[Dailydave] Keynotes

[Moses Hernandez]

I have always wondered at what point does the CEO stop thinking strategy and start thinking culture. Does it happen all at once, throughout the day, or does it come in shifts? Unless you believe CEO is all about strategy and not culture. Does the culture in the company become a strategic and immutable (no pun intended) asset?  I’ve been torn on this concept in leadership, maybe because strategy and culture are actually two sides of the same coin. 

For a keynote, I’m also in the same torn scenario. Should a keynote for a conference be considered the overall message topic for the conference, or should it be a synopsis of the current zeitgeist? I think the most difficult part of a keynote for me is to figure out how to tell the story, once I figure out what the narrative is. Is there a clear introduction, conflict, resolution in my conversation and is it a conversation at all? I find that most of my stories have too little intro, much conflict, and unclear if ever a resolution. Perhaps it is me, clearly doing what I am doing in this email right now, having all the thoughts being splashed on the page and asking people to come with me on the most epic Hunter S. Thompson time of their life without their willingness to do so. 

That probably does lead back to the idea that structure in stories are enjoyed, dare I say, expected. With that in mind, I think back to those who study film and have a prescriptive formula for film. We innately know when X, Y, and Z will happen in a film, TV show, movie, youtube video, snap, and we expect it to happen the way we Percieve it to happen. When that doesn’t happen we are either tired from the fast paced action that we cannot process or bored out of our minds with the slow paced film. Such is probably the collection of thoughts that make up a good keynote. 

As for your keynotes, I think you could just hack up your own process for talks and just market it as a Det Talk for the challenged hacker. That's probably a unicorn company, I swear. 

-M

> On Oct 16, 2017, at 12:27 PM, dave aitel <dave at immunityinc.com> wrote:
> 
> So I'm about to do V6 of my T2 keynote - usually it takes about 10 full
> runs until a keynote is good. This is why we are very very careful about
> asking people to do keynotes. They typical first run of a keynote gets
> feedback like "This is terrible. Just terrible. Awful". (Except Halvar's).
> 
> In any case, I've sent out versions of it to lots of different people
> for feedback and I've noticed a few things. Probably the most common
> complaint about me as a CEO is that I don't share my strategy with the
> company at large. I think maybe this is because strategy is insanely
> hard to verbalize and structure in any domain, and cyber is twice as
> hard as most. The talk has 10 minutes of policy bashing in it,
> essentially a cliff notes of "Why the policy community as a whole is
> broken and what the vulnerability classes are that they tend to have in
> their thought processes" because policy impacts national strategy and
> the cyber landscape, which impacts the technical direction you go as a
> hacker, which in turn impacts policy if they were aware enough to know that.
> 
> When I send this talk to policy people, they are fine with the bashing.
> In fact, it bores them. They know it all too well.
> 
> What policy people want, universally, is MORE STRUCTURE in the talk. For
> some reason this is fascinating to me, because as a whole, if you have
> to define hackers, who are really the target market of the talk, it is
> "Those who are OK with less structure, despite being basically autistic".
> 
> -dave
> 
> (P.S. If you have not reviewed any previous versions and want to review
> V6, let me know!:)
> 
> 
> 
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