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 […]

Nebraska farm boy Arleigh Burke rose from an ensign fresh out of the Naval Academy to Chief of Naval Operations, the top job in the U.S. Navy. Along the way, he successfully expanded the scope of his understanding of leadership, from the perspective of a ship, a squadron, and a fleet, to a Navy with new technologies and an evolving strategic role. There is so much that a privacy professional can learn from his example, and much of it is captured in something he told a subordinate after an engagement in Blackett Strait in the Solomon Islands in March 1943. […]

I recently read a nifty book by James Hornfischer, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945. Comedian John Mullaney has a bit about old guys who draw endless analogies to World War II, and I guess I am exemplifying that cliche at the moment. It’s not like I tell dad jokes or wear business socks to the beach, but I do like history it can help us understand the present as well as the past. It’s a very good book that I hoped would be a distraction, but inevitably thoughts of the practice of […]