Summary: CEO Denny Schleper, along with CLA leadership, is stepping forward to educate the firm and improve the overall quality of security awareness across the CLA family. Listen to the podcast and hear where we are now and where we want to be in this new era of security awareness.<br> [00:00:03]<br> Narrator: Welcome to “Own The Promise,” a CLA podcast created to share what guides every decision we make and every relationship we cultivate.<br> [00:00:16]<br> Denny: Good morning, CLA family. This is Denny coming to you really in the middle of our promise season. I hope everyone has had a chance to embrace the promise season at a personal level. Obviously, the promise season, as we’ve indicated, is really all about gratitude and service, not only to one another but to our clients, so I hope we’re off to really a great promise season across the firm.<br> We did have an opportunity in the last week or so to conclude the Promise Leadership Series. This is a series, if you’re not familiar with it, that we have around 40 individuals who select to spend a good portion of their summer going through this series, understanding more about leadership within the firm, understanding more about the skillsets that are needed for leadership across the firm, and really an opportunity also to engage themselves into small groups and work on some very important and specific projects around CLA.<br> [00:01:23]<br> If you know any of these individuals, please congratulate them for an incredible summer experience that they had, and also some tremendous work that they accomplished. I know this because I sat in on the final presentation of these projects, and it was incredibly impressive what they all came up with to address some major issues across the firm.<br> [00:01:48]<br> You will hear more about these changes and various projects that they worked on. One, however, that after the presentation left me with a task, and that was around really the security issues in the firm. They really presented this as ‘protecting this house’, protecting the CLA house, and they came up with many great ideas that we will be implementing as we go forward to really increase the overall awareness of security in the firm.<br> I know many of you listening to this probably have a high level of awareness. However, as a CLA firm, CLA family, our awareness of the security issues are really not where it needs to be.<br> [00:02:41]<br> It needs to be elevated, and so one of the tasks that I committed, and I know Hod Dahl as the chief quality officer, also committed to, and that was really to heighten the awareness in every opportunity that we have, and if I could put it into this perspective for you, if you look at the way we address quality in the firm, in everything we do, I believe we’ve elevated the quality.<br> [00:03:10]<br> We see that just simply by the results. That same elevation of quality we have to match with the elevation of our security issues; how we take care of our physical environment around us with important information, secure information; how we deal with our own personal computers; the security of those computers.<br> We’ve had quite a number of what we call lost computers. Now, some of those may be stolen; others are simply misplaced and lost. That’s not taking care of the physical security that’s really afforded to all of us and the responsibility of all of us, and as you know, it goes far beyond the physical security. It goes into the phishing campaigns that you see constantly bombarding us in our daily lives and the test phishing that CLA does with our security group.<br> [00:04:15]<br> We have found that there is an incredible amount of us that are still clicking through the phishing emails and not understanding that that is a major responsibility of all of us, to make sure that that does not happen. One of the statistics given during the PLS project was ...
