Posts Tagged 'handheld'

We have a generation gap to bridge!

Posted on January 30th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I’ve reported a number of cases where managers (most famously, Barack Obama)  implement an interrupt-free environment by mandating a “no cellphones” policy in meetings. While I wholeheartedly applaud this behavior, I must in all fairness report a dissenting viewpoint. I was talking to a Gen Y worker whose company  had launched such a ban, and he told me that he thought it was not a good idea at all, because his millennial generation needed the cellphones to work, he said! To his mind, having a coworker without a cellphone in ringing mode meant they were inaccessible, and hence unavailable to.. Read more

Volkswagen shields its employees from its own Blackberries

Posted on December 24th, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

The proliferation of Blackberries and similar Smartphones has contributed significantly to the erosion of the Work/Life barrier, and has caused knowledge Workers to assume – erroneously, perhaps, but with conviction – that they must be on call 24×7. I’ve seen it happen repeatedly among my clients: people send and receive emails at all hours, and make a habit of checking their Blackberry every few minutes. Convincing these people to stop this addictive behavior is hopeless: I’ve run an experiment along these lines a few years back with a group of engineers and despite all exhortations to the contrary their behaviors.. Read more

A sorely needed cellphone feature

Posted on September 21st, 2011 · Posted in Individual Solutions

A lecture attendee reacted to my data about the scary extent of disruption caused by endlessly ringing cellphones by saying: “I keep my cellphone turned on only in case my child calls – I wish it would only ring for him!” Now, here is a feature that is painfully needed, and obviously useful: Allow the user to specify which callers the phone will ring for, and which it will not, when you put it into a “Silent” mode. Or use “vibrate” as part of the equation: Ring for calls from an emergency-prone dependent, vibrate for close family and coworkers, let.. Read more

The iPad is mightier than the pen

Posted on June 7th, 2011 · Posted in Off-topic

It has been remarked that younger people tend not to wear watches, because their ubiquitous cellphones and other computing devices make them superfluous (interestingly, this brings back the action of having to fish something out of your pocket to read the time –  a throwback to the Victorian pocket watch, without the chain!). But I’ve just been informed of another victim to portable computing, and it goes back much earlier than the watch. I was talking to a friend who is also a consultant and he told me that in his workshops the attendees often sit with iPads and other.. Read more

Respect and Telephony

Posted on May 30th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

A manager at a small company told me over coffee of a job interview she gave a young candidate, in the middle of which he received a cellphone call from his wife (who wanted, with the wrong timing, to wish him luck in the coming interview). I was curious how this had affected her attitude to the candidate. After all, on one hand, it is nice that he’d answer his wife – he proved to be a considerate spouse. Yet on the other hand he had interrupted the interview and did not have the courtesy to either shut the phone.. Read more

The price of extreme mobility

Posted on April 16th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Our desire for extreme mobility is both enabled by and a motive of the impressive progress in powerful mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry and their clones. We can now read our email messages anytime, anywhere, on these tiny marvels. But there is a price – because the small form factor is inherently unsuited to reading many of those messages. This was pointed out by an attendee at one of my information overload sessions. This guy, a manager at a hi-tech company, was very familiar with the use of handhelds to communicate; and he pointed out that a consequence of.. Read more

Overloaded child/parent communications

Posted on November 29th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

I remember how as a small child in the fifties my family would go on Saturday to lunch at my grandma’s. It was quite a tiring walk across town (we had no car then) and it had occurred to me that as we had no telephone either, there was no way to cancel the get together if there was an unexpected need. But of course there wasn’t; life moved much more sedately then, and the meal would be waiting for us time after time. There was little need of frequent communication. That was then. Now, we were having dinner at.. Read more

How to politely respond to a cellphone in a meeting?

Posted on November 9th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Now that we live in a reality where we’re interrupted by a cellphone call a few times every hour, it is inevitable that people ring us even while we’re in an important business meeting. The question becomes, then, how do we react to the ring while remaining polite? This was not a problem back in that ancient era – say, 25 years ago – when business people had something called an office, which had a door, and a secretary that could be asked not to transfer calls. But today we meet in coffee shops as often as in walled rooms,.. Read more

Keep your hands on the wheel!

Posted on October 24th, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

The silly, if cheerful, pop song from the fifties, “Seven little girls“,  gives us the chorus: All together now, one, two, three / Keep your mind on your driving / Keep your hands on the wheel / Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead / We’re having fun, sitting in the backseat / Kissing and a hugging with Fred! A somewhat improbable notion, considering that there were seven girls (plus Fred) in the back seat; but it has an important lesson: the driver should keep his mind on the driving, his eyes on the road, and – most obvious.. Read more

The Dawn of the Blackberry Era

Posted on August 3rd, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Today RIM announced the BlackBerry Torch 9800, which is even more chock-full of amazing technology than the model before it, which was itself ahead of its predecessor, which was… This has been going on for a long time, but it reminds me that the sequence did have a beginning – yes, there was a first BlackBerry, which had perhaps appeared, fully formed, from the primordial chaos… I collect items from the History of Computing, and I have a sample of that earliest BlackBerry, the model 950, introduced in 1998, which you see in this photo. The interesting thing is that.. Read more