Get Over Yourself and Pick Up the Phone

People in business who like to Get Sh*t Done fall in love with each version of The New. When I was a kid, new was the the Apple II. Then the IBM PC, digital phones and voice mail, the Mac — oh God, the Mac! — word processing, email, the cell phone, the Internet — mmmmm, the Internet! — and then the iPhone — oh…the iPhone!

Well damn the iPhone, because I lay at its feet the death of the most efficient technology ever created for the speedy disposition of Getting Shit Done — the plain old telephone. But not just any old-school telephone. The high tech, multi-line, digitally switched telephone of the late 1980s — the kind of phone upon which you could conduct, merge, and manage multiple direct conversations with your peers, colleagues, partners and adversaries — a direct line of human expression brain to brain — the kind of shit it’ll take us decades to replicate (if we ever do).

Cross posted from NewCo Shift. Follow us here, and check out our newsletters!

Why was that phone so perfect? It certainly wasn’t the technology, though it was pretty darn boss at the time. It was how our society adapted to it, optimizing direct, one-to-one communications in real time between a network of engaged colleagues. As a young reporter, and later as an editor and a CEO, my call list was my life. I’d spend hours a day calling sources, collaborators, even employees down the hall — and as a result, we’d Get Sh*t Done.*

Because to Get Sh*t Done, you have to engage real time with the people who help define what it is You Are Actually Doing. And nothing, nothing at all, beats a conversation to move that ball along.

For reasons I am sure will merit multiple PhD defenses some day, we’ve evolved to an almost apologetic relationship to the humble telephone. Through email or social media (ick!), we ask each other for a “quick call” — then we offload the rest to calendar apps with their annoying reminders — shitty simulacrums of our intent which pervert our goal: to connect and exchange, to respond and to act.

But first, always to connect.

At some point in the last ten years we replaced direct connection with technology-intermediated obsequity. And when we do “get on a call,” it’s fraught with a Moderator and an Agenda and Follow Up Action Items and … well, wait what the f*ck are we talking about?

No more. It’s time to pick up the phone and start calling each other again.

Hey — It’s John. You have a few minutes to bounce something around? Cool!…

*Some industries continue to work this way — I’d love your input on which one you think still do.