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Reposted from AAM
Have you registered for the Future of Museums Summit? Taking place from 1-5 pm ET November 1 and 2, this virtual conference will explore four themes from the current edition of TrendsWatch: the evolution of digital practice, workplace trends, the growing partisan divide, and recent developments in repatriation, restitution, and reparations. Early Bird Registration rates end September 15—I encourage you to take advantage of this special rate and hope to see you at the Summit.
When I write AAM’s annual trends report, my job is to summarize important forces shaping society and highlight what that may mean for our sector. Each year I recruit people who are experts to help educate me on these topics, guide my thinking, and provide feedback on the draft text. This year we also invited these advisors to draft their fantasy lineup of sessions to explore their corresponding topic in more depth—and that list became the program for the Summit. I look forward joining you in the audience to learn from these incredible folks from inside and outside our field.
You, readers, are the first to hear about two of our four “big idea” speakers for the Summit:
How can preserving and drawing attention to the remaining slave dwellings in the US help repair the narrative we tell of American history? Learn from Joseph McGill, Jr., Founder and Executive Director of the Slave Dwellings Project and history consultant at Magnolia Plantation.
When robots learn to get creative, what will happen to informal learning? Hear four proposals about generative AI for museums from William-Hart Davidson, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures and Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Education at Michigan State University.
The final two big idea speakers, and our keynote speaker, will be announced in the coming weeks.
What is the Metaverse and Should Museums Care? Nik Honeysett, Director and CEO at Balboa Park Online Collaborative has organized this session as a debate, inviting speakers to make their case for or against museums expanding into 3D virtual space. As an audience member, you will be invited to cast your vote to determine the victor. See if the speakers can sway your opinion on metaversity!
Human-centered Work Practices. Micah Parzen, CEO, Museum of Us will moderate this panel exploring human-centered HR as the future of work and the key to long-term sustainability for any museum. I look forward to hearing panelists’ recommendations on how museums can ensure staff are seen, heard, valued, and appreciated, and that their voices are embedded into operational decisions that have a profound impact on their lives.
Navigating Partisan Tensions in Museums. The tense national political climate is putting stress on museums, their staff, and their communities. In this session, Devon Akmon, Director of the Michigan State University Museum will be joined by Christy Coleman, Executive Director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and Jorge Zamanillo, Director of the National Museum of the American Latino to explore how museums can steer a steady course through partisan storms.
Sharing Authority with Indigenous Peoples. Museums are in the early stages of repairing their relationships with Indigenous communities, learning how to undo some of the harm resulting from traditional museum practices. In this session, Brandie Macdonald (Chickasaw Nation), Executive Director of the Indiana University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, will be joined by Nicole Armstrong-Best, Museum Administrator of the S’edav Va’aki Museum (formerly Pueblo Grande Museum) and Dawn DiPrince, President/CEO & State Historic Preservation Officer of History Colorado to discuss how these two museums have “flipped the script,” ceding power, authority, and voice to the Indigenous peoples whose stories they tell.
Each day will end with the opportunity to join some of our speakers in breakout rooms where there will be ample time to ask questions, contribute your views, and debate the issues raised in their conversations.
Now, if you will excuse me, I’ll return to researching topics for next year’s trends report! Members will have the first opportunity to read TrendsWatch in the January/February 2024 issue of Museum magazine—I look forward to engaging with you on a new set of topics in 2024.
See Original Post
Reposted from NBC News
A man who was charged Monday with a felony hate crime after allegedly smashing the windows of an Asian American art and history museum in Seattle and issuing a racial slur was arrested for a hate crime a decade ago, new charging documents show.
Craig Day Milne, accused of smashing the windows at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle’s Chinatown-International district, was arrested in 2013 on charges of physically attacking an Asian man in a locker room, repeatedly punching him at a Shoreline, Washington, recreation center, according to the charging documents.
Deputies who responded at the time heard Milne yell that his only regret was not hitting the “Or---tal harder” before fighting them and calling an Asian officer racial slurs. This earlier hate crime was dismissed, “under unknown circumstances” in 2015, according to the charging documents.
Asian American leaders, residents and others have been fearful for the community’s safety since the incident at the museum last Thursday. The suspect yelled racial slurs while smashing windows with a sledgehammer, according to the Seattle Police Department.
Milne, who was also charged with malicious mischief in the first degree, allegedly continued rambling anti-Chinese statements following the attack, which took place as a retreat for the Japanese American organization Tsuru For Solidarity was being held inside, said Stanley Shikuma, a member of the group’s leadership council who was present during the attack. Museum staff disarmed the man themselves, before police arrived. The King County Department of Public Defense, declined to comment. An attorney from that office represented Milne on the day of his hearing. Efforts to find Milne’s current representation were not immediately successful Tuesday. “He was saying, ‘The Chinese have ruined my life. It’s all because of the Chinese,’” Shikuma, who’s also co-president of the Seattle chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, said. “He was also saying: ‘I’ve lost two houses. My car was stolen. I’ve been tortured. And that’s all because of the Chinese. Something has to be done, and that’s why I came to Chinatown.’”
While police were called about the window smashing at 5:22 pm on Thursday, they were not dispatched until roughly 45 minutes later because of “staffing constraints and call volume,” according to a police press release. Officers arrived almost an hour after the incident, prompting criticisms over police response and concerns over the Asian American community’s safety.
And given footage released last week of a Seattle police officer saying the life of a 23-year-old college student from India, Jaahnavi Kandula, “had limited value” after she was struck and killed by a police cruiser as she was crossing the street, Shikuma said that many in the Asian American community feel that the museum incident serves as a further example of the police department’s failure to value Asian lives.
The Seattle Police Department declined to comment on the museum attack beyond its press release.
“I think we need a radical rethinking of how we guarantee safety and security to everybody,” Shikuma said, adding that he feels greater police presence doesn’t ensure safety.
Shikuma said that he and other members of Tsuru For Solidarity had just begun their retreat Thursday with a viewing of the museum’s “Resisters” exhibit, dedicated to Japanese American resistance movements, when their seats began to tremble.
“We were all seated in the theater, which is right above the glass windows that this guy was hammering on and breaking,” Shikuma said. “Five minutes into the welcoming program, all of a sudden we heard this breaking glass, and it kept getting louder and it was hard enough that seats in the theater were literally shaking.”
The organization’s members and museum staff were able to surround the suspect, who was still holding the sledgehammer, Shikuma said. A museum security guard was able to disarm the suspect before authorities arrived.
According to court documents, Milne told police that his briefcase had been stolen for the third time and “he had to do something.” When asked by police if an Asian individual had taken the briefcase, Milne said he didn’t know, adding that the “Chinese ruined his life.”
“We are grateful to those members, Wing Luke staff, and community neighbors who immediately addressed the situation,” Tsuru for Solidarity said in a statement. “We are grateful to our members, experts in community trauma, who created space, in the moment and over the weekend, for vulnerability, processing, and healing. We were the first responders.”
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office is reviewing how the initial call to police was prioritized and dispatched, the city’s director of communications, Jamie Housen, said in an email. Harrell said in a statement Friday that he was “appalled” by the incident.
“The targeting of our AAPI community is unacceptable, and I condemn the attack — and the hate-fueled motivations of the suspect who was arrested — in the strongest possible terms,” Harrell said.
Greg Wong, deputy mayor, said in a statement that the incident “underscores the importance of recruiting and retaining officers.”
Shikuma said that he feels the attack is “symptomatic of a larger malady within American society,” adding that there’s a fear that the undercurrent of anti-Asian sentiment will only continue to materialize as violence.
“I don’t think this is one crazy individual who just went nuts. I think it’s a reflection of the political climate, targeting and anger and hate that’s being spread,” he said, adding that politicians, particularly former President Donald Trump, “talking about things like ‘Kung Flu’ and the China virus set the tone of all social ills to be traced to China and Chinese people.”
While the attack has left many Asian Americans in the area rattled, Shikuma said that his organization had received an influx of messages, emails and texts from those across Seattle, showing their unity with the community. Major League Soccer’s Seattle Sounders and the Pacific Northwest chapter of the Anti-Defamation League, among others, expressed their solidarity on social media.
And a coalition serving those across the Asian American diaspora, including Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Korean groups, are drafting a letter to the city expressing safety concerns and demanding support, Shikuma said.
“The community response has been pretty immediate as soon as people learn about what happened,” Shikuma said. “The positive thing is that there is this pulling together and feeling of community.”
Steve McLean, strategic communications officer at the Wing Luke Museum, said in a statement that the organization is “grateful” for the overwhelming support from the community.
“As the museum works to support its staff and the community we serve, it is heartening to know we are surrounded by those who believe in our work,” McLean said. “Despite the clear racial motivation of the attack, and the delayed 911 response, we will not be deterred in our mission’s work, and holding space for our staff and our community to make sense of the attack on the Museum.”
Reposted from Reuters
The British Museum launched a public hotline on Tuesday asking for help to locate some 2,000 missing artefacts, revealing they were mostly ancient Greek and Roman gems and jewellery.
The museum said last month it had sacked a staff member over stolen, missing or damaged items in a crisis that highlighted internal failings and led to its director quitting days later.
Home to treasures such as the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon marbles, the British Museum houses one of the world's most visited collections and has since tightened its security.
Sixty items had now been returned, with a further 300 identified and due to be handed back imminently, the museum said in a statement.
"If you are concerned that you may be, or have been, in possession of items from the British Museum, or if you have any other information that may help us, please contact us," said a page on its website advertising a dedicated email address.
The page said it was only disclosing the types of artefacts stolen and heeding expert advice not to share full details.
It said the stolen items included gold rings, ear-rings and other pieces of jewellery dating back to ancient Greek and Roman periods as well as small objects such as gems that were often set in rings.
The museum, which is facing demands from several governments for the repatriation of historical treasures to their home countries, said it was working with London's police, "actively monitoring" the art market, and had registered the missing items on the Art Loss Register database.
The museum is also consulting an international panel of experts.
Reposted from Post Gazette
The Andy Warhol Museum on Pittsburgh’s North Side received a bomb threat by email Sunday afternoon, authorities said.
Officers from Zone 1 responded to Sandusky Street on the North Side at 1:50 p.m., where they contacted museum security. The decision was made to evacuate the building.
Pittsburgh Public Safety said explosives K-9s were called in to search the building and no explosives were found.
Authorities determined the email came in from a third party located in Harrisburg.
The Pittsburgh Police Intelligence Unit is investigating in cooperation with the FBI, currently investigating similar threats made to other jurisdictions.
Reposted from BBC
A Van Gogh painting stolen from a Dutch museum in March 2020 is back in safe hands after a three-and-a-half-year quest to recover it.
Dutch art detective Arthur Brand said he had been handed the 139-year-old painting in a pillow and an Ikea bag by a man who came to his front door.
"I did this in complete co-ordination with Dutch police and we knew this guy wasn't involved in the theft," he said.
In 2021, a career criminal was jailed for eight years over the incident.
But by then the painting, worth several million euros, had already changed hands.
The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring was initially stolen from the Dutch town of Laren, to the south-east of Amsterdam. The thief smashed through two glass doors at the Singer museum with a sledgehammer, at the start of the coronavirus lockdown.
It had been on loan from a museum in the north-eastern city of Groningen which has hailed the work's recovery as "wonderful news".
The French-born thief, 59-year-old Nils M, who lived a short distance away from Laren, was convicted of stealing the work as well as a Frans Hals painting a few months later from a museum in Leerdam, near Utrecht. His DNA was found at both crime scenes.
According to communications intercepted by police, the Van Gogh painting from 1884, also known as Spring Garden, had been acquired by a crime group intending to use it in exchange for shorter jail terms.
Mr Brand, who has collaborated with Dutch police on the hunt for the work, told the BBC that they knew it would pass from one group to another in the criminal underworld, as nobody would want to touch it.
He was sent "proof of life" pictures of the Van Gogh as early as June 2020.
Eventually, he was approached by a man in Amsterdam who offered to return it in exchange for complete confidentiality, partly because it had become a headache to keep holding on to the painting.
"I was at a birthday party and he was waiting under a tree and he explained to me why he wanted to do this," Mr Brand told the BBC.
The painting was then handed over to him at his home on Monday afternoon, while the director of the Groninger museum was waiting on the street corner in a bar to authenticate the work.
It was protected by a pillow which was covered with blood, he added, as the man had cut a finger while retrieving it.
A spokesman for the Dutch police arts crime unit has confirmed that the recovered painting is authentic and Andreas Blühm, the head of the Groninger museum, has spoken of his delight at its safe return.
"There are scratches... but it's painted on paper and glued on panel so it's stable. We can restore it and it should be fine," he told the BBC's Newshour programme.
The Spring Garden is currently in the hands of the Van Gogh museum whose experts will help restore it, and it could take weeks or months before it goes back on display.
The director said he would not lend it out any more as he was too traumatised.
Reposted from The New York Times
On Thursday evening, the doors abruptly closed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Officials had learned that climate protesters were planning a visit during the hours when the cultural institution offers free admission.
The activist group Extinction Rebellion had posted on social media earlier in the day, saying this would be its second attempt at visiting the museum. “This is a peaceful field trip without the risk of arrest,” the invitation said.
In March, demonstrators had tried to stage a “guerrilla art installation” that would have involved inserting their own images into empty picture frames at the museum, an action intended to draw attention to the loss of biodiversity. But the event also would have fallen on the same day as the infamous art heist at the Gardner 33 years earlier, and executives were nervous about security risks and decided to close the museum. Protesters instead carried flags and red banners, staging a “die-in” near the museum’s entrance.
For more than a year, climate protesters have targeted museums as a method of gaining attention for their cause. One of the latest attacks occurred at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, where a protester threw pink paint on Tom Thomson’s 1915 painting “Northern River.” The museum said the artwork was unharmed during the incident thanks to a protective glazed panel installed on the canvas.
Some of the most serious charges against demonstrators stemmed from an episode in April, when two activists splattered paint on the case surrounding a 19th-century Degas sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Because the museum is a federal institution, the protesters are now facing federal charges, including conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States.
During an interview, Fogelman said the Gardner Museum needed to increase its spending on security because of the ongoing threat of protests; it also lost out on revenues generated by the 1,300 people who usually visit the museum on a Thursday evening, spending money in the gift shop and restaurant.
“The most painful part of the decision was that we had to curtail our free hours,” Fogelman said. “It deprives our community of the chance to really immerse themselves in the experience of art at the Gardner Museum.”
She questioned why protesters would target the museum, which dwells inside a building designed to have a low carbon footprint by drawing its energy from geothermal power. The museum also maintains a renowned garden and currently has an exhibition called “Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art,” reflecting the closeness of artists with the natural world.
“The Gardner Museum simply serves as a conversation-starter,” said Jamie McGonagill, the media and messaging director for Extinction Rebellion’s Boston branch. She said the activists were planning to wear shirts with the images they had originally wanted to insert into the empty frames. “There was no civil disobedience planned. There was no disruption of guests planned.”
Reposted from Artnet News
Greece’s culture minister Lina Mendoni wrote a blistering commentary in response to the ongoing scandal at the British Museum, where it has come to light that more than 1,500 items from the collection were stolen by a staff member.
“The thefts by the responsible curator, but also the proud silence of the leaders who neither take care of their collections nor implement the appropriate security measures, proves that the ‘hospitality’ provided to the Parthenon marbles at the British Museum has always been flawed, incomplete, and problematic,” she stated in opinion piece for Ta Nea.
Mendoni is not alone in weaving the scandal that erupted mid-August into a renewed call for the repatriation of her country’s cultural heritage; Nigeria, China, and Wales have followed suit. Critical to her claim, is Mendoni’s focus not on one suspected lone ranger’s greedy opportunism, but on the systemic failures that allowed him to get away with it in the first place. Many of the missing items were not logged in the British Museum’s collection database.
That perhaps half of the British Museum’s mammoth collection of some 8 million objects was never fully catalogued has become a matter of keen public interest. Incomplete or out-of-date records is an issue that affects many major museums worldwide. To take just one other example, Germany’s Ethnological Museum in Berlin, housed at the Humboldt Forum, admits that “only a small number” of the 75,000 items in the collection stemming from Africa “is well documented.” Jeopardizing not only the safety of their collections but also the public’s right to access its cultural heritage and the ability of other countries to make repatriation claims.
“The ‘guarding’ of the sculptures in the British Museum has proven to be disastrous and dangerous. The urgent need for their reunion, in Athens, is now an act of justice,” continued the Greek minister.
Last week, the British Museum’s former director Hartwig Fischer resigned with immediate effect and deputy director Jonathan Williams “stepped back.” An interim deputy director and director have since been named and an independent security review has been launched by the museum.
While the investigation into the theft is still ongoing, what is known already about it points to major flaws in the ways that museums are running their collections—namely, a lack of information about collections and accountability from collections is a problem that has been on many experts’ radars for years. “It’s very important that we get away from a cozy world of museum curators choosing to share information with each other, and it being available for anyone who has an interest in the matter,” noted Barnaby Phillips, the author of Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes.
Though the British Museum’s collection, it now seems, had been freely plundered for years, most of the objects taken had not been properly documented. “It’s chaos down here,” was the infamous admission from the museum’s Greek antiquities curator Peter Higgs, speaking to The Times in 2002. Earlier this year, Higgs was fired over the thefts, though he has denied any wrongdoing.
The British Museum missed its chance to appropriately crack down on the thefts in early 2021, when dealer Ittai Gradel alerted the museum about suspicious artifacts that were appearing on eBay. Though his suspicions were first aroused by Higgs’ eBay account in 2016, it would take Gradel years to amass enough evidence to approach the museum. Why? Of the 70 items that he personally bought and many more that he observed over the years, only three were listed on the British Museum’s website and could therefore be proven to have been stolen.
Inadequate funding and the funnelling of energy and expertise into blockbuster exhibitions at the expense of drearier custodial duties have been cited by experts like Dan Hicks as the primary reasons for the failure to properly record objects in the collection. On the social media platform X, the art theft expert and author Anthony Amore estimated that, practically speaking, even bountiful resources and the best of intentions may not be enough when it comes to diligent cataloguing.
“If it takes just one hour to identify, handle, photograph, and digitize a collection piece for cataloguing, and you have 8 million pieces, it would take a team of four 685 years to complete the catalogue if they work non-stop, eight hours a days, seven days per week,” he wrote.
Of course, the length of time needed to catalogue varies according to the method and object in question, and some experts noted that one hour per item may be a conservative estimate.
“I’m not excusing the British Museum, but my goal is to give context when people sit aghast that the collection wasn’t photographed,” Amore told Artnet News. “Every museum struggles with accomplishing what is considered cataloguing in 2023.”
Even in an ideal world, where a team of cataloguers are recruited by the British Museum, Amore’s calculation reveals the scale of the challenge for a collection of its size. A real solution may be more radical. “That concentration of resources in a single place is not only totally impractical, it’s totally unethical,” said Marlowe. “A new director could start a semi-permanent long-term loan initiative where the collections are distributed more evenly across the country and, ideally, across the world. To redistribute wealth, and also to distribute the burden of cataloguing.”
The theft at the British Museum also highlights issues around the digitization of collections. Many of the pieces of gold jewellery, gems, and antiquities that have gone missing were bequeathed by the antiquities collector Charles Townley in 1814. Even if they had been immediately recorded in a ledger, this would have needed to be converted onto card catalogues and, eventually, a computer database.
The problem is not uncommon. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which has a collection of nearly 500,000 items from a wide range of cultures that date from antiquity to today, provenance and archiving is a laborious and pain-staking process. “We are working with the legacy of our forebears. Even if objects have all been registered in the past, the process of making them available digitally today is not simple,” MFA Boston’s curator for provenance Victoria Reed told Artnet News.
Objects might need to be re-photographed or documented for the first time, fact-checking needs to be done on all the information provided about it as small details, from the dimensions to the medium, could be wrong; after that, one must undertake provenance and exhibition history research, in addition to building a bibliography. “Essentially, cataloguing work is never done and is never going to be perfect,” she said.
For its part, the British Museum has made attempts to modernize its storage and security systems, including a new £64 million ($81 million) facility that was first announced in 2019 and is still under construction. But does it simply own more inventory than it can manage? “The fact remains that those items would still have to be catalogued by somebody somewhere,” said Amore. “You could donate the pieces to a university, but where are they going to get the resources?”
According to Amore, catalogued items generally remain in storage, which is only accessible with an ID card and surveyed by CCTV. It is only feasible to audit a small slice of the collection at any one time, so each item can easily become a needle in a haystack. Is it all that shocking that this state of affairs is sometimes exploited? “It goes unreported, of course,” said Amore. “I know art thieves who have stolen from museum storage and you’ll never find the story in the press.”
Theft aside, when works languish in crates for centuries they may drop off the radar of both the public and the museum. It becomes impossible to monitor their conservation status. “You can’t repatriate what you don’t know you have,” said Elizabeth Marlowe, director of Museum Studies at Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York. “I don’t think it requires too much of a conspiracy-minded way of thinking to wonder if it isn’t an accident that the British Museum has catalogued less than half of their holdings.”
Many are quick to applaud high profile restitution cases when they make headlines, but it is less exciting to think about the mechanics that make these kinds of claims feasible. One publicized effort to address the issue is the project Digital Benin, the first comprehensive online catalogue of the Benin bronzes.
Phillips, the author, said the site has helped Nigeria establish and deal with restitution claims. “It should be said in fairness that the British Museum has been a dedicated and cooperative partner,” Phillips noted. Although curators from Nigeria had already been visiting the British Museum’s stores for years, the online record also provides “wider public accountability,” he added.
Despite showing willingness to participate, “on the question of restitution, the British Museum has been increasingly isolated in recent years,” said Phillips, referring to the return of many bronzes from museums in Germany and the U.S. “The British Museum has been out of step with those changes and will struggle now to justify why, when its own reputation has been damaged.”
Though this scandal may pile more pressure on the museum, there is no quick fix to the ongoing negotiations around repatriation. For one, the British Museum is currently barred by a 1963 law from deaccessioning its holdings, and for another, “Nigerian museums have problems, and those won’t be solved by how good or bad the British Museum is.”
William Carruthers, a lecturer in Heritage Studies at the University of Essex, fears a missed opportunity in the crisis where museums focus on security alone, instead of repatriation. “Security is important, but museums need to do the work to understand the multiple histories of these objects, where they came from, how they hold meaning for the people from whom they were often taken, and who should decide what now happens to them,” he said. “Whether the very limited resources available are sent in that direction is another matter.”
Reposted from Security Management Magazine
The phrase “Mission first, people always” is a common mantra in the military, and it is often borrowed in leadership studies. It’s a vision of success that invests in the success of those around you, a sense of shared mission (the why), no matter your specialty or job. Security teams can’t exist in silos, and security leaders need specific skills to help them reach across aisles and departments. Fostering connections between people and functions may well be one of the most significant markers of success, and without the support of others, you may well fail in your mission.
Often, I’m asked what I look for in a corporate security professional. Sometimes the question comes from someone trying to get into the business or advance their career; other times, it’s someone looking to hire.
My answer can be more complex because many of the characteristics of an effective corporate security professional differ from those listed on a résumé.
Though helpful, candidates don’t have to be former military or law enforcement. They also don’t need an MBA—though, again, that credential can be useful. Ultimately, it’s hard to understand threats to an organization, especially if you’re early in your career and don’t understand how it operates.
The most effective corporate security professionals share a common set of related skills. If I were to boil them down into one element, it would be this: They can listen well and connect with people.
Traditionally, the security industry tends to focus on the three G’s: guns, guards, and gates. But building strong soft skills is crucial for effective leadership in the security field. While technical expertise and knowledge of operational strategies are undoubtedly significant, the ability to effectively communicate, collaborate, and empathize with others sets exceptional security leaders apart from the mediocre.
Here are a few examples of how the best security leaders I’ve worked with have used soft skills successfully:
How many have seen someone who compensated for a lack of confidence with arrogance and bluster? It’s not just an interpersonal shortcoming; it’s dangerous within security roles.
A great security professional speaks confidently but comprehends potential voids. In the security world, knowledge gaps could mean missed threats. Effective practitioners can also identify how to mitigate these knowledge gaps with integrated solutions—whether people, processes, or technology.
Picture this: a newly minted executive is planning a security program. He or she is given a budget and a mandate to keep the company and its assets safe. Influential security professionals can articulate to leadership what they can safeguard and, more importantly, what they cannot if resources are inadequate. Whether designing a security program’s budget or managing a crisis, the best security practitioners can explain a situation professionally and succinctly, proving the value of their team and work.
There’s a stereotype of the corporate security professional. They are the quiet person in the back of the room with the earpiece, suit, and crew cut. When the glass is broken, their job is to react to crises. And unless there’s a crisis, they stay out of the way. Yes, there’s still room for the “quiet professional” in this world. However, practitioners are more frequently called on to anticipate risk and provide strategic counsel to leadership teams rather than just reacting.
Enabling business decisions requires a more expansive view of the threat landscape. For some, it means getting comfortable being uncomfortable with emerging tools and technologies that may not be second nature to them. The professionals I know are intelligent, inquisitive, and dynamic; they use their curiosity to develop creative problem-solving strategies.
The rapidly changing threat landscape means we face more hazards than ever and an intense demand for tools and people with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
The question facing security leaders: How do I assemble a team to manage a demanding, rapidly changing environment? The future of security includes groups of people from traditional (i.e., three-letter government agency) backgrounds and non-traditional (i.e., data analysts) backgrounds with diverse experience and thought to provide holistic solutions to real-world risk.
A professional is only as good as their internal network in nearly any field. They need cross-functional support to push through crucial initiatives. Internal networking is particularly critical for security teams, which rely on cooperation and information from organizational allies to do their jobs. The ideal security professional connects people within the organization, from new hires to tenured executives, across human resources, finance, and IT. By breaking down silos, they communicate their mission and help others understand how security teams play a critical role in the business.
Building hard and soft skills enables security leaders to navigate complex organizational dynamics, influence stakeholders, and foster a culture of security awareness. These skills ultimately help them do their jobs better. By developing excellent communication skills, they can effectively articulate the importance of security measures to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. They can convey complex ideas clearly and concisely, ensuring everyone understands the potential risks and the need for proactive security measures.
Soft skill-savvy security leaders also excel in collaboration and teamwork. They are skilled at building relationships, fostering trust, and effectively working with cross-functional teams. They understand that security and risk mitigation are shared responsibilities and recognize the importance of involving stakeholders from various departments, such as IT, HR, legal, and senior management, to help them do their jobs and mitigate risk to their organization.
Chuck Randolph is a highly regarded security professional with extensive expertise in global operations and risk intelligence serving as Ontic's Chief Security Officer and leading The Ontic Center for Connected Intelligence. At Microsoft, he successfully led global operations and intelligence teams throughout his career, leveraging his expertise to safeguard executives, assets, and report on threat intelligence and risk trends. His extensive experience in executive protection, event risk management, and intelligence made a significant impact and transformed these services into strategic enablers. In addition to his remarkable tenure in the private sector, Randolph has a notable 30-year military career, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel.
Are you aiming to move up the career ladder and take a new management role? The shift from frontline contributor to first-time manager can be a tricky one to navigate, and a number of ASIS International mentoring program leaders stepped forward to share some of their lessons learned and tips for new managers to help them overcome hidden hurdles.
“Lead by example, and empower people to take the initiative. People will learn from mistakes… and they will be proud of their successes. Rewarding someone with compliments empowers the individual. It’s more than a financial reward—it’s a psychological reward that pays off for the organization. Someone in this position will be less likely to move away from the organization.”
“When you are moving up the ladder, it is important to respect diversity. And when I say diversity, it’s diversity in a sense of age difference, multicultural backgrounds, gender—I will explain. We live in a multicultural society—I’m talking about the security piece, the IT world that I live in—and we have to respect people’s opinions even when they differ from our own because those opinions are preconceptions based on the way they were raised, their gender, their backgrounds. So, what I learned moving up the ladder is not to take everything personally, take one step back, look at the situation from a holistic perspective, try to understand all the angles from which a person is giving you that opinion, and really try to address and respond accordingly.”
“First time managers may lack confidence in leading a team, not feel they have the technical knowledge that others on their team have, or are not quite sure how to manage a team. One source that mentors can recommend is LinkedIn Learning. Corporations may already have LinkedIn Learning available for employees where they don’t have to pay for it. Premium levels on LinkedIn include the learning for the price of the level. LinkedIn Learning has thousands of topics available with quality speakers and instruction on basic team leadership, planning, budgeting, leadership—you name it, they probably have a course on it. As a mentor, I have introduced mentees to LinkedIn Learning and recommended books that could help with leadership direction.
“Mentors can listen to their mentee with new manager questions and help guide them through to arriving at some options to try to apply to their management situation.”
“Managing employees is one of the hardest things to learn. New managers will make mistakes, but helping them learn from each experience is vital to their success. For inexperienced managers, simulating challenging discussions they may have with employees better prepares to address employee responses. Sharing my experiences (from both sides) can also provide insight and help guide them through those situations.”
“I still have very fresh memories of one of my first performance evaluation interviews as first-time manager that I conducted many years ago with a frontline employee, an excellent worker in the department. …At that time, my experience supervising work teams was limited. To be honest, also at that moment I behaved like a demanding boss, not like the leader I should be. Among other mistakes, I did not start the interview by reinforcing her excellent performance and wrongly I only focused on highlighting the improvements I expected from her for the future. It was a rookie mistake that I haven’t forgotten ever since. My collaborator, who was the best on the team, left the interview unmotivated.
“In those moments, I would have liked to have a mentor who could have guided me to prepare the performance evaluation interviews and to have acquired the soft skills that I was missing.
“I never forgot my mistake, and I got somebody who guided me about how to conduct effective performance appraisal interview. More important, with the first support from my mentor, I started a long learning process to acquire knowledge and abilities as mentor because it meant practicing the core skills needed to be a successful manager or team leader and prepared me for senior leadership. I do not forget these lessons learned.”
“First-time managers often face talent management challenges. I encourage them to employ a 90-day strategy to focus on three things: start/stop exercises, building rapport, and capturing small wins.”
As throngs of summer tourists descend on Greece, the country has decided to limit the number of visitors to its most popular archaeological site, the Acropolis, to 20,000 guests per day.
This year, with tourism spiking, the fifth century B.C.E. UNESCO World Heritage site, located atop a rocky hill in the heart of Athens, has been attracting as many as 23,000 people each day. In 2022, annual visitorship reached three million.
“That’s a huge number,” Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni told the radio station Real FM. “Obviously tourism is desirable for the country, for all of us. But we have to find a way of preventing over tourism from harming the monument.”
The influx of visitors—up 80 percent from June and early July of 2019 and the same period this year—has led to concerns about the long-term preservation of the ancient citadel, most famous as the home of the Parthenon temple, dedicated to the goddess Athena.
Overcrowding also create bottlenecks among tourists exploring the site.
Starting on September 4, the government-imposed quota will include hourly entry limits based on the time of day. Currently, roughly half of visitors arrive before noon in large groups from cruise ships and other organized tours, spending about 45 minutes at the Acropolis.
“In the past, these cruise ships had the capacity to carry a few thousand, the population of a large village,” Lysandros Tsilidis, the president of the Federation of Hellenic Associations of Tourist and Travel Agencies, told the Greek Reporter. “Now the vessels are so big you’ve got the size of a small state on board and at least 30 percent of all of those passengers will have pre-purchased tickets to visit the Acropolis.”
With the new measures, 3,000 visitors will be admitted when the monument opens at 8 a.m., with an additional 2,000 slots at 9 a.m. and varied allotments throughout the day. The Acropolis closes at 9 p.m.
The plan is to introduce the limits next month on a trial basis. If all goes well, the restrictions will become permanent in April, when they will also roll out to other archaeological sites across the country.
“The measure will address the need to protect the monument, which is the main thing for us, as well as [improving] visitors’ experience of the site,” Mendoni said, as reported by the Associated Press.
The culture minister, who is a classical archaeologist, controversially installed concrete pathways between some of the Acropolis temples in the fall of 2021. Her plan to widen the site’s Propylaia gateway to improve access to the site has also been met with criticism.
That work is expected to be completed in about 10 months, Manolis Korres, the architect who heads the Committee for the Conservation of the Acropolis Monuments, told the Guardian.
The Acropolis faces other challenges in tourism in the form of soaring summer temperatures and more frequent heat waves due to climate change. Last month, as the heat reached 118 degrees, the government closed the site, along with other popular tourist attractions, for several hours during the hottest part of the day. It has also installed awnings to provide shade to protect visitors from the sun.
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