Built Wrong

“I was one of the lucky ones who got to read the early drafts of Richard’s book “Built Wrong.” I’ve had the privilege of getting to know Richard well over the years, and what I’ve always admired about him is his fearlessness and his unflinching commitment to truth. “Built Wrong” is a book filled with uncomfortable truths. I’m sure that it will anger quite a few people, but hopefully it will open the eyes of even more.”

John Kindervag, Creator of Zero Trust

“For many decades, cybersecurity leadership has been trapped in a repeating cycle of recycled conversations and bad investments, leading to a net-negative security posture. The core of this failure is a strategic misalignment: CISOs continue to operate as cost centers, making technology investments without connecting them to business outcomes. The adversaries are operating with a business mindset, which is the lesson leadership needs to internalize. We are losing because we are playing the wrong game. The recommended path forward is to adopt a new operational model, as articulated by Richard Bird in the very book you are holding in your hands, which promises to link cyber investment to concrete security results and break this decades-long stagnation.”

Jeffrey Wheatman - Cyber Risk Leader and Former Gartner Analyst

“Cybersecurity is the only industry of its size that renamed its defects and called it progress. Richard Bird spent three decades inside the machine watching organizations do everything the system asked of them and still lose. Built Wrong applies systems dynamics thinking that MIT has used for sixty years to explain why well-run organizations unintentionally produce disaster: a self-reinforcing loop where a broken narrative picks the wrong metric, the wrong metric rewards the wrong incentive, and the wrong incentive builds architecture that satisfies the metric instead of stopping the attack. Spending more money without touching the flawed logic within the loop just feeds it. Bird names the flaw and then shows us how to clearly solve it.”

Dutch Schwartz, AI Security thought-leader and 2x LinkedIn Top Voice

“Richard has done the hard thing; he has put into succinct words what seasoned identity professionals know in their bones. He does so without assigning blame or victimization. And most importantly, he shows us a path forward.”

Ian Glazer, Founder IDPro and Digital Identity Expert

“I have run global identity at the scale this book describes, and Richard is not exaggerating. He says out loud what most of the industry pays consultants to avoid: the model is built wrong, we mistook activity for impact, and we still fund identity like a discretionary line item. If you own, fund, or answer for enterprise identity, this is not optional reading. You cannot govern the exposure until you understand it. Read it before your 3:47 a.m. alert does the explaining for you.”

Steve Tout, Founder / CEO, Identient and Author, CISO On The Razor’s Edge