The future of corporate espionage and security

Corporate espionage. Security. Keeping your precious trade secrets from The Bad Guys, whether they be competitors or government agents looking to destabilize your economy.

This. Is. Serious. Stuff! Just ask Washington’s Eamon Javers, who just published Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy, about the use of former MI5, CIA, and KGB agents in the corporate wars over market share in the chocolate toy segment. Spies are involved!

He’s even on the Daily Show, the highwater mark of all important information.

So again, This Is Serious Stuff. Kids, break out your Cold War Mindsets!

This past weekend  I spoke at the George Washington University’s graduate program for high-tech security to discuss the future of intelligence. As the professors expect, I take this from a much more broad perspective, bringing competitive intelligence, futures studies, scenario planning, stochastic thinking, and general irreverence into a bouillabaise we call Intelligence 2.0.

The real news piece here is that I am excited for the next generation of leaders. The dialogue that ensued among these future security professionals was broad-ranging, insightful, and fun. We’ll need plenty of all three in order to meet the needs of organizations that exist in a world of pervasive media, and these young people seem up to the challenge.

Some major points that came out of our dialogue:

• A command-and-control mindset about information will not fit with a world of social media – the goal will be to limit risk for a certain number of activities, not to funnel all information through one conduit.
• Asymmetry of analysis will be more important than asymmetry of information – it’s not who collects the most data, but who is the best at deriving insights who will be most effective.
• A corporate culture of constantly hiring and downsizing employees with decreasing levels of engagement is no recipe for data security – many corporations are begging for their data to hit the wild Internet through shoddy HR practices.
• The shift to Gen X management will be huge – while Boomers came up on strictly hierarchical, militaristic command structures, Gen X and Y believe much more in sharing information, decisionmaking power, even credit. This will change what “secure” means in the future.
• Increasingly multinational corporations are turning to nation-state legal apparatuses to enforce their own security needs – even though the economic benefit will not necessary transfer to the nation-state in question. Over time, tension will increase about this issue.

Not bad for a grad school class on a Saturday before lunch, am I right? If these are our future leaders, I couldn’t feel any more secure.