Do you see what you believe, or believe what you see?

My teenage daughter, like most kids her age, loves the look of fast sports cars. She is particularly amused by the fact that she shares the same name with a Lotus sports car, the Elise.

One morning recently, as I was driving her to the school bus stop, she excitedly pointed out the car in front of us. “Look dad, it’s an Elise.” Until then, she had only seen the car in magazines and online. I gently pointed out that the car was not an Elise, but a Corvette. But she was not to be deterred, as she insisted it was an Elise. That is, until we pulled up next to the car and she could clearly see the Corvette badge.

Later I reflected on this incident and wondered what it was that made a teenager who had never seen (or had a live experience with) a Lotus Elise, believe her own mental image of the car more than the feedback from someone three times her age, who has actually seen (had an experience with) the car in question. Was it youthful self confidence, or worse? And, I wondered how often the same phenomena occurred in business settings. I have seen managers reviewing market data and completely disagreeing on the potential opportunities. I have seen financial data which suggested financial deterioration, interpreted in a favorable light. And I wondered, were these people really seeing the same things?

I did not get very far with my exploration of these questions until I came across a piece written by Daniel Levitin:

The word pitch refers to the mental representation an organism has of the fundamental frequency of a sound. That is, pitch is a purely psychological phenomenon related to the frequency of vibrating air molecules. By “psychological,” I mean that it is entirely in our heads, not in the world-out-there; it is the end product of a chain of mental events that gives rise to an entirely subjective, internal mental representation or quality. Sound waves – molecules of air vibrating at various frequencies – do not themselves have pitch. Their motion and oscillations can be measured, but it takes a human (or animal) brain to map them to that internal quality we call pitch.

We perceive color in a similar way, and it was Isaac Newton who first realized this. (Newton, of course is known as the discoverer of the theory of gravity, and the inventor, along with Leibniz, of calculus. Like Einstein, Newton was a very poor student, and his teachers often complained of his inattentiveness.)

Newton was the first to point out that light is colorless, and that consequently color has to occur inside our brains.

Excerpts From This is your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin

In essence, Daniel is saying that things like color and sound are not absolutes, people hear and see the same thing differently. Thus, some see a glass with some liquid and by focusing one way or the other can see a half-empty or half-filled glass. Several people might be listening to the same CD, but concentrating on different elements of the music and subsequently liking or disliking what they are hearing.

In a business setting, the implications are stunning. If everyone is seeing your markets, customers, performance, numbers the same way, and there are no opportunities for alternate explanations, you very well may be missing important elements. You might be looking at data that shows revenue growth, but nuances such as whether the growth was in line with the rest of the market, with targeted segments, due to lucky wins, or fundamentally based on purposefully managed activities delivering better value to customers are incredibly important distinctions. Management teams that lack diversity of thought, or avoid honest questioning of the facts, will almost always be blind-sided by an alternate reality.

Are there alternate realities or interpretations that can be inferred from the same set of facts? Absolutely! Just examine the optical illusion above. Some people see the young girl, others an old lady. They are both present in the same set of facts. What you choose to see is a matter of where you are looking. You can only see both pictures when you shift your perspective, an activity that might serve you well in your business.

“This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession” (Daniel J. Levitin)

Fix your shrinking knowledge quotient

Every hour of every day I’m learning more

The more I learn, the less I know about before

The less I know, the more I want to look around

Digging deep for clues on higher ground

From UB40 – Higher ground Lyrics

I love listening to UB40, a British reggae band formed in the 70’s. Their songs are usually light hearted affairs sung to a catchy melody which reminds you of being on a Caribbean beach vacation. Then I listened to the lyrics of the song “Higher Ground”. Now that was more serious stuff than I was accustomed to. i did not know what to make of it.

Over the years though, the meaning has become clearer to me. Friends warned me that, the more I learned the more I would not know. Recently I came across some stunning statistics on knowledge expansion and information overload. Did you know for example, that:

• It is estimated that one weeks worth of New York TImes contains more information than an individual would have encountered in a lifetime in the 18th century.
• IDC estimates 160 Exabytes (160 Billion Gigabytes) of data was generated in 2006, more than was generated in the previous 5000 years.
• It’s estimated that the amount of stored information is growing at a rate of 30 per cent a year and that the US generates about 40 per cent of that. The researchers estimated with a world population of 6.3 billion that would mean 800Mb of data each and less than 10 per cent of the world’s population have access to computers or the internet.
• Technical information is doubling every 2 years.

The stunning result of this exponential information explosion is that your personal knowledge quotient (and mine) is shrinking.

Fortunately, there are ways to ensure your knowledge does not become obsolete. An important action you must take is to continue to develop what you know personally. More important, you need to recognize that the rate of information growth is exponential, while your personal information growth is more likely to be linear (based on what you read, touch, experience etc.). Therefore, you should focus on capitalizing on the network effect. In our increasingly connected world, your network knowledge quotient is perhaps more important than your personal knowledge quotient. For it is your network, what it knows, and your ability to leverage that knowledge which is becoming increasingly important.

The most effective ways to build your network knowledge quotient is effectively increasing your network. Stuff it with the smartest people you know and tap into their knowledge a much as you can. Somewhere out there is n answer to any question you might have. Do you know how to find it?

Lifetime Employment – Apply Here

Since the 1950s, Japan’s labor markets have been characterized by several distinctive features. Perhaps the most notable among them is “lifetime employment,” the practice at large firms of hiring workers directly out of school and retaining them until a mandatory retirement age (originally age 55, now around 60 for most companies).

From Job Security in Japan: Is Lifetime Employment on the Way Out? – Brookings Institution

Lifetime employment used to mean staying with a company until retirement. However, as the workplace has evolved, few workers are interested in staying at a single company until retirement. The chart below shows how dramatically this effect has played out in different countries around the world (with Americans staying on average only 4 years per job).

The question of lifetime employment has therefore shifted to the possibility of being employed (at any company) until expected retirement. The challenge of staying relevant in the workforce has been exacerbated by concerns over the rapid shift of manufacturing and service sector jobs to lower wage regions around the world.

What can you do to stay employed, and not become a victim of these dynamic shifts in the global economy?

For my answer, I build on my three fundamental beliefs, except replacing company with employee. Thus:

1. Customers always choose the best available

2. The best is always changing

3. Only employees capable of change are sustainable.

In simple terms, your company can’t guarantee you a job, your government cannot, not your union rep, nor your boss. Only customers guarantee jobs, and only so while you are creating value for that customer.

• Who is your customer? Today? In the future?
• What does that customer want? Will want?
• What skills do customer needs imply are necesary and how will they change over time?

To stay relevant and experience lifetime employment, you must have answers to these questions and a personal development plan that allows you to change faster than your customers (employers) are changing. That I argue is the only way to ensure you have lifetime employment!

Fundamental Beliefs – Guiding principles for strategy

I am frequently asked about the most important factors that shape my views on strategy. And to that question, my answer is always simple. I am driven by three fundamental beliefs:

1. Customers always choose the best available

What is best is defined by each customer. It could be price, availability, specifications, or some other variable. Whatever the utility curve the customer is using to determine their preference, they will choose the best they can afford, from what’s available, wherever they can find it.

2. The best is always changing

The best changes over time because customer preferences change, what competitors offer changes, or because what companies provide to their customer changes.

3. Only companies capable of change are sustainable

The inevitable conclusion is that companies must change. And, they must change faster than the customers are changing in order to stay relevant.

For me, the only constant is change!

Innovation

Innovation is not about fixing what is broken, it’s about breaking what is “fixed”!

Reinterpreting Drucker

 

Entrepreneur’s define tomorrow and understand today. They live both forwards and backwards. Entrepreneurs invest themselves in making the tomorrow they care about. They imagine a reality and expect more than others think possible.

From Elizabeth Edersheim Blog

 

How many people do you know could reinterpret Drucker, and make his work relevant again? You would have to be brilliant, and my friend and former partner Elizabeth Edersheim is one such person.

 

I first met Liz when I joined McKinsey in 1986. She was already a storied “thought leader” in Operations. Armed with a Ph.D. in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was shaking up traditional thinking in the world of operations strategy. I later joined her, as we partnered to build New York Consulting Partners into a world class transformation advisory service. We served some pretty amazing clients such as market leaders Arrow Electronics, Colgate-Palmolive, Clairol, Motorola and Symbol Technologies and the Thomas H. Lee portfolio companies – First Alert, Healthometer and Mr. Coffee, among others.

 

Analysis comes easily to Liz. She is fact-based, hypothesis driven and a brilliant thinker. To top it all off, every word she writes (and she has written several highly acclaimed books) has been honed many times before it gets committed. I know from personal experience working with our then editorial team, through whose hands every client review had to be filtered, that great communication was at the heart of every successful change management program.

If you want a sense of how brilliant people think, check out her blog, or read one of her books:

 

“The Definitive Drucker” (Elizabeth Haas Edersheim)

“McKinsey’s Marvin Bower: Vision, Leadership, and the Creation of Management Consulting” (Elizabeth Haas Edersheim)

The Benefits of Color blindness

Color blindness, a color vision deficiency in animals, is the inability to perceive differences between some of the colors that others can distinguish. It is most often of genetic nature, but may also occur because of eye, nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals.

Color blindness is usually classed as disability; however, in selected situations color blind people have an advantage over people with normal color vision. There are some studies which conclude that color blind individuals are better at penetrating certain camouflages.

WWII teams that analyzed aerial photographs were looking for unusual patterns, so a color blind person could prove useful. From an evolutionary perspective a hunting group will be more effective if it includes a color blind hunter (one in twenty) who can spot prey that others cannot.

Excerpts From Color blindness – Wikipedia

I discovered I was color blind early on. It wasn’t hard to think of this condition as a disability. Art was a difficult class, and my hopes of becoming a doctor were not likely when during biology I could not really discern some of the key points the teacher was trying to highlight.

Over the years though I have found my affliction to have more benefits than deficits. Not just in the ways identified through technical studies, but in many less obvious ways:

• An appreciation for the subtler shades
• Uncolored perception
• Recognition that what what I see may not be the same as everyone-else
• Discovery of facets of humanity that were more important than color

So you see, if you are trying to innovate, solve problems bigger than your current thinking, you may need some color blindness. Don’t always focus on the most obvious colors, but look at the subtler shades, and embrace diversity of thought!

Think Different – The Fosbury Flop

You may have seen the recent Visa Olympics commercial featuring Dick Fosbury. He is famous for what is now known as the Fosbury Flop – a high jump made backwards over the bar, with which he won the Gold medal in Mexico, 1968.

Innovation requires looking at the problem from a completely different angle than previously used. When you are stuck, and can’t think of a solution to an impossible problem, try the Fosbury Flop.