thought leadership
July 2019
Go Ahead and Leverage Your Network
A pithy and seemingly superficial greeting accompanied by a request from a long-lost business associate arrived in my inbox. You know the type: “Hi … it’s been a while … can you direct me to copious leads for my services?” I’m paraphrasing, but that was the nub. I enjoy the role of bridging those in my network with bountiful opportunities, and gaining from the reciprocal benefits. But, in the case of this peer, her past...
The Thanksgiving leftovers are gone, and all things pumpkin have transitioned to everything peppermint. Perfect time to feast on a film, a feature and a podcast to both incite and inspire us during the next round of holidays. [watch] The price of monitoring online content. The PBS series Independent Lens recently aired an excellent documentary on offshore content moderators paid to screen and often block controversial pictures and videos. The filmmakers juxtapose young Filipinos hired to...
November 2018
Get Inspired from Buckets of Good Advice
Receiving advice from accomplished people, whether for personal or business gain, is a way to accelerate your own trajectory toward favorable outcomes. There are many ways to seek out guidance from experts, such as reading success stories, listening to helpful podcasts, crafting a thoughtful request to start a dialogue with a mentor, advisor or sponsor, and attending big and small networking events. I find that a consistent resource for a concentration of experts and networking...
November 2018
The Price of Privacy
We thought we’d offer a break from all the U.S. elections coverage to focus on what some elected officials recently did in our area of expertise: privacy and cybersecurity. Several legislators have introduced consumer data protection laws, but so far only one major bill has passed at the state, versus federal, level. Earlier this year, California legislators passed the nation’s most stringent consumer privacy law to date. It’s modeled in the image of the European...
Recommendations for What to Read, Watch and Listen to [LISTEN, OR READ] Social Media and the Global War for Public Opinion Two think tankers, P.W. Singer, a strategist at New America, consultant for the U.S. military and intelligence community and book author, partnered with Emerson T. Brooking, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who writes about conflict and social media, to co-write a new book, “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media.” The...
Two things immediately stood out, to me at least, while attending my favorite cybersecurity conference last week in New Orleans. Both were tied to toilets. One had to do with a personal observation: There were lines between sessions to use women’s restrooms. At any other event, women typically stand in longer restroom lines than men. Cybersecurity conferences, though, are the reverse because there are far more men than women in the information security profession. Having...
November 2017
Ways to Celebrate Computer Security Day
There’s an Apple commercial now running in which a girl moves through her day using her iPad Pro. At one point, a neighbor asks what she’s doing with her computer and the young woman responds, “What’s a computer?” Messaging implications aside, it does make Thursday’s Computer Security Day seem a bit antiquated. For starters, we rarely call devices computers anymore despite the fact we rely on them more than ever. Still, every November 30, those...
September 2017
Why Equifax Gets an F for Incident Response
While everyone was fixating on hurricane coverage over the past several days, another storm was brewing—a massive data breach announced at Equifax. And unlike those living in the Caribbean, Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard, this one impacts up to half of the U.S. population. It’s OK if you didn’t realize that one of the nation’s largest credit reporting agencies failed to keep cybercriminals from stealing vital data on up to 143 million consumers. Equifax leaders...
Venture capitalist Brad Feld was so shaped by the generosity he received in an earlier career as an entrepreneur that his mantra became “Give first.” Whether it was advice, introductions or staying after a speech to answer every audience member’s question, Feld gave in to his giving impulse. And as a result, he suffered a major, six-month bout of depression. “You can have a very, very deep underlying philosophy around generosity, but even in the...
The other day we were creating content for a client when I noticed a quote lacked appropriate attribution. This got us thinking about how often content is taken out of context—perhaps innocently; perhaps intentionally—to prove a point. In this instance, it was an excerpt from a thought-provoking keynote made during a cybersecurity conference that drew attention for its brevity and stark statement. The conference was in February, but the piece wouldn’t be published until May....