One of my great joys of being the CTO at OODA is being able to continuously learn from a community that includes our own analysts and researchers but also a network of experts and leaders that have decided to directly support our activities by joining our OODAloop.com network. We engage with this community continuously via online dialog and monthly video sessions as well as other specialized events and activities.
We also seek to share leadership lessons from community members via an executive leadership interview series. Our objective with these interviews is to provide actionable information of interest to the community, including insights that can help with your own career progression. We also really like highlighting some of the great people that make our continued research and reporting possible. For the full series see: OODA Expert Network Bio Series.
Some recent interviews include:
Masha Sedova
Masha Sedova, Co-Founder of Elevate Security. Masha’s life story is a surprise and an inspiration. Read how this Russian-born emigre developed a synergy between left-brain and right-brain to solve one of our toughest problems in Cyber Security – the Insider Threat.
Masha often hears executives opine “Humans are the weakest link”. She disagrees. “It’s a hard problem, and requires good psychology and good data, but I’ve seen organizations where the human element is one of the core features of their defense.”
Paul Becker
RADM Paul Becker, CEO of The Becker T3 Group. Admiral Becker is extremely interested in “People Centricity,” the way technologies interact with and impact users. “As we become more and more connected, there is an up-side to the total user experience, however we are exposed and our privacy is potentially compromised in new ways.”
Joel Wallenstrom
Joel Wallenstrom, CEO and President at Wickr. Joel took a long look at his classmates in the computer lab at Brown University and decided he’d never have the discipline and rigorous engineering habits needed to create a career in technology. Today, he’s the CEO and President of the world’s most innovative secure communications company.
“We need to create a data transport where the service provider can’t get access to your information for monetization. It’s a very complex problem when you consider firewall rulesets being automatically updated by machines.”
Marc Ambinder
Marc Ambinder has spent his high profile career at the intersection of journalism, national security and politics.
“When you are trying to mitigate a crisis, you need to be open minded for things that violate your intuition but might make sense down the road.” Marc advises. It’s not always immediately obvious what the winners will be.
Dr. Jen Buss
Dr. Jen Buss, President of Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
“Ask for the best available science you can get, and then make a decision and live with it. There will always be MORE data later, and you can adjust as needed, but waiting to have ALL the data is a decision in itself!”
Jen Hoar
Jen Hoar has been a part of the OODA expert network for a decade, specializing in the HUMINT skills that can be utilized to derive nuance and information from conversations and interviews. “I’ve come to be surprised at how indispensable listening to your intuition is, including when you have a ton of information at your disposal to make a risk calculus,” Jen says. “You can research and pull data forever, but there is only so much analysis a human mind can do. At some point, you have a pretty good read on the situation, and that is borne of experience and trusting the instincts that come from that.”
Chitra Sivanandam
Chitra Sivanandam followed her dual love of Art and Science to forge an amazing career. Read how she applied her Mission Centric approach throughout.
“You can only enable technology to do a small portion of our communications. At the end of the day, it’s the human dynamic and person-to-person trust that is needed to solve problems.”
Dr. Gaurav Banga
Dr. Guarav Banga assumed he would become a Professor and spend his life in Academia. Read about how his one year sabbatical to Silicon Valley in the late 1990’s changed his life and led to an explosive career on the leading edge of technology trends.
Dr. Christopher Ahlberg, CEO of Recorded Future
Dr. Christopher Ahlberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Recorded Future. Christopher grew up in Sweden. After graduating from High School, he served his mandatory military service with the Swedish Army Rangers. His time consisted of skiing through Swedish woods and mountains, practicing the observation and destruction of Russian supply lines. In the 1990’s they were actively watching the Russians and their maneuvers, poised to respond if they came across the borders.
Tom Quinn
Tom Quinn turned an education in the U.S. Navy into a lifetime of learning. Read how Tom used his military skillsets to prepare him for some of the most important positions in the country: CISO at a the world’s largest financial firms including his current role as CISO at Investment Firm, T. Rowe Price.
“Using data science to create insight is where we are spending a lot of time. Tools and controls are necessary and still effective, but they don’t discover the things you don’t expect to find. You need ML/AI for that – to produce a picture of what is normal and identify what isn’t.”
For Deeper Insights:
We’ve made some exciting changes to our OODA Loop subscription model we would like to bring to your attention.
Previously, site content was restricted to OODA Network members, but we’ve heard from many of you asking for a way to get access to the content without access to other Member benefits such as monthly meetings, networking events, online training and OODA Unlocked deals.
We’ve now introduced a subscription-only option that gives you access to all site content for only $9.95/month or $100/year. This allows you to take advantage of our great premium content on OODAloop.com and our historical national security database at Boyd.AI without becoming a full OODA Network Member.
To take advantage of this offer, please visit this link.