Great writeup. You rightly diagnoses chronic distress but we need to dig into how incentive structures amplify it. Most cybersecurity compensation and promotion systems reward firefighting, not prevention. Bonuses tied to incident response speed, not risk reduction. This creates a hidden feedback loop where leaders are economically motivated to stay in survival mode. Until boards tie executive rewards to leading indicators like mean time to prevent or resilience maturity not just breach aftermath we’ll keep incentivizing the very burnout we claim to solve.
A question would be, should CISOs demand compensation models that align with swamp-draining, not alligator-whacking?
Love this idea. I also think CISOs have a lot of opportunity to discuss how they want their bonuses to be judged. What are the 5 things we want to achieve so a CISO is rewarded accordingly
Before replying, I think a caveat is that the things matter less than who controls the definition.
Boards default to lagging indicators because that is what they know: breach cost, regulatory fines, audit findings.
If CISOs don't walk in with a pre-built measurement framework, they negotiate targets inside someone else's model and lose before the conversation starts.
A starting set could be (With the last one being the most important in my opinion):
- resilience maturity progression
- security debt reduction rate
- mean time to prevent
- board security literacy improvement
- team retention
Those are indicators a CISO can actually influence. The harder question is how you get a board to value a metric for something that didn't happen.
Great writeup. You rightly diagnoses chronic distress but we need to dig into how incentive structures amplify it. Most cybersecurity compensation and promotion systems reward firefighting, not prevention. Bonuses tied to incident response speed, not risk reduction. This creates a hidden feedback loop where leaders are economically motivated to stay in survival mode. Until boards tie executive rewards to leading indicators like mean time to prevent or resilience maturity not just breach aftermath we’ll keep incentivizing the very burnout we claim to solve.
A question would be, should CISOs demand compensation models that align with swamp-draining, not alligator-whacking?
Love this idea. I also think CISOs have a lot of opportunity to discuss how they want their bonuses to be judged. What are the 5 things we want to achieve so a CISO is rewarded accordingly
Before replying, I think a caveat is that the things matter less than who controls the definition.
Boards default to lagging indicators because that is what they know: breach cost, regulatory fines, audit findings.
If CISOs don't walk in with a pre-built measurement framework, they negotiate targets inside someone else's model and lose before the conversation starts.
A starting set could be (With the last one being the most important in my opinion):
- resilience maturity progression
- security debt reduction rate
- mean time to prevent
- board security literacy improvement
- team retention
Those are indicators a CISO can actually influence. The harder question is how you get a board to value a metric for something that didn't happen.