Seeking Coastal Utopia

Your face is bathed in a white-blue glow. This is the mask of the 21st century. “are you allowing your children to grow up this way?” photo by Ludovic Toinel on  Unsplash Who are you? Are you the same person that is represented on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat? Are you the same person when you are face-to-face? Or are you hiding behind an electronic mask, where the online-personality presents someone who is different than what you portray in the real world? “Guy Fawkes mask” by Samuel Zeller on  Unsplash This is a world where many of us seem to present ourselves differently online, using electronic anonymity. Is it because we are unhappy with who we are when we are at work? Or are we afraid? Is the online persona a different person when you are home? Why? Has the chameleon effect taken over when you are online with your “friends?” Is it healthy that we all have multiple faces, but the one in public is someone else? Too often we have seen som...

We are an angry country right now — these are angry times. “fried egg in bowl” by KS KYUNG on  Unsplash There has to be something in the water, maybe it is all the pharmaceuticals we are peeing into our drinking water? Are there mind altering brain waves coming through social media to make us angry ? Somebody, please get me the aluminum foil! You wake up every day, you breathe one more breath, your heart continues to beat. You are able to move on through the rest of the day. Some days there are more bonus points than others, but guess what? You are still here, in this moment, and you have the choice to make — be a jerk or be nice. Hopefully, you choose “be nice” since that is how you wish to be treated. When you meet people every morning on your way to wherever it is you go every day, how do you greet those that you know? What sort of look do you have on your face? Is it a slack, deeply drawn face? Is your face pinched in pain or thought? Is it a scowl because the li...

“painting of man” by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on  Unsplash Face it, we humans are a messy lot. We are a train wreck of sound and fury. Yet we are innately capable of amazing things — and we have opposable thumbs. Because humans are messy, we need to learn to be effective, especially when we need to accomplish tasks. We need to consider and take the effort to walk around in the shoes of others — to be inside of their skin and take on their worldview . Having an empathetic perspective helps us grow and connect. Leaders and managers need to understand the delicate balances of how their direct reports react to information, whilst also understanding the nuances of diplomacy and political marshes surrounding them created by their own peers and superiors. In order to succeed, we need to listen and pay attention . Why? Filters and biases warp our worlds. “person lying down on white surface” by mwangi gatheca on  Unsplash We all have emotions. We also have filters an...

Manual central switchboard 1900 — B ritannica Back in the olden days, the late 1980's and early 1990’s — days of the 80286, 80386, and 80486 Intel processor chip series, there was concern over switch costs, which was the identification of chip latency and overall utilization based on the number switches and their frequency. Effectively a reduced capability due to the “cost” of switching tasks in a multithreaded environment. However switching costs are in today’s vernacular when it relates to investments of time and money; such as changing suppliers, changing brands, or even changing products. There is a physical and psychological investment in developing those original supply bases, in that it costs effort, both mentally and physically, to change brands. For example, you wish to change banks. Think of the switches, the changes you have to make from all the accounts you have. Deposits, automatic payments, checks, debit cards, all the changes that have to take place. The amount of...