Speech No.2: Speak With Sincerity

The objectives of this speech are:
- To convince the audience of your earnestness, sincerity, and conviction on a subject you throughly understand.
- To confront and control any nervousness you may have.
Time 5 to 7 minutes.

| Go to my Speech Bar Progress |

Survival of the Fittest
Rico Abibas
Date presented: May 4, 2001

Are you ready to be extinct within the next five years? I am not asking about your physical cessation nor predicting your early death but rather your professional extinction of your working skills will be obsolete in the midst of a changing workplace bringing in by wonders of technology. Many of you had never thought of about it seriously, but my speech today, my fellow toastmasters is about CHANGES… technological changes that will affect your working attitudes particularly here in this office.

Dr. Charles Darwin coined the termed "Survival of the Fittest" and it is about "natural selection conceived of as a struggle for life in which only those organisms best adapted to existing conditions are able to survive and reproduce". How do insects particularly cockroaches become resistant to insecticides? If the pesticide (either synthetic or plant-made) kills almost all the bugs, only those insects with a gene that makes a chemical that somehow evades or destroys the pesticide will survive. When these so-called "resistant" insects breed, their offspring are more likely to have the resistance gene. If the pesticide is still present, these resistant insects soon become dominant. As Dr. Darwin said, they are the fittest, and they survive.

So how is this phenomenon will most likely hit our workplace? I believe that most of you will agree with me that technology is the culprit here. Technology is the pesticide here. Technology sprays digital virus across all over space—at home and in the office, it's everywhere. Fast-pace advancement made by technology for the past decades drove if not shaped the people to become a "weaker organism". I might consider all of you today as the "dominant species" just like the resistant insects. You had absorbed the first bite, the second one and even more; unconsciously these technobites left a mark of psychological imbalance on yourself. But beware technocide makers will unleash yet another virus to totally extinct you professionally. Management experts called it "digital Darwinism" where present stimuli encouraged modern approach of survival methods to combat seamless corporate changes taking place in the office. "You have to be able to function at hyper-speed because that's what your competitors are doing," concluded Evan Schwartz in his published book, Digital Darwinism: Seven Breakthrough Business Strategies for Surviving in the Cutthroat Web Economy. Whew…that seems to be working like a computer indeed!

Allow me my fellow toastmasters to bring you to the future, maybe five or even ten years from now. As I spoke before you, I'm become a virtual speaker and you also participated as a virtual members of a virtual office. Artificial Intelligence becomes a reality then implying human-like intelligent where each of us, the "survivor" is machined clone to communicate with Cyborgs and work without stopping.

Consider this amazing discovery recently, relying on billions of DNA molecules to store and manipulate data, biological computers hold out the promise of solving massive problems beyond the scope of current electronic computers. Because DNA computers manipulate immense numbers with ease, the technology is ideally suited for encryption and human body embedding database. In the future, technology will be inside us. In time, optical and biological computer systems are certain to become faster, smaller and more widespread. Clearly, a prophetic 666 beast is awakening!

When a survey was taken sometime last 1999 about employee's reaction to change, most are very hostile to it. Majority agrees to ask for clarification: "Why sudden change the rules in the middle of the game?" Rapid changes in the workplace, is a reality for many, if not all companies today. On October of this year, the company will embrace the SAP integration technology. Digital Darwinism is not only intended to harm us but it targets the company itself of its existence in the business world. Quoting Phil Carroll from a Fluor Employee Live Videoconference last May 27, 1999, he said, "The reason for change is to fundamentally re-invent Fluor. This is imperative for survival in today's competitive world… The new Fluor will be flexible and adaptable, able to sense and create change before the competition."

If the organization itself is in threat of extinction from surrounding technological viruses, how much extreme dangers can you face even more because you are resident of that body. The Internet has made the world look like a little marble. Time and space are no longer boundless. E-business, e-commerce, B2B transactions are going to shape you like a little iota in the eyes of technocides makers.

Of course, we are the ultimate consumers of technology. We benefit from it. We enjoy using it. We depend on technology, we sleep and breathe and live with it. The only problem here is the we become a passive end user of it until such time that we no longer thinks that it actually harms us because of the enjoyment that we are getting from it. The sole purpose of technology is really to simplify our lives. That's real danger of automation. Looks what technology has produced in our workplace, fierce competition, stress to achieve greed for higher profit margins, work pressures that provokes behavior like workplace hostilities, bullying, mobbing. That's why my high blood pressure rises! Is technology then bad? Not at all!

So what are the rewards of being a "digitally flexible" individual? Except that you're still having a job to do, you will work at home in your own pace. Anyplace can be a workplace. Greater benefits will be provided by the employers and support a vast array of work/life benefits such as flexible schedules, education, profit sharing, childcare, and eldercare, ownership programs, courses and coaching on work/life issues - such as finance, health, home purchase, and community service. Positive transformation of one's individual working attitude towards these never ending changes produce even more benefits to a "survivor" as a whole.

So going back to my first question of about readiness of your extinction. My advise: "You must all be ready in order to survive!" That's all.