TABLE OF CONTENTS In this chapter we cover a few issues that have important influences on the other material you'll find in this book. We want to get you thinking about concepts that we believe can have strong, positive effects on the quality of security education but that haven't always been as much a part of your thinking as they should be. We'll be talking in generalities, but we'll offer specific examples of how these concepts have impact. As we move through other chapters, we'll be coming back to these concepts and hitting them again from different angles with more specific examples.
As you move through this book, you'll notice one significant and somewhat unusual characteristic of our approach to security education. Our focus is almost entirely on performance people doing things that either support or hinder your security program. We'll talk about information and knowledge, but only as they are needed for performance. We'll discuss attitudes, but only as they affect performance. We'll examine that favorite security icon, security awareness, but only as a trigger to performance. Although all of those factors are important, our premise is that it's not what people know, or feel, or are aware of that is the final determinant of the quality of security it's what they do. If the purpose of security education is to establish, enhance, and maintain quality security, we should keep our eyes firmly fixed on performance.
There are a couple of reasons for this focus,...
