Welcome back. We're going to continue our speeches here in the Essie Village.
We've got 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's 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 to try their framework on your own.
Let's give our attention to Keith Conway and Cameron Craig.
Change agents, how to effectively influence intractable corporate cultures.
All right, thanks, Jordan, for coming out.
I really appreciate you guys being here after 7 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 on a second.
Disclaimer, 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 to try and change or get the culture to move?
Exactly.
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 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 his perspective from kind of the guy on the inside.
And then let's just jump in.
There's a ton.
There's a ton to go over.
So this happens because of what's called the innovator's 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've 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 expensive.
Fast, your brain is 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 a 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 share the vision.
But first we've 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 are 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 other 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.
One, 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 a 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 in networks.
And that's essentially what you're –
And that's what 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, 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 they think.
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, like, design research and design thinking.
But let's get into the next step.
A shared value system, 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.
That can 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.
They're 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've got to solve the customer needs simply.
Build a great company.
It's got to be profitable.
Change is inevitable.
You've 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.
So, 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 formation story.
So, if you're Facebook, you're primarily a developer culture.
So, if you don't code, you have no say, you have 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, when the catalogs came out, if what you had on the shelf didn't sell, you were 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, Mike Kazenko wrote a book called Red Teams.
One of his main premises is that the C-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 the prisoner's dilemma.
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, Cameron and I get tired.
We're tired of doing what we're doing.
We rob a bank.
We get arrested.
Police separate us.
And they say, alright.
Keith, if you rat Cam out, you go free.
He gets 20 years.
Please give him 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, in 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, the thing that works the most, is called reciprocal altruism.
Which is you do the most altruistic thing first and then respond tit for tat.
Meaning you do a nice thing to try and solve their problems.
And then if they act 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' 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've got to keep collecting OSINT.
But what do you collect?
What are their unmet needs?
What are their points of friction?
What do you think success looks like to them?
And even if you're interviewing, ask the same people the same, or ask the different people the same question.
You're going to get a thousand 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 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 an industrial psychologist back in the 60s, Frederick Herzberg.
You can check him 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, now kind of putting this into some context, using a lot of the building blocks to keep it simple.
I think one of the things 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.
Grab it 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,
and give them that short-term gain.
While 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 an 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.
And you're trying to 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 tertiary involved.
So remember their ego is actually your friend.
You're actually enabling their success.
And they need to feel that you're there.
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.
And 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 OSINT 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 OSINT is changing.
Some techniques for cultivating OSINT 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 OSINT in a nutshell.
Suspend your ego.
It's the biggest one.
It's the hardest one as well.
That continuous collection of OSINT and knowing that it's porous.
The continual 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 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 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 with that numerical 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 and 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 as we've gone through this process is
the first thing is obvious.
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 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 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 what they're doing.
They 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
that 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.
There's some theater behind it.
So 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 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,
scare them 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's
is this magical connection point
between 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.
Oh, and hey, look.
We happen to have both
a very large virtual presence
and a very broader 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 estate 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
this is something that people can 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% 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.
It actually enabled 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 was 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
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
pope 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 flaw in the data.
The funny thing was
you actually see on the website that it's available
for delivery.
I'm actually having this conversation with our COO
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
thing going.
Every single time I met with an exec
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 geez he's handing us another bookmark
and then largely it kind of became a symbol
of I'm in the club
I'm in the know.
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.
within the organization.
Alright so one of the other things we did
was called a journey map.
And basically all a journey map does
is you map left to right
an actual process.
So all the kind of greenish yellow
posts on the top
this is like what checkout looks like.
It's like 30 plus steps
which is way too long just to check yourself out.
And if you go top to bottom
the little pink guys are basically
everything that's busted or like a breakdown.
So we literally have them map out
what it is like for a customer to go
and shop and check out.
And we did 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 there's a ton of stuff to just cram in your head.
So Cam's old boss said
someone should just get a couple GoPros
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 crew, super fast and light.
We didn't tell anyone we were doing this
because if we did
then all of a sudden other groups would want to come in
and we'd have to use our editors and do this
and it would have taken way too long.
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, four GoPros, 4K,
jam synced, what's called
double system sound so we actually had
shotguns hidden wirelessly back
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 then 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 as a main character
and then three others
that kind of came around.
15 minutes to check out
and we actually had the whole C-level sit
and see that as 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 at Macy's
and it's super old school
and I don't know if you guys follow astrology
but this day Mercury went retrograde
so all the tech was getting whacked out
and we literally had to go and troubleshoot the scaler
and I had to go with the tech
with the satellite team to make it work
to make sure it presented properly
because Cam 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 they think it's just like
okay, whatever, it's no big deal
but it takes a lot to get the IT to go
so you guys are all
in security so you know
the sysadmins 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 thing
about this
at a higher level too was
we did this, as Keith said, to illustrate the point
and it was done in a matter of
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 a reason why
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
you saw that sweep across that board room
from the chairman on down
we have to fix this
and I don't think 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
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
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
which makes it pretty simpler
and ultimately, as we've been saying throughout this
it 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 these hack shirts showed up
okay
they want to hack the company
which is concepts that we had been kind of throwing around
through both the idea of red teaming
and 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 adapt and iterate
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
we're 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
realized as 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
and we ended up having to kind of map back
to the larger thing
so we have to kind of tailor the message
as we're doing that
so again, back to the personal side of it
remember, slow and 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 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 a dynamic page that would not only
present products but also would present
ideas for
runners as an example
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
and 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 a 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 happen
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 have to bring you along too
and if you take some time
to polish your presentation
how you move
then it'll help
and this is essentially the secret sauce
as you're solving unmet needs for people
you want to do that in a coordinated manner
because if you just do one
then one group like the 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's acting in their own self interest
we'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
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
as 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
so in the end it comes down to
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 won
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've 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 that's 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 oh I worked at this company
and it's the exact same problem
it is not confined to a single sector
or a single industry
it's everywhere
it's 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
and 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've 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
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
I'm not going to say theft
but it's not egalitarian in a way
it is a challenge you know
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 eighteen months ahead
so the things that we're trying to get done
now that people would potentially
steal
I'll borrow that word
is the stuff that we had conceived
eighteen months ago
so we were already on 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
where you're 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 been 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
and the minute he leaves the room
you're going to get pawned 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 going to 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 seed it
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 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
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 going to be the guy who's going to be the CEO
the previous CEO
was definitely not a fan
of any of this so it was
again bide 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 going to try and be like
you know no you're not doing this because it's
going to threaten me and people are going to be like yes
I want to do that so part of the matrix
is understanding who's going to help you who's going to
hurt you the ones that are going to hurt you just
do whatever you can to get out of the way the ones that
are going to help you figure out how to incentivize them
keep going and you know
like I said there's so much we could talk about
today that we didn't and trying to develop
this down to a simple succinct talk was a lot of
work but in your case
you know 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 got to 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
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 to kind of latch onto
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 slides
by dense powerpoint decks
that no one reads it 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 it doesn't have any
crazy big words it's all really simple
that's the idea so it's
just how do you keep them engaged
as long as possible in as a simple
way as possible so it's a good
question
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
this is a good one so strategy
coordination and 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 IA
tricks that we are using across
this
yeah simplicity is the key
to brilliance Bruce Lee
again too these little icons
this is like a bulleted list in a way just with icons
but if you guys go to the nounproject.com
ten 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 they'll say oh you're just
one of the designy 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
the nounproject
the nounproject.com
it's got amazing search engines
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
applause