The Art of Protecting the Leader

If you think about it, protecting those who lead us must be one of the oldest professions. Today there is a professional practice called “Executive Protection”. In most companies, it is one of many spokes of their security program wheel. But for some time now, the practice of risk management and security has been undergoing a radical transformation. The deluge of information and the ability to collect it, organize it, understand it, and communicate it for appropriate defense measures and actionable incident response, can no longer depend on a single person or department. Technology is advancing to bring a vast aggregation engine from on-the-ground resources to online media outlets (including social). And there is an opportunity to bring executive-level purview into the mix from HR, Legal, Compliance, and Operations through a comprehensive and integrated cross-functional communication platform.

I turned to Michael Trott, a thought leader, author (The Protected), and security executive leader for Discovery Land Company, to seek his counsel and wisdom, from experience, in advance of the Protective Intelligence Summit we will be at in Austin, Texas February 21-23, 2022. We begin to unpack what executive protection and security might look like in the years to come.

It was a great conversation.