Superhuman: Mission Possible...

Each new day is a real opportunity to make yourself better. It can be another day of new discovery, curiosity and learning.

Are you Superman?

Living day by day, going to work and/or finding the truth, as you talk with other people to hear what they have to say and then perform the tasks to improve your own world or the enterprise.

What about conquering evil the moment you see it or feel it, by using your God given talents in order to protect others and defend people from harm and to provide for their daily needs.

Are you a Father or Mother?

Then you too may be a “Superhuman” (Superman or SuperWoman) and now you truly understand what it really means to be a good responsible parent.

It is difficult to know the feeling and experience the emotions of being a Parent, until you actually are one.

You won’t be able to ever comprehend being a parent by just becoming a singular representative, manager, analyst, chef, teacher, banker, author, artist, supervisor or landlord.

You can learn about what to do or not to do, by watching your sibling or your own parent, a friend or by reading a parenting book or even just watching CoComelon on YouTube.

Yet it is not until you are actually performing and experiencing the moments in your own motherhood or fatherhood, that you will truly understand.

Yes, you will need to be “Superhuman” to achieve a level of true excellence that others will say you are a good and responsible Mom or Dad.

So what?

You alone as a “Superhuman” parent have a duty and mission.

The mission will change your life forever and so you too, have only one person to rely on.

On your next Childs birthday, take the time to reflect. Take the time to think about the journey so far.

Say another prayer.

You know that each birthday of your child is another opportunity for you to show your own super powers as a parent. No matter how old they are on this day.

"Love. Patience. Friendship. Encouragement. Forgiveness. Faith. Love."

Onward!

True Professional: Who Will You Become...

What will you do that is extraordinary and contributes a positive addition in your life that demonstrates your consistent effort and shows your own actual discipline?

It shall demonstrate your devotion and focus on becoming better even though you shall never achieve a level of true perfection.

Continuous skill and knowledge improvement is just that.

The discipline you choose will be so difficult to perfect that even after 2 decades and over 1000 documented examples almost weekly, you are far from the perceived finish line.

1000+ examples / 52 weeks = 19+ years

In September 2003 it all began. Writing words on a regular basis about real topics of interest was a discipline that started a career to become an even better “Operational Risk Specialist”.

Your discipline might be flying aircraft or doing heart surgery and you want to continuously grow your expertise. How do you measure your own consistent effort and show discipline?

Do you measure the number of hours or miles you have on duty in the air or space or classroom or on camera or operating room or court room or missions in theatre using your skills?

Why?

You too may become, a “True Professional”.

Do you measure the quality of your particular skill and/or innovative deliverable on every attempt?

So what?

You see, what ever your discipline may be and to what degree you are practicing consistently to become even better, if you are not measuring it in some way, then is it a real discipline?

What tool do you utilize to capture and measure your accomplishments? A log book, a photo journal, a score card, a web blog, a three ring binder, a digital file folder measured in GBs or TBs?

What are you actually measuring? The Number of attempts. The Quality of completions. The game score?

Maybe it is just a written exam and Two, Three or four letters (_ _ _ _) after your name?

Whether you have become a Doctor, Lawyer, Professor, Pilot, Operator, Specialist, Stylist, Salesperson, Manager, VP, Owner, Driver, Player, Author or Analyst in your life does not really matter to so many.

Maybe it does to you and your specific clients, customers, parishioners and patients and a few of your fellow family, comrades, co-pilots, clergy, operators and other True Professionals.

Yet, when you decide personally that your own professional tenure in this discipline has come to an end and you will stop being measured, then what?

Start a new one and have extraordinary consistent discipline…Godspeed!

Prescience: Coffee on Glebe Road...

One glorious Spring morning in the National Capital Region (NCR), the coffee meetup was scheduled just about 30 minutes away as the Jeep GC headed down the tree lined woods of Old Dominion Dr. through McLean, VA.

We were meeting at the First Floor Starbucks of the Westin Arlington on North Glebe Road.

The meeting this early Thursday was with a Chief Security Officer (CSO) of a large Defense-Industrial-Base contractor (_ _ _ _) and we had planned to catch-up and talk shop for 45 min.

As we recognized each other in the lobby and made small talk ordering our favorite Starbucks blend, the dialogue shifted to one of the key reasons for our meeting.

Our real focus on Operational Risk Management (ORM) that particular day was the “Insider Threat” best practices that we all were rapidly implementing.

Whether you are talking about an employee or a contract supplier who visits your facility or organization on a single or periodic basis, the threat exists.

It was April 2013 and little did we realize this morning, we both would be hearing the name of Edward Joseph Snowden in July.

“An ex-government (_ _ _) employee now working for another large DIB contractor based in Tysons Corner (_ _ _) as a system administrator, “Ed” might have been thinking about his eventual escape from a government regional operations center in Hawaii as we talked.”

In Northern Virginia just two months earlier, our conversation turned to the actual prescience of the DIB companies “Insider Threat Program” and how many employees working for his company were also current members of a specific large non-profit organization.

One example we discussed was a local non-profit that is excellent on educating and training members on the tools and strategies to enhance protection of intellectual property.

Gaining additional foresight, clairvoyance or the special ability to see or know about events before they actually occur, is your CSO ground zero.

Concern or preparation for the potential future threat event or incident, is on the mind of every Chief Security Officer in the corporate world. Yet, what are you doing this month to improve your own sixth sense?

How many people in your organization are members of non-profit XYZ or ABCDEF that are now focused on training their members on topics of relevant interest to you?

The lesson here, is that whether you are a local Bank Manager, a School Principal, a CxO or just a parent; people in your responsibility are counting on you.

They want you to ask them questions, they want you to test them on their readiness to use CPR or a tourniquet. They want you to make them even feel more safe every day by educating them about ransomware and cyber "phishing".

When our Starbucks coffee meeting was over by 8:00AM, my hunch is that Jeff went back to his Defense Industrial Base company a mile away to do some homework and some rapid internal recruiting of key employees.

As a CxO in your particular organization, how well do you really know your employees, contractors and suppliers?

Easter 2023: Finding Forgiveness...

On Easter weekend growing up in the late 1960’s as a young acolyte at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in a small midwestern U.S. city, there was a tremendous focus on our services.

This holy holiday on Good Friday, was just the start of a busy weekend of prayer and many family gatherings.

As a fellow church acolyte, how well did any of us truly understand the real story around this man known as Jesus Christ?

At this point in serving our local church, how could having so much faith in a man you never met or knew, make any real difference in your day-to-day life?

Over time, the answer to this question became more apparent and continues to make a true difference today in so many ways.

When you grow up as the eldest sibling of four, you are looked upon by your Christian parents as a lead by example kind of person.

Over decades of time, it is hard to count the number of prayers said out loud on numerous occasions and after so many other significant life events.

“Easter is a Christian festival and cultural holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, described in the New Testament as having occurred on the third day of his burial following his crucifixion by the Romans at Calvary c. 30 AD.”

What Good Friday and Easter are really all about across history is this: “Forgiveness”.

Who will you forgive in your life and who will you pray with?

One truth about our humanity, is that if you too are experiencing forgiveness, whether “Giving it” or “Receiving it”, this creates even more positive outcomes and increased resilience in our personal lives…

Believe.

Life Lessons: What Did You Learn?

Do you remember the first time you learned a real “Life Lesson”?

Maybe it was with a brother or sister. Maybe it is a best friend. Maybe it is a co-worker. Maybe it is a Mother or a Father. Maybe it is a Grand Parent? Maybe it is a doctor. Maybe it is a lawyer.

Your particular “Life Lessons” will most likely be a combination of events and of coaches along the journey.

How about the time you were picking up your sibling from a friends house at 9:00PM on a Sunday night? The “Blue” flashing lights from the police in the rear view mirror was unexpected, yet driving 42 MPH in a 25 MPH zone at 17 years old, resulted in a traffic ticket and drivers license 30 day suspension.

How about the time you were assigned a vital project at work with a date/time certain deadline and it was 3 hours late? Your supervisor/boss/commander asked you to come to their office and they shut the door. The tone of their voice was stern and it was a little bit loud, as they explained how your failure to submit your part of the project, delayed the customers shipment and they canceled the order.

Your particular “Life Lessons” will typically occur when your lack of experience or your apathetic mental attitude, puts you in a direct intersection with some new learning opportunity.

The question is, What did you Learn?

Follow the rules when driving an automotive vehicle. Turn in your work assignments early or on-time. Tell the truth. Save money. Pay your bills. Any of the Ten Commandments. Use an 18-multi-character password.

One life lesson you will certainly learn, is that making mistakes is inevitable. Understood. Making the same mistake over and over, is an unwillingness to comply with the defined rules or a real learning deficiency.

Which is it?

Life's analogies are prolific. Three strikes and you are out. Or where there is smoke there is fire.

Should you find yourself in a bad place or a difficult situation, where you are asking yourself “Again,” why am I here again, then perhaps you need to ask for some real help.

Whether your own journey is successful or is not successful is entirely up to you. It is now totally up to you as a person, citizen, student, colleague, or an employee whether you are truly capable of learning real lessons in life.

Now that you too have found the help and the coaching you need, Onward!

Live a wonderful life and always remember your own “Life Lessons”…

Reliable: Who Do You Have Faith In?

When you think of the person you would recommend for a particular task or to perform defined professional services, who comes to mind?

There are many ways and words to describe a person or the business, yet if you had only one word to choose from, what would it be?

Reliable  adjective

1: suitable or fit to be relied on: DEPENDABLE

2: giving the same result on successive trials

Reliable noun

1: one that is reliable

In many cases, this is the word people really mean to use, as the basis for their recommendation.

Whether a business or a person is reliable, makes all the difference in your world, especially if you must rely on the outcomes of their service or duty.

When someone or something you pay for, does not meet a series of positive results, you begin to question your decision to utilize the service or receive the product for use.

Unfortunately for many people and businesses, this word “Reliable” is not considered or even measured on a consistent or measurable basis.

"Over the course of time in your life, think of one person or business you could say was truly reliable."

Think of this one person or business you have utilized for more than ten years that is reliable.

In any professional capacity, becoming reliable takes many years of practice and substantial learning. It requires the development of people, processes, systems and real innovation.

Now, think about someone or an entity (business, product, government agency) that you have lost faith in.

The people or businesses that you have stopped interaction with, have become “Unreliable” for your particular requirements or expectations of quality of service.

How would our world change for the better if there was more learning and focus on being “Reliable”?

How can you as a person or business become top of mind, when someone is asked “Who would you recommend” to: _________________?

You too, can become truly reliable…

Navigator: Trusted Journey...

Looking out over the horizon, what visual geographic point will you navigate towards in order to achieve your mission objective?

Navigator noun

Nav-i-ga-tor

:one that navigates or is qualified to navigate

We looked at the map and wondered what obstacles we would encounter across the challenging journey ahead of us.

We were planning as a team of two, to travel to a place together that we had never been before.

As we looked across the table from each other, with our data and imagery on the laptop screen before us, we laughed.

Your mission together will also be epic. It may require hours and days or weeks of effective planning, yet the most vital tool, will be how you are communicating to your partner.

You both clearly know the objective and the destination. You know the deadline.

Now, how will you “Navigate” to reach that place, you have both dreamed about together?

Weeks later, this particular journey was over and we knew ahead of our launch, that the navigation and the communication was going to be unpredictable.

Perhaps most important. What did we learn together?

Whether it was navigate left or right, navigate up or down, navigate to these precise coordinates at this altitude or depth, there was one thing we truly learned.

You have to trust your navigator 100%.

Yes of course there will be continuous questions and answers along the journey. Timely and effective communication is vital.

The only way to build that “Trust Factor” to 100% is more time together in practice.

Discovering what failure looks, feels and sounds like.

Learning together, means that you are well on your way, to future achievements you could never have dreamed about.

Who is your single trusted “Navigator”...

C²: Enterprise Continuous Continuity…

Business Crisis and Continuity Management (BCCM) is a dynamic change management initiative that requires dedicated resources, funding and auditing.

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.

According to the best practices from several sources, the Board of Directors is responsible for the BCCM of an organization. Let’s take a look at what the highly influential Basel Committee says about one principle as it pertains to business continuity:

Review and Testing of Business Continuity Plans – Basel Principle 13

“It is the responsibility of the organization's Internal Audit and Business Continuity functions to ensure that all of the organization's business continuity plans are tested and reviewed on a periodic basis to spot incorrect assumptions, oversights or changes to equipment, and employees and to identify any changes in business requirements not reflected in specific plans. Any undocumented requirements must immediately be documented. In addition, appropriate information owners and users must be informed of updates to plans.”

• 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 such as ransomware.
• 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.

The 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 Accounts Receivable. The BCCM will become a core process of 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”.

The enterprise today that understands the myriad of potential threats to its people, processes, systems and structures, stands to be better equipped for sustained continuity of Operational Risk Management and business operations.

Human Dialogue: "Decision Advantage"​ of a Trusted Digital Globe...

How will you innovate with your front line team this month and this year to enable more accurate and resourceful “TrustDecisions”?

The ability to make business decisions in a standardized process simultaneously wrapped around our own human intelligence is the real advantage.

A true “Decision Advantage” in a world of constantly changing conditions and data environments is one of the greatest challenges within our global Leadership Management.

Creating innovation around decision making may sound like a lofty goal. It is, and yet for your particular team or organization, it certainly is within reach.

How might your team utilize a process and method for making more rapid and effective “TrustDecisions” across your global enterprise?

While these words are being written by a human-being now and not an Ai such as C h a t G P T, our future lives will encompass a continuous process to gain a digital assets advantage.

“But we will not function successfully if the war for control of those assets is lost. The battlefield, however, is the one on which trust is to be gained or lost—trust in the information we use, trust in the infrastructures that support us, and trust in the decisions we make in a digital world.” Achieving Digital Trust - Jeffrey Ritter

A process that is focused on digital truth will require our continuous application of “Operational Risk Management” combined with our global data governance collaboration.

• Have you this week in the United States tried to unsubscribe from an e-mail list and did not find a digital link at the bottom of your e-mail to accomplish this?
• Have you this week scheduled a 45 min Digital Zoom meeting and found yourself at min 44 without a decision?
• Have you this week been taking depositions in California regarding the use of videos on your platform that are covered by Section 230?

"From the Board Room to our modern day asymmetric battlefield, achieving digital trust will open eyes. It will provide us with a reference model that management and software architects have been seeking for decades.

The survival of the Internet as we know it, is currently at stake. Leadership shall provide a look into the transparency of «Trust Decisions» and how ensuring digital truth will shape our global governance for decades to come."

Innovation with making accurate and resourceful “TrustDecisions” will go far beyond technology or Zeros and Ones.

Our future will require so much more that will not be digital.

Think Human Dialogue.

It will require more “TrustDecisions” that are in person, Face-to-Face, Eye-to-Eye and finalized with a hand shake…

Onward! 

4D: Extraordinary Risk…

As we gathered up our gear to walk out to the Bell 407 for another epic day one February in the remote mountains, you could just feel the “butterflies” in our gut again.

When you think of any challenging mission that has real risks, you and your team know that when you launch that daily objective and buckle up, that you have each others backs. Got your six.

You as a team have already trained to identify the risks, “Deter, Detect, Defend and Document” the environment you are operating within, that particular day.

"The helicopter now rapidly gained altitude and we looked at each other across the aisle with smiles on our faces. Our goggles made it hard to see each others eyes, but you could feel the adrenaline starting to take effect."

Now it’s all about, the person to your right and left, keeping each other in your peripheral vision to know that s/he is still there.

It was just another day in pursuit of the daily mission, accelerating down the mountain on our skis in endless powder snow.

Until it happened. Passing to close to the “tree well,” the edge caved in and now you could feel yourself falling down the deep hole around the trunk of the massive pine tree.

Catching your breath and now looking up, you could see the dark blue sky yet the surface was 6-7 feet vertical and you just hugged the tree in sub-freezing temperatures.

Then pure silence and just deep snow surrounding you and the tree well.

In the next minute, you realize you are in the red zone of risk and now your OPS training kicks in. Your thoughts wonder if you will ever make it back.

About 30 minutes later, you could hear our team yelling out and blowing their whistles. By now, that bright yellow plastic whistle we all kept around our necks was now being blown louder than ever before.

Finally, as someone from our Team, heard the whistle cadence of distress you could hear their voices getting even closer!

What are you doing down there our leader yelled out! As they threw down the bright orange knotted rope…

So what?

Do you have a “4D” Risk Strategy being utilized in your organization and with your team?

A "4D" Risk Strategy for Survival is only effective if it is operating on a continuous basis. You must create the culture and the due diligence to see that it becomes part of the fabric of your organization internally and with outsourced partners or suppliers.

Only then will the attacker (or nature) realize that this combination to Deter, Detect, Defend and Document is alive and growing in your enterprise. This is when attackers become discouraged, afraid, uncertain and ultimately ready for a new and less formidable adversary.

"Attackers use tools to exploit a vulnerability to create an action on a target that produces an unauthorized result, to obtain their objective. These "4D" lessons should put you on the way to creating a more survivable business.”

Whether you are at 9,000+ feet in the snow capped mountains in a foreign country or you are just sitting in your dark corporate conference room on “Chain Bridge Road” innovating to try and solve todays risk problem-sets does not matter.

Whether you and your particular team, devotes 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week to a potential threat risk to you or your organization training for “What If,” is what truly will make a future difference.

Operational Risk Management (ORM) will determine whether you ultimately just survive, or become:

Extraordinary adjective

1 a : going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary

       extraordinary powers