Curated by the Knowledge Team of ICS Career GPS
Education
The Importance of Teaching Kids About Cyber Security and Privacy
Excerpts from article by Meenakshisundaram published in Small Business Trends
Technological advancements have redefined the way we live, across generations. With easy access to the internet, we can now conveniently stay safe and work from the comforts of our home. Educational institutions have switched to online learning as well to combat the ongoing pandemic. Across age-groups basic cyber awareness is now more important than ever.
Kids lack complete awareness of online safety and the potential risks involving cyber attacks. Over three in five children have access to the internet, and they spend over 45 hours per week online. As the internet becomes an inseparable part of childhood, there’s no better time than now for us to talk about internet safety, and we have some cyber security tips to help you get started.
1. Create Cyber Security Awareness
Mobile devices and the internet have become a common, entangled part of the lives of today’s kids and it’s important to teach them about privacy, computer security, and social media safety at an early age. Brief them about issues such as cyber bullying, phishing, cyber threats, and their impacts.
2. Secure their devices
If you and your children share a common computer in the house, it’s essential to keep your system updated with the latest upgrades. This increases your device’s safety, protecting your personal and financial details from any imminent cyber threats.
3. Talk to them about privacy
Popular social media services like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok require users to be at least 13 years old to sign up, however, many underage users still join. Talk to your children about the impacts of sharing sensitive details like financial details on social media and the risks of interacting with strangers online. If you wish to monitor your children’s online activity, use parental controls on their device.
4. Use strong passwords
Passwords are the first line of defense for any account and their security should never be compromised. Encourage your kids to use complex passwords that include symbols, numbers, upper and lower case letters. To help them generate and remember strong passwords, add them to your family’s password manager account.
5. Restrict access from public networks
The appeal of free WiFi in public places could get kids with data restrictions excited. However, potential attackers can steal data transmitted through unsecured networks. Instruct your kids never to access sensitive information or to even completely avoid connecting to such networks.
6. Take them offline
Ensure your kids spend some quality time off-screen. Limit their screen time and encourage them to try spending some time outdoors, reading a book, or making something creative. This can prevent online addiction.
We hope these tips were helpful.
CAREER
The Three Key Ingredients Of Leadership You Need
Excerpts from article by Steve Denning published in Forbes
When even a Stanford University professor like Jeffrey Pfeffer concludes that “the leadership industry has failed,” some critics are tempted to ditch the whole idea of leadership. This would be a mistake.
In a time of accelerating disruption, the art and science of enabling change is more important than ever. Three sets of tools are available to those aspiring to induce change: inspiration, information and power, as shown in Figure 1. Leaders need to master all three, if they are to be effective.
The Growing Role Of Leadership In Management
In 21st century management, the number of people who need to be enabling change is greatly expanded.
. The transition to 21st century management involves many people on an organization-wide journey for perhaps a decade, as at SRI International and Microsoft.
· The organization as a whole functions as a network where ideas can come from anywhere: the sponsors of new ideas must be able to make their voice heard.
· Innovation plays a much larger role: many new ideas need champions to sponsor them.
· When self-organizing teams are a central element in the structure of work, leadership within every team also becomes crucial.
The Shifting Nature Of Leadership
In 20th century management, leaders appealed to the self-interest of employees, just as the organization itself pursued the self-interest of the firm: maximizing shareholder value. Leaders and managers were seen as different kinds of people with different functions: leaders set direction, while managers were charged with getting there.
In 2019, Professor Barbara Kellerman proposed that leadership should be seen as having a service dimension while management does not.
In 21st century management, management and leadership are fully integrated. Both management and leadership have a service function and collaborate to create value for customers and users.
The Limited Contribution Of Business Schools
In the ongoing transformation of management and leadership, the contribution of business schools has been limited. One reason is that business schools spend a vast amount of time and effort on academic research that has no actionable findings, as explained in a comprehensive review by Jone L. Pearce and Laura Huang in their article, “The Decreasing Value of Our Research to Management Education”.
In a follow-up article, former business school dean Roger Martin has estimated that the cost of producing such articles with no actionable findings is around $600 million per year: The Price of Actionability. His conclusion is that such research may promote conversations among academics but is not very useful for organizations or society.
Three Sets of Tools for Effective Leadership
Leadership occurs throughout society. In education, it is called teaching. In a family, it is called parenting. In politics, it’s called campaigning. In organizations, it is also called innovation.
In 21st century management, leadership is about creating new ways for the organization to create value for customers and users and to do so with truth and integrity. Effective transformational leaders rely mainly on inspiration and information tools, with occasional resort to power tools in a crisis.
Inspirational Tools
Inspirational tools, particularly storytelling, are useful in terms of inspiring people to think differently about the opportunities that lie ahead and embrace them for their own lives. Why storytelling?
Slides leave listeners dazed. Prose remains unread. Reasons often inspire a contrary reaction. When it comes to inspiring people to embrace some strange new ideas, storytelling isn’t just better than the other tools. It’s often the only thing that works.
The main characteristics of leadership stories that do work are as follows:
- The story must be authentically true.
- The story must be positive in tone. Negative stories are useful for getting attention, but not for inspiring change.
- Leadership stories need to be told in a minimalist form, so as to spark a new story in the mind of the listener.
The Information Tools
Information tools also play a key role in 21st century management. The decentralized structure of 21st century management in the form of networks, rather than vertical hierarchies, with multiple self-organizing teams, means that access to reliable information as to how the work is progressing is essential. Amazon has shown the way in this area by insisting that, before any activity begins, there are agreed metrics that will reveal progress in real time in terms of costs and external customer outcomes, not just outputs or internal outcomes. When it comes to inspiring change, the timing of information is crucial.
Power Tools
In many big corporations, there is often an excessive use of power tools, partly as a result of the prevalent transactional leadership but also partly as a result of a lack of skills in the use of the inspiration and information tools. Power tools can be effective in the short run in forcing compliance change, but they lay the basis for future implementation problems.
Yet power tools are not irrelevant. There are occasions when power tools are the only solution. For instance, former CEO Curt Carlson explains how in 1998 when SRI International was transitioning to 21st century management, the use of power tools was essential to his eventual success. As Carlson told me in 2015:
“In my first month, I got a phone call. I learned that a team had moved its laboratory from one part of the company to another without telling anybody. Imagine! I called up the vice presidents and said, ‘Do you want to undo this?’ They said, ‘No, it’s too hard to undo.’ So I called a meeting that brought everyone together. I explained that from now on, we weren’t going to behave that way. If anybody did this again, the entire management chain would have to go somewhere else.”
Most of the heavy lifting for change at SRI was eventually done through inspiration. At its heart, value creation is continuous iteration, based on the core principles of active learning.
For leadership to succeed in 21st century management, eventually all of the organizational tools for changing minds will need to be put in play.
(Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in the article mentioned above are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of ICS Career GPS or its staff.)
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