Some people are easy to praise. They follow instructions, avoid conflict, and never question the way things are done. Then there are the others — the ones who push back, ask uncomfortable questions, and don’t know when to let something go. These are the ones often labeled as troublemakers. But more often than not, they’re the only ones actually paying attention.

They’re not disruptive for the sake of it. They’re rebels — and that rebelliousness usually comes from seeing clearly what others choose to ignore. They’re not resisting change. They’re demanding it.

Too often, they’re dismissed as difficult. Labeled as arrogant. Or told, directly, to stop being a problem. But these people — the ones who refuse to nod along quietly — are often the ones who drive real change.

I’ve seen it firsthand. One of my challenges as a leader came when I was asked to lead a newly formed team with value to uncover and the freedom to shape what that would look like.

One of the first people assigned to the team shared something with me even before we officially started working together.

He had been working in a team responsible — among other things — for writing rules and procedures. And while he was technically capable, it was clear that the job wasn’t extracting his best. Someone with his sharpness, speed, and clarity of thought was stuck operating inside a rigid framework — ironically, he’d soon join what we internally started calling the Freestyle Team.”

I’ve been told I should stop laying down the law,” he said. “That I come off as the guy who always needs to say how things should be done.”

That comment came from that previous role — and it stuck with him. It made him question whether it was worth speaking up again.

But I didn’t see it that way. Yes, he was impatient. He didn’t have much tolerance for bureaucracy, and he pushed hard for things to improve — fast. But he was smart, experienced, and he was right.

I told him, “Don’t hold back. We need more people who care enough to speak up when something’s not working — and who actually know what they’re talking about.

”What others saw as overstepping, I saw as urgency. He wasn’t trying to control — he was trying to fix what was broken. And in this new team, that kind of clarity was exactly what we needed.

In any organization, especially large ones, it’s easy to reward obedience and penalize friction. The quiet, compliant employee is easier to manage. But change never starts with the quiet. It starts with the ones who are restless. Who are frustrated. Who demand better. It starts with the rebels.

But here’s the thing — if you don’t listen to them, if you don’t give them a real role in shaping the future, one of two things will happen. Either they’ll shut down and start nodding along like everyone else, saying “that’s just the way things are” — or they’ll leave.

In both cases, the organization loses. Not just a sharp voice, but the very push that could’ve sparked progress.

In my case, that so-called rebel was exactly what the team needed. He helped shape the mission. He questioned assumptions. He moved fast and challenged me, too — and that made all of us better.

Leadership isn’t about keeping people in line. It’s about looking beyond the rough edges to understand what someone really brings to the table — even if it comes wrapped in frustration or sharp criticism. Sometimes the hardest voices to manage are the ones carrying the most insight. The challenge is not to silence them, but to help channel that energy into something constructive.

So the next time someone on your team is labeled as too intense, too critical, or — my favorite — “always laying down the law,” ask yourself: are they actually the problem… or are they trying to solve one nobody else wants to look at?

There’s a particular genre of language that shows up in almost every cybersecurity report, press release, vendor pitch, or CISO recommendation: security must be robust, solutions should be advanced, systems must be resilient, and threats are always sophisticated. It’s the poetry of the unexamined, the PR sheen applied to technical failure.

Take robust security. What does that even mean? What does robust protect against that, say, basic or adequate security doesn’t? Is it a measure of uptime? Coverage? Detection capabilities? Resilience under attack?

Most of the time, “robust” is a placeholder for we don’t really know how this works, but it sounds solid. It’s the cybersecurity equivalent of calling a car “sporty” without specifying the engine. The irony? Many of the systems labeled “robust” fail under the most mundane of attacks — misconfigurations, phishing, default credentials, or unpatched dependencies. Apparently, “robust” doesn’t mean verified, proven, or audited. It just means we’re hoping you won’t ask.

Then there’s the phrase advanced tools. Every vendor has them. Every CISO is “leveraging” them. And every breach report retroactively claims that “we should implement advanced tools to detect and respond.” But which tools, exactly? What made them advanced? Did they apply behavioral analytics? Correlate signals across domains? Or just produce prettier dashboards?

When everything is labeled “advanced,” the term loses all discriminatory power. Worse, it implies that the solution to systemic issues is always just a smarter tool away — never better processes, governance, or culture. “Advanced” becomes a way to outsource responsibility to technology. And that’s dangerous.

The word sophisticated is practically the industry’s safe word. It appears in breach disclosures like clockwork, usually to imply that the attack was so cleverly executed, no reasonable defense could’ve stopped it. But if your system was compromised because someone reused a password or clicked a fake login form, we’re not dealing with sophistication. We’re dealing with competence — on the attacker’s part, and a lack of it on ours.

Calling every intrusion “sophisticated” shifts blame away from structural flaws and toward the mythical prowess of the adversary. It’s a rhetorical move, not an analytical one. And it doesn’t help anyone.

Another favorite: resilient architectures. What does that even look like? Redundancy? Immutable infrastructure? Backup strategies? “Resilient” is often just another way of saying “we hope it doesn’t break too badly.” But that doesn’t answer the critical question: resilience under what conditions, with what mitigations, and at what cost?

This language problem isn’t cosmetic. It actively undermines our understanding of risk. Buzzwords don’t make systems safer. They make failures easier to excuse. The use of vague, inflated terminology creates an illusion of maturity — and an environment where assumptions replace analysis.

It’s not enough to say security is strong. We need to define how and why. Don’t tell me the system is robust. Show me the threat models, controls, and test results. Don’t say you use advanced tools. Describe the data sources and detection logic. Don’t label a threat as sophisticated unless you can explain its TTPs, and why your defenses failed.

We don’t need more powerful adjectives. We need more precise thinking — and more honest communication.