Man... I'm going to have to teach some of you reverse management engineering. This is the art of getting management to let you do what you need to do...

E.g.:

Manager: (CFO mind you): "You need to be doing X tomorrow at noon"
Me: "Sorry but I can't. Unless you haven't heard... PCI changed the rules as did FINRA within the last 6 weeks. I seriously need to focus on keeping our clients in compliance. Therefore tomorrow I have SIEM + Security projects on the board, you will have to shift X to about 3PM. It's definitely mission critical I remain free tomorrow until 2PM earliest. We need to ensure I understand all I need to know about concepts, methodologies in this field if you wanna keep managed security services in order"


Works all the time... However, it works for me. I'm a stickler on project management (and yes I have studied PMP + ITIL for those wondering). I almost always try to make things a business case since that's all bosses care about at the end of the day. When it makes sense to them financially, you're talking their language. Not trying to explain why you need to understand core concepts and alternatives for pivoting into multiple meterpreter shells

I actually have 3 conflicts tomorrow. Conducting job interview (this will be the 37th candidate we've interviewed, background checks take too long and candidates always find other work by the time we clear them) which I'm happy to miss, (2nd round anyway, I already assessed their technical chops, this one is the touchy feely culture interview) is the first.

PCI panel thing, I could have smacked my boss. He gets an email from a fellow CIO at sister organization with an invite for a PCI summit/panel focused on parking revenue systems and he says that "maybe" he will send his "PCI guru". He refers to me that way sometimes and I always tell him I'm not a guru, I'm constantly looking up requirements because i can never remember exactly what the SSC had to say on topic X. but now the requester has me listed on the agenda as a PCI guru and several sister organizations are clamoring for my presence, and they don't even know me. Oh and apparently I'm supposed to answer questions, at least I don't have to give a presentation. Tomorrow is going to suck as their expectations are dashed to pieces.

Sil, your strategy works usually, but when my boss has extended an offer to a group of his peers, nothing else matters. Hayabusa I feel your pain, some things are just out of our hands.