Today, Ray Wang joins Christopher Lochhead to talk about diversity, startups, and why Alexa is kind of terrifying. They ask questions of how much privacy humans are willing to sacrifice for convenience. They also discuss the digital rights of humans.

"At some point, the right to be disconnected is also going to be a huge right." - Ray Wang

Three Things We Learned

Inclusion is a long-standing and complicated systemic struggle

From educational institutions to the corporate sphere, diversity has been a decades-long problem that can't be easily resolved by lobbying for inclusion to meet quotas and improve statistics. To be inclusive doesn't mean to merely increase the percentage of people of color in schools or female CEOs in networks. What needs to be done is to continue upholding meritocracy and fairness in order to affect actual changes that will allow for realized diversity.

We should probably get paid for our data

For the longest time, people have been selling their personal data in order to avail of services without realizing. Everyone bills for the products from these services, but it's time to treat data privacy as an asset and part of the process of moving society forward. If data privacy were made a property right, it would offer more protection to the digital footprint people leave behind.

Too many exception-based rules have been passed

When people's privacy rights are taken away either in whole or one by one, they're trampled on and people enjoy less freedom. In turn, the demand for new rules to be passed in order to protect this freedom shoots up. This cycle is actually more counterproductive than effective because society has reached a point where exceptions are made the rules when in fact, policies must have a larger, broader scope in order to truly protect everyone and everything.

With the digital world constantly expanding, our exposure to the digital sphere we navigate increases. There are several drawbacks to increased digital engagement, and most glaring is the potential to ultimately lose our data privacy rights and freedom. Humans need to work harder in order to keep this from happening and more rigid policies must be passed in order to strengthen our protection.

Bio:

R "Ray" Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Principal Analyst, Founder, and Chairman of Silicon Valley based Constellation Research, Inc.  

He's also the author of the popular business strategy and technology  blog "A Software Insider’s Point of View". With viewership in the 10's of millions of page views a year, his blog provides insight into how disruptive technologies and new business models such as digital transformation impact brands, enterprises, and organizations.  

Wang has held executive roles in product, marketing, strategy, and consulting at companies such as Forrester Research, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and Johns Hopkins Hospital.

His new best selling book Disrupting Digital Business, published by Harvard Business Review Press and now globally available provides insights on why 52% of the Fortune 500 have been merged, acquired, gone bankrupt, or fallen off the list since 2000.  

In fact, this impact of digital disruption is real.  However, it’s not the technologies that drive this change. It’s a shift in how new business models are created.

Wang has held executive roles in product, marketing, strategy, and consulting at companies such as Forrester Research, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Personify, and Johns Hopkins Hospital.  

He is a prominent and dynamic keynote speaker and research analyst working with clients on digital, innovation, business model design, engagement strategies, customer experience, matrix commerce, and big data.

His Silicon Valley research firm, Constellation Research,