“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” – Steve Jobs

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Are those who espouse the primacy of face to face communication really just hiding the fact that they are illiterate? I mean this in the sense that they are not very comfortable  expressing themselves in writing. Most people don’t really have much experience of putting thoughts down “on paper”. Not many people keep journals, letter writing isn’t what it once was, and business documents are really a very small and undistinguished subset of what is possible with the written word!

Just wondering …

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So many of my conversations with clients end up being about either maintaining the corporation’s managerial integrity in the face of marauding hordes of Facebook enabled staff, or protecting their brand integrity in the face of viral damage spinning out of control online when a customer decides to get their own back for a bad experience. Neither the fantasy of brand nor managerial integrity are sustainable.

Banking epitomises this. When I eventually give up with online systems – that treat me as an undifferentiated unit of a mass market, barely segmented into simplistic demographics – and trek down to my local branch where I have to sit and watch a bank teller – who is treated as an undifferentiated unit of a staff who isn”t trusted to make any decisions and are subject to the same online systems as me albeit with a different set of assumptions this time about grade and accountability.

We both face the same impersonal closed box and we have both had enough. We are starting to talk to each other.

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