Controlling the Uncontrollable in IT (EP 855)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here, recording live at Pax8 Beyond in Denver, Colorado, and we are just outside the exhibit hall, so it's probably going to start getting a little loud here, but we're here on radio roll. I think there are 10 or 11 of us at this year's event. It is huge, it is massive, it is being covered really, really well, and let's get on with my next guest, Brian Weiss with iTech Solutions, calls himself now the Tech Stoic. 

Brian, how are you? Yeah, I'm doing great actually. Happy to be here at Pax8 Beyond and appreciate the opportunity to come on your podcast today. All right, well, thanks for being flexible, because it's a lot of interviews going in and out here, but let's just do some quick recaps, because you've been on the show before and we chatted about stuff, talked about your company and all of that, saw you at Zero Trust world. 

We didn't chat there, but you're a big ThreatLocker guy, as am I now. Big ThreatLocker guy, and I thought we did do a podcast there, because I remember people were walking in front of the camera or something. Lunch was starting. 

Yeah, that's what it was. A lot of clinking of plates. So here we are now, Pax8, an event closer to you, so not as bad of travel. 

Yeah, direct flights makes it nice, and brought the family with me, enjoying the resort, the Gaylord Resort. Love this location. That's good. 

Did you get to do much in town with the family? I think you went on a tour of the city, right? Yeah, we did a little, well, we kind of did our own tour, but we went to the Museum of Illusions and got some cool pictures there, did a little scooter ride around, trying not to get hit by traffic along the way, but they have a pretty good setup with some bike lanes, and then took my daughter over to the trampoline park. Oh. And I did not get on the trampoline myself, because I'm still healing from a broken clavicle last fall and didn't want to risk that, but yeah, that was a fun time for the family. 

Interesting. Now, is this like a park full of trampolines? I mean, is it one big trampoline, or what is it? Yeah, it's got all sorts of little trampoline style things. They got basketball, they've got, you know, obstacle courses, they've got zip lines. 

I'm not trying to, you know, promote the place necessarily, but it's a fun place to take kids. I just asked for me. I mean, I never heard of a trampoline park. 

So, all right. So, what's been happening? What else is going on in your world? I'm starting my own podcast. This month, I've actually been working on what that looks like, practicing, getting to know the tools, called the Tech Stoic. 

And so, Stoicism is a philosophy I've been studying up on. Started last year, just for my personal life, you know, and I realized that it works well in the tech industry, taking a stoic approach to things. And, you know, high level, it's really focusing on what you can control, and not letting things that you can't control distract you from the things you can control, you know, and trying to stay present.

Right. So, that is something that kind of gets talked about here and there in the tech world, where we, you know, of course, most techs want to control absolutely everything, every little detail. So, I know that you've been working on this project for a while. 

I'm assuming that you've, you know, reached out and talked to some people to get some insights on, you know, how they would, you know, approach it, how they would receive a podcast that was, you know, based on that. So, what have you heard so far? Yeah, I mean, I'm, I will be, I guess, teaching about stoicism on the podcast, but I do consider myself a student. You know, I'm always trying to learn. 

I think the minute that we tell ourselves we got this, and we know this is when we start selling ourselves short. You know, excuse me, we made it one of our core principles or core values, stoicism. So, you know, really helping the team understand what that looks like is a big part of my journey. 

There are some misconceptions about stoicism out there, and you have the Roman version, you have the Greek version, you know, what does that look like? I think for us, it's, you know, being, everyone wants to be seen or heard. So, at its base, it's having empathy for understanding, you know, what do people need? You know, we've shifted to a people, process, and technology focus with our clients, really trying to hear the people out, gather user stories, understand, you know, their processes, and then kind of fitting technology in as a last piece, really focusing on, okay, now that we understand more about the people and the processes, what are some things we can control or help make more efficient using technology? And, you know, I think one of the greatest things that I've seen as far as a transformation with our team lately is we'll be in team meetings talking about an issue with a client, and we all know in technology, clients can get upset when things go wrong, and so a lot of us deal with, you know, fires that are, to the client, seem bigger than they really are. And so I hear my team literally in meetings, you know, okay, well, what can we control about this situation? What are the things that are outside of our control? And, you know, I think a good example, just trying to keep it basic, is when we look at business continuity for a client, which is important, they want to stay operational, the two biggest single points of failure tend to be internet or power, and clients kind of freak out when either of those go down, even though, you know, IT isn't necessarily the internet service provider or the electricity provider. 

We don't handle the grid. Right? We don't handle the grid, but, you know, pivoting with the client and helping them, you know, at least get the information they need to understand as far as how long the outage might be or what needs to be done to immediately fix it, kind of band-aided, if we look at the ITIL framework, how can we deal with this incident? But the biggest, bigger problem is that we want to try to minimize the impact of anything like this happening again. So the next steps with the client is, well, here's what we can control in the future. 

Let's look at a backup internet connection, right? We all know that that's obviously something that a client can put in place to have more redundant internet. When it comes to power, you know, does the budget warrant getting a generator? Maybe not. You know, are we talking about, you know, things like, well, if the power is out, what operations do we still want to run? A good example that we do with our hospitality clients and hotels is typically they want at least one front desk computer still operational, right? Maybe we're looking at some battery backups at that point, right? They want the incoming main phone line to go somewhere. Yeah. 

You know, it's like, you know, we're not running at full capacity. We're running at a minimal capacity. But that's a good example of, you know, things we can control versus things we can't, right? And having those discussions and even with our clients, we've been talking about our values and they love it. 

You know, the approach to stoicism and the fact that we can come in with a common composed approach to addressing the issue and even thinking ahead in the sense of, okay, these things are out of our control, but here's what we can control in the future. And then our other two core values, we just redid our mission vision values, is continuous improvement as well as, sorry, got a little distracted there. We'll start over. 

Continuous improvement and process driven excellence. So, you know, ultimately all three of these core values kind of tie into each other. You know, when you're talking about developing out processes, we want everything to be process based when we're looking at workflows. 

And it even helps us prepare better for AI, because if you don't have a process, it's really hard to start using AI in an organization. And how do we continuously improve those processes? We don't strive for perfection necessarily, because it's a little unrealistic and you start getting into areas where you're probably focusing on things you can't control, right? I like referencing the 80-20 rule as well. Like, can we get 80% of the way there? That 20% tends to be things you can't control or that are so wild, they're such wild variables, they're hard to anticipate sometimes, right, until you actually run into it. 

So the idea of process driven excellence, developing processes around everything, continuously improving them, whether that's improving the process, you know, helping train people around the process, back to the people process technology. And how can we approach that in a common composed way, focusing only on the items we can control? So as you're saying all of this stuff, I'm thinking in my head the things that I've put in place with my clients. And we've come at it from a little different perspective where it's more of what is it that you cannot live with or cannot live without when it comes to your computers and your network. 

And it's literally listing out, you know, all those things about we want to be up all the time. Okay, well, let's define what is all the time. Tell me more about that. 

Does that mean 24 hours? Because are you really working at 11.30pm? I just had a client recently, and this is, you know, one of those types of things where he said, you know, I wish you would hire more people. So that, you know, you could support us 24/7. And I said, Well, you need to pay 24/7 prices. 

He's like, Oh, I love that you called that out. Because I think people can develop unrealistic expectations, because we, we all want to wave that magic wand and have everything at our fingertips. But if we can focus on the needs to have versus the wants to have, right, you know, and the needs to have, typically, it gets back to like, well, here's the things we can actually control, you know, around what you need to have, you know, the want to haves are, are can be unrealistic. 

And how can we get back? How can we get to a point where we're present and understanding like, what do we actually need versus want? You know, I want a lot of things. But if I focus on all my wants, and ignored my needs, you know, am I really fulfilling what I need? You know, either it's personal or business at that point? Yeah. So just this very morning, I woke up to one of my clients, a workstation, went off at 3am, couldn't get back on. 

The person went into the office, did all the usual steps, left me a voicemail, sent an email. I called and the very first thing she said was, I'm so sorry. And I'm like, it's not your fault that the computer died at three in the morning. 

There's nothing you could have done there. But we got her up and running and all that stuff. And again, at the very end, if she's like, I'm so sorry, I know you're not here.

I said, “It doesn't matter. If you really need something, I can get somebody there to take care of it. She's like, no, as long as I can do this, this, she had three things you needed to do.

She's like, we'll wait till you get back. And it's funny. That's probably my best client that understands what you're talking about, where they know what they need. 

They know what they want. And they're willing to pay extra to get some of that stuff. But on the other side, they're always understanding. 

They're like, look, we know this isn't your fault. I'm trying to get them to stop apologizing all the time for calling. I'm like, no, that's what we're here for. 

That's what you're paying for. Are they Canadian? No. Sorry, a little joke there. 

No, that sounds like, a dream client. Empathy goes both ways. We're all just people trying to do our best.

That's a good story to hear. I say that because it doesn't happen often. I have stories of AJ and TJ. 

We wouldn't have a job if technology worked perfect. And I think it's easy to blame people when technology goes wrong. Back to what can we control around technology? We can't control the fact that it's eventually going to break down on us. 

But what can we plan ahead from a process-based perspective to minimize the impact when it does break down on us? You often come at your business sense from an enterprise mindset that we try to translate down to SMBs. I don't think I've asked you this in the past, but how do you find that translation happening with the smaller clients? Do they understand? Are you able to explain to them what you're doing? Because a lot of them are like, well, we're not that big. We don't need all that stuff. 

When in fact, some of them actually needed as much or more in a lot of sense. Small businesses tend to be entrepreneurs, and they are willing to take a certain level of risk. But typically that decision-making I've found, and even in my own personal journey as a small business and an entrepreneur, it starts out kind of you're making decisions based on your gut. 

And initially it's, hey, I have expenses I need to be able to pay. So I need to bring in enough income to cover those expenses. But if we can get to what I like to call maybe like a turning point as a small business to where we're worrying less about just paying the bills on a day-to-day basis, there is an opportunity for growth and maturing at that point. 

And I wonder if some small businesses take the journey of more of being happy just being like a lifestyle business, where they don't necessarily care to grow or even become more efficient, because that takes work, right? It takes extra work. So you might call it a sense of complacency. I don't know if that's the right word, but I'm happy where I'm at, and I don't feel like I need to put more on my plate, right? But it takes understanding, scaling a business, which is what we've learned by working with these large enterprises, is we worked with a lot of fully managed small businesses that we're even learning how to work better with every day. 

And we also work with larger enterprises, and we see these enterprises have a lot of processes in place. They have a lot of roles that would normally be shared with a small business divvied out between people, and they tend to lean on processes more. They also lean on financial spreadsheets more. 

So there's less of that people aspect that I love seeing with small businesses. Small businesses tend to be more relationship-based, right? Which can be a double-edged sword, because we also need to focus on merit-based items, and how are we performing? Are we measuring for performance? Are we looking to improve that performance? You see that all the time in the enterprise, because they're very spreadsheet-driven. And with the small businesses, it's more relationship-driven, which I see less of in enterprise. 

So when I look at both of these and try to connect the dots, I think I do feel like there's a happy medium in it of still maintaining relationships, having empathy for people, understanding we all just want to be seen and heard, right? We can do business without treating people like a number, but we also need to care about the numbers in our business if we want to minimize negative impacts that might happen in the future. Really starting to try to plan ahead. So with small businesses, I see typically less of a visionary approach that you might see with an enterprise, to the point where some of them may not even have budgets, or maybe if you ask them for a budget, they hand you their P&L from last year and say, here's our budget. 

They tend to not have five-year plans, maybe, because they're more focused on what's going on. They're month-to-month or project-to-project in a lot of ways. Yeah. 

And I wonder if, as IT, we can't help them with that. And maybe we should understand how to start having those conversations. And that's what we've been doing with our small business clients, is helping them understand that, hey, we've created four major areas of any business. 

You've got operations, HR, finance, and then the fourth one is essentially risk. How much risk are they willing to take on? And we try to talk with our clients and understand, well, who's responsible? Who are the stakeholders, the decision makers, when it comes to these areas of the business? And by starting those conversations, and typically it can be shared roles, right, in a smaller business. Yes. 

But at least identifying and knowing that, then we can start positioning conversations around people, process, and technology in those areas. And risk is a tricky one. Typically, they look at you kind of as a question mark, like, what do you mean by risk? And we pivot and say, well, who decides what insurance policies you're going to have and what the limits should be? You know, that's typically someone who understands risk at some level for the company and is making those decisions. 

And in our world, cybersecurity insurance, right? Hopefully we can get them to carry that. And that would be our main contact. But those are always areas where we can look to continuously improve processes, you know, involving technology. 

And we have to understand who the people are, the stakeholders in that, and really hear their story. Gather, understand what their challenges are. What type of business outcomes are they hoping to achieve? And even more importantly, how might we measure what success looks like after we help them achieve one of those business outcomes? So you mentioned the fact that they're coming closer together.

Of course, the enterprises are trying to, you know, revert from the number system into to, you know, bring back a culture and make people feel like a part of everything. The smaller businesses are trying to get those processes in place, which I'm going to lead this into the next question I'm going to ask you about AI. Yeah, because that's how a lot of the smaller companies are looking to leverage, you know, what they know in terms of how can we use AI to speed up what we're doing, or teach us faster? What can we use AI to, you know, replicate employees? So we don't have to, you know, maybe I don't have to, you know, hire another employee if I can get AI to make the one I have much more efficient or any of those things. 

So how are you guys dealing with AI now? Yeah, there's, you know, lots of discussions around AI, which, again, taking a stoic approach to AI, we really try to avoid a lot of the fear, uncertainty and doubt that is out there that's, you know, or the fear of missing out. You know, if you're a lot of times, those are things you can't control anyway. We see a lot of that just with the 24 hour news cycle. 

Nowadays, it's all about the clicks. And how do you get a click? Well, you have a headline that imposes fear or a headline that makes you feel like you're missing out, you better read this now. And, and that can, that can cause someone to veer off path. 

I mean, I think when I look at AI, and understand its value, and looking at the people aspect to humans, I've been using humans a lot more, just to help differentiate, right? Humans make mistakes. That's part of being human. Humans are social beings. 

So you know, AI will never replace any type of social aspect of a business. You know, we really want to connect inherently, we want to feel seen and heard by other humans. We want to help each other, we want to give back. 

And so I look at AI, if a company came to me and said, Hey, what does AI look for, like for our business? And how would you propose us using it? I would say, well, let's look at your processes. Right? And if we don't have processes developed yet, let's develop some of those out. And let's identify areas where human error might be causing issues with your processes, right? processes don't run by themselves, it requires a human to follow a process, where in this process might human error happen, right? And how can we replace that with maybe some automation or some AI to help take over that task to minimize the amount of human error that's happening? You know, technology inherently helps with that.

We're not the best at math, you know, there's some of us that are, but others aren't. And so that's a place where technology and AI can help out a lot. I would say, when you think about the value that a human gets out of living, you know, we tend to not like doing repetitive tasks over and over again. 

We're kind of, we like being creative. Typically, we like doing new things. So how can AI help with repetitive tasks in a business? I would say another thing is we're very curious as humans. 

And we're always trying to learn and adapt and adopt new knowledge. And AI can really help with that as well. I grew up, you know, I hated reading books, you know, because and I learned to speed read because I hate reading books. 

But I tend to miss things when I speed read, which also gives me empathy for AI because I feel like it does the same thing at speed reads, but I relied on cliff notes a lot growing up. I'm dating myself, I guess, but you read this book and give me a book report. Cool. 

Do they have cliff notes? Let me grab those yellow and black books. And in all honesty, cliff notes do pull out the main aspects of any type of book or something you're trying to learn. And I feel like AI is great for that. 

There's the nature of an LLM. You know, if we think about historically how we've learned pulling knowledge from the internet, it's Googling things, right? And then you're looking at the first page of results, you're going to each result and you're trying to tie all that information together to learn from it. And AI LLMs will do that for you. 

They'll summarize it all. And so, you know, those are without going on too long here. I could talk forever about AI, but those are probably some aspects I'd look at, right? Is how can we reduce human error? How can we prevent humans from having to do repetitive tasks? And how can we use it to help upskill our team? And all of those really, in my opinion, aren't necessarily situations where AI is replacing humans. 

It's where AI is assisting humans. Right. Very nice. 

So out of all we just talked about, are you going to be able to find any of those answers here? Are you going to find any fellow Stoics here? What's the goal? Yeah, I've been talking about my new approach. I'm a lot more reserved and even humble, if you will, these days. In the past, I'm very passionate as an entrepreneur. 

So things excite me. When AI first came out, I was overly excited. And now I'm kind of... You pulled back a little bit? I pulled back. 

Yeah. And, you know, being a visionary, too, I wonder if I tend to see things that other people haven't seen yet around me. And they might even think I'm a little crazy with some of the things that I talk about. 

Well, you may look for things faster than others. And a lot of us are just kind of adjusting on the fly. And some people are starting to look at the broader implications. 

What is this really going to mean? I mean, it's been talked about, you know, labor displacement, those types of things. But from your Stoic approach, it sounds almost holistic. I like that. 

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. You know, I would say one of the other things, too, is I've always been told and thought that life is about finding a balance. 

But when I think about balancing things, I think of someone with a bunch of plates, you know, spinning, and they don't want to let any of them drop. Yeah, I know. But I like it more as do everything in moderation, not necessarily balance. 

You moderate what you have in your life. Yeah, that's a good approach. You know, and that comes from the whole idea of you can't really do a work-life balance.

But that's where I was going with that. Yeah, because that's something I've always struggled with. And one of the new kind of outlooks that I have on life is I look at it more like a dance, also because I love dancing. 

I thought you were going to say you love Garth Brooks. Oh, good call out. I do love Garth Brooks. 

But no, life is more of a dance. And I guess where I'm going with this is rather than my outlook being life is a balance, and I'm trying to balance things, it's more of a rhythm. And sometimes, you know, in a dance, you have to take some steps backwards in order to step forward. 

That's just a part of the dance, right? And so I used to beat myself up if I'm spending too much time on one thing and then feeling like something else is getting, is becoming unbalanced. And now I look at it as, hey, I took a step back with this other thing so that I could take a step forward with this thing that I'm more focused on. But eventually, it's going to come back into play, right? And so it's more of a rhythm. 

A rhythm, a pendulum, all of that good stuff. All right. Well, Brian, thank you very much for stopping by. 

So if you are listening to this, this sounds like a lot of the stuff you're going to get on the Tech Stoic podcast. And you said that's going to be launching soon. How soon? End of this month.

Okay. So the end of June. Yep. 

And I've even, you know, with my sound engineering radio background, I was a DJ also. It feels great to be able to play with all this equipment again and tools. I did actually create a theme song and a music video.

I wasn't even going to mention that. I know. You're like, don't say it. 

But I'm saying it. I'm a little overproducing this, maybe. So that's part of the delay. 

But, you know, it's something I'm passionate about. And I, you know, I'm not going to try to over-perfect it. Yeah, you will.

Will I? All right. You will. You will.

You know me that well. That's all right. You'll come back to us podcasters and us simpletons and be like, how can I make this a little easier? Little easier. 

Yeah. And I am starting off with just one podcast a month. So I'm not trying to overdo it too much there. 

But yeah, thank you for the promotion of that podcast coming out. All right. We'll be looking forward to that. 

You can add that to your list and all your favorite podcasters. And you check out Brian J. Weiss. And look up his profile on the LinkedIn. 

He's changed that. He's now the tech stoic on the LinkedIn. And it'll be good. 

We'll catch up again once that releases and get some feedback. All right. All right. 

All right, folks, that's going to do it. We're moving on at Pax8 Beyond. And we'll see you soon. 

Holla!