Author: Marko Cabric
ISBN No: 9780128029343
Review date: 25/04/2024
No of pages: 243
Publisher: Elsevier
Publisher URL:
http://store.elsevier.com/product.jsp?isbn=9780128029343
Year of publication: 12/06/2015
Brief:
Corporate Security Management, First Edition Challenges, Risks, and Strategies
For whatever reason, works on corporate security management are not that thick on the ground; less thick than books about other aspects of security management, and for that reason alone this book by Marco Cabric is welcome and worth its price.
Very reasonably he begins with definitions, and takes the two halves; security, and corporate. He divides the subject into what (those definitions), who (the chief security officer, or leader), the how (organisation), the why (the risks, whether from fraud and other theft, acts of protest, or ‘inadequate security resilience’ to name some of the internal risks, let alone the external ones), the where (a building, supply chain, or ‘human resources’) and when (measuring the threats and your own metrics).
This book works as a reminder, an aide memoire, to the sheer amount of things that the corporate security manager has to do, or at least keep tabs on and have someone do it for them: security of corporate travellers and expatriates; information security, fraud or other investigation; business continuity and disaster recovery, to name only some. What the book doesn’t do is offer some sense of how the author does corporate security management (unless the book sets out the way that he does it; he doesn’t explicitly say; the book is the product of his experience, the blurb says). Cabric seldom uses ‘I’ in the book, nor offers case studies. It’d be entirely understandable if he had a reason not to offer stories from himself or others – after all, he does have a chapter partly on confidentiality – except in the introduction he said that his main motive for writing the book was to close the gap between theory and practice.
This may be carping, and may simply have come about because it isn’t actually that long a book – which for anyone in a corporate position is a good and meritworthy thing (and indeed may make it much more likely it’s read, quite apart from the truth that a longer book often doesn’t mean it’s better, but actually less tightly written and less well thought out). It does mean that Cabric cannot go into that much detail about everything; setting up the security team only gets a few pages, choosing a manned guarding provider a couple. There’s only so much Cabric could say; it’s just that the author might have been more reassuring by offered examples of ‘from the corporate security manager’s chair’, or ‘being in the corporate security manager’s shoes’.
All this said, Cabric has succeeded in presenting corporate security to his target audience as set out in the introduction – ‘security professionals who are making the transition to corporate security’, ‘acting corporate security managers who are looking to expand their knowledge and skills and move upward in the corporate world’ and ‘business leaders looking to gain an in-depth understanding of one of the crucial corporate functions’. Precisely because Cabric correctly notes that corporate security is a step from ‘shooting targets to meeting targets’ and takes ‘soft skills’, some chatty anecdotes might have been in order.
On second thoughts, just as so much is a mere matter of opinion, by leaving out named and specific anecdotes, case studies, whatever you want to call them, Cabric avoided turning off the reader – a story about some event in a Toronto or New York skyscraper would not have spoken to the reader in Edinburgh or Frankfurt, for example.
Rather than wish for what the book is not, then, it’s more proper to praise the book for what it is – a well-written, responsible and clear setting out of what the corporate security manager’s job is, and how to do it. The fact is that what the budding corporate security manager wants is more than chummy or indiscreet anecdotes; what will help more is a framework – and this Cabric delivers. You can only understand corporate culture, work with other departments such as HR, internal audit and legal, and be a good communicator, for instance by giving feedback to your team, by doing it; Carbic points you in the right directions.
