Victor Rozek
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As I See It: So You’re Thinking About Retirement
August 28, 2017 Victor Rozek
If your IT career spanned the AS/400 years, you may be of an age when you are considering retirement. Certainly, if both your health and your bank account are reasonably robust, retirement can be as sweetly anticipated as a tax refund. The prospect of leisure and travel, or just putting a halt to the daily grind, exerts a strong gravitational pull. But reality is like the spellchecker of the imagination: it corrects misconceptions.
We are, in fact, absurdly encouraged to view decline as the Golden Years. Retirement has long been romanticized by everyone from the AARP, to financial planners, to …
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Who Says You Can’t Go Home Again
August 16, 2017 Victor Rozek
As anyone who has ever managed an IT installation can attest, computer technology offers equal measures of empowerment and annoyance. On one hand, computers allow us to run our businesses on a scale of complexity unimaginable just a few decades ago. Multiple platforms churn in multiple time zones, global data transfers clog the ether; and people from different cultures, speaking different languages, are able to collaborate digitally for the good of the enterprise.
On the other hand, management must perpetually contend with the aggravation of the archaic. Even the finest computers and most elegant software are cursed by the specter …
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As I See It: Those Accursed Millennials
July 24, 2017 Victor Rozek
Kids!
I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today!
Kids!
Who can understand anything they say?
Kids!
They are disobedient, disrespectful oafs!
Noisy, crazy, dirty, lazy, loafers!
While we’re on the subject:
Kids!
You can talk and talk till your face is blue!
Kids!
But they still just do what they want to do!
Why can’t they be like we were,
Perfect in every way?
What’s the matter with kids today?
That little ditty was sung by the wonderfully snarky Paul Lynde from the 1960s musical Bye Bye Birdie, still performed in high schools around the country. Beyond …
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As I See It: The Hungry Leader
June 12, 2017 Victor Rozek
Corporate leaders like to compare business to the military. From top-down command structures, to having a “mission,” that can only be accomplished by “capturing” market share, and “crushing” the competition; it all sounds very Ramboesque. Given the languaging you would think every CEO was the second coming of George Patton. Turns out Patton had more regard for the people under his command.
Besides the fact that the color of corporate bloodshed is green, there is a core difference between military ethics and corporate ethics. Author and TED Talk regular Simon Sinek succinctly summarizes the difference. The military, says Sinek, “gives …
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As I See It: Wake Up Call
May 22, 2017 Victor Rozek
Maybe she just didn’t want to carry a purse. Or maybe she liked to wear tight jeans and having anything in the pockets spoiled the look. Or maybe she wanted to keep it handy, or thought it was trendy or “dope.” But whatever the reason she, like a growing number of women, carried her cell phone tucked into her bra.
She was 39 at the time of diagnosis, a Chinese woman, non-meat eater, with no genetic or lifestyle predispositions to cancer. Under the circumstances, what her doctor found was highly unusual: multiple primary tumors in her right breast. It was …
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As I See It: In the Land Of Lost Listeners
April 24, 2017 Victor Rozek
“I should sell my tongue and buy a thousand ears.” – Rumi
Rumi would not do well on social media. Not much listening going on there. We are a culture of speakers. From the advent of email through the current suite of thumb-enabled apps, all are designed to amplify the mouth. From sea to shining sea, we have become one long declarative sentence fragment.
Let’s face it: Most of us speak because we want to be heard. Only a priest in a confessional begins a conversation in anticipation of listening to someone blather on about their dysfunctions. But that’s the …
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As I See It: The Politics of Self-Disclosure
March 27, 2017 Victor Rozek
It is quite possible that two of the most unexpected and consequential events of recent times had their origins with a student in Warsaw. Perhaps if he hadn’t been accepted to Cambridge University, the fates of two nations would not now be spinning off in unforeseen directions. But he was, and in Cambridge, the ripples of his fascination with psychometrics grew into an unintended tsunami. His name is Michal Kosinski, and there are a lot of people angry with him.
Psychometrics is the reality-based branch of psychology, at least in so far as it is data-driven. It is rooted in …
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As I See It: Expanding Reach And Shrinking Intelligence
February 27, 2017 Victor Rozek
For those of us accustomed to ingesting information in scraps, the Lincoln-Douglas debates would have been a month’s worth of forced-feeding. Lincoln, the challenger, and Douglas, the Senate incumbent from Illinois, jousted seven times in seven cities adhering to a format that would shrivel today’s sound bite-spouting politicians, and overwhelm voters with truncated attention spans.
The first candidate would speak for a solid hour, followed by a 90-minute rebuttal, topped-off by a 30-minute rejoinder from the first speaker. Three hours of political debate; three hours of issues and remedies, analysis and inspiration, with speakers erudite enough to keep audiences engaged …
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As I See It: Collaboration And Context
January 30, 2017 Victor Rozek
Blitzkrieg is a German term meaning “lightning warfare.” It describes a rapid, overpowering mechanized strike. Armored columns pour into enemy territory with overwhelming speed and numbers, crushing any opposition.
While this concept is now well integrated into modern warfare, in September of 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, it was revolutionary. Portions of the Polish border were still defended by cavalry, matched against waves of tanks and heavy armor.
A year before the invasion an industrialist received the highest civilian decoration bestowed by the Nazis: The Grand Cross of the German Eagle. He received it for his support of the Nazi …
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As I See It: History Repeating
December 12, 2016 Victor Rozek
… Read moreIt was a known problem 16 years ago. And for 16 years it was largely ignored, even though it poses a direct threat to representative democracy. It is a problem well understood by IT professionals and cyber security experts, and it haunts the entire spectrum of computer-dependent users from the military and political establishment, to corporations and the public. It was the subject of debate, accusation, and investigation during the recent election, and it has the power to cast doubt on its legitimacy.
The problem: Through neglect or deliberate intent, computers that decide elections have been allowed to remain vulnerable