Strategy

We can only innovate if people know and understand what we are trying to achieve (оur Mission & Vision).

At Secure Group, we realize that today the privacy and security of people's communications are at risk.
We understand that in a world gripped by cybercrime and mass surveillance, intruders can easily steal personal data and compromise correspondence unless people have the right tools.
That is why we decided to revive privacy through strong encryption, education, transparency, and control. Our technology eliminates workarounds to security, giving users the means to communicate with anyone, anywhere – in total privacy.

Everything we do is to challenge the standards of securing people’s mobile communications:
- We engineer solutions for encrypted communications that are bulletproof and easy-to-use.
- We preserve users' information with a product line of secure devices, applications, MDMs and enterprise solutions.
- We believe in the fundamental right to privacy for all. And we don’t just say it, we stand for it by developing solutions that enable people to exchange sensitive information securely, protecting their business, reputation, and personal life.

• OUR VISION
  

Leading the fight for a secure mobile world where users will have full control over the privacy of their data and communications.
It’s hard to imagine a world where the privacy of your data will be absolute. Third-party providers have access to incredible amounts of information about end-users without asking for their permission or consent. There’re countless data breaches in every industry on a daily basis. Secure Group wants to change that. We believe in a future where the control over privacy will be placed in the hands of consumers. A mobile world where everyone would be able to secure their information flow and manage who has access to it.

• OUR MISSION
  

Providing customer-tailored mobile solutions to individuals, businesses, and organizations which help them secure and manage the information flow while preserving the privacy of their data.
Our relationship with consumers and partners is at the heart of our business. Secure Group’s work approach is what makes us unique. We aim at offering not just a working product, but one that will fit the needs of our clients and their business model completely. A solution that both provides full control over the management of data privacy and is intuitive, easy-to-use, and offering all functionalities required by the consumer. 

In order to achieve our vision and mission we realized:
- We needed to reinvent the mobile world through innovation;
- We needed to mitigate any risks that would jeopardize cybersecurity;
- We needed to fight the mobile giants: Google and Apple.

For that, we decided to create our own mobile operating system and a suite of innovative mobile security solutions. But we also knew that to continue our growth and development of even more innovative solutions we needed to be surrounded by unique, remarkable people. On the other hand, to attract these incredible people and get the best out of them, we also realized we needed a new way of working.
Organizations are still run as hierarchical command-and-control systems in a world of networked purpose-driven individuals. The way that humans interact, and information is displayed have dramatically changed and the social dynamics in firms have become messy and full of power relationships that tend to be unfair. This leads to “office politics” which, of course, wastes time. At Secure Group we don’t want this type of environment and we perceived that for this transformation to work well, nothing less than a revolution in management practices was needed.

At Secure Group we have replaced the traditional working model with agile working practices where the individual has genuine autonomy over their working pattern. Our working model shifts away from a command and control mentality toward a leadership style that empowers people, trusting them to get on with the work. That's why employees are treated as innovative and mature, able to make decisions that consider the needs of the employer as well as their own priorities. This model of work has been developed to best-fit the social, technological, and economic influences of the twenty-first century.

People choose why, how and who to work with for reasons unique to them whereas every organization believes in a mission and seeks success that is unique to it. A fit between employers and employees is achieved when these align. This means that we want our people to have work that matters to them so we place them in roles in Secure Group where they can have a meaningful impact and at the same time, we make sure these unique people share our mindset in order for us to achieve our goals.

That is why we created the Secure Group Management Model: to empower and manage high-performing people with the freedom to make a big impact.

Context, not Control

We believe in Context, not Control to provide insight and understanding to make sound decisions. For us, instead of trying to control people, we think that what will lead to High Performance is to set the appropriate context which embraces our strategy, objectives, assumptions, and metrics.

Problems we had when trying to create the right context:
- Micro-managing doesn’t work. It is not scalable, and the many that use it do so because it is comfortable rather than because it is any good
- Innovation drives the most value in a product-led business like ours, so we needed this as the primary focus of our corporate culture
- Inability to convey the company’s business vision and development strategy across the whole company to align teams’ goals.

On the other hand, we did find a solution to these problems: Strategic Management.

Strategic Management

Strategic management is the ongoing planning, monitoring, analysis and assessment of all that is necessary for an organization to meet its goals and objectives.

At Secure Group we decided to use Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard. This allowed us to easily tell the story and create the right context by:
- Communicating what we are trying to accomplish: complete top-to-bottom strategic visibility for everyone (driving company-wide understanding)
- Aligning everyone’s day-to-day work with strategy
- Prioritizing projects, products, and services
- Measuring and monitoring progress towards strategic targets: Goal-based processes, KPI-measurement, and data visualization across the company.

Each department has its own Strategic Map and Balanced Scorecard.

Because of that, it's possible to say:
- When strategy and goals are clear, specific and broadly understood...
- When team interactions are focused on strategy and goals, rather than tactics...
- When management time is transparent, articulate and perceptive...

... we achieve the ideal scenario of "Context, Not Control" which leads to the high alignment, performance and impact we need to create a great product!

However, to ensure security in all aspects, there're some situations where control is required, for example, to prevent irrevocable risks like the possibility of data breaches, when people are still learning because they need mentoring (junior employees / Levels 1 and 2) and when we encounter Moral, Ethical and Legal Issues (escalated conflicts).

Culture

Once we have developed the context, we need our people to be inspired by the same values as us. We embrace diversity.
Being innovative requires people from different backgrounds with different ideas, and we want to get the best from everyone. To achieve this we need to share the same set of corporate values, regardless of background.
We want to work with smart, like-minded people who understand and respect this, and who are aligned with our values and that's why we created our Culture Code.
Оur Culture Code is built on 7 essential permission to play values that we believe are essential to our business model. Permission to play means exactly that: minimum standards of behavior we expect within our “free to create” environment.

We only hire people that demonstrate these values, and we don’t tolerate employees who don’t exhibit these values:

• Responsibility
• Devotion to Learning
• Remarkability
• Respect
• Collaboration
• Adaptiveness
• Innovation

We are all human, though, and prone to mistakes from time to time. Occasionally during hiring, someone who is not a good culture fit will slip through the net. We needed a way to manage these culture mismatch scenarios because you may be a high performer at a technical level, but what if you don’t embrace our culture? We believe it is fair to give all employees a second chance We work to the premise that people can change – and we developed a process called the Corrective Action Plan (CAP) to manage this. The CAP also provides a last opportunity to reflect if Secure Group is right for you

We have seen that by setting the right context our employees can understand our mission and vision and create a great product. The leadership style in the company supports this. It moves management and people interactions away from “controlling activities” and toward synergistic relationships between team members.