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Cult Crossovers Into Information Security
Posted March 18th, 2008 by rybolov
One idea I’ve been mulling over the past couple of weeks is the amount of crossover skills that information security people need to get things done. We’re almost coming to the point where we admit that we need this kind of crossbreeding to get new ideas into the IT security industry.
2 people that I think are on most of the New School’s closet reading list: Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.
Seth Godin lives in New York and dreams about how he can get your attention by using a trained army of purple cows. Unfortunately, there is an army of purple cows, people being uncreative for the most part, and now the most interesting thing you can do is to be a yellow giant wooden badger. If you think that the phrase “Think outside the box” is in itself thinking inside the box, then Seth’s blog should be an interesting read.
Malcolm Gladwell is an overly smart person with Sideshow-Bob hair. He wrote some little article called “The Tipping Point” that eventually he expanded into a book and people have been fawning all over him since. If you believe that sometimes the right thing to do is the counterintuitive thing thing to do, then Malcolm is your guy.
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2 Comments »
March 24th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell once wrote a book called “Unleashing the Ideavirus”. I ravaged the book in an Amazon.com review for what I saw as an act of intellectual dishonesty. The ‘Ideavirus’ was a rebranded version of the meme with a big marketing spin. I wish I remembered the source material more clearly. But I do recall being livid at the time for how they appeared to take credit for the idea of this rebranded rehash of the meme. The concept of the meme was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in 1974’s “The Selfish Gene” and has seen both academic and non-academic development since then. How they could write about an idea which predated their publication by 25 years and even had widespread currency on the Internet in the mid-1990s without giving due credit was beyond me. And what was worse, they wrote about it so badly it wasn’t worth the time I spent finishing the read in the first place. So I find it hard to take these two seriously anymore.
March 24th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
This book? http://www.sethgodin.com/ideavirus/
No Gladwell, only Godin. And consider his audience: marketing people. =)
Gladwell does talk about the concept in much better depth in The Tipping Point (the book) with a wide variety of case studies.
BTW Dan, you’re a lulzkiller. Anybody tell you that lately. =)