RedMonk senior analyst Kate Holterhoff took the MonkCast on the road to devopsdays Atlanta 2025. In episode 1 of this 2-part series, Kate interviews Andrew Clay Shafer, John Willis, and Katie Anderson about their devopsdays talks, their interest in W. Edwards Deming, and the roast of John Willis.
Links
Transcript
Andrew Clay Shafer
Kate Holterhoff
All right, welcome to this episode of the MonkCast, recording here at the lovely Academy of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. We are here for devopsdays 2025 Atlanta, and I am excited to welcome Andrew Clay Schaefer, one of the founders of DevOps. he is a principal at Ergonautic. Andrew, thanks for coming on the MonkCast.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Thanks for having me. As I like to say, I didn’t create DevOps, I stole it. I stole it from my friends.
Kate Holterhoff
Amazing. Okay. Of what you have many, I’ve come to understand.
Andrew Clay Shafer
I try. Yeah. Great.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay. So are you counting at this point? How many devopsdays have you attended?
Andrew Clay Shafer
I lost count. All of them. A long time ago. Yeah. Since 2009-ish.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay. Amazing. All right. Well, this is my first and it’s going well. I saw it. It’s an unmitigated success.
Andrew Clay Shafer
But wait, DevOps is dead. So.
Kate Holterhoff
Absolutely. All right, so Andrew, this particular DevOps Day has a little bit of a special theme, which is roasting John Willis How do you feel like the love fest for John is going so far?
Andrew Clay Shafer
I always loved John, so it’s going good. It’s going good, okay. I think it was all fun and good natured. Yeah, good natured, okay, fantastic.
Kate Holterhoff
All right, yeah, John seems to be taking it in stride. I’ve seen him, cracking a few grins, in fact. I mean, he seems to be.
Andrew Clay Shafer
.. got a few belly laughs out of it.
Kate Holterhoff
Amazing. I mean, who wouldn’t love the attention, right?
Andrew Clay Shafer
Humans like that, usually. like that,
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, and we’ve learned that maybe some of the Europeans aren’t completely familiar with the roast format.
Andrew Clay Shafer
I’m not I’m not sure we did the roast format if we’re gonna be pedantic about it. But
Kate Holterhoff
let’s be pedantic.
Andrew Clay Shafer
I mean, I don’t know how you grew up. But in my day, there was this thing that was more formal. Yeah, with the focus on the the roastie, guess that focus on the roastie. Okay. And we just had this like sprinkling of whatever Yeah, banter on top of the other stuff. fair enough. Yeah, that’s true. It’s a good time.
Kate Holterhoff
So we’re like not laying it on thick, but we’re laying it, it’s like a little amuse-bouche
Andrew Clay Shafer
Well, there was a lot to do because we had to do the Deming days and the devopsdays and roast John Willis. Yeah. This makes sense. So we make it do.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay. Have you been to other devopsdays that were roast enabled?
Andrew Clay Shafer
This is a first. This is a first. Although I’m constantly roasting people.
Kate Holterhoff
They don’t realize it when they walk into the room.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Oh, I think they do.
Kate Holterhoff
That’s the vibe that you bring.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Oh, I don’t know. I think I think you gotta have fun.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah. Okay. So DevOps differentiator. Gotta have fun.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Or what else are you doing? Yeah. mean, that’s a Deming thing too.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah. Is it?
Andrew Clay Shafer
He makes many quotes. There’s a of stuff about how management has sucked the fun out of the work and that people only will have high quality work if they enjoy their work. Okay. it’s important. I love me some Deming, by the way, if you didn’t realize that. If you’re not a Deming aficionado, I didn’t do the actual calculation, but I’m relatively certain I average over one Deming quote per devopsdays presentation. Go back to the beginning. Oh my God. Now you have that.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, very good. Yeah, I mean, I should have mentioned too, we are often calling this demingdays, and John Willis has even replaced his photo with John Deming,
Andrew Clay Shafer
Oh, that he did like 10 years ago.
Kate Holterhoff
Oh, geez.
Andrew Clay Shafer
He said that, yeah, the the Edwards Deming photo for a long time and he wrote a book about Deming too.
Kate Holterhoff
But yeah, OK, so all Deming all the time from the beginning, we’re just happening to lean into it.
Andrew Clay Shafer
I think part of the point I was trying to make today is all this stuff’s timeless. So you can find all these Deming quotes and then, oh, like he embedded this thing or here’s the cycle, you plan, do you check act or plan, do you study act or plan, do you study adjust? Like everyone’s got to have some little different thing to fight about a detail. But one of the points I made in my talk is you can find quotes all through history. And I made a quote that is sounds like Deming would say it, but it’s actually from Aristotle. So that’s a good 2500 years ago.
Kate Holterhoff
Nice. so now you’re pandering fake news is what you’re telling me.
Andrew Clay Shafer
I mean, there’s very, very few things that are unchanged, right? We build on the shoulders of giants.
Kate Holterhoff
For sure. You just gave your talk.
Andrew Clay Shafer
This morning. About an hour and a half ago.
Kate Holterhoff
How did it go?
Andrew Clay Shafer
I don’t know. I was amused. I’m not sure I’m the best judge, but the chef prepared the omakase for the for the consumption of the audience.
Kate Holterhoff
And what was your talk about?
Andrew Clay Shafer
I made a lot of Deming references. There’s a few points. there’s this thing called, the title of the talk was Plan, Do, Study, Act, which is sometimes referred to as the Deming Cycle. But if you go down that rabbit hole, you’ll realize it was, before that, was really called the Shewhart Cycle. There’s this other guy that influenced Deming, yada, yada, yada. And in the middle of this, I show that there’s a papyrus from Egypt talking about medicine, which has something that looks suspiciously like the same cycle for diagnosing and treating diseases. That’s 1600 BC. So we keep thinking we’re smart, but it’s like people were smart before.
So there’s this looping construct about how you have some model, you’re making actions based on what you think your strategy, what game you’re trying to win, and then you’re making measurements and you’re going through this cycle. So that’s the cycle there, but it’s the same cycle. We could make a list of 25 different looping cycles from different disciplines and it’s literally all the same. Going back and like science is science, let’s do this. So that’s one point.
what I’m trying to get people to realize is you’re only going to get better if your model gets better, but you’re not really learning. I made this point a lot in my illustrious DevOps career. ⁓ yeah. organizational learning is not about getting new vocabulary. It’s about expressing new behaviors. So when you’re talking about whatever buzzword you want to pick and what it really means, it’s, it’s not.
the new vocabulary, it’s the new behavior. So if you just adopted the titles, if you change all your titles to DevOps, just to do nothing different and wait until you could change your titles to SRE and then do nothing different and then now change your titles to platform engineering and do nothing different, then you probably won’t have great outcomes. You get the DevOps you deserve. That’s how I usually tell people.
Kate Holterhoff
Yes, yes. I’m so glad that we brought up platform engineering and SREs because it seems to be the point of contention that comes up all the time. So where do we sit with this tripartite diffusion of the field?
Andrew Clay Shafer
I mean, one of our favorite hobbies in this industry is arguing over the definitions of made up words. And one of the quotes that I had in my talk is, the narcissism of small differences, which is it’s from Freud. It basically says that the more commonalities there are between adjacent groups, the more likely they are to ridicule each other and find ways to point out the differences instead of how it’s 99 % the same thing. between the SRE and DevOps differences, think, you know, 2016, called and wants its arguments back because that was resolved a long time ago. And then, you know, platform engineering. I haven’t seen a single novelty introduced into the conversation, but it is sometimes useful to have a new report from the analyst that has a new buzzword so that you can justify a new initiative and a new budget to tried to change the things that you didn’t change last time.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, well I speak for all analysts when I say you’re welcome.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Yeah. Yeah. We need that.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, you sure do.
Andrew Clay Shafer
But you know you’re doing it right when you have a silo for DevOps and a silo for SRE and a new silo for platform engineering in the same organization and they don’t work together.
Kate Holterhoff
Beautiful.
Andrew Clay Shafer
That’s where it’s at.
Kate Holterhoff
Everyone’s butting heads.
Andrew Clay Shafer
No, not necessarily, but everyone wants to rule the world. Once the DevOps initiative lost steam because we didn’t change anything, then we needed a new word to not change anything.
Kate Holterhoff
Well, you say anything, but as someone who studied the difference between front-end engineers and full-stack engineers, it’s $20,000 is the difference.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Oh, yeah. I mean, we had this conversation the other day, and I was talking to someone else about this nuance, and it’s like, well, did you get a raise? High five.
Kate Holterhoff
That’s not nothing, Andrew.
Andrew Clay Shafer
No, you’re right. You’re right. I mean, platform engineering all the way, baby. Let’s go.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay, so we talked about the roast. We’ve talked about devopsdays writ large. We’ve talked about your talk. You want to pitch us on anything? What’s next? What’s new?
Andrew Clay Shafer
I got so many things.
Kate Holterhoff
Hit me.
Andrew Clay Shafer
I mean, right now, I feel that everything is being reconfigured.
Kate Holterhoff
Okay.
Andrew Clay Shafer
And we didn’t really talk about AI or vibe coding or what’s going to change or what’s already changed about some of these processes, but I feel like every assumption about software is being revisited or should be. I spent a lot of time, and in fact, I introduced this terminology in my talk today, talking about socio-technical systems, which is a term that was coined in the 1950s, studying the mechanization of coal mines. And it has a lot of parallels to what we see with the adoption of tools in DevOps and it’s definitely gonna have an implication in the way people adopt AI but the fundamental theorem of socio-technical systems is that you can’t treat the socio and the technical as separate systems that they’re an interdependent single system. Got it. So that’s interesting but the presumption until now is that agency really only existed on the socio system.
And now we’re entering a phase where you’re going to have agency on the technical side. I mean, I think it’s interesting and exciting to think about how that adds to the complexity of this. if you’re not tracking the daily changes of what’s happening with these tools and what’s possible, and you’re still in the time capsule circa 2023 or whatever, then.
you’re gonna be in for a rude awakening when the rest, it’s just gonna be such a competitive advantage for those who step into the stream. At least I’m convinced of it. I do also think there’s gonna be a bit of a reconciliation of the valuations against the value created, but there’s definitely fire behind the smoke.
Kate Holterhoff
All right, well, it has been amazing catching up with you, Andrew. If folks want to continue this conversation or follow more of your deep thoughts on all things DevOps and adjacent categories, what’s the best channel for them to do that?
Andrew Clay Shafer
I’m terrible at self-promotion and I have been particularly terrible at being active on the socials. need to really…relearn how to feed the algorithms, if you will. So I’m not sure there’s a great way to follow me because I’m mostly quiet and working on things until someone summons me from my cave to the devopsdays, if you will. But if you hit me up on LinkedIn, make a note about what you heard or why you think it’d be interesting to talk and I’d love to continue any conversation.
Kate Holterhoff
All right. Thanks for coming on the pod, Andrew.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Let’s go. RedMonk. Oh yeah, I told you this before. Long time ago, ancient history, puppet, $5,000. The best money ever spent on RedMonk.
Kate Holterhoff
Aww, I love that. All right.
Andrew Clay Shafer
ROI. Hey. Let’s go.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, thanks.
Andrew Clay Shafer
Thank you.
John Willis
Kate Holterhoff
Hello and welcome to devopsdays Atlanta 2025. I’m recording the MonkCast here live from the lovely Academy of Medicine and talking to a lot of guests here, a lot of speakers, and I am excited to say that I got John Willis here to talk to me a little bit about his experiences at the conference. Now you’ve been to a number of devopsdays over the years. Can we say that you’ve attended them all?
John Willis
No, not all of them, but I will say I think I still probably hold the record for attending the most devopsdays of any one person.
Kate Holterhoff
my gosh, okay. Yeah, I had Andrew Clay Schaeffer on earlier and do you think that he would want to arm wrestle for the title of who’s been?
John Willis
No, no, I’ve been way more than he has. He’s been to a lot. But as anybody should know, I’m a huge fan and he’s been an incredible mentor to me. So I love Andrew Clay Schaeffer, but I’ve been to more devopsdays than he has.
Kate Holterhoff
All right, fair enough. Gauntlet thrown. So talk to me about your experience being roasted because you are the guest of honor. Have you been roasted before?
John Willis
I have never been roasted before and I hope we never will be roasted again. No, I don’t know. You know, so we had the, so I, just, short little, I, I am, I was the only American at the first devopsdays in Ghent. the original Patrick Debois
And I had the idea to come back and see if we couldn’t create one in the US. so I, actually with Andrew and a good friend of mine, Damon Edwards, and a couple other people, we literally ran the first devopsdays in Silicon Valley. And then for the first couple of years, we ran like all the ones in the US. And so anyway, we had a 15 year anniversary of the first discussion of DevOps in Antwerp last summer.
And so all the organizers, we had a pre-organizer day. there was a lot of discussions about like, should we call it DevOps? I mean, the economies of conferences post pandemic has been very difficult, right? And then, so the communities pre pandemic of devopsdays were just flourishing, know, really big venues. In fact, the last time they ran one in Atlanta, it was, I think was at the aquarium, right? So like this place is beautiful.
the Academy of Science and Medicine, but we’ve gotten to the point where you could run it at the aquarium, And now the economics of this stuff is it’s tough to run the DevOps stage, right? So on 15-year anniversary, we were sort of having a conversation, and I haven’t been as active as I used to be a core organizer, but I sort of now I’m the old advisor, like, John, what do you think? And being the person who’s been to the most of them, and I’ve seen every angle of every problem that’s come over the 15 years.
So anyway, the discussion was, should we rename it? Gene Kim renamed the DevOps Enterprise Summit to ETLS, the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit. So there’s been this debate, and it was an active debate of the organizers pre-meet up about how name it. And Chris Corriere was just a brilliant crazy guy. And he’s like, if we’re going to do something crazy, let’s do something crazy. ⁓
And he just announced in front of the whole group that I want to run a roast of John Willis, a Deming Day, and I’m the Deming person, right? I wrote my book about Dr. Deming. And I was like, man, you’re crazy, dude. That’s a terrible idea. ⁓ And in retrospect, not from my own ego, it’s actually turned out to be a cool idea. he’s like that crazy, like Dali says, know, that like,
There’s sort of a special type of crazy. forget what his famous quote is. Dali has a great quote about being crazy, but that he’s really actually, there’s some brilliance in his craziness. And there actually was some, I think brilliance in Chris’s, not for the ego, but because we needed to shake something up. Nobody could agree on actually renaming it. Because nobody wants to take that sword of like, you’re to run the first devopsdays, that isn’t called devopsdays.
And so this idea of sort of creating a fun Deming DevOps and AI or John Willis roast sounded insane, but he pulled it off. had sponsors, we had a good turnout. And so back to me, I was like, okay, know, that, want to do that? That’s fine.
I figured, you know, I better find some people I know really like me. Like, let me prefab this thing, right? Like, I didn’t want him just pulling out somebody who’s like, yeah, that Willis guy, he shows up everywhere, you know? So I was like, you know, Chris, if we’re going to do this, you mind asking this, Andrew, like, do you mind asking this guy? And so that, so I kind of built a couple of guardrails there, I guess. But yeah, it was, you know, I literally, as we got closer, I was like, you know, like,
There’s a lot of, like, there’s some interesting things you could say about my career. Never, I’ve never lied to anybody. I don’t think there’s anybody on this planet that can actually stand up and legitimately say I screwed him over. I’ll go to my grave with that one. But probably think a lot of people think I’m just incredibly lucky, right? Like, and I am, right? Like I’ve sold a startup that was like less than three months old to Docker.
Right and people like how what did he do? He must have like even you’ve probably heard some of the jokes about like Patrick was saying he seems to sell really good and I do like there’s a lot of like it’s not as simple it looks like that I built a company of three months old and sold it to Docker on a face value that looks like it had to be all zoot-suit stuff But I went in business to two guys who were literally The first guy did the first commit on OpenDaylight, which was the new Syracilla who had been working on that for two years
at Red Hat on the CTO team. we had like day one, we had two and a half years of open source IP that he was the top committer, first committer and top committer on this project. So it wasn’t a three month old company. But so again, the fact that I got to know these guys, the fact that I understood enough to help them build a business. But my career does look like I do a little bit of work and have a lot of success. So anyway, I’m like over rotating now. But but like,
It scared me to think that somebody who didn’t know me could come in and make these observations, and that would probably sting and hurt. So I did prefab it. It was a lot of love. Michael Edenzon from Fianu, a big shout out to Fianu he did the true, like he really made fun of me. He called me short, talked about how I dress, made fun about, like even like the stinging one was like.
I had to take fashion advice from John Willis and then he said he probably has his breakfast stains on his shirt And he’s probably right, you know, so all right, so it was good. It was it was all love and it was great
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, Andrew and I were speaking about how it’s not a traditional roast in the sense that everyone’s kind of sprinkling it sure Yeah, but I would say that yes the one that you’re referring to Michael’s was that that was a real roast. That was a good
Yes, I know. feel like certain folks have a flair for that type of… Yeah, he could have a different second career there going. Yeah, he was pretty good at it.
Kate Holterhoff
Yes, I was very impressed.
John Willis
And it’s all in good fun. I like to think this is a… Well, as long as it was with love. I don’t mind, like, it’s like feels great to be made fun of by somebody who loves you, right? Like, you know, that’s… I’ll take that all day long, you know? So, honestly, because you know where it comes from. And then like that is, you know, you know, the people who love you should be the most critical of.
Sure. Right? yeah. So it was all good. Fantastic. But I’d love to talk a little about my book.
Kate Holterhoff
I would love to hear about your book. Let’s hear it.
John Willis
Yeah. you know, I’ve done a number of books over the years. I wrote the DevOps Handbook. I co-wrote the DevOps Handbook. I also did a project with Gene, Gene Kim called Beyond the Phoenix Project, which was an audio only book. And then I, during the pandemic, I sat down and wrote a book about one of my favorite characters, Dr. Edwards Deming. It was called
Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge. And it’s been out for a little over two years. And so I finished it almost three years ago. By the you finish it, and it sort of goes through poetry. So I had this notion of, so my Deming book was very much, I like to sort of think about how a subject said, if Michael Lewis was gonna write the book, how would he write it? Because I love the way he tells, like the Moneyball, the Flashboys, or Blindside. They’re all great, very technical, but anybody can read them.
And so I did that with my Deming book. was sort of anybody could read it. And I have two target readers. I have a subject matter expert and my mother-in-law, who’s a high IQ reader, but she doesn’t, she knows nothing about technology. So I started thinking about it. I’ve been working very hard in the last three or four years on AI, generative AI models, helping organizations, architecture scale, security, all the things that you do, that I do. I’m an infrastructure operations person pretty much.
And then I really started wondering about the history. So I just started doing a lot of digging on the history. And it turns out when you go looking for history, when you look from the history angle, not the technical, not the Turing did this and here’s how the Turing test works. When you go look for the story of Turing or you look to every one of these characters were just glorious. had the incredible accomplishments. Some of them you’ve never heard of who’s changed your life.
And but they all have these brilliant, the fact that they were brilliant in one thing means they were like iconically crazy in other things. And so along the way, I started compiling all these stories of sort of last 75 to like in some cases 200 years, but mostly about 75 years of what led us to the ChatGPT moment. So the idea was ChatGPT wasn’t like, it just didn’t miraculously happen in 2022. I mean, it actually started in 1943 with a
paper about the mathematical calculus of how the brain might work, which was really the first paper on neural networks. then there’s just a glorious path of all these people that have these amazing stories and politics and this one trying to sort of steal the thunder from that one. So you get like sort of a nice fun arc. And a friend of mine had mentioned
I couldn’t really come up with a name and he said, you know, sounds like all your characters, or all these characters in the history of AI are rebels. And that they’re always told, oh, don’t do that, it’ll never work. But they defiantly say they don’t, you know, they don’t fall for dogma. They have this sort of vision for something that has to be there. Like all these characteristics are so common in every one of them. And I was like, they are rebels. And I was sort of fumbling around like the idea of what is
The sub-theme is the human’s quest for thinking machines. And that’s really been what’s been going on here. Everybody’s been trying to think, can I create a computational implementation of a sort of reasoning or thinking machine? so it sort of hit me in a flash, like this idea of rebels of reason. Like this is all about been reasoning, right, from like back to, you know.
Babbage’s analytical machine to Ada Lovelace’s translation of it all the way to sort of Turing to these two gentlemen that are crazy story people, McCulloch and Pitts or like Jack Kerouac characters of math and psychology. And you go all the way through the arc of like, Demis Hassabis is the guy who found the DeepMind. Now he’s part of Google’s DeepMind.
Four years old, he beats his dad in chess. At like 13, he’s a chess master. At like 15, he’s sitting in a tournament and realizing how much wasted time is on chess that could go through curing cancer. Last year, he wins the Nobel Prize for protein folding. that is the road to curing cancer. that isn’t even the best story in the book. Yeah.
Yeah, that sounds incredible. And what is the name of this book? Rebels of Reason. Rebels of Reason. great. Yeah, so that’s been like a lot of fun. And then my day job is literally learning how to do like deep architecture for large corporations to implement, know, sort of not just LLMs, but gateways and architectures for how to scale it, how to make sure it’s secure, how to guardrail it, how to run sort of what they call evaluations and ground truth to make sure you’re getting the possible
best answers that you can get for, you know, what we would call safety critical or high consequence services and applications. Yes. Wow. Fun stuff. It’s a good time to be alive.
Kate Holterhoff
I’m telling you. I know. And you’ve been busy. Okay. Amazing. And how many books have you published at this point?
John Willis
So there’s some, there’s, know, if I did a list, this is my 13th book, right? That should be an unlucky number. But I will say, um, So, like the first seven books were a lot of sort of project oriented, like there was something back in the day called IBM Redbooks. And I used to get involved in these projects and to be multi-authors. But I counted those books, they’re books, they’re out there, they’ve got ISBN numbers so you can look them up. ⁓ But then I sort of I wouldn’t say they’re not real books, but sort of the first real book, like you’d be hard pressed to find one of those books on Amazon. You might find them, but ⁓ you’d probably find them in IBM.
catalog somewhere. But my first sort of book is on, was like the first book, real book was a home run which was The DevOps Handbook. And then that was, we worked Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois and myself. And so that was ⁓ a stake in the ground book. And today it’s still relative, right? It is sort of still I think would be considered the canonical book for DevOps, right? And then I did a side project with Gene called Beyond the Phoenix Project. recorded as an audio book.
And then I started thinking about this Deming story, Dr. Deming, and I had been working on that for 10 years. And then in the pandemic, I finally decided, you know, I’m gonna do this. You know, like first, like either do it or shut up about it, you know? And that’s the hardest part about people who wanna write books, right? You have this idea and you just, like there’s a point at which you’re like, you gotta say to yourself, am I really gonna do this? Like, cause I mean, I gotta shut up about it at this point. And I’ve seen in the pandemic,
I think in the foreword of my Deming book I said something like I got back like 40 hours a month because no traveling, right? Like if you add up all the time, it’s like get the airport, on the plane, all that stuff. I was given this gift of about 40 hours a month of extra time. And I said like if I’m not going to use that time to write a book, then like I really need to stop saying I’m going to write this book. And I sat down, I hired a consultant, now he’s my business partner. And then now I’m on a roll. Like I’ve just finished this.
Rebels of Reason, History of AI, and I’m starting to play around with like what’s my next subject. So I’m probably going to write a book every year for the rest of my life. I mean, I love it. It’s a great process. built a process working with my business partner now that we’re even going to try to turn that process over to other people in sort of a like cliche but AI mode of like helping you make… So the idea is I meet so many people that wrote a book and they’re like, I’ll never do that again.
I’ll never stop doing it. And it depends on the approach that you use to create a book and it makes a difference on the approach. I love writing books. It’s research. I mean, if I ever get to a point where that… I mean, if I kind of quasi-retire, that will be it. But I would love the day where I’m just… All my income is based on my books. So that’s all I would do then. Go around, talk, talk about my books, have discussions like this and write books.
And research. mean, the beauty thing about books is research. The research is the beautiful… You pick a subject, I don’t know. I’ve got a couple of interesting ideas for my next subject, right? And the thing that, with the light, you go with the flashlight. And once you start, okay, there’s Joseph Duran, he’s an interesting character. But what I have to do next is I’ve to the flashlight all around him. And if I can see these tentacles of brilliant side stories…
then I know it’s the right book. Like, so it’s not just the person. I just I think Michael Lewis does this, I think someday I’m going to meet him and say, like, all my books, like, you got to read these because these are all like, you are my hero. Right? But, ⁓ but I think that’s the thing, know all the subjects he can pick. Like, I think when you he writes this book, I don’t think it’s just happenstance that you get all these great stories. Yeah, I think you have to do some like, you have to have some sort of mental test.
to look around the edges of the character or the story that you want to tell to say how interesting are all the side stories going to be because that’s what makes a great Michael Lewis book. Moneyball, I mean, I’m not going to get geeky, Moneyball could have been about the general manager, a guy named Billy Beane and it could have been a biography of Billy Beane and that would have been boring as hell book. But the story around what happened
and the economics of baseball and the stats and the analytics and all that stuff, is, that was the flashlight of why it wasn’t just a Billy Beane biography. So yeah, so yeah.
Kate Holterhoff
So I’m interested, I’ve published two academic books at this point and so I’ve dipped my toe in, I’m not near 13. ⁓ But I think the thing that I’m… questioning is the value of books in the age of AI. I guess maybe more just when you’re a technical book, the turnaround is so slow with writing books. Would it make more sense for us to write blog posts? I mean, you’re doing history. I write history. I get that lot of the folks we write about are dead. We’ve got time.
John Willis
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. You’re writing about AI. And AI is changing. Well, but again, I, you know, knock on glass. I think I’m isolated. really, think there’s, it’s the same thing with startups right now. I’ve done like 12 startups, right? Right now I wouldn’t do a startup unless I had an incredible niche. Like if I thought there was an angle and you so there are some startups like have this niche side, they’re staying away from all the fire. And like that’s a good idea right now. And by the way though, soon as it’s exposed, two people in the garage are going to basically replicate it. You like you have
You literally have the Star Trek, like there was the Star Trek thing where you want to take your vacation and it just made this whole…
Kate Holterhoff
Holodeck.
John Willis
Yeah, Holodeck, right? Yeah, I mean, like we are really close to holodecking any idea or any story. Yeah. All right. So it’s the same thing with the technical book. I mean, I hate to say this, but one of my best friends wrote a book about vibe coding. Okay. I’ve seen five, now the fifth book in last two weeks that’s been published on vibe coding.
And by the way, I don’t think any of them are going to be, I disrespect to, I know how hard it is to write a book. To your point, in six months or at least a year, they’re all going to be irrelevant. So any technical book, just like a startup, it is dangerous ground. Now the reason, like, yeah, okay, so now I’ve said this, so now I’m going to defend my book. But my book is about the history of AI. Nothing is going to change about my
know McCulloch and Pitts creating a paper about the first way they use Boolean calculus to describe the vein. Yeah, sure. Like that ain’t gonna change. And then go all the way through Turing and all that stuff. And by the way, my book, you know my book ends? No. You don’t, of course I don’t. It ends before the debate of the argument between Google and OpenAI and the character that literally there’s a Elon Musk versus what’s his face?
Kate Holterhoff
Sam Altman?
John Willis
No, it was Elon Musk originally who was the primary investor of OpenAI who was battling with the Sergey Brin whatever, from Google for this guy named, and I was pronouncing it, Ilya Sutskever that was the guy and they were going back and forth and it was this unbelievable drama story of like who was going to win because this guy’s a genius and he became the first CTO of OpenAI and Musk won. That’s where I end the story.
I’m not telling you anything, even, like I don’t even tell you other than like what happened with ChatGPT and how the numbers are phenomenal. But then I sort of end the history of AI at that debate of who is going to get that guy. Right? like I am again, knock on glass pretty isolated about like that story is not changing. And unless somebody else comes around and writes a better version, which right now I don’t know anybody who’s written a full end to end that can
you know, tie that all the dots together of, you know, like, like, ton of people talk about Turing ton of people talk about McCulloch and less people talk about McCulloch Pitts. Everybody talks about Hinton. But like, I can draw you a narrative of like, like, put it this way, I read 23 books on the history of AI. None of them mentioned Grace Hopper. Wow. Right. And because like, on face value, she’s not part of the AI story. But you don’t have NLP.
is she doesn’t create the first compiler. And the first compiler is the first instantiation of trying to take natural language to turn it into bits and bytes. So she deserves a seat at the table in the history of AI, and she’s in my book. And I’m a big fan of diversity. I say that, I’m the fat old white guy. But I probably have more stories. I’ve got Ada Lovelace, I’ve got, you
I bet you nobody knows that Janet Baker was the woman who basically was the genesis of Siri. Who’s got Ada Lovelace in their AI history book? know, Fei-Fei Li, some people know how important she is. I have an whole chapter on Fei-Fei Li. Without Fei-Fei Li, we don’t have ChatGPT. And nobody calls her the godfather of AI. All so I think I did an incredible job on diversity. I think I’ve done a… Anyway, I think I’m clear, but your point is well taken. And what I worry about…
or I think about is none of my books, there’s not one text in any of my books that has been written by AI. I don’t know, somebody asked me that yesterday. I think there’s an opportunity to write a book about AI. Now, going back to your core question, I hope that great, like I’m gonna sort of lowercase G with the word great, or because I’m not a great writer, that maybe I can someday be considered somebody who’s
more than lowercase, close to the uppercase, g-great. But… You’re modest too. All right, but here’s the point though. I am very creative. Okay. And what I hope that never happens… I mean, if in some future version of a book where I like use AI to help me build this section, this section, this section, but I Lego piece a great story, I got my fingers crossed that a day where AI can create
a better book about Deming than my book about Deming, that’s sort of doomsday. And that’s probably going to happen. I hope it happens way longer than later. think the people that I love to read, like Michael Lewis, our favorite authors, I think we’ve got some timeline and a runway with their ability to piece together a creative story.
is gotta be better than something than hitting a button and say, yeah, ChatGPT give me a great story about Dr. Deming. But the answer is I don’t know. And I can’t guarantee you that I won’t write a future book that isn’t completely like where I Legoed together my version of a story about some history story.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, well, John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I’m going to wrap it up here. But this is super interesting. So maybe I’ll have you come on for a full episode.
John Willis
Yeah, that’d awesome.
Kate Holterhoff
Dig it a bit.
John Willis
Tell those knuckleheads to invite me to MonkeyCast. I’ve never been invited there. Tell James and those guys, all you gotta do is ask.
Kate Holterhoff
That’s funny.
John Willis
Yes. All you gotta do is ask. Yeah, my toe is bad. All you gotta do is ask, guys.
Kate Holterhoff
For the record. Amazing. Okay, so if folks want to follow your next new project, what’s the best solution?
John Willis
Yeah, I’m on Amazon. I mean, so I’ve got a book portal out there. It’s pretty easy. John Willis. There might be some other John Willis’s, but you’ll quickly see that the one that has at least five books on the portal. Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge. Rebels of Reason, should be June 5th, is the projected date to show up that you can order. I may have an early order page up on Amazon.
Before then, I’m called Botchagalupe I don’t know if you put it in the show notes, but that’s the best way to find me. Botchagalupe.gmail is my email. But if you do John Willis DevOps or Botchagalupe, if you can spell it, I’m pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. Fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on. Sure. was great. Thank you. All right.
Katie Anderson
Kate HolterhoffAll right. I am here with Katie Anderson at devopsdays Atlanta. We are recording live in the library. Super excited to talk to Katie about her book and her talk here. So is this your first devopsdays?
Katie Anderson
This is my very first devopsdays. I was invited by John Willis to help roast him because John and I got to know each other a few years ago when he was in Japan with me.
Kate Holterhoff
I love that so much. I love the idea of attending something with the benefit of participating in a roast of someone you admire.
Katie Anderson
Yes, it was. I immediately said yes. It was amazing that my calendar was cleared. And it’s been such an incredible event and so many really fabulous conversations. Great to meet you and so many other people here. just been dived so deep into how do we create cultures of learning? It doesn’t matter what our industry is. It’s really about how do we foster learning and focus on people. And it’s just been really exciting to have those conversations here.
Kate Holterhoff
And so, before we go any further, how do you typically introduce yourself at these things? I mean, you’re obviously a passionate speaker and I’ve been already talked with Kimasia earlier about how wonderful your talk was.
Katie Anderson
Thank you. Well, I’m Katie Anderson. I like to consider myself a learning enthusiast. I’m a leadership consultant and an author of a book, Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn. And I work with organizations to help bring the behaviors and mindset that leaders need to really foster innovation and learning and focus on people first.
Kate Holterhoff
Fantastic. OK, love that. Yes, as a former academic, any time we talk about learning, get very excited.
Katie Anderson
Yes. This is something that I feel passionate about. I started off my career in academia as well. So that’s really where my passion for learning and research and bringing concepts together really started from those early days in my career. And it’s now just transitioned into helping organizations do the same thing.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, yeah. I’d love to hear more about what that looks like because you mentioned it a couple of times. ⁓ And so yeah, what is that? Yeah, what’s that process like? In terms of what?
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, when you go into a company, like how do you them to improve their learning culture, like try to, I don’t know, I just update the ways that they think through it. you spoke a little bit about Toyota and how they encourage not blaming folks and, trying to consistently upskill the team. I’m just I’m interested in how you extend that.
Katie Anderson
Yeah, so 20 years ago, when I made the transition from academia and academic research to working in organizations, I got so excited about how do we harness people’s problem solving and input at all levels of organization? And so when I work with organizations and executives and their leaders now, it’s really about helping create the conditions for them to have some aha moments about what’s going on in their organization now and how do their leadership behaviors contribute to the outcomes that they’re seeing. And so one of the things or a few of the things I hear all the time is we’re
like we have, so busy, there’s, we’re putting out fires all the time. We’re running around. We don’t have time to like be leaders as coaches. We just got to get stuff done. And I’m able to help give them the space for some reflection and seeing that by just doing, doing, doing, they’re actually not using the people’s capabilities in the best way. And actually when we can slow down and really understand what problem we need to solve or where, you know, the destination we need to go to, we can be more effective in, in the doing.
because we’re actually having it be aligned and thinking and solving problems along the way. And I think most leaders have this greater purpose of being a good human being and doing good things for the world or helping their ⁓ people grow in capability. But again, it just feels like this time pressure. And so it’s sort of this trap that we get into that if we can just break that cycle just a little bit.
actually so much more happens. it’s like small, changes. Like I talked yesterday about break the telling habit. How do we ask more questions and not just tell, tell, tell? How do we just pause and just reflect a little bit more and just small things just like build into greater impact.
Kate Holterhoff
And so you’ve written a book.
Katie Anderson
Yes.
Kate Holterhoff
Talk to us about your recent book.
Katie Anderson
Yeah, I have it here. Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn. Lessons from Toyota leader Isao Yoshino on a lifetime of continuous learning. And again, the lifetime of continuous learning, because as I learned when I lived in Japan, I moved there in 2015 for two years and was so excited as a continuous improvement practitioner and consultant about to go to the birthplace of the Toyota production system. And so I was speaking with this 40 year Toyota leader and I was so curious on what’s
What’s the secret to Toyota success? mean, everything that we know is like lean manufacturing, agile DevOps has its origins in the Toyota way. And he kept saying there is no secret. And one day he said, the only secret to Toyota is its attitude towards learning. And so that is really was the genesis of, it just enriched my understanding and really all the tools and all the practices again, know, agnostic of what industry we’re in goes about how can we really create this learning culture and
you know, our conversations, I started writing a blog 10 years ago, then became this passion of mine, I needed to share the knowledge that I was gaining from this incredible human being and the history of Toyota with the world. so became a dedicated, I was leveraging my qualitative research experience from academia, became this two year research project of deep interviews with him and then consolidating it into a story driven history and lesson about how do we learn to lead? And then how do we lead with an attitude towards learning?
Kate Holterhoff
That’s phenomenal. Okay. And so your talk yesterday got into that a little bit. And I was very interested in the story around the painting the car. So it didn’t go well. you mind sharing that?
Katie Anderson
Certainly. this was one of the very, when Mr. Yoshino and I sat down for purposeful interviews, we went back to the beginning. And one of the very first stories or experiences he reflected on was one he hadn’t thought of for decades. And it’s the story I shared yesterday about how when he was a new hire in 1966 at Toyota, 22 years old coming out of college. ⁓ First and foremost, Toyota had a four month orientation program, which is like, yeah, like a true investment in people’s learning. And the point of it was to both learn the value creation work of the organization as well as the company culture. And he was working a back office job, but he was assigned to the front line. And his one simple job for a few months was to pour a of paint and a can of solvent into a big vat.
And as the cars came down the road, the line to spray them. And one day the shop floor manager ran in and said, stop the line. The cars are like literally the paint’s not sticking to them, like dripping down the side of the cars. And all eyes went on him. And I tell this story all the time on stage because like, what would happen to you? Like your first job, if you made a huge mistake, like.
Kate Holterhoff
They would have fired me, I assume.
Katie Anderson
fired me. I certainly like yelled at you, blamed at you, like been angry. And that is not what happened. They paused and they came over calmly and asked, what was the process that you took to mix the paint and the solvent together? And he was like super nervous. He was 22, was new job. And so they focused on process, not blaming the person. And like, what a powerful story. But then something even more incredible, and he was laughing at this thinking and he’s like, can you believe this? He said, not only they asked me about the process and not blame me, they then said,
Thank you. Thank you for making this mistake. Because you showed that we as the managers hadn’t set up the working conditions for you to be successful. And like, wow, it’s like mic drop, right? And that was happening consistently for all of this other fellow new hires. Like when they made a mistake and they were working in the car and didn’t tighten the bolt the right way. They saw the mistake as an opportunity for learning and saw it as their responsibility to ensure that the working conditions were set up for people.
not to be able to make mistakes and when they do to create the learning conditions around it. I mean, that is the essence. like, so it doesn’t matter all the tools that we can be putting in all the maps and all the everything. If we don’t fundamentally have this acceptance in the embracing of mistakes as a source of learning and the concept of, know, Mr. Yoshino always says no problem is a problem, then we’re not going to be successful in any of the tool application.
Kate Holterhoff
Yeah, that’s phenomenal. And so a lot of these lessons, yeah, apply to Lean, they apply to DevOps, Can you talk at all about, you know, again, we’re roasting John Willis here. what is the intersection between what DevOps is doing, what sort of message John and the other folks at The Phoenix Project, etc. are bringing to your own learning?
Katie Anderson
Well, so it all comes back to, again, how do we look at systems and how do we have a learning mindset? So John’s and my paths overlapped because of his passion and interest in W. Edwards Deming and Deming’s influence on Japanese management and culture. And he got excited through a client of mine, Glenn Wilson, who had participated in some of my programs during the pandemic, who had already signed on to join one of my Japan leadership experiences, an immersive week in Japan. And Glenn said, John, you should come too. And so John joined me on that.
And what we discovered through many, both in that time in Japan and John and I have continued to stay connected because of the passion around Deming and learning, I’ve really come to see, and I hadn’t really been exposed to DevOps before that. I came from a healthcare background and worked with lot of manufacturing, biotech government. again, regardless of the process that we’re working in or the industry, the principles are all fundamentally the same. And I’ve heard that throughout the whole.
The whole of the last two days here, it’s about how do we know what problem we need to solve? What’s the value we need to create for our customers? How do we collaborate across our organization to do that? And how do we have a learning mindset to iterate our way towards that outcome that we need? And so if you strip away the language, it all comes back to the same principles and you can be talking about anything. So that’s why it’s also been such a fabulous time to be here because we’re all really trying to do the same thing.
Kate Holterhoff
Wow. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And you’ve brought a little toy with you today. So I’d love to hear about what
Katie Anderson
Yeah. So these are, I’m obsessed with these Japanese figures called Daruma dolls. And I now import thousands of them. I’m going back to Japan and I bring back hundreds every trip. And I have some huge ones. Well, they’re paper mache dolls that represent the Bodhidharma and he actually lost his feet because he sat in Zen meditation for so long. So it’s just a head. And they’re like little weeble wobbles where literally if you knock them over, they right themselves back up, they’re weighted at the bottom. And they represent the Japanese proverb, the Japanese proverb, fall down seven times, get up eight. And it’s when you have a goal, you fill in the doll’s left eye, give it a pupil. And it’s a visual reminder for you of your goal and that also the path towards achieving your goal is
going to have setbacks and stumbles and you’re going to fall down. But what’s important is about getting yourself back up and learning your way forward. And when you achieve your goal, you can fill in the dolls right eye. So I became obsessed with them when I lived in Japan in 2015. My kids were in preschool and they had a bunch of these. said, what are these? And then I’ve become obsessed. actually take people to the Daruma temple in Japan where they’re like stacked up in Japanese companies.
bring them for good luck and then have a big bonfire at the end of the year. But it’s really, really special. It’s about that patience, the perseverance, and the knowing that there’s stumbles and struggle along the way. And that’s inherent to the learning process or inherent to us achieving goals that we want.
Kate Holterhoff
Wow. that is so important. And I love the idea that it’s something you can interact with and it becomes part of your goal culture, right? Like, hey, I’m going to write a book, I’m going to start with the one eye and then when I finish it, you know, I’m going to remind myself throughout that it’s not going to be easy, there’s going to be hiccups, but you know, eventually I’m going to fill in that last eye.
Katie Anderson
So this one’s for you.
Kate Holterhoff
well, thank you so much. I appreciate that. All right. Well, so we are wrapping up here. You have your own podcast.
Katie Anderson
I do.
Kate Holterhoff
Talk to me about that.
Katie Anderson
It’s called Chain of Learning. And this came from a comment that Mr. Yoshino made to me as well as that. He was so grateful to be part of a company that really believed in a Chain of Learning. And I’ve come to see a Chain of Learning. It’s you and he and I here together, Kate. It’s the people listening. We’re all connected together as learners and leaders together. And it’s that intersection that really creates the strength in our organizations and in our world. So go check out Chain of Learning. And I drop episodes every two weeks. And people can reach out to me at Katie. I’m Katie Anderson. And KBJAnderson.com is my website and I’m on LinkedIn as well.
Kate Holterhoff
All right, thanks so much for coming.
Katie Anderson
Thanks Kate, it’s been great.
No Comments