C-Suite Lingo

Mar 1, 2006 12:00 PM, BY MICHAEL FICKES

Listen in as a senior executive committee plans a new research and development (R&D) installation.

“Eastern Europe would make an excellent location for our R&D facility,” Tony Vermillion says. “It provides ideal green-field acreage and a substantial tax abatement deal. But have we considered how cultural differences might affect our people?”

While Vermillion sounds like a chief operating officer or chief finance officer, he is actually the director of global security for Emerson, a $19 billion, 120,000-person global manufacturing company based in St. Louis.

“C-level executives do not have time for geopolitics, security and policy discussions,” Vermillion says. “They want to talk about two things: How will this idea affect the profit and loss statement? And will this strategy get anyone killed?”

Today's successful security directors are altering the way they speak to senior executives about security. In fact, the conversations are not entirely about security anymore. They are about the part of security that affects what the company is doing in some material way. To survive in the C-suite, security directors must boost their communications abilities with the C-level.

On the day that Craig McQuate started as director of global security and safety for Waltham, Mass.- based Modus Link Corp., a supply chain management firm, he met the CEO. “He had just fired the director of worldwide quality,” McQuate says. “And he told me to take over the quality function, too.”

Later, McQuate asked a co-worker why the CEO had picked him for the job when he knew nothing about quality assurance. “He likes your style,” the co-worker says.

McQuate looked into the quality operation and began to wonder why the former quality director had been let go. “We were doing so much to guarantee quality that I could not figure out why the CEO did not understand how good we were,” McQuate says. “Then I stumbled onto the weekly reports that the former quality director had been sending to the CEO. These were e-mails with 30 links to different quality reports for various departments. “No wonder he was out of a job. He expected the CEO to click on each link to view a separate story.”

McQuate changed the 30-page interactive report to a one-page snapshot. As always, it was not the quantity but the quality of the communication that mattered. McQuate earned kudos for his quality work, when, actually, it was communications work.

“The key to communicating with anyone in the C-suite is to give them information in a form that is short and clear,” McQuate says. “To do that, you have to know your audience. You have to know the difference between what the CFO and the CEO need to know. Each executive in the C-suite wants different information.”

For example, back in the 1990s, when McQuate started with the Internet infrastructure provider Genuity, he encountered an access control system that produced high service and repair costs every month. McQuate had previously worked with a different system that seemed ideal for Genuity's size and access control needs.

“We were currently constructing a fourth building,” he says. “That seemed like a good opportunity to pitch the new system. I gathered the data about what the existing system was costing us and put together a replacement proposal.”

McQuate went to the CFO and said: Here is the cost for the existing system for two years. Replacing that system with a new system will cost $20,000 more than the service costs for the existing system for two years. McQuate said the new system, with which he was familiar, would cost virtually nothing for service. So the costs of going forward would be lower.

“That's all the CFO wanted to know,” McQuate says. “Our conversation lasted a minute or so. And he said, ‘do it.’ He did not need a technical discussion. Those talks come later, with the department heads, when you are managing the work.”

Joseph DiDona, director of corporate security with The Readers Digest Association Inc., Pleasantville, N.Y., says that communicating with senior executives takes two forms: First, discussing what executives need to know to ensure their personal safety when traveling; second, making a business pitch related to security people and technology.

“Suppose a senior corporate executive is traveling to Mexico City,” DiDona says. “It is the security director's job to make sure, first of all, that the company's folks in Mexico City know how to take care of him or her.

“Second, you want the executive to know what is going on politically in Mexico City. You also want to communicate what makes sense on the street.

“For example, in Mexico City, there are specific taxis that you should never take.”

On the other side of DiDona's equation are the business discussions. For him, the budgetary discussions with senior executives will end with the right decision as long as the security director spells out why the money is necessary. “The discussion may not always involve a mention of return on investment,” he says. “There are some things you need to do for the sake of keeping your people safe — perhaps adding access control features to another part of a building or installing CCTV or executive protection.

My point is that I have seen too many security directors simply go in and say, ‘I need money for more physical security technology.’ But they are not prepared to discuss the business reasons why the company needs that technology.”

The common theme that Vermillion, McQuate and DiDona espouse is that when security directors enter the C-suite, they have put their concerns into the language of the C-suite and never expect the occupants of the C-suite to figure out the business message behind a presentation heavy with security concepts and terminology.

“We cannot be cops anymore,” Vermillion says. “It may be new to guys like us, but we are business people now.”

“Do not be a security professional when talking to senior executives,” McQuate adds. “Be a business manager, whose expertise happens to be security. If you think that way, you will not fail.”

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