How I Said No to Drugs, And Yes to Technology

Leaving the cozy comforts of the doctor’s office — with all its benign-yet-medieval contraptions — I realized that the prescription was an A through Z (or alpha through omega) of medical comforts. I wasn’t looking forward to it. For one thing, I wasn’t a drug person. Like many people of my generation, I had sampled recreational drugs — but less as a lifestyle choice, and more as a rite of passage to growing up. With the possible exception of alcohol, my body has never taken well to drugs. I suffered so much of my childhood with an unbelievably long hay-fever season — beginning early Spring, ending late Fall — because I hated the loopy feeling induced by antihistamines, and later, when the new class of hay-fever drugs came along, the jumpy mania of pseudoephedrine. The problem I had with drugs was as much physical as it was psychological. With drugs, I really didn’t feel like myself. Yes, it’s hard being me – there are easier jobs, I am sure — but I prefer it to the alternatives.

My Life as an Amphibian — Part II: The Colonel of Silicon Valley

The doctor I visited in the summer of 1999 — in a non-descript medical-professional strip mall in Belmont, California — was of the latter variety. He struggled through elementary school, middle school, high school, and medical school, never understanding why he had to work so much harder than everyone else around him. He didn’t work harder on the things that most people found difficult — he was great at math, sciences, and other things that require a facility for abstraction. It was the little things — or littler things — that made life so difficult for him. Like showing up to class on time. Like remembering people’s names. Like putting on his shoes — from the same pair — in the morning. He became a famous ADD doctor — highly recommended by someone close to me and my wife — and a legend in Silicon Valley, though few of his patients will reveal his name. Not because it would expose the patients as ADD people, but because revealing would be rude. The doctor was a gentleman, the furthest thing from rude. He spoke in a hard-to-exactly-place Southern accent, appeared to wear the same suit every time you visited, sported a well-groomed beard, clean, snow-white, cut with a flair. On the right day, he looked just like Colonel Sanders. I will respect the doctor’s anonymity — kinda — and call him the Colonel. I owe him that respect. I may have been his last patient.

Weekly Wrap: 8/3-7/2009: Matter Over Mind

I can’t help but feel like what I experienced this week — my second week writing this blog — might have been a microcosm of two larger-but-related trends: man reaching its limits, machines being deployed to do more. But a more likely explanation is that I have carefully chosen to focus on fresh information that conveniently fits my new focus of interest. But even if that were true, I believe that the mounting evidence that people are pushing themselves to their physical, intellectual and emotional limits (did I mention all the new drugs we are taking?) compels us to look closely at the narrowing interface between man and machine. That’s a big focus for this blog, and in my travels this week I realized just how important it has become. The machine is becoming more like man — everyone gets that. But the surprise for so many of us at the beginning of this century is how man is becoming more like machine. As I suggested in my Thursday rant about the pleasures of disconnecting, it’s important to distinguish between the two phenomena. For as long as we are more like man and less like machine, we will need to take better care of the body that houses us. And for now, that body does have limits.

Who Will Speak Up About “Distracted Driving?”

This is the post-2.0 era, where so many issues cannot or will not wait for a brand to the lead the conversation. But from my perspective — the perspective of a communications consultant who often advises companies on both their opportunities and duties in public affairs — it really doesn’t matter who speaks up first. We are all guilty parties to this affair. Who among us has never picked up a phone behind the wheel and dialed or texted or emailed or taken a photo, all the while knowing that it’s reckless — perhaps criminal — to do so when operating a one-plus ton piece of machinery on wheels? Like drunk driving, distracted driving may have to claim more lives before we all care enough to take serious action. Hope we will not have to wait long this time around. But device addiction, like many other post-2.0 consumer behavior, is rooted in a great need to stay connected, in a world that demands we stay connected. This is not going to be easy.

The New “Company Town”

Over the past six months, my business partner and I have been on the road quite a bit, meeting with clients, friends, and prospects, and we’ve had the luck to see some of the greatest contemporary expressions of a rather ancient idea: the corporate campus. In an age where the distributed workforce is the controlling idea, there are a number of very large organizations thriving on the foundation of the well knit “society within a society” that was a mainstay of corporate life long ago.

But what about the rest of the corporate world – the many companies that do not have the resources or inclination to build corporate campuses?

My Life as An Amphibian

Starting Monday, August 10, I will be running a weekly column chronicling my learnings — and blunders — over the past 10 years as a marketing professional in Silicon Valley. The thread of the story — it began exactly ten years ago — is my struggle to survive a life that increasingly got more difficult as the demands of my profession pulled me away further and further from the physical world and more and more into the virtual world. A unique client engagement in 2008 helped me to articulate the condition that I and most of my peers have found ourselves in: we have become amphibian, living in two distinct worlds, and suffering as much as we are evolving as a result. In my weekly posts, I will try to tell the story of how we have all become this way, using my personal story as a source for insight (if not just amusement).

The story begins in a doctor’s office — an accomplished ADD expert in Belmont, California — who diagnosed me in 1999 and sent me off to my first job in marketing with a poignant warning. If you have ADD, a life in marketing in Silicon Valley can be a curse or a blessing; you’re actually in the job of creating the conditions and tools — the weapons of mass distraction — that make life so difficult for so many people. For me, the marketing life has been both a curse and a blessing. But for this column, I’ve chosen to highlight the former. It makes for a better story, and it is a bit closer to the truth.

Here Come the Social Machines

For as much as we have become aware that the machine is becoming more like man, we are blissfully unaware of how much man is become more like machine. We’re seeing more and more research – not much, however, surfacing to mainstream consciousness — that our device addictions are taxing our neural anatomy, limiting our ability to perform, limiting our ability to relate to others. So, in the end, what has been cut off from our vision is not only the coming of smarter, more useful social machines, but the extent to which we have become social machines as well.