Category Archives: Dialogue

Of Attention, Digital Natives and Book Reading

The NYT has been running an excellent series on the ways that technology is altering our lives. Today they had another remarkable piece.  The topic was teenagers, computer use and connectivity.  I will highlight a few stunning lines at the end of this post.

My whole hypothesis in Consider is that we work inside organizations where thinking and reflection have been fragmented and simply replaced by distraction and bias for action.  The firms that fight to return some concept of reflection inside the organization will prove the most relevant and lasting.

Today’s article took my mind to another place.  The teenagers and college students of today have been immersed in all things digital since the day they were born.  Many have no clue what it means to be unplugged from technology– even for short periods of time.  Further, they don’t value it as their parents helped to facilitate their dependence on the technology.   Schools can’t push back either as use of technology is correlated to grants and perceived value in the market place.    We have a generation trying to enter a resistant workforce with poor writing skills and indirect communication skills — as in face to face dialogue and rich discussions come a distant second to texting and email.     You could say that the knowledge supply chain into companies today is filled with many incapable of demonstrating the skills that I suggest matters the most today– critical and horizontal thinking and the ability to frame approaches to problems of a size and scope that is stunning.

The next decade will see America incorporate these young workers into tens of thousands of organizations. They will likely be hired primarily for their tech savvy skills and ability to mythically multi-task.  I think we are asking for the wrong things from them on the inbound hiring side.  Yes technology skills matter.  But does computer savvy matter as much as the ability to: problem solve, work in groups, and harness the potential of others towards solving ambiguous problems?   We should ask these young people to tackle a tricky business problem — and write out their logic on white board without the internet to find the quick answer.   We should ask them to hand write a note to a colleague as they explain the answer to the problem.  We should see if they can even sit alone for fifteen minutes or even five as they digest the assignment.  We should see if they even read the details of the assignment.

The consequences of the fragmentation of attention is that reflection is not only devalued but it becomes inconsequential. What does this mean for thinking, innovation and creativity when reflection is absent in an entire generation?  We are only beginning to discover the answer to this question.  Its rather disturbing when you actually consider it.  Pun intended.

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

By MATT RICHTEL

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

Later in the article:

The technology has created on campuses a new set of social types — not the thespian and the jock but the texter and gamer, Facebook addict and YouTube potato.

“The technology amplifies whoever you are,” Mr. Reilly says.

For some, the amplification is intense. Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying.

Most of the exchanges are little more than quick greetings, but they can get more in-depth, like “if someone tells you about a drama going on with someone,” Allison said. “I can text one person while talking on the phone to someone else.”

But this proficiency comes at a cost: she blames multitasking for the three B’s on her recent progress report.

“I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ”

CEO of BNP Paribas- Forces Reflection & Thinking

I wish that I had interviewed the CEO of BNP Paribas (one of the most well known banks in Europe and a top lender in the world), as he forces himself to reflect.  The Economist had a short piece on how well the bank is doing.  They wondered if it was correlated to the methodical way that the CEO, Baudouin Prot, sometimes answers questions posed to him.  It turns out that he forces himself to think and reflect before he answers.  Sounds so simple– yet how novel it is

This is exactly what I discuss in the book as I wrote a full chapter on what its like to be in rooms today where people just “dump” content on the table — and few are engaged in real dialogue– also known as the “art of thinking together.” Take a close read of this description by the Economist and ask yourself: “When was the last time I allowed even ten seconds to creep in between a question and an answer that I gave?”

BAUDOUIN PROT has an unusual habit for a chief executive. A talkative man, the boss of BNP Paribas occasionally forces himself to pause before answering a question. The delay can be unnervingly long. He grimaces. He leans back. He scribbles notes to himself, as if wrestling with the finer points of semiotics. As you wait you wonder how many bad ideas have fizzled out in these self-enforced moments of reflection. Perhaps Mr Prot’s pauses are one of the secrets of BNP Paribas’s success.

Later in the article they allude to the discipline of the firm.  It takes lots of discipline to allow reflection to become a habit that thrives as much as instant response:

Yet the overall impression is of discipline. BNP Paribas was recently outbid by Santander for a Polish bank. When Mr Prot warns of the dangers of a “market psychology of complete risk aversion,” he sounds concerned, not gung-ho. BNP Paribas’s recent history is not about being brilliantly contrarian—expanding in downturns and retrenching in booms. Instead it is a story of consistent, tightly managed expansion and risk-taking. Tempered by the ability to stop, and for a moment, think.

Barefoot Reflections

Last week I attended a two-day economic summit in Larue, Texas at the invitation of global investor Kyle Bass. It was called “The Barefoot Economic Summit.” Kyle is the founder of Hayman Capital out of Dallas. His firm did very well in 2006 and 2007 by shorting banks and other institutions with sub prime mortgages on the balance sheet. He saw the financial crisis before others did and it made him and his investors a lot of money.

I wrote about Kyle in the book. I wanted to know how he saw what was to come when so many others were in denial. I wanted to know his thought patterns. I wanted to know how he structured dialogues in his firm. I wanted to know what influenced him as a child. I wrote a chapter about him and compared and contrasted him with another “Cassandra” named Brooksley Born. I will write about her in later posts. To understand Kyle and gain some context you should watch, House of Cards on C-NBC.

I formally interviewed Kyle in 2009 and then met him and spoke with him via phone several times in 2010. He has a command of language over what is happening globally that makes you rethink many assumptions. Kyle likes to debate. He likes to open up his hypotheses on the world and be told that he is wrong. A lot of money is on the line and he spoke a lot to me about what happens when ego and money collide. These days Kyle is looking at countries like Japan and asking what happens when, not if, Japan defaults on its debt obligations.

Kyle invited me to attend the summit with 40 plus of his friends, clients, policy makers, writers and even the governor of Texas. Inside his extraordinary ranch we assembled for what I can say was the most thought provoking two days I have been a part of in the last several years. The presentations were extraordinary. The questions were equally engaging. From the history of the great depression and the debt that America took on, to the state of natural gas it was a stunning overview of the world and how unstable it is.

I won’t quote from what was said inside the meeting room as it was free flow of big ideas set within a specific context. I will say that the event was two days of reflective thinking in action. It was everything that I write about in the book. It was the kind of two-day dialogue that created new associations in my mind. It forced me to reconsider many assumptions. It was also sobering as the group was also rather bearish about what it will take for the world to free itself of the massive and unstable debt that is permanently embedded within the balance sheets of dozens of countries around the world. We are likely entering a seven-year cycle that will allow the debt to clear through the financial system. It will be instability and a likely cascade of sovereign debt defaults that will drive behaviors and outcomes that no one can predict. Uncertainty abounds.

C-NBC was there to interview many who attended, as there were so many global thinkers in one place at one time. I will link to the clips below and all are worth watching if you missed it. David Faber asked Kyle why he had the summit.  Kyle noted that he gets hundreds of emails a day and that what he was hearing and learning within the rooms was like nothing he would gather through the day to process of constant immediacy that technology affords. He wanted to step back. He forced it and in the end he raised the consciousness of all who were there. We thought together for two days.

One of the things I will say about the dialogue in the room is that it featured many statements from speakers such as, “if this is true then this can’t be true” or, “if this is true then this must also be true.” It was a constant state of forcing your mind to hold simultaneous, competing and sometimes unintuitive thoughts. How many rooms do you enter where such statements are made and then debated? People would put an idea out there backed up by a graph and then put it in an historic context. My mind went places that I never thought possible.

I told my wife that the day the planes flew into the towers in 2001, that I could not explain why it had happened. I spent the next two years finding the answers. There won’t be planes the next time. But when Spain defaults on its debt, I won’t sit there with my mouth agape and say how and why did that happen? It was discussed in Larue, Texas as moments of reflection gave rise to that high probability event.

The next several years will feature a level of uncertainty for the country and the world that doesn’t lend itself to the rapid fire and immediate thinking. It will require organizations to constantly step back and question what they see. It will require lots of data but it will require something even more important – meaning. Meaning cant be hatched in minutes and while everyone is tethered to technology.

Here is new interview that he just did by the way. Kyle on Fox

My thanks to Kyle for the chance to be there last week. I offer my thanks to those who attended for teaching me so much. They demonstrated that some of the busiest people you could meet believe that stepping back to reflect has value and virtue.  That’s my gospel.

Barefoot Economic Summit Clips