How many Steve Jobs never had a chance

The world mourns the death of Steve Jobs today. He was a larger than life figure and one of the most influential people in the exploding world of technology that shapes our lives and changes on a daily basis. By all accounts he was a brilliant man, a great leader and businessman and his death is mourned by millions. I likewise mourn his death, not because of his accomplishments but because for all of his wealth and fame he appears to have died outside of Christ and all of the worldly acclaim and huge bank accounts that seemed so important yesterday are meaningless today. His death, like all of those who die outside of salvation in Christ, is a stark reminder of how crucial the Great Commission is.

There is more to Steve Jobs than the black turtlenecks, jeans and iPods. One of the little known facts about Steve is that his mother placed him for adoption in 1955, some 18 years before the creation out of a "right" to abortion out of thin air in the Roe v Wade decision of 1973. With the advent of abortion on demand, adoption has become a far less attractive option. Had he been conceived two decades later, it is quite likely he never would have been born.

Placing your child for adoption is a heartwrenching choice but it is infintely better than killing that child before she has a chance to take her first breath. Think of Steve Jobs and his mother who made that difficult decision so many years ago. Because she gave her child a chance to live, the world has experienced an amazing amount of innovation. Whether that is for good or ill is a different topic but it is without debate that many brilliant innovators have died before drawing their first breath, much less getting their first patent. I don't know that Steve Jobs would have agreed but his life is a powerful testimony to the value of life and the beauty of the decision to place a child resulting from an crisis pregnancy for adoption.

If you or someone you knows is in the situation of having an unwanted pregnancy think of Steve Jobs. Every child deserves the chance to live, whether they grow up to be a toll booth attendant or the leader of one of the most innovative technology companies to exist. Every child deserves life.

Personal technology and the workplace

This is an off-beat post for me but as I have mentioned before, I blog what I am thinking about.

Growing up, my dad wasn’t in constant contact with my mom or the family during the workday. He is a family physician and his office was about five minutes from our house. When dad was at work, he was at work and seeing patients. He came home every day at lunch time, ate lunch prepared by my mom and took a power nap. Like clockwork he woke up and went back to the office. Short of the house being on fire I can’t think of a reason as a child that I would have called him at work.

Today?

The amount of external contact is enormous in the workplace. I work in a primarily cubicle environment but even in my cubicle the world is present. With my blackberry at hand and a computer with a high speed internet connection (for those of you who are younger, there was a time when you could barely open a grainy photo via the internet, much less watch streaming video in HD on demand) I have access to the internet, email, text messaging, twitter, facebook, etc. I and many of my co-workers are constantly shifting between media, from work to personal email briefly back to work to checking a new text and back to work again. I often know more about what is happening in the sports world than I do about what is going on in the cubicle next to me. I knew within a matter of minutes that George Steinbrenner died this morning, long before I got home to read the newspaper or watch the news, before I could even hear it from a co-worker.

In my lifetime we have seen an enormous shift in attitude and technology in the workplace, a change that really bugs the heck out of older workers. Attitudinally speaking, not many people are interested in going to work, hunkering down for eight hours and being disconnected from the world. We want to stay as connected as possible. Employers used to issue stern warnings about making personal calls on company time. Ha! Those warnings don’t seem to be all that relevant these days when you can surreptitiously send text messages from your tiny cell phone all day with no one the wiser.

A lot of this has to do with having both parents working. The moms I work with especially seem connected with what is going on at home or daycare because that is where their kids are and they are constantly communicating via phone calls to their cells, texting and emails. I am pretty connected with home but not nearly to the extent of some of my co-workers because my wife is home with my kids and I know where they are and who they are with virtually all of the time. With both parents so often working and with the insanely busy schedules most families seem to have adopted, it is hard to even keep track of who is supposed to be where each night.

This has to have an impact on productivity and I assume it is a negative impact, although I have not seen any studies to that effect. When you have all of the distractions available to you it intuitively is going to make one less productive at work. On the other hand perhaps it is not as bad as it might seem. Many workers today can multi-task like crazy. Most of us where I work have dual monitors and I often have half a dozen things I am working on simultaneously spread over two screens. I am not a text message person but lots of my younger co-workers are and they can text and read a work email and answer the phone all at once.

How much of a bad thing is this? If it is bad, is the technology to blame or the culture? Is the problem the temptation of technology or is the problem that workers, especially younger ones, see having a job as an onerous burden instead of being glad to have one. Work is something to escape from and now we can escape from work without leaving the building!

Perhaps the issue is not so much of a productivity loss as it is of barriers dropping. While it is true that the outside world intrudes into the workplace it is also true that with laptops, remote access, blackberries, etc. the workplace intrudes into the outside world. I always take my blackberry on vacation so I can stay ahead of problems and keep up on email. It makes a vacation less stressful for me to know that there are not going to be any huge headaches for me when I get back and that I won’t have 500 emails to sort through. The dividing line between work and personal is pretty blurry these days.

What do you think? Lots of tech lovers read this blog. Is the advent and availability of personal technology a net positive or negative for the work world?

The Wonders of Technology

My new modem/router from AT&T puked after all of two weeks, so I am back to no Internet access at home, and my laptop is giving me trouble as well so I am in a library at the public computers. Needless to say, not very happy. At least I can check my email and set my rosters for my fantasy baseball teams...