“Change Before You Have To”

Jack Welch, the former longtime CEO of General Electric, was an agent of change before that was a thing. His mantra was “change before you have to,” referring to his leadership philosophy, which saw him lay off nearly 10% of GE’s staff annually. Avoiding complacency was among the reasons Welch would resort to eliminating layers of bureaucracy and axing underperforming business units. Welch believed that past success was no guarantee of future survival. He often said that if the rate of change on the outside exceeded the rate of change inside a company, the end was near.

I realize this was a long and winding path in announcing that, after more than two decades as Security Technology Executive magazine, the editors have decided the time was right for a change. Welch was adamant that companies had to reinvent themselves before competitors forced them to. We are doing that at the corporate level with our recent rebranding. While the Security Group will remain in the Endeavor Business Media unit, the overall transformation for our organization, launched this month, is Endeavor B2B.

As the industry continues to morph into a landscape driven by evolving advanced technologies and threatened by forces never imagined 20 years ago, the audience reading our magazines and visiting our SecurityInfoWatch web portal continues to change. We, as a magazine, need to do likewise.

When I launched this magazine in 1993, technology and low-voltage analog devices powered the systems our end-user readers deployed. At the time, Security Technology & Design fit the time and the audience. And so, it remained for almost a decade. Technology and our end-user profile dictated moving on to the more appropriate STE name change, not to mention the STD abbreviation was not ideal – think about it.

We realize that a name is at once a label and a legacy. It is a collection of letters and sounds strung together that identify a person, place or thing. However, a name, or in this case, a magazine title, is layered with history, memory and identity.

The environment our security media platforms now serve has been put through a veritable time warp when you consider how physical security systems have evolved since ST&D was born. They are now critical extensions of many organizations’ cyber networks and almost every device on that network acts as a sensor or monitoring device. Security is not a simple equation in today’s enterprise business. When mitigating threats to the company’s bottom line, there are considerations of risk, business continuity, cybersecurity, compliance and domestic and global upheaval.

It's a new day in security and risk management. We needed a name that reflects that time and that changing audience.

Beginning with this September/October issue of the magazine, it will be called Security Executive. A new name reflects our changing times. Security Executive will be your trusted resource for security and risk executives – just as the logo’s tagline suggests. It also works well with our sister publication, Security Business.

We welcome your input on the name change and the subtle magazine redesign. I would love to hear from you at [email protected].