Yearly Archives: 2012

NextGen: How to Make Effective Decisions- Lessons Learned from an Undercover Case

The Mongols are an extremely violent motorcycle gang in Los Angeles organized over 30 years ago. John Torres, Deputy Assistant Director, Headquarters, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, discussed leadership lessons learned from two undercover cases involving the gang. In 2001, Billy Queen, an AFT agent infiltrated the Mongols successfully for the first timeRead… Read more »

Walking the tightrope between best practice and negligence – things to consider when responding to targeted or advanced persistent threats

Over the course of the last few months I’ve been asked several times how incident responders should react to notification that their company has been breached by targeted or advanced persistent threats (T/APT). In every case I offer the same, simple insights: People count. A trained, analytically curious team will have a far greater chanceRead… Read more »

Write Better, Think Critically

For the next generation of government leaders, Nick Charney has several strategies to give your writing edge. And why should you care? According to him, “The ability to affectively communicate information is what puts you above everyone else.” With left-brain, creative skills of increasing importance in our economy, what differentiates you is the ability toRead… Read more »

Leading with Risk

Making decisions is never easy — and some might argue that it is even more challenging today because things change SO quickly. How do you make the best decisions? That is one of the issues we’ll be talking about later this month at the Next Generation of Government Training Summit taking place July 26-27 hereRead… Read more »

How many things does government do?

Easy: 1,479,025,887 GDS has produced another fascinating tool, this time providing a list and volumes of government transactional services, which it turns out are used a shade under one and a half billion times a year. Richard Sargeant has a blog post introducing the endeavour, and making clear that this initial version is an alphaRead… Read more »

Engagement on a shoestring

You could probably do more digital engagement around a series of stakeholder seminars, but it would be a tall order. For the last month or so, DCMS have been running a little site we helped build for them on our Read+Comment platform, to open up discussion around a series of seminars they’re running to informRead… Read more »

This week got me thinking

I spent last week in Richmond Virginia and Washington DC. I visited old friends and made new ones. I put in a couple days of probono work for the great city of Richmond, and spoke at the Next Generation of Government Summit in DC. It’s been a whirlwind week and I am completely exhausted butRead… Read more »