How to Speak More Strategically?

Thinking article by Peter Bregman on HBR:


http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2012/05/how-to-speak-more-strategicall.html


As a believer, James reminds us of how restless and evil and full of deadly poison our tongue can be (James 3:1-12). Peter Bregman gives us a reminder of the three reasons we speak:

• To help ourselves
• To help others
• To connect with each other

As believers, I believe God calls us to prioritize these. Every interaction with every human God has made, are we thinking through these reasons as we speak? Should helping others be our first priority? What do our conversations look like, are they about us?

Should I Be Upset?

I'm staying in the Dallas/Fort Worth area this week for a wonderful Higher Education Software Conference called JAM. Our sessions ended about 4:45 Friday afternoon with a conference networking party at 6. Several of us headed back to our hotel to change and get a little well deserved down time before the party.

I headed up to my second floor room, put in my key, yellow light. Mmm, I have two keys, tried the second one, yellow light. No problem, sometimes this technology looses its brains so let me go check at the front desk.

Down to the front desk I go, and the sweet lady says, oh, we have to move your rooms, the demolition crew came in early. What! Move rooms? 

If you travel much(which I don't normally), you know that there's a set up time to moving into a room, a getting cozy with the room (clothes hung up, toiletries assembled, etc.), and then a tear down time when you check out. In productivity time, about 10 to 15 minutes each way. We only had one more night at this hotel.

You can imagine, here we are, ready to get just a little R&R (it's our right, isn't it?) and we are told we have to move rooms. 

Internally, my mind races, I'm a believer, I'm a believer, I shouldn't get upset, but I'm extremely upset, what should I do? After about 45 minutes of getting the new keys, oh, and the elevator stopped working in the middle of all of this, and we were moving from the 2nd floor to the 4th, I was settled in my new room.

Now, here's the question. This is where our faith touches our realty. What should I do? What do you think I did? What should be my response as a believer, representing Christ in all I do? It's my right, I paid for it, to have one room the entire time I was in the hotel. It's my right to get that R&R, even if it was only going to be for an hour, how dare the hotel move me, why didn't they tell me ahead of time. They could have told me this morning when I left? They could have checked us in to another room that was going to be available for the entire stay. Oh, for the mind of Christ in a situation like this.

What do we need our smartphones to really do?

A friend at work sent me this link today on a Siri/Windows face off. This is really interesting. I learned several things, I had no clue Facebook chat was built into Windows phone, we tested it and it works great, including the voice interaction.

What I think is very interesting is, we have two worlds here, Apple’s closed world of do it our way, only use our stuff, and we’ll enchant you and you’ll never know anything is wrong. Microsoft, very oddly enough, is saying no, we are going to get everything out there we can and bring it into one platform and you choose what you want to use. What’s interesting about this for Microsoft is they were going the Apple route many years ago. And, we all know what happened with that. It will be very interesting to see what time will tell in this space, whether folks want a one-vendor we'll decide what needs to meet environment or a one-vendor platform aggregate all data and ideas out there.

http://www.techding.com/2011/12/another-siri-on-iphone-4s-vs-tellme-on.html

From a faith perspective, having technology that serves us is key. Having technology that makes us laugh, as Siri does in so many cases, is fun, but is this really how we should be redeeming our time?