The Great Conversation

The care and feeding of a company creates a highly leveraged vehicle to optimize its path to value: personally, professionally, and within the context of a team known as a business. Great leaders know how to leverage different points of view that originate from disparate cultural backgrounds. This strengthens the vision, mission, and execution. We explore the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion and the power of the perceived other in a great conversation with Dr. Jade Singleton of The Sarah Jane Academy.

Dylan Thomas's famous poem, Fern Hill, is based on his childhood experiences on a farm in Wales. The poem is a celebration of the wonder, magic, and joy of this world that many of us experienced and have a hard time remembering as we grow older.

This conversation is about that young child growing older and continuing to see life through his once-child's eyes. The Editor in Chief of Centennial Media, Michelle Stacey, shares her story of helping her Father die while he sings in his chains like the sea. 

If you were entering a new market in a foreign country, where do you acquire the boots on the ground intelligence to navigate your risks and opportunities?

And how would you consume the information quickly enough to make an impact on your strategies and plans?

We reached out to a CEO who has created a company that provides this intelligence for Latin America. And, serendipitously, he had just posted a blog that provided a visual map of the political ideologies of each country. The post struck a nerve and at the time of this writing had over 5 million views.

Yes, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

James Bosworth is the founder of Hxagon, which provides political risk analysis and bespoke investigations in emerging markets, as well as the author of the Latin America Risk Report, a weekly newsletter. For two decades, Bosworth has written about politics, economics, security and technology in emerging markets, primarily Latin America and the Caribbean. Additionally, since 2004, Bosworth has been the author of ‘Bloggings by Boz’, where he provides analysis and commentary on Latin American politics and US foreign policy.

“It is hard to breathe, and my heart is palpitating like a drum. I am feeling weak – I want to lie on the ground so the world stops spinning for a minute and I can catch my breath.

A thousand thoughts cross my mind. What if this goes wrong? What if I can’t deliver that? What if I can no longer support my family and be there for them? What kind of example will I be to my children? I have everything I thought I wanted, but I am still not happy.”

This comes from the prologue of How to Beat Burnout with Gratitude by Marcelo Carvalho, Vice President of Cybersecurity, Capital One ·

The book was written from Marcelo’s experience in life and business. We have a great conversation with the book in mind by starting with his career at GE where he worked closely to embed a single source of truth cybersecurity architecture into the core methodology of a critical product manufacturing practice. Through this conversation we explore how he did that and find organizational change and transformation theory come to life. Security becomes part of an empowered culture and as well as the engineering process.

Then we turn from this business integration into another way of looking at a single source of truth to guide us personally and professionally. Through this leader’s transparent sharing of his own experience, we find ourselves on our own path to value.

As a strategic advisor to CEOs, helping to create the story that drives their organization and helping them achieve the promise of that story, I created The Path to Value. It was my way of learning. It was my way of teaching. And learning. And teaching.

I have been able to see and feel first-hand, the attempt of leaders with a background in law enforcement, military, and agency, to become strategic advisors to the business. The best ones attempt to learn the language of the operational leaders of the business. They listen to the value proposition these leaders make for their contribution to the whole business. This informs and infuses their work. In many cases, it changes how they approach their profession.

Law enforcement has been through a roller coaster over the years. Its leaders and officers are being confronted with a new generation and new rules that are challenging their morale and their work. I found one leader who seems energized by this time and place. He is learning the value proposition of his “customer” and leveraging them to create a force multiplier in risk management.

His name is Mike Zegadlo. He is Chief of Police at Lewis University in Romeoville, Illinois. He was an educator and trainer before entering law enforcement. He has leveraged this to create relationships in the community and at the school that is changing the perception of law enforcement. It also is elevating their value.

We have a great conversation around the people, process, and tools he is leveraging to bring the art and practice of policing to the next level.

We are data driven. As leaders, we need the right data to make effective decisions. But most of the data that is provided to us only shows what happened. We are making decisions based by staring in a rear-view mirror.

But what if we could forecast the future? What if the data we have collected can be leveraged to provide us scenarios that will provide us a glimpse into the impact our decisions would have on the future of our organizations.

Most of the assumptions we make are based on an incomplete picture.

As we have said in past conversations, CEOs are paid to navigate risk and opportunity. How do I understand all the variables in my future decision making? Do I put my finger in the air and make a choice anyway?!

There are many tools that can help you organize and understand the risk models in your plan. 80-90% of the variables in your decision making can be captured. You can use computing power to go through them, check on the integrity of the numbers, sensitivities, scenario waterfalls that go beyond the numbers. The goal is to understand what the data is telling you before the future happens.

Most C-Level executives have people who run the numbers and the variables. They are often called analysts. They create the frameworks or models for the executives who don’t want to see the data engine and tool, (the single source of truth) but see the data take shape so a decision can be made.

The model architecture can than display functional context so executives can see how the data uniquely applies to them, and they can change data that is unique to them. But each contextualized input than impacts the whole picture. Executive teams who have this ability have the opportunity to see a clearer picture of how the sum of the parts impacts the whole.

In this conversation we go through this and then I ask the data strategist to apply the concept to the Chief Security Officer who is attempting to embed themselves in the contextualized risk and opportunity of the C-Suite. We have a great conversation about a big idea. Can we turn this technology approach into a qualitative tool to manage risk, resilience, security, and the opportunities that can be leveraged from a wholistic view of risk.

Gianluca Bisceglie is the Founder & CEO at Visyond Technologist. He also is a strategist, private equity executive, and entrepreneur with broad international experience across both mature and emerging markets.

Visyond is a cloud-native enterprise SaaS company that transforms spreadsheets into decision-making platforms to drive performance.

Prior to founding Visyond, he worked in Private Equity in the Middle East and in Russia, responsible for the identification, screening, due diligence, and execution of investment opportunities in various industries.

He is a regular guest speaker and a mentor at various universities and accelerators.

Gianluca holds an MBA with Distinction from London Business School and an MEng in Electronics Engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin (Italy).

History can teach us a lot about the repercussions of change. The impact of change is accelerated by the confluence of events, crisis upon crisis.

Imagine if you were able to imagine it before it happened thereby providing the white space to adapt and innovate mitigating the impact of the change.

This is how this great conversation begins with an author that leverages research of our world and imagines scenarios that government and private sector leaders must see to help us all. Rather than a white paper, his “useful fiction” captures the interest and then the mind of the leader.

Peter Warren Singer is Strategist at New America, a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and Founder & Managing Partner at Useful Fiction LLC.

A New York Times Bestselling author, described in the Wall Street Journal as “the premier futurist in the national-security environment” and “all-around smart guy” in the Washington Post, he has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators, by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues, by Foreign Policy to their Top 100 Global Thinkers List, and as an official “Mad Scientist” for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

If you were known to be trustworthy. If you engendered trust from others, how would it change your life and your world?

Our great conversation with a global credibility expert, Mitchell Levy, is really about saving our humanity and changing the trajectory of our lives.

Mitchell is an international bestselling author of over 60 books, and an executive coach at Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches. After interviewing 500 thought leaders on credibility, he published a 7-country international bestselling book, delivered a powerful TEDx on humanity, created courses, and created the Credibility Nation membership community to help those live, learn and surround themselves with others on the credibility journey.

He’s an accomplished entrepreneur who has created twenty businesses in Silicon Valley including four publishing companies that have published over 750 books. He’s provided strategic consulting to hundreds of companies and has been the chairman of a board of a NASDAQ-listed company.

Mitchell is all about finding people he can trust and being trustworthy in return. Along the way he leveraged the term credibility, to describe the 10 values. Those values describe our character and the perception of your character.

Why be credible? If we are credible, we will be humane to one another. If we are credible, we will form relationships that will prosper our lives and those around us.

This is an inspiring conversation, but also a practical one. Mitchell takes us through his process for listening to what you value and what you do and helps you with a brief description that can be used in any social or business setting that immediately underlines your credibility. And then he can show you how to manifest it in the messaging around your personal and professional brand.

Enjoy the conversation.

Words are real things. When conveyed through the written word or articulated in a speech, they have the power to direct and shape individual behavior and markets.

With this mind, I would like to discuss what it means to be a professional. I believe we can agree that it infers a ranking conferred by education, skill, or training. Markets show their maturity by the establishment of formal standards that are then used to judge the competency of an individual or product. If they pass the test, they often get a certification that can be aligned with their personal or product brand.

The largest security association in the world is ASIS International. They are an established Standards Developing Organization. That unique role and its associated processes create the context for incubating and formalizing standards and guidelines that drive behavior in the risk, resilience, and security industry.

In our latest conversation, we asked a member of the ASIS committee that has been reviewing, amending, and, he would argue, enhancing the Chief Security Officer Standard originally published in 2004. It will now be called “Senior Security Executive”.

Our conversation takes us back to a time when Physical Security was associated with gates, guns, and guards. And Cyber Security was an IT Management function. Security was not often viewed as a member of the executive team. Largely, the leaders in the security industry did not have a voice because they did not know the language of business. Thus, people were advocating for a job description for a corporate role. Chief Security Officer (CSO), as a title, became the focus.

This conversation centers around the value of a title vs. a role. The new standard will be debated among the original committee and their advocates and many who have benefited from these early adopters. But this new standard has the opportunity to reframe the role in terms of the business.

It the role is reframed and articulated to the business correctly, it will act as a touchstone for reframing security from a solely defensive role into one that acts as a pivotal advisor to the business and its leaders as they navigate risk and opportunity. The framework is expressed through a published guideline: Enterprise Security Risk Management (ESRM). It describes the enterprise security risk management (ESRM) approach and explains how it can enhance a security program while aligning security resources with organizational strategy to manage risk. Utilizing ESRM security professionals work with asset owners to identify and prioritize assets and risks in order to mitigate those risks and create a holistic security program that supports the organization’s mission.

The gentlemen we spoke with, Michael Gips, Principal of Global Insights in Professional Security has been a top influencer in the industry for over 20 years and is recognized as such by his peers.

Listen to this walk through the history of a profession seeking influence in the vision, mission, and execution of the business. The opportunity is enormous. And it is now.

Enjoy the conversation.

Are you a diminisher or a multiplier? Do you bring all the answers to the table, or do you help others solve problems? Do you believe you are the best voice in the room?

Our guest learned the hard way, that he was a diminisher. He would take a great idea from his staff, acknowledge it, and then suggest how to make it better. After all, that is what great leaders do; make them better.

Bob Tiede is prolific author, blogger, and trainer on how to develop leaders through questions. His book, Leading with Questions has been published in 190+ nations around the world. He has spoken with and met some of the greatest minds around this subject and he shares these stories twice a week on his free subscriber list.

He calls himself a charter member of TA…Tellers Anonymous. And most of us are. We love talking about ourselves and jumping in the arena to help. But we forget the meaningful excavation that can occur with a genuine curiosity in another. through a series of questions. The excavation can produce a rich vein of gold but not if we are filling the hole we were digging with our dirt.

One of the key takeaways from our conversation was the scorecard for a great leader. “Good leaders count their followers”, said Bob. “Great leaders measure the leaders they have developed.”

Bob began this journey in a bookstore when he picked up Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask by Michael J. Marquardt. It was a 2x4 over his head. He was suddenly self-aware. And to seek restitution he turned the book into a training class which was successful. And then he turned it into his first book.

In my practice, we realize that most people start talking after getting an answer to a question. They have learned everything there is to know. But then they miss the answer behind the question. The answer they will never receive. The knowledge never gained. The wisdom never achieved.

Listen to a man with a teller addiction tell his stories. This is not your average ted-talk version of The Great Conversation. You will need some time. But it is worth it. Enjoy.