Here’s an update, if you’re interested:
If Trump gets elected…I’m not moving anywhere.
If Hillary gets elected…I’m not moving anywhere.
I’ll keep doing the same thing I’ve been doing since Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama were elected and these silly threats started getting thrown around.
You know.
Working.
In the United States.
Under whatever government thinks that they are running the Republic.
I recommend that you all do the same.
I wish that you had more time.
Time to explore all that the world has to offer.
Time to be more.
Time to do more.
Time to have more.
Time to do the things that really matter in your life.
Time to develop more personally, professionally, and even spiritually.
Time to make the right decisions, for the right reasons, to impact more people positively in your life.
I wish that you had more time.
But you don’t.
And you’ve chosen to use the time allotted to you to do, well, those things that you believe matter, in the long run.
Whether you have considered the long run, or not.
The government (and the corporations that consort with it through lobbying efforts) can’t provide every service, fulfill every need, and relieve every want for every individual.
The government (and the corporations that consort with it through lobbying efforts) can be hampered from taking away rights and encouraging responsibility, from individuals.
One perspective is known as “positive rights” and the other perspective is known as “negative rights.”
In online interactions with corporations that are coalescing and acting like “real-world” mega-corporations (consorting with, and lobbying against or for, government policies and such) the issue in conversations around online anonymity is whether or not you believe that those mega-corporations should do for you, or should not do to you.
“For” you, or “to” you.
The preposition makes a difference.
If you believe that Google should do for you, then you will gladly give over your private data without a thought, to companies that view you as a product, and your privacy and anonymity as an afterthought.
If you believe that Facebook should not do to you, then you will be savvy about what you reveal online, where you reveal it, and to what company you give access to your data. You will interact with companies on the Internet who view you as a customer, and your privacy and anonymity as their first thought.
The preposition makes a difference.
If you believe that SnapChat should do for you, then you will gladly stay inside the walls of that communication garden, adopt the rules of the garden without thinking, and will complain when the rules of the garden are changed—as they inevitably will be—because you didn’t build SnapChat. Evan Speigel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown did.
If you believe that Dropbox should not do to you, then you will gladly pay for their premium service which protects your anonymity and expands company revenues in ways that allow it to continue to grow, because you will realize that you aren’t the product. The cloud storage is the product. And you won’t get caught the next time there’s a data breach.
The preposition makes a difference.
If you believe that AirBnB should do for you, then you will gladly applaud as they make changes to who can use their app as a part of their service, to reflect current political and social considerations based in long-simmering cultural passions, rather than revenue based considerations.
If you believe that Uber should not do to you, then you will sign petitions to bring Uber to your town, while also insisting on anonymity in driver data, protection from harassment from incumbents such as taxi drivers and others, and encourage the founders to develop robust responses to charges of sexual assault by drivers in countries not America.
The preposition makes a difference.
If you believe that the Internet should do for you, then you will happily engage with the Internet as a finite communication and connection tool. You will be happy inside walled communications (Skype), commodity (Gmail), and collaboration (GoToMeeting) gardens, and you won’t explore much further than those gardens. Because the Internet has too many options, is too confusing, changes too fast, and is too chaotic and scary to make an informed decision about services or products.
If you believe that the Internet should not do to you, then you will read blogs that have only been read by under 100 people or so, you will mourn the death of RSS feeds and will manage your email subscriptions carefully, and you will be unhappy with the “walled gardens” that the majority insist upon using. Because the Internet is infinite, never-ending, and like any other communication tool, requires self-control to manage, intuition and critical thinking to navigate, and patience to address on its own terms.
“For” you, or “to” you.
The preposition makes a difference.
When considering issues of online anonymity, harassment, bullying, bad behavior, privacy concerns, data breaches, and all the other unethical and illegal behavior being engaged in by individuals and corporations, the understanding of the difference in the meaning behind the preposition matters.
Seeing is believing.
Why is that?
Role modeling is still the most powerful predictor of leadership success or failure.
Role modeling builds a company culture and ensures that the culture grows.
Role modeling is about both presence and absence. It’s about what is there, and what isn’t there.
Role modeling is unstated, unsaid, and often unremarked upon, but its power is acknowledged in the actions people choose.
Role modeling starts in childhood. Children follow their siblings—or don’t—directly due to what they see role modeled before them.
There are some questions to ask to determine if you’re actually role modeling or if you’re just putting on a show for an audience:
Is anyone actually watching?
Do I care what they see?
Can they learn a lesson?
Does my absence speak volumes?
Who will be impacted?
Is this a test?
Could I have done better at that last action?
Do I owe an apology?
Does it (i.e. my words, or deeds) matter to someone else?
Do they care what they are watching?
The difference between putting on a show (which is what the performer, the impresario, and the flim-flam man do) and role modeling (which is what parents, teachers, supervisors, managers, and responsible adults are supposed to do) is that putting on show requires that you answer none of the above questions.
Role modeling requires that you take responsibility and accountability for the answers to each one of the above questions.
Conflict is the process of change.
No great change—not one—happens without conflict.
The key is not to fear conflict (which many of us do) but to manage it.
Many people are afraid in times of great change because they aren’t offered a vision for what the change will bring, nor are they offered the courage to look the change in the eye.
The role of statesmen, leaders, and even executives used to be to provide assurances to the masses of people that the conflict would be manageable, that the outcomes (or changes) would be beneficial, and that the future would be positive.
Those roles stand empty now, and thus it is up to us to choose individually: A past state of supposed peace we cannot return to, or a future state that we need courage, clarity, and candor to get to.
There are no more statesmen and leaders “over there” anymore.
Which is good.
Because, they’re right here.
Technology changes are comparatively easy to predict.
The computer.
The fax machine.
The interstellar rocket.
The airplane.
The cell phone.
The drones.
The lie detector.
The biometric scan.
The electric car.
The driverless car.
The internet.
These are just some of the technologies that were developed, conceived, proposed, or prototyped in early to middle part of the last century and now have come to full commercial fruition in our time.
Societal changes based in changing behavior and ideas (economic, social, political, etc.) are less easy to predict.
The rise and fall of cigarette smoking.
Women in the workplace.
Gay marriage.
Minority civil rights.
The illegalization of drug use.
The end of child labor.
Prohibition.
The move of manufacturing away from the US.
The rise of globalism.
Mass genocide.
Mass immigration movement.
The rise of religious based radicalism.
The fall of the British Empire.
The rise and fall of Soviet Communism.
Until we can predict how people will use the technology they now have (i.e. Twitter) in conjunction with behavioral changes at the societal level (i.e. Black Lives Matter) to create a future where half of that equation stubbornly refuses to be examined (behavioral changes at the societal level) we will remain blind to future changes, surprised by black swans, and bound to hindsight biases.
And we’ll get no closer to being able to predict the future than we are now.
You are probably going to read this post by clicking on a link from Facebook, if you read this at all.
More likely than not, you won’t read this if you see it posted on LinkedIn (it seems too arduous to click on an article, thus the increase of click-bait recently on the platform).
If you happen to see the link to the blog post on Twitter (I didn’t pay for it to trend, nor do I have enough heft to cut through the constant firehose of information on the platform) you most likely won’t read it either.
These three platforms (along with Google) have created an environment of ease of access, shareability of information, and have grown through social proofing (“Everybody else is there, so I must be there as well”) that their influence as media companies is now being seriously discussed by media companies still around from the 20th century.
This leads to three problems, beyond the obvious ones though:
Note, I did not say that these platforms would be profitable, popular to the masses, or easy for outsiders to integrate to and use. Reddit is already like this to some degree in its resistance to monetization, its relative openness, and its vain efforts to curtail its core users’ language and political preferences.
But as every woman seeks the promise behind being her own information queen, the seduction inherent in getting away from Facebook-as-the-Internet will grow in popularity and promise.
Every day of the week, the month, and the year, is Labor Day when you’re in conflict.
Conflict with family, friends, enemies, co-workers; the bandwidth to actually deal with each scenario and relationship in a healthy way, diminishes with each passing moment.
But then, sometimes, through mixing and applying a heady cocktail of avoidance, accommodation, and collaboration, the labor becomes less, well, laborious.
The emotional high that goes along with establishing this sort of safety in the group (thanks to a calmed fear response deep in your amygdala) can last for many days…sometimes for many months.
Until you forget and the next conflict flares up.
Because it’s scary to deal with the problem underneath, and drinking heady cocktails (metaphorically), can always be used as a substitute for the real action of confrontation.
If you want to be known, it’s not enough to build a great product.
If you want to be heard, it’s not enough to do something that you call marketing.
If you want to be acknowledged, it’s not enough to sell constantly, and be an interruptive presence in your customers’ lives.
You have to build a product, a company, and a category that occupies a space in the mind of your client or your customer. You have to build a pirate ship, in essence, to hijack that valuable mental space.
And then, you have to constantly build out that space in their minds.
Does this sound like hard work?
Well, it was just as hard 100 years ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when companies, people, and organizations believed that all they needed to do was build a better product incrementally over time.
Courage, awareness of trends, and thinking outside of your own box, work well when pushing innovation and getting new ideas at the individual level, but are tough to get to scale past just a few people.
Group think, social proofing, ego driven statements, fear based responses, body language cueing and other forms of involuntary people management begin to kick in when a groups gets to be larger than four members.
Which is why understanding your own conflict style, your own communication approach, and being clear on your own goals (not at the expense of understanding and listening to others’ goals though) becomes the bedrock of innovative action.
Don’t believe me?
Try this: The next time you’re in a meeting with the “smartest” people in your department, your division, your company, or your organization, say nothing (or little) and instead watch how they respond to each other.
How they subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) manage each other.
And if the group is larger than four people, watch even closer.
Watch how “good” ideas become mired in indecision, vagueness, and lack of forward motion.
And then, wonder to yourself: “How can I make this situation better the next time?”