Monthly ITsec Leadership Quotes and Articles: October 2010

A little late (in love, keeps one busy!)

• Incident or Event Management: Keep it simple but real!, on the IT Security and Compliance Thought Leadership blog.
• 25 Sure-fire Ways To Motivate Your Team Members, excellent reminder of the basics for team motivation and good atmosphere.
• Security: Competence Never Compensates for Insecurity, aka Attributes of Leadership #17 on Joyce Schneider's blog.
• [FR] A good security policy reflects the life of the company, by NetASQ's product director Jeremy d’Hoinne, addressing the future of firewalls, that is, something else, not firewalls. Traffic inspection, all-in-one appliances... Nothing new but I'm glad to hear that from NetASQ.
• Transparency, accountability, and IT success (Michael Krigsman).
• Help! No One Is Following Our Processes! on The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the ITIL Galaxy and Beyond.
• How to Crush Dissent, on Rob Weir's blog.
• Microsoft is a dying consumer brand, on CNNMoney.com, which is my feeling as, in very little time, Microsoft added up Vista, Zune, unwanted DRMs, Office 2007's frightening GUI, and missed the turn to smartphones and web applications...
• "Companies up and down supply chains in numerous industries confront the same challenge: A well-intentioned individual action or demand aimed at making a business greener can create a long string of unanticipated consequences that collectively dwarf the benefits.", by Hau L. Lee in HBR, October. You could switch greener for any of: more secure, thinner, cheaper, more customer-friendly...
• "Listen, don't broadcast", as a hint for a company's social media strategy, by Larry Kramer, same source
  
• "One CEO I know fines people $1 for every e-mail he gets that he didn't need to see.", Rita Gunther McGrath, in HBR Onpoint, Fall 2010.
  
• "If you think your people won't understand something, remember it's your job to explain it to them.", Stever Robbins, same source.
• "[...] if things aren't going well, the teams are probably well aware of the problems. In fact, they've probably known about them longer than you have.", same author, same source.
• "Most organizations penalize employees for the wrong outcome, even if they follow the right process. Perversely, others are rewarded for the right outcome, even when they flout the rules about process.", same author, same source.
• "[...] the value of clear, honest, explicit communication rises exponentially with the size of the organization.", John Hamm, same source.
• The whole article The Leadership Lessons of Mount Everest, same source, which I can't quote without reprinting it entirely. (Reprint R0109B)