Mark Weatherford’s forward-leaning leadership is evident in how he’s quickly created new collaboration and information sharing opportunities across the six brand companies of Booking Holdings, which include Agoda.com, Booking.com, BookingGO.com, Kayak.com, OpenTable.com and Priceline.com. Working closely with the CISOs at each of these companies, Weatherford has created an environment with significantly higher levels of security excellence across the global travel industry. More frequent and robust communications between CISOs has also minimized a former reluctance to engage due to perceived competition among brands, raising the bar of security across the entire organization.
Weatherford is actively working with the vendor community to consolidate contracts, while also increasing the product portfolios available to the Booking Holdings brand companies.
Finally, taking an enterprise approach to governance and policy across Booking Holdings, Weatherford is finding opportunities for greater consistency in reacting to the compliance and regulatory environment, creating vast improvements in efficiency while minimizing the company’s global risk.
Weatherford is regularly sought out by media organizations for his opinion and thoughts on global governance, national policy and technology innovations. He is a director on several for-profit and not-for-profit boards, an active member of several corporate security advisory boards, an Affiliate at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) and a Distinguished Fellow at the Poneman Institute.
Mentoring has long been a key part of Weatherford professional profile, and many of his former mentees are now successful CISOs and executive leaders in private industry and in federal government agencies. There are dozens of security professionals across the globe who would call Weatherford an informal mentor because of his constant and proactive availability for personal and professional career and leadership advice.
His career advice is to “Under-promise and over-deliver. This doesn’t mean gun-decking your goals, but rather, being realistic about what you and your team can accomplish and then go above and beyond to raise the bar,” he says. “Second, be professional, be dependable and be passionate. These three traits reveal themselves in every facet of your life, from the way you show up for work every day, to the way you lead your team, to how you deal with your customers. Leadership is every bit as important as technical and professional skills, and communicating like a leader, taking care of your people and maintaining poise and control when things inevitably go sideways will make you someone people aspire to be like.”
