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 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,…
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…
