It is not easy to summarize each month’s playlist. Sometimes you cannot find the thread that binds the conversations together. But what we do know from listening to The Great Conversation Podcast, is the core principle of a round table with minds that want to share their ideas and their experiences with open minds and a sense of discovery. Why is this important? Many leaders have conveyed to me how frustrating it is not to be able to get into the minds of their people. Engagement leads to information which leads to insights which leads to innovation, the core element of sustainable high performance. Now extrapolate that principle and apply it to markets, domains of thought leadership, and practices. You get all three this month. Let us take a closer look.

Capturing the Mind of the Risk Leader and Transforming Protection

2020, for most organizations, was a time to reflect, pivot, and live to fight another day. But during every crisis, there are a few leaders and organizations that are prepared for the moment and thrive. One such company just announced its 2020 results. They shared revenue growth of 177%, a 68% increase in Fortune 500 customers, a 319% increase in the number of users, and an exponential increase in their ability to scale through human and digital assets.

This is an organization that purports to have a “living threat assessment” based on their market, location, brand, and operational reach.

We speak with the co-founder and CEO of Ontic, Lukas Quanstrom, about his entrepreneurial journey into the risk, resilience, and security industry. It is a story that is as much about mining, capturing, and uniquely presenting the mind and the methodology of the risk leader as it is about qualitative and quantitative scale. Meet the digital transformation of “Protective Intelligence” through our great conversation.

The Power of Story

The Power of Story impacts how customers relate to your brand. The Power of Story impacts how employees buy into your purpose and vision for your business. Once you know your story and can articulate it, you have many avenues for telling it. One of those is business-to-business (B2B) Media companies. Pick the right one, and your story might be consumed and acted upon. We turned to one of the most experienced editorial directors in the risk, resilience, and security industry to have him reflect how he got into the business and what he is seeing as media is redefined in the age of digital transformation.

Steve Laskey is an experienced Group Publisher and Editorial Director with a demonstrated history of working with the marketing and advertising industry as a B2B Media Executive. Steve is highly skilled in Sales, Journalism and Corporate Communications. His company, Endeavor Business Media, is now one of the largest B2B Media companies in the world.

A Coat of Many Colors and Backgrounds: Leadership’s Competitive Weapon

We are always interested in pursuing leaders who are focused on employee engagement and powerful self-correcting cultures that promote innovation and change. Avoiding the peril of scotomas (blind spots) requires cultivating a diversity of thinking. Diversity of thinking comes from a melting pot of cultures, education, and experiences. Diversity is not about numbers. Diversity is about organizational strength.

One such leader is Eddie Reynolds, CEO and co-Founder of Iluminar. Iluminar is a specialist manufacturer and supplier of IR and white light illuminators and license plate recognition products. Co-owners Eddie Reynolds and Joni Hamasaki bring over 30 years of combined industry experience. Together they launched Iluminar in 2009 with a mission to supply high quality and reliable lighting and license plate recognition products to the video surveillance industry, backed by unsurpassed customer service.

Eddie happens to be black and a woman. We get inside her head on the value of diversity, how mentors make a difference, and her experiences within the industry. She is also a member of the Security Industry Association (SIA) and the SIA RISE Steering Committee. They are launching Talent Inclusion Mentorship Education (TIME) – a new mentorship program for early and mid-career professionals in the security industry.

The TIME program is designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion and empowerment of underrepresented identities in the security industry by creating a well-defined pathway for learning and development.

An Inside Look at Our Greatest Challenges in Security: Technology Innovation

Min Kyriannis, the Managing Director of a consulting company called JMK, is unique. Her knowledge of technology, systems that run our buildings and security, and her grasp of our times, fuels a great conversation. When asked what the greatest challenges were going forward, she links our ability to be agile and innovative to our emotional IQ, our ability to be empathetic, and our integrity. The human issue needs to be in place to be able to grasp and leverage the opportunities ahead.

Leading by Example

We are always looking for success stories of women leaders. Especially in the security industry. Many of the more successful women we have spoken with have found their path to value starts with a mindset of no barriers. Elisa Mula, the Founder of EMD is one of those women. We discuss the front of mind opportunities she sees emerging and gain insights into how she conducts her business.

Elisa formed EM Designs, LLC (“EMD”) in 2004 to achieve her vision of creating a consulting business focused on forging new paths for women in industries where they are typically underrepresented. Elisa researched a variety of industries across the international community and ultimately determined that committing to one field would allow EMD to make a greater difference. Focused on an industry in which she had extensive education and years of experience – Elisa was able to leverage her expertise for the benefit of EMD specifically and women as a whole. That industry, Physical Security, is one to which Elisa has dedicated more than a decade of her life, developed an unparalleled network of professional colleagues, and demonstrated an unrelenting work ethic. 

During her decade-long immersion in the Physical Security industry, Elisa worked on the manufacturing, integration, and consulting aspects of the industry, while simultaneously securing her Masters’ Degree in Protection Management from John Jay College. Her depth of experience allowed her to develop her practice with both public and private sector security professionals. These partnerships have imparted a distinctively fresh and inimitable perspective that allows Elisa and EMD to offer a new means of recognizing, evaluating, and remediating threats and vulnerabilities.

What is The Business of Before®?

Torchstone Global is in the security business. They have a network of employees, independent contractors, and trusted partners that help them provide their clients with a broad range of services and expertise in over 70 countries.

We spoke with co-founder David Niccolini to understand his journey and philosophy in creating Torchstone’s The Business of Before®

This conversation not only covers the complexity of protective intelligence, but also helps each of us really search our hearts and the organizations we are creating to answer the questions "Who are We?" and "Who will we Never Be?"

A Winning Formula for Security

Jim Sawyer has been one of the key architects of the physical security program at one of the largest children’s hospitals in the USA for over 40 years. We sit down with him to see what he has learned and how it is informing the future of security at Seattle Children’s and the industry. Learn how customer service, collaborative risk management, “zero incidents”, and information aggregation and reporting are fueling the success of his program.

The Digital Transformation of the Security Integrator

The Digital Transformation of key sectors of our economy is complicated. In many cases, the ecosystem is unable to adjust because their tried-and-true practices are good enough to produce the profits they are comfortable with. For some, the ability to invest in new operational models requires heavy lifting in re-training their people and constrains their ability to innovate and change.

When I met Eric Yunag, the Vice President of Technology and Innovation at one of the largest security integration companies in the world, he was the CEO of a much smaller integrator in South Dakota. During his sixteen-year tenure at the company, he led numerous operational and sales initiatives, as well as the expansion of the company into new locations around the country. But now he is helping Convergint Technologies pivot from providing security solutions to becoming a strategic advisor on digital transformation initiatives to security and business executives. This has been happening in the midst of an aggressive acquisition spree; innovation and change and aggressive growth. The recipe for their success is a meal that security executives want on the menu: business and security intelligence as a service that promises to create strategic advantage for their organizations.

The opportunity is open to many integrators and to their customers. The risk is their ability to adjust to the speed of change in our social and business worlds that technology is demanding of all of us. 

Is Security a Silent Movie?

Whenever I review the security technology architecture of a business, I look for a simple answer to a nagging problem. Why can’t I hear what is going on before, during, or after an incident? You would think that most security organizations strive toward real-time situational awareness leveraging all the tools they own by embedding audio and voice into their business processes. But instead, many have cameras that are producing a silent movie.  

Why isn’t audio ubiquitous in the building, on the campus, and in our cities? 

I press on this question with Cameron Jadvani, the President of an audio technology company called SoundSecure, and I am pleasantly surprised and hopeful that we finally will see an acceleration of a simple premise: in a sensor driven world, I need to see, hear, be heard, and be understood now more than ever. 

From Turnstiles to a New Category called ‘Presence’

Steve Caroselli, the CEO of Orion, joins us to talk about the next generation of entrance controls and his unique approach to innovation in collaboration with his clients. Just when you thought you were talking about turnstiles Steve opens our eyes and minds to a new sensor driven world. 

He will tell you he is not a turnstile company, although he is a leader in that product category. To Caroselli, turnstiles are access control systems. To innovate and lead in this rapidly expanding category, Orion must be a technology company. To Caroselli, that is important. With technology rapidly evolving, every security product that you purchase today will likely be disrupted by new and imaginative approaches to identity, presence, and access control. 

To Caroselli, innovative technology companies must practice "speed lane" thinking. “We must own our responsibility for getting our customers brand right as well as mitigating the risk to their company”, he said. And mitigating the risk from a ‘speed lane’ requires Orion to know the use case that impacts their people, process, and other technologies in the building. “We must be the ones that help our customer ask the right questions.”

And Caroselli takes his own medicine. One of his main jobs is to stay in front of leading indicators of change including the risk, the uberization of core assumptions we make about situational awareness and actionable response, and the technology. Today one of his biggest projects is reimagining and repurposing the turnstile. “The age of COVID-19 has taught us that we need to not just validate entrance, but also validate presence”, said Caroselli. And that means we must be tied into other security, building, and enterprise systems. And we have to reimagine the internal and external entries and the behavior in and around it.” Caroselli believes that this will radically expand the market for Orion’s solutions.

As you listen to our conversation, you will hear how his mind works, and why a bet on his success might be a sound investment. 

The New Scorecard for Excellence in Education Demands Security

Parents: Are you Listening?

We sit down with Joe Souza, Director of Security for the University of Florida and discuss his journey in helping the university in their quest to be a top five public university.

Joe is sold out on the mission of his university to be a preeminent brand within the public education sector. And that is the difference. He starts with the vision, mission, and core values of the university, and then determines how his program contributes. 

For those of you who are parents of prospective university students, pause for a second and reflect whether you and your child prioritized security and safety in your scorecard for evaluating a university. Do your children prosper because they know they are safe and secure?

What I appreciated is Joe’s efforts to help his university leverage his program to ensure that all the other elements of the scorecard are not radically diluted by an otherwise predictable event or a poor response. That is value protection and value generation.

The Market Forces Driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Cascadia Capital is tackling the Fourth Industrial Revolution head-on with one of the nation’s first emerging growth investment banking practice groups dedicated to Robotics, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence (“RAAI”). Learn what they see as the market forces driving this and how you might evaluate your next steps as an end user, service provider, or technology vendor. We sit down with their Managing Director, Firdaus Pohowalla, in a great conversation about this upcoming wave.  With seven investment banking professionals and over 100 years of combined experience, the Cascadia team has significant industry knowledge and a successful track record of advising companies in the RAAI space. 

The Exhilarating Ride of a Security Leader

Not many security executives could balance a merger and acquisition of companies with disparate cultures, methods, and business models at the same time they were dealing with the pandemic, social unrest, and the economy. That seems challenging. But amid all of this, Tammi Morton, the VP and CSO for Raytheon, exudes an energy, focus and enthusiasm that is contagious. Enjoy this conversation that we had during the 2020 pandemic and pick up some tips on how to take your culture to the next level with composure and integrity. 

Security is in Your DNA

George Finney, CSO of SMU, shows why he is the ultimate bridge builder. He steps us through the 9 habits that need to be cultivated in individuals and teams to empower the DNA of security. People, to George, are the strongest link, not the weakest. 

If you are a business leader, you might take note. Finney says: “For anyone who wants to be a CEO, a VP of Sales, or even start their own business…Cybersecurity is now a now a required qualification. And if you are in HR you can help train employees to have better cybersecurity habits. You need to understand cybersecurity or else you are going to be passed over in favor of someone else who does understand it. Just like you have had leadership coaches or mentors in your career, you need a cybersecurity coach.”

Read George’s book, Well Aware: Master the Nine Cybersecurity Habits to Protect Your Future, for more on this subject.

The Battle for Time

Mark Reid, Director of Security and Safety for Seattle Pacific University, recounts the tale of two fires that occurred on and near his campus. He shares transparently the lessons learned on preparedness, the right tools, and the inherent risks that must be considered to ensure the safety of his campus. 

To Mark, security should be measured in seconds, not minutes. And through his stories, you can see why. You will also get a keen sense of how he has leveraged the culture of his university and its people to ensure their safety and the viability of their education.

In the Midst of Uncertainty, Think Fast and Slow

When a Security Executive tells me he is reading a book on Disney (Be our Guest), Kahneman's Think Fast and Slow,  and a book on rebels at work, I sit up and listen. Clearly this is not your Father's security program.

Brian Uridge, Deputy Director of the Department of Public Safety and Security for the University of Michigan, sat with me in the middle of the chaos of 2020 to talk about his unique approach to people, process, and technology. 

He discusses his development as a leader and how it reframed how he looked at his mission. Through Brian, we look at our unique ability to honestly see ourselves and our unique contribution in a new way. And, perhaps, a more creative way in which to govern ourselves as well. 

We hope you enjoy the March Playlist. Remember, we are sitting down with leaders throughout the month searching for leaders willing to have a great conversation about their unique perspective on our world. Please follow us on one of the above podcast channels and to this blog. And let us know if your interested in recommending a great conversation topic or person Info@The-Great-Conversation.com

Good listening!