Mary Frantz: Encouraging Sustainability Leadership with Inspiring Attributes of Progress

Enterprise Knowledge Partners, LLC (EKP) is a cybersecurity consulting company that offers a unique combination of security, compliance, forensics and enterprise architecture. EKP is a leader in cyber and litigation forensics, incident response and ethical hacking. The company offers enterprise and cloud architecture development services. EKP believes in the value of providing holistic security services because, "If you don't know how to build it, you can't protect it or defend it." 

Learning Life Lessons through Experience 

Mary Frantz is the CEO and Founder of EKP. The company was created in 2004. EKP was the first company in Minnesota to be owned by a minority woman whose core competency was the unique combination of security, compliance, forensics and enterprise architecture.  

Mary grew up on the south side of Chicago. In high school and college, she had a wonderful opportunity to live in Europe and Central America, and Mary immersed herself in its language, culture and politics. She always loved math and computers. So, at college, Mary pursued all her passions and declared a quadruple major. She graduated with four degrees: Operational Management and Information Systems (how to develop and manage global manufacturing systems), Statistics, International Relations (emphasis in Southeast Asian studies), and Foreign Language transaction of Spanish with French as a minor. Mary then went on to earn two master's degrees. 

To pay for college, Mary worked on multiple jobs, sometimes two or three at the same time, and made a point of gaining employment in manufacturing and data analysis. At a stage, she was even the lead (and only female) computer technician at the university.  

During graduate school, Mary held positions at large multi-national organizations and gained a wide breadth of experience in both hands-on technology and leadership. She left the corporate world shortly after moving to Minnesota to begin consulting in the areas of enterprise architecture and security. Within a few years, Mary had more work than she could handle and started expanding her team. Several years later, Enterprise Knowledge Partners, LLC was launched. 

Comprehending to Accept Failures and Think Forward 

Mary learned to fail forward and not to be too hard on herself whenever she made a mistake. Mary was convinced that no one can grow if they have not failed at something. By failure, she means taking calculated chances and learning what works and what does not and not unnecessary risks. The key is to learn, and never be afraid to say, "I was wrong." 

Mary has failed and learned a lot from it. She acknowledged to embrace trying and failing and then learning and succeeding. Mary retained to always do the right thing, even if it means losing business. Mary was lucky that she has had past employees and peers from her years in corporations who told they remember her because she did the right thing, even if it was not popular. Mary realized that 'this is a very small world and if you treat people with dignity and respect (even those who have wronged you), and behave and work with integrity, it does pay off in ways you can't possibly foresee.'   

Facing the Challenge of Being the Only Woman 

During Mary's college and post-graduate courses, she was often the only female and many times the only minority female. Mary remembers that being a woman in tech, particularly operational engineering and cybersecurity, was a lonely journey. At the first decade of her career, Mary worked and studied in a predominantly male environment. She remarks that there were few if any, women leaders to follow, and the concept of mentoring was non-existent. When Mary had a huge success, the credit was often given to her male boss or a male colleague.  

 While several of Mary's supervisors would advise her to always be herself, it often led to being ostracized, hazed and avoided. When Mary worked for a defence contractor, she was often referred to as the EEOC requirement, the one that checked all the boxes for the company to meet its obligations to hire women and minorities. In Mary's first years of work in the corporate world, she survived by adapting, conforming and becoming one of the guys, and avoided discussing cultural or personal backgrounds. While that worked for a while, Mary was able to fit in and earn respect for her work. Mary recalls that it was hard and she started to lose her creative, entrepreneurial skills. Not only did this make every day feel lifeless, but Mary started feeling like a fraud. She was dying inside. Mary was bored and lacked creativity. She longed to be challenged.  

 Mary believes that companies don't succeed by doing what everyone else does or by hiring people who don't challenge the status quo. Therefore, Mary wanted to find a work that was valued, and a place where she could constantly learn and engage. Mary wanted to work in an environment without fear of making mistakes or standing out. Mary recollects that having a child while working as a senior technical director in a large U.S. company was eye-opening and disturbing. She had a C-section and only received a week off from work. Every other absence was unpaid leave. Maternity leave was not fully developed at that time (it's better now, but not great). However, it was clear that Mary's position would be in jeopardy and her career could stagnate because of the stigma of being not just a woman but also a mom. That is when Mary first thought about going off work on her own.  

Transformational Leadership to Motivate Others 

Mary advises that leaders should surround themselves with gifted, smart, curious and passionate people from diverse backgrounds and competencies. She believes that everyone is gifted with a special talent, but those with critical thinking skills (Mary's definition of smart) and holds natural curiosity and passion will succeed. This isn't book smart, its curious smart. Encouraging open cultures, respecting individuality, and multiple perspectives keep people happy and relaxed. Relaxed people think better. Mary adds that most critical thinkers are engaged by the challenge; challenging projects and engaging in trial and error by celebrating the failures as learnings which will retain the best performers, regardless of the job role.  

Mary advises that major decision shouldn't be made by a leader without consulting the peers and employees. Encouraging and receiving feedback, even if it is contrary to the leader's opinion, will always result in a better course of action. Just because Mary, the CEO and the leader of a company, this rarely equates to being the smartest or wisest person in the room, she adds. Mary says that a good leader won't let their ego stand in the way of a company's growth.  

Mary shares that if a team looks, sounds and prefers to fit in rather than stand out like the leader, the organization, its products and services will stagnate – or potentially never get off the ground. Leaders must push themselves to confront what they don't know and fail forward, and keep learning. Mary strongly believes that change requires change, it longs to be uncomfortable once in a while and a leader leads by example.  

Learning to be in Customer's Shoes to Stipulate Innovation 

Mary ensures that by walking in customer's shoes, seeing challenges from their side of the table in their language will bring a change. Innovation cannot occur in the bubble of one's own perspectives. But leaders don't have to be an expert in another industry to understand and relate to another perspective. Just like AI and machine learning, algorithms are cumulative and based upon patterns and anomalies, the leader's ability is to apply those same patterns to customers. She adds that critical skills can be applied across industries, environments and within technologies.  

Viewing Technology as a Natural Continuum  

Mary doesn't see Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Automation, Cloud Computing and Big Data technologies as disruptive, except in a marketing sense. She views it as a natural continuum of innovation. Understanding the technology continuum and the limitations of those technologies helps EKP to not only develop but anticipate the next phase, and to embrace, adapt or wait for greater maturity before adopting.   

Mary thinks that the primary difference over the years is the rate of adoption and adaptation. The leader today has to anticipate change and create flexible environments to make innovation, adopting a normal course of business without re-architecting and creating unnecessary expense and chaos. It also requires patience and wisdom. Not every innovation is ready; sometimes it is better to wait for the maturity of a new technology to learn from the lessons of early adopters.  

Learning Critical Skills to Improve Functions 

Mary sees EKP being proactive and not reactive. EKP performs a lot of cyber breach responses, which is primarily reactive. The company also functions in designing and building systems to create automatic counter-responses that both prevent the current attack and adjust, based upon the real-time analysis of the attack, to prevent future pivots of the attack.  

 According to Mary, the single largest challenge that leaders face is the shortage of critical skills needed to develop the system capabilities responsibly and ethically. The keyword here is ethical. She opines leaders cannot wait for the legal system to catch up.   

 Mary predicts that if the industry advances ethically, the use of AI may help to solve some of the world's greatest challenges. But leaders need to attract and encourage participants and other leaders in the journey. The future of robotic automation, cybersecurity and the use of predictive analytics are not about raw technology. It is about the psychology of being able to capitalize on the technology through multiple disciplines.  

Guidance to the Emerging Women Leaders 

Mary advises women in the workforce to not be afraid of trying new things. She adds, women needn't be petrified to go into jobs where they have the passion but not the experience. Everyone started somewhere. Mary asks them to bring their full self to the job. Technology, particularly data science and cybersecurity, remains a male-dominated world that works best in a collaborative and conversational environment. Mary asks women to realize that they might not always be invited into the conversation, so make your own conversations. She suggests women to reach out to female peers and leaders in their field: there are many out there who are more than willing to let women join their conversations.