CSM Speakers Bureau

The Topics

Current and future CSM Speakers will address topics that are relevant to today’s headlines while timeless in scope and simply fascinating to hear about. This is true whether the audience is composed of "insiders" or those with no experience in the area at all. Our speakers are able to make you feel like you were there while these events were happening. Yet they are more than just good storytellers and they were not doing these things by themselves - they are strong leaders and capable managers who also took their organizations to higher levels of performance by focusing on results.

Performance Ethics

John McKay examines situations that may be acknowledged by some as “just the way government does business,” but which are actually the result of serious leadership lapses that may rise to the level of ethical negligence and prevent agencies from achieving these results they were created to achieve. McKay explains that, at law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the sensitive and critical mission does not allow leaders let performance erode into a zone of false and dangerous comfort, where the long-standing level of effort becomes accepted as "good enough for government work." McKay identifies some of the most serious of these situations in the law enforcement and intelligence communities, explore and explain the ethical dimension, and recommend systemic and individual changes to improve performance.

Counterterrorism

CSM’s speakers have spent time in the intense world of counterterrorism – preventing terrorist attacks, investigating attacks, prosecuting terrorist, and dealing with Congressional hearings and Presidential Commissions in the aftermath of an attack.

John McKay was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington less than two years after an Algerian named Ahmed Rassam was caught with bomb making material in his car’s trunk crossing the Canadian border. When he took responsibility for that prosecution, McKay found that little had been done to prevent a similar incident from happening again and regional law enforcement – federal, state, and local – did not have a coherent strategy to combat terrorism or any other regional crime problem. To remedy this, McKay led an effort and developed a regional strategy and then championed the first successful law enforcement information sharing project to include federal, state, and local data, greatly enhancing counterterrorism efforts in the Seattle area.

War on Drugs

Before the War on Terror there was the War on Drugs - but when the War on Terror started the War on Drugs wasn't over. John McKay can describe his firsthand experiences in the struggle to disrupt and defeat drug traffickers and how the two wars sometimes intersect.

The regional law enforcement strategy and information sharing system John McKay helped create greatly aided regional drug enforcement efforts in western Washington State, a major transit point for "BC Bud" - marijuana produced in British Columbia - entering the U.S.
 

© Center for Strategic Management 2008