The Cybersecurity Playbook

CHAPTER 4Stop the Line

Cybersecurity is viewed as a critical defensive effort for our business. If you think about what we do and what we provide—water—in the event of something compromising our systems and if our customers lose faith in our ability to provide good, clean, safe drinking water, it’s catastrophic.

CEO, Utilities Company

The year was 2017. We saw the beginnings of an investigation of suspected tampering by Russians in the U.S. presidential election. We witnessed the rise of the #MeToo movement and the subsequent fall of entertainment and business tycoons crushed under its weight. We endured catastrophic losses, courtesy of Mother Nature’s wrath, with some of the most devastating hurricanes in recent history, including Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

Amid all this turmoil that seemed to characterize 2017, we lost a luminary whose contributions to business will remain with us long into the foreseeable future. Tatsuro Toyoda, son of the founder of the Japanese automotive company Toyota, passed away quietly and without much media fanfare on December 30. He was 88 years old.

You’re more than likely familiar with auto giant Toyota. But you may not realize how profoundly one of its forefathers, Toyoda-san, influenced the way you and I do business today.

To understand Toyoda’s impact, we must go back to a different era—the early 1980s—when he took the reins of his company’s first American factory. At the time, American auto manufacturers dominated in market share. General ...