🎂⏳ Countdown to Sixty – Article 3 of 5 ⏳🎂
Two days to my birthday… and only two more articles to go. If you’re tired reading, imagine writing them. 😅
Today’s episode is a boardroom western:
“The Genius, the Charlatan, and the IP = Instant Pizza Manager.”
Think Sergio Leone meets cybersecurity, narrated with a wink to Jerome K. Jerome, Douglas Adams, and a little Monty Python coconut to bonk nonsense on the head.
In 40 years I’ve met them all—in tech and in real life. The Genius who quietly saves weekends with a boring, perfect restore. The Charlatan who repackages yesterday and sells it as tomorrow (now NIS2, yesterday GDPR, last summer blockchain, next week who knows). And the Instant Pizza Manager who honestly thinks IP is something you can eat—and sometimes sits in a technical role. Brandolini’s Law is the soundtrack.
Inside you’ll find: why stupidity isn’t “not knowing” but not knowing while pretending you do; how Web 2.0 gave radical certainty a megaphone; why budgets stampede after a breach and vanish with the board’s goldfish memory; and the unfashionable controls that actually work (tested backups, identity hygiene, email continuity).
👉 Article 3 of 5 — below.
Got your own Genius/Charlatan/Instant-Pizza tales? Drop them in the comments. I promise not to install the Internet on a CD.

Countdown to Sixty – Part 3: The Genius, the Charlatan, and the “IP = Instant Pizza” Manager

(language spirit cheerfully inspired by Jerome K. Jerome, Douglas Adams, and—clop clop—Monty Python; scored like a Sergio Leone western)

Prologue: a western in a meeting room

This is the third step in my birthday countdown. Part 1 set the tone (Ikigai, irony, no solemnity). Part 2 named the villain (human stupidity with a Web-2.0 megaphone). Part 3 changes camera angle and soundtrack: a dusty meeting room at high noon; the projector hums like a lonely harmonica. Three silhouettes push through the saloon doors of “digital transformation”: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

They’re not archetypes from a self-help book; they’re people I have met, repeatedly, across four decades—inside tech and outside it. Sometimes genius colleagues, sometimes old managers, sometimes customers, sometimes passengers at 33,000 feet who explain to me what I do for a living. There is always someone who fits the description. On honest days, I suspect I fit one or two of them myself. At almost sixty, I doubt I’ll suddenly find only the good ones. Life is a very large organisation chart.

Opening definition: what stupidity is (and is not)

Stupidity is not “not knowing.” Ignorance is normal; we all start there. Stupidity is not knowing while failing to realise you don’t know, then pretending you do, and making decisions powered by ego, fashion, or the last glossy demo. It is the opposite of curiosity. It is the enemy of safety. And it scales beautifully.

Scene 1 — The Good rides in quietly

The Genius arrives without trumpet. No cape; just a mug of coffee and a laptop patched with stickers that are either jokes or RFC numbers. They don’t just know things; they understand how things connect. They can explain why a rule exists, who will cry if you delete it, and how to restore the data without a parade. They read manuals—worse, footnotes. They say sentences like, “Let’s test restores,” which is how you know they’re dangerous (to downtime).

Subspecies exist. Some are great with bits and clumsy with people. Some are architects who can talk to boards without scaring the horses. The rare overlap—deep technical skill and humane people management and decent public speaking—does occur. I’ve been blessed to work with a few who taught me and made the work joyful. I repay them by playing my assigned role: frequently dumb in at least one area, loud about what I don’t know, and trying to learn without breaking production.

Scene 2 — The Bad sells water to a fish

The Charlatan speaks fluent buzzword. Not always malicious—often just swept along. He can pitch AI-powered SASE-XDR Zero Trust like a smoothie. Yesterday’s heuristic becomes today’s revolution with a galaxy background. He rolls in with a caravan of slides, leaves with your budget, and returns later to rename the same thing. When the world has a need, a charlatan leaks through the dam: now it’s NIS2, before it was GDPR, now it’s “secure development,” before it was Kubernetes, last season it was blockchain, the season before that whatever. They move faster than an EU directive and duplicate faster than an annex. Marketing sometimes joins the parade with pom-poms.

Scene 3 — The Ugly believes in Instant Pizza

The Instant Pizza Manager is confident, charming, incurious. He once asked whether we could “install the Internet on a CD.” He will announce an email outage by email. He funds the shiny thing (“because LinkedIn/Gartner”) and ignores the dull thing that prevents disasters: tested backups, runbooks, identity hygiene, inventories, takedown capability. He adores new waves that promise “no more DR,” “shift-left later,” or “AI will solve phishing.” When the breach arrives he invokes the sacred phrase: “unexpected, incredibly sophisticated attack.” Translation: we didn’t fund the boring controls, and now we need a bigger adjective.

Once I asked a colleague about a training course: “Do you think this training is good?” He replied, “You’re the manager—you have to know.” I answered, “My role as a manager isn’t to know everything; it’s to find the correct answers by asking the right people.” That sentence dents the Instant Pizza belief system, which orbits a small sun called ego.

Interlude — people I actually met (not just in IT)

Across decades—and companies like IBM, Cisco, Symantec, Huawei, Proofpoint, plus publishers, distributors and integrators—I’ve met all three. I taught OS/2→Windows migrations with one gentleman (two days from retirement) sleeping through the entire class, snoring with the serenity of a monk. I travelled so much one employer reimbursed laundry worldwide—except underwear—which is a perfect metaphor for programmes that fund everything but the obvious. I sat in meetings where the question “Can we install the Internet on a CD?” was asked without irony. I’ve been on calls where an outage was announced—by email—while email was down.

And outside the industry? Airports, concerts, customs desks, supermarket queues. The cast reappears. Different costumes, same script.

Web 2.0 and the decline in language

Web 2.0 was a cultural revolution, not a technical one. The plumbing barely changed; the crowd at the microphone did. First blogs, then social platforms, and suddenly everyone had a stage. The upside was participation and community. The downside was a factory for confident error and radicalised positions—technology included. The need to show up eclipsed the need to have anything useful to say. Lately I’ve noticed the language itself fraying: even being a proper charlatan seems too expensive now. I’m afraid AI won’t fix this; it will enhance it. Knowing without understanding is already a fire hazard; giving it a jet engine won’t help.

Developers, deadlines, and the security that “we’ll add later”

I like developers. I was one. But shipping on time has a long history of winning over shipping safely. In the COM/COM+ era, sensible security knobs existed and were “temporarily” bypassed for speed. Later, when .NET arrived and the garbage collector was presented to some as a revelation, old hands smiled—we’d seen collectors in other languages long before. The pattern is consistent: features that improve safety arrive; the schedule arrives faster; the first thing to go is the thing no one can see in a demo. Productivity theatre wins; the attack surface applauds.

The vendor shoot-out (Leone style)

Boardroom. High noon. The Charlatan presents “Zero Trust by Q3.” The slides are beautiful. The Instant Pizza Manager nods. The Genius asks quietly, “Who owns identity?” Ownership is not a slide; it’s names, budgets, privileges, revocation schedules. The Charlatan pivots to SASE. The Genius asks about SBOMs. The Charlatan pronounces CNAPP like a spa treatment. The Instant Pizza Manager wonders if the plan can be installed on a CD.

The budget stampede (and evaporation)

After an incident, money pours in like a cattle drive. Tools are bought like confetti. The Charlatan returns with a bigger brochure. The Genius asks for restore tests, a second factor for the maintenance account, tabletop exercises. Three months later the board’s goldfish memory resets; budgets vanish. The Instant Pizza Manager announces a “return to resilience basics,” then cancels the patch window because Marketing needs a splash page. The Genius updates the runbooks—and the CV.

The post-mortem at high noon

The Charlatan blames an unknown zero-day APT nation-state. The Instant Pizza Manager blames the intern. The Genius brings logs, timelines, and (if he was allowed to prepare) a successful restore that kept the story out of the papers. Everyone blames his tone. We retire to the saloon for water and sarcasm.

Subspecies: a field guide (discursive, not bullets)

Among the Good: monkish geniuses who can coax clean packets from dirty air and go mute in front of a committee; teacher-geniuses who translate complexity into budgets; architect-geniuses with three Plan Bs ready before Plan A hits the cabling cupboard. The overlap of tech depth, people sense, and stagecraft is rare—treasure it.

Among the Bad: cheerful optimists who simply love the future and exaggerate it; poets of the half-truth who sell Tuesday by renaming Monday; perfectly nice people who will learn if you shut the projector and talk like humans. Some grow into the Good. Some retire to consultancy, where they can cause less damage and make more slides.

Among the Ugly: decent humans trapped in belief systems. Experts in one field who apply that axiom to everything. They once fixed a factory with a checklist and now prescribe checklists for love, art, and zero-day response. They’re persistent, sincere, and powered by Brandolini’s Law: it takes far more energy to refute nonsense than to produce it. If you plan to argue, pack a lunch.

A little anthropology of meetings

Listen to the verbs. The Genius asks why and how and uses present tense: measure, limit, test, restore. The Charlatan says reimagine, accelerate, journey—words that look good on mugs. The Instant Pizza Manager says ownership and means “someone else,” says accountability and means “someone junior,” says strategy and means slides. When these three share a table, the result depends on who is allowed to finish a sentence. If the Genius is cut off after six words, expect a press release. If the Genius gets fifteen minutes of boring clarity, expect a result.

A compassionate confession

I have been the Ugly by accident more than once. I’ve fallen in love with my own plan. I’ve mistaken a slide for a system. I’ve pinned “security” onto a hat and called the hat secure. If you’re smiling at someone else right now, save a little smile for yourself. The only cure I’ve found is to surround myself with people who are clever in different directions and to practise saying “I don’t know—please explain” without adding “but.”

Brandolini’s interlude

The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle is the secret soundtrack of our era. It takes far less energy to produce nonsense than to refute it. That’s why charlatans scale better than engineers and why “AI will help” is not a guarantee; it may merely help produce nonsense faster in prettier sentences. Knowing without understanding needs brakes, not boosters.

Closing scene: the wind across the car park

Leone never promised easy endings. The Good survives by being boring and right. The Bad survives by rebranding the town. The Ugly survives by changing jobs and headers. The company survives only if someone funds the dull things: inventories; least privilege; patching before ransomware; tested backups that restore; email continuity when the cloud faints; a takedown muscle for malicious domains (remember: DNS outruns lawyers); and people who can tell the difference between IP and dinner.

I’ve met the good win, quietly. I’ve watched the bad win, loudly and briefly. I’ve seen the ugly win, then exit before the credits. They’re not only in my field; they’re in supermarkets, on planes, at concerts, at customs. Different costumes, same script.

If in Part 2 I tried to explain where stupidity lives, here I’ve shown a few of its faces. Next up, Part 4: the chorus—culture, politics, PR, and the languages we use and misuse, with guitars to keep the rhythm.

#CountdownToSixty #Cybersecurity #Infosec #Leadership #DigitalTransformation #EmailContinuity #ZeroTrust #DNS #BrandolinisLaw #quellidelfascicolop #quellascemenzadellasera