How to Herd Clouds and Influence People
Follow Gary's journey from chaos to control as he transforms his organization's enterprise cloud strategy into sustainable governance that balances agility with control.
When Gary became a cloud architect at Goliath Federal Bank, he knew he'd face technical challenges. What he didn't expect was organizational politics, shadow IT teams, and deeply entrenched silos. His biggest job wasn't fixing cloud configurations. It was changing how people worked.
How to Herd Clouds and Influence People is the story of Gary's journey from chaos to control, and the hard-won lessons that every cloud team leader needs to navigate real enterprise transformation.
The story behind the story
After years of helping enterprise teams tackle cloud governance, I kept seeing the same thing: brilliant people, powerful tools, and mountains of reports, but little lasting change.
The problems weren't technical. They were human.
I realized that the real work wasn't finding misconfigurations. It was building trust, navigating silos, and influencing without authority. It's sustaining momentum while priorities shift. And those lessons don't fit neatly into a checklist.
That's why I wrote this as a story.
Gary's journey may be fictional, but everything he encounters is real, drawn from the patterns, frustrations, and breakthroughs I've seen in enterprise transformations.
This is the story every cloud leader goes through of making change happen at scale.
The book
I am thrilled to announce the early access release of How to Herd Clouds and Influence People, a narrative guide to cloud governance transformation in large enterprises.
The book follows Gary, a new cloud architect at Goliath Federal Bank, as he steps into a role he thinks will be mostly technical — only to find his real job is navigating complexity, relationships, and organizational change. His first day sets the tone: he can’t even log in.
What unfolds is a relatable, practical story about cloud transformation done in the real world. Gary faces executive mandates with no roadmap, audit deadlines, siloed teams, and the challenge of building trust across a distributed organization. Along the way, he develops a governance model that supports innovation instead of stifling it.
This isn’t a checklist. It’s a field guide disguised as a story. Through Gary’s journey, you’ll uncover hard-won lessons about how to:
- Build trust across silos
- Use guardrails to empower rather than restrict
- Turn security and compliance into enablers of progress
- Move from cloud chaos to sustainable, scalable innovation
Who it's for
If you lead a cloud team, officially or unofficially, this story will feel familiar. You've deployed the tools. Run the audits. Identified the risks. But the real work? Convincing teams to fix things. Earning trust across silos. Making governance stick without slowing everything down.
This book is for you.
Whether you're managing technical teams, responding to security incidents, or trying to turn cloud chaos into something sustainable, Gary's story gives you a mirror and a map.
Get Involved
How to Herd Clouds and Influence People is the first release in the Cloud Governance Library at CloudGovernance.org, a growing collection of practical guides to help organizations align people, processes, and platforms.
The book is available now as a web-based version and will soon be available in other formats.
Want to share your own cloud journey or feedback on the story? I'd love to hear from you. Email me at bob@cloudgovernance.org.