Advice for CEOs

Newport Board Group has recently released a white paper that addresses an issue of importance to all organizations: mitigating the risk of cyber attack. The new white paper by David Wilson, Newport’s New England Managing Director, and Marcus McInnis, Former Director of Operations for the Center for Cyber Security Innovation (CCSI) at Lockheed Martin, questions some commonly held assumptions and offers some perhaps surprising advice.

In a recent blog, I discussed trends that are converging to create an opportunity for the $470 billion U.S. franchise industry to expand into new franchise concepts. Specialized technology-based services represent an opportunity for franchising to expand beyond its traditional confines of retail services.

Note: John Isaza, Esq. is the co-author of this blog. Content, including records and information, has become a pervasive and strategic part of companies — large and small.1 Records and information are commonly considered an important and strategic asset of any organization. 2Yet many companies treat this asset as, at best, a cost center — an important issue but not an urgent one. But this may be changing. A sense of urgency about content is growing. The regulatory environment is demanding accountability for the management of content. At the same time, liability for failing to control unfettered information raises the stakes tremendously. This blog explores this problem in a bit more detail and proposes an approach to manage it.

Several trends are converging to create a new concept that may help the $470 billion U.S. franchise industry achieve a major leap in growth. Big Data, social media, and advances in how software is developed and deployed are enabling entrepreneurs to create innovative packages of specialized B2C and B2B services and software — and target them to niche markets. If these specialized technology-based services companies prove to be franchise-able, they would be a departure from the retail services businesses that have traditionally dominated franchising--and could attract a new generation of franchisees.

Mogo Interactive, a leading digital advertising agency and Newport Board Group client, is the subject of a recently published case study of how leading marketers are using the DoubleClick by Google platform. The marketer featured in the case study? No less than The Greatest Show on Earth.

To be the CEO of an emerging business—a company that our firm helps get past No Man’s Land so it can grow to scale and create wealth for you—is to grapple every day with many issues that clamor for your attention. Finding and selling to new customers; keeping existing customers in the fold; dealing with investors and vendors; overseeing finances.