Kendrick Vinar

Leadership is influence. Your influence with people is all about your connection with them. Sometimes we overwhelm ourselves and think we need a deep long discussion to talk with people. Actually a quick “ping” (check in) is a powerful tool to stay connected.

A computer guru at Grace Church, Ray Hooker, sent me the following thoughts on “pinging” people. Pretty cool application.

Ray:
I thought I would give you an extended explanation of “ping” and some
interesting analogies for human “pinging”.

The developers of the Internet knew that it would be important to be
able to test the ability to connect between two points in the
Internet. So they developed a special format to send a small bit of
data between two points to verify connectivity. They called this bit
of data an ICMP packet. They also built into the software that talks
across the network the feature that it will automatically return an
ICMP packet if it receives one. It is automatic. They developed a
simple program name “ping” which will send an ICMP packet to whereever
you specify give you messages about what happens. In windows the
results are fairly technical though the original ping would simply say
“xyz is alive”. Sometimes people disable this feature for security
reasons, so that they can essentially hide their presence to some
degree.

One interesting analogy is that most people respond when you touch
base with them. It is built by God into the human to respond since we
desire relationship. Of course there are some people who try to shut
that down and hide, but not most people.