This week we've covered the role of upskilling through deliberate practice, which is how you get a 3.61x multiple return on investment. We covered intentionally applying your practice in becoming more open-minded about aggregating services in your practice. We covered expanding your list of tech risks to cover wellbeing .  Not done yet! Many organizations do a talent audit. This includes leaders, and people who want to become leaders.  Organizations that are serious about leadership will do assessments. About 70% of leadership assessments happen at the individual -- i.e., you -- level; about 20% do team-level assessment, and the rest is some combination of those and a 360-degree/in-depth interview assessment. (Organizations that are less serious about leadership will only do surveys, such as "the annual employee survey." Which is good only if action is taken based on results -- much like deliberate practice. Otherwise it's a ritual.) I have included here a chart abo...

Phishing scams? Cake! AI-based cyber-attacks? Sure! Quantum apocalypse coming at ya? You got it! Return to the office mandates, 80-hour work weeks, constant threat of layoffs? But of course! Workplace wellbeing?  Workplace wellbeing, come in workforce wellbeing... Your cybersecurity workplace is lacking in workforce wellbeing. The term wellbeing can be defined as follows: "[It] is a measure of how well life is going for someone. In the broadest sense, it covers the balance of all positive and negative aspects of a person's life. More narrowly, it refers only to positive degrees and contrasts with ill-being, which denotes negative ones. In this sense, well-being is what egoists typically seek for themselves and altruists aim to enhance in others, serving as a central goal of many individual and societal endeavors. Researchers discuss different types of well-being by how they are measured, who they belong to, and which domain of life they affect. Subjective well-being refers to...

We've seen several thought pieces recently on the future of technology leadership. The bad news is that it's evolving probably faster than people can cope with. The good news is that the future of technology leadership is creating opportunities for leaders who deliberately work at being effective. I like how  James Azar  put it: "Modern business isn’t built anymore. It’s integrated." That's right. Your AI models, your platforms, your security systems -- all of it is on an 'as-a-service' model. That creates modularity compatibility challenges. It also creates team utilization challenges and possible threats from over-servicing especially when supply chains are added.  Over at Deloitte Consulting  they think a lot about agentic AI. Here is their key chart: As they put it (quoting at length): What’s clear is that the underlying shifts aren’t happening in isolation. They operate across every layer of the tech stack: computing, coordination across agents and da...

The old joke goes like this: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice, practice, practice." Speaking of, the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz -- who played Tchaikovky's Piano Concerto #1 at Carnegie Hall in April 1943 as a WWII bond fundraiser, a performance that is still a masterpiece -- once said that if he didn't practice for one day, he would know it, and if he didn't practice for two days the whole world would know it. How about you?  Be honest in answering this question: how have you improved yourself as a cybersecurity professional in the past year? To get ahead of things, the wrong answer is along the lines of "I listened to some podcasts" or "I attended an industry event." The challenge in answering this question is that you had to change something. If you do not now do things differently than you did before, you did not develop yourself as a cybersecurity professional no matter what you think. Disclaimer : connecting wit...

You may have been around for the bicentennial...maybe you'll be here for the tercentennial...but seize the semiquincentennial while you have it! (image credit: After Jasper Johns, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

I love the phrase "more art than science" because I feel that only pure science is "science" in the popular sense of "following clearly defined rules and therefore providing clear, reliable answers." There is a similar issue with logic and mathematics; if you can somehow cram a topic into either one of these containers then whatever ridiculously wrong conclusions you come to are given instant credibility. For example, this old chestnut: All apes are hairy. All men are hairy. Therefor all men are apes. This seems logical, but it isn't logical and it certainly isn't true. So it is with cybersecurity: Cybersecurity is about access to computer technology. Technology is science. Therefore cybersecurity is a science. Cybersecurity is about human beings interacting with computer technology. Human beings are inconsistent and capable of ignoring reason and of using terrible judgement. Therefore cybersecurity is most definitely not purely a science. If you p...