“Comparison is the thief of joy” –Theodore Roosevelt
When I was a teenager, most of my friends had posters in their rooms.
I didn’t because my parents didn’t let me, and now I think that was a good thing.
Let me explain.
There were different categories of posters.
One of them was the sex symbols. e.g. Samantha Fox.
Another one was the rock bands. e.g. Bon Jovi.
A third one was movies. e.g. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian.
A fourth one was superheroes. e.g. Superman.
Most of my friends wanted to be like the people in the posters.
This does not apply to Samantha Fox’s posters. My friends admired her, but in a different way.
All of us wanted to have the success of Bon Jovi, the muscles of Conan (I won’t copy-paste the last name again), and wanted to smoke a cigar while saying “I love it when a plan comes together”.
At that time we didn’t think how did they get there.
It turns out Arnold trained a lot, Bon Jovi played a lot, and Hannibal… Well, Hannibal was a character with a good script writer.
We really thought that there was one step to becoming them. Maybe one big step, but one step.
From teenager with acne to barbarian knocking out camels with one punch.
What a wonderful thing the imagination.
Frustration came because there was too much distance between ourselves back then, and our heroes in the posters, but that didn’t matter then.
Our delusional minds were not an issue back then, but they may be nowadays.
Nowadays, when a company wants to decide the security budget they use as a reference the common spending of similar companies.
I think it is called “Benchmarking”.
I would call it “Shielding behind the market because I do not know what to do”.
The name does not matter. What matters is the comparisons you are making.
Can you compare a company in banking and another in energy?
Can you compare a growing company and a stalled one?
Can you compare a company with a focus on gaining market share and one focused on optimizing costs to increase benefits?
Of course, you can compare them. There’s a lot of companies comparing themselves.
Whether this is a good way to define the security budget is a different question.
Whether there is a better way to define the security budget is also a different question.
The thing with comparisons is it is difficult to end up well.
Maybe you are comparing your company with others with a bigger budget. This means you will ask for more money. Great!
Maybe you are comparing your company with others with a better performance. This means you will be required to perform better. Oh!
Most of the time, you will be compared with companies that someone thinks are similar to yours.
Most of the time, you will disagree. Beware, or ss Roosevelt said, that may steal your joy.
Regardless of the benchmarking and the budget, if you want to make a change in the direction of the security of your company, I may help you.
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