Talking to the Suits

Abstract

Many years ago, the CTO asked me to a give a five-minute presentation to the rest of executive leadership regarding the recent risk analysis my team had completed. It was a huge project for the security team, spanning months of work examining every possible IT risk to the company we could imagine. The final report was nearly 50 pages long, filled with quantitative details on multiple sources of threats and multifaceted impact calculations. This was my first appearance before the entire executive team in a single room. Since I had only five minutes, I condensed our results into a handful of slides covering the top three risks. I arrived early and set up my laptop and the projector. As the execs strode into the boardroom, the CEO noticed my title page, “The Top Risks to the Company.” He asked as he sat down, “Oh, you’re going to talk about our competition?”.