The world is closing in...

How bizarre. I was going over our upcoming development schedule, and I realized that 60% of our clients I've never seen face-to-face. The world is shrinking, and our perceptions of that are becoming more and more complacent. I've often thought that we would return to a cottage industry based economy that would revolve around video communication. However, during the early years of the internet that wasn't available, so we adapted by degrading our own innate need for visual relationships. This ultimately relates back to my previous post, "Networking - old school", but at a different level because Business Relationships rely more heavily on a face-to-face understanding. Whether this is a result of some primordial need to size up a rival/partner with a handshake, or establish dominance and alpha-maledom, I'm not sure. But I know that the best Business Relationships always have a physical handshake between them.

So what is the new handshake?

I can write to a client, pick and choose my words carefully, then send it off. Is the quality of that selection of words what is establishing the hierarchy in the absence of looking someone in the eye? Or has the evolution progressed even beyond that, and are we in a sort of relationship communism, where there is no longer a hierarchy at all? Perhaps the hierarchy is more basic than all of this. Perhaps it simply comes down to client/vendor. That's it. That's all. One person has the money, the other person has the service, barter and exchange.

Frankly, I don't like it.

Business is a tricky thing. Nuances, politics, finessing. While e-mail can do this, it is a poor exchange at best. It's very good at delivering information, but not terribly good at delivering passion or humor. Ultimately, without that phonecall or meeting, without the human contact, the relationship's motivation suffers.

What would Ayn Rand say?

In Ayn Rand's, "Fountainhead", (a long time favorite book) She often has the protagonist, Howard Roark, an architect, standing on cliffs with clients staring at the future site of a building. They would sit there and complain about injustice and the collapse of quality. It's all very stoic, and one pictures dramatic eyebrow furrowing. It's all very "of the time", late 30's/early 40's. To me, this is business. A meeting of minds, a push into a new era, a discussion of the future, and most importantly, the eyebrow furrowing. Remove all that, and we literally become computers ourselves. Granted, polite computers, but computers regardless, taking written instructions in the form of a business programming code then spitting digital production back at the code writer.

I hope our complacency with e-mail, with anonymous relationships, with the new business as usual, experiences a backlash. Granted, I like the convienience, but there needs to be a return to the visual.

Hidden Talents...

So you meet people. You get to know them. They surprise you with a skill or a talent that you didn't know they had. Then they keep on surprising you with more and more talents. You find out these people are also, good people. This in and of itself is an additional surprise. However, people like this don't come along often enough to make this an easy adjustment. Or do they?

I have happily gone down a path of being jaded and cycnical. My belief in people has typically been very limited. I have, over the last ten years or so, begun to belive strongly in something my father once said, "Everybody hits an age when they stop growing as a person." So I've diligently watched people grow until they hit this point and then stopped changing. That was that. That was who they would be until the day they died. In addition, I have begun to feel that I'm on the verge of hitting this point. Needless to say, I've been finding that rather depressing.

However, over the last few months I've been looking deeper at the interests of people I know, and have been surprised at what I've found. People don't stop growing. They stop growing publically, and continue expanding on private tangents. Therefore, you'll most likely find that your long time friends have the same social graces, mannerisms, and jokes as time goes on. However their Action Figure collection, their knowledge of Victorian fashion, or their karaoke prowess continues unabated, but under the table.

Realistically, these private talents are mostly worthless to your friends, you know that, they know that, so they remain socially unobtrusive. But the fact remains, most people have these talent/interest/knowledge tangents, and are really quite proud of them, even if they mostly keep them under wraps. I've started asking people about these interests of theirs, and am universally surprised to find that not only is their interest in these subjects vast, but not really that under the table. You just need to get people talking...

So now that we've determined that people are publically predictable, and privately surprising, what happens when you meet someone that is exlusively publically surprising? So far, it's made me rethink the possibilities available to me. Really, the sky is the limit. The world is what we make it. It's important that we don't allow our biases and presuppositions to determine our own glass ceiling.

Based on this, my new years resolutions:

• Believe in people more by understanding that what they portray outwardly is really only a small part of what they have to offer.
  
• Delve deeper into other people's interests, and try and not judge them in comparison to my own.
  
• Expand my own public offerings by adding new talents and facets to my personality.
  
• Don't stop growing...