In 2002 Billy Beane changed the game of baseball for the better and forever.  Moneyball is one of my all-time favorite sports books, and I rarely flip past the channel when I come across the movie on TV.  Billy Beane made a name for himself by going against the grain and upsetting the system for evaluating pro-baseball player prospects.  Instead of relying on the subjective observations of baseball insiders, he went beyond the commonly used statistics of stolen bases and batting average, and instead chose to analyze on-base percentage and slugging percentage as true indicators of player’s capability.  This went against the conventional analysis and put Beane on the receiving end of a great deal of criticism.  This criticism ended after the A’s set an American League record of 20 consecutive wins and secured the AL West division title, putting his objective approach on the map.  When the Boston Red Sox replicated his process, they built a World Series Championship team in two years and won the title again three years later.  Billy Beane stayed true to his belief even as baseball traditionalists told him over and over “this is not how baseball is played.”  Scouts said their tacit understanding of the players “intangibles” and “tools” was the most effective way to build a team, not by the numbers.  Billy Beane proved them wrong.

In sports, it is easy to show that the Oakland A’s approach to building a team worked.  There is a clear win-loss record.  There are clear increases or decreases in revenue from merchandise and ticket sales.  In security – whether for the military, law enforcement, or corporate security – determining success is much more difficult.   Continue reading »

A white paper title “Getting Beyond A Perception of Security – A Behavioral Profiling Approach To Threat Recognition and Public Safety” has been added to our downloads section.  To access it, simply visit our library and access all of our downloads.  I’ve added the paper’s Executive Summary into this post to provide an overview of what you can expect.

Executive Summary

The complexities and difficulties that active shooter scenarios present to the security personnel responsible for preventing them create a perception that an active shooter event is unpreventable.  This is untrue.  Threat recognition is based on a person’s ability to accurately predict another person’s intentions and capabilities. This allows a person to separate the criminal from the crowd he hides amongst.  With the limitations of many threat recognition programs, programs that teach people to search for indicators that change from attack to attack, security providers will continue to struggle in preventing an attack from occurring. Continue reading »

Have you controlled access to the building you are tasked to secure? Check.

Ensuring that only people who belong in the office building is the obvious and essential first step to security.  All of the side doors are locked and have alarms to make sure that no one goes in or out through anywhere but the main entrance.  You have placed signs directing people to the clearly marked front of the building to make sure that no one can bypass your security measures.  You have installed turnstiles in the lobby that are operated with a unique key card to make sure that only people who belong inside can get inside.  You have security guards manning the visitor’s desk to check the bags of anyone who doesn’t work in the building and to issue them a temporary pass once they have an escort.  Regardless of how elaborate the system your building uses to control who can get into your building, controlling those entry points is only the first step to actually preventing outsiders, crime, and violence from occurring within.

Access control measures make it easy to observe every person that enters the building by forcing them through a single point of entry.  However, this also makes it difficult to do your job as a security professional because you now have people with violent intentions and those with a legitimate reason for entering mixed into one group.  You have created a situation where criminals can blend in with the people who enter the building every day, making detection increasingly challenging.

If you own that building or are the building’s Director of Security, you have to ask yourself, Continue reading »

I found a great article this morning written on PoliceOne.com that highlights the key parts of a talk that David Grossman gave about how schools are inadequately prepared to deal with school violence.  Obviously, with last week’s tragedy in Newtown, CT, there are a lot of people looking at their own school’s safety situation and this is really an article written for them.

Grossman talks about all of the steps schools have taken to prevent fires in schools (and rightly so) which has ensured that not a single student has died in a school fire in the last 50 years.  School violence on the other hand claims continues to claim the lives of children.  Why? Grossman talks about denial and the perceptions of security vs. fire safety.

The article is definitely worth the read, you can find it here: http://bit.ly/12p0H77

I haven’t had the chance to sit down and get the next few articles written.  In the meantime, take a look at this great TED talk video by Simon Sinek about “How Great Leaders Inspire Action”

The post can be found here:  https://www.cp-journal.com//2012/01/how-great-leaders-inspire-action/

The material here in the Tactical Analysis course is focused on the “locate” piece of the mission of a Marine Rifle Squad – to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy.  What you do once you’ve found the enemy, the criminal, the insurgent, the terrorist, or who ever you are trying to stop.

I stumbled upon a site today after getting a bunch of views coming from it and wanted to pass it on.  Take a look at Suarez International who provides marksmanship training among other things focused on how to win fights.  I haven’t gone through a course, so I cant vouch for them personally, but after looking through their Warrior Talk Forum, I’d assume that their large number of followers is a testament to the benefit from one of their courses.  You have to create an account to view the forum, but it’s free, so don’t worry about signing up.

Locating the enemy is only the first part of the equation – how ready are you to take action and stay left of bang?

This is the last article in the Veterans Week series about how to take control of your job search and control how people research you.  To an overwhelming number of people in the military, setting up a blog might seem trendy, superficial, or even like a waste of time, but without it you have conceded control of what other people are saying or seeing about you.

My reason for recommending that you start a personal website is to give you a tangible product that you can show to a future employer that highlights your ability to apply what you learned in the military and translate that to success in the private sector.  Think about the experiences that you have had fighting a counter-insurgency battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Think about the underlying factor that drives an insurgent’s initial success.  It is his ability to communicate an ideology or a cause to a large number of people, and to convince them to actively support his mission to see that cause come to fruition.  Without his ability to get people on board, the insurgency would never grow past a small core group.

Businesses crave the same level of influence with their customers that insurgents have with the local population.  Continue reading »

The key takeaway from yesterday’s post was that companies are going to do their homework when it comes to job applicants.  Companies want to get it right the first time they hire someone for a position, so they will research you before you ever sit down with them.  It is costly to fire someone.  There is the loss of productivity while the position is open, the time that the company needs to train a new hire, and there is a significant learning curve as the company adapts to the new personality.

With the economy as down as it is, companies are flooded by resumes, and someone who has provided the company with more information than you have and painted a better picture of what they offer will have the advantage when the selection is made.  Companies are looking at applicants from two perspectives.  They are looking to analyze your professional capabilities as well as your personality to make sure you fit into the team.  Let’s start by controlling what the company will see when they research your professional history.

Professionals throughout the human resources field will often tell you the same thing: that their search for new hires starts on Google and LinkedIn.  LinkedIn has become the place to consolidate your professional history and what you’ve been responsible for. This is where recruiters and interviewers can find more comprehensive information on you to compensate for the fact that your resume is usually limited to one page.  Your online resume can provide as much, or as little, information as you choose to expose.  Google has seen the impact that LinkedIn has had on the consolidation of this information and often puts LinkedIn pages in the first five results for a search on a person’s name.

To find the best way to set yourself up on LinkedIn, I sat down with Chris Dessi, the CEO for Silverback Social, a social media marketing company, and talked to him about how to improve what companies see when they research you.

The Human Factor

One of the first (and arguably most important) lessons I learned from Chris Dessi is that a good LinkedIn profile has to be attractive for two audiences.  The first, and most common sense answer, is that it has to be attractive to humans.  If a person or a recruiter finds your LinkedIn profile and only finds a list of job titkes that you have held without any explanation of what you did or what your responsibilities were, they aren’t going to put in the extra effort to keep searching.  The same concept applies if your profile has no picture of who you are. Let’s start with some common LinkedIn mistakes that will cause a recruiter to bypass your profile.

–       No profile picture or an unprofessional picture.  Unless you are working for the CIA, not having a picture shows a degree of laziness and that will likely cause someone to lose interest.

–       Your work history only shows company names and has no explanation of what you did.  This shows either a lack of caring in your profile or an inability to communicate your responsibilities and accomplishments, driving a recruiter away from your page and towards someone who was able to accomplish this.

–       Your profile is written in jargon.  Jargon in general is a turn off, but if you are in sales, it is likely that the person trying to hire you at least knows what the jargon means.  Because security professionals are likely transitioning into a new field (from the military or police department,) any jargon might as well be a foreign language, because the person researching you probably haven’t been in those jobs and probably wont be familiar with the terminology.

Once you think you’ve created the profile that highlights your skills and abilities the best, ask as many people to look through it as you can to get their feedback. The more people (especially without security experience) who look at it and can understand what you have done and what you offer will be the sign that you have successfully created a solid online profile.

The Tech Factor

The second audience that your profile has to be attractive to isn’t a person, but the search algorithms that are the back-end to the various search engines.  This could be considered even more important than tailoring your LinkedIn profile to humans, because it is how people are going to find your page in the first place.  When someone is searching for a person possessing certain experiences or skills, Google doesn’t assume (from a military example) that an infantry squad leader has leadership, planning, training, and logistics experience.  Google doesn’t know that an NCO from motor-transport has spent time managing a team of mechanics, reporting maintenance readiness rates or coordinating resupply of commonly broken parts.  To make your profile attractive to a search engine, you have to tell it how to find you, and you do that through keywords.

These keywords will depend on the job you are looking for.  If the job you are looking for relates to project management, you might want to add in the keywords of “maintained client relationships,” “project life cycle,” or “met operational timelines,” to the various positions you’ve held while on active duty.  If you aren’t sure what words to put into the profile, simply do a Google search for a job description and see what the common keywords are and then make sure they are spread throughout your profile for the different jobs you’ve held in the past.  This will help bring your profile to the first page of a search.  Remember, that you have to think about the words a recruiter would choose to use when describing your capabilities.  You will want to be smart about your research and not just drop these words into your profile if they don’t apply.  If a recruiter is searching for someone using specific words, it is highly likely that they will ask you about them during your interview for examples of how you have applied them in your career.  If they aren’t relevant, don’t use them.

Build Your Network

Since you are already on LinkedIn improving your profile, you need to make sure people can find you.  Begin building as expansive of a network as you can.  To see why, do a search on LinkedIn for a skill and see who comes up on the top of the results list.  It will be the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd degree connections at the top, then followed by the countless people that you are unconnected to.  If a recruiter is a friend of a friend and searches for a Marine squad leader in San Diego, CA, you will come up higher on their search (a 2^nd degree connection) or a friend of a friend of a friend (a 3^rd degree connection) than someone who is not even remotely connected to them.  The larger your network, the more likely that people will find your profile, because you become a 3^rd degree connection to a much larger pool of people who could be searching for your specific skills.

To understand this better, I recommend two books, The Start Up Of You, by Reid Hoffman (the founder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha, is an excellent book about growing you network.  The second, Your World Is Exploding by Chris Dessi, talks about the power of social media and how it can help you stand out from the crowd.  Both of these are great books that discuss the power of a network and how to control the way people research you.

Want to see other books that we have read and recommend? Take a look at our complete reading list for our other suggestions.

On Veterans Day, Sunday November 11, 2012 “A Concert That Cares: featuring Phil Vassar” will air on The Pentagon Channel for thousands of U.S Military Service Members stationed all over the globe. The concert is being presented by Operation Gratitude and KKGO/Go Country 105 and was videotaped at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, CA.

Country music star Phil Vassar will be joined by rising country music artists, Miss Willie Brown and teen pop-indie duo, Brandon & Savannah as they honor U.S. Service Members on Veterans Day.

This special presentation will air only the Pentagon Channel:

Sunday November 11th and Monday November 12th, 2012

0400 ET (4:00AM EST)
0900 ET (9:00AM EST)
1900 ET (7:00PM EST)

The 237^th Marine Corps Birthday and Veteran’s Day this year have special meaning for the Rockaways, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Queens.  Last week, Super Storm Sandy hit this neighborhood particularly hard, destroying entire houses, flooding basements while leaving behind feet of beach sand behind, knocking out electrical power that still hasn’t been restored, and more.  To add insult to injury, yesterday’s first winter storm of the season, Winter Storm Athena, added a few inches of snow to the area and brought temperatures even colder.  If you ask the locals congregating at St. Francis Church, where the recovery efforts are being coordinated from, if there has been any saving grace, the name Team Rubicon comes to mind time and time again.

Team Rubicon is a nonprofit organization that provides disaster relief to areas around the world that get hit particularly hard by Mother Nature.  They aren’t the Red Cross or FEMA; TR is designed to bridge the gap between Continue reading »

–       Last week gas prices in Southern California rose to over $4.70 a gallon.

–       Indian Point, the 40-year-old nuclear power plant that provides electricity to roughly 25% of the NYC area, risks closure as it is approaching it’s relicensing deadline.

–       New York State continues to ban fracking as a means to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale

The ongoing energy debate and skyrocketing fuel costs are often looked at from one of two perspectives: either through the lens of what effects the capturing of energy will have on the environment, or the effect that energy has on our economy.  As the Presidential debates shift focus from domestic to foreign policy, I want look at the energy issue from perspective of national security.

The number of options that our policy makers and military leaders have in creating and ensuring a national security plan is greatly limited because of our reliance on oil from the Middle East.

–       How should we deal with the ongoing war in Syria?

–       How can we respond to the continued effects of the Arab Spring in Libya and Egypt?

–       What resources do we have available to deal with a nuclear Iran?

–       What should we do if Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz?

–       How we can target an Al Qaeda network dispersed around the globe? Continue reading »