Books written for leaders who'd rather hear the truth than be told what they want to hear.
With Grant Shih · Magnitude Consulting
Executive Points of View (EPoV)
Leadership Without the Platitudes
Most business books tell leaders what they want to hear. Executive Points of View was written to tell leaders what they need to hear. Co-authored by Joe Marroquín and Grant Shih, CEO of Magnitude Consulting, EPoV is the product of decades spent leading organizations, advising executives, and navigating decision-making in complex, multi-billion-dollar enterprises.
It is not another leadership book filled with motivational slogans and recycled management theory. It is a practical guide to how organizations actually function when accountability, politics, competing priorities, and human nature collide.
A New Language for Leadership
At its core, EPoV introduces a practical lexicon for recurring organizational realities — Organizational Wake, Character vs. Competence, Menu of Services, Buying in the C-Suite, There Are Bad Questions, and There Is No Win-Win — tools for diagnosing problems, improving communication, and making more effective decisions.
Practical Lessons for Modern Leaders
EPoV is intentionally direct. It challenges conventional wisdom. It questions popular management clichés. It forces readers to confront uncomfortable realities about trade-offs, incentives, and accountability. Leadership requires more than good intentions; it requires judgment, courage, and the willingness to make difficult decisions while understanding their consequences.
TWO DECADES OF LEADERSHIP PRACTICE
Pragmatic Cybersecurity
Judgment Over Jargon
Most cybersecurity books focus on frameworks, controls, compliance requirements, or the latest technology. Pragmatic Cybersecurity focuses on something far more important: leadership.
For more than twenty years, Joe Marroquín has advised executives, boards, government agencies, private equity firms, and enterprise organizations facing the realities of cybersecurity, compliance, governance, risk management, and digital transformation. Across industries and cultures, one lesson emerged repeatedly: the most significant cybersecurity failures are rarely technical. They are failures of judgment, governance, communication, accountability, and leadership.
The Human Side of Cybersecurity
Rather than focusing on products and technical implementations, the book examines leadership, governance, culture, financial stewardship, vendor management, executive influence, and the difficult decisions that define successful security programs. Effective programs rarely look the same from one organization to another — and successful security leaders communicate business risk rather than technical complexity.
Compliance, Risk, and Reality
From SOX, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and SEC disclosure requirements to emerging AI governance frameworks, cybersecurity leaders increasingly serve as translators between technical teams, executives, boards, regulators, and business stakeholders. One central theme: every organization possesses an inherent risk appetite — revealed not by policy documents, but by budgets, priorities, incentives, and behavior.
Principles That Endure
- Security must support business objectives
- Governance must be practical, actionable, and understandable
- Compliance should strengthen the organization rather than burden it
- Risk appetite is revealed through behavior, not documentation
- Technology matters, but leadership is decisive
- Credibility is earned through judgment, not jargon
Forthcoming
Modern Belligerence
Conflict, Crime, and Geopolitics in the Asymmetric Age of Intelligent Machines
For thousands of years, humanity has pursued a single objective: security. Every civilization, institution, invention, and technological revolution has been an attempt to create a safer, more prosperous future. Yet every breakthrough that protected civilization also transformed the nature of conflict. From the first stone axe to artificial intelligence, humanity has continually solved one set of problems while creating entirely new domains of competition.
Beyond Technology
Modern Belligerence examines how artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cyber warfare, biotechnology, robotics, space, and other emerging technologies are reshaping crime, conflict, and geopolitics. Rather than focusing on individual technologies, the book explores the deeper forces redefining security, power, and civilization in the twenty-first century.
Constructing Security
At the heart of the book is a new framework for understanding the modern world. Belligerence follows structural incentives. Civilizations prosper by constructing security. Every technological revolution redraws the geometry of security, redistributes power, and creates new forms of competition. From the first hunter protecting his tribe from predators to autonomous drone swarms and intelligent machines, the story of civilization has always been one of adapting to an ever-changing landscape of uncertainty.
A New Framework for the Twenty-First Century
Written for policymakers, business leaders, military professionals, technologists, and students of history, Modern Belligerence challenges many of the assumptions that have shaped our understanding of international security. It examines why geography still matters even as cyberspace ignores borders, why small nations can wield extraordinary strategic influence, why criminal organizations increasingly resemble multinational enterprises, and why artificial intelligence represents far more than another technological revolution.
Themes Explored
- Constructed Security as the foundation of civilization
- Belligerence follows structural incentives
- The changing geometry of security
- Artificial intelligence and the future of power
- Crime, geopolitics, and emerging technologies
- The Asymmetric Age of Intelligent Machines
- Drones