Preface

When I was in high school, I was appointed captain of the Newington College Basketball First Team. I felt elated; it was an ambition I had held for many years. Then, my coach, Mr. Herb Barker, who had played rugby for the Australian Wallabies and represented the country at the Commonwealth Games, asked me to ‘pass’ the ball rather than ‘shoot’. Having always been the best shooter on the team, this was a mental challenge as I found myself conflicted. Herb wanted me to make the team better. This was my first lesson in leadership.

This same transition from individual contributor to team enabler defines the CISO journey. The (probably technical) expertise that got you noticed must evolve into something broader: the ability to guide, influence and elevate others while navigating complex organisational dynamics.

A Day in the Life of a CISO is a personal mentoring and coaching session with 24+ CISOs and other cybersecurity leaders. This is not classic textbook material, but career lessons from each leader, told through real stories of crisis management, board presentations, team building, organisational change and the countless unexpected challenges that define our profession. Each story captures both the experience of what happened and the behaviour these leaders had to model in response.

My first book, The Aspiring CIO and CISO, was written to help you get the job. This book is intended to help you be successful as a CISO, once you are appointed to a CISO role. In many ways, that is when the real learning starts, as there will be many situations you will not have experienced before or had the opportunity to learn about firsthand.

To produce this book, I reached out to my network and the network of my contacts to invite CISOs and senior cybersecurity executives to join me in sharing their own scar tissue of learning. These battle-tested insights represent knowledge forged under real-world pressure, the kind that can only be gained through lived experience, not theoretical study. I wanted each leader to tell their own story and provide the advice they themselves wished someone had shared with them earlier in their career.