Alan Chapell

How to gain influence — and stop being the office speed bump

Privacy professionals, especially in large companies, get typecast as ivory-tower academics who don't share the revenue pressure the rest of the organization lives with. That reputation is a career inhibitor. Every privacy discussion is really a series of trade-offs: privacy versus competition, privacy versus child safety, privacy versus innovation. This is the strategist's version of a motivational keynote. Why does the person who always says no lose? And how do you build the incentives and relationships that make people want to do the right thing? Expect two decades of war stories from inside the privacy office — most of them funny, a few of them cautionary.