Cybersecurity for Executives: A Practical Guide

7.0PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT

If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.

Red Adair¹

7.1 FINDING THE RIGHT FIT

Having a great strategy complemented by great plans, policies, and procedures gets you absolutely nowhere without the right people, properly trained, with the right attitude, in the right positions doing the right jobs.

As an executive, one of your principal responsibilities is to select and align the right talent to execute your organization’s mission. Throughout your career, you likely have seen the negative effects wrought by ill-prepared employees or ill-fitting personalities being overmatched by difficult tasks. In today’s highly competitive market where organizations like yours rely on cyberspace capabilities to gain and maintain competitive advantage, you can’t afford to have ill-prepared employees or ill-fitting personalities. You have to build a team that delivers results that are effective, efficient, and secure.

Cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue handled by your technical staff. As earlier chapters in this book demonstrated, cybersecurity is now a key concern that affects everyone in your business, both at home and in the office. Cybersecurity issues at home can spill over to your business and vice versa. It touches every business function and activity and presents very real (and potentially existential) threats to your business and your livelihood. Cybersecurity must be a key component of your ...