This Series

This article is part of a series called Connected Leadership. It revolves around the observations or lessons a father wrote about in his memoir, You Are Held In Love. The specific lessons addressed in this article are:

• We create through being — Because we are, we create. Our beingness is what allows us to be creators. Since our beingness is what enables creation, what we are creating arises out of how we are being. Are you aware of how you are being in every moment? We create through being.
• Objects appear as you are — This lesson couples well with…

Diversity is essential to life, literally fueling nature — integrated differences creating conditions that create life. Sameness is not a natural product of creation. Regardless of the appearance of similarity, everything is distinctly unique, driven through evolution. The continued evolution of identifying business requires a leader to foster diversity. Diversity of perspective empowers critical thinking and fuels creative problem-solving. Through the energy and act of presence, listening, and allowing, a connected leader holds the space where creation can occur. So realize, my PowerPoint isn’t about meeting your expectations of sameness and story, it’s about you understanding my unique, diverse perspective…

Part 1: A father's memoir of life lessons applied to business.

In December of 2019, I finished the memoir, You Are Held In Love. Written as an offering to my children, it identified over a dozen patterns I had discovered about how life moved, about how life operated. After a life-altering spiritual awakening polished the lens of my internal vision, offering me the ability to see and feel beyond what I had come to believe was a horizon, I discovered what it meant to embody love, compassion, and empathy, to move from my heart, to align to my highest divine…

It was 3 a.m. on July 15th. I was in the hypnagogic state of consciousness, the liminal space, the area of tranquil calm and peace, separating wakefulness and sleep. The silence was disturbed by a non-alarming clear male voice that said ‘July 31st is the day’. My eyes were dry, and I struggled to open them, the lashes seemingly tangled together. I could sense my wife lying beside me, sleeping soundly. I was not alarmed by this voice since I had heard it before, arriving years ago after a prayer, it offered guidance and direction on my life.

The prayer…

A Framework for Security Reporting

Did you know FICO is a company, not an acronym? FICO, originally Fair, Isaac and Company, provides data analytics focused on credit scoring. FICO influenced the consumer credit risk industry so heavily that its name became the de facto measure depicting consumer credit risk. Enter in SICO (sī-kō), an reporting framework enabling the depiction of business security risk.

In June of 2019, I attended Gartner’s Security Risk Conference in Maryland. I was introduced to a company providing a ‘FICO’ type security score for virtually any major company with an internet presence. The score was assigned…

The goal was clear; risk-based metrics providing a defense-in-depth based view of security posture by app team. We knew app teams were competitive. We knew app teams wanted to be empowered! We knew app teams wanted to be secure. We also knew many app teams were unclear on what “secure” meant. We wanted a scoreboard by app-team that provided not just the necessary information to “score” them, but the essential information to inform them. What inspired us was sharing “our” perspective on security. How does Information Security see security? What is meant by defense-in-depth? Why is security posture important? …

Logs and events are the backbone of performant security. They provide the necessary details to investigate and audit security incidents. They also supply the ‘experiences’ that powers today’s machine learning and artificial intelligence constructs. As with life, the more experiences a system has, the more successful that system will be in identifying, alerting, and reacting to anomalous event experiences. Logs and events facilitate system learning. The more, the better.

Capturing ‘all’ logs and events can be expensive. CISOs know this because a SIEM, the tool that can ingest, learn, and alert upon these items, is one of if not the…

I live a spiritual life. Yoga. Meditation. Self-reflection. A significant part of my life is dedicated to understanding myself and connecting with others in a deep meaningful way.

Outside of work, I spend my time outdoors enjoying and connecting with nature. Morning and evening fires entice me, and I can feel my heart smile as I share these experiences with close friends and family.

I do not own a TV. I choose instead to connect directly with life. …