Monday, November 16, 2009

A Sense of Urgency

It's the name of a book I'm reading by John P. Kotter. It's a book about CHANGE—organizational change. Kotter posits that the main barrier (among others) is complacency. The goal is activity with purpose and the real challenge is discerning fruitful activity from that breathless, mindless doing that we attend for its own sake because it makes us feel safe. I think the principles apply equally to personal change. I believe there has to be an honest sense of urgency for both organizational and personal change to occur, More to come as I read further in this book by one of the gurus of change.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Technology II

It's done. I'm a Tweeter. Or is it Twitterer? Or is it Twit? The value may be questionable, but I won't know until I experiment and see where it takes me. For if I don't try, I'll never know. Trying is doing. Doing is so much more than the words we use to prepare to do, or think of doing, or dreaming, or wishing, or wanting. Yoda said "Try not. Do." Nike says "Just Do It." I just did.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Technology

We need it. We want it. We are all but slaves to it. Like Hal in 2001 Space Odyssey, the Technology monster seems to be running us rather than the other way around. 

Our writer's group had a panel on it. Some of us had stuck our big toe up to our knee in the ocean of technology, but it appears that the tsunami has us running to the high ground...wherever that is. Because the high ground keeps getting higher.  And like Tantalus we keep reaching for it, but it's just beyond our grasp. 

Surrounded by it, neck deep, we tread water and try to go with the flow, and without surfboards, we ride until we meet the sandy beach flopping and flailing, wondering what to try before the newer wave comes and pushes us around just a little more. 

But we live through it.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

"101 Ways To Promote Yourself"

I'm starting a new venture. We all must if we are to progress. I'm stepping into the future because the past is gone forever. The book -- 101 Ways--is by Raleigh Pinsky -- a P.R. person, who promotes herself to a remarkable degree, a living advertisement for Public Relations. My blog has already changed, and will change more as I plow through her book. I'm on chapter one. Naming your Business. Indeed, naming oneself...a difficult first step to be sure. It's the beginning and "a trip of a thousand miles begins with the first step" or something like that. Walk with me.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

URBAN WILDFLOWERS

The word "urban" to me means city. City like New York. City like L.A. City like Chicago. Like not suburban or country. I'd call where we live suburban, but it's rapidly going urban. When does the sub find itself scrubbed from the property and ground down into "urban?" And it's definitely a down not an up, for although some call it progress, it (urbanization) drags pollution and overcrowding, crime and stress along with it, making tranquility its victim, sanity a mortality statistic, like soldiers in a war meant to conquer poverty in a place that didn't want the ravages of civilization anyway, thanks.
"Whither the wildflowers?" we ask. Whisked away, the wildflowers would want to wave wistfully in wide women's backyards, but will waste away in the wagons with wooden wheels drawn by dirty white horses every Wednesday during the week and every third weekend at the end of every month ending in a "y."
The wagons went West, the wildflowers wilted, and Urbanity laughed to see them go, triumphant again--restaurant chains, drugstore and hardware store chains muscling each other in the background for newly paved-over wildflowers. Man's striving to have more had created a place to escape FROM on the very next plane to find the open spaces where the wildflowers grow wild, but not the people because there is peace in the wilds. Contradictions notwithstanding, the open spaces beckon closed minds formerly full but now emptied by predatory purveyors and pedantic preachers. Pus-carrying pimples on pre-pubescent people in countries no longer confined to the U.S. but bleeding globally, harbor no longer in solely U.S. ports, but spread beyond borders in electronic vastness making no one immune to the disease of progress in the 21st century.