Recovering from ransomware: a conversation with Veritas CEO Greg Hughes
Why executives and boards need to understand the growing cyber threat, how to best prepare for recovery, and who should be at the table.
Driving Change When There Isn't A Crisis
Executing during an emergency is a rush but the bigger test comes when you must execute vital change outside of adversity. How to do it? Pressurize the system.
Today’s CEOs Need Hands-On Digital Skills
Because digital transformations change every process — from strategy to execution — and alter every function, they’re often challenging to pull off. CEOs have to be digitally literate and get personally involved if they wish to succeed. Yet, it seems that many companies don’t have the kind of CEOs, top management teams, and boards of directors they need to tackle digital transformations. Not only do CEOs have to be digitally literate, but they also need to play the pivotal role of the change agent. Digital transformation is about so much more than adopting new technologies and processes. At its core, it’s about overcoming inertia and resistance to changing the way people think and work. The CEO needs to lead from the front, inspire confidence in her vision, and rally the company to believe in what might appear to be a distant destination.
Do You Know How Your Teams Get Work Done?
In a research study at four Fortune 500 companies, when managers were asked about their teams’ work, on average they either did not know or could not remember 60% of the work their teams do. This is a major problem because it can lead to unrealistic digital transformation targets and the poor allocation of resources. But in the same study, machine learning tools were able to bridge the gap between manager intuition and reality. The study showed that employing ML algorithms reduced the average work-recall gap from ~60% to 24%. Managers should roll out such ML tools but take steps to ensure employees don’t feel surveilled — they can anonymize and aggregate data, and communicate openly with employees about what they are measuring and what they hope to achieve.
Your Calendar = Your Priorities
Share your calendar, and the world will know what you (and your companies) values are.
^ADJ: It has always been interesting to look at the diary and then compare that to company strategy - sometimes we have alignment, often not.
On Pegasus · LRB 4 November 2021
With the Covid infection rate soaring in spring last year, Naftali Bennett – Israel’s then defence minister, now its prime minister – came up with an original approach to the crisis. As an emergency measure, the domestic security service, Shin Bet, had already been tasked with reporting the movements of mobile phone users for the purposes of contact tracing, making Israel one of the most privacy-disregarding countries in the world when it came to the battle against coronavirus. But Bennett now sought to bypass the civil and medical authorities completely. A former elite commando officer turned tech startup millionaire before he went into politics, he felt the solution lay in Israel’s lucrative tech frontrunners – in particular, a boutique cyber-hacking company from Herzliya called NSO.
Place your bets. When you’re the President of the United States ....
When you’re the President of the United States, the easy decisions never reach your desk. Barack Obama observed that if a problem had a perfect solution, “someone else would have solved it.”