The Great Conversation Playlist for October 2021

Fall is upon us. What was new in spring, madly growing in summer, is now beginning to fall. New revelations will come from this. Only memories will remain.

Our playlist features those who have learned from their seasons. And they are producing remarkable insights that they have agreed to share with us in The Great Conversation. Enjoy the brief description that follows and the associated podcast. I look forward to you joining me as well or let us know of someone you believe you would like to hear and learn from in a great conversation. Contact us at info@The-Great-Conversation.com

Be Less Zombie

We are not will-less. Or speechless. We do not need to act like the living dead. That is the beginning of my conversation with Elvin Turner, an award-winning innovation expert and associate professor of innovation, entrepreneurship and marketing for MBA and executive education programs.

​His clients include some of the world’s most innovative organizations in the finance, technology, music, and publishing industries.

His recent book: Be Less Zombie: How great organizations create dynamic innovation, fearless leadership, and passionate people is intended for leaders and their teams who are suffering from creative constipation or creative indigestion where ideas never get heard or never get executed.

I was struck by Elvin’s relentless heart and mindset focused on the leadership opportunity to steward tomorrow’s ideas.

Keeping the Lights On
through Protective Intelligence

Sam Queeno is the Director of Digital Identity and Physical Security for a major utility: American Electric Power (AEP). We have a great conversation around the journey toward AEPs convergence of physical and logical security, first organizationally, then through the baby steps they are taking with the tools.

The conversation then became centered on something all security leaders consider a less then desirable situation: when something bad is happening and you are the last one to know.

This led to a focus on proactive intelligence, first with the hiring of a leader with an analyst background, the manual gathering of information on persons of interest (POI), and eventually the digital transformation of the intelligence gathering process through the purchase of a protective intelligence platform. (Ontic)

“We now have intelligence served up to us”, said Sam. Public records from disparate sources are organized, stored, managed, and delivered to the key people on Sam’s team. However, what Sam said later was telling. I was looking for business and security executives applauding his team’s progress. He corrected that assumption by acknowledging this is the baseline everyone expects their program to have.  “This is expected”, said Sam.

Leadership and Security

Guy Beveridge believes in teaching executives and their security teams how to navigate risk and opportunity. Although he is a professional security consultant he first and foremost is focused on the mind of the leader and how they communicate a risk, resilience, and security mindset to their people.

We have a great conversation around human investment, empowerment, and how to handle the deadly curse of organizational culture; not exposing the fear inside.

Covert Close Protection: Protecting the Leader

There is a critical role for the high net worth and/or corporate leader to consider just like they would do for a key function in their company.

This critical role is the Executive Protection Leader. In a great conversation with Mac Segal, founder and CEO of the AHNA Group, we take advantage of his upcoming International Covert Close Protection Course that he is launching on October 25-31 in Amsterdam to uncover the multi-faceted attributes of such a leader.

You will want to listen in to a thought-provoking exchange on the attributes needed in this age of risk – this is not your father’s James Bond.

AHNA Group is a multi-discipline security consortium, providing you with true security convergence services to ensure smooth and optimal operational outcomes

 A Smart Gun Promising to Change
the Way We Think about Security and Safety

If you are a gun owner, you know the drill. Keep the gun in a safe. Especially if you have children. What if there was another, better way?

In Seattle, during one of our many so-called civil demonstrations, a gun was taken from a law enforcement officer’s car. A frightening situation. What if the perpetrator could take the gun, but not be able to use it?

It was after another gun-related incident, a school shooting, that the founder of TrueFire, Justin Gant, sought a way to create a fool proof access control device for a firearm. Pretty tough to do since, according to Justin, there have been very few innovations in gun design for many years.

What happened next? A series of design iterations, testing, and test cases that are getting very close to establishing a standard for preventing an unauthorized use of a weapon, without disrupting the experience of the gun owner and the aesthetics of the gun. “It has to not be there”, said Erik Larson, his cofounder.

They are close to imagining a day where no one can access a device that they are unauthorized to use. No more need to lock the gun in a safe. No more frightening incidents around police firearms on the street.

We explore their idea, the stage of their design, and their passion for saving the lives of the gun owner, their friends and family, and law enforcement.

Serving the Emerging Leaders in Security

Mark Weatherford is an American cybersecurity professional who has held a variety of executive level positions in both the public and private sectors. He was appointed as the first deputy under secretary for cybersecurity at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2011 to 2013. He is currently the Global Information Security Strategist for Booking Holdings.

Mark Weatherford is investing his wealth of knowledge into helping emerging companies become more strategic in the risk, resilience, and security industry. He does this through a portfolio of private companies as a strategic advisor as well as with non-profits such as the National Cybersecurity Center (NCC) where he is the Chief Strategy Officer. The NCC is a non-profit helping with the cybersecurity of startups and state and local government. The Unfortunate 5000. There are three program pillars that help them meet their mission.

1. Education and outreach. The NCC’s Cyber Education Program provides cybersecurity leadership, with two main pillars: K-12 education, NCC Student Alliance, and the Adult Education Initiative. As our nation addresses the critical gap in skilled cybersecurity talent, NCC addresses the importance of cyber education through programs and partnerships that invite students to participate in an ecosystem which encourages them to learn, explore, and build their skills.

2. The Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC), a separate nonprofit organization, has the mission to facilitate collaboration across the global space industry to enhance our ability to prepare for and respond to vulnerabilities, incidents and threats; to disseminate timely and actionable information among member entities; and to serve as the primary communications channel for the sector with respect to this information.

3. Voting security. Secure the Vote seeks to increase voter confidence in the U.S. on the accuracy of vote-counting, and to generate greater awareness of possible solutions to critical gaps in the voting infrastructure. Secure the Vote supports jurisdictions’ efforts to offer a secure, auditable mobile voting option for overseas voters through coordinating and evaluating pilots across the country.

After exploring his portfolio and his work, we examine the technologies that are transforming our world.

The Servant Leaders of the Security Industry

The Kindness Games was created in September 2020 by Tim Wenzel and Lee Oughton, two security industry leaders. They believed they could help counter-program the disruption, hate, and discontent that had engulfed the world during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the ensuing spike of racial tensions and civil unrest. They exposed their idea to me, Ron Worman, and I fumbled with a spontaneous video recording as my initial contribution. Many others have contributed as well. It has touched something in all of us.

Here is another contribution via our podcast, The Great Conversation. In it you will hear the fullness of my heart for the leaders in this industry who I have encountered in my 20+ years of strategic consulting as managing director of The Sage Group and The Great Conversation. I still sound awkward. It is unscripted. But it is important to keep the kindness moving forward. Thank you Tim and Lee and thank you to The Great Conversation community.

Nothing like a Crisis to Fuel Innovation

Innovation is the positive response to crisis. We have three leaders this week who have taken what the world has supplied us and used it to strengthen their approach to their business. We find the core disciplines needed to thrive are still in place: leadership, organizational strength, a methodology for success, the resources needed to aggregate, manage, and communicate intelligence that will impact the business, and, finally, the rightsized technology to augment the human.  

Nick Weber, a strategic risk consultant, sits down with us and we end up on a journey that starts with the nature of work to the nature of work in security today. We walk away acknowledging that this is a road less travelled.  

We had just come off a call with Dr. Rob McKenna speaking about work life balance on his weekly, free leadership series. For Nick, work life balance is probably not an accurate term. He sees work as tied to purpose and passion and, therefore, as more of a river. A river is not linear.  You ride the river allowing it to take you, but not control you.  

We also talked about the unique problems with our critical infrastructure as well as a surprising way of seeing how our dysfunction may have strengthened our resilience.  

I asked Nick to treat me as a client and ask me the questions he would ask in his first meeting. They were questions designed to measure my program as well as my leadership. I think you will appreciate the approach.  

Kip Boyle, the CEO of Cyber Risk Opportunities, runs a virtual CISO for business leaders who need leadership and advice in protecting their companies. Seasoned decision makers that are held back by a threat or a perceived lack of discipline that is constraining their business but cannot afford a full-time leader or a team, turn to Kip for “fractional” ownership over the cyber risk.

We are seeing the idea of renting a CSO or CISO is becoming more urgent given the state of risk, the breadth of knowledge and resources needed to manage it, and the evolving landscape of technology. Like any business decision, it is multi-dimensional. He lists three examples of this in our conversation.

“A lot of decision makers have not caught on to the fact that cyber was once seen as obscure” said Kip. “Cyber is now a bonafide business risk, not just a technology issue. It should be a peer risk with operational line of businesses and disciplines that can threaten the viability and long-term prospects of the business.”

Kip terms this a management opportunity in his new book: Fire Doesn’t Innovate: The Executive’s Practical Guide to Thriving in the Face of Evolving Cyber Risks featured on our resource page.

Robert Dodge is the President of Corporate Risk Services at one of the largest security companies in the world; G4S. I wanted to pick his brain on how G4S is innovating in this rapidly changing world. What I discovered is an organization that can meet you where you are and rapidly shift to downsizing or scaling for growth to meet demand. Robert talks a lot about agility. And he has architected his services to meet the speed of a changing business climate.

One of the key pillars of the current and future strategy for growth is the Risk Operations Center (ROC). I was able to tour this in February before The Great Conversation in Palm Beach, Florida. This center contains predictive and proactive intelligence, executive protection, and real time command and control.

This fully leverages the 600,000 security professionals on the ground by marrying this “human sensor” with fully automated intelligence and monitoring. Robert called it “Intelligence-led Risk Management”. He has effectively converged the silos of excellence that have been architected over the last 65 years.

All three of our conversations pointed to a reimagination of leadership, and for Kip and Robert, the business model of security. Change is a constant. Risks are not going away. We need to invest in hiring and training for mindset,  be it a vendor or an employee.

Enjoy the conversations. And remember, membership is free. The price for leveraging the knowledge: priceless.