Whose Sights are You In?
Imagine this book-turned-movie plot. Super Vision International is a small company with 90 employees – a “Fortune 50,000” company. This small company, like thousands of others, is the backbone of the supply chain to the Fortune 500. Companies like Super Vision are important to American business. That’s why they are targets.
As the plot thickens, the Super Vision founder and CEO learns that the market had been flooded with counterfeit Super Vision products. He starts to fight back immediately, protecting the business he started as a 19-year-old Stanford student.
With little or no help from the local police, the FBI or the U.S. Department of Justice, he gathers enough evidence to take the criminals to court with the help of private investigators posing as rich Arab sheiks.
Now imagine that Super Vision wins a $33 million verdict against the intellectual property thieves, yet years later still hasn’t seen one dime of that award. The camera pans in on one expert, testifying in court that the defendants wired $28.5 million out of the United States “…using methods consistent with money laundering.”
The Truth
As the story unfolds … but wait a minute. There is no such movie.
And Super Vision isn’t a fictional company. This is a true story, about a real company named Super Vision, whose giant color displays you have seen in Times Square and sports stadiums and other venues around the world.
Super Vision is a real-life company founded by Brett Kingstone, who has fought against criminals that most other business owners would have simply let “get away with it”.
Why did Kingstone stand up for himself, his company and his country?
It’s a Real-Life War
The Real War Against America is Kingstone’s highly captivating book that explains why and how he fought the war that he’s still fighting. It is a riveting story, but also an urgent call to arms for every American to fight against terrorists who do not need bullets or bombs to destroy the American dream. They just need to steal your plans—paper, electronic, spoken or discussed—and use them to take away your customers. It’s a very simple and effective strategy.
You will walk away from this book with a deep insight into how human weakness (do you not have employees and partners?), coupled with security weakness, can open the door for your goals and dreams to be plucked away without your even knowing it’s happening. Even if you don’t own the company but just work there, if the company goes or just your job does—so goes your livelihood. So much for today’s goals and dreams.
Why? Because most small and medium size businesses don’t consider themselves to be targets, or to be that vulnerable. But most are.
Sneak Peak
I was captured by this story when I got a sneak peak online through Google Books. News papers and sites report such stories as “facts and figures”. This book will give you a real taste of what its like to be targeted and attacked.
Hard Target
TV, movies and video games have have given us a dual world, where drama is on-screen and real-life is just the daily grind. We turn off or sign off the life-wrenching drama, and return to “life as we know it”. But it turns out that we don’t really know it like we should—at least in terms of the actual threats we face.
Every manager and executive who makes risk or security decisions needs to feel the impact of being the target. So grab and read this book. How exposed is your company? How would you even know for sure?
These days, what company hasn’t gotten leaner and at least a little bit meaner or more determined to survive and thrive? So protect what you are working so hard for.
My friends and colleagues had the same experience that I did: it’s hard to put this book aside once you start reading it. Here and there, you see yourself and your company between the story lines.
If you are a Fortune 1000 company, then get the word out to the smaller companies in your supply chain.
Strong companies make a strong country, and we certainly need a lot more of that now.
Get the book and get the deep insight you need to make your company a hard target.
Best regards,
Ray Bernard
P.S. Kindle owners: do like I did and tell Amazon to get a Kindle edition.
Small Business Secrets Under Siege
Solutions Snapshot – August 2010 – SMB Threats in 2010 and Beyond
