Digital RubiCON: The Fifth Domain...

Operational Risk Management is a continuous process in the context of our rapidly expanding corporate environments. What is one example?

People traveling to emerging markets to explore new business opportunities or new suppliers that will be connected by high speed Internet connections to the supply chain management system. These boundaries of managing operational risk, have not only expanded, they have become invisible.

Ru·bi·con

1. a river in N Italy flowing E into the Adriatic

—Idiom

2. Rubicon, to take a decisive, irrevocable step

This "Digital Rubicon" before us, to take on a more "Active Defense" in navigating the risk across international waters of e-commerce, privacy and legal jurisdictions will forever shape our future.

The decisions made on what constitutes an adversarial attack in the cyber domain, will not be as easy as the dawn of the nuclear age. Policy makers today have to weave the potential implications into a sophisticated decision tree that crosses the complex areas of intelligence, diplomacy, defense, law, commerce, economics and technology.

The new digital "Rule Sets" are currently being defined by not only nation states but the "Non-State" actors who dominate a segment of the global digital domains.

The same kinds of schemes, ploys, communication tactics and strategies are playing out online and what has worked in the physical world, may also work even better in the cyber-centric environment.

Corporations are increasingly under estimating the magnitude of the risk or the speed that it is approaching their front or back door steps.

The private sector is under tremendous oversight by various regulators, government agencies and corporate risk management. Yet the "public-private" "tug-of-war" over information sharing, leaks to the public press and Wikileaks incidents has everyone on full alert.

As the government has outsourced the jobs that will take too long to execute or that the private sector already is an expert, operational risks have begun to soar.

As the private sector tasks morph with the requirements of government you perpetuate the gap for effective risk mitigation and spectacular incidents of failure.

Whether it is the failure of people, processes, systems or some other clandestine event doesn't matter. The public-private paradox will continue as long as the two seek some form of symbiosis.

The symbiotic relationship between a government entity and a private sector supplier must be managed no differently than any other mission critical resource within an unpredictable environment.

Once an organization has determined the vital combination of assets it requires to operate on a daily basis, then it can begin it's quest for enabling enterprise resiliency.

The problem is, most companies still do not understand these complex relationships within the matrix of their business and therefore remain vulnerable.

The only path to gaining that resilient outcome, is to finally cross that "Digital Rubicon" and realize that you no longer can control it.

The first step in any remediation program, is first to admit the problem and to accept the fact that it exists.

Corporate enterprises and governments across the globe are coming to the realization that the only way forward is to cooperate, coordinate and contemplate a new level of trust...

C²: Continuous Continuity in the Enterprise...

Many enterprises today understand the myriad of potential threats to its people, processes, systems and structures. It stands to be better equipped for sustained continuity. 

Business Crisis and Continuity Management (BCCM) is a dynamic change management initiative that requires dedicated resources, funding and auditing.

Certainly the largest organizations realize that the risks are taking on different forms than the standard fire, flood, earthquake and hurricane/twister scenarios. These large catastrophic external loss events have been insured against and the premiums are substantial.

What it is less easy to analyze from a threat perspective are the constantly changing landscapes and continuity postures of the many facets of the organization having to do with people, processes and systems.

The many sources of significant loss events are changing as we speak. Here are a few that should not be overlooked:

• · Public perception
• · Unethical dealings
• · Regulatory or civil action
• · Failure to respond to market changes
• · Failure to control industrial espionage
• · Failure to take account of widespread disease or illness among the workforce
• · Fraud
• · Exploitation of the 3rd party suppliers
• · Failure to establish a positive culture
• · Failure in post employment process to quarantine information assets upon termination of employees

Frankly, corporate directors have their hands full helping executives managing risk and continuity on behalf of the shareholders.

The risk management process will continue to have as big an impact on the enterprise as other key functions because shareholders will be asking more questions about the changing landscape of managing risk for corporate governance.

Since effective BCCM analysis is a 24/7 operation, it takes a combination of factors across the organization to provide what one might call C², or “Continuous Continuity”.

A one-time threat or risk assessment or even an annual look at what has changed across the enterprise is opening the door for a Board of Directors worst nightmare.

These nightmares are “Loss Events” that could have been prevented or mitigated all together.

Most of the best practices talk about a BCCM plan that will be periodically updated. Periodic is not continuous. Change is the key factor here.

What changes take place in your organization between these periodic updates? How could any organization accurately account for all the changes to the organization in between BCCM updates? The fact is that they can’t.

This will change over time as organizations figure out that this is now as vital a business component as Accounts Receivable. The BCCM will become a core process of the organization if it is not already, dynamically evolving by the minute as new change-based factors take place in the enterprise.

As new or terminated employees, suppliers and partners come and go into the BCCM process, the threat profile is updated in real-time. This takes the operational management that much closer to C², or “Continuous Continuity”.

So what?

Boards of Directors have the responsibility to insure the resiliency of the organization. The people, processes, systems and external events that are constantly changing the operational risk landscape become the greatest threat to an enterprise.

It’s the shareholders duty to scrutinize which organizations are most adept at “Continuous Continuity” before they invest in their future.

9/11/2025: Never Forget...

 Where were you on 9/11/2001?  Do you remember…

What this day is about every year beyond these memories, is the renewed vow of vigilance. A time to revisit all the reasons why you have made the decisions you have since that Tuesday morning in America so many years ago.

Never forget that day. Never forget why you wake each morning.

9/11 vigilance is about being adaptive. It is about resilience. For those of us who have never paid the same price as those who have served, supported and are the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters or relatives of those who have, we can never know or really feel what they have. We can only pledge our vigilance in continuing our respective missions.

Most of all. The mission is not America's alone and the entire planet understands this. As they teach the history of 9/11 in the schools of New York City, Haiti, Chile, Pakistan, India and even Saudi Arabia, what do you think the lesson is about?

If it is not about vigilance and resilience, then we are doing our children a disservice. We must be preparing them for the future threats that this globe will be facing in the years and decades before us.

Whether it is the wrath of "Mother Nature" or the evil planning of ordinary people does not matter. We can never predict exactly the day the hour or when and where the next attack will occur.

Whether it will impact our buildings, bridges, rivers, schools or the Internet is unknown. If all of us on this 3rd rock from the sun, have done our job teaching our kids about vigilance and resilience, then we should all be able to have a peaceful nights sleep.

Devoid of nightmares.

"Remember that Tuesday in September across the globe for the lessons we have all learned since that infamous day in New York City, Washington, DC and Shanksville, Pennsylvania."

For the children, teach them the truth…

Proactive Measures: Beyond the Perimeter...

Operational Risk Management requires both proactive and passive measures that encompass a comprehensive organizational strategy. Odds are that you have devoted a majority of your time and resources to this point on the passive mode of preparedness and defense. A reactive and alert oriented focus. The time has come to change the priorities and to increase the allocation of strategy on the "Active Measures." Why?

Stuxnet is and was ground zero for a new generation of digital infrastructure cyber weapons.

The attribution game is still going on with several suspects on who actually developed, tested and deployed "Stuxnet." This is not as important as the realization that sitting back and waiting for the next variant or hybrid cyber weapon to attack your critical infrastructure assets in passive mode.

"The most advanced organizations are now taking the "Proactive" stance to not only detect changes in their environment in a more real-time mode, but they are starting to hunt down the attackers."

There is a decision point where you realize that the passive mode will not buy you time nor will it redirect your attackers to other more vulnerable assets. Your organization will continue to operate with the goal of serving your clients, members or customers yet simultaneously a "SpecOPS" team of internal experts will be monitoring, measuring and exercising tactics to legally neutralize the threat before them.

Commercial and non-governmental entities are creating the means and the capabilities to deter, detect and document who is attacking their digital systems and where they can be found. This intelligence is being shared within the private sector organizations to determine fingerprints, modus operandi and other evidence that is required to effectively hunt down the attackers. The next challenge will be how to package this and make sure that the proper authorities are notified in a timely manner.

There is no longer a solution that is wide enough or in depth enough to be distributed across a whole spectrum of companies or organizations. The answers will be specific, customized to the unique environment and infrastructure that comprises a particular enterprise.

In order for that specification to be developed internally and provided to the correct people, you have to have the internal mechanisms in place to know in real-time what is changing and how fast it is changing from the normal state.

Is your view beyond your own perimeter? Are you looking for the anomalies that are over the horizon and could impact your network soon? It's one thing to look at the changes to your own perimeter but what about the intelligence on providers and ISP's somewhere on the other side of the planet? Do you know where your packets are going and how they are being routed?

"In a savvy Operational Risk Management enterprise, the "Corporate Intelligence Unit” (CIU) is alive and thriving."

A proactive intelligence-led investigation doesn't begin with a phone call from someone who say's, "My system is down" or "What does this Blue Screen mean”?

It doesn't start when your VP, Research & Development suddenly leaves the company for no apparent reason. Intelligence-led operations will continue to be the aspiration of many, yet only possessed by a few.

Facilities Safety: +Beyond Travel Risk Management...

Have you ever wondered where high value assets are located in your facility or on your campus? Especially those that are mobile assets. Have you ever wondered who and where visitors to your offices or campus facilities are located at any given time?

Ekahau is making the answers to these and other questions much easier and at a more rapid response. Safety, production costs, and time-to-market are vital points of consideration for industries, education and campus organizations.

"By being able to easily track people, vehicles, and assets, these factors can be made substantially more safe and efficient."

Founded in 2000, Ekahau is the recognized leader in location-enabling enterprise Wi-Fi networks. Ekahau's mission is to provide the easiest, most cost effective and accurate positioning solutions for locating people, assets, inventory and other objects using wireless enterprise networks. The Ekahau solution tracks wireless laptops, PDAs, VOIP phones, Wi-Fi tags and other 802.11 enabled devices.

Ekahau’s solution allows businesses to keep track of valuable assets and equipment, improve the overall workflow, and improve the levels of corporate security and customer service. With Ekahau, the critical corporate resources, people and assets, will be always available at the right place and at the right time.

As Ekahau's location tracking solution does not require installation of proprietary wireless infrastructure, but can be done individually over the private Wi-Fi network, the deployment cost is kept in minimum, and the overall system payback time is the fastest possible.

Safety and security applications are numerous especially in Healthcare:

• Emergency management - more efficient and faster emergency response

• Patient monitoring - better patient safety and increased throughput

• Workflow management - better staff utilization and increased patient throughput

• Equipment management - reduced need for inventory

• Information delivery - improved workflow, reduced errors

• Billing support & verification - improved revenue capture

Can you think of other Homeland Security and first responder applications using the Ekahau capabilities especially in post event incident management and key personnel tracking inside a closed perimeter? As WiMax and other 802.11 networks are deployed in major metro locations, the applications become wide spread.

People: Beyond Travel Risk Management...

When was the last time your corporate travel department gave you some timely INTEL?

Maybe you got a report on the current level of risk in the foreign region, city or country you are now scheduled to visit in the next few days. What are you going to do if everything “Goes South” in a matter of seconds or minutes?

The Mission

In situations that require instinctive response, you have to go beyond the traditional travel management report on what to do and who to call. You have to be proactive and make decisions on your own.

In order to survive, one must be trained on the authoritative, detailed description of the methods by which terrorist organizations, hostile intelligence services, and criminal groups select and target specific individuals.

Individuals and a team must learn how they can detect and counter potential threats against them, and their sponsoring organizations to better manage these pervasive operational risks.

These threats could include recruitment by a hostile service, kidnapping or assassination by terrorist and criminal elements or espionage by business competitors.

Combined with real-time INTEL, you must receive intense, real-time instruction in surveillance detection and counter-surveillance so that you can take appropriate actions.

Combining real-time intelligence with a focused surveillance and threat detection-training program is exactly what savvy corporate executives and Chief Security Officers are looking for from a single source.

Personnel threat management is a prudent risk mitigation solution. This combination is one key strategy to mitigate the operational risks associated with key personnel in your organization.

Individuals whose occupations place them at risk may include people with access to valuable proprietary information or holders of high level security clearances, the wealthy and those responsible for their safety.

The Take Away

Combine two parts Threat Detection & Management Training with one part INTEL and you have the perfect combination to ensure the successful completion of corporate or organizational missions across the globe…

Innovation: Accelerate to "New"...

Remember the anticipation you had in your heart and mind at the beginning of your first year in college. Or the first day of that new job you had been seeking for months. Or that day your first child was born.

The anticipation of a next phase of your life that you had so much adrenaline or hope on your mind you couldn’t sleep thinking about it.

You see, discovering and experiencing “New” learning, “New’ opportunities, “New” challenges, “New” solutions and “New” insights is holy.

Before you were able to innovate and to accomplish the next anticipated change in your life, you were naive. You have learned to stay alive as you navigate your way across America and towards “New”.

As you join that next organizational phase to learn, to work or to care for others you realize you must continuously innovate:

Staying Alive While Creating Innovation

Key Takeaways

• Innovation is anything that helps your organization accomplish its mission, from small improvements to processes or policies to successful moon shots.
• To develop an innovative culture, you must be an agent of change.
• Creating innovation isn’t about new ways of doing work, it is about the outcomes, results and mission impact of those efforts.
• Speed is a fundamental change often needed to achieve significant results.
• A strategic approach is best, whether creating an innovative organization or developing innovative approaches to assist your organization.

Page 9 - Creating Innovation Navigators - Achieving Mission Through Innovation - Author, Sabra Horne

After you graduated from college, or were terminated from your job or celebrated your first child’s first birthday you had become more innovative.

You are well on your way to that next step, next opportunity or next life commitment with the wisdom you need.

The question now may be whether you have the right resources and the right team to accomplish the mission.

"How will you accelerate your activities so that you will discover whether your resources and your people are correct for your particular mission?"

Become an “Innovation Navigator” sixteen hours a day. Wake up early. Accelerate. Nourish your mind and body. Sleep eight hours a day. Repeat…

QFD: The End of Compliance...

Corporations will continue to be responsible for the criminal behavior and actions of their employees, 3rd party suppliers and other contractors for at least the near term.

In any case that has the defense legal eagles and "Usual Suspects" arguing against the corporate liability issue, the intent is getting cloudy or is it crystal clear?

Even if your Corporate Compliance Programs are in full force and the financial integrity unit is robust in it's efforts, the "Operational Risk" still exists for litigation.

Regardless of the amount of awareness building, education and corporate window dressing, you can't ultimately control human behavior. 

More compliance enforcement and regulatory pressure may seem to be the answer. A voluntary effort to shore up security, soundness and the opportunity for malfeasance in the work place may not be working effectively.

And still the liabilities exist from the plaintiffs and government adversaries to gain compensation. So what is the answer?

The answer lies in the "Enterprise Architecture" of our institutions and the failure to implement the process of "Quality Function Deployment" (QFD). This has been ignored by senior executives and US business because many judge it to be too complex.

One only has to look at the state of our automobile manufacturers versus the likes of Japanese companies to get a sense of the success of incorporating QFD on a comprehensive basis. But now apply this to the culture of an organization and how each individual makes logical business decisions instead of emotion-based decisions.

What many liability issues begin with are the employee(s) who made a bad decision.

QFD in its simplest form is a tool to promote communications. Among peers and connected teams within the organization it provides the methodology to catch errors, omissions and emotional bias early in the process.

As an example, let's take the Request for Proposal (RFP).

Many companies depend heavily on winning business by responding to RFP's. A "deal makers" perception of importance to the RFP determines the effort for the response.

Many times, this is influenced by an incentive plan. The human behavior to accept or decline the effort on an RFP as well as what it takes to push it through the organization for executive sign offs, is not always compatible with the strategic and quality measures of the enterprise.

Over time this will form an unimaginable amount of moral decay within a company. This leads to bad behavior and unethical decisions that people make because the business environment has rewarded it for far too long. So who is to blame here? The employee or the culture and company that has condoned and encouraged the behavior that ultimately damaged someone or something.

Implementing QFD in your information-based enterprise could have a dramatic impact on achieving a defensible standard of care by reducing the likelihood of catastrophic emotional decisions.

More importantly, QFD programs such as this that are directly reducing the likelihood of bad employee behavior and criminal incidents, can reduce the necessity for invasive compliance programs that most everyone wants to ignore.

InTP: “Insider Threat Program”...

 Does your company have a culture of "Organizational Integrity?"

Boards of Directors have the responsibility to insure the resiliency of the organization. The people, processes, systems and external events that are constantly changing the operational risk landscape become the greatest threat to an enterprise.

One key item may have revealed itself in your experience so far.  How would you improve your organization, when it comes to "Incident Response"?

One truth is, that our individuals who have a "C" in their title acronym, (CEO, CSO, CIO, CTO, CISO, CMO, CRO) have been challenged in new ways.  These same leaders have not trained enough, or long enough in this past decade.  Complacency is now becoming apparent again.

Our leadership skills have all been exposed to the vulnerabilities of people, processes, systems and external events. We have been caught off guard on a spectrum of challenging global incidents just these past 24 months.  A crisis spectrum that spans our physical world.  Also to our invisible virtual digital world.

Our growing "Incident Response Spectrum" is wide and vast.  It still requires specialized skills and knowledge to address the kind of change, that will now increasingly be required, in Fortune 500 Global Companies, Mid-Market INC 500 emerging businesses and especially, our Small-Medium Businesses (SMB).

How will we continuously Understand, Decide and Act from this point forward?

"The private sector organizations of the United States are vital to the protection and security of the Homeland.  The private sector owns a majority of our assets and Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) remains a priority as a result of the latest asymmetric threats."

The U.S. National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, emphasizes the importance of public/private partnerships in securing these critical infrastructures and improving national cyber security.

Similarly, one focus of the Department of Homeland Security is enhancing protection for critical infrastructure and networks by promoting working relationships between the government and private industry.

The federal government has acknowledged that these relations are vital because most of America’s critical infrastructure is privately held.  Further, the networks of our global super-infrastructure are tightly “coupled”—so tightly interconnected, that is, that any change in one has a nearly instantaneous effect on the others.

Attacking one network is like knocking over the first domino in a series: it leads to cascades of failure through a variety of connected networks, faster than most human managers can respond.

Many companies have already started the establishment of an “Insider Threat Program” (InTP)…have you?

Independence Day 2025: Service Wisdom...

Who among mortal men are you, good friend? Since never before have I seen you in the fighting where men win glory, yet now you have come striding far out in front of all others in your great heart… —Homer, The Iliad

It was December 21, 2009 boarding a Delta flight with a newly published book in hand on a 10 day Christmas vacation in another country.

“Where Men Win Glory” The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer is a tragic story worth remembering as we contemplate our country the USA and all those brave men and women who have defended our freedom and our way of life.

As we approach our next July 4th weekend, this book caught my eye on the shelf as the thoughts of celebrating our United States of America birthday in 2025 came to mind.

Before you were wise, you as an American can’t truly know or understand it all, until you leave it. Until you travel far away across our globe to other countries and cities to see and feel the differences.

Most recently traveling on a Boeing 787 for 14 hours then another 7 hours to another place near the equator, this first gives you the real context of how enormous our Earth really is.

Secondly, spending weeks time in other countries that are foreign to you, provides you the vivid context on our United States in so many ways.

You learn why America included specific language in its “Constitution” as a new country and you can better understand what influence the United States has had on other parts of the world since it’s 1st birthday.

In early June 2002, Pat Tillman and his brother Kevin appeared at the Military Processing Station in downtown Phoenix, AZ. Later in the day, they signed away their freedom and recited the oath of enlistment, and received their orders to appear at Fort Benning Georgia on July, 8 2002.

Two years later Pat Tillman died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan after leaving behind a $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army.

How will you work in your own years ahead in America or OCONUS, to defend our freedoms and to help defeat evil across our small towns, our cities and vast metropolitan areas?

This 4th of July Independence Day weekend, think about how you will contribute to our great nation.

Maybe it begins by leaving it for a week or two, just to reveal what you will miss.

What you will feel. What you will better understand about the “How and “Why” we were founded as the United States of America.

"We as a nation have so much to learn from others across the world, and yet if you never travel outside your state or even your own country, how will you ever say you truly understand."

When you feel the same calling as Pat Tillman and his brother did about serving your country, figure out how you too will contribute.

How might you make a difference in fighting evil and making our country even better?

Get out there! How will you serve…

Black Swan: Strategy Execution for the "Outlier"...

The Black Swan is a surprise event and the idea that a catastrophe can strike without warning. A professional colleagues recent presentation was a timely reminder of its history and the origins.

What does your organization plan for within the Operational Risk Management (ORM) discipline? The Low Consequence “High Frequency Incident” or the High Consequence “Low Frequency Incident”?

The ratio can tell you what your "Resilience" factor is to Operational Risk loss events. Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) can give you some forward looking view into the risk portfolio, yet what about the resilience to the "Black Swan"?

The “Back Swan” is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics:

It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.

"The astonishing success of Google was a Black Swan; so was 9/11.  For author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives."

"Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

Your organization is no doubt spending time on the Operational Risk Management (ORM) events, that consistently are in the high frequency "In Your Face" category.

In a highly regulated industry sector such as finance, health care or energy the oversight mechanisms require a continuous analysis of risk based upon the criticality of these sectors to the overall resilience of the economy.

"Yet it is the "Outlier" incident, that comes at the most unexpected time that is the real threat and the incident catalyst, that could be your "Black Swan”."

You never know when it is going to be coming, so you must plan, prepare and imagine that someday, it will happen.

Enabling Global Operational Risk Management (ORM) requires thinking beyond models and outside the box analysis of the "Resilience Factor," should an outlier impact the organization, the state or the country. The resources, personnel and systems focused on these areas of risk are small today. But not for long.

Just ask those people who had been working 24/7 since on any major incident.  It could have been the 9/11, "Fukushima"or "Lehman Brothers" crisis. Or more importantly, the plaintiff lawyers preparing their briefs for the inevitable aftermath of litigation over who knew what, when?

Another lesson learned from Supply Chain Risk.  Losing control of sensitive customer data is a fact of life for American companies. They’re collecting more of it, and they are often outgunned by nation state hackers, who are highly motivated to get at it.  Perhaps a vector through your most trusted supply chain vendors and partners.

One prediction into the future could be that litigation will follow all "Black Swan" incidents. If you are in a highly vulnerable industry sector, because it's part of the Critical Infrastructure of the global grid, then you already know you are in the middle of the target zone.

What is amazing to many in the after-action reporting is still how much we continue to under estimate the magnitude of a lack of planning and resources devoted, to these low frequency high consequence events…

Linchpin: Life Journey To R3...

Before you realized how indispensable you had become to the team, the organization or the agency, you made an important decision.

Growing up in life there are several points in your journey where you are so challenged. It all really starts when you are a Junior in High School and the dialogue begins on your next steps after graduation.

The conversation is already about who you are and what you have already achieved. In your studies, with your athletic team and so many others. Were you OK, Good, or Great.

Your next decisions in life will take you where you never imagined. Before you really knew your real talents in life, you began your journey. Was it close to home or hundreds or thousands of miles away?

It was only several years later in your early twenties when you started to see your true ambitions and your God given talents.

Developing real skills that would become so valuable in your life.

Recognizing now your compass point, you dived into making those skill sets even better. The challenges before you became greater both physically and mentally in order to achieve true success.

After awhile, the skill sets you had learned and utilized to pay the rent and the jobs you loathed were not enough. Change was in the wind.

Now you began to understand the value of the “Linchpin”:

“Every successful organization has at least one linchpin, some have dozens or even thousands. The linchpin is the essential element, the person who holds part of the operation together. Without the linchpin, the thing falls apart.

Is there anyone in an organization who is absolutely irreplaceable? Probably not. But the most essential people are so difficult to replace, so risky to lose, and so valuable they they might as well be irreplaceable. Entire corporations are built around a linchpin, or more likely, a scattering of them, essential individuals who are worth holding on to.”Linchpin - Seth Godin - Page 49

Think back to that place in Orange County, CA or Northern Virginia or any other virtual geography where the competition was fierce and you were a “Linchpin”.

After you realized your true abilities, real ambitions and the increasing value to your fellow colleagues for the mission, you were now indispensable.

Life is full of skill building and showing those who pay you that you can be trusted and that you are worth it.

Yet never forget how much your life will be more fulfilled with faith, family and relationships with those you love.

Someday, you will reach that place where maybe you got it all wrong. It could be that it all comes down to this: “Relationships, Results, Rewards (R3).”

Simple as it may seem, you became a linchpin and indispensable because other people respected you, learned from you and enjoyed your guidance on the joint mission…

Godspeed!

Team Mission: Trusted Community...

Just when you think you know it all, you realize that your graduation or promotion is nothing more than a stepping stone in your next phase of your life.

You begin to realize that the experience and the education is vital, yet you only have a glimpse at the value of the entire community.

How will you know your wing man or your class mates even better than you do today?

Your mission now is to continuously grow your relationships within your latest trusted community.

You might begin with a regular monthly meeting online and then add Face-to-Face gatherings every other month.

In both cases you learn your community members names, you begin to know their real expertise and you start the process of building your growing trust.

Imagine for a moment that some in your trusted community will ask you curious questions about your upbringing, where you grew up or what your focus is currently.

Over the course of your time with your community you start to become more genuine, more open to sharing your true thoughts and bold ideas.

Your levels of "TrustDecisions" are becoming exponential.

We are embedded with our end-users listening and learning. We are testing hypotheses and working side-by-side while continuously adapting to ever changing problem-sets, to improve and become more agile.

We are developing new solutions, iteratively and incrementally with our beneficiary clients.

So what?

You now begin to realize who you can really trust and the true value of the time and resources dedicated to your community.

Now is the time to learn again and to seek that next stepping stone towards your next life milestone.

Accomplish it together, not “Alone”. Your community is growing with you and your dreams will soon become even more true…