artificial intelligence will be a threat or a boon to the industry, whether you're discussing with justice in law, what would be the explosion of the case law, explosion of the cases, the rising dockets of the cases. These all trends and a lot of us discussing about as to whether the foreign companies would take over or the other companies would take over and the individual practice, whether they'll be a threat, whether all these aspects requires to relook, revisit and reinvent ourselves with emerging trends. These all are the broader contours on which the session will be taken forward. Since it's a working day at a lot of places except for in Punjab Rihanna High Court and Delhi High Court where we are having vacations, we thought that why not utilize this time for a betterment of the knowledge sharing, be that as it may, all these YouTube sessions what we have taken are already on the YouTube in case you have missed. Justice Rajiv Sai and Law Shores sessions are also there which are doing extremely well. Without taking much time, we thought that since it's a working day, we will take a session which is short and crisp. As normally we speak when we talk of short and simple because we did one session and that word just ticked in me. It said that in any precise and concise drafting, it has to be, you have to say it's kiss, keep it short and simple. See that's why we have set the session to be small but to the point and without taking much time, we will request sir to share his insights of his journey as a lawyer then as a judge and thereafter again as a lawyer. What are the challenges he has seen as they say, and what he feels that we have to tune ourselves, sharpen our tools to match with the changing trends in the society. Over to you sir. Thank you Mr. Chhatrat. A very good day to all of you who are watching now or as Mr. Chhatrat says, who may happen to watch the recording later. And friends, let me share one thing with you. Whenever earlier I did not want to read and I wanted to watch something while sleeping or something, the only content available which I used to watch on YouTube was the short films and those short films I found very engrossing and I realized that maybe what we were used to watching in a three or four hour film the thought or the story was being communicated to us in about 10 to 15 minutes and which I always found very interesting. The good thing about the initiative which Mr. Chhatrat and some others like him have taken is that now we have a choice besides the short films or other content which is available on YouTube or other platforms. If we want to just hear somebody or just see that what is available on a particular subject relating to law or on any other subject on the YouTube, there is a lot of content available and thanks to people like Mr. Chhatrat for the same. So it's a human duty which you are doing to knowledge sharing. Now friends, you may be wondering that how I am qualified to speak on challenging challenges for lawyers with emerging trends. I consider myself qualified because I've had a occasion to be a part of the legal profession for the last over 40 years. I have witnessed the change in the century. I commenced my law practice in the previous century in the 1980s and continued in the next century and I failed when I was talking to Mr. Chhatrat that what is worth placing for consideration of others on this platform is that we need to discuss that how we people as lawyers and especially young lawyers need to prepare themselves for the future and how the profession of law and how the lawyers are required to behave are changing. The second important thing which happened that as a practicing lawyer most of the time we are not at least I was not observing the profession as such one was so engrossed in one's own cases and putting it before the court and then running to another court that you were not really bothered that what challenges the lawyers were facing or how different lawyers were behaving or coping with the matters or the changes which were happening in the court. But about 14 years as a judge which I got an opportunity in the Delhi High Court I think the biggest observation period was that as compared to the 25 years before that which I had been a lawyer. So as a judge I got an opportunity to see on an average about 50 to 100 or more lawyers every day and I was able to watch them dispassionately rather than in an adversarial mode. So that I'll be speaking for your consideration or placing with my thoughts before you from that perspective. And as Mr. Chhatrat mentioned I have for today's discussion I won't really call it a discussion since it's not interactive or today I have chosen five trends which I want to place for your consideration and if I may just in a nutshell say the first trend is the much more competition in the legal profession than what it was at the time when I joined the profession. The second trend which I'll be placing for your consideration is the change in the nature and character of disputes which are coming before the court and which the lawyers today are required to argue or defend or plead before the court. And yet another which has hardly been spoken or written about but which according to me is very important is the explosion in the case law availability of case law and my assessment is that that explosion has led to a slow death of judicial precedent. The fourth topic which is I'm very passionate about and which I have spoken of at several other platforms and for which reason I am restricting my time for that today because most of my thoughts on that are already available is the effect of introduction of artificial intelligence in the legal profession and how it is a challenge to the legal profession. And the fifth and the last again very important but which I think we need a separate session is the challenge of the commercialization of the legal profession. So in a nutshell these are the five topics of the trends which I'll be touching upon today. Now coming back to the first one about much more competition in the legal profession today. Friends at the time I'm talking in the context of the time when I joined them today. The time when I joined the legal profession the legal profession was the last resort of those who were on the threshold of their working life or who were in the process of choosing the careers. So the best of the minds who had done well in schools and colleges were not coming to the legal profession only those would be joining law who had not got admission into any other career and with the result and out of those who joined the LLP course also most of the brighter ones went for other competitive services examination got selected in that and only those who were not able to get employment or a career opportunity anywhere else were coming to the court to practice law. So this resulted in a very small number of people and who generally represented a category which had not done well in exams which they had been required to take till then at the school level and at the college level joining the legal profession. So out of those few who joined it was very easy to shine with a little bit of effort or with a little bit of common sense but that is something which has changed today totally. Today you have what I have been noticing since I have been getting a lot of youngsters earlier as associates in my law office and subsequently as law clerks as a judge or as interns at both the places is that today we have the best of the students who are opting LLP as a career choice immediately after school or after college and the students who have secured very high marks in whichever stream of examination or subject they have chosen and out of those who complete their LLP course also most of them are coming into litigation or are becoming lawyers whether practicing on the corporate side or in the courts. So what the lawyers are having to contend with today is much more competition for each brief or each assignment you are competing with the very best of the people the best of the students the best of the youngsters of your age and who have who are used to scoring high who are used to winning in the exams and who want to continue the same trend in their professional career as a lawyer also. So the level of competition has gone up tremendously and that is a trend which nobody can miss and all of you must be already aware. So to shine in the legal profession takes much more than what it used to take earlier so you cannot rest on your laurels of the law college or anything because you never know from where somebody who may not have learned the art of cracking the exam learns the art of cracking how to put the matter best before the court or in a corporate transaction before the regulatory authority how to put the matter best how to ensure that the approvals are expeditiously obtained how to negotiate with the opposite with the opposite contracting party. So today you have to prepare yourself much better each lawyer is required to do much better on a day to day basis than he was required to do in earlier times. Now it's fortunately for us it's the work for which a lawyer is required has also grown tremendously today the need for lawyers is being filled in avenues where earlier nobody thought of involving lawyers or consulting lawyers but that doesn't underscore the fact that you have to be at the best because if you do not deliver somebody else will deliver or somebody else will be able to convince the client that he could have or he has done the job better. So that is the first challenge which are a trend which I wanted to place for your consideration. Now coming to the second which is of the change or the shift in the nature and character of disputes which are coming before the court. In my times when I joined the civil disputes which were coming before the courts either related to immobile property or related to money recovery suits or some other commercial transaction which had gone wrong or relating to employment conditions or service conditions these were the basic if they formed the core of the civil disputes which were for adjudication and all of which were more governed by law than by the facts there was not much dispute about the facts and the application of law for which the lawyer was in any case trained or which the lawyer knew where to find the lawyer was able to deliver his duty but today what is happening before the court is that see there was a big pool of landlord and tenant cases all over India that class of litigation as far as Delhi is concerned has died down totally because with the change in law and with the realization that even if you overstay in the property by delaying the litigation you were still liable for mean profits and which could be recovered from you today the number of tenants which are who are fighting their eviction are much fewer than what the number which was there earlier so that category that class of litigation has totally disappeared today what we have disputes most of the good paying disputes which are coming before the courts are rights in data so you have to learn everything about data rights in computer so softwares rights in the source code of the computer software disputes as to cryptocurrency disputes as to stock exchanges money if you see today the financial packages which most of the investors are advising to their clients today and from which the disputes arise are very complicated they have several elements in it so if a dispute arises all those questions have to be gone into then money that how how how the money is invested how it moves how it how it is to be invested technology patents psychology because in trademarks psychology is being applied then there is a new form litigation about plant varieties so for which the court has to decide that which seed falls in which plant variety there is another very large genre of litigation which has opened up is about trade secrets or about confidential information which is shared between the two parties having either a contractual or other relationship and the disputes about which there is no law as of today so these are the cases which are coming before the court now how does it make a difference because see the law on all these subjects the new subjects of disputes which are coming before the courts is also evolving so the law as we all know basically evolves on the facts good facts make good law and bad facts make bad law so the application of law to facts relating to all these disputes is still at a very nascent stage so it becomes very important unless the lawyer understands himself that how the software source code of a computer software works or what is the confidentiality in the data which is shared or what is a trade secret and I'm not going into the plant varieties or the patents disputes which are there or psychology why do we why does the mind how does the mind perceive two different trademarks what is the test to be applied that of similarity of this similarity of trademarks so all this is requiring the lawyers to study so much more subjects now nobody can be can be a master of all the subjects or in your school or graduation become an expert in economics or physics, chemistry, biology but what is required is to develop a mindset so what I am seeing is that only those lawyers are doing well today or are scoring over others keep an open mindset who are open to learning whose entire education has not been based on just knowing how to answer the question or to reproduce what is written in the textbooks in the answer papers but the lawyers who as students have always tried to go to the root of the matter or asked the question why why is it so how does it happen like this why does it not happen like this so even if we are forced or beyond the student stage we have to develop our aptitude or mindset to be able to go to the root of the matter and to find the reason because only when we as lawyers will understand will we be able to convince of course subject experts are available to you to explain because whenever a client comes with a dispute of this nature to you he will know everything about this object but unless you quiz him because he on his own will tell you only what he thinks is relevant and in that also so many things will be what he presumes that you should know because he knows but it's not necessary that we as lawyers will know all those things so it is becoming very important so the only solution which I or which I suggest for your consideration is to increase your extracurricular reading there are a lot of summer courses or other online courses which are available 15-day or weekend courses don't be afraid carve out time to always enroll for those courses so that you are learning on a day-to-day basis in fact I was reading a very interesting news item because I won't say I read the law journal we all know driverless cars are a reality now so in the US district court there has already been a case with respect to an accident caused by a driverless car of course besides the other issues which were involved in that case of jurisdiction because if you see our motor accidents claims cases are based on fault liability to some extent there is a provision for no fault liability but the outcome ultimate outcome is based on fault so now in a driverless car how do you find who is at fault can the owner of the vehicle be said to be at fault if the driverless car has caused an accident because the accident has not been caused by the driver as the agent of the owner that accident may have been caused by either a mechanical failure or by an electronic failure or a software model malfunction now the mechanical failure may be owing to somebody who's beyond the jurisdiction of the court or more likely in the jurisdiction of the court but with respect to the electrical failure and the software malfunction in all probability you will find that the suppliers there of are beyond jurisdiction so one of the case questions which arose in that case was that how do you determine the jurisdiction to adjudicate the claim for the accident but the more interesting question which I wanted to place for your consideration is that the defense of the software ultimate person who had designed the software and malfunction of which software had caused the accident that much was proved before the court that prove itself was a long story but again that is not for today's consideration the defense of that person was that look there is nothing wrong with my software but my software was hit by a virus generated by somebody else and which virus was meant to afflict my software so but he was unable to show that yes there was any virus existing in the software of the driverless car which had caused the accident so his defense was that it was a self distracting virus which after causing the malfunction disrupted itself and there was no trace of it so that defense was successful in that case I have not had the benefit of reading the judgment to find out that how it was proved but imagine to be able to convince the court the lawyer has to understand all those things he has to not only make innovative arguments of readings with respect to jurisdiction by application and extension of new legal principles but he has to also understand that there is something like a self distracting virus and to show that indeed the malfunction of the software was afflicted by that software by that virus so I found that very interesting and I was really wondering that how we will all cope with this when these kind of issues start coming before the court so the need of the R is to develop our minds and our attitude to be always continuously learning new things and interacting with different kinds of people reading different materials besides law we all get so engrossed in our practice of law that we forget to read any other subject but that time is now passive and I would request all to commence reading on other diverse subjects you never know which day you will be required to deal with other such issues now friends the third thing which I wanted to touch and which as I mentioned earlier I find hardly anything has been written about or spoken on this subject is about the explosion of case law in my time when I had started the profession besides the local journals of Delhi which were available who were reporting only judgments of the Delhi High Court the national journals were very few most prominent among them was of course all India reporters, Supreme Court cases then there were on the company side there were company law journal company cases labor law there were labor law cases labor law journals but the reportage over there was very limited because paper was costly plus the journals had to travel to far off places so there was a limit on the number of judgments which could be published over there so there was pruning of what was published at two stages each High Court had its rules High Court as well as Supreme Court that the judges who were authoring the judgment were also required to indicate at the top of the judgment whether the judgment was to be shown to the law publishers or publishers of legal journals or not and or the language in Delhi High Court used to be whether the judgment is reportable another column used to be that whether the judgment is to be shown to newspapers so the judges were required to indicate yes or no against those two columns so the judges also when we joined as judges we were told that the way to decide was if you felt you were saying anything new or enunciating a new principle or applying the old principle of law to facts which had not been applied earlier then you we used to make it reportable otherwise we would say not reportable it was if it was only a application of facts which had been done in so many cases earlier but then came the right to information act and at least the thought in Delhi High Court when we did away with that column at the top of the judgment was that the author of the judgment has no right to restrict its circulation it is a judgment pronounced in open court so it should be available to also we did away with that column so there was no pruning at the judge level of what was reportable and what was not reportable the second important development earlier you see the publishers of all India reporter and Supreme Court cases used to also do the pruning they could not if suppose there were 50 reportable judgments from each high court in each month they could not publish all the 50 so they used to do the pruning themselves that they would decide which is more important to be reported and pick up one or two judgments from each high court and publish it in their reporters but because they were also limited by as I said weight of the journal and the cost of paper but with the internet and with the physical journals nearly disappearing and the online journals coming into work and being prescribed by most of the lawyers today vis-a-vis the physical journal the publishers also are able to publish all the judgments so there is I find there is a race amongst the publishers also who is publishing more number of judgments because it doesn't cost anything to them to publish all the judgments whether reportable or not reportable so today what we are finding is that not only all judgments which do not contain any new principle of law but also daily orders are being reported and available on the internet and which results in that they all constitute case law so if today you have to argue on a proposition and you take 10 judgments out in support of the proposition you can be sure that your opponent will bring equal number of or more judgments on the contrary because ultimately the judges whose writing he is deciding the cases on the basis of application of law to the facts of the case so a lot of times it happens that the facts of the case require the application of law in a particular manner and which the judge does in earlier times the judge would simply say not reportable because the judge is not doing anything or expanding the law or taking it any further but today with the judge having been left with no such option all those orders also are reported and they'll be cited against you and you have the lawyer has to face the challenge of then convincing the judge that why that judgment is not to be applied and the judgment which you are performing or relying upon is more up to the facts of the case which are for adjudication in that case so that fringe according to me is a very big challenge which today is facing the legal profession and my assessment of course it's very individual to me is that this has resulted in dilution of the importance of judicial precedent in the court and which is a very dangerous thing the death of judicial precedent would result in all matters being decided on the basis of equity today already we have reached a stage where a lawyer is unable to give an opinion if a client comes to a lawyer and says that these are my facts whether it is worth filing a case or these are the facts with which the opposite party has filed a case whether it is worthwhile to contest the case today the lawyer is not in a position to say anything because tomorrow a judgment may come which may have said totally to the contrary I have faced this in between while I was still on the bench and opinion had come from the supreme court that if one of the parties to a contract termination the contract terminated the contract and the other parties used for specific performance if he had not sued for declaration that the termination was bad then the suit for specific performance was not maintainable applying that judgment I myself dismissed so many suits for specific performance which were then pending before me in which that relief had not been sought or which were coming up for admission before me but then after about three years that view was changed so this is what I am saying that it is not as if there was earlier there was no requirement there was no judgment which said that without seeking declaration of illegality of termination you were debarred from seeking specific performance so in the fact of some case the supreme court took that view and that view when I myself dismissed must have dismissed some 20 odd cases on the basis of that and I really wonder what happened to those cases because if they chose not to go and appeal then those people have been denied the right of specific performance which they may have validly had so that has become the biggest challenge that today the lawyer has to plead or defend the case without much reliance on judicial precedent and the lawyer is not in a position to give any opinion on the matter because as the case progresses even if the judge at the first level has failed that in the facts you are not entitled to a case another judge at a affiliate level in the same facts may find so the death of judicial precedent would result in cases being decided by inequity or on the basis of what is the view of the judges of the last court on the facts of the case so the only suggestion which I have for the legal profession on this is that you have to own your ability to separate the shaft from the grain so you have to really be a better lawyer to place that look this is the fact and this is how the law applies and why that case was decided was because of this different factor peculiar fact in that now friends coming to the fourth trend is the introduction of artificial intelligence which again till now has entered India to a very limited extent but when one meets about the American ports in the American ports it has infiltrated the legal profession to a very large extent the biggest use which I have been able to find from my readings about the American legal system is one is that in due diligence today out of the maximum number of graduates from the law colleges are being absorbed in law firms and which are in the practice of corporate law in a large part of corporate law is of due diligence because of the mergers and acquisitions which are happening or even in the regulatory framework when they are required to make disclosures before the regulatory authorities so doing all that requires somebody to go through a large number of documents so generally fresh law graduates who are hired they are guided by the senior people in the law offices or the law firms to in each page look if there is any reference to expise it and if there is a reference to expise it to flag that document to be shown to the senior person to further see how to use it for the assignment similarly if you see as a lawyer I had a case where it was a large estate P estate which was being transacted and what the seller company had represented was that it's free from all litigations and the law firm which was engaged by the purchaser did the due diligence and did not find reported that there was no litigation but ultimately after all the monies had been paid and the acquisition of the P estate was complete it turned out that there was a suit for specific performance already decreed on the date of the transaction with respect to the part of the T estate which used to yield the T fetching the maximum price in the international market and in that case I learned that the price of a T estate is not governed by how much acre of land for the area of the T estate you are transacting the price of the T estate depends upon that how much does the T grown in that estate fetch in the international and the national market so the particular patch which was fetching the maximum price that there was already a degree for specific performance and when we went through all the documents again what we realized is what the lawyer who had done the due diligence missed out was that in the books there was a reference to payments to certain lawyers now if the due diligence had been good they would have immediately picked up that alright why are these lawyers being paid which is the case or which is the opinion or which is the work for which you have made the payment and that investigation would have yielded that case which had already been decided now today in America there are softwares in which you can feel that alright it will go through lakhs of documents and point out flag out to you that out of these lakhs of pages which have been perused by me I find on pages XYZ there is a mention of this thing now the work for which a large number of lawyers were engaged or for which they were employed is being done by machine so the lawyers used to work what take maybe 30 days in going through the entire documentation of a company but now that machine can do that work in maybe a couple of days instead of 30 days so the billing hours go down this thing goes down another very important thing which is happening is the American courts that trial is very very expensive so that is why you may have heard already that a large number of suits are settled at the stage of negotiations or the pre-trial stage so for that and another peculiar thing about US court is that once the trial commences generally it's on a day-to-day basis so it is decided by the same judge so there they have the data of each and every judge available and all that a litigant has to do is to feed that data into the and feed the facts of his case into that software and find out that how is this just likely to decide my case so which is resulting in again elimination of a lot of lawyers so it sounds very frightening at the moment that what happens when all this and I give an example of see we used to have these horoscope makers in India in the Indian context but who would charge anything from 500 rupees to five lakhs rupees to draw the horoscope of a newborn baby or of anybody who would want the horoscope drawn up today it's all computerized you can walk into any shop and get it done for 50 rupees or 100 rupees so artificial intelligence will cut down a lot of work which the lawyers do and because the software and the machines being used on repetitive times are cheaper they even if a lawyer is using it for his benefit he may not be able to build the client so much but the good part of it is that the human touch would still be required because the profession of law let us not forget is a profession where a litigant like the patient with a medical problem comes to the lawyer in a pain in a distress and the soles and the comfort which a lawyer or a human being can give that can never be given by a machine so even if a person having a potential dispute or to go to a chaos and feed the facts of his case and what his opposite party is saying and ask for an opinion he would he is unlikely to be satisfied he'll find more comfort in talking to a lawyer so the what my reading has shown the solution for that is that the lawyers are typically known to be very rough and they think they know the laws so they don't they are sometimes not very patient with their plans so we have to learn our internal personal skills better they should according to me be special courses on blind handling and how to give soles because say long back I think in 16th century it was said that the trust of council is the biggest trust between man and man so the lawyer is the litigant is coming to you in trust that you will guide them or give them the correct advice so that quality will remain that requirement will remain so yes we have to be prepared for it it is a challenge which the legal profession is faced with but as for other challenges there is a solution to it friends we have already completed our time span I just highlight what I wanted to say about commercialization of the legal profession see commercialization and what is the difference between commerce or a profession or a business or a profession when you go to the shop to buy something it's a purely commercial dealing but yeah it is as I mentioned earlier it's a question of trust and he is coming to you of course he is paying you for your time but he is trusting you for telling correctly when I go and buy a refrigerator from a Roma shop whichever refrigerator I am picking up I am depending upon how that manufacturer has done that there is no this thing about the shopkeeper any trust between the shopkeeper and me as the buyer now that but what is happening in a large number of what I find the legal profession to be forgetting is that they are forgetting it is a profession and they are treating it more and more as a business or a commercial relationship and that can again have see one is it will cease to be a noble profession as it has always been called the state share or the dignity which the lawyers as of today command in the society that will go down you will be like any other shopkeeper you will be like any other businessman who is there to make money and in the legal profession it will be very difficult see today we are seeing from consumer claims but civil claims in some matters are already being made as far as really is concerned against lawyers or negligence and if the client sees that you are acting business like in profession he will not hesitate to file litigations against the lawyers which we see increasingly being done against the doctors and God forbid we should not have a situation like we are already having in the hospitals of the doctors being under attack we don't want a case where the litigants in the court become use physical violence against the lawyer for having not done his duty. Thank you very much Mr. Chhatrat I think I've exceeded by three minutes you are muted Mr. Chhatrat. Maybe the person who was moderating wanted to show the devil of the artificial intelligence and intelligence that you can be controlled by someone else also but I personally believe that the attention span of nobody is beyond 30 minutes I personally when I watch I like to watch for 20 minutes it all depends if actually like if we in one of the discussions we were discussing that you can't compare apples and pineapples like today's session we divide it to five parts so once you're dividing into five parts the participants who are watching it he knows that part one is over part two it's just like a sequel so there was something more to be watched and what more to be understood and the way you have taken the entire session into different parts and all were actually mesmerized at least I can say for myself there were a lot of key takes which you have given to us interpersonal skills that's what I'm also talking to my associates and young lawyers who sometimes ask that gone are the days where simplicity you had to have good communication good writing skills communication of course includes the writing skills good oratory again part of the communication skills law research these were there but now not only you are asked to write in a drafting cell but at the same time you are looked upon where you can write certain articles just to hammer a point I'm reminded of your associate Ahmed George writing very well on different aspects especially the way he took your legal journey when you demanded the office so there are a lot of key takeaways and if one actually takes it and even during vacations right you likely rightly said one should read not only law because all during all these sessions it was learned that a good lawyer is not limited to his knowledge to that of the law itself I was hearing to one of the sessions of Mr. Kapil Sebel even of Dupal Subramanian on live law and a lot of speakers they all come to the common point that you have to read sociology you have to read history because the lessons learned from all these books are also important which you actually do not know but actually when you are making submissions in the court or in the normal life also they actually do help and the way it has caught up the session during the youtube I was watching it it's actually doing very well and I know that even though that it was an office ask for many or students time where there are exams if it's doing well it will continue to do well we only request that keep on blessing us because certain sessions or interpersonal skills awfully we have actually started shiftings are focused towards this interpersonal skills how to draft I had made a submission to the former advocate general Karnataka Mr. Uday Hola and he has agreed on in the month of July to take a session on how to think as a lawyer and to one of the speakers we have requested that he should give a session on what is to be drafted and what not to be drafted in the written statement because we feel that these are certain things which at least during our times where we were never taught we learned unlearned ourselves we all learned during the flux of time with the experience by watching experience but now there are courses which teach them so we thought let's try that journey especially like people like you who have been blessing us with your guidance so thank you everyone stay safe stay blessed and tomorrow's session would be we will be taking around good quick questions on court of civil procedure especially focused on for the purposes of judicial exams but again since timings of different courts are different he's from Madurai so he will be taking session at 9 p.m tomorrow but do stay connected with us everyone stay safe stay blessed and thank you sir once again for sharing your knowledge it's always a pleasure connecting with you virtually and outside the this platform also thank you thank you


The threat from Al Qaeda has evolved significantly since September 11, 2001. What began as a small group of Arab militants in rural Pakistan has since evolved into a terrorist network with global reach. CSIS has started the Al Qaeda and Associated Movements Futures project. This project will produce a series of scenarios on the future of Al Qaeda and its affiliates through year 2025. Earlier I spoke with project co-directors Rick Ozzie Nelson and Tom Sanderson to talk more about their study. Given the degree and nature of the threat today, governments are understandably focused on what's happening now. One of the benefits of our study is to look into the future, determine some of the currents of the threat so that we can help governments become more proactive in facing what's going to happen in 2025. We're looking out 10 years plus because that's what it takes for governments, for the international community to go ahead and build kind of relationships and build the kind of capabilities that are going to be required to mitigate this threat that we'll be facing for arguably the next coming decades. Well, the study has various phases. The first phase is what we call a baseline assessment. And that assessment gives us an overview of where we think Al Qaeda and the affiliated movements are today. That's a necessary step in order to figure out or determine where they will likely be in the future. In the second part of the project, we're going to evaluate a series of case studies, everything from Al Qaeda core to individual cells that are inspired by the Al Qaeda narrative, as well as some of the affiliated movements. We're also going to look at issues such as technology and how that influences the group. Clearly, we can see that technology has had a big influence on the evolution of Al Qaeda and the affiliated movements to this point. But how is it going to affect it going forward? As part of the study, the research team will travel extensively to gain perspectives from outside Washington. The team will engage in a series of field visits across Europe, West Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia. And what this will do is provide much greater context and texture to the findings that we've developed back here in Washington through the research that we've been conducting. To supplement written publications, the AQAM Futures Project will produce a series of audio and video podcasts to provide interim findings from the study. In September, we will release the findings of our report and discuss the future of Al Qaeda and associated movements. This will include a discussion with some senior intelligence and foreign government officials who will be able to provide their insights as to where the threat is today and where it may be in 2025. We're not looking to predict the future. That's impossible. We're looking to determine some of the key factors, the fundamental conditions that may exist in the future and understand how we can mitigate this threat. To learn more about the Al Qaeda and associated movements Futures Project, visit aqam.csis.org.


So this talk will be about the Riemann-Roch theorem for genus one curves. More precisely, we'll be showing how to use the genus, the Riemann-Roch theorem to classify genus one curves. So previously, we showed that if we take a copy of the projective line, then this satisfies the Riemann-Roch theorem. In the case of genus nought and conversely, we showed that if we've got a curve satisfying the Riemann-Roch theorem for genus zero, then it must be a copy of the projective line. We also showed that if we've got an elliptic curve performed c modulo elatis, then this satisfies the Riemann-Roch theorem for genus one. And what we're going to do today is to show that if we've got a curve satisfying the Riemann-Roch theorem for genus one, then you can write it as the complex numbers modulo elatis. And so suppose c is a curve satisfying the Riemann-Roch theorem for genus one. Now the Riemann-Roch theorem in the case of genus one says that L of d is equal to degree of d plus L of k minus d, where as usual k is the canonical divisor and L is the dimension of the space of functions with poles only on d. As usual, we find that degree of k is equal to zero and L of k is equal to one from this. So the Riemann-Roch theorem becomes L of d is equal to degree of d whenever degree of d is greater than zero, because in that case the degree of this will be less than zero, so it just vanishes. So what we want to do is to try and classify curves satisfying this condition. So how do we do that? Well we're going to pick a point P on the curve, and then we're going to look at the dimension of n of P for n equals zero, one, two, three, and so on, where you recall this is the dimension of the space of functions which have a pole of order at most n at the point P and no poles elsewhere. So let's just calculate this using the Riemann-Roch theorem. Well this is pretty easy. So we just take n to be zero, one, two, three, four, five, or six, and then what L of nP? Well L of zero is always just one, and then by the Riemann-Roch theorem these numbers are one, two, three, four, five, and six. So it's almost linear except there's a sort of little glitch when you go from zero to one. Let's try and figure out what functions you get. Well here we get the space of constants, which is obviously spanned by one. Here well the dimension of L of P is the same as the dimension of L of zero so we get nothing new, so there are no new functions. Here the dimension goes up by one so we get a new function, let's call it x, which has a pole of order two. And similarly when we go up to here we get a new function, let's call it y, which has a pole of order three. And here you may think we get a new function but we don't really because the new function we get has a pole of order four but it's pretty obvious what that is. We can just take this function of the pole of order two and square it so we just get x squared. When we go to a pole of order five well we can get that by multiplying x and y together so we get x, y, and when we go to six well we can get a pole of order six by multiplying y by itself or we can multiply x by itself three times. So well we can now stop here because if we count up we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven functions living inside a six-dimensional vector space. That means there must be a linear relation between them. So we get a linear relation of the following form. It says a y squared plus b y plus c x y equals d x cube plus e x squared plus f times x plus g for some a, b, c, d, e, f, g in the complex numbers. So this is giving us a curve in p three, sorry, in p two I guess. And we can simplify it as follows. So first of all, we can just change y to y plus a constant. And this will eliminate the term b times y. At least if the characteristic is not equal to two because if we do that we can't always get rid of that. Similarly we can change y to y plus constant times x. And this will eliminate the term c times x times y. Again, that characteristic isn't two. Then we can change x to x plus a constant. And this will eliminate the term in x squared. Then we can change y to y times a constant. So the term in y squared has coefficient one. And then we can change x to x times a constant to make the coefficient of x cubed equal to, well for historical reasons, we make it equal to four not one. So our equation now looks like y squared equals four x cubed minus g two x minus g three for some g two and g three in the complex numbers. Again, this notation is done mostly for historical reasons. So this is an affine curve and we can look at the corresponding projective curve if we like it, z, z, z y squared is four x cubed minus g two x z squared minus g three z cubed. So this is a curve in p two. And for the curve in p two the point p that we started with corresponds to the point at infinity, which is just the point where x, in projective space is the point where x, y, z is equal to zero, one, zero. So we've started with an arbitrary curve, I guess complete or compact, satisfying the Riemann-Roch theorem for genus zero and shown that we can write it in this form, assuming it's non-simple and so on. Well, now the next question is how do we show that this is C modulo elatis? Well, the first thing to do is to try and identify what it looks like topologically over the complex numbers. So suppose for any curve which is of a form y squared equals x minus a x minus b x minus c or y squared equals x minus a x minus b x minus c x minus d. So we're doing this case because we can get it for free. Then what we do is we get a map from C to the projective line, just taking a point x, y to the point x. And you see this is almost a double cover except at the points a, b, c and either zero and either d or infinity. So at the points a or b or c or either d in this case or infinity in this case, there are two points of the curve c that map to the same point. So what has happened is we get C is got by gluing together two copies of P1, except you have to glue them a little bit carefully. So let's draw the two copies of P1. And we've got these points a, b, c and either d or infinity on both copies. Or rather, these are the points that are going to map to d or infinity. And we've got to kind of glue them together. We sort of glue them together like this. What we do is we cut these open with a, you know, you imagine these being made out of paper or something.  And then you glue them together. So, and we're going to glue this piece to this piece. And we're going to glue this piece to this piece and this piece to this piece and that piece to that piece. So let's draw what we're getting again. Here I'll draw them slightly differently so you can see them being joined together.  So now here are the four bits. I'm going to have got a green bit and a dark blue bit. And I think this was a pink bit and a light blue bit or whatever. And I glue it to a second copy of. So you see, this is just a sphere where I've made a couple of slits in it and then I've deformed it a bit. And I'm doing that blue bit to that blue bit and this green bit to that green bit. And maybe I should have done it the other way around to make it a bit less confusing. And if I glue them up like this, you can see that what you're getting is just a torus. So it ends up looking something like this. So in other words, the genus of this complex curve in the sense of algebraic topology, where the genus is the number of handles on a sphere, is the same as the genus G that appears in the Riemann-Roch theorem. Well, so far, we've got our curve as a cubic equation in X and Y, but we haven't quite written it as C modulo alattis. So we've got two ways of representing it as an elliptic curve. We can either write it as the complex numbers modulo alattis, or we can write it as this plane curve Y squared equals 4X cubed minus G2X minus G3. And how do we get from one to the other? Well, we saw we can get from C modulo alattis to the plane curve by taking Y to be the bias-strice function, differentiated, and X to be the bias-strice function. To go back the other way, what we're going to do is to use this magic differential dx over Y. So this is a one form on the curve. And now you may think this one form has got a singularity at Y equals 0. And the answer is no, it doesn't actually have a singularity at Y equals 0. And let's see why.  Let's forget about this factor of 4 for the moment.  So dx over Y is equal to 2Y dy divided by all this junk here. We should also divide by Y. So here we have X minus A X minus B plus all the rest of it. I can't be bothered to write out all over again. And now you see the Y's cancel out. And the key point is this thing is none 0 at Y equals 0 because if Y is equal to 0, then X is equal to A or B or C. And if X is equal to A or B or C, then 2 of these terms are 0. And the third one is very definitely none 0 because of course A is not equal to B. B is not equal to C and C is not equal to A. Otherwise, we would have a covert singularity. So this side is now holomorphic at Y equals 0. So this is also really holomorphic at Y equals 0. It just happens that dx and Y both have a 0 at these points. Now what we've got is a rather nice one form that's actually holomorphic everywhere on the curve. I guess I should have checked the point of infinity as well, but I'm feeling too lazy to do that. And now what we can do is we can look at the integral from point P to any other point Z. And we're going to integrate dx over Y. So this is going to be some fixed point. And this is going to be some point varying on our curve. And the problem is this isn't really quite well defined because if we draw a curve like this, we might have a point P here and a point Z here, but then there are lots of different paths from P to Z. So we could go along here or we could go along here. And these would give different values of this integral. So Cauchy's theorem says that we get the same value if two paths are homotopic. But this pink path and this green path are certainly not homotopic. So this integral is not actually well defined. It depends on the path. Well, so what's the ambiguity? Well, there are two ambiguities. First of all, if we just integrate round a loop like this, we can get something that's nonzero. And secondly, if we integrate round a loop like this, we also might get something nonzero. But every loop you can do on the torus is homotopic to an integral multiple of some multiple of the pink loop and some multiple of the green loop. So if we put omega 1 is the integral over the pink loop of dx over y and omega 2 is the integral over the green loop of dx over y, then the ambiguity of the integral from P to Z dx over y is equal to m times omega 1 plus n times omega 2. And this is just a point of a certain lattice L, which is just the lattice generated by omega 1 and omega 2. So we've now found the lattice L corresponding to our elliptic curve. It's given by the ambiguity in this integral here. So what we get is a well-defined map from the curve y equals 4x cubed minus g2x minus g3 to the complex numbers modulo this lattice L. So that's how you get from an algebraic curve to the complex numbers modulo a lattice. Okay, that's all for the Riemann Rock in the genus 1. And next we'll be looking at the Riemann Rock for genus 2.


Well, it's going on everyone Sam here with latent sports cards, and I'm ripping two boxes of 2021-22 Panini obsidian soccer team all Exclusive for Jim L. So good luck Jim Pull some fire out of this for a man a little tiny box is a team all here Got that is red flood of on health de Maria for Argentina More messy boys right there Got rookie of Milo, Rochica Yeah, Rochica That is 14 out of 26 for Norwich City Got volcanic patch auto of mckel. Oh yours of all for Spain That is numbered 30 out of 44 On the volcanic patch auto Slick-licking card right there And last card of box one is Rafael Leo for AC Milan on the cutting-edge materials That is numbered 16 out of 44 Love Joshua Got box to here. We go. We got points in this one. Wow 2,500. Holy cow. That's a lot That's honestly not bad 2,500 points again, there it is It's most points I've ever seen I think got Marco Royce Dortmund to 26 nice kinds. He pulled the super of his out of finest that I Got red flood is Casper Schmeichel for Leicester City nice one there and We've got eruption a meal Smith row for arsenal on the jersey to 30 out of 44 There you go. That'll do it for your break there Jim congrats on the hits. We'll get those right out to you. Appreciate it man


Hello, I'm Chris Neller, Executive for Research Services, and I want to thank you for joining this year's National Archives Genealogy Series. All session recordings and handouts are now available on our Genealogy Series webpage. I too am a genealogy buff, dating back to my first job at the National Archives more than 20 years ago. I loved seeing researchers' anticipation and thrill when they discovered something new in the records about their families, and I had a similar response when I learned that my great-great-great-grandfather was listed in the 1870 census as a huckster, working at the center market at the exact location where the National Archives building in Washington, DC now stands. We welcome your feedback. Please fill out this quick evaluation to let us know what you liked, what worked, and what didn't, and suggest topics for future sessions. We hope that you continue your journeys of discovery with us by visiting us online or in person at one of our research facilities nationwide. I also want to thank everyone who made this Genealogy Series possible, those who led sessions and those behind the scenes. Thank you for your participation in the 2023 National Archives Genealogy Series and your continued interest in the records maintained by the National Archives. We look forward to seeing you next time.


was two years ago to the day that I was in New York City. I was in a deli, in Carnegie deli in Manhattan, to be exact. It was cold and it was rainy and everybody seemed to be in a bad mood, or maybe that's just Manhattan. And I realized that driving in Manhattan is not really for the faint of heart or the weak, but they encourage you in New York. If you're ever in New York City, they're very encouraging folks. Several people had already told me that I was number one and that I could go do things to myself that I don't think are technically physically possible. So encouraging, right? I mean they're on your side. I was listening to a gentleman talk to me over a cup of coffee about an opportunity at a company called Hearst, Hearst Business Media to be exact, and he was discussing how these 10 business units that make up HBM were going through transformational journeys, through Lean and DevOps and Agile, and I was supposed to come in and help them along this journey. They're split basically in three verticals. There's the healthcare vertical, there is the transportation vertical, and the smallest of the three is finance. And it's interesting because Hearst invests in these organizations, not just in resources, but also in allowing them to maintain a high degree of autonomy, which means that you have 10 unique, very individual business units that operate like individual organizations. I was highly intrigued and I decided to take the job, so a few weeks later I started, and the first order of business for me was to go out to each of these business units and get to know the engineers to understand how they made software and how their organizations ran. For the most part, as far as DevOps was concerned, you had kind of three camps. You had the folks who had a DevOps team, which is essentially ops rebranded. You had someone who had a DevOps evangelist. This was sort of the internal DevOps Sherpa that was trying to help shepherd the DevOps transformation, but was kind of the only person actually interested in DevOps, beating a lone drum kind of thing, right? And then you had folks that just hadn't really started at all. They'd go into conferences, they had some interest in it, but hadn't figured out, like, what is the first step for us? So I realized, however, that each of those business units all were facing more or less similar challenges, if not the same challenges. They were all incredibly unique, just like everyone else. And so what I decided to do was, instead of just having these BUs communicate with one another at a high level, which they were good at already, so the executives got together of course during budget season, but the engineers never really talked to one another. So I was going to create this sort of broad DevOps community across all 10 business units. So an interesting challenge, so I started thinking, that's me, or it's supposed to be me, I started thinking to myself, like, how am I going to go about doing this? And usually when we go to make decisions, we tend to look at things that have worked for us in the past, right? If it worked for us before, surely it'll work again. But I also recognize that, you know, I have two shortcomings. Well, I actually have a lot of shortcomings, but we'll just focus on two for right now. One of which is I sometimes get so hung up on past experiences that it becomes a bias for myself. I don't allow myself the room or the opportunity to really focus on innovation. Like, how can we do this better this time? My other shortcoming that can sometimes really get in the way is I tend to get wrapped around the axle when technology is involved. I'm an engineer in my heart and soul. I went to Georgia Tech, you know, Double E, and so if there's technology involved, I really want to get involved too. And so I tend to kind of sometimes go overboard. I'll give you an example. So when my son was very young, he was reliant upon a sound machine to sleep. So I came up with what I think is arguably a brilliant idea, to move the sound machine a little farther away from the bed every night, right, to wean him off of this thing. You know, I thought, well, we could attach like an extension cord, move it down the hallway. My wife said at the time, you know, why don't you just turn the volume down a little bit more each night? That's the only, yeah, if you want to do it the easy way, right? But I'm an engineer. Like, that's just not how we roll. So what I really couldn't tell her was I'd already purchased the domain name and had Arduino boxes set up and I bought a Lego train so that I could like graph it and graph it as it moved down the hallway there.  No one will ever know really for sure. But so knowing these two sort of issues that I can potentially have, I was like, okay, how can I resolve this? So what I decided to do is create a roadmap. And the idea behind this was to use not just my past experiences, but the past experiences of others in our industry. You know, I reached out to thought leaders. You know, as an example, I called up Gene Kim, who's down in Portland, I'm in Seattle, and I've known for many years now. And I said, you know, Gene, this is my idea. What do you think? You know, I'll never forget what he said to me. He said, Polly, how did you get this phone number? And so, and you know, that really stuck with me, right? Because what Gene was trying to say was, you know, you need to have really solid communication skills to be able to really do DevOps well to collaborate. And so I took this roadmap and I went out to the business units. And I talked to the leadership there and I said, Listen, this is what we're going to do. We're going to focus focus on culture and process and we're going to focus on tools and we're going to do it in that order, right? And yes, I understand that that you have very unique challenges and we will focus on those, but we're also going to focus on the broader community. Because really, I think the value here, the real sort of opportunity is to get these business units to communicate the engineers to share. And so I also created a maturity model and the maturity model is essentially used internally for the business unit to kind of gauge where they were on that journey, right? What's their maturation? So I decided to start with something very simplistic. The idea was, okay, let's do something small, something simple. I mean, we're talking about a very large effort with a lot of moving pieces. And then we can build on that. And so I started with with chat, which I didn't invent chat, of course, and neither did Hearst. And prior to this, Hearst had chat, but it was the sort of chat that you're familiar with in an enterprise, right? In other words, link was pushed down to your desktop or laptop, whether you wanted it or not. And it was linked into AD and it was a great tool for you to basically go out and find another individual and have this sort of ad hoc one-on-one conversation. And you could pull, you know, John or Jane in also, but it didn't have a very organic feel. It had a very enterprise feel. And so I decided to take a different tactic, right? Again, thinking back about how would DevOps do this? And so instead, I said, let's create a cause, let's rally people around the cause, and then the tool will shake itself out. So we'll start with culture, then we'll go to process, and the tool will just figure out as we go. And so the cause was pretty simple. Let's just get folks together so we can talk. And we're going to do it in the thousands, so let's try and figure out a process that's going to work. And the benefit here is that we can have knowledge here and help each other out. Ideally, if you're going through a problem, and I've already gone through it, I want to be able to share my experiences. It started out fairly slow. We moved up to about 50 folks fairly rapidly. And the nice thing about this is it's completely opt in. So you can either join us on the journey or not.  We created some guidelines or codes of conduct inside. Now, this was done by the community. So the idea was from the very beginning, the community would police itself. There is no police in charge of this. It's ours. And this worked out incredibly well. We ballooned from 50 to well over 1,000. We're on our way to 2,000 people in there now. And there was some concern in the beginning from some managers that people were not going to do their job. They're just going to hang out and chat all day and watch cat videos. By the way, this is an accurate representation of how I play golf. And I think a reasonable response to missing a one foot putt. And so I wasn't worried about that, right? I was actually really worried and concerned that no one was going to use it at all. You know how it is, right? It's another tool I got to keep up with. I've got a full-time job.  We were both wrong. People did use it, and they used it appropriately. And now we had some fun too. We have some silly channels to have some fun in. But people ended up helping each other very quickly. Now the beginning, it started inside the BU as you'd probably expect, right? You had people talking inside of teams. It was very isolated, very siloed. And we started working to break that apart and get people to communicate across business units. Before long, we saw people between business units coming in and helping each other, you know, in things like outages and incidents, and then the sort of real magic happened. And that's when we saw these self-forming cross-functional teams across business unit boundaries where people were getting together to create innovative solutions. And in some cases actually creating products that could be sold and generate revenue for the business. Now the amazing thing here, as a manager, the amazing thing here is you didn't need a manager, right? People are smart. You hire incredibly intelligent, innovative, creative people. So just get out of their way, just give them the right tools and create a process that everyone can agree on that's inclusive. That's DevOps, right? So this worked amazingly well. So I'm like, all right, mission accomplished. I can sort of just drop the microphone and walk away. Well, not exactly, right? The interesting thing here was, I like to use analogies, and the interesting thing here to me was it was sort of like we were creating a new product together, both literally and figuratively. So I was thinking, this is sort of like creating a DevOps airplane, right? This DevOps transformation was a new type of aircraft we were building in a cross-functional team with very little guidance from management. There's a new type of plane. It could see 300 people. It ran on solar power, something we'd never seen before, so we weren't sure what to expect. And we got a volunteer pilot from some of the engineers. They strapped himself into the cockpit, and we pulled it out onto the runway, pushing the throttle forward. It rumbles down the runway, and he pulls back on the yoke, and the nose lifts up. And we all watch in awe as the plane careens into the trees at the end of the runway in this massive spectacular fireball. And so, luckily the pilot escaped with very little injuries, but something didn't work. Something didn't help that plane slip the surly bonds of gravity, right? What were we missing? Now, I tend to think that these types of things are like puzzles, right? But more like riddles than puzzles. You kind of feel like you have all the moving pieces, but at the same time, we had all the moving pieces, and yet I'm still missing something out of this, right? And so, I kind of think of this sort of joke about an engineer who goes in for a job, and the prospective employer says, well, it says here on your resume that, you know, you're incredibly quick at math. That's very impressive. What's 32 times 47? The engineer without skipping a B goes 36. And the employer goes, that's not even close. And he goes, no, but it was quick. So, the answer was right in front of me, excuse me, but I wasn't seeing it. And I was like, okay, I got to figure this out because I have the roadmap. It's built from solid foundational principles and documents. I had all the artifacts to support this thing, both from myself and from other thought leaders in the industry. I had a maturity model that was well thought out and well groomed, and it failed. So, I went back out to the business units. I went to the leaders and I said, listen, we need to have an open and honest conversation. I knew I could do that with the engineers, but I wasn't sure I could do that with the leadership. It's a different breed, right? And so, I said, I'm gonna be very honest. I'm gonna make myself vulnerable, right? There may be hugging, there could be tears, maybe we do trust falls. I don't know what's gonna happen, but we gotta get to the bottom of this. And I need the root cause of why this plane crashed. Now, the good news is they weren't. They were very open, they were very honest, and I came away from all 10 conversations with essentially two root cause of the crash. Unfortunately, they're both my fault, but that's okay, right? That's actually good because the only person you can control in your life is really yourself. So, I felt pretty good about that, and I came away with basically one. I came in with this roadmap at the beginning of 2015. Everyone loved the roadmap. Everyone said these are great foundational ideas. They all make sense. We absolutely should be doing these things. But I've already budgeted for 2015. All my resources are already allocated, now you came in and dumped this on me. I don't see how I can be successful. Basically, I feel like you're setting me up to fail. Okay, fair enough. Number two, that roadmap is highly prescriptive. Now, it's highly prescriptive from whose perspective, the leaders. Why? Because I created that roadmap with the engineers, and I didn't create it with leadership in the room, right? Myopic again, right? We talked about my shortcomings. I fell victim to them anyway. I got so wrapped up. I love engineers. I'm an engineer. So, I love sitting with engineers, and I love working with engineers. I love being an engineer, and so unfortunately, I forgot that there were other people involved in this transformation. Okay, so in 2016, let's take a whole new approach, right? A fresh new DevOps approach. By the end of 2016, DevOps will smell like a fresh Carolina pine forest, right? And so, the idea here was I'm gonna hire a team, and we're gonna basically do sort of very highly dedicated engagements, almost like a consultancy. And so, I needed three very different skill sets that would complement each other very well. So, I hired Ahern Blythe, Levi Smith, and Alex Alley. And the idea here was that we were going to create this sort of Tiger team. I get now that it's really hard to get these initiatives started. It's not so hard once they're going, but you need some assistance. So, we were gonna do this internally, and we started with creating value stream mapping workshops. So, we would go around to each business unit and get a sense for what they were doing, how they were doing it. You'd create a current state map of your value stream, a future state, and then an actual tactical plan to get there. So, that tangible asset was something leadership wanted. Like, show me where I can get an ROI on this. I need some numbers. Whereas, the engineers were like, show me how I can make my life better day to day. Probably the most valuable thing we did. And I think one of the best kickoff points for any DevOps transformation I've ever seen. I took my maturity model and my roadmap. Those are the actual documents. And I threw those into the trash and went to the business units and said, listen, you guys have all the contextual knowledge of how you do your work. The world you live in, I do not. And it's wrong for me to come in and say I do inadvertently or otherwise. So, let's build it together. Let's make it specialized for your business unit. And let's set it up so that in 2016 we have the budget to do the things that have the biggest business priority in the business technical impact. So, now, mission accomplished, right? So, we take that, you know, version two of the airplanes, all licensed, shiny. We get a new volunteer pilot. She straps herself into the cockpit, rumbles out onto the runway, throttles up and takes off. She pulls back on the stick. The nose lifts up. We see the plane lift into the air and everyone is super excited. It's like we finally think we've got this thing going. It clears the trees at the end of the runway and then settles back into the forest. Another spectacular fireball. Our pilot stumbles out of the forest, hair a little singed, but otherwise okay. So, what went wrong? So, now I'm thinking back, I don't understand. So, I literally have everyone on board. We have all the support and lift we need to get this transformation not only off the ground, but flying. So, I take some time here to try and be introspective. And at the time I was reading a book by Nietzsche. He's a pretty interesting fellow. If you've never read anything he's done. Even if you don't agree with him, it's interesting perspectives. And the book was called The Birth of Tragedy. And in this book, Nietzsche talks about these two diametrically opposed perspectives. On one hand you have the Apollonian. And the Apollonian is really focused on control and order. And on the other side, the antithesis is Dionysium. And so, these folks really say listen, in order to move forward in life, you have to accept chaos. You have to accept there's gonna be some disorder. Now, when I started thinking about how this applied to what I was trying to accomplish, I thought about Apollonian as being sort of like leadership. Leaders love to prognosticate the future. They wanna plan and chart where we're gonna be. And ideally if possible, control it. In some cases they wanna know like five years out, which is a tech, as tech folks we know that's impossible. We don't even know what products we're gonna be creating in five years. On the other hand, Dionysium, I really think more along the lines of engineers. These are the artists, right? These are the folks we give a blank canvas and some basic tools and say, I need a painting of a woman in a pastoral scene and my expectation is the Mona Lisa. Now hopefully you'll iterate to get there. So who's left out? I literally have everyone included in these two perspectives. Now in our case, the person who was left out was the middle manager. And the issue here is that the middle manager has the unenviable task of having to live in both perspectives at the same time. They need to create these artifacts and these consumable products that they can send up in highly tangible form to leaders while simultaneously having to be an evangelist and an inspired leader for folks who are artists. These are very different roles to play. Oftentimes they have to switch very quickly between these roles, between meetings. So that contextual shift is very difficult. And they were the ones that weren't supporting the overall effort. It turns out middle managers have a lot more power than you think. Why? Because they're key influencers in any organization. So I need to understand why we're middle managers not supporting this effort. When everyone else was, even their boss, right? So you have all of the people that report to the middle manager loving it, you have the leaders loving it and yet still they're not on board. So anytime that I really need to understand motives why someone is acting the way they are or making decisions the way they are, I tend to look at three key factors, drivers, fears and incentives. And so incentives for the most part in our organization, like any enterprise organization with 25,000 plus employees are goal based, right? I'm not a huge fan of goals, but I also recognize like the IRS, they're not going away anytime soon and we're just gonna have to live with it. So let's make the best of it. For goals for us, I really focused heavily on reevaluating the business goals. That's where everything starts. That's the origin of your goals. I made sure that the goals that were being brought out by the business were aligned with your team goals, were aligned with DevOps principles, and that we minimized individual goals. So we put a much heavier focus on overall team goals. The idea there was to bring the middle manager in to a more collaborative mindset. And this alignment meant that everyone was working towards the same end game, right? Even the business. For us drivers, you know, you have extrinsic drivers, but really nowadays every business has reasonable comp package. I kind of think of like the carnival, I guess you'd have to be this tall to ride this ride kind of thing. Like if you're not offering decent pay and decent comp packages, I don't see how you can ever expect to get highly qualified top talent. So we didn't really focus heavily on that because after evaluation, all that was sort of a non-starter force, but intrinsic rewards in drivers, that's a totally different thing. That's something we could control and there's a lot of impact you can have here. And so I boiled down intrinsic drivers, basically the three things, right? Who you work with, who you work for, and what you work on. In our case, who you work with, this was less about just the average co-worker of yours as a middle manager, but more about the other middle managers in other business units. Now you remember earlier I talked about how we focused really heavily on getting the engineers together because leadership, executive leadership already communicated? Well, who do we leave out? Right, I left out the middle manager. Again, in my whole reckoning. And so the idea was, let's create a safe, secure environment where middle managers can communicate with other middle managers in other business units without any fear of reprisal or big brother watching me, any of that kind of stuff. And the idea is we really wanna get these problems, these challenges that we have out into the open and so that we can work together to solve them. Not just in the siloed business unit, but across the business units. Next we talked about who you work for. Now this is really where I focused more with leadership. What we didn't want was we didn't want a situation of lip service, right? Where it's like, I empower all of my middle managers. That's an easy thing to say. How do you go about actually doing that? And it's not just saying you get to make the decisions. I think it goes a step further than that. I think it's really more about creating some understandable, reasonable boundaries of innovation and say this is where you can really reach and then let people take some risks. And what you work on is last, and this was really when I went around and talked to all the different folks, it ended up being different than what I thought it was gonna be. I thought it was gonna be, listen, we don't get to work on anything fun. Actually, it turns out, it's like, listen, if you could just get rid of some of this tech debt, my life would be better and it would be more fun. And so we kind of reevaluated how are we communicating what tech debt is to the business because the business was making the decisions. And so what that really entailed was taking that tech debt, the things that you wanted to change and defining the value not in technology but in business value and then selling that up. So it's kind of just knowing your audience. And lastly, we looked at fears. Maybe my fears are not working, I guess. And so fears, in the case of middle management, is really more about this fear of obsolescence, right? If you automate and dev ops me out of a job, where do I go next? It's just gonna keep chasing me down. And this really comes, I thought of it more as like a fear of what I call CPR, a loss of CPR, which is a loss of control, a loss of power, and a loss of resources. And when we go in and we say, listen, we need you to push decision making closer to where the work is actually occurring.  That's scary because what happens is the middle manager then has to lose a little bit of control and power through transference. And the way we approach this is listen, let's redefine what value is to the organization. A lot of middle managers say, well, if I have a big budget or I have a lot of people reporting to me, that's value. And if you take any of that away, it diminishes my value. I actually disagree. I think it's quite the opposite. I think it increases your value because in the end, you're not successful by the number of fiefdoms and people that you collect. You're successful based on the products that you produce and how satisfied your customers are. So we put a refocused effort on the customer first, redefining what value meant for the middle and then really supporting that change. This is really hard for some folks. It doesn't happen overnight, certainly, right? We need middle leaders. When I'm talking about these types of changes, this isn't just managing a transformational change. It's leading a transformational change and there's a big difference there. And it's hard and it's scary and it definitely doesn't happen overnight. It takes a lot of time. There is no sort of magic pill that you can take and then in tomorrow, you're a great leader. But it's what we've been doing and it's what we've been focusing on and we've seen an incredible amount of value derived from these changes. Most of them, as you probably already figured out, are cultural in nature. I didn't really mention any tools in here because the tools are sort of interchangeable. It's the easiest thing to rip out and replace. Your process is a little bit harder and that's mainly because people become very attached to the way they do things, right? This entrenched inertia around, that's how we've always done it. Or it's just your favorite process. It's just your way of doing things. And then the culture is the hardest thing to change. I actually don't believe you can change culture. I think you can influence culture by modeling behaviors and trying to drive the behaviors that you wanna see that reinforce the culture. But I think the notion of changing the culture is not actually accurate. So finally, we taxi like this third iteration of the aircraft, this DevOps transformational airplane out onto the runway. By this point, it's understandable and arguably harder to get volunteers to climb up into the cockpit. But we find something, by the way, I think this is a testament to the nature at Hearst, at HBM, and that is that we will accept risk, we'll take chances, and if it doesn't work, we'll just keep trying. And the testament there is more about me saying, hey, I need another volunteer and lots of hands shooting to the air. That's sort of your measure of are you succeeding or not? Are people willing to take risks when things don't work the first two times? So we get the pilot into the cockpit, we pull it out onto the runway, he throttles up, it rumbles down the runway, the nose lifts, the plane lifts, the wheels go up, clear the trees, and the plane is flying. Now actually, the plane is soaring. Now to end that sort of analogy in metaphors is we don't really have a destination in mind. We took off from Seattle and we're just heading east. Dionysian, right? Now we need to control enough of the aircraft through Apollonian perspective so that we don't crash, but we're just gonna head east for now and we're gonna keep iterating and we're gonna fine tune it over time. That's been our approach and it's worked really, really well. I hope that you guys would share with me later. One on one, I'd love to hear your approaches, things that have worked for you. This is a great opportunity for all of us to learn, including myself. So that's it, thank you very much. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your conference.