Leaders Must Learn From Others’ Mistakes Too

Learning from our mistakes is popular advice and I find it interesting that the majority of the advice and the majority of experts’ quotes have two common themes:

• If YOU are taking risks and moving forward, YOU will make mistakes.
• When YOU make mistakes, the key is not to make the same mistakes twice.

Good advice but not updated for today:

• Today’s challenges include serious economic challenges, accelerating threats and constant changes.
• Today’s leaders will not live long enough to make all the mistakes on their own so today’s leaders must do a better job of learning from the mistakes of others.

Headlines, lessons learned and case studies seem to be occurring almost every day and the incidents are showing alarming and dangerous trends in two key areas:

• Bad guys are taking advantage of known gaps and weaknesses that organizations are not proactively addressing
• Individuals (at all levels) and organizations are making the same mistakes over and over leading to expensive and embarrassing results

While a lot of leaders are saying a lot of the right things when it comes to mistakes and lessons learned, it is time for today’s leaders to take proactive steps to implement and maintain customized knowledge based on their own lessons learned as well as lessons learned from mistakes made by others.

Another good reason to learn from the mistakes of others is impressive ROIs!  If it is someone else’s mistake then your costs are $0 and if your proactive efforts reduce, eliminate or prevent thousands or millions of dollars in expenses, fines and lawsuits…why wouldn’t you?

If Tiger Woods Can’t Do It…What makes you think you and your employees can?

As good as Tiger Woods is at golf, even Tiger could not take 8 months off and then perform at the level he needed to be successful and win this past week’s tournament.

So here’s a question…

Why in the world would management think their employees can make winning decisions for their organization if they have training every twelve months??

While Tiger’s results help, the results we are seeing in the headlines today (fines, breaches, lawsuits, losses, layoffs, etc.) clearly show that organizations are not proactively training and preparing their people (management, employees, contractor, partners, vendors, etc.) to win.

An organization’s success and ability to win have a lot in common with winning at golf including:

• Practice is the key to success in golf and business
• Using the right tools (clubs) in different situations is the key to better results
• 18 holes of golf today is not the same as 18 holes of golf tomorrow
• You need to practice all types of “decisions/shots” to be ready for your round
• A caddy with good “course knowledge” can make all the difference

 If organizations want to win, they must become “the caddy with customized knowledge” and help all personnel to be better prepared with proactive training to ensure better knowledge and more repetition to ensure better decisions as situations and challenges change from “shot-to-shot”.

Is Encryption the Panacea? Statistically Better Knowledge is Needed…

I was reading a blog the other day and the question presented to readers was do you believe adoption of end-to-end encryption technology throughout the payments industry is the panacea to protecting personal information? 

Some experts have indicated that end-to-end encryption is the way to protect sensitive and personal information from being hacked in situations like TJX and Heartland Payment Systems and others.  The Ponemon Institute even released a new survey (sponsored by PGP – an encryption company) saying that their research shows that breaches are more expensive and can lead to losing customers and indicated that a strategic and more holistic use of encryption is the technology most implemented after a breach.

While I am not against encryption as a way to protect unauthorized access to sensitive and personal information, I am not convinced that increasingly sophisticated ‘bad guys’ who have successfully infiltrated an organization’s network and their servers will have much problem accessing encrypted data.  

No doubt technology is needed in securing sensitive and personal information, but implementing more technology is not the answer unless your goal is to keep out the novice ‘bad guys’.

Better results will come from better decisions which require better knowledge at the individual level. 

Implementing individual-level knowledge so individuals (technical, non-technical, management, vendors, contractors, etc.) can make better decisions is the key to addressing a much bigger problem – ‘people, process and technology gaps’.  Organizations can have the best technology money can buy, but lack of awareness (of customized and organization specific knowledge) and lack of acceptance (accountability and understanding) of procedures and processes continue to weaken the best technologies and strategies.

Bad guys will always try to take advantage of negligent insiders and growing awareness gaps between people, processes and technology. Proof of this comes in the Ponemon survey which reported that most breaches were not due to hackers, but negligence of insiders. Breaches by third-party organizations such as outsourcers, contractors and consultants were reported by 44 percent of respondents, more than double the percentage in 2005.

So with all the breaches statistics and lessons learned, doesn’t it make sense to reduce the ‘people, process and technology gaps’ with better knowledge at the individual-level?