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: [email protected]
Website: https://theimpromptugameplan.com/
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…
by Sarah Firisen Maybe I’m just getting old. Having recently turned 45, I realize that what I’m about to write may very well just be an early sign that I’m about to turn into one of those older people who need a young person to help them use their phone/computer/toaster. Despite the fact that I…
by Sarah Firisen My topic today, online dating Is this really the best way for mating?Is it worth all the pain?The interest I feignIn the men who on my nerves are grating? Was the bar scene so great in its day?Does venue change the games that we play?Is this way really worse?Are the men more…
by Sarah Firisen As a woman, I know so much pain Not the least pre-menstrual weight gainMenopause is no funBirthing pain can quite stunAnd we do it and rarely complain Men get to glide right through lifeA failed erection the worst of their strifeWe have the right to refuseBut they still get to chooseWhen it's…
by Sarah Firisen [See Frank Bruni in the New York Times.] Today we are all equal, right?No more damsels and their brave knightI can fight, I can voteChoose on whom I will doteAnd any wage difference is slight But is this the end of the taleOf the fight for the rights of the female?Is there…
by Sarah Firisen So who has the right be wed? Who deserves a marital bed?Should just Jack and JillMarry at will?We’ll wait for the ruling with dread But what really here is at stake?Will the value of wedded bliss break?Is it really the caseThat gay weddings debaseThe vows that the rest of us take? Are…
Congress, I do hate to pester But this fuckfest that you've named SequesterJust the latest dumb tiffAfter the Fiscal CliffAnd this time the wound will long fester Is it really so much to askThat you stick to the important taskConcentrate on Job OneGet the People's work doneNot just the people in whose money you bask…
by Sarah Firisen When a vote carries quite this much weight Should it really all hinge on debate?Was this truly the keyTo help you finally seeA choice that good sense should dictate? Undecided, it's all up to youYou're the one that both parties must wooYou're the one in the pollsThat they court with their soulsMy…