The Great Conversation

I had a great conversation with a former FBI Special Agent and Head of Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program (RET) who spent 21+ years of working counterintelligence.

I was intrigued on what he had learned about reading people. What I was not prepared for was his relentless flywheel of learning that he has developed to become a better person and leader.

The tools he developed are used to achieve self-mastery in observation, communication, and execution from a foundation of humility and transparency, whether it is with your perceived enemy, an employee, or a friend.

Robin Dreeke spent 21 years in the FBI before starting The People Formula and authoring a number of books on leadership and trust including It’s Not All About “Me”, The Code of Trust, and his latest, Sizing People Up.

As you can imagine, you can’t help but immerse yourself in his world and come out a better person as a result.

Enjoy the conversation.

No one wants to see this picture. (Podcast listeners, go to our blog on March 15, 2020). It offends us. It depresses us. But it is a graphic example of Gallup’s recent poll on the disengagement of the workforce. In this conversation, we find two amazing leaders who decided to change that narrative in their own unique way. It is a conversation of hope in the midst of the Great Resignation.

“For the first year in more than a decade, the percentage of engaged workers in the U.S. declined in 2021. Just over one-third of employees (34%) were engaged, and 16% were actively disengaged in their work and workplace, based on a random sample of 57,022 full- and part-time employees throughout the year. This compares with 36% engaged and 14% actively disengaged in 2020, a year with unprecedented highs and lows.” Gallup Survey

The data scares you, but it is not surprising. In the middle of the “Great Resignation” Gallup’s new survey says that only a third of employees are engaged in their work. That means 66% are not. And 16% are actively disengaged. Actively disengaged means feeling miserable at work and spreading negativity to their colleagues.

But what if you found a way to change that? What if you excelled at engagement? Gallup suggests it could be a force multiplier in improving your profitability, your productivity, your turnover, and your absenteeism (which costs businesses a half trillion a year).

Imagine my surprise when I found a security team leading the charge in changing their corporate culture. And they did it in a highly creative and innovative way. First in their own department and then across the company.

Join me for a great conversation with the former CSO of one of the largest utilities in the United States, Stan Partlow, and one of his former executives who had the idea 5 years ago, Sam Queeno, and led the ground-breaking new initiative that is still operating today.

I have had the opportunity to meet many of the executives who planned on attending the Protective Intelligence Summit hosted by Ontic last month. Staying true to the summit’s theme to “widen the aperture of security”, I had been meeting with HR, CISOs, CSOs, CCOs, and Chief Legal Officers (CLOs).

I also was preparing to facilitate a discussion around uniting Legal and Security at the Summit. Before I did so, I decided to meet with Ontic’s CLO.

Scott Shepherd has a unique background.  He had been the CLO at Khoros and the VP of Legal at Spredfast. Prior to Spredfast, he was a General Counsel, law firm partner, and USMC Lieutenant Colonel. His educational background spans public policy, political science, and law.

We sit down, discuss the article, his experience and his learnings from the industry and the survey.

Enjoy the conversation.

When we were preparing to participate in a Protective Intelligence Summit hosted by Ontic, Steven Antoine and I decided to have a great conversation about some of the agonizingly persistent questions around the functional role of the risk, resilience, and security leader.

Steven is the Vice President of Global Security for the North American Pepsico organization. Before that, he was the CSO of Global Assets Protection for Yum! Brands. At Yum!, we encountered a marketing philosophy driven by Yum’s former CEO called R.E.D. And we began to apply it to our views of the Security Industry.

R: Relevance – Is Security relevant to the organization? Is it mission critical?

E: Easy – Is Security easy to understand and use? Is it easily translatable to the navigation of risk and opportunity that the C Suite is facing real-time every day?

D: Distinctive – If you benchmarked how Security partners with the C Suite, would your Security organization stand out? Would it be distinctively valuable?

As you listen to this great conversation, you will see a naturally inquisitive mind and a natural leader asking the tough questions about security’s role in the organization and ultimately its value.

Enjoy the conversation.

Brian Tuskan is a senior executive leader (CSO) for a Fortune 500 organization that we have known since the early days of The Great Conversation. His ability to absorb new technology, leadership skills, and industry experience and learnings, has allowed him to grow personally and professionally.

We caught up with him to understand what was front of mind for him and to help us define security’s evolving role in the era of digital transformation, threat intelligence platforms, work from home, and the breadth and depth of global risk conditions.

Brian is also the founder and host of Cop to Corporate, a webcast featuring strategies for law enforcement professionals seeking to transition to the corporate world.

I rarely meet people who are trying to anticipate change in a healthy way. The one’s who do practice a rigorous discipline of inquiry without assuming what they have learned is enough to navigate the risks and opportunities of tomorrow.

Nathan Mills, a senior enterprise risk management executive in Zoom is such a person. With a unique background in technology, business operations, intelligence, and security, he is helping his organization to live their group’s mission of "Protect to Enable"

His group is blazing new ground in developing a world-class physical security and business resilience program inside a converged cyber-physical security organization.

Enjoy the conversation.

Dale Buckner, CEO of Global Guardian, a risk management, and advisory firm, is a trusted supplier to global organizations around the world.

We have been following Dale for some time, and his public briefings are enormously powerful.

This great conversation is relevant to CEOs and their board of directors. It revolves around the question: “What have you done over the past two years to create competitive advantage from this generational shift that is occurring around the world?” This shift is impacting how we model our businesses, interact with our employees, and how we finally integrate security into the primary mission of the CEO and their teams: to leverage risk and opportunity to create a valuable company.

Enjoy the conversation.

There are recurring questions that risk, resilience, security, and business leaders have been asking themselves for years. They are common themes we hear at the seminars and conferences alike. Questions like:

• Is security mission critical to the execution of the business?

I will be providing some of the answers I received from a recent polling of the Great Conversation community. I also want to share this recent conversation I had with the Founder and CEO of Concentric Security, Mark Oakes. He takes a multi-disciplinary, creative look at industrial security, some of the stories security practitioners have been telling themselves for years as well as some new, useful mental models we can use to improve our thinking processes.

This is a fascinating and great conversation around how we see, know, and act as both security professionals, as human beings… and as leaders. These insights can positively impact the stories we tell ourselves in the future.

One of the key disciplines I have leveraged and taught falls under a personal philosophy of mine: “Never waste an opportunity to learn”

On February 21-23, Ontic, a leading platform for protective intelligence, is hosting a thought leader forum. It promises to be an inflection point for the organizational leaders who influence the policies, procedures, people, and tools around proactive risk management. We are talking about CSOs, CLOs, COOs, CFOs, and CEOs. Risk is now everyone’s business because it impacts the reach and resilience of business which also impacts its brand.

My discipline is to go over the agenda, research the speaker’s backgrounds, research the subject, and then determine the questions I have on the subject matter. I must cultivate an inquiring mind by doing my own research or I become a consumer instead of an active listener. The good news is I asked a fellow attendee who is an executive with a risk management company to review our options with me.

Chuck Randolph has been a senior director of threat intelligence and executive protection at Microsoft and is now Senior Director of Operations for an international risk advisory and executive protection firm called AT-RISK International. We have a great conversation around our potential learnings and the quality of the speakers and the topics.

Most people are looking for something. Early on it could be as simple as love from a parent or friends. It might evolve into living vicariously through our heroes. Then attention naturally focuses on a career path, a search for a combination of recognition, or power, or wealth.

But very few of us think about our end of days.

I was originally attracted to Nick Brossit, Ed.D. through a posting on LinkedIn where he was sharing his journey dealing with pancreatic cancer. He has over 32 years in formal public education – 22 years as a Superintendent in two different school districts in Washington State. He also generously gives of his time as a leadership coach and consultant.

We have a great conversation about his path to value, personally and professionally. We touch on servant leadership, having a north star, and the nature of wholeness as a platform to lead others. And, finally, we come full circle to how that path prepared him for a cancer diagnosis that could eventually kill him.

 I was humbled by his gift, his grace, and his faith.