A Cultural Paradigm Shift

Our modern concepts of leadership and motivation are rooted in the experience of early efforts to create large military, religious, and feudal organizations, such as the Roman Army, Catholic Church, and Kingdom of England. The primary basis for motivation in these traditional centralized, standardized, and formalized bureaucratic organizations has been fear. The main benefit of bureaucracy and leading by fear is to create a control system that ensures minimum levels of effort, organizational commitment, and performance. However, fear-led bureaucratic leaders can prevent people from feeling good about their work and lead to avoidance behavior, including feelings of powerlessness and low confidence, low commitment, enthusiasm, and most importantly, is the effect of reduced trust and communication so that important problems and issues are hidden or suppressed.

Cyber security is one of the suppressed issues

The “bad actors” are challenging corporate sustainability and requires a public/private partnership that proactively takes on the responsibility of creating conditions that limit the potential harm to our society as well as our corporations.  This means protecting our critical infrastructure as well as our supply chain, our recreation venues, and our schools.

We only hear of a few “high-profile” cases of cyber-attacks as the vast majority go unreported.  There are many reasons for suppressing the news that you have been hacked…the following are just a few:

1. Negative effect on stock prices
2. Client concern about their stored data (financial, habits, health records, etc.)
3. Loss of income due to fear of purchasing and exposing personal data
4. Fear of job loss by senior leadership that are charged with protecting employee and customer data
5. Concerns by employees from potential stolen data
6. Increase in the cost of business continuity or ransomware insurance
7. Lost contracts with government and others due to exposure of inefficiencies in security
8. Cost of bringing security measures up to par to prevent such incidents
9. Ego, the fact that senior management cannot admit that they could be compromised.

Now that we are so tied to our devices that connect us to each other, I propose that we are entering an age of unprecedented “interconnectedness.”   It is the beginning of a new age… the age of the “cyber soul.”

The “cyber soul” is the interconnected relationship people and companies have with each other.  Over the decades, it has been well defined by pundits as bigger offers and better protection, however, in today’s cyber world, even a lone wolf can get access to ransomware and other technologies as a service.  This is leading to even the largest corporations to realize that they are never too big to be hacked!

We can come away better

As every problem is an opportunity to explore our creative potential, there is no need to anchor ourselves to the unchangeable. Trying to solve problems is how we keep bettering our competencies, and how we broaden our minds. We begin to understand that one must not operate only from the profit and a sub-optimized view, but rather from mutual benefit philosophy. In fact, effective change requires living what we think, reinforcing how we speak and proving our intentions through our actions.

There is growing realization that cyber security is not a technological problem and cannot be easily mitigated by throwing more technology at the problem.  The realization that we will never restore the previous “normality” and the need to facilitate structural change is necessary to develop new criteria for securing our way of life into the future.