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Part 3 of Living and Leading in an Era of Super Transparency
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From the course by Copenhagen Business School
Leadership in 21st Century Organizations
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From the lesson
Communication in an Age of Super Transparency
In an age of social media and super hackers, leaders have to worry more than ever about secrets getting out, making hard decisions under scrutiny, and people misinterpreting what the company and its leaders are doing. Thanks primarily to the advance of technology, the organizational activities have never been more transparent. How should a leader take this new 21st century reality into account? Do past communications and PR approaches need to change? How would YOU do it?
Meet the Instructors
Robert AustinProfessor, Management of Creativity and Innovation
Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy
Shannon HesselAssistant Professor of Art, Leadership and Entrepreneurship
Department of Management, Politics, and Philosophy
Welcome to Living and Leading in An Era of Super-Transparency, Part 3.
Now, I asked you to take a look at some videos before we
started this part of the lecture and
the lectures that you've been watching were about this group of people.
Group of people who have come to be known as hacktivists.
In particular, a group called Anonymous.
Anonymous in a way is not exactly a group, because it doesn't have fixed membership.
The people who are a part of it don't necessarily know who the other
members are.
What they have in common is this idea that hacktivism can
help promote certain causes.
And I mention them, because this is a group of people who just might know
about you or your company than you do and
they certainly know more than you think they do.
You've seen some examples of this in the two videos.
One example from the Rehtaeh Parsons story and
you saw the Anonymous video that goes with the Rehtaeh Parsons's story.
This is a very tragic story,
because Rehtaeh Parsons actually committed suicide after the events in this.
But in the aftermath,
when people were extremely indignant about what had happened and
felt that the law enforcement in the Eastern Canada region had not done
what they were supposed to, all of this information went viral.
The tragedy went viral, the fact that maybe the law enforcement
people had not moved fast enough on the alleged perpetrators of what
was allegedly a rape and there was an outpouring of sympathy and dismay.
And interestingly, I think, very interestingly,
there were direct calls for Anonymous to become involved.
So this is kinda like in the old days of Batman comic books.
You may remember, Batman wasn't actually a police officer.
But when the police couldn't solve the crime, people put on the bat signal.
The bat signal was a call to what was, in essence, a vigilante named Batman and
what's going on in cyberspace via Twitter and so forth is very much like that.
The local crime fighters can't solve the crime,
so we call on this group called Anonymous.
And Anonymous, as you can see on this slide, responds.
They will be on the cause and in the very next day,
the Rehtaeh Parsons case was reopened by the police.
Of course, the triggering event of Rehtaeh's suicide is that they
had closed the case and said that they would not lay charges.
Interestingly, the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
the national police force, found it important to state that important
new information did not come from an online source.
So they are denying the influence of Anonymous in this case, but
the timing is quite suspicious.
You've also seen the story, a video about the story of the HBGary case.
Now this one's particularly interesting,
because these people are IT security experts.
They're not only IT security experts, they are selling their services to
the intelligence services in the United States.
So you would think people that can sell IT security services to the intelligence
services in the US should be among the most sophisticated IT security people
in the world and they should have some of the most sophisticated defenses.
You can see their clients include the Departments of Defense, State,
Homeland Security, Energy, and Justice.
So these are people who should really know their IT security stuff and
should have protected their data very well.
But as you've seen, Mr. Barr, who had this idea that he was gonna go after Anonymous,
really had a really difficult time with the Anonymous hackers.
They basically, as you've seen from the video, came in and took him out.
Took his company out in a sort of hacking rampage.
So if it could happen to this company, of course, the point is how are regular
companies gonna defend themselves from motivated hackers who are trying to
break down the boundaries between the information they would like to have and
that you don't want them to have in the cloud or the Internet?
If we take a look at some headlines from the Boston Globe,
it's fairly easy to get excited and enthusiastic,
perhaps even supportive of Anonymous activities when
they're helping apprehend rapists, when they're targeting
companies that perhaps are a little bit too proud of their
information technology capabilities like HBGary.
But it is important to realize that if you're starting to feel some sympathy for
these group that they can also do considerable harm.
In 2014, around Easter, the hacker group Anonymous
decided to target a medical organization in the Boston area.
The story is that there was a young woman,
a teenager who was brought to the hospital ill.
Her parents claimed that she had a rare genetic disease.
The doctors after examining her closely were afraid that her parents were
harming her.
And so they instigated removing her temporarily from her home in
the interest of making sure that she was adequately protected.
And the place that Anonymous wanted to target was
the organization where she was placed,
the temporary medical facility where this young lady was placed.
The problem is they didn't know the IP address of that organization.
So they targeted a range of IP addresses.
And in effect, they took down the entire medical establishment in the Boston area,
an entire set of hospitals and
medical facilities in a way that could have caused real harm to real people.
There are other sources of worry.
Pressure is building on the levees.
Pressure is building on the boundaries that we erect to try to keep our
information inside.
You can see here, a cyber boss has offered a Ferrari for
the hacker who dreams up the biggest scam.
Increasingly, the people who are hacking organizations are not kids playing jokes,
not hackers looking for bragging rights and things like that.
But organized crime figures who are looking for
money, who are looking for things that are valuable and
who don't brag about their exploits, but keep them secret and reuse them.
So the threat there is becoming very great.
As a result of information flowing around like this,
one of the things we all need to think about what Dan Geer,
a computer security expert has called our digital exhaust.
Every one of us throws off digital exhaust as we walk through the world.
Also, your company throws off digital exhaust.
It's all the collection of data that we're producing via our cell phones,
via our location services in our cell phones.
The computers that we connect to the Internet,
the searches we make on Google and so on.
And your digital exhaust is unique and it's also constantly being updated.
You may not be fully aware of it, but it completely identifies you unambiguously.
It's not only coming from you, by the way.
It's coming from other people who capture you in their
video in their digital data gathering, so you can't opt out.
You may decide not to put your picture on Facebook and label it, so
facial recognition software can't access who you are that way.
But someone else has probably already taken your photo and
put it on Facebook and tagged it with your name.
So you can try, but you can’t really easily not opt out.
Dan Geer, who I mentioned before, the computer security expert,
he likes to tell a story where he turned off, in his cell phone, the feature that
sends the telephone number of the caller to the person who's receiving the call.
So he essentially keeps people from knowing that it's him who's calling, but
his friends and family tell him that they always know it's him,
because he's the only one who turns off that feature.
So as you can see, your digital exhaust doesn't depend enough on you that you can
really keep it from forming.
Your face is tagged already on someone's Facebook page and
facial recognition is good at 500 meters.
There are other ways to identify you, the accelerometer in your cellphone.
It can identify you by what's called gait analysis.
The way you smell can identify you.
There are many, many other ways.
The rhythm of your heartbeat can be detected at distance and
used to identify you.
This is a picture of a government making use of this fact.
This is the Iranian government after they had some difficulty with unrest.
They have posted the pictures from cameras around the city of people who
they would like to know the identity of and
you can be sure that they are not planning to provide awards to these folks.
They're looking for them because they see them as troublemakers.
So everywhere you go, you are being captured in some form.
Another thing that's changed and changing is that the information, once captured,
your digital exhaust once it's out there is very difficult to get rid of.
There is what on the Internet is called the Streisand effect.
When you attempt to censor information on the web it often produces
a backlash that just causes the information to replicate.
It's called the Streisand effect, because Barbra Streisand's house
in California was captured on an aerial survey photo and then posted to the web.
And people came after the aerial survey photo lifted the photo and
circled her home and identified it as hers.
She used legal action to try to remove the photo with her house identified on it
from the web.
But the problem is every time they got a site to pull down the photo,
another 10 or 100 sites posted it elsewhere.
And so this has been called the Barbra Streisand effect as a result.
Another example of it is when some DVD players,
people discovered that you could hack them to defeat their region coding and
you just needed a code that you typed in using your remote control.
And the companies in question there tried to use legal action to remove the code or
the information distributing the code from the web.
And once again, it was pointless.
Every time they got it taken down, it replicated itself around the world.
So one thing that you have to realize is you can't turn it off.
You can't turn off this information overflow, this information flood.
The prime minister of Turkey realized this not too long ago in March of last year.
He didn't like some things that were being said on Twitter.
Presumably, he was reasonably capable of influencing the local formal news media,
but he couldn't influence Twitter.
So he decided to ban it.
So on March 21st, he banned Twitter.
Unfortunately for him, the users figured out very quickly,
within three or four hours, ways of circumventing his ban.
And so just a little bit later that day, the headlines were saying,
users bypass Turkey's Twitter ban.
And in fact, Twitter itself was tweeting information to people
about how to defeat the ban.
What are the business implications?
What are the leadership implications here?
Well, it means for a great deal of the activity you're likely to engage in as
a leader, you should expect that people will be able to see what you're doing.
Your supply chains will be naked.
Who will make it and how?
People will know.
How will you manage your company's image?
It will not be completely under your control.
There will be people who know things about you and maybe know more about you
than you do who will be helping you quote, make your company's image.
Another thing that it means is that companies and
organizations need to think about whether they can truly in this age
of super-transparency rely on strategies that depend on secrecy.
You may wanna go back through your strategy and make sure that it's not
overly dependent on keeping secrets that you can't be sure of keeping.
You may also wanna ask yourself, what would happen
if certain information that you've assumed would stay secret gets out?
There are also things that used to work that won't work anymore in
a super-transparent world.
I was giving a talk at a conference in Brussels and
afterwards, I was talking about this very phenomenon.
And afterwards, a gentleman came up and said,
they'd been having trouble with their sales promotions.
He was a part of a software company.
They used to, in the old days, give discounts to new customers.
So they'd get new customers in the door by giving them a reduced price.
But what he said is this doesn't work anymore,
because now their existing customers find out about the discounts
that they're offering the new customers and they get angry about it.
So things that you used to think would work won't work anymore.
Finally, we have to realize that this new super-transparency impacts
even what we consider fair, what we consider right and what we consider just.
How does this happen?
Well, to understand that, I'm going to rewind.
Take us back in time to the late 90s when the music industry suddenly discovered
that its digital information, its intellectual property was moving around
the Internet without its permission and in ways that harmed its business model.
As you'll recall, services like Napster were leading to lots of illegal downloads.
And one of the things that Charlie Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor,
has observed about that time is that the idea behind copyright,
protecting intellectual property like music depends very much
not only on legalities, but also practicalities.
So for example, the copyright protection for a book depends not only on the fact
that there's a law that people consider reasonable, but
also on the fact that it's actually kinda difficult to copy a book.
You have to stand at a copier and turn the pages and so
on, because of the binding on the book.
Well, the same thing was true before the digital era for music.
People used to make cassette tapes of their favorite songs
by mixing music from different albums and different other cassettes.
But they were low in quality, they were not anything like the quality
of the original and it was actually difficult to make these tapes.
So practicality was aligned with legality.
It was hard to make copies and it was also illegal to make copies.
Well, what happened in the music industry is once everything was digitized,
the bits and bytes could flow around very easily.
The practicalities came unstuck from the legalities and
it was still illegal to copy music, but it was so easy,
people's sense of what was right and what was fair changed.
So people went from thinking, I shouldn't copy things, because it's wrong
to thinking those record companies are trying to make me buy 12 songs when
I only want 1 and they want me to pay $20 for 12 songs when I only want 1.
And that made people think about the music industry as being run by extortionists,
that was the way some people actually talked about it at the time.
So what we see here is a completely different sense of what's appropriate.
One point, the music industry is behaving in a certain way and
people consider it perfectly reasonable and at a future point, no longer the case.
People see it as extortion.
So one of the most difficult and complicated things and as yet,
still misunderstood aspects of this super-transparent world is
how it's gonna change our sense of what's fair.
How it's gonna change our sense of what's right and just.
And how that will need to be reflected in the behavior of 21st century leaders.
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