The Great Conversation

John Coovert, the VP and Global Head of Security for SAP, has been a voice of innovation and change in our conversations for close to ten years. In this conversation we discuss his concept of duty of care “Everyone, Anywhere” and how that guides his strategy and planning at SAP. We learn about how he wants the vendor community to approach him, and his need to secure his future by automating the physical tasks that permeate security within his company. 

A highly experienced security professional with over 33 years of experience in physical security, law enforcement, and the military, John has been focused on strong leadership and prioritizing to achieve determined results. Because of this, he excels at developing relationships with business units supported by, and in support of, security programs. He possesses a unique and dynamic experience from tenures at security roles at various notable companies, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the United States Marine Corps.

Do your people who travel to support your business believe that you are doing everything you can to keep them safe and secure? Does your organization believe they have a duty to care for them?

We have climate uncertainty.

We have global terrorism.

The question is: do we have an agreed upon standard of care for our workforce? And are we taking steps to mitigate their risk?

Fundamentally, we need to have an over-arching risk management standard. We have one that is internationally  recognized: ISO 31000. With this in place we can now address specific risk in travel. For some time now, working through many virtual conference calls, a consortium of risk, resilience and security professionals have been working on a new travel management standard called ISO 31030.

We sit down with one of the key committee members, Ronny Saether of Norges Bank, along with a noted security consultant, Patrick Kane, and an owner of an executive protection agency, Mac Segal of AHNA, to unwrap the potential this may have of changing how we evangelize travel risk management in our organizations and in our vendor relationships.

If you have worked for a variety of access control technology vendors, you have an inside view of how they develop their products and their go to market strategies. We wanted to leverage those insights to explore the next generation of what we call Unbound Intelligent Security.

To do that, we looked up Paul Dipeso who works for a company called Feenics that purports to be the “rebirth of access control”. We actually think it might be more than that. Listen in and see how we attempt to tease out the ‘why’ behind this new approach to an age old problem.

Keep by Feenics is the rebirth of access control. Designed by an integrator, for an integrator, it's about meeting the needs of the end user by maximizing their current infrastructure with a flexible, scalable platform that uses a secure connection to the cloud, no different than online banking. Feenics believes in protecting the initial investment with licensing costs that are not complicated or prohibitive and hardware that is non-proprietary.

Seattle Children's is one of the most respected children's research and hospital in the nation. Dylan Hayes, is the lead Cyber-Physical IT Security Manager. He has been in the center of physical security services at Children’s Hospital and shares his thoughts on leadership, innovation, and change.

Dylan is a seasoned leader, planner, and enterprise change agent with 20+ year progressive career record spanning a wide range of critical business systems and operations including enterprise risk, resilience, and response.

He also has extensive expertise and background in consulting/assessment, system analysis/integration, application and system management, resilient and streamlined operations, safety identification and mitigation, disaster planning and customer service.

We live a life of intersections between Yes and No. Whatever path we choose necessarily demands a sacrifice of the other. Each path leads to another intersection. And although this happens to all of us, few of us recognize at the time the incredible blessing of choice and the learnings that carryover.

Stan Partlow of Relentless Effort, LLC is one of the few. His career spans law enforcement, the FBI, most recently, CSO of one of the foremost utilities in the nation, AEP. Stan is a self-described “leadership nerd”. For him, leadership is all about influence, and influence is the art and the science of relationships. And relationships, if harnessed toward a common goal drives outcomes that matter. We also talk about influence that can be manipulative. We touch on leaders who are great at influence but drive people to do horrible things. So we expand the definition of leadership to underline the commitment to honor, integrity, and the common good.

If you are relentlessly pursuing your path to value, you might want to sit in on this great conversation about his life, his learnings, and his passion for a life well lived.

If we are fortunate enough to have the resources and time to help others in need, we truly are blessed. If we live in the land of the free and the home of the brave, we also have the duty to step in and help others find their path and courage to pursue hope, liberty, and happiness.

David Nicastro of Secure Source International is in the business of helping his clients navigate travel around the world as well as providing strategic advice on corporate risk management. He has built his business through a network of skilled relationships around the world.

Recently he volunteered his time, resources, and money, to help extract people from Afghanistan who were close to losing their freedom and their lives.

In our conversation, we step through his journey, his business model, and the events that led to a successful extraction from one of the world's most dangerous countries.

Mark Weatherford is an American cybersecurity professional who has held a variety of executive level positions in both the public and private sectors. He was appointed as the first deputy under secretary for cybersecurity at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from 2011 to 2013. He is currently the Global Information Security Strategist for Booking Holdings.

Mark Weatherford is investing his wealth of knowledge into helping emerging companies become more strategic in the risk, resilience, and security industry. He does this through a portfolio of private companies as a strategic advisor as well as with non-profits such as the National Cybersecurity Center (NCC) where he is the Chief Strategy Officer. The NCC is a non-profit helping with the cybersecurity of startups and state and local government. The Unfortunate 5000. There are three program pillars that help them meet their mission.

1. Education and outreach. The NCC’s Cyber Education Program provides cybersecurity leadership, with two main pillars: K-12 education, NCC Student Alliance, and the Adult Education Initiative. As our nation addresses the critical gap in skilled cybersecurity talent, NCC addresses the importance of cyber education through programs and partnerships that invite students to participate in an ecosystem which encourages them to learn, explore, and build their skills.

2. The Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC), a separate nonprofit organization, has the mission to facilitate collaboration across the global space industry to enhance our ability to prepare for and respond to vulnerabilities, incidents and threats; to disseminate timely and actionable information among member entities; and to serve as the primary communications channel for the sector with respect to this information.

3. Voting security. Secure the Vote seeks to increase voter confidence in the U.S. on the accuracy of vote-counting, and to generate greater awareness of possible solutions to critical gaps in the voting infrastructure. Secure the Vote supports jurisdictions’ efforts to offer a secure, auditable mobile voting option for overseas voters through coordinating and evaluating pilots across the country.

After exploring his portfolio and his work, we examine the technologies that are transforming our world.

If you are a gun owner, you know the drill. Keep the gun in a safe. Especially if you have children. What if there was another, better way?

In Seattle, during one of our many so-called civil demonstrations, a gun was taken from a law enforcement officer’s car. A frightening situation. What if the perpetrator could take the gun, but not be able to use it?

It was after another gun-related incident, a school shooting, that the founder of TrueFire, Justin Gant, sought a way to create a fool proof access control device for a firearm. Pretty tough to do since, according to Justin, there have been very innovations in gun design for many years.

What happened next? A series of design iterations, testing, and test cases that are getting very close to establishing a standard for preventing an unauthorized use of a weapon, without disrupting the experience of the gun owner and the aesthetics of the gun. “It has to not be there”, said Erik Larson, his cofounder.

They are close to imagining a day where no one can access a device that they are unauthorized to use. No more need to lock the gun in a safe. No more frightening incidents around police firearms on the street.

We explore their idea, the stage of their design, and their passion for saving the lives of the gun owner, their friends and family, and law enforcement.

Sam Queeno is the Director of Digital Identity and Physical Security for a major utility: American Electric Power (AEP). We have a great conversation around the journey toward AEPs convergence of physical and logical security, first organizationally, then through the baby steps they are taking with the tools.

The conversation then became centered on something all security leaders consider a less then desirable situation: when something bad is happening and you are the last one to know.

This led to a focus on proactive intelligence, first with the hiring of a leader with an analyst background, the manual gathering of information on persons of interest (POI), and eventually the digital transformation of the intelligence gathering process through the purchase of a protective intelligence platform. (Ontic)

“We now have intelligence served up to us”, said Sam. Public records from disparate sources are organized, stored, managed, and delivered to the key people on Sam’s team. However, what Sam said later was telling. I was looking for business and security executives applauding his team’s progress. He corrected that assumption by acknowledging this is the baseline everyone expects their program to have.  “This is expected”, said Sam.

The Kindness Games was created in September 2020 by Tim Wenzel and Lee Oughton, two security industry leaders. They believed they could help counter-program the disruption, hate, and discontent that had engulfed the world during the COVID-19 Pandemic and the ensuing spike of racial tensions and civil unrest. They exposed their idea to me, Ron Worman, and I fumbled with a spontaneous video recording as my initial contribution. Many others have contributed as well. It has touched something in all of us.

Here is another contribution via our podcast, The Great Conversation. In it you will hear the fullness of my heart for the leaders in this industry who I have encountered in my 20+ years of strategic consulting as managing director of The Sage Group and The Great Conversation. I still sound awkward. It is unscripted. But it is important to keep the kindness moving forward. Thank you Tim and Lee and thank you to The Great Conversation community.