Many long-time privacy professionals did not choose privacy as a profession; privacy found them. I got to thinking recently that AI emerged quickly as something that privacy professionals must contend with, but there may be uneven enthusiasm about it. And that means that many privacy pros might be facing career choices of whether to adapt, or whether to move to something that feels like growth and deeper meaning.  My recent blog for FPF goes deeper on this issue. Career Choice in the AI Age: What Next for Privacy and Data Professionals?

How do we reinvent privacy work? My new FPF blog post says privacy executives and their teams now have an opportunity to think bigger about their roles in the company. They contribute to the connection of privacy work to business strategy, and the possibilities of growing compliance maturity while contributing to revenue increases and cost reductions. It’s not merely an incremental adjustment: It’s reinventing the privacy and data governance work for modern times.  Adapting the Privacy Profession to Changing Times

Many clients come to me interested in some sort of change.  Some experience a sense of burnout or languishing. Some are quite motivated and benefit from a thinking partner as they navigate their transition or reinvention.  But there is a subset who itch for change and want to talk about that change but lack the tools or “task relevant maturity” to effectuate it.  Some of those people are not ready for the big change but want to position themselves so they can be. The problem this program seeks to fix is to help privacy pros, execs, lawyers, and teams develop […]

It’s a well-known problem that privacy and compliance initiatives may appear to be misaligned with the mission or purpose of companies, which want few obstacles to the pursuit of revenue and innovation.  Privacy teams face the challenge of getting the company to invest in compliance while a growing body of law and regulation makes compliance harder to accomplish.  How can privacy teams be more sophisticated in getting the organization to invest in and do things that it does not want to have to do?  Privacy teams must bring their “A-Game.” There was a time when I was pretty sure that […]

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of the first show by Impressionist painters, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC has a great show called “Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment”.  I have had a chance to see it twice so far, and in between visits read Sebastian Smee’s new book on the same topic, Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism.  All of this gave rise to three coaching-related ideas, about the messiness of transitions, the importance of moving forward, and the marvel of Berthe Morisot. The first Impressionist show opened April 15, 1874, at the […]

I’m increasingly convinced that one of the ways to fight off burnout is to take action.  And with the growing flattening of organizations, more individual contributors will have to take action to communicate, provide clarity, and connect the dots across the org – particularly if middle managers won’t be there to do it. I created the Weekly “What Are We Doing?” email as a template for this kind of quick communication to keep people aligned.  Here’s the basic rubric. It’s five ideas, ten sentences or so: What’s urgent? Identify the main focus this week, the thing that has to get […]

In the modern workplace we hear a lot about quiet quitting, burnout, or people simply feeling overwhelmed. Burnout is a concept that means many things to different people. As I’ve been researching burnout and related issues and talking to people who have varying degrees of symptoms of burnout, I’m convinced that privacy teams are uniquely undermined by various manifestations of what is broadly called “burnout.”  I think there are about 10 dimensions of burnout, which can compound together or exist independently of each other. “Burnout” is a widely used, and possibly overused, term. Some articles say it needs to be […]

I recently learned about something called the Gish Gallop, which I had never heard of.  I was relieved to discover that people I know hadn’t heard of it either.  The Gish Gallop is a debate technique deploying a firehose of bluster, often falsehoods, that the debate opponent simply can’t fact-check or even keep up with.  It’s named for a Creationist back in the ‘30s called Duane Gish, who used the technique to great effect. I had serendipitously discovered a book by Mehdi Hasan, called Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, and this is where I […]

I used to love the TV show M*A*S*H.  I think it’s one of the greatest shows of all time.  It was about a mobile army surgical hospital right near the front lines in Korea.  When combat heated up, the wounded would come in overwhelming waves, resulting in surgery sessions many hours straight.  The whole point of a MASH unit was to get the wounded to care as quickly as possible, which helped increase survival rates.  But with too few surgeons and too many wounded, they were forced to triage.  Triage is prioritizing — determining who is going to die, who […]

How we re-invent ourselves is a common theme these days as we emerge from the pandemic. Underneath all that “quiet quitting” is a yearning among many to do something else.  I recently was inspired by how the artist Henri Matisse re-invented himself late in life. When I first moved to Washington DC, I went to a temporary exhibit about Matisse’s cutouts at the East Wing of the National Gallery.  I was young and did not know much about them at the time and I thought they were sensational.  I was impressed by his evolution into pure fields of color and […]