Chaos Tamer
My foci have moved lately.
If you’re a fan of my poetry, this page is focused on that. I’m quite pleased with the results. Less than a year ago, I had no followers. Now, over 1,400. ‘Tis very validating.
My more general writing has been over here at NotJustSeattle. Over 2,200 subscribers since launch. Again, quite pleasing.
So, come over to these sites and say “hi”.
An element of my pastor’s sermon this Sunday was interdependence. Our culture puts more emphasis on being right than on effectiveness. Today I witnessed several discussions which were focusing on one liners and zingers, not on dialog and engagement. There was no respect, no interest in the other side’s opinion, except as something to pull apart and deride. Out of all the elements, though, it’s the disrespect that bothers me the most.
American culture heavily values the individual, to the detriment of society. We have lost our valuation for interdependence, assuming we ever had that to begin with. All out culture’s problems require us to work together. Our ability to collaborate will determine our species’ survival. No pressure.
Check out my friend Toby’s JibJab video. I love these things.
For many years now, I’ve been a Franklin-Covey devotee. For decades it’s been live changing/life affirming in the richest way possible. At one point, I was recruited to be a training facilitator. That didn’t align with my objectives, but was very flattering, and shows my commitment to these principles.
Anyway, this week brought several reminders of all that. First, my son is getting introduced to the concepts more formally. He’s enjoying the fact he knows all the concepts. And it’s very satisfying to hear that attributed to my teachings.
Also, at my latest team meeting, my boss broke out my beloved “Importance/Urgency” grid. (Side note: I understand that this was developed by Eisenhower, but I was introduced to this by Steven Covey.)
As we were talking, the group was talking about focusing on quadrant I, what I call the hyper-urgent. Mostly, this is the land if crises and drama. No, we don’t want to live in this space. Of course it needs to be dealt with; they only become more dramatic with neglect. But our goal must be to spend as little time in this space as necessary.
Quadrant II, the “non-urgent but important” is where we need to focus, and where the others 3 quadrants distract us from. Planning, developing, growing, learning and building our relationships all help prevent the crises of quadrant I. This is the area that grows our sphere of influence, too.
Moving our focus “above the line”, only on the important is the real focus, and the real challenge. It requires forethought, planning, and consideration, all of which help define “important”, and keep us focused on it. All quadrant II activities. See how this works?
I’m moving all my more formal business and technology focused writing over to my new website, Forward Facing. The goal is for CarlSetzer.com to be more of a personal site. Forward Facing will showcase my writing and web work in a more professional manner. At least that’s the plan.
Part of the fun with this, though, is that ForwardFacing.net is showing up in Twitter’s spam/malware database. I guess the prior owners were nasty with it. Anyway, I’ve made the initial request of Twitter to get removed from that list. Which me luck.
Those that know me well know that I’m an Apple guy. Well, that’s waning. There are several key things that have caused me great consternation, as well as a few key sector swings that have impacted my opinion.
A biggie for me: Apple’s reluctance to “play well” with others. One key example: the whole iCloud thing. Calendaring drives me crazy. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo!, all these use the same calendaring protocol. If I send an invite, or receive one, from one of the other systems, it works fine in mine (currently Gmail). Updates come through, changes come cleanly. Apple, of course, needs to do things their way. So, when my wife sends a calendar invite from her iCloud account, I check to ensure sure it’s in my calendar correctly. And if she sends an update, I need to manually update. This drives me nutty. This is rudimentary. Nobody exists within one network’s system, and the inability to “play well” with something as basic as calendaring shows a deep disregard for customer needs.
Once, .Mac’s email (the original incarnation of the current cloud tool) was on par with Yahoo!, Gmail et al. (And was free too. Alas!) Well, that’s gone. The iCloud email interface is nearly identical to its first iteration and Apple has made minimal effort to update their UI. Clunky and ugly; ironic for an entity that makes a big deal about their design chops.
More critically, though, Apple’s dead silence on dealing with system issues angers me. A few years back, my Macbook would drop its wifi signal randomly and repeatedly. The wifi fan would sit and spin. I found the Genius bar useless. Then I read tons of discussions in forums, including Apple’s own. Nobody found a solution, and Apple corp’s insights, replies, thoughts or even a simple acknowledgment were completely absent. Well, my solution was simple: boot it into Windows. I did have it set up with Boot Camp and Windows worked fine (hence how I knew it was an OS or driver/OS issue, even though the Geniuses insisted it was a wifi network issue. Yeah, the library and Cafe Ladro and Starbucks and the local community college all configured their wifi with the same error). I’ve come across several issues over the years where it was clear Apple had a system problem, but we never, EVER saw anything publically announced by the company. Well, with huge PR debacle situations, they’d say a little “we value your concern and are working diligently on it” non-answer. Basically, silence. Then (like with the wifi issue above) an update rolls out and fixes the problem. Apple’s unwillingness to engage with even their fans is just plain dumb.
As someone who spent a significant portion of his career working on sustainability and social responsibility issues, their unwillingness to engage and publically addresses serious issues with their environmental and labor practices really disappointed me. Yes, eventually they caved in and started addressing these, but it took quite a bit of pressure and resolve to overcome the Cupertino silence. At least that was the perception based on their silence.
Last fall I took a web development course. The entire course was focused on the PC environment. My instructor needed to look for Mac based alternatives for each program they used and it was left to me to figure out how to make those equivalents work. Eventually I solved this problem the same as with the wifi issue: run Windows. But it was very telling, as the last dev class I took and all the design classes I took focused on Macs. There was pity and some condensention towards the Windows crowd. That’s dead.
If my Macbook were to die today, it’s likely successor would be some Windows variant. Justifying the Mac tax is hard enough given the comparative systems now. Add to that the issues I’ve had and it becomes very hard indeed to justify buying a Mac.
Working in Real Estate, I’m currently dealing with a distinctly frustrating lender issue. The other agent (we represent the sellers) has been great. Also, the lender’s mortgage staff have been great and responsive. But we have an appraiser who the descriptor “slow” is a glorious understatement. So, a few points of frustration on this. One is obvious: everything is backed up due to the sluggish progress of one individual. However, the bigger point of aggravation comes from this appraiser’s routine failure to produce documentation in a timely manner. Being on-time is the rarity, as confirmed a few discussions.
It’s easy to be frustrated with the appraiser, however, that’s not entirely fair. When routine incompetence isn’t addressed, that’s a management failure. I understand that banks and appraisers need to maintain an “arms-length” relationship. However, a documented pattern of failure shouldn’t, well, can’t be tolerated. It is terrible customer service, and reflects poorly on the whole institution to the other stakeholders.
It’s bad enough to accept mediocrity. Accepting incompetence? No, don’t do it. Don’t!
Read “The man who drove us into our national ditch” this morning, by Michael Smerconish . Though focused upon a particular “shock-jock” (Morton Downey, Jr.), it touched on the whole spectrum of political rhetoric in the United States. And reminded me of recent thoughts about the current state of US public discourse. One of the points that Mr. Smerconish makes gave me deep pause: we are in uniquely extreme times in terms of political divide.
First, I’m reminded of the long-standing uncivil thread within our political conversations. Consider the Jefferson/Adams campaign of 1800 and the Jackson/Adams campaign of 1824, amongst others. Political rhetoric and person invective have been part of our public banter as long as we’ve been, well, us. Also look to the uncivil history of English politics to get further context at our roots.
Smerconish, though, points to research by the National Journal pointing to truly historical levels of division. I feel this too, but am not so sure I fully agree with the absolute quality of this statement. Well, at least when considered in full historical context. Let’s not forget the Caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the US Senate. As nasty as political speech has become, we haven’t had any assaults in Congressional chambers lately. Ultimately, historically rhetorical venom ebbs and flows, currently flowing at the ugliest of levels.
History aside, our ugly rhetoric compromises our political effectiveness. Exacerbating this: our 24/7 election cycle. Continuous campaigns laden with brutal, and often personal, invective, create powerful challenges to coming back together. Our areas of consensus become forgotten. And our divided house fiddles in the face of the “burning Rome” issues we face. Sadly, this gets compounded by our tendency to resist action until facing deep crisis. But that’s a post for another day.
Footnotes:
Just discovered this video by Sofia Ashraf about Unilever’s “response” to mercury poisoning in Kodaikanal, India. I found it powerful. I, being me, did a little digging through this.
Updated 5/10/2023: Fixed some broken links.
This is the most powerful thing I’ve read all week, perhaps longer. Zoehler’s very gifted as an invoker of emotion. I, a delighted invokee. Take a few minutes and give this a read. Please.