 Alright, welcome back. We're going to continue our speeches here in the Essie's Village. We had Keith Conway and Cameron Craig. Today Keith and Cam are going to give you a crash course in how to hack the monolith. Cam was the man on the inside with a desire to develop change. Keith was a consultant on Cam staff who acted as an advisor and the link to get the techniques you're about to see into the company. Keith and Cam hope you come away not only entertained but educated and empowered by their framework on your, your own. Let's give our attention to Keith, that Conway and Cameron Craig change agents, how to effectively influence intractable corporate cultures. Alright, thanks for coming out. I really appreciate you guys being here after seven o'clock on Saturday night when it's peak party time at DEF CON. Real quick, I'm Keith, this is Cam. We're here to help you guys figure out how to hack intractable corporations. Just a quick show of hands, actually hold a second. Disclaimer, these are, this is our story. These are our opinions. Your mileage may vary. Don't be evil. So how many people have worked for or currently work for large corporations? Okay, awesome. How easy is it or was your experience of trying to change or get the culture to move? Exactly. So everything we talk about tonight is going to go back to this thesis right here. Corporate culture is hard to fix because of a fundamental misalignment of shared vision, shared value, shared culture and shared change. So everything we talk about is going to come back to this. And we want to give you guys tools to take this and have an application tomorrow and not just have this be all theoretical. So I came with a lot of theory. Cam's going to give us perspective from kind of like the guy on the inside. And then let's just jump in. There's a tonda to go over. So this happens because of what's called the innovators dilemma. Essentially what was your competitive advantage in the past becomes what's called like a legacy problem over time, right? And if you're really interested, look up a guy named Clay Christensen. He's a professor at Harvard. If you heard about disruptive innovation, a lot of people in Silicon Valley use it improperly, but he's the guy who kind of coined the term. It's also because of exponential growth, right? So the rate of change is accelerating things like in less than 10 years a phone is going to be as fast as your brain, less than $1,000. And that just changes everything. So what happens is right now, if you don't change, your company is going to go under. But you can't change because of fundamental misalignment of shared vision, shared culture, shared value and shared change. So it's all about how do you craft a narrative to get everybody to carry on and kind of, you know, share the vision. But first, we got to look at large corporations are essentially complex systems. And complexity theory is really tricky to kind of pin down. So let's just look at an example real quick. So there's an idea of complicated versus complex. If something's complicated, it could be like a plane flying 500 miles an hour through the air. But you know, it's more or less predictable because the probabilities you're not going to crash. Like it's tuned very well to be predictable versus a complex system. You can have the same input all the time but the output could be different. So like predicting weather is really, really hard. So this is a whole nother talk in and of itself. We're not going to get into it. But suffice to say, there are three properties to kind of focus on. Non-linearity emergence and adaptation. Non-linearity is the idea that the same input can change the output based on context or state. Emergence is the idea that groups will exhibit behavior that individuals won't display in isolation, meaning you're going to act differently in a group or a collective versus individually. And adaptation. People in groups are going to change based on responses to the environment. So let's say you use bookstore. You want to maintain homeostasis and equilibrium. And you want people to talk on the phone because if people are talking on the phone, they're going to leave. So this is kind of like a passive aggressive signal to the rest of the group that, hey, we don't want you doing that. Now, whenever you're doing OSINT, we're going to come back to this later. It's really easy to try and just take a ton of information and figure out how to use it. But this is one of the ways that you can deal with scale. You've got to look at whether the, well, let's look at homeostasis is actually a collection of how relationships, values, resources and objectives work and networks. And that's essentially what your corporate culture is. And that corporate culture will change based on how the market is changing and based on the behaviors and expectations of your employees and your customers. So again, this is the OSINT slide. Whenever you're doing OSINT, look at what someone's unmet needs are, what the points of friction are, what the sentiment is, meaning do they like their job or do they hate what they're doing? And lastly, what do they think success looks like? Because what they say on their LinkedIn is how they perceive their position versus what the job description says, which is going to be different than what their boss or the company as a whole thinks they're going to say. And again, it's all about a fundamental misalignment. So it's a human centered system and that's what you've got to design for. And this kind of comes back to our background. If you look us up, which is from design research and design thinking. But let's get into the next step. The shared value system is a shared culture carrier wave. If you want a transformation, you need three things. You've got to solve your unmet customer needs simply, right? Any great company now does this to a T. You've got to build a great company. A company has got to be profitable. It's got to be able to invest back and change. And then third, you've got to have happy employees that take pride in what they're doing and have a purpose to get out of bed and come to work every day. Otherwise, they're just coming for benefits or just coming for pay. There's some other thing that's keeping them there that's making them work hard enough just not to get fired. So let's unpack this real fast. Customers, they're your lifeblood of your business. Without them, your company won't exist. You're going to solve the customer needs simply, build a great company, got to be profitable, change is inevitable. You got to find a way to invest and keep that going. And then third, your employees have to really take pride and enjoy what they're doing. And this is kind of you need all three things. You heard Jason talk about customers and employees or employees earlier. They're part of the figure. So it's customers, employees and your business all together. So there's going to be a hierarchy of value systems that you're going to have to like be aware of. And that's going to go from what the CEO thinks to what the market says is valuable to what your organizational culture says all the way back through your customers. And there's going to be so much information that you're going to have to have some strategies to kind of collapse this and make sense of all this to kind of optimize your signal to noise. So the first thing is about mapping the architecture of power. And the other is about mapping continuums of scale time and expertise. So the architecture of power is all about like your your formation story. So if you're Facebook, primarily a developer culture. So if you don't code, you have no say you've no vote because that's essentially how they communicate. We came from retail and in retail, the marketers and the merchandisers had all the power because back in the day in the early 1900s, the catalogs came out. If what you had in the shelf didn't sell, you're out. So those guys had the power and that doesn't change over time. So that will help you see, you know, where the power kind of comes from. Second, continuums will give you trends of value systems and this is how you kind of make sense of dynamic kind of chaotic systems. So for time, if someone's been there longer, they're less likely to want to change. If someone's newer, they're going to be hungrier for change. If someone's more of an expert with 35 years of experience, there's a very little chance that they're going to think differently about what they know and getting them to kind of see is going to be a lot more of a challenge. So Mekazenko wrote a book called Red Teams. One of his main premises is that the sea level essentially won't really know what's going on because no one below is incentivized to tell the truth. And this is going to be one of the biggest challenges you're going to deal with. So how do you become a change agent? First things first, there's this thing called a prisoner dilemma. It's if you're into game theory or game mechanics, it's basically about how do you cooperate when you're rational, but people act irrationally. So let's say camera and I get tired of doing what we're doing. We rob a bank. We get arrested. We get arrested. Police separate us and they say, All right, Keith, if you came out, you go free, he gets 20 years. Please give him the same the same deal. What ends up happening is if we cooperated, we'd both get one year and hit a little bit of a pain. But what ends up happening is we rat each other out. And we both get 20 years. So we're rational individuals, but because we're motivated by self interest, this is what happens. So an iterated version of a prisoner's dilemma, meaning a version that remembers history. So we remember history because we're interacting with one another every day. And you remember how someone treated you the day before. The dominant strategy, I mean, the thing that works the most is called reciprocal altruism, which is you respond tit for you do the most altruistic thing first and then respond to it for tat, meaning you do a nice thing or try and solve their problems. And then if they act, you know, maliciously or not nice to you, you cut them off and don't do the same thing. So this idea of solving someone's unmet need, this is the golden rule of influence and where everything starts for our framework. So if you take Michelle and Chris's class, they'll say, how do you leave someone better than they found you? What we say is how do you solve someone's unmet needs, whether it's your customer, or in this case, the employees that you're having to work with. So again, when you're thinking about how do you solve someone's unmet needs, you got to be keep collecting OSINT, but what do you collect? What are their unmet needs? What are the points of friction? What do they love and hate about their job? And what do they think success looks like to them? Even if you're interviewing, ask the same people the same or ask the different people the same question, you're going to get 1000 different perspectives. So the challenge for most people is that they will not suspend their ego. If you do and just worry about getting results, this this took me a long time to learn when I started out my career. But once I figured it out, it was just like I took off. So two more quick theories. People work essentially for achievement and recognition for achievement. There's industrial psychologists back in the 60s, Frederick Herzberg, you can check them out. But people also work for affiliation, influence and achievement. And right now, this is an economy of attention. So think about how does someone want to exert influence in front of a certain kind of group within the company, whether it's a marketing team or developers or whoever. So maybe I won't. So now kind of putting this into some context using a lot of the building blocks that Keith talked about specifically within an organization, this concept of hyperbolic discounting comes up where largely people are motivated for the short term gain versus the long term gain. And as Keith was saying about suspending your ego, one of the things that in doing that, you're more motivated for the long term gain versus the short term gain, which is a mindset that you have to have throughout this, like this is kind of a basic of this entire thing. But largely people are motivated to kind of do things in the short term that make them look great, pull a rabbit out of the hat, make the boss look great. And ultimately they're not thinking about that bigger picture, which you are, which kind of goes to this idea of the prisoner's dilemma as well, where everything that most people are thinking about is in their silo. What is it that I'm doing today to make myself look good to ultimately get the bonus, to get the recognition in my space? And the result of all this is people become incredibly predictable, which means you can actually use them, seed them with concepts and ideas that will give them that short term gain. While, you know, in the background, what's going on for you is you're building towards the long term gain. So the first thing is this idea of psyching yourself, which is the thing that took Keith and I'll say myself a long time to learn. It's this concept that you're actually giving things away. Now you're not giving things away necessarily for free. There is a ulterior motive, but what you're actually trying to do is you're solving unmet needs for those people that you're giving these ideas to, which make them look good in the short term, which builds rapport, which ultimately turns into support. And that long term support for your idea, your larger picture, is what actually develops change. So this isn't to say that you just blindly are walking around the organization, dropping ideas off. One of the first things that you have to do is a threat assessment. And we're not necessarily saying this from a negative aspect, but you need to understand who is a gatekeeper, who's a megaphone, who's ultimately there to influence other people. And of course you're going to come across the people that are ultimately a threat. And through this you're kind of making a list of the people that you're using for these various activities and you're also eliminating people that you don't need to message to, or that you need to keep at a bare minimum just sort of tertiarily involved. So remember their ego is actually your friend. You're actually enabling their success and they need to feel that you're enabling their success. And they also need to feel that somehow they are key to your success. It's a mutual arrangement. So you prioritize their ego above your own and ultimately you seed them with the ideas that you want to come across in the larger picture. We'll talk about this more as we get into some of the techniques. There's another thing about this that we've discovered is this idea of oscent being very fluid. So we get attached to our information, our ideas, the things that we know, the things that we hold dear to some degree, the things that we've discovered first. And it's important to remember that this information is extremely porous. It's also time sensitive and it's always changing and it's always going out of date. And on a bad day it is potentially misleading. So the thing is to never get too attached to that because the system is always changing and thus your information and ultimately your oscent is changing. Some techniques for cultivating oscent within the organization. So we've been talking about using social capital to gain influence. That's the first thing. We talked about threat assessment. So there's that idea of constantly looking at the threat or the opportunity. And in these large sort of matrixed environments the further you go and the more that your message travels what you end up finding is there's more and more people that you actually have to assess and each of them has some way of sort of catapulting you up to the next level or potentially taking you down. And as these organizations change mold into one another or collapse you've got to kind of continue to take not only the information but the people into account. So the cycle of oscent in a nutshell. Suspend your ego. The biggest one. It's the hardest one as well. That continuous collection of oscent and knowing that it's porous. The continuum reevaluation of the people that are working with you. And then ultimately expanding your influence. So you're actually trying to target the folks that you know can can take your message the furthest. And a personal note out of this. One of the things that we're really big on is this idea of personal resilience. This process is not a short term process. This is a long term process. I think everybody laughing about how corporations don't change. Understand the fact that it takes a really long time to make change happen. So it's kind of not for the faint of heart. It's definitely one of those things that your primary objective is this forward movement with both the knowledge that you've gained and the sort of influence that you're building. That is it. It isn't really to some degree about the smaller things that you're dropping off. Because the other end of that is you can immediately get sucked down into mindless detail. Tons of meetings. No decisions. And the biggest thing in all of this is it erodes your ability to think. And that is one of the things that when people come in fresh they've got a perspective. They've got new knowledge. They've got new ideas. And over time that erodes to the point where they become like everybody else stuck in a silo. Super important to remember there's more of them than you. You are walking amongst the sheep. And you know with that new miracle superiority comes the potential for being sucked down to the point of death. Not literally. But you get the meaning. So the next bit is around the content and the narrative. Right. So it's this idea of you're coming into a situation you need to learn the narrative so that you can change the narrative. So as Keith asked in the beginning everybody's experienced these issues. We all have a common framework for this working in these large corporations. But for some reason we don't act. Things don't change. So we asked why. And a lot of what we found is we as we've gone through this process is the first thing is obviously ego which we've been talking about and people feel a threat to that. The second is this idea of the elephant in the room. It's like ooh this concept that I know is out there but it's just it's too big and I don't want to talk about it. Or I feel uncomfortable because I've got challenges with my boss or the you know the people that I work with etc. The last one which seems the least nefarious but is actually the killer of large companies more than probably the other two is people actually don't know where to start. The problem is so big and they work on one little piece of whatever it is that they do in the company and ultimately they don't see the bigger picture. They've forgotten the customer service really matters to a retail organization as an example. So how do you rewrite that narrative. So a lot of this is the sort of social engineering tricks that we've been using which is to focus a story on something simple that people can get and understand put some theater behind it. So even even the way we present our style tends to be very visual these kind of quick hits not a lot of bullet points. The other thing is to have a plan and to be succinct and have that plan hit at every level. So it needs to solve the unmet need for the person who you're trying to influence at the lower level and at the top level it needs to kind of be the macro plan. And then the last thing is don't be afraid to get kinetic. We'll talk a little bit about what that means. So we thought we'd show a little bit of an example around the work that we've been doing. So this is the concept that we kind of came up with which was this ever-changing thing within Macy's. So the story is the world is changing away from this as we all know to this. We also threw some financial things in there to kind of shake things up. The customer is also changing. We however are not. So this is a little bit of theater and this is actual real photos of the environment that we work in. Lastly, scaring with their competition as those people are beginning to fail in the industry. So this is actually a photo of the Sears corporate campus looking at the Sears Tower both of which have been sold. And as you know most things Sears are being liquidated or sort of unbranded. And the next step is you have to have a plan. So our idea was that Macy sees as this magical connection point between customers and brands within the organization brands are referred to as vendors. So they're sort of seen as a subordinate and the idea here was through the use of data mainly that we would be this amazing conduit between these two groups of people and that we would actually bring them together. So this idea that the future is not cheap products. It's bespoke products. Customers actually want tailored products. And hey look we happen to have both a very large virtual presence and a very large brick and mortar presence that we could use to enable this stuff. Manufacturing is getting cheaper and wouldn't it be great to make things in America again maybe in all that real state that's sitting around. And lastly our pitch was that essentially we would use the data that we already have to fund this effort. So it is a zero sum gain in terms of or a zero sum spend in terms of what they need to make this happen or at least get us on the books. So out of this one of the things that we also learned is you needed to create a vision something that people could take with them and our two things were it should be eight words or less and the message should be so simple and so easy to get that 80 percent of it kind of drops away and the person that you're influencing their narrative takes over and they're the thing that is actually filling the gap and kind of selling it forward. So again back to our example the best customer experience wins five simple words. We also kind of threw some payload behind it what would actually enable that this idea of simplicity convenience and trust kind of the baseline of everything that needs to be done. And lastly as Keith had said we made the pitch that this is actually the brand in a company that hangs most of its importance around what the brand actually means saying that the customer experience is the brand really kind of drove that home for both merchants and marketing who are the power structure. So what about getting kinetic. So we had learned along the way that there was going to be a meeting of basically everybody who is a decision maker to go or no go this. We staged ourselves outside waited for everybody to show up. They were about 20 minutes in talking about this this plan their version of the plan and we literally slid this under the door and got the attention of one of the people who was in the meeting who picked it up and was like oh my God they've solved our problem. The next thing that we did kind of to prove some of the points around why this was important early on in my career there we had this pop bookmark two popes ago. And it was largely thought that for some reason this thing didn't actually exist in our inventory. It was a it was a flaw in the data. The funny thing was you actually see on the website that it's available in stock ready to go. I'm actually having this conversation with our CEO who doesn't believe that this is reality. And then I hear furious typing on the keyboard in his office and sure enough he finds a whole stack of them available for delivery in the DC. Interesting. So this kind of became a bit of a badge as well. So I bought as many of them as I could buy and I left one in inventory so it would continue to show up in search results so that we could keep this kind of going every single time I met with an exact to give them any sort of book like red teaming or change by design they'd get a bookmark. So they started collecting them. So originally it was like oh Jesus handed us another bookmark and then largely it kind of became a symbol of I'm in the club. I'm in the now like yes there's a little bit of shame involved but on the other end. I'm thought of highly enough that I would actually get these bookmarks so these became highly collectible within the organization. All right. So one of the things we did was called a journey map and basically all the journey map does is you map left to right an actual process. So all the kind of greenish yellow posts in the top. This is like what checkout looks like. It's like 30 plus steps which is way too long to just check yourself out. If you go top to bottom the little pink guys are basically everything that's busted or like a breakdown. So basically you go you hang out with the associates you interview you literally have them map out what it is like for a customer to go and shop and check out. And we do two of these to have two different stores and this helps you kind of figure out what the process is and how to deconstruct it. But the problem is no one really understands these kind of flows unless you're highly technical because it's just there's a ton of stuff to just cram in your head. So Kim's old boss said someone should just get a couple go pros and then record this thing and then show them how long it takes. So we did that. This guy here is a buddy of mine and that's another friend of mine on the top left. We did a three person cruise super fast and light. We didn't tell anyone we were doing this because if we did then all of a sudden other groups who want to come in and we have to use our editors and do this and this would have taken way too long. So next one. So this is a bunch of tactical packs and just gear I had because I got a film background and we just went light and fast a couple grip arms for go pros 4k jam sinks what's called double system sound. So we actually had shotguns hidden wirelessly back next and we set it up and filmed it like a little TV series. So we have the left side the right side the POS meaning the little register guy so you can actually see the details of what's going on during the transaction. And we had a little handheld guy in a gimbal and we edited it all together and we got really lucked out. We had one person or it was one person as a main character and then three others that kind of came around 15 minutes to check out and we actually had the whole sea level set and see that as a pre read what's called a pre read before we had this meeting kind of last minute. Now you're not done until the output is right. So this is the boardroom that Macy's and it's super old school and I don't know if you guys follow a strategy but this day mercury with much regrets all the tech was getting whacked out and we literally had to go and troubleshoot the scalar and I had to go with the tech with the satellite team to make it work to make sure it presented properly because can was in San Francisco we were in New York you can't send high definition video through the network because it's just going to clip and play and you know they they think it's just like okay whatever it's no big deal but it's a lot it's you know it takes a lot to get the it to go so you guys are all in security so you know this admins are your friends they help you make it work but again you're not done until the output is done and tested. So I think one one thing about this at a higher level too was we did this as he said to illustrate the point and it was it was done in a matter of you know a couple of weeks and it became an undeniable fact of how things actually worked where a lot of times people were saying oh no there's there's a reason why you couldn't you couldn't actually deny the fact that things didn't work when you saw the video and it was a huge moment of change like you saw that sweep across that boardroom from the chairman on down or like we have to fix this and I don't think that that would have been done had we not been able to capture that and actually show customers struggling through that process. So how do you know how do you know when you're getting it right. The first thing is the narrative is shared it's a shared vision people start adopting it people start saying oh I understand that and yes like I'm all about simplicity. The vision is something that everybody kind of buys into and it enables them at the level that they're working at but they're also seeing it in the larger picture and it also ends up being something that they can see themselves in like yes I want the company to be simpler and ultimately as we've been saying throughout this needs to solve an unmet need both for them and for the company at large. People do want to actually show up and do a good job. We definitely saw that even in something as large and monolithic as the environment that we were in but they need to have something that they can attach to and actually feel tangibly involved with. You also know it's working when they start using your ideas and words so all of a sudden like these hack shirts showed up I was like whoa. Okay. I want to hack the company which is concepts that we had been kind of throwing around through both the idea of red teaming and you know sort of our larger experience in terms of things that we had built on the fly. So in the end the process from there is this idea of adapting it right until you get up as far as you can go and for us our feeling is that without buy off from the CEO and without a mandate from the CEO change is probably going to be pretty slow. So again back to our main concept. Everyone wants to be a hero so they want to be able to be a hero to their boss but they also want to make sure that they're achieving the things that they set out to do which are normally called KPIs. One of the things that we realize is we kept doing this we kept getting invited to larger and larger meetings with bigger and bigger divisions around the company and everybody had their own version of what they thought success was that we ended up having to kind of map back to the larger thing. So we have to kind of tailor the messages we're doing that. So again back to the personal side of it remember Sloan Steady it takes a long time to get there but the message ends up being the currency that is being traded and ultimately they're bringing the message forward and they're bringing you along with it. So a couple of things back to this and talking about tailoring. So one of the largest groups that we needed to influence was merchandising and two of the things that they care about most are this idea of relevancy product relevancy how do you actually get a customer to the right product and partnerships. So we wrote a vignette where we talked about one of the partners that we were working with Fitbit using their data to enrich our data and ultimately use that to drive what the customer sees on the website and we pitched this idea of an you know a dynamic page that would not only present products but also would present ideas for runners as an example and because we know that you're running and how much you're running from Fitbit we can also recommend products to go along with your Fitbit. We also could say hey after a while Nike shoes wear out you do 10 miles a week you should probably be switching shoes out every 45 days. And again this idea that the data is really the currency in that mesh between data stores is ultimately the thing that's going to drive a better experience. So how did it work? It worked pretty well. So this is an actual message. The names have been blanked out but you can see it's hey Cam I just got off the phone with the head of merchandising and apparently you guys were hit. They apparently couldn't stop talking about the presentation and how important it was. They think you guys are super smart and they want people to see it. Awesome job. Which actually did get us to the place where we were developing content for the C level. So these are two folks that are on the board. And the thing that you can't see is this slide so they actually just pulled the slide straight out of our deck and stuck it in there which was pretty amazing. And that's what you want to actually have happened. That's how this whole thing works. The secret sauce is basically getting them to take parts of your vision and they're going to use that to make themselves look good in front of their own bosses and then at some point they're not going to be able to explain the whole thing. They're going to be able to do parts of it. So they're going to need to have to bring you along too. And if you take some time to kind of polish your presentation kind of how you how you move then it'll be it'll help. And this is essentially the secret sauce. It's as you're solving unmet needs for people you want to do that in a coordinated manner because if you just do one and okay one group like the tech tech or design team they're getting their needs met but if you can do three or four in parallel everyone's going to be going here but you're going to be pushing the value up here. And so as everybody is kind of acting in their own self-interest they're going to actually help you get to where you want to go which is changing the vision. And that's a subtle way that you change corporate culture without disturbing the equilibrium within the bigger beast. So again as Keith was saying too it's all about the efficient amplification and again in large companies what it usually comes down to not to be totally crass is the finances it's people's personal finances it's the thing that are the objectives that generate their salary their bonuses etc so at a low level you're using that. At a higher level the performance of the company the ultimate performance of the company is what the C level is judged on and that has a trickle down effect. Most people that we encountered never really thought about that they thought about their own KPIs and the things that would generate the highest possibility of a bonus for them. They never thought about the fact that some things that they were doing were contrary to the larger picture or even to other groups the prisoner's dilemma to some degree. So getting them out of that was a huge step forward. As you're kind of climbing up this rung the important thing is again to get out of the micro and stay macro so people are ultimately going to be thinking about the things within their silo but the thing that we're ultimately trying to do is make sure that that macro level is represented. Now at every level the thing that we're also trying to do is in addition to the OSINT that we're throwing out we're also throwing out tangible ideas to help them get to their goals which largely should if they're coordinated get the company to its larger goal. So this idea of a shiny object at every point. So we're helping kind of seed ideas that make the larger vision work and the objectives at the divisional level. And then ultimately the thing that you're trying to do is we've been saying is you're trying to get that buy off from the CEO and for us specifically we were trying to get red teaming as an actual signed on activity within the company that was sanctioned that we would control. So in the end it comes down to kind of are you in or are you out? Both you the individual and the company. So we want to acknowledge that it's taxing. It definitely was something that we had to keep pushing towards. The other thing is you can lose and win or win and lose depending on how you look at it and again that's all kind of mindset. Or you can get to the CEO and he says I'm in and it's great if he says I'm in and doesn't suffer from the but where do we attack this problem and you get a clear direction. But in some cases you get I'm in and then nothing materially changes. And these are all kind of the risks that you take when you're trying to make change happen at this level. But it really is about that resilience and I think that's one of the things that we've learned is we actually did win the company one. We might not have gotten to all of the goals that we wanted. But at the end of the day the learnings that we took forward and the things that we gained from this were a huge win. So outside of the company there are other people that did win. So this idea that we were talking about actually got patented in the time that we were throwing it out. So this idea of making manufacturing happen at a very localized personalized level our friends at Amazon have patented that. At the same time they also decided that they were going to up their game in terms of customer service through a small company called Whole Foods. Back to us internally and again to the KPIs you can see here this is actually the real stock chart for the last year. We put arrows where we actually made the presentation to the CEO where a lot of it was let's change how we're messaging to the street and let's also change the core objectives of what we're trying to get through as a company and make that extremely clear. And the company value actually went up by 10% in that timeline. So you're seeing the peak there. Lastly for those who are trying to be change agents the thing that we've realized and we've seen it while here at DEF CON the last three days is this pattern is everywhere. We've just talked to people in the halls and it's like they're regaling you with their stories like I worked at this company and it's the exact same problem. Like it is not confined to a single sector or a single industry. It's everywhere. So there is a ripe opportunity for change and people that know how to change our thing is we think that we're kind of just at the genesis of this and it's really beginning to take hold in terms of something that people are looking for in terms of help. So in the end you're trying to build shared vision, shared values, shared culture and sharing in the change amongst the employees, the business and the customers. So at the very end if you remember nothing else take a picture of this or look at this solving unmet needs for your co-workers is how you kind of start building rapport. You got to suspend your ego so you understand how to leverage your social capital because that's your currency. Learn the current narrative then change it keep your message simple less than eight words and then strategically coordinate the vectors like we talked about earlier and then just rinse and repeat adapt and iterate until you hit the CEO. And that's our talk. Thank you. So does anyone have any questions or no? Sure. It's a challenge. If you're just going to have a simple idea and then everyone is going to be pulling it and you can't stop that then you may not want to be working there because the culture there is one of it's not not going to say theft but it's not egalitarian in a way. It is a challenge, you know? Or do you have any? I mean I think the thing that we've had to do is it's constant innovation so we're always trying to be at least nine to 18 months ahead so the things that we're trying to get done now that people would potentially steal I'll borrow that word I'll steal that word is the stuff that we had conceived 18 months ago so we were already on the the way to a new concept that we were trying to actually pitch and that is the thing that keeps you employed is you have to be in that space we are sort of forward looking beyond what's just happening today. It's a great question. So I've seen this culture in pretty much every company that I've either consulted for or ended up working for. You can get an audience with the CEO sometimes if you have that level of influence. For me where I was in the stack of hierarchy there were two layers above me between me and the CEO so I could actually pick up the phone and call him. The problem is you can have an awesome conversation with him in the minute he leaves the room you're gonna get pond off to somebody who ultimately is either at my level or a lower level and that is where good ideas go to die. So our thing was instead of having a feel good meeting where largely it's like yeah that's a great idea Cam let's go do that and then it's like I'm gonna bring in all the people from the 27 departments that need to get this done. Our idea was could you get the idea to them and seeded first and then go to the CEO with this sort of grander vision and have that buy in already done to some degree. Yeah. That one I'm hoping doesn't exist in every corporate culture but I've yet to see one that it doesn't exist because again people they're working in their silo and they probably want to do what they need to do to make their objectives. They're not really interested in your objectives without some buy in. Yeah. Working in a large corporation what should be the very top of that threatening business should be the CEO or your. Yeah I mean I think unfortunately it is the CEO he can either make or break what you're doing and in the time that we were doing this we actually had the fortune or misfortune however you want to look at it of having two CEOs the departing CEO and the incoming CEO and our choice was let's go after the incoming CEO because one he's closer aligned to how we think but he's also gonna be the guy who's gonna be the CEO. The previous CEO was definitely not a fan of any of this so it was again buy your time and wait for the new guy to come in. So it's a good question. I don't think there is one most important person in the threat matrix there are people in that matrix who are gonna try and be like you know no you're not doing this because it's gonna threaten me and people are gonna be like yes I want to do that so part of the matrix is understanding who's gonna help you who's gonna hurt you the ones are gonna hurt you just do whatever you can to get out of the way ones are gonna help you figure out how to incentivize them keep going and you know like I said there's so much we could talk about it that we didn't and trying to develop trying to develop this down to a simple to sync talk was a lot of work but in your case if you're a large company people want to just take advantage of certain things so one of the tricks we would use is okay hey if we know someone wants to sync us we get some other project managers to kind of help out and slow them down and then give them something to do because you know they want to have control and they want to have solidarity in what they're doing and that's fine but it's you know you gotta understand it's a complex system so it's not just linear where this is number one high priority this is number two it's like ebbs and flows so I was an actual employee so I hired well Keith was actually working there as well as a consultant but I pulled him from other projects and essentially saw the potential for doing this so we went after this that's more my style I think it's easier I come from a film background special effects and film sound so this to me is like a storyboard for a film but you know disguising a business plan and a corporate vision to get everybody kind of latch on to yeah exactly so for me it's easier to kind of see an image and it jogs what I want to say because I didn't have like a billion things in my mind always going on in parallel so instead of sitting and reading and that's the thing too like you sit in any kind of large corporation it's just like 200 slide dense powerpoint decks that no one reads doesn't matter what level they are and they see this I mean you can read this over lunch or over a cup of coffee on your phone or at your desk and just follow along like a story doesn't have any crazy big words it's all really simple it's that's the idea so it's just how do you keep them engaged as long as possible and it is a simple way as possible so it's a good question got one other thing to add to that I think one thing to kind of see in this is we have a a trick that we use where we put the most important point at the bottom so let's see if I can find one that's good that has that is a good one it's a strategy coordination hyperbolic discounting bias will help you build a vision and these other elements that we've used the iconography around are really the bullet points but it takes it out of that bullet that nobody's going to read and again you're probably going to pay more attention to the visuals and then whatever is being said but if we were to hand the deck off and not be here to present it it's kind of follow the bouncing ball where you read the thing in the black and that's kind of the main concept and then you're like oh I got it you know so that's kind of one of the the I.A. tricks that we are using across this sure yeah simplicity is the key to brilliance Bruce Lee again too these little icons it is like a bullet of list in a way just with the icons but if you guys go to thenownproject.com 10 bucks a month they have tons of icons this is really simple I mean it's royalty free unless you're printing t-shirts and stuff but this is just and again it's really easy but people will try and attack this so let's say oh you're just you're one of the designing kind of decks this is a pretty deck instead of it's one of our you know monolithic PowerPoint you know tomes of information that nobody reads so it's going to happen and don't worry about it just keep doing what you do keep it simple and keep pushing the message forward thenownproject thenownproject.com it's got amazing search engine so you can put any concept in and you'll largely get iconography that makes sense and if not you can quickly kind of come up with something else that will get you stuff thank you really thanks so much