Summary:

What happens when an engineer who thrives on data is forced to navigate chaos where the rules no longer compute? Chris May shares how COVID stripped away his reliance on rigid process and revealed the true currency of business: empathy, connection, and people-first leadership. This conversation explores how Chris reshaped himself and his company to succeed by humanizing technology and centering people at the core of cybersecurity.

Chapters:

00:00 – When the rules don’t compute: Chris’s messy COVID reality

03:45 – An engineer meets chaos: when process fails

07:30 – Facing fear, loss, and the human side of crisis

12:15 – Chris’s three-month road trip: rediscovering connection

17:40 – From transactions to people-first leadership

23:00 – Learning to translate between tech and human

27:10 – Data vs. context: why relationships matter

31:20 – Cybersecurity’s biggest risk: humans, not servers

36:00 – Training people, not just systems, to fight cyber threats

40:45 – Mentorship, growth, and soft skills in tech careers

46:30 – Cutting through the static: avoiding politics and division at work

50:00 – Fighting otherization and building people-centered IT

52:00 – Closing reflections: disrupting IT with empathy

Host Alexa Beavers: linkedin.com/in/alexabeaverspmp

Guest Chris May: linkedin.com/in/chrismaycybersec

Executive Producer Jim Kanichirayil: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Music Credit: "Lost in Dreams" by Kulakovka

Their brain doesn't work like mine. So they're not gonna follow, they're not gonna understand. I, the best skill I ever learned was to be, to translate both directions. Okay. We work very high level technical stuff. People don't understand what we talk about. I had to learn how to translate it to them in a way that makes sense to them.

Just like a doctor has to translate things to you that you don't understand 'cause you're not a surgeon. And then I had to learn what they were trying to say to me in non-technical speak and their issues and translate that to what it means to us. It's the best thing I ever did. I was okay at it before COVID, but I feel like that's why.

Our security department especially, has been so much more successful because I'm the one out talking about it, and I've learned how to translate that into the way other humans communicate. So I can still give you very high level knowledge that'll impress you, but it's not gonna impress you. If I'm talking in acronyms, you don't understand.

What do facial instructions mean? And as you do that, you just finally learn it. I don't have to think about it anymore. It's built into me now because I took the time to understand the normal communication processes. And here's the cool thing. All this stuff's in a book. It's all online. It's all you can find it, and so I just put myself to school on how to deal with people better.

Alexa Beavers: What happens when a leader who's always trusted data zeros and ones suddenly faces a world where the rules don't compute? For Chris May COVID ripped down the walls, he'd built as an engineer and forced him to lead with something he'd long avoided human connection. Today's guest, Chris, takes us on a journey from rigidity to resilience, from seeing people as math problems to understanding the data of human connection.

And empathy and presence. In this episode, Chris shares how breaking down his walls helped him build trust, how he and his team members restructured their company around their strengths and transform their business to one that thrives by making a difference in people's lives, not just in their IT systems.

Over 20 years protecting organizations as small as neighborhood nonprofits and as large as a 16,000 person healthcare system. From 2010 to 2015, he safeguarded DuPont, then a Fortune 500 company, keeping more than 60,000 computers and valuable research out of hacker's hands. Today Chris guides leaders through privacy and security rules like HIPAA and PCI.

He translates cyber risks into plain language action plans and shows boards how good security can actually grow the business. Chris is a frequent speaker and educator. He's known for turning intimidating geek. Speak into stories that even I can understand. Chris, welcome to the show. We're so glad to have you here today.

Chris May: Thank you. It's good to be here. I'm excited.

Alexa Beavers: Yeah, I'm very excited, especially since I learned so much about you and I think you have a brilliant story to share today. So what was your career messy moment?

And I think during then was the messiest that my life had been around business. I'm used to numbers and I'm very analytical and we're engineers. It was a time when the math didn't make sense, right? We couldn't add anything up and come out with two plus two didn't equal four anymore. I think the, what got so messy for us is our big focus is trying to make sure that we support not just the company, but the employees that helped build the company.

And we got in a position to where, we sell huge technical instances and we couldn't get equipment. So if we look back to COVID, remember we sell wireless networks and servers, and we were waiting on shipments of three and $400,000 worth of hardware that didn't come.

And so when it didn't show up, you couldn't install it.

You couldn't get paid, you couldn't pay your people. And it just, I remember it feeling messy, right? Like how and nobody had an instruction manual,

Right.

And there was no manual, right? There was no instructions. There was no way to Google and figure out what to do.

Alexa Beavers: I imagine as an engineer, so you're an established engineer, you really are great at process, you're great at figuring things out it. What did it feel like to not be able to figure something out the way you always had before?

Alexa Beavers: Yeah, what you thought you were dealing with was not what you were dealing with when you made the plan. The rug got stuck out from under you or pulled out from under you. How did that look? If I was watching y'all in action during that messy COVID time where you weren't able to get the things you needed, you couldn't support your people, you know the things you would be invoicing for, you're not bringing money in.

What did it look like if I was watching you?

Chris May: what you saw was what's typically a very, well-oiled machine. Start to get squeaky and not so well oiled, right? I think what we saw quickly that we did not plan for, right? When we saw this happening, we try to make a plan and we tried to plan for the business side of it, right?

What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen if we can't get tech? What's gonna happen if we can't do this? What we saw happen very quickly that we weren't prepared for that got very messy is the people, right? People were scared, people were nervous, people were scared for their kids. I think we can all say people made decisions they that aren't rational for them that they wouldn't normally make.

We ha people acting completely differently than they ever had and getting very polarized about things they had never been polarized about before. And we're not political by nature, or we don't get into any of that. So it was a whole new realm that we had never had to navigate. I think that was one of the things that was so shocking.

And then in that you don't want to have to let anybody go because their life's already upended and they're already don't know what's gonna happen. And some people have already lost jobs in their family, and so it just became this, it was like an entirely new way to have to navigate business.

Chris May: That's very true. And that's what, that's when it gets very hard is because if you've got these people so we employ a lot of engineers and technical people, and you're used to them. They do the same motions and the same things, and then all of a sudden you've got, I think a one example of a person that had been with the company for six, seven years and was very stable and very solid, and then all of a sudden this person is acting like a completely different human being one day.

And they're not getting on the calls. They should get on and they're not showing up. And they're not, and you're like, what happened? Wasn't, they didn't wanna do a good job. There was other things. They had people in their family that had gotten ill, somebody passed away. We had an employee pass away from COVID. We were one of, we had one of the very early, like very early in, we had an employee that lived outside of DC where I am that. That, that passed away. And that's, so you're starting to deal with these, and that scares the other people in the company. And now nobody, they're like, oh my gosh, I was with this guy at some point.

So it was just all these things that I had never had to deal with.

What is, what happens for you when that comes your way?

Chris May: so for me in particular it was even made more difficult. So I'm very open about the fact that I have Asperger's syndrome, which is now on the autism spectrum. It used, it's always been on the autism spectrum, but it used to be diagnosed as its own thing. And so for me, I'm very analytical, right?

I think in black and white ones and zeros, I'm a math savant, so like I just understand very high level functions that doesn't lend itself well to dealing with. People's messy functions, right? Like I can understand everything. Math comes out a certain way. There's one answer. Computers work a certain way, they're binary, ones and zeros.

Everybody's a little messy. I was messy. I didn't know what was happening. And so it was harder for me, right? I started, I couldn't understand why business processes were breaking down in the way they were, and I couldn't get my head around, why can't you just do your job?

Because that's how I've always been wired.

Not in a bad way, but I do my

Alexa Beavers: There was a little bit of an if then rule book and suddenly that was upended and you are finding yourself being like, wait a second. All the ways I've trained myself to be successful in this world are just not working.

Chris May: they were flying out the window and I couldn't figure it out. I couldn't, and here's the funny part for me, here's, I think might have been one of the dividing lines, is I couldn't figure out why everybody else was acting in the manner they were not realizing that I was also acting in a very different manner than I would have before that happened.

Chris May: we never can, we're

always the last to see what we do, right? And so I had to get very analytical about it and I was like, what is going on here? Why are. I was more angry than I I'm not usually a very highly emotional person because of my condition. So I was very angry and couldn't understand why, and was like, what is happening here?

I thought people were just failing. And it really caused me to do a lot of deep dive and be like, okay, how in the world are we gonna deal with this? I'm over here worried about we might lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I'm having that conversation with a gentleman and he's worried about that.

His wife's gonna die. I'm like, wait a minute. This is, we're not in the same

place

Alexa Beavers: What a juxtaposition, right? It puts things in big perspective, I think.

Chris May: It really did. And it, yeah I'll be honest, I, when we, when they finally locked the country down, I don't know if you and I have talked about this before, but when they finally locked the country down, I packed up my motor home by myself and I don't have any kids or anything. And at the time I was not in a a long, in a relationship and I packed up my motor home and I drove around the country for three and a half months that there was nowhere to go.

And I was gone for three and a half months. I put satellite wifi on my motor home so I could work because I do have some things I have to run

every day and I just left. And I think it's the first time I had ever spent time to try to understand the human element Outside of myself. I know that sounds crazy, but it's just not how I think.

And so I had three and a half months and I went and traveled and saw friends I hadn't seen in 20, 30 years, and just did whatever I wanted to do, but I would, when I did that, it allowed me to separate. From all the noise, right? My office was six blocks from my house. I've been doing this a decade. We've built this thing from 21 people to 120.

Alexa Beavers: The transactions.

Chris May: rent? Do you get a check? Yeah. I want you to get a check so you can support your family. The emotions for me, don't get tied into it, but at that point in time, I started to really talk to first about our people because I'm on all these meetings with people, right?

We can't go into offices where, and it became much easier I think, because the walls were down. And so here I'm sitting somewhere in Texas with a desert behind me. They're sitting in their house stuck, and we just talk. Like they're like, what are you doing out there? And I'm telling 'em what I'm doing.

And there these, there were so many people I knew that were living vicariously through me traveling around the country.

I.

think that, yeah, and I think that helped because we had these real conversations about what do you wish you could do? They're like, I wish I could do that. I'm like don't wish.

Just go right. And that's always been my philosophy. I, my wife will take, I live on the far edge of life where people are very afraid to go. because of that, I do things like that. And I just say yes, and I'm like, let's go. I don't believe I would've had the same understanding of the human element of what was happening in the world and in business and all that.

The whole world was scared, but people were still people. And I had to get gas for my motor home and I had to get groceries. And so I was like, as I do this, I'm gonna just figure out what's happening.

Alexa Beavers: So let me get this straight. You lived kind of your whole life being a successful. a successful kind of ones and zeros thinker. And then COVID came along and there was all this noise. And part of the noise was of course the transactional stuff wasn't even working. But then you have enter the human element and that was, maybe like a big storm around you.

So you said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give myself the space to really learn. Was that intentional?

Chris May: No, it was a product of what was happening, right? I'm a, like I said, I say yes. So when I just, that's my philosophy, like just it, mine's a yes and or a yes, but or yes, comma, right? There's always some qualifiers there, but I just knew it was my one chance to go, and then when I did that. I started thinking if I'm gonna do this, it was a thing, right?

My grandfather used to tell me that my whole life, Chris, there's good that can come out of everything. And he was a say yes guy, right? Say yes, but let's figure it out. And so I started thinking how do I make myself different? Every conversation I had, 98% of the conversations I had prior to COVID were about the work. You have people do the niceties and they're like, oh, hey, how are you? Whatever. It seems like once that happened, a few weeks into COVID, 98% of the conversations that we're having were about people. And how they were struggling or not struggling, how they were coping, how their family was coping, who was possibly gonna die, who was sick, who was not sick, who wanted a shot.

And so it like just flipped it on its head. So I had to just live in the moment I was in. If I was gonna gain anything from it, I had to be a part of that moment and a part of what was happening. And again, it's easier when you're by yourself and there's no noise and you're in this motor home and you're in beautiful places.

And it just, it happened over time. I found myself being like, wait a minute. This is so much more important than all the other things we were worried about. And at some point it clicked in my head about halfway through. I was like, if I worry about this stuff as much or even more, then the other things are gonna come. And it goes back to our founder, who's one of my closest friends. He started this 24 years ago, the spare bedroom of an apartment, just doing break, fix it by himself. He had went on the internet to find out how to make money besides being a doctor or a lawyer. 'cause it took too long in school. And so he got an MCSE, which is a Microsoft certification. About 20 plus years ago, he started this little company and he's always been the kindest person I've ever known 100%. And we're different, right? He's incredibly smart engineer, super kind, cares about people. Soft [00:17:00] heart, almost to a fault, right?

Doesn't wanna fire anybody, doesn't wanna let anybody go, doesn't wanna hurt anybody. I'm an engineer. If you're not doing your job and you're not functioning, you gotta go flat out. So different ends of the spectrum. Yep. Both very smart people though, both understand things, understand business and he's always been that way.

He's always really, he'll tell you, I'm one of the smartest engineers he's ever known. I'll tell you he's the same, but I'll also tell you, he's one of the best people. People I've ever known. I call them people. People 'cause I'm didn't used to be. And it came from that, right? I started to hear things he had told me over the years and that we had talked about and his whole focus during COVID was the people.

We've gotta keep these people employed. We've gotta keep these people in a job. We're from a place that's poor. We're from Southern West Virginia and the coal fields. There's not a lot of industry now there. We're one of the few in, we're one of the few people there that is supporting growth in jobs, right?

I was seeing the people differently. I was seeing inside their lives, I was seeing their kids on web calls. I was seeing their dogs, their cats, their babies, their, the things they were afraid about and loved. And then all that advice from him over the years and watching how he operated just slowly took root.

It's wait,

these

Alexa Beavers: sense a little bit.

Chris May: yeah, because I'm out here trying to build a business. I can't build anything without these brilliant people that, that have done this. And I'm like, wait a minute. If we lose you, the other Chris, as we call him Chris, with a K, or if we lose you, Zach, or if we lose you, Brian, through all this, we've lost so much more than just some business from COVID.

And so it really started to impress upon me that the people were the most important thing, and then that really started to flip a light the other way and realize that our customers are people too.

The, not the deliverable, but a human on the other side of the deliverable. Ugh.

Chris May: That's what changed. And Richie said something at one point our president and founder, he said our customers are people and these people are gonna be here on the other side of this, and we have to make sure that they're with us on the other side of this. And I'll never forget that. I was like, what does he mean?

There was a lot of upheaval and a lot of upending and things were changing, right? And the one thing that we knew is if we served them and looked at them as humans and served them well and did our job, we could ride this out together. And we would all figure this out and we would get to the other side.

We're gonna figure this out. We're gonna solve the problem, we're gonna move forward. You're gonna pay me, right? You're paying me to do a job. And it was the conversations became easier. What I found out and I found out we're like anybody, we fail. There's times we fail. The failure's so much easier when. You have a personal relationship with these people, you can fail and say, oh my gosh, I'm sorry. And they know you. So they know you didn't intentionally fail. They're not assuming things in the absence of facts. They have the facts about who you are and how you perform and what your standard is. And then they can accept, and it goes both ways.

So say the client fails and before I would've been like, oh, their IT director broke this. It's terrible. I can't believe he did this. He doesn't know what he's doing. That's old Chris. That's wrong. Thinking the new Chris is like, Hey. Maybe he's never done this before. Maybe he was just trying to do something to save him some money, right?

This has been a huge journey for me since COVID. I'm super analytical, so I would just have to work it like a math problem. I've started understand people the way I understand math

Alexa Beavers: I know we have a lot of technical folks out there and people are like, okay, gimme the math of a human. Can you, do you have anything you can share with us?

Chris May: a hundred percent, yeah. So my mom was a special education teacher and she helped me tremendously growing up. I wasn't diagnosed with. On the spectrum till I was in my thirties, 'cause I'm 47, so I was older and I had a high iq. So oh, we just put him in a gifted program and isolate him. That worked. That's what they did back then. They didn't know any better either. So what's happened for me over time is to not look at it so analytical, and it was my mom that had said years ago, try to just work people like a math problem, like you do everything else. What I mean by that is I don't have the same emotional.

I don't understand those, but I can learn 'em. I can pay attention and say, okay, if facial intuition is this and they've done this and their body language says this, that means they're feeling this way and maybe not verbalizing it. We do a lot of things through nonverbal

Alexa Beavers: Of course.

Chris May: and so I'd studied a lot about that and a lot about what's nonverbal communication look like.

I did what an engineer does. I put myself to school on body language and on facial recognition and on like how to better communicate. I taught myself because that's what I'm good

Alexa Beavers: So you had a formula. If the face looks like this, then I can have a hypothesis that might be what's happening over there for that person.

Chris May: A hundred percent and even to a deeper level is to learn what people respond to and don't respond to. So the most of the world doesn't respond well to somebody like me that will go on a diatribe and say, here's how everything is, here's how it works. Talk super fast. Here's, they got all these answers.

Just like a doctor has to translate things to you that you don't understand 'cause you're not a surgeon. And then I had to learn what they were trying to say to me in non-technical speak and their issues and translate that to what it means to us. It's the best thing I ever did. I was okay at it before COVID, but I feel like that's why.

Our security department especially, has been so much more successful because I'm the one out talking about it, and I've learned how to translate that into the way other humans communicate. So I can still give you very high level knowledge that'll impress you, but it's not gonna impress you. If I'm talking in acronyms, you don't understand.

What do facial instructions mean? And as you do that, you just finally learn it. I don't have to think about it anymore. It's built into me now because I took the time to understand the normal communication processes. And here's the cool thing. All this stuff's in a book. It's all online. It's all you can find it, and so I just put myself to school on how to deal with people better.

I would've never

Alexa Beavers: differently. You said, oh here's a whole part of the equation that I haven't even been paying attention to, and once you put your skillset towards that, you decoded something that was mysterious before.

Alexa Beavers: How what has it done for you?

Chris May: Just the ability to be a little softer in the world, to not think everything has to fit in this rigid box that my brain says it does. My brain is black and white.

If you could understand anything about somebody with my condition, and I'm sure people that watch this that have my condition will get this. I'm so good at computers and cybersecurity 'cause I think in ones and zeros, and this all runs off ones and zeros, my brain's like a Microsoft operating system.

I can file things in place and. Once I could take how other people work and communicate and translate that into how I work and communicate, everything changed, right? And it hasn't required me to be hugely different. I'm still very outspoken. I'm still very in your face. I'm still like, Hey, here's the answer.

Alexa Beavers: Oh, that's fascinating. I think that present with the data is one thing, but being here and present with humans has allowed you to notice when something doesn't compute on their side and you're seeing them for how they think, and then you're flexing your style to meet them where they are.

Chris May: You have to, data doesn't make sense without context. If you think about it from an engineering standpoint, you can gimme a massive amount of data, right? All this data, it could be all these ones and zeros, all this stuff. If I don't know the context and I have no idea what I'm supposed to extrapolate from it, or what it is, or where it came from, or anything, it's just junk.

Just garbage. But if you come back and you say that same thousand terabytes of data, here's the context around the data, and here's the algorithm to unpack the data. And here, wow, now we've got it. So that's what I learned is I can be getting the same type of data from people, right? The same type of inputs, but without the context of who they are, what their background is, where they came from, what situation they're in.

No man, just COVID hit me in the face.

Alexa Beavers: Really concentrated some of the things that might have been happening in smaller ways to be almost unavoidable. So you had to, maybe you had to look at it, but I don't know that you had to, you could have turned your face away. You leaned into it.

Chris May: I think it hit at a good time for me

too. Not a good time. There's no good time to go through a worldwide pandemic, but I was in a transitional space in my life. I was getting older. And I'll say this and I've done a lot of studies around this too, men's brains don't fully form together and make those final cognitive connections until we're like 40, right?

But there's this weird cool thing that happens when we get about 40 that both sides of the brain actually start talking to each other. And what does that give you? Empathy and understanding of why this part is this way and this part is this way. So I really did a deep dive into that too, and started to understand like. That my brain was in a different place than it had been the first 40 years of my life. And so if that's the case, and I positioned myself to be somewhat intelligent and know things how do I reshape myself knowing that? And I think that led down a lot of these paths. I learned that I could teach myself the things I didn't know, which I'd already known that, but it didn't ever really, it just applied to humans.

I don't

Alexa Beavers: And I think you were doing the best you could with what you had at the time. You really were maximizing, the gifts that you brought to the table and from a perspective of something happened maybe at the right. Time and you were able to differently engage with it, which is a gift. And so now you're working with people differently than you have before.

Chris May: Much more fulfilling engagements and relationships with people and companies and clients people, many more people. Coming the other way to me and saying, Hey, help us do this thing. Help us with this. Help us do this. One of the things I really started doing at that point was really focusing on doing speaking engagements, right?

Not typical, the thing that I would've used to done but really taught myself how to be on that stage and have the presence to do it. And and again because what that was overcoming a problem, I saw a bunch of people get on stage like me and blab or a bunch of technical stuff and nobody in the audience can keep up or understand.

And it's like you're not solving anything. And so I really started to go after it from that people perspective. How do I get on the stage and translate. I started to make myself a translator of technology

and I think that's worked in my whole life, right? So now what I have is clients that aren't just and now we deal with some big companies and this stuff's very serious, right?

We're securing it because these are these people's livelihoods. These are their jobs, these are their careers. These are the companies they built. And now that I know more about them and know more about who they are, I understand more about their limitations. I understand more about their strengths, and we can work together better, right?

Because we understand each other. And again, it all comes back to the fact if we trip and we fail on something, they're much more apt to give us grace because they know us as people. And so I would say now that my, my relationships are more people driven than business driven. And if we're kind and if we're smart and we do our job, the money will come.

And so what we've really done is focus, again, this is how we reverted to the fact that you know this. This has led a lot of us down the path after COVID that we're a customer service business. We've always been an IT business in a cybersecurity business, an MSSP. We just restructured our whole leadership chart, whole org chart at the beginning of this year, big leadership retreat to do it and roll it out to the company. And Richie's entire focus was to structure us to serve the client better and to look at the strengths we have as individuals and to use those strengths to service our clients better. And that's the position we need to be in, in the company. And that's what we've done. And I don't believe that I would.

Be able to pull off exactly what I do and what my charge is now after a decade here. If I hadn't taken some time to be introspective and work on myself,

He runs this business. He needs these things. Here's a little bit more about Bob. Is that right?

Chris May: It. It's true. And I used to get really frustrated. I'm a security guy, right? So I'm paranoid as I should be. I gotta secure everything. And I would get frustrated. I hear customers say, we just can't afford that right now. We don't have the money for that. We can't do that. We can't secure that. And I'm like, you're not making this priority.

What's wrong with you? That's crazy. It is not always the case. As you get to know these people more and you get to understand what they're doing, you talk to Bob who's owned this business for 60 years and Bob's I'm trying to grow this whole section of the business to avoid more people in this town where everybody's broke and all my money's in there right now and I just don't have any cash flow and I'm really am concerned about my security, but Chris, I just can't afford it and I don't know what to do.

That leads you down a path to make some caveats and

Alexa Beavers: What's possible instead of what's not possible? It sounds

Chris May: because it's a whole different conversation. If you talk to those same two gentlemen, own the same businesses, same women, whatever, same families, and this one is telling you that and saying, I want to try.

I'm just trying to do this thing, and this person's over here saying, I don't even care. I got the money. I just don't care. They both told you they can't afford it. But that's not the same conversation. And so if you know that, then you don't put any more time into these people. You're like, oh, you just don't care.

You do care. You just don't have the resources. We can pull some of the resources from this person that doesn't care and focus them on this person that does care. And so that's. That's where you get into some more of that nuance, right? What I've learned is this is all nuance and it's nothing happens without people involved anymore.

We talk about AI and we talk about machine learning. There's still people doing all

this transactional type of things, and I think that's where it's helped me the most is I make the people part the most important now, and I've turned into an educator as much as an engineer. I don't know how to do brain surgery, right?

right? Cloud are dumb. This has been the whole industry for 30 years. They're dumb. They don't know anything.

I've learned now, and this is a big change that's happened in that I posit that they're not dumb. We've done, we're dumb. We've done a bad job of teaching them. You can't look at me and say, Chris, you're dumb. You don't know how to do brain surgery when you've never taught me. And so what I've decided is we have to now take the focus off of just the technical.

And you've got a plan for that, right? I used to think that was 'cause they didn't care. I tell you what I've definitely learned, it's not, people don't care, it's just we are not all, we're all not on the same mission at that point. We all have our own thing. And so I would think, if anything, I've learned that the people do care more than I thought they did.

It's just finding out what, where they're at in that moment. Just like I said, the guy that can't afford it 'cause he's trying to help, or the guy that just doesn't want to, 'cause he doesn't care. And I've started to dive really a lot deeper into what's the reasoning behind it. And it's also gonna judge how much.

I put out for you,

Alexa Beavers: Yeah you're calibrating with that person so that you can meet them where they are. One thing you said I wanna circle back around on was, the thing I'm most concerned about as a security person is the people. And that's. Where the greatest opportunity is, but also maybe the greatest threat.

And I'm curious what you think about that.

Chris May: I think it's a hundred percent true, and we've proven that over and over recently, right? The number one attack vector for cybersecurity right now is humans. They're attacking the employees, the C-suite, the people, right? They're not beat, they're still beating on servers and firewalls.

They're attacking the people. Why? Because it's, these are human actions, right? You, if the password lives in your head, who do we have to come at to steal the password from you? And and what we're seeing is that. As the attacks become more well crafted because of machine learning and ai, somebody sitting in the Philippines that doesn't even speak English can send you this very well crafted email.

They've used AI to search all your websites and look at all your LinkedIns and your employee's private social media, so they know all this stuff about you. And now that person is delivering a very well crafted attack to you that what's it gonna do? Trigger things that would affect a person, not a computer.

So what we've really tried to learn over the years is we do free trainings. This came outta COVID. We do free cybersecurity training. So we pull the barrier to entry down, right? So you're like, I don't have to pay for this. It's free. And then what we're doing is training the human element. And that's where I've gotten good at being a translator.

I found out these people don't understand cybersecurity 'cause nobody's ever told 'em in language that they understand. And so we do these free trainings to say, Hey, Mr. Or Mrs. Business person. This is where they're trying to attack you. This is how, this is the actions you need to take. And by simply making them aware, they become vigilant.

'cause they're like, I don't wanna be that person that does

that. And so again, that human element in cybersecurity right now is the biggest element. You know how we could keep everything safe?

but the biggest element right now in cybersecurity is the human element, right? Because if this system needs access to something and they can't break into it, they're just gonna come to you and say how do you log in?

And as we teach people that and expose them to it, and then here's the biggest key I've learned, we've gotta tie it to their personal life.

We've got to make them so intertwined. If I come and speak to you in a business and your employer has said. Come listen to Chris. He's gonna talk about cybersecurity, so we keep our business safe. Okay. Whatever. They don't, a lot of times they don't, that doesn't matter to them, right? You're, they're like, all the owner's making a million dollars a year.

Who cares? I get 'em in the room. I start talking about cybersecurity as a whole to their personal life, to the work. Do you wanna be the person that gets fired because you did this wrong? And also, we see personal ransomware now where they're ransoming your home computer and you gotta pay 3, 4, 5 grand to get your stuff back.

Because I'm gonna tell you how I can break into 'em in two seconds right now. When I explain that, oh my gosh, now it's personal. Now it's serious, now it matters. And then they go do better stuff at work. That was mind blowing to me when for years we couldn't get them to do the right thing ever. We changed the training.

It's all we did. Same data changed. It, focused on them, and now we see the, their work stuff gets better and better, better.

Alexa Beavers: it's like a flywheel. And I think that what you'd said earlier was, if I focus on the people, the rest is gonna come in business. And when it comes to our, next century, what's gonna really make our society's work? I think if you focus on the people, the rest will potentially follow.

Chris May: find a mentor. Find a mentor that's not like you, that understands you, but isn't exactly like you. If they're exactly like you, there's no room for growth. You're just gonna grow into what they are and you all are already.

So one of the biggest things that's helped me, I was at DuPont. I was young because of my skill sets. I've gotten into these positions very young, where all my peers were like 60 and I'm like 35. I found out in that scenario was how important that mentorship is, right? 35 in my world's not that seasoned in this stuff, but what I found in a mentor was somebody that could help me overcome the things I didn't understand.

So one of the first things he ever told me, and he was my boss at one point, and he was like, Chris, you're super smart, but you gotta realize not everybody understands the things you do. Not everybody can grasp the concept like you can. So you just spit this stuff out, they don't get it, and then they get lost.

That you won't get anywhere in a career without other humans. You just won't. You can't do this by yourself. It's impossible. And if you try to, it becomes very painful. And I'd spent a lot of years like being an island of one. I know what I know. I think a lot of jobs, Alexa, the only reason they kept me around is 'cause of how smart I was.

Not 'cause of how easy I was to deal with, because I was a pain, right? I wanted things exactly in a very specific way, in a very structured manner. And I would be a nightmare about it. I've let loose of that. It's just crazy. Why should everybody else have to work? Like I work when I'm 1.01% of the population, and so that's really been that transformational thing for me is like the people are so involved and the people will help you.

Away from other humans in my office working. Not everybody's like that, and I can't expect them to be. And so what we've done very recently is something I wish I would've done years ago in my career when we restructured the organization. I have no direct reports now,

not for hr, not for anything. Now I still run all the security and that stuff.

Definitely that's my decision. But if I'm not good with people and I'm not good at managing people and managing. HR issues and all that, why am I in that chain? And so I would say find your strengths and find what you're good at and try to focus on that. Don't think the world, you have to follow the model of the world, but also on those things you're not strong at. Take your own personal time to get better at it. That's the biggest growth for me. I've taken personal time over the last amount of years to get better at the people side of it. If you're great at the people side, get good at take time at learning the engineering side. But one thing I do know is in this world we're in right now, if you're very technically adept and have these things, the differentiator is the soft skills.

And so now we've moved in and that's what I would say I wish earlier in my career. That I understood more what kindness and compassion and thought for your fellow human could do. Because when I put that in place, I've went from here where everybody thought I was at a high level already. I feel like it's just gone to the mood.

And here's the last thing. I said this to a group of college students last week. Stop talking about religion and politics and business, please. It sounds like such a simple thing, right? But we've run into a lot of scenarios recently in business with internal employees and employees from other companies where they wanna drag all this outside political and religious and world static into business.

And we've seen a lot of that lately.

Alexa Beavers: what does the static do? That is. Diminishing

Chris May: It makes you not be able to have to solve real problems about what the problem is you're trying to accomplish, right? So you're trying to accomplish a, you're trying to solve a problem, you're trying to solve a problem about data sets and some, I had, this is a prime example, got on a meeting two weeks ago, we're trying to solve a problem about data sets. Somebody says, yeah, we need to move this here, we need to do that. Oh, that's, if we do that in Maryland, they added a 3% data tax. Okay. This is a real conversation. That's fine. Cool. That's a thing we need to talk about. So we go down that maybe we should place it in another data center so there's not that data tax.

This guy goes off the rails. I can't believe they would tax us. I can't believe that Maryland would do that. Then he starts talking about the president and other presidents, and now he is on Obama and we're just like,

Alexa Beavers: And then you're not even facing what was important in the first place. You're example is excellent and, reducing the static between human beings. So that you can face the problem at hand is the key.

We're like, stop. You know what I mean? He'd be called out, this is a grown man. Stop. What? And then he got mad, right? I've had to give that advice more lately than you would ever imagine, and if I would want people to know anything, don't be a part of that trap, right?

You can believe whatever you want to believe in your personal life. I do not care. I don't pay your bills. We're not in a relationship like we're cool. We're cool. Don't care. Don't drag that in. And we've seen more of that since COVID. I think you would pauses it. We've been in the business world a little bit.

We've seen so much more of that, and I'm starting to see it some more with some of the younger people that we get on meetings and stuff with. And I'm just like, don't, man, you'll, because what you'll do is alienate yourself and nobody will wanna work with you anymore, even if they're on your side. They don't want to hear about it in that scenario.

Yeah.

Chris May: It's what we fight all the time. It's like I'm guilty as well. As soon as this guy started saying the things he was saying that don't belong in a business meeting, I was like, I automatically had a picture of who this person was. I'll admit that.

We all do,

and if you say you

Alexa Beavers: think if you're human, that's the, that is what happens, right?

Chris May: And

It just made me really, I had to look at myself. 'cause as soon as it started, you know what I said, I don't wanna work with this idiot again.

That was my internal dialogue and I'm being very honest with

people on here. I said, I don't wanna work with this idiot again. Why? I don't need added static.

I'm on the phone with other engineers trying to solve a problem and you put all this static in the middle of it. And so I've just never thought I would. It's funny too, 'cause I'm telling you, the people, part's important, right? The personal part's important, but it's, don't drag it too far, I guess is what I would say. You're never gonna hear me. One of the things that's hard for me too is the oversharing.

Alexa Beavers: What do I do with that? I think when you were doing the COVID thing, a lot of times some of those things became normalized. Like you were not normalized, but you were faced with things. You maybe never. Had to face and were very uncomfortable about. And you found a way to face it with courage.

And now you also found how do we stay in it together and keep an eye, our eye on what's important to both of us as a human to human kind of level without taking it to a place where somebody feels like they don't belong. Or like their other. So how can you find ways to connect is one of the big messages I'm taking away from you, Chris.

So I know that there will be people out there that are like, I wanna learn more about how Chris did this. Chris's brain is interesting to me. I wanna chat with him, or I wanna hear him speak. Can you tell me how people can get in touch with you?

I'm vice president of security and growth and what I tell you, growth means people to me, not money. Growth means growing people. The money will come. And we even do a lot of free education and training around, speaking around, not just it, I speak on Neurodivergency in it and how people like me that are neurodivergent, as we call 'em now, assimilate.

They're some of the best technical people you would ever have.

I tell you, it's not just me. I have people that work with us, coworkers that are on the spectrum like I am. If you understand them and understand their personal differences and how to work with them, they'll be some of the best employees you ever have in your life.

And so I think that's what we've really seen is and we need to look like our customer bases. My customers have people with Asperger's and people that are on the spectrum, and people that are L-G-B-T-Q and people that are trans and people that are all these different things. Why in the world when a customer wanna work with me if I don't look like them and not like them and don't understand who they are in this world?

So we hire all those same people and what you'll find is maybe this. Mr. Or Mrs. Customer doesn't communicate well with somebody, but maybe you brought in this person that kind of speaks their language and now that's the person they deal with. And all of a sudden the relationship is great. But if you just have this white male sanitized world, you're not looking like the people you're talking to every day.

And that's scary. And we've really went a long way from hiring for engineering prowess first to hiring for personality and people first. And I think that's drastically changed the makeup of advantage

as a company.

Chris May: Absolutely.

Alexa Beavers: The things that are standing out to me are a ton, but at the end of the day, I think Chris and his team have figured out how to fight otherization by humanizing their technical business, and now it's leading to great results and probably a whole lot of fulfillment from your perspective.

Is that true, Chris?

But if within the matter of 15 minutes we can put our brains on it, bring everything back up, now you're making money. So we see really serious outcomes and to be able to, I used to be driven by tying those outcomes to metrics, right? What are our PKIs, what are our performance metrics?

What are whatever? To be able to tie those outcomes to real humans that you can see, smile, and say, man, I'm, my family made an extra a hundred thousand this year. 'cause you all enabled us with technology to outpace our competition. That's all the pat on the back I'll ever

Alexa Beavers: That's amazing.

Chris May: That's where we are.

We, our job is as humans, to enable you through technology and through smart human consulting to beat your competition and win. That's all we're here for and that's what we've, we, our new slogan that we've put on all of our stuff is we disrupt it. Intelligence, how? 'cause we don't think about it the way everybody else has.

We're disrupting an entire industry by putting the people first, and we're growing and we're getting bigger and we're getting recognition for that.

I invite you if you would like to hear more from other humans about what it's like to go through some tough times and transform your business and really maybe even transform your life and the world. If I'm being so idealistic, please join us on transformation, on Filtered you can like this podcast, you can subscribe and you can find us on your favorite podcast platform.