“Security is a team sport.”
I hate that phrase.
It sounds nice. It looks great on a slide deck. But in the real world, when a ransomware group is encrypting your backups at 3 AM, security is not a team sport. It is a specific responsibility held by specific people with the terrifying job of making the right call when everyone else is panicking.
“Lead with curiosity.” “Synergize.” “Circle back.”
We are drowning in this stuff. It is the language of evasion. It is a linguistic fog designed to make simple things sound complex and hard things sound soft. And God knows how much of this comes from the MBA world; a finishing school for conformity that churns out leaders who know how to talk but have forgotten how to act.
I want to take a detour from our usual programming to talk about the “Business of Business.” Specifically, the obsession with the MBA and the corporate rhetoric that comes with it.
Is the degree worth the paper it is printed on? Or are we just paying six figures to learn how to sound like everyone else?
The MBA Industrial Complex
I see it constantly. Brilliant engineers and security practitioners hitting a ceiling. They look around and see the suits speaking a different language. They think the missing link is three letters after their name.
So they go back to school.
They take on debt. They pause their careers. They spend two years analyzing case studies from 2015.
Here is the cold water: Unless you are attending a top 10 school (Harvard, Wharton, Stanford), the math rarely works out.
The “return on investment” for a mid-tier MBA is increasingly shaky. You are factoring in tuition, yes. But you also have to factor in the opportunity cost. In cybersecurity, two years is a geological epoch. The technology you knew when you started your program will be obsolete by the time you graduate.
While you were writing papers on “organizational behavior theories,” your peers were in the trenches. They were responding to incidents. They were managing budgets. They were learning how to fire a vendor who lied to them.
That experience has a compounding interest that no classroom can replicate.
Shell Shock vs. PTSD: The Danger of Soft Language
The biggest export of the MBA system is not leadership. It is rhetoric.
It teaches you to smooth over the rough edges of reality. It teaches you to prioritize the “narrative” over the “truth.”
George Carlin warned us about this decades ago. He had a famous routine about how we devolved from the punchy, visceral “Shell Shock” in World War I to the sterilized, clinical “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” by Vietnam.
His point was simple: Soft language takes the blood out of the water. It makes the horror easier to ignore.
Corporate America took that lesson and ran with it. In cybersecurity, this is deadly.
I sat in a meeting recently where a director described a critical vulnerability as a “headwind to our operational synergy.”
No. It was a Security Group open to the world. Just a modern name for a hole in the firewall.
When we use this language, we are hiding. We use “team sport” to diffuse accountability so no single person can be blamed for a failure. We use “lead with curiosity” to mask the fact that we have no strategic plan.
This rhetoric is dangerous because it disconnects the leader from the ground truth. You cannot defend a network with metaphors. You cannot patch a server with synergy.
The Case for the “Trench MBA”
I am not anti-education. I am anti-illusion.
You do not need a two-year sabbatical to learn the language of business.
If you want to learn how to read a P&L sheet, take a finance course on Coursera for $50. Better yet, upload a sample budget into an LLM and ask it to roleplay a hostile CFO. Ask it to tear your math apart. That simulation will teach you more about defending a budget in 20 minutes than a semester of theory ever could.
The best leaders I know did not learn leadership from a textbook. They learned it from a mentor who kicked their ass.
They learned it by:
Watching a bad leader: Seeing exactly what not to do is often more valuable than a case study on Apple.
Managing a crisis: Nothing clarifies your thinking like the threat of losing your job or your company’s reputation.
Owning a P&L: Managing a budget with real money is very different from managing a theoretical one in a simulation.
A kick-ass mentor will teach you the unwritten rules of the game. An MBA teaches you the written ones. In security, the unwritten rules are the ones that kill you.
When the Degree Actually Matters
There is a caveat. Seems like their often is.
If your goal is to leave security and become a generic F500 CEO, the MBA is a signaling mechanism. It tells the other executives that you are “one of them.” It signals that you have been socialized into the club.
If you need the degree to get past an HR filter or to pivot into investment banking, fine. Go get it.
But do not confuse the credential with capability.
Do not confuse the ability to make a PowerPoint with the ability to lead others through a crisis.
Thinking Outside the Narrative
We need to stop rewarding the fluff.
As leaders, we need to strip the MBA-speak out of our teams.
If someone says “synergy,” ask them what specific metric they are trying to improve.
If someone says “team sport,” ask them who is the captain and who is getting fired if we lose.
We need fewer people who can recite Porter’s Five Forces and more people who can make a hard decision with incomplete data at 4 PM on a Friday.
You don’t need a degree for that. You need guts. You need experience. And you need the willingness to speak plainly in a world that is obsessed with being polite.
Save your tuition money. Buy a better home lab. Use AI to close your knowledge gaps. Hire a mentor.
And for the love of God, stop “circling back.” Just answer the email.
References
The MBA Value Proposition (Investopedia)
Why it matters: A breakdown of the financial realities of the degree, highlighting that outside the top tier, the ROI often takes nearly a decade to materialize.
The Opportunity Cost of the MBA (Forbes)
Why it matters: Analysis of how “time out of market” negatively impacts tech careers specifically.
Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (David Graeber)
Why it matters: Essential reading on how corporate bureaucracy creates layers of meaningless work and language to justify its own existence.