How to get a CxO:s attention
Nov 9th, 2008 by Jesper Kråkhede
I have had a terrific week at Les Fontaines where I attended a course named Boardroom Enterprise Architecture. From my point of view it was the best course I have attended for many, many years. That said we had a quite interesting discussion regarding how to sell security to CxO-level.
The general opinion was of course to not get technical and that is also the case from my experience from GIO. But after that we ran into a littel bit of an argument if fear or trust was the way to go. We all had different experience in this topic but the general agreement was that to wake the topic of security at CxO you don´t have to do a thing. it is always there and they hate it. What you should do is show them how they should trust you in this matter and that you have a tracable approach to security that brings calm into the boardroom. Sounds easy enough? I spent 4 hours on a presentation that took five minutes. That said security presentations has to be done very carefully and with a mix of trust and a bias for action.
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