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Quick Note: Ownership

leadership management security

What we really want as security professionals

I was in a meeting with a handful of senior leaders today when I got hit in the face with a brick of a realization…. as security professionals, the thing that we most often fight for is not:

  • budget
  • patching
  • best practices

It’s true ownership. It’s really easy to create a list of defects, point at a person who is “accountable” for those defects, and shine a bright light at them. It’s VERY difficult to build a company culture where people OWN the processes and technologies they work with on a daily basis.

One thing that I loved about Grubhub was our definition of ownership. You don’t just manage your service, and point to an upstream dependency when it fails. You learn from the failures, detect them in the future, and work with your partners so that you’re both more resilient in the future.

True owners don’t need someone shining a flashlight in their face… they need a partner to help make things better together.

(And if anyone has a link to a quote on ownership at Grubhub - please share. It was very well written)