A warning about talking to me.

A warning:

If you have words with me over the next couple of decades or so and you mention the word "disruption," there's a better than average chance that you'll get something of a tirade from me.

I have a personal predilection that with disruption, with the embrace of the new, new models, new approaches, new ways of doing things often comes a throwing out of the old and valuable.

My two cents says this, in our modern era--our modern ADD era, we have tossed away a lot of what makes us human. We have thrown away, in fact, two of the things that make us most human.

Here's an example of one of those things.

Yesterday, I had just finished a script--in a rush, under duress--for an internal award video. I did what I do when I finish something. I pushed myself back from my desk and looked for a distraction, a song on my iPod, some item of news, a note from a friend. 

Immediately a very good project manager who sits near me homed in on me goofing off.

"Are you done with that script?" she barked.

I looked at her and slowly said, "I pushing away from it for ten minutes, then coming back to it. That's how I work. I work with distance. You'll have it soon."

We don't work for the electric company. You can't flick a switch and make creativity come out. And we would all do well to take a walk around the block, or read something by Updike before we hand in an assignment.

Today, that's looked upon as an assault against timesheets, a monkey-wrench thrown into the great productivity machine.

Maybe someday, maybe someday soon, a machine will be able to read a folder of 79 images and 91 pages of random text and from all that data coalesce a communication.

Said machine won't be a moody, grumpy, obstreperous sonofabitch who reads Thomas Wolfe, Joseph Mitchell, Homer and John Updike when he needs to center himself creatively.

That machine will disrupt our industry, and productivity will soar through our unfinished ceilings and holding company share-prices and the compensation packages of the oligarchs at the top will puff up even more than they already have.

But I warn you.

Everything will suck.