Recently I have received phone calls from CIBC Visa, TD Canada Trust, Telus, and a few smaller companies asking me to buy things. (I’m not providing links to these companies. They can generate their own markets.)
I would like you to know, if you are a telemarketer, that I don’t like cold calls. I consider it phone spam. If I’m looking for a line of credit, or a cheaper long distance plan or a VISA card with 5000 bonus airmiles, Google and I are perfectly capable of finding it.
So if you do call please be aware that I will subject you to one of the following treatments:
- The phone will be put on my desk while you prattle on and I continue working (the world record for this treatment is a full two minutes from someone soliciting funds from a police benevolent society).
- You will be passed to my three year old and be invited to try selling to him (let’s see how good you REALLY are).
- You will be subjected to an uncontrollable fit of laughing, coughing, sneezing or worse.
- You and I will have a conversation about spam.
I’m not a mean person, trust me. But if you phone me looking to sell me something I don’t need, I will respond to you with the same courtesy. If your company’s products and marketing are so shabby that you have to resort to phone spam, then you are not a step above the emailers who get trapped in my mail filters. The difference between them and you, is that you are on the end of my phone line and I’ll have a word with you before I delete you.
Argh. It drives me crazy how people always figure out the basest uses for the best technologies.
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Apropos of what I blogged the other day on vision, Johnnie Moore has posted a nice piece at finding where the true potential lies.
Change is often spoken of as something to be done elsewhere, by other people. I think the effect is to make change some hypothetical process, and perhaps to give the speakers a kind of illusory sense of power.
Turning the conversation to the one thing we can change – ourselves and the ways in which we interact with the world – creates a more empowering and realistic set of tasks, and works from a vision that feels truer becasue it comes from within.
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I’ve been playing around with Webjay for a few months now. It’s a tool that creates playlists of music (and other media) from users all over the place. My musical tastes are pretty varied, but I have always loved what is known as “world music” and so I have distilled some great findings on the web into a rotating top 40 of sounds that are making my ears tingle at the moment. You might have heard of some of these artists, but I’m willing to be that most of them are new discoveries.
Go visit the playlist and have a listen. You can subscribe to the playlist’s RSS feed as well to be alerted to when I change it up, which should happen every week or so. There’s a link on the sidebar here, under “Little Projects” that goes to the playlist as well.
Happy listening!
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Recent searches that have brought visitors to Parking Lot:
- “repatriation of sacred objects and human bones and First Nations people”
- “japan everyday relationship to living space”
- “How did politics influence space technology?”
- “every Year the Salmon Come Back”
- “Ojibway turtle song lyrics”
- “example of short essay about students parking space”
- “the claw marks of those who preceded us”
- “experiences living in remote communities”
- “poems for staff finishing work”
- “hungarian detachment AND strategy”
- “small structure in open space”
That last one would make a cool tag line, eh?
Welcome to all of you, no matter how you got here.
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It seems almost intuitive that there should be a connection between seeing and vision. Certainly in the physiological processes, seeing is what you do and vision is what you have. You can still see if you have bad vision, but you can’t see well.
I have been reading Presence by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworsky and Betty Sue Flowers very slowly now for a few months and it’s time to start posting from it. The book is really about the evolution of Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, which is a map for looking at how people reach down into their deep sense of intention and purpose and bring that out to bear on the world around them, creating the futures for their communities and organizations that they want to see. It is beautifully in line with stuff I have been doing intuitively for years. This is one of those books that comes along to confirm one’s work and to give it language.
At any rate, not knowing where to start in posting from this great work, I am choosing this great quote on vision. It comes after the part of the book that talks about developing the capacity to see from within a system:
…many visions are doomed from the outset because those who articulate them, whether consciously or not, are coming from a place of powerlessness. If we believe that someone else has created our present reality, what is the basis for believing that we can create a different reality in the future?…When this happens, people formulate visions that are disconnected from a shared understanding of present reality and a shared responsibility for that reality. If people are still externalizing their problems, they create, in a sense, “externalized visions,” which amount to a kind of change strategy for fixing problems which they have not yet seen their part in creating. Only when people begin to see from within the forces that shape their reality and to see their part in how those forces might evolve does vision become powerful. Everything else is just vague hope.
— Presence, p 136
There is a nice review of the book here.