March 13, 2008 - Volume 3, #26
Good Morning:
The rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer will make a great case study at some
point. Now it's just a sad statement of hypocrisy, power
mongering, and the awesome power of karma - which cuts both ways.
Spitzer seems to have pissed off anyone who he's ever met. Even the
folks that voted for him did so not because they thought he was a
compelling individual - but that he'd take no crap and get things done.
[1]They say you find
out who your friends are when you hit hard times. The former Governor
has certainly found out - the hard way.
Ultimately this is a story of arrogance. You wonder how a guy with
almost
everything going for him could engage in this kind of behavior -
illicit meetings with high end hookers, and the
answer is he didn't think he'd get caught. Crap, he spent a
career chasing laundered money, so he knows how to hide it. He spent a
career tapping phones and getting incontrovertible evidence against
someone, and then ramming the blade hilt deep to extract whatever
concessions he wanted.
Payback is a bitch. To Spitzer's credit, he didn't dispute the issue.
He fessed up, stepped down, and will now retreat into history - with
his trust fund (estimated in the hundreds of millions). You do feel bad
for his wife and kids. I'm sure the
kids at school and the tennis club have been very understanding...
Ultimately this is a great learning experience for us all. No one is
above the law. No one is that smart. Maybe for a few years, but not
forever. I'm going to make the assumption that you (yes, you Mr/Ms
Reader) wouldn't engage in this kind of stuff. But at some point you
may be asked to clean up after it. We're security professionals. We
clean up the mess.
It gets back to business continuity. There are self-destructive people
in every business. You must make sure the business survives. Do you
have contingency plans if the CEO is taken on a perp walk? What about
any other key exec or rainmaker? That's really the lesson to learn. You
can't stop someone from self-destructing. Even if you could intervene,
it would only be a matter of time before the demons return. But you CAN
and MUST make sure that you and your organization can move on.
No one is indispensable. Everyone must be able to be replaced. Even the
Governor of New York. It does bring up a question that's been nagging
at me. Everyone knows about the NY/Boston rivalry. What are the
Beantown guys going to do to top this? My depraved mind has some ideas,
but I'll leave them unsaid. For once.
Below you'll find some snippets from two of the more interesting
sessions at Source Boston yesterday. Tomorrow I'll cover the sessions I
hit
today, including Dan Geer's keynote. I'll resume the normal TDI format
next week, but there have been some interesting sessions and it makes
sense to cover those. Have a great weekend.
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