Faculty
Keri Pearlson is the Executive Director of the Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan: The Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (IC)3 at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is also a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School.
Pearlson has held positions in academia and industry including Babson College, The University of Texas at Austin, Gartner’s Research Board, CSC, and AT&T. She founded KP Partners, a CIO advisory services firm and the IT Leaders’ Forum, a community of next generation IT executives. She is the founding director of the Analytics Leadership Consortium at the International Institute of Analytics. Pearlson began her career at Hughes Aircraft Company as a systems analyst.
Pearlson's research spans MIS, business strategy, and organizational design. Her current research studies how organizations build a culture of cybersecurity and how organizations build trust to share mitigations for cyber breaches. She is the coauthor of Managing and Using Information: A Strategic Approach 6thed and of Zero Time: Providing Instant Customer Value. Her work has been published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, The Academy of Management Executive, Information Resources Management Journal, and Harvard Business Publishing.
Pearlson holds a Doctorate in business administration (DBA) in MIS from Harvard Business School, and an MS in industrial engineering and BS in mathematics from Stanford. She is the founding president of the Austin Society for Information Management (SIM) and was named “2014 National SIM Leader of the Year.”
Keri Pearlson, Michael Sapienza, and Sarah Chou. In Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, Cambridge, MA: December 2019.
Huang, Keman, Michael Siegel, Keri Pearlson, and Stuart Madnick. MIT Sloan Management Review, July 15, 2019.
Keman Huang and Keri Pearlson. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS- 2019), Honolulu, HI: January 2019.
Keman Huang, and Keri Pearlson. Cambridge, MA: 2019.
Keman Huang, Keri Pearlson, and Stuart Madnick.
Organizations must base their cybersecurity strategies on resilience — the ability to weather an attack with minimal damage to data, finances, and reputation.
"A prevention mindset means doing all you can to keep the bad guys out. A resilience mindset adds a layer."
This provides a holistic, enterprise approach to cybersecurity and data privacy. Course faculty are colleagues at Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS) research consortium, the only research group in the world that focuses entirely on the managerial side of cybersecurity. Topics covered include governance, protection and response, law and regulations, security strategy and culture.
Cyber risk and cybersecurity are a source of frustration for executives and government officials who spend inordinate time and worry trying to protect their data from sophisticated phishing schemes, ransomware, and state-sponsored hacking. However, cybersecurity issues are not purely a technology problem—they are multi-headed hydras that need to be addressed with a multi-disciplinary approach. This cybersecurity course is not intended to provide guidance on IT infrastructure or troubleshooting, rather it focuses on the humanistic and managerial aspects of cybersecurity. As a participant in this cyber security training for executives course, you will be provided with a framework of managerial protocols to follow, resulting in a personalized playbook with actionable next steps towards creating a more cyber-aware culture within your organization.
