The Value of Small Kindnesses

 

I’ve been thinking about the way, 

when you walk down a crowded aisle, 

people pull in their legs to let you by. 

Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, 

a leftover from the Bubonic plague. 

“Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, 

when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, 

someone else will help you pick them up. 

Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it. 

To smile at them and for them to smile back. 

For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. 

So far from tribe and fire. 

Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, 

these fleeting temples we make together when we say, 

“Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” 

“I like your hat.

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​Source: A poem by Danusha Laméris on the value of small kindnesses:

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The Once and Future King

 Author T.H. White on learning as a cure for sadness:

"The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

Source: The Once and Future King​

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Death: The Final Stage of Growth

A psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler Ross once wrote on how beautiful people are made:

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

Source: Death: The Final Stage of Growth

#growth #people #stage #beautiful

Lessons Learnt from the Uber Data Breach

 

I stumbled on the news about the massive data breach suffered by Uber last week Thursday. The attack was attributed to the notorious Lapsus$ hacking group, which has been increasingly active in recent months. Researchers say the incident has highlighted the risks that can come from trusting too much in multifactor authentication (MFA), as well as unmanaged risk around cloud-service adoption.

 

One well-known tactic that the Lapsus$ hacking group has been known to use is co-opt MFA-circumventing tools into its attack chain. In a statement released by Uber yesterday said the attacker who breached its network last week had first obtained the VPN credentials of an external contractor, likely by purchasing them on the Dark Web. The attacker then repeatedly tried to log in to the Uber account using the illegally obtained credentials, prompting a two-factor login approval request each time.

 

Sadly unfortunate, this can happen to any organization, thus instead of playing the blame-game, it is important to focus our lens on learning how to protect against such attack scenarios for our various organization. Here is what experts think should be done.

 

-       Reet Kaur, a Board Member and Advisor to Cisco highlights the following as controls to be taken:

a. Implement #zerotrust (ZT) - ZT can address these types of attacks by authenticating every transaction.

b. Enable #redteam / #pentesters to test like a real hacker - Uber has a great pentest team, but most security #teams are asked to play offense but in a restricted way so that operations don’t get impacted. A hacker would have no such limitation. Will you like hacker to test it for you or your team?

c. Security controls do fail, so implement multiple - Security is a #people #processes and #technology play. Implement security controls at multiple layers so that if one control plane fails, another one protects. Continue providing #training to employees but don’t expect flawless execution from them all the time as security is only 1 % of their job responsibilities and mistakes may happen.

d. Implement #changemanagement | Separation of Duties | Dual Control - This is to make sure that NO ONE privilege account can disable critical implementations like MFA without going through proper verifications and approvals.

e. Set exhaustion limits on MFA - Failed attempts for more than 5-6 times should disable the account & require call back to enable the account which may reduce risk of MFA getting compromised. 

f. Implement CASB and #cloudsecurity posture management solutions - It is easy to drift out of compliance if you don’t have full visibility into the cloud. Implementing automated monitoring, detection and response can help get an alert or automatically deny unapproved policy changes.

g. Plan for out-of-band #communication - In case your internal communication channels (Slack) get breached. 

 

In addition to the above, Patrick Tiquet, vice president of security and architecture at Keeper Security, says the Uber attack highlights a fundamental misconception around MFA's strength as a method to secure access. "Use of SMS text messages as MFA should be discouraged and never used as MFA for high-value assets," Tiquet says. "The use of an authenticator app, security key, or biometrics are stronger and more effective methods to protect your accounts." 

 

Although, some organizations may have implemented these controls however, it is pivotal to ensure we stay ahead with these multiple strategies in order to avoid being outplaced by the sprawling complexity of modern threats and the actors.

 

 

7 Things Great Leaders Do to Be Courageous

 I learnt bad leadership is usually in part a result of fear. Here are some concrete ways to get beyond it. Here are seven practices of great leadership that you can adopt to begin changing everything.

Embrace the intelligence of the team

Smart leaders recognize that no one can know everything. Instead, they look for and welcome intelligence in team members. You want a variety of experiences and bodies of knowledge to bring to bear on the organization's goals. Encourage people to be smart and active in planning and execution.

Give people authority and responsibility

You can't know everything and you can't do everything. Micromanagement never makes sense when you can train people and then depend on them. Team members need responsibility to grow and have a good relationship to the organization and they need the authority to undertake the responsibility.

Make most of your job to help others

You lose nothing when you help others shine. You may not take the bows every time, and that's fine. It's like being a good parent. Your children will grow into adulthood and responsibility, and yet everyone knows it would have been impossible without your help. Enjoying the satisfaction of enabling the best in others is part of being a true grownup.

Keep an eye on something bigger than you

Fear is strongest when you focus on yourself. Every difficult and setback gets tied into your sense of yourself. Of course you will be scared because problems get wrongly turned into attacks on your very existence. Get the focus on something bigger and more important than yourself, like the goals of the organization and principles of being a good leader.

Remember goals enable means

We usually think of means in relationship to goals. You create and steer an organization to achieve the end. But you can also think of goals as what enable means. You want your team to do great things. If you achieve a big goal, were you planning to dissolve your company? Probably not. Goals become reasons for the people in the organization to thrive and work together.

Love the process more than the results

As part of enabling the means, enjoy the process. The true pleasure of leadership isn't in the results, because their importance will always pass, but in the process of working toward achievement. You oversee and are responsible for a thriving community, and success comes in its everyday management and cultivation. When you don't get the results, go back to the process and find what needs to happen differently.

Recognize that mistakes are essential

Fear of mistakes comes with fear of failure. However, you need mistakes if you're to do the real job of leadership and help improve the organization. Find problems through the evidence of mistakes, work with the team to fix them, and then keep moving on. Where's the fun if everything goes right?

 

Learning Through The Rope

 A couple of months ago I assumed the role of the Managing Director of our company – Techspecialist Consulting Limited. Before now, my understanding of the office is to:

- be at the peak of ones career where you enjoy the luxury of a big fancy office

- have opportunity to network with millionaires and billionaires

- close deals your team have been working on for months with just an appearance,

-Take vacation trips as frequent as you like to rejuvenated

-Give directives to team members and provide them the requisite resources and environment to achieve them.

 

But No! Being an MD is actually more like:

- Dealing with emergency calls at 1am and preferring resolutions at the spot

- making tough decisions and sticking your neck out to take bullet for it

- being there for your team members whenever you are needed irrespective of the time or your mood.

- Chasing your next deal and closing it on time.

- Spending late hours fixing issues when everyone else has retired for the day.

- Being the accountants, marketing officer, Human resources,  project manager,  and alot more at the same time.

- Keeping your cool at all time, this is one is even advance emotional intelligence.

- Hiring and Firing, the first easier done, telling someone they're fired is the most difficult.

-Responsible for everything that happens at company.

 

A decade of experience in the industry should have prepare anyone for this so I thought. Again NO, the MD/CEO role is a whole new terrain you must relearn, unlearn what you know, then keep learning. But the most amazing part of it is, I found out that you don't have to be a superhero or genius to run any firm, just be good at any of the following, then persistently learn others:

·       - Be great at selling to customers.

·       - Be great at selling to partners and stakeholders.

·       - Be great at selling to current and potential employees.

Every CEO/MD need only one of the above to be a good at the jo  But the best CEOs can do all 3. And that's what every business owner should aspire for.

 

Thank you for reading

 

End#

Optimists Make Better Leaders

 Recently, I was listening to Jon Pratlett podcast on “How Optimists Make Better Leaders” and he explained extensively how on our brain processes failure determines whether you'll succeed in the future. I thought to share my lessons here.

An optimistic attitude makes it less likely you'll jump into fight/flight, because you're less likely to interpret a situation as a dire disaster. 

The way you explain setbacks, mistakes, and disappointments to yourself can dramatically affect your outcomes. Whether your thoughts are pessimistic or optimistic will affect the choices you make and actions you take. - Jon Pratlett, a pioneer in using neuroscience in leadership training. 

It is therefore in your interest to cultivate an optimistic attitude about failure, because it reduces your emotional need to have a fight/flight reaction. That frees you to make better decisions, especially when things are happening quickly.

To cultivate an optimistic attitude about failure, you must change your inner dialogue so that it characterizes failure as impersonal, impermanent, avoidable, and limited rather than personal, permanent, inevitable, and pervasive. Here are a few tips on how to stay optimistic amidst failures or disappointments:

1. Don't take failure personally.

Pessimists tend to take failure personally. They believe that the problems are the result of who they are rather than what they did. "I'm a born loser."

Optimists tend to take failure philosophically. They see problems as puzzles they must solve to succeed in the future. "What must I do differently?"

2. Treat failure as a temporary event.

Pessimists tend to see failure as permanent. They believe that trying after you've failed is beating your head against a brick wall. "That didn't work, so why bother?"

Optimists tend to see failure as temporary. They believe that failure is a signal to try a different approach based upon what they've learned. "That didn't work, but this might."

3. Take responsibility for your failures.

Pessimists blame their failures on fate. They believe their failures are the inevitable result of outside forces that they cannot control. "It was bad luck."

Optimists focus on what they could have done differently. They believe that failure results from their mistakes within the context of what's possible. "I played my hand poorly."

4. Keep failure in perspective.

Pessimists bloat failure out of proportion. The failure seems so huge to them that everything else in life becomes unimportant. "Why do these things always happen to me?"

Optimists see failure as limited in scope. They see a failure as a bump or an obstacle on the road to success. "I learned a tough lesson, but it's time to move on."

5. Encourage optimism in others.

Pessimists secretly want optimists to fail. Because misery loves company, pessimists resent those who reject their negative spin. "Stop ignoring reality! This sucks!"

Optimists openly want pessimists to succeed. They know negative spin makes things worse, so they try to chide pessimists to cheer up. "Maybe it isn't as bad as you think."

We all face challenges now and again, but it is our reaction to those challenges that determine how quickly we can overcome them. While everyone may have a natural tendency to have one view or the other, your ability to be an optimist when challenges arise will impact your overall success and outlook on life.

 

As I Got Older, I Realized

1.    Lost Money Can Be Found; Lost Time Is Lost Forever

2.    Learning To Learn, And Changing Yourself Is A Superpower

3.    You Are Not Your Job

4.    Networking Is About Giving

5.    Best Teacher Is Your Last Mistake

6.    Good Manners As Important As Good Education

7.    Do Not Take Your Health For Granted

8.    Be A Better Friend And Value Relationships

9.    If You Are Waiting For A Title To Lead, You Are Not Ready To Lead

10.           A Sponsor Is More Important Than A Mentor

11.                  A Good Story Is Soulful With Sprinkling Of Data

12.                  Stop Worrying About What Others Think Of You

13.                  If You Want An Easier Life, Work On Harder Problems

14.                  Best Teachers Are Life Long Students

15.                  Imposter Syndrome Is Real

16.                  Fight Against A Sense Of Entitlement

17.                  Half The Battle Is Showing Up

18.                  Love And Cherish Your Parents By Giving Them Your Time

19.                  Success Is Not Accidental

20.                  The Best Views Are There For Those Who Love The Climb

21.                  Lucky People Work Harder

22.                  Takers May End Up With More, But Givers Sleep Better At Night

23.                  Memorizing Is Not Learning

24.                  It Is Okay To Look Back, Just Don’t Stare

25.                  Knowing Is Not Acting

26.                  Straight Roads Do Not Make Great Drivers

27.                  Good Listeners Hear The Unsaid

28.                  Be The Person That You Want To Follow

29.                  Do Not Limit Your Contribution To A Job Description

30.                  Take Care Of Your Parents - The Best Gift That You Can Give        Yourself

31.                  Customer Service Is Not A Department

32.                  In The Long Run, The Optimists Do More

33.                  Never Ruin an Apology With Excuses

 

 

 

Acing through my root

I was born in Lagos(my first home), grew up (adolescent) at Iponri Estate in Surulere. Surulere had and moulded me into adulthood before Abuja beckoned and provided me home and then gave me a reason to hussle and earn a good living.

Ilorin started me out with a view of life that is simple, contented and happy. Ajase Ipo provided home to my ancestors and grate grand parents. While Zaria showed me a mix of what is possible as long as I still breathe. It's safe to say Zaria prepared me for what was to come in when came back to Abuja and life as whole.

It was in Zaria that I realized I could be any kind of human I want. The ancient town taught and showed me the value of choice and the price to pay for each I make. So, I walked back into Abuja prepared or so I thought. Luckily, in Abuja, like many who broke in here, I started out from the suburbs, then moved to one of the highbrows both on the bills of those kind enough to host me. My Independence in the capital city took me to somewhere between the two possible extremes of Abuja; neither highbrow nor suburb😄. In all, there's a bit of everywhere in me including Kano that treated me with so much kindness during my one year service. 

My career choice in Abuja took me round the country. Couple of months spent in Yenagoa and Rivers provided with some riverine experiences. The plateau of Jos taught me more about life and nature. While the vast land mast of Niger State gave me an insight into how big a country Nigeria is. 

Truly, places have their lessons and they in no small measure, shape us.

Thanks for this little journey back to forward.

#resilience #hope #grateful #Nigeria