This book reveals the transformative frameworks that propelled BrainGu from a struggling startup to an industry leader. By emphasizing small, impactful adjustments it provides a clear roadmap for balancing creativity with commercial viability and navigating each stage of innovation—dreaming, incubating, and scaling. Change the Box equips entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders with disciplined yet flexible concepts to bridge the gap between bold ideas and bottom-line realities, ultimately fostering accountable autonomy and unlocking growth.
John Spencer-Taylor
Known to most as simply “Spence,” John Spencer-Taylor comes to the cybersecurity industry by way of an early career in the field of business intelligence and financial systems. From this background, he brought a heavy data analytics and automation approach to various R&D positions in both the offensive and defensive cyber realms. With some highly talented and forward-thinking colleagues, he co-founded BrainGu in 2012 to build a multi-disciplinary team at the intersection of data and cyber to solve issues facing large organizations delivering software.
Today, he and his team build platforms that help organizations deliver higher quality software and are routinely deployed to assist, advise, and enhance the innovation efforts of organizations around the world, from the energy and finance sectors, to national intelligence and defense agencies.
Spence co-founded BrainGu with the desire to bring a human-centric, creative blend of technology and business. He is passionate about solving mind-bending problems where both critical thinking and breadth of experience are crucial, as well as encapsulating those solutions into platforms to help others tackle their toughest challenges.
As CEO, he draws on experience leading innovation efforts and a Swiss Army knife technology background to keep BrainGu aggressively focused on delivering advances for its customers. When he’s not brainstorming with the team at a whiteboard, Spence is all about cranking it up to eleven—both as a huge music fan and as a hobbyist musician. Catch him off duty in the front row at a live music venue or around town belting out Queen’s greatest hits at a karaoke bar.
The adage “think outside the box” assumes that all previous attempts at solving a problem that weren’t 100% successful are useless and that wholesale change is the only answer. At BrainGu, we believe that every bit of progress toward a solution is valuable. Our approach is to thoroughly evaluate the situation, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and then optimize those strengths to create a path forward.
How 'Change the Box' came to be
We had a dream. We knew there was a better way to run a business. Through passion and compassion, energy and empathy, caring about our employees, customers, and community in equal measure. Our true north lies in our Core Values; "Change the Box," "Live with Passion," and "Focus on Community." This book dives deep on the first of those. In this book, we explore the principles behind the Change the Box value and how it guides our decisions and actions.
Passionate about evolving technologies and creating solutions that help make workflows easier to manage, we launched BrainGu.
Our objective is to help our customers journey from automation to innovation. Automation lessens the workload on the human operators and end-users. Innovation revolutionizes how they achieve their goals.
Teams need better tooling and processes to get repeatability and scale to their solutions. At BrainGu, we create capabilities that help them succeed. Not everything we create is revolutionary, but everything we make allows someone to "Do it Better" regardless of the specific problem domain. Incremental improvements implemented at the speed of relevancy enable us to evolve the solutions we develop to our customer's changing needs in real-time.
Learn more about Gu Culture.
Change the Box
Traditionally, the saying is 'think outside the box.' All too often, when approaching the 'impossible,' it is assumed that a current or previously tried approach is entirely useless. We believe that all progress against a difficult outcome is valuable, so we seek to evaluate the situation, maximize its strengths, and minimize its weaknesses.
Embracing the burrito How we signal affirmation at BrainGu
We didn’t have a non-intrusive way to acknowledge a message. If someone were to reply to a comment with 'Got it,' or 'Roger,' or any variation a notification would be sent out to everyone associated with that message, which was quite unnecessary.
Introduction to Being Agile
First, let’s define some things. Agile is not Scrum (or XP, or Kanban). Agile is not JIRA (or Rally, or VersionOne).
In the GuLight April Johnson
My family is my top priority and I love that BrainGu encourages a great work-life balance.
One on One Meeting Best Practices
We expect a lot of our people and put them into high-pressure situations. So it’s key to establish a solid and consistent line of communication with each member. Team members value the time and opportunity to offer thoughts, ask questions, and connect in a non-tasking way.
2021 Internship Program and Philosophy
BrainGu is highly committed to recruiting a diverse and well-rounded cohort of interns and providing them with an immersive and educational employment experience. We want our Gu-interns to share a similar experience to that of our full-time engineers and developers.