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Reposted from Fast Company
The workforce has been forced to consistently and quickly adapt to socio-economic shifts as a result of the pandemic. While the world as we know it changed in 2020, we are currently living in a “re-adjustment” phase that has brought about its own set of changes and challenges.
Employers and employees alike are juggling what their new normal looks like, and how to integrate pandemic-learned behaviors and activities into a post-pandemic world. An uptake in digital tools allowing for remote work, the creation of virtual company cultures, and an internal focus on employee engagement and satisfaction are all examples of these pandemic-based pursuits that workplaces are looking to blend into their day-to-day.
As a new year begins, a potentially looming recession adds another element of uncertainty that must be accounted for in the workplace sector. It is vital to look ahead to what shifts can be expected in order to provide workers the opportunity to prepare for these changes.
With this in mind, here are the five trends that I expect to gain prominence into the New Year.
Upskilling and soft skills were themes that gained steam across industry conversations in 2022. As we move into the New Year with economic uncertainty on the horizon, upskilling opportunities for the workforce will become a prominent retention strategy, demonstrating an organization’s desire to drive employee growth and development. Organizations today have picked up on employee’s desire for continuous learning, and so we will see unique learning and development programs set in place as they create an environment where upskilling is encouraged and also allow companies to reap the rewards of developing highly skilled teams.
The current tight market has created a challenge for employers to attract the best talent, making it crucial for both employees and employers to be aware of, or close, any skill gaps. Offering the opportunity to job seekers and employees to develop or learn new skills is a solution for employers hoping to remain competitive in the market and increase the efficiency of their current team.
Additionally, soft skills in particular are invaluable to an organization and possessing these skills often sets top leaders apart. Interpersonal communication, decision-making, time management and collaboration are all soft skills for employees and job seekers alike to focus on in the new year, to increase their value in the workforce.
Flexibility within the workplace has never been as valued as it is right now. Most employees do not want to feel tethered to their desks for eight hours per day after experiencing the openness of remote work. Lessened commutes and the ability to shift working time to non-traditional work hours allowed employees to improve their work/life balance.
With the world returning back to “normal” after two years at home, employees are not ready to completely give up the elements that have dramatically improved their quality of life in favor of returning to the office five days a week.
Many teams have chosen a hybrid approach. In the year ahead, we will continue to see hybrid work environments being adopted by organizations, allowing employees to have the freedom and independence of remote work that they enjoy while also providing teams with the opportunity for in-person facetime and collaboration in the office. Non-flexible work environments can be a dealbreaker for workers, so workplaces will continue to take employees’ wants into consideration through hybrid work models.
With the wide-spread adoption of hybrid work, employers are enacting efforts to measure employee productivity when not in the office. From tracking hours to monitoring softwares, we have started to see that employers are trying to gain insight into how teams spend their time. However, these measures may negatively impact trust levels within the workplace. It is very important for employers to work collaboratively and be transparent with their teams and to maintain a sense of trust.
In 2023, we expect to see an increasing importance of benefits in worker compensation packages. A recently conducted Talent.com study, found that close to 60% of U.S. job seekers find benefits to be an important element when looking for a job, second only to salary.
With the continued talent crunch in the labor market, many organizations will turn to implementing more comprehensive and attractive benefit packages to attract and retain top talent. Non-traditional benefits such as access to fertility treatments, financial wellness programs, and pet insurance won’t be uncommon benefits in the year ahead. In fact, they are already highly sought after by Americans.
Moreover, as an increasing number of states move in the direction of pay transparency, jobseekers will also turn to benefits as a negotiation tactic. Increased vacation days, parental leave, and 401(k) matching are a few of the many avenues job seekers will leverage to increase the value of compensation packages.
Pay transparency is the future of work, and we’ve already seen this shift begin to happen in 2022. New York City and Colorado already have pay transparency laws in place, requiring employers to state salary ranges in job descriptions. California is next to legalize pay transparency, with a similar policy coming into effect on January 1.
Pay transparency is one way to correct wage gaps and erase pay discrimination, which would be a huge victory. A recent study conducted by Talent.com highlights New York City resident’s thoughts on pay transparency. We found that nearly 35% of jobseekers experienced pay discrimination and over 50% of those who did were women. Pay discrimination is an issue that has plagued the employment sector for far too long, and enacting salary transparency can help address the situation.
There are also benefits to engaging in salary transparency efforts for employers, including increasing the quality of applications. When job seekers are able to ensure both the qualifications and compensation of a role fit what they are looking for, the best workers will self-sort accordingly. Providing a good-faith salary range—not too wide of a range—can also act as a powerful brand statement and build positive sentiment among applicants.
Economists suggest that a recession is likely looming and with widespread news coverage of layoffs at large tech organizations across the country, many employees are concerned for the fate of their own employment.
The pandemic produced many important conversations surrounding mental health and wellness inside and outside of the workplace. As a result, many organizations now provide employees with wellness perks such as meditation software, summer fridays to destress, or access to psychological services. Although we have moved past the pandemic, now is not the time to move backward on the tremendous progress made that allowed employees to be open about their mental health struggles.
Times of economic uncertainty bring about a whole new set of fears that have the power to negatively affect mental health. The onus is on employers to recognize these potential barriers and provide employees with ongoing access to resources that can improve their mental wellbeing, and in turn work performance.
In conclusion, the state of the modern workplace is continuing to adapt before us and it’s necessary to keep up with its changes. Keeping these six trends in mind over the next year will set employers and employees up for success, providing organizations and individuals with the opportunity to thrive in a post-pandemic workforce.
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Reposted from BlooLoop
Dubai’s Museum of the Future has introduced a robotic canine, or ‘robodog’, that can be seen roaming the lobby, welcoming and interacting with visitors.
The four-legged robotic dog joins the museum’s growing robot community, including an AI-powered humanoid bot named Ameca. The institution is also home to Bob the robot barista, and a robotic flying penguin and jellyfish.
The robodog has 3D vision and moves using 17 joints. Per a release, the advanced robot uses machine learning and navigates the territory with unprecedented mobility for a robot.
“We are excited to welcome the latest addition to our family of intelligent robots,” said Majed Al Mansoori, deputy executive director at the Museum of the Future.
“With Ameca, the robodog, and others, the Museum of the Future enables visitors to meet some of the most cutting-edge and advanced robots and AI systems currently on the market.
“We welcome visitors to come and meet our interactive robots and learn about the technologies that are shaping our future today and tomorrow.”
Designed by US technology firm Boston Dynamics, the robodog uses 360-degree perception to map the terrain and avoid obstacles. It can also balance on uneven surfaces, navigate stairs and collect 2D and 3D information using sensors.
Ameca, the museum’s first robotic staff member, features a human-like face and a robotic body. It can interact with guests, answer their questions and provide directions. Additionally, it can make facial expressions and track movement.
In the UK, Blenheim Palace has joined forces with the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and Oxford Biology to test a robot dog monitoring the impact of climate change.
The Museum of the Future is inviting people to name the robodog on social media. Those interested can suggest names via Twitter and Instagram.
Reposted from Security Management Magazine
Harvard Business Review recently asked a group of technical leads from McKinsey & Company to identify the leading technology trends in their areas. Security Management asked Quang Trinh, PSP, vice chair of the ASIS Security Applied Sciences Community Steering Committee and professional services manager for Axis Communications, to discuss each of the trends from a security perspective.
Following is a synopsis of each trend and Trinh’s analysis, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
McKinsey advisor Lareina Yee examined the trends McKinsey had identified the previous year, including “space technologies, clean tech, AI, and immersive reality technologies.” The trend she sees this year is the challenge of combining these technologies to create unique, value-producing products and initiatives.
“When looking at how you plan to invest in technologies over the next year,” she said, “try to think holistically and consider how they may work together to unlock new opportunities.”
Trinh: This is quite evident in the physical security industry with trends such as cybersecurity and data privacy technologies being implemented in unison.
In the topics of artificial intelligence (AI), a combination of cloud, on-premise, and edge based applications are working collectively together to balance the solution for the customer and offer a more scalable approach. Especially in the realm of computer vision, where there are benefits for image processing at the edge, on-premise servers, and cloud computing, depending on the outcome desired.
This ecosystem approach is allowing multiple technology trends to work in a collaborative effort to solve a customer’s use case needs.
Many game-changing technology developments, such as 5G, AI, and cloud computing, have moved from early adopter status to the mainstream curve. McKinsey’s Klemens Hjartar said this means the way organizations think about and budget for IT must change as a result.
“These aren’t the sexiest investment,” he said, “but automating processes, investing in data foundations, cleaning up tech debt, and continually renewing the IT architecture are needed for the business to have a chance of taking advantage of the new technologies coming online.”
Trinh: These tipping-point technologies are more difficult to measure ROI. Most executive boards don’t prioritize investments and budgets unless there is a compelling correlation to profitability, operational efficiencies, or effectiveness of the technology to impact business in a positive way. I agree that the department heads of an organization need to better prepare board level executives on the impacts of these technologies to their operations. IT technologies are evolving each year and remaining stagnant because of the “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it” mentality can cause negative impacts to business in the long term. In the physical security industry, it took several years to transition an analog industry to digital, and the topics of cybersecurity and bridging the needs of OT (operational technology) and IT groups required a lot of collaboration and explanation to address each side’s risk perspective.
Aamer Baig from McKinsey sees the potential for corporate belt-tightening in 2023 leading to hiring freezes or layoffs in technology staff. He said it would be a mistake for organizations in such a situation to ask their technology staff to “simply do more.” Rather, he said, find ways to maximize the time they can spend on technology by removing administrative and bureaucratic burdens.
“This isn’t just a productivity issue, it’s a talent issue,” he said. “If you want your company to become a destination for top engineers, you need to create a work environment where engineers can do what they love.”
Trinh: As this relates to the physical security industry, we have security engineers that can be more efficient if they are trained on the tools that can help them be more productive and efficient. The physical security industry is now impacted from emerging technologies such as AI, robotics, and analytics. These security engineers need companies to invest in their individual development because the lack of experienced engineers is causing staffing issues for companies trying to tackle these technology trends. While it’s always nice to hire someone outside with the knowledge, investment in personal development can lead to better staff retention based on how companies structure their personal development plan for internal employees.
Will Forrest is the second McKinsey consultant to note technology reaching a tipping point and moving from trend to mainstream. He specifically said now is the time to capitalize on laying a solid foundation for cloud computing.
“In 2023,” he said, “companies should focus on building out strong cloud foundations that allow them to take advantage of the most important benefits that cloud provides, [such as] scaling applications or automatically adding capacity to meet surges in demand.”
Trinh: The concept of cloud is starting to mature with many large organizations. The topic of scalability has become quite important as these companies’ workforces have grown during the last few years. But the COVID-19 pandemic also caused a lot of companies to lose talent and find ways to augment the loss of their workforce through a cloud strategy.... Workforce augmentation and automation was something that could also offer value for companies looking to do more with less.
Security, in the context of this trend, is referring to protection of information assets. Advisor Jan Shelley Brown said previously, security concerns were the reason for slow adoption of, and movement to the cloud. That has changed, however, and ushered in a new way for organizations to think about information security, one focused on risk management.
Cloud service providers have greatly enhanced their security protections. The conversations have shifted, she said, to consider what reliance on the cloud means to an organization’s risk posture, as she asks the question: “What if one of the big [cloud service providers] goes down?” This is the exact scenario Security Management tackled in its December issue of Security Technology.
Trinh: As security breaches become more frequent and costly, cloud solutions offer services that have more enhanced security than what many organizations have in-house. These cloud solutions follow industry standards such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2. They also implemented technologies like AI to detect anomalies and were proactive in scanning and indexing vulnerabilities and risks in real time.
The physical security industry had challenges applying cybersecurity principles to its physical security systems, which included edge devices like IP cameras, video management systems, and access control systems. The mentality of air-gapped systems meant many security practitioners ignored cybersecurity risks and stated that the system had no connection to the outside world via the Internet. With the velocity of cybersecurity patches and firmware, many physical security practitioners soon learned that managing the devices and having them connected allowed for better management, insight, and compliance. Once liability and accountability around cyber breaches redefined the importance of these separate air-gapped systems, the door opened for connected services such as the cloud to play a bigger role in scaling the security needs and management of the system for OT and IT teams.
According to McKinsey consultant Vinayak HV, a developing trend is the democratization of AI functionality. Formally the playground of researchers with massive, centralized, proprietary datasets, new products and applications, such as ChatGPT, have allowed a much wider swath of people and organizations to make use of AI technology.
“The big challenge and opportunity for companies in 2023,” he said, “will be to take advantage of these decentralized AI capabilities—and what this technology might mean for their business models.
Trinh: Decentralizing AI has both pros and cons. The challenge with AI and the tools developed around AI is the ethical use of the tools and who and how the data is being trained on, supervised, or corrected by human interactions. Taking ChatGPT as an example, the output of ChatGPT is based on all the training data it collects. During that training, who or what mechanism is used to fact-check certain datasets used for retraining? In the case of ChatGPT, the user’s interactions are also used in the retraining of the platform.
As organizations look to incorporate AI into their business operations, the challenge will be filtering out all the bad data. AI, machine and deep learning are all predictive algorithms; the outputs are not absolute but have a high probability based on the input. The output is also susceptible to GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
Decentralization allows for innovation and more people to use the tool but also has the side effect of producing outputs that are not desirable if they are not supervised or corrected. As the physical security industry grasps the potential impacts of AI techniques in images, videos, acoustics, and other sensor data, will proper expectations be set for the industry and the customers looking to solve their problems? It will take a collective group of industry leaders to covey a common message and expectation of the technology influences on the industry.
Reposted from The Art Newspaper
In 2022, the Louvre received 7.8 million visitors—19% less than in 2019, albeit a rise of 170% from 2021 when French museums were closed for nearly five months. But the fall in attendance is not necessarily bad news. The Louvre director Laurence des Cars has hit the pause button and decided to limit daily entries to 30,000. Prior to Covid-19, the museum could welcome up to 45,000 people on its most crowded days. With 80% of tickets now issued via a reservation service, the new policy should stabilise attendance at between 7.5 million and 8 million visitors for 2023, the same levels experienced by the museum around 17 years ago.
In a statement, Des Cars said she opted for the change “so the visit would be a pleasurable experience, especially for first-timers to the museum who make up 60% of entries". The Louvre, which welcomed around five million visitors at the end of the 1990s, has been struggling for years against over-attendance, with long queues outside the glass pyramid or in front of masterpieces like the Mona Lisa now common. In recent years, Louvre employees have gone on strike citing "unprecedented deterioration of conditions" amid record crowds.
Although her predecessor, Jean-Luc Martinez, had implemented major works to improve visiting conditions, Des Cars says she is "the first museum director to consciously decide to limit the number of visitors", taking into account not only the needs of the public but also the staff. As a major two-year renovation of the exhibitions gallery begins this month, the Louvre will not plan any major shows, even with Paris set to receive around ten million visitors during the Olympic Games in summer 2024.
When she was appointed in 2021, Des Cars had also announced that she wished to close the museum one hour later every day (7 pm), in order to attract more local visitors, but this will not take place before careful planning, including discussions with the unions, according to an informed source. The Louvre, which has about 2,000 employees, has promised to hire 90 agents in 2023 to take the proposal forward.
Normally, ticketing accounts for almost one third of the €200m annual budget of the Louvre, half of which is subsidised by the state. Without detailing the financial impact of the fall in attendance, a museum spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper that “the museum met its expectations". According to Des Cars's statement, "the state’s endowment will be increased from €84m to €93m, but this is destined to help the museum to face rising energy costs, which amount to €10m". She adds that the government has provided €120m of exceptional help to the Louvre since 2020.
Of Louvre visitors last year, 70% were foreigners who had resumed travelling after the pandemic—mostly Americans (rising to 18% of the total) and Europeans (27% from UK, Germany, Italy and Spain). However, there were almost no visitors from China, although it accounted for between 8 and 10% of the total before the pandemic. Overall, attendance fell by 24% compared to 2018, when the museum reached an historical record of more than 10m entries. In December, the average daily attendance was 25,000 before rising to 30,000 over the Christmas and New Year’s period.
The 2022 visitor totals confirm the return of tourism in Paris, a trend also reflected in ticket sales to other leading cultural sites. For example, the Château de Versailles registered 6.9m entries last year, 77% of them foreigners, while the Centre Pompidou welcomed 3m. The numbers for these two institutions were respectively 16% and 10% less than in 2019, but the results are still better than expected. The French culture ministry had been planning for a fall in attendance of 50% in 2022 (compared to 2019), a third in 2023 and less than 20% in 2024.
What do a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania, a chief HR executive with diarrhea, and cannabis-induced psychosis have in common with having a great workplace security culture?
Connection.
Fortune may favor the brave, but it also favors the compassionate, empathetic, humble, engaging, perceptive, innovative, and trusted business expert and security partner.
Building a sustained security culture starts with the security leader’s ability to emotionally connect, engage, and partner with people at all levels of the organization, from the C-suite to the third-shift frontline associate. Without those abovementioned traits, asking leaders and employees to understand and embrace a security culture can backfire, and your efforts to build a culture will either fail or be insufficient, resulting in a long-term impact on your credibility.
Connection is a full-time occupation, however, and security leaders cannot take it lightly.
Imagine that you’re traveling to a site to do a pending security assessment and other projects. You put in a full day in the office on Monday and plan for an evening flight to the site. You happen to wear a light jacket with your company logo on it to the airport. While sitting at the gate waiting for your plane to board, you notice two people also with your company logos on their backpacks and sweaters, and by coincidence you make eye contact with one of them. What do you do?
The next morning you’re having breakfast at the hotel. You recognize a different colleague from the legal department, but you have never met in person. What do you do?
You pull up to the site’s parking lot and you run into two employees walking in together talking about the Monday night football game. What do you do?
Another employee scans her badge and opens the main door to enter. She turns and looks at you and your ID badge as you swipe the badge reader. What do you do?
As you approach the sign-in desk, you pass an adjacent side-hall entrance, and you look to your left and see a joyous-looking janitor sweeping next to a planted tree. What do you say?
At the desk the receptionist says, "Good morning, may I help you?" What do you say?
Every interaction represents an opportunity to build your personal brand and security culture. You have the precious opportunity to make someone feel good about themselves if you know how to do it, and if it’s part of your DNA.
Now, each company’s culture is a little different, and understanding that your overall company culture will determine the success of your security culture. Having this foundation provides you with a realistic expectation of success and how you will design your strategy and tactics.
So, what about that sweet transvestite, diarrhea, and psychosis? Each of them provides essential lessons on how to build and promote a specific culture.
Would you like to have four hours with 900 members of your legal; HR; internal audit; ethics and compliance; environmental, health and safety (EHS); procurement; and operations departments so they would get to know you, you them, and establish long-lasting relationships?
I developed an innovative way to share one of global security's traditional skill sets—conducting investigative interviewing. All these departments conduct investigations within their roles, so why not share something security is good at to make them better at what they do?
Instead of death by PowerPoint, I start my course with something they have never seen before in an interviewing course. Just a minute and a half video emphasizes that this session will be entertaining, thought provoking, and focused on empathy and compassion. I start my course with an opening visit by a Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania—a classic number from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Initial reactions range from being shocked to offended to confused to singing along—the video is not what you usually see in a business setting, but it goes to the critical investigative component of personal bias barriers or obstacles. We all have personal biases that, if left unchecked, can impact your ability to objectively seek and obtain the main point of any investigation—the complete truth.
This video is an excellent ice-breaker technique to bring the audience’s biases to surface. Then we discuss how their opinions of what one sees and hears on the screen could hinder the viewer from treating everyone with fairness, respect, and empathy. In the clip, Tim Curry sings, “Don’t get strung out by the way I look! Don’t judge a book by its cover!” People are often overwhelmed by what they are seeing on the screen, and they do not listen to and process these words of wisdom in the moment—until we discuss them in the session.
The rest of the course is full of video samples of well-known people (for example, did Tom Brady know air was taken out of the footballs during a 2014 football championship?) exhibiting various types of deceptive behavior.
In 10 years, I have taught the course more than 40 times at my organization’s corporate headquarters as well as at field operations and at annual meetings around the world. Two days after the first of these courses in Puerto Rico, the vice president of HR sent me a note saying she applied the methods and determined someone was untruthful during an investigation.
Each time I encounter someone who provides positive feedback and asks for additional training is one more affirmation that I am contributing to my colleagues and the business. When it comes from a business leader, “I want that training or service” are some of the sweetest words for a security leader to hear, and this outreach is the best advocacy to building security cultures.
Setting the tone for company culture can also come down to personal compassion. Years back I provided executive protection for some senior leaders, including the chief human resources officer (CHRO), for a three-day operations review of sites in Latin America. We traveled on the corporate aircraft and planned for health contingencies, especially the most common one—food poisoning. Unfortunately, the CHRO fell ill on the second day.
Prior to boarding our vehicles for the 45-minute drive from the hotel to a site, I had checked with each of the travelers and noticed the CHRO did not look well, but she insisted on heading out. I discreetly informed our two drivers of the situation, and they assessed potential emergency stopping points. Twenty minutes into the trip, a stop was urgently required—many of us have been there and know how painful, miserable, and embarrassing it can be. The drivers quickly turned back a couple of miles to a toll road booth with a rest stop. The drivers had even brought toilet paper in case the stall was out. The executive was offered Imodium, and she made it through the trip without additional problems.
After this incident, our relationship was extremely positive, and she was a crucial leader in setting the tone at the top regarding our company security culture and supporting all aspects of our program. Preparedness and compassion help to secure strategic allies, as well as a broader cultural shift.
The last example of innovation, compassion, and empathy concerns mental health.
Several years ago, during their university studies, one of my children experienced a psychotic episode triggered by several years of self-medicating their depression with marijuana. Our child had started vaping THC cartridges, which can have up to 80 percent THC concentration. This landed them in a mental health hospital for two weeks.
My family’s lives changed forever upon a diagnosis of cannabis-induced psychosis, something that mimics or can even cause bipolar disorder. Since this diagnosis, I immersed myself day and night learning about all things mental health. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), along with therapy, were lifesavers in helping us understand what our family’s journey forward would be like.
In 2020, I decided to help others by obtaining a NAMI certification as a family support group facilitator. These groups are made up of family members of people with a mental health diagnosis, and we come together in small groups to provide empathic support, education, and guidance. Helping others in this way has been the best thing for my soul…ever. But it could help a broader audience.
I shared my story with a vice president at my company, and she asked me to begin similar programs at work. The goal was to help colleagues break through the stigma barrier, and to better understand their mental health journey, as well as leverage available resources like employee assistance programs (EAPs) and local NAMI groups.
Security professionals understand the connection mental health has to comprehensive workplace violence prevention programs, including ones that address suicide and bullying risks. This has been an incredible opportunity to partner with the human resources and benefits departments and hundreds of colleagues at all levels in the organization.
These cases represent just three examples of ways and opportunities to help develop your personal brand and your company’s security culture for a great workplace. There are many more things you can do to help others at work, build your brand, and have a best-in-class security culture. Most importantly, it takes time to develop and sustain one.
Developing and fomenting a best-in-class security culture takes years, and cultures are built one interaction at a time, over time. The entire security department must be united in this approach. Having just one member on your team not believing in this philosophy and wanting to be the corporate cop can set your culture building effort back to square one or even be such an impediment that they drive top talent away from your security department.
Each and every contact you have with a work colleague is an opportunity to do that and be seen as friend, not a foe.
In closing, it all comes down to your feelings about people, especially people different from you, your self-awareness and make-up, your humility, empathy, and compassion, and lastly, your overall attitude towards life and understanding of what a strong security culture can do for a company’s employee security and business successes.
Reposted from Artnet News
Thieves broke into a German museum on Monday night and stole 450 gold coins thought to be worth several million euros, the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (LKA) confirmed.
The police have not disclosed whether they have arrested anyone for the crime, but it has been suggested that the criminals were professionals who got away with the heist by disrupting local phone and internet services.
The ancient treasures are around 2,000 years old and were uncovered in 1999 during the excavation of a large Celtic settlement in the modern-day region of Manching in Bavaria, Germany. It was the largest discovery of Celtic gold in the last century and a landmark find at one of the most important archaeological sites in central Europe.
In 2006, the treasure was installed at the nearby Roman-Celtic Museum, which presents local finds from the Iron Age and Roman times. It became the crown jewel of the collection.
“The loss of the Celtic treasure is a catastrophe, the gold coins are irreplaceable as evidence of our history,” said Bavaria’s minister for science and art, Markus Blume, according to a report in Monopol. “Whoever did this, someone has violated our history.”
“The burglary must have taken place in the early hours of the morning,” said a spokesperson for the LKA. “It was classic, as you would imagine in a bad film.”
It is believed the thieves succeeded in part by disrupting local phone and internet services. “Professionals were at work here,” the local mayor, Herbet Nerb, told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “They cut off the whole of Manching. The museum is actually a high-security location but all the connections to the police were severed.”
The local criminal investigation department for the city of Ingolstadt was initially called to the scene but the severity of the case meant it was transferred to the state police.
The site of the archaeological dig itself has also been known to attract thieves. In May of this year, individuals illegally dug some 140 holes that they presumably probed for undiscovered treasure. It is not yet known if they were successful and what may have been taken.
Germany has been targeted by several high-profile museum heists in recent years. A major jewelry collection, Dresden’s Green Vault, was hit in 2019, and the losses amounted to as much as $1 billion. A few days later, thieves broke into Berlin’s Stasi Museum, making off with medals, jewelry, and other artifacts. In 2017, a huge gold coin known as the “Big Maple Leaf” was stolen from Berlin’s Bode Museum.
Receiving executive buy-in for crisis planning and program development can be a daunting endeavor. Most private sector industries have few legal or regulatory requirements specific to security or crisis programing. Additionally, security and crisis management programming are sometimes not viewed as priorities or aligned with the corporate mission. Finally, most security and crisis professionals are left to try to influence executives with limited budgets and staff. I learned these challenges the hard way.
For more than 10 years in the U.S. federal government, I was part of several large-scale emergency responses and planning efforts at the executive level. I engaged with top-level government executives and foreign dignitaries. In 2012, I transitioned to a private sector emergency management role. I was hired to create comprehensive crisis response plans and to train all employees—including the C-suite—on their roles during a crisis. I assumed the importance of life safety would be an easy sell. I was wrong.
I quickly learned that I didn’t speak the language of my new environment and I no longer had the power I had in government to issue mandates and penalize non-compliance. For me to be successful in the private sector, I needed to rethink my approach and find a way to influence people without having many rules or regulations that I could lean on.
So, I developed a three-pronged strategy that helped me create successful crisis management programs for Fortune 500 organizations and other businesses and non-profits.
A major difference between private and public sector emergency management is what words are used to get financial buy-in. In the public sector, statements such as “leveraging the whole community” or “will save the most lives” are typical lead sentences when requesting federal grant dollars. In the private sector, though, the emphasis is on words that show how you can save the company money.
For instance, if you are trying to earn buy-in to launch an emergency notification system to communicate with your employees during a crisis, concentrate on the following: Show how the system will decrease the company’s risk, demonstrate how implementing this system positively impacts the corporate brand, and highlight what types of insurance coverage discounts the company can receive if the system is implemented.
A sample pitch to get funding for the system could be:
Investing in a company emergency notifications system:
There is no single better way to get funding and executive support for your crisis management program than a real-life crisis. This is the time the security lead or crisis manager can truly show how they can add value by stepping up to coordinate the company’s response. Use the crisis as the springboard to establish the process and protocol you want to build and document for future responses. Simply pulling together a basic situation briefing call with the core corporate functions provides an important example of how corporate response should be done, and it quickly defines your company’s duty of care to its employees.
Try to side-step the whole “who is in charge” issue. In the private sector, the CEO is always in charge, and no corporate crisis plan should suggest otherwise. It is the job of the security or crisis leader to showcase how they can facilitate the response by ensuring the appropriate corporate leaders are around the table and guiding them through the decision-making process.
I witnessed hours lost in one company’s response because the security director got into a shouting match with his C-suite executives by saying he was the incident commander, and they must follow his directions.
The title incident commander is standard public sector vernacular, but it doesn’t translate to the private sector. In any corporate crisis plan, designate an incident coordinator instead—that simple word change completely shifts dynamics and avoids many clashes over territory. Finally, remember the private sector is rarely required do anything when it comes to crisis planning.
In the United States, traditional public sector emergency planning is driven by a set process and protocol typically outlined by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) rules and regulations. There are federal guidelines that specifically detail the requirements for hazard mitigation plans, emergency operations center plans, etc. Although there are industry best practice recommendations for crisis management and planning in the private sector, such as ISO 22361, requirements are few and far between. Often, businesses will recognize they need some sort of crisis response plan, but the focus will be on the management of a specific incident instead of looking at the big picture—how the company will respond as whole and what expectations, roles, and responsibilities employees have.
One of the best approaches to get engagement for corporate crisis planning is to conduct a very simple 30-minute tabletop discussion with your executives. This is the opposite of the public-sector approach of building your plan first then testing it with an exercise. I have found a lot of success by gently throwing executives into the deep end. Talking through a crisis scenario quickly opens executives’ eyes to their personal knowledge gaps and how these gaps pose a risk to the company.
I once did a tabletop discussion with executives that focused on their earthquake response protocol (knowing they had none). My 30-minute timeframe got extended to more than two hours because the executives realized they had no protocols in place. Of top concern was they had no plans on how to communicate with their employees nor knowledge of what do if the server in the building was damaged. A server that had no fail-over and held millions of dollars of intellectual property content. That conversation got me the support I needed to develop a comprehensive all-hazards response plan and crisis communication protocol for the company.
Although there are many differences between public and private sector crisis planning, no corporate plan should be done in a vacuum without engagement with local emergency response agencies. Many corporate plans have been written without communicating with local responders or even an understanding of local emergency response protocols, and this makes the company’s crisis response plan worthless. For example, if you don’t know in what type of situations local responders will shut off access to a company’s facilities, you and your employees can find yourselves not being able to work for days.
Reposted from NBC Connecticut
Dropping temperatures have played a role in the temporary closure of one of Hartford's libraries.
Officials say the city's Main Street library will be closed for at least a week after a four-inch water feed line to a chiller in a fourth floor penthouse broke around 10:30 Saturday morning.
All four floors of the library suffered water damage and a lengthy clean up process is currently underway.
“While this situation is serious, we are thankful the damage is not more extensive,” said Hartford Public Library President and CEO Bridget E. Quinn. “The Hartford Fire Department was incredible in their response, as well as library staff who assisted today.”
Most of the computer equipment and furniture on the first two floors, as well as a portion on the third floor, were damaged as a result of the pipe burst. However, the library collections suffered far less damage.
More information is expected to be released as clean up efforts and damage evaluations continue.
A member of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art is facing a felony charge after stealing a small sculpture from an exhibition of the museum’s glass collection.
Roughly a third of the nearly 180-piece Rose Family Glass Collection is currently on view in a show of highlights of a recent donation from the children of Jerome and Judith Rose.
The thief is Christopher Lambert, who is accused of sticking a small but valuable glass artwork in his pocket and walking out of the museum.
But Lambert wasn’t done. It appears he hid the sculpture under his car tire and then returned to the scene of the crime, presumably to see the rest of the exhibition.
Fortunately, an observant employee quickly realized that it was missing from the display and sounded the alarm.
A quick review of the security footage made clear what had happened.
“We were able to identify a probable suspect. We didn’t immediately know all of the details of the theft upon discovering its absence, so of course we were concerned with the condition of it,” museum president and CEO, Michael Anderson, told local news outlet News 9.
The museum has not identified the stolen work, but it is worth $70,000, according to court records.
Even before the Rose donation, the institution had an extensive and collection of contemporary glass art.
The Roses began their collection in 1977, and, over the next 40 years, acquired work by 83 artists. Many were graduates of Seattle’s Pilchuck Glass School, co-founded by Dale Chihuly, with whom they became friendly through many trips from their home in Atherton, California.
Fortunately, it only took about a week to recover the stolen sculpture.
“Thankfully,” Michael said, “when we got it back it was still in pristine condition.”
Reposted from The New York Times
For Hans-Peter Wipplinger, the director of Vienna’s Leopold Museum, the last few weeks have been challenging. As climate protesters across Europe stepped up their attacks against art, Wipplinger took measures to protect his storied collection, which includes famous paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Bags were banned; coats, too. The museum hired extra guards to patrol its five floors.
It didn’t work. Last week, members of a group called Last Generation walked into the museum and threw black liquid at one of Klimt’s major works, “Death and Life.” A protester had sneaked the liquid into the museum in a hot water bottle strapped to his chest, Wipplinger said.
The Klimt, protected by glass, was unharmed. But Wipplinger said his security team could only have stopped the attack by subjecting visitors to invasive body searches, “like at the airport.” He didn’t want to even consider that prospect, he added.
“If we start such procedures, the whole idea of what a museum is dies,” Wipplinger said. “A museum is a place that should always be open to the public,” adding: “We can’t stop being that.”
With the attacks showing no sign of abating, museum directors across Europe are settling into a nervous new equilibrium, fearful for the works in their care but unwilling to compromise on making visitors feel welcome. So far, nothing has been permanently damaged. But many fear that an accident, or an escalation in the protesters’ tactics, could result in a masterpiece being destroyed.
The actions, which began in Britain in June, are already increasing in frequency and daring. At first protesters glued themselves to the frames of famous paintings, but since footage of activists splattering Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” with tomato soup spread rapidly on social media last month, masterpieces have been doused in pea soup, mashed potatoes and flour.
Those works were all protected by glass, and the protesters’ projectiles never touched an artist’s brush stroke. Yet last Friday, protesters in Paris poured orange paint directly onto a silver Charles Ray sculpture outside the Bourse de Commerce contemporary art space. (A Bourse de Commerce spokesman said the sculpture was cleaned within a few hours.)
In a statement earlier this month signed by the leaders of over 90 of the world’s largest art institutions — including Daniel H. Weiss, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art in New York — museum administrators said they were “deeply shaken” by the protesters’ “risky endangerment” of artworks. The activists “severely underestimate the fragility of these irreplaceable objects,” the statement added.
Yet few museums appear to have taken bold steps to protect their collections. Norway’s National Museum and the Barberini Museum in Potsdam, Germany, have, like the Leopold Museum, banned visitors from taking bags or jackets into their exhibition halls. Others have made no changes. In London, visitors may still carry bags around museums including the National Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern and the British Museum. All four inspect bags at their entrances, but the checks are often cursory. At Tate Britain last Friday, security guards waved through several visitors without looking inside their backpacks.
Wipplinger, of the Leopold Museum, said there was little that a bag check could achieve, anyway, since items like tubes of glue were easy to conceal. “If a person wants to attack an art piece, they will find a way,” he said.
With museums reluctant to act, politicians are beginning to weigh in. On Sunday, Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, said in a news release that his department was considering the actions it could take, including a requirement to cover all paintings in Italy’s museums with glass. Such a program would be expensive and museum entrance fees would rise as a result, Sangiuliano added.
Wipplinger said his teams had been protectively glazing works in its collection for decades, but couldn’t do that quickly for every remaining piece. Nonreflective glass was costly, he said: Work on a painting of moderate size — a square yard, say — could come in at around $1,000.
Robert Read, the head of art at the insurance company Hiscox, said that he was advising museum clients to put more works in their collections behind glass, but Hiscox’s policies did not require it. A contemporary art installation, for instance, simply couldn’t be glazed, he said.
And sometimes a barrier between a painting and its audience is contrary to the work’s spirit. Mabel Tapia, the deputy artistic director of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, said she would never allow that collection’s highlight, Picasso’s 1937 antiwar masterpiece “Guernica,” to be displayed behind glass. It was “a symbol of freedom, and of the fight against fascism,” she added.
Tapia said she had recently redeployed security guards so they could focus on high-profile works — something she commonly does at times of protest — but she felt there was little more she could do. “The only measure that would actually do something is if we closed the museum,” Tapia said, “and we’re not going to do that.” Museums are meant to be places where people meet to think about important issues, she added. “We need to keep them open.”
There was “no silver bullet” for dealing with the protests, Read, the insurer, said. Museum administrators just had to hope the protesters remained “genteel, middle-class liberals” who took steps to avoid permanent damage, he added.
Florian Wagner, 30, the member of Last Generation who threw the black mixture at the Klimt painting in the Leopold Museum, said by phone that he knew before the protest that the work was protected by glass. He practiced the stunt five times at home, he said, and was convinced it would not disfigure the painting. “We are not trying to destroy beautiful pieces of art,” Wagner said, but to “shock people” into acting on climate change.
He wouldn’t be staging any more protests, he said, adding, “I think I’ve made my point.” But he said he was sure others in Austria and across Europe would continue. The actions would only stop, he added, once governments “act on this crisis.”
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