Entrepreneurship

Earlier this week, Intelius Chief Privacy Officer Jim Adler spoke at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference.  His talk, The Accidental Chief Privacy Officer (CPO), discussed how the industrial privacy professional is evolving from a compliance enforcer to a product innovator.  Here are the slides and interview with O’Reilly’s Alex Howard (@digiphile):

Jim Adler interviewed at Strata NY 2011

The key takeaway from the talk (see summary slide) is that the privacy pro is becoming a key evangelist for responsible innovation within fast-moving, high technology organizations. To be successful, four lessons:

1. Innovation is a team sport. Communication is key. So talk and (more importantly) listen to your toughest critics, both inside and outside your organization. They’ll better understand your perspective and you’ll often get great ideas.
2. Build a confluence of influence. Good decisions come from every corner of the business, early in the product cycle. Find the members of any team that are inventive, collaborative, and capable of creating the Reality Distortion Field (used so effectively by Steve Jobs) that’s so vital to disruptive innovation.
3. Be the happy warrior. Innovation, by definition, changes the status quo and makes some people uncomfortable. Engage with them in a constructive, respectful way inline with Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement.
4. Find clarity in the confusion. Use math, data, and history to find the clarity within the confusion. Privacy issues are especially difficult. As Jeff Jarvis points out in his new book, Public Parts, even defining privacy is a journey through an Escher maze. Jeff has a great, well referenced chapter on What Is Privacy? that illustrates the perennial struggle we all have navigating the privacy maze.
   
   The good news is that the privacy labyrinth can be traversed with sufficient situational assessment, data analysis, and historical perspective. Then, to remix metaphors, you can be that excited child in the room of manure who finds that elusive pony.

More from Jim Adler, Chief Privacy Officer at Intelius

Intelius founder and CEO Naveen Jain was recently interviewed by Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal. In the interview Naveen discusses his plans for the future of Intelius, his successes and what he attributes them to:

• Passion - You must be passionate about what you are trying to achieve. It must mean something to you and you must be willing to sacrifice a large part of your waking hours to this purpose. Your passion will ignite the same intensity in others who join your team and help the same cause. Your team members and your customers are more likely to believe in what you are doing because of your passion.
• Focus - Great entrepreneurs see many opportunities where others see nothing; this is a gift but without focus can be the downfall. We can only focus on things that we can control and that means we need to stay focused on our efforts and let the results be what they will be. You have to always remember that most companies die from indigestion rather than starvation i.e. companies suffer from doing too many things at the same time rather than doing too few things.
• Hard Work - Success comes from hard work; there is no such thing as overnight success. Behind every overnight success lies years of hard work and sweat. Even the luckiest people will tell you that there is just no easy way to achieve success. Luck comes to those who work hard. Successful entrepreneurs always give 100% of their efforts to everything they do. There should never be any regret in the outcome if one knows that they are giving it their best effort and leaving no stone unturned. - Search Engine Journal

Read the full article at SearchEngineJournal.com