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There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

To reduce cost, our company’s human resources group wants to move all HR-related processes to a SaaS provider, a cloud-based business that’s less than five years old. At first glance, this might seem a low-risk decision. There’s a clear business case, and outsourcing HR systems doesn’t seem to create risks to corporate information assets such as intellectual property. Most businesses regard HR systems as commodity applications, so they might select the supplier who can deliver the required functionality at the lowest cost.

After spending a day at a conference, I was having dinner with a dozen or so peers when a debate began about the dangers and benefits of sharing security information with other companies. One person turned to me and asked me whether, if I had information about a specific new threat, I would share it with him.

A few years ago, a senior manager began bringing his corporate laptop into the cafeteria at lunchtime. Typically, he’d find an empty table, set down the laptop, and then walk out of sight to get his lunch. As he perused the salads and main courses, made selections, and paid for his food, his laptop sat unattended in plain view of hundreds of people using the large cafeteria.

These days it’s hard to read an online news source, pick up a newspaper, or watch TV without seeing reports of new threats: cybercrimes, data breaches, industrial espionage, and potential destruction of national infrastructure. These reports inevitably leave the impression that we are drowning in an inexorable tide of new and terrifying threats.

An organization’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

The Web has existed for two decades, yet it’s only in the last few years that we’ve gained a clearer picture of what the Internet may become, and how the emerging capabilities may shape the future.

In the past year or so, we have passed a major inflection point; it has become clear that almost every powered device will compute, communicate, and have an IP address.

The finance director sounded frustrated and exhausted. Our IT auditors had been trying to tell her about an obscure yet important data backup problem that affected SOX compliance. But her background was in accounting, not technology, and as the IT experts presented page after page of technical information elaborating the intricacies of backup processes, her eyes glazed over. The more they tried to explain by adding yet another layer of detail, the more confused and frustrated she became.