CDSA

CDSA’s Atkinson Explores Piracy, the Importance of Good Leadership

Good leadership is important for companies to succeed and thrive, and those who work under good leadership stand to learn a lot, according to Richard Atkinson, president of the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA).

“There’s no straight line between going to work as a photographer for Northrop and winding up as a general manager of a business segment at Adobe,” he said March 3, during the first MESA “Lunch and Learn” discussion, held via its MESAverse platform and Zoom, that brought members together to network, share and learn.

“But I think what I’ve learned certainly through” a long career is “you learn from others…. If you can work for great people and kind of let that rub off, you get a lot of opportunities,” he told viewers.

Atkinson started off the discussion by pointing to the wide range of jobs and accomplishments he had over the years, including photographer, Adobe general manager, Disney Imagineer, shutting down a global gaming network for 24 hours, flying fighter jets and being hired as deputy chief security officer by the Electronic Arts (EA) board.

Moving on, the audience was asked what the attention span of a common goldfish is. Atkinson replied nine seconds, joking: “But the average human is unfortunately down to about eight with social media and mobile devices. I’m going to do my best to hold your attention but it’s already gone.”

Over the course of his 40-year career, Atkinson has worked for four big companies: Northrop Grumman in the aerospace sector, Disney in the entertainment sector, EA in the video game sector and Adobe in the software sector, he noted.

“One thing that I typically told my teams, especially folks that had a lot of ambition, is it’s very possible that the biggest jumps in your career you’ll have is when you move from one company to another company,” he said. That is because “companies are rarely set up to have you grow significantly internal to the company; there’s a lot of things set up to kind of limit that growth,” he explained.

“But you’ll see that I’ve had fairly big jumps but some of the biggest jumps” were from one company to another, including from Northrop to Disney, he said.

While at Northrop, he worked on “black,” classified programs that the company doesn’t publicly talk about or even acknowledge exist, he noted, adding his own wife “had no idea what I did” for the company.

He went on to discuss technology he helped pioneer, including electronic photography at Northrop.

In 1999, he jumped to Disney Imagineering and, while there, worked on projects including its Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith theme park ride, he noted.

The Piracy Challenge

Atkinson went on to discuss piracy issues, noting he was “asked to lead and build a strategy for how to deal with the piracy of movies and television content” at Disney.

Disney estimated it suffered $111 million in lost revenue from piracy on the Disney/Pixar animated film Ratatouille. For the Disney/Pixar animated film Wall-E, the company was able to trace every pirated copy of it back to only one of 10 pirates, Atkinson said. And the pirates were in at least some cases distributing the movie in languages that Disney wasn’t distributing the film in, he noted. One of the sources of the pirated content was largely from piracy rings shooting the film in theaters using camcorders, he said, adding a lot of arrests were made.

What Disney was able to figure out was, “against a given film, depending on how the piracy went – better than average or worse than average – there was about a $51 million swing between good and bad,” he told viewers.

“A bunch of the reason” why the piracy on a film could be “really bad or really good have nothing to do with security; they have everything to do with business decisions,” he explained. For example, it’s a good idea not to distribute a film in Russia first, he noted.

Another thing he learned was that, in many cases, the consumers of pirated movies were “Disney’s best customers,” he said, pointing out the music industry learned something similar: Those who downloaded music a lot also bought a lot of music. A lot of the time, movie lovers who could not legally find a movie would buy it illegally, he said, adding these people are fans, not pirates.

What movie distributors needed to do, therefore, was “figure out a way to close that gap” and solve the “last mile problem” for customers, he explained.

Another problem in the industry, meanwhile, is “we don’t do enough leveraging of each other” to learn, he said, adding one of the reasons to hold these “Lunch and Learn” events is to “provide a forum for sharing.”

Great vs. Poor Leaders

What Atkinson said he experienced, having worked for great and poor managers in his career was that you tend to pick up the habits of the management around you, so it is best to seek out the best leaders and work for them.

Great Leaders: Motivate via a vision of success; give credit for success to others; and take responsibility for failure, according to Atkinson.

On the other hand, poor leaders are motivated by fear of failure, take credit for success and blame others.

He ended the session by offering up four lessons to live by: Have fun, find the joy, be a doer and not a talker, and leadership is not a title. Nobody likes to be managed but everybody likes to be inspired, according to Atkinson.

The MESAverse

The MESAverse is MESA’s virtual work environment for its members and communities to watch live presentations, network, and step on the stage to share opinions.

MESAverse is using ICVR’s RendezVu, a proprietary, interactive 3D-world application that will allow for hybrid live and virtual events and regular day-to-day interactions that go far beyond video conferencing.

Atkinson will help intro future industry discussions for the weekly “Lunch and Learn” series.

To register for the Thursday events, click here.