same exact first computers. I’d also, I touched those instruments with cartridges that you would shove on the side. It had that weird like audio voice thing that you could like slide into the right side of it. Oh, yeah, yeah. Bill Cosby advertised for it. Let’s see, what else? And then my first computer was also a 386. Oh, interesting. There’s some… some, some catalog. Uh, but you were in college with your three 86. I was in high school in my three 86. So the, did you have any access to the internet with that thing? A modem?
Speaker 1 | 03:02.507
No, nothing. I didn’t get internet access until a little bit later. I remember, um, a buddy of mine actually showed, you know, we used to play this game called magic, the gathering when I was in college, uh, it just came out and, um, and he showed me that you could go online and actually see the, all the cards and stuff and interact with the developers and what not. I thought it was the coolest thing on earth.
Speaker 0 | 03:23.234
That’s not nerdy at all. That’s not stereotypical or nerdy at all.
Speaker 1 | 03:27.676
First time I got to it was actually text-based. He showed me that you could actually render it in HTML with a proper web browser, which I was like, whoa! Blew my mind.
Speaker 0 | 03:41.822
Very cool. Or not cool. However, we wanted to say that back then. Okay. So what made you want to get a job? Or was it because I could get a job in IT and this is fun and we can get paid for doing this type of stuff? Or what was it? It’s a difference, a huge difference back then. You know, like today it’s real. Like back then it was like, yeah, it was like it’s happening. you know, like that type of thing. Like how real was a job in it back then compared to today?
Speaker 1 | 04:17.157
It was, it was definitely real. I mean, it was a lot harder to, um, to get your, your, to be, um, proficient in it, uh, just because it was more complicated. It was more rudimentary. You know, when you were doing the stuff we were doing with, um, you had to open up computers and mess around with, uh, with jumpers and yeah,
Speaker 0 | 04:36.926
you had to work in DOS, you had to work in DOS and stuff and like, yeah. And like, Yeah, put a network card in physically.
Speaker 1 | 04:44.413
Yeah, yeah. But the company that I joined… was, if you got your MCSE certification, which was a reasonable difficulty level to do, then they bumped you to 50 grand a year right then and there, like next paycheck. And so for me, it was like, I can make 50 grand a year.
Speaker 0 | 05:04.582
There is an argument for certifications. Does anything like that exist today? Does anything like that exist today? Because I have the argument a lot. Do certifications matter? Like, do you really need certifications or could you just be like really skilled and awesome, like a ninja of some sort?
Speaker 1 | 05:18.706
Or do you think that was always the case, right? If you were just good at it, it didn’t really matter. But if you don’t know someone and you’ve got two candidates, let’s say for a role, and one of them has a certification and maybe one doesn’t, maybe you lean towards the one with the certification. I don’t know.
Speaker 0 | 05:35.600
Yeah. And you might make the wrong hire. Yeah. Okay. So get a certification, bump to $50,000, which was considerable back then, which is amazing. That just goes to show you how, I guess, whatever fast inflation is because $97,000, $50,000 was, I mean, they were paying those pharmaceuticals. I just remember my dad’s a doctor, so I remember pharmaceutical reps and I remember my dad saying, you know, you’re going to get $40,000 right a year if you become a pharmaceutical rep. So if that was a lot back then, then $50,000 for, you know, ITI.
Speaker 1 | 06:12.218
was a lot so oh yeah the single making making uh you know decent money i could buy a car i could live on my own i i uh i was very independent at that point oh so tell me how that how that would did that do well for you or bad for you because if i made i
Speaker 0 | 06:30.207
i have eight kids so if i made the amount of money that i make now in order to just put food on the table and keep the lights on and pay for diapers and clothing and all kinds of other stuff right and like the washing machine that breaks every six months. If I made the amount of money that I make now and I was single, I think that would probably destroy me. So just,
Speaker 1 | 06:54.469
just me, I’m just,
Speaker 0 | 06:55.769
that’s just, I’m just kind of, you know, I’m just thinking back then, like if I made that money back then. So, so I’m just curious, how did that, and I, and the reason why I ask is because there’s different,
Speaker 1 | 07:08.376
um, people,
Speaker 0 | 07:10.458
People spend money and do, I guess, things with money. I guess invest it well and some don’t. You look at a lot of salespeople that might do really, really on sales, but they have no money management skills. So they kind of crash and burn. Where you being an engineering-minded guy, I imagine it might be the opposite. So what’s your philosophy on saving or anything like that?
Speaker 1 | 07:39.346
I mean, at the time, I didn’t know a whole lot about saving. I just, you know, I went from cutting grass on a golf course to working as a mechanical engineer, making very little. I think I was making $14 an hour or something like that. And then jumping to IT and making 50 grand a year. So I went from cutting grass to making 50 grand a year in the span of about a year. And so, you know, I… I just ran with it. I mean, it’s still, I mean, it’s not like a monumental amount of money. No. Don’t get me wrong, even back then, but.
Speaker 0 | 08:13.911
But you weren’t starving.
Speaker 1 | 08:15.893
No, no, it got me to where I could at least, you know, go to the movies whenever I wanted to and not have to worry too much about where I went out to eat and stuff like that. So,
Speaker 0 | 08:24.900
yeah. Yeah. Okay. At what point did you make kind of a jump into the leadership piece? I kind of want to just ask you. At what point did you learn the business side of IT?
Speaker 1 | 08:40.816
Yeah. So I stepped into leadership just filling vacancies. You know, I had the fortune and misfortune of an organization that was going through a bankruptcy. And so people were jumping ship and there were holes to fill. And I’ve always had a little bit more of, you know, if you ask my group of friends, I’m usually the one that they rally around. So I’ve always sort of had that in my DNA. No. And so I was the obvious choice when some people started stepping out of supervisory roles and such to formally take on more managerial responsibilities. And it just sort of went from there. I decided to take it very seriously and really invest in myself and in the leadership side of my skill set. And it paid off. I made sure that I… wasn’t just a technical person that i was able to uh to look at someone across the table and have you know, the types of conversations that you need to have in a role like that.
Speaker 0 | 09:47.203
So when you say invest,
Speaker 1 | 09:48.684
there was a second part of your question. What was the second part of your question?
Speaker 0 | 09:51.987
Who cares? Let’s dig into this one. Let’s dig into this one because this is much more important. When you said you invested in yourself and you took it very seriously, when you say invest, you mean training, reading books, going to conferences. What did you mean by that? You invested very heavily.
Speaker 1 | 10:05.596
Yeah, all of that. And actually I had the, opportunity to attend the society of information management has this, um, regional leadership forum that they do. And it’s, it’s a pretty awesome program. I don’t know if they still do it or not, but back, um, I think I did it in 2005, something like that, where for two days every month, they bury you in, um, this conference room or whatever in New York city. And, uh, and you have to read a bunch of. books and you have guest speakers come in and there’s sort of, you know, around the table discussions. And it was just a two days of isolation with this group of people. There’s probably about 25 of us aspiring leaders in various organizations. And it was incredibly impactful for me because I realized that I was actually doing things through gut feel and not necessarily the way that it needs to be done and that there is. you can formally train yourself and not just, uh, not just shoot from the hip when it comes to some of this. So, um, so a lot, a lot of reading, you know,
Speaker 0 | 11:18.214
uh, the two day isolation though, the two day isolation, was it all information technology people?
Speaker 1 | 11:24.959
Yeah. Um, uh, varying technical levels. I would say that, um, you know, large organizations, what, what you would, um, call an IT person is probably. not the same as it would be in a small organization. And so you had people really from all walks of life that were still were in these larger IT organizations, but they were doing things related to product management, project management. Yeah. And so, so your question earlier was like, when did I learn the business side of things? I went and got an MBA and realized that I, it’s just like, I didn’t know much about leadership. I didn’t really know much about business. So. Got an MBA and started to really retune myself from that perspective as well.
Speaker 0 | 12:14.437
Feed me some of the key points that you realized you didn’t know. Or what would you say the typical IT manager, IT director that might not have an MBA, what is he missing? Is he missing what gross margin is? Is he missing how to read a P&L? Is he missing… what EBITDA is, what is he missing?
Speaker 1 | 12:40.406
Yeah, there’s certainly a lot of that. I mean, IT’s got a language, business has got a language. And so if you don’t speak that language, you don’t know what a P&L is, for example, or what SG&A is, or some of these, every function has its own acronyms. And IT is notorious for having too many of them. But learning the acronyms, learning what EBITDA is, like you said, learning really what a balance sheet is, what a general ledger is, all these things. It’s very difficult to partner with your colleagues in the accounting department or finance or whatever if they’re using words that you don’t understand. And so and it’s it wasn’t just that, you know, I think that early career IT people will make decisions based on the technical merit of those decisions. They won’t necessarily make decisions based on. the business merit of those decisions and that’s an important leap to be able to take to say okay um you could spend 50 grand on something and have this very elegant technical solution but the business only really needs the you know the twelve thousand dollar version of it and so let’s not overthink it right what
Speaker 0 | 13:49.671
about the opposite we we do the twelve thousand version but really we need the seventy thousand dollar version and we can calculate the return on investment and other pieces that we’re missing and add to the business and create more I don’t know, efficiency, et cetera.
Speaker 1 | 14:05.077
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I’d say that that’s as much an art as it is a science when it comes to convincing people to spend money. It comes down to who approves the money and what resonates with them. I deal with CFOs a lot. And so with CFOs, it’s very simple. When you come to other functions, defining value is a lot. more difficult because you really ultimately have to frame things in terms of how they need, which, which problems they need to solve. And if you can do that, then you’re probably going to win and, um, and people will spend the money that you need them to spend.
Speaker 0 | 14:42.437
Well, let’s solve the simple CFO conversation first then versus the complicated, um, operations department selling on value or whatever. But what’s the, what’s the simple CFO conversation?
Speaker 1 | 14:54.056
Uh, is it going to save money? Is it going to make money? If you can show one of those two things, then you’re good. You know, other functions, you need to show how it’s going to improve functionality within the business or how it’s going to, you know, provide regulatory compliance with this or that. But when you deal with CFOs and you say, Hey, listen, if you spend 200 grand over the course of four years, it’s going to actually save us 500 grand go. Or if, if, um, if we make this whatever $50,000 investments, uh, we’re going to recoup that by adding $150,000 worth of revenue, um, go. I mean, that’s, that’s usually how it works.
Speaker 0 | 15:29.781
Which one’s easier, which one’s easier to save money or make money?
Speaker 1 | 15:33.862
Uh, the saved monies are easier for me. I think that if you have the right partner, who’s going to be behind you, you know, the make money stuff, uh, you really need to be partnered with somebody who’s going to help make that happen. Saving money. Um, usually you can do without a whole lot of help. At least that’s been my experience.
Speaker 0 | 15:48.366
And when you say partner, do you mean partnered internally with another team? Like Hmm. internal team partner? Okay.
Speaker 1 | 15:56.426
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my, my roles, I’ve always had to be the Switzerland of every organization. You have to, you have to, um, to be friends with everyone. You have to be partnered with everyone. You have to make sure that you understand what you, each of the functions, what makes them tick, what’s driving them, what their goals are, how those goals, um, align with the organization’s goals and, uh, how do you get them from point A to point B?
Speaker 0 | 16:18.341
I love the Switzerland piece. Do you know who Jay Abraham is?
Speaker 1 | 16:23.504
Uh,
Speaker 0 | 16:23.784
sounds like one of the coaches for like some of the shark tank guys and everything. He’s just, he’s like a, just like a business mogul or something. He called me the Switzerland of telecom a couple of years ago. Yeah. I had a,
Speaker 1 | 16:34.207
um, I had a friend in high school, you know, when Facebook first came out, um, and I connected with a guy and he said, yeah, you were always like Switzerland in high school. And I’ve always used that analogy to, uh, whenever I need to, to demonstrate that somebody is, uh, sort of independent of the politics,
Speaker 0 | 16:57.838
which I try and be. Okay. So to summarize so far, we go into engineering, realize we’re not going to do that, go into IT, and then just start filling holes and gaps when companies are going bankrupt and people are jumping ships. So you’re just going to take whatever role opens up. This is how we grow in the IT world. That’s part one. Part two is, which is really not far off. from the number of people that I have interviewed and spoken to over the years, it’s pretty much that. I worked in the cafeteria and I started talking with the IT guys. So I got a job at the help desk. And then I worked my way up from there. It’s a true story. All the way to CTO. I literally started out in the cafeteria and went all the way to CTO. That is a true story. That was Doug Edmond, Summit Design. But yeah, it was terrifying.
Speaker 1 | 17:48.828
thing though. I mean, being a mechanical engineer and spending my college years studying that and thinking that’s what I’m going to be. I, um, the organization, when I joined, they gave me an assessment and one was windows 95 and they gave me 50 questions or something. And one of them was windows NT. And I didn’t know any of the windows NT stuff at all because I had never, you know, I was, um, I was a hobbyist. So I have windows 95 on my home computer. I didn’t have windows NT. That’s what you find in the corporate world. So. I had to ramp up pretty quickly. And thankfully, when you join a consulting firm, you get the opportunity to do stints at lots of different organizations, which my first IT role was as a consultant. And so in a three, three and a half year span, I consulted for call at maybe 30 different organizations and mostly. So you get exposure to the world of IT.
Speaker 0 | 18:46.128
Everyone else has screwed up stuff everywhere, so that’s great.
Speaker 1 | 18:49.329
Yeah, but you get to see how they all do it. Then you can pick and choose what works and what doesn’t. To me, when I stepped into my first non-consulting gig and had a full-time role in an IT department at a company, bringing all that with me just made me a superhero to these folks. I was solving problems that they didn’t even know they had on some cases.
Speaker 0 | 19:09.217
I like it. It’s kind of like the Phoenix Project a little bit. Have you read that?
Speaker 1 | 19:14.519
Yeah, great book.
Speaker 0 | 19:16.164
I, you know, I’ve been trying to just listen to the audio. I have no, it’s so long. I mean, talk about putting the work into it. It’s like 24 hours or something like that. I thought, oh, I’ll be able to bang this out from, uh, you know, driving. I had to drive from Connecticut to Baltimore. I was like, oh, I’ll be able to bang this out. Drove all the way there, all the way back. Still got 13 hours left.
Speaker 1 | 19:39.159
Yeah. Yeah. I did the audio for it as well. And, um, I don’t remember how long it took, but when you have an hour and a half. commute, you can, you can churn through books pretty quickly.
Speaker 0 | 19:47.526
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, okay. So So you’re the Switzerland where CFO is easy, save money, make money, if you can do that. What if you can’t do either, but you need it? How’s that argument go? There’s got to be some way. There’s got to be some sort of make money, save money somewhere in there. Actually, there always is. Everything is going to translate to that.
Speaker 1 | 20:13.047
There always is, yes. It’s more difficult to articulate in some cases. To me, I’ve always divided the portfolio of work. that it does into two buckets there’s things that are driven by the business and there’s things that are driven by it and so the things that are driven by it um a lot of those investments you know i use i use a scoring model basically and so the scoring that i do for business driven projects is a little different than the scoring that i do for it driven projects so that everything could kind of live on the same list if you will and um and so when it comes to the it stuff um you I found that developing credibility around the business, when you then say you need something to invest in your own function, you don’t get a whole lot of pushback. At least that’s been my experiences, but I’ve had extremely supportive CFOs and CEOs in some cases that have understood that I’m not going to ask for it unless I really need it.
Speaker 0 | 21:18.404
So knock a bunch of wins. Knock a bunch of balls out of the park first, then ask for what you want.
Speaker 1 | 21:24.765
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 21:26.186
Get everyone else what they want. Then, then, then you can ask.
Speaker 1 | 21:29.288
Yeah. If you can show that you’re responsible with, with the money, um, I’ve found that if I manage my budget meticulously and in fact, try and be the person who is leading the charge of amongst all the functions of who really has the most control over their budget, then that will resonate typically with. you know, your CFOs, your CAOs, whoever’s sort of responsible for that process. And word gets around that that’s in your tool belt. And that coupled with the fact that a lot of what I do is negotiation with vendors. And so developing a reputation for managing vendors very effectively also helps because they might come to you and say, hey, listen, we’re talking to so-and-so and they’re posing this thing for 400,000. And in my gut, I’ll say, well, that probably is a $280,000 project that they want to sell you for $400,000. I might be able to get them to $280,000 and they’re like, whoa, we need him involved in everything.
Speaker 0 | 22:27.608
So manage the budget meticulously, translate that budget into business language from IT language, i.e. back to balance sheets and general ledgers and all that type of stuff. Correct. And does this sound about right? Does it sound about right as far as how I’m going to do this? Okay. And then the scoring model is very interesting to me, but I’m very intrigued with this. I’m still back on this two-day isolation, kind of like a Navy SEAL IT, like lock you up in a room type of thing. I really like this idea.
Speaker 1 | 23:02.643
Yeah. So let me tell you how it worked. It was, they gave you a list of books you had to purchase before the program began. It was like 40 books or something. I thought, oh my goodness, this nine-month program.
Speaker 0 | 23:14.518
What kind of books were they? Just knock a few of these out real quick. What kind of books were these?
Speaker 1 | 23:19.679
It was anything and everything you could think of. The first book they actually asked you to read is a book called How to Read a Book. And it’s probably the worst book I’ve ever read in my life. But it helps you to get through the other 39 or whatever. Okay. The Pearl by Stanton. by steinbeck wow i read that in like seventh grade i remember that okay cool weird yeah um we read a book called crucial conversations i mean remember that um there was a book by a um a nazi prison camp survivor and he sort of spoke about um i forget the name of the book now but actually that was one of the most impactful ones for me but it was all these different um takes on leadership and uh and we would then talk about it and talk about how we could pie and stuff. I, um, I, it was, it was a great program. You know, people would discover themselves through this process. And like, there was one program, the, the, um, there was two gentlemen, they were both,
Speaker 0 | 24:25.082
wait a second. Are you talking about man’s search for meaning? Was that the book? Yeah. Search for me. Okay. Yeah. I read that too. Amazing. Amazing. You know, that’s like, no, yeah, because no one in the whole like point of that book is like, no matter what people do to you, no matter what they’re doing, whether they’re torturing you and putting you through everything, right? No one can really steal your freedom because you always have the ability to choose how to respond to any given situation.
Speaker 1 | 24:47.866
Totally, totally,
Speaker 0 | 24:49.187
totally. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, that’s an amazing book. Amazing book. That’s some Tony Robbins stuff kind of there, although he’s a little bit of a charlatan.
Speaker 1 | 24:57.734
And there was, there was a lot of that. But some of it was, I mean, everyone’s a little different. And so, you know, every session we’d go in having had to have read four or five books and I was, I was meticulous about it. I would make sure some people didn’t read them. Uh, but some people did, you know, I took it very seriously.
Speaker 0 | 25:15.495
And so how do you read 40 books in two days or was it well,
Speaker 1 | 25:19.258
it was, it was about five per session. Um, it was, I think nine different, um, it was nine different sessions or, you know, every month we would get together. So each month you would basically have to turn through four or five, which came out to a book a week. And some of them you could do in two days and some of them, uh, 220 pages was your typical sort of, uh, um, typical reading. And so, you know, whatever, however long it takes someone to read 220 pages now, I’d probably just do it all on audio. But back then that wasn’t really an option. So,
Speaker 0 | 25:52.777
yeah,
Speaker 1 | 25:53.537
but but people were coming out with all sorts of, you know, talking about their marriages. I mean, it started to really impact people beyond just the workplace. This this process of discovering your leadership style is really not. not so much about anything other than discovering who you are.
Speaker 0 | 26:13.043
So tell me, so why, so you mentioned the marriage thing. Why, you know, what obviously that hits home with something, but you know, what, what do you mean?
Speaker 1 | 26:21.867
Yeah. Well, so, um, I mean, for me personally, I, um, I told myself I want to be the best. I always want to be the best at what I do, but you realize like, am I being the best? dad? Am I being the best husband? You know, it was more than just applying it to the workspace. And so you start to realize that you’re a lot more accountable for how things are going than maybe you were, you were admitting to prior to that. And so, you know, to me, effective leadership is as much about owning up to things and just being as real as possible and not, you know, not tending to be something you’re not. if you can be incredibly authentic as a leader, I think that’s really, really powerful. And those are usually the people that get, um, people that will follow them from one organization to the next are the ones that are really, truly authentic leaders. And they’re not, uh, not trying to fake it. They’re not pretending.
Speaker 0 | 27:24.034
Yep. Accountability, responsibility, the ability, the ability to choose your response. You can do that. I tell my kids that a lot. So You have a scoring model and you realized from this that there really is like leadership isn’t just kind of like shooting from the hip. There can be some organization to this. When you say organization, are you talking like ITIL type stuff? Is any of that important? Or when it comes to kind of managing IT in general, is there any kind of like philosophy or methodology or anything like that that you’re using? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 28:00.032
I mean, I think ITIL is applicable in just about every IT organization. But you got to pick and choose what works. Same with project management, right? Some organizations can be very rigorous and other organizations are a little bit looser or even formal project management with disdain in some cases. So you just have to pick and choose what works for you and for your business run with that. I tell it to me is a framework that I’ve… I, um, I use for any and all the process engineering I do and sort of framing the business to, to, or framing it to the business as well. So, um, but there’s others out there. I, um, I think that as you can, as you go, you pick and choose what works and you sort of, uh,
Speaker 0 | 28:51.583
would you say it’s not rocket science or it is rocket science? Like what’s the best way to, to project manage in your opinion?
Speaker 1 | 28:58.347
Uh, I, I think that for people that are not, um, trained or don’t have experience as project managers it’s very much rocket science in fact i’ve i tried to teach somebody once the very basics of time management um and just sort of making sure that they weren’t over committing on the different projects that they were involved with and he referred to it as linear algebra to me which i thought well it’s i i mean to me it just seemed so simple you know but uh but
Speaker 0 | 29:30.098
But you got to break that down for me. You got to break that down for me. So what was this person doing then?
Speaker 1 | 29:35.903
Well, he was a network engineer. And so in smaller IT organizations, this particular organization had 30 some odd people. And so he was in high demand. And so he had to be really meticulous. We would carve up our work in two weeks, all of the, you know, agile methodology. And so every two weeks he had to be meticulous with the commitments that he made to make sure that he was giving everyone what they needed. And he just, like the tool set, you know, some people are, are wired to go in straight lines and some people are not wired that way. They, they can’t go in straight lines. They, their their superpowers that they can flip things over and look at it a bunch of different ways before they actually attack it of an issue so you know i’ve always had the ability to break things down down into smaller and smaller components and take um you know that plan projects by just chunking it up and taking the boulder and turning it into the rocks and taking the rock and turning it into pebbles and take the pebble and turn it into the grains of sand you know yeah
Speaker 0 | 30:42.290
Where do we rip all this stuff off from? You know what I mean? Because everyone steals everyone’s idea. You know, the pebbles, the boulders, the two-week sprints, the 90-day planning session. Do you know what I mean? It’s like just a different iteration. It’s just someone that just puts a different stamp on it. You know what I mean? Yeah. And it’s, anyways.
Speaker 1 | 31:02.505
There’s stuff I borrowed. There’s stuff I thought I came up with on my own, and then I found it in some book somewhere. I thought it was really good. Really super bright for having thought of it first, even though that’s not true. Who knows?
Speaker 0 | 31:17.637
Linear algebra. That scares me, to be honest with you. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 31:23.999
it is. It’s an undisciplined approach to the work, which unfortunately, when you try and impose discipline on people that have been able to get away with just being really smart and not having to be very disciplined, then it can be really painful for people.
Speaker 0 | 31:39.210
Hmm. It sounds like I could go through a lot of pain. I could go through a lot of pain with you. I have, if I look at my, if I look at my linear algebraic, I, I, I sat down and had to put my, I use these manila folders, you know, for like goal setting and taking notes. Cause I took this, like how to take, I was a horrible student, horrible student for years. And really what I realized is that I just had no, I had no study skills. Yeah. Right. So I’m, I take these, I started taking these study skills and learning things later on in life because I just, I love the idea of being able to memorize things and put things into better organization. So anyways, I can’t remember the guy off the top of my head, but basically he uses these manila folders whenever he goes anywhere to like a movie. I got, I got, I’m going to have to look it up and put it in the show notes, but wherever he goes, he takes notes on these manila folders because they’re a stiff and hard and uses. different colored Sharpie pens to like take notes on them. It works amazing. Yeah. Um, anywho, and he always leaves the left side of every notebook blank. So he takes all his notes on the right side and then he goes back through and he uses memorization techniques on the left side, on the blank side to read, to then. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. Are you into any, have you studied any memorization techniques? Like, you know, uh, what’s wrong with me? Like the, the, the memory palaces and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 | 33:03.913
No.
Speaker 0 | 33:05.054
I probably should have yeah so like a memory palace is like it’s like if you go through like I don’t know like your house that you grew up in as a kid and you visualize it you can probably visualize all the rooms or even just your house now or outside you can visualize different places right so you place the things that you want to memorize in this palace in this memory palace as you go through that’s the short story of it but if you just google memory palaces and just different memorization techniques like you know acronyms and stuff like that that’s basically what you would use the left side of the notebook for to remember To basically input things. And then there’s ways to memorize names as well. Like I’ll never forget an Allen because I always remember an Allen was when the big Allen wrench coming out of his head, like shooting up into the sky. So like, I’ll never forget. Even my kids use it now. They’re like, oh, Allen wrench, our neighbor. Like his name’s not Allen wrench. His name is Allen. And they’re like, so they start calling him Allen wrench. Anyways, diverge off of topics here for a moment. the scoring model. Did you make it up yourself or did you rip it off from someone and kind of redo it yourself? Is there any suggestions here on scoring models for different things?
Speaker 1 | 34:17.845
I loosely based it on some work that I had done with actually Capgemini, but have since flipped it on its head so many times that it probably doesn’t resemble anything even close to what we worked on there. But yeah. It’s simple. It’s five different categories of ways that you can determine the value of an initiative. And each one of them, you just give it a number from zero to four. If it’s a zero, then no impact in that particular category. If it’s a four, then maximum impact. And then you just have some math. You weight the different categories. Yeah. You go.
Speaker 0 | 35:02.523
Simple spreadsheet? Is it in a spreadsheet? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 35:04.964
Yeah, yeah. Just basic Excel.
Speaker 0 | 35:07.845
Maybe you want to share it. If you do, we’ll put it. It’ll be a download. But what are your five categories?
Speaker 1 | 35:16.347
So the first one is, will it make money? The second one, will it save money?
Speaker 0 | 35:21.028
Yes.
Speaker 1 | 35:21.488
The third one is, will it add some sort of customer satisfaction to…
Speaker 0 | 35:30.211
CSAT score of some sort. Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 35:32.531
Exactly. Or will it improve the capabilities in some way? And the fifth one is, is it going to achieve or solve some sort of regulatory, some sort of compliance thing?
Speaker 0 | 35:44.855
Sucks. something, I don’t know, PCI compliance, something compliance. Will it make us more secure? Secure? Will it make us more secure? I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 35:57.443
Yeah. I mean, if you’re dealing with oil and gas, there’s all sorts of regulatory stuff that goes on with environmental and that kind of thing too. So stuff you can’t ignore plus security and, and cybersecurity stuff is now starting to become regulated, regulated as well. So.
Speaker 0 | 36:14.892
I didn’t get to the rest of that part. I’m assuming in the Phoenix project, something’s going to happen to the security guy, John. All I know is that John gets crapped on.
Speaker 1 | 36:25.021
I don’t remember.
Speaker 0 | 36:26.802
He was like, why does no one care about security? No one reads my emails. I see. I know you don’t read my emails because when I call you about it, I get the read receipt right as I’m talking to you about the email.
Speaker 1 | 36:39.454
Oh, that’s funny. I don’t remember.
Speaker 0 | 36:41.340
Anyways, exactly. That’s exactly the point, I think. But anyways, we’ll have to have a secure. Do you guys have a CISO?
Speaker 1 | 36:51.244
No.
Speaker 0 | 36:53.365
So it’s you?
Speaker 1 | 36:56.586
Sort of. We do it by committee.
Speaker 0 | 36:59.647
Okay, okay. So a community of technology people or a committee of what?
Speaker 1 | 37:07.771
It’s technology people, yeah. Not necessarily all in IT, though.
Speaker 0 | 37:11.733
Okay, I gotcha. And what’s your general take on security nowadays? Obviously, you have the basics, you have the human factor, obviously, but just in general, from 96, no one cared.
Speaker 1 | 37:30.300
Yeah, I mean, I think that you can go as far with it as you want to, and depending on who you’re dealing with, they’ll take it far further than maybe is even necessary. You know, for me, cybersecurity is something that you want to make sure that you don’t ever have any sort of holes. But other than that, didn’t necessarily overinvest in because you can really, really overinvest if you’re not careful.
Speaker 0 | 37:58.930
In other words, make sure the business doesn’t go down in a burning inferno due to a security leak, but don’t oversecure so much that it’s… just slowing things down and hurting the business and yeah, slowing process. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 38:11.735
totally. I mean, there’s these sliding scales, right. Of, of, um, no security to maximum security. And I think that the organizations that need that, the highest of highest levels of security are probably much less than maybe the it people that, um, I think the sky is falling all the time. Uh,
Speaker 0 | 38:32.410
this has been a pleasure. The. For anyone out there listening, growing up in IT now, what would be, what’s your, you know, when you think back about it, what would be your biggest piece of advice? If you were a mentor, you had, you know what I mean, people underneath you, what’s kind of like your biggest, your tagline or piece of advice that you’re often giving out or finding yourself thinking about?
Speaker 1 | 38:59.130
Yeah, I think that people underestimate. And people get into IT oftentimes because they love technology, which is cool, but they underestimate how important it is to continue to be a human being and to bring the human aspects of what we do into IT. You know, at the end of the day, unless you’re a hobbyist or you’re in your basement doing this on your own, you have to be good at interacting with people, and there’s no hiding from that. You have to be good at it. If you’re not good at interacting with people, then no matter what career you choose, you’re still not going to be successful. So I tell people to make sure that you… you invest in not just the tech skills, but also understand that the people skills are equally important. You have to, um, you have to invest in yourself in developing that side of things also, because most jobs you’re not going to get because unless they give you a technical assessment and that, and that’s it, most jobs you’re not going to get unless you talk to actual human beings and convince them of who you are. And then there’s culture fit. And there’s all these other things that go well beyond your tech skills. If you can’t, um, have those kinds of conversations, then you’re probably going to have a very low ceiling.
Speaker 0 | 40:17.800
Did you, well, you were Switzerland always, so easy for you, you know, easy for you. Is there, have you, have you coached any people successfully through people skills? I guess we could throw them into a room for two days and make them read the Pearl man’s search for meaning crucial conversations, how to read a book. That sounds amazing. We might have to do that, but. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 40:39.649
it’s really simple. be nice to people. And when you think you’re, you’re, um, you have an urge to not be nice to people, take a deep breath and then come back and then be nice to people. If you can just, if you can just be nice to people and be generally respectful, it solves an awful lot of problems and it comes across in, in a variety of ways. Um, you know, I see people get a bad rap with good reason because sometimes they don’t, um, you know, they get very passionate about things outside of, uh, of just the basic. human interaction that’s occurring you have to make sure that uh if you look at and what i do is i look at at the people that i really admire and say what do they do there’s very few very admirable people that you’ll find that are that are nasty to other people or that are disrespectful or that have bad things to say to people or or get involved in sort of the water cooler stuff i mean they usually keep their nose clean and they usually um are respected for that so if you’re in a If you’re going to want to get to the very top of the top, assume the best and let people disappoint you, not the other way around.
Speaker 0 | 41:48.056
I love it. Be nice to people solves a lot of problems. Yeah. Being nice to people solves a lot of IT problems. Wow. That’s mind blowing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 41:57.658
Yeah. Well, when it comes to technology, there’s usually 15 different ways to solve a problem. But a lot of times it’s the people involved that get in the way of actually solving them. So. And you got these late nights, the server’s down. The difference between having a high-performing team and not a high-performing team is often how well are they going to get together on low sleep when they’re really hungry.
Speaker 0 | 42:23.881
So true. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 | 42:26.443
Of course.
