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Why Intention Will Be Central To The AI Economy | Digital Tonto
When Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492, he was looking for an alternative to the Silk Road to reach India. He found America instead. In a similar way, when Jennifer Doudna set out to study an obscure defense mechanism in bacteria, she had no idea that she would discover the revolutionary gene editing technology we now know as CRISPR. Yet it was their basic human yearning to explore that drove them to discover new things. Over the years, I’ve gotten to meet and learn from many genuine changemakers. Both of my books explored the question of what makes these people different. Time and again, I found that those who make an outsized impact start with a question they so desperately wanted answered that they were willing to devote years, even decades to the search. Artificially intelligent systems do exactly the opposite. They train on data from the past and are able to create answers that far surpass any living person, or perhaps all of humanity. Yet, there are lots of things machines will never do. Machines will never strike out at a Little League game, have their hearts broken in a summer romance or see their children born. Those may seem like trivial things, but genuine human experiences are crucial to shaping the yearning that forms the basis of intent. While machines are masterfully rational, humans are prosocial. We live for each other. We thrive on connection and purpose. That’s what drives us to delve into the unknown and discover new things that lead to bold, unpredictable leaps. Therein lies the enormous opportunity of artificial intelligence. It’s not that it can give us all the answers, but that it can help us explore the questions that matter to us.
First, Try Not To Fool Yourself, Because You are The Easiest One To Fool | Digital Tonto
It would be nice if everyone could have the experience of writing a book and having it thoroughly fact checked. In each of my books, I had dozens of errors in the original manuscript. Many of the them were corrected by my publisher’s fact checkers looking online for reference materials to verify what I had written. But they can only do so much, which is I also sent sections of my work to primary sources for verification. Even then at least one minor error got through on my first book (a publicist for a source didn’t catch it when I sent the section). That’s how I caught a terrible error about Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and was able to fix it. He was also generous enough to offer additional insight and write a blurb for my book. Yet that doesn’t change the fact that I repeated the error in multiple articles, even though I had read the accurate version in Gina Keating’s book about the subject. My version was then picked up by others and repeated in their work. As the great physicist Richard Feynman famously said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” We need to be disciplined about what we think we know. The first step is to be hyper-vigilant and aware that our brains have a tendency to fool us. We will quickly grasp on the most readily available information and detect patterns that may or may not be there. Then we seek out other evidence that confirms those initial hunches while disregarding contrary evidence.. It happens to the best of us and, if you are going to put work out in the world you are going to have to accept the risk of getting things wrong. Once you embrace that, you have a chance to make a positive impact on the world.
3 Strategic Tools Every Changemaker Needs In Their Toolbox | Digital Tonto
When I was researching my book, Cascades, I noticed that change movements all started out very differently. The activists in the 19th century and early 20th tended to be women, like Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, and Alice Paul. For most of the 20th century, they were mostly men in their 30s and older, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. In the 60s, student groups became more predominant. Yet despite their differences, I noticed a consistent pattern over the past two centuries. A movement would start with a grassroots effort, begin to gain traction and then experience a tragic failure, such as the Women’s Suffrage Procession, Gandhi’s Himalayan Miscalculation and the massacre at Sharpeville. The successful movements learned from their experience and changed tactics. The unsuccessful movements never did. To this rule, there was one major exception: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and there is a clear reason why. They learned the successes and failures of those who came before them. Some, like James Lawson, travelled to India and studied directly under Gandhi’s disciples and then trained young activists, like John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Diane Nash who became leaders in their own right. You can do the same. Every effort to drive change faces challenges in maintaining unity, but creating a “contract” that encourages people to explicitly commit to shared values is a proven way to build cohesion. Creating resources that others can co-opt to achieve their own goals allows initiatives to scale organically, while designing dilemmas offers a powerful strategy to discredit those working to sabotage and undermine your efforts. These principles are just as effective for driving organizational change. One thing history has shown is that transformational change is possible in even the most difficult contexts. The key isn’t the righteousness of the cause of even the commitment of those working for change, but the ability to learn use the right tools with skill, discipline and wisdom. Yet despite their differences, I noticed a consistent pattern over the past two centuries. A movement would start with a grassroots effort, begin to gain traction and then experience a tragic failure, such as the Women’s Suffrage Procession, Gandhi’s Himalayan Miscalculation and the massacre at Sharpeville. The successful movements learned from their experience and changed tactics. The unsuccessful movements never did. To this rule, there was one major exception: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States and there is a clear reason why. They learned the successes and failures of those who came before them. Some, like James Lawson, travelled to India and studied directly under Gandhi’s disciples and then trained young activists, like John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Diane Nash who became leaders in their own right. You can do the same. Every effort to drive change faces challenges in maintaining unity, but creating a “contract” that encourages people to explicitly commit to shared values is a proven way to build cohesion. Creating resources that others can co-opt to achieve their own goals allows initiatives to scale organically, while designing dilemmas offers a powerful strategy to discredit those working to sabotage and undermine your efforts. These same principles are just as effective for driving organizational change. One thing history has clearly shown is that truly transformational change is possible in even the most difficult contexts. The key isn’t the righteousness of the cause of even the commitment of those working for change, but the ability to learn use the right tools with skill, discipline and wisdom.
Why Smart Leaders Run Their Organizations With Dignity | Digital Tonto
In "Seeing Around Corners," Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath emphasizes how important it is for leaders to get more visibility at the edges. When you’re at the center, you are insulated in ways you’re not aware of and there are going to be things that you don’t see. A striking example of these blind spots occured when Portuguese colonists first came across manioc in South America. They were perplexed by the elaborate, multi-day process the indigenous people followed to prepare it. Some steps, like boiling the raw tuber to eliminate its bitterness and prevent digestive issues, appeared practical. Others seemed superstitious. What the Portuguese didn’t realize was that they were seeing survivors—those who had inherited generations of hard-won knowledge about manioc’s dangers. As it turns out, manioc, if not properly processed, has low levels of cyanide, which accumulate over time and cause chronic poisoning. Those who ignored these traditions had died out. When the Portuguese streamlined the process to gain efficiency, they slowly poisoned entire populations, which is a great metaphor for what happens when leaders fail to treat people with dignity. Just like the Portuguese ignored generations of knowledge, leaders who dismiss long-standing institutional wisdom often pay a heavy price. They cut themselves off from crucial channels of information. Eventually that catches up to you. Linus's law states, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” But the opposite is also true. Without enough eyeballs, all dangers are potentially lethal. That’s why it's so important to treat people with dignity. When you empower those around you, they are that much more capable of delivering the performance you need to compete.
This Is How Change Fails To Survive Victory (And What To Do About It) | Digital Tonto
The failure to survive victory is always a failure to leverage shared values in favor of differentiating values that allow stalwarts to signal identity and status. The truth is that most change efforts fail and the ones that do succeed almost always have at least one heartbreaking setback along the way. Gandhi had his Himalayan miscalculation. Mandela had Sharpeville. The first march on Washington, in 1913, was a disaster. As Saul Alinsky put it, every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That is the physics of change. Yet as Alinsky also wrote, “Once we accept and learn to anticipate the inevitable counterrevolution, we may then alter the historical pattern of revolution and counterrevolution from the traditional slow advance of two steps forward and one step backward to minimizing the latter.” Resistance is inevitable. Anticipating it is how you survive victory. It’s also how you recover from a setback. When your opposition is triumphant, that’s when you should be preparing for your next window of opportunity. Ask yourself: What do I wish I had in place before I began this effort? What could I have built? What connections could I have made? What alliances could I have forged?” The best time to do that is when nobody is watching, when it seems that all is lost and your cause has been all but forgotten. That’s when you have the space to really think things through, to build a strategy without the stress and strain of having to execute on a daily basis. The time to lay the groundwork for victory is before the battle begins. If you want to be an effective changemaker, your first task is to anticipate resistance and build strategies to overcome it. To do that, you need to focus on shared values and always be preparing for your next window of opportunity. Lasting change is built on common ground.
How To Navigate Today’s Media Environment When So Many Are Working To Mislead You | Digital Tonto
Conspiracy theories used to be relatively rare. Sure, we had lots of people claiming that the was a moon landing was a hoax or that Elvis is still alive, but today we are inundated with falsehoods ranging from the complex narratives of Q-Anon to the idea that there are secret biolabs in Ukraine and that its president came to power in a coup. If we are to avoid getting duped, there are a few simple rules of thumb to follow. The first is to consider whether you are hearing from a primary, secondary or tertiary source. Primary sources have first-hand knowledge, either because they are reporting from where an event is happening or because they have underlying knowledge or expertise. Secondary and tertiary sources are merely passing on what they have heard from others. The second thing is to look out for how your own emotions are triggered. The dopamine rushes that come from negative emotions are addictive and many media business models are based on them (recent claims about USAID fit this pattern). If you find yourself tuning into outlets that are constantly driving fear and anger, you need to apply a more stringent standard of proof. Third, we need to apply a critical eye and demand extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims. Yes, it’s possible that there are secret, infallible organizations that affect our lives in important ways but leave no trace, but we should be very doubtful, especially when the news comes from YouTube, a podcast or social media. Perhaps most of all, we need to understand that many have significant incentives to mislead us. Fighter jets are expensive, but social media personalities and bot farms are relatively cheap and nation states like Russia, China and Iran, as well as billionaires, corporations and other interest groups, invest heavily in them to shape what we think. Getting misled has little to do with intelligence or education. We simply need to be more careful.
Experian Was Being Disrupted by Fintech Startups. Then They Turned the Tables | Digital Tonto
As Robert Gordon explains in "The Rise and Fall of American Growth", the turn of the 20th century was a time of great change. New innovations like electricity, indoor plumbing and the automobile were changing the way people lived, worked and shopped. New supermarkets and department stores were edging out the old corner markets and dry goods dealers. While this created great opportunities, it also created problems. Merchants needed to extend credit no longer knew their customers personally and so there was a great need to verify consumers’ trustworthiness. Experian built a great business being a trustworthy gatekeeper of data that helped those businesses evaluate the credit of hundreds of millions of people. Yet when its consumer business was disrupted by fintech startups, Jeff Softley saw that the same data and technology infrastructure the company had built to serve large enterprises, could also be put to work to empower consumers to improve their access to credit and measurably improve their lives. Somewhere along the line we got it into our heads that large firms can’t innovate and should strive to act like startups. The truth is that they are very different types of organizations and need to innovate differently. While large firms can’t move as fast, they have other advantages. Rather than try to act like startups, they need to leverage other assets. While it’s true that venture-backed startups have a lot of advantages, large enterprises also have deep expertise, proven technology and customer relationships they can put to work for them. You can’t innovate by copying your competitors. Good strategy is always a process of discovery, to identify a relative strength you can bring to bear against the relative weakness of your competition.
How AI Can Help You Make Better Decisions | Digital Tonto
Clearly, we are on the verge of something very different. Individual firms are investing tens of billions of dollars to create AI systems that will bring us every fact ever uncovered, every story ever told, every language ever recorded; all human knowledge at our beck and call. This has the potential to give our rational brain unprecedented power. What it can’t do is replace our innate capacity to wonder and explore. The knowledge of the world is finite, but the universe of possibility is limitless. Our emotional brain, driven by somatic markers in our limbic system from personal experiences, fuels our ability to form intent. An AI system can help us to discern facts, but only we can determine what truly matters and decide the paths we want to pursue. It is through forming intent that we can begin to leverage AI to explore. We can, as Warren Berger suggested in A More Beautiful Question, ask our systems questions such as “Why?” “What if” and “How?” That can lead us to new territory where we can create new knowledge, tell new stories and spark new conversations. AI systems are exceptional at analyzing the past, but they can’t envision a completely different future, much less determine what we want from it. They can inform our decisions by helping us discern baseline knowledge, but only we can decide what possibilities we want to explore and whether, when we examine them, they are to our liking. As we embark on this new era of augmented cognitive capacity, we need to learn to collaborate effectively with intelligent machines. We will have far greater power to inform our decisions, but we will still have to make our own.
3 Types Of Change Problems (And How To Solve Them) | Digital Tonto
People love to quote the pre-socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus about change. Yet pithy aphorisms like "Change is the only constant" and "You cannot step into the same river twice," are popular because they are so imprecise. They point to, as Kafka put it, “some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.” Every change effort represents a problem, or set of problems, to be solved. A strategic shift starts at the top and needs effective communication and coordination for everybody to play their role. To build high performing teams, individual managers need to help and empower their people to adopt new skills and practices, see blind spots and kill bad habits. Yet often the most important changes involve collective action, which can be maddeningly complex. People adopt things when they see others around them adopt them. Success begets more success, just as failure begets more failure. Big communication campaigns can ignite early resistance and backfire. Individual efforts don’t scale. For collective action problems, we need to focus on, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts put it to me, “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.” You build momentum and reach critical mass not through persuasion, but by empowering early adopters and helping them to build connections with others. To be an effective change leader, you can’t take a one-size fits all approach.. Solutions need to fit the problem, not the other way around. There is no silver bullet.
2025: The Coming Realignment | Digital Tonto
In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published an essay in the journal The National Interest entitled The End of History, which led to a bestselling book. Many took his argument to mean that, with the defeat of communism, US-style liberal democracy had emerged as the only viable way of organizing a society. He was misunderstood. Fukuyama pointed out that even if we had reached an endpoint in the debate about ideologies, there would still be conflict because of people’s need to express their identity. What many thought to be a justification, was actually a warning to expect people to rebel against order imposed on them from outside their communities. I began to better understand this when I went to live in Moscow for a time in 2003. It was my view, as it was of most Americans, that we had won the Cold war. In Poland, where I had lived for six years, people felt similarly. Yet Russians felt otherwise. In their view, they had not lost, but had been betrayed by Gorbachev. “This must have been what Weimar Germany must have felt like,” I remember thinking. “They are biding their time, plotting their return.” The truth is that every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution and the pendulum will continue to swing until there can be some agreement about shared values and how to move forward. Lasting change is always built on common ground and there is precious little of that in this particular moment. Even the lines defining the battle are just now being drawn. We won the Cold War not because we were able to overpower, but because we could attract. Nobody ever truly capitulates, not really. The human need for status and identity are too strong for that. They may surrender and retreat, but they will always be plotting their return. The forces of discontinuity will continue to prevail, until the forces of continuity are able to build strength, and are ready to take over. The future will be shaped by choices we make—or don’t make. While many of these decisions will revolve around technology and economics, both are ultimately shaped by deeper questions about who we are and who we aspire to become. That’s why dominance will always be fleeting. Until we make our minds up about our identity and aspirations, conflict will continue. As Josep Borrell put it, “It’s the identity, stupid.
Top Posts of 2024 | Digital Tonto
2024 was an exhausting year. I don’t remember any period that seemed so chaotic. Roughly 70 countries had elections this year, encompassing half the world’s population, which was a record. In just about every one, the vote went against the incumbent office holder. People made clear that they want something different. We seem to be
The 2024 Digital Tonto Reading List | Digital Tonto
“Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them,” Fareed Zakaria once wrote. Others have said similar things, but I like how he said it best. It is especially true when writing books. You can keep an email or a blog post in your head, but tens of thousands of words are too much for a single brain to hold at once. You need to approach writing a book like you would building a ship or a house, starting with a basic structure and then carefully crafting each detail to work together. That’s why in our climate of digital distractions reading books is more important than ever. Reading, like writing, is a form of thinking. You are not only taking in information, but reflecting on it and forming opinions about it. The slow pace enables that private, intimate dialogue between you and the author. Here is the list the books I spent time with this year.
What Gandhi Can Teach Us About Change | Digital Tonto
As one of Gandhi’s followers would later note, before Salt March forced the British to sit down and negotiate with Gandhi as an equal, they “were all sahibs and we were obeying. No more after that.” At that point, Indian Independence was just a matter of time. Many would say Gandhi achieved what he did because he had a natural ability to communicate the plight of the Indians, to differentiate their plight in ways that were meaningful and, that by speaking out against the powerful he was able to get the world to see the injustice that the British Raj was perpetrating against his people. But they’d be wrong. In fact, he did exactly the opposite. He didn’t look for things that differentiated his people from the British, but what they shared, what they could agree on—and then exploited it. That’s what made him a master strategist, because he was able to identify where he was strong and his opponents were weak. Our mistake is that we look back on Gandhi as if he was a saint, when the historical record is clear that he was nothing of the sort. For much of his life, he struggled with his temper, treated his wife poorly and gave into his worst urges. It was only when he was able to learn self-control and discipline himself that he was able to see opportunities that others couldn’t. Most of all, he learned that identity is a trap and once you can escape your own, you can learn to identify the values that you share with others. That is the key to genuinely transformational change. Gandhi didn’t just beat the British, he won them over. When he died, they, like the Indians, celebrated him as a hero.
To Make Tough Conversations Productive, Focus On These 3 Things | Digital Tonto
We all need to have difficult conversations from time to time and navigating them successfully is a key skill for any leader. If you can’t resolve thorny issues, they will fester and grow more destructive over time. On the other hand, tackling them effectively can strengthen relationships and build trust. The best way to approach difficult conversations is to think about why they’re difficult in the first place. What conflicting values are at stake? What role does the desire to assert status play? How can we best align the conversation with the other person’s state of mind? It’s worth taking a few minutes to think through these issues before engaging. But even more importantly, you need to think about why you want to have the conversation. Is there a specific issue to be resolved or are you trying to assert your own identity and status? What are you trying to achieve? What do you expect a positive outcome to look like? How do you want the other person to feel when it’s over? How do you expect to feel? At the core of all this lies psychological safety, which is rooted in a sense of belonging. By creating bonds based on shared values and purpose, affirming others’ sense of status and identity and doing our best to align with the type of conversation that others want to have, we can build deeper, more honest and collaborative relationships that will help us achieve more.
When Things Seem Hopeless And That Nothing Will Ever Change, You Need To Prepare For The Next Window Of Opportunity | Digital Tonto
We often see events as decisive. A road forks and it feels like our fate has been set. Yet that’s rarely ever true. There will be more forks ahead that represent new possibilities. When times seem bleak, it’s crucial to remember this and focus on preparing for those future moments, so you’re ready to seize the opportunities they bring. I remember moving to Poland in 1997, shortly after the Berlin Wall had fallen. The Cold War was had ended, capitalism and democracy had emerged victorious. There was a sense of triumph in the air. The future felt not just bright but assured. Across Eastern Europe, people were embracing newfound freedom and prosperity. It seemed inevitable that this model was the path everyone would aspire to follow. Yet, many twists and turns lay ahead. There would be the 1998 Ruble Crisis, the Color Revolutions of the early 2000s, Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. Each came with their own triumphs and heartaches, but none were decisive—there was always another chapter waiting to unfold. I was honored to have played a small role in these events and fortunate to know others who played far larger ones. One key lesson I learned is that the most effective people are always preparing for the next trigger—an unforeseen event that could shift the landscape in their favor —in order to be ready when the winds of fortune turned more favorable. So that’s what I try to do when things are bleak. That’s the discipline I try to build. When things don’t go your way and you feel like you’ve been knocked to the ground, lay down there for a moment, focus on the foundational ideas and values that make the fight important to you in the first place, and then return to the fray with renewed vigor.
The Best Way To Help Innovation Take Hold Is To Design A Co-optable Resource | Digital Tonto
The global activist Srdja Popović once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. Yet many leaders approach change initiatives as if they were swashbuckling heroes in their own action movie. The simple truth is that every change initiative starts out weak and vulnerable, without an internal track record of success. People are bound to be suspicious. They already have everyday struggles and don’t want someone else’s idea to add to their burden. Most often, they’ll nod their head, pay lip service, take a “wait and see” approach and then turn away at the first sign of trouble. To create genuine transformation we need to get out of the business of selling ideas and into the business of selling success. That can’t be done through persuasion, we have to start by identifying people who are already enthusiastic about change. Change isn’t about communication, but empowerment and the best way to empower is to give people resources with which they can pursue their own goals and dreams. If we can help allies to make change successful, even on a small scale, they can bring in others who bring in others still. The best way to do that is to design a resource that is both accessible and impactful, which people can co-opt to further ambitions and goals they pursue for their own reasons, even if those are different from your own.
Gradually, Then Suddenly: Why Change Seems To Happen So Slowly, And Then All At Once | Digital Tonto
Bent Flyvbjerg, author of How Big Things Get Done, frequently highlights the planning fallacy as a key reason why projects go awry. We tend to trust too much in our plans, often underestimating setbacks and complications. This issue becomes even more pronounced in change initiatives, where the change itself can provoke resistance, creating additional obstacles that slow progress. The truth is that things that change the world always arrive out of context, for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. Samuel Adams starts a Committee of Correspondence in Boston. Five kids meet in a cafe in Belgrade. At first, few noticed. But connections were forged and networks began to expand. What people do notice is when an event triggers a moment of opportunity. Shots are fired in Lexington, a tyrant attempts to steal an election, an innocent is killed or some other injustice is perpetrated. That’s when it shows whether you’ve put in the work when it really mattered, long before the issue was on most people’s radar, when the groundwork needs to be done. When that moment happens, it’s already too late. We know from centuries of history as well as decades of research that change follows an s-curve. It starts out slowly and then, if the ground has been prepared, it can accelerate exponentially. But you need to start building networks long before, when nobody is watching and there is no credit to claim. That’s what makes the difference between a movement that succeeds and those countless others that catch some limelight, make a little noise and then sputter out and fade away into obscurity. And when that happens, many will throw up their hands and complain that nothing ever changes
Communicate A Vision To Shift Strategy, Shape Networks To Change Behavior | Digital Tonto
The 18th century French enlightenment writer Voltaire once said, “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms,” and we need to approach transformation with a similar mindset. Some transformations require changes in investments, while others require changes in behaviors and these have very different challenges. Until fairly recently, our economy was based on atoms and transformations were usually focused on strategic decisions such as building a new factory, entering a new market or launching a new product line. These types of decisions fall squarely within the authority of senior managers and rarely inspire much internal resistance. It is to communicate clearly at every stage so that the rest of the organization can effectively align. However, when a transformation is focused on changing behaviors, leaders should expect significant resistance. With these types of transformational programs, early alignment is not possible and leaders need to form a coalition. It’s important to start slowly, identify people who are enthusiastic about the change, want it to succeed and focus on an early keystone change to gain traction, before the project can accelerate. What leaders need to recognize is that the vast majority of transformations today are not strategic and consensus-driven, but focused on shifting behaviors and coalition-driven. Over-communicating can provoke early resistance and will likely undermine what you’re trying to achieve. Decades of research shows that people adopt behaviors that they see working for people around them, not those they just hear about or that are dictated to them from above. So the first thing you need to ask before undertaking any transformational effort is whether the goal is to change a strategic asset or to shift behaviors. The answer will determine how you need to move forward.
We Live In Dangerous, Confusing Times. Here’s How To Make Sense Of Them. | Digital Tonto
Western society tends toward reductionism. We focus on our own particular area of expertise, learning subtle nuances largely invisible to those outside the field. As a result, we tend to overvalue developments within our realm of knowledge, while that which lies outside our immediate attention often seems less relevant. Yet the reality is that everything is connected. We simply can’t separate the forces of technology, economics and identity. So while Silicon Valley types wax glowingly about the wonders of the latest advance, waves of disruption crash through people’s lives, creating crises of identity that result in backlash, undermining progress that could have potentially been made. These forces can bubble beneath the surface for decades, while incumbent institutions try to keep a lid on them, curbing the worst of the turmoil, confusion and disorder they create. But eventually, they must be dealt with and some fundamental change to the existing order—a revolution— needs to take place. That is the point at which the danger is greatest. History tends to converge and cascade around certain points and we seem to be at one now. The philosopher Martin Heidegger thought about technology in terms of both revealing and building. The forces of the universe being what they are, we do not have much choice in what we uncover. Yet how we create and channel technologies such is very much in our control. The choices we make not only reflect who we are, but what we will become. We can’t separate the forces of technology and economics from that of identity, because they are inextricably intertwined. We are, no doubt, at a time of great potential, with technology advancing to such a point that we may soon have the power to create infinite energy, shape biology and conquer space. What we lack is a shared vision for what we want the world to be. Surviving progress is always a matter of identifying and leveraging shared values. As Francis Fukuyama has written, “Identity can be used to divide, but it can also be used to integrate,” and that is how we navigate to the other side.
The Identity Trap | Digital Tonto
On September 17th, 2011, protesters began to stream into Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and the #Occupy movement had begun. “We are the 99%,” they declared and as far as they were concerned, it was time for the reign of the “1%” to end. The protests soon spread like wildfire to 951 cities across 82 countries. Despite all the hoopla, within a few months, the streets and parks were cleared. The protesters went home and nothing much changed. Occupy was, to paraphrase Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Eventually, even its founder had to admit it was all a dismal failure, while he voiced support and admiration for Donald Trump. This pattern of hype leading to discredit is not just for social justice warriors. Business leaders are prone to many of the same pitfalls. Fads like six sigma, stack ranking and the war for talent emerge for a time and create a cascade in which adherents rush to not only adopt a practice, but signal their inclusion into the tribe. Later, when the idea is found wanting, it is discarded and something else comes along. A lot of damage is done along the way. This is the identity trap: if we're not careful, signaling our identity can become more important than the underlying idea itself. Yet, our identities are not fixed. They grow and evolve over time as we add new elements and shed of others—switching careers, moving to new places, or shifting relationships. “Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book on the subject. And that is the challenge for anyone who wants to lead an endeavor of any significance: How can you create an inclusive identity that doesn't divide and ostracize those who don’t belong, but that integrates and empowers? If you are to achieve anything meaningful, you can’t just preach to the choir, but must venture out of the church and mix with the heathens.
Why Incentives So Often Fail | Digital Tonto
Many managers spend a lot of time and energy designing compensation schemes to incentivize performance. Yet as Daniel Pink explained in Drive, decades of studies show incentive pay often decreases productivity, especially for tasks that require creative thinking. He argues that the best way to motivate people is to give them opportunities for autonomy, mastery and purpose. The 19th century philosopher Immanuel Kant believed strongly in the notion of dignity, which he defined as treating people as ends in themselves, rather than as means to an end. I’ve found that Kant’s ideas about dignity are essential to managing employees, customers and partners. Nobody wants to be a cog in somebody else’s machine. When you treat people as ends in themselves you make their goals your own. You want employees to do more than perform tasks, but to attain their potential. You see customers as more than a way to pay the bills, but as central to the mission of the enterprise. You want communities to be invested in your success, rather than just tolerate your existence. So rather than working to construct some Rube Goldberg-like incentive structure and then adjusting it every time you want a change in behavior, try treating people with dignity. Think about what they want to achieve in terms of autonomy, mastery and purpose and make it clear how their actions can advance your collective mission. Sound leadership is not about prodding to get people to do what you want, but attracting those who want what you want and leading them with shared values in pursuit of a shared purpose.
To Lead Change, You Need To Shift From A Manager Mindset To A Changemaker Mindset | Digital Tonto
Most of the time, we operate with a manager mindset and that works fine. We build consensus and execute with predictable outcomes. Our colleagues are motivated, customers are satisfied and everybody is happy. In an era of disruption, however, it’s only a matter of time until we need to adapt and drive transformation. That’s never easy. To pull it off we need to shift from a manager mindset to a changemaker mindset in which we no longer assume an environment of predictability but explore unknowns in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Not everybody will be willing to make the journey with us, so rather than relying on a consensus, we will need to build a coalition and leave some people behind. Effective leaders need to master both mindsets and mode shift between them. Clearly, we need to pursue change, but that doesn’t mean we can just abandon day-to-day operations, which require a stable environment to coordinate and execute complex tasks. At the same time, if we try to pursue change with that same manager mindset, we will surely fail. We need to internalize the fact that these two mindsets are not in conflict with one another. In fact, they support each other to some extent. Change always involves a certain amount of disruption, so benefits from the atmosphere of stability and psychological safety which norms, rituals and existing behaviors can provide. In a similar vein, without change, everyday operations will eventually fail to compete. Leading transformation isn’t something most leaders do well. If you want to be among the few that can succeed, the first thing you need to change is your mindset.
Sometimes The Future Demands A Vision. This Is Probably Not One Of Those Times. | Digital Tonto
Over the past two centuries, we have seen echoes of the same pattern first established in the late 18th century: a wave of new ideas is resisted by the dominant powers, as tensions build below the surface and eventually explode. Sometimes order holds and sometimes it gives way to a period of chaos and destruction before, eventually, finding some sort of homeostasis. These are the “Noah effects” and “Joseph effects” that Mandelbrot described. History during this time has largely been defined by inflection points. 1776 brought both the Declaration of Independence, The Wealth of Nations and the steam engine. With 1919 came a peace treaty establishing a new world order as well as a crippling epidemic. Within a single momentous month in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the World Wide Web was born. Waves of revolution in 1848 and 1968 marked important shifts that helped define what came after. We are now in the later stages of this cycle. Clearly, 2020 marked a critical junture, where significant disruptions challenged the prevailing order, but it’s not clear what comes next. Authoritarianism challenges democracy, while demands for new rights from the left are met with reactionary forces on the right. As the Boomer generation recedes, Millennials are emerging. Major shifts in technology, demography, resources and migration add more stress to the system. Some eras call for a vision, while in others certain forces are set in motion and our task is to merely survive them, averting the worst of possible calamities, overcoming the deluge so that we can make it to the other side. It seems that what we are experiencing today is the latter. There is no doubt that the future holds great promise. Technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing will power new sciences like synthetic biology and nanotechnology, which will, in turn, revolutionize healthcare, energy and manufacturing. We can, as trite as it sounds, heal the planet. But first we need to heal ourselves.
We Need To Rethink Competition And Collusion For An Artificially Intelligent World | Digital Tonto
Back in the Gilded Age of the 19th century, it was taken for granted that industrialists were all powerful. Men met in smoke-filled back rooms, traded information and, much like Adam Smith described, conspired against the public to raise prices and increase profits. Eventually, the public could bear no more, political pressure built, and legislation was passed to prevent collusive and predatory behavior. As ProPublica described in an investigative article about RealPage’s “Yieldstar” software, companies are using algorithms to do essentially the same thing. As they point out, if we wouldn’t let “a guy named Bob,” collect and pool private information of market participants and then make pricing recommendations, then we shouldn’t let algorithms do it either. The problems will only get more pervasive as we constantly feed information into artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT. As I wrote along with Josh Sutton five years ago in Harvard Business Review, we need algorithms that are explainable, auditable and transparent. Yet it seems like we’ve gone in the opposite direction. Many would argue that, today, we are in a new Gilded Age, in which powerful industrialists, unbeholden to the rule of law, regularly engage in predatory behavior, but their actions are often shielded from view by technology, buried in complexity. When they are called before congress, the people’s representatives seem lost, unable to penetrate technical jargon. Yet as the RealPage case shows, the situation really isn't that complicated. The burden of proof should be on corporations to show that they aren’t screwing us, not the other way around. The standards of explainability, audibility and transparence aren’t unreasonably onerous. We should demand they be met.
We Have Decades Of Research Telling Us How Change Works. We Need To Start Following The Evidence | Digital Tonto
The biggest misconception about change is that once people understand it, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true. If you intend to influence an entire organization— or even an entire society—you have to assume the deck is stacked against you. The status quo has had years—and sometimes decades or longer—to build connections and form networks. The good news is that we have over a half-century of research and practice that can inform our efforts. Yet to be effective, we have to put that learning to work. It makes no sense, for example, to “create a sense of urgency” around change when we know that transformation follows an s-shaped curve, starting slowly and then accelerating after a tipping point. Doing so is more likely to trigger resistance than to move things forward. In much the same way, if we know that shifts in knowledge and attitudes don’t necessarily result in changes in practice and that ideas about change are transmitted socially, we should focus our efforts on empowering enthusiasts rather than wordsmithing and broadcasting slogans. People tend to adopt the ideas and actions of those around them. We need to think about change as a strategic conflict between the present state and an alternative vision. The truth is that change isn’t about persuasion, but power. To bring about transformation we need to undermine the sources of power that underlie the present state while strengthening the forces that favor a different future.
3 Myths That Underlie Transformation Theater | Digital Tonto
It’s tough to imagine how anyone who is familiar with the evidence would ever assume that change is linear, that it is a good idea to “create a sense of urgency around change,” or that you should move quickly to publicize an early win. Yet, more often than not, that’s what otherwise smart, accomplished people set out to do. There are a few reasons that this is the case. The first is that change itself has changed. Consider that research shows in 1975, 83% of the average US corporation’s assets were tangible assets, such as factories, machinery and buildings. When your assets are tangible, change is largely about communicating strategic decisions made from above. There’s little anybody can do to resist them anyway. However, the very same research finds that by 2015, 84% of corporate assets became intangible, such as licenses, patents and research. Change is no longer about making decisions about strategic assets, but about what people think and do everyday. You can’t try to force or overpower that kind of change, you need to attract and empower. Yet today's cult of disruption often favors those who make a lot of noise. CEOs who are able to create a lot of hoopla in the media can often keep the stock price up long enough for their options to vest and cash out. Even more junior managers can make a name for themselves with big, splashy initiatives and then switch jobs before it all comes crashing down. Some have made big careers that way. That’s what makes transformation theater so destructive. It seeks to ennoble the change leader rather than the enterprise or its mission. It is, quite simply, how incompetent managers attempt to take on the appearance of a high-performance culture, without ever doing the hard work needed to actually build one.
Happy 15th Birthday Digital Tonto! | Digital Tonto
It’s funny how things can turn out. We’re heading in a particular direction, focused on the future and things somehow go awry. We try in vain to get back on track, but instead we end up setting out in a new direction, exploring avenues we scarcely knew existed. Before we know it, we’ve gotten to
Here’s Why It’s So Hard To Change A Culture | Digital Tonto
My friend Stephen Shapiro argues that best practices are stupid. It’s not that he believes they can’t be useful, in fact in areas of low-competence they can be very helpful in helping a team get up to speed. Yet Steve’s point is that you can’t separate a practice from its context. Copying Netflix’s Culture Deck or Amazon’s six-page memo is unlikely to improve your performance if you don’t develop the norms and rituals to support them. Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao explained in The Friction Project how organizations will cling on to rituals, such as processes and paperwork, in ways that are so nonsensical they are almost comical, because they support norms embedded in the culture. Often, stakeholders compete for power over norms and rituals because they signal status and create privilege. Consider the expense authorization ritual. The ability for a clan to deny an authorization gives them power, which they can barter for other goods, such as respect, deference and maybe a favor here or there. They can then, in turn, give deference to other powerful clans, building up clout with which they can use to gain power over other rituals and rites. That’s what makes cultures so hard to transform. You can’t change behaviors without changing norms and rituals that underlie them. We are, as much as we may hate to admit it, evolved to signal identity and seek status. These truths rarely make it into PowerPoint charts or quarterly strategies, but they lie at the core of every enterprise. Culture is, among other things, deeply rooted in norms and rituals and, if we aim to change behaviors, that’s where we need to start.
Why The Future Of Technology Is Always More Human | Digital Tonto
Bill Gates recently wrote that, “The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone.” Yet the unspoken problem is that none of those technologies, except for the Internet, had a significant impact on productivity. In fact, since 2005, we seem to be caught in a second productivity paradox. In 2016, while researching my book Mapping Innovation, I noticed that we were entering a new era of innovation, which became the title of the last chapter. That’s largely become true, we are on the precipice of leveraging a number of new technologies including, along with artificial intelligence, things like quantum computing and synthetic biology. Yet as we have seen clearly throughout history, it is ecosystems, not inventions that truly change the world and we are the crucial missing link. It took the redesigning of factories to make electricity impactful and the reorganization of retail to make the automobile a transformational technology. Whether these new technologies have an impact depends more on us and how we put them to use than any details about the technology itself. Using large language models to dump more crap on the Internet, will not get us far, just as our newfound ability to shape the genetic code will not fix our broken healthcare system. The future of technology is always more human and that has never been more true than today. As Todd McLees points out, it is on human skills and human behaviors that we must focus to tackle the challenges ahead.
3 Questions Every Change Consultant Should Be Able To Answer | Digital Tonto
The ugly truth about change management is that the traditional change models simply don’t work. They aren’t based on any serious research and have shown themselves, over a period of decades, to fail consistently. Often, organizational change management units are used by consulting firms and vendors to cheerlead a larger engagement. That isn’t to say it’s some sort of con. In my experience, organizational change management practitioners are well-meaning and under the impression they make a positive impact. They are hired for engagements, make proposals, deliver on what they promised and leave their clients happy. They usually aren’t around to see the wreckage after the engagement ends. You can’t just cheerlead change. It’s not a communication exercise and wordsmithing slogans will get you nowhere. That’s why you need to ask hard questions like, “What evidence is our strategy based on?” “How will we overcome resistance?” and “How will we leverage organizational dynamics to gain traction and scale the transformation? All too often, we treat people who ask tough questions as enemies who seek to undermine what we’re trying to achieve. But good questions don’t close doors, they open them. In fact, asking hard questions in the beginning will help you identify obstacles that you can then work to build strategies to overcome. Today, every enterprise needs to adopt and scale change. That doesn’t just happen by itself. You need to go into it with open eyes and be ready to accept hard truths. The best way to start is by asking the right questions.
We Say We Want Change, But The Status Quo Almost Always Wins Out. Here’s Why: | Digital Tonto
We tend to see change as an engineering problem. There is a desired end state, so we design a logical strategy to achieve it, build a timeline and execute the plan. We expect some obstacles along the way, work to identify sticking points and maybe even devise some plans to address them. It seems that, with some will and determination, we should be able to push through. Yet that’s not how the world really works. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. It has had years—and sometimes decades or longer—to build connections and form networks. If we are to achieve genuine transformation, it’s that underlying ecosystem we need to address. That’s why we need to think less like engineers and more like gardeners. Engineers believe in laws that can be understood and put to specific use, so they build machines to perform specific tasks. Gardeners believe in complexity and emergence. They don’t design their garden as much as tend to it, nurture it and support its surrounding ecosystem. They don’t expect the same result every time, but understand' they'll need to adjust as they go. That’s why we need to think less about individual nodes and focus on networks. It is small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose that bring about transformational change. That can’t be mandated and it’s never top-down or bottom-up, but travels from side-to-side, propagating through social bonds. Or, as General Stanley McChrystal put it, "It takes a network to defeat a network." We can’t simply think of strategy as a game of chess, but must weave networks by widening and deepening connections in order to influence the sources of power that support the status quo.
Why You Often Need To Start Slow In Order To Go Fast | Digital Tonto
When I first moved overseas in 1997, email was still relatively new. There was no social media. Mostly, we communicated by landline and that was expensive. You couldn’t always reach who you wanted to, so things necessarily moved slower. We had to be more thoughtful because we didn’t really have any other choice. Today we live in a much more technological age, where many things move faster and we’ve come to expect nearly instant gratification. We communicate at the speed of light at negligible cost. We can order things online with little more than a few strokes on a smartphone and things almost magically appear on our doorstep. Yet our brains still operate at the relatively slow pace they always did and there’s no indication we build trust any faster. So we essentially operate at two speeds. Our operating speeds move much faster than they once did, but human relationships still go at their turtle-like, ancestral pace. That’s why effective leaders need to master both a manager mindset, to handle operations, and a changemaker mindset, to innovate and take on projects that are new and different. When you’re doing something big, new or different, you can’t assume an environment of predictability. You need to take the time to explore unknowns in an atmosphere of uncertainty. There’s simply no way to speed that up. You need to go slowly, figure out the stuff you don’t know how to do, examine possible points of failure and build strategies to overcome them. As Jerry Seinfeld put it, when you're in a creative process, “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way.”
The Best Way To Overcome Resistance And Defeat Doubters: Start with a Resistance Inventory | Digital Tonto
The story of Blockbuster video is one that is often repeated, but rarely understood. The CEO, John Antioco, did not, as is frequently assumed, ignore the Netflix threat but devised an effective strategy to meet it head on. However, tensions with shareholders eventually boiled over, a salary dispute led him to resign and the strategy was abandoned. Antioco’s mistake wasn't a lack of a market strategy, but a lack of a resistance strategy. He would later tell me, “throughout my career, I had learned that whenever you set out to do anything big, some people aren’t going to like it. I’d been successful by defying the status quo at important junctures and that’s what I thought had to be done in this case.” Simply pushing through resistance isn’t enough, though. You need to actively anticipate it and devise plans to overcome it. That’s why when we start working with an organization on a transformational initiative one of the first things we do is go through a detailed resistance inventory, identifying the five major categories of resistance and how they are likely to play out. You can't anticipate everything, but with a little bit of thought, you can proactively prepare to mitigate foreseeable problems. Read this post to learn more...
There Is No Secret Formula. Effective Leaders Need To Master Mode Shifting. | Digital Tonto
About a decade ago I made the trip out to see Brian Robertson, the creator of Holacracy, the leaderless management governance method. It was all the rage at the time, with high-flying firms such as Zappos and Medium adopting it enthusiastically. Brian was kind enough to spend a few hours with me, explaining the ins and outs of how it all worked. But even then I was skeptical and I told him so. My experience running organizations taught me that the most important thing a leader does is make decisions and that often requires you to switch directions, exchanging one set of principles for another to adapt to different contexts. There are no easy guides to making these mode shifts and you can’t just take a vote. You have to take responsibility for making the decision. For creative challenges, giving everyone a say leads to better results, but when you need to execute operations, especially complex ones, everybody needs to play their role and there can be no questioning of authority. Innovation requires you to identify what kind of problem you have before you can identify the right strategy to solve it. You can’t pursue change with the same mindset with which you pursue everyday operations. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out, “no course of action can be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” We have to have the courage to make decisions and that often means we need to exchange one mode of logic for another.
Why Bad Ideas Don’t Just Die | Digital Tonto
I recently read David Sanger’s new book, "The New Cold Wars," which was excellent in many ways. It was very well sourced, often insightful and excellently written. It was also riddled with relatively minor errors. These didn’t really affect the story he was trying to tell, but they were annoying and undermined an otherwise excellent book. What probably happened is that the fact checker was intimidated by Sanger’s prominence and didn’t call him out or didn’t bother checking facts that, truth be told, are not really his area of expertise. (Being much less prominent, my fact checkers didn’t have the same reluctance with my books). So the errors persist and Sanger looks a little bit silly. What’s important to understand is that, in the publishing world, someone like David Sanger isn’t just a person, but a powerful ecosystem, which includes his agent, his editor and a number of other people who depend on him to make a living. If they see those relationships being threatened, they will tend to lash out. So you can sympathize with a low status fact checker being intimidated. The thing is, as Annalee Saxenian explained in her book "Regional Advantage" that chronicled the rise of Silicon Valley, the tech giants in Boston that reigned in the 60s and 70s, built very insular ecosystems and were unable to adapt when things changed. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, built much wider networks in which information flowed much more freely. The rest, as they say, is history. We get to choose what types of networks we build. We can build networks of control, in which power determines truth. Or we can build networks where information flows freely and new ideas can take hold, grow and cascade to where they can create the most value. Those choices will determine whether new ideas can gain traction and take hold or bad ones persist.
The 3 Pillars Of The Changemaker Mindset | Digital Tonto
Most of the time, we operate with a manager mindset and that works fine. We build consensus and execute with predictable outcomes. Our colleagues are motivated, customers are satisfied and everybody is happy. However, in an era of disruption it’s only a matter of time until we need to adapt and drive transformation. That’s never easy. Top performers learn to switch between mindsets. Athletes need to be able to switch between training mindsets and competition mindsets. Navy SEALs have a “command and control mindset,” when executing a mission in the field and then a “take off your stripes, everyone is equal” mindset for debriefs when working to innovate and improve. The three elements of the Changemaker mindset are: Where do you start? Who do you start with? And how do you sustain? Those are the questions you need to ask before you start any transformational initiative and the answers are rarely obvious. It takes work to analyze the situation and identify viable answers. But if we want to put an end to the track record of failure that’s what we need to do. We need to start small, with a single Keystone Change; to start with people who are already enthusiastic and not try to create and maintain the energy ourselves and to sustain our efforts through empowering allies, with co-optable resources and other platforms. Perhaps most of all, and often most difficult, we need to accept that when we shift to a changemaker mindset not everyone will be coming with us. Some will have to take a different path; choose another journey and we will have to leave them behind. That doesn’t mean betrayal, but it does mean you’ve arrived at a fork in the road and choices need to be made.
Why Do Pundits Work So Hard To Deny These 3 Things About Human Nature? | Digital Tonto
In "Homo Deus," author Yuval Noah Harari asserted that “organisms are algorithms.” Much like vending machines are programmed to respond to buttons, Harari argues that humans and other animals are programmed by genetics and evolution to respond to “sensations, emotions and thoughts.” When those particular buttons are pushed, we respond, much like a vending machine does. He gives evidence for this point of view. For example, he describes psychological experiments in which, by monitoring brainwaves, researchers are able to predict actions, such as whether a person will flip a switch, even before he or she is aware of it. He also points out that certain chemicals, such as Ritalin and Prozac, can modify behavior. Yet the argument only feels persuasive because it is selective, focusing on some facts while ignoring others. Yes, much like software, we come with built-in programming, but we are also built to adapt, forming new pathways in our brains while discarding others as we go through experiences and learn new things. Adults in even primitive societies are expected to overcome basic urges, govern their behavior and invest resources in the future. That’s why it’s important to understand human nature. Once we know that our motivations are not always clear to us, we can be more thoughtful about our actions. If we accept that humans are naturally hierarchical and status-driven, we can both work within those parameters while at the same time We work to better know ourselves not to surrender to our inherent nature, but to transcend it. We need to know our limitations in order to go past them.
Is AI Selfish? | Digital Tonto
When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins claimed that genes are selfish, he didn’t mean that he thought they are cognisant, with a will of their own. Rather, that genes act as if they are selfish, working to replicate themselves in the most efficient way, regardless of what that entails for the organism that carries them. In When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins claimed that genes are selfish, he didn’t mean that he thought they are cognisant, with a will of their own. Rather, that genes act as if they are selfish, working to replicate themselves in the most efficient way, regardless of what that entails for the organism that carries them. In other words, the phrase "survival of the fittest" applies to our genes, not to us. The concept led to the idea of memes, elemental bits of culture that compete to be replicated in the marketplace of ideas. Then Susan Blackmore introduced the concept of temes, elemental bits of technology, like lines of code sitting in Github, that are competing to replicate in order to survive in future technological artifacts. Once you start thinking about selfish genes, memes and temes, and begin applying those concepts to artificial intelligence, it becomes clear that AI must be selfish as well, competing to get itself replicated through us. That in turn, raises some very important questions: What is the context we are creating for this competition and how will the rules affect our own fate? If, like genes, memes and temes, in order to compete and survive algorithms must be selfish, we need to take responsibility for shaping the environments in which they compete. We have the power to design every aspect of the game, from which biases get encoded into our systems to what determines success and what the rewards are. In her new book, "Data, Strategy, Culture & Power," data expert Nicole Radziwill, PhD introduces “Radziwill’s Law,” which states: “Data cannot be decoupled from power. Organizations create and use data, analytics, and AI in ways that embed and reflect the power structures and power differentials between the people that develop and use them.” We are far from helpless. We have, throughout history, shown that we can overcome basic human urges that flow from our brains’ varying levels of neurotransmitters. Citizens of Ancient Rome were taxed to pay for roads that led to distant lands and took decades to build. Medieval communities built churches that stood for centuries. We managed to contain nuclear weapons and curb the dangers of genetic research. AI is different, though, because of the way it interacts with us. It is constantly not only learning from our behavior, it is also generating cultural content that helps to shape our identities and how we pursue status. We at once players and referees; teachers and learners; influencers and influenced. It’s a game we cannot escape If it is true, as Daniel Dennett asserted, that a scholar is a library’s way of creating more libraries, then we are are an algorithm’s way of creating more algorithms. We have to recognize that we are creating the rules that determine which algorithms survive, replicate and shape our future.
This Is One Big Reason Why So Much Business Thinking Is Crap | Digital Tonto
Management fads tend to come from people who did well in school. Many of these are business school professors and consultants, who’ve never operated a business. They are often people who’ve never failed, been told that they’re smart all their lives and expect others to be impressed by their ideas, not to examine them thoroughly. They tend come up with their ideas by talking to other smart, successful people about their experiences. These ideas get picked up by more smart, successful people and are propagated further. The elite hivemind then puts these ideas into practice, rarely checking what evidence the ideas are based on. When the ideas fail, they are rarely questioned. Shortcomings are blamed on poor execution by less smart, successful people. We need to own up to some basic truths. Case studies can be useful, but are enormously flawed and highly susceptible to bias. People recounting events usually tell self-serving accounts and researchers conducting interviews are often trying to confirm their own hunches. The interviews themselves are almost never subjected to any serious review. We need to be more vigilant. We can do better. While it is true that researching organizations is notoriously difficult and that interviewing executives is often the best we can do, we can seek to corroborate findings from other fields, explore counternarratives and apply greater scrutiny. We can’t just go around believing everything we think. As Richard Feynman put it “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”
11 Books That Will Make You A Better Communicator | Digital Tonto
More than a decade ago I published an article in Forbes about IBM’s Watson. With the system’s triumph, beating the best human players at Jeopardy!, everybody was wondering whether humans had a future or whether we would all be at the mercy of “our new robot overlords.” It was an exciting and confusing time. Yet