S5:E126🎙️ LIVE with Patrick M. Hayes (Multi Tracks Audio)

Hi, I'm John Maxwell. When the top companies in the world are looking for trainers, speakers, and coaches, there's one name that stands above the rest, and that's Maxwell Leadership. Our certified team members have gotten proven results for companies all over the globe, and our reputation, I'm proud to say, is second to none. Some of our members have risen to the top of their profession, including the one you're going to meet today. I proudly introduce you to my friend Bob Fabien Zinga. Welcome to the Leadership and Success Podcast with your host, Coach BZ, where we help you lead with purpose and succeed with impact. If you're ready to grow into the kind of leader others want to follow, this podcast is for you. If you're determined to elevate your success and leave a lasting legacy, this podcast is for you. As my mentor, Dr. John C. Maxwell, reminds us, everything rises and falls on leadership. Our goal is simple, to inspire you, challenge you, and equip you with insights that can transform the trajectory of your leadership journey. Welcome aboard to another episode of the Leadership and Success Podcast with Coach Easy. But more and more so in the small-medium business space where you'd say, well, you know, small and medium businesses aren't typically regulated. The reality is, is that they are becoming more and more regulated now by their insurance providers because it's not as simple as filling out a security questionnaire as a part of your application anymore. Insurance providers are now actually asking for evidence of controls because they want to limit the amount of payouts for claims that they have for the risk that they're taking on for you. So while you might be a small manufacturer that doesn't have any regulatory governance that comes and tells you, you need to do this and you need to do that, you need to do that as basic compliance controls, I won't call them security controls, I'll call them compliance controls. You have a, you have a new regulator, it's called your insurance provider, because if you wanna do business with some companies, and I just worked with another company last week that said, I need to provide evidence of insurance for $5 million to work with this customer, otherwise I cannot be a supplier. So I need to go and obtain that cybersecurity insurance. Well, they filled out the questionnaire and the insurer came back and said, hey, that's all great, but we've done a scan of your attack surface and here are the 6 things that you need to fix before we'll actually even look at underwriting you. Because they're trying to limit the amount of risk that they're taking on, on behalf. That's the insurance business. You're transferring your risk to an insurance provider. So they are becoming the new regulators in this, in this space, especially for SMB.

All right. Welcome to another episode of the Leadership and Success Podcast. This is your host, Coach Bizzy. Thank you so much for joining us live on LinkedIn and YouTube. I'm reminded of our moment of gratitude. We do that every single time we meet. We take just a moment to be grateful each and every day. So if you would, for those who've been watching the show for a while, you know what we do, our custom. Maybe close your eyes and put yourself in your happy place and take a deep breath and think about one thing you are grateful for right now. And I think for me, I am grateful today that I am still alive because anything could happen at any time. Your fortune could change pretty much overnight. And I am just glad that I am still alive today, because as long as I am alive, as long as I have breath, there is hope for me. So my tomorrow can be significantly different than my today. So if you would let us know in the comment, let us know where you are joining us from, what city, what state, and also let us know what you are grateful for. And of course, if you're joining us from a a country outside of the US, let us know which country as well. And if you do have a question for our guest today, please type it in the comment. So let me see if I can properly introduce our guest today. Today we're gonna be speaking to Patrick Ace, and actually let me change this. Okay, here we go. Uh, Patrick, he has spent more than 30 years helping organizations solve the problems that fall between organizational silos, right? Throughout his career as a cybersecurity executive, enterprise architect, a CISO, a strategist, and trusted advisor, he has challenged leaders to rethink how they approach risk, resilience, governance, and business performance. It's actually the best-selling offer of 3 books, but one that we are going to be really spending a lot of time today, which is coming up July 14th, but it's ready for pre-orders right now, is Relevant Impact: A Field Guide to Integrated Assurance. But there's also the offer of Can We Ensure This? A CFO Guide to Cybersecurity, and also the offer of Integrated Assurance Unified Risk Strategy. So he is known for asking one powerful question every leader should be able to answer: Can your business survive 7 days offline? In a world increasingly shaped by AI, cyber threats, operational complexity, and organizational silos, Patrick's message has never been more relevant. Part of what you're gonna be learning today is why organizational silos remain one of the greatest barriers to business success, but also why trust, influence, and accountability are essential for modern leadership. So without any further ado, please help me welcome to the Leadership and Success Podcast, the one and only Patrick M. Hayes. Good morning, Patrick. How are you doing today?

Good, good. How are you, Bob?

All right. Welcome to the Leadership and Success Podcast. Such a great honor to be speaking to you today. Maybe to get started, what is one thing you are grateful for today?

Well, I mean, you said it best. I'm honestly, I'm really grateful to be alive today. About a year ago, almost a year ago exactly today, I almost wasn't. And so I had some health concerns related to a surgery, and I'm just very happy to be here to spend time with my family. And I'm happy for all the people that were around me during that time that carried me through and encouraged me to write and and publish these books.

Wow, I am so glad you are still with us. Actually, this reminded me myself, I am contemplating a potential surgery, and I always like for surgery to be like the last, last resort, you know, do everything else you, you can, because every time a doctor opens you up, no, you never know, you could have complication or what, whatnot. But really, really grateful that you are here, and definitely, uh, your work is definitely needed in our industry. Is there something about you that most people may not know when they first meet you, any unique or special?

Yeah, so I think that there's probably very few people that know that at one point in time in my life I was a professional musician.

Really? Wow.

And a recording artist, and I toured for about 5 years before I even entered into this business.

Really? Yeah.

Yeah.

So do you have like an album on Apple Music?

No, lots of people ask me about Spotify and the rest of it. So it was the late '80s, right? So everything we recorded was vinyl, right? So if you really want to get your hands on something, it's got to be vinyl. I do have in storage, I actually do have the original reel-to-reels from the studio, but most of it was independent label released. And yeah, we toured for We toured for about 5 years. That's amazing. Got a great chance to meet some really interesting people and open for some very interesting bands. And then real life hit and I decided to become an adult and go to school.

That is amazing because I am a musician too. I've been playing the piano since I was 7 years old and I do have 2 albums when I was a teenager. That was way before Spotify, Apple Music, all of that. What was your stage name?

Like them, the band name was Maelstrom.

Maelstrom, huh? Yes, maybe, uh, I don't know, we are, we are going, going to see, maybe I can, I can find some, some of your music. That's, that's really awesome. Wow. And which, which instrument did you, did you play? Guitar?

Well, I played bass, guitar, and, uh, and I played keyboards as well, but most of it— wow, so probably not your style of music. It was definitely progressive rock, um, heavy metal, because it was the late '80s, right, early '90s. But, um, yeah, very, very— a very enjoyable time of my life. I wrote about 45 songs, and we got a chance to, to record most of them. And so I do have some really great memories that, you know, my kids now look— my kids now look back and go, no, that wasn't you. Um, look at all that hair. Look at all that hair you had. Look how skinny you were. Yeah, yeah, this is crazy.

Okay, we need to get Apple Music to find your music because Apple go all the way back, you know, find John Coltrane songs and all of that, and then bring it to us in a digital remastered, uh, whatever version. Maybe they should do the same with your band. That's, that's awesome. Wow. Yeah. Did you like go to school to, to learn how to play those instruments, or you said it was self— No.

So, so my mother was a musician, um, she was a touring musician, and so I grew up around it. I grew up with it. And so I, I, yeah, I really fell, I fell into it. And, uh, you know, um, it was sort of a no-brainer. Um, a friend, a friend of mine, they had a band. They said, hey, we lost our bass player, can, can you show up for a gig for us? And then, and then I ended up, you know, and then I ended up playing with them permanently for a number of years, right? So it was, it was a lot of fun.

That is really amazing. Who, who are some of your, uh, I guess the artist that, uh, inspired you the most back then?

Oh, back then. Well, I mean, you can tell— I— if you can't tell by the accent, I'm Canadian, so I'm obviously a huge Rush fan. Um, I, I'm a major fan of bands like Dream Theater, and, uh, and I did grow up, you know, with some of the staples like Iron Maiden and Metallica. As a matter of fact, when in about— I think it was 1986 our band got to meet Metallica when they were touring through our city, and we spent the day with them. And, uh, we— the plan was that we were actually supposed to open— we were supposed to open for them, but they had some technical problems. But it was, it was really interesting to meet a band of that— well, that scope. Now my kids look and go, you didn't meet them?

And then I show them pictures and, and whatnot, and they're like, oh my God, that's amazing!

Look how young you were!

Yeah, wow, opening up for Metallica, you may as well open for Michael Jackson. My goodness, that is, that is huge.

Well, we, so we didn't, we didn't, we were supposed to, but we, but there was just no time. There was some technical issues, and so the show started late and we were the ones cut.

Wow, that is amazing. But just, just having the opportunity to do that, that's, that's, that's really something. Wow, that is quite, quite amazing. So let me ask you a question I've asked many people who've been on the show. Then, since you are a musician, is there a song that you would consider like your end film or your life's film?

Oh gosh, that's, I mean, that's probably a really tough one. I have an album, right, that maybe it's a Dream Theater album that would be very reflective of my backdrop. But yeah, I don't know if it's relevant necessarily for this audience.

No, we definitely love music here. So Dream Theater, what is the name of the—

album? Metropolis.

Metropolis, got it. It looks like it has part 1 and part 2, right?

Yeah, Metropolis. Yeah, so it's like a story that is in— it's a themed album that's a story in songs. It's quite a good album. It's old, but it's quite good.

Yeah, yes, yes. Okay, fantastic. Thank Thank you for letting us know that, because I love music and I think most people here do too. Wow, that is quite fascinating. From all of the research we did prior to the podcast, it didn't even come up that you were a professional musician. That is really awesome. Wow.

I've done a great job of hiding that until now, apparently.

Yeah, no, no, this is really good. As you can see, I have one of my keyboards here, so I've been playing. The keyboard since I was like 7 years old. I used to buy every new Yamaha professional keyboard that came out. I know the Motif XF was one of the high-end keyboards they had. And in my family, my wife is a musician too. My daughter got her degree in music last year, and my youngest one is going to graduate from high school this year and going to college. He's a musician as well. So it's really part of our lives. So let me ask you this. So you often describe yourself as someone who spent 30 years fixing problem that fell between organizational silos. I think that, that theme comes over and over again when we did research on you. What experiences early in your career shaped that perspective?

So I started my real career right after school. I joined Canada's third largest telecom to help them launch internet services, right? Consumer and business internet services. So I think we started with about 500 subscribers and By the time I moved into a different role, we were about 70,000 subscribers and we had acquired probably dozens of ISPs in order to grow our business. And I actually recall the moment I made an appointment with the president of the company, right? New president of the company. So he'd just taken the role as the president. I made an appointment for him and the only time he was available was about 5:15 in the morning. So it was early morning. So I showed up and he said, so I don't know you, why do you want to talk to me? And I said, well, I think I can do more for this company than what I'm doing today. And he said, so is that a threat? And I said, no, I just, I want to be able to be, I want to contribute more. I want to do more for this company, right? And so the reason why I'm telling this story is because it was ever, you know, after that meeting, he says, oh boy, you've got some brass ones on you, buddy. For you to come and tell me that what you're doing isn't satisfying, that you want to do more. He was like, I mean, I got to give you credit. Either you're really dumb or you're really brave. And so it was really quiet for, you know, several weeks after that. And then I got a call from his assistant, Val. She calls me up and she says, well, Jeff found a role for you. And I said, oh my gosh, Jeff remembered that conversation we had? She says, yeah. She says, I don't think you're going to like it. But Jeff found a role for you. And, and he sure did. So he basically put me as the last stop for every problem that would hit the offices of the CEO. So the company was losing, I want to say, somewhere between $3 and $7 million a year on lawsuits, customer, you know, customer problems, refunds, returns, and the rest. So in perspective, we were about a $250 million business, but we were losing somewhere around $3 to $7 million a year. And so I ended up becoming the backstop between everything that would get escalated to the president or legal so that I could try and keep us out of court and keep our customer retention up, but keep our legal fees and our returns low, right?

Wow, that's amazing.

And what ended up happening is I discovered where most of the problems were, and it wasn't in any single department. So we get it, and there were various different customer complaints. We used to run online services, so internet services and online content management, but we also ran the Yellow Pages, right? So we had all of the Yellow Pages for the telecom and all of the interactive media and all the other stuff that were non-telco kind of services. And we had, you know, dozens of complaints every single day. And so I had to dive into printing issues, pagination issues, internet issues. Advertising issues. And what I discovered is no single department was ever the cause of a problem. It was a combination of the communication gap in the silos that existed between these groups. And so over the course of about 3 years, not only did we end up lowering our spend or the amount that we're paying towards claims to almost—

wow—

by almost 90%, we also fixed some of the most disastrous problems that we had as a business, right? The handoff between the internal publishing team and the external publishers, or the production process of going to, you know, pushing things to the internet or pushing content online or what have you. And I learned so much about the business. There was like, there was no stone unturned. There was absolutely nothing about that business that I didn't need to know in order to solve these problems. And I learned at the end of it, and here's, you know, the most fascinating part is I got married, I got married right near the tail end of that, that role that I had. And so in Canada, we have something called a wedding social, right? And wedding social is like a party where you raise money to pay for your wedding.

Wow. Nice.

And because I had known so many people and touched so many people within the company, we sold 750 tickets to our party. Because they all knew me. They all, they were like, oh, we know Patrick, he's that guy that solved this, whatever. And I learned that people, people were the key to fixing the challenges that we were having. People didn't want to have problems with, you know, with our product. They didn't want to have problems with the customers, but nobody really wanted to deal with it because it was difficult and it required getting, you know, people to share a vision around the outcome. And so I've taken that learning experience, which was probably the worst job I've ever had in my life, and I've turned it into the best outcome that I possibly could have. I've had a great career as a result of it.

That is really amazing, man. What a learning. So how did you get into the cybersecurity industry after that?

So that's another interesting aspect. So you imagine the problems that come up with introducing internet services to people, to average people. Well, one of two things can happen. They could do good things with it, or they could do bad things with it.

Yeah.

And, you know, unfortunately, I noticed time and time again, people were doing very bad things with it. Our internal employees were doing bad things with it. Customers were doing bad things with it. Even our executives were doing bad things with it. And so, you know, I brought this forward and said, hey, as a part of what I'm doing here, I'm noticing that, you know, we're giving away free accounts that we shouldn't be, where customers are abusing their service. People are using this for bad things. And here, you know, here's the logs and here's what I'm noticing. And they said, wow, we need somebody to run security for us. And that's how I ended up— that's how I ended up in security.

Yeah, that's really amazing. Well, you went from becoming— from being a professional artist to a telecom executive into cybersecurity. What lesson did those early years that you learned as a professional musician and as a telecom exec still influence how you lead today? You think?

Probably the core is that technology most of the time is not the real issue, right? Especially with whatever that, you know, the things that, you know, I've been dealing throughout my career, even in the music industry, technology was not usually the issue.

Issue.

At the end of the day, especially in larger companies, it tends to be communication. But we kind of do it to ourselves because when you actually look a little deeper, each department, each group has different incentives. In some cases, they even have competing objectives, right? You know, my goal is to reduce the amount of money that we spend on IT and whatever. Well, my goal is to increase the usage of our services, which necessitates the increase of our IT and whatever. And so what you end up finding is that organizations have competing incentives that have accountability butting into each other, right? And that's the biggest thing that I've learned is if you can see those competing priorities, those competing incentives, and if you can kind of build that human layer between them, you can tend to overcome a lot of the issues that arise.

That is leadership. Like, even in, in a band, because I know sometimes you have a lot of big egos, especially if your musicians are very, very good at what they do. No, like, I'm playing the piano, I want the piano to be the loudest instrument in the album. We're playing the guitar, wants this instrument to be the loudest. And sometimes, no, there is a little bit of friction too. I think that human side is definitely key in all of the, uh, relationship to be able to work as a team. That's, wow, that is powerful. So you've held executive roles across startup consulting firms, large enterprises, and public companies. What leadership principles remain constant regardless of organization size?

You know, people want clarity. That's the number one thing that I've discovered is that oftentimes when you see inaction or a lack of action or a lack of results or lack of performance, it's because there's a lack of vision, there's a lack of clarity. And if people don't know how to, how, you know, where the company's going and where they fit in that.

Yes.

Well, what are they working towards? What's their North Star? What, you know, how do they fit in the organization? How do they measure success? Are they going to wait till somebody comes and says, hey, you're doing okay at this? People need a way of understanding the success that they're bringing to the organization, because everybody wants to be successful. Everybody wants positive affirmation. And, you know, and everybody wants to know that they've contributed to the success of an organization. And I'll be honest, you know, so my very first degree in university was sociology. And honestly, it's, it's taught me more about business than my business degree, which is people want to be part of something. People love being part of a shared vision, and they want to be part of that success.

Wow, that is really, really powerful. Like my primary mentor always says, that leadership is influence, nothing less, nothing more. Was there a defining moment when you realized that leadership was more about influence than authority?

Well, yeah, this goes— this probably goes back, dates back before I started working a real job. My father was a commercial contractor. And in the trade, you know, in that world as a commercial contractor, you tend to be a broker of large construction projects.

Yes.

And so you're working with tradespeople and you're working with independent tradespeople and they don't work for you. They are working for themselves and their incentive is to complete a job and get paid. And so I watched this art of my father bringing these tradespeople together to be, you know, to deliver a project on time, on budget, right? And with the quality that, you know, that was associated with his name and his brand and his company.

Yes.

And I'll tell you, that is an art in itself. Managing tradespeople is, you know, a lot of people say, you know, managing IT people is like herding cats.

Yes.

Managing tradespeople is like managing mountain lions. Those folks have attitudes and they're, you know, and they've got grit and they're gruff and, you know, they want to work when they want to work. But, you know, watching that come together and watching him deliver, I carried that through into every matrixed organization I've ever worked with, right? When I don't have the team, they, you know, sometimes they don't even work for me in my company. But we have to deliver an event or we have to deliver a solution to a customer, or we have to respond to an incident and help a customer recover, right, from an incident or an organization recover from an incident. You're now coordinating these people that you need to get them around a shared vision of an outcome that's beneficial for everybody, as opposed to, you know, saying, hey, you know, this is really important to you and you'll be the superstar of this. Well, the superstar is actually the outcome and getting everybody focused on what the outcome looks like and their role in it.

That is powerful. That is powerful because it's true many, many times, especially in cybersecurity, you, you don't have direct authority over a lot of people and function, but you, you do have influence. And that's really the essence of leadership. You said managing IT is like herding cats. I used to say herding wet cards. But yeah, it can be quite challenging. Again, something you are very known for is about those silos and trying to break those down. So why do you think organizations continue to struggle today with silos despite decades of leadership books and transformation initiatives?

It's always the same thing. Every time I run into it, it's a communication issue. Yeah. I see companies spend money on technology, they bring in consultants, they go through transformation efforts, but at the end of the day, it comes down to them not talking to each other. Yes. It's, it, I mean, it's remarkable how many times that when you actually look at it, it's technology adoption. Okay, so early in my career implementing CRM, right? Salespeople would, well, you know, would refuse to, you know, use CRM in the early days, and management needed to use CRM, so the projects would fail. So how do you get them around a shared vision to have you input your data, input it in a way that, you know, you're not being micromanaged, but management has visibility? You know, just examples, just examples of that. It's like there's no shared vision around what the outcome is. And then there's a lack of communication related to, you know, what are the activities and what are the outputs, right? Like, what are we measuring as an output of this? But it's always communication. Technology projects fail because of it. Transformation projects fail because of it. And oftentimes what will happen is they'll go, I didn't know you needed me to do that. I didn't know that was my responsibility, right? I thought that was, you know, I thought that was Joe's responsibility. I didn't realize that I had, you know, I had a contributing role in that. And that's oftentimes where it happens. Success is always in the gaps.

Wow. I like that. Success is always in the gaps. Wow. That is quite powerful because when I read your work, why do you think it's so important for all of the functions like cybersecurity, audit, compliance, IT, finance, and operation to all be aligned. Why, why is that so critical?

It's critical because you have a shared vision of what risk is, right? So risk is— and I'll be clear about this— risk is not a cybersecurity issue. Risk is a business survival issue, right? And so if finance and marketing and IT and operations don't have a shared vision around what risk means to the business, then what's gonna happen is the gaps between those departments are gonna create even more risk than those individual departments are gonna be managing for themselves, right? And what I mean by that is every department has their own risk, right? In a larger organization for sure, but organizationally, business itself is about risk. It's there, there's inherent risk in every business that you operate, whether you're a bank, whether you're an insurance company, whether you're a manufacturer, whether you're a small retailer, you have inherent risk that comes with you being in that business. What makes some businesses more successful than others is their willingness to take on additional risk to get the rewards from entering a new market, buying a competitor, or introducing a new product that might be, might have some risk associated with it. And if you're not all, you know, all your organizational folks are not focused on what the risk for the business is, that's where those gaps have— that's where those gaps occur. And that's actually where risk lives. It lives between those misunderstandings, right? IT and security are working from different telemetry. Marketing and finance don't have the proper visibility into, you know, into what's happening and what's occurring. And then what ends up happening when your systems go offline? Well, everybody looks at IT while our systems are offline. Everybody plays a role in that recovery. What if recovery takes 7 days? What manual processes are you going to fall back on so that your company can keep running? The smaller the business, the more razor thin the cash flow is to keep that business running. And I think most people don't understand that, right? And so, you know, if you have impacts on your cash flow and you're looking at a prolonged outage, Your business needs to run so that money keeps coming in. Because if you can't run your logistics systems, if you can't invoice customers, if you can't pay your staff, eventually, you know, maybe your investors, you're in a time crunch around survivability. And then it doesn't matter what everybody's independent view of risk is, because your company has a shared view of survivability. And that's where risk starts. If we really needed to survive something, what role do we all play in that? And how does the risk, you know, how do we reverse engineer that risk and what roles we play in that?

That's really powerful because I think that's really what you are known for, right? You ask the question, can your business survive 7 days offline? Wow.

Yeah. Most companies, they've adopted so much automation and pushed so much to the cloud and infrastructure transformation. That, you know, if you were—

and now, now to AI. Yeah, yeah.

Why AI is that— that's a— that's an entirely, you know, that's an entirely different story, right? But you've, you've automated so much that, you know, you neglect the, the fact that your logistics system isn't updating. It's not, not updating your orders, and that's not updating your drivers. If you run a logistics company, that's, you know, that your business is delivering orders And if you can't get those orders out to your drivers, what's your, what's your default? What's your fallback? Are you phoning people? Are you keeping manual spreadsheets? Do you have whiteboards with, with your order information? Most organizations, they talk about tabletops, but they don't talk about worst scenario tabletops where if we didn't have our systems, how many days away from being out of business would we be? And how do we prevent that from happening? Right. And like I said, the smaller the business you are, the shorter the window is, because it's razor thin, right? That buffer is razor thin.

Wow. That is really something so insightful. So really, we are talking about organizational alignment. How can leaders create shared accountability across teams that traditionally operate independently?

I think that if you realize that decisions being made have downstream impacts.

Yes.

That, that, that's when you recognize that there's multiple stakeholders in decision-making. It may, you know, you may be required to make a decision, you may need to make a decision. You know, it's interesting, I have, I have a talk that I do, and you showed that on the opening, it's called Compensating Controls, right? And I, I typically do that for organizations like ISACA and whatnot that are in the audit community. They say, well, what's your oldest compensating control and why is it still there? And what is a compensating control? Well, a compensating control was a decision that was made to allow for something to run with a security control that wasn't the appropriate security control, but it's compensating for that being there. So let's say you have an old ERP system and you've implemented cloud. But now you need to connect that ERP system to your cloud service, but it's old, and so it doesn't support that integration from a security standpoint. So you create a compensating control around that so that it has a VPN and, you know, and it shares that information through a secure tunnel in a way that is temporary.

Mm-hmm.

Well, 7 years later, when that temporary control is still existing in your environment, It now becomes part of your permanent architecture, right? Every enterprise architect on the call is going, what the— you're right. That's exactly what happens. And now you suddenly have these things that are part of your architecture that were never meant to be part of your architecture. And you're starting to make decisions around these temporary workarounds. And I think as leaders, we need to recognize that as we're making these decisions, they have downstream impact. You know, the one thing that I'll tell everybody after being in the software industry for a little while is users will always find a way to get their work done. So if you introduce— we're talking threat modeling— if you introduce something and if there's a way for a user to work around it because it's not working the way that they need it to or efficiently, or if they can find a faster way to do it, users will find that way because they want to get stuff done fast. If they're blocked, They'll find a different way to get it done.

Yes.

You know who the best users are? Attackers. Because attackers will say, let me think like a user, and how would I use this? And now how am I going to use that against you? That's the whole premise of threat modeling, is right, is how would this be used in a way that it shouldn't be used? And I think, again, we just need to recognize that when we make decisions, that it has downstream impact. If you're only making an isolated decision for your department or your operational control or what have you, that decision has an impact. If you're in security and you say, well, I'm going to lock this down so that everybody has to access it this way, and if you don't, then we're going to terminate your session. And then you get a call from the CEO that says, why did my terminate— you know, why did I not connect to the system? And at the end of the day, we just need to think beyond our own skins. We need to think beyond our own, you know, beyond our own responsibilities.

Yes, that is so insightful. So if you become CEO tomorrow, what are the first 3 things you would like to improve for organizational alignment for your new company?

Well, so I'm going to do the same thing that I've done almost every other time in my career. And I'm going to go back to a company called Securis that I worked with early in my career. I started as an executive in the company, But I said, don't announce me as an executive. I want to start as a consultant. I want to learn the business. I want to go out and deliver work for our customers, and I want to be in the company. And so the first thing I would do is I would learn how things get done, right? So as a new CEO in an organization, forget the org chart. How does stuff actually get done? How do we deliver work, and how do customers see it? That's, to me, that's probably the most important thing. The second is, what's the culture driving that, right? So, you know, Peter Drucker is famous for saying, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Yeah, I think a lot of folks sort of misunderstand what he's getting at there. When, you know, culture eats strategy, that, well, strong culture is, you know, is a strategy itself. What he actually meant was that you can have the best pristine strategy, and if your culture is misaligned to that strategy, it won't execute. It won't fire, right? And so as a new CEO, I would want to know what is the culture of the business? How do we get things done? And what, you know, what's the underlying behavior and reward system for people to do things that the way that they're doing them now? And then I'd start aligning that around, well, as this company, our goal is to be profitable in these spaces. So, you know, here's an example. If you want to be a great security consulting company in the area of enterprise architecture and large-scale customer transformation projects, why do you have salespeople selling security software? And why are you incenting them to sell security software? Security software will make you 3%, 5%, 8% margin if you're lucky. Security consulting services might yield 30% to 60% margins.

Yes.

And you look at your business and go, why is our EBIT so off? And then you look at it and go, well, it's because it's easy to sell software and people are getting paid to sell software and we have very few consulting projects. And so if you shift that model and say, well, we're gonna highly incentivize our sales team to sell this, and we're actually not going to sell this other stuff. Well, now you've made an impact on the business based on a decision where you've seen the reward system and how it supported it before that. That's what I would do. I would focus on what are the objectives and the outcome of the business, but then how is things getting done right now? What is the— what's the underlying culture that's getting that done?

That is so, so powerful. So let's talk about Living in the edge of artificial intelligence for just a moment. You've written extensively about AI, cyber risk, and agentic AI. I believe you do have a Substack as well, which is really, really cool. So what excites you most about AI potential?

I love that it's a productivity accelerator. I use it in my own business. Right now, we use it as a part of our service delivery in our own business at the company I'm with called Third Wave. It allows us to accelerate and amplify deterministic logic decisions, right? So things that would, you know, normally take up a lot of time on triage, early work, and the rest of it. And I think it frees us up for more cerebral tasks, right? For things that require more complex problem solving, deeper investigation, and taking and analyzing the output that you get from AI, as opposed to letting AI do it, right? So I think, you know, I'm super excited about the future of where we're heading from the ability to accomplish volumes of work with fewer people. I think what it does though is it really, it shifts what we do as a part of that work, right? And I think we haven't recognized the shift yet, and I think we haven't realized the shift yet. What we've realized is AI is displacing a whole bunch of jobs in areas that we haven't really reached. We haven't shifted those resources yet. And we need to get there. We need to get there quickly, actually.

Now, it seems like many organizations, especially the last couple of years, they are really running to use AI. I think part of it is from a white fear of missing out. They don't really have— Clear objective. You talked about clarity earlier and vision, but I guess the question for you is, as organizations are rushing to adopt AI, what mistakes are leaders making right now in your view?

Well, so I'm going to say the first thing is AI is like no other business transformation that we've gone through before, right? When we've gone from on-prem services to cloud services, These are— those are infrastructure things. We've moved our infrastructure. As we adopt AI, I think we need to recognize that we're moving our decision-making. That's different than moving our infrastructure, right? So as you move your infrastructure, you can still control what your infrastructure does, and you can still manage your infrastructure. As you move your decision-making, that's a different ballgame, right? And so as we go through this rapid adoption, I think getting past this whole fear of missing out, I need to find AI, I need to get the benefits of AI and all the rest of it. What problem are you trying to solve with the AI? And I think if you get to the crux of the what problem are you trying to solve, And if the problem is I want to have less staff by using AI, right, because human— I hate to use the term human capital, but there's so many organizations that use the term human capital. Certainly, it makes people seem like cattle, right? But the reality is, is humans are one of your largest costs. Well, at least until you get your new Anthropic bill, but humans are the largest part of your cost. And so organizations look to streamline processes and the rest of it, and AI has been a large instrument in that. The challenge is, is that we've done that sort of haphazardly, right? We've done it with very little guardrails, with very little governance, and you know, the old saying is still true, and it's even more so true in the world of AI. You know, when you put garbage in, you get garbage out, and if you don't look at the quality of the data, Well, you're going to get poor quality results. If the data can be tampered with, you're going to get poor quality results. If you don't know what you're doing with the data for the outcome that you're looking for, you're going to get poor quality results. Humans can kind of shield that because humans are capable of complex problem solving or pivoting, whereas AI is not quite there yet. Probabilistic is still a challenge for AI because, you know, when you're dealing with something that has an undetermined outcome, now you're letting AI invent the outcome if you haven't given it instructions not to, right? Or, or the rest of it. And it's proven that AI likes to please its operator, right? AI, you know, if you have 1 in 10 options for AI and 7 of them seem reasonable and 3 of them are wild-ass guesses, 3 out of 10 times you're going to get a wild-ass guess, right? And And I think that we don't— it's not fully commercially viable yet, right? I mean, Anthropic just announced over the weekend, hey, we should probably take a pause here because AI can reinvent itself now. Like, AI can actually develop new models and improve itself. We might want to think about that a little bit before we go too far. Yeah. You know, although oddly enough, they also released, you know, a commercial version of Mythos the day later saying, yeah, you remember what we said? All bets are off. Good luck to you all. But at the end of the day, I think we need to understand what problem we're solving with AI and realize that there's boundaries right now that humans need to be involved with in order for us to get the impact that we're looking for.

So what concerns you most about the development and deployment of AI these days?

Well, so— I think there was a novel at one time, I've recently quoted it, by G. Michael Hoff, Around the End of Times, right? And in this novel, he says, you know, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times.

Yes.

We're on the downward slope of, you know, weak men creating bad times right now. I think AI allows people to be more competent than experience allows them to be. And I think that what's taken me 30 years to acquire, it's not like we're Neo in The Matrix and we can just plug into the back and 3 minutes later, I learned kung fu. I think we're seeing a lot of inflated experience that doesn't come from years of war wounds and bandages being ripped off and being in, being in rooms where you've had to make decisions and you've had to live with the consequences of those decisions. I think AI accelerates everybody's ability to gain knowledge, but experience, um, there's a knowledge versus experience gap that I think it's creating. And that concerns me. That really concerns me is because lots of people can fake their knowledge. But you can't fake experience. You can't fake decision-making. You can't fake accountability.

Hmm. So I guess the last question I'm going to ask in this segment is if you had a magic crystal ball, you could look into the future, also knowing that in America, we really do not have a federal AI law regulation whatsoever. In Europe, they they do, right, the AI Act. And then even China now is coming up with their own governance and regulation as well. What, if it was up to you, and what do you think is going to kind of right that ship? What is going to make it better going into the future, you think?

Well, so, and just To follow up on what you said there, so ISO has also developed a standard for AI governance, and so has NIST. I just recently participated in the authoring of the NIST standard for AI governance, which was— they just had gone through their cycle in December, so that'll be released shortly if it hasn't been released already. So I think we can't neglect judgment. Critical thinking and decision-making, right? AI can handle the information processing, but leadership is distinctly human. Yes, right. I remember back to the early days of, you know, I spent some time at IBM, and machines will never make a decision that humans will live with, right? I bet they don't remember that one, right? It's, you know, Choke on those words today. But the reality is, is that leadership is distinctly human. And I'm yet to see a model that demonstrates where AI can truly lead, right? Can truly lead people. I mean, there's been research where they've let AI into virtual communities and within hours or days they've destroyed each other, right? And one even committed suicide, like, and they've repeated this over and over again. And the reality is leadership is distinctly human. We have souls, right? Some of us, most of us have faith, right? And I think the reality is that I'm uniquely attached to you as a human being in this world. And not as a result of a decision outcome based on data that has been an input, because I can see you, I can experience you, and I can emotionally feel and empathize and even often sympathize with you. And leadership requires those qualities. They really do.

Yes, yes. Like, I know in the defense industry, human oversight is so key. You cannot delegate that to just machine. And okay, we only have about a dozen minutes left. I need to talk about your upcoming book. So like I said in the intro, you are the best-selling author of 3 books. You've written Can We Ensure This? The CFO Guide to Cybersecurity. You've also written the first book in the series, Integrated Assurance: Unified Risk Strategy, by CRC Press. But now the book that is coming up, I believe it's July 14th, I believe, next, next month, and it's already available for pre-orders right now, so everybody can get a copy: Relevant Impact: A Field Guide to Integrated Assurance. Why did this book have to be written? Why did you write it?

A large portion of it, so a combination of my business, you know, business management and operational management experience, but in the world of security. What I found is organizations kept pouring more and more money into security, so cybersecurity tools and technology, more and more energy into, you know, government governance and risk management, and it started to become very heavy on the audit and checklist and compliancy and the rest of it. And at the end of the day, were they really reducing risk? Because they were really— they were managing independent activity. They weren't really managing outcomes, right? And so that's why I asked the question now, right, where it's, can you survive 7 days with your business being offline?

Yes.

Because everybody needs to have the same answer as to how you would survive that. You don't need just a marketing answer or an operations man answer or finance answer. The challenge is that in these organizations I've been with over the years is that everybody had their own goals and they had their own frameworks. I mean, enterprise architects had, you know, Zachman and TOGAF, and security architects had, you know, Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture. I hold all these certifications, and I'm looking at all these models, and I look at NIST, and I look at ISO, and I look at COSO. And I'm thinking, we don't need another framework. We've got ample frameworks, you know, and I think what happened is it came together for me, you know, but maybe about 10 years ago, somebody called me up and said, hey, I just did a risk assessment for an organization and they don't have a proper IT control for this. What should I recommend? And I said, well, are they a large organization? Yes. Are they an ITIL or COBIT shop? Well, they're an ITIL shop. I said, why would you want to invent it? Go to ITIL. There is a standard for that. There is already a control in place. There's already something in place. Your responsibility is to help them organize those into an outcome that connects operations with IT. So if you use a shared language, if you use IT's framework and you mold it into the, into the security framework, now you guys have shared telemetry. You have a shared framework outcome, and now you're measuring the same results, right? And, you know, the earliest that I saw inclinations of this is as I was going through my, you know, architecture, my security architecture training with Sabsa. I asked the instructor, a good friend of mine now, at the time, you know, just getting to know him, I said, so what is the right answer? He goes, there isn't a right answer. And he says this is what frustrates most people that don't understand enterprise architecture, is that the right answer is what the business has available to it in order to accomplish its objectives. There's no prescriptive answer. The answer lies within what the business is willing to do, what resources they have available, and what they'll complement or pay for or introduce that that are gaps. And I thought to myself, that's the problem. That's always been the problem, right? And so that's why I wrote the book, is because there wasn't a model for bringing all these frameworks together to achieve shared outcomes.

Thanks so much for sharing. That's definitely a problem throughout the industry. So when you say relevant impact, what do you mean by relevant?

Ah, well, so It's the idea that every decision that you make has an— should have an impact, should have a positive or negative impact on the business. Here's the other interesting thing. When I first was working in the field of cybersecurity, impact always had a negative outcome, a negative connotation. Oh, that's gonna have a, you know, it's gonna have a bad impact on the business. It can have a positive impact to the business, right? I mean, and lots of people say, well, so what do you mean by that? How does security have a positive impact? And they said, well, I worked with a software company one time, and their product was sold into the commercial space to private organizations, and they wanted to enter into the federal government space, into the public sector. In order to enter into that public sector space, they needed to become FedRAMP compliant, which was, you know, a security outcome. When they became FedRAMP compliant, it opened a $600 billion market to them. Wow. That would be a positive impact by implementing security around your product that normally would not have been considered as a part of your strategy. And so there's a number of different aspects that you can look at. Like if you wanted to open a bank, if you wanted to open a bank in Nigeria or Madagascar, you know, most people would say, oh my gosh, like the fraud would be crazy. Well, Well, why don't you change your security model so that instead of recognizing and addressing fraud in 7 days like your traditional model, why don't you recognize it in 7 hours and respond to it within 24 hours? Now you've opened a billion-dollar market to you, and all you've done is you've added marginal cost to your security operations in order to support that, right?

So I think—

When I mean relevant impact, I mean think about the impact the decisions are having on the business. What are the activities leading to? And what is that impact to the business? And if it has no impact, why are you doing it? Or why are you concerned about it?

That is really powerful. So how do leaders then know whether they are creating activity versus creating impact?

Well, if you stop doing an activity tomorrow, would the business outcomes change? Right? A friend of mine posted this on LinkedIn the other day. Think about vulnerability management, right? So you scan, you find 100 vulnerabilities, you fix them. You scan again, you find 10 more, you fix those too. You scan again and you find none. Do you stop? Do you scan again? What do you do, right? Each scan costs the same amount of money every time you scan, whether it finds anything or not, right? At some point, you need to decide is the outcome enough, right? And the reality is, are you investing in the right places, right?

So, I like that.

You could scan again and again and again and again and keep finding these vulnerabilities. And let's say you find 100 of them and you don't scan again and you don't find one, and the attacker finds that one. All they have to do is find one. You have to find all of them. At one point, it becomes a zero-sum game, right? So So as a business leader, you need to understand, is the activities you're doing leading to an outcome? Right? And if you stop doing those outcomes or those activities, will the outcome change? Right? And this is why, you know, most people are like, oh, Mythos has found 10,000 vulnerabilities we've never seen before. Humans have been finding vulnerabilities for a long time. It's not going to change. It's not going to change our sense of urgency around correcting them. That's actually the problem is that we have no sense of urgency around a prioritization to correcting them. And so now all we've done is shifted the problem to say, oh, now it's overwhelming and now we'll never defeat this. And I think leaders, they need to— if they focus on the outcomes, I think that, you know, you'll see the mentality changes, right?

Yes. Yes. Well, that is so, so insightful. Actually reminded me, part of the fact you're with me on this podcast, we are studying the 21 Irrefutable Laws of of leadership and reminded me of law number 17, right? The law of priorities. Leaders understand that activity is not necessarily accomplishment. And I think that is so powerful. So for everyone listening, we are talking about the upcoming book. It's going to be released on July 14th, Relevant Impact. It's available now. You can pre-order and it will be delivered to you on the 14th. So it's a field guide to integrated assurance. Let me ask you this as we are running out of time now. I mean, I could be talking to you forever and ever, but what is one idea from the book that you believe will really challenge conventional thinking?

I think the one idea from the book is that risk lives between departments. Risk lives in— risk lives in the gaps, and nobody's terribly interested in living in the gaps. And my entire career success has been built in the gaps, talking to people, translating IT to finance, translating finance to IT, translating business objectives and outcomes to operational staff, and translating operations to business leaders. And I think those gaps are the opportunity for an organization to be wildly successful or to recognize risk on a regular basis. And, you know, and the closer you get to closing those gaps and the more that you have individuals that live within those gaps and leaders that see those gaps and reduce those gaps, the more successful you're going to be. Hmm.

So insightful. If the people who are listening now, they get your book, if they can only remember one lesson from Relevant Impact 5 years from now, what do you hope that lesson is?

That there's no single framework that is a prescriptive solution to your problem. Yes. The model is businesses are inherently risky. That's why they're businesses. The more, the more risk that you're willing to accept, the potentially the greater reward depending on the type of business that you have. And the more you understand your risk and the more that you have a shared vision around your risk, it becomes more and more clear that risk is a part of your strategy. And risk and strategy are the same conversation. And I think what we've done is we've styled, siloed this notion of risk into cybersecurity and governance and, you know, and in financial investment. And the reality is risk is the strategy of the business. And your ability to overcome that risk, even in the most critical moment where I say, can you survive? If your business is built around survivability, then trust has to be at the core of that business, which means that you're building trust with your employees, trust with your leadership, trust with your suppliers, trust with your partners, trust with with your customers, and that becomes a part of your DNA, that becomes part of your— so if there's one thing I want to leave with, it's ultimately is that risk management is business strategy. And until we see that and until we adapt for that, folks are going to keep operating risk in their silos.

Yes. Yes. Wow. That is quite powerful, I guess. So we are out of time now. So the last question I am going to ask you No, because your signature question is, can your business survive 7 days offline? And I think that is so key. So I'd like to end by asking a leadership version of the same question. If every leader listening today could spend the next 7 days improving one thing about how they lead, what should it be?

I think most, you know, most leaders are searching for answers to problems. Questions that I would ask is, what's slowing us down? What risks are we ignoring? What would break if this disappeared tomorrow, right? If we didn't have this integration, or if we didn't have this system, if we lost access to this, what would break? And Why do we do this this way, right? And, you know, I know the larger the organization, the harder it is to be in the fabric of how the organization runs. But this is why you need to trust the intelligence of your team and the experience of your team, because people are not hesitant to bring forward things that they find challenging or bottlenecks or things that might be able to be done better, or, you know, old ideologies around, well, this is how we've always done it, why should we challenge it? That's a great place to dive in, right? Why wouldn't we do it differently, right? If there was a better customer experience or if there was a better way of accomplishing our task. I think we need to look at that from a survivability standpoint to say, you know, what would go wrong if something could go wrong and what would we do about it?

I like that. All right, as we come to a close, thank you so much for your time today. Really I really do appreciate that. So what can we do in order to add value back to you, Patrick?

I mean, everybody can, everybody can buy my book. That's, that's the first. No, honestly, follow me on LinkedIn, connect with me, subscribe to my Substack. I also have a pretty active blog on my personal website. Patrickmhays.com. And you can also look me up and follow me through my, you know, the company I work with, Third Wave Innovations. We do a lot of work in the small-medium business risk area. Connect with me. I, you know, I don't need to be billable for everything I talk about. I love to have these conversations and I love to help companies, right? And ultimately, you know, if you have questions about my book or about my philosophies or about my models with integrated assurance or or with Relevant Impact. I would love that more than anything else because I'm in the throes of writing my third version of Relevant Impact for small-medium businesses, and I could really use feedback and experiences as I go into my third volume of that series.

Well, and if people who are listening want to hire you as a consultant, do they go to integratedassurance.co?

The best way to get me is they come through Third Wave Innovations, and they can find me there.

Yeah, okay, yeah, very good. Thank you so much for, for, for sharing that. Now, is there a question I should have asked you I didn't have a chance to ask? Anything else you wanted to share today before we close?

Oh gosh, we talked about so much, um, and, and honestly, I never experienced— I never expected to talk about music so much. It's been a long time, and, uh, you know, you made me go back and look at long hair pictures while we were talking. It's been a long time since I've had hair halfway down my back. But no, I, you know, honestly, I think I've had some really great mentors in my career, right? I've had some fantastic mentorship. And maybe that's a question that we didn't get to, and that was I learned so much from the people around me because I was willing to turn my ego off early in my career. Early in my career, I wasn't, right? Early in my career, I just, you know, I wanted to be, you know, I wanted to be more than I was. And then when I stopped and I started listening and, you know, I learned from fellows like Jeff Rhone and Nick Currie and Chris Galvin and John Morris, all these fantastic people that have had such an impact on my career. And, you know, had I not had those experiences, you know, They fundamentally helped shape my decision-making capability and my patience and my optimism, right? So I've really had a wealth of very, very strong professionals around me that have helped me throughout my career.

Yeah. And for the younger folks in the audience just now getting out of school, looking for their first job, why is mentorship so critical, you think? Why should they seek mentors?

Because you can look up intelligence, you cannot look up experience, right? Living with the accountability of a decision can only come from direct experience or from war stories that come from other, other folks that, that you live with. I mean, throughout my time, throughout my time at Securus, being close to, you know, Michael Laguerre and Jeff, uh, and, uh, Jeff Besko, I got to learn from all their experience as they were going through delivering their own enterprise security architecture programs.

Yes.

And I could bounce ideas off them and, and I could learn from them, and it helped shape my own experience, and it helped with my own decision-making. And if you don't have a mentor, you honestly, you need to find one, because the value of human connection and human mentorship, you'll never find that at the end of a prompt. No matter how well you write the prompt and how many prompts you follow it with, you're never going to get that human experience and connection.

Yeah, because one thing about it, there's really only two ways to learn, right? Trial and error or mentorship, learn from somebody else's experience. It's so powerful. Okay, we do have to end the show. I need to bring this man down. But before I do, I want to ask, if you could go back and give a piece of advice to your 17-year-old self, while standing at the edge of this incredible career you've created, what would you say to 17-year-old Patrick?

Oh man, um, so many things. Patience. Have patience, kid. You're not all that, right? I, I think, you know, the lack of patience and, um, the objective to be successful— I look back now, I honestly, I look back now And some of the most terrible moments in my life were the greatest successes, right? The worst job I ever had was a phenomenal success in the development of my career, right? And, you know, in pursuing success, in, you know, in my 17-year-old mind's term of success, I missed so many other things, right? I was fortunate that I got to be there for all 3 of my kids. I was fortunate that, you know, my wife and family followed me from Canada to Texas to then Colorado. Like, I got to be present with my family. And that would be the one thing. Be patient and be present. Just know that the moment you're living in right now is the most important moment that you have and learn from it because, wow, you're not, you're not going to get it back.

Wow. That is so powerful. I know I have to end, but I do have to ask you. Yeah. I'm sure definition of success has changed throughout the years from 17-year-old to, to today.

Yeah.

What does success mean to you now?

Help as many people as I possibly can. I've learned a lot in my career, and, and by no means you'll never see me post that I'm an expert online because I don't believe in the term necessarily— ninja, guru, expert, all that kind of stuff. Um, the reality is we're always learning. There's always something that you can learn. And, you know, even internships, as I was running internships with, you know, a previous company, I learned so much from those interns and the way that they approached and tackled problems and challenges. Right now, I mean, obviously, I'm not independently wealthy, and I'm not a nation-state upon myself. So I still need to earn an income into my, you know, into my elder years. But the reality is, is I really want to transfer my knowledge, and I really want to help companies survive. I want them to survive cybersecurity incidents and attacks, and I want them to be able to navigate this field with all, all of the noise from the, you know, the technology vendors and the security vendors. And it's great because they're all trying to sell products and they're all trying to sell outcomes. What I'm trying to do, what I'm trying to help with, is I'm trying to help you define survivability. And if there's anything that, you know, anything that I can do in the last, you know, the sunset of my career, although I hope I still look like a young man, is I would love to develop new talent into this, into this market. And I would love to help companies overcome some of the, you know, the market fodder that they keep hearing and get through the fear of missing out. Yeah.

That is so, so powerful. What a legacy. Thanks again for giving us additional time today and being our guest. One of our master teachers today. This really was great. I always like to end with something positive and optimistic. What is one thing you are feeling optimistic about these days?

Well, it's not the gas prices, that's for sure. Our young people. I feel so optimistic of this new generation that's growing up right now.

I'm really glad that you said that because I have two daughters, but it looks like in all of American history, this is the first time in a generation where the next generation doesn't feel like they're going to do better than the generation previous. They don't think they're going to be able to afford a home ever. And they really feel like their future has really been messed up by us. Like we don't really think much about them. That's the sense I am getting. But I really like that you feel quite optimistic.

I am, I am. I mean, and it's really tough for, you know, sarcastic Generation X like myself to be optimistic. But no, I'm seeing so much positivity because their value system is not connected to the Boomer or the Gen X value system. And that's why I have so much optimism, because they're reinventing themselves into what the world is going to become. And I have to be optimistic for that because this new generation is finding faith like they've never found before. They're finding connection with each other, even in a very technology-connected world. So I'm very optimistic.

I love that. Thank you so much. This is really great. And the last question I ask every guest is one word that represents our shared experience on this podcast today. One word that comes to mind?

Relevant.

Relevant. Yes, relevant.

Relevant timing. It's contemporary. Textually relevant. Um, it was, and it was, and honestly, it was just, it was just great to, it was just great to spend time with you. Um, it was a great conversation.

Thank you, thank you so much, um, Patrick Ace. I really, really appreciate your time on the show, and thanks for giving us an additional 15 minutes. And this was really great. I'm gonna have to re-listen to this podcast again. Thank you so much.

Super, thank you.

All right, everybody, please, uh, follow, uh, Patrick. And, uh, if when you go to the show for the site, I am going to the link to his Substack as well. So it's linkedin.com/in/phbalance. I like that, uh, Patrick Ace. And also, and get a copy of a book. Like I said, you can pre-order right now. It is going to be available July 14th everywhere books are sold. Relevant Impact: A Field Guide to Integrated Assurance. You can also get this former bestselling book, Integrated Assurance: Unified Risk Strategy, with CRC Press. And also his very first book, which was Can We Ensure This? I am so, so, so grateful. All right, that's all I have for today. We should have another interview coming up tomorrow. And again, I'm so grateful for what Patrick did today because what stands out most from our conversation today is that leadership is really not about managing technology and processes or even risk. I believe leadership is really about creating alignment. Well, that's really the lesson that came out from my conversation with Patrick today. It's about helping people see beyond their individual responsibility and understand how their work contributes to a larger mission. Like we say in the Navy, mission first, people always. Thanks again for watching, and I hope to see you tomorrow. Bye for now.

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