Grateful: Appreciate, Reflect and Communicate...

Now that you have had a few days and been challenged to reflect on what and who you are grateful for in your life, how will you change?

The “Thanksgiving” holiday brings out some of the most interesting behaviors in people. It is now a time to reflect on what you have learned about the others in your clan, your community or your own household.

How might you take the words you acknowledged while talking to people about your“Gratefulness” and now putting those sentences into something more positive?

Rewarding outcomes for others and for yourself.

If you said you were grateful for your work/job as an example, how might you enhance the work you are doing each day to use your job as a platform.

A work platform for increased quality to create, design and deliver better solutions that provide an even more valuable result, for someone or some entity.

Is your work just one step in a multi-step process? How might you make the process more efficient, more effective or even more reliable?

If you said you were grateful for your family, how might you improve the relationships you have with your siblings, your cousins and even your Mother or Father?

What is just one way you could show your family member, that you trust them, love them and appreciate their continuous contributions?

Will you change your behavior going forward, based upon all that you have learned this past week?

Will you acknowledge your own thoughts and feelings about others, yet make the changes necessary to improve your important and vital relationships?

These two words “Thank You” are far more powerful, than you may ever realize.

These words are the beginning of a dialogue about something that is important or so vital to you.

Acknowledge it in a way, that the other person truly knows you are grateful.

Grateful adjective

grate· ful | \ ˈgrāt-fəl

Definition of grateful

1a : appreciative of benefits received

b : expressing gratitude grateful thanks

2a : affording pleasure or contentment : pleasing

b : pleasing by reason of comfort supplied or discomfort alleviated

Look them right in the eyes when you say it, or even with an appropriate emoji. If you have been successful, you will know it. Hopefully, they will acknowledge your kind words in some way.

Our personal and work environments are moving so rapidly and the ability to slow down just enough to actually Appreciate, Reflect and to Communicate effectively, is such a continuous challenge. Yet worth every minute of focus.

“Thank you” for all that you are doing, to make this place more effective, more livable, more comfortable, more enjoyable, more laughable, more loving, more faithful and more peaceful. You know who you are…

Metadata: Guardians on the Front Lines...

Continuous Continuity (C2) in your particular enterprise is a priority you shall not just focus upon during our U.S. Infrastructure Security Month.

Last week here, we reviewed Ten Steps your organization can practice on a regular basis to enhance your focus on Continuous Continuity and simultaneously your overall Operational Risk Management (ORM).

Let’s circle back to a few vital areas to emphasize as we increase our production and consumption of corporate or organizational “Data”.

Of Metadata. “Data that provides information about other data”.

The details on the creation date, time and application generating these words as they were originally written, is just one small example. What about the actual platform and the browser that was used:

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:94.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/94.0

Screen Resolution: 1680 x 1050 (pixels)

Browser Dimensions: 1005 x 853 (pixels)

Cookie Status: Enabled

You understand that the data you can’t see on your screen and the data you may not even care about, is present, and that the metadata is being collected by some entity somewhere.

The amount of data and the speed of data is now overwhelming our global digital world we live in the year 2021 and beyond. The question remains, So What?

If you are a seasoned General Counsel (GC) today with a Fortune 1000 organization doing business on a global basis, your Blackberry :) must be "buzzing" every few minutes. Just the legal risk alone being encountered will always be a factor of the number of deals, the number of employees and the growing number of countries you are operational.

As a corporate GC of a global enterprise, you have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the enterprise from all adversaries, such as the rogue employee, the government regulator, competitors, digital hackers, nation states and all of the plaintiff class actions.

The Rule of Law in your organization is in your hands. How you transfer the "Talking Points" on ethics, compliance and legal messages to your employees, partners, suppliers and adversaries is ever more critical.

The true effectiveness of your relationship with internal partners such as your CEO, CFO, CSO, CISO and Internal/External First Responder leadership could mean the survival of the company itself.

When was the last time you as a GC took the “Ethics," “Compliance” and "Rule of Law" program directly to your employees in face-to-face sessions?

How might you provide your employees, partners or 3rd-Party suppliers with the first hand opportunity to meet, greet and engage with the General Counsel of your particular enterprise?

By doing this, you are directly engaging with the people on the front lines, to be our "Guardians" for your company and to build trusted relationships with all of them.

Get out There.

(C2) to Secure your Enterprise: Here are ten steps to Practice Continuous Continuity...

Here are ten steps to Practice Continuous Continuity (C2) to Secure your Enterprise: 

1. Develop and practice a contingency plan that includes a succession plan for your executive team. 

2. Train backup employees to perform emergency tasks. The employees you count on to lead in an emergency won't always be available. 

3. Consider creating offsite crisis meeting places for top executives and operational teams. 

4. Make sure employees—as well as executives—are involved in the exercises so that they get practice in responding to an emergency and following orders in potential chaos. 

5. Make exercises realistic enough to tap into employees' emotions so that you can see how they'll react when the situation gets stressful. 

6. Practice crisis communication with employees, customers and the outside world. 

7. Invest in an alternate means of communication in case the phone networks go down, including wireless devices. 

8. Form partnerships with local emergency response groups—firefighters, police and EMTs—to establish a good working relationship. Let them become familiar with your company and site. 

9. Evaluate your company's performance during each test, and make changes to ensure constant improvement. Continuity plans should reveal weaknesses. 

10. Regularly test your continuity plan to reveal and accommodate changes. technology, personnel and facilities are in a constant state of change at any company.

Organizational Design: Transition Speed into Action...

How would you change the design of your organization in order to accelerate your transition speed into action?

Now that you have just completed the phase of creative solution development that has produced five new designed prototypes, what is next?

How fast will you be able to put these into action with others on the front lines?

When might you and your organization deploy a cadre of people who have a single mission?

The “Mission Leaders Team” shall take the new designs and will be putting them into the air, onto the cloud server or in the hands of the true operators, who are in the game each hour of each day.

You see, your problem is not the pace of your innovation within your organization. It is the ability to more rapidly apply what you have learned, from all of your failed experiments in the field. It is the current design of your organization that requires new change.

Your ability to get the new tangible answers into operation with your most talented and able people is your next summit. Your next finish line. Your next destination. Who are these people?

The five new prototypes shall be demonstrated and documented with quiet care, so that you might expand the testing, the experiments in new environments. Why?

To learn faster than your adversary. To achieve market dominance before your competition. To deliver solutions to those in need just-in-time.

As the "Mission Leader" in your organization, you shall design the methodology and the process for others to view in real-time.

Allow each other to see, feel and witness the outcomes of the idea, the invention or the intended solution.

So what?

The transition phase is now before you. Take it and deploy it across the organization to those geographic locations that will allow you to learn faster. To decide with new insights gaining speed with the correct operators in the field.

Understand. Decide. Act.

Repeat.

Let us know what you learn and when you learn it. We might just be able to take this and apply it to our own team, in our own Area of Responsibility.

Now get out there…Onward!