About
Background & Philosophy
The intersection of technology, risk, and business trust.
Adam Sealey is the Global Chief Information Security Officer at NIKE Inc., responsible for cybersecurity capabilities protecting the company's brands worldwide. He leads Cyber Defense, Security Architecture and Engineering, GRC, and Insider Threat across a global organization.
Over 13 years at NIKE, Adam built the security program from the ground up as one of its early security engineers, rising through senior director and deputy CISO roles before taking on the CISO position in December 2022. Before NIKE, he held roles at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Baylor University, where he also taught Data Structures as an adjunct professor of computer science.
His career spans federal research, higher education, and consumer brand. The common thread across all of it: building programs that earn partnership, not just compliance. Security that the business actually wants to execute.
He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Baylor University and carries CISSP and CISM certifications.
- CISSP
- CISM
- M.Sc., Computer Science — Baylor University
- B.Sc., Computer Science — Baylor University
- NIKE Technology Maxim Award (2016)
Leadership Philosophy
Three Values, In Deliberate Order
Integrity
The foundation. People must trust what you say, trust that you will do what you commit to, and trust that you will say when you do not know. Without integrity, nothing else holds.
Kindness
Work is fundamentally about people. Play the long game on relationships. Never prioritize short-term results over the people delivering them. Kindness without integrity is flattery. Integrity without kindness is cold execution.
Results
Non-negotiable, but third deliberately. Get integrity and kindness right, and results follow. Flip the order and you get short-term wins at the expense of the trust that makes long-term success possible.
Career Lessons
Hard-Won Lessons
You cannot mandate compliance. You have to earn it.
At a brand like NIKE, no one follows security direction just because it is policy. The most important lesson of his career has been that technology leadership — especially in security — requires deeply understanding what the business is trying to accomplish, earning the trust of the leaders driving it, and building strategies they actually want to execute. Partnership is not a soft skill. It is the job.
Trust is forged under pressure, not in calm water.
Some of his most important professional relationships were built in the middle of difficult situations: incidents, organizational change, high-stakes decisions. Pressure reveals character, and the relationships that survive it become the foundation of real organizational trust. He actively looks for those moments as opportunities, not threats.
The leader's job is to unlock others' potential.
The transition from individual contributor to people leader is a fundamental mindset shift: from solving problems with technology to empowering talented people to solve bigger problems at greater scale. His best days as a leader are the ones where he created the conditions for someone else to do something remarkable.
Building the right team matters more than having all the answers.
When Adam stepped fully into the CISO role, he made a deliberate choice: rather than surrounding himself with people who thought like him, he specifically sought out leaders who would challenge him, complement the team's strengths, and bring perspectives he didn't have. The result is the strongest leadership team he has built, long-tenured, technically excellent, deeply people-oriented, and genuinely trusting of each other.
Change is the only path through which we grow.
Early in his career, change was the thing he feared most. Over time he learned to embrace it, not just personally but as a leadership discipline. Leading teams through uncertainty requires being present, being honest about what you know and don't know, and giving people a genuine sense of direction without pretending to have all the answers.