Robert F. Kennedy once said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
Another inspirational quote on the topic of failure comes from best-selling author Denis Waitley: “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”
I have been fascinated by this topic of studying failures in careers, and especially cybersecurity leadership decision-making, ever since I became a state government CISO in 2002.
Why?
I’ve had plenty of failures in my career. In fact, I wrote a piece for CSO Magazine in January 2006 entitled “Are You the Party Pooper?” because (as I wrote at that time) “I learned that many internal customers thought of me as the party pooper. I was the guy who always said, ‘no.’”
Those early CISO mistakes almost cost me my job, but they also taught me many valuable lessons on how to lead, build a team, mentor others and much more.
Fast forward to December 2023, and Carter Schoenberg, a friend and respected…
