What Fills Your Cup?

What Fills Your Cup?

For leaders in the risk management and security industry, we feel we own the safety of our organization’s people and assets. That burden plays out in the intelligence we gather, the people we manage, the processes we measure, and the insights we must deliver to the executives who run the business. And one more thing… some of us have been doing this 24x7 our entire lives through agency work, the military, and law enforcement. Brian Cooke, a senior security executive for a major energy company explores what it means to have personal resilience.

Empathy: The Security Leader’s Invisible Superpower

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When I train cops about operational empathy, I make the claim that empathy will save their lives more often than the gun on their hip. This is initially met with blank stares, because empathy is not a tangible tool or a defensive weapon. However, when we take the time to understand empathy and apply it to our work, it has a habit of turning into a superpower.

The same is true as corporate security leaders, whether we are talking about customer service at the uniformed security officer level, or if we are talking about influencing the decisions of the C suite.

Let’s define empathy. I like to keep it simple: “The ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes.” This means taking the time to look at an issue, an encounter, an experience, from someone else’s perspective. When we start to understand another person’s perspective and then adjust our approach to them, this is where the power of empathy can shine. So, what does this all mean in the context of security leadership?  We have an opportunity to extend our native skills and competencies. A superpower, in this context, is a human trait taken to a much higher level.

For the purposes of brevity, I will focus on perhaps the most important core activity that contributes to empathy and the creation of a superpower in leadership: Asking Questions.

Ask the Right Questions at the Right Time:

If empathy is the practice of placing ourselves in someone else’s shoes, the most practical way to start is by asking questions! To help explain this, I will start out with one of my empathy failures (I have plenty of those!)

When I managed security for the Washington DC Metro system, I managed a team of special police officers, stationed at rail yards, bus depots, and office buildings. I was also charged with beefing up physical security. In one location, I spearheaded the effort to enhance the perimeter fencing around a rail yard, to deter people from being able to cut or climb the fence. This meant a much tighter and stronger metal mesh on the chain link fencing. Installation day arrived and it was a beautiful fence. It went all the way around the perimeter, and right up to the guard house near the front entrance to the property, where all vehicles and pedestrians entered. I was proud of my accomplishment.

I went to the guard house and asked the officer what he thought of the fence, assuming he would be grateful towards me and shower the fence with compliments. Instead, he looked uncomfortable and said begrudgingly, “The fence looks great, but now I can’t see cars as they enter the property.” Oops. The fence I had installed, had such tight mesh, and was installed at such an angle that the officer literally had no visibility of the front entrance of the rail yard. I stepped inside and stood in the exact position of the officer, and sure enough, I couldn’t see the driveway. All I could see was that beautiful tightly knit fence mesh. In this case, when I was planning the project, I made two major failures. Number one, I did not take the time to evaluate the impact of my decision from the perspective of the end user, in this case, the officer in the guard house. Number two, I failed to ask the right questions at the right time, of the right person. Had I practiced these basic building blocks of empathy; I could have mitigated the issues during the planning stage. I never tried to place myself in the shoes of the right person. A few basic questions of this officer would have prevented my mini disaster. In a broader security leadership context, we can easily see the relevance beyond operational physical security.

Imagine when it is time to implement a new travel security policy, or access control policy. Perhaps you are announcing a handful of countries that you’ve deemed “no-go” zones that are too “high risk” for travel. It is easy to benchmark with other security professionals and lean on your own security expertise for such decisions. However, if we don’t take the time to ask the right questions and listen to our stakeholders about the impacts of our plans, we run the risk of never finding the true solution to the problem at hand. Or worse yet, like my fence mistake, our solution produces a new problem.  In the travel security example, what if one of your new “high risk” countries is the next emerging location for new market entry for your core business? Suddenly you are preventing your company’s executives from traveling to that exact country where they plan to do major business. How do you think that will be received?

When it comes time to make decisions that will have an impact on our stakeholders, it is crucial to activate our empathy muscle. Step inside the shoes of your stakeholders by asking them for feedback and seeking to understand how your actions will impact them. When you truly place yourself in their shoes, you will then be able to make a decision based on a holistic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve.

Burke Brownfeld is Director of Global Safety and Security for Visa Incorporated and is part of the 2020 faculty in The Great Conversation in Security in Palm Beach, Florida

Digital Transformation Highway: Which on ramp will you take?

Digital Transformation Highway: Which on ramp will you take?

The digital transformation of security is underway. There are many on ramps. But to start the journey demands you know what the highway looks like and the new measures of performance that will influence how your are valued over time. We have a number of conversations taking place in 2020. Each one very different, but, with a theme of leadership, innovation and change that will impact how your organization sees you and how you see your organization.

The Road to 2020

The Road to 2020

As leaders, we sometimes are so immersed in the day to day grind of running our programs we miss the strategic opportunities that will define our success or even our legacy. .Sometimes we need to make time for a conversation that can help us see and think more clearly. The Great Conversation is on a Path to four forums in 2020 that will feed your mind, possibly change your heart, and impact your performance.

The Future is Ours to Create

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Two CSOs. Two perspectives. Both in a Great Conversation on May 21, 2019 at The Great Conversation in Security™

Their interest and their passion? The future of the ‘art of security’

Garrett Petraia, Levi Strauss and Tyson Aiken, Nike, started their conversation with a simple logic statement.

·Art often refers to the past: the value of what has been accomplished.

· State of the art implies more of an active present tense or emergent standard of conduct.

· Should we refer to the Future of Art as the process we use to revise or disrupt a standard based on a new way of thinking?

For example, we all practice “Risk Management”. But the term itself is limiting. It is only one side of a coin. The other side represents the opportunities that would arise if we had knowledge of the risks and leveraged them. This is an opportunistic mindset our industry must adapt to if they are going to become true business advisors and leaders.

And for business leaders, this strategic intelligence might move them from business enablement to business acceleration.

Tyson asked us: “How do we get to that place?”

And both speakers suggested we need to hire more business talent and train them in risk principles. “We need to move from hiring a resume that fits our current ‘state of the art’, to hiring based on intellect and values”, said Garrett. “I cannot allow my lack of perspective and knowledge to blind me to the risks or the opportunities. I must hire to support my blind spots.

But they acknowledged that it is easier to hire for security subject matter expertise then it is to find business talent that wants to join the security industry. The talent pipelines from the government, intelligent community, the military and the law enforcement community are crowded. So, our search for diversity will be more difficult. But it is desperately needed.

As Garrett said we need to understand why people fail. It usually comes down to the culture and the degree of collaboration they can foster with the community; the value intersection of their wants and needs with your own.

And both agreed, we need to learn how to gather, analyze, and leverage data that will allow business leaders to better comprehend their own risks and their opportunities by collaborating with our people and programs.

And it just might start with re-writing our own job descriptions to better represent the future of our art.

The Technology World is Evolving, Are You?

Steven Antoine, one of our Great Conversation faculty, had an article posted on Enterprise Security that is well worth the read. Written by Steven Antoine, Director, Global Assets Protection, Yum! Brands we have provided a starting point for the article and a link to read it here.

With the digitization of business, security often finds itself in the familiar, yet uncomfortable space of being reactionary; again. GTRM and the security of data typically are found in bifurcated skill sets, CISO vs. CSO. With the evolution and internet of things, everything is more connected. In the restaurant space, for example, predictive and prevention techniques are being refined as apps and gift, and credit cards are now the focus of the digital criminal enterprise. Camera and alarm vulnerabilities have to be (re)addressed as savvy hackers seek to become more criminally creative and less physically confrontational. The development of new tools such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence and the availability on consumer data make it such that “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” is being acted out in ways that five years ago couldn’t have been anticipated.

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Leveraging the Differences: A Recipe for Innovation and Change

Last week we profiled the keynote that Greg Creed, the CEO of Yum! Brands provided to the executive community in The Great Conversation in Security. As you remember, he talked about the power of culture and the necessity to create a self-correcting culture focused on the vision, mission and goals of the organization. Engagement is key. If fosters trust.

Understanding what you are engaged to do is critical. The “Why” of your work. To Greg, that means you need to be RED. Relevant, Easy and Distinctive. To the degree he can create a culture that is continuously moving in that direction, he believes they can be successful. Every security executive was asking themselves, how they could bring RED into their program.

We were also privileged to listen to a cross functional industry panel discussing the strategic imperative of of diversity. We brought members of Greg’s team together that came from different backgrounds and departments to understand how they defined diversity, leveraged it, and are creating a force multiplier in value generation as a result.

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The executives included the following:

James Fripp
Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer
Yum! Brands, Inc.

Erika Burkhardt
Vice President of Brand Protection
Pizza Hut LLC

Steven Antoine
Global Assets Protection Director
Yum! Brands, Inc.

We also included a medical doctor, Dr Robert Genzel, who had become the Chief Security Officer for Texas Motor Speedway, proving to all of us, that intelligent minds can absorb critical risk indicators and use their skills to create a strategy and a plan. Dr. Genzel is now providing services to the security community as CEO of Overwatch, a company dedicated to providing Medical, EMS, Fire and Security support services to Corporations, High Net-worth individuals and governmental agencies around the world. Through this experience he has become a sought-after speaker and consultant on Emergency Preparedness and Mass Casualty preparation and response for corporate campuses and large spectator venues. That would not have happened without a recognition that another perspective could be a game-changer.

The discussion was poignant. We walked away with a number of nuggets of wisdom that we believe can add to our leadership and our value.

  1. Diversity is the foundation of ideation and innovation. By intentionally identifying, including and listening to people from different experiences, cultural backgrounds, and racial or gender identities, we have the opportunity to expand our imagination and sharpen our ideas.

  2. Diversity demands empathy and care. If fostered, it strengthens the ties that bind us to one another.

  3. Diversity opens our eyes. It is the enemy of scotomas; the dysfunctional blindness of ignorance.

  4. Diversity leverages the differences in us. It does not fight them or critique them. It seeks to understand them.

So, as we left the conversation, each of us were thinking who is on my team and, more importantly, who is not. And what can I do about it?

Focus Will Drive Your Value

When Greg Creed, the CEO of Yum! Brands addressed the Great Conversation community of senior risk, resilience and security executives on May 21, 2019, he left them with several take-aways that, if leveraged and implemented, may change the way our programs are designed, managed and measured.

One of his first remarks would put the rest of his time with us in perspective. He asked us whether we could find the key to the value of Yum! on his balance sheet.

Before we answered he shared some of Yum! Brands public information.

Yum! Brands performance has certainly been impressive.

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, they have over 48,000 restaurants in more than 145 countries and territories primarily operating the company’s restaurant brands – KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell – global leaders of the chicken, pizza and Mexican-style food categories. Worldwide, the Yum! Brands system opens over eight new restaurants per day on average, making it a leader in global retail development. In 2018, Yum! Brands was named to the Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index and ranked among the top 100 Best Corporate Citizens by Corporate Responsibility Magazine. In 2019, Yum! Brands was named to the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index for the second consecutive year.

The Great Conversation in Security was held in Plano, Texas at the Yum! Brands Center of Excellence. And Greg flew in for the forum.

“No”, Greg would answer his own question. “You will not find Yum! Brands key to corporate value on the balance sheet.” It could be culture, or reputation, or customer care or even the brands themselves. But all of those are overshadowed by the impact of engaged people creating the culture that results in outstanding business performance and brand.

How do you connect the business strategies to the people? According to Greg, they must care. To care they must understand the vision, mission and core values of the organization and how it applies to them. That creates trust.

Can trust be measured? Greg would say “Yes”. He has implemented a program that teaches his employees what it means to be at Yum! Brands, how it applies to them, and how it will be measured.

“Our strength is in how we recognize the uniqueness of each person at Yum! Brands” said Greg. “For a global company, this is critical. We cannot be devaluing one another according to our differences.”

Yum! has a 4-level measurement ranking system for every employee. It promotes a self-correcting culture. You may be first introduced to Yum! and/or the training and begin your assimilation into the culture. That would be a “Learner”. Grace is given. Mentoring is paramount. If you need more training or remediation, you would be “Lacking”. Once you get it and achieved a baseline of culture assimilation you would be “Living” the culture. And for those who go the extra mile, proactively, to advance the culture, the brand and the measures of performance that make the brand what it intends to be, they would be lauded as “Leaders”. Note, at Yum! leaders do not need a title.

With this cultural baseline, Greg has also created a strategy that energizes the culture, the franchisees, and the investors. He calls it “Being RED”.

RED is an acronym that strategically aligns the entire ecosystem.

R: is for Relevant. Whatever category you choose, is your value proposition relevant to your target audience?

E: is for Easy. Your offering should be intuitively easy to identify, access and purchase. Frictionless.

D: is for Distinctive. Your target audience should see you as highly differentiated. Your value proposition compelling. The Customer Experience outstanding.

With his cultural focus and his precise definition of how to create value, he helped the security executives in the room and their vendors imagine a path to value. A path that included their unique role in creating an engaged culture, that was safe and secure, and a shared understanding of their role in “Being RED”.

His final message was to ensure they understood their role in teaching the employees to be culture keepers of their own security and safety.

“We must instill a culture of trust. That is our strength. But it must be tempered with their ownership over the security and safety of our intellectual property, our people and our food safety process.”

The feedback we received underlined the need for more leadership lessons and perspective from the CEO in helping our community position their own organizations on a path to value.

The Future is Ours to Define

I have been speaking with our faculty over the last few weeks and the conversations are taking on a level of urgency I have not seen in awhile.

We are an industry in transition. Many of us feel like we are trying to run in mud, but, for some of us, we are starting to see changes that will radically redefine our value proposition. Here are a few of the conversations I have recently had.

Today, two senior executives underlined the fact that vendors must wake up to the new reality of uberization. Our internal customers live in the age of plug and play. Facebook just works. Uber just works. The complexity is hidden from us. The “contract model” is front-loaded with a license fee and services. A new contract model must emerge that provides a shared risk model for delivery of outcomes (the customer experience).

We keep hearing of the intelligent building. But what is it and why do we need it? If we need it, what is the return on investment? What is security’s role in the strategy and execution of an intelligent building? Will this help us leverage a new and more compelling value proposition?

What is the role of communication in today’s security program? We tend to think in linear terms. But what if it was more dynamic, leveraging all forms of communication? How would that change the optimization of our people, processes and technology?

Is Loss Prevention becoming a powerful organizational example of convergence?

Is video surveillance a business tool and a risk tool?

Can security help an organization scale rapidly while mitigating risks?

Diversity is and is not what you think. Learn from a powerful panel of leaders on their experiences creating value over the differences.

Culture is at once a powerful weapon. It can be good, bad, even ugly, based on leadership casting a vision that can be intuitively grasped by the stakeholders.

All of these ideas can begin to contribute to a CEO’s conversation with their company, their board and their investors. We will pick the brain of a CEO who is in the process of doing just that.

Each of our faculty deeply believe that the conversation matters. Each expect to go back to their organizations with take-aways that make a difference. They are action-oriented and driven by the need to continuously advance their proficiency in creating organizational value and mitigating the risks to people, the business and the community.

Connecting with the CTO of LenelS2

As part of the discipline around The Great Conversation, we seek true case studies of our executive community. A case study to us communicates a problem or opportunity the executive is facing, how they mustered internal and external teams to assess it, and then how they approached rectifying it, including the performance measures that supported the effort. This can be thought provoking and meaningful to our community. How our peers are addressing issues may give us guidance on our own core processes.

After each case study, we like to have a technology discussion. There are two parts to this which can be very helpful. One is to understand how others are evaluating the technology against similar problems. Two is to understand the roadmap for the category. For example: How is the access control technology category evolving? What can we expect to see and how will it change the way we manage our future program?

Ewa Pigna, the CTO LenelS2, will represent the access control category for us this year. She will follow a case study by Jason Veiock, who leads a converged security team at GoDaddy.

We asked Ewa several questions before she meets with us on March 4 & 5 in Seattle.

Why Do you participate in the Great Conversation?

I would love to share my perspective on the state of the security industry and specifically as it relates to access control. I also see it as a great opportunity to hear other industry professionals on this topic, interact with various security influencers and help to shape the future of the industry.

What do you hope to learn?

I hope to learn how existing solutions are applied to help customers solve real world problems, what gaps still exist that industry manufacturers can focus on, and how to better connect security to the overall business value.

What was your presentation about?

My presentation touches on the Enterprise Security Platform, it’s current state, roadmap, future trends, and key points that end-users should be aware of when evaluating the state of their overall security risk management strategy.

What is the most common constraint you hear from end users?

The most common constraint I hear form end-users is how to justify security funding as part of the overall risk management budget. I believe that as we connect security and business processes together, we will be much more successful in opening up more funding for those types of projects.

How are they addressing this constraint today?

End users are looking at various ways to overcome the funding obstacle. They are embracing multi-generational approach towards introduction of newer security models into their environments. They are also leveraging the solutions interoperability capabilities to drive greater business reward from security investments, and they are introducing more self-service capabilities to their users in order to drive increased productivity with their security staff.

It Takes a Village: An Interview with Fallon Long, Security Manager at Grant County PUD

Fallon Long is the Security Manager with Grant County PUD.

Established by local residents over 75 years ago, Grant PUD generates and delivers energy to millions of customers throughout the Pacific Northwest. What began as a grassroots movement of public power has evolved into one of the premiere providers of renewable energy at some of the most affordable rates in the nation.

Security and safety is a critical part of any utility. And the scope of the effort requires a team approach.

Fallon has demonstrated that team approach not only with her previous work at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, but also with her volunteer time as the past Vice Chair for the Regional ASIS group, her current position as Assistant Area Regional Vice President for ASIS, .and the Co-Chair of the Puget Sound Chapter of Women in Security.

We were able to catch up with her and have a small, but great conversation.

Why do leaders need a great conversation with their peers?

Leaders need a great conversation to keep from becoming stagnate. Everything needs to evolve or it gets eliminated. They say it takes a village to raise a child. I agree that that it takes a village to develop your program. My network of professionals has supported the program I have designed within my organization and my professional development.

What have you learned from the other conversations you have participated in?

I have learned that it is ok to not know it all. People fear the exposure of not knowing the answers. So they minimize their ability to learn. When you can speak openly and freely in a conversation, you get to hear real and raw information. Who knew we all experienced the same challenges? Who knew that so and so at this organization went through the same trials I have had and found something that works? Who knew that people would utilize the methods I put in place because I shared it with them.?

It is important to know you do not need to know everything and be willing to ask and receive what others are doing.

What are the front of mind issues you have been dealing with as a security leader?

I think I have learned the secret weapon needed to be successful. I stopped telling department leaders what I wanted them to hear and I started listening.

I let the frontline staff help me build my program. I asked them to help me with the budget. I asked them to help me improve the plan that protects what is important to them. In return we have developed trust. I get their buy-in which shifts their behaviors regarding security. They see value in the partnership and services.

As a woman leader in security, what advice do you have for other women in our industry?

I don’t let being a woman hold me back or influence the way I respond.

I do my best to approach each situation with confidence and not arrogance. I can’t change the way people behave or think but I can set boundaries for respect. I address issues as they arise and let people know when boundaries have been crossed.

I look at myself as a leader in my profession first. I will be defined by my performance, my leadership, and my willingness to respect other stakeholders in my organization and in the industry. Of course I am proud to be a woman but I am more proud of my leadership capabilities.

Editor’s Note: Fallon will be a panelist on a panel that asks a very unsettling question: Are you being disrupted? The Uberization of Security. She will be joined by security leaders from Microsoft, Seattle Children’s, ASG’s Enterprise Security Risk Group, and ADT’s Enterprise Solutions Group.

Creating the Future through a Great Conversation

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Are you confident that your risk, resilience and security program is fully optimized? Are you satisfied with your value proposition to your organization’s senior leaders? Are you sure you know where the hidden costs of your program are and how you might leverage those costs to improve your situational awareness and actionable response?

If any of these questions give you pause, you deserve a great conversation with thought leaders and your peers.

A guiding coalition of senior risk and security executives helped shape what was an intense one-day forum designed for busy leaders and their teams on May 21 at Yum! Brands Center of Restaurant Excellence.

What is the promise based on past Great Conversations forums? You walk away with nuggets of wisdom from one or more of the speakers or panelists that you will want to activate before the end of the year.

The forum is based on educational tracks such as: Leadership, Strategy and Innovation, Organizational Strength, Enterprise Security Risk Management, Intelligence acquisition and planning and, of course, the track that can disrupt any best practice: Technology.

Our guest faculty is compelling:

  • CEO of Yum! Brands, Greg Creed, addressing the security executive community with an articulation of value that may become a manifesto for future leaders

  • Former Amazon Security Executive Ed Bacco, who leads a group of senior risk, resilience and security leaders known as the Enterprise Security Risk Group (eSRG), moderating a panel on the Uberization of Security and how it might be disrupting best practices for better practices.

  • Jonathan Shimp, the Vice President of Risk Management at Louis Vuitton discussing his journey on creating a new model of identifying, acquiring, measuring and maintaining his security technology infrastructure.

  • Transparent industry case studies on the business problems security executives face at their organization and how they assess it, quantify the cost, muster internal and external teams to address it and the solutions they begin to implement.

  • The Security Leader of Yum! Brands, Steven Antoine, assembles a cross functional panel to uncover the ROI of creating a leadership culture of diversity.

  • A security executive from Seattle Children’s Hospital describes his journey in uncovering the unique value in creating a intelligent communication strategy. Three leading vendors provide a current and future roadmap that can be described as Communication-as-a-Service featuring intelligibility, interoperability, and IT’s need for enterprise scale provisioning.

  • In this sensor driven world, or what many are calling IoT, we no longer have an option to disregard the needs of the business and the environment that the business functions within: a building, a campus and a city. We bring a team together that has constructed an intelligent building to discuss how leaders can begin to use the lessons learned to shape their digital transformation strategy.

  • If “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast,” then the polar opposite is culture’s ability to create a highly leveraged model for security and safety. Two great leaders, Tyson Aiken, Senior Director for Global Safety & Security for Nike Inc. and Garrett Petraia, Vice President of Global Security for Levi Strauss & Co. describe their journey in a transparent and intimate dialogue.

An Interview with William Plante: Disrupting Security

William Plante, Senior Principal in the Enterprise Security Risk Group (eSRG), moderated a panel on the “Uberization” of Security at the Great Conversation in Seattle. No, we are not talking about a mobile app to run everything. We are talking about the increasing dilution of the security executive’s impact on the organization’s value because of the hidden costs of the security infrastructure including the shortage of subject matter expertise to run it. It is a sign that you are about to get disrupted when you are not attentive to the customer experience which includes the value proposition of time, money and value. Let’s learn more about William.

What is your background?

I was a CSO at Symantec. I was also Director of Enterprise Resiliency at Intuit. I ran a boutique security consultancy for programs and systems. And I have been a security practitioner for 39 years.

As a Risk, Resilience and Security leader, why is it important to have a great conversation with the security ecosystem?

The security ecosystem is rich with knowledge, experience, and perspective. Any security practitioner looking for guidance and advice can turn to all segements of the security industry – manufacturers, consultants, integrators, distribution, publishers, and other endusers – to gain a full perspective of issues and trends within the industry and that impact our world.

What are the key learnings you have experienced in past conversations?

I am impressed with the level of leadership sophistication and practical advice that we get from our conversations. We are an industry with some very smart people, both as practitioners and as business managers. Provocative, and sometimes contentious conversations, bring better meaning and understanding regarding issues and problems that we (as a collective of practitioners) can solve.

Describe the objective of your panel?

The IT world continues to impact how we manage and operate our systems. And the enterprise continues to demand the best bang for the buck challenging security leaders to remain focused on core competency and bring best value to the table. This conversation is focused on understanding how that is translating as an outcome in security departments and within the market. As leaders contine to grasp the true total cost of security while simultaneously adapting to new business and operating challenges, they are now pushing the “standard” paradigm of hosting and managing systems. The outsource model of consumption-based (or “pay-per-sip”) managed security services is becoming financially and technically viable. This panel explores this new paradigm.

Why is this important to the conversation?

Our Conversations often concern themselves with identifying significant trends and interpreting their impact. Providing a Managed Security Service isn’t a new idea within the IT and business community, and it isn’t new to corporate security either. With new advances in Cloud infrastructure and deployment, coupled with businesses that focus on providing core services and adding best value, the time to reexamine 3rd party hosted infrastructure and services is now. This trend will gain more momentum in the next several years and should be understood by every organization concerned with providing the best programs for the best value.

Based on the agenda, what do you hope to learn this year?

I am keen to learn how Scott Klososky is going to address the Integrated Security Model. Security is a very dynamic program, and I do think there’s a continual disruption in our space. I’m keen to hear what he has to say. The smart building discussion is also an especially interesting topic and I’d like to learn what others are thing about in terms of challenges and opportunities to integrate smart buildings into security system services.

Why Do You Do What You Do?

Why does Jeff Bezos start his senior leadership team meetings in silence?

Why does Tom Brady spend voluminous hours studying film of his opponents?

Why does world-renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman continue to practice eight hours per day after playing professionally for 50 + years?

Why does Taylor Swift still take voice lessons?

We each do what we do because we believe that something beneficial will happen. Jeff Bezos starts his meetings in silence to create an environment that fosters laser focus and critical thinking. Tom Brady studies film to find one weakness in his opponent to win the game. For Itzhak Perlman and Taylor Swift it is to be the absolute best musicians they can be.

Why do you do what you do? That question was asked of me recently by a friend after I mentioned that I was asked to speak at an event in Seattle called The Great Conversation in Security. My friend knows I’m not an expert in security and wanted to know what I would say to an audience of Chief Security Officers.

I told my friend that the reason why I speak is simple. I speak in the hopes of making a positive difference in a leader’s success at work and satisfaction at home. I also paraphrased Chicago Evening Post journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne who said, “I speak to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” In other words, I speak to help an audience think in ways that are both uncomfortable and rewarding.

Why do you do what you do? Can you clearly articulate why you do what you do professionally or personally? If that question seems cumbersome or unwieldy, here’s a suggestion about how to get to your answer.

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An Interview with Dr. Zafar Choudry

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We interviewed the visionary CIO leader of Seattle Children’s in preparation for his presentation on March 4 at The Great Conversation in Security. It was clear when we first met him, that he is not a man to just keep the lights on, provisioning IT systems that help the hospital. He also wants to make the entire business of the hospital intelligent so that it anticipates and serves to create a unique experience for the stakeholders.

Why do leaders need a Great Conversation with their peers?

This is the best opportunity to learn from peers, share best practices and just have time to brainstorm and strategize with different industries

How does the mission and vision of your organization impact how you develop your security program?

Our mission is to take care of Kiddos, help them remain healthy, at the same time we have to keep them safe, as well as their caregivers.

What is the greatest constraint you have today, that if you overcame it, would take your program to an exponential level of performance?

There continues to be a disconnect between IT in healthcare and Facilities Management, such that the amalgamation of technology and physical security is still too far apart

What Did you share with your peers at the March forum?

I’m talked about the Real Time Healthcare System – the amalgamation of Cloud, Social, Mobile and Analytics in healthcare to make it more responsive. How the concept of situational awareness will impact business strategy, safety and security.

What DID YOU learn in this year’s great conversation?

I learned what other sectors are doing in the field of physical, logical and network security and how they are linking it directly to their business strategy