a viral wasteland

In considering this wandering little piece I debated over its title while my tea steeped to a rich dark sepia. There were a number of options, possibly a pun or two to poke fun at the situation but in the end I decided to draw blood with a straight forward attaque with "a viral wasteland". If you are wondering what has irked my rather consistent curmudgeonly demeanor with such a grand assault, it is probably best explained by a new discussion series I am initiating on the "doing business in a frontier of procrastination".

While it is the broadest of broad generalizations and quite naturally prone to some error given this fact, the economic downturn of the last eighteen months has ushered in a reformatted type of procrastination, which is virtually accepted by the public. The pulse of the go-go work week has come off the rails and putting sixty, much less eighty hours on the docket is a vestige of the past, likely to sectioned off behind a velvet rope. Seemingly much of the public seems satisfied with a four day work-week, with Fridays a thing of the past and even those Monday's need not be so manic anymore as the late start is just fine and dandy.

The cause of this is a debate that cuts a mighty swath. While the advanced digital age of 2009 is light years ahead of twenty-plus years ago, it is interesting debate to compare personal productivity of the era's. While the the futuristic vision of the 1980's was that heightened connectivity would enhance productivity, it seems to have equally fanned the flames of procrastination with more "important" pursuits such as status updates on Facebook and masking creative genius with acronyms on Twitter. While my sardonic side gets the best of me, the advertising campaigns of the past showing an office worker conducting a conference call along the sandy beaches of some perfect little spot emphasized the capabilities of technology but unbeknownst to many this would later manifest in an entirely different form.

Flash forward to 2009, where email is forced to change into bite-sized morsels lest in be deleted by mobile systems or simply not read by a public, productivity of many has not necessarily improved and instead merely served as a tool for lowering business standards. While much of the older work force is debating what precisely happened to fine art of the "sales call" and understanding to return important messages within the hour, it is abundantly clear that along with educational standards being ratcheted down, so have many common business skills.

Where fault lays with this is a difficult matter to pin-point. Is it a school system that hands out ribbons for failure and plummeting educational standards or even still, is it society as a whole that embraces the lunacy of one-hundred forty character bit messages as worthy? I will leave that point for another time but for the record for those who wish to stand on the top it is time to follow the path of a great leader, Mr. Lee Iacocca, when he said "lead, follow or get out the way". The test is for you is whether you're the type to lead or merely one who allows the world of business opportunity to close before your eyes. Respond quickly because sometimes, opportunity only knocks once.