Innovation: Accelerate to "New"...

Remember the anticipation you had in your heart and mind at the beginning of your first year in college. Or the first day of that new job you had been seeking for months. Or that day your first child was born.

The anticipation of a next phase of your life that you had so much adrenaline or hope on your mind you couldn’t sleep thinking about it.

You see, discovering and experiencing “New” learning, “New’ opportunities, “New” challenges, “New” solutions and “New” insights is holy.

Before you were able to innovate and to accomplish the next anticipated change in your life, you were naive. You have learned to stay alive as you navigate your way across America and towards “New”.

As you join that next organizational phase to learn, to work or to care for others you realize you must continuously innovate:

Staying Alive While Creating Innovation

Key Takeaways

• Innovation is anything that helps your organization accomplish its mission, from small improvements to processes or policies to successful moon shots.
• To develop an innovative culture, you must be an agent of change.
• Creating innovation isn’t about new ways of doing work, it is about the outcomes, results and mission impact of those efforts.
• Speed is a fundamental change often needed to achieve significant results.
• A strategic approach is best, whether creating an innovative organization or developing innovative approaches to assist your organization.

Page 9 - Creating Innovation Navigators - Achieving Mission Through Innovation - Author, Sabra Horne

After you graduated from college, or were terminated from your job or celebrated your first child’s first birthday you had become more innovative.

You are well on your way to that next step, next opportunity or next life commitment with the wisdom you need.

The question now may be whether you have the right resources and the right team to accomplish the mission.

"How will you accelerate your activities so that you will discover whether your resources and your people are correct for your particular mission?"

Become an “Innovation Navigator” sixteen hours a day. Wake up early. Accelerate. Nourish your mind and body. Sleep eight hours a day. Repeat…

QFD: The End of Compliance...

Corporations will continue to be responsible for the criminal behavior and actions of their employees, 3rd party suppliers and other contractors for at least the near term.

In any case that has the defense legal eagles and "Usual Suspects" arguing against the corporate liability issue, the intent is getting cloudy or is it crystal clear?

Even if your Corporate Compliance Programs are in full force and the financial integrity unit is robust in it's efforts, the "Operational Risk" still exists for litigation.

Regardless of the amount of awareness building, education and corporate window dressing, you can't ultimately control human behavior. 

More compliance enforcement and regulatory pressure may seem to be the answer. A voluntary effort to shore up security, soundness and the opportunity for malfeasance in the work place may not be working effectively.

And still the liabilities exist from the plaintiffs and government adversaries to gain compensation. So what is the answer?

The answer lies in the "Enterprise Architecture" of our institutions and the failure to implement the process of "Quality Function Deployment" (QFD). This has been ignored by senior executives and US business because many judge it to be too complex.

One only has to look at the state of our automobile manufacturers versus the likes of Japanese companies to get a sense of the success of incorporating QFD on a comprehensive basis. But now apply this to the culture of an organization and how each individual makes logical business decisions instead of emotion-based decisions.

What many liability issues begin with are the employee(s) who made a bad decision.

QFD in its simplest form is a tool to promote communications. Among peers and connected teams within the organization it provides the methodology to catch errors, omissions and emotional bias early in the process.

As an example, let's take the Request for Proposal (RFP).

Many companies depend heavily on winning business by responding to RFP's. A "deal makers" perception of importance to the RFP determines the effort for the response.

Many times, this is influenced by an incentive plan. The human behavior to accept or decline the effort on an RFP as well as what it takes to push it through the organization for executive sign offs, is not always compatible with the strategic and quality measures of the enterprise.

Over time this will form an unimaginable amount of moral decay within a company. This leads to bad behavior and unethical decisions that people make because the business environment has rewarded it for far too long. So who is to blame here? The employee or the culture and company that has condoned and encouraged the behavior that ultimately damaged someone or something.

Implementing QFD in your information-based enterprise could have a dramatic impact on achieving a defensible standard of care by reducing the likelihood of catastrophic emotional decisions.

More importantly, QFD programs such as this that are directly reducing the likelihood of bad employee behavior and criminal incidents, can reduce the necessity for invasive compliance programs that most everyone wants to ignore.

InTP: “Insider Threat Program”...

Does your company have a culture of "Organizational Integrity?"

Boards of Directors have the responsibility to insure the resiliency of the organization. The people, processes, systems and external events that are constantly changing the operational risk landscape become the greatest threat to an enterprise.

One key item may have revealed itself in your experience so far.  How would you improve your organization, when it comes to "Incident Response"?

One truth is, that our individuals who have a "C" in their title acronym, (CEO, CSO, CIO, CTO, CISO, CMO, CRO) have been challenged in new ways.  These same leaders have not trained enough, or long enough in this past decade.  Complacency is now becoming apparent again.

Our leadership skills have all been exposed to the vulnerabilities of people, processes, systems and external events. We have been caught off guard on a spectrum of challenging global incidents just these past 24 months.  A crisis spectrum that spans our physical world.  Also to our invisible virtual digital world.

Our growing "Incident Response Spectrum" is wide and vast.  It still requires specialized skills and knowledge to address the kind of change, that will now increasingly be required, in Fortune 500 Global Companies, Mid-Market INC 500 emerging businesses and especially, our Small-Medium Businesses (SMB).

How will we continuously Understand, Decide and Act from this point forward?

"The private sector organizations of the United States are vital to the protection and security of the Homeland.  The private sector owns a majority of our assets and Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) remains a priority as a result of the latest asymmetric threats."

The U.S. National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, emphasizes the importance of public/private partnerships in securing these critical infrastructures and improving national cyber security.

Similarly, one focus of the Department of Homeland Security is enhancing protection for critical infrastructure and networks by promoting working relationships between the government and private industry.

The federal government has acknowledged that these relations are vital because most of America’s critical infrastructure is privately held.  Further, the networks of our global super-infrastructure are tightly “coupled”—so tightly interconnected, that is, that any change in one has a nearly instantaneous effect on the others.

Attacking one network is like knocking over the first domino in a series: it leads to cascades of failure through a variety of connected networks, faster than most human managers can respond.

Many companies have already started the establishment of an “Insider Threat Program” (InTP)…have you?

Independence Day 2025: Service Wisdom...

Who among mortal men are you, good friend? Since never before have I seen you in the fighting where men win glory, yet now you have come striding far out in front of all others in your great heart… —Homer, The Iliad

It was December 21, 2009 boarding a Delta flight with a newly published book in hand on a 10 day Christmas vacation in another country.

“Where Men Win Glory” The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer is a tragic story worth remembering as we contemplate our country the USA and all those brave men and women who have defended our freedom and our way of life.

As we approach our next July 4th weekend, this book caught my eye on the shelf as the thoughts of celebrating our United States of America birthday in 2025 came to mind.

Before you were wise, you as an American can’t truly know or understand it all, until you leave it. Until you travel far away across our globe to other countries and cities to see and feel the differences.

Most recently traveling on a Boeing 787 for 14 hours then another 7 hours to another place near the equator, this first gives you the real context of how enormous our Earth really is.

Secondly, spending weeks time in other countries that are foreign to you, provides you the vivid context on our United States in so many ways.

You learn why America included specific language in its “Constitution” as a new country and you can better understand what influence the United States has had on other parts of the world since it’s 1st birthday.

In early June 2002, Pat Tillman and his brother Kevin appeared at the Military Processing Station in downtown Phoenix, AZ. Later in the day, they signed away their freedom and recited the oath of enlistment, and received their orders to appear at Fort Benning Georgia on July, 8 2002.

Two years later Pat Tillman died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan after leaving behind a $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army.

How will you work in your own years ahead in America or OCONUS, to defend our freedoms and to help defeat evil across our small towns, our cities and vast metropolitan areas?

This 4th of July Independence Day weekend, think about how you will contribute to our great nation.

Maybe it begins by leaving it for a week or two, just to reveal what you will miss.

What you will feel. What you will better understand about the “How and “Why” we were founded as the United States of America.

"We as a nation have so much to learn from others across the world, and yet if you never travel outside your state or even your own country, how will you ever say you truly understand."

When you feel the same calling as Pat Tillman and his brother did about serving your country, figure out how you too will contribute.

How might you make a difference in fighting evil and making our country even better?

Get out there! How will you serve…

Black Swan: Strategy Execution for the "Outlier"...

The Black Swan is a surprise event and the idea that a catastrophe can strike without warning. A professional colleagues recent presentation was a timely reminder of its history and the origins.

What does your organization plan for within the Operational Risk Management (ORM) discipline? The Low Consequence “High Frequency Incident” or the High Consequence “Low Frequency Incident”?

The ratio can tell you what your "Resilience" factor is to Operational Risk loss events. Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) can give you some forward looking view into the risk portfolio, yet what about the resilience to the "Black Swan"?

The “Back Swan” is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics:

It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.

"The astonishing success of Google was a Black Swan; so was 9/11.  For author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives."

"Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

Your organization is no doubt spending time on the Operational Risk Management (ORM) events, that consistently are in the high frequency "In Your Face" category.

In a highly regulated industry sector such as finance, health care or energy the oversight mechanisms require a continuous analysis of risk based upon the criticality of these sectors to the overall resilience of the economy.

"Yet it is the "Outlier" incident, that comes at the most unexpected time that is the real threat and the incident catalyst, that could be your "Black Swan”."

You never know when it is going to be coming, so you must plan, prepare and imagine that someday, it will happen.

Enabling Global Operational Risk Management (ORM) requires thinking beyond models and outside the box analysis of the "Resilience Factor," should an outlier impact the organization, the state or the country. The resources, personnel and systems focused on these areas of risk are small today. But not for long.

Just ask those people who had been working 24/7 since on any major incident.  It could have been the 9/11, "Fukushima"or "Lehman Brothers" crisis. Or more importantly, the plaintiff lawyers preparing their briefs for the inevitable aftermath of litigation over who knew what, when?

Another lesson learned from Supply Chain Risk.  Losing control of sensitive customer data is a fact of life for American companies. They’re collecting more of it, and they are often outgunned by nation state hackers, who are highly motivated to get at it.  Perhaps a vector through your most trusted supply chain vendors and partners.

One prediction into the future could be that litigation will follow all "Black Swan" incidents. If you are in a highly vulnerable industry sector, because it's part of the Critical Infrastructure of the global grid, then you already know you are in the middle of the target zone.

What is amazing to many in the after-action reporting is still how much we continue to under estimate the magnitude of a lack of planning and resources devoted, to these low frequency high consequence events…

Linchpin: Life Journey To R3...

Before you realized how indispensable you had become to the team, the organization or the agency, you made an important decision.

Growing up in life there are several points in your journey where you are so challenged. It all really starts when you are a Junior in High School and the dialogue begins on your next steps after graduation.

The conversation is already about who you are and what you have already achieved. In your studies, with your athletic team and so many others. Were you OK, Good, or Great.

Your next decisions in life will take you where you never imagined. Before you really knew your real talents in life, you began your journey. Was it close to home or hundreds or thousands of miles away?

It was only several years later in your early twenties when you started to see your true ambitions and your God given talents.

Developing real skills that would become so valuable in your life.

Recognizing now your compass point, you dived into making those skill sets even better. The challenges before you became greater both physically and mentally in order to achieve true success.

After awhile, the skill sets you had learned and utilized to pay the rent and the jobs you loathed were not enough. Change was in the wind.

Now you began to understand the value of the “Linchpin”:

“Every successful organization has at least one linchpin, some have dozens or even thousands. The linchpin is the essential element, the person who holds part of the operation together. Without the linchpin, the thing falls apart.

Is there anyone in an organization who is absolutely irreplaceable? Probably not. But the most essential people are so difficult to replace, so risky to lose, and so valuable they they might as well be irreplaceable. Entire corporations are built around a linchpin, or more likely, a scattering of them, essential individuals who are worth holding on to.”Linchpin - Seth Godin - Page 49

Think back to that place in Orange County, CA or Northern Virginia or any other virtual geography where the competition was fierce and you were a “Linchpin”.

After you realized your true abilities, real ambitions and the increasing value to your fellow colleagues for the mission, you were now indispensable.

Life is full of skill building and showing those who pay you that you can be trusted and that you are worth it.

Yet never forget how much your life will be more fulfilled with faith, family and relationships with those you love.

Someday, you will reach that place where maybe you got it all wrong. It could be that it all comes down to this: “Relationships, Results, Rewards (R3).”

Simple as it may seem, you became a linchpin and indispensable because other people respected you, learned from you and enjoyed your guidance on the joint mission…

Godspeed!

Team Mission: Trusted Community...

Just when you think you know it all, you realize that your graduation or promotion is nothing more than a stepping stone in your next phase of your life.

You begin to realize that the experience and the education is vital, yet you only have a glimpse at the value of the entire community.

How will you know your wing man or your class mates even better than you do today?

Your mission now is to continuously grow your relationships within your latest trusted community.

You might begin with a regular monthly meeting online and then add Face-to-Face gatherings every other month.

In both cases you learn your community members names, you begin to know their real expertise and you start the process of building your growing trust.

Imagine for a moment that some in your trusted community will ask you curious questions about your upbringing, where you grew up or what your focus is currently.

Over the course of your time with your community you start to become more genuine, more open to sharing your true thoughts and bold ideas.

Your levels of "TrustDecisions" are becoming exponential.

We are embedded with our end-users listening and learning. We are testing hypotheses and working side-by-side while continuously adapting to ever changing problem-sets, to improve and become more agile.

We are developing new solutions, iteratively and incrementally with our beneficiary clients.

So what?

You now begin to realize who you can really trust and the true value of the time and resources dedicated to your community.

Now is the time to learn again and to seek that next stepping stone towards your next life milestone.

Accomplish it together, not “Alone”. Your community is growing with you and your dreams will soon become even more true…

Memorial Day 2025: Remember Them...

On Memorial Day 2025 what do you think about and remember in memory of our fallen.

Those brave men and women in the USA who have defended our Flag and our Freedom for almost 250 years.

Walking through Arlington Cemetery anytime, or to a Funeral in Section 60 there, provides context on how much we value our country, our way of life and the people who call themselves true “Americans’.

“As we seek to shrink what remains of the Gap over the next several decades, we will rarely find societies adequately prepared—either intellectually or emotionally—for the travails that lie ahead. Instead, the elements most prepared will be the most willing to wage bloody resistance against this process: educated, worldly young men who are familiar with the future we offer and have already decided that it is corrupting beyond all reason. These revolutionaries and terrorists will wage wars of extreme perversity against both us and their own peoples, convinced as they are of their moral superiority in rooting out hypocrisy and heresy.”

The Pentagon’s New Map - BLUEPRINT For ACTION - A Future Worth Creating - Page 281- Thomas P.M. Barnett 2005

Over twenty years after reading this book, we are still at war. Memorial Day each year and many years ahead of us will be about our American citizens, who have served in our U.S. Military and lost their lives.

This Memorial Day weekend as you see the military ceremonies, or hear the fighter jets flying in formation over your city...now think about all those who have served behind the front lines, Visible and Invisible.

The “Quiet Professionals” in the United States who provide a spectrum of services, supplies and continuous information in support of securing our valuable freedom.

As you reread chapters of "BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION" while you watch our Flag waving in the wind, Remember Them…Never Forget, Always Be Ready!

Business Survival: Training & Simulation to Mitigate Risk...

The risk of loss from external events is a growing emphasis by many Operational Risk Officers.

Preparedness is a key strategy to mitigating hazards and minimizing the loss of property and life. Imagine for a moment that you have a complete model of your facility, building or mall. A virtual model.

One that you can use to train employees, staff and other suppliers about the idiosyncratic nature of your evacuation procedures or shelter-in-place locations.

Not only is this method of training smart, it is cost effective and allows for participant interaction directly with the model and the procedures.

Real-time training with people in one room or multiple locations it does not matter. The participants can be exercised without exposure to potential hazardous situations until they are ready for a complete and full test of the simulation with a live scenario. The other applications include your physical security teams.

The strategy for Business Survival begins with an understanding of how your corporate assets are being attacked, both online and offline. Both physical and digital.

Our corporate assets are under attack by a continuous barrage of new laws, new employees, new competitors and new exploits. Business survival in the next decade will require a more effective and robust risk strategy to deter, detect and defend against a myriad of new threats to the organization.

Modern day attackers include hackers, spies, terrorists, corporate raiders, professional criminals, vandals and voyeurs.

Simply said, these attackers use tools to exploit vulnerabilities. They create an action on a target that produces an unauthorized result. They do this to obtain their objective.

The Mission

Deter the attacker from launching a salvo of new threats to compromise your organizations assets. You first have to understand the value of your corporate assets to determine what are the most valuable in the eyes of your adversary. You must make it increasingly more difficult for these valuable assets to be attacked or you will find yourself under the constant eye of those who wish to create a significant business disruption.

These attackers are individuals who take on these quests or objectives for several key reasons. They include financial gain, political gain, damage or the simple challenge, status or thrill. It’s your job to create deterrence for each one of these objectives.

The Take Away

In order to effectively deter potential risks to your corporate assets, first you have to understand what they are and how valuable they are in the eyes of each kind of attacker. The more valuable the target, the more deterrence it requires.

Mothers Day 2025: Remembering Anne...

Reflecting upon your Mom at this time of year, is always a treasure of memories.

Here are a wonderful few that decades later, stand out in my life about Anne:

• Anne was an only child and maybe that is why she always seemed so capable and reliable all the time. We were always on time for our car pool to swim practice each week. Usually that meant picking up 4 of us from the same neighborhood after school and taking us downtown to the “Youth Building” for a few hour workout.
• Anne was a very social lady, and met Dad at a Northwestern University, Pi Phi Sorority party. The social party gal continued to have dinner parties and I remember the late night tunes in bed upstairs until 11:00PM on Fridays or Saturdays while their friends danced the night away to “Petula Clarks” “Downtown” and other mid-sixties bands.
• Anne was a gifted Artist and through her life spent countless hours in the basement “Art Studio” of our childhood homes painting large canvas oil abstracts and hundreds of others that were multimedia. They still adorn our and our kids places over fire places and in bedrooms. One of the favorites is a 48”x48” multi-Media Oil named “Dream Sleep” she painted in 1996.

Anne married Richard in 1955 and a year later was off base at Parris Island and was still at his side when she passed away in 2014.

She was devoted to him through thick and thin and especially to her four kids. As the oldest son, thinking about my Mother explains so much, about how we all learned and what was so important in life.

• Anne sent us off to Sunday School at an early age to St. Thomas Episcopal to develop our faith in Jesus and turn us towards serving others and fully understanding the Ten Commandments.
• Anne sent us off to six week “Summer Camps” that were hours away in Wisconsin and Northern Michigan were we could learn new skills such as, Sailing, Horseback Riding, Water Skiing, Riflery, Archery, Camping and Canoeing.
• Anne supported us getting out of our “Small Town” to go to college in another state. University of Colorado was a wonderful choice that helped with a real passion for Snow Ski Racing. A year later, my parents relocated to Teton Village, Wyoming. Perfect.
• Anne was also an excellent snow skier and will never forget the times we talked about life on the Rendezvous Mountain Tram and the lifts to the top of Apres Vous Mountain. She chased me down the “Blue” runs there yet they were almost Teton “Black” runs!

A Mom that loved us, looked after me, protected me, taught me, gave me the support to grow up with new Skills, Faith, Integrity and Ambition to be a Father myself and learn first hand what being a Mother is really all about. Anne was just one Mom, who does it all for her children.

Thank you to all the wonderful and couragous Moms on this day of celebration, “Mothers Day 2025”…

Innovation Leadership: In The Company of "True Professionals"...

Floating down the Potomac River looking back on the Key Bridge this week, brings back decades of memories living and working in Northern Virginia.

Before you have experience on the geographic region of the center of leadership of the USA, you might be naive.

Your perspective from a distance could be deficient in worldly wisdom or informed judgement.

Our United States is due for significant change and upgrades after years of ambivalence, it is now time for us to have laser focus.

Look around your own neighborhood. What do you see, as clear examples of lost strategy and poor planning.

After you have realized that improvement is necessary, go to work:

• Innovate.
• Accelerate.
• Repeat.

If you were in the National Capital Region (NCR) in the early 2000-2005 era, you may have some understanding of the rapid pace then, the daily sense of urgency.

Our days were long yet the enthusiasm and the ambition was tremendous. The private sector and government collaboration was continuous, inside and outside your organization.

The next generation of new companies, new ideas and innovative products will not come from AI.

They will come from “Small Teams” of very strong and bright people. "Trust Decisions" will be exponential created by colleagues with decades of knowledge and first hand experience.

Once the new wave of USA spirited organizations deliver the results of their 24/7/365 human-based initiatives, our country will see our new Courage, our Creativity and our Wealth.

In the company of fellow "True Professionals", we shall see new and promising inventions, upgrades, “Critical Infrastructure” innovation and “Decision Advantage” in our International Global Affairs.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” ― Albert Einstein

TrustDecisions: A "New" Innovative Future...

During this “Holy Week” in the USA, what shall you have learned about your new future?

What decisions have you recently made, that will change your life forever?

Before you were mature enough to truly understand what “Trust” means in the course of your relationships, you relied on someones tone of voice, their behavior and perhaps even a smile.

As time goes on and you immerse yourself in exponential new experiences, meet new people and endure real life challenges, your definition of “Trust” will gradually change:

• Every transaction creating wealth first requires an affirmative decision to trust.
• Building trust creates new wealth.
• Sustaining trust creates recurring wealth.
• Achieving trust superior to your competition achieves market dominance.
• Leadership rises (or falls) based on trust (or the absence of trust).

Jeffrey Ritter - Page 35 - Achieving Digital Trust

“Trust Decisions” are now your focus:

Trust decisions are the most complex computations possible. Yet trust decisions have consistency, design, and structure that are possible to visualize and express with remarkable congruity, regardless of the complexity of the variables or the time during which a trust decision must be completed.

Trust decisions, properly executed, take account of the circumstances in which you are about to act; the qualities of the person, thing, or information on which you intend to rely; and the value you intend to invest, and realize, from giving your trust.

Jeffrey Ritter - Page 50 - Achieving Digital Trust

Now after your proactive actions, how will you proceed in pursuit of your latest

“TrustDecisions" ?

Your new future and true destiny shall reveal itself in the days and years ahead of you.

You shall continuously pursue it with the following innovation process:

• Map / Target
• Sketch / Solution
• Decide
• Prototype

Learn and repeat this process in order to create new innovative wealth…both personally and professionally!

Godspeed…

AI Start-Ups: Dot-com "Lessons Learned"...

Remember when we used to visit the “Chill-Out” room after work for some Foosball, Billiards or just having a few beers.

You could just feel the enthusiasm, anticipation and collaboration in the air with our growing Team of Technologists, Analysts, Marketing & Business Professionals.

It was the summer of 1999 in Reston, VA outside the United States capital 30 minutes and ten minutes to Dulles International (IAD).

The Internet was only a few years old and the “Dot Com” revolution was attracting the Venture Capitalists (VCs) by the dozens.

Our idea was to become the USA “One-Stop” shop on the exploding Net to compare mobile phones with relevant telecom carriers plans and with a few clicks have the box on the way via FedEx or UPS. We named it “Simplexity”.

There were long hours, in and out of our low profile modern office building at 11600 Sunrise Valley Drive.

The buzz every early morning and late evening was that mobile phones were going to get much smarter, with increased processing power, storage and displays. There was already government standards on only using a “Blackberry” for sensitive work.

As January 2000 approached, we had already outgrown our office space and moved to a much larger multi-floor space closer to IAD in Herndon off the 267 Dulles Access Road.

At the height of our growth change was in the wind and our equity shares were ready to cash in as new management was hired to take the next stage of growth.

Looking back on those early Dot Com days reminds us of what we had learned especially as the new AI era in 2025 consumes our technology and VC bandwidth.

Developing prototypes and new business models is every entrepreneurs dream to then become the next “Unicorn”.

Key Lessons Learned:

• Growing your firm with the right technology and innovation will require more time “Out-of-the-Building” then you may anticipate.
• The Trusted Relationships that you built in the beginning will be tested by the new investors and Board Members who think they know more than the Founders.
• Your ambitions and future success could depend on your clairvoyance on the timing of your own exit from the company.
• Never under estimate the behaviors possible by another human when it comes to real competition in the work place.
• The AI era will no doubt see the same kind of actions and results as we witnessed in Northern Virginia during the“Dot-com bubble”.

AI innovation is far from the end and yet the companies formed today, may not even exist in three years.

Contribute your best now, make new lasting relationships and never forget your fun times in the “Chill-out” room…

Starfish: A Community of Resilience…

When is the last time you were in an environment where trust was implicit? A place where the people you were working along side, shared a unity of purpose and a single mission.

Once you experience this, it is forever engraved in your mind and felt deep in your soul.

A "Starfish Community," walking together with such a high degree of mutual trust, it will endure and remain resilient against all Operational Risks that may be encountered.

Enabled by the wisdom and thinking from Rod Beckstrom and Ori Brafman's book "Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations", the "Starfish Community" is growing rapidly across the globe.

A group of decentralized networks that are able to work without hesitancy and with moral courage. It does not matter if the model is used on the battlefield or in business, the desired outcomes are the same.

The ability for the Starfish Community to evolve, adapt and to consistently execute against its agreed upon mission manifests itself in terrorist acts and simultaneously in humanitarian and disaster response.

The ability for the human race to at one moment be so evil and at the same moment so forgiving and good, will continue to amaze us all.

The business world evolves around us with mergers and acquisitions, incidents of fraud and corruption while a silent and clandestine army of cyber warriors wage conflict on our critical infrastructure and copy or steal our intellectual assets.

The ability for the "Starfish Community" to survive in the virtual environment of the Internet is no different than the cities of Amman or Washington, DC.

This is why Wikipedia and other open source projects are able to continuously adapt, grow and survive the threats or vulnerabilities to this resilient and self-healing network.

A crisis appears in your business only when you are unable to adapt and withstand the impact of the virtual or physical forces thrust upon you.

"Whether it is the economic well being of the U.S. or the privacy laws in Europe. The shock wave of a VBIED or Insider Threat."

Your organization could reach an Operational Risk crisis state, if you have not embraced the architecture of the "Starfish Community". Learn from the best on how to withstand the test of time and all that humanity has in store for us.

And to all of those who are on the front lines of crisis everyday. God Speed. You know who you are. 

Battle-Tested Strategies: for Mission Critical Activities...

Mission Critical Activity (MCA)

Critical operational and/or business support, service or product related activity (provided internally or externally), including its dependencies and single points of failure, which enables an organization to achieve its business objective(s), taking into account seasonal trends and/or critical timing issues.

The trend to create "virtual" organizations raises a number of new issues as it pertains to interdependencies and single points of failure. The ability to provide sourcing alternatives in the event of a catastrophic failure of an MCA provider is a key priority. As the trend becomes more operational and logistically complex organizations must exercise more often to determine where processes or systems weaknesses occur.

An organizational Business Crisis & Continuity Management (BCCM) strategy ensures resilience and high reliability of MCA's. At the process level is a documented framework that identifies the organizations MCA's in the context of products or services.

Each MCA should have it's own BCM strategy that provides clarity of how the organization will provide protection for the MCA.

One key outcome is the definition of the BCCM relationship, positioning and connection with other risk related functions, e.g. Operational Risk Management (ORM) A critical component of getting this BCCM relationship connected with the risk management culture is through awareness and education training.

Merely documenting a strategy and plan provides a narrow and limited method of fully developing a true BCCM culture.

Ownership of BCCM by organizational lines of business, especially where Operational Risk originates and resides is paramount. No matter how well designed a strategy may be, exercising and testing on a regular basis is necessary to identify potential issues during a real incident.  

Good quality exercises rely on specific and relevant scenarios in the actual locations, facilities and with normal personnel in place.

And no BCCM is complete without measurement and audit. You must verify compliance independently to highlight key material deficiencies and issues to ensure their resolution.

Each stage of the BCCM life-cycle may require a unique audit process depending on that stage of the life cycles maturity.

At the end of the day, the question is this.

Has the organization introduced risk management controls to eliminate, mitigate, reduce, transfer the effects of identified threats, vulnerabilities, exposures or liabilities to MCA's?

operational risk

Corporate Directors: Continuous Continuity (C2) of the Enterprise...

The modern enterprise that effectively manages the myriad of potential threats to its people, processes, systems and critical infrastructures stands to be better equipped for sustained continuity.

A Business Crisis and Continuity Management (BCCM) program is a dynamic change management initiative that requires dedicated resources, funding and auditing. Corporate Directors must scrutinize organizational survivability on a global basis.

Since effective BCCM analysis is a 24/7 operation, it takes a combination of factors across the organization to provide what one might call C2, or "Continuous Continuity”.

A one-time threat or risk assessment or even an annual look at what has changed across the enterprise is opening the door for a Board of Directors worst nightmare.

These nightmares are "Loss Events" that could have been prevented or mitigated all together.

The following testing techniques must be used to ensure the continuity plan can be executed in a real-life emergency:

• Table-top testing: Discussing how business recovery arrangements would react by using example interruptions
• Simulations: Training individuals by simulating a crisis and rehearsing their post-incident/crisis management roles
• Technical recovery testing: Testing to ensure information systems can be restored effectively
• Testing recovery at an alternate site: Running business processes in parallel with recovery operations at an off-site location
• Test of supplier facilities and services: Ensuring externally provided services and products will meet the contract requirements in the case of interruptions
• Complete rehearsals: Testing to ensure the organization, employees, equipment, facilities and processes can cope with interruptions

Many of these best practices talk about a BCCM that will be periodically updated. Periodic is not continuous. Change is the key factor here.

What changes take place in your organization between these periodic updates? How could any organization accurately account for all the changes to the organization in between BCCM updates? The fact is that they can’t.

This will change over time as organizations figure out that this is now as vital a business component as supply chain management. The effective BCCM framework will become a core process within the organization if it is not already, dynamically evolving by the minute as new change-based factors take place in the enterprise.

As new or terminated employees, suppliers and partners come and go into the BCCM process, the threat profile is updated in real-time. This takes the operational management that much closer to C2, or "Continuous Continuity”.

Having survived several large quakes in Southern California in years past, we are not sure that all of the testing in the world can prepare people for human behaviors that come from within.

"People literally lose all sense of common sense when you are on the 42nd floor of the 50+ sky scraper and without any warning it physically sways a couple feet to the left and a few more feet to the right. Believe me, the issue is not the testing itself, it’s how to create a real enough scenario that you get similar behaviors out of unsuspecting people."

Certainly the largest organizations realize that the external threats are taking on new and different forms than the standard fire, flood, earthquake and twister scenarios. These historically large catastrophic external loss events have been insured against and the premiums are substantial.

What it is less easy to analyze from a threat perspective are the constantly changing landscapes and continuity postures of the internal facets of the organization having to do with people, processes and systems.

Corporate Boards of Director’s are now being continuously subjected to regulatory scrutiny across the globe to ensure the continuity and survivability of the enterprise.

It is their duty and responsibility to their shareholders to make sure this occurs on a continuous basis. The world can only hope that our Global 500 companies are well on their way to achieving C2 already.

Corporate Directors are ultimately responsible for Continuous Continuity (C2) of the Enterprise…

Security Governance: Corporate Emergency Response Team (CERT)...

You can be a proud CxO if you can confidently say that in the event of a "Crisis" your employees are trained and ready to handle it.

You can never predict human behavior in the face of a sudden and shocking incident.

If your company doesn't have "Corporate Emergency Response Teams" (CERT) exercising test scenarios monthly or quarterly, you face the consequences of poor Operational Risk Management (ORM); losses that could have been prevented.

We are still amazed at how many “Executive Rows” we visit that still doesn’t have an AED within arms reach in the event of a heart attack.

Protecting corporate assets first begins with common sense and then expands exponentially from there.

How will you and your CxO’s provide your employees with the privacy as a U.S. citizen and remain vigilant with all potential insider threats?

Programatic Data Privacy and Integrity is the real issue at stake here.

“Enterprise Security Governance will provide the mechanisms and controls necessary for the Patriot Act to operate with the highest degree of assurance.”

Our civil liberties are still in force and will be there to protect everyone who is an American.

What we must not waiver on is the need to modernize, to re-equip and to create more robust "Correlation Centers”. Perhaps with AI and always with trained Intel Analysts.

The fact is, our intelligence analysts in enforcement are under attack every day by more savvy and increasingly powerful adversaries.

The establishment of a more robust, pervasive and technologically superior force to defend our Homeland today is still in the maturation stages.

What is paramount now at this stage of growth, is the framework for your own organizations “Security Governance” to be injected into each stakeholder.

The policies, ethics and controls must be there to guide those who are protecting our privacy while simultaneously allowing us to accelerate our countermeasures to Deter, Detect and Defend against those who will continue to attack us.

The Patriot Act will remain a powerful asset to those who wake every morning to ensure the Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of information in our country and to protect the American people…

The Third Alternative: A Precarious Future...

 If we really believe what we say we believe- if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a "wandering to find home", why should we not look forward to the arrival. There are, aren't there, only three things we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls "healthy" is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all." — C.S. Lewis (Letters to an American Lady)

How will your life change, now that she is gone and she is truly home?

Have faith in the journey ahead with the confidence she is safe, sound and secure forever.

Your mission forward shall be to explore your own course of activities and actions to continue to give back. To invest in those new people who need you most now.

You see, your mission ahead is to find ways to help others you care about who can thrive from your advice. Your love. Your experience.

Relationships. >>>>> Results. >>>>> Rewards.

Find the time to build on your relationships with others and to increase the true value of the relationship mutually.

The increased value of the relationship will take time to discover and yet the trust and sharing will produce the most favored results.

Count the results and realize what and how the results will continue forward in time. Analyze the results and determine the changes that might be necessary.

Feel and process the rewards. Cherish the time and feelings you now have earned.

Look up...

Recognize that your time and your efforts are valuable and that it all begins with the “relate.”

You know, the way you behave initially with that person each time, to further build the relationship.

Your words and your actions collaborating with others shall provide you with the ongoing satisfaction and desirable outcomes you shall always seek.

Continue to cherish those Relationships, Results and Rewards that will make her so proud of you, before you see her again…

Godspeed!

Destination Unknown: Explore, Adapt & Learn...

What is your new destination? How will you get there?

The business climate in your particular industry is adapting to the latest global change upon us in 2025. What are you implementing now, that will change the processes, business rules and positive outcomes for you in the foreseeable future?

Creative activities to adapt to your particular new approach to customers, clients and followers requires new thinking. It may achieve your primary destination, yet how long will it take to arrive?

As you “Go-to-Market” in your particular industry sector in 2025, what new innovations and strategies will be in place? Have you thoroughly prototyped your solutions and discovered their results? What have you learned?

Was your industry launched in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, NC or Dearborn, MI? Your business is going to require more than one “Maverick” to achieve your future destination on a timely basis.

You will require exponential unconventional thinking. People who are “Nonconformist”, “Dissenting” and “Iconoclastic”.

Why?

How many years have you been running your business this way? In the same cities, with the same labor pools, absent of any new thoughts of creativity.

When was the last time you financed a new product launch with a brand new sales force?

Perhaps you have a tradition of doing business with the same old Legal Counsel, Accounting firm, or hosting systems of Information Technology services. Are you using the same suppliers for talent acquisition? Look where you are today.

"Are you capable of creating a new “Business Unit,” that will shed the past and test the future of your organization and your industry? Then do it."

The future of your business and our country requires it. Your particular contributions to our economic livelihood, persistence and longevity, needs your new ingenuity and continuous resilience.

Head out there.

Explore. Adapt. Learn.

Onward!