Category: Career Advice

Have you ever noticed that a lot of organisations purporting to embrace change and innovation end up hiring the same type of people who are the majority cause of their current challenges?

‘Talent acquisition’ is much like the famous [mis]quote by Henry Ford; “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”. By sticking to standard job descriptions and not looking for PEOPLE to fulfill the leadership’s vision, companies will get what they ask for, and not what they need.

I’ve never seen a job description yet (that wasn’t written by me, FOR me) that did not set me up for failure before I even began. There are people much better at certain things than me, and who may actually enjoy doing them, why would you give those things to me?

Worst of all, above a certain level of seniority, you wind up being lumped into one of two categories, and if you’re REALLY unlucky, both; Leader and/or Manager.

What if you’re neither?

Here’s a little experiment I conducted:

I typed; “books on leadership” into Google and got >271,000,000 hits. If even 0.1% of those are ACTUAL books, that’s 271,000 books on leadership, some of which may even have been written by a true leader. Possible, but unlikely.

Then I typed “books on being a manager” and got >170,000,000 hits If I apply the same criteria as above, that’s another 170,000 books to plough through.

Finally, I typed “books for neither a manager or a leader” and these are the top 5 hits;

  1. 3 Things That Separate Leaders From Managers – Business Insider
  2. Managers and Leaders: Are They Different? – Harvard Business Review
  3. Why All Managers Must Be Leaders – Forbes
  4. Leaders and managers, leadership and management … – CIPD Courses
  5. Why Managers Can’t Lead and Leaders Can’t Manage

OK, so I’ve completely tipped this in favour of the point I’m trying to make, but not ONE article on the first 5 pages of hits gets close to what I’m saying, which is;

People who are very good at what they do don’t need to be a Leader or a Manager, they need a great leader in whom to believe, and great managers to get the right people on board.

My favourite phrase on leadership is on www.despair.com; “Leaders are like eagles, we don’t have either of them here.”. The same could be said for managers, both leadership and managing people are talents not skills, and the really good ones are equally rare.

What if the skills you need, even temporarily, are actually in someone who’s neither?

A good leader has specific attributes that VERY few people have (hence LEADer I suppose), and I truly believe leadership is not something you can learn.

A good manager is, to me, someone who can recognise the talents and skills you HAVE, not the ones they either a) think you might have, or b) want you to have, or c) need you to have for the job at hand.

Focusing on these 2 senior-level talents ignores the vast array of other talents that require neither of these attributes to provide enormous benefit. Call them subject matter experts, gurus, trusted advisors, or a whole host of meaninglessly clichéd names, what you get is the same; someone who can take the leader’s vision, and translate it into something the managers can act upon. Leaders usually can’t manage, managers should rarely lead, and neither has the necessary talents / skills / knowledge to bring the vision to life.

So if you have failed at fulfilling either of these roles (as I have many times), maybe they are not for you. But what you DO have could be of equal importance, if you know what it is.

No one likes to think they’re not a good fit for a senior position, but there’s little reason to extrapolate one or two bad ‘corporate’ fits into the rejection of an entire line of opportunities. Just make damned sure you ask the right questions up front. No you can’t guarantee an honest answer, but hopefully you’ll know pretty quickly if they sold you down the river.

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In the digital age, the need to transform your business in the face of competition is only going to become more important, and more difficult. Start-ups can build all of this in from the beginning, and have a whole host of success and horror stories from which to choose their inspiration. Large organisations that have developed slowly over time do not have this luxury, but the fear of ‘disruption’ has them mad-scrambling looking for a way forward.

Increasingly, they are turning to Agile and Lean as ways to kickstart their business transformation efforts.

Let me be clear, I have nothing against either of these tools, but that is all they are; tools. They are a means to the end, not the end itself, and over-reliance ON the tools will eventually lead you astray. Unless the business goals drive the tool choice, and NEVER the other around, all the action items in the world won’t get you where you need to be.

This requires a Vision.

And not just one vision, you need a vision per department. There’s no point trying to promote change when your HR department still hires people in exactly the same way, and are looking for the exactly same ‘corporate fit’. What you’ve always had got you here, only something else will get you somewhere different.

IN security for example, an example of a vision statement goes something like; “We will provide world-class defence for all information assets to enable and optimise all corporate goals and exceed client expectations.”

There are millions of these vision STATEMENTS out there, but three things that a lot of organisation who tout them seem to lack are; a) an understanding of what “defence for information assets” actually entails, b) what the most important things are to the foundation of such an effort, and c) the ability to execute that plan at the right level.

For example; Everyone who’s been in security for more than 5 minutes should know that without a policy framework, you have nothing to build your security program on. You then work out very quickly that any policy framework not signed and evangelised from the highest levels of an organisation will be basically ignored. An information security policy framework (ISPF) signed by the CSO is unlikely to followed wholeheartedly by the the other C-levels, an ISPF signed by the CEO will.

Quick Advice: If you’re a security expert, never work for someone who is not prepared to at least ask the CEO to sign something, especially policies, it’s just not worth it.

It is very easy to bandy words like Agile and Lean around, especially if you’re the one doing the delegating, but it’s very difficult to LEAD a team when you yourself either haven’t defined what your vision looks like, or worse, you don’t have one and you simply regurgitate things you’ve just read in a book.

Frantic energy expended on a series of action items [Agile] assigned to a few key people [Lean] is one thing, doing this with a vision of what SHOULD be is quite another.

Don’t get me wrong, I love toys. I’ve had every version of the iPhone since its inception and have, quite literally, a drawer full of the old ones. I also cannot even tell you how many electronic gadgets I have sitting in boxes that I had wanted badly, used once or twice, and eventually packed away after watching them gather dust for months / years on end.

I could start my own eBay with this stuff. Or a museum.

In this context, technology is harmless. Every toy I have is offline, provides no access to sensitive data of any sort, and simply demonstrates that I have more money than sense. Though in truth, I have very little of both.

This becomes a far riskier proposition when organisations throw technology at broken processes, especially when those processes are directly related to some compliance / regulation requirement of some sort. PCI for example, has driven technology purchases (both infrastructure and outsourced managed services) like no other regulation before it.

This is because the DSS called for technologies by name; firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection/protection systems, file integrity monitoring and so on, and instead of performing a risk assessment FIRST, most organisations went straight out and spent money on things that likely provide no security benefits whatsoever. It takes significant expertise to extract value from technology.

And no technology related to information security can ever provide benefit unless:

  1. It was purchased to fulfil a properly defined business need (via risk assessment, business impact analysis, and Governance)
    o
  2. It is appropriate for the current needs, but can scale for future growth, or reduce in the case of managed services (speaks to controls selection and vendor due diligence processes)
    o
  3. It was purchased with full understanding of who is responsible for the following, and how they are to be accomplished:
    i.   Installation and integration with established processes
    ii.  Ongoing maintenance and updates
    iii. Monitoring and incident response
    0
  4. It has properly defined metrics to measure its production capability against the originally defined requirements, and those resulting from a changing threat landscape (via vulnerability management and ISMS)
    o
  5. It is constantly baselined against an established ‘known-good’ state. If it’s not simple, it’s not secure. Period / Full Stop.

Think about this another way; every appliance you buy is just a server, with an operating system, running an application, and regardless of how much effort went into hardening this system against an attack, the bad-guys get smarter every day. Secure today is no indication of security tomorrow (just ask Juniper about their backdoor challenges).

The purchase of any new technology is always the last of these three options:

  1. Examine your business processes to determine whether or not you really need to process / keep the sensitive data in the way you currently do. i.e. can you tokenise, truncate, delete entirely, or outsource etc?
    o
  2. Examine your current infrastructure and procedures to see if adjustments here can fill the gaps exposed by the risk assessment and gap analysis
    o
  3. Buy an appropriate technology in-line with the above 5 pre-requisites above.

Equal effort needs to go into maintaining current capability using existing technology and decommissioning obsolete technology as buying new capability, and not one of these decisions falls outside of a properly run security program in-line with business goals.

You really must ask the right questions, or you’ll get what you asked for, not what you need. Security vendors will not help you here, it will be up to you.

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In 2013 I was made redundant from a company where I had worked for the previous 12.5 years. I had grown with the company from the 14th person to join (as a firewall admin) to a position leading 28 people across 14 time zones in a company of over 1,000.

I subsequently discovered that I was basically unhirable, so I started my own consulting practice, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I then joined a very small start-up for a year, which I thoroughly enjoyed, and went back to my own practice.

I swore up and down that I would never go corporate, ever again. I convinced myself that there was never enough freedom, or room for innovation, or ability to make a difference in a large organisation to EVER go back. Not that ‘corporate’ would ever have me back.

Now here I am, at the end of my 3rd week at an organisation that is bigger by far than any I have ever worked for previously.

…and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

Many times in the course of my blogs I have expounded on the need for self-reflection, on being honest with yourself enough to know when something was entirely your fault, and to adjust your career choices accordingly. Well clearly I had mistaken ‘corporate’ for my own inability to effectively create the change needed to stop me from being made “redundant”.

While I’m not saying I now have that ability, as I will always have a big mouth, when you’re in an organisation who ALL seem to want the change you’ve craved your whole career, it’s a feeling unlike I’ve ever experienced at work. I’ve never needed, or even particularly wanted, to be part of a team growing up, I now find myself in one.

…and I like it.

Frankly I’m not even sure why I’m writing this blog, except perhaps as a tip for those who find themselves in a position where they cannot decide on what’s the right place for them to work. Corporate, start-up, self-employed, or somewhere in between. Every one of my jobs had its benefits, and had its downsides, and I’m under no illusion that this one will be the same. The only difference this time, is that I have now seen both sides of the fence.

It’s not the fence that matters, your skills and talents have no fences.

The only reason I think that corporate fails to attract the truly entrepreneurial is that they are still very attached to job titles and descriptions, effectively pigeon-holing a person into a role that will always limit them. It’s the organisations that go looking for talents to fill known functional gaps, but then get out of the person’s way, that will attract the game changers.

Not saying I’m a game changer, but my title was only assigned to complete a field in the HR system, and my job description was a run-down of the challenges my new organisation was facing. And in just 3 weeks I have not only learned more than I did in the last 6 months, I have a learning curve ahead of me for which I can see no end.

I loved running my own business, and have no regrets about the start-up, but this little adventure is a revelation that has me very excited for the future. And the lesson I learned from all this?;

Don’t limit where you look for your next job, just ask the right questions.

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[Ed. June 2016: Clearly this gig did not work out, but I am still not against trying again for the right organisation.]

Feeling lazy, this is a re-blog, but the last few weeks at work has made this especially relevant;

I started when I was thinking about how superstitions begin; It’s bad luck to walk under ladders, or it’s 7 years of bad luck if you break a mirror for example.  And then it occurred to me that these superstitions were probably the only way to scare children into, or out of, certain behaviour.

Walking under ladders, well duh, things fall OFF ladders, so don’t walk under them. Mirrors used to be really, REALLY, expensive, so telling children that breaking them would have horrific consequences makes a lot of sense. I’m surprised that playing with matches didn’t become a superstition, but then again, household-use matches were not readily available until the 1800’s.

Unfortunately, these things have a way of sticking around long after the original cause is meaningless. Or worse, is twisted and perverted by those with a vested interest in the status quo. ‘Heretics’ were burned at the stake for suggesting that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around. ‘Witches’ were similarly killed in horrific ways when they suggested that herbal remedies were better than leaches and other forms of bleeding. Priests and Doctors respectively were very protective of their power.

Human nature has changed very little since then, only societal laws and the more progressive ‘norms’ keep the peace.

I have for years likened information security to insurance, in that no-one wants to spend money on it. They just know it’s a cost of doing business. And more recently I have likened security to the law, because it’s becoming so complex in terms of regulation / legislation / standards etc, that’s it’s often out of reach for the organisations and individuals who need it most.

Now I find myself likening security to superstition, because from the way we’re going, it won’t be long before being in security will have the same stigma as being a tax auditor, a parking enforcer, or a lawyer. QSAs are almost there already because the entire concept of PCI is so limited. However, to me, there is no reason why true security professionals should not be seen in the same light as those responsible for driving revenue, growth, or competitive innovation.

Security departments are something people go out of their way to avoid, or to circumvent. They are seen as the department-who-says-no, who will stifle innovation and good ideas, and generally do the one thing that would label them heretics; get in the way of revenue.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as no other department has the knowledge and DESIRE to do the things that make staying is business possible:

  1. Innovation: It’s the 2000s, the vast majority of innovation now is in technology. Who else is best placed to pick the RIGHT technologies to ensure that innovation is implemented in a way that enhances the organisation and not just adds risk?
    o
  2. Business Transformation: Competitive advantage in the information age is now measure in weeks and months, not years or decades. Organisations without the ability to adjust critical business processes quickly and appropriately will be left behind. What other department has the knowledge of existing processes to enable the adjustments?
    o
  3. Revenue Protection: Can you think of anything worse than seeing all your revenue disappear into the hands of regulators because your focus on selling failed to take into account that your processes for doing so were completely inappropriate. I understand completely the pressures, but revenue generation is not about doing what it takes, it’s about doing what’s right.
    o
  4. Reputation Protection: I could have put this under revenue protection, but wanted to break this out as corporate reputation goes way beyond just revenue, and my OCD will not allow for an even number of bullet points. Damage of reputation through loss of data C.I.A. can have long-term negative effects on a business. Just ask CardSystems who went from $25M / annum to out of business in less than 1 year after their breach.
    o
  5. Infrastructure Investment Optimisation: OK, long title, but consider that the amount of money spent on PCI is already in the multi-billions, when a huge chunk of that could have been save by adjustments in PROCESS. Technology purchase is the last resort of a true security professional.

I really don’t have an answer to HOW we can ensure our reputations remain unsullied, and there are a lot of so called security experts out there giving the rest of us a bad name. But I think the worst thing to do is fall back one of the phrases I hate most in this world; “It is, what it is.”

Actions speak louder than words, and I will never stop trying to show my clients that security is something to be embraced, not avoided.

Forward this to all your friends or you’ll have 3 years of bad luck.

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