The Net and Children: Still Scary

CNNMoney's newsletter from today profiles a very scary phenomenon: internet predators and the unsuspecting children who become their prey.

It is a very scary world. And the concerns can't be over highlighted, especially when you read some of the case studies from the experts in this field.

But what I don't understand....is...

Would any parent let their children go unescorted for hours into a city of millions of strangers, roaming wherever, whenever, and meeting whomever?

Of course, everyone says no. Well, most everyone.

But then how do so many children  spend so many hours roaming the world wide web in the exact same manner? The world wide web at this point is essentially one large community with few rules or limits of access. Allowing children hours of unsupervised surfing is the same as allowing them to roam the streets at night by themselves.

Why do so many children prefer an imaginary (aka virtual)  friend over their real, in-person, friends (and family)? What's so rich about a virtual friend compared to the, should-be anyway, richer experience in real life?

Why do so many children prefer spending so much more time away from their family and friends,  instead spending hours alone roaming the streets of the world wide web, unescorted, unprotected, with seemingly disinterested family members and friends not bothering to connect?

It's not the internet that's scary.

What's scary is why children have and want so much time on the internet, prefering imaginary friends and relationships over those real in-person relationships just on the other side of the door and why no one's escorting them or protecting them, in this virtual world. 

But I don't have any children in the house. So what do I know? But, how do you have a family if no one's participating?

Just a quick post.

Pacing Yourself

Sandy Renshaw, at Purple Wren,  shares how she schedules her day for maximum efficiency. USE A TIMER, especially when you're on the computer.

Whew! Simple, but very effective. So many times I'll be cranking away...and not notice I've missed the start of a meeting or lunch at home. And so many times what I was doing was not important enough to overlook those.

I see on her post she displays a book called Leave the Office Earlier.  I'm not opposed to long hours...where it's effective.  Sure, in a crunch. Project specific. Task-oriented.

But few people have the stamina to work long hours AND make good decisions consistently. At some point...the quality of decisions deteriorates though the adrenals and denials convince you otherwise and what once were productive meetings are now ones required to correct the impact of decisions made based on limited thinking. And your day becomes longer and less productive. I worked at acompany once where at 12 hour days we accomplished far less than at 7 hour days. At 7 hour days we made far fewer decisions; they were all better. ( If it was a bad decision we didn't get too far with its execution. ) At 12 hour days....our days increasingly were spent on a cascading series of bad decisions, HR issues, angry employees acting out from burnout and long unproductive meetings.

My experience these days is most projects I'm hurrying to finish, staying late, pushing, trying to rush things up the court...inevitably end being ones I could finish the next day, ones I should have finished the next day or ones I should never have finished at all.

That comes across remarkably laissez-faire in its attitude. It's not. It's a recognition, a reassessing of priorities based on what's productive. I make better decisions with a balanced schedule. And most decisions that take me out of that schedule, in general and over a long period of time, usually end up being unproductive.

Leave the office earlier. Go home. Make your family happy. Make yourself happy. Come back, make good decisions. help others make good decisions. Go home earlier. Repeat, 5, maybe 6 days a week.

Ambiguous

Ambiguous.

That's how my nephew described business. Or much of what he reads about business he described as ambiguous. ( I listen to him, though he may dispute that. He's smart; he's in a PhD program.)

I had to laugh. He's right. As much as we all tend to think of business as all hard-headed, rational, numbers-oriented, tangible results-oriented, quantifiable....it's really quite ambiguous.

Well, the important part of business is very ambigous. Brands, added-value, perceived value, leadership...leading people, managing people....understanding what they want (c8ustomers and employees)...creating passion in your customers, creating passion within your company...communicating that story...it's all very ambiguous. There's not a standard set of rules other than the bottomline needs to be black. And even then...not always, certainly not all the time...but at the right time. And when's that? It's ambiguous.

But in this ambiguity resides the money. Those who can master the ambiguities needed to create a brand of passion and loyalty, can master the ambiguities of communicating that message first to their staff and inciting their passion behind it in creating it in delivering it in supporting it...then repeat this success with the buying public....to them go the spoils.

Those who can'? Well, they're relegated to managing the impact from the commoditization of their industry, their services and finally their company.

It's ambiguous, neph. You drilled right to the core of business success.

Newt Gingrich on Health Care

Newt's weighing in on health care, among other issues, as critical to our nation's progress. Fortune profiles him and his efforts to offer their possible solutions.  Any and all are welcome here with their solutions.

Newt comes across to me as a flawed hero: much great insight, analytical skills, comprehensive thinking and some quirks and inconsistencies that so completely overshadow any benefit from his thinking. He's like the embodiment of the phrase that teachers learn the most and preachers preach what THEY need to hear. ('course it's on the edge of irony blogging about it.)

I particularly liked this quote:

It was so painfully clear by the summer of 2004 that my party, which had this opportunity to be the great, change-oriented, modernizing institution, was committed to winning by proving that John Kerry didn't deserve three Purple Hearts or some other nonsense...

Granted, there's some paradox, almost cognitive dissonance, with him sharing this insight. But its credibility is enhanced given his background as a former leader of the party he describes in that comment.

And it is rewarding to see any leader in our country recognize how we as a nation allow national discussions to descend to absurd issues of triviality, inconsistently applied. And before anyone launches on a partisan harangue...recognize that this is a more than a bi-partisan issue. It's how we as a nation discourse these days in politics, religion, business. The first step towards healing is to recognize the problem. And this is a problem.