Friday, January 5, 2018

Wall St. Journal Valudates More of Our Trends

In an article about the pressures facing CEOs, and the boards that hire and fire them, "Hackers and a Shrinking Talent Pool Top CEO Concerns for 2018" (print headline: "CEOs Gird for a Year of Disruption"), the Wall St. Journal identified several key trends, including:
  • Data breaches and cybersecurity. In our list of Ongoing Trends in 2018, we said, "There's never enough cybersecurity/privacy." According to the Journal, CEOs are recognizing that protecting their companies (and their customers and partners) from data breaches and cyberattacks is a critical risk. One CEO quoted in the article said, "These bad actors keep getting smarter and more aggressive. It's an ongoing war." We think it's an important issue, and that companies all need to bake cybersecurity and anti-data breach measures into their cultures even if they are not even close to being a security company. By that we mean, practically every company needs to have a solution in place, and needs to re-evaluate on a regular basis if they're doing enough.
  • Talent battles. Among those we included in our list of key trends for 2018, we identified the labor shortage an important issue. We see the labor shortage already affect the A.I. and biotech sectors, and the Journal says there is a shortage of engineers at financial services companies, noting, "In their quest to build highly sophisticated technology platforms, some financial-services giants now have more software engineers than bankers and traders on their payrolls."
To be fair, we did not cite data breaches specifically in our trends but we think cybersecurity and privacy does cover it. And we didn't go into as much detail about the talent battle in our blog as we have in a subsequent article that we expect to appear shortly. (We focused more on the impact on the nature of work, which is still a story we think will be addressed in 2018.)

Let us know what you think we got right or what we missed.

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