Cybersecurity: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (June 2019)

How and why cybersecurity isn’t just for techno-futurists

This is one of the first volumes in a new series published by Harvard Business Review Press. Each offers dozens of cutting-edge insights within a business field of greatest importance now when the global marketplace today is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall. In this instance, the field is cryptocurrency.

Each volume anthologizes HBR articles that are among the most relevant and of greatest value. There are fourteen in this volume that focus on cybersecurity, following a superb Introduction by Alex Blau. In terms of value, if all fourteen were purchased separately as reprints, the total cost would be about $125. Amazon now sells a copy for only $22.95. That’s quite a bargain.

As Blau correctly suggests, “This book covers a number of critical topics that will aid any reader in becoming conversant in current and future cybersecurity issues relevant to your role, organization, and industry, and in understanding how you are both part of your organization’s security problem as well as a key player in identifying and managing solutions.”

There is a new paradigm that requires “a different way of of thinking, and this book is designed to help non-technical leaders, including executives, board members, and managers in roles ranging from design and marketing, to human resources and accounting, to get up to speed on the current state of the field.”

Moreover, the field of cybersecurity ” isn’t just for techno-futurists and digital natives. We’ve all been brought into this futuristic present whether we like it or not.”

For me, one of the greatest benefits of this new series is that each volume illustrates what Wayne Gretsky meant when asked to explain why he played hockey better than almost all of his opponents: “They knew where the puck was.  I knew [begin italics] where it was going to be [end italics].”

The information, insights, and counsel in this volume — and in the other series volumes I have read thus far — will help business leaders to see where their competitive market will be in months and even years to come.

Here are two points of my own. First, there are no cybersecurity issues. Rather, ultimately, there are only [begin italics] business [end italics] issues. Also, it is very important to think in terms of enterprise architecture as your organization’s primary strategy when embracing and then acting upon the insights it needs to prosper.