S624:E4🎙️ Industry Guest Speaker Mathew Webster

Hi, I'm John Maxwell. When the top companies in the world are looking for trainers, speakers, and coaches, there's one name that stands above the rest, and that's Maxwell Leadership. Our certified team members have gotten proven results for companies all over the globe, and our reputation, I'm proud to say, is second to none. Some of our members have risen to the top of their profession, including the one you're going to meet today. I proudly introduce you to my friend Bob Fabien Zinga.

Welcome to the Leadership Success Podcast with your host, Coach BZ, where we help you lead with purpose and succeed with impact. If you're ready to grow into the kind of leader others want to follow, this podcast is for you. If you're determined to elevate your success and leave a lasting legacy, this podcast is for you. As my mentor, Dr. John C. Maxwell, reminds us, everything rises and falls on leadership. Our goal is simple: to inspire you, challenge you, and equip you with insights that can transform the trajectory of your leadership journey. Welcome aboard to another episode of the Leadership and Success Podcast with Coach.

All right, everyone, welcome to our second podcast today. This is a very, very special podcast. Uh, you already know who the guest is because We already had an hour-long interview for Season 5, Episode 72. But today is going to be a little bit different. He's going to give us a TEDx-like presentation about Beyond Technical Skills: Communication, Emotional Intelligence, and Leadership in Cybersecurity. This is my industry guest speaker series for the graduate students of my class at California Science and Technology University. So let me introduce him to the classroom, and then I'm going to give him the floor. So class, today we are going to challenge one of the biggest assumptions in cybersecurity, that more controls equal more security. In reality, most organizations don't fail because they lack tools, frameworks, or controls. They fail because when it matters most, when decisions become consequential, governance breaks down. That's why I am excited to introduce our next guest speaker, And today's session is really going to be about something that many technical professionals underestimate until it becomes the very thing that really limits their growth, right? So we often believe that success in cybersecurity is purely technical, but if we master the tools, the framework, and the system, then success will immediately follow. But that's only part of the equation. Right? Because at the highest level of leadership, I believe that whether you are in the military, cybersecurity, or the boardroom, success is really defined by your ability to communicate, to influence, and to lead. That's why I'm excited to introduce our Week 6 industry expert guest lecturer, Matthew Webster. He brings not only technical expertise, but also a deep understanding of what it takes to thrive in a corporate environment. Matthew is going to challenge you to think beyond your technical skill set and focus on something even more powerful. How do you express ideas? How do you collaborate with others? And how do you lead? Because in cybersecurity, it's not enough to see the risk, but you must be able to also convince other people that it matters. And that requires communication, emotional intelligence, and leadership. Please join me in welcoming Matthew Webster. All right, Matt, welcome back to the Leadership and Success Podcast, our industry guest speaker series. The floor is all yours, sir. Thank you.

Well, thank you so much. So as Bob did a great job introducing me, Today we're gonna talk a little bit about beyond technical skills, getting into communication, emotional intelligence, and leadership in cybersecurity. For those who may not have seen the original broadcast, you can see here that I've got a slide deck, and it was presented to his students. Um, but you can see here it says Bridging Business and Cybersecurity. This is not on accident, because that's part of what I do as part of a company, but it's also important for you to think about whether you're just listening casually, if you're one of the students, et cetera. But for me, that bridging really is all about your communication skills. And that can mean a lot of different things in a lot of different contexts. Your emotional intelligence. You need to be able to read the room. You need to understand where other people are at. And what are your leadership skills actually like when you're talking about cybersecurity? A lot of people think that cybersecurity is a bunch of zeros and ones. In my personal opinion, it is far more than zeros and ones. But I'm going to get into a leading question here and introduce myself from a different standpoint. So yes, I did write a book. That's probably the first thing that you see over on the right-hand side. It's a book on medical device cybersecurity and it's very broad. And as you can probably tell, I'm a pretty broad-minded person. But let's take a look over on the left-hand side. You know, you can see here that I started out at the New School, went all the way through B&H Photo, but I've been a CISO, a sales engineer, global CISO. Etc. And so this is important when we get into the next slide. You can see here that I've got sales engineer twice. I had a GRC and security officer and then a CISO after that when you talk about the sales engineers. And those are like senior sales engineer, engineer functions. And so this is my path to CISO and it's my path to success. So it's good to sit down and take a look at that and really think about this. So one of the things I did with the previous group here is— I do— well, before I do, I want you to talk a little bit about how do you define— oh, sorry, we jumped over a slide, I think, here. It's missing. I want to talk a little bit about— slides aren't showing up properly here. You know what? The slides don't show up properly. All right, so I'm just going to go ahead and run with it. So I'll jump, I'll just kind of jump in here because we aren't running according to the way they normally would be. So when you're talking about success, I'm going to talk about the reminder of what that could be. We have a possible view of success, and what's happening is there's a picture behind this. It's sort of hidden, but what you're doing is you find a picture of success, and a lot of people think it's all about that straight line. And the reality is it is not about the straight line. People think that you get from point A to point B, especially when you're outside of the scope of how you would want to take a look at this. Sorry, you moved the slides there. All right, so I'm going to go to my personal slides and kind of talk. Oh, there we go. So, yeah, so when you look at the reality of everybody's life, it doesn't matter where you come from, how things are set up, success is a curly, wavy line. It's not from point A to point B to point C. You jump at different points, you step over certain things, and it's a crazy world that you're sitting down and dealing with. Dealing with when you're looking at what success actually looks like. And so what you're seeing, what should be on the right-hand side, you should see a squiggly line for what success actually looks like. But for me, that's important because everybody's journey is a little bit different when you talk about what does that success actually look like. Now, for the students that were in the course, it's a technical perspective of success. And when you're going to school, That's typically what they focus on. But I'd also like to talk about when you jump through things, and I've made the mistakes myself, you need to look at that broader picture. Because all of us have our paths of learning, and I can tell you the American way of doing business oftentimes is not overly friendly, just calling a horse a horse here. Because part of the challenge is when you're talking about how we operate, You know, it's sort of messy. We don't have mentorship. We don't have coaching. I mean, it's the very thing that Bob focuses on is coaching. And that is incredibly important. We need to mentor people, you know, so we're entering into a whole new world when we start to talk about this stuff. And so really, they want people who are experts. They plug and play into their organization and they start to run. You know, the first time I had leadership training was until my 30s, and I was absolutely ecstatic. They flew us out. They brought a bunch of people in. They trained us for a couple of days. And I was just— thought this is the best thing that I've seen in a very long time. So this slide kind of hides some of the information, you know, because originally what I did with the students is I said, guess my degree, and none of all this stuff was hidden. So you're seeing some of the stuff out of order here, but my degree, probably some of you did not guess, is philosophy of social theory integrating political science and economics. That is probably very different from what you might have thought by taking a look at the previous slide. You know, I've got a very broad background, and that broad background is part of the messiness, but it's also part of the wonderful part of being human. None of us are exactly what our degrees are, you know. It doesn't matter what that context is. Nobody is exactly what their jobs are. People are rich. They're full of all kinds of things. So the students were actually guessing a lot of good things in here. For example, they would talk about, they would say, well, are you computer science? Are you finance? Are you this? Well, the reality is when I look at cybersecurity, I look at it from a very broad perspective. So I'll bring in things like financial equations. Do these financial equations actually make sense? Is that part of the risk process? Are you quantifying it in a way that makes sense to the business? Are you offering tradeoffs? You know, when you talk about the success in cybersecurity, it is not purely about the technical. If all you're doing is a technical, You're gonna miss your chance to communicate effectively with the business. A lot of businesses actually fail because of lack of communication, is poor communication skills. So other things that I've done to you, but the reality is, who am I? I am change. I am constantly changing. I am looking at things. I'm learning new things. I'm growing. I intend to do that until I'm no longer on planet Earth. And if I travel to another planet, sure. But this is really important when you stop to think about it. Who are you? And who are you in relationship to whatever task you're focusing on? Hopefully, because I believe in leadership at all levels. I believe we all should be growing. We have an opportunity to lead no matter where we're at. Maybe you learn a technical skill in college, and then you realize just how much you don't know once you step out of college. You know, from a lot of people, if you study things like the Dunning-Kruger effect, you're you have a lot to learn, and you— your confidence is here, but your skills are probably down here. And those take a lot of years to master and a lot of years to focus on. But that's who I see who I am. That's how I see how everybody is and how they focus when they start to learn something new in business or in, uh, school or whatever it is that you're doing. You have to look at those bigger pictures. So Where are we right now? From my perspective, we are in something called the technological singularity. It's a hypothetical point in time when technology growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible. There are other definitions of singularity that are out there. This, to me, is very powerful. I think right now, with how fast AI is changing, I think we're at one of those points. It used to be, yes, there were so many pieces of software. So one of the statistics I like to play with is looking at the number of pieces of software that were out. And this is probably 5, 6 years old before AI came around. There were probably 38,000 cybersecurity companies, uh, products on the market. Companies is even more. But when you're, when you're looking at that fact, that's a lot of different types of products that are out there. At the time, there were something like, uh, 70 different types of cybersecurity products. All were looking at things from a, from a different viewpoint. There was no way that any human being can pay attention to that or know all of that. I'm sure the number is closer to 60,000 right now when you look at the number of companies and seeing new things growing and the innovation that's happening. It is fast happening, faster than the speed of light. Companies are trying to adapt very quickly to the new reality that we're dealing with when it comes to AI. Now, for some of you, that might seem a little bit scary. So in, in reality, I do think AI is changing things. When you look at the nature of human beings to human beings, it's modifying. Like when I work with PE and VC firms, sometimes there's— they're telling their clients, either you're in AI or you're dead to me, and they're scaring a lot of people. And so what's happening is you're seeing a fundamental shift in how people are thinking about AI, and they're jumping in all in. When you look at today's youth, when you look at the Gen Z, the Gen Alpha, et cetera, a lot of them are saying, you know what? We don't need all of this AI. We don't need to be this hyperconnected because we got used to that. A lot of us, that was part of our jobs. We needed to be connected into the world. We needed our phone on 24/7, 365. And that's a big challenge because if you've got your phone on, you're not really resting because that phone could come off. You got to check your email several times a day. There's phone addictions, all of these types of things that are going on. But then you're adding AI to the mix now where they're collecting every single piece of data out there. You know, but it is my firm belief that human creativity will outpace AI with discipline. And what that means is, like, even now when I'm using AI, I am so far ahead of where it's at. It can think certain things and it's good for getting you, you know, 60, 70% of the way there, but it's not there yet. I even believe that if AI captures all of human knowledge, which some people say we're already there, I think we've still got a lot of ways to go. I think that that's going to be an issue. But I do think that people are able to be more creative than what AI is able to do. You can suggest a few things, and it would go off in a few different directions. But I think that's where the spirit— human spirit needs to jump in and do more. So what does this ultimately mean, though? Well, some of the people that were in the class were really interested in their jobs. And for me, it means don't give up. Leaders will no longer be able to teach you how to run AI. So like one of the, uh, teachers that I was listening to just recently was a leader. He was like, you've got to learn the skill and then teach that skill to somebody else. I don't think that model is going to work anymore. It is good when you talk about coaching and mentorship. You're not going to be able to teach a specific skill, especially when you look at IT. Your skills are changing so rapidly and so quickly. We can't use the same model that we did 10 years ago. We can't use the same model we did 20 years ago. You know, so what we're going to have is AI teaching some of those individual skills, but what, what's not teachable is the full extent of human relations. How did you— you can get some of the stuff off of AI. I think that's a very valuable part of it, but learning the communication, what are your blind spots when it comes to your communication? You need people to tell you those things. You need that feedback. I like something called feedforward when it comes to a leadership perspective over straight feedback. What can we do to get you to be in a better place in the future? There are some people that are actively giving up. "Well, AI knows everything, so I should just walk off." No, AI still doesn't know everything. You can still do much better than what AI is able to do. I mean, I've looked at AI. I've taken a look at the output of it. It's been 90% wrong in some cases. Now, will it get better 10 or 15 years from now? Absolutely, it's going to get better. But right now, we're still seeing that there's a lot of problems with how AI is operating. Even if you say, tell me the honest truth all the time, AI, it still has a hard time doing that. But I do think this means that we've got to have a different relationship to work. We've got to recognize what is the value of interconnecting with other people and communicating with other people. And sometimes that means speaking another language. In IT, and I'm guilty of this myself, you know, we sometimes want to speak to like, take the vulnerability management program. We talk about things in a CVE, Common Vulnerability Exposure. That doesn't communicate well to somebody outside of cybersecurity. The question that I find, like for example, I'm working with a company, you know, very, very close to signing the dotted line to help them communicate. Because they come in and they say the CVE, and the answer is— the question they come back with from the business side is, "So what?" To me, that's kind of sad. And apparently they sit there, they don't even know how to answer that question. This is why communication is so important. You've got to have the emotional skills, and sometimes this means curiosity. I'm very big on curiosity. But are you able to ask the question, What do you mean by that? And that ends up being such a huge issue for people because they don't understand the context of the question. Half the time they're too busy or they think, well, they're stupid, they don't get it, so I'm just going to sit here in my bubble. And that's a problem. Communication is important. When you ask questions, that's a sign of emotional intelligence. That's also a sign of leadership. You know, but I do think this is the beginning of the end of the old forms of leadership, that we have to look at those human skills. That we have when we work with other people in order to build ourselves up. And one of the challenges I have with AI flattering you— oh, you're so great, oh, that's so insightful, oh, you're wonderful— you know, it— for some people, that could be hard to accept criticism because it wants the positive. Like, I'm somebody— I love criticism. Criticism is a gift, and that is something you should take as a gift because then you can improve. That's a great feedback. What can I do better? Thank you very much. So I love criticism, but that's also part of emotional intelligence. It's about emotional maturity when you're entering into the workplace. So as you go on, though, one of the things that's very important for me is taking a look at your internal compass. And this is really important. You know, right is right, even if nobody else is doing it. You're in a toxic culture, and there's plenty of those in the United States. Roughly 50% of people want to leave their jobs. This is not in cybersecurity. This is just in companies in general. But you need to hold your ground. You need to decide where are you going to draw a line in the sand? Are you going to continue to recognize it? Are you going to determine what's important, what isn't? And when do you actually walk away? And that's really important. That's a sign of emotional intelligence too. But from my perspective, if you want to keep growing, you want to keep changing, you want to keep understanding the world around you, you have to be an explorer at heart. You know, I don't care— like, for me, I like to travel. I like to go to different countries. I want to experience different things. I want to see the way they live, what they eat, you know, all of those sorts of things. You get a completely different perspective when you're elsewhere. But the same thing is true when you look at things from an academic perspective. Yes, stay focused on some of the things you're doing. Like if you happen to love networking, for example, do networking, learn it very well, but learn some of these other professions, learn outside of your scope. That's what I want you to focus on. You know, there are things like employee shape that people talk about. Are you a T-shape? Hey, you know one thing about a lot and very little about nothing else. You know, are you an M-shape? Means you've got multiple areas where you've gotten deep knowledge in. Or so on. So when you start to look at these things, if you decide to go down the route of leadership, or you're gonna be working with others or gonna be influencing others, you wanna think about how can I influence people? How can I communicate with people? How can I change? And those types of things are incredibly important. But I wanna thank you very much. Uh, this is pretty much what, um, I had spoken about last time, but, uh, if you have any questions, I'm definitely open to answering some questions this afternoon.

Yes, thank you. Thank you so much, Matt. This is really insightful because I really love that even as a CISO, yes, you do have to have technical skill, but you also need to develop those leadership skills because influence really, really matters, especially when you work across the entire C-suite and all of those other business leaders. As you know, for many of us, many organizations look at cybersecurity or IT as a cost center. But really what we need to become is adding value, right? But one question my student had was, let me see, I think I have it here. Here we go. What is the biggest communication mistake technical professionals make in corporate environment?

Knowing your audience, reading the room. I mean, I think that is probably the biggest challenge that's out there. And I gave a pretty good example of that, that CVE score. You know, it doesn't make sense to a business executive. Do they help them decide based on a CVE score? No, but that's a 10.0 CVE.

Yes.

What are you talking about? You know, they're looking at you like you've got two heads. They know that you know what you're talking about, but you're just missing that communication. You know, if you say, look, This whole site could go down if anybody were to hack it. Whoa, you're just getting into operational risk. Whoa, now I understand it. That makes a little bit more sense to them. And so just understanding those nuances for what is that so what is really critical. And it's, it's tough when you spent years learning, is it going to be the CVSS or EPSS score? And now we've got Glasswing and all this. Other mythos that we're dealing with, you know, that's a very tough conversation to get into, but that's where you need to sit down and really take the time and translate it. And I'm going to say something really silly too that may help you, but I think that it's true. Sometimes you can work with AI. You don't know how to talk to a CFO? Ask AI how to talk to a CFO. You know, it's something that I teach. I teach CISOs how to CISO better.. And a lot of it is about emotional intelligence. It's how do you communicate? How do you ask the right questions? And I'll teach financial skills and I'll teach, you know, leadership skills. And there's so many other things to get into that most people don't even know the questions to ask when you're talking about the big picture. And I think that's, you know, from just a communication standpoint is really one of the big things there. Like one of the things I do focus on is a topic called the dark triad. This is something that psychologists came up with in, I think it was 2002, to talk about the convergence of 3 traits: narcissism, somebody who's a narcissist, psychopathy, so somebody who's a psychopath, and a Machiavellian.

Hmm.

So those are the 3 right there. You better know that you're talking to a dark triad if you're having a conversation, because you're going to be speaking to that person in a vastly different way than you would an ordinary person, because there's a whole different set of variables that you're going to have to understand when having that conversation. So if you haven't read the room, gotten to know people, read the signals properly, and pay attention to the social side of the house, you're not going to make it very far. You know, I have made those mistakes myself. I have learned from them, and now I'm teaching other people how to deal with people from a communication standpoint. And this stuff is not easy. So that would be the best way I could talk about that.

Yeah, thanks so much. I have another student question. They're asking, uh, how can early career cybersecurity professionals develop emotional intelligence intentionally?

So I think there's a lot of different ways. Um, A, there are a lot of books. I'm a big fan of reading books and things like that. There are courses that are out there, like I do teach that. I think there are other people who teach that as well. I know there's a certification. I forgot which company that does that, but they've got an emotional intelligence certification you can get. I haven't taken it. I haven't even looked at the course material. But I have to believe every single little thing that you learn is going to help. But sometimes, you know, there's a lot to emotional intelligence. It's not something you can talk about in 5 minutes. But take the fact I was talking about curiosity. That is such a powerful emotional intelligence skill. You know, if you're dealing with somebody who is very narcissistic, you could say, let's start to ask questions and they could answer in a nasty way, but you just say, thank you. But if you ask the question and they respond in a negative way, you've learned something about them. That is a way to learn it. So that curiosity is an underrated skill in my particular opinion. You know, when we were little kids, we didn't know what happens if you jump on a mud puddle. So we, as a little kid, we run up and we jump in it and it splashes water like, oh, We didn't realize the water would splash on us too. But, you know, we kind of lose a little bit of that as we start to gain more knowledge. That's part of the problem when you go through that kind of Dunning-Kruger effect. You know, we lose that curiosity, but we have to keep the curiosity, keep the humility. And the humility is such a good thing too, because we have to be grounded in the other people that we're around. We have to listen to them. So I talked a little about feedforward in a leadership practice, in a leadership role. And to me, that is extraordinarily valuable because that's going to keep us curious and it's going to keep us humble and grounded with the other people that are around us. And it will help us to take them on a journey. So there are a lot of options that are out there. Um, I imagine there's a lot of YouTube videos and things like that that are out there that you can watch too, but pick one skill at a time. I mean, you're early in your career, pick a skill and maybe learn like one skill a week, maybe one skill a month. You know, but you start to add that up over the course of years, you're going to be so far ahead of anybody around you that it's going to be something that's very valuable. I do think there's a lot of options out there for learning emotional intelligence.

All right, we have time for one more question. A student asked, can you share an example where strong communication changed a cybersecurity outcome?

Sure. I mean, there's lots and lots of examples along those lines. So one of the examples I often use is how I would write a business case. You know, and which when you're talking about it, you think, oh, it's just about the business case. Oh, you got to write good business cases. Like, no, no, no, no. When you, when you're trying to work with other people, you like, for me, I'm all about creating a cybersecurity committee. And I brought in, for example, the head of legal, head of HR, the CIO, the CTO, others. And so when you bring them in, it's not a one and done event where a few people just go through and say something. It's a matter of getting people on your side over a long period of time. This is not just one action. Hey, I did it. I was very slick in the way I presented something like, well, that helps, but that's not the whole thing. If you're relying on that one slick presentation to try to change somebody's mind, you've missed the whole purpose of changing somebody's minds. There are actually scientific rules that are used in order to influence and persuade people. And you've got to use different tips and tricks, and they're going to work in different ways with different people. Some are going to be like, oh, we're buddy-buddy now because of X, Y, or Z, and they're going to love everything. Some are going to be buddy-buddy and say, whoa, that is— I'm not— I'm not— I don't buy that. And they're going to use their intellect in another way. So it's— a lot of people think that when you talk about influence, it's about one thing. No, each person is going to care about something a little bit different. They're going to take a look at the situation in a different way. And it's about the side conversations and the side communication that gets everything to come together.

Very good. Do you have time for one more question? Yes. Okay, one last question. This is from live audience. So Daniel says, Matthew, you've called translating technical risk the new standard of care for security leaders. How do you coach technical experts to move from individual contributor to trusted advisor without losing the technical integrity of the data they, um, when they speak to the C-suite.

So I think that's important. You don't want to— in some cases you have to look at the context. Once again, you know, you're reading, that's part of reading the room. So some cases you may have to, but in some cases you could do— like, for example, I was assessing a company against this really tough standard known as 853. They were investing a billion dollars over I think it was 5 years to upgrade things. Now, I can imagine what the conversation is like in that particular situation, but it's such a fun example because they had nothing that was up to date. You know, I'm imagining they had stuff from like NT4 or really old operating systems that should not be used at all today. And you look at the hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities and say, look, we can't even install antivirus on it. We can't even get the logs off of it. We have no way of reading it with various tools that we have. You know, you've got to use all these archaic methods to be able to pull the information. You can't see what's going on. Like my book on medical device cybersecurity, that was a huge issue. They'd have a modern, at the time, modern operating system, but some of the stuff is getting dated now. But when they did have a modern operating system, you could never patch it. You can't install anything, otherwise you voided the warranty. So never install anything on it whatsoever. So you've got to communicate that to senior management. Like, look, we're buying this tool. But we have no way of patching. And here's why that's valuable. Yes, any hackers in, they could take it down like that. They could wipe out our whole infrastructure in a matter of minutes. Let me give you an example from X, Y, or Z. You know, Maersk is an example that comes to mind, but in Maersk, that was really interesting because they didn't patch their systems and they managed to get 55,000 machines out of over 200,000 machines down in 7 minutes. Do you want that to happen to our hospital? That is more than 25% of their systems down in 7 minutes.

Wow.

You know, when you tell a story and telling the cybersecurity stories, it's more important than the technical details behind it, you know, to tell that story. So don't be afraid to say, well, we've got 4,000 CVEs on there. We looked at 700 this, like, you've lost the room already. If you're talking to a technical audience, don't be afraid to lose some of the technical details. But if you say, hey, it's never been patched in 7 years, this is what can happen. Oh, it's going to resonate with people. And, you know, you always give options, you get into the technical amount, how much is this going to be? You know, we could do nothing and hope nothing happens. We'll cross our fingers. We all know that the threat landscape is getting worse. Option 2 is we do a half approach and we're going to, you know, put maybe some VLANs in place, but we're not going to put the firewall rules in place, but we have the VLANs there. But the third option is, you know what, maybe we needed to put VLAN ACLs in place. We can't replace the equipment because it's too new, but at least we've got more protection now. And so anything that's of this category is going to be on its own separate VLAN because with hospitals, you can have up to 15 different medical devices per bed. It's big.

Yes.

Wow.

That is really big. Thank you so much for your time again. Thank you for coming back to the Leadership and Success Podcast. Really, really appreciate that. So class, if you would please give a round of applause to our guest expert, Matt Webster. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Thank you.

All right. So this is it for now. Thanks again for watching. And I want everybody to follow Matt on LinkedIn.com, Matthew-Webster-2087A3, and his business, his consulting firm, Cybergence.biz. And like he says, he also teaches CISOs how to be a better CISO because it's not just about technical skills, but you have to learn finances, you have to learn leadership, emotional intelligence, on and on and on. So I also want everybody to please have a chance to get his bestselling book, Do No Harm: Protecting Connected Medical Devices, Healthcare, and Data from Hackers and Adversarial Nation States. I think this was published by CRC Press. All right, and also, since I already interviewed him before, go ahead and listen to the hour-long interview, Season 5, Episode 72. We talked about the CISO mindset, aligning cyber risk with executive decision-making. So, to end this today, I just want to say What you heard really from Matthew is one of the most important lessons you will learn in this course. And frankly, in your entire career, I think, because many of you are extremely talented technically, and especially the computer science engineer track, but you understand network security, control, AI, and system. But the reality I've seen from the Navy to Silicon Valley is that technical excellence alone is not enough. It's good, but that's not enough. So at the highest level of leadership, success comes down to 3 things: how you communicate, how you connect with people, and how you lead under pressure. So you can identify the vulnerability, but you can explain it to a CEO. Can you do that? You can design a secure system, but can you influence the team to adopt that new design? You can detect threats, but can you lead during the crisis? Will engineers even listen to you and respect you? So, that's where emotional intelligence and communication become your force multiplier. And this is what separates, I believe, engineers from leaders, analysts from advisors, and contributors from decision-makers. So, I want to really reflect on this. If you cannot communicate your ideas clearly, your impact will always be limited. No matter how smart you are. So here's your charge as future cybersecurity and business leader: invest in your technical skills, but don't stop there. Practice explaining complex ideas in simple terms. That's why, again, for the final project of this class, I have you guys giving a 10 to 15 minutes presentation as if you are speaking to a board of directors. So you can be technical, but you have to be able to translate those technical skills and ideas into business language that people can understand, right? Practice explaining complex ideas in simple terms, learn to listen, not just respond, and build relationships, not just solutions. So lead with both competence but also character. Because I believe in the end, cybersecurity is not just about technology, it's about people, decisions, and trust. So, Matthew gave you a roadmap today. Now it's on you to execute. I expect you to apply this not someday, but starting right now. Because the best time to do that is yesterday. The next best time is today, right this very minute. So let's give Matthew one more round of applause. And thanks again for watching this special episode of the Leadership Success Podcast. Bye for now.

Thank you for tuning in to the Leadership Success Podcast with your host, Coach Beezy. If today's episode added value to your leadership journey, be sure to subscribe, share, and join us again for more wisdom nuggets on how to lead better and achieve greater success. Remember, leadership is the most critical skill of our time. The world will always need leaders to inspire others, drive innovation, and execute meaningful strategy. So why not count yourself among the bold leaders shaping the 21st century? Until next time, stay inspired, stay committed, and keep leading