|
↑ NAVIGATING
changing WORLDS #fastp #adt ↑ ↓
WorldS RELENTLESSLY
moving toward
#uf =
unimagined
and often unimaginable
futures #memo #tln #rlaexp #adt ↑ ↓ …
What mental resources
are needed
or will be needed
for
INFORMED
futureS directed action? ↓
#mmit
Learning to Learn ↑ ↓
The Second Curve
Tomorrow always arrives and
it is always different
PastS, Present and FutureS
The PRESENT MOMENT is a composition of incalculable time dimensionS.
It is alway location based.
These DIMENSIONS include
all individual YESTERDAYs,
DAYs-BEFORE-YESTERDAYs
and attempts to preserve the PRESENT
or MAKE THE FUTUREs
A concrete example can be explored in the
transition from a pre-electricity world
to a post-electricity world below
«§§§»
Things are … like they were … until they’re not …
“People in any organization
are always attached to the obsolete —
the things that should have worked but did not,
the things that once were productive and no longer are.” Druckerism
«§§§»
The thought fragments
on this page are
attention directing tools #adt #sda
#uf To know something ↑ ↓,
to really understand
something important,
one must look at it
from sixteen different angles ↓ #sda
The first part of this page
primarily concerns
the mental challenges of navigating
Finding and selecting …
the pieces of the puzzle ↓ #sda
“Social ecology”
↓ Most mistakes in thinking … #mmit
#wtin “What Thinking is Needed’
Niall Ferguson
Networks and power? ↑
Why thinking is important
What thinking
is needed? ↑ ↓
What kind of information?
This ↓ is not enough
«§§§»
#uf Developments, events, circumstances and situations ↑ ↓
SEEABLE
A “toolbox” ↑ containing “attention-directing tools” #adt
as does Alistair Cooke’s America — Kindle #ad
Tools extend human capabilities
#uf The unpredictable chapters in the American story
mind map ↓ for collecting #ideas (puzzle pieces #fastp)
#uf “Electricity is an essential part of modern life
so vital that most of us cannot imagine #uf ↑
a life without it.
But – amazingly – it has only been
an everyday aspect of our lives
for a little over a century.
(Only in 1925 did half of all homes
in the U.S. have electric power.)
Back in 1752,
when Benjamin Franklin demonstrated
that lightning was electrical
with his famous kite experiment,
people couldn’t even fathom
the many conveniences and luxuries
that electricity would bring
to the 20th and 21st centuries.” source
Broader thoughtscape PATTERNS ↓
One thing always leads to something else unexpected
#uf The Manager and the Moron
#uf Luther, Machiavelli, and the Salmon
#uf artificial intelligence
«§§§»
The road ahead
Something genuinely interesting to work toward
“Trying to predict the future
is like trying to drive down a country road
at night
with no lights
while looking out the back window.” — Peter Drucker
#uf To know something ↑ ↓,
to really understand
something important,
one must look at it
from sixteen different angles
#uf Intelligence Information Thinking
Where the universe began?
#uf
#uf Transnational and tribal together
#uf Continuing turmoil → #connect connect, connect,
#uf Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Polity
A long page ↑
please wait for it to finish loading
(10 seconds)
#uf The danger of too much planning
Successful careers are not planned
#fastp
The pieces of the puzzle ?
#htmp = How the mind performs
THE PICTURE THAT EMERGES …
MEANS SOMETHING SO VERY DIFFERENT …
From Knowledge to KnowledgeS
Finding and selecting #connect
Finding and selecting …
the pieces of the puzzle ↓
mind map ↓ for collecting #ideas (puzzle pieces)
#dawa
Developing a realistic
work approach #fastp
that is effective #gtrtd for
the challenges ahead → (two things)
Why thinking is important
What thinking is needed?
Build on vs. take off from
What do you want to be remembered for? NYT Obits
Different life seasons
Second half of your life
The difficulties associated with “the bright idea” and
dealing with risk and uncertainty
Each Of Us As CEO
Wisdom
Challenges ↓
Colonialism vs. Imperialism
America before Columbus
Alistair Cooke's America
The Journals of Lewis and Clark
The Long Shadow:
The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century
Hitler's Circle of Evil
The U.S. and the Holocaust (Ken Burns)
World War Two: 1941 and the Man of Steel (Stalin)
The Vietnam War (Ken Burns)
COVID-19 pandemic
#fastp
Living a fulfilling life
#wlh Life 2.0 Make your life your endgame
The second half of your life
The importance of perceptiveness
The Square and the Tower:
Networks and Power, from the
Freemasons to Facebook at Amazon
#uf #hor2 #hor3 #wlh2
Management Challenges for the 21st Century and Managing in the Next Society
Water Logic (adapting to conditions/circumstances)
Life directions — alternative approaches (#hor3 → #whtmal)
HORIZONS to navigate and work toward? #hor3 → #org
Near horizons and non-linear future horizonS
The Second Curve (acting before necessity)
“TEN or twelve years are not a long time in history,
but they are a very long period in current events”
source
Something genuinely interesting to work toward
Try searching this page
for the word “RESULTS”
what exists is getting old
Water Logic (adapting to conditions/circumstances)
The Second Curve (acting before necessity)
“You have to produce results
in the short term.
But you also have to
produce results in the long term.
And the long term is not simply
the adding up of short terms.” — Druckerism
Aim high
On Fortune's Role in Human Affairs
and How She Can Be Dealt With
by Niccolò Machiavelli published in 1532
Tomorrow always arrives and
it is always different
#adt ↓
~1957 — Landmarks of Tomorrow ↓
At some unmarked point
during the last twenty years
we imperceptibly
moved out of the Modern Age
and into a new, as yet nameless, era …
The situation today #lot
Water Logic (adapting to conditions/circumstances)
~1994 — Post-Capitalist Society ↓
EVERY FEW HUNDRED YEARS in Western history
there occurs a sharp transformation …
Knowledge THE resource → Org. characteristics
Water Logic (adapting to conditions/circumstances)
~2001 — Management Challenges for the 21st Century ↓
Long years of profound changes
Water Logic (adapting to conditions/circumstances)
#ptf
We know only two things
about the future … (continue)
What thinking is needed? …
to navigate?
#mmit #hor3
Most mistakes in THINKING
are mistakes in perception
1. Seeing only part of the picture #information #sda
2. Jumping to conclusions
3. Misinterpretation caused by feelings
↑ Dealing with risk and uncertainty ↓
#fastp #sda
↑ “Finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle” ↓
Edward de Bono
Missing the Turn to the Future
Fine print ↓
This site is NOT about school, academics,
scholarship, intellectualism or jobs. It is about
REALITY and LIFE.
Obviously jobs and careers
play a role — a changing role —
in the broad timescape of reality in time.
Education and learning for effective ACTION
is an essential life skill. #uf #tln
#fastp #adt
“For almost nothing
in our educational systems
prepares people
for the reality
in which they will live,
work, and become effective”
The Second Curve
CONDITIONS FOR SURVIVAL
#hor3 #wlh
HorizonS to navigate and work toward? ↓
 Effective work approach
No two people ever read the same book
Francis Ford Coppola Godfather notebook
Why thinking is important
What thinking is needed?
#thinkingcanvas or #mindmap1 /mind map ↓ for collecting #ideas
Social ecology
The Daily Drucker
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Management, Revised Edition
The Executive in Action #executive
The Definitive Drucker
More than anything else,
we are responsible for
our own self-development
Earning a living is no longer enough.
Work has to make a life
Why we need effective executives
What makes an effective executive
What Executives Should Remember ::: html ::: AMZ #ad #wesr
The CEO in the New Millennium
Those who want to live a fulfilling life
What do you want to be remembered for? NYT Obits
Making the turn to the future
Adapting to circumstances?
#hor3 #wlh2
How is it possible to
work toward horizonS
that aren’t on your radar
at the right pointS in time ↓
#ewtl = evidence wall + time line
Outer world — inner world #hor3
One can only act
on what one is
paying attention (#adt) to —
no surprises
#fastp
↑ “Finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle” ↓
Edward de Bono
#ewtl = evidence wall + time line
the road ahead?
↑ Dealing with risk and uncertainty ↓
Every thing here ↑ ↓ can be summarized as:
Time-life Navigation©
#tln #adt → perceptual identity
#lms → #ams
TIME ::: LIFE ::: NAVIGATION ↓
#sda Having informed HORIZONs is essential
#sda An exploration path
No two people ever read the same book ↓
Outer world — inner world ↑ ↓
Image Thinking ↑ ↓
“Knowledge
is useless to executives
until it has been translated into deeds.
But before springing into action,
the executive needs to
plan his course.
Adequate ecological awareness is needed
He needs to think about
desired RESULTS,
What needs doing?
Serious Creativity
probable restraints,
future revisions,
check-in points,
and implications for how
he'll spend his time.
The action plan is a
statement of intentions
rather than a commitment … .
#dwrau
It should be revised often
because every success
creates new #opportunities.
So does every failure ….
A written plan should anticipate
the need for flexibility.
In addition, the action plan
needs to create a system
for checking the results
against expectations ….
Finally, the action plan has to
become the basis
for the executive's time management.
Time is the executive's scarcest
and most precious resource.
And organizations … are inherently time wasters.
The action plan will prove useless
unless it's allowed to determine
how the executive spends his or her time.”
Peter F. Drucker,
"What Makes an Effective Executive,"
Harvard Business Review, June 2004
The Effective Executive
The Executive In Action Preface
Decisions
TO-LO-PO-SO-GO
Personal knowledge management system? No
Getting the right thing done? Yes #gtrtd
Topic work
Action Plans
The Power of an Hour
Major changeS #uf
are never linear,
never extrapolations of the past, and
never come with
warning or instruction booklet. #fastp
Searching for changeS
WordS or ConceptS ending with an uppercase S
signal more than plural, more than plural plural,
more than plural plural plural …
(e.g., “sound transportation deviceS” — narrow example) ↓
Out of Africa circa 1920 ish ↓ YouTube
what exists is getting old
Knowledge and technology
Technologies crisscross industries
and travel incredibly fast,
making few of them unique anymore.
The future of the planet
depends on our …
intelligence, information, and thinking ↓
Continuing Turmoil … ↓
Making the future #lypc
«§§§»
This page is a
relevant collection ↑ of
thought fragmentS details↓
Finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle #mmit #broad #sda ↓
Each element on an evidence wall ↑ is a brain address #adt
Books are attention directing frameworks/devices #adt
Each highlight or margin note ↓ is a brain address #adt
No two people ever read the same book
Always remember this is YOU
and your brain
at a specific place and time
looking at something
written sometime in the past
by someone with their brain
Knowing what to do
Practical Thinking toc
Putting knowledge to work
When a thought fragment (brain address #adt)
implies action
how do you process that fragment,
how do you identify the core concept,
how do you determine
the effective action direction,
the effective timing and
develop the necessary movement?
How do you integrate that fragment
into YOUR day-to-day life?
Integration requires caution: there are
going to be different tomorrowS
When do you abandon parts of your life?
The danger of too much planning
Warren Buffett’s Formula for Success: One Good Decision Every Five Years :::
Cornelius Vanderbilt ::: Time spans
↓
#fastp Finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle ↓
↑ Dealing with risk and uncertainty ↓
↑
↓ ↑
#adt Dealing with risk and uncertainty
No two people ever read the same book
Highlighting and margin notes = #adt
Just reading is not enough
for creating a work approach
that is effective for the challenges ahead
↓ ↑
Putting knowledge to work
The patterning system of the human mind
Three types of broad
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
↓
“The human mind ↓
attempts to fit ↓
impressions and stimulations
into a frame of expectations.” — PFD
Outer world — inner world
“At some unmarked point …
we imperceptibly moved out of the Modern Age
and into a new, as yet nameless, era” ↓
Landmarks of Tomorrow (circa 1957) by Peter Drucker
Alistair Cooke's America — first few chapters — Amazon
Post capitalist Society
Managing in the Next Society
#fastp Finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle
About technology ::: what exists is getting old
The INDIVIDUAL
in entrepreneurial society
“This is who I am” ↑
Positive revolutions
100 Years of Car Design: An Overview ↑
#fastp Finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle
Our idea of process
How is it possible … ?
What exists is getting OLD
Conditions for survival
Long years of PROFOUND change
Intelligence, Information, Thinking
as a “system” (PDF)
What’s Wrong with Economics?:
A Primer for the Perplexed
Dismal economics
The Poverty of Economic Theory #pdf
Economics, economists, and real people #pdf
The Big Con:
How the Consulting Industry
Weakens Our Businesses,
Infantilizes Our Governments, and
Warps Our Economies
Snake-oil ↑
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
McKinsey: What happened to the world's “greatest” companies?
From Good to Great … to Below Average
Tomorrow always arrives and
it is always different
The Second Curve
CONDITIONS FOR SURVIVAL
What does this evolution ↑ mean for you?
Image Thinking ↓
The explorer
#ewtl
What thinking is needed?
# hashtags ↓ are brain addresses #adt
#wlh = work-life horizons
#hor3© → #wle = work-life evolution ©
#hor3 = key horizons
#hor1 and #hor2
are reserved for unimagined futures #uf
#wlh = work-life horizons©
are a sub-system of
“time-life navigation”© #tln
and “work-life evolution”©
#hor3 = key horizons
#tln #hor3 #wle #wlh
and #fastp are connected
About technology ::: what exists is getting old
“Knowledge
is useless to executives
until it has been translated into deeds.
But before springing into action,
the executive needs to
plan his course.
Adequate ecological awareness is needed
He needs to think about
desired RESULTS,
What needs doing?
Serious Creativity
probable restraints,
future revisions,
check-in points,
and implications for how
he'll spend his time.
The action plan is a
statement of intentions
rather than a commitment … .
#dwrau
It should be revised often
because every success
creates new #opportunities.
So does every failure ….
A written plan should anticipate
the need for flexibility.
In addition, the action plan
needs to create a system
for checking the results
against expectations ….
Finally, the action plan has to
become the basis
for the executive's time management.
Time is the executive's scarcest
and most precious resource.
And organizations… are inherently time wasters.
The action plan will prove useless
unless it's allowed to determine
how the executive spends his or her time.”
Peter F. Drucker,
"What Makes an Effective Executive,"
Harvard Business Review, June 2004
The Effective Executive
#67 #wlh The Executive In Action Preface
Decisions
TO-LO-PO-SO-GO
Topic work
Action Plans
The Power of an Hour
#hor3 ↑ … Dealing with
risk and uncertainty ↓
Text formatting is an
attention-DIRECTING TOOL #adt
#hor3 #fastp ↓
↑ … Finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle ↓
#hor3 #sda ↓
Most mistakes in THINKING
are mistakes in perception:
seeing only part of the situation
#ewtl
The thought fragments
and thought clusters
on this page
are relevant to
navigating changing worldS. #tln
They are more than things to just READ. ↓
To be other than a waste of time ↓
↑ ↓ NAVIGATING #wlh needS to be
made operational ↓
within and across time dimensions. #ams
Just reading and taking notes
is not enough
Thinking and operacy are also needed
But first there needs to be
“adequate” ecological awareness. #ea
Many of the thought clusters
contain links to
other closely related #mmit #sda
thought clusters ↓
Time spans ::: Horizon evolution work
finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle ↑ ↓
↑ People change over such a long time span ↓
Teach Yourself to Think : Basic Processes —
Broad/Specific, General/Detail ::: Projection ::: Attention Directing :::
Recognition and Fit ::: Movement and Alternatives
… again, before undertaking decisive action,
“adequate” ecological awareness is needed ↓
#hor3
AWARENESS
is an essential FOUNDATION for DOING ↓
Where to jump next?
What we do today
needs to ‘crack doors’
toward tomorrowS
FoundationS ↓ for futureS directed decisionS
The Second Curve
#hor3
Drucker: a political/social ecologist
Books by
Peter Drucker ::: Walter Wriston ::: Bob Buford ::: Rick Warren
#hotw
History Of The World In Two Hours
Last 15 minutes — A pivotable event
in human history (Columbian Exchange)
More food → more calories → more energy
Population doubles to 900 million within three centuries
Power shifts to the “West”
Population explosion of the 20th century
November 18, 2022 world population reached 8 billion people
About technology ::: what exists is getting old
Tomorrow always arrives
and it is always different
↑ America Before Columbus
The TransformationS: From YesterdayS toward TomorrowS
THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION:
the meaning and impact of knowledge FOR society
The Search for Intelligent Life Is About to Get a Lot More Interesting
«§§§»
#uf #tln #hor3 #wlh
How is it possible
to WORK TOWARD
#horizonS
that aren’t on YOUR mental radar
at the right pointS in time?
When is the right point time, the necessary point in time,
the adequate point in time to be able to prepare and pivot,
or the best point in time?
↑ Consider major historical events
in combination with various global locations
“THE BEST TIME TO PLANT A TREE
WAS 20 YEARS AGO.
THE SECOND BEST TIME
IS NOW.”
Chinese Proverb
No two people ever read the same book
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
“Tools” will be needed
They have to be identified and acquired.
Information is a tool as are thinking skills.
#Information: IIT ::: Six frames ::: The White Hat ::: Executives need
Tools extend human capabilities ↓
#hor3 #sda The brain can only SEE ↑ ↓ what it is prepared to SEE
We live in the world WE SEE ::: The centering of mental patterns
Parallel thinking
#fastp ↓
↑ … finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle
The New Society
Judgement required
Why didn’t somebody SHOW me?
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
Self-development … something once gained
can’t be taken away
Apple™ Freeform
Before long
new puzzle pieces emerge
while existing pieces change, age, and disappear ↓
The Transformations
The Grail Knight : “But choose wisely,
for while the true Grail will bring you “life”,
the false Grail will take it from you”.
That knowledge has become THE resource …
Ludecy
#wlh
Making a living is no longer enough,
work has to make a life ↓
Average life-expectancy of an organization #org
#tln #fastp Everyday thinking — knowing what to do
Real GDP
#hor3 #wlh #worldview
People of high #effectiveness
are conspicuous by their absence
in executive jobs continue
AMZ What makes an effective executive?
What Executives Should Remember ::: html ::: AMZ
A road ahead — connect, connect, connect
#tln #knowledge2
From Knowledge to KnowledgeS
Knowledge exists only in application.
Libraries and schools are concerned with information
#wlh
Replace the quest ↑ for achievement or success
with the quest for contribution.
#tln #hor3 #wlh #mo1
Buford said Drucker passed on
three questions
everyone should ask themselves during
different seasons of life:
“Who am I, now?”
“Where do I belong?”
“What’s my contribution now?”
“Who I want to be tomorrow” — Thomas Crown 2:23
The Josh Abrams story
THE ALTERNATIVE TO TYRANNY
“For almost nothing
in our educational-system
PREPARES people for …
THE REALITY
in which THEY will live, work.
and become effective.” PFD
Political/social ecologist
Topics vs. realities ::: larger view ↓
“Is it then
not only astonishing
but also absurd
that THINKING is not
the core subject
in all education? …
totally neglected” explore
Most mistakes in THINKING
are mistakes in perception
Choice of ATTENTION areas
The Black Cylinder Experiment
ATTENTION directing frameworks
Hierarchical institutions vs. social networks —
as the true sources of power
and drivers of change? — Niall Ferguson
THE ALTERNATIVE TO TYRANNY
#ptf Civilization: The West and the Rest at Amazon.com
Charles Kuralt’s America
Alistair Cooke’s America
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
The Vietnam War: An Intimate History
The New Pluralism
#ptf Amazon: Principles for Dealing with
the Changing World Order —
Why Nations Succeed or Fail by Ray Dalio
Kara Swisher:
A Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Predicts the Future —
and What He Sees Is Concerning.
Ray Dalio discusses the economic and political
mechanics of a changing world order
Google: “what are the big social issues of today”
Every social problem is an opportunity
Amazon.com: Thomas Friedman books ::: NYT
Amazon.com: The World Is Flat :
A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Amazon.com: Thank You for Being Late:
An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
The future of the planet
depends on the
perceptions — and
the horizons —
between OUR ears
“Practical men who believe themselves
to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence,
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air,
are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler
of a few years back” — John Maynard Keynes
#sda From Knowledge to KnowledgeS
Management Worldview(S)
No one has any relevant experience here ↓
and REALITY does’t care
#hor2 #hor3 #wlh2
Management Challenges for the 21st Century and Managing in the Next Society
“The quality of our future
will depend entirely on
the quality of our thinking” — #EdB
“Applies on a personal level,
a community level
and on the world level” EdB
Think! Before It's Too Late
#ptf Dealing with risk and uncertainty
#ptf We know only two things about the future … (continue)
Intelligence, Information, Thinking #pdf
#wlh #ewtl Operacy — the thinking that goes into doing …
The INDIVIDUAL in entrepreneurial society
Imagining Navigation Course Changes
From Knowledge to KnowledgeS ::: Knowledge and Technology #technology #pdf
#hor3
Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Polity !!!
And with knowledge becoming the key resource,
there is only a world economy
About technology
Information challenges ::: #41
Strategic decisions ↑ ::: Six Thinking Hats
What would happen
if …
a region (North America, EU, ASEAN etc.)
a nation, a sub-nation, an organization,
city, ethnic group or other group of people
were satisfied
repeating last week
over and over and over and over?
Where in the world
is this stagnation
the prevailing reality?
The INDIVIDUAL in entrepreneurial society
From Knowledge to KnowledgeS ::: Knowledge and Technology #pdf
Richard N. Haass
#ptf The World: A Brief Introduction — Amazon #ad
Preface
PART I: THE ESSENTIAL HISTORY :::
From the Thirty Years War to the Outbreak of World War I (1618-1914) :::
The Long Shadow: the Great War and the Twentieth Century :::
From World War II Through World War I (1914-1945) :::
The Cold War (1945 - 1989) ::: The Post-Cold War Era (1989 -Present) :::
PART II: REGIONS OF THE WORLD ::: Europe :::
East Asia and the Pacific ::: Asia :::
The Middle East ::: Africa ::: The Americas :::
PART III: THE GLOBAL ERA ::: Globalization :::
Terrorism and Counterterrorism :::
Nuclear Proliferation ::: Climate Change ::: Migration :::
The Internet, Cyberspace, and Cybersecurity :::
Global Health ::: Trade and Investment :::
Currency and Monetary Policy ::: Development :::
PART IV: ORDER AND DISORDER :::
Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Balance of Power :::
Alliances and Coalitions ::: International Society :::
War Between Countries :::
Internal Instability and War Within Countries :::
The Liberal World Order ::: Preface
What thinking is needed?
Is reality divided into conceptual “islands”
similar to the parts and chapters of a book?
Obviously not,
but we still need
attention-directing frameworks.
Social ecology ↑ ↓ #soceco #apta
The future that has already happened
If a book
similar to The World ↑ had been
researched and written
in the 1930s, 1950s, or 1970s,
how useful would it be
to those
attempting to navigate their lives
toward positive horizons
in the 1990s, 2010s, today
or tomorrowS?
Kevin Kelly: 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
We know only two things about the future … (continue)
About time ↓
About hashtags (#) on this page
#ptf = predicting the future
The road ahead?
… finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle
A few people
(not very many)
higher up your
LIFE
food chain
may be OBSERVING
your #worldview
and behavior …
people decisions are the real control of an organization #org
Who might some of these observers be? Stalin, Hitler, Le Duan …
“You have to produce results
in the short term.
But you also have to
produce results in the long term.
And the long term is not simply
the adding up of short terms.” — Druckerism
Aim high
#sda Most mistakes in thinking
are
mistakes in perception
continue
Seeing only
part of the situation ↑ ↓
Dealing with
risk and uncertainty ↑ ↓
An #idea
can never
make the best use
of available information
because …
«§§§»
How is it POSSIBLE to
work toward
unexpected #horizons …
Books by
Peter Drucker ::: Walter Wriston ::: Bob Buford ::: Rick Warren
…
that aren’t on your mental radar …
… at the right pointS in time?
«§§§»
#wlh
“You must take
integrating responsibility
for putting YOURSELF
into the BIG PICTURE.”
#horizons
#whtmal = work has to make a life
#bp = big picture #self-development
#ir #lter #dtao #operacy #trade Pluralism
#bp #fastp #lter
What Executives Should Remember
AMAZON ::: html
Aim high
#ewtl
From Knowledge to KnowledgeS ::: Knowledge and Technology #pdf
Information challenges ::: #41
Strategic decisions ↑ ::: Six Thinking Hats
These ↑ #horizons
are YOUR means
for making YOUR futureS —
requires different time usage
including
some different
“ecological awareness” here
#worldview and #horizons overlap … worldview
provides the “mental space”
for choosing horizons
#horizons
What’s the outer limit of your concern? …
… Tomorrow, next week, your “life-time,”
the futureS of the planet?
#lter #horizons
Who you really are
and
who you might become … ?
«§§§»
Ideas, thoughts, “brain addresses” on this site
can be individually copied, edited, and organized
in a sequence
that fits your aspirations and horizons
«§§§»
Reality is not linear
so don’t expect this page/site
to be linear —
where all of the pieces
are in one place
#worldview #fastp
Pick a time and place in history
then consider
how you could
integrate yourself
into the existing situation
and what strategic intent
should you pursue … ?
… the overnight leap … from Abraham’s time
Human Evolution 101
“Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago
and, in several early migrations,
spread throughout Africa (where it is dubbed H.ergaster)
and Eurasia.” — Wikipedia
Technology: what really matters
“Evolution is very slow, very messy,
very wasteful and is incapable of
making the best use of available resources.” #EdB
“Scientists say planet in midst of
sixth mass extinction,
Earth’s wildlife running out of
places to live” —CBS
“Language is an encyclopedia of ignorance” ↑
Do we need a new theory of evolution?
Your family tree ↑ ↓
Practical Thinking
What you have others want and will struggle to get more
What Goes On Behind Closed Doors #wgobcd
#uf Dealing with risk and uncertainty
History of the World in Two Hours (audio playback 7 min.)
History hasn’t come to an end …
↑ Imagine someone, somewhere
in an earlier time
trying to figure out
what to do
with the rest of their life. #sda
We can only work TOWARD
the thingS on our mental radar ↓
at a point in time
“Most mistakes in thinking ↑ are
mistakes in perception”
Connect, connect, connect …
“The mind can SEE ↑
only
what it is
prepared to SEE”
“Once you SEE something
you can not UNSEE it” ↓ continue
“Most mistakes in thinking ↑ are
mistakes in perception”
#sit ↑ → … → #JUDGEMENT ↓
#seek #avoid #means ← to get other things
Intelligence, Information, Thinking pdf ↓
Attention-directing frameworks
#self-development
a.k.a.
#tln #sda #uf
Time-life navigation © ↓
#Trade ↓
The Ascent of Money ↑ ::: WPedia ::: AMZ ::: YT
The Square and the Tower:
Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
America Before Columbus
The Great Degeneration
#lter
The Second Curve or Why bother? ↓
Outliers ::: Finishing Well
From Knowledge to KnowledgeS
Management and the World’s Work
What Executives Should Remember ::: html ::: AMZ
THEY don’t want YOU to SEE!
TLN Insights
What thinking is needed?
Time-life navigation concept map
“You must take
integrating responsibility
for putting YOURSELF
into the BIG PICTURE.”
#wlh #horizons
#whtmal = work has to make a life
#bp = big picture #self-development
#ir #lter #dtao #operacy #trade Pluralism
What Executives Should Remember ::: html ::: AMZ
… the real pattern of economic activity
#worldview
What exists is getting old ↑ ↓ #bp
The Five Deadly Sins
Unimagined futureS ↑ ↓ are near receding #horizonS #ptf
#ewtl
information challenges ↑
#horizons
↑ Making a living is no longer enough ↑.
“Work” has to make a life ↓. continue #whtmal
… ↑ finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle ↓ #fastp
“Life is based on
beliefs, expectations and assumptions.” ↑ ↓ EDB
The explorer
Attention directing frameworks ::: Think! Before It's Too Late ::: The Six Thinking Hats
Knowledge-Based Management
This page offers:
#bp #fastp A brainroad for designing a way forward ↓ …
#fastp
… an evolving life action #work-approach and work plan
that circumvents
your history, your current #situation or your current #worldview
that imprison you in the past #psdapa
#Work-approach: Identify and record the thought-fragments ↑ ↓ —
with their implied #horizons translated for YOU ↓ —
that you're willing to work toward
in your life — within time. #adt #apta
#36 #uf #tln #hor3 #wlh #horizons #mo1 #seek #means
“Those who want to live a #fulfilling life —
who want to feel as if there is some purpose
in their being on this earth —
will have to learn
to MANAGE THEMSELVES” ↓ PFD
#mo1 = key managing oneself “ideas”
“They will have to accept the fact
that it is their own responsibility
to find #fastp
meaningful work
that builds on
their strengths and values”
PFD #svm.
Work has to make a life
How can the individual survive? →
“What cause do I want to serve?” →
Josh Abrams → allocating one’s life
The second half of your life
Make your life your endgame
Buford said Drucker passed on
three questions everyone should ask themselves during
different seasons of life:
“Who am I, now?” “Where do I belong?”
“What’s my contribution now?”
“Who I want to be tomorrow” — Thomas Crown 2:23
The danger of too much planning ::: Return on luck
Opportunities
Connect, connect, connect
Managing Oneself overview on steroids
Seeking guidance?
Imagining Navigation Course Changes
Why bother?
#org
Who Is An Executive?
Every knowledge worker
in modern organization
is an “executive” if,
by virtue of
his position or knowledge,
he is responsible for
a contribution
that materially affects
the capacity of the organization
to perform and to obtain results. summary ::: full version
The INDIVIDUAL in entrepreneurial society
How can the INDIVIDUAL survive?
#70 #sda #wlh #thinking
“One can … never be sure
what the
knowledge worker
thinks—
and yet
THINKING !!!
is her/his specific work;
it is his/her “doing.”” ↓
Where in an organization?
Within ↑ REALITY there are recursive needs for:
 SEEING → broad #sda
SEEING → the road ahead
Thinking broad and thinking detailed
Dense reading and dense listening
SEEING → that REALITY
is not controlled by
any system
including an education system —
now or in the future … ↓ #ptf
#worldview #bp #ptf Druckerism ↓
“We know only two things
about the future ↑.
It cannot be known.
It will be different
from what exists now
and from what we now expect”
#worldview ::: The Second Curve ::: Water Logic ↓
↑ … projecting your current work or current life #situation
into the future
is very likely to imprison you in the past
e.g. The Bomber Mafia ↓
TomorrowS
… you can’t get there
directly from here
… so you can’t get there by
piling up more todayS —
even with some adjustments.
The challenge:
‘To boldly go (some) where (valuable)
no person has gone before’?
e.g., In 1910 no one had gone to 1920 or 1930 or 1940 …
#hor3 #ewtl
NAVIGATING ↑ ↓ is done by the human mind —
Intelligence Information Thinking — (#PDF) #apta
PLUS
why thinking is so very important
Why bother?
Introduction to Human Evolution ::: Imagine a time so vast …
How many species? ::: Water logic
Try reflecting on the daily and longer-term lives ↑
over thousands of years — up to the industrial revolution
Human migration and evolution ↑ what’s driving them?
A change in the human condition ::: Landmarks of Tomorrow
The Second Curve by Charles Handy
Finishing Well ::: Charles Kuralt’s America
the road to Davy’s Bar —
missing the turn to the future
#dwrau #sda #fastp
#second-curve #connect #worldview #horizons #ptf
#YouTube ::: larger 1 ::: larger 2
WHAT EXISTS IS GETTING OLD ↓
The Second Curve ↑ ↓
What Executives Should Remember ::: html ::: AMZ
… the real pattern of economic activity
Water Logic
The Five Deadly Sins
#bp Long years of profound changes ↑ ↓
You don’t know what you’re going to be doing next
Management: 21st Century ~ Next Society
The Economy ↑ ↓
Knowledge Dimensions ↑
#49 #tln #hor3 #wlh #work-approach #lms #ams
A work approach ↑ ↓
that is effective for the challengeS ahead
is needed ↓
The danger of too much planning — the need
for being flexible and ready to seize the right opportunities
when they come …
The #wisdom learning curve
Boredom is one of those challenges
#ewtl
There are things that happen
between two points in time
and things that are happening over time … ↑ ↓
What exists is getting old
If you can see the road ahead …
THEY don’t want you to see!
↑ finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle #fastp
Knowledge-Based Management
«§§§»
To know something,
to really understand
something important,
one must look at it
from sixteen different angles #sda #apta
Most mistakes in thinking are
mistakes in perception #sda
Richard Haass #worldview ↓
The World: A Brief Introduction Amazon ::: Preface #pdf
Allocating one’s life ::: Managing Oneself :::
Executive realities #work-approach
Important: Page/site exploration/navigation ↓
This page contains a great many web links (a.k.a. brainroadS)
These links are a means
of making mental #connections (#sda)
In quite a few places on this page,
you will see a cluster of links.
These clusters are meant to create
a bigger mental picture and
a better mental map.
Some of these clusters are in “teleprompter” format
to make exploration vectors more obvious
The explorer
… To further aid in making connections,
this page contains #hashtags (#sda #dtmp #lms #connect etc.) and
word stem search suggestions.
Search results may create
another set of thought clusters
and a different mental map.
Not every possible connection ( #connect) is tagged.
Some hashtags are “place marks,” brain-addresses/neighborhoods —
#01 → #78 #sda …
Web #page-search: Windows = Control F | macOS = Command F | iOS
Try a #page-search ↑ for
“effectiveness” ::: “concentration” or
“management by objectives”
For each thought fragment, concept, illustration, link, or text block
you encounter ↑ ↓
your could EXP lore (rla exp.com)
employing dense reading and dense listening
plus #thinkingbroad and thinking detailed
then ask yourself what does this mean for me? (illustration)
along with performing a #PMI
in conjunction with visualizing (#visual) the operacy involved
Teach Yourself to Think
This page is
an entry point, an introduction, a brainroad & a breadcrumb trail for ↓
BEWARE OF THE PRISONs OF THE PAST —
YOURS plus “your small worldS” with their six degrees of separation
and their water logic
(past, present and future)
In a relatively short period of time,
humanity has moved from a world
where people had to be totally self-sufficient
to a world becoming more and more dependent on
a society of interdependent organizations,
but these organizations are not permanent.
The journey through this page
is going to be confusing
because changing realities must be confusing.
YouTube : The History of Europe: Every Year #youtube → image
what exists is getting old
Imagining Navigation Course Changes
#horizons Age of Discontinuity ::: The Divide ::: Post Capitalist Society
Moving beyond CAPITALISM #worldview #horizons #apta
Capitalism in One Country (1946) ::: The Code of Capital #pdf
Xerox, Kodak, Nokia, Excellent companies et al. #pdf
CNN miniseries: 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, 2000’s, The Movies
Social Needs and Business Opportunities ::: The Descent of Money
The explorer
If Socialism is defined, as Marx defined it,
as ownership of the means of production
by the employees, then
the United States has become
the most “socialist” country around —
while still remaining
the most “capitalist” one as well. continue
You may find it very useful
to create and maintain
a “travel log” and “map”
for recording the
important mental “points of interest”
along your mental journey ↑ ↓
As a person moves through life and time,
major new realities
aren’t automatically revealed to them
when it is convenient
Never heard of … #apta
“To know something,
to really understand
something important,
one must look at it from sixteen different angles.
People are perceptually slow,
and there is no shortcut to understanding;
it takes a great deal of time.” more ↓
#wlh #hor3
More than anything else
we are responsible for
our own #self-development
and allocating our lives continue
If you can see the road ahead …
There are no answers here. There are
there are only BROAD #sda
attention-directing #adt
thought-fragments
and/or connectable thought clusters
Life and Action Management System Foundation
(#LMS3 #AMS #work-approach) ↓
finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle
Larger view ↑
The Six Thinking Hats may be applied
to the concepts implied
within the thinking map above
↑ finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle #fastp
“In today’s ever changing world,
you can’t meet the responsibilities of leadership
unless you keep up with the times”
— and that must be confusing
because there will alway be
multiple contradictions.
larger view ↑ ::: seen-ew-attention ::: explore ↓
#wlh
“Your first and foremost job as a leader
is to take charge of your own energy
and then help to orchestrate the energy
of those around you” — Peter Drucker
BEWARE OF THE PRISONs OF THE PAST
If
you
don’t
design
Alternative life directions
(Why you NEED many competing patterns ::: broad #sda ::: #design :::
imagining navigation course changes ::: early career work :::
insights ::: why bother? ::: self-development :::
managing oneself — a revolution in human affairs ::: Peter Drucker)
your own life
then
someone else
(#worldview #hotw ::: The Vanishing East ::: IBM ::: guttersnipes !!! :::
Easy prey !!! ::: #28 #ea #fastp Trans/Tribal ::: Wars !!!)
What’s happening to America's middle class? And the implications?
Can workers really “fix” the problem? (Kodak, Blackberry, Sears … ) #pdf
will
do it
for you
me → #wgobcd → Vietnam-era Vet and former
Fortune 200 Fixer and General Manager of Discontinued Operations ↑
#wgobcd #surprises
“If you don’t design your own life plan,
chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan.
And guess what they have planned for you?
Not much.” ― Jim Rohn
Alternative life directions
«§§§»
What happens
when the world changes
and you don’t?
BEWARE OF THE PRISONs OF THE PAST → our inheritance ↓
Circa 1958 ish ↑ “No one born after the turn of our century (1900)
has ever known anything
but a world uprooting its foundations,
overturning its values
and toppling its idols.
No one younger than this century
has known anything
but an age of revolution.
In the political, the social, the economic,
even the cultural sphere,
the revolutions of our time
have been revolutions “against”
rather than revolutions “for.””
The New Frontiers (The Marshall Plan →)
A panoramic view of Ottoman era Istanbul in the 19th century
VS.
Handbook for
the Positive Revolution
… avoiding a system that makes intelligent people
stagnate and ineffective
↑ Principles ::: Methods ::: Power
The Principles : Effectiveness ::: Constructive (design) :::
Respect ::: Self-Improvement ::: Contribution
Effectiveness: Lord heart of the matter
The four elements of Commando Spirit :
Courage, Determination, Unselfishness,
and Cheerfulness in the face of adversity small worlds ::: Aldo Kane
«§§§»
Thinking conclusions ↑ ↓
based on something familiar
are likely to be
associated with
yesterday’S reality continue
Outer world — inner world
«§§§»
Imagine your life existing within the world of
1910, 1935, 1950, 1960, 1970 or …,
how would you devote your time
to creating your future
without basing your actions
on an ill-fated extrapolation of the past?
BEWARE OF THE PRISONs OF THE PAST
We know only two things about the future (continue)
Why you NEED many competing patterns ↑ ::: broad worldview #sda within perception ↑
The danger in excessive emphasis on
rigid
acceptances and rejections — judgement
«§§§»
This page provides a compass and
a unique breadcrumb trail
for SEEING an evolving life
among other lives
in changing, unpredictable small worlds
over time
If you focus your attention
on anyone’s life
at a point in time
you will see their small worldS
connected to other small worldS
through degrees of separation
↑ Can be seen in Rick Steves’ Europe #youtube
This page is
a time-investment menu
and thought-scape for
identifying (seeing) and exploring horizons —
alternative horizons to consider
Look north, look south … note what you SEE #adt continue
There are no answers
only alternatives and
constantly receding horizons
#horizons
… work has to make a life continue ↑ ↓
but how?
#wlh
Successful careers are not planned … continue ↑ ↓ #ptf
We are … what we do — repeatedly ( Groundhog Day )
#horizons From Knowledge to KnowledgeS
#evidence-wall and timeline #iewt → larger ↓
#ewtl
If you can see the road, life is easier continue
Your thinking, choices, decisions are determined by what you’ve “ SEEN”
FREEDOM
Build on islands (a.k.a. small worlds) of health and strength
What, exactly, will we remember years from now?
Memories from people who lived through major historical events —
World War II, the Vietnam War, and others —
offer a clue for how we’ll look back on the pandemic.
We know only two things about the future (continue)
Why you NEED many competing patterns ↑ ↓
«§§§»
Along the road of time there are new realities
that create a new reality
which is followed by another new reality
followed by another new reality.
New realities have an impact on an old reality and old realities.
Transnational/Tribal #ea #fastp #worldview #connect
Part of a new reality is that there will be people around the world
who are/were trapped in prior realities at various points in time.
Circa 1958 ish ↑ “No one born after the turn of our century (1900)
has ever known anything
but a world uprooting its foundations,
overturning its values
and toppling its idols.
No one younger than this century
has known anything
but an age of revolution.
In the political, the social, the economic,
even the cultural sphere,
the revolutions of our time
have been revolutions “against”
rather than revolutions “for”” The New Frontiers
#ihor ↓
Fragmentary evidence of
changing worldS may be seen in museums around the world —
at various pointS in time. All worldS are small worldS
Karen Blixen : Out of Africa
What Goes On Behind Closed Doors #wgobcd ↓
#evidence-wall ↓
The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook at Amazon
Importance of thinking → Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question. #pdf ← WWII
“Only the paranoid #survive” — boredom? ::: From Progress to Innovation #pdf
#lter #hotw History of the World in Two Hours (first 2 and last 13 minutes)
The origins of native Americans:
First Face of America
What happened to America before Columbus? #youtube #worldview
What happened to the empires in world history? GONE #worldview
"David Reynolds" historian YouTube #youtube #worldview
The Asian Century
This page and it’s linked pages
are a foundation for creating life work -books.
images: single cell 1 ::: single cell 2 ::: tree of life ::: history of life ::: stages
Did you #SEE and #NOTE the patterns (#connect #pattern #patterns) of change? ↑ —
The universe and our worldS are not stable nor static but dynamic and
non-linear — tomorrowS aren’t extrapolations of yesterdayS
Even the variety of universe “conceptualizations” ↓ are of very recent origins
#hotw History of the world in seven minutes #audioplayback
Making the future #ptf #mtf
#08 “It is almost frightening
how fast the obvious of yesteryear
is turning incomprehensible” continue
On the road ahead ↑, there will be multiple, multiple new realitieS ↓
In less than 150 years, (circa 1988)
MANAGEMENT
has transformed
the social and economic fabric
of the world’s developed countries. … continue
#sop The Spirit of Performance #pdf
Hong Kong more recent
Google: McKinsey Asia
The New Pluralism ::: Up to poverty ::: Luther, Machiavelli, and the Salmon
What is the social impact of your participation and contribution? ↑ ↓
How will your children and grandchildren
know to
and
know how to
integrate their lives
into this
unfolding and unpredictable reality?
Does being just another job-holder count?
How can the individual survive? continue
We live in the world we see continue
In a relatively short period of time
humanity has moved from a world
where people had to be totally self-sufficient
to a world becoming more and more dependent on
a society of interdependent organizations,
but these organizations are not permanent.
#iecs We know only two things about the future:
It cannot be known.
It will be different from what exists now and from what we now expect
The future that has already happened #ptf
Living in an Age of Overlap
Intelligence Information Thinking (#iit)
BROAD worldview #sda
From Knowledge to KnowledgeS ::: Knowledge and Technology #pdf
The Emerging Knowledge Society
> Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Polity
> School and Education as Society’s Center
> The Competitive Knowledge Economy
> How Can Government Function?
The Manager and the Moron ::: Luther, Machiavelli … ::: Transnational/Tribal
… #worldview to RESPONSIBILITY based organization ::: #article titles
The mothership
What Executives Should Remember ::: html ::: AMZ
… the real pattern of economic activity
↑ larger view and additional connections
The Five Deadly Sins
Try mentally running this ↑ backward and forward through time !!! — 1800 - 2050
#Cities ::: Supply chain management ::: Last mile
Even organizations that normally are long-lived
In a transition period, the number of people in need always grows
Easy prey !!!
The English Constitution ::: Lombard Street
Supplemental awareness
BEWARE OF THE PRISONs OF THE PAST ↑ ↓
Real GDP (gross domestic product) trend 1950 - 2020 ↓
Economic #growth ↑ is linked to interest rates ↓ Central banks running scared
Stock prices vs. economic growth. ↓ both are linked to interest rates ↑
Per capita GDP ↓
“Economists never know anything until twenty years later.
There are no slower learners than economists.
There is no greater obstacle to learning
than to be the prisoner
of totally invalid but dogmatic theories.
The economists are where the theologians were
in 1300: prematurely dogmatic” — Frontiers of Management
“The customer never buys
what you think you sell.
And you don’t know it.
That’s why it’s so difficult
to differentiate yourself.” — Druckerisms
Potential customers are somewhere else ↓
Population distribution by location ↓
Production ::: Larger view of the image above
larger view of the image above ↑
Ports
larger
larger 1 ::: larger 2
What needs doing around here?
A local view from Google Earth ↓
Try searching Google for "largest cities" then see
what do they look like on the map in overview and in street view.
Along the road to Terra Alta ↓
Urban world: The shifting global business landscape
Knowledge: Its Economics and Its Productivity
Economic content and structure landscape
High tech is living in the nineteenth century continue
futile heroic efforts … but tomorrow always arrives
Victims of success
Dense reading and Dense Listening
thinking broad and thinking detailed
Decisions ::: Topic work ::: Action plans ::: Communications
Google: global falling birth rate implications
… and at the same time ↓
Why good people still can’t get jobs #pdf
Will GE’s pension freeze help or hurt? #pdf
#reality check: the journeyS ahead ↓ are not going to be easy …
“For almost nothing (#fan — source)
in our educational systems
prepares people
for the #reality
in which they will live, work,
and become #effective” —
Peter Drucker
… and graduate school is much worse …
… “ not even educated in management ” … continue
Google search
Druckerism and intellectual capitalist #wlh #lms #education
Books by
Peter Drucker ::: Walter Wriston ::: Bob Buford ::: Rick Warren
How could an education system
prepare us
for unknown and unpredictable
future #realitieS? #ptf
Topics in books by Walter Wriston #ea #fastp ::: Transnational/Tribal
A Century of Social Transformation
… take more responsibility for himself or herself,
rather than depend on the company. continue
#ATTENTION: Preparing to SEE #adt
The Educational Revolution circa 1957 A sudden, sharp change
has occurred in the meaning and impact of
knowledge for society
#dinp Description is not #perception
Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Polity
#worldview
People of high #effectiveness are conspicuous by their absence in executive jobs continue
The Pentagon Papers ::: The Afghanistan Papers
#hor3 #wlh “To say that most executives spend most of their time tackling the problems of today is euphemism.
They spend most of their time on the problems of yesterday.
Executives spend more of their time trying to unmake the past (here) than on anything else.” Druckerism
what exists is getting old
«§§§»
“We need judgement to find our way through life.
The danger is an excessive emphasis on rigid acceptances and rejections, and not enough attention to design.
#Design is a matter of putting things together to achieve an objective and to serve our values #svm.
Instead of searching for the standard solution we design a way forward.” — Edward de Bono
The explorer
JUDGEMENT
#ewtl
The patterning system of the brain
NO SURPRISES
Managing the Moron
“We can only move through life because the judgement of ‘recognition’ tells us at every moment
what things are;
what things to #seek; #lms
what things to #avoid; #lms
what things to #use as means to get other things. #lms
Without judgement we could not proceed at all .
The danger lies in the harsh, quick and rigid judgements that we require of ourselves and that are required by our traditional thinking habits .
Too often we use stereotypes to ease our judgement.
Too often we put up false either/or choices to force ourselves, or others, into a certain position .
All this is an integral part of the Gang of Three thinking system, with its emphasis on:
rejection of the ‘untruth’
the search for absolutes
and an inclusion/ exclusion box type of logic with the avoidance of contradiction.
This is an excellent system for many purposes but it has its limits and its dangers.
In a changing world the ‘boxes’ derived from the past may no longer be adequate to describe a changed present .
The dangers of judgement lie both in the rejection aspect and in the acceptance aspect .
Something rejected drops out of attention and perception .
It is no longer an ingredient in our thinking .
Something accepted may be accepted too wholeheartedly, when acceptance should be
milder ,
doubtful or
related to circumstances .
While acknowledging the practicality of simplistic black/white judgements, most people are coming to realize that the world does not work that way.
If you choose to take a black and white photograph of the world this does not mean that the world has no colors.
Instead of judgement the emphasis is on ‘design’ .
How do we put things together in order to satisfy our values and needs ?
Design may be much more difficult than judgement but the results will be better .
Many problems can be solved by analysis .
You identify the cause of the problem and then you seek to remove that cause .
But when the cause cannot be found or, if found, cannot be removed, then we are paralyzed because more and more #analysis will not solve that problem.
We need to be able to ‘design the way forward ’, leaving the cause in place .
#ihong While we are excellent at #analysis we are not nearly so expert at design — because design requires idea creativity .” continue
Judgement needs to be made OPERATIONAL
Parallel Thinking
Dealing with risk and uncertainty continue
Harnessing Everyday Genius?
#04 In navigating … ↑ ↓
“Your #thinking, choices, #decisions are determined by
what you’ve “SEEN” ↓
Not everything you’ve seen is equally valuable and there maybe contradictions
Once you’ve seen something you can’t unsee it
We live in the world WE SEE
“#Decision making ↑ #PDFs is a time machine (here)
that synchronizes into a single time — the present —
a great number of divergent time spans.” Druckerism
“Wisdom is about awareness ↑. #ptf ↓
If you know the road ↑, life is easier.
TLN insights
If you can see the road ↑ ↓, life is easier.
If you can discover new roads ↑ ↓, life is richer.
If you know you have a choice of roads ↑ ↓,
life is richer.” continue
Richard Branson
#tln #whtmal
“Making a living is no longer enough,” …
“Work also has to make a life.”
Druckerism ::: TLN insights ::: Managing oneself (calendarize this? #ams)
Successful careers are not planned … #ptf continue
Consider these observations ↑ from different points in time.
How could you make them operational? ↓
evidence wall and timeline larger ↓
#ewtl
… still thinking inside the box?
“one acts only upon what one is paying attention to …” ↑
Build on islands (a.k.a. small worlds) of health and strength
We are nowhere near the end of the turbulences,
the transformations, the sudden upsets #lter continue
Long years of profound change #ptf
And “The actual #results of (current) action are not predictable ↓” #ptf continue
“I have known many people who are
very clever indeed within their own fields
(even winning #Nobel prizes)
but not especially ‘wise’
outside their own fields of study.” — EDB
#reality assumptions ::: The Black Cylinder Experiment !!! #bce
Josh Abrams — lessons ::: Danger of too much planning
Annual review ::: Goal review
«§§§»
#01 How is it possible
to work toward
the “right horizonS” — the “right thingS” —
that aren’t on your mental radar ↓ …
#evidence-wall ↓
… at the right points in time? ↑ ↓
#02 How is it possible
to know
what goes on
behind closed doors? #wgobcd #surprises
Why not let Peter Drucker provide some awareness and insights?
#worldview
Is “right” something #dogmatic or something determined by a #situation? ↓
The images above suggest an answer and
there is a connection to time spans #connect
What exists is getting old ↑ (wip) ::: The future that has already happened ↑ (wip) #worldview
You have to be prepared for the abandonment of everything (#wgobcd) ↑
From Progress to Innovation ↑
The Shift To The Knowledge Society ↑
Handbook for the Positive Revolution
The explorer
The explorer
rla exp.com = r eal l ife a dventures from exp ↑ loration #adt
The general intention: getting on down the road —
in YOUR life within TIME
employee development ↓
Judgement Needs to be Made Operational within time
#Thinking stages: exploring what to do → concluding → doing (#operacy) → back to stage 1
There are structureS to be considered in deciding what to do next ↓
“That knowledge has become THE resource ↑,
rather than a resource,
is what makes our society ‘post-capitalist.’
This fact changes — fundamentally —
the structure of society.
It creates new social and economic dynamics.
It creates new politics.” #knowledge ::: KEKP ::: MW
THIS ↑ MEANS IT HAS TO BE A SOCIETY OF ORGANIZATIONS ↓
«§§§»
Knowledge exists only in application
(… and not in school courses)
The knowledge we now consider knowledge proves itself in action …
Knowledge exists only in application
Moving beyond capitalism
From Progress to #Innovation
Startup thinking ::: Entrepreneurs and Innovation
«§§§»
#61 #attention1 of 3 #tln #wlh #ns #surprises
NO SURPRISES ↓
#adt1
“One does not pay attention to everything.
And one acts only upon
what one is
paying attention to. …
Attention-directing frameworks
… The reaction
may be thinking or
it may be action (which is only thinking
that passes through our mouths
or our muscles instead of our minds).
Getting things done
The world around
is full of a huge number of things
to which one could pay attention.
But it would be impossible
to react to everything at once.
So one reacts only to a selected part of it.
#wlh The choice of attention area
determines the action
or thinking that follows.
The choice of this area of attention
is one of the most
fundamental aspects of thinking” #edb TLN Insights
The reaction is governed by ↓
The brain is a history library
that has to run in the future tense. continue
what exists is getting old
«§§§»
… “Another implication is that the performance of an #individual, an organization, an industry, a country,
in acquiring and applying #connect
KNOWLEDGE
will increasingly become THE key competitive factor —for career and earnings opportunities of the #individuals; for the performance, perhaps even the survival, of the individual organization; for an industry; and for a country. (#mtf)
About time (wip) ::: The future that has already happened (wip)
The knowledge society will inevitably become far more competitive than any society we have yet known — for the simple reason that with knowledge being universally accessible, there are no excuses for nonperformance.
There will be no “poor” countries.
There will only be ignorant countries.
And the same will be true for individual companies, individual industries, and individual organizations of any kind.
It will be true for the #individual, too.
In fact, developed societies have already become infinitely more competitive for the #individual than were the societies of the early twentieth century—let alone earlier societies, those of the nineteenth or eighteenth centuries.
Then, most people had no opportunity to rise out of the “class” into which they were born, with most #individuals following their fathers in their work and in their station in life.” continue and small worlds
Knowledge and technology #pdf
WW II as Three-dimensional Chess #pdf #sda #thinking #knowledge #technology
Joining technological frontiers #pdf #knowledge
How marriage became an outdated concept #pdf
#Hong Kong more recent
Google: McKinsey Asia
Knowledge as THE key resource is fundamentally different from any of the traditional key resources, that is, from land and labor, and even from capital.
It is not tied to any country.
It is transnational.
It is portable.
It can be created everywhere, fast, and cheaply.
Finally, it is, by definition, changing.
Knowledge always makes itself obsolete within a short period of time.
The one thing that is predictable about a competitive advantage based on knowledge —whether the advantage be that of a country, of an industry, of an institution (whether a business or a university), or of an #individual—is that the advantage will soon be challenged, and probably by a total newcomer.
#evidence-wall ↓
For that reason alone the acquisition of knowledge, that is, learning, can no longer stop at any age. #wlhschools as partners with high performing adults and their organizatons
For an #individual, having a socially needed knowledge specialty is valuable — but #reality is not quite so simple
#thinkingcanvas ↓
Make Judgement Operational within time ↓
#wlh More than anything else, the #individual has to take more responsibility for himself or herself, rather than depend on the company — explored further down the page
#ewtl
#careerTimeView ↓ → knowledge industries, work, worker
Buford said Drucker passed on
three questions everyone should ask themselves during
different seasons of life:
“Who am I, now?” “Where do I belong?”
“What’s my contribution now?”
“Who I want to be tomorrow” — Thomas Crown 2:23
The danger of too much planning ::: Return on luck
Opportunities
What are the elements of work-life and career that need to be considered?
Google: Average company life span ::: Life expectancy of an institution
If you can see the road ahead — work-life time view #wisdom ↑ ↓ …
We live in the world WE SEE
#engagement?
Assumptions
Tactics (success) by Edward de Bono ::: People decisions
StrengthsFinder ::: Knowledge specialty evolution ::: Mojo :::
What Got You Here Won't Get You There ::: Managing Oneself a revolution …
The Second Half of One’s Life
Allocating your life
larger #careerTimeView ↑ ::: The walking dead
Opportunities ::: The return on luck
Build on islands (a.k.a. small worlds) of health and strength
#worldview #horizons It is time to give up thinking of jobs or career paths as we once did and think in terms of taking on assignments one after the other continue
Broad worldview #sda ::: Danger of too much planning ::: Learning to learn ::: Seasonal changes #parallel
Evolution of occupations
Know your strengths ::: The first #question to ask is what needs to be done ::: Every six months, ask yourself, what do I want to be remembered for? NYT Obits continue
You are the Twenty-first Century CEO of yourself
If you read only one management book OR Where do I begin to read Drucker? #whtmal
“To say that most executives spend most of their time tackling the problems of today is euphemism.
They spend most of their time on the problems of yesterday. (here)
Executives spend more of their time trying to unmake the past than on anything else.” Druckerism (what exists is getting old)
#62 #hor3 #wlh 25 JAN — Reinvent Yourself
The following thought fragments are a part of
managing oneself — a revolution in human affairs
The concepts below imply the need for dense reading plus
thinking broad and thinking detailed
“Knowledge people must take responsibility
for their own
development #self-development
and placement.
In today’s society and organizations, people work increasingly with knowledge, rather than with skill.
Knowledge and skill differ in a fundamental characteristic — #skills change very, very slowly.
Knowledge, however, changes itself.
What different knowledge specialties ↑
were necessary in each broad situation?
What were their origins and evolution?
It makes itself obsolete ↑, and very rapidly.
A #knowledge worker becomes obsolescent ↑ if he or she does not go back to school every three or four years. continuing education
#ewtl
The individual in entrepreneurial society
This not only means that the equipment of learning, of knowledge, of skill, of experience that one acquires early is not sufficient for our present life time and working time ↓.
People change over such a long time span.
They become different persons with
different needs,
different abilities,
different perspectives,
and, therefore,
with a need
to “reinvent themselves.”
I quite intentionally use a stronger word than “revitalize.”
If you talk of fifty years of working life — and this, I think, is going to be increasingly the norm — you have to reinvent yourself.
You have to make something different out of yourself, rather than just find anew supply of energy.” — The Daily Drucker
The second-half of your life
“Quite simply, the values habit determines the whole value of the thinking (in real life).
Without values there is no value to the thinking. #svm
In real life values determine choices, decisions, success and failure” continue
#tinl “There is no law requiring one to think for oneself or to make one's own #ideas.
In important matters it is usually easier to accept other people's ideas ready-made and this saves one the trouble of doing any thinking for oneself — though one may still have to do it in minor matters.
Often one has no choice but to accept the ideas of others because thinking things out for oneself can be so difficult.
Education unfortunately provides little help in this matter.
You can probably remember things you were taught at school
about geography (valleys, river deltas, rice-growing countries, etc.) and
about history (dates of battles, names of kings, etc.).
But can you remember what you were taught about thinking?
Or is thinking something that one knows all about anyway — like walking or breathing?
The truth is that thinking is too important a matter to do anything about.
So we have left it to the philosophers who over the ages have amused themselves with the most intricate analyses which have little relevance to everyday life.
Some time ago a man (Rudolf Carnap), who was described as being one of the most influential philosophers of the century, died.
Influential on his fellow philosophers, but hardly on anyone else.
Just how much influence does logical positivism have on everyday thinking?” practical thinking
#14 #wb #worldview #mmit
“Why bother?
Why didn’t somebody show me?
This is a sensible phrase to cover a sensible strategy.
Go your own way.
Do your own thing.
Carve out a little niche in the complex world and then be happy and content in that niche.
Being worried about the rest of the world is too futile and too difficult a task.
Let those (the unreasonable man) who are motivated to change the world work on that task. #wgobcd
The world will always last long enough to see out your lifetime.
Century of social transformation
#wgobcd guttersnipes ::: The Alternative to Tyranny
#wgobcd The Forces Creating a New Geography of Opportunity?
How can the individual survive?
I am not going to disagree with this point of view but to side-step it in order to write for those who know that they are inseparably part of the world in which they live : their own internal world, the local community world and the world at large …
sidebar — ↑ #connect ↓
What goes on behind closed doors #wgobcd ↓
Freedom is not fun … guttersnipes
Your education has not prepared you …
Plenty of people will always be needed
who can bring only muscle to the job continue
The End of Loyalty
“The reasonable man
adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable man
persists in trying to
adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Shaw
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
Wisdom BROAD #sda
Intelligence and PEOPLE BEHAVIOR #seek
More than an animal
Time-life navigation insights
Beware of the guttersnipes
Tomorrow always arrives
WHAT EXECUTIVES SHOULD REMEMBER (Audible)
How Much Labor Is Needed — and What Kind? #wgobcd continue
Managing oneself — a revolution in human affairs
#wlh A non-competitive life #aomt
Danger of too much planning
The responsibility based organization
We face long years of profound changes
Survival is competition
Living in a Lego™ world
Post-capitalist society has to be decentralized
#hor3
Remembered for — a difference in the lives of people —
A MAJOR HORIZON NYT Obits …
The Walking Dead
Alternative life directions
Ludecy
main brainroad continues ↓
… Let the others munch contentedly like cows in the field — happy that there is grass today.
My concern has always been with human thinking because this seems to me to play so central a #role in human happiness and development both from moment to moment and also over the longer term.
I believe that we have done relatively little about thinking but have been content with a fluency of argument and the ability to attack and defend positions.
This sort of thinking unfortunately lacks the creative, constructive and #design energies that we really need in order to go forward.
Indeed, our absurd emphasis on negativity seriously impedes such progress.
This particular book is not, however, about thinking habits and methods.
This book is about the fundamental background and setting in which we would use our thinking skills .
If we are disposed to be negative then our thinking skills will help us to be negative.
If we are disposed to be positive then our thinking skills will take us in that direction.
This is more than a moment to moment emotional bias — it is THE fundamental attitude of our being.
There are far too many people who believe that natural evolution controlled by critical negativity will form the #ideas that we need — just as Darwinian evolution perfected a variety of life forms.
This is a dangerous fallacy.
Evolution is very slow, very messy, very wasteful and is incapable of making the best use of available resources.
Inadequate — but not disastrous — #ideas and #institutions will #survive, perfect and defend themselves (#cfs #ole #lypc) thus preventing the more effective use of resources.
sidebar — ↑ #connect ↓
Realities:
Business realities, Market realities, and Knowledge realities
The Second Curve
Amazon → How the Mighty Fall — Stages: 1 Hubris Born of Success; 2 Undisciplined Pursuit of More; 3 Denial of Risk and Peril Stage; 4 Grasping for Salvation; 5 Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death.
Every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline.
There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top.
Anyone can fall and most eventually do.
Tomorrow always arrives
and it is always different
main brainroad continues ↓
… That has always been the logical basis for revolution.
This book is intended for those who see this logical need.
There is a useful place for negativity
in changing values; #svm
in providing shaping pressures;
in curbing excesses;
in removing defects in order to improve an idea; and
in forming the conscience of society.
But the constructive and creative energies have to be there in order to get the steady, step by step progress that is the basis of the positive revolution. …
A revolution in every generation
is not the answer
Management Worldview(S)
… How we generate these constructive energies is what the positive revolution is about . ” Handbook for the Positive Revolution
Beware of boredom
Josh Abrams → allocating one’s life
Starting small fires
Beware of waisting time and energy on good intentions and “good causes”
#mmit
A few people
(not everyone)
higher up your LIFE food chain
may be observing your worldview and behavior
#31 #hor3 #think #fastp #tln #wlh #ea
Pieces of the Puzzle #fastp #connect
A person is sitting down at a table with all the pieces of a puzzle on the table before him.
The task is to complete the puzzle.
The intelligent person may complete that puzzle rather quickly.
When all the pieces of the puzzle are given there is a skill in seeing how they fit together.
But in most #situations the pieces of the puzzle are not given.
Homeland Showtime ::: #evidence-wall ↓
The stepladder is gone,
and there’s not even the implied structure
of an industry’s rope ladder.
It’s more like vines,
and you bring your own machete.
The Daily Drucker topic list (puzzle pieces)
If you can see the road ahead
#wb #mo
sidebar ↓
Seeing only part of the situation
The explorer
JUDGEMENT → Attention-directing frameworks
Before long
new puzzle pieces emerge
while existing pieces change, age, and possibly disappear
#ewtl
If you can see the road ahead
The patterning system of the brain
Learning to learn
main brainroad continues ↓
You have to find and select the pieces.
Most #situations are open-ended not closed-ended.
Homeland (Wikipedia)
“Needle in a haystack”
“the dog didn't bark”
Murder at the Baskervilles
#sda To know something,
to really understand something important,
one must look at it
from sixteen different angles.
If you can see the road ahead
sidebar ↓
Information challenges
Mistakes in Perception
Ludecy
Six Frames for Thinking About Information
Connect, connect, connect
main brainroad continues ↓
The intelligence needed to find and select the pieces is not the same as the intelligence needed to put pre-selected pieces together.
sidebar ↓
The Intelligence Trap
Brain-addresses in books by Peter Drucker
The Daily Drucker topic list (puzzle pieces)
Topics in books by Walter Wriston
If you can see the road ahead
Making connections
main brainroad continues ↓
Intelligence may be very good
at ‘understanding’ things
but is not necessarily so good
at ‘designing’ or‘doing’ things.
finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle
If you can see the road ahead
The Daily Drucker topic list (puzzle pieces)
Different skills
are needed
for the different #situations. — EDB
↑ Same for knowledgeS
Intelligence Information Thinking #pdf
In navigating
“Your #thinking, choices, #decisions
are determined by
what you’ve “SEEN”
Men of high effectiveness
are conspicuous
by their absence in executive jobs
One does not pay attention
to everything — No Surprises
one acts
only upon
what one is paying attention to
An exploration path designed for finding the pieces
Education
“Education teaches reading, writing, arithmetic and a lot of #knowledge (#information).
The reading, writing and arithmetic are basic skills which everyone needs to survive in society — and to contribute.
There is, however, a skill missing from traditional education.
This is the skill of thinking.
I do not mean thinking in the sense of argument or #analysis but thinking in the sense of '#effectiveness'. explore
This is the thinking needed to get things done : objectives, priorities, alternatives, other people's views, idea creativity, decisions, choices, planning, #consequences of action.
We have literacy and numeracy but we need 'operacy' or the skill of doing.
Many years ago I designed the #CoRT thinking lessons for the deliberate and direct teaching of thinking as a school subject.
These lessons are now widely used throughout the world with several countries making them compulsory in all schools.
There is increasing use of the lessons in the USA, Canada and Australia and a more limited use in China and Malaysia.
Intelligence is a potential just like the horsepower of a car.
To use that potential the driver needs to develop skill.
That is the skill of thinking.
Education must teach #effectiveness.
#knowledge ( #information) is not enough.
Knowledge without effectiveness can be very dangerous.
It can mean that the people with knowledge get into positions of power and do not know how to be effective.
The new education of the positive revolution must teach the thinking skills necessary for #effectiveness, leadership and the skills of dealing with other people.” — Handbook for the Positive Revolution
#wlh #apta
Language is an encyclopedia of ignorance
“Language has been the biggest help in human progress.
Language is now by far the biggest barrier to human progress.
If language has indeed been the biggest help to human progress, how can it now be the biggest barrier?
Language has enabled the human species to move ahead of primates even though there is only a tiny difference in genetic DNA.
Language has allowed communication and therefore cooperation.
Language has allowed the storing of knowledge (a.k.a. #information) , so that future generations can benefit from the learning and wisdom of past generations.
Language allows the formulation and expression of thoughts.
Language allows competent and subtle descriptions.
So how can language now be the biggest barrier to human progress?
Any self-organizing system like human thought and human language reaches a stable equilibrium state (sometimes called a local equilibrium).
It is very difficult to budge from this state because any change seems inferior.
Landmarks of Tomorrow
The Manager and the Moron
So we are sucked back to the equilibrium state.
That is why changes in language are so slow and so difficult.
COMPLEX WORLD
Purely on this system basis it is inevitable that language will reach a complacent ‘stable’ state and will become more and more inadequate at describing an increasingly complex world.
So language may indeed have been the biggest help towards human progress up to this point in time.
It may also be the biggest barrier to further progress.
A child’s clothes are important and suitable, but the child eventually grows out of them.
The clothes remain wonderful, but their value is changed.
Trainer wheels on a bicycle are essential until you learn to ride the bicycle — but a hindrance thereafter.
The apparent contradiction can also be resolved in another way.
Language as a general concept remains as valuable as it has always been.
At the same time, our current language is a barrier to progress.
That is why my book ( The De Bono Code Book: Going Beyond the Limits of Language ) needed to be written.
Language is an encyclopedia of ignorance.
Words and concepts enter language at a state of relative ignorance (relative to our current knowledge).
Luther, Machiavelli, and the Salmon
These perceptions are frozen into permanence with a language word.
So we are forced to perceive the world in a very old-fashioned way.
It is for precisely this reason that language has become a barrier to human progress.
For example, the perception of ‘profit’ has severely limited the social development of business and value creation in society.
Why, then, have we not been able to develop the new concepts and perceptions that are needed?
The answer to this question is the key element in the book, which is published by Viking this month.
We have not developed new perceptions or complex perceptions because our ability to describe in words is so superb that we feel we can describe any #situation perfectly well with the existing language.
This is a dangerous and fatal mistake because description and perception are two different things.” — EDB
Afterword: The Descent of Money by Niall Ferguson
Today’s financial world is the result of four millennia of economic evolution. #second-curve
Money — the crystallized relationship between debtor and creditor begat banks, clearing houses for ever larger aggregations of borrowing and lending.
From the thirteenth century onwards, government bonds introduced the securitization of streams of interest payments; while bond markets revealed the benefits of regulated public markets for trading and pricing securities.
From the seventeenth century, equity in corporations could be bought and sold in similar ways.
From the eighteenth century, insurance funds and then pension funds exploited economies of scale and the laws of averages to provide financial protection against calculable risk.
From the nineteenth, futures and options offered more specialized and sophisticated instruments: the first derivatives.
And, from the twentieth, households were encouraged, for political reasons, to increase leverage and skew their portfolios in favor of real estate.
Economies that combined all these institutional innovations banks, bond markets, stock markets, insurance and property-owning democracy performed better over the long run than those that did not, because financial intermediation generally permits a more efficient allocation of resources than, say, feudalism or central planning.
For this reason,it is not wholly surprising that the Western financial model tended to spread around the world, first in the guise of imperialism, then in the guise of globalization.’
From ancient Mesopotamia to present-day China, in short, the ascent of money has been one of the driving forces behind human progress: a complex process of innovation, intermediation and integration that has been as vital as the advance of science or the spread of law in mankind’s escape from the drudgery of subsistence agriculture and the misery of the Malthusian trap. (Malthusianism is the idea that population #growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear.)
In the words of former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, ‘the financial system [is] the brain of the economy …
It acts as a coordinating mechanism that allocates capital, the lifeblood of economic activity, to its most productive uses by businesses and households.
If capital goes to the wrong uses or does not flow at all, the economy will operate inefficiently, and ultimately economic #growth will be low.’
#idea Yet money’s ascent has not been, and can never be, a smooth one.
On the contrary, financial history is a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes.
One recent study of the available data for gross domestic product and consumption since 1870 has identified 148 crises in which a country experienced a cumulative decline in GDP of at least 10 per cent and eighty-seven crises in which consumption suffered a fall of comparable magnitude, implying a probability of financial disaster of around 3.6 per cent per year.
Even today, despite the unprecedented sophistication of our institutions and instruments, Planet Finance remains as vulnerable as ever to crises.
… snip, snip …
Keynes went on to hypothesize about the ways in which investors ‘manage in such circumstances to behave in a manner which saves our faces as rational, economic men’:
(1) We assume that the present is a much more serviceable guide to the future than candid examination of past experience would show it to have been hitherto.
In other words we largely ignore the prospect of future changes about the actual character of which we know nothing.
(2) We assume that the existing state of opinion as expressed in prices and the character of existing output is based on a correct summing up of future prospects …
(3) Knowing that our own individual judgment is worthless, we endeavor to fall back on the judgment of the rest of the world which is perhaps better informed.
That is, we endeavor to conform with the behavior of the majority or the average.’
Though it is far from clear that Keynes was correct in his interpretation of investors’ behavior, he was certainly thinking along the right lines.
… snip, snip …
This brings us to the second reason for the inherent instability of the financial system: human behavior.
As we have seen, all financial institutions are at the mercy of our innate inclination to veer from euphoria to despondency; our recurrent inability to protect ourselves against ‘tail risk’ our perennial failure to learn from history.
… snip, snip …
If any field has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the way financial markets work, it must surely be the burgeoning discipline of behavioral finance.
It is far from clear how much of the body of work derived from the efficient markets hypothesis can survive this challenge.
Those who put their faith in the ‘wisdom of crowds’ mean no more than that a large group of people is more likely to make a correct assessment than a small group of supposed experts.
But that is not saying much.
The old joke that ‘Macroeconomists have successfully predicted nine of the last five recessions is not so much a joke as a dispiriting truth about the difficulty of economic forecasting.
Meanwhile, serious students of human psychology will expect as much madness as wisdom from large groups of people.”
A case in point must be the near-universal delusion among investors in the first half of 2007 that a major liquidity crisis could not occur (see Introduction).
To adapt an elegant summation by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
People may be overconfident and over-optimistic.
They may focus on overly specific scenarios for the future, to the exclusion of all others.
They may not recall any past liquidity crises in memory.
They may overestimate the predictability of the past, and hence underestimate the surprise of the future.
They may not realize the difficulty of preparing for [liquidity crises] without the benefit of hindsight.
They may prefer … gambles with higher payoff probabilities, neglecting the value of the stakes.
They may conflate positive information about the benefits of a technology [e-g.bond insurance] and negative information about its risks.
They may be contaminated by movies where the [financial system] ends up being saved … Or the extremely unpleasant prospect of [a liquidity crisis] may spur them to seek arguments that [liquidity] will not [dry up], without an equally frantic search for reasons why [it should].
But if the question is, specifically, “Why aren’t more people doing something about it?’, one possible component is that people are asking that very question — darting their eyes around to see if anyone else is reacting … meanwhile trying to appear poised and unflustered.
Most of our cognitive warping is, of course, the result of evolution.
… snip, snip …
Thorstein Veblen first posed the question ‘Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?’ (implying that it really should be) as long ago as 1898.
In a famous passage in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy , which could equally well apply to finance, Joseph Schumpeter characterized industrial capitalism as ‘an evolutionary process’: This evolutionary character is not merely due to the fact that economic life goes on in a social and natural environment which changes and by its change alters the data of economic action; this fact is important and these changes (wars, revolutions and so on) often condition industrial change, but they are not its prime movers.
Nor is this evolutionary character due to quasi-autonomic increase in population and capital or to the vagaries of monetary systems of which exactly the same thing holds true.
The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates …
The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation — if may use the biological term — that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.
This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
A key point that emerges from recent research is just how much destruction goes on in a modern economy.
Around one in ten US companies disappears each year.
Between 1989 and 1997, to be precise, an average of 611,000 businesses a year vanished out of a total of 5.73 million firms.
Ten per cent is the average extinction rate, it should be noted; in some sectors of the economy it can rise as high as 20 per cent in a bad year (as in the District of Columbia’s financial sector in 1989, at the height of the Savings and Loans crisis).
According to the UK Department of Trade and Industry, 30 per cent of tax-registered businesses disappear after three years.
Even if they survive the first few years of existence and go on to enjoy great success, most firms fail eventually.
Of the world’s 100 largest companies in 1912, 29 were bankrupt by 1995, 48 had disappeared, and only 19 were still in the top 100.
Given that a good deal of what banks and stock markets do is to provide finance to companies, we should not be surprised to find a similar pattern of creative destruction in the financial world.
We have already noted the high attrition rate among hedge funds.
(The only reason that more banks do not fail, as we shall see, is that they are explicitly and implicitly protected from collapse by governments.)
… snip, snip …
I remain more than ever convinced that, until we fully understand the origin of financial species, we shall never understand the fundamental truth about money: that, far from being ‘a monster that must be put back in its place’, as the German president recently complained,” financial markets are like the mirror of mankind, revealing every hour of every working day the way we value ourselves and the resources of the world around us.
It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty. full text
What about feelings and values? #svm
You may believe that feelings and values are the most important things in life.
You are right.
That is why thinking is so very important.
The purpose of thinking is to deliver to you the values you #seek just as the purpose of a bicycle is to get you to where you want to go.
A bicycle uses less energy; gets you there faster and allows you to go much further.
So thinking allows you to enjoy your values more effectively.
You are locked in a room.
You desperately want to get out.
You want freedom.
Your feelings are very strong.
Which is the more useful, this very strong feeling or a key to the lock?
Feelings without the means to carry them out are not much good.
At the same time, the key without the desire to leave the room is also not much good.
We need values, feelings and thinking.
Feeling is no substitute for thinking.
Thinking without values is aimless. Allocating your life
This book is about thinking.
Values and feelings are equally important but insufficient without thinking. the manager and the moron
About thinking and 12 principles ↓
Thinking takes place along a time line
leading toward unimagined futures
Reality assumptions ::: The Black Cylinder Experiment !!!
To aid in
the relentless
necessary
navigating,
this page (#sda) provides
#11 a jumble of ↓
CONCEPTs (about #concepts),
thought fragmentS, thought clusterS,
brain-addresseS & clueS
that can be used as
HORIZONs and BUILDING BLOCKs ↓
Freedom etal. ::: TLN insights
… to #SEE (attention-scape) … ↓
… and CONSIDER (what does a thought area ↓ ↑ mean 4 you?)
— much more like a “future” museum or menu
than an article. ↓
There are things to #avoid
and
things → ( horizons and building blocks )
to seek out #horizons #seek
and make operational ↓ #ams
within time
The explorer
Judgement Needs to be Made Operational #operacy
“Brain-addresses” ↑ provide a concept for recording targets for repeated deliberate thinking
#ams #ir #dtao #thinkingworkbook
finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle
Larger view ↑ What exists is getting old
↑ finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle #fastp
Knowledge-Based Management
Tom Peters → The project50
Navigating changing worldS
involves “moving on” ↓
what exists is getting old
Finding a way forward from yesterdayS
Without “moving on”
a person remains a prisoner of the past —
their pastS and other people in their prisons of their pastS.
These pastS are complex constellationS and universeS
of ageS and pointS in time —
age 21 in 1950 vs. age 21 in 1970.
Imagining navigation course changes ↑ ↓ #thinkingcanvas
↑ #05 Everybody is born totally ignorant
and get their #guidance from somebody
who was also born totally ignorant and
who got their guidance from somebody (Twitter → @NewsLitProject)
who acts on the assumption that tomorrowS
are extrapolationS of yesterdayS —
despite the massive obvious evidence to the contrary (ludecy) ↓
Perception provides the ingredients for thinking
Escaping the kiddy table
Imagining navigation course changes
What about guidance from topic area experts?
Experts, chapter 2, “The 10,000-Hour Rule” Outliers
Which #experts control #reality? #lms
(Those associated with a university, a consulting firm,
or an operational institution …
or those with an exalted station in life …
or economists who ignore aspects of #reality (#pdf)
that don’t fit their prior preaching …
or lying politicians and other dogmatists …
What about mental health experts? …
What did Machiavelli say?)
Experts speak
Which of these ↑ have a #broad #worldview #sda
and what would a broad worldview look like?
And where would Management Worldview(S) fit?
#Intelligence #Information #Thinking ↓
#evidence-wall ↓
Larger ↑ ::: Awareness ::: Post-capitalist executive ::: The Daily Drucker
Drucker book search
Imagining navigation course changes
Those who want to live a #fulfilling life …
How can you work toward
the “right horizons” — the “right things” —
that aren't on your mental radar
at the right points in time? ↑ ↓
#wlh1
How can the INDIVIDUAL survive?
Knowledge specialty ::: The #individual in entrepreneurial society :::
Return on luck ::: Danger of too much planning
Managing Oneself Overview
The responsibility based organization ::: Survival (#mtf) ::: Next society
#tln Time-life navigation © ↑ ↓ is NEEDED #lms #ams
#horizons That man must die …
Remembered for — a difference in the lives of people — A MAJOR HORIZON NYT Obits … #horizons #tln #uf
#06 #awp In your whole life,
how much time
have you spent
“trying to” #see
the content and the dynamics of society and the economy?
What were your #information sources?
How has the content and structure of the economy and society changed over time? #intelligence
#thinkingcanvas or #mindmap1 /mind map ↓ for collecting #ideas
How do you explain an event you cannot understand? continue
#07 #awp At what point in your life
did someone
with a broad #sda,
top of the food chain worldview (#lter)
provide you
a breadcrumb trail
for navigating changing worldS —
worldS continuing to move toward unimagined futureS. How many
major global institutions (#wgobcd) look to this person for guidance on
making THEIR futureS? #connect
Replace the quest for success
with the quest for contribution.
The #critical #question is not,
“How can I achieve?”
but “What can I contribute?”
… to the society of organizations
Try searching this page for the word stem “contribut”
#careerTimeView ↑ ↓ #thinkingcanvas
Copying a predecessor’s work approach will lead to the prison of the past
Tactics (success) by Edward de Bono
What does it take to be an expert?
It is time to give up thinking of jobs or career paths as we once did and
think in terms of taking on assignments one after the other continue
Buford said Drucker passed on
three questions everyone should ask themselves during
different seasons of life:
“Who am I, now?” “Where do I belong?”
“What’s my contribution now?”
“Who I want to be tomorrow” — Thomas Crown 2:23
The danger of too much planning ::: Return on luck
Opportunities
↑ Near-term ecological awareness #ntea :::
Purposeful self-development and parallel approach #psdapa #parallel #mbr :::
Jump before you have to #jump ::: Long-term ecological revolution #lter :::
Deliberate thinking (#pdf) and #operacy
deliberate thinking and operacy = #dtao ↓
Where to jump next? ↓ No stable places #lter
Connect, connect, connect
#ntea
#ptf Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless ↓
↑ Space travel — circa 1940s — vs. the various versions of Starship Enterprise
What exists is getting old #lter
Why do “things” exist? ↑ Why do they die?
horizon evolution stages #hes
Action system (harvesting and implementing) #thinkingcanvas #lms #ams ↓ larger view #ntea ↑ ↓
↑ finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle #fastp
Knowledge-Based Management
What exists is getting old
The thoughts you encounter as you move through time
need to be integrated into your unfolding life.
This implies that you need an idea recorder tool,
a review process and a thinking and scheduling mechanism.
One acts (#intelligence #information #thinking) only upon
what one is paying attention to explore
For example: Power of an Hour ::: de Bono books ::: Drucker books
Brain dangers: try a #page-search for → past or synonyms for past or brainstorming or brain or mind or ignorance
«§§§»
#hor3 #tcd
In navigating … ↓
“Your #thinking, choices, #decisions are determined by
what you’ve SEEN” ↓
#decision or #decisions
Attention is a key part of thinking
one acts only upon what one is paying attention to
#hor3
Perception provides the ingredients for thinking
“#Decision making ↑ is a time machine (here)
that synchronizes into a single time — the present —
a great number of divergent time spans.” Druckerism
time spans larger view ↓
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
#ntea
We can make decisions only in the present,
and yet
we cannot make decisions
for the present alone;
the most expedient, most opportunistic decision — let alone
the decision not to decide at all —
may commit us for a long time,
if not permanently and irrevocably.” — Chapter 11, MRE by Druckerism
“Most discussions of decision-making
assume that only senior executives
make decisions or that only senior executives
decisions matter.
This is a dangerous mistake.” — PFD
evidence wall and timeline larger ↓
#ewtl
#Decision Making: The Chassis That Holds the Whole Together ↑ ↓
#hor3 #wlh #sda
“To know something,
to really understand
something important,
one must look at it
from s ixteen d ifferent a ngles ↓.”
#sda important = #impact #druckerism #thinkingcanvas #mindmap continue
People are perceptually slow,
and there is no shortcut to understanding;
it takes a great deal of time.” read more ↓
“If you do not care to
understand
something,
then you must borrow an explanation
from someone else (and they will deceive you)
or do without one.” continue
… “expert systems” are about;
they attempt to put into … process,
the perception of experience
that comes from understanding the whole
of a #task or #subject-matter … continue
«§§§»
#78 #hor3
“For almost nothing (#fan — source)
in our educational systems
prepares people
for the #reality
in which they will live, work,
and become #effective” —
… and graduate school is much worse …
… “ not even educated in management ” … continue
How to make
the schools accountable
Learning that becomes a part of you
Google search
Druckerism and intellectual capitalist #lms #education
Books by
Peter Drucker ::: Walter Wriston ::: Bob Buford ::: Rick Warren
How could an education system prepare us
for unknown and unpredictable future #realitieS?
Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade
Topics in books by Walter Wriston ::: Transnational/Tribal
A Century of Social Transformation
… take more responsibility for himself or herself,
rather than depend on the company. continue
Intelligence, Information, Thinking
«§§§»
#hor3
“#Thinking is the most fundamental of all human skills.
The quality of our future will depend directly
on the quality of our thinking.
Is it then not only astonishing but also absurd that thinking
is not the core subject in all #education
and the central subject on any school curriculum” #EDB explore
«§§§»
Thinking … the most fundamental,
the most important aspect of life,
the basis for everything
is totally neglected …
School : no thinking subject —
Book store : no thinking category
Universities : no thinking faculty
and zero possibility thinking
What about critical thinking?
— #edb Edward de Bono
#visual
Atlas of Management Thinking
What I do think is important is the recognition of a type of thinking that is not dominated by language. …
They are 'idea pictures' which represent relationships, functions and happenings, not physical reality. … …
Unfortunately we do not have non-verbal images for complex situations. …
The reason is that we have never experienced such situations with any 'sense'. …
We have only recognized them intellectually, so there is no sense-image storage. …
The specific, and perhaps too bold, purpose of this book is to create a repertoire of just such nonverbal sense-images for management situations.explore
#research “There is, of course, a place for academic intellectualizing and passive scholarship (which consists of repeating what others have repeated about still yet others) but that is only a small part of thinking — but valuable nevertheless.” EDB
«§§§»
“We know only two things about the future ↑.
It cannot be known.
It will be different from what exists now and
from what we now expect” ↓ Druckerism
“Trying to predict the future
is like trying to drive down a country road
at night
with no lights
while looking out the back window.”
“Data analytics” does not alter the assertion above
(why the #analysis of data
can never produce all the #ideas
present in that data and
try a #page-search for the word stem “innovat” #innovation)
#63 #msd = means something different
#htmp #ptf #sda
Consider integrating the following
into your mental reflex system ↓
“The really
important
things —
as usual
in an attempt
to analyze
and to predict —
are changes
which the author
when writing the book
fully saw
but failed to perceive,
fully recognized
but failed to understand.
What makes
predicting the future #ptf
so certain of failure
is not
that the unexpected
always happens.
It is that
the expected
always
MEANS
something
so very different. #msd
The most disappointed man
is always
the prophet whose vision has come true,
the pioneer who has reached the new frontier,
the explorer who has found the new continent.” —
The New Society: The Anatomy of Industrial Order (1950)
↑ If you can see the road ahead ↓
MEANS? What does it mean
if a person's house burns down?
To the owner? occupants? neighbors?
emergency services? community? financial services? etc.
The brain is a history library
that has to run in the future tense continue
what exists is getting old
Intelligence Information Thinking #pdf
Making the future (#mtf) — a chance for survival →
one ::: two ::: three
We face long years of profound changes ↑
Managing oneself — a revolution in human affairs continue
A non-competitive life
The alternative is to be someone else’s whipping boy
«§§§»
This page (#sda) provides a coping tool ↑ for
directing one’s energy toward “present” opportunitieS
to make the future
rather than toward the dead past
«§§§»
#hor3
“What Everybody Knows Is Frequently Wrong” continue
“If You Keep Doing What Worked in the Past You're Going to Fail
Approach Problems with Your Ignorance — Not Your Experience
Base Your Strategy on the #Situation, Not on a Formula” Druckerisms
#evidence-wall ↓
The Five Deadly Sins
What economist still need to learn #pdf
Don’t balme economics blame public policy #pdf
The Meritocracy Muddle #pdf
What divides NATO? #pdf
Germany’s divided soul #pdf
«§§§»
“Alternatives do not have to show themselves” ↓ #EDB
«§§§»
“Life-long learning” → Learning what ← from whom → to do what?
And what is useful learning?
The individual in entrepreneurial society
«§§§»
Richard Branson
#whtmal “Making a living is no longer enough,” …
“Work also has to make a life.”
Druckerism ::: TLN insights ::: Managing oneself
An Alyssa Goodman example #pdf (calendarize these? #ams)
Successful careers are not planned … #ptf continue
Replace the quest ↑ for achievement or success
with the quest for contribution.
Depending on where you live and your aspirations,
managing oneself along with citizenship through the social sector
may provide a timeline that will/would work #sda for you.
Bonting: Thinking to Create Value
YouTube ::: Amazon
Just reading is not enough
This page (#sda) provides a tool for
necessary awareness exploring —
before it’s too late (avoiding stagnation)
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) complicates the situation
#12 #wwpd #pfd
Who was Peter Drucker?
An Über Mentor+
What’s the #impact ↑ ↓ on your life
#12b #doe #ms Drucker on professional writing, economics,
business schools, philosophy, religion,
political science, Japanese Art,
accountants, and academia
Books by
Peter Drucker ::: Walter Wriston ::: Bob Buford ::: Rick Warren
The New Pluralism ↓ circa 1957
Management WorldviewS
Vienna Imperial Palace
“I am not a ‘theoretician’
through my consulting practice
I am in daily touch with the
concrete opportunities and problems
of a fairly large number of institutions,
foremost among them businesses
but also hospitals, government agencies
and public-service institutions
such as museums and universities. …” continues below
#24 #seco Drucker ↑: a political/social ecologist #lms ↓
Who was Peter Drucker?
SEEING things as they really are #pdf
Social ecologist 2
… It also implies that society, polity and economy
are a genuine environment, a genuine whole, a true “system,”
to use the fashionable term,
in which everything relates to everything else
and in which men, ideas, institutions, and actions
must always be seen together
in order to be seen at all,
let alone to be understood.
… But they also know that
the man-made environment
of society, polity, and economics,
like the environment of nature itself,
knows no balance
except dynamic disequilibrium.
… Political ecologists believe
that the traditional disciplines
define fairly narrow and limited tools
rather than meaningful and self-contained areas of
knowledge, action, and events — in the same way
in which the ecologists of the natural environment
know that swamp or the desert is the reality
and ornithology, botany, and geology only special-purpose tools. the rest of the story
For almost nothing in our education system prepares people for …
The Daily Drucker ← (examples of a BROAD worldview) #sda
If you can see the road ahead ↑ ↓ … continue
Continuing Turmoil
“Peter was an original thinker,
a self-created,
one-of-a-kind #individual
who comes along
every two or three centuries. …
He was an indefatigable observer
of human nature
and the interaction of
human beings
with one another
and with #circumstances” …
«§§§»
“All of us had the same story,” Buford says.
“We all had wanted to talk to Peter
because we knew
he was
the wisest man alive ”
— Bob Buford ::: #wisdom
“THE PRESIDENT (Nixon) knew the man needed no introduction,
so, without a word of identification” … continue
“Drucker belonged to the church of #results”
“Good intentions,” he would seemingly yell
without ever raising his voice,
“are no excuse for incompetence.” … continue
Interviews with Drucker #pdf
including
Moving beyond capitalism
“Peter liberated me” … #lms continue
“Drucker’s secret to great #mentoring, says Buford,
is that he “has the most comprehensive, 50,000-foot view
of how the world works, on one extreme
On the other extreme,
he’s incredibly personal in his mentoring.
He joins those two points of view.”
#gpdf No human being
has built a better brand
by managing just himself
than Peter Drucker has. continue
#Note the number of books about Drucker ↓
#evidence-wall ↓
“I am not a ‘theoretician’
through my consulting practice
I am in daily touch with the concrete opportunities and problems
of a fairly large number of institutions,
foremost among them businesses
but also hospitals, government agencies
and public-service institutions such as museums and universities.
And I am working with such institutions on several continents:
North America, including Canada and Mexico;
Latin America; Europe; Japan and South East Asia.
Still, a consultant is at one remove
from the day-today practice —
that is both his strength
and his weakness.
And so my viewpoint tends more to be that of an outsider.”
broad worldview #sda ↑
«§§§»
By the mid-1940s, he had found his way deep inside General Motors, and by the 1950s he was consulting for Sears, General Electric and IBM.
Over the decades, he’d add a host of other major companies and nonprofits to his client list: Intel, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and many more.
Why was Drucker so in demand?
What made him so good?
For starters, he understood that his job wasn’t to serve up answers.
“My greatest strength as a consultant,” Drucker once remarked, “is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.”
In many cases, they were deceptively simple: Who is your customer?
What have you stopped doing lately (so as to free up resources for the new and innovative)?
What business are you in? (What is YOUR business? What contribution to the outside world can you make NOW?)
Or, as he urged the founders of the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette to ask themselves in 1974, after they had enjoyed a heady period of #growth: “What should our business be?”
“I shall not attempt to answer the question what your business should be,” Drucker added.
“First, one should not answer such a question off the top of one’s head.
… Secondly, one man’s opinion, no matter how brilliant, is at best one man’s opinion.”
No two people ever read the same book
Outer world — Inner world
Logic bubbles
Besides, Drucker said, “I can only ask questions.
The answers have to be YOURS.”
Other times, of course, corporations sought Drucker’s counsel to deal with narrower challenges.
In 1992, for example, he wrote a 56-page analysis for Coca-Cola that explored distribution, branding, advertising, the structure of the company’s bottling operations and more.
Still, the approach was always the same: “This report raises questions,” Drucker told Coke.
“It does not attempt to give answers.”
Another thing that made Drucker stand apart was his integrity.
He wouldn’t come in, do a job — and then stick his client with the bill without knowing whether he had made a real difference.
“Remember,” Drucker told the assistant to the chairman of Sears, as he turned in an invoice in March 1955, “that this is submitted on condition that there is no payment due unless the work satisfies you.”
Indeed, Drucker knew that the test wasn’t whether he had delivered some sharp insight.
All that counted was whether his client could use that insight to make measurable progress on an important issue.
It’s the performance of others, Drucker wrote, that “determines in the last analysis whether a consultant contributes and achieves results, or whether he is … at best a court jester.”
In this respect, Drucker knew that the most dangerous thing for any consultant was to become too impressed with his own wisdom.
He didn’t like his clients getting carried away, either.
“Stop talking about ‘Druckerizing’ your organization,” he told officials at Edward Jones, the investment firm.
“The job ahead of you is to ‘Jonesize’ your organization — and only if you accept this would I be of any help to you.
Otherwise, I would rapidly become a menace — which I refuse to be.”
Oh, and one other thing: Peter Drucker never drew a four-box matrix in his entire life.
«§§§»
… “As an author he is a phenomenal seller; his books remain in print, and some have gone into dozens of editions.
His byline remains potent in magazines.
When, for example, Harvard Business Review publishes a Drucker piece, the staff braces itself for a flood of reprint requests.
Drucker’s influence is worldwide.
One reason that his thinking is valued by politicians and managers in many countries is that he does not just enunciate principles.
He tries to get inside the traditions and culture of a particular place, to understand how things really work, so that he can focus on what is truly important.
For example, Drucker has been a welcome guest in Japan for many years.
He first went there during the occupation, to lecture to Japanese businessmen.
In the beginning, one observer reports, Drucker’s lectures were popular but not necessarily productive.
Typically, there is a story of two Japanese executives meeting after one of Drucker’s sessions.
One says, “My friend, you enjoyed Drucker-san?”
“Oh, yes, very much.”
They talk about the brilliance of what they have heard; how important it will be to them.
Then one asks, “What have you done about what you heard last year from Drucker-san?”
“Nothing,” is the reply.
“Will you return next year to hear him again?”
“Oh, yes.”
For some years Drucker told the Japanese wise and sometimes brilliant things, but he was talking from the outside.
He realized this.
He dedicated himself to penetrating and understanding the Japanese culture.
Now his thinking on management and organization is tempered by his sense of Japanese tradition.
His words are welcomed—and acted upon.
In turn Drucker’s experience in Japan has enabled him to bring new insights to Western organizational thinking, notably in his analyzes of the decision-making process.
Drucker is a conservative and a moral opponent of Communism.
This does not keep Soviet management technicians from studying his theories and appropriating what they think is relevant.
The Soviets approach Drucker on the basis that, while he cannot be trusted at all in terms of overall political and economic theory, he is nevertheless a valuable thinker when it comes to practical matters of organization policy and procedure.
Soviet experts acknowledge that it is Drucker who has formulated the definition of management that has become the standard in “bourgeois” writings.
Moreover, Drucker even wins grudging praise from Communist management theorists.” — Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society
«§§§»
The Practical Drucker ← Amazon link
FOREWORD
I must confess that my first reaction when I learned of the title of Bill Cohen’s new book, The Practical Drucker, was to think to myself:
“Hmmm.
Perhaps an official from the Department of Redundancy Department should be asked to write the foreword instead.”
In my mind, after all, Drucker and practicality are synonymous.
Calling a book The Practical Drucker is like referring to someone as a “big giant” or a 100-story building as a “tall skyscraper.”
Indeed, Drucker was so practical that much of the scholarly community regarded him as a pariah.
Although he taught at four institutions of higher learning over his long career — Sarah Lawrence College, Bennington College, New York University, and Claremont Graduate University — Drucker never fit the mold of many of his colleagues.
Those around him often seemed most interested in racking up citations in peer-reviewed academic journals; Drucker, for his part, was focused on making a difference in the real world.
“Being incomprehensible has become a virtue in academia,” Drucker complained in the mid-1980s.
By contrast, he added, “I have a deep horror of obscurity and arrogance” — a trait that constantly pushed him to present his work “in a form that people could apply.”
He hardly used footnotes.
He eschewed regression analysis, charts, and graphs.
As a consultant to major corporations and nonprofits, he stressed the need to put ideas into action.
“Don’t tell me you had a wonderful meeting with me,” he’d say.
“Tell me what you’re going to do on Monday that’s different.”
Theory was fine with Drucker, but only insofar as it helped to lead to pragmatic solutions to pressing issues.
“Sure, we want and need research,” he said.
“But consider the modern medical school, which began in the late 18th century.
The emphasis in medical school is not on publication but on the ability to treat patients and make a difference in their lives.”
In a similar manner, he believed, “business educators should be out as practitioners where the problems and results are.”
This fundamental insight — that writing about management and leadership isn’t worth a whole lot if it isn’t rooted in the day-to-day trials of organizational life — lies at the heart of Drucker’s work.
It is also where many of his peers get things backward.
“Intellectuals and scholars tend to believe that #ideas come first, which then lead to new political, social, economic, psychological realities,” Drucker wrote. #apta
“This does happen, but it is the exception.
As a rule, theory does not precede practice.
Its #role is to structure and codify already proven practice.
Its role is to convert the isolated and ‘atypical’ from exception to ‘rule’ and ‘system,’ and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.”
This bent toward application, toward action, toward usefulness, animated everything that Drucker did.
In the end, it was what set him apart.
Drucker “spoke in plain language that resonated with ordinary managers,” Andy Grove, the co-founder of Intel, has remarked.
“Consequently, simple statements from him have influenced untold numbers of daily actions; they did mine over decades.”
Tom Peters, the best-selling management writer who also bends strongly toward the practical, once praised Drucker for his pioneering #role in helping “incredibly complex organizations” run better. #pdf Drucker’s real main thrust was to help them perform better — structure follows strategy — for society.
“Drucker was the first person to give us a handbook for that,” he said.
Actually, that’s not quite right.
Rather than produce one handbook, Drucker penned thirty-nine books and thousands of articles over many decades — a trove so immense that, all in all, it may add up to the most impractical thing he ever did.
How many times have you ever thought, “What would Drucker say?” about a particular situation — and then tried to quickly find the answer?
Where do you begin?
Perhaps The Practice of Management is the best source.
Maybe the The Essential Drucker
But what about Managing for Results ?
No, wait.
Maybe what you really need is a later text, like Management Challenges for the 21st Century .
Searching through this vast ocean of content when all you want to take away is a single glass of water can be difficult, if not downright frustrating. “And it is the wrong approach to management” — bobembry rlaexp.com developer
Drucker’s output was so massive, it led another best-selling management writer, Jim Collins, to ask a pointed question.
Jim Collins is the author of Built to Last , Good to Great , How the Mighty Fall and Good to Great and the Social Sectors
Although Collins is a huge Drucker fan, he couldn’t help but wonder, “Do you think Peter Drucker would have been more influential if he had written less?”
I’d argue no, but I get the point.
And this is where Bill Cohen’s book comes in.
By combing through Drucker’s enormous body of work and deftly synthesizing the “how to do” (as opposed to the “what to do”) aspects of his writing, Bill has made a great contribution. (I disagree for a number of reasons. I think the book is a waste of time and money. I think Bill Cohen’s worldview is ineffective. bobembry rlaexp.com developer)
In this way, The Practical Drucker is less redundant and more a revelation.
#wlh “Knowledgeable executives are plentiful,” Drucker observed shortly before he passed away in 2005.
“But executives are not being paid for knowing.
#wlh2 #gtrtd They are being paid for getting the right things done.”
Rick Wartzman — Executive Director, The Drucker Institute
Books by Peter Drucker
Beware of narrow worldviews ↑
THE ALTERNATIVE TO TYRANNY
It is very, very difficult to effectively grasp the implicationS of
w hat g oes o n b ehind c losed d oorS (#wgobcd) #ntea ↓
To what extent are these people ↑ ↓ looking after your interests?
Three types of intelligence
e.g., The End of Loyalty et al.
Management Worldviews ↑ ::: Post-capitalist executive ↑
Global Peter Drucker Forum ::: Charles Handy → Starting small fires
Hofburg ↑ ↓
larger view one ::: two ::: three ↑
#09 #sda ↑ “In less than 150 years, (circa 1988)
MANAGEMENT has transformed
the social and economic fabric
of the world’s
developed countries. …
How would it be possible to participate in this transformation process
if you’re not aware of it?
… It has created a global economy ↑
(as a concept, “global” is on a higher level
than international #trade.
And there is a transnational level
that challenges/supplants multi-national operations)
and set new rules
for countries
that would participate in that economy
as equals.” ↓
Origins of The Practice of Management
Corporate America in the Crossfire #pdf
#knowledge economy and knowledge polity #lter
#knowledge and technology #pdf
From #knowledge to knowledgeS
The organization of the post-capitalist
SOCIETY OF ORGANIZATIONS
is a DESTABILIZER. (#cities)
It must be organized for
constant change … explore
Purpose and #Objectives First
There is only world history and world civilization continue
Drucker: The Man Who Invented the Corporate Society ↓
#evidence-wall ↓
… the real pattern of economic activity
larger composite view ↑ ::: Economic & content and structure ::: Adoption rates: one & two
The Forces Creating a New Geography of Opportunity?
The Five Deadly Sins
Entrepreneurship vs. traditional economics
… A change as tremendous as this doesn’t just
satisfy existing wants, or replace things we are now doing.
It creates new wants
and makes new things possible continue
It also requires an almost 180-degree change
in the #knowledge workers' thoughts and actions
from what most of us — even of the younger generation —
still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act continue
We face long years of profound changes continue
Managing in the Next Society
“For almost nothing in our educational systems
prepares people
for the reality
in which they will live, work,
and become #effective” —
Druckerism and intellectual capitalist #lms #education
How could an education system prepare us
for unknown and unpredictable future #realitieS?
Topics in books by Walter Wriston ::: Transnational/Tribal
A Century of Social Transformation
«§§§»
Thinking … the most fundamental,
the most important aspect of life,
the basis for everything
is totally neglected …
School : no thinking subject —
Book store : no thinking category
Universities : no thinking faculty
and zero possibility thinking
What about critical thinking?
— Edward de Bono
«§§§»
Try a #page-search (#sda) for each of these words: determine, education, reality,
effective, work, risk, different, and live
“The traditional notion in #education
that #information is sufficient
is old-fashioned and dangerous.”
Edward de Bono #EDB ↓
Intelligence ::: Information ::: Thinking ↓
#pdw larger ↑ ::: Books by Peter Drucker ::: Rick Warren + Drucker
the #knowledge society
#09b #hor3 #wlh
“The leading social groups of the knowledge society
will be “knowledge workers” —
knowledge executives
who know HOW to
allocate knowledge
to productive use
just as the capitalists knew HOW to
allocate capital to productive use;
knowledge professionals; knowledge employees.
↑ What thinking is needed?
Practically all these knowledge people will be employed in organizations.
Yet, unlike the employees under Capitalism,
they will own both
the “means of production”
and the “tools of production” —
the former through their pension funds, which are rapidly emerging in all developed countries as the only real owners;
the latter because knowledge workers own THEIR knowledge
and can take it with them wherever they go — a.k.a. mobility.
How does this alter economic dynamics?
The economic challenge of the post-capitalist society will therefore be
the productivity
of knowledge work and the knowledge worker” — here, here, here and pcs.
Try a #page-search for the word stem “productiv” (#productivity)
«§§§»
#technology1
About Technology
What really matters is that all these developments alter man’s biological capacity — and not through the random genetic mutation of biological evolution but through the purposeful nonorganic development we call technology.
What I have called here the “Wallace insight,” that is, the approach from human biology, thus leads to the conclusion that technology is not about things: tools, processes, and products.
From Analysis to Perception — The New Worldview
It is about work: the specifically human activity by means of which man pushes back the limitations of the iron biological law which condemns all other animals to devote all their time and energy to keeping themselves alive for the next day, if not for the next hour.
continue
#knowledge2 #technology2
Knowledge exists only in application
Knowledge and Technology
The Daily Drucker — Feb 4
The new technology
embraces and feeds off
the entire array
of human knowledges.
The search for knowledge, as well as the teaching thereof, has traditionally been dissociated from application.
Both have been organized by subject, that is, according to what appeared to be the logic of knowledge itself.
The faculties and departments of the university, its degrees, its specializations, indeed the entire organization of higher learning, have been #subject-focused.
They have been, to use the language of the experts on organization, based upon “product,” rather than on “market” or “end use.”
Now we are increasingly organizing knowledge and the search for it around areas of application rather than around the subject areas of disciplines.
Interdisciplinary work has grown everywhere.
This is a symptom of the shift in the meaning of knowledge from an end in itself to a resource, that is, a means to some result.
Knowledge
as the central energy
of a modern society
exists altogether
in application
and when it is put to work.
Work, however, cannot be defined in terms of the disciplines.
End results
are interdisciplinary
of necessity.
… but not knowledge as it is presented in the education system
That knowledge has become THE resource rather that A resource is what makes continue
The knowledge we now consider knowledge proves itself in action …
Moving beyond capitalism
Knowledge and Technology PDF
From Knowledge to Knowledges
Try searching this page for: “knowledge”
The road ahead
see Chapter 10 ::: The future … already happened ::: Making the future :::
Research management
… the importance of accessing, interpreting, connecting, and translating knowledge …
Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Polity
«§§§»
#hor3 #wlh
“More than anything else,
the individual
has to take more responsibility for himself or herself,
rather than depend on the company.”
dangerous jobs #psdapa continue ↓
Responsibility for: freedom ::: all powerful ::: survival ::: #worldview
Developing yourself — as a person, as an executive, as a leader — #pdf
Learning to learn !!!!!
Try a #page-search (#sda) for the word stem “learn”
Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Polity
«§§§»
#reality deals us “cards” from
an ever changing “deck” —
only in fairy tales do we get to live happily ever-after ↓
Annotated pyramid to DNA ::: Larger view ↓
↑ Most successful executive … ::: … organized by #information ↑
Road ahead timeline ↑ ::: Knowledge and technology ↑ (#impact #pdf)
Imagining navigation course changes
What might be the global content of each radar at each point in time?
This exploration work ↑ ↓ involves “TIME TRAVEL”
that goes way beyond jobs and careers …
(decision making is a time machine …)
Your today
is just one “scene” in one chapter
in an evolving story …
… where trees don’t grow to the sky (2, 3, 4)
There are #discontinuities ahead
For each thought fragment, concept, illustration, link, or text block
you encounter ↑ ↓
your could EXP lore (rla exp.com)
employing dense reading and dense listening
plus #thinking broad and thinking detailed
then ask yourself what does this mean for me? (illustration)
along with performing a #PMI
in conjunction with visualizing the operacy involved
The explorer
Saigon, 1965 Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History #podcast
The black cylinder experiment #bce
You don’t know what you’re going to be doing next
Luther, Machiavelli, and the Salmon
↑ So, there is life to navigate and
there are evolving time spans to navigate.
Conflating and inter-twining the two
becomes “time-life navigation © .”
the future of any nation
#worldview “In a transition period, the number of people in need always grows.
There are the huge masses of refugees all over the globe, victims of war and social upheaval, of racial, ethnic, political, and #religious persecution, of government incompetence and of government cruelty.
Even in the most settled and stable societies
people will be
left behind
in the shift to knowledge work.
It takes a generation or two before a society and its population catch up with radical changes in the composition of the work force and in the demands for skills and #knowledge.
It takes some time—the best part of a generation, judging by historical experience—before the productivity of service workers can be raised sufficiently to provide them with a “middle-class” standard of living.” citizenship through the social sector
TLN overview #pdf ↓ ::: brainroad example and links ::: #article titles (#see #sda)
You can’t get there directly from here
#pdvdd #sda Supplemental awareness PDFs #pdf
#pdvdd #sda Notes from Peter Drucker’s work on
developmental directions — #pdf
Drucker: a political or social ecologist
Imagining navigation course changes
The need for roots ::: From command to responsibility-based organization #information
::: Post-capitalized society has to be decentralized #lter
“… being right is the feeling of being right. This is what
guides your actions …” Practical Thinking
Why is #thinking important? continue
¶ ¶ ¶
#conversation
“‘Everyone is always right — no one is ever right.’
What it means is that at any moment
everyone is acting logically within
his or her ‘bubble’ of values and perceptions.
So at that moment in time that person is ‘right’.
In the broader, overall and objective sense
no one is ever right because
we do not have a full understanding of the world
or the detailed #consequences of our action far into the future.”
Logic bubbles ::: Rules of everyday thinking
#hotw The History of the World in Two Hours
What Everybody Knows Is Frequently Wrong continue
«§§§»
SEEING and exploring connections → Remember to
use your browser’s back button
when following links within this page ↑ ↓
There are quite a few duplicate links
on this page. They exist to help #see possible connections
«§§§»
How is it POSSIBLE to work toward unexpected horizons
that aren’t on your mental radar? …
These ↑ horizons are your means
for making your future S — requires different time usage including
some different “ecological awareness” here
“Your thinking, choices, decisions are determined by
what you’ve SEEN” (and here) that challenges your assumptions ↓
Your horizons are determined by what you’ve SEEN ↑ ↓
#Decision Making: The Chassis That Holds the Whole Together
“We cannot #see things unless
we are prepared to #see them” more & true system
Nobody is going to do this ↑ for you — quite the opposite
«§§§»
“Decision making is a time machine (here)
that synchronizes into a single time — the present —
a great number of divergent time spans.” Druckerism
larger view ↓ #thinkingcanvas
«§§§»
We can make #decisions only in the present,
and yet we cannot make decisions for the present alone;
the most expedient, most opportunistic decision — let alone
the decision not to decide at all —
may commit us for a long time,
if not permanently and irrevocably.” — Chapter 11, MRE by Druckerism
«§§§»
“The future requires decisions-now. It imposes risk-now.
It requires action-now.” Druckerism
decision-making is a time machine — explored
#attention3
“One does not pay attention to everything …
And one acts only upon what one is
paying attention to.
Harvesting and implementing
The reaction may be #thinking or it may be action (which is only thinking that passes through our mouths or our muscles instead of our minds).
The world around is full of a huge number of things to which one could pay attention.
But it would be impossible to react to everything at once.
So one reacts only to a selected part of it.
The choice of attention area determines the action or thinking that follows.
The choice of this area of attention is one of the most fundamental aspects of thinking”. very powerful ::: TLN Insights ::: #adt #edb
«§§§»
*this page is a work in progress*
Warning: this site is not for you if you are anchored to the idea that tomorrowS
are an extrapolation of yesterdayS — a belief that sabotages your family tree
Navigating unimagined
future S
JUDGEMENT → Attention-directing frameworks
If you run your imagination over the last hundred years,
how many sequences of unimagined futures do you see? #surprises
What reasons would make you think this pattern ↑ is going to stop?
What do you think is going to happen to the time spans
between yesterdays and tomorrows?
Will the time spans get shorter, longer, stay about the same?
Or maybe it is totally random
At what point in your life
did someone
with a broad #sda,
top of the food chain worldview (#lter)
provide you
a breadcrumb trail
for navigating changing worldS —
worldS continuing to move toward unimagined futureS. How many
major global institutions (#wgobcd) look to this person for guidance on
making THEIR futureS? #connect
Google → “How Baby Boomers Broke America” continue
Thoughts to add to your evidence wall (see image below ↓)
Google → “A Princeton sociologist spent 8 years asking rural Americans
why they're so pissed off” continue
Google → “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy” continue
Stagnation?
Evidence Wall ↓
#sda #parallel Navigating requires
parallel pre-thought work approaches action system #ams ↓
Try a #page-search for
the words “parallel” and “organized”
… that identifies relevant “blind-spots” ,
acknowledges the NEED for new understanding,
and passes the test of time (the shift to a #knowledge society)
Revisionist History : Saigon, 1965 ::: The Prime Minister and the Prof #podcast
When the crisis happens ↑
there will be little or no time
to think and prepare an action plan.
Thinking is that waste of time
between seeing something
and knowing what to do about it.
The time is filled with #ideas
which lead on from one to another
as we try and sort out the unfamiliar situation
and change it into a familiar one
with which we know how to cope. continue
… But how do you #see an unfamiliar situation
before it is too late to effectively respond …
the future that has already happened
How do you explain an event
you cannot understand? continue
A work approach that will help you get through a world
that is unfamiliar to you and everybody else …
A work approach that is
effective for the challenges ahead …
A life and action management system (#lms #ams)
Who knows anything specific about the world ten years from now?
And you can’t get there directly from here …
To be able to navigate you have be prepared to
abandon everything — before one really wants to,
let alone before one has to … (#wgobcd)
The Society of Organizations and
the accompanying destabilization
society of organizations brainroad
(↑ the only way to be prepared ↓)
WW2 battle map
«§§§»
Our vocabulary is of necessity based on multiple layers of primitive history …
History of the World in Two Hours
We are always completely hostage to
the limited words of language. We have to use available words.
Language is an encyclopedia of ignorance, which
forces us to perceive and communicate in a limited way.
↑ requires unilateral, effective action in multiple now S ↓
(everything visible and “SEEABLE” on this page)
… you may believe that feelings and values are
the most important things in life. You are right.
That is why thinking is so very important. ↓
TO-LO-PO-SO-GO ↓ — a thinking landscape ↓
But first, something has to get on your mental radar (this page)
then what does that radar blip mean for you? ← who is you? →
then something like TO -LO-PO-SO-GO+
Feedback #analysis applies to all important action
Getting to tomorrowS isn’t easy,
but being left behind
and becoming a prisoner of the past (pre-knowledge dynamics)
is very easy …
Try a page search for “belief” here
For each thought fragment, concept, illustration, link, or text block
you encounter ↑ ↓ ask yourself what does this mean for me? (illustration)
along with doing a #PMI, dense reading and dense listening,
#thinking broad and thinking detailed plus visualizing
the operacy involved.
#72 #hor3
The future of any nation is the
sum of #individual behaviors.
It is an insane delusion to believe
that a country can improve
while #individuals
keep repeating the past.
the competitive knowledge economy
#MAGA
«§§§»
#73 #wlh “The #knowledge society, by definition, is a competitive society; with knowledge accessible to everyone, everyone is expected to place himself or herself, to improve himself or herself, and to have aspirations.
It is a society in which many more people than ever before can be successful.
But it is therefore, by definition, also a society in which many more people than ever before can fail, or at least can come in second.
And if only because the application of #knowledge to work has made developed societies so much richer than any earlier society could even dream of becoming, the failures, whether poverty or alcoholism, battered women or juvenile delinquents, are seen as failures of society.
In traditional society they were taken for granted.
In the #knowledge society they are an affront, not just to the sense of justice, but equally to the competence of society and its self-respect.” continue
«§§§»
“More than anything else, the individual
has to take more responsibility for himself or herself,
rather than depend on the company.” continue ↓
«§§§»
#74 #wlh Given the competitive struggle, a growing number of highly successful #knowledge workers of both sexes—business managers, university teachers, museum directors, doctors— plateau in their forties.
They know they have achieved all they will achieve.
If their work is all they have, they are in trouble.
Knowledge workers therefore need to develop, preferably while they are still quite young, a noncompetitive life and community of their own, and some SERIOUS outside interest. continue
«§§§»
Escaping the “kiddy table”
Broad worldview #sda
“Self-development of the executive
toward effectiveness
is the only
available answer
to satisfy both
the objective needs of society for performance by the organization, and
the needs of the person for achievement and fulfillment.
It is the only way
in which organization goals and
individual needs
can come together.” Druckerism
«§§§»
Furthermore, in the #knowledge-based organization all members have to be able to control their own work by feedback from their #results to their #objectives.
All members must ask themselves: “What is the one major contribution to this organization and its mission which I can make at this particular time?” responsibility-based organization
... snip, snip...
There is a great deal of talk today about “entitlement” and “empowerment.”
These terms express the demise of the command and control-based organization.
But they are just as much terms of power and rank as the old terms were.
We should instead be talking about responsibility and contribution.
For power without responsibility is not power at all; it is irresponsibility.
Our aim should be to make people be more responsible.
#wlh What we ought to be asking is not, “What should you be entitled to?” but, “ What should you be responsible for? ”
The task of management in the #knowledge-based organization is not to make everybody a boss.
It is to make everybody a contributor.
The emerging knowledge society
«§§§»
... replace the quest for success with the quest for contribution. The #critical #question is not, “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?”
«§§§»
Skills (and skill sets) vs. #knowledgeS ↓
Try a page search for “skill” on A Century of Social Transformation
… is a revolution in human affairs —
and is the
action foundation and eventual beginning point for everything,
but ecological awareness ↑ ↓ is also needed #psdapa
Essential Awareness
Most mistakes in thinking
are mistakes in perception
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
We know only two things about the future
The Essential Drucker
#fastp ↓
↑ … finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle ↓
People change over such a long time span
The ideas on the image below
can be found on this page
larger and evolving map
a change in the human condition
The explorer
Tactics (success) by Edward de Bono
Intelligence, Information, Thinking
JUDGEMENT → Attention-directing frameworks
The concepts below imply the need for dense reading plus
thinking broad and thinking detailed.
Then you have to make it ↑ operational …
… and that involves Practical Thinking and the awareness of risk and uncertainty
#mo1 Managing oneself is a revolution in human affairs.
It requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker.
For in effect it demands that each #knowledge worker think and behave as a Chief Executive Officer.
Further, the shift from manual workers who do as they are told — either by the task or the boss — to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure.
It also requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers' thoughts and actions from what most of us — even of the younger generation — still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act.
More and more people in the workforce — and most knowledge workers — will have to MANAGE THEMSELVES.
They will have to place themselves
where ↓ THEY
can make the greatest contribution ↓; (something that needs doing)
they will have to learn to develop themselves. (#responsibility word stem #contribut or #voluntee)
sidebar ↓
To know something ↑ ↓ … one must look at it
from sixteen different angles continue
Who was Peter Drucker?
The alternative to tyranny
Origins of a new world (#wgobcd ↑ ↓)
Moving on
… tomorrow always arrives
#ewtl
The Walking Dead
The World: A Brief Introduction
The Second Curve by Charles Handy
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Managing in the Next Society
The Forces Creating a New Geography of Opportunity?
#hor3
Striving
toward an #idea
outside of yourself continue
#bigpicture … we can only work toward the horizons on our mental radar at a point in time #ams
Why do things exist? Why do they die? ↑
larger composite view ↑ ::: Economic & content and structure ::: Adoption rates: one & two
The Forces Creating a New Geography of Opportunity?
#Ideas and action system ::: Idea collection and organization ::: Action thinking ::: Converting idea sources to action
The Management Revolution ↑ ::: Developing countries
The Poverty of Economic Theory #pdf
Dangers of inside-out thinking
How can the individual survive?
Imagining navigation course changes ↓
Cityscapes
Build on islands (a.k.a. small worlds) of health and strength
Annual goal review
Reviewing the previous year then looking forward
In helping people learn how to be responsible,
our educational system is
more and more counterproductive …
The longer you stay in school,
the fewer decisions you have to make. …
And graduate school
is much worse. continue
main brainroad continues ↓
#mo1 #ptf They will have to learn
to stay young and mentally alive
during a fifty-year working life.
They will have to learn
how and when
to change
what they do,
how they do it
and when they do it.
See: The rest they contract out
sidebar ↓
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
Listening for the signal
that it is time to change
is an essential skill
for self-development and self-renewal
The stages of Josh Abrams +++ continue
The Second Curve by Charles Handy
Reinvent Yourself (something that needs doing and make your life your endgame)
main brainroad continues ↓
#mo1 Knowledge workers are likely to outlive their employing organization.
Organization characteristics
within
post-capitalist society
#survive Why great companies fail
We should expect
radical changes
in society
as well as in business.
Even the very products we buy
will change drastically. #connect ::: continue
#wlh #44 Even if knowledge workers postpone entry into the labor force as long as possible — if, for instance, they stay in school till their late twenties to get a doctorate — they are likely, with present life expectancies in the developed countries, to live into their eighties.
And they are likely to have to keep working, if only part-time, until they are around seventy-five or older.
The average working life, in other words, is likely to be fifty years, especially for knowledge workers.
#mo1 #ole #lypc #ptf #survive #cfs
But the average life expectancy
of a successful business
is only thirty years —
and in a period of great turbulence
such as the one we are living in,
it is unlikely to be even that long.
#mo1 #uf #taa #wgcf #lypc
Even organizations that normally are long-lived if not expected to live forever — schools and universities, hospitals, government agencies — will see rapid changes in the period of turbulence we have already entered.
#mo1 #survive
Even if they survive — and a great many surely will not, at least not in their present form — they will change their structure, the work they are doing, the knowledges they require and the kind of people they employ. consider the case for outsourcing ::: conditions for survival ::: long years of profound change
sidebar ↓
Evolution of sound transportation — in time and place ↓
Why do “things” exist? ↑
Why do they die? ↑
… tomorrow always arrives #taa
Hofburg ::: Post-capitalist executive ↑
main brainroad continues ↓
#mo1 Increasingly, therefore, workers, and especially knowledge workers,
will outlive any one employer,
and will have to be prepared for
more than one job,
more than one assignment,
more than one career.
So far, this book — Management Challenges for the 21st Century — has dealt with changes in the environment : in society, economy, politics, technology.
This concluding chapter deals with the new demands on the individual.
#mo1 The very great achievers, a Napoleon, a Leonardo da Vinci, a Mozart, have always managed themselves.
This in large measure made them great achievers.
But they were the rarest of exceptions.
And they were so unusual, both in their talents and in their achievements, as to be considered outside the boundaries of normal human existence.
#mo1 Now even people of modest endowments,
that is, average mediocrities,
will have to learn
to manage themselves.
How can the INDIVIDUAL survive? continue
The INDIVIDUAL in entrepreneurial society continue
#mo1 #moq Knowledge workers, therefore, face drastically new demands:
They have to ask:
Who Am I?
What Are My Strengths? → Drucker methodology vs. StrengthsFinder
HOW Do I Work/Perform ? (here)
They have to ask: Where Do I Belong? In details 1 ::: details 2 ::: Insight: Where right becomes wrong
This is not a decision that most people can or should make at the beginning of their careers. (here)
Tactics (success) by Edward de Bono
They have to ask: What is My Contribution? (something that needs doing)
And do you know the biggest thing these young executives have to learn in their new positions?
My friend continued, “We have more Ph.D.’s in biology and chemistry than we have janitors, and they have to learn that their customers aren’t Ph.D.’s, and the people who do the work aren’t.”
In other words, they must learn to speak English instead of putting formulas on the blackboard.
They must learn to listen to somebody who does not know what a regression analysis is.
Basically, they have to learn the meaning and importance of RESPECT.
From Command to Information
to the Responsibility-based organization
“Men of high effectiveness are conspicuous by their absence in executive jobs.”
Q: A difficult thing to learn, let alone teach.
A: You have to focus on a person’s performance.
The individual must shoulder the burden of defining what his or her own contribution will be.
We have to demand — and “demand” is the word, nothing permissive — that people think through what constitutes the greatest contribution that they can make to the company in the next eighteen months or two years.
Then they have to make sure that contribution is accepted and understood by the people they work with and for.
Most people don’t ask themselves this question, however obvious and essential it seems.
When I ask people what they contribute to an organization, they blossom and love to answer.
And when I follow with, “Have you told other people about it?” the answer often is “No, that would be silly, because they know.”
But of course “they” don’t.
We are one hundred years past the simple economy in which most people knew what others did at work.
Farmers knew what most farmers did and industrial workers knew what other factory workers did.
Domestic servants understood each other’s work, as did the fourth major group in that economy: small tradesmen.
No one needed to explain.
But now nobody knows what others do, even within the same organization.
Everybody you work with needs to know your priorities.
If you don’t ask and don’t tell, your peers and subordinates will guess incorrectly. start here
They have to take Relationship Responsibility.
Very few people work by themselves and achieve #results by themselves—a few great artists, a few great scientists, a few great athletes.
Most people work with other people and are #effective through other people.
That is true whether they are members of an organization or legally independent.
To manage oneself, therefore, requires taking relationship responsibility.
Can we then say anything constructive about communication?
From command to responsibility-based organization and Managing the boss — boss list
They have to plan for the Second Half of THEIR Lives. more on this below … #parallel
sidebar ↓
Alternative life directions
Reinvent yourself
The individual in entrepreneurial society
The Return on Luck
Danger of too much planning
#mo1 #moq Equally important, knowing the answer to these #questions ↑ enables a person to say to an opportunity, an offer, or an assignment … ↓
“Yes, I will do that.
But this is the way I should be doing it.
This is the way it should be structured.
This is the way the relationships should be.
These are the kind of #results you should expect from me, and in this time frame, because this is who I am.” ↓
Try searching this page for the word “team”
People Decisions ↓
Beware of “what goes on behind closed doors” #wgobcd continue
What do I want to put into life ↑
and
what do I want to get out of it? continue
↓ From Interview: Post-Capitalist Executive ↓
#mo1 Even today, remarkably few Americans are prepared to select jobs for themselves.
Jobs that kill you
When you ask, “Do you know what you are good at?
Do you know your limitations?” they look at you with a blank stare.
Or they often respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.
sidebar ↓
Connect, connect, connect
The Individual in Entrepreneurial Society
From Knowledge to KnowledgeS
Knowledge is always specialized
The answers that gave you an “A+”
40 years ago are the wrong answers (research)
About knowledge ::: connecting ::: not connecting
main brainroad continues ↓
When they prepare their resumes,
they still try to list positions
like steps up a ladder.
It is time to give up
thinking of jobs
or career paths
as we once did
and
think in terms of
taking on assignments
one after the other.
#75 #wlh #mo1
Q: If a young man in a gray flannel suit represented the lifelong corporate type, what’s today’s image?
A: Taking individual responsibility and not depending on any particular company.
Equally important is managing your own career.
The stepladder is gone, and there’s not even the implied structure of an industry’s rope ladder.
It’s more like vines, and you bring your own machete.
You don’t know what you’ll be doing next, or whether you’ll work in a private office or one big amphitheater or even out of your home.
You have to take responsibility for knowing yourself, so you can find the right jobs as you develop and as your family becomes a factor in your values and choices. continue → Interview: Post-Capitalist Executive
… snip, snip …
#wlh Performance is not hitting the bull’s-eye with every shot.
Performance is rather the consistent ability to produce #results over prolonged periods of time and in a variety of assignments.
A performance record must include mistakes.
It must include failures.
It must reveal a person’s limitations as well as his strengths.
… snip, snip …
The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake, never commits a blunder, never fails in what he tries to do.
Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.
The better a person is, the more mistakes he will make—for the more new things he will try. — The Daily Drucker
Read more on the preceding topics
The individual in entrepreneurial society
… one thing worth being remembered for
is the difference one makes in the lives of people more
Wisdom → broad #sda
thinking broad and thinking detailed
The Return on Luck
Danger of too much planning
Knowledge and technology #pdf
Knowledge economy and knowledge polity
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Managing in the Next Society
A Year with Peter Drucker:
52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness
Freedom (et al.) is the heaviest burden
laid on mankind
Origins of The Practice of Management
the main managing oneself brainroad continues ↓
... snip, snip...
#20 #wlh The Second Half of Your Life #parallel #second-curve
As said before: For the first time in human history, individuals can expect to outlive organizations.
This creates a totally new challenge: What to do with the second half of one’s life?
If you can see the road ahead
#adt One can no longer expect that the organization for which one works at age thirty will still be around when one reaches age sixty.
#wlh #worldview #horizons But also, forty or fifty years in the same kind of work is much too long for most people.
They deteriorate, get bored, lose all joy in their work, “retire on the job” and become a burden to themselves and to everyone around them.
This is not necessarily true of the very top achievers such as very great artists.
Claude Monet (1840-1926), the greatest Impressionist painter, was still painting masterpieces in his eighties, and working twelve hours a day, even though he had lost almost all his eyesight.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), perhaps the greatest Post-Impressionist painter, similarly painted till he died in his nineties and in his seventies invented a new style.
The greatest musical instrumentalist of this century, the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973), planned to perform a new piece of music and practiced it on the very day on which he died at age ninety-seven.
But these are the rarest of exceptions even among very great achievers.
Neither Max Planck (1858-1947) nor Albert Einstein (1879-1955), the two giants of modern physics, did important scientific work after their forties.
Planck had two more careers.
After 1918 — aged sixty — he reorganized German science.
After being forced into retirement by the Nazis in 1933, he, in 1945, almost ninety, started once more to rebuild German science after Hitler’s fall.
But Einstein retired in his forties to become a “famous man.”
There is a great deal of talk today about the “mid-life crisis” of the executive.
It is mostly boredom.
At age forty-five most executives have reached the peak of their business career and know it.
After twenty years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are good at their jobs.
But few are learning anything anymore,
few are contributing anything anymore
and few expect the job again to become a challenge and a satisfaction.
Manual workers who have been working for forty years — in the steel mill for instance, or in the cab of a locomotive — are physically and mentally tired long before they reach the end of their normal life expectancy, that is, well before they reach even traditional retirement age.
They are “finished.”
If they survive — and their life expectancy too has gone up to an average of seventy-five years or so — they are quite happy spending ten or fifteen years doing nothing, playing golf, going fishing, engaging in some minor hobby and so on.
But knowledge workers are not “finished.”
They are perfectly capable of functioning despite all kinds of minor complaints.
And yet the original work that was so challenging when the knowledge worker was thirty has become a deadly bore when the knowledge worker is fifty and still he or she is likely to face another fifteen if not another twenty years of work.
To manage oneself, therefore, will increasingly require preparing oneself for the second half of one’s life.
(The best books on this subject are by Bob Buford — a very successful businessman who himself has created his own second half of life.
They are Half Time [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994] and Game Plan [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997].)
... snip, snip...
People who manage the “second half” may always be a minority only.
The majority may keep doing what they are doing now, that is, to retire on the job, being bored, keeping on with their routine and counting the years until retirement.
But it will be this minority, the people who see the long working-life expectancy as an opportunity both for themselves and for society, who may increasingly become the leaders and the models.
They, increasingly, will be the “success stories.” continue
#wlh Finding Your #Role #pdf
Reinvent yourself
#33 The following is from the chapter “Non-profits: the second career — interview with Robert Buford” in Managing the Non-Profit Organization
PETER DRUCKER: You’ve had significant achievements in both of your careers.
Is there any particular experience that helped you either to do the right things or avoid doing the wrong ones ?
ROBERT BUFORD: Perhaps two experiences that came early in my life.
My mother gave me a great deal of responsibility early in life and a great deal of freedom to fail.
The second thing that was important to me is that I got caught off base a couple of times when I was quite young.
For the rest of my life I’ve assumed that anything I did in violation of the rules, I would get caught doing.
So, I’ve made it a rule that I’m simply not going to take shortcuts and cheat, because I assume I’ll get caught.
And I find that’s good discipline.
PETER DRUCKER: Can you remember any one person in your own company or in your own community who made you realize who really you are and who you might become?
For instance, I’ve heard you talk a great deal about how much you gave, but also how much you got from the Young Presidents Organization.
Was that one of the important relationships in your life?
ROBERT BUFORD: The Young Presidents Organization has been important in my life because it’s given me a window into the real worlds of other executives.
I have chosen to live all my life in a town with a population of seventy-five thousand because it seems to me to be a sane environment to function from, and a caring and warm environment.
But it is a small town.
The Young Presidents Organization has provided me with access to sophisticated and successful people whom I would otherwise have been unlikely to meet.
PETER DRUCKER: That’s why it’s so important, I think, for people who work in an organization to have an outside interest , to meet people and not just become totally absorbed in their own small world .
And all worlds are small worlds . (Try a #page-search for “small worlds”)
Six degrees of separation
That’s particularly important for people in non-profit organizations because their work is so much more absorbing than it is in a business.
#adt Build on islands (a.k.a. small worlds) of health and strength
When you say to a business executive, you’re working hard from nine to five, make sure you have some other interest—be a Scout Master, well, that gets a resonance.
But when you say to a pastor, perhaps you should go on the board of the local hospital, he says, I’m too busy .
He becomes a victim of his own organization .
One of the most successful—and busy—non-profit executives I know sits on several company boards.
She says that gives her a window on a different world—that she learns from doing that.
Let me ask you what important advice you have on self-development for people in non-profit service organizations?
You have seen more of them than almost anybody I know, worked with more of them through your pastoral churches and the service organization executives you work with in Leadership Network.
What would be the important advice?
ROBERT BUFORD: #adt On either the business side or the non-profit side, stay in touch with your constituency, or you run the risk that they will change and you won’t.
You’ll be left a prisoner of your own tradition, a prisoner of the insiders in an organization and their desires, and will miss the role of a service organization, which is to serve.
Josh Abrams story
PETER DRUCKER: I’m reminded that Gustav Mahler told his orchestra members they should sit in the audience at least twice a year so that they know what music sounds like to the listener.
A great pastor I knew years ago made it his habit to take off about four or five Sundays a year, go to other churches, and sit in the congregation.
Is that what you are telling me is important?
ROBERT BUFORD: A great pastor I know summers in the country and goes to small local churches all summer.
Another pastor I know makes it his practice to go to the offices of his members on a frequent and disciplined basis to meet them on their turf.
PETER DRUCKER: The best hospital administrators I know have themselves admitted once a year as a patient, go through the admission routine, and then spend a day just to see not only how their organization works but what it is like to be a patient.
So that’s one of the important development things.
Any other?
ROBERT BUFORD: #adt It’s very important that the leader, and, for that matter, the whole leadership team, stay in touch with the seasonal changes within themselves .
We all have different experiences and levels of intensity in our mid-forties than we had in our mid-thirties.
And we will be entirely different in our mid-fifties when, perhaps, we’re, bored with our current careers, where we have achieved virtuosity and mastery in things which we used to think very challenging, but which are now yesterday’s work .
How is it possible
to NAVIGATE and WORK toward
THE “right horizonS”
that aren’t on your mental radar
at the the RIGHT pointS in time?
#ewtl
This is who I am
↓ #hor3 #wlh #mo1 ↓
The individual in entrepreneurial society
The Return on Luck
Danger of too much planning
Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Managing in the Next Society
Living in more than one world
Knowledge workers therefore need to develop,
preferably while they are still quite young,
a noncompetitive life and community
of their own,
and some SERIOUS outside interest. continue
Consider all factors → a broader landscape → Life 2.0 et al.
Just reading ↑ is not enough — you’ve got to make it operational
“Curiosity is a mindset, and it is a skill.
Intelligence and behavior
The art of asking the right #questions can make all the difference in a manager’s success or failure no matter the stage in their career.
Learn from a legend.
Billionaire Mort Mandel learned this critical lesson from leadership legend Peter Drucker.
In Mandel’s autobiography, “It’s All About Who” he shares the following story:
“Years ago the famous management guru Peter Drucker sat down with me and gave me the best advice I’ve received.
I asked him how we could grow faster.
He told me to put my best person on my biggest #opportunity — Mort Mandel, billionaire and philanthropist
That simple answer probably feels a bit like something Captain Obvious would tell you.
How helpful is it?
Well, after hearing that advice, Mandel was as skeptical as you, so he followed up with another #question:
“If my best person is a dentist, would I put him in charge of running a brass foundry?”
Mandel figured he’d be able to stump Drucker with this extreme situation, but Drucker took no time to insightfully respond:
“Yes.
Let me tell you what that dentist will do if he’s your best person.
He’ll walk into that building, tour the plant, and speak to the employees.
He’ll immediately realize he doesn’t know anything about a brass foundry.
But he’s going to get his people together and figure it out.
He’ll try to find someone on that team who is highly qualified to run the plant.
If he doesn’t come up with one, he’ll find the best foundry man in the country.
The dentist will soon learn how to improve the leadership and the culture and reinforce the values.”
I bet you can imagine the dentist doing all those things around the plant.
And as they do, the dentist will be asking critical #questions like:
What’s working well at the foundry right now?
What could we do to improve your work area?
What’s management missing that matters?
Who is the best leader among the staff?
Why?
Who is the best foundry man in the industry?
It is the act of listening and asking good questions to the right people that will turn the dentist into the leader the foundry needs.
They’ll discover the problems plaguing the foundry, what’s working well, and help find the right people to appoint as leaders.
While the dentist would never succeed on their knowledge alone, by using questions and curiosity they can forge a path to success.
Be inquisitive when you start a new role.
Like many of us, when put in a new role, the dentist didn’t know much about their new job.
However, asking the right people the right questions (#rq) quickly changed the situation for them and can do the same for you and your team.
Learning by experience alone does not scale as a leader.
Where’s the exploration of the biggest #opportunity?
Your best hope is to become great at asking questions to learn from others.
But curiosity isn’t just for when you start.
It’s a habit you should never stop, regardless of your leadership role and experience level.
Why Asking Great Questions is a Critical Management Skill
Many of the best leaders in the world have learned this lesson and shared it with others.
Here are some of our favorite quotes from leaders at companies like Pepsi, Pixar, and Intel, as well as a legendary Hollywood producer.
1) Bossing people around misses out on a ton of learning.
Brian Grazer is a legendary Hollywood producer you probably have never heard of, but you’ve definitely heard of the movies he’s helped make make.
He’s been working for decades with director and long time friend, Ron Howard, on films like A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13. In his book, “A Curious Mind” he reveals how he’s learned so much in his career by asking questions.
He’s used it to meet and learn from brilliant and famous people including multiple US Presidents, Michael Jackson, and Princess Diana.
He’s also used his curiosity to inform his management style, which he describes in his book:
“I especially think questions are a great management tool when I think someone isn’t doing what I would hope they would, or when I think something isn’t going in the direction I want it to go.
Asking questions creates the space for people to raise issues they are worried about that the boss, or their colleagues, may not know about.
Asking questions gives people the chance to tell a different story than the one you’re expecting.
Most important from my perspective is asking questions means people have to make their case for the way they want a decision to go.”
Rather than being the boss, and telling everyone how to do things, Grazer uses questions to listen and learn.
When his team answers them, sometimes Brian changes his mind, and other times, the act of answering changes theirs.
Either way, the outcome has nothing to do with Brian’s ego or his ideas being the only way to do things.
Brian doesn’t mind sacrificing his ego, because his real goal is to make a great work of art.
The result of his approach speaks for itself: he has 43 Academy Award nominations and 149 Emmy nominations.
Don’t be bossy; ask questions when you see something wrong and use the answers to shape a better path forward.
2) Problems don’t come to you.
You have to seek them out by asking.
Pixar Animation Studios has been making hit animated films for the last 20 years.
This hot streak is no mistake.
It is the careful attention to a hard working, candid culture, that has helped them succeed.
At the helm of this culture is co-founder Ed Catmull.
In his book, Creativity, Inc, he shares many lessons on how he architected the culture and improved it as they grew and changed.
One major lesson he learned early on that he wrote about in his book was that leaders must seek out problems:
During the arduous journey to make Toy Story, he never once heard about issues production managers were having.
When he finally did find out about them, he felt horrible they had gone on for so long.
It was a painful lesson he learned that shaped much of his management approach going forward.
After Toy Story was a big success and the future of Pixar seemed secure after so many years of struggling, Catmull was looking for his next challenge.
That turned out to be focusing on Pixar’s leadership and culture.
Reflecting on how he and other leaders have risen to that challenge over the years, he wrote:
“What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it.
This more than any elaborate party or turreted workstation, is why I love coming to work in the morning.
It is what motivates me and gives me a definite sense of mission.”
Building a great culture in your company or on your team does not happen by accident.
It is only by hard work setting a good example and actively seeking out problems that you will find the changes you need to make for your team to perform at their highest possible levels.
These problems do not come to you.
You must seek them out.
3) Questions level the playing field.
No matter the role you’re in, as your team grows, you’ll work with many different personalities.
One of the risks you run as your team grows is that you can be dominated by your extroverts.
As the saying goes, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
If you’re not careful, you’ll end up having your most outspoken team members driving your decisions and changes you make on the team’s behalf.
This is why it’s important to ask questions of everyone on your team, even if they aren’t coming to you or readily volunteering information.
One of the best places to ask questions is in your one on ones with each person on your team.
These meetings are invaluable for many reasons, and Ben Horowitz, VC and author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things points out a crucial one:
You have to ask your introverts.
Draw the answers and insights out of them.
(Ed.note: these one on one questions can help if you’re looking for ideas on what to ask.)
It can be hard work, but it’s critical to getting their input.
They can help you fully understand what problems or opportunities exist.
And even if someone on your team does come to you with something, don’t just take it at face value.
You should probe deeper so you fully understand the situation, idea, or feedback.
That’s why Andy Grove, former CEO and founder of Intel has, “Grove’s Principle of Didactic Management”, which he writes about in his leadership classic, High Output Management:
“When the supervisor thinks the subordinate has said all he wants to about a subject, he should ask another question.
He should try to keep the flow of thoughts coming by prompting the subordinate with queries until both feel satisfied they have gotten to the bottom of the problem.”
If you know the 5 Why’s method to get to the root of a problem, consider this the sibling to that approach.
Never assume you fully understand something from simply an initial statement.
You need to probe deeper so you’re not treating symptoms without knowing the disease.
For example, someone may tell you they want to be involved in a meeting they hadn’t been attending before.
The easy answer would be to just invite them along and move on.
However, if you probe deeper, you may discover the reason they want to be there has little to do with the meeting.
Instead, it could be due to a feeling of being out of the loop, not having input where they feel they should, or that they want to impress someone in the meeting.
All 3 of those would have different ideal solutions and be worthy of much more discussion to determine the best approach.
Whether your team member is starting the discussion or you are, it’s important bring questions and keep asking questions so you get the full story regardless of their personality.
4) Questions prevent rushing to judgment.
When you hear bad news or about a problem, it’s easy to jump to conclusions and want to take action quickly.
However, if you do that, it’s easy to say or do things you’ll regret later.
That’s why Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi, takes a different approach:
When you assume positive intent, and come to those involved in a situation with good questions to learn more, you’ll be in a much better position.
Not only do you avoid making any ill advised decisions, you can diffuse the situation by not escalating tensions.
As Nooyi wrote:
“Sometimes in the heat of the moment, people say things.
You can either misconstrue what they’re saying and assume they are trying to put you down, or you can say, “Wait a minute.
Let me really get behind what they are saying to understand”…when you assume positive intent, I think what often happens is the other person says, “Hey, wait a minute, maybe I’m wrong in reacting the way I do because this person is really making an effort.”
And it goes deeper.
When you take a positive approach and use questions to learn more, you make mistakes safe to occur, and for you to be told about them.
The downward spiral of rushing to judgment.
If you have a habit of killing the messenger, no one will come to you with problems for long.
Similarly, if a you tend to explode over any problem, your team will quickly learn to avoid making any mistakes.
Both are catastrophic for you and your team.
If everyone is afraid to come to you with problems, then many issues will fester and force you into a fire fighting, reactionary management mode.
Once you’re there, it’s quite easy to get trapped as a new, major problem will likely be emerging just as you dealt with the last one.
Meanwhile, if your team is afraid to make mistakes and take risks, you will never discover breakthrough opportunities, and creativity will be stymied.
This is a recipe for your best people to leave and your team as a whole to underperform.
Be a thoughtful manager.
Give people the benefit of the doubt and use questions to get all the facts before rushing to a decision.
5) Questions help you learn your people’s motivations.
Many people want to “be the boss,” but no one likes being bossed around.
You have to tap into people’s motivations to get the best work out of them.
It’s why a core part of Dale Carnegie’s leadership classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, has this simple, yet important lesson:
Later in How to Win Friends, Carnegie relays the following story about how a plant manager got his employees to step up to help deliver a massive order that he originally thought was impossible to do with their other order commitments:
“Instead of pushing his people to accelerate their work and rush the order through, he called everyone together, explained the situation to them, and told them how much it would mean to the company and to them if they could make it possible to produce the order on time.
Then he started asking questions:
Is there anything we can do to handle this order?
Can anyone think of different ways to process it through the shop that will make it possible to take the order?
Is there any way to adjust hours or personnel assignments that would help?”
Because the plant manager came to his people and involved them in the decision, they rallied with him and helped create a way to deliver the order on time.
If he had simply come out and started giving orders, he would have likely been met with groans and resistance instead.
As Carnegie later wrote, “Asking questions not only makes an order more palatable; it often stimulates the creativity of the persons whom you ask.
People are more likely to accept an order if they have had a part in the decision that caused the order to be issued.”
Do you know what excites your team?
Do you engage or order them?
The only way to get anyone to do anything is if they want to do it.
The only way to know what they want is to ask.
Questions are at the core of every facet of succeeding as a manager.
If you want to develop your management skills, hone your curiosity.
Looking for helpful questions to ask?” source
#30 #Questions from #Parallel Thinking by Edward de Bono (#attention #adt #apta)
They have to be YOUR answers
… But, on the whole, the question is the preferred device because it is more polite (asking instead of instructing) and simpler to use.
sidebar ↓
Attention is a very KEY part of thinking !!!!!!!!!!
one acts only upon what one is paying attention to
main brainroad continues ↓
Attention-directing is a very important part of #perception.
We look and then notice, and note
what we #SEE
in the direction
to which our attention is drawn
The brain can only SEE
what it is prepared to see
Six Frames for Thinking about Information
Perception
provides
the INGREDIENTS
for thinking
Most mistakes in thinking are mistakes in perception:
Seeing only part of the situation :::
Jumping to conclusions :::
Misinterpretation caused by feelings
An #expert in a subject may have acquired an ‘attention-directing framework’.
When an art expert looks at a painting, that expert may direct his or her attention to the colors, the brushwork, the composition, the use of light, the hands, etc.
A hypothesis will itself immediately direct attention.
If the expert believes that the unsigned work is by a certain artist then the expert may immediately look at the nose because that artist is known to paint noses in a characteristic way.
In #thinking about anything we need ‘attention-directing’ frameworks.
sidebar ↓
#fastp ↓
↑ … finding and selecting
the pieces of the puzzle ↓
The explorer
Six Frames for Thinking about Information
JUDGEMENT
Six Frames for Thinking about Information
#ewtl
The patterning system of the brain
NO SURPRISES
Managing the Moron
The CEO in the New Millennium
Information Challenges
Six Frames for Thinking about Information ↓
How To Be More Interesting
Serious Creativity
Operacy — effectiveness and
the thinking that goes into doing —
getting things done
main brainroad continues ↓
We cannot look at everything at the same time in order to put us into the same position as an expert who has built up just such a framework.
Answers to Drucker questions have to be YOUR answers
Rick Warren tribute to Drucker
Without the ability to direct attention, we see only the familiar patterns
Instead of waiting for our attention to be pulled towards something unusual, we can set out frameworks for ‘directing’ our attention in a conscious manner
We need attention-directing devices in order to prevent confusion.
It is more effective to look at one thing after another and to make a thorough job of each ‘look’. #cities
JUDGEMENT
Teach Yourself to Think : Basic Processes —
Broad/Specific, General/Detail ::: Projection ::: Attention Directing :::
Recognition and Fit ::: Movement and Alternatives
We also need attention-directing devices in order to be sure that we have not left anything out but have done a broad #sda and competent perceptual scan: that we have looked in all directions that matter.
The #CoRT Thinking Lessons, which are now in wide use in many countries around the world and with excellent results, deliberately provide just such attention-directing devices. #adt
So instead of the hit-and-miss haphazard questioning of the Socratic method we can have the organized attention-directing of the ‘de Bono method’ of parallel thinking.
The formal attention-directing devices of the #CoRT method provide ‘executive concepts’ for the mind.
Our minds are full of ‘descriptive concepts’ like chair, car, dog, etc.
But there are few, if any, executive #concepts, which we use to direct our thinking or attention.
In the #CoRT lessons there is an attention-directing device called ‘C&S’.
This stands for ‘Consequence and Sequel’ but is always referred to by the initials. #c&s
Why?
To give it its own perceptual identity.
It is perfectly useless simply to exhort someone to ‘look at the consequences’.
Such an instruction, which would apparently do the same thing, has no permanent standing in the mind, whereas the #C&S comes to have its own identity.
When a teacher asks a student to ‘do a C&S’ the student knows exactly what to do.
In time the student gives himself or herself the same instruction.
The results, as shown by the research of Professor John Edwards at James Cook University in Australia, can be very powerful.
Just telling a student to ‘think’ is perfectly useless.
In Canada I once #suggested to a roomful of about 150 senior women executives that women should be paid 15 per cent more money than men for doing the same job.
Eighty per cent of those present liked the idea and even muttered that it was ‘about time too’.
I then briefly explained the #C&S technique: direct attention to immediate, short-term, medium-term and long-term consequences of the suggestion.
At the end I again asked for their opinion regarding the suggestion.
The 80 per cent in favor had now dropped to only 15 per cent.
So ‘doing a formal C&S’ had made a huge difference.
Now, I suspect that everyone in that room would have regarded the C&S as an unnecessary device because as ‘thinking adults’ they always looked at the consequences of a suggestion .
If so then the formal request to do a C&S should have made no difference at all.
Most people make the mistake of believing that because something is simple, obvious and sensible we do it all the time.
This is not so at all.
We do not usually do even the simplest of things.
I have often told how I once asked a class of 30 12-year-olds in a school in Australia to give me their reaction to the suggestion that they should each receive a small amount of money each week for going to school.
All 30 thought it was a great idea since they would be able to buy sweets, comics and chewing gum.
I then briefly explained another simple attention-directing device: the ‘#PMI’.
Here the thinker directs attention to the ‘plus’ points first, followed by the ‘minus’ points and finally the ‘interesting’ points.
At the end of the exercise 29 of the 30 students had totally changed their mind and decided that the suggestion was a bad idea: ‘Where would the money come from?’, etc.
The important point to notice about this story is that I did not stand there asking them questions.
I did not say another word after explaining the PMI.
The students used this attention-directing device on their own.
As a result, they had a broader #sda perceptual picture.
As a result of having a broader perceptual picture they changed their mind about the suggestion.
The difference from the Socratic method, in which the teacher has to ask a string of questions, is very obvious.
Other attention-directing tools in the first set of CORT Thinking Lessons include:
#CAF: Consider All Factors — this directs attention to all the factors that need to be looked at when considering a decision, choice, design, plan, etc.
#FIP: First Important Priorities — an attempt to spell out the priorities.
Which things matter most?
#AGO: Aims, Goals and Objectives — this directs attention to the purpose of the action or choice.
What are you trying to achieve?
#APC: Alternatives, Possibilities and Choices — this is an executive order to find other ways of looking at something or doing something.
#OPV: Other People’s Views — this directs attention to the view or thinking of the other people involved.
All these attention-directing devices are very obvious and very simple.
But, in action, they have a powerful effect.
And students love using them, because they provide a framework for thinking about something.
Just telling a student to ‘think’ is perfectly useless.
One enlightened philosopher in Canada declared that the devices could not possibly work.
Even as he was writing this the devices were in use in hundreds of classrooms, where they were working very well.
It is somewhat like trying to prove that cheese does not exist when people are eating cheese every day.
We get many reports of children going home and teaching the attention-directing devices to their parents who are about to make major decisions.
We get reports of children helping their fathers and mothers think through business decisions.
There are countries where the methods are taught in some, many or all the schools.
There is no magic.
A question is an attention-directing device.
But who tells you where to direct the question?
The #CoRT thinking tools provide a framework for directing the directing of attention.
The #CoRT method also gets the students or thinkers to direct their own attention instead of just waiting for the teacher to ask the right question (#rq).
The CoRT Thinking Lessons are also used in business as well as in schools.
Intelligence Information Thinking
Books by Edward de Bono
society of organizations brainroad ::: The need for a theory of organizations ::: Toward a theory of organizations ::: Society of organizations #pdf
These text blocks ↓ — made up of book heading titles — are meant to facilitate finding topics spread among various conceptual resources and creating conceptual landscape awareness.
sidebar ↓
The Poverty of Economic Theory #pdf
… the real pattern of economic activity
larger composite view ↑ ::: Economic & content and structure ::: Adoption rates: one & two
The Forces Creating a New Geography of Opportunity?
The Management Revolution ↑ ::: Developing countries
main brainroad continues ↓
#worldview
#hor3 #wlh #org1 #fastp
Organizations
An organization is a special-purpose institution ::: A human group composed of specialists — not labors — working together on a common task ::: The function of organizations to make knowledge productive ::: The more specialized knowledges are, the more effective they will be ::: Have to be put together with the work of other specialist to become #results — outside the organization ::: Knowledges by themselves are sterile ::: Specialist are effective only as specialists — and knowledge workers have to be effective ::: The most highly effective knowledge workers do not want to be anything but narrow specialists #ntea ::: Specialist need exposure to the universe of knowledge, but they need to work as specialists and to concentrate on being specialist ::: And for this to produce results, an organization is needed ::: Organization as a distinct species ::: All one species … Armies, Churches, Universities, Hospitals, Businesses, Labor unions ::: They are the man-made environment, the “social ecology” of post-capitalist society ::: Management is a generic function pertaining to all organizations
Knowledge-based management
The characteristics of organizations ::: Organizations are special-purpose institutions ::: They are effective because they concentrate on one task ::: In an organization, diversification means splintering ::: It destroys performance capacity ::: Organization is a tool ::: The more specialized its given task, the greater its performance capacity ::: Its mission must be crystal clear ::: Because the organization is composed of specialists ::: Each with his or her own narrow knowledge ::: Otherwise its members become confused ::: They will follow their specialty ::: Rather than applying it to the common task ::: They will each define “#results” in terms of that specialty — imposing their own values on the organization ::: Only a clear, focused, and common mission can hold the organization together and enable it to produce #results ::: The prototype of the modern organization is the symphony orchestra ::: Many high-grade specialists ::: By themselves they don’t make music. Only the orchestra can do that ::: Perform because they have the same score ::: # Results exist only on the outside ::: Organizations exist to produce results on the outside ::: Results in an organization are always pretty far away from what each member contributes ::: Results need to be defined clearly and unambiguously and, if at all possible, measurably ::: Organizations need to appraise and judge itself and its performance against clear, known, impersonal #objectives and goals ::: “Voluntary” membership and the ability to leave an organizations ::: Organizations are always in competition for its essential resource qualified, knowledgeable, dedicated people ::: Need to market membership (what do the jobs really have to be to attract the needed people) ::: Have to attract people ::: Have to hold people ::: Have to recognize and reward people ::: Have to motivate people ::: Have to serve and satisfy people ::: Has to be an organization of equals, of “colleagues,” of “associates” ::: The position of each is determined by its contribution to the common task rather than by any inherent superiority or inferiority ::: Must be organized as a team of “associates” ::: They are always managed ::: Have “leaders” ::: May be perfunctory and intermittent ::: Or may be a full-time and demanding job for a fairly large group of people ::: Have to be people who make decisions ::: or nothing will get done ::: Have to be people who are accountable for the organization’s mission, spirit, performance, results ::: Must be a “conductor” who controls the “score” ::: There have to be people who: focus the organization on its mission; set the strategy to carry it out; define what the results are ::: This management has to have considerable authority ::: Yet its job in the knowledge organization is not to command; it is to direct (and inspire) ::: To be able to perform, an organization must be autonomous ::: Cannot be used to carry out “government policy”
Organization as a destabilizer #jump #lter #psdapa #sda ::: The organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer ::: Its function is to put knowledge to work on tools, processes, and products + on knowledge itself ::: #horizons It must be organized for constant change ::: It must be organized for #innovation ::: It must be organized for systematic abandonment of … the established, the customary, the familiar, the comfortable, products, services, and processes, human and social relationships, skills, organizations themselves (#wgobcd) ::: Knowledge changes fast ::: Today’s certainties will be tomorrow’s absurdities ::: Skills change slowly and infrequently ::: Changes that most profoundly affect a knowledge do not, as a rule, come out of its own area ::: Social innovation is as important as new science or new technology in creating new knowledges and in making old ones obsolete ::: Purposeful innovation has itself become an organized discipline ::: Which is both teachable and learnable ::: Every organization has to build into its very structure the management of change ::: Organized abandonment ::: Increasingly, organizations will have to plan abandonment rather than try to prolong the life of a successful policy: practice, or product—something which so far only a few large Japanese companies have faced up to (#wgobcd) ::: The ability to create the new (three systematic practices) ::: Continuing improvement of everything it does (Kaizen) ::: What every artist does ::: Aim is to improve each product or service so that it becomes a truly different product or service in two or three year’s time ::: Learn to exploit ::: Develop new applications from its own successes ::: Learn how to innovate ::: Every organization will have to learn how to innovate and to learn that innovation can and should be organized as a systematic process ::: Then we come back to abandonment and we start all over again
Post-capitalist society has to be decentralized (#sda #horizons) ::: Its organizations must be able to make fast decisions based on closeness to performance, to the market, to technology, to the changes in society, environment, and demographics, all of which must be seen and utilized as (REAL not imagined) opportunities for innovation ::: Organizations in the post-capitalist society thus constantly upset, disorganize, and destabilize the community (#horizons #sda) ::: The “culture” of the organization must transcend community ::: It is the nature of the task that determines the culture of an organization, rather than the community in which that task is being performed ::: If the organization’s culture clashes with the values of the community the organization’s culture will prevail or else the organization will not make its social contribution ::: “Knowledge knows no boundaries” ::: Of necessity every knowledge organization is of necessity non-national, non-community ::: Even if totally embedded in the local community
The employee society ::: Another way to describe the phenomenon of the society of organizations ::: Employees who work in subordinate and menial occupations ::: Service workers ::: The wage earner, the “worker” of yesterday ::: Knowledge workers ::: 1/3 of the work force ::: They own the “means of production” ::: Cannot, in effect, be supervised ::: Cannot be told what to do, how to do it, how fast to do it and so on ::: Unless they know more than anybody else in the organization they are to all intents and purposes useless ::: They hold a crucial card in their mobility ::: Organizations and knowledge workers are interdependent ::: “Loyalty” will have to be earned by proving to knowledge employees that the organization which presently employs them can offer them exceptional opportunities to be effective ::: Capital now serves the employee ::: From command and control to information-based to responsibility-based organizations (#responsibility #information word stem #contribut) ::: The Society of Organizations text society of organizations brainroad
The need for productivity
Realities and concepts are the essence of this page
They ↑ are vision elements in a life design & management system ↓
This page and its connected pages can be used as starting points
to create your own pre-thought work approach
A work approach that is effective
for the challenges ahead ↓
#43 #wlh Realities → Business realities, Market realities, and Knowledge realities
“… being right is the feeling of being right. This is what
guides your actions …” Practical Thinking and logic bubbles
The Black Cylinder Experiment #bce
First museum exhibit → Imagine the time span between the emergence of the railroad
— making the industrial revolution accomplished fact — and 2050 …
… how many alternative realities and unimagined futures do you #see?
From various points around the world, how many? ↓
( Long Shadow may be available on Netflix streaming)
↓
#ewtl
Adventures of a Bystander → toward organic design !!!
The management of change → abandon the old
and create the new ← a community destabilizer explore !!!
Exhibit 2 ↓
“We know only two things about the future ↑.
It cannot be known.
It will be different from what exists now and
from what we now expect”
This ↑ means the future isn’t going to be like today
which was created yesterday …
and yesterday
was the product of the day before yesterday ↓
We are nowhere near the end of the turbulences,
the transformations, the sudden upsets #lter continue :::
Long years of profound change
And “The actual results of (current) action are not predictable ↓” continue
#reality assumptions ::: The Black Cylinder Experiment !!! #bce
Exhibit 3 ↓
These unimagined alternative realitieS ↑ imply the need to
circumvent the organization and political power structureS that
act on the assumption (here) that tomorrow
is going to be an extrapolation of yesterday.
This backward focus ↑ sabotages the futureS and
leaves its victimS as prisonerS of the past …
“Looking out the window” ↓ is a useful alternative
Exhibit 4 ↓
↑ A work approach that searches for
“INFORMED” future horizons to work toward
is needed ↓ REPEATEDLY
A work approach that is effective for the challenges ahead
There are major horizons (here) and supporting horizons (here) at different points in time
And what is the global social value of those horizons and how operationally specific are they?
Exhibit 5 ↓
One example of unimagined futureS ↑ → KNOWLEDGE is the only
meaningful resource “TODAY” — dynamicS ↓ & implicationS ↓
A change in how the world functions
Exhibit 6 ↓
It is impossible to work on “things/opportunities” that
aren’t on one’s mental radar ↓ ↓ at the “right & necessary” point S in time ↑ ↓
The Power and Purpose of #Objectives: The Marks & Spencer Story and Its Lessons !!!
The case against corporate short termism
It is also impossible to work toward “horizons” that
aren’t on one’s mental radar ↑ ↑ at the “right & necessary” point S in time ↑ ↓
The things on your current mental radar are most likely
wrong, out-of-date, or mis-informed important
The sequence of “things” ↑ and “horizons” ↑ needs to be operationally reversed
Awareness ↑ ↓
about Questions
#Questions are a key time-life navigation tool #question
Try a #page-search for the word stem “question”
A question thoughtscape ↓ ::: Larger view ↓
Creating a constellation from question alternativess ↓ ::: Larger view ↓
Questions are attention-directing tools #adt
#54 We cannot #see things unless we are prepared to see them.
That is why science advances by fits and starts as paradigms change and we are allowed to #see things differently.
That is why the analysis of #data can never produce all the ideas present in that data.
Think “big data” vs. #information challenges.
The inherent weaknesses in all possible #information systems
That is why #analysis is a limited tool, not the complete one we have always believed it to be. continue
“Your thinking, choices, #decisions are determined by
what you have SEEN” edb
Why Peter Drucker Distrusted Facts
Try a #page-search for the word “information”
and then visualize the connections between what you have #SEEN
Hash tags (#) 53, 54, 55 56 and 57 form a thought space
The CEO in the New Millennium #worldview #mbr
The CEO in the new millennium has six specific tasks.
They are
- To define the meaningful outside of the organization
- To think through what #information regarding the outside is meaningful and needed for the organization, and then to work on getting it into usable form
- To decide what # results are meaningful for the institution
- To set priorities for the organization
- To place people into key positions
- To organize top management
The concept of the CEO is an American invention and export.
Connections :
A PDF #pdf
Not even educated in management
Management revolution → making knowledge productive
A radical change in structure for the organizations of tomorrow
The prototype of the modern organization
From command to information-based to responsibility based organization
“#Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose.” — Druckerism
Attention-directing frameworks
Continuing turmoil
The Society of Organizations and the accompanying destabilization society of organizations brainroad
Meta-System by Edward de Bono continue
Meta-System definition
A meta-system provides a reason for doing something which does not lie within the immediate situation itself.
The Happiness Purpose
What do you want to be remembered for?
Try a #page-search for: “remembered for”
A meta-system is a higher system outside the immediate system in which one happens to be operating.
Examples
Perhaps the most striking example of the operation of a powerful meta-system is the way Christian martyrs went singing to their deaths in the Colosseum of Rome and elsewhere throughout the ages.
Their meta-system of belief was so powerful that they were willing to give up life itself:
the meta-system required that the operating system close down.
A meta-system can make no higher demand.
Not very different was the fervour with which the Janissaries and other soldiers of Islam hurled themselves into battle with a disregard for their personal safety.
They knew that once a jehad or holy war had been declared, death in battle meant instant access to heaven.
Suicides (lack of a meta-system)
In contrast to the Christian martyrs and the Islamic soldiers there is the opposite example of suicides or people who end their lives not through the operation of a meta-system but through the lack of one.
From this must be exempted ritual suicide such as the Japanese hara-kiri which is another example of the operation of a powerful meta-system (though this time a social one and with no reward of heaven).
I have known many people who have attempted suicide and several who have succeeded.
Anthony Bourdain: Wikipedia ::: CNN ::: images
If we leave aside the gesture type of suicide attempt there seem to be two mechanisms.
One is a sort of temporary madness or rage and fury at life itself and especially at oneself.
Though the end-point is different the process is probably not any different from any burst of destructive rage.
The other mechanism is a sort of blankness or emptiness of the will to live.
There seems to be nothing to look forward to and no point in life.
The spirit appears to have died and so the body might as well follow it.
It is sadly characteristic of depression that at the depth of depression it does not seem possible that anything can ever change or get better.
It does not seem possible that there should ever be any enjoyment again in anything.
No matter how many up and down swings a depressive may experience, in each down-swing he cannot believe that it will pass.
The depressive exists from moment to moment.
There is no meta-system of belief which allows him to get outside of himself and outside of the moment.
Figure 2 shows how in the moments of depression a meta-system can provide the needed continuity and hope.
A device for reacting
A meta-system is a device for reacting to something other than what is immediately under one’s nose.
Left to himself a child would eat poison berries (or medicines) because they were red and pretty.
Human children would have difficulty in surviving if there were not the meta-system of parents who provide instruction that goes beyond the gratification of the moment.
Because of his freedom of action a human child needs such an outside meta-system.
A bird, however, avoids the poison berries because instinct has programmed him against them.
Instinct provides an inbuilt meta-system—except that the bird probably does not feel attracted to the berries in the first place since he is not free to be attracted unless his instinct programme includes such attraction. continue
A road ahead ↑ and horizon ↓
Striving toward an idea outside of yourself
A horizon → Knowledge Economy and Knowledge Polity !!!
And with knowledge becoming the key resource,
there is only a world economy ↑ ↓
“Making a living is no longer enough,” …
“Work also has to make a life.”
The need for roots
Druckerism (calendarize this? #ams)
“Self-development — #wlh ↑ — seems to me
to mean both
acquiring more capacity and also
more weight as a person altogether.
By focusing on accountability,
people take a bigger view of themselves.
That’s not vanity, not pride,
but it is self-respect and self-confidence.
Its something that, once gained,
can’t be taken away from a person.
It’s outside of me but also inside of me.” continue two development tasks
“The … I wouldn’t say happy people, but satisfied, contented people I knew were all people who lived in more than one world.
Those single-minded people — you meet them most in politics — in the end they are very unhappy people.
There isn’t that much room at the top — there is very little room at the top.” Then what? and #YouTube
How much labor?
Where right becomes wrong
#16 #iit #sda
#Intelligence ::: #Information ::: #Thinking
Intelligence Information Thinking → PDF
A brief celebration of Edward de Bono's ideas on thinking (YouTube)
Edward de Bono interview #audioplayback
Books by Edward de Bono
The explorer
JUDGEMENT → Attention-directing frameworks
Intelligence Information Thinking #dtao #pdf by Edward de Bono
The #PMI and mental scanning
Information is energy for mental tasks
Information vs. Thinking
The inherent weaknesses in all possible information systems
B.C. Forbes → Foundations and opportunities ↓
Knowing what to do #apta
How do you explain an event
you cannot understand?
The concepts above imply the need for dense reading plus
thinking broad and thinking detailed
Malcolm Forbes ↑ ::: Remembered for?
The love letters of Walter Bagehot and Eliza Wilson #pdf
#wlh
“Your first and foremost job as a leader
is to take charge of your own energy
and then help to orchestrate the energy
of those around you” — Peter Drucker
What Makes An Effective Executive?
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Management, Revised Edition
Drucker’s other work
What thinking is needed
to get these ideas ↑ ↓ — this information —
effectively accomplished?
#ewtl
larger view ↑
How could you convert these concepts ↑
into evolving operational steps ↓? calendarize this? #ams
Ludecy
#wlh “Why is ‘thinking’ important? awareness
Because without thinking we can only act in the following ways:
1. Act purely on instinct like insects.
2. Repeat the usual routines.
3. Do what someone else > decides > and orders.
4. Follow the emotion of the moment.” — Edward de Bono
What about feelings and values?
Thinking is a skill
We live in the world we ‘see’.
But the world we see
is not the physical world around us
but the ‘perceived’ world in our minds.
Outer world — inner world
The physical world may be exactly the same
but different people
will see different things.
A holiday is half gone.
Or, half the holiday is still to come.
A glass is half empty.
Or, the glass is half full.
The mistake is a disaster.
Or, the mistake teaches a useful lesson.
A plate of chicken is placed on the table before a person.
How does that person perceive the food?
1. A vegetarian does not want to eat the chicken but is timid about asking for something else.
2. A hungry person looks with delight and anticipation at the food.
3. A person who is trying to lose weight wonders how many calories there are in the chicken and remembers the fat is mainly in the skin.
4. A person who has a stomach upset is nauseated by the smell of the food.
5. A person who has just read about an outbreak of salmonella infection is suspicious and cautious.
Would it be risky to eat the chicken?
For each person
the physical appearance of the chicken
is exactly the same
as would be shown
if each person
took a photograph
from the same angle.
But the mind does not take photographs.
The mind brings in information, experience, frames, present contexts, feelings and emotions.
All these get organized
by perception
to give us
‘the way we look at the situation’ evolving worldviews ::: Grandmother and the Twentieth Century.
On Being Right — Rules Of Everyday Thinking
#conversation
“If I had to summarize the most important rules of everyday thinking I would reduce them to two. #conversation
1. Everyone is always right
2. No one is ever right
These are not contradictory.
In his own mind no one is wrong on purpose.
According to his knowledge, experience, emotions and the way he looks at things a person sets up his ideas in the best possible way.
One has to realize that this is the case when one is dealing with other minds.
It may be obvious but it is very easy to forget.
If one does want to show someone a different point of view one has to arrange things so that his mind can of itself snap over to that point of view in an insight change.
Insight is also the process by which one moves, oneself, from an idea that is adequate to one that is even better.
Although everyone is always right within his own context this rightness is not absolute but limited to that context.
This means that one must forego the arrogance and dogmatism of those who feel that they are so right that they must impose their ideas on others.
This arrogance is the most deadly mistake since it goes right against the natural behavior of the mind in improving its ideas.
If one accepts that no one is ever right in an absolute sense then one is more willing to look around for better ideas, and to look at the ideas of others.” — EDB
Thinking is the most fundamental of all human skills.
The quality of our future will depend directly on the quality of our thinking.
Is it then not only astonishing but also absurd that thinking is not the core subject in all #education and the central subject on any school curriculum?
It is not.
It is not there at all.
There are some schools that teach thinking.
Many of them teach #critical thinking, which is excellent but totally inadequate.
Judgement thinking is important but so is design thinking.
We need to create as well as to judge. continue
“Attention is a key element of perception
Without the ability to direct attention #adt ,
we #see only the familiar patterns (#connect)
Attention can be pulled or attracted
to something unusual
How much attention do we pay to the usual?” — EdB
“Attention-directing tools (#adt) are very powerful.
If you are looking in the right direction you #see things.” continue
«§§§»
#03 #patterns
#htmp
“The mind works to
recognize familiar patterns
in the outside world … ↓ #apta
As soon as such a #pattern is recognized (Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot)
the mind switches into it
and follows it along —
further thinking is unnecessary …
Unless there are competing patterns (here+),
then anything remotely similar
to the established pattern
will be treated
just as if it were that #pattern.
It is not unlike the watershed into a valley.
Unless there is a competing valley,
water which falls quite far away
will end up at
the center of the valley.
This is what we might call ‘the centering of patterns.’” continue
#sda ↓
Most mistakes in THINKING
are mistakes in perception:
seeing only part of the situation
#ewtl
THE OBSCURE VIRUS CLUB
Throughout the 1970s, a biologist named Howard Temin became convinced that something wasn’t right in science’s understanding of viruses.
His colleagues dismissed him as a heretic.
He turned out to be right — and you’re alive today as a result.
Season Four (Revisionist History) ends with a bedtime story about how we should be freed by our doubts (#adt), not imprisoned by them. Druid Hills #adt ::: Research Management #adt
Connections: Pearl Harbor, Pentagon Papers, Afghanistan Papers, Watergate, Flint water lies, Newark water lies …
Examples of competing landscapes:
One ::: Two ::: Three
To know something … one must look at it from sixteen different angles continue
Sources of competing patterns :
The Daily Drucker
The Textbook of Wisdom
Practical Thinking
#Podcasts
This page and #hotw the history of the world in two hours
Try a #page-search
for the word stem “pattern”
to see the #pattern concept in different contexts
Why thinking is important …
Highly intelligent people do not necessarily make good thinkers. the #intelligence trap below
“For there are three types of intelligence
* one understands on its own
* the second discerns what others understand
* the third neither understands by itself nor through the intelligence of others
# the first kind is most excellent
# the second excellent
# the third useless” — Machiavelli
The Prince
On New Principalities Acquired by One's Own Arms and Skill
On the Prince's Private Advisers
On Fortune's Role in Human Affairs and How She Can Be Dealt With
(naming) People behaviors
CATEGORY ONE: Behavior that is constructive but also very effective
The Intelligence Trap
Effectiveness: Getting the right things done
CATEGORY TWO: This is a person who is actually contributing a great deal at this moment
CATEGORY THREE: This is someone who is hardworking, cooperative, helpful and also effective.
CATEGORY FOUR: This person is positive, agreeable, pleasant and cheerful.
CATEGORY FIVE: Behavior that is neutral, behavior that is passive.
CATEGORY SIX: This behavior is critical, negative and destructive.
CATEGORY SEVEN: Behavior that is totally selfish.
CATEGORY EIGHT: This is the behavior of the bully.
CATEGORY NINE: This is the behavior of the outlaw. continue
The manager and the moron ↓ The point at which we teach people to think will have to be moved further and further down the line → Knowledge, technology, computers, managers, economic impact … the future continue
#35 #sda #tias Thinking is a skill,
not
intelligence in action.
“Why is ‘thinking’ important? awareness — seeing the road ahead
Because without thinking we can only act in the following ways:
1. Act purely on instinct like insects.
2. Repeat the usual routines.
3. Do what someone else > decides > and orders.
4. Follow the emotion of the moment.” — Edward de Bono
If you don’t design your own life THEN someone else will do it for you!!!
The Alternative to Tyranny
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
Everyday thinking is what fills in the time when you are neither asleep nor dead.
Thinking is that waste of time between SEEING something and “knowing” what to do about it.
Knowing what to do
The purpose of thinking is to deliver to you the values you seek … continue
“If you do not care
to understand something,
then you must borrow an explanation
from someone else (and they will deceive you)
or do without one.” continue
#wlh #thinking
“One can … never be sure
what the knowledge worker thinks—and yet
THINKING !!! is her/his specific work;
it is his/her “doing.”” ↓
Dealing with risk and uncertainty ↓
What thinking is needed — now or later? ↑ ↓
Now and then the ‘edge effect’
Edward de Bono interview (12+ minutes) #audioplayback
Wisdom is largely about ‘broadening’ perception
… to know something important … (#sda on memo)
Finding and selecting the pieces
Connect, connect, connect
Getting a broader view !!! helicopter
DEALING WITH RISK AND UNCERTAINTY ↑ ↓
Most of the mistakes in thinking are mistakes in perception. an exploration #sda
 SEEING only part of the situation — insufficient #information
Topics vs. realities ::: larger view ↓
Three types of broad — width, depth, richness
Once you see something you can’t unsee it
JUDGEMENT → Attention-directing frameworks
Now and then the ‘edge effect’ ↑
It’s easy to get lost without a map ↑
Creating a better “map” ↓
 The patterning system of the mind — the NEED for MANY competing patterns
Finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle ↓
“Alternatives don’t have to show themselves” ↓
A big really picture
A smaller element ↓
 “The terms knowledge industries, knowledge work and knowledge worker are nearly fifty (sixty, seventy, eighty) years old.
They were coined around 1960, simultaneously but independently— the first by a Princeton economist, Fritz Machlup, the second and third by this writer.
Now everyone uses them, but as yet hardly anyone understands their implications for human values and human behavior, for managing people and making them productive, for economics, and for politics.” — PFD
The Second Curve — missing the turn to the future
The World: A Brief Introduction
Books by Walter Wriston
Technology is about work: the specifically human activity by means of which man pushes back the limitations of the iron biological law which condemns all other animals to devote all their time and energy to keeping themselves alive for the next day, if not for the next hour.
 “A change as tremendous as … doesn’t just satisfy existing wants, or replace things we are now doing.
It creates new wants and makes new things possible.”
Knowledge and technology
No surprises
Long years of profound changes
The Five Deadly Sins
A FREEDOM brainroad
T. George Harris — civil rights, politics, business, psychology, careers, self-development, health and spirituality
Celebrating the life of Peter Drucker — audio by Rick Warren
Things don’t alway work out as expected. What are the implications for those impacted?
The voyage of the St. Louis 1939
The really bad guys don’t always get what they deserve
The good guys don’t always carry out their obligations
Intelligence, information, thinking
If you never change your mind, why have one?
Have a sign on your desk which says:
‘Same thinking as yesterday, last year or ten years ago.’ — life experience
Parallel Thinking
Water Logic — what does something lead to?
Think! Before It's Too Late
Practical Thinking — The black cylinder experiment and the world surrounding you
Textbook of Wisdom — if you can SEE the road ahead …
Attention directing frameworks — a place in the mind
Intelligence ::: Information ::: Thinking combo pdf
Three types of intelligence
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
Information: Search not Think
Windows of Opportunity
Information and Decisions
What Everybody Knows Is Frequently Wrong
Time-life Navigation Insights
The memo THEY don’t want you to see
Why bother?
How can the INDIVIDUAL survive?
The INDIVIDUAL in entrepreneurial society
Managing Oneself — a REVOLUTION in human affairs
More than anything else we are responsible for our own self-development and allocating our lives
The second half of one’s life
Who you really are and who you might become!?
Jumping to conclusions
see above
“Most people make the mistake of believing that because something is simple, obvious and sensible we do it all the time.
This is not so at all.
We do not usually do even the simplest of things.” EDB
Assumptions
Misinterpretation caused by feelings
What about feelings and values?
What about beliefs? It is also true that beliefs can stand in the way of progress
Doing a PMI
Social ecologist
Sixteen different angles
Broad
Perception provides
the ingredients for thinking ↓ #pta
↑ “If our perceptions are wrong
then no amount of logical excellence
will give the right answer.” ↓
Your thinking, choices, DECISIONS are
determined by
what you’ve “SEEN” ↑ …
“It is only our lack of complete information
that makes it necessary for us to think”
The traditional notion in education that information is sufficient is old-fashioned and dangerous
“In addition to information
we need #ideas.
Ideas are
the spectacles
through which
we look
at information.”
‘An #idea
can never
make the best use
of available information
because
information trickles into the mind
over a period of time
the idea patterns set up
cannot be as good
as if
all the information
arrived at once.’ continue
“One does not pay attention to everything.
And one acts
only upon what one is
paying attention to.
(A Century of Social Transformation)
The reaction may be #thinking or it may be action (which is only thinking that passes through our mouths or our muscles instead of our minds).
The world around is full of a huge number of things to which one could pay attention.
But it would be impossible to react to everything at once.
So one reacts only to a selected part of it.
The choice of attention area
determines
the action or thinking
that follows.
The choice
of this area of attention
is one of the most fundamental
aspects of thinking.”
Very powerful ::: TLN Insights ::: #adt #edb
The thinking
needed
to get things done:
Getting the RIGHT things done and avoiding the four realities of an executive’s situation that push them toward futility
Is it a problem or an important decision?
Career Performance or trivial pursuit
objectives, priorities, alternatives,
other people's views,
creativity, decisions, choices, planning,
consequences of action operacy
#hor3 #wlh “There are three types of ‘broad’.
The first type of broad is to do with ‘width’.
How widely do we #see?
This means taking into account different factors, different people, different values and different needs.
The second type of broad is to do with ‘depth’.
This means looking forward and looking backwards.
We look backwards in time to seek explanations and reasons for what is before us.
We look backwards to examine past experiences, both our own and those of other people.
We look forward to #see the #consequences of what is before us.
#ewtl
This might be prediction in terms of what may happen.
It may also be looking for the #consequences of any action we are contemplating.
We look forward from the immediate #consequences to the long-term #consequences
The third type of broad is to do with ‘richness’.
Here we open up alternatives and different ways of looking at things.
We seek out the existing alternatives.
We imagine the different viewpoints of other people.
We make an effort to generate further alternatives.
These are alternatives of perception and alternatives of action.
We look for ‘might be’ and for ‘possibly’.
We go beyond ‘what is’.” wisdom ::: Water logic
#wlh #Information vs. Thinking
We need both information and thinking.
Information is no substitute for thinking and thinking is no substitute for information.
In connection with information there are two uses for our thinking.
The first is directed at the information itself:
getting information
obtaining the maximum from the information we already have
checking the information.
The second is the use of the information to carry out some thinking purpose:
decision
action
choice
plan
design
or pleasure.
§
We need as much information (1) as we can get.
But we also need thinking.
We need thinking to decide what information (2) we should seek and where to look for it.
We need thinking to make the best use of the information (3) we have.
We need thinking to set up possible ways of putting the information together.
The traditional notion in education that information is sufficient is old-fashioned and dangerous.
It is only our lack of complete information that makes it necessary for us to think
Thinking is no substitute for information.
Check the timetable, do not just try to think when there might be a flight to Geneva.
The more information we have the better will our thinking be and the more appropriate our actions.
Since every little bit of information helps, every bit of time must be taken up with providing more information.
So there is no time to look directly at thinking as a skill.
The dilemma is obvious.
If we could have complete information in an area then thinking would be unnecessary.
But if we cannot have complete information then it is better to have somewhat less information and higher skill in thinking.
«§§§»
There may be certain areas where it is possible to have complete information but more often we have to supplement the information with thinking.
Suppose the timetable does show that there is a flight from London to Geneva at 9.45 A.M. designated as SR 815.
Now that we know, do we need thinking?
Indeed, we do.
How are we going to get to the airport?
How long should we allow to get there?
Is it rush hour?
Are there any strikes on at the moment?
Is there likely to be bad weather and what would be the best way of checking this?
Does it matter if the flight is late?
If the plans are disrupted how do I let the person at the other end know of this?
These are all considerations that require thinking.
Information and ideas #apta
In our management thinking we tend, quite rightly, to rely heavily on information.
A good financial reporting system leads to profits. #profit
A speedy sales reporting system results in effective marketing.
Detailed market analysis information brings about the correct product choice.
An examination of trends and forecasts provides the information required for planning.
It could be said that the size of any decision is proportional to the inadequacy of the reason for making it
If our information was complete then the information would make its own decisions.
If a shipowner for instance had complete information about oil transport requirements, future cost of finance, the firm plans of his competitors, knowledge of political and labour stability, information about government subsidies and regulations and so on, he could feed all this into a computer and the decision would be produced for him.
It is only when our information is inadequate that we have to make a human decision.
And the greater the inadequacy of information the bigger the decision will seem
Our hunger for information should not, however, blind us to the fact that information alone is insufficient
In addition to information we need #ideas.
Ideas are the spectacles through which we look at information.
I once gave the following problem to a group of chief executives:
'A man buys a dog as a watch-dog.
He then finds that the dog does not bark.
What should he do?' continue
#53 de Bono's 1st law: #apta
'An idea can never make the best use of available information.'
Since an idea develops slowly over time as more information becomes available the idea cannot make as good use of that information as would be possible if all the information had become available at once
de Bono's 2nd law:
'Proof is often no more than lack of imagination in providing an alternative explanation.'
The realization that proof does not arise solely from the excellence with which the explanation fits the facts but also from a feeble imagination is hugely important.
It leads at once to three things:
1. It is not enough for scientists to be accurate and to work with painstaking logic on their data.
They need to be imaginative and creative as well.
It is idea creativity that turns up alternative explanations to challenge the certainty of a current explanation and so suggest new experiments.
2. No explanation can be absolute in its rightness since it is impossible to exclude an alternative explanation simply because you cannot think of one yourself and no one else can at the moment.
3. People with feeble imaginations are the most sure of their conclusions.
If one puts the law in a rather fiercer form:
'Certainty arises only from a feeble imagination,'
then one can clearly see the shift in emphasis from the solidity of a proof in itself to the feeble imagination which cannot provide an alternative explanation.
Hash tags (#) 53, 54, 55 56 and 57 form a thought space
INFORMATION
Thinking is never a substitute for information.
We need all the information we can get.
Two thousand years ago China was far ahead of the rest of the world in science and technology.
They had gunpowder, rockets and many other things long before the rest of the world.
Had China continued at the same rate of progress it would easily be the dominant power in the world today.
But it did not continue.
Progress came to a dead end.
Why?
The scholars started to believe that they could move from certainty (fact) to certainty without any need for the messiness of ‘possibility’.
So they never developed the possibility system: hypothesis, speculation, imagination, etc.
Progress came to a dead end.
Exactly the same thing is happening today in the West.
Because of the excellence of our computers we are starting to believe that all you need to do is to collect and collate information.
That information will do your thinking for you.
That information will make your decisions, design your strategy and indicate the way forward.
This is much more dangerous than most people realize.
Thinking is needed to interpret the information in different ways.
Thinking is needed to put information together to design value.
Thinking is needed to see where to get more information.
Thinking is not a substitute for information but information is not a substitute for thinking.
Search Not Think
Youngsters given computers and Internet connections have a huge world opened up for them.
This is a great privilege.
There is a danger, however, that youngsters start to believe that you do not need to think.
All you need to do is to ‘search’ and somewhere you will find that answer.
This is a difficult point.
Everyone does not need to re-invent the wheel for him and herself.
There is much useful information available that can save a lot of thinking.
What is important is that as we develop the search abilities we should at the same time develop the ‘thinking’ abilities.
The combination of thinking and information is most powerful.
School and Information
A large part of school is taken up with information.
This is for two very practical reasons and two less so.
The first practical reason is that there is a lot of information around.
It is there and it is relatively easy to teach.
So as school is a sort of ‘baby-sitting’ exercise the information fills up time.
The pupils are busy.
The teacher is busy.
The parents are happy.
The second practical reason is that information is easy to test.
Does the pupil remember the information he or she is supposed to know?
Marks and grades can be given.
These are believed to be good motivators to get the pupils to work harder — directly or through the parents.
The third reason is that the information is there and has always been taught traditionally.
In the UK children leave school knowing the names of most of Henry VIII’s wives and even the date of the Treaty of Utrecht.
Yet they have no ideas how the corner shop works or how value is created in society.
The fourth reason is the unfortunate belief that teaching information is a way of teaching thinking.
This is a dangerous mistake since it blocks the direct teaching of thinking as a skill.
Certain skills of presentation and argument may accompany the teaching of information but these are only a very tiny part of practical real-life thinking.
Necessary but not Enough
If a chef spends so much time making elaborate pastries that he has no time to make a decent sauce that does not mean that the pastries are bad or even a waste of time.
It simply means that time must be made available for the sauces.
There is no substitute for information.
We need as much as we can get.
But we need thinking as well.
The skill of thinking does not arise from teaching more and more information.
Unless you can teach the right answer to every conceivable situation, then the skill of thinking is needed.
Intelligence and thinking
Far too many people regard thinking as a matter of inborn intelligence — which it is not.
In my researches and experiments I have again and again come across very intelligent people who turned out to be very poor thinkers.
Nor have I found that thinking skill has much to do with #education, for some of the best educated people (Ph.D.s — phds, university lecturers and professors, senior business executives, etc.) have also been poor thinkers.
To regard thinking as a skill rather than as a gift is the first step towards doing something to improve that skill.
«§§§»
Highly intelligent people do like to be right.
This may mean that they spend their time attacking and criticizing others since it is so easy to prove the others wrong.
It also may mean that highly intelligent people are unwilling to take speculative risks because they cannot then be sure they are right.
There is, of course, nothing to prevent highly intelligent people also being excellent thinkers.
But this does not follow automatically.
There is need to develop the skill of thinking.
Intelligence ::: Information ::: Thinking
Intelligence is like the horsepower of a car.
Thinking is like the skill with which the car is driven.
Information (including ecological awareness) is like the road map available to the driver.
By themselves, each of these three components — #intelligence, information, thinking — is not enough, but together they can be used to great effect in the world around us.
#40 Operacy → the thinking that goes into doing #apta
… objectives, priorities, alternatives, other people's views, idea creativity, decisions, choices, planning, #consequences of action.
… “It is perfectly true that the characteristics of effectiveness are more important in doing than intellectual niceties.
But the characteristics of effectiveness include a great deal of thinking : especially of the goal-setting variety.
The action-directed thinker is perhaps more concerned with the positive aspects of the possible than with doubts and fears, but that is thinking none the less.
That a doer should stand up and proclaim his pride in not thinking reflects either upon his luck or the poor image that thinking possesses.”
Idea creativity and #brainstorming
REAL Opportunities ::: Serious Creativity idea creativity
Six Thinking Hats
Management and the World's Work #pdf #mbr
… the real pattern of economic activity
larger composite view ↑ ::: Economic & content and structure ::: Adoption rates: one & two
The Forces Creating a New Geography of Opportunity?
#27 3 kinds of #intelligence and 9 action behaviors ↑ ↓ ← Niccolò Machiavelli ↑ ↓
The motivation to seek REAL opportunities ::: Executive styles
Finding Your Role #pdf
Society of Organizations
Executive realities —
unless executives work at becoming #effective,
the realities of their situation
will push them into futility
The Intelligence Trap continue
“Twenty-five years of experience in the field have convinced me that many people who consider themselves to be highly intelligent are not necessarily good thinkers.
They get caught in the intelligence trap.
There are many aspects of this trap but I shall mention just two.
A highly intelligent person can take a view on a subject and then use his or her #intelligence to defend that view.
The more intelligent the person the better the defense of the view.
The better the defense of the view the less that person sees any need to seek out alternatives or to listen to anyone else.
If you know "that you are right" why should you do either of those things?
As a result, many highly intelligent minds are trapped in poor #ideas because they can defend them so well.
A second aspect of the intelligence trap is that a person who has grown up with the notion that he or she is more intelligent than those around (possibly a correct view) wants to get the most satisfaction from that intelligence.
The quickest and most reliable way to be rewarded for intelligence is to "prove someone else wrong."
Such a strategy gives you an immediate result and also establishes your superiority.
Being constructive is much less rewarding.
It may take years to show that a new idea works.
Furthermore, you have to depend on the listener liking your idea.
So it is obvious that being #critical and destructive is a much more appealing use of #intelligence.
This is made even worse by the absurd Western notion that " #critical thinking " is enough.”
¶ ¶ ¶
#research “There is, of course, a place for academic intellectualizing and passive scholarship (which consists of repeating what others have repeated about still yet others) but that is only a small part of thinking — but valuable nevertheless.” EDB
#pti Practical Thinking
“You can probably remember things you were taught at school :
about geography (valleys, river deltas, rice-growing countries, etc.) and
about history (dates of battles, names of kings, etc.).
But can you remember what you were taught about thinking?”
… “Far too many people regard thinking as a matter of inborn #intelligence — which it is not.” continue
Perception
Perception is how we look at the world, what things we take into account, how we structure the world — #worldview #apta Water Logic.
Outside highly technical matter, perception is by far the most important part of thinking.
Professor David Perkins at Harvard has shown that almost all the errors of thinking are errors of perception.
In real life, logical errors are quite rare.
Yet we persist in believing that thinking is all a matter of avoiding logical errors.
… snip, snip …
Exactly the same thing applies to logic.
If your perception is limited then flawless logic will give you an incorrect answer.
Bad logic makes for bad thinking.
Everyone would agree with that.
But the opposite is not true at all.
Good logic does not make for good thinking.
If the perception is poor then good logic will give you a faulty answer.
There is even the added danger that good logic will give a false arrogance with which to hold the false answer. #arrogance
Unlike most books on thinking this book is not about logic but about perception .
It now seems very likely that perception works as a “self-organizing information system” (see The Mechanism of Mind , Penguin, 1976, I Am Right You Are Wrong , Penguin, 1992).
Such systems allow the sequence in which information arrives to set up patterns.
Our thinking then remains trapped within these patterns.
So we need some ways of broadening perception and of changing perception (idea creativity).
These are the sort of matters that are covered in this book.
More on perception.
Man’s mind
#10 Man's mind creates the world in which he lives.
Man lives according to
his own map of the world,
his own way of SEEING things,
which has been created by
his perception.
The process of perception
is a self-organizing one
in which signals
from the external world
received through the senses
are converted into
nerve excitations in the brain.
These excitations
organize themselves
into recorded patterns.
The patterns are individual
and depend on
#circumstances,
past experience
and the particular
sequence of
arrival of the information.
It is quite possible
for the same information
to be put together
in another pattern
by a different brain
or by the same brain
in the process
known as
insight or idea creativity. #apta
‘An #idea
can never
make the best use
of available information
because
information trickles into the mind
over a period of time
the idea patterns set up
cannot be as good
as if all the information
arrived at once.’ continue
Finding and selecting the pieces of the puzzle #fastp
#57 “Why We Need Creativity
The human brain is not designed to be #creative.
It is designed to set up routine #patterns and to use and follow these patterns.
That is why life is practical and possible.
We may need to use routine patterns 98 per cent of the time and only to be creative 2 per cent of the time.
To show this, there is a game where you start with a letter and then add another letter.
At each point, as you add another letter, a whole word has to be formed.
Start with ‘a’.
Add ’t’.
The new word is ‘at’.
Add ‘c’.
The new word is ‘cat’.
Add ‘o’.
The new word is ‘coat’.
Add ‘r’.
The new word is ‘actor’.
Until the addition of the ‘r’ it was quite simple to add the new letter to the existing ones to form a new word.
With the ‘r’ it was necessary to go back and completely restructure the use of the previous words.
INSIGHT
We live over time.
New information comes in over time.
We add this new information to what we already have.
There may come a point where we have to go back and restructure what we had before.
This is #creativity. idea creativity
More often we are not forced to go back.
We stick to what we have.
If, however, we choose to go back and restructure then we get a much better arrangement.
This is idea creativity we choose to use.
Another important consequence is the realization that no amount of ‘tinkering’ with an existing idea will suddenly change it into a fundamentally different idea.
The new idea may require a basic rearrangement of the components.
It is also possible to claim that no idea can ever make the best use of its components, since these have arrived in a particular sequence over time and that sequence of arrival plays too large a part in the final arrangement.
Theoretically all the components would have needed to be present simultaneously.
But what are the practical outcomes from these realizations and considerations?
One outcome is the understanding that radical changes are sometimes essential.
What was wonderful and the best in its time may need to be radically changed.
But how do you change from something which is adequate, or which people have come to accept as adequate, to something that is unknown and risky?
If the existing idea is the best then we should keep it.
If the new idea is better then we must change.
We are tied here to the either/or and true/false dichotomies that underly our thinking.
So what is the ‘parallel’ approach?
The answer is very literal.
You introduce the new idea ‘in parallel’ or alongside the old idea.
You allow both to coexist.
You might even give people the option of choosing.
If the new idea is valuable, over time it will then gain force.” — Edward de Bono
Hash tags (#) 53, 54, 55 56 and 57 form a thought space
No two people
“Actually, the real quote is, “ No two persons ever read the same book.” (Edmund Wilson)
And holy mackerel is that statement true!
Take any book and read a sampling of the reviews and you’ll find yourself wondering if they even read the same book.
What is praised in one is completely trashed in the other, from the writing and grammatical errors (which shouldn’t be debatable but apparently are) to the story line, the writing style, the characterizations, the dialog, and everything (and I mean everything) in between.
It’s amazing how each person reacts to the same book: the words are the same, the story is the same but the response is vastly different. (#meetings, #conversation, #communication)
And the higher the expectations the worse the review if the story fails to deliver.
What a person brings with them when they begin a story matters, too; being in the right frame of mind can mean the difference between loving a book and loathing the same book.
It’s fascinating to see the different responses and learning more about what makes people tick.” source
«§§§»
“To raise the question (What is our business? — chapter 7, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices) always reveals cleavages and differences within the top-management group itself. (See what exists is getting old)
People who have worked side by side for many years and who think that they know each other’s thoughts suddenly realize with a shock that they are in fundamental disagreement.”
«§§§»
Lateral thinking is a provocative process used for changing the patterns of perception.
Thinking, in general, is an exploration of the map of the world created by perception.
The purpose of thinking is either direct enjoyment or else a change in the world map intended to increase happiness.
This change in the world map may take the form of an adjustment to circumstances or an alteration of circumstances by means of activity which follows the thinking.
The balance between adjustment of oneself or alteration of circumstances is emphasized.
Water Logic
At several points in the book I have referred to ‘water logic’ as a contrast to the ‘rock logic’ of traditional thinking.
The purpose of this naming of ‘water logic’ is to give an impression of the difference.
At this point I shall spell out in more detail some of the points of difference.
A rock is solid, permanent and hard.
This suggests the absolutes of traditional thinking (solid as a rock).
Water is just as real as a rock but it is not solid or hard.
The permanence of water is not defined by its shape.
A rock has hard edges and a definite shape.
This suggests the defined categories of traditional thinking.
We judge whether something fits that category shape or not.
Water has a boundary and an edge which is just as definite as the edge of a rock, but this boundary will vary according to the terrain (#connections).
Water will fill a bowl or a lake.
It adapts to the terrain or landscape.
Water logic is determined by the conditions and circumstances.
The shape of the rock remains the same no matter what the terrain might be.
If you place a small rock in a bowl, it will retain its shape and make no concession at all towards filling the bowl.
The absolutes of traditional thinking deliberately set out to be circumstance-independent.
If you add more water to water, the new water becomes part of the whole.
If you add a rock to a rock, you simply have two rocks.
This addition and absorption of water logic corresponds to the process of poetry, in which new images become absorbed in the whole.
It is also the basis of the new artificial device of the ‘strata!’.
With conditions and #circumstances, the addition of new circumstances becomes part of the whole set of circumstances.
We can match rocks by saying this shape ‘is’ or ‘is not’ the same as another shape.
A rock has a fixed identity.
Water flows according to the gradient.
Instead of the word ‘is’ we use the word ‘to’.
Water flows ‘to’ somewhere.
In traditional (rock) logic we have judgements based upon right/wrong.
In perception (water) logic we have the concepts of ‘fit’ and ‘flow’.
The concept of ‘fit’ means:
‘Does this fit the circumstances and conditions?’
The concept of ‘flow’ means:
‘Is the terrain suitable for flow to take place in this direction?’
Fit and flow both mean the same thing.
Fit covers the static situation, flow covers the dynamic situation.
Does the water fit the lake or hole?
Does the river flow in this direction?
Truth is a particular constellation of circumstances with a particular outcome.
In this definition of truth we have both the concepts of fit (constellation of circumstances) and of flow (outcome).
In a conflict situation both sides are arguing that they are right.
This they can show logically.
Traditional thinking would seek to discover which party was really ‘right’.
Water logic would acknowledge that both parties were right but that each conclusion was based on a particular aspect of the situation, particular circumstances, and a particular point of view. …
continue
#42 #tln #wlh #dwrau #ptf #apta #fastp #ole #lypc
#brainstorming #mindfulness #journaling
Dealing with risk and uncertainty
The brain is a history library …
… that has to run
in the future tense.
Almost all our thinking activity
is directed towards
dealing with the future
since all actions taken
are directed towards
bringing about an effect
which is not yet present.
Yet the brain can only make
observations of the moment (#worldview)
and recall experience of the past.
Even what we see
at the moment
is conditioned by
the perceptions of the past … Water Logic Outer world — inner world
this brainroad continues following the sidebar below
sidebar ↓
We know only
two things
about the future
continue
What are the implications ↑ for #brainstorming?
Practical Thinking >
The Black Cylinder Experiment
Success always obsoletes the very behavior that achieved it #arrogance
Intelligence and behavior
Information challenges
Most
mistakes in thinking
are
mistakes
in perception
explore further ::: #sda
The dimensions of Broad #sda ::: Assumptions
main brainroad continues ↓
Our habit of #analysis
has been developed
in order to
break down unfamiliar chunks.
We seek to discover scientific truths
so that we may predict
what will happen
and how we can make things happen
with a practical degree of certainty.
Five ways to understand
The use of understanding
We are forever extrapolating the past
in order to prepare the future
into which we are always moving. #wlh Luther, Mac, and the salmon
Experts speak !
It is not surprising that
much of business
is dealing with risk and uncertainty
because all of business
is dealing with the future.
When we concern ourselves with #opportunity
we are dealing with greater risk and uncertainty
because we have to do
much more
than predict
that an already existing business #ole
will go on being successful #lypc
(the minimal prediction anyone has to make — and
it is increasingly difficult to make). — Edward de Bono ::: continue
The expected always means
something so very different
The concept of “risk management” is essentially fairy-tale BS.
See “Innovation—The New Conservatism?” and
Search the contents of The Daily Drucker for “risk”
Why Drucker distrusted “facts”
The inherent weaknesses in all possible #information systems
The Tool Method
Carpenters have tools and learn how to use them.
The hammer, the saw, the plane and the drill all have their purposes.
Each tool carries out a defined function.
The skilled carpenter knows which tools to use at any point in order to get the desired effect.
In an exactly similar way, some very fundamental thinking tools are put forward in this book.
They are extremely simple but very powerful to use.
You can learn and practice the tools.
When you have built up some skill in using the tools they can be taken and applied to any situation whatever.
The tools are really “attention-directing tools.” #adt
We can now direct attention at will.
Without attention-directing tools,
attention follows the patterns
laid down by experience
and we remain trapped.
This tool method has now been in use for twenty years and it works very well.
It is easy to learn, easy to practice and easy to apply.
The tool method is much easier and more effective than other methods of teaching thinking.
Teaching people to avoid mistakes is very limited.
You could avoid all mistakes in driving by leaving the car in the garage.
Debate and discussion around a subject may practice thinking but do not leave any transferable skills.
Following the thinking of an outstanding teacher could work but would depend on a long period of contact and the general availability of outstanding teachers.
Each tool is very simple to learn.
Once learned it can be applied explicitly.
Our minds are full of “descriptive” concepts such as table, shop, book, #education etc.
What the thinking tools do is to furnish the mind with some “executive” concepts so that at different points in our thinking we can instruct our own minds to work as we wish .
Thinking is a skill that can be improved—if we want to improve that skill.
The tool method is a powerful and effective way of improving that skill.
Some of the most basic tools are laid out in this book.
These tools are derived from the basic #CoRT Thinking Lessons program, which is available for use in schools across a wide range of ages and abilities.
#CAF: Consider All Factors
This is one of the thinking tools from the widely used #CoRT Thinking Program (published by SRA) that I developed.
This program is now in use in thousands of schools world-wide.
The CoRT Program is a comprehensive program consisting of sixty thinking lessons divided into six sections.
There are detailed teacher guides.
A small handful of the #CoRT tools are included in this book because it would be confusing to create new tools to serve the same purpose .
I must make clear, however, that the full CoRT Program is the one designed for educational use in schools.
This book is designed for parents at home.
It may also happen that parents who use this book may want to move on to the full CoRT Program .
CAF is an attention-directing tool.
CAF is a tool designed to increase the breadth of perception. #sda
What are the factors that have to be considered in this matter?
CAF is pronounced ‘caff’.
… ‘Please do a “caff” on this.’
… ‘If you had done a “caff” you would not have left out that important point.’
… ‘Should we do a CAF here?’
The more you use the tool in a deliberate manner the more of a tool it becomes.
If you are shy about mentioning the tool, it does not become usable as a tool but remains as a weak attitude.
A father told his young daughter that she could call in early at his office on her way back from school, because business was very slack.
When she arrived at his office the girl (who had been doing CoRT Thinking at school) suggested to her father that they do a CAF on why business was slack.
Some ideas were developed that helped the business to pick up again.
Looking around a used-car lot a man suddenly spots his favorite make of sports car.
The condition is good, the mileage is right and the price is just affordable.
He is delighted.
Later he comes back and purchases the car.
He drives home in triumph.
He then finds that the car is too wide to fit in the garage at his home.
He had forgotten to do a CAF.
A dwarf got into the elevator intending to go up to the twentieth floor.
But he had to get out at the tenth floor.
He could only reach as high as the tenth-floor button.
He had not done a CAF.
If he had, he might have waited until someone else was ready to get into the elevator.
The government allowed wealthy foreigners to bid up the price of houses in the town.
They then found that they could not get local people to work in the town because the local people could not afford the same prices.
Someone had not done a CAF.
Teaching CAF is a matter of adding to the list of factors.
What has been left out?
Can you add another factor to the list we have?
What else must be considered?
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