Is Your Company Frozen or Boiling? with Etienne de Bruin, Founder of 7CTOs

Today, we're talking to Etienne de Bruin, founder of 7CTOs, about his latest book, Liquid. Thank you to Fin for sponsoring this episode. To learn more about the number one AI agent for customer support, go to fin.ai/cto. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

What is Liquid? Let's talk about Liquid. That's such an interesting name.

Liquid is my second book. This time I am co-authoring it with Kathy Keating and Scott Graves. So the three of us have started an organization which we call CTO Sentinel. Lots of little buzzwords. But the reason we wrote the book is because there's a lot of frameworks and ideas that we help CTOs with that needs a foundation. So a lot of our thinking, a lot of my thinking of course was built over the many years, and so I can't just start at the top of the mountain and say, "Oh, you should do CTO Levels, or you should do this." We felt like we should write a book that just explains where all these models were birthed from and what the foundations are for those frameworks. And that's how Liquid was born. I thought initially I was going to write a CTO Levels book, which just basically is the book about CTO Levels, but Levels is a little more—I think Levels can become dated pretty quickly because things can change. Like AI, of course, is compressing everything and compressing organizations. But Liquid is about the systems thinking that produces these types of frameworks. And that systems thinking we bring in the form of complex adaptive systems, which is of course a well-known study. It's a well-known science. And inside of complex adaptive systems, we're talking to the CEO and the CTO about complexity. Sometimes we run up against all sorts of issues. A lot of times we do, and we don't know why. Like the thing that worked yesterday just doesn't work today. My example I like to give is, you know, you're a team of 20 and you hire this amazing staff engineer from Apple to join your team, and then suddenly everything collapses and nothing works as far as planning, relationships, operations. And that really highlights the brittleness sometimes of complex adaptive systems, where organizations will respond to change in ways that is very hard to predict. And so Liquid talks about the ideal state of your organization being liquid, as opposed to being frozen or being boiling. So that was the impetus for it, and I'm really proud of it. It was an incredible writing experience. Kathy and Scott are just wickedly smart, and so I think the three of us had a really good—I think this book is a good representation of how we see technology organizations.

When's it coming out? August 19th. Is it preorder right now?

It is preorder, yes. I think it is up there. I think it's the Kindle version or the paperback version's available. But I mean, you remember that moment when, you know, with your book, you have all these ideas and concepts that are alive in your head and you put them of course into a Google Doc or something, and then when you actually see the book and you're like, "Wow, my thinking and my history and my experience is captured in this physical object." It's a very special feeling, and I'm very excited. I don't—I haven't held a copy yet, so I'm excited to see one. The best part. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. I buy all your books. I got, uh, there it is, CTO Excellence right down there.

Thank you, brother. Thank you. You know how to make me feel amazing.

Oh, it's a good book. It's a good book. So what is this book like? And CTO Excellence was about your first 100 days as a CTO, right? I know Levels because we talk, and I understand Levels is something that you were doing in coaching and consulting with different CTOs to understand their gaps and where they sit in the stack. And we've been talking about this for like over five years.

And you got that really dialed in with your crew. You ended up bonding with Kathy and I think Scott and some other people throughout the course of this. We were talking about it in 7CTOs groups and all of those things. So this has been around for a while and been really refining over the years. And then we had talked and you said you were going to write a CTO Levels book, but that didn't happen and instead Liquid came out. Is that right?

Absolutely. Yeah. And you're right. You and I have been in conversation all throughout those years. And yes, like what I said, the idea was to write the definitive book on Levels, but then Cathy and Scott challenged me on, you know, our audience is going to question, "Well, framework, schmaimework, whatever. Then that's like another framework. It's another this, another that." And so we decided to rather explain the thinking behind what ultimately gave birth to Levels. So it's the prequel.

It's the prequel to Levels. Yes. So Levels still might be?

Yeah. I, you know, Levels has had a profound impact on—it's been great, really. It's, you know, we've had hundreds of organizations get their assessments. We've had action plans. We've got automations. We've got—and even with the advent of LLMs, it's become even more interesting to see how to conjugate all this information into something that is doable for people. But I've come to realize that, you know, Levels is not—I shouldn't be worshiping Levels as the pinnacle of my achievements, because I did feel like that for a while. I was like, "Wow, if this is—if this is why I am doing what I'm doing." And I felt like Levels was my precious, you know, I was so—

Forget the kids. Yeah. And you—

Had a front row seat to my pride and joy of how proud I—and I'm still extremely proud of it and it's an incredibly powerful tool. But I'm realizing it's just a tool as a manifestation of a deeper way of thinking about what makes organizations tick. And I think, you know, in your thousands of interviews, that's really what you do, is you like to go just below that surface of ostensibly we're all doing this, but what is really going on? And that's why I think this book was the right book to write, because from that I want someone to read Liquid and say, "Oh, wow, okay. I think I buy this and I believe in it, and I'm going to go—I think Levels make sense to me now, and I'm going to go do it." As opposed to writing a Levels book and then, you know, kind of having to die on that hill, because Levels, I think, is impacted by the times that we live in. A good example is in Levels—I'll just explain for people. So CTO Levels is a framework that I built when I realized that I was screwing up as a CTO. Like I, you know, I started 7CTOs and I was becoming Mr. CTO to people and I was CTO this and YouTube video that, and, you know, you and I spoke in those early days, and I came up with this framework called—actually it's my most viral video on YouTube. Viral, I say, in airports.

Within our industry.

Within our industry. And it was simply titled "What is the Role of CTO?" And I guess the moment I published that was just at the moment that people were really searching for it, and YouTube was like, "Thank the Lord there's a video on what the role of CTO is," and presented that to people. But the thing is the model that I came up with was very naive and very simple and really only based on a limited experience I had at that point. And it was the four Ts, and I drew a little quadrant and I was like, "Oh, okay. So we have Tech, and we have Tools, and we have Timing, and we have Team." You know? And a lot of people thought that was great, and I thought it was great. But then when COVID hit and we all started thinking about our futures, and I was really worried that, you know, I was getting rusty as a CTO and that I needed to make sure I could be a CTO. I joined a company, and I did the four Ts. You know? I was very focused on the technology. I invested in the team. I helped the C-suite with the timing of decisions, and I was refining our tooling. And I failed miserably. Miserably. I botched a release. I showed up half the person that I needed to be as a CTO. I was completely depleted by the energy and the inabilities of the team, the previous CTO. Like, that was a very difficult time for me to be, you know, this four Ts CTO that I had been a proponent of and that had become this, you know, mini-viral video. And the big realization I got was that I am actually not CTO in this company. I'm actually—I'm just being a tech dude. You know? I'm being a tech guy. And I wasn't managing the company to its business objectives, and I didn't understand what the CEO really wanted. The CEO was saying, "I want growth. I want enhanced features. I want to go to a new market." And all I was hearing was, "You know, upgrade the tech, hire the next person." And I wasn't drawing the connection between the fact that I was going to fail if the CEO did not see me being successful in his objectives.

Absolutely. I mean, that's the thing I see so often. Because people will reach out asking for advice because of the show, and I'm always redirecting them to talk to their team. It's like, it's not what I say the title of CTO is. It's not what Etienne says it is. It's not what your Reddit post says it is. It's like, you need to go figure out who writes your paycheck—that's the easiest path to follow. All right, this person pays me. It's usually the CEO is the one that's responsible for that. And you go ask them what would be valuable. Because at the end of the day, you could be—it's like a relationship with your wife. You could be right and you're still wrong. You could be right and lose the relationship. You can be doing all the work. You could be doing whatever the best CTO on the planet says to do. You know, you talked to the CTO of Verizon and he told you this, you could be doing all of that.

I read that book.

The person who's stroking the paycheck and who you need to bring value to—if their alignment of value and your alignment of value are out of sync, then you're failing and you're not doing well.

Absolutely, man. And that is so true, and I learned that the hard way. You know, it's also a clash between idealism and, you know, purist tech vibes versus the messiness of business and the resiliency and the survival instinct that businesses have. Businesses don't want to die. And, you know, when you're in survival mode, you're willing to chop off your arm and, you know, cut off your foot. That's not something you're going to do when you're sitting watching Silo on Apple TV. Sorry.

Great show, by the way.

Great show.

I don't stand behind many shows, but Silo is a good show.

That is a good show. The family loves that.

A good show.

But I love that reflection that you're giving, is like go—and this is what I learned—is go and find out what will make the other people in your C-suite, what will have them feel like they're succeeding? And go and do that within reason, but make sure you know what that is. And the four Ts—Tech, Team, Timing, Tools—that's not going to do that. I mean, that—

That's like a secondary level.

That's a secondary level. Yes. And I think that was my learning, was, you know, I started 7CTOs on a secondary learning. Like, it's almost like I was coming from the bottom up. And only through this—and I talk about this experience in the book in far greater detail—but I had a moment of holy molys. If I am not supporting the business, helping the CEO, challenging existing norms and operations for the greater good, then I ain't being no CTO. I'm just being a—I don't know. Like you said, like, I'm just at a secondary level. So that's where I had the top of the mountain experience, and I came up with what I call the Sentinel. So that completely changed my worldview, and to this day I think is one tier up, which is, you know, I talk about Speed, Stretch, Shield, and Sales. And so everything I do as CTO is Speed. You're never going to get away from delivering at the best, most efficient velocity possible. Like, you just—you have to deliver, and you have to deliver well. So that's the Speed. Then you have Stretch, which is what are the organizational challenges that you're facing budget-wise, skills-wise, capabilities-wise that is going to—that you need in order to deliver that technology. So pretty common, like, hey, what—you know, you have to think about—well, I'm not just going to say I'm going to go build this thing if I don't have the means to do it. And I know CTOs who are like, "I'm not going to think about that because I can just put in 48-hour days and I'll go build it." And it's like, no, you've got to think about the sustainable growth of your organization. So that's the Stretch Sentinel. And then there's the Shield Sentinel, which is how am I protecting the IP, the know-how, the internal, the external threats of this organization as CTO? And then the fourth Sentinel is Sales. What are the cross-functional duties that I have in order to—whatever I'm building in Speed, whatever is being brought in through Stretch, how am I facilitating and growing the organization's understanding of what's being built? And when I saw that, I thought—and this was pre-COVID, so it was—what's 25 minus 19? 2020. Five. Five, six years ago. When I had that revelation, I realized, wow, you know, the role of CTO is actually to make sure we're doing well on those four things. And so we backtracked into, well, what does this mean? Actually, what we're doing is we're actually managing a complex adaptive system, where a complex adaptive system of course is a system that contains multiple entities that are in relationship to each other. And through that relationship, properties emerge, behavior emerges. And you can't control the behavior directly. You can only control the emergent properties through influencing and through changing the entities and the relationships in that complex adaptive system.

Like the people and the teams within the—yeah.

Yeah. And so what we realized was that the four Sentinels are actually emergent properties of a healthy technology organization. If it's healthy, it's going to deliver its Speed. It's going to Stretch according to its means. It's going to Shield the organization, and it's going to deliver Sales. And Levels is really—what do the four Sentinels look like at increasing levels of complexity? So that completely changed how we viewed where technology organizations need to be. And so Liquid basically, instead of talking about those various levels of complexity, Liquid actually talks about the state of the organization—whether it's frozen, whether it's liquid, or whether it's boiling. And my hope is that CTOs and CEOs will read this and say, "Man, the reason I'm struggling so much with my CTO or with my company, it's got nothing to do with the players around me. It's got everything to do with my system having become frozen because of bad habits, because of overregulation, because of QA, you know, to the max," as some examples. And that loosening up, empowering your team actually takes you from the frozen state into the liquid state. And then you can overcompensate by going into the boiling state where anything goes. Chaos. Chaos, basically. Yes.

Oh. That's interesting.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:20:42) Yeah. I read it, and I was like, man, this is actually really—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:49) He wrote it, and then he read his writing, and he was like, "This is—"

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:20:51) —to it, and I read it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:52) This is something. This guy. He's always buddies. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:00) Real quick. Thank you to Fin for sponsoring this episode. Fin is the number one AI agent for customer service with a 59% average resolution rate. Fin delivers high quality answers and resolves even the most complex customer queries. Fin is trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders and top AI companies including Anthropic and Synthesia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:23) Fin works on any help desk. You don't have to overhaul your current system to get the best AI agent for customer service. Priced at only 99 cents per resolution with a 90-day money-back guarantee. If you're ready to transform your customer service experience, find out how at fin.ai/cto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:43) No. I love the evolution of it because some of the earlier conversations were more like, "I'm a CTO, and what are my responsibilities when we're at 100 engineers and this much revenue?" And this just gives—it's a way more advanced, mature view of how to look at it at different sizes. Because that's the thing. We say CTO. There are people listening right now that are founders in a garage with the title of CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) There are people that are running Verizon, you know, as a CTO. And there's everything in between. I love you, Kyle. Anyways, there's everything in between. And so when people give advice, I always say that whether I'm at a conference giving a talk and I'm giving advice, I always preface it with, "Everyone who's listening to this is getting advice at a different stage."

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:26) And so what's the way to win across all stages? So whenever I give advice, I always point back to, who is your stakeholder? Have you asked them the type of value you're supposed to be bringing? And are you tracking your ability to bring them that value? Because that's all that really matters.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:22:40) That in the end, you will be fired or they will find a reason to get rid of you if you are tone deaf to what you just said. And it doesn't have to be—you don't have to sell your soul. I'm not saying you have to be like, "Well, tell me what you need and I'm gonna make it happen. Oh, you want this feature? Oh, you can't sell because you don't have this."

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:23:03) I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that there's an attunement to what the business needs that, I don't care if you're in a small company or a large company, that role is the same. You know, the role—so, yeah, might be a bit of a hot take, but I'm curious to know what you think. I've been working on this immutable statement of what the role of CTO is.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:23:39) Because oftentimes on LinkedIn—not often—the LinkedIn algorithm is convinced that whenever someone writes about the role of CTO, I need to see it. So I see a lot of these, "Well, the role of CTO, you know, these changes and this and, you know..." So there's a lot of pontification about it, and then there's always 500 comments. And it seems to be a really fun, easy, hot topic for people to talk about. And I decided, based on my view of the complex adaptive system of the four sentinels—which I believe the four sentinels do not change, whether you are brutally early or whether you are running a multibillion-dollar enterprise—who is gonna complain? Which CEO is gonna complain about those four sentinels? I don't know one, because it basically supports the business.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:24:38) So I wrote this—I actually put it at ctomanifesto.org. And I wrote this statement that I wanna hear what you have to say about it. But I said, basically, my point of view is that the role of CTO never changes. So it doesn't mean that your focus doesn't change or your actual job description could look a little different. But the organization views the role of CTO, first and foremost, that it grasps the company's business growth engine.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:25:15) So anybody in the C-suite needs to understand how the business grows. The role of CTO then has a vision for what the technology is that is needed to realize that growth. The role of CTO also has financial savvy to bring that to reality. And by that, you know, at the high end, it's understanding business financials. At the low end, it is just being mindful of how much money is in the bank and what your investor needs means to help you.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:25:55) Then I say that the CTO assembles a team and leads them with precision to build the technology that fuels the engine. And to me, that's the role. I don't think it's anything other than that. Really curious to know what you think, having spoken to every CTO under the sun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:21) Yeah. I think that encapsulates almost everything. I mean, I would say I'd see the people in different stages of growth—they usually learn that financial savvy thing last, including myself. That's one of the last things I've learned.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:38) I like how you're—I like the idea of you understanding how the company grows because usually the people that make it into the top 1% of CTOs, they have a very similar story of working in multiple departments or really deeply understanding the needs of each team and how the product goes from nonexistence to existence in a profitable way. And yeah, I would say the only thing that I would add to that—I wouldn't take anything away. I think everything is there. And I don't know how to add this to it, but I'll roughly spit out an idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) Something about—because it's a chief technology—you're part of this tribe. You're part of this group of people trying to achieve this outcome together. So something that would also connect—because you're not operating in isolation. You know? You mentioned assembling a team, but that's the level below. It's like, where's—how does—where's the statement in there about the relationship with the peers?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:27:41) Yes. Yes. Explicitly stating that, I think, is actually super interesting because I think I'm, yeah, I think I'm kind of rolling that into the "grasping the company's business growth engine," but that could be more mechanical. Whereas—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:58) You can do that. You can, yeah, you can go do that with other departments. But, you know, I know that the founders are meeting, you know, or the chiefs are meeting, and that needs to be addressed. Because I see people fall short there a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) They just—it's so easy to look down to what you know because usually you come from product or you come from engineering, you know, you come from that world. So it's really easy to look down that pipe of all the CTO responsibilities. It's really hard to have empathy with your CMO or your CFO or the relationship dynamics with your CEO. Those things are skills that you learn much later.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:28:34) I like that. I really do. Yeah. I think I'll have to do a little—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:39) Yeah. I don't know what the words are to use, but just addressing the peer relationship as a chief. You know?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:28:45) Yes. Because you're right. You could be seriously out of step with your peers, and then you will not survive. You will be axed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:58) Well, I also have a rough example that I'm making up on the fly. But let's say that you go into the company and you do everything that you said. "This is how the company grows." You do all of that. But let's say there wasn't anything specific about you interacting with your peers or the CEO's specific objectives.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:14) What if there's something happening in the marketplace, an M&A taking place, something shifting that you don't see, but yet you still understand the growth. But some big market shift that's happening that the CEO is very concerned about and focused on, and they're planning this strategic maneuver to help address that in the marketplace. You would have no concept of that. And then therefore, the CEO would be like, "You're working on the old business model that's gonna be outdated because this new technology just approved." And so you definitely have to have that communication about—because it's not your—look, at the end of the day, until you decide to lay down this title of CTO and take up the title of CEO, you have to understand what the vision is and everything you have to do has to first understand that vision and then do all your sentinels and all your four Ts and everything in relation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:05) Have you heard that Canadian psychologist talk about aim, Jordan Peterson? He's a Canadian psychologist. He talks a lot about personal development and he has this concept of aim, and it's helped me a lot. It's like, this phone is just a phone, right? But if I don't have a goal, it's just this piece of technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:22) But if all of a sudden my goal is to become the best, you know, husband in the world, all of a sudden this phone is the ability for me to buy flowers and to detect sweet things and to write poems. I don't know. Now this object now aligns with my aim. And now when I'm looking at this object, I'm looking at it through the lens of achieving this greater aim. So you can have all the systems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:43) You can have all the tools in the world and know all the technologies in the world, but it has to be looked at through the aim of the company. And the CEO is the one that sets the aim for the company, not the CTO. And we have to accept that too.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:30:58) Absolutely. No. I think that is—you know, because I think just from reading that statement, there could be a fixation on the business growth engine that is void of the emotional intelligence or the collaborative spirit in the C-suite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:17) But it's critical too. You cannot escape understanding the growth engine. Even if there's a different vision or a movement, you still have to understand the current state to get to the new state.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:31:28) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) So it's—

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:31:29) And I think the CTOs that I admire and the ones that blow my mind are the ones with the financial savvy. There is a—you know, when you understand logic and the complexities in code, where you can sort of read the matrix and you can sort of quickly see what's going on as you're solving a problem. I find that good CFOs and financial controllers, they can see that in the numbers. They see the same thing, but they see it in a whole different modality.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:32:12) And it's a modality, I think, that scares a lot of CTOs and maybe a lot of people in general. Finances, A, is hard, and B, the mechanisms, the ratios, the trends, the derivatives, the interpretations—I mean, this isn't something that you just learn. There's a feeling, and that's why I chose the word "savvy," because there is a comfort with what the numbers are saying. A lot of us are taught about SaaS metrics and lean startup metrics, and you know, there's a lot of measurements. But very seldomly do I see CTOs talk about—you know, probably the most common thing we talk about is OPEX versus CAPEX, you know, blah blah blah. But really, if you start looking at the ratios, how your Amazon bill affects the cost of goods sold and how, if you're in the C-suite, when you say, "I can reduce the COGS," which, guess what, immediately increases profitability or earnings.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:33:26) And the way I plan to do that is to spend a million dollars in DevOps resources because I can save us $20 million in COGS, and that equals a reduction and an increase in earnings, which, guess what, gives all of you better dividends. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:48) I want the stock price up.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:33:49) Yeah. Yes. And so for me, you know, I came up with another framework called COR, C-O-R, CTO COR. I think I have a website for that as well. ctocore.org. Is it still up? What I do with that—yes. What I do with that is I just teach—COR stands for cost of goods sold, OPEX, revenues, and earnings. C-O-R-E.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:18) Oh, you're teaching CTOs financial stuff.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:34:21) I am because this is what I'm seeing in 7CTOs—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) Is this a book?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:34:30) It's not a book yet. I'm not—

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) You gotta GPT this into the financially savvy CTO or the numbers CTO. Because this is honestly the area where I see the biggest lack when people make that transition of, whether it's VP of engineering at a mid-sized company to CTO. They have no idea how to even interface with the CFO. They don't even know the basics. What are they gonna do? Roll into their office and say, "Hey, show me a P&L"?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:34:57) Yes. Yes. You're right. And I love that you also see that because you talk to—you've spoken to an exceptional amount of people. And in my limited experience with 7CTOs, I can tell you now there is a massive difference between the CTO who understands the finances and the one who doesn't.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:35:19) And so one of my missions—Liquid is a very important step in that—but I definitely want this COR framework to become something that if you wanna be a CTO, if you wanna be an exceptional CTO, this is where you need to live, is inside of the COR framework. And I picked four. And then what I did was, again, Joel, this is the interesting thing in how my brain works, is I married the core financials with how it shows up in the sentinels. And I came up with a bunch of ratios. And, dude, I have seen these ratios give you almost an insight beneath, you know, the iceberg where you can see beneath. And so it's been a phenomenal journey to—I mean, there's obviously basic things like gross profit and operating efficiency.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:36:17) But I will say this stuff is very exciting for me. And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:23) But it's also how they choose different—the other thing too when you—so, like, step one is to learn the basic terms. Step two is experience, where you see how different companies kind of twist the terms differently. You know? Because you have the standards for accounting, but everybody kind of massages the standard a little bit.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:36:43) Yes. Yeah. Yes. But try and massage the finances with a really solid CFO in the room, or even a COO. I will say, I think that's why a lot of COOs and CTOs struggle.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:36:59) You know, it's probably the two C-level positions that I see the biggest headbutts. When a CTO has been cruising along, helps scale the company—on the levels framework, they hit a level five and six—and then the company brings in a COO for operational efficiency. And I tell you what, COOs, most of them, they know their finances. And the CTOs, they live in that second tier where they can build and they can ship and they're amazing and blah blah blah. But now there's a gap, and they start hating each other.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:37:42) And I tell you what, brother, I have seen more CTOs leave because of COOs than CEOs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:49) I could tell you exactly why too, to support your point. They're more social, and they have more time. The CTO, it's so easy and amazing to go build product. You wanna go dive deep and you wanna create and do this artistic expression in business, and it's a beautiful thing. The COOs are organizing these structures, and to organize these structures, they have to spend more face time with the CEO and the CFO. So the COOs are just with them—

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:38:17) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:18) —more, meaning they're more fluent in the language, they have a closer understanding of what's going on in the business, and then the CTO can sometimes be on the outs if they're too busy diving—

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:38:27) Wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:27) —deep. And then that's when they learn how to delegate properly and how to make sure you're close with the vision. And if you stay tight with the vision, then, you know, things will go smoother.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:38:41) I totally agree with you. The—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:49) You know? Every COO I know is slightly more social than every CTO I know.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:38:55) Yes. And what I was going to say was, to a COO, given a solid product organization, building is simply resource allocation. It's simply, "Well, I can go to offshoring, or I can..." You know, I've done this at Amazon before. For them, it's more like a cost center that has to produce what the product needs. Dude, you will never hear a CTO talk about product engineering like that.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:39:30) It's about the beauty of the system, the crafting of the code, the sustainability of the architecture. Now, personally, I am a CTO. I love that stuff. COOs generally do not care about it. For them, it's like, "Hey, CTO, you're hiring $250K resources to do the work that I know a $60K resource can do." Is it going to be the same prettiness? No. Is it going to be the same exact gorgeous, sustainable output? No.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:40:03) But is it going to have the appearance of delivery, and in many cases be the actual delivery? Yes. But the CTO is going to have to have a whole new level of influence, emotional intelligence, some of that social skill that you're talking about to be able to have that conversation. But instead of having that conversation, they see it as conflict, and the immovable rock meets the unstoppable force, and one of them leaves. And it's not the COO. It's the CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:35) Isn't it weird? After having kids and then going and working with adults, you can kind of, you've got to be like, "Oh, there's still lessons that haven't been learned." All right. Yeah. Yeah. I got it. This is, but I'm okay with it. It's like, I'm okay with that.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:40:51) Yeah. My uncle, when I arrived in the United States—this is in 2000—my uncle said to me... I said to him, "So, you're..." Because he was on boards and very successful in the biotech space. And I talk about him a lot. And he said to me, I said to him, "So what's it like, you know, being on a board of a publicly traded company?" And he was like, "You know what? It's like a bunch of kids fighting in the schoolyard." And the way with which he said it was with such disdain and disappointment that I was like, "Wow." You are seeing levels of behavior that is probably shocking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:33) Well, for me, the reason why it was so shocking was because I had a built-in expectation—just my fault. I had a built-in expectation that as I raised higher in income and projects, the importance of projects and the scale of which they're operating, I imagined the people scaled, like the quality of the people scaled. But there is just an upper limit of human behavior.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:42:00) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:00) And so you can get to a company that you would imagine operating incredibly efficiently at the pinnacle of technology and that they're all getting along and solving problems. And it can just be like romper room in there, you know, because we're humans. And so you have this expectation that it's, like, so classy, and you get up to the top, and you're like, "Wait. What?"

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:42:20) Yes. You know? Yes, dude. Like, I'm 53 now, and I can clearly remember as a young kid how I would often say to myself, "Oh, man. Like, 50-year-olds, man, they must... like, wow." Like, I'm only 25. And when you're 50... You get to 50, and you're like, "No, dude. You're still just trying to figure things out, and you still have basic human needs and instincts that aren't being necessarily met or you haven't figured out how." And then also, you keep changing. And so I think this is the thing, and I think this is why the role of CTO is trying so hard to be defined constantly, is because as the complexity shifts... And like we call in Liquid, we call it phase shifts, which is, you know, just common for the state of liquid. But when those phase shifts happen, you are often caught off guard.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:43:20) You know? And so we think that, "Well, listen. I am now the CTO of a successful company," until that company goes through a phase shift, and then you're a terrible CTO for that company. And then you either have to bounce or you have to upgrade. But then when you're upgrading, you're like, "Oh, come on, man. I'm like 53. Do I really have to learn how to manage teams?" And you're like, "Yes. Yes. Yep."

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:43:47) The teams that you managed six months ago, completely different dynamic today than it was. Not because of anything you did or any... The intricacy and the magic of this complex adaptive system is just the exponential increase of interactions that produces behavior that no one can predict. Try be a CTO in that environment. Like, try to be a CTO. Try be any C-suite in that environment.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:44:24) It's unpredictable. It's uncertain. It's crazy. So do you have the skills to say, "Okay. Everything I know is wrong. Let's go back to work. Let's pour another cup of coffee, and let's figure this out."

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:43) That's humility, partly. Shit. Dude. Awareness. A little awareness, a little humility. And because, you know, I play music. Josh plays music. I don't know. Are you a musician, Etienne?

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:44:56) I am. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:57) I play the bass.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:59) When I heard... Slap at the bass. When I heard John Mayer giving this lecture at some music college, he was discussing this concept of having to relearn his songs. So there's only so much you can keep in your memory at once. And so you can only play so many songs. You can only keep them in your memory. You can be really great at them. And so I'll often see people, let's connect this over to CTOs. "Oh, I know how to manage a team. Oh, I know how to deal with that transition. Oh, I know." It's a... You have to have the humility to say, "Okay, I once did it. I was good at it once. I remember I did it." But now I have to go relearn how to do it so that I can do it well again. But a lot of people skip that last part. They're like, "I know what I'm doing, and I'm just going to go do a bunch of stuff, and it's going to work because it worked." You've got to relearn the song.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:45:50) Dude, that is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:50) You've got to listen to another episode of Modern CTO podcast. You've got to buy the book Liquid. Relearn it, baby.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:45:58) Dude, you are a pro at landing the plane. Now, I think that's profound. I'm going to really think about that, because the disappointment that you can feel... Like, let's say I knew how to lead teams and now you have to relearn it. There's a healthy dose of disappointment that comes with that. Like, "Man, I should know this stuff by now, or I should have learned this. Dude, I'm already in my fifties. Why don't I know this?" And I think sometimes we just live in that disappointment, and it becomes extremely hard to just function and be a good person, a good CTO, because you're living in that shame or disappointment. And then you take it out on people, and then you start being a doofus, when really all you had to do was say, "Hey, johnmayer.com, I'm going to relearn the song."

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:51) Going to relearn it. That's how he sounds too. You did a great John Mayer impression.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:46:55) I'm really good with accents. Like, this whole accent I'm doing now is totally just a fake one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:01) You do a brilliant South African accent.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:47:03) Thank you. Thank you. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:04) It's what you're... It's like if I were to nail it correctly, I'd say it's like South African that has been stateside for like almost 30 years. Wow. And that would be...

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:47:14) That's exactly what I'm going for. That's exactly what I'm going for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:18) Last plug for the book. The book is called Liquid. It is available on amazon.com and every place you can buy books, but mostly Amazon. Etienne, tell them to go buy the book.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:47:30) Go buy the book. Go to ctosentinel.com. Go and learn and be part of this movement. And Liquid is going to show you the secret hidden machine that is either working for you or against you. And I want you to plug in. So thanks, brother. Appreciate it. Plug in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) Yeah. You check out 7CTOs too. That's a business that puts groups of CTOs together. 7CTOs. They physically go to their meetings. They're great people. Highly recommend them. It's the best CTO mastermind type collective group that I know about.

(Etienne de Bruin at 00:48:08) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:10) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.