 So, good afternoon and welcome. Thank you guys for coming to Saving the World from Bad Websites. I know the schedule says Riding the World of Bad Websites. I'll touch on that in just a minute, but this is the story or this is Chromatic's Compelling Saga, Saving the World from Bad Websites. So just a quick bit about me before I jump in. My name is Dave Look. I am a partner and the managing director at Chromatic. That means my role kind of spreads broadly across the company. I handle things like legal and finance, operations and HR, I do business development and in general I help with my two partners in the overall leadership of Chromatic as a whole. I am also on the leadership team at my church back in Chicago and I help my wife run her company and do operations for her. Her company is Shelly Harms Collection or shopchc.com, little plug for her. And I love the study of leadership and kind of group dynamics and group organization. I would also say I like to fancy myself as an adventurer, so I like the idea of climbing mountains. I don't get to very often living in downtown Chicago, but I grew up in the Boy Scouts and hunting and fishing and camping and being outdoors and these things and some of the stories that we'll talk about briefly today are really inspiring to me. My activities of choice are rock climbing and doing these events called Go Rock Challenges, which I'll share a bit in the middle of my talk about that. So like I said, I'm really inspired by the stories of mountaineering and that's where a bit of this talk will come from. Chromatic is my company. We were founded in 2007, so we've been around for 12 years. We're a team of 16 people, fully distributed. We've never had an office and we don't intend to. We are currently hiring, so if you are a front-end developer or back-end developer and looking for an awesome place to work and you like what I have to say, come check us out. We've worked with a wide range of clients over the years. State Farm, Outside Magazine, Meredith Publishing and most of their sub-brands, Martha Stewart, Better Homes and Gardens, so on. We launched a project for Harvard last year. We do work with Maui Gym and a handful of others. We have a deep expertise in the Drupal, what, this? We have a deep expertise in the Drupal space. Obviously, that's why we're here at DrupalCon, but we like to think of ourselves as expert practitioners in all things related to the web, so design, front-end, architecture, back-end, project management, DevOps and automation. We have a great team and a great set of tools to help solve the complex problems related to saving the world from bad websites. So I'm going to borrow liberally from this book, High Altitude Leadership Today. What the world's most forbidding peaks teach us about success. Actually, Gus, sitting in the front row up here, he gave me a copy of this book a couple of years ago. It was written by these two gentlemen, Chris Warner and Don Schmeky. They have led mountaineering expeditions all over the world, Mount Everest, K2, a lot of other Himalayan peaks that I can't pronounce. And the book is stories of leadership and success and failure in mountaineering and then tying it to the real world of business and operations and things like that. They, Don has an organization that does leadership research and consulting, so it's really cool. I have to give them the credit for the idea of a compelling saga. This is the only place I can find that even talks about a compelling saga is in this book. And then I threw this in here for fun. This is me on the right there, or my right, your left at the highest mountain I ever climbed, which was Grace Peak. This is in between two 14,000-foot peaks. So, lastly, I just want to say leadership is a topic for all of us. It doesn't really matter if you are a business owner or not. Leadership is important for all of us to dive into. We all have different roles and we all have a different place. But studying leadership and what makes a good leader or a bad leader lets us know who and when and where we should follow and it lets us know how we can lead better as well. So the book, High Altitude Leadership, is broken down into eight chapters and each chapter highlights a danger that we will face as leaders or as an organization. Each one of these dangers has a survival tip associated to it. I'm not going to go into each one of them because that would be really stealing from the book. And I highly recommend you take the opportunity to read it if you can. But I wanted to go through these to just kind of see the theme of all of these dangers that they highlight. And I also know this isn't the comprehensive list. This isn't everything that we would face, but it's a pretty good place to start. So they talk about the fear of death, which I think really translates to us as fearing failure as people and as leaders and as an organization. The second one is selfishness. This is kind of letting our ego get in the way and our personal desires outweigh the groups. Tool seduction, this is composer and grunt and gulp and all of those things. This is like the thing that we struggle with a lot in this industry. I love reading this chapter because they were talking about how this is like really true in mountaineering. And there was a quote at the beginning of the chapter from a climber that said, with the best equipment in the world, the man with poor judgment is in mortal danger. So just that idea that we think we can kind of triumph just because we have a new tool. The next one is arrogance. I think this is, again, ego. Pride comes before the fall, something that we have to look out for. Loan heroism, this idea that I'm the only one that can save or solve the problem. So kind of going rogue or being the roadblock to others in the organization. I think that is ego as well. Cowardice, I think this comes out in fear, just in a different way. Comfort, I personally relate comfort to selfishness because we're putting our own personal desires to be comfortable ahead of something else. And then they have gravity is the last danger. And gravity is the great equalizer of all of these things. I'd say gravity is luck. So there's two different types of luck. You have dumb luck and you have manufactured luck. If you've heard the phrase, fortune favors the prepared. I think you can kind of manufacture good luck sometimes. But we're going to hone in on number two, which is selfishness. Conveniently, the survival tip given for selfishness is the idea of crafting a compelling saga. So it tied together nicely with the talk. Selfishness kills people, profits, and possibilities. I probably don't need to convince you that selfishness is something that we are up against both personally and as leaders. It's something that we see in many different organizations. So we are not climbing a mountain, most of us probably. And we don't have a life or death consequence because of our selfishness or selfishness, the selfishness on our team. But there are real world consequences to these things being in our organizations, which is at the extreme end, we could see the death of our organization. And people have health care and mortgages and rent and things that are all impacted by that. In the book, they talk about selfishness leading to what they call dud behavior, D-U-D behavior, dangerous, unproductive, or dysfunctional behavior. And I'm going to hit on that a few times and come back to that in just a second. I also want to say that I try to not solely steal from this book and bring in some other leadership research. And there's a woman that I would highly recommend that you read her books called Brene Brown. She's done some TED talks and written, I think, four or five books on leadership. Her recent one is called Dare to Lead. And in the beginning of that book, she lists 10 items that she said, leaders from her research said are items that get in our way. And I cherry-picked three of them to share. So one, she said, we avoid tough conversations, including giving honest feedback. I think we do that because we are putting our selfish desire or our lack of ability to step into that uncomfortable conversation ahead of the team. The sixth point that she said is that there's too much shame and blame and not enough accountability and learning. Again, we're shifting that responsibility off of ourselves out of self-preservation. And then this one, which really hit me hard, was that people are opting out of vital conversations about diversity and inclusivity because they fear looking wrong, saying something wrong, or being wrong. So again, I'm fearful of myself and my own self-image. And then she emphasizes this by saying, choosing our own comfort over hard conversations is the epitome of privilege and corrode's trust and moves us away from meaning and lasting change. I highlight all these things because I believe that the root of all of them is selfishness and putting ourself above our team or our organization. And it's a great book. I highly recommend that one as well. I have a whole bunch of books I recommend and I will share my slides with them as well. So they cite in high altitude leadership that selfishness is the scientists have proven that this is a genetic disposition that we have as human beings. So in essence, selfish genes will win out in the evolution of a species, whether that's humans or something else. So Dr. Pat Allen, this psychotherapist says, genetic animal instincts drive our relationships more than we ever knew, and it's not politically correct, but it's scientifically accurate. Richard Dawkins published a book called The Selfish Gene, which really goes into depth about the science behind selfishness winning out in evolution. But I say this as a way to remind us that this is part of our disposition as humans is that we are kind of wired for survival out of selfish behavior. So if we all agree on this, that selfishness is something that does kill people and profits and possibilities, how do we see this manifest in our organizations? And I mentioned that dangerous, unproductive, dysfunctional behavior. So these are just some examples that they have in the book. I'm sure we've all experienced this, but having a 15 minute meeting take an hour. You've lost 300% productivity out of that time. Project's going over budget. This one I think we see a lot, or maybe not a lot, but maybe you're in a kickoff meeting and the client's telling you something that's crazy that everybody in the room knows you can't do it. Nobody's willing to say that you can't do it. And then they come to you after the meeting and say, hey, we can't do that, but we wasted everybody's time pretending like we could do it. So you can see this just in any period of dynamics, somebody talking about somebody behind their back and so on. It can manifest as lies, manipulation and stealing. And just in general, it could be an overall lack of productivity and or distractions within the agency. So if these are some of the behaviors and the actions that we see, what is actually happening to our organizations? Well, I think these things can lead to missed opportunities with our current clients or loss of clients. We can see team members leave because of these types of activities. We have legal issues and additional risk that the organization is taking on. What am I at? Waste, we could have just general waste within our organization, poor morale, toxic leadership. And at the very extreme end, we could see the death of our organization or the closing of our agency. Now, just some simple math. The book says, their research says you could see somewhere between 20 and 80% lack of productivity because of this. I think 80% would be insane. If your organization is losing 80%, I don't know how you're surviving, but let's just take some simple math and say you're at that 15 to 20% lack of productivity range and apply that to a million dollars of payroll or multiply your payroll by whatever factor you need to. For every million dollars of payroll you have, you're losing, you're spending $150 to $200,000 of just lost money because of not addressing the lack of productivity or the selfishness within your team. And I hope I'm not telling you all that your teams are super selfish. I think we have a lot of good people and I believe our team's great. So the idea of the compelling saga is that this human selfishness can only be unhooked when we have a greater passion that overwhelms our selfish agenda. So one of the stories that they tell in the book is that they are in the Himalayas, they're climbing, they're going to these different monasteries and villages and visiting people. They've spent a month in the mountains, they've overcome all sorts of different trials and adversity and they're on their way out of the mountains and Don looks over the team leader and he's really depressed and the team leader says, he says to the team leader like, hey, what's going on? And he said, well, I really hate this part of the expedition. Most expeditions fail on the way out of the mountains, not on the way in or during. And so they started to unpack the why. Why were expeditions failing at the end? And the conclusion was that there wasn't another peak, there wasn't another mountain to climb, there wasn't another summit to hit. So they didn't have the narrative of their whole story taking them from the start to the finish. They only had it going to the summit. And they emphasize this point even more with highlighting a stat that the mountain K2, which is similar to Everest but more technically difficult to climb, one out of seven people that summit and hit the peak of K2 die on the way down the mountain. And my, I don't think that's necessarily necessarily tied to selfishness, but it's tied to this concept that they didn't see the full picture or they didn't have a story that motivated them to get all the way home. So I mentioned GoRuck challenges. These are just a little, I'll just tell you a bit about them. This is my personal experience. So GoRuck challenges are team-based physical endurance events. They're led by former special forces guys and they're based on their training and their combat experience. That the events emphasize teamwork and leadership and they're intensified by physical and mental demands of the event. So the events themselves are about 12 hours long and you're gonna move 15 to 20 miles and then intermixed in those 15 to 20 miles. You do what I'd call like crossfit style workouts. So lots of push-ups and PT and craziness. They'll find coupons or things to motivate you with like logs and rocks and whatever, pick this up and carry it. And they start at nine at night. So you go all through the evening doing these things. Oh, and you carry a rucksack like this the whole time that's 30 to 40 pounds. All of these events as of now are memorial events. So they're memorializing things like Pearl Harbor or 9-Eleven or Operation Red Wings, which is the lone survivor story if you've ever seen that movie. The Black Hawk Down incident, Mogadishu Mile and many other events. So Friday night and Saturday of last weekend I participated in an event honoring the Baton Death March which if you don't know anything about it it was a horrific incident that happened in World War II where some prisoners of war of the United States and the Philippines were forced to march 60 to 70 miles and just it was atrocious. So I share that because there's two stories of this compelling saga that I wanna share out of it. One is I'm doing this event in Chicago and I'm just getting a glimmer of what this kind of event could have been like this Baton Death March. So we're getting crushed by marching all over the city and carrying heavy stuff and we go into the lake in the morning but the compelling saga for me was to complete the event in honor of these people that actually went through something that was really, really hard. The other bit that the cadre, the leader of that event shared was a story of a man that had taken a photo of his wife and put it in his boot. So for him on the Baton Death March for him the compelling saga was every step that he took had a purpose. It was getting him one step closer to his wife. That was his personal compelling saga and this Nietzsche quote, he who has a why can bear almost anyhow. That's sort of that ethos that you get in those moments. If you really know why you're doing something you can bear the hard times. Victor Frankel who wrote Man's Search for Meaning and was a Holocaust survivor talked about that in terms of the psychology of surviving atrocious things. The real goal of this is to shift your priorities from yourself to the bigger picture. Sorry that's a lot I'm trying to go fast. So humans need this compelling saga, this story or drama that inspires passion for a strategic result, passion that overwhelms the selfishness common in humans. So this is the idea of the compelling saga. I wanna tie it to our common business vernacular. So and I apologize this slide has a lot of text on it. But we start with a lot of times as an organization our mission and or purpose. So answering the questions of who are we and why are we in business? Then we go into our vision which is where are we going? How do we see success down the road? We define values so what are the behaviors that define living these things out that we're trying to do? Some organizations have strategies some don't but that's the how do we achieve this vision? How do we get to where we're going? How do we win? And then we can tie all this together with the compelling saga which will ask and answer the questions like what language inspires our passion for a strategic result? Why should we die? Why should I submit my ego and myself for the mission, vision and strategy that we are trying to achieve? This last point I just threw in here because I needed another one. This is just living it out. So I grabbed a couple examples out of the book that they shared of early compelling sagas. I didn't fact check these. I don't know if they're real but they communicate the point. So they said that Lexis' early compelling saga was to beat Ben's. Coca-Cola was to put Coke within arm's reach. Honda was we will destroy Yamaha. FedEx was we'll beat the brown shirts with our red, white and blue trucks. I've never seen a red, white and blue FedEx truck. I've only seen the purple and orange so I don't know the validity of that. And I was even thinking about this as I went through my talk. I would say chromatics early compelling saga was to be lullabot. Not to beat them but to be them. We admired lullabot. We wanted to imitate them and we've certainly grown up from that and have our own compelling saga now. If you guys are tracking with me and you think this is good how do we get to having our own compelling sagas? I would also encourage you to say that this isn't just about your organization. You could apply this to a team at a team level or you could apply it to your own life and your family or whatever. So if we're going to implement a compelling saga we have to prepare to do this. Crafting this statement could be very quick or it could be an art like any other thing. And I do kind of agree that it takes some finesse and some time to really dial it in to get it right. And I don't know that we have ours right yet. So you need to gather the information that you have. So if you have a mission, vision, values or your strategy you should gather those and reassess them. If you don't have them I think you should start there and try to define those items. And I would also encourage everyone to employ a concept called tactical empathy. So yet another book called Ego Authority and Failure by a gentleman named Derek Gaunt who was a hostage negotiator for many years. The book is about hostage negotiation leadership and applying the techniques that they have for negotiating with hostages to your leadership style. They coined this phrase called tactical empathy which is the deliberate drive to accurate, accurately recognize and articulate another's emotional state or perspective so well that you could articulate it for them. I bring this up because we talk a lot about fostering diversity in this community and we talk a lot about diversity within our organizations and that's something we desire. But I don't think you can truly do that if you're not trying to fully understand the other. And we want to have a compelling saga that is inclusive and unifying. So I think this is just a little side encouragement to explore this idea and concept of tactical empathy which is different than simply feeling for someone else. This is truly going out of your way to understand it in a new way. The last bit on the prepare phase is take your time. Do the things that you need to do. Don't rush this part. Also I'll say this is directly out of the book. It was written in 2009, a winning strategy wasn't frowned upon at that time. So the compelling saga should capture the essence of the winning intentions of the mission, the vision and the values. So it should be, it should move you towards success, not just be a cheery tagline. It should be memorable. So keep it simple and short. It doesn't have to be long to be or complicated to be meaningful. Step four is to always be vigilant as leaders we have to stay ahead of the selfishness that will naturally creep into our organizations. Even we have to watch it and keep ourselves in check in these places. And step five is to iterate and go back to step one. So I mentioned the title originally being reading the world of bad websites versus saving the world from bad websites. We iterated one time so far in the year and a half that we've had this as a compelling saga. And I know that's a very minor change, but that's how that came about. I do think this is important that we should regularly revisit our mission, vision values and our compelling saga if we have one. But it doesn't mean do this every month or every other month. It's, do this at your team retreat, say, hey, are these the things that still matter to us or every other year revisit them. And then don't let perfect be the enemy of good. I think it's really easy for us to think we have to craft this beautiful, very specific, tangible language that has a 10 point action plan behind it. And I say this not to say fail fast and fail often, but to just have the freedom to mess it up and redo it. It's, that's the beauty that we have in trying to work at these things together. So saving the world from bad websites is what we landed on as a compelling saga. I certainly think there could be more to this, but this is what Chris and Mark and I have landed on. We spent time reviewing our values and seeing how they aligned to this. We refined our messaging around this internally. We added this as our compelling saga. We've wrote a manifesto like around this idea. And part of what I think is unique about this is that we can save the world from bad websites in innumerable ways. We can make websites faster. We can make them more accessible. We can give them better design and user experience. We can optimize our development processes and ensure that we're pushing clean and sanitized code, which is something that I think even companies like Boeing could learn from currently. And that would go beyond websites, but they are everywhere. There's something that we all encounter and we can all engage in. Our team knows this. It's easy, it's short. You can remember it. And yeah, that's our compelling saga. So I would encourage you all to give this a go, whether it's for yourself or for your organization or your team. And I'm happy to chat about this some more. I'll be at our booth, 516, I'll be here. We have like five minutes, so I can take a couple questions if you want. And I do have a trivia question for you guys. And I have a copy of the book. If somebody gets, there's like three questions here, but if you get the final question right, you get the book. So does anybody know who this is? Okay, I'll give you his name. His name is Edmund Hillary. Does anybody know what Edmund Hillary did or is it known for? Yeah, he's the first to climb Everest, first summit of Everest. Does anybody know who Tenzing Norge is? Who said it first? He was his Sherpa. Yes, so hopefully I've been here Sherpa just briefly today. And yeah, thank you guys for coming. So this is for you.