How Can the Threat of Networks Be Reduced?
A new book says leaders need to develop a deep understanding of
the opportunities and threats posed by networks--a "seventh
sense."James Heskett invites readers to add their own insights. What
do YOU think?
I’m a sucker for lists of what other people are reading. So it
was with great interest that I looked over the results of a recent small,
unscientific survey by McKinsey of what CEOs were reading this summer. The most
frequently mentioned book somehow had escaped my attention: The Seventh
Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, by Joshua
Cooper Ramo, co-CEO and vice chairman of Kissinger Associates.
Ramo’s core thesis is that today's world of networks and
connectivity may be the biggest game-changer of the future, whether the game is
business competition, public health, political success, or even life on this
planet, to cite just a few examples.
Networks enable mind-bending progress--but offer the potential
of indescribable chaos in everybody’s personal life and society at large. Just
ask Democratic members of the US Congress whose email accounts were
systematically hacked recently. According to Ramo, networks profoundly change
anything or anyone connected to them. They may affect us when we least expect
it.
This is not new. The world of networks is one in which links and
nodes, hubs, connectivity, speed, and “reach” rule. During work on my doctoral
thesis on business logistics, I was inspired by what location and graph theorists
had to say about the impact of network design on transportation and inventory
location at least 60 years ago. It was my meal ticket to a position on the
Harvard Business School faculty.
What has changed, of course, is the impact of the internet on
network design and performance. Those with the “seventh sense” that Ramo talks
about understand how networks change and speed up everything they connect.
Seventh sensers don’t just see unused autos and drivers with
some extra time on their hands. They envision what happens when those unused
autos and drivers are connected to those in need of a ride. Seventh sensers
create communities--“gatelands” with borders--for which they serve as powerful
gatekeepers. And they know how to design software that serves as a platform on
which other things can be provided to those in the gateland.
Networks give, but they also take. In dramatic fashion Ramo
describes his association with pioneering network designers and malevolent
hackers alike. He also concentrates on the vulnerability of networks,
especially those fueled by the Internet. First, there is the possibility that
an important node--a hub through which information is transmitted over the
network--may be destroyed. There is an answer to this problem: distributed
networks with maximum connectivity (all nodes connected to each other by
alternate paths similar to a fish net) with the capability of self-repairing
damage to particular nodes.
The scarier network vulnerability is that created by errors in
the original coding or "windows" for hackers intentionally left in
the network code by agents hoping to use them later to access and sell
information.
Ramo describes the active global market for hacked information
that makes all of this so potentially lucrative to the thousands of hackers who
flock to the cracks found in existing network architecture daily. Results may
include leaked emails, drained bank accounts, and the destruction of production
facilities (as Iranian nuclear scientists found out).
It’s easy to conclude that you or your organization will be
hacked in your lifetime. No wonder CEOs are interested in the message. The book
must scare them to death.
What’s to be done about these threats? Ramo quotes one “security
genius” as suggesting three rules for dealing with the threat: Do not own a
computer, do not power it on, do not use it. He adds a fourth, “Do not connect
it to anything.”
But surely the genius that created the internet that makes so
much connectivity, speed, and information exchange possible today can outthink
the hackers who would bring it all down.
Will it require, as Ramo suggests, education and training to
develop leaders of all stripes with the Seventh Sense?(Just envision this
training occurring in law schools that originate most of our politicians.) Could
sanctions against malpractice that have been established in professions such as
law and medicine work in this arena as well?
How about more explicit laws and stiffer penalties for those
found to create economic chaos and worse? Perhaps we would be willing to
sacrifice some network speed in order to increase security. How can we reduce
the threat that networks represent? What do you think?
References:
Joshua Cooper Ramo, The
Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks (New
York: Little Brown and Company, 2016)
by James Heskett
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/how-can-the-threat-of-networks-be-reduced?cid=spmailing-13398414-WK%20Newsletter%209-7-2016%20(1)-September%2007,%202016
No comments:
Post a Comment