Hello. I flew in at like 4:30 Atlanta time this morning, so I might be a little bit dizzy. But if Gene heard me say that, and it's good that he's not here anymore, he would say that I'm usually this dizzy. I'm right here.

Oh, hey Gene. Proof point, I am that dizzy. So, if you personally have a problem with uncertainty or certainty in general, and you have some control issues in your life, you might find this session a little bit uncomfortable. Unlike a good amount of the presentations that talk about people's DevOps journey and all the different technical things that they've done in order to actually speed up their continuous delivery or their continuous deployment or their automation builds and things like that, I'm not really going to talk about that.

Instead, I'm going to talk about how to talk about it. That inside large enterprises, there are ways in which the way that you talk allows change to happen, or the way that you talk sometimes gets in the way of change. So, the title of my talk is Gandhi and Patton, and it's the Redemption of Wes. Gene and I, several years ago, met at South By and we talked about many things, and this was before the Phoenix Project came out, and we've been in close conversation for a long time since then, talking about how I am a former Wes myself, the guy screaming in the back room saying all these horrible things about how everyone's a bunch of morons, and how that, for a long time, hindered my ability to get things done.

And that I've since come to a different understanding. So, myself, I've worked at a bunch of different companies. I'm about a 25-year veteran inside of IT. I've worked inside of government, I've worked inside of consulting, I've worked inside of private industry, I've worked inside of internet companies, retail, you name it.

The different places from either in or working for have been a lot of different contexts. So currently, I reside at Autotrader, which is one part of Cox Automotive. Cox Automotive is about an $8 billion or so company, or maybe a little bit bigger than that. We own Kelley Blue Book, we own Autotrader, we own Manheim.

If you didn't know, the largest advertising spend in the world is in the automotive segment. And Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book and the various different parts of our company, we are one of the primary channels which the automotive industry spends for marketing their vehicles. So, I've been at Autotrader about four years now. And in the last, since 2012, so just over two since we've really started talking about DevOps inside of our company.

We've done a good amount of stuff. We've swapped out our search engine. Autotrader actually is a search engine. That's pretty much all that we do.

We swapped our ad platform, our enterprise service bus, our services gateway, our web application stack, our CRM platform. The list just kept going and going and going. And also during that time, we switched from waterfall to Agile. We ingested and digested a lot of change in the course of three years.

So, I know a lot of people have probably seen or heard the Jesse Robbins talk about culture hacking. Yes, no? Have you seen that? Where Jesse pretty much says to go small, and I'm here to tell you that you don't have to do that.

So, like I said, about two to three years ago, I met Gene at South By. And this was pre the Phoenix Project, and Gene's talk was entitled, When IT Fails or When IT Says No. I forget which one it was. But basically, I went because I was a UX guy.

I come from a significant design and empathy background as well as a technical background, and I float between the two disciplines. And I thought it was a UX talk about how to deal with IT departments when they crumble and fail. And so I went in thinking it was one thing, and I walked out completely just blown away because also in my past life, I was an infrastructure guy. And so hearing Gene talk about the downward spiral and hearing Gene talk about how things go wrong when you don't pay attention to the holistic craft of being a good IT developer or being good IT operations staff, that just immediately hit home to me.

And so since then, Gene and I have developed a good friendship, and we've been talking about different concepts around how to drive adoption faster inside of large enterprises. So, who here works in a consensus driven enterprise? Okay. Consensus driven enterprises are very proliferated around the industry, but they're different than necessarily, let's say, a financial services enterprise.

Financial services enterprises are more focused on absolutes being what is right versus consensus. And they can be consensus driven, but consensus driven qualitative enterprises don't have a necessarily fully objective point of view on what works and what doesn't, and they figure it out via experiments over time. So, whether you're in a consensus driven enterprise or not, who in this room finds themselves frustrated by the pace of change? Good.

I would argue that that's pretty much everyone in a consensus based organization. If you're part of the change that's happening, it's moving too slow for you. And if you are outside the change that's happening, it's moving too fast for you. Does anyone else find that to be true?

Couple people. Okay. So, in terms of DevOps transformations and languages that is more appropriate for this room, which of these sound familiar?Automation costs too much and it wouldn't work anyway. Has anyone heard that one?

I've heard that one. We've tried that before, and it failed. Why should I pay for that? That's your IT job.

Get back in that closet and start plugging wires and typing on keyboards. We want humans to make those changes. Machines make big mistakes, big mistakes faster. We make too many mistakes now.

Why would you want to speed up? So I personally believe that all of these were boiled down to one basic statement, which is, "That sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. I'm busy going and getting revenue, making customers want to buy what we're selling. Go back in your closet and make the product." So when you're faced with this stuff, how do you typically respond?

Who's a frustrated person inside this audience who's felt that way and responded? Has anyone kind of ever lost it? Good. I'm here to talk to you guys today.

So have you heard the one about the guy who'd rather have a hole in his organization? Does anyone know this joke? The punchline is, "I'd rather have a hole in my organization than an a*****e." That was actually said on a keynote at Velocity in New York last year, so hopefully I'm not that horrible. So who knows this diagram?

Yeah. Where's Wes? On the right. On the right?

You think the guy with the gray sweatshirt and the laptop? Mm-hmm. I actually think it's this guy. Oh.

Mm-hmm. He's kind of got his fingers waving in the air, and he's yelling at someone , telling everyone who's not in the room that they're a bunch of morons. So I would refer to some of this dynamic as what's called the jerk paradox. Now, I've had a good amount of conversation with Scott Cook over at Intuit to talk about this idea.

That it's very often that the people inside your enterprise who sometimes, if not more often than not, are the most talented and have the most fundamental sense of where the organization should go, often are the biggest jerks and don't have the ability to actually turn their ideas into action that other people can follow and then make real for the rest of the enterprise. And nobody basically wants to listen to them because they're too busy telling everyone what a bunch of morons they are. Does that ring true for other people? Has everyone seen that before?

All right, so Harvard Business Review actually talked about this in 2005. And they talk about it in terms of a typical two-by-two grid, in terms of likability and competence, where one person is considered to be the competent jerk who cares more about results to the point where form doesn't matter at all. Results are the only thing that matters. And then on the other corner, there's the lovable fool, somebody who cares so much more about form than results.

And the statement from HBR that has pretty much become general wisdom throughout corporate America is that it's better to be the lovable fool than the competent jerk, because at least the lovable fool has a job. So I would argue that this boils down to one statement, is that results are insufficient if a reasonable amount of form is not present. So what this basically means for you is as you're trying to actually attempt to speed up adoption inside your enterprise, you have to figure out a way to transcend the jerk paradox and move from competent jerk to lovable star and actually become desperately followed rather than mostly avoided. Now, I know this can be easier said than done, but that's actually what I'm here to talk about today, is how to move right.

And I know we're all here to figure out how to shift left, but in the Harvard two-by-two grid, we're going to talk about shifting right. So, I don't actually think this is impossible at all if you understand some basic concepts around trust and conversational dynamics. So who here in the room is a bicyclist? Any mountain bikers in the room?

All right, mountain biker in the room, what governs the speed of the bicycle? The skill of the rider. I would say that's one thing, but what's bigger than that? The guy in front.

Gravity. All right. So if you've ever ridden downhill, you'll know that actually pedaling the pedals has pretty much next to no effect. That's because the bicycle chain doesn't actually connect, or the gear on which you're pedaling doesn't actually connect to the rear wheel.

Your pedaling only has effect when your pedaling is faster than the speed at which the rear wheel is already traveling, which is basically the result of gravity. Now, that's different depending upon whether you're going uphill or downhill. And when you're going uphill, the actual thing that's more important than anything else is actually the form that you have, the skill of the rider. How you position yourself on the bike, how you choose to place your effort, when you choose to place your effort, how you choose to move the gears, how you position your center of gravity, all those things are more important than any amount of effort that you actually place in the pedals.

Similarly, when going downhill, it's actually the opposite. Form has almost next to nothing to do with it. It's how committed you are to actually getting to where you're going.Now, I position these two different orientations as leadership contexts, one being Gandhi, the other being Patton. I think everyone knows the Gandhi quote, "Be the change we want to see in the world." The model that we talk about inside of our enterprise is that's gentle pressure relentlessly applied, or persistently applied.

Now, personally, the Patton quote is less known, but I love it. "We're not going to shoot the b******s, we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks." Does anyone know where that actually came from, when that was? Does anyone a Patton historian at all? All right.

So Patton is maniacal pressure relentlessly applied. This is when you are going downhill in a consensus organization. Now I'm going to talk more about each one and tell you how to kind of mock that leadership style. But first, before we actually get into that, you have to understand how do you determine which one to apply and when.

And basic ones for figuring this out is just a conventional model of trust circles. Now, your typical trust circle is drawn as in your circle of trust are people who you trust. This is the converse. This is people who trust you.

Inside the circle of Patton are people who implicitly trust you regardless of anything else. Now, what that would mean is imagine that a very close friend of yours walked into a room, and in the room is you and their dog, and their dog is lying dead at your feet with a bullet hole in his head, and you're holding a smoking gun, and he says, "Wow, thank you. My dog must have had rabies. You've done me a great service today.

I appreciate the efforts that you must have taken to actually put my dog down when he should have been put down." Now, on the other side is the circle of Gandhi. These are people who implicitly distrust you regardless of appearances. So when you come and say, "Hey, I'd really like to figure out a way to speed up our deployment process," all they hear you say is, "Wow, you're trying to put machines in the place of humans. They're coming for our jobs.

We like humans, we hate robots. Go away." So, critical factor to understand and account for when you're actually deciding which leadership context to apply is to determine the amount of trust that is placed in you by the audiences you're attempting to inspire. This stuff goes way back to Heraclitus and Aristotle. This is basically the science of rhetoric and the science of kairos.

If anyone is a Greek historian or wants to talk about that afterwards, I'd love to catch up with you. So let's talk about this in a little bit more detail. Who here has seen the film Patton? All right.

Let's see if you guys remember this scene. What's the matter with you? I guess I just can't take it, sir. What did you say?

It's my nerves, sir. I just can't stand the shelling anymore. Your nerves? Hell, you're just a goddamn coward.

I won't have a yellow b***d sitting here crying in front of these brave men who've been wounded in battle. Shut up! Don't admit you're a yellow b***d. Nothing wrong with him.

I won't have s*s o b*****s who are afraid to fight staining up this place of honor. You're going back to the front, my friend. You may get shot, and you may get killed, but you're going up to the fighting. Either that or I'm going to stand you up in front of a firing squad.

I ought to shoot you myself, you goddamned no good b*****d. Get him out of here. Send him up to the front. Do you hear me?

You goddamn coward! Won't have cowards in my army. And so who knows anything about Patton at all? Do you guys know approximately when this took place?

Because this is based on real events. There's actually three events that happened. Patton literally slapped three different soldiers during his campaign through Sicily up through in order to push the Germans out of Italy. Anyone else know about this stuff?

All right. So basically what's going on is that Patton is a guy who is so obsessively driven by one idea, that he has to figure out a way to end the war sooner. And that every day that the war keeps going on is thousands and thousands of lives that are going to be sacrificed every day. And the people who are really close to Patton understand this, that that is his only goal, and that anything that he could possibly do to shorten the amount of time before the Germans surrendered, Patton was willing to do, including slap a soldier.

Now, any ideas? Does anyone know what happened after this incident broke loose? Patton was removed from command. Patton was removed from command.

He was arguably, and consensus-wise, the most talented officer within the Allied forces. The only one that the Germans were actually afraid of. Afraid of a general, because Patton could do things that other people considered to be impossible, and he was still removed from command. Now, I would argue that the reason that Patton was removed from command, the real mistake that he made, is that he acted in a manner that others, in absence of knowing who he was and what his prime ethos was, would jump to the wrong conclusion.That instead of seeing a guy who is willing to sacrifice almost anything to end the war sooner and save thousands and thousands of lives, what they saw was a man who would become what he beheld, and that here was a guy who had become very similar to the forces that they were fighting when they were an inhuman person.

Now, I would ask you guys a question, but please don't answer yet because I'm going to ask it again in a different light in a second. So think about this. Imagine that the same thing had happened, but only in front of Patton's inner circle, basically the people who implicitly trusted Patton. Would it have turned out differently?

Would it have leaked out to the press? Would the press have leaked back out to Eisenhower? Would Eisenhower have removed him from command? Would the war have gone on as long as it did?

We'll never know, but think about that for a minute. So let's flip to the other side. Hussein Gandhi. What is it?

Saurah was sent to tell me I must rake and cover the latrine. That's right. Everyone takes their turn. It is the work of untouchables.

In this place, there are no untouchables, and no work is beneath any of us. I'm your wife. All the more reason. As you command.

The others may follow you, but you forget, I knew you when you were a boy. It's not me. It's the principle, and you will do it with joy or not do it at all. Not at all, then.

All right, then. Go. Oh, please no! No, wait!

Heck, you're Hussein. I'm your wife. Where do you expect me to go? What's the matter with me?

You are human. Only human. And it's even harder for those of us who were not even born to be as good as you. I apologize.

I must get back to that reporter. And I must rake and cover the latrine. So who knows why Gandhi has hair here? Anyone?

Gandhi has hair because this is actually in his younger days when he's still in South Africa, and this is prior to him going to India and prior to creating the movement which Gandhi is more famous for. Now, so think about the previous scene with Patton. Now, think about this one. So any idea what Gandhi did right here?

I would argue that the real thing that Gandhi did right is he demonstrated his commitment to his ideals by being willing to sacrifice the relationship that he valued the most in order to actually further the cause that he was looking for, and also immediately apologized for how far he stepped over the line. Now, remember we asked a minute ago, would it have turned out differently if Patton had acted that way in front of only people who he trusted? Now, I would ask the same thing, but on the flip. So in this scene, Gandhi only acted in front of his wife, the person who implicitly trusted him the most.

The press wasn't there, his opponents weren't there, no other people were there. So imagine this early in Gandhi's career, what would have been different had news broken out that here's this person who is trying to lead a significant change in South Africa, who under the guise of nonviolence, who is now manhandling his wife and pushing her around. What would have been different? So two models go this way.

In the circle of Patton, there's one thing and one thing only. Raise the bar higher, always, unless you're Jiminy Livo. Now, what this means is to aim for this zone right in the middle between competent jerk and lovable star, and never being ashamed to ask for excellence. These are people who trust you, who know what you're going after.

So in aiming for this zone, you have to be willing to mix it up a little bit. You have to be able to say the hard message in terms of, "Hey, this really does need to get done. We do need to automate everything, and we will do it. And it should've been done yesterday, so get to it." At the same time, you also have to be willing to shift a little bit to the other side and be more inspiring, saying, "I know that we can do this.

It's only a matter of time. We will fail a couple times before we get there, but eventually we will. Who's with me?" Perfect spot to hit, right in the middle, is just that competitive edge of, "Hey, I know this is hard, but I thought that's why we're here because we're a bunch of talented individuals and I know we can get this done. I didn't think we were in it for easy winnings, that we could just show up every day and just collect a check."So in doing this, you also have to pay attention to the other side of it, is that you always have to be able to religiously strive for collegiality.

If you don't strive for collegiality, it quickly becomes-- The whole model breaks down because at that point, it becomes the arguments of the highest-paid person in the room and the loudest person in the room. And that if you-- Inside the circle of trust, collegiality has to remain true, where the best ideas win and titles don't matter about anything. Now, over time, if you practice this model inside the circle of Patton with people who implicitly trust you and then you're also inside their circle, over time, you become legion. And this is where everybody kind of knows what you're going after and everybody bands together, and the things that other teams leave behind because they don't want to focus on the small things that actually make a difference.

They say, "That's too hard," or, "We're not interested, but you guys can go ahead and do that." You can feed off of that and grow stronger because you will win where other people have given up. Now, on the other side, in the circle of Gandhi, there are four steps. This one is harder to do. So, I think people are generally familiar with the axiom, assume good intentions.

I would argue that most people kind of interpret it wrong, that it's not necessarily for the benefit of others, it's actually for the benefit of you. So if you break it down in terms of a truth table that geeks can understand, inside of consensus organizations, if the other person who you're interacting with has a positive intent and you assume positive intent, change goes faster and everyone says, "Thanks for leaning into change. Yay, we're all winners. Hooray.

Good you." On the other side, if you assume good intent and the person on the outside who is trying to possibly oppose your change has actually ill intent, he just doesn't want to change, but you still behave in a manner of true professionalism and always assuming good intent no matter what the circumstance, in a consensus organization, you still get respect and credit for assuming good intentions. Generally, this is what happens is, "Hey, I know that thing's going to be frustrating. Change is hard. Thanks for fighting the good fight." Now, on the other side, if you assume bad intentions and if you-- All right, I'm going to have to speed up.

My time is out. All right. If you assume bad intentions and the person has good intentions, you're castigated. And lastly, if you assume bad intentions and the person actually has bad intentions, you're still viewed as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

This happens all the time in consensus-driven organizations because no one can prove anything. That's just how it is inside large-- Unless you have video cameras in every room, this is pretty much how it goes. Now, so in assuming positive intent, after you've done that, and the reason it was step zero was because it's before you enter the room. When you've now entered the room and you assume good intentions of all your parties that you're working with, now you can actually come from a place of empathy.

You can look them in the eye and say, "Hey, I understand that you want to preserve people's jobs, and I care about that too. I'm going to preserve people's jobs through automation because I'm going to increase throughput by three times, and that makes everyone here have a job as long as they jump in now." Which is pointing to the higher ground. Being able to actually look your partners in the eye and say that, "I understand that you have good intentions, and there is a place where we all can meet and do better." After you do that, wait, because it doesn't work every time. Get over it if you think that you don't have to actually try and try and try again.

That's exactly what you have to do. Basically, the law is that seven times you have to repeat a message before it's actually heard. That's management theory that's proven across different industries. Now over time, what happens?

People move from the circle of Gandhi into the circle of Patton. Because over time, they understand, begin to trust your intentions, and they become part of your legion. If you continuously practice the respect of assuming good intentions and converting them to your point of view over time, slowly. Now, there are flaws in my model.

There are flaws in every model. First one, if you pay too much attention to form rather than results, you'll be branded the lovable fool. And you also have to remember that newly converted people are highly volatile and that they can flip in and out. Now, there is a way to balance against this, is you can't stay static.

You have to consistently be willing to shift pattern to pattern to pattern. From aggressive to Pat to inspiring to competitive. Other challenge, man, people are told no all the time. I know that everyone in here who tries to make change happen, you are told no more often than not.

I assume that is true of every enterprise because it's true everywhere. In sales, did you know this stat is real? 80% of leads in sales are converted after the fifth time calling. For both you and your people that you're working with, understanding that yes may be the destination, but no is how you get there.

Your job is to go and collect the noes. Go collect them, and then wait, and wait and wait, and then when, honestly, when crap breaks down, now you can look at them and say, "Hey, remember we talked about that. Is now the time that you're willing to actually do something to make this go away? If not, stop complaining to me."Next challenge, pressing inward too hard can cause unforeseen results.

If the people inside your circle see you pressing harder and harder and harder, sometimes they'll crack. And that's not good for anybody. It's not good for you, it's not good for them, it's not good for the company or the change you're trying to achieve, because it can totally undercut your platform in a matter of seconds, just like that. Now, there is a way to combat this.

Aim high, always aim high, continuously do so, and be willing to celebrate small wins, such that last speaker up here talked about it. Recognize that you're better than you were before you started trying, and be willing to go again, and retreat to the corner of the lovable fool. "Hey, I know I'm a little bit crazy. I say some crazy things.

I try to push us hard because I really enjoy what we do, and I'm a passionate guy, but I'm kind of stupid that way." Now, so a couple things that Gene asked me to talk about personally, why I'm personally here. I'm a redeemed Wes. I was the guy in the corner of the room calling everybody a bunch of morons because I knew a faster and better way to actually do things. Automation was stuff we did in the late 1990s, and watching people not want to do that, I was like, "Duh, why would you not want to be faster and better?" But over time, between the people who surrounded me, between people who I worked with and people who I cared about, I kind of evolved into something different.

And I've been able to actually both be a better master of myself and my own behaviors and help teach others in how to do it, and it makes me better every day. So some things that I personally need help with, because I don't have it all figured out at all. We're still trying to take automation to the next level inside of our enterprise. If you have any tips for me in terms of doing things like automated tag validation or building out more robust canary infrastructures, doing other data centric services validation, these are things that we still struggle with.

We still have humans in some of these jobs, and I'm looking to have those humans elevate to new jobs. I need to find more and better talent in Atlanta. Auditor is hiring, and if you guys know of people who are looking for gigs, I'm interested to be introduced to them. Lastly, I care about the stuff I talk about.

If you have feedback for me, I'm really interested to hear it. I'm way over time, so questions I'll take outside if anybody has them. Thank you.