What's the deal with the otters?

Nobody else said I was normal.

Sometimes people ask me, “James, what’s with the bloody otters.” Well, that’s a story.

1. It’s really the fault of Bill Gregg
When McKinsey & Company acquired Candid Partners, Bill introduced us all to the concept of an icebreaker, a non work related question at the start of a video conference.

He insisted we do an icebreaker as we did a team kickoff call for a hashtag#cloud hashtag#cybersecurity engagement, asking what wild animal would each of us like as a pet. People responded: one team member wanted a lion, another a tiger.

When it came my turn, i said I wanted a river otter, eliciting surprise. The BA consulted the Google and confirmed that otters were wildlife and illegal to keep as pets in most US states. I showed the group a YouTube video of a pair of otters kept as (very lucrative) pets in Japan. (For inscrutable reasons, the YouTube algorithm had recently decided to complete cat videos with otter videos in my feed.)

2. I tried to give the team what it wanted.
Richard Isenberg Luisa Armstrong and Jan Shelly Brown (JSB) and other team members loved the otter video. Always looking to keep up moral in the immediate post-quarantine era (with infrequent in person interactions), I promised to post daily otter videos to the team slack channel.

Adopting a policy of “more impact, more otters,” I posted multiple videos when the team was especially productive or created especially insightful output.

3. The Cloud Leadership Forum creates otters controversies
Given how much work many people put in to developing sessions for CLF (now TLF), I committed to providing a stuffed otter to the team participants voted as holding the most compelling session. This did not go well.

Pablo Prieto, Ph.D. And Zubin Ghafari and others won the stuffed otter for their session on FinOps-as-code. But runner up Dan Collins immediately either rescued or kidnapped the otter. Dan alleged that the FinOps team had been irresponsible otter guardians. He soon emailed the entire McKinsey cloud practice photos of Ottavius the otter flying around the world, typically in business class.

4. Otters make their way into the Tech Office Update
By accident, in my role as MTech CTO, i send out a weekly newsletter with perspectives on enterprise technology. One week, I decided to include a section with links to otters videos. I received multiple emails people saying that they might or might not be interested in hashtag#GenAI, hashtag#techdebt and hashtag#knowlegegraphs, but there were, in the words of Kevin Buehler “here for the otters.”

5. Otters —> esprit de corps
In one of my newsletters, I celebrated the increasing esprit de corps I saw in McKinsey Technology. Charlie Lewis told me how they use nicknames, patches other symbols to build esprit de corps in the Army, so I made up “MTech: River Otters” laptop stickers to hand out. People seem to like them. At Charlie’s suggestion, I will also get River Otters challenges coins for our senior leaders to distribute.

No ever said I was normal.