Host Intro (Gene Kim)

So I had mentioned yesterday what I've been working on recently, which is how to get business leadership on board. And here's what I think the problem statement is. Great CEOs and board directors know how to run great companies. They're fearless about insisting on process excellence, whether it's sales pipeline forecasts, product market fit. They even have the confidence and intuition to do things like firing the top salesperson because they know that principles, process, repeatability are more important than any one individual. And yet, some CEOs are much less confident about holding R&D accountable, so we treat it like a black box.

And I love this phrase, "When things go wrong, I don't know why. When things go right, I don't know why." So better just leave it alone than to meddle with it and have it blow up. And so my claim that I'm making now is that you don't have to be a technologist to hold R&D accountable. The same sort of intuitions that made you successful in sales, marketing, operations, or finance can be applied to R&D. I mentioned yesterday that I had the opportunity to present to 100 CEOs of software companies to make the case for DevOps.

This is not what I presented to them. In fact, my first turn at bat was to 50 software companies, CEOs ranging from $100 million revenue to $2 billion, and I don't think I did that well. In fact, Chris O'Malley, CEO of Compuware, a $1 billion software company, took me aside and said, "Gene, you really blew it. They totally didn't get it." And I am so grateful that he's been kind enough to coach me, along with Joe Payne, CEO of Code42, and work with Mik Kersten and me to teach us how to communicate better with CEOs.

Mik Kersten introduced me to a fascinating model that I think is very useful in terms of framing our challenge. So this is a post from Ben Horowitz. He's the founder of the famous investment firm Andreessen Horowitz. And there's a famous blog post that talks about-- He also wrote this book called "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," but he also wrote this famous blog post about the ones and the twos. So in this post, he describes for their founding companies, they've categorized the founding CEOs as either ones or twos, and saying that you really need both, but they really favor the ones.

So the ones are the product visionaries. They love gathering information. They love the strategic planning process. They love ideation. They love creation. And so the archetypes for this I think would be Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and so forth. On the other hand, we have the twos. The twos love process excellence. They love holding people accountable. They love sales calls, budgeting. Now, they love all those things. They maybe create processes. And so those are the twos. And in my mind, in this community, we are like the ones. We are the ones who see a better way, and often the people that are in our way are the conservative leadership, the orthodoxies, the people who are really trying to enforce status quo.

So for years within the program committee, we've searched for the right person who could teach us better how to understand the twos with the goal of better to be able to communicate with them, influence them, and in the worst case, survive their opposition. We debated this endlessly within the program committee for months. But when one person's name came up and their background and skills we studied, something really interesting happened. Everyone on the program committee was super excited, and I think it's because of his unique background. Someone who has a computer science degree, someone who was VP of sales at CA and is now a CEO of a billion-dollar company.

So in various parts of his career, he has both been a one and a two. And this person is Chris O'Malley, who I feel has so many important things to teach us. He's someone that I've learned... In every interaction I have with him, I learn something, including backstage an hour ago. So let me just get this out on the table. Some of you may be wondering why I would invite the CEO of a software company, a vendor, to speak to us, and I'll tell you this directly head-on. If we can't convince, as a community, CEOs of software companies about how important our work is, where you live and die by the software that you sell, there is no hope of convincing a CEO of a retailer, insurance company, hospitality, any industry.

So I'm convinced that we need to be able to talk and think more like Chris. So with no further ado, Chris O'Malley. Thank you, Chris.

Chris O'Malley

Glad to be here.

Gene Kim

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

Chris O'Malley

A loser?

Gene Kim

No. Right. And as you once said to me, you too once had dreams. So can you tell us about your life both as a two and a one?

Chris O'Malley

Yeah. So I started on the right path. So I was a computer science major out of college, which is a good thing to be, right? But I quickly went to the dark side and went into sales. And then about 10 years ago, I took a unique job, which really gave me the perspective of a two. So 10 years ago, I took the general manager mainframe job for CA Technologies. If you think back 10 years ago, that was the middle of the recession. So companies generally were doing incredibly poorly. The mainframe business, today it's going through a renaissance, but 10 years ago, there was a lot of mainframe naysayers that were controlling basically the airwaves, so there was a lot of negative energy around the mainframe.

CA itself was going through some difficult times. There was an accounting scandal that put actually some people into jail. There was a "Fortune" article that came out that said that Computer Associates is actually the most dysfunctional company in the United States. So those are a lot of things that are working against you. Sounds like a fun job. Yeah, it is fun. It's like working your whole life to be a head coach and you find out that you're the head coach of the Cleveland Browns or something. So it is a... I'm a Vikings fan, I can't help myself.

But it's important for you to understand that because when you get a job like that, you don't get a pass. There's this expectation from shareholders, specifically through the board, that they want you to create value. They didn't put you in that job to make excuses. So, you see these scenarios that happen that sometimes a person causes these situations that are like these type two, but sometimes the situation caused the person. And if you're going to influence these people, you didn't understand, it's not a situation where they don't get it. Trust me, I didn't sleep a lot of nights when I had that job.

They get it. But when you think that there's so few avenues for you to actually get things to improve between a spectrum of growth to value, you tend to focus on the value side, and that's usually cutting costs. It's usually looking at things that are going to have a long-term return horizon as something that you're cynical towards. So again, we're talking about trying to influence these people. You got to understand the motives and where they come from. My second job that I had, or not second job, but job after CA, was actually the other extreme.

I was a startup CEO, and I started the job by actually going out and getting money. You see in that kind of scenario where you're trying to get your first customer a sense of purity in terms of having to have a strong vision of a changed future, that you've got to have a disruptive mission, that you're actually trying to change the way that jobs are done so that you can make a case for selling new technologies. So you get a sense of having to be these extremes in terms of zealots and passion, but you also get to see the value of things like DevOps and Agile.

And that these things become an essential part of actually the birth of innovation within these companies. In fact, in that startup, it was almost all PhDs, right? It was all PhDs. It's one thing to be a computer science major, it's another to be a PhD. So I was subordinate to them, but I learned an enormous amount from them about how critical what you all do are if these companies, these large enterprises, are actually going to succeed. So from there, I went to Compuware, and I became the CEO of Compuware four years ago, which is a mainframe software company.

And what excited me about that job was that Compuware at that moment, was in a lot of trouble. It was in this chronic state of decline. Some people thought it was on a pace to basically go out of business. It hadn't come out with a product for 15 years. It was associated with the mainframe market. It was a sense of decline. But my thesis was is that if you could take what I learned as a startup CEO, the passion of a vision, a mission that gave a sense of purpose to the company, and applied these techniques like DevOps and Agile, that you could restart a company and create something new and different and actually disrupt the market generally, but definitely change the fate of Compuware.

So the effect of that was that, in January of this coming year, for a company that hadn't come out with a new product in 15 years and had done waterfall for 40, and that our backlog was dominated by maintenance and basically compliance issues and the complaints of the largest customers, we will come out in January with our 16th consecutive quarter of new capabilities, upgrades to our classic offerings, integration with leading DevOps tools, and improvements in the customer experience. We were a company in a state of decline to a company that's now, in fact, growing.

And what's interesting for a type two person that is constantly looking at a short list of cost cuts as the answer to everything, the way that Compuware did that was one where we had no restructuring costs of any nature. We had basically no negative effects in terms of cash flow. So those are financial mumbo jumbo, but what it really means when you double-click it is that the people changed. We went and had people that basically had that outcome for 40 years that wasn't nearly as successful and was leading to basically failure of the organization, reset themselves, reinvent themselves, embrace things like DevOps, embrace things like Agile, and get basically a successful outcome almost immediately.

So when you look at the core people within Compuware today, it's basically the same people there the day that I started. And I say that to you because a lot of leadership believes you got to purge and start again. You need restructuring costs, the consequence of cash flow, and type two people hate that because in the short term, it creates a decrease in value of the firm. To think that we changed the tire on a moving car and actually created that outcome and bent the curve so fast is incredible testament to what you're trying to do and the importance of what you're trying to do to basically help the businesses you serve.

Gene Kim

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

Chris O'Malley

That's right.

Gene Kim

So you also told me something very surprising. And this has actually resulted in the way I talk about DevOps. I've changed that. You said, "DevOps people talk about things that business people don't care about." And so tell us more about how bad we are at communicating value to people like you.

Chris O'Malley

I don't think that's exactly the way I think about it, but first, what I'm about to say is that the DevOps story is an incomplete story, that there's two sides to the story, and one side is not being told. So I do want you to know, as a CEO that lives and dies by the DevOps efforts of my own organization, that what you're trying to do or are doing is incredibly important. But I want to set the context for the other side of the story that's not told enough, if at all.

And I'll use an example of a discussion that I had with a CIO of a large financial services company, and I was having a discussion with him, and the subject of DevOps came up, and he got a little bit upset. Actually, not a little bit upset, really upset. And his perspective on it was that, "I'm tired of people coming in my office and talk about improvements of a release frequency, that MTTR is getting better, that less and less bugs are going into the wild- Oops ... when those things are placebos in the eyes of our customers."

And his point that he was making is that the ideation, the ideas, are as important as how you do it, and they have to be made in balance. And you've probably heard in the course of these few days of change of mindset and being product-minded rather than project or something like that, and that doesn't mean that much to me. But I want to double-click on this idea of ideation because it's important for you to understand it. So one of the greatest successes in this modern digital age, obviously, is Amazon, and Jeff Bezos is amazing.

And he is a person, though, that shares his successes. He's not hiding it. He's not like Willy Wonka in his chocolate factory and keeping everything secret in terms of what goes on. He shares the ways that make Amazon different. And a couple of years ago, a letter to the shareholders that he wrote as part of his annual report, he talked about a bunch of things that makes Amazon different, but the first one he talked about was customer obsession and how important that is to what's made Amazon what it is today.

And he goes, "What's amazing about being obsessed about customers is that customers are always wonderfully and beautifully dissatisfied. No matter when things are good and they think things are all right, there's always something more that they want. And your earnestness to try to understand those things will drive you to invent on their behalf." And that cycle, that virtuous cycle of being better at building customer experiences, customer journeys, eventually will separate you from your competition. So it's incredibly important, just as you're trying to do all these efforts to improve throughput, quality, velocity, efficiency, that you counterbalance that with the discussions about what ideas you're harvesting and finding and turning those into deliverables that are actually making a difference to your customers.

You had this great Beatles analogy to describe that partnership.

Gene Kim

Tell us about that.

Chris O'Malley

Yeah. So, internally at Compuware, I talk about product management and engineering, both report actually directly to me as CEO, as Lennon and McCartney. That the two of them have to challenge one another. The ideation side of it needs to challenge the efforts of engineering to get the sequence of getting those ideas to market in a quality state as fast as you can and get more and more throughput. The ideation side is we got to have awesome ideas, not maintenance, not compliance stuff, but awesome ideas that are going to transform the company in the eyes of our customers and the market generally.

So you need those two to make sweet music together, but they also got to fight. That combativeness as Lennon and McCartney had when you didn't see the music, when they were sitting in the studio, is important for both of them to escalate in their efforts. And when you think about these type twos and trying to change their minds, there's not a pill you can give them. They're sitting there thinking about how do I create value, and almost always the short list is on cost cutting. So you, in partnership with product management, needs to start becoming storytellers.

And at Compuware, what we do is every two weeks, at the same time every two weeks, we do a town hall. And in that town hall, if you came and listened to it, you're going to hear product managers talking about ideas that we've harvested, that we're fashioning into deliverables that make a difference, and how customers are reacting to it. We're showing the fact that we're evolving the products that we have to nail the jobs that our customers are trying to do. You are also hearing engineering talking about their progress and basically throwing out constraints and getting the flow of work to go faster.

And they're saying it in authentic ways. We're not just everything's wonderful and beautiful. They're talking about the good and the bad and the ugly. There was times when we had significant quality issues, but we put it front and center, and we worked it through. And if you listen to those discussions every week, it gives you a sense of two things that are really important in trying to tune into these type twos. One is you're showing them efficiency, right? You're showing you're changing a tire and moving a car because you're a culture that's constantly looking about at constraints and trying to think about how do I improve them?

How do I get them faster? How do I get the throughput to be better? Which is music to their ears, right? That's greater return from the assets within the business without adding more to it. But you're also showing them something that's equally important, which is resilience. All these ideas that are coming in are allowing the company to bob and weave and always have the days matter in terms of better serving customers. And that's critically important because as much as these type twos think about, I got to cut costs, I got to make these decisive decisions as to what we're going to do.

They also fear making a mistake. What if they make a huge decision and they can't unwind it, and they put the company into a cul-de-sac? That scares the crap out of them. And I read a recent article from Business Investors, and they have this article about 50 companies that are retailers that have gone out of business in your history. And anybody that's older than 30 years old will recognize most of the names, and it makes you want to cry. And I think about what makes that happen, and to a certain degree, it's type twos chasing profitability without thinking about resilience, and that you've got to, in the digital age, bob and weave.

You got to get a little bit better. So trust me, it's not like they're oblivious to this fact. All of them have cell phones. All of them see that shopping malls are closing. All of them shop on Amazon. They get that side of it. They just don't know how to get that to happen within their own business. So this two-week cadence or whatever cadence you have where you've got Lennon and McCartney, and I'm talking about it like it's one person or two people. It could be organizations. But giving that messaging, throughput, and efficiency along with taking these ideas and keeping us in this resilient state is something that over time, it may not catch them in a moment and they might not just have this epiphany, but trust me, they're getting beat on by boards.

They're listening to McKinsey and Bain. Everybody's telling them they got to transform. At some point, the aperture will open and they'll have to start learning and understanding, and it's everything that you've done up until that point that makes a spark something where you become the flywheel to take the business to the next level. So this idea of Lennon and McCartney I think is really important, and you need to look at it not as something that you do independent, because again, you'll look like a placebo. You're a talking head that's doing things that are different in ways that may be important to you, but not to our customers.

You need that partner, that ideation person to basically give you those stereo sound that makes people that are both type one and type two start to listen to you.

Gene Kim

So let's talk about the scenario, and I love the analogy of Lennon and McCartney. So what if I'm the Lennon and I can't find any McCartneys? What advice do you have? And you had something about passionate explorers.

Chris O'Malley

Yeah. So, I'll digress just for a minute because I think it's important because it teaches you about the headwinds you face. You're trying to help your company go on a journey. It's a revolution, to steal from the Beatles. You're trying to do something that's pretty heavy lifting, and it's always important to appreciate how hard it is to do what you're trying to achieve, because you've got to have will and you've got to have courage, and it's got to measure up to what you're up against. And I digress for a second, but I think it'll be helpful.

So there was somebody that presented to me at one point, and they showed this slide, and the slide had GDP divided by hours worked in the United States over the last five years. And it was flat. And I'm looking at it and I'm like, "How can that possibly be?" All the robotics in this world that's coming to the country, companies like Amazon, all this technology. How can GDP versus hour worked be flat? Now there's a lot of reasons that economists talk about it that are way too complex for a kid that went to a public school.

But there is something that I saw that made sense to me. So Gallup does this survey on engagement, on employee engagement, and they've been doing it for 30 years, and they do it every year or two. And every year for 30 years, it's had the exact same outcome, which blows my mind. But what it's found is that a third of the people in organizations of scale are engaged. 50% of the people are what they term to be not engaged. And then the remaining 17% are what is called actively disengaged. They actually sabotage- ...

the efforts of the companies that they serve. So you do the quick math on it. If you're this engaged employee that's actually trying to be part of an effort to transform, two-thirds of the company is working against you. They want things to remain in the status quo. They want things to be in a steady state. And that aligns to human nature. Human nature does not want to take risks. We'd rather be miserable in the known than take a chance on the fact that changing will create a better outcome. So you need to be conscious of that being the headwinds that you face.

So I tell people when I see these people that are really good at DevOps, like Gene, they're passionate, they're excited, they're pumped, they're consistent in terms of that mantra that they give because they understand any vacuum you create, gravity will pull that organization back so fast. So you've got to be on your game all the time. So what we talk about a lot within Compuware is this subset of engaged people called passionate explorers. Those are the people that you see that come on stage here that are pumped up. They fear nothing.

They're going to go after the world. And you as a person on your side, you know who those people are, right? You know that there's people that feel frustrated within the business, that they see a better path forward, and they're trying to basically get people to join this journey. There are other people within the business that are equally frustrated. They see the problems that the business has got. I tell people that you can't tell me that everybody at Sears is stupid and that everybody at Kmart's stupid. There are smart people on the business side of the organization, but they got to have the equal courage and desire to elevate themselves to be your equal.

So you got to find those people, and they're going to be not like Lennon or McCartney probably at the outset. They're going to be more like Pete Best, which is the fifth Beatle that got fired. But you got to help them to learn through the journey that you went through. You guys read "The Phoenix Project," right? And you use that as a means of getting everybody to understand why we got to change and the fundamental things that have got to be different. There's books like that on the other side, like Marty Cagan's book, "Inspire: Building Products That Customers Love."

And you've got to help them to build product management skills so that they can go into that DMZ zone between customers and your value prop and understand that dissatisfaction, right? That beautiful and wonderful dissatisfaction, and think of creative ideas, not that aren't prejudiced, but are innovative to make it better so that they become a source of really awesome backlogs that aren't maintenance, that aren't compliance, but are going to take the company to be more competitive in the digital age. So those people exist. You got to go find them. You can't have them be somebody that you talk to now and then.

You got to hug them. You got to get involved with them. You got to teach them exactly what you did on your journey for them to do the same from a product management standpoint.

Gene Kim

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

Chris O'Malley

Yeah. Again, you have to have some sense of... There's got to be a little bit of faith here, right? Your management, I just went to a CEO event in Manhattan. That's the one I blew. Yeah. No, no. Just two days ago. You did fine. But Bain was there, and your CEOs and COOs are getting bombarded with this transform state, that the economy's being disrupted, acceleration and pace of that disruption's getting quicker. It is all centered on software, and software being delivered faster and going in rates and speeds. So they're hearing that, right?

And it's hard, because if you're a type two, it's incongruent because it feels like investment. It feels like things that I haven't mastered as part of my career path. If I've come up through the CFO rank, I don't know these things. So it is really important that you do, as we've talked about, that you find a partner, that Lennon or McCartney, that becomes, in a sense, your equal contributors. That you get a platform that communicates constantly. Whether it's weekly or bi-weekly, but you're always on stage, and you're always talking about ideas that were incredibly important to our customers that we got into the backlog, and we figured out a way to turn those into deliverables that make a difference.

And you tell those stories and the issues and the problems that you've got. And then through it also, in doing that and having them watch that movie unfold and understanding it a little bit more, a little bit, making a difference, and they're getting this external stimulus, "You got to go digital. You got to do this digital transformation." Those things will get them eventually to the right place. But one trick that I think is important for you to draw them in, and you should target these type twos, is that in the course of this journey, and again, it doesn't happen in two weeks, it's going to be quarter, it could be years.

That's why you got to have a lot of energy, and a lot of will and determination. But eventually you're going to get defining moments. That is either a catastrophe, it was a massive mistake, but we learned. Man, we learned so much as a result of that, and it's basically moved the ball 20 yards, having put that in the category of a deep lesson learned. And you want to put that on stage, celebrate the person that took the risk, and celebrate the person that made a difference in a mistake. And have that type two on stage being part of that celebration.

Because what you're doing is you're showing what this passion and explorer looks like in the flesh. It's a face. It's a person. Man, I want to be like Gary. I want to be like Judy. You're putting that person on, and you're getting a type two person to confirm that's that subset of engaged people that we need. You want to use the others' examples, too. If you get a defining moment, that's just an outrageous success. We delivered something that moved the needle massively in the eyes of customers. Get that person on stage and get that type two person on there.

Draw them in to this journey and these people that are basically pulling the organization forward. So it's a long road. There's no silver bullets. There's no drugs you can give these people. But you've got a set of chemistry, both macro, and then all these things that they're being told by McKinsey and Bain and Boston Consulting Group. You've got to show that you're changing, you're working on efficiency, you're working on resilience, and eventually it'll happen. Trust me, that spark will occur. They'll engage, and you'll look five years from now and see, you can directly correlate with what you're doing right now to making your business turn around and do much better.

Gene Kim

One of our conversations, you said it's like Horton Hears a Who. That one voice will maybe create that aha moment for someone, and the tide will turn.

Chris O'Malley

Yeah, and I think what's interesting, I've lived in the old enterprise software world with large enterprises and especially over time, the secrecy of it all. It's like we don't talk to the press, we don't talk to anybody, and that's terrible. Because the leaders that are in this room, being a leader is lonely and it's scary. And you got to come up pumped up, and you got to look like you got no fear, and you got to have courage. And part of the means by which you regather yourself if you stumbled and you have made a mistake, and I'm sure you've all been in this mode where something bad happened and those two thirds of the organization that are either not engaged or actively disengaged seize on it and say, "Oh my God, I told you we shouldn't change.

We should keep doing it the old way." And you muscle through it, but when you go home at night, you got an empty feeling in your stomach. And so what makes it work is getting everybody to support the cause and get the cacophony. Is that right?

Gene Kim

No, no, no. Oh.

Chris O'Malley

You just reminded me of something. Yeah. You got to get the cacophony going. And I think using things like social media, and not Twitter because it's transient. I think things like LinkedIn are looked at by your executives. Your CEOs and CIOs are certainly trying to use that platform to cultivate their own brand. But you being visible in social media and showing those successes and getting other companies to chime in, and that sense of building on something that creates momentum is incredibly important. So your voice matters. I mean, what you have to say matters.

Contribute to that conversation publicly, not just to your buddies at lunch. I mean, those are important things in terms of getting this thing to move.

Gene Kim

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

Chris O'Malley

Yeah, and I think it goes back to what I've said. I mean, you can't, in the moment, fix a situation like that. I mean, if you've been quiet about the effort, and it's been a skunkworks project, and then you get to a decision point and you had a bad quarter or something bad has happened, which gives the type two a very short list of what to do at this moment in time. I mean, you've created a trap that's very difficult to get out of. So it's everything that you've done through the course of time before that moment occurs that creates the greater degree of likelihood of a successful outcome.

In business, no matter how good you are, there is good luck and there is bad luck, right? It's just the way it works. And it's a game of luck to a certain degree. So a good leader understands that they're doing things in terms of messaging efficiency, messaging resilience. There's a crank being turned, and there's a continuous degree of improvement that's being happening every day, every week, every month, and that they get to now a decision point of what you've just said. They're going to say, "This one stays." "We keep this thing going because I've seen it for what it's done and what it can do, and the promise of it."

But you've got to involve them in the story. So I know a lot of you work for very large organizations, and this idea of two-week town halls seems, how are we going to do that? I mean, when I talked about the fact that people are engaged and not engaged and actively disengaged, everybody wants to believe they're in the first category. I've never presented to an audience and everybody thought, "Oh, I'm not the engaged," or, "I'm not the..." I mean, they don't think that. Everybody thinks they're engaged. I mean, everybody thinks, "I'm the passionate explorer."

But if you're sitting in the audience right now and saying things like, "Doing a town hall every two, that's hard. I mean, that's a lot of content. I mean, that's a lot..." You're actively disengaged. You are sabotaging the effort. I mean, you are basically you yourself the problem. I'm not saying anybody feels that way, but you're the problem. So, it's everything that you do- ... up until that moment that determines what's going to happen when the decision has to be made.

Gene Kim

So what final advice-

Chris O'Malley

I said something you didn't like.

Gene Kim

No, no, no. It's great. No, I want to make sure that you had a great piece of final advice for this community.

Chris O'Malley

Yeah. The first thing, you're on a quest, a revolution, a crusade. In any of those things, what's important at the outset is that truth is on your side. You are doing the right thing, and it is essential to the success of your companies. So get that in your psyche. Get that in your mindset. It is crucial that you come from a disposition of courage because things will go bad. You will fail. I mean, part of getting better is failing. But you need to know at your heart that you're doing the right thing.

And as a CEO of a company that went from a nosedive to turning itself around and now creating growth in ways that investors look at as being extraordinary, if somebody asks me the question how we did it, core to it is DevOps. Core. Could not have possibly done what we've done at Compuware without DevOps and Agile methods. Impossible. So have that in your mind all the time, even when you're lonely and things got bad and you had a bad day. Second thing is you need an alter ego. It's, you're only half the story.

You need your McCartney. You need your Lennon. You don't need Pete Best. You need somebody who's your equal, and help them to paint a collective story. As much as you need them to make you successful, right, that they're an advocate for the fact that what you've done is a means of taking these awesome ideas we've got and turn them into deliverables that make a difference, and they need to have you give the support to them that you're giving them a way to iterate, to experiment, to learn things. Never go down a cul-de-sac.

Always going maybe on a meandering path, but we're always getting to a place where customer satisfaction is getting better. Engagement is getting better. So that's second part of it. The third thing is you got to talk together. You got to communicate that message as an ongoing storyline and promote in this mindset an idea of efficiency, I mean, that plays to the type two, but also resiliency. They may not be able to take that leap to innovation because that's just a bridge too far, but they do understand resiliency because they fear making the wrong decision.

And you're giving them a way to basically give a net that if they do make the wrong choice, they can back out of this cul-de-sac and take it on a different path. And then lastly, I'll just say is be inspired. When I look at the travels that we have, that we're seeing a lot more DevOps and Agile happen on the mainframe, so I'm getting introduced to more and more DevOps people, and they're kind of a consistent breed. They're inspired. They're fired up. They get the troops going. I mean, you got to have that kind of relentless disposition about you because gravity is so hard.

And always keep in your mind that two thirds of the people want you dead. I mean, they don't want you to succeed, but do not fear that. Anything that is great in any company that's been achieved, that's been worthy, right, that's really made a difference is because it overcame that gravity. And I guarantee if you just keep that chin up and those arguments going, that you're going to see five years ago that you were the core. You were the spark that turned your company around and got to a level of growth and ability to compete in the digital age that no one thought was possible today.

So thank you.

Gene Kim

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

Chris O'Malley

You're welcome.

Gene Kim

Thank you. Peace. Thank you, everybody.