Sarah Firisen was born in London, England but has lived in New York for 30 years. She has two daughters Anya and Sasha. She has undergraduate and graduate degrees in Philosophy. Sarah's had a variety of roles over her career, most in and around technology, but the thread through them all has been her passion for helping organizations and their people to deliver on and tell their disruption stories. A strategic, creative innovator and storyteller, Sarah is a passionate technologist and very interested in the societal impacts of emerging technologies. Email: [email protected]
by Sarah Firisen I just spent two months living on the Caribbean island of Grenada. It’s a wonderful place with a somewhat antiquated healthcare system. To visit Grenada, I had to have a negative PCR test within 72 hours of flying. I was planning to go to a clinic and wait in line, which I’d…
by Sarah Firisen This Christmas, I stayed in a Marriott in the town where my kids live. Like most people, my business and personal travel has mostly ground to a halt in the last 9 months. So I was pleasantly surprised by the check-in experience the hotel provided me to allow for social distancing. I’m…
by Sarah Firisen When I was in my twenties, I didn’t own handbags, I didn’t even have a wallet, I used to stuff my keys and money into a pocket. This was easy when I had one credit card and not a lot of cash. But as I got older, I began to see the…
by Sarah Firisen I’ve telecommuted from home for many years now. Before COVID-19, I would rarely turn my camera on when I was on video chats. And if I did, I’d make sure to put makeup on and look somewhat professional and put together from at least the waist up. But since lockdown started in…
by Sarah Firisen I was a Philosophy major in University from 1988-1991 (degrees are 3 years in the UK). To be accurate in British terms, I read Philosophy. Some friends and I would socialize with a group of our professors. We’d often talk and drink late into the night in the living room of one…
by Sarah Firisen Two months ago, COVID lockdown was still new; in the US it was horrific that 3,000 people had died and I wrote about some possible longer-term technology innovation that might come out of this crisis. Fast forward to today and the US has just passed an unimaginable, grim milestone, 100,000 dead. And while…
by Sarah Firisen I’ve been telecommuting on and off for over 17 years. I first started working from home because I’d moved 150 miles away from the company I’d been contracting for over the previous 4 years. Back then, I worked in a small team that was part of a larger team in a huge…
by Sarah Firisen First off, let me just get this out of the way: we share too much data about ourselves knowingly with companies and they collect, use and share even more than most of us are aware of (read through those lengthy privacy notices recently?). And unless you live in Europe with its pretty…
by Sarah Firisen When I moved into a new, larger apartment with my boyfriend a couple of months ago, I decided to buy a Roomba, robot vacuum cleaner. I named her Joanne. I love Joanne, my boyfriend is less of a fan. He finds her hour and a half or so a day moving around…
by Sarah Firisen This morning I rode an Uber to JFK from my apartment in Queens. I do this regularly and normally don’t worry too much about it, but this morning, there was just something about the driver that concerned me, though I couldn’t put my finger on what. But every time his, very loud,…
by Sarah Firisen I’ve just come back from a lovely vacation in Ireland. We did a lot of driving and usually had the radio on, often to RTE, the state run station (the equivalent to the BBC in the UK). At least once an hour an advertisement would come on reminding people that they need…
by Sarah Firisen Many years ago, my father and I were at a backyard BBQ in New Jersey hosted by someone we barely knew, I think they were somehow connected to my step-mother. At some point, the topic of flag burning came up and, before we knew it, we were engaged in an extremely heated…
by Sarah Firisen I was standing in Penn Station the other day waiting for a train and someone passed through begging for change. I’ve lived in New York City long enough that I don’t just start taking my wallet out and going through it in crowded public spaces, but beyond that, I don’t have change.…
by Sarah Firisen My seventy-something year old uncle, who still uses a flip phone, was talking to me a while ago about self-driving cars. He was adamant that he didn’t want to put his fate in the hands of a computer, he didn’t trust them. My question to him was “but you trust other people…
by Sarah Firisen “I’m bored!”. How often I would whine that as a kid. How often my kids would whine that to me. “Go out and play” my mother would reply. I probably said some version of the same thing to my kids. And I usually would go out and play. I’d go to the…
by Sarah Firisen Books have always mattered to me. When I was single in my 20s, I mentioned to my then boss that whenever I first visited a date’s apartment I would look at his bookshelves. He didn’t get it. Why did it matter what books a person read? I tried to explain that for…
by Sarah Firisen Many years ago in 1991, in my first job out of college, I worked for a small investment bank. By 1994, I was working in its IT department. One of my tasks was PC support and I had a modem attached to my computer so that I could connect to Compuserve for…
by Sarah Firisen I have a friend who is a travel agent. The days when we all talked on the phone to travel agents in order to book any travel are long gone. These days, for the most part, travel agents, the actual human ones, deal with business travel and high end travel for elites.…
by Sarah Firisen 30 years ago I moved from the UK to New York City and I gave up my car. I had mixed feelings about doing so at the time – I was only 21 and driving was still a novelty and an expression of independence. When I moved out of New York City…
by Sarah Firisen My grandmother had 7 sisters (and a couple of brothers who died young and none of us remember), my great-grandmother had 10 siblings. This past week, I attended reunions with 22 of the descendents of these ancestors, on two continents (New York and London). At these joyful family gatherings we told stories,…