 This is a little talk. I actually was invited to give this in Poland at DevOps. So if you really like it, come to Krakow. And you can see a 30 minute version of it. But there's me. And it really just goes over how to kind of, as the title says, function and do well in a large company. So I've worked in several large companies, from Dell to BMC and little startups and places like that. And I've been in various roles from development to corporate strategy and M&A. So I've been exposed to a whole lot of folks and practices. And I've been cataloging for a while. And I thought I'd finally try to write them down in a compressed form. And I think in our industry, that's particularly important because a lot of us here and think about advice for sort of like cowboys or unicorns or things that don't seem normal or usual. People who are fine getting their boot caught in a strap and you've got to shoot your horse out to survive. Risk takers who are doing things in IT. But I think most of us are basically like city workers. We're garbage people, essentially. We have like a normal work process to do. We've got to keep up with it. We don't do our job. Bad things pile up. And we really have to maintain our mental fortitude because we're collecting garbage and making sure things are running. We're not doing exciting stuff. So first is a disclaimer. I work at Pivotal. And none of this applies to Pivotal. Pivotal is great and awesome. There's no cynicism or anything that you need to survive there. And also we're hiring. So you should come work for us. We just got a lot of money. So we have money to give to people and lots of fridges full of beer and sriracha cashews. We write on glass and stuff like that. So the first thing, if you're working at a large company, is you should think about bringing your own tools. Whatever centralized IT is doing from you from facilities to tools you're given are probably going to be insufficient and are not going to work out well for you. You're going to have all sorts of log jams you've got to get through. Next, people always say when you go to a big company, you should get a mentor. And mentors are great. That's fun to get educated. But having a champion is even better. And a champion, think of someone who's fighting on your behalf and is doing things for you. And I've been lucky to have both, especially champions in my career. And they actually work out a lot better than just having mentors. The second one is as you get to, not second, but you do more and more work, what you want to start doing is avoiding people assigning homework to you. And also you want to have a way of avoiding people making you do work. And you can always do what I call assigning homework. Have them write a brief or a report or about this project that they want you to work on. Now conversely, you can be on the other end of this and you have to be worried about it. The more concerns you have and the more you complain and the more you ask questions, people will start assigning homework to you. And you'll have busy work to do outside of your normal norms. So that could be totally normal and great if you want to do it. But be aware of falling into the trap of doing a lot of extra busy work for people out of your chain of command or responsibility. So another thing I've noticed that when you're in a large corporation, if you want to innovate, all the way back to where we get this from, from Lockheed, you really need to hide out and do a sort of skunk works project. Unless you're working in one of these great unicorn places like Pivotal where, of course, you could do that. But you'll find that you'll be safer from the machine killing you than if you hide out. And another thing, this is more to my young self, is when you work at a large company, you're thought of in terms of your total overhead, not your salary. So look at all the perks you have, like matching 401Ks and discounts for your wireless and all that. And mercifully go get all of them. Like, expensing from mileage to the airport is a great extra source of revenue that you might have. Finally, not finally, but also if you're a large company, before we get into the presentation slide part, it's good to focus on relaxing and not overworking too much. Try to work as little as possible in an advisable way. But think about a big company is a nice place to hang out. People describe companies as being resorty, which that sounds awesome. So try to take advantage of that, because that's also part of your comp. Now, this is the presentation, the slide part of the presentation, going over tips for meetings and slides, which I think is a vital part for surviving in a large company, especially outside of the world of development. So the first thing is I would think about when you're putting together your presentations, think about them as a document accidentally printed in landscape mode. Not like this presentation with big pictures and things like that. Like, it's a document that's going to be emailed around and it's going to be something that people read as if it were a word document. And second, when you're titling things, this is just a little tip, use what's called a McKinsey title. And there's some examples here, but basically have your title be the brainwashing thing you want to see or into whoever's mind that you want them to think. And then below is the stuff that supports that conclusion or statement. Next, it's always good to assume you'll never get past the first slide. I've been in many meetings where we did huge monumental things and we never got past the cover slide. Like, a presentation is more about you thinking through what your discussion is, your argument, counterarguments, really strategizing what you'll do. It's more of a storyboard. So if you're ready for that, then you'll be happily on the first slide there. And next, this is just good in general, but especially for a presentation, a lot of what you're doing in knowledge work and large company stuff is always making a decision and getting, getting, or requesting someone to do something. So always know what you want from someone should you encounter them. Always have an ask ready. So finally, if you're in a large corporation and you're the kind of person who thinks this is all funny, or you recognize it, you need to have some way of surviving in there, right? And I think, I think there's this good song from a good old Texan about like, you've got to really steal your mind to survive in that large corporation because it's probably a reason you're there instead of just running away from it. Now there's a lot of other good references here. One of my co-workers at Dell Matt Baker had a great presentation about presentations for executives. I did a write up, you know, over in Medium you can look up. And this is a fantastic book from the early 80s about understanding how corporations operate and the people in them. So this is my last slide with the stack of rocks and everything. Like I mentioned earlier, we've got a great conference coming up and, you know, you should check that out because they're paying for my airport mileage for this conference. And, you know, if you want to get more of these slides, you can just go to cotay.io slash bigco and I'll be out at the pivotal booth in around. Thanks.