Sarah Firisen was born in London, England but has lived in New York for 30 years. 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 finishing up a book, The Impromptu Game Plan. This book (and related podcast) explores the career and life stories of people who’ve made pivots in their lives to create more meaningful careers that utilize their strengths and experiences and speak to their passions and values. Email: sfirisen@gmail.com
Website: https://theimpromptugameplan.com/
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,…
by Sarah Firisen I have a colleague who “lives in the cloud”. And I’m not using this as a euphemism for not being grounded in reality. So what do I mean? Well to begin with, he doesn’t have a permanent home. He’s mostly based in a major US city and when he’s not traveling for…
by Sarah Firisen When I was in my early to mid twenties and starting out in my career, my grandmother repeatedly told me (and she meant it with love), that if I wasn’t careful, I’d quickly end up an old maid. The day she watched me marry a nice Jewish boy under a chuppah was…
by Sarah Firisen Watch this video. No, I mean, right now, go and watch this video, I’ll wait. Even if you don’t agree with all of it, even if you think it’s unnecessary scaremongering, you should still find it thought provoking and at least a little scary (most people find it terrifying), and if you…
by Sarah Firisen Recently, I dropped my iPhone on the sidewalk. I have a case with a bumper on it, but even so, I guess it hit the sidewalk in just the wrong way and, the next thing I knew, I had a $130 trip to the Apple store in my immediate future. Now clearly,…
by Sarah Firisen On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. This was the tagline of a great New Yorker cartoon years ago. The joke being that no one could ever be sure who the real person was sitting behind the online persona. Last night I was watching a re-run of the Big Bang Theory.…
by Sarah Firisen Science fiction has always run the gamut from extreme prescience on one end to paranoid fantastical delusions at the other, and everything in between. But it has always done more than merely try to predict future technologies, it has played its part in our imagining of the future. From the imaginations of…
by Sarah Firisen President-elect Trump, along with so many other gaping holes in his knowledge, seems, for all his evident command of social media, to not really get the modern computer age. On the one hand, this is both astounding and terrifying. It’s one thing to have your 70 year old grandmother not understand or…
by Sarah Firisen People are awful. You only need read the daily headlines to realize how awful so many of us are to each other. Intolerance, prejudice, ignorance, sit behind so many of the evils that men (and women) do to each other. But as bad as things are, they are mostly so much better…
by Sarah Firisen There’s never been a better, safer, healthier, fairer time to be a woman than right now. On the other hand, the bar was set pretty low for most of history. Yes, we are no longer chattel, the property of our fathers and husbands. We can vote, hell one of us is probably…
by Sarah Firisen Anyone can be in charge. Being in charge isn’t the same as being a leader. We've all known great leaders. People that we’d walk through fire for, but what makes them such great leaders? As the Presidential primary season gets under way, perhaps it’s worth considering what leadership really is. Because despite…
by Sarah Firisen The world seems a very depressing, scary place these days. Maybe it always was. I remember being 12 years old and driving with my father and expressing to him how terrified I was by the possibility of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He talked to me about mutual assured destruction and…
by Sarah Firisen The week before last I changed the sheets on my bed. Stripped the fitted sheet, the pillow cases, bundled it all up in my arms and threw it in the washing machine and turned it on (I’m lucky enough to have a washer/dryer in my apartment in NYC). About 3 minutes went…
by Sarah Firisen Big news: millions of married people, mainly men, are using the Internet to try to cheat on their spouses. The Ashley Madison hack scandal, the data dump of records of 32 million would-be adulterers, is apparently a surprise to some people. Not to me. Ever since I started online dating after my…
by Sarah Firisen I haven't spent a lot of time in churches over the years, being born a Jew and becoming an atheist as a teenager, it’s not a common hangout place for me. But when I have, weddings, christenings, sitting in the back during mass at various European cathedrals, there’s been a solemn stillness…
by Sarah Firisen “The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by…” so sang Andy Williams in 1967. Boys looking at girls, and then reacting with admiration; what could be more natural? In movie after movie a barrage of wolf whistles following Sofia Loren and Marilyn Monroe…
by Sarah Firisen I am Jewish by birth. My family wasn’t particularly religious; we went to synagogue at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, but not really any other time. My brother and I went through years of Hebrew school, but we came home and ate bacon sandwiches.…
by Sarah Firisen Privacy; Do we have it? If we don’t, should we care? With the news today that the NSA is now collection millions of faces from web images and using face recognition software on them, I think the answer to the first question is clearly, no. But of course, the NSA, at least…
by Sarah Firisen Odds are you’re on Facebook. After all, 1 in 6 people on the planet are on it, why should you be the exception? I think in my immediate circle of friends and family I know one person who isn’t on it at all. I know, I know, we overshare these days; we…