Secure Value by Preventing Bad Things From Becoming Crises Cases

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We are not going to prevent all bad things from happening in all areas of life including the weather (as I sit semi-snowbound in my home office) and information security. I'm using the downtime to catch up on some business reading.

One article that struck me as sharable to the executive and business leader trying to secure value was a Management Tip of the Day for Feburary 16th from the Harvard Business Review: 3 Components for Preventing Crises:

1. Pattern recognition. Encourage your people to share information and make connections so that you can recognize when a problem is forming.

Part of this is ensuring that you have a good news travels, bad news travels fast culture. If your employees are scared to deliver bad news you won't get the information you need to see an emerging pattern in time to prevent the crises. You also need to have awareness of what to do and visibility for what "normal" is, so that abnormalities can be identified.

Does your behavior as a leader support bad news making it to your desk in time?
Are you staff aware of what their role in the information security process is?
Do you know what "normal" looks like in your business environment? On your network? In your call center? In your applications?

2. Broader communication. Communication across silos is not easy, but it should be mandatory so that critical information reaches all parts of an organization.

Again, the ability to communicate across silos is a cultural issue. Do you promote cross cultural collaboration? Or do you prefer that information and data travel up and down a chain of command?

3. Trusted leadership. Leaders need to react quickly when a problem surfaces. Showing that you c are about an issue is critical to gaining your employees' trust in your ability to handle problems.

And I believe that showing you care about how the company handles its critical data during good times is a precursor to whether you'll be believable to your employees and customers (and maybe the courts!) if something bad happens. Trust is critical to securing value. The trusted leader accepts responsibility for the company's stewardship of critical data. Are you daily behaviors regarding information stewardship the kind of behaviors that will lead employees to the conclusion that you care about protecting data?

Additional information is available from Harvard Business Review at http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/managementtip.php?date=021610.