Brett T. Williams, Major General USAF (Ret.)

I had just completed the first 28 years of my Air Force career and achieved a modicum of success as a fighter pilot, culminating with my fourth and largest command, the 18th Wing on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. That’s when I got the call: “Williams, you are going to be the Director of Communications at U.S. Pacific Command.” And just like that, I went from a job where I had extremely deep experience and credibility to one where I could barely speak the language and my subordinates greeted me with great skepticism as well as preconceived notions about what to expect from a “fly-boy” coming into their IT world. As it turned out, everything I knew about leading and managing crossed over directly to my new job but it took a lot of work to become an accepted and valued member of my new team. As cyber security moves steadily from being a stovepipe function of the IT department to a key element of the overall business organization, it is becoming increasingly common to see managers with little technical, much less cyber background, being put into positions of responsibility for cyber risk. This presentation is geared toward leaders and managers at all levels and focuses on Major General (Ret) Brett Williams’s lessons learned from leading a variety of large, diverse organizations