Victor Rozek
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As I See It: The IT Election
October 27, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreAs the election draws near, the experts are again speculating about which sector of society will provide the winning margin. Will it be the undecideds, or first-time voters, or minorities who ultimately decide the course of the nation? Or perhaps our future will be fashioned by the frozen hands of hockey moms, or the lead feet of NASCAR dads, or the uppity minds of latte-sipping intellectuals. Or, who knows, maybe Chicago’s cemetery precincts will weigh in, or space aliens will drop off their absentee ballots?
Or, just maybe, none of them will matter.
The astute candidate will be courting another
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As I See It: What’s Old is New
October 13, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThe economy may be in shambles, but the surge appears to be working. No, not that surge, the IT Surge. At least that’s what Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson call it. The silly war metaphor (silly, because the similarity between business and war ends when the first shot is fired) is used to describe the period between 1995 and 2005 when investment in all things IT jumped from about $3,500 per worker to around $8,000.
That’s a hefty increase, as surges go, but what did it actually accomplish? Cause and effect are often elusive, still it’s worth noting that during
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As I See It: Insult to Injury
September 29, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreAfter the Fed bailed out AIG with 85 taxpayer billions, William Greider said something that caught my attention the way a near-death experience does. Greider is no blowhard. He is a serious journalist with a deep understanding of the backroom workings of the economy. Among other things, he’s written a weighty volume about the inner-working of the Fed called Secrets of the Temple. He knows of what he speaks. In the aftermath of the AIG bailout Greider wrote: “For the first time in this unfolding financial crisis, I felt personally scared by the news. Not about my money, but
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As I See It: Get Ready to ROWE
September 15, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreEach generation holds beliefs about work that are forged by time and place. Some are accepted without question, others are repeated with sufficient frequency that they become hard-coded in the collective consciousness. For example, people who lived through the Great Depression believed that nothing could be more important than having a job.
As the Depression gave way to the post war economic ramp-up, people were able to secure a single job that spanned an entire career. But when the pace of prosperity quickened, people came to believe that job-hopping was the way to accelerate their earning potential. By the time
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As I See It: Lessons from Robben Island
August 18, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreRichard Stengel describes him as “the closest thing the world has to a secular saint.” And Stengel is in a good position to know. For two years, the managing editor of Time collaborated with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. How better to describe a man who endured 27 years of hellish captivity, emerged unembittered, and rejected vengeance in favor of creating a more perfect union.
Stengel recently wrote an article in which he shares his reflections on Mandela’s leadership qualities honed over nine decades of tumultuous and heroic living. Not all are equally relevant to
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As I See It: God Bless Technology
August 11, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreTechnology is a canvas painted in broad strokes. It tends to be discussed as an abstraction, serving as a one-word synopsis for the diverse exertions of scientists and engineers. Technology is a verb without a definitive object. It has become an end in itself, many steps removed from the lives of end users.
While the cultural impacts of technology are readily apparent, the personal impacts are far less evident. We may approximate from sales and usage figures the number of computer owners and Internet users. We can track how many messages they send, and which Internet sites they frequent; but
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As I See It: Babes in Broadband
July 28, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreA couple of years back, my wife got frustrated with our glacially slow Internet connection and called Qwest, our telephone service provider, to see if anything could be done–preferably before the next millennium. After spending the obligatory eon in automated phone-support hell, then being shuffled to an assortment of earnest but useless people, she was finally dumped on the marketing department.
Now, marketing is not a reality-based profession. It is most assuredly faith-based, complete with promises of eternal satisfaction. Just sign here and accept Qwest as your provider, and you will be granted eternal access at heavenly speeds. Well, as
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As I See It: The Digital Leader
July 7, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreRemote management, like remote viewing, is a specialized skill with a small practitioner base and an even smaller number of players who can actually do it successfully. Leading a tightly knit group of people, all of whom work in the same facility–and with whom you can directly interact–is one thing. Leading groups in a distributed world, where people are separated by continents and cultures, and with whom you have no personal contact, is quite another. And although management schools and how-to theories abound, there is really no place to learn the complexities of managing people who aren’t there. So what’s
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As I See It: Flights of Fancy
June 23, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreOn December 7, 2005, the Air Force released its new mission statement: “The Mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests–to fly and fight in air, space, and cyberspace.” Besides noting that the Air Force should expand its mission to include hiring an English major to fix that tortured bit of writing, it is worth observing that the Air Force has taken an active interest in cyberspace.
It’s all part of the NeoCon dream of world domination through a process of global militarization
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As I See It: Citizen CEO
June 9, 2008 Victor Rozek
… Read moreThink of yourself as the CEO of your life. Your budget, like that of your competitors, is 8,760 hours per year. How do you vote with your time, money, and energy? What do you say “yes” to, and what do you say “no” to? Given all of your different personas (the goof-off, the responsible one, the dreamer, the provider, the visionary, the critic, the good child, etc.), which has controlling interest of the enterprise that is you? Who are the stockholders you are obliged to please? Who sits on your board of directors; and who has veto power? And, if