The author G.K. Chesterton noted that “there is a lot of difference between listening and hearing.” Of the four communication skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing – we learn listening first, but as time goes on many of us seem to lose interest in truly listening to what others have to say. Leaders would do well to work on listening to inspire workers and increase productivity.

You can’t fix the flaws you don’t know about – and the clearer your sense of your organization’s overall security posture, the better equipped you are to improve it. Vulnerability assessments are a core requirement for IT security, and conducting them on a regular basis can help you stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

When I was younger, I played a variety of team sports and enjoyed competing against opponents with my teammates. Winning was always a matter of applying sound tactics and strategy, attacking and defending well and using a blend of skill, talent and luck. Now that I’m older, I watch more than I play, and I’m able to appreciate the many lessons team sports teach, especially at the professional level. With sports, we can tackle technical topics in a relatable way.

Physical security includes measures and precautions designed to guarantee the physical protection of IT assets such as facilities, equipment and other properties from damage and unauthorized physical access. Physical security aims to protect such assets from physical threats like theft, manmade catastrophes, accidental damage, fire and other natural disasters. It is an essential part of a security plan and is an indispensable component of all security efforts.

If you suspect that your employees are wasting time on the job and they are not performing up to expectations, it might be time to transform the culture of your organization. A company with a toxic culture runs the risk that employees will remain disengaged and productivity will decline even further. As a leader, you have the perfect opportunity to make improvements by building a culture of support and respect and strengthening teamwork.

In all sectors, technology has become a vital aspect of operations and has transformed the workplace, but that dependence on technologies also poses a threat to organizational wellbeing. Data breaches, system failures, malicious attacks–as well as natural disasters that impact technologies–can wreak havoc on company reputations, regulatory compliance and fiscal health.

Cybersecurity professionals know what they’re up against. The type, number and severity of cyberattacks grows with time. Hackers display no shortage of cunning and ingenuity in exploiting security vulnerabilities, compromising important data and inflicting damage to both individuals and organizations. Cybersecurity professionals also know that their defenses must evolve along with the attacks, requiring them to display even more ingenuity than hackers when creating security tools.

Magic seems to be very popular at the moment. Just look at last week’s Britain’s Got Talent, which featured an improbable number of magicians in its line-up. These included ‘X’, the masked magician who was wearing something that looked suspiciously like an anonymous mask and managed to supposedly hack Instagram. A lot of cyber security technology seems to work like magic, so is this a coincidence? Is ‘X’ a reformed hacker turned stage magician? Spoiler alert: no.