For this month, we have a playlist that seems to mirror the pandemic sense of urgency. We have a senior group of leaders celebrating an emerging standard for global travel risk management, while at the same time we bring back a leader who in 2020 suggested that we protect “Everyone, Anywhere”. We have a Physical and Cyber Leader at one of the major hospitals reminding us of the charter to protect lives, whether they be doctors and nurses, patients, or visitors. We have a leader who focused his entire business on saving the ones left behind in Afghanistan. And we have a leader who relentlessly pursued the knowledge of leadership, practiced it, and is now giving his learnings back to all of us. And finally a technology platform that may unbind us from the way we would think of purchasing technology. Let’s start another round of The Great Conversation.

ISO 31030: The Global Community Addresses Travel Risk Management

Do your people who travel to support your business believe that you are doing everything you can to keep them safe and secure? Does your organization believe they have a duty to care for them?

The world is changing dramatically. We have the new threat vector of Covid 19 and may be facing a new era of similar outbreaks. We have socio-political divisiveness leading to civil unrest with the corresponding ramifications of the new role of law enforcement in mitigating the risk.

We have climate uncertainty.

We have global terrorism.

The question is: do we have an agreed upon standard of care for our workforce? And are we taking steps to mitigate their risk?

Fundamentally, we need to have an over-arching risk management standard. We have one that is internationally  recognized: ISO 31000. With this in place we can now address specific risk in travel. For some time now, working through many virtual conference calls, a consortium of risk, resilience and security professionals have been working on a new travel management standard called ISO 31030.

We sit down with one of the key committee members, Ronny Saether of Norges Bank, along with a noted security consultant, Patrick Kane, and an owner of an executive protection agency, Mac Segal of AHNA, to unwrap the potential this may have of changing how we evangelize travel risk management in our organizations and in our vendor relationships.

Making a Difference: A Relentless Pursuit of Leadership

We live a life of intersections between Yes and No. Whatever path we choose necessarily demands a sacrifice of the other. Each path leads to another intersection. And although this happens to all of us, few of us recognize at the time the incredible blessing of choice and the learnings that carryover.

Stan Partlow of Relentless Effort, LLC is one of the few. His career spans law enforcement, the FBI, most recently, CSO of one of the foremost utilities in the nation, AEP. Stan is a self-described “leadership nerd”. For him, leadership is all about influence, and influence is the art and the science of relationships. And relationships, if harnessed toward a common goal drives outcomes that matter. We also talk about influence that can be manipulative. We touch on leaders who are great at influence but drive people to do horrible things. So we expand the definition of leadership to underline the commitment to honor, integrity, and the common good.

If you are relentlessly pursuing your path to value, you might want to sit in on this great conversation about his life, his learnings, and his passion for a life well lived.

Standing in the Gap in Afghanistan

If we are fortunate enough to have the resources and time to help others in need, we truly are blessed. If we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we also have the duty to step in and help others find their path and courage to pursue hope, liberty, and happiness.

David Nicastro of Secure Source International is in the business of helping his clients navigate travel around the world as well as providing strategic advice on corporate risk management. He has built his business through a network of skilled relationships around the world.

Recently he volunteered his time, resources, and money, to help extract people from Afghanistan who were close to losing their freedom and their lives.

In our conversation, we step through his journey, his business model, and the events that led to a successful extraction from one of the world's most dangerous countries.

Unbound Intelligent Security

If you have worked for a variety of access control technology vendors, you have an inside view of how they develop their products and their go to market strategies. We wanted to leverage those insights to explore the next generation of what we call Unbound Intelligent Security.

To do that, we looked up Paul Dipeso who works for a company called Feenics that purports to be the “rebirth of access control”. We actually think it might be more than that. Listen in and see how we attempt to tease out the ‘why’ behind this new approach to an age old problem.

Keep by Feenics is the rebirth of access control. Designed by an integrator, for an integrator, it's about meeting the needs of the end user by maximizing their current infrastructure with a flexible, scalable platform that uses a secure connection to the cloud, no different than online banking. Feenics believes in protecting the initial investment with licensing costs that are not complicated or prohibitive and hardware that is non-proprietary.

Interviewing a Technology Vendor

We wanted to be a fly on the wall when an integrator interviewed a potential technology vendor that happened to be offering an enterprise platform for integrating video management into access control, health monitoring, IoT integration, and analytics at the edge.

While we listened in they discussed the current state of best-in-class video monitoring, the value of the data center platforms like Google, the roadblocks to creating a compelling value proposition with the CSO and the CISO, and the nature of evaluating technology and technology vendor relationships.

It was a new grand experiment for The Great Conversation. Listen in and see if you can extract some value out of their discussion.

The participants are Nigel Waterton, Chief Revenue Officer for Arcules; Brian Cox, Regional Manager for Arcules in Texas; Joe Harris, Chief Solutions Officer for STAR Asset Security; and Jack Johnson, VP of Sales and Marketing for STAR.

Our learnings: serendipitously, we had just interviewed another cloud platform vendor. We found an overwhelming demand for cloud solutions due to labor shortages, budget constraints, the need for rapid application development, and the ease of use and administration.

Everyone, Anywhere

John Coovert, the VP and Global Head of Security for SAP, has been a voice of innovation and change in our conversations for close to ten years. In this conversation we discuss his concept of duty of care “Everyone, Anywhere” and how that guides his strategy and planning at SAP. We learn about how he wants the vendor community to approach him, and his need to secure his future by automating the physical tasks that permeate security within his company. 

A highly experienced security professional with over 33 years of experience in physical security, law enforcement, and the military, John has been focused on strong leadership and prioritizing to achieve determined results. Because of this, he excels at developing relationships with business units supported by, and in support of, security programs. He possesses a unique and dynamic experience from tenures at security roles at various notable companies, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the United States Marine Corps.

John has been able to progressively advance through leadership/management positions due to his ability to motivate staff, increase productivity, develop plans and solutions in fighting crime, provide safety and effectively use the tools provided. Additionally, he has served as a Director, Manager, Supervisor, field training officer, while employed in the security industry as well as worked independently as an Executive Protection Specialist for several companies.

In the Face of the Threat: Security on the Front Line

Seattle Children's is one of the most respected children's research and hospital in the nation. Dylan Hayes, is the lead Cyber-Physical IT Security Manager. He has been in the center of physical security services at Children’s Hospital and shares his thoughts on leadership, innovation, and change.

Dylan is a seasoned leader, planner, and enterprise change agent with 20+ year progressive career record spanning a wide range of critical business systems and operations including enterprise risk, resilience, and response.

He also has extensive expertise and background in consulting/assessment, system analysis/integration, application and system management, resilient and streamlined operations, safety identification and mitigation, disaster planning and customer service.