What Sourdough Taught Me About IT

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to techstrong TV. My next guest is an interesting fellow.

I think you're going to enjoy what he has to say. His name is Zsolt Varga. You can see his name spelled on the bottom third there.

Zsolt, welcome to techstrong TV. It's great to have you on here. Thank you so much.

The pleasure is mine. You know, Zsolt, I didn't even mention a company, a title, or anything. I'm going to let you lay it all out.

Let's start by telling our audience a little bit about you and up to today. Absolutely. Thank you so much, and welcome everyone who is watching this video.

So, to be honest, the company and my background is almost irrelevant. I've been in this industry for more than two decades, and I've been living and breathing with IT. So, approximately two years ago, I reached a stage when I was quite low and nothing was working.

And that was a moment when we visited family in Hungary, and I had a really good conversation with my grandma. And she was talking about a lot of things, even about the war when she was a young girl. But I don't want to be fancy with the resilience topic.

She was talking about bread making, great sourdough bread. And it's not just about the bread making, but about community. When they had a big beehive outdoor oven that they heated up and the entire community went there, and they baked their own bread for their family.

And that was resonating with me very much, from value creation point of view. And you know the things which might sound cheesy, but achieving something together instead of the individual efforts or something like that. And I have been baking for six years, but that was the point which pushed me towards the sourdough.

Sourdough is a living creature. It's not like the dry yeast that you just throw into the flour, add some water, and in four hours you have bread. Sourdough is different.

It takes time and that's a long process. You have to respect nature. You have to respect the bulk fermentation.

You don't have shortcuts as such. You know the classic situation when we are building the plane during the flight. I think all of us can relate to that in our modern world.

And I started to bake and somehow, obviously, I shared those with friends, and I started to have orders. " So I started to figure out my own way. And I said, "Okay, so let's make a test.

" And that's when, for instance, I used the four dimensions of IT just to check all aspects of this, and I started to build a micro bakery. Including all the legal side of the things, and also focusing on the values things, because that was the most important, the end product. So I started to do that, and the people were just more and more interested in that because they found something genuine, something forgotten in there.

And guess what? It was back and forth learning because that also influenced my daily work. Sometimes when, let's be honest, when you are negative or when you are not in the right mood, you can be judgmental.

But when you, for instance, miss to put this salt into the dough. That teaches you some humbleness. And you understand that, okay, so someone at support, for instance, who just started to work can make a mistake because out of sudden, with the two decades of IT experience, I just became a beginner in something.

And then, I just carried on the work and I started to have B2B partners. And when, for instance, the very first time my B2B partner, a customer just came to me and said, "Listen, we have to figure out something," because previously we were focusing on creating huge sandwich shape loaves for his toasty business because he wanted to ensure that everyone would get pretty much the same size of toasty. Guess what?

This sandwich shape bread crumbs is more dense, therefore, it's isolating very well. So creating the final product, the toasty, takes more time and the cheese is not melting as much when you use a standard boule shape bread, which has a very open crumb. So we just changed the sandwich shape to a boule shape.

And what did we achieve with that? A much faster process on their side. And that was also a really good value stream exercise because the value is not created when I make a beautiful loaf, but the value is created when someone, a hungry person, approaches the sandwich van, requests something, and in two minutes, they get a fantastic cheese toasty.

And when they pull it apart, then the cheese is just stretching. So, yeah, these type of things, that experience just influenced my work and that helps me to understand my customers better, and just a living proof what ITIL is talking about with regards to the value creation. That was just a real focus exercise, let's put it like that.

Yeah. So basically, everything I needed to know about ITIL, I learned from making sourdough bread. But there is a lesson in there, and I've learned this lesson personally myself, not necessarily with ITIL per se, but sometimes when we think about technology, we get blinders on, and we think it's like the laws of physics don't apply, right?

That it's something that is just so unique and outside of our normal things that we do in life. It has its own rule set or whatever. But it's not, especially something like ITIL.

At the end of the day, ITIL is supposed to be based on common sense, on best practices, on people's experiences, right? And those experiences don't always just happen when we're working on deploying or managing software. Right?

Humans experience every day, whether we're baking sourdough bread or walking down the street interacting with strangers, friends, what have you. And I always say when it comes to doing any technology task, you can't leave your common sense at the door. Right?

You can't leave your humanity at the door. You can't leave your life experience at the door just because it's not technology. And so I think there's valuable lessons there, Zsolt, in what you're saying and telling people.

I'd like to turn a little bit, though, and of course, ITIL 5 is now out and being rolled out. A lot of people are saying, "Jesus, I was ITIL 3 certified. I was ITIL 4.

" Right? Between your sourdough experience and what you get from talking to people in the industry, what's your experience there? What's your advice to people who are confronting this very question right now?

That's a question I get quite often, especially when people learn that I started my IT journey quite back in time and as anyone can check it, I achieved the Version 3 Expert level, then the ITIL 4 Master, and the ITIL 5 Master. What I usually say, previously, I had the privilege to learn from real professionals, and I don't think ITIL is talking about any rocket science. Since I met with the ITIL framework, what I learned or how I interpreted ITIL always wanted to just deliver a better service value to the customer.

So ITIL 5 helps the The newcomers get a better big picture quicker, even during the foundation level. So my advice is don't stick to the particular version itself. Start where you are.

If you grab a V3 book, honestly, just read it and try to understand the intention behind everything. I mean, behind every process. Those are not for fulfilling the working hours, but delivering the value to our customers.

And funny enough, that's what I did with this sourdough and this micro bakery. And guess what? In less than a year, I participated, attended on Britain's Best Loaf competition, and I took two awards.

One- Really? Yes. One was a gold medal and the other bronze medal.

And the gold medal went to Pharaoh's Loaf, which is again another lovely story because I have a really good friend, an Egyptian guy, who supported me a lot. He pushed me a lot to do this because that's how much he believed in me and in my passion about baking. And one day he called me and he said he wanted me to name one product after him.

" And that was the moment when I just started to use ChatGPT, and ChatGPT came up with 10 names, and the first one was Pharaoh's Loaf, and I fell in love with the name. And then I said, "Okay, so tell me what makes a good Pharaoh's Loaf. " And the base was obviously my standard sourdough recipe, and ChatGPT started to list the ingredients, like nigella seed, sesame seeds, fenugreek powder, and stuff like that.

" Then became my bestseller, and that brought home a gold medal from Britain's Best Loaf. Very cool. So that's an absolute interesting story.

So what I wanted to do from the bottom of my heart, to deliver value to my customers. And that's really my advice to any professional in the tech world. If you are focusing on that, obviously it has to happen in a sustainable way.

But if your activity is for achieving value at the end of the value stream, then you are on the right path. I love it. Zsolt, the problem with these interviews is they're too short, right?

And we come up on 15 minutes really quickly. For people who, whether it's because of IDOL, they're interested in maybe IDOL or learning IDOL, or maybe they're sourdough bread... Sourdough, it's huge here in the US.

I have many, many friends who keep, what do they call it when you have your own starter or whatever it's called, right? The- Yeah. Sourdough starter.

Yeah. And they have starters, and they're always experimenting. I have a few friends who are doing that.

But anyway, for people who want to reach out, what's the best way to reach you? LinkedIn. LinkedIn.

So my LinkedIn profile is available. And, yeah, feel free to reach out and happy to have a coffee and some chat. And maybe some sourdough.

Absolutely. Pharaoh's Loaf. Zsolt, thank you for coming here on Techstrong TV.

What a great story. What a great parable and lesson in life. Keep it up, and we hope to check in on you in the future and hear more.

Excellent, Alan. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Take care. And you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. We're going to take a break. We'll be back here on Techstrong TV in just a moment.