2007/06/01 08:35 Thomas Stewart, "The Wealth of Knowledge"

2007/06/01 08:35 Thomas Stewart, "The Wealth of Knowledge", Rotman Lifelong Learning Conference, Toronto

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

[Roger Martin]

Have received the largest grant to a Canadian business school from the Ontario Government

Thomas Stewart

• Runs Harvard Business Review magazine
• Had written Intellectual Capital, second book Wealth of Knowledge

[Editor-in-Chief and Managing Director, Harvard Business Review; Author, The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization (Currency, 2001); Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (Currency, 1998)]

[Thomas Stewart]

Iconic CEO, in a hotel in New Orleans:  where am I, and why am I here?

Theme of conference as thinking to win

• Thinking is to business as justice is to military
• Shouldn't deny intellectual streak
• When Harvard Business School started:  is business something that should be taught in universities?
• Bias to action

Ted Levitt: 

• Faculty is bad writers, use passive voice, never telling interesting stories
• Business people are impatient readers, want bullet points
• HBR is a magazine by people who won't write, and people who don't want to read

It's a paradox in business

Make an economic case for thinking:

• If take it serious, it changes the way do you do business, manage

Two questions:

• What is it that will make a company successful over 20 to 30 years?  
  • Capital, assets, things that appear on the balance sheet, as source of competitive advantage, or things not on a balance sheet, e.g. relationships
• How many think that the primary role of managers and leaders in companies over the next 20 to 30 years to drive change or preserve continuity?
  • When people manage continuity better, they have less reason to manage change
  • Change is extremely important
• Talents and skills matter more than physical and financial assets

Chart: commodity prices go down

• Commodity trap, e.g. Nigeria has oil
• Wealth extracted from a place isn't as valuable as wealth created in a place

Chart: Wages in Europe

• Pre-industrial revolution, 1500-1800, odds doing better than mother or father weren't good
• After industrial revolution, wages go up
• Pattern changes, as people applying brainpower, and start using industrial machinery
• Revolution of 1848, and social unrest, as things are changing, and generally for the better
• See price of food, it costs less to eat, and people eat a lot more

Ideas are capital, and everything else is just money

Four steps:

• Role of money in what we buy and sell
• Knowledge separates winners from losers
• Knowledge defines work
• Returns to knowledge should produce larger returns

Follow the money

Neil Workman: started a company collecting debt from Maine fishermen

• Small fisherman, with a few large companies (e.g. Disney buys lots of fish), and small restaurants with no assets (e.g. can't collect after a few days)
• South Street Seaport restaurant, got a bullhorn and told diners that fish hadn't been paid for
• Better:  prevention
• Could know who didn't pay bills, and who did
• Then started collecting data on changing in restaurants, e.g. a new CFO at Long John Silver, or new manager at Disney Orland
• Clients said: if you knew this, why don't we?
• Fax was new, created SeaFax
• Sold naughty list, nice list, and directory
• Similar to poultry for fish
• Then published on CDROM, as a yellow pages
• Then Neil Workman was selling half a dozen knowledge products, while still collecting debts: really selling knowledge

Three generic ways to sell knowledge:

1. Install knowledge:  put knowledge into a product

• e.g. mobile phone, compared to old dumb phones
• Can put knowledge into automobiles, into computers

2. Distill knowledge

• e.g. Neil Workman
• e.g. Maritime insurance, also knows customs and maps, for Miller's Encyclopedia on when you get through ports

3. Black box knowledge:  can't tell it, but you can hire me

• Consultants

Consider. GE, under Jack Welch

• Engines, also sell repair and services
• Service strategies that go with product strategies
• Similar at IBM

There are companies that don't think about this

• Have to trade off commoditization over scale
• Risk of just good enough

Worry about Google:  don't need HBR, just need enough data to get through the day

Black box strategies:  advantage of high prices, but star players may get hit by a bus or raided

Roger Martin: capital versus talent

Should have this discussion openly

• Glue on cardboard boxes, but being paid by the pound, and had no way to monetize to go to Unilever
• We've found a well to sell you less of our product, can you help us find a way to make a return at this?

Knowledge assets create this type of value, and monetize

Assets: something that transform inputs

• Not the definition of accountants:  who think assets are something you own
• There are non-physical assets, e.g. recipe for cola
• Transform physical assets into something of higher value
• Can also transform information assets into something of higher value, e.g. lawyer
• Assets without application are a waste

Need a process of identifying knowledge assets that are useful

• Norwegian advertising agency:  something is valuable in that it's valued by a customer, and it's unique
• If's a grain of sand on the beach, not valuable
• If it's a curio, may not have value

Intellectual assets:  what do we sell that is unique and valuable?

• Ask executives, workers, customers
• If responsive and innovative, then how do we create that innovativeness and responsiveness?
• This gets to the intellectual capital question
• Are we responsive because of computers? because of customers?

Three types of assets

1. Human capital:

2. Structural capital, e.g. patents, things that don't go home at night

3. Customer capital: relationship capital, talk and communicate with clients

Can think about 3 different types of restaurants

• Alice Waters, Chez Panisse:  You go there because of the chef
• McDonald's:  formula
• Local pub or diner, where food is bad, but the waiter calls you "hon": for the warmth and experience

Each company has all of these types of assets, but they go to companies different ways

• McKinsey:  smartest people
• Accenture: modules that can be assembled
• Bain: never leaves

If I want to change my strategy, how do I change my intellectual capital?

• Where to invest?
• How to manage the company?

Managing knowledge workers

• Drucker:  what's the job, and the knowledge base to do the job?
• Industrial jobs, job decided by supervisors
• Today, every day, decide, what is the job?
• If this is what I need to do today, how to I provision things to do the job today?

Xerox: automated call centre

• Tried case-based reasoning
• No one used it
• Tried instead financial incentives for people who used it best
• Winner was Carlos: cowboy, knew everything, he never went near the software
• Runner up was Trish: mother who came to work, didn't know copiers, they didn't use the software, she sat next to Carlos
• Knowledge management problem:  who can sit next to Carlos
• The most valuable knowledge isn't what you can get from software or a manual, it's tacit knowledge
• Tacit means silent, but close to tactile
• German: feeling that that you get in your fingertips

How to get to the most valuable knowledge, and share it?

• Not just by sitting next to Carlos, but getting stories from Carlos circulating in the company

If returns to knowledge greater, than improbable romance between the suits and creatives

• How do you create this conversation?
• Publishing: hate the financial people

Three ideas

1. A company that wants to be a thinking company has to take off the suits, and allow people to be in your face

• Richard Florida: Creative Class, a tolerance for the others
• A city's ability to allow creative
• How to enable this in a company?
• G.E.: Strong finance, but it's an informal company
• Informality is hard
• Mike Zafirosky talking with Jack Welch:  honest conversations
• Celebrate differences, ask people who don't speak at meetings

2. Two idea in innovation:  innovation as a machine (Thomas Edison, eureka to a process) and innovation as a magic garden (3M, give people 10% of the time)

• Both are true
• Teresa Amabile: brain freeze when someone has to be creative
• Too many companies think it's one or the other

3. Time and place

• Thinking matters, and have to validate the person when it's thinking
• It takes 10-15 years for someone to become an expert, so why are moving people around every 18 months?

[Questions]

Open source.  Mozilla, and other companes that open up knowledge

• Open source not just in software
• P&G, connect and develop, for more chemists that we can employ
• Eli Lilly
• An emerging phenomenon
• How to use open source to create proprietary advantage?  A paradox
• When should I do it and not?
• Should add to portfolio selectively, it's a solution to some problems

Waking: Open source collaboration.  Beyond black box strategies?

• Creating a knowledge community
• Traditional black box community puts the knowledge community inside the firm
• Another strategy, opening it up, as an open box, community of practice

Knowledge offshore is cheaper, how much to invest there?

• Seeing more and more high-end work going offshore
• Long run, wages will equalize
• For certain jobs in India, could pay someone cheaper in North America
• It's a standard make-or-buy question:  what are risks, opporunities?  How much control do I want?
• Engineers in Detroit, felt as it they too little control over workers in Bangalore
• How close do you need to be to that person?
• Intellectual capital trilogy: human capital, structural capital, customer capital
• How to create the experience?  Then want to create it at low cost, secondary consideration

2007/06/01 09:50 Howard Gardner, "Five Minds for the Future"

2007/06/01 09:50 Howard Gardner, "Five Minds for the Future", Rotman Lifelong Learning Conference, Toronto, June 1, 2007

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

[Roger Martin]

Howard Gardner has written 21 books

• Changing the idea so that there's multiple types of intelligence
• Harvard Graduate School of Education
• Macarthur Foundation award winner

[Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard University; Author of 20 books including Five Minds for the Future (Harvard Business School Press, March 2007) and Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds (Harvard Business School Press, 2004)]

[Howard Gardner]

Disclaimer:  there are 8 or 9 intelligences, and five minds don't matter on intelligences

• Intelligences, as how the mind has evolved, and how it's organized now
• Instead of having a single computer in the skull, have 8 or 8
• IQ is language and logic
• Have spatial, informational

Five minds for the future is written as a policy-maker

• If I was a czar, and could have an influence over learning, there are five kinds of minds that I would nurture

Background as psychology and education

• These are minds that we should nurture in children
• But should also look for these in organizations, hiring
• In addition, should think about self:  if don't have the mind, can you hire it, or nurture it in the self

Images: Clone, Ginal Kolata

• James Watson's genome has been published

Image: McDonald's, brands

Image: stock exchange

Image: intelligent machines

Image:  virtual reality, Second Life

Image: lifelong learning

Image: auto-didacticism, for Dummies

Can't just treat people traditional knowledges, finish at age 20 to 30, and then rest on laurels

• What minds will be valuable in the future?
• Five minds

What was the greatest invention of hte last 2000 years?

• Said classical music, Mozart
• Gave this answer, because wanted to be quoted

More serious answer:  the Disciplines (#1)

• Scholarly, but also arts, crafts
• We take disciplines totally for granted
• Disciplines are invented by human beings, over eons, and they might have never been invented
• A lot of things depend on the disciplined mind

Three sense of disciplines:

• 1.  Keep working on stuff, it gets better
• 2.  Thinking in scholarship
• 3.  Becoming expert in something:  an art, craft, profession
• All three senses of discipline are important
• If don't have discipline, will work with others

Basic argument for the disciplined mind

• Learning discipline is learning a language
• Listening to two experts, there's knowledge that you can't poach on
• Now, so much is interdisciplinary, so knowing one discipline isn't enough

For each discipline, false

• There's no cigar, i.e. knocking down a kewpie doll

Arthur Rubenstein, prodigy in 20s

• Became a sybarite:  carouse, didn't practice
• Played with flourishes, but wasn't getting better
• In his 30s, got married, and decided to practice 4 to 6 hours
• If I don't practice for a day, I know it; if I don't practice for a week, the orchestra knows it; if I don't practice for a month, the audience knows it

Hyper-discipline:  changing dinner table into a courtroom

• Shouldn't see everything through a disciplinary lens
• e.g. rational choice theory is useful, but not everything

2. The synthesizing mind

• Darwin:  spent 5 years observing, then next 30 years communicating, then produced the Origin of the Species
• A book more valued the farther north you go, don't go too far south

All of us are inundated by information

• The synthesizing mind decides what to pay attention to, and what to ignore
• Puts things together so an individual can retain it
• Then the synthesis needs to be communicable to other people
• Murray Gell Man:  In the 21st century, the most valuable mind will be the synthesizing mind

Psychology:  nothing on the topic of synthesizing

• May be ways of teaching it, but no formal literature on this
• In book, talk about how this would work

If want to synthesize, need to know what will happen at the end

• Then where to start, where to go:  what position papers, movie, state of the art
• Then what disciplines will you draw on, that is relevant?
• Then what method to bootstrap the synthesis, so that the synthesis off the shelf can be improved
• Don't wait until the last night:  try provisional synthesis, and people will tell you what's missing
• Then here it is, and move on

Believe that there will be whole schools that will teach synthesis

• Bill Clinton:  What presidents need is a synthesizing mind

Syntheses that don't work take in too much

• Are else they're eccentric, and don't fit
• Two books:  Ken Wilber, Griesen
• What makes a good synthesis

3.  Creative mind

• Einstein, Virginia Wolff, 
• Have spent much of life thinking about what creativity is

Can't be creative unless have mastered a discipline

• Kid's drawings won't go into a museum
• Takes 10 years
• Also need to know what's been done before
• Can think outside the box, but need to know what the box is

Creator raises good questions, new questions, finds problems (not just solves)

• Creating is as much about institutional power as computing power
• Creative person has to be willing to step out and do thinks that haven't been done before
• When ridiculed, have to pick self up, and try something else

Freud came to America in 1909, couldn't stand U.S.

• Jung came, liked it, sent Freud a note
• Freud said:  what did you leave out?

Creativity is judged by other people in the field

• In business, it's customers or shareholders

Not creative, failed:

• Ether
• Cold fusion
• Most best sellers
• Most biennial art shows

Two additional minds, wouldn't have written about them as a cognitive psychologist

• Respectful mind and ethical mind

Respectful mind: world is diverse, have contact with people around the world

• Need to tolerate people, but respectful mind embraces diversity, give people the benefit of the doubt
• At least as important in commerce and corporate life

Close, but no cigar:

• Kissing up, kicking down:  Bob Sutton, anti-asshole
• Bad jokes, at the expense of others
• Respect with too many conditions:  Kant, people aren't entitled to respect, no matter what they do

Promising instituitions:

• Commisions on Peace and Reconciliation:  people being regretful for what they've done
• Artistic ping-pong:  Mid-east orchestra with both sides playing, silk road orchestra

Changing minds:  Have changed own mind on whether there should be penalties on where should allow scarves in France, and cartoons in Denmark

• Concluded cartoons shouldn't have been published:  too much damage, to indulge a cartoonist
• In a world where everything is connected, we need to have a higher standard for what we share outside our own mind

5. Ethical mind

• Begins at day one, should have respect
• Disrespect from day one leads to bad
• Ethics: self as worker and a citizen
• Not just what are rights, but what are responsibilities (as a manager, lawyer, painter, physician), and how to I carry them out?
• Territory between courtesy and illegality: could get away with it legally, but decide not to

Good work project:  Bill Damon, Czisentmahali

Three E's

• Excellent quality, good discipline
• Engaging, we like to do it 
• Ethical:  moral within work and citizenship

Want people to have all three E's, how do we engender this in young people?

• Martin Luther King, Gandhi

Young people know good work, but a large number know that they can't be good workers when they're young

• Their peers don't want to give up opportunities to get ahead
• Good, but not know
• Augustin:  make me chaste, but not quite yet

No cigar:

• Work that is compromised, people getting away with what they can
• e.g. tests in education, not developing
• Bad work: Enron
• Perplexing:  Lord John Brown of BP, thought of well earlier, but then questions arise about what the company doesn't do
• Full responsibility needs to have a grounded meaning
• Next book: Responsibility in the Workplace

Role of education in nurturing these minds?

• Bring attention to them, at conferences like these
• Know about examples, good and bad
• Be in personal contact with people with these types of minds
• Mentor, tormentors and anti-mentors
• Meaningful work and meaningful life:  fragmentors, taking parts of people
• Even if have all five minds, not certain how to synthesize them
• Have to overthrow mentors, that's why a lot of Asians move to the west

Two questions:

• Aren't there other minds?
• How can you be in favour of censorship?

Martin Luther King:  Education and discipline

Emerson: Character is more important than intellect

Changed mind:  was studying, in an amoral way

• Can justify this as a scientist, but now a citizen, particularly in declining years
• Don't need more of best and brightest, need more people who are decent

[Questions]

How to formulate to create a common standard on the five minds, particularly on respectful and ethical?

• Difficult
• Respect is easier, because disrespect means not giving the other party the benefit of the doubt
• Universals: don't lie, don't hurt; then move to more specific
• Not bribery, but facilitation payments

12-year old daughter being challenged on short-term memory, not on creativity

• As parents, have to counter messages in society that we don't have sympathy
• Put some rules into effect
• Parents have to make an extra effort in the areas
• Patient, rewards don't come easily
• Children observe what is being done
• Sometimes choices of schools and teachers, and may exercise them
• But parents create antibodies for things we don't like
• As parents, also have to help kids, e.g. SATs

Can respective for others and ethical behaviour exist without self-respect

• Reciprocal:  if you treat people respectfully, it creates ways they'll treat you

Consider the religious mind, and ethics?

• Deliberately avoided religion and spirituality, as enemies would find inflammatory
• Good work project, across disciplines
• Impressed by a lot of good workers who emphasize religious beliefs early in life, even when they're not practicising
• When religion turns to intolerance, then it's pathological
• In the U.S., there's a lot of pathological behaviour

Clarify that people don't receive respect?

• Dershowitz:  if next to Hitler, would strangle him myself
• There are behaviours that trump respect
• Removal of people from positions of authority, and shunning signals that people no longer deserve respect
• Penalities have to be over a longer period of time
• Vivian Hailey:  If you don't save, you can't play

2007/06/01 11:00 Roger Martin, "Think Again: How Today's Greatest Business Leaders Think to Win"

2007/06/01 11:00 Roger Martin, "Think Again: How Today's Greatest Business Leaders Think to Win", Rotman Lifelong Learning Conference, Toronto

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

[Thomas Stewart]

Roger Martin has been dean for 9 years, and has renewed

• Harvard graduate
• Monitor Group
• First book, Responsibility Virus

[Dean and Premier’s Research Chair in Productivity and Competitiveness and Director, AIC Institute for Corporate Citizenship, Rotman School; Author, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking (Harvard Business School Press, Fall 2007); The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets – and the Rest of Us – Can Harness the Power of True Partnership(Basic Books, 2002); Co-Author, The Future of MBA – The MBA of the Future (working title for Oxford University Press, Fall 2007)]

[Roger Martin]

Will talk about integrating thinking

• For past 7 years, have been interviewing people who are successful
• Not looking at what they do, because it's related to context, but looking upstream
• Have interviewed business rock stars
• The way these people think, and how they got that way

F. Scott Fitzgerald: hold two opposing ideas in mind, and still function

• Central to integrative thinking
• Importance of models and models clash in the world, for leaders and decision-makers
• We make sense of the world
• We often don't realize that we're making sense of the world with models

Clip:  John Sterman:  modeling process happening unconsciously, and you can't turn it off

• What you're seeing  really isn't there
• Question of which model

Our models become reality

• This matters, because as we model, we complete to completely different views of things, that we confuse with reality
• There are clashing models in business all of the time:  low price, shareholder value, ...
• Perpetual model clash

Model clash leads to fundamental choice:  in the face of clashing models, fear and avoid

• The follow a strategy of crush it, or give it:  resulting in no model clash
• Argue most common, because people think that model clash is bad

Alternative choice to seek out and leverage:

• Enjoy it, get a new insight before proceeding

Example:  Izzy Sharp, built the best luxury hotel chain in the world

• Clash between model of first hotel (Four Season Motor Inn on Jarvis, 125 motels, with intimacy) and second hotel (Four Seasons Conference hotel) across from City Hall, with full amenities

Clip:  Izzy Sharp, which hotel most important?

• Four Seasons London:  instant success, always profitable
• London hotel became model:  mid-sized hotels of exceptional quality
• Purpose to be recognized as the best in every location, where we were
• In 1970s, in every Canadian city with a 5-star hotel
• First to offer free shampoo, 24 hour hotels, etc.
• Listened to customers
• Luxury in the 1970s was architecture and decor, decided to redefine luxury as service

Rather than accepting one or the other, took parts of the both models

• Got price premium by paying attention to things that other competitors didn't
• An environment like a home or an office
• Business travellers missed the facilities of the office, and amenities at home
• Became copied by other hotels who didn't know why

Thus, update of F. Scott Fitzgerald's quote:

• (see slide)

How do they do this, by what process of thinking?

• The make decisions differently from other human beings
• Salience --> causality --> architecture --> resolution

Unhelpful:

• Salience:  limit variables under consideration
• Causality: simplify considerations, e.g. straight line between X and Y
• Architecture: sequential or independent consideration of the piece parts
• Resolution:  trade-offs, making tough choices between two things rather than making choices non-tough

Integrative thinkers:

• Think about more features as salient, considering more factors
• Consider non-linear causality
• Architecture:  Keep the whole in mind, while working in the parts
• Search for creative resolution of tensions, as part of their jobs
• When they don't get to a great choice, they go back to the bottom, and think whether they've got the right variables (salience)

It's not that people aren't decisive, it's to search for creative solutions to tensions

• They need to think more

John Bachman, Edward Jones, second largest broker in the U.S., and one of the best places to think in the company

Clip, John Bachman:

• No vertical integration, prefer outsourcing to simplify lives
• McDonald's could be the best bakery, or best potato company, but they're distributors

McDonald's as salient to him, which isn't salient to his competitors

Non-linear thinking is a trait of Jack Welch, even though he portrays himself as straightfoward

Clip: Jack Welch

• Looking at budget, hear the competitors are tough, etc.
• Negotiating targets
• Build trust: how to get competition, and how to do better than prior year
• Have negotiation, because you get paid on that

Relationship between the nature of competition, and dreaming

Saw this, willing to compensate for more complicated relationship

Clip: Nandan Niekani, CEO, Infosys

• Get the parts, grow a strategy
• Multidimensional view of business

Search for creative resolution of tensions

A.G. Laffee, getting more innovation at lower cost, rather than increasing cost

Clip:  Laffee

• P&G principal scientists angry, thinking that wanted less innovation, no wanted more
• Scientists thought about outsourcing innovation lab, no we want to think about improving people's lives
• Now, see that people are picking up innovation
• Were below average on commercializing, from 15% to 65%
• An "and" versus an "or":  anyone can do "or", but not going to win if doing a trade-off game

Take a bad trade-off, blame himself

Case:  1994 Festival of Festivals

• Piers Handling, on what's salient

Clip: Piers Handling

• Different funding structural
• Stratford would go to philantropics
• Festival of Festival would go to business, they've got a product to sell and want to reach an audience
• Risk of selling, that can reduce by having multiple companies

Causality?

Clip: Piers Handling:

• Audience in the community, not just audience, but also directors
• Canadian film industry
• Some criticism of creating a ghetto
• Care and attention comes through to an audience

Architecture?

Clip:  Piers Handling:

• Larger and larger snowball

Key choices:  two competing models, of jury festivals (Cannes, to get Palme d'Or, buzz) versus an inclusive non-jury festival embracing community (with no buzz)

Clip: Piers Handling

• Toronto 1976, three founders
• Didn't want to follow European model
  • Usually 20 films in competition
  • Jury of international experts
  • Large hullabaloo about films
• Non-competitive festival doesn't have the same profile
  • 10 experts are arbiters of taste, 1 film happy, 19 unhappy
• Non-competitive means more involvement
• Key prize is the audience award
• Designed to be inclusive, for the audience
• Festival for the industry came later

Thus, innovation is from award from the audience, which is inclusive

Fundamental choice:

• Fear and avoid or Seek and leverage?

How to become a more integrative thinker

• Your personal knowledge system
• Three important pieces
• 1.  All of us have a Stance, of what we want to accomplish that guides us to create and use ...
• 2. ... Tools ... which add to 
• 3. ... Experiences ...

e.g. MBA prospects sees executives making decisions, need to go back to school to change stance

Stance, three aspects

• Stance on the world, and my place in the the world
• Can leverage opposing models

Example:  Victoria Hale, first non-profit pharmaceutical company, found cure to African black fever

• Saw model of creating medicines for people who can pay, or public health
• Nothing for third world countries that can't pay

Clip: Victoria Hale

• Why not a not-for-profit sponsored pharma company
• Get through development phase

Stance on existing models, they're constructions, not reality

Clip: Victoria Hale:

• Messier

Stance:  models are there to be opposed, not adhered

Clip:  Victoria Hale

• Some people field oriented and relationship, others technically oriented
• Need them to come together

Different points of view are important

Clip:  Victoria Hale

• Dr. Why not?

Self

Clip: Victoria Hale

• As a scientist, should try it

Believe job is to for individuals to find choices, not make choices

Clip: Victoria Hale

• Looking for pieces to put together

Know when have give selves time to find a solution

Clip: Victoria Hale

• Know when I want to know, give it time

Conventional stance versus an Integrative Stance

• (Summary chart)

[Questions]

Individual integrative thinker, role of emotions?

• There are a lot of emotional attributes, researching it right now (with Melanie)
• People are frightened into left and right side, frightened of complexity, and the need to act immediately
• Confidence and calm come with experience

When model runs into tensions, need to rethink it

• First sketch in Santa Cruz, 6 years ago
• Frontier for the work, now working on the stance
• Interested in the phenomenon of the tools and experience for the future, feedback from people

Mindset, Canadians aren't the type to go forward without compromise?  Don't have a culture of innovation?

• Hope you're totally wrong
• In the competitiveness, it's conventional or stylized, e.g. are we going to be like Americans who are too harse and individualistic, versus are we going to be poor and nice
• Part of the task is making sure that policy makers will think more, stew on it, work on more complicated solutions
• Learning experience on competitiveness:  there isn't just one or two policy-makers, getting to the large number is a problem

Strategy about making trade-offs and choices.  Compromise instead?  How to ensure not a sub-compromise.

• It has a lot to do with the experience
• It's absolutely about making choices, but integrative thinkers see an unreasonable choice and will wait
• Not compromise, it's a better model

2007/06/01 13:15 Ellen Langer, "Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Learning and Creativity"

2007/06/01 13:15 Ellen Langer, "Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Learning and Creativity", Rotman Lifelong Learning Conference, Toronto

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

[Greeting from Chris Hart, regional manager of the Four Seasons]

[Roger Martin]

Ellen Langer:  academic, yet accessible

• Mindfulness
• Professor of psych at Harvard
• Getting a movie made about her, and she'll be played by Jennifer Aniston

[Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; Author, On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity (Ballantine, 2005); The Power of Mindful Learning (Perseus, 1998); Mindfulness (Addison Wesley, 1990)]

[Ellen Langer]

The costs and consequences of mindlessness

Image;  can't see it -- it's a cow -- then can't see anything

• Almost everything we know is wrong
• This limits innovation, health and happiness
• We want to retain uncertainty, and learn how to exploit the power of uncertainty

We learn things in a simple perspective, but then standing in a different place, it becomes something completely different

We learn, and then learn to be mindless

Gorilla video

Roast beef, cutting off slice to put into another pan

Behaviour makes sense at time 1

• Then, at time 2, don't waste time

Skid in car, impulse is to ease on brakes, but with anti-lock brakes, push firmly

Unsigned credit card, then comparing signatures

When you're mindless, you're not there

Airport without passport

Air Florida flight from D.C. to Florida, deicer off, caused crash

• Checklists, but after a while, they become mindless

Believe all of suffering is the direct or indirect effect of being mindless

• In 30 years of research, have been increasing mindfulness
• Increase competence ... increase lifetime

Attention:  object to attention deficit disorder

• Teachers:  when you pay attention to it, stand still
• Compare:  observe what's different about it, actively noticing new things

Define mindfulness without meditation:  active noticing new things

• Puts you in the present
• If you don't, then you don't know that you're not there
• They guide what you're doing

Engagement

• Otherwise, past is over-ruling
• Mindlessness comes by default

Mindlessness coming from doing it over and over again

• Learn basics, so it becomes second nature
• Who's basics?
• If second nature, it's mindless

Saying "use your intuition" says that people go back to their experiences

Work versus play, who decides?

• Have a good time, put in extra time
• Fatigue can be from mindset

Study of chambermaids, asked what exercise they get

• They said they don't get exercise, because it's associated with leisure
• They're doing more than the surgeon general
• One month later, nothing change, except that they see their work as exercise

Don't have the faintest idea of how being trapped in these exercises

Learning conditionally

• Cure is the hard part

e.g. cholesterol:  a measure 12 years ago

Look for familiar in the novel, the novel in the future

Look for universal versus personal attribution, e.g. it's different

Specific cure:

• Try creative mindfulness
• People can see it, we wear our mindfulness or mindlessness

Roadblocks to mindful creativity

1. Stop pretending

• Dolphins swim faster to the trainers who are mindful
• Children know who is mindful
• Adults learning scripts

Started painting

• Don't know what I'm doing, putting heart and soul into it

Is mindfulness in the eye of the beholder, or on the canvas?

• Both
• People prefer mindful drawings

Symphony musicians trained to be mindful

How to become more mindful?

• We have a fear of making mistakes
• Fear in one context is a success in another

A mistake is a cue to be in the present

• Puts you into a different consciousness
• Handmade rugs are more expensive than machine made, with the major difference being the errors
• If don't know where are going forward, will be mindful
• If you make a mistake, incorporate it in

Absolutes:  keep off the grass

• Experience was person-created, and then come into an ontological status
• When we put people into the equation, it's easier to deviate from the status quo
• Become like a 2-year old:  who says so?

Recognizing the social construction of reality, rather than implicitly imputing ontological status, leads to control

When we're not mindfully creating, is there a way that we can enjoy more?

Children:  when we expect them to change, we notice more

• Has to do with stability of the underlying measure

[Questions]

Business calculations in a spreadsheet?

• Numbers are a way to hide ambiguity
• If you want to pretend there's more authority, obfuscate by taking people out of the equation.
• If want the opportunity to engage, all the ways before you were decisions that might not be done today

Measure mindfulness?

• Yes, there's a scale, and it's oxymoronic
• Believe that all people are capable of virtually the same thing, albeit in slightly different ways
• Behaviour makes sense from the actor's point of view
• Things that I have problem changing are things that I value

Golf?

• No matter what you do, it will be better if you're really there.
• If practice and you're aware of what will vary, it won't hurt you.

Fitness and wellness.

• There are both direct and indirect effects to health on mindfulness
• Mindfulness is enlivening

2007/06/01 14:35 Mihnea Moldoveanu, "Designing the Thinker of the Future"

2007/06/01 14:35 Mihnea Moldoveanu, "Designing the Thinker of the Future", Rotman Lifelong Learning Conference, Toronto

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the Coevolving Innovations web site by David Ing.

[Roger Martin]

Mike Moldoveanu is director of the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking

[Associate Professor and Director, Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking™, Rotman School; Co-Author, The Future of MBA – The MBA of the Future (working title for Oxford University Press, Fall 2007); Master Passions: Emotion, Narrative, and the Development of Culture (MIT Press, 2002)]

[Mihnea Moldoveanu]

New book:  MBAs of the future

Take three words (designing, thinker, future) and put them together to make you comfortable

Something about designing a thinker

Mind is an uncontrollable organ

Opportunity:  the new workforce, to create value, relies on a new skill set

• These are epistemic skill sets:  the ability to guide your mind to do different things
• Create a basic science of integrative thinking

Market opportunity:

• Adapted from Johnson, Manyika and Yee, three McKinsey consultants
• Transformational jobs:  matter into matter, or information into information
• Transactional jobs, different transactions
• Tacit:  structuration and management of complex interactions
• Significant majority are in the tacit jobs, and require tacit skills

When don't have a science, often call it tacit

• To put back on the path, make it implicit
• Differentiate between algorithmic and non-algorithmic skills
• e.g. making a computer program itself, outset of skill set

 

Expertise map of a large telecomm company

• Person needs expertise in different languages to design a base station: hardware, software, ...
• Underlying disciplines
• Different languages
• Different underlying sciences
• Different modes of thinking, justifying
  • Engineer prefers deductive, marketer prefers inductive

General manager wants to integrate:  the tacit skills integrating across the domains

• Mental model clash across a large family of models

Can have different mental models of fairness, e.g. end of year performance review, with a response coming back "it's not fair"

• Fairness on equality on rights, needs, sharing of authority, effort, etc.
• Words "it's not fair" obscure the underlying mental model fact

Conflict monger, see conflict everywhere

• Thus, mental model clash when people are using the same words, but in different senses

Ability to resolve mental model clash varies with different thinkers

Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines: lowest cost and highest profit, yet highest customer satisfaction

• Have to recognize the clash, and live it
• Get it by thinking through the detailed implementation
• Thus, short-haul airline that doesn't have frills, but looks after employees

Jack Welch, General Electric

• Stretch goals versus productive budgeting and planning meetings (as an efficient coordinating device)
• Resolution: Think outside the usual models
• Delinking of discussions of hopes and dreams from budget conversations
• Cake:  I cut you, you choose
• Can expand to an envy-free decision protocol

Richard Currie, Loblaws

• Low prices for customers, versus high margins for Loblaws
• Creative resolution: President's Choice

Moses Znaimer:

• Television stations as the space between programs
• Can use this space to feel local, while doing global programming

Integrative thinking:

• Think about learning to swim, and how to turn at the end of the pool
• One may, watch lots of videos of Mark Spitz, but it's complicated
• Go to a learning theorist:  break the complex sequences into simple sequences and then put them together into a complex sequence
• Thus create some simpler models, that can put together

Four modules

• Suspension of belief
• Suspension of disbelief
• Interactive reasoning
• Behavioral responsiveness

Integrative thinking has to be guided by a stance, it can't be guided by a role

Stance has two parts:

• 1. Cognitive pragmatism: says mental behaviour is the result of a choice
  • Brain constantly behaves consciously and unconsciously
  • Can do reconnaisance to figure out what is product and unproductive
  • Thinking, thinking about thinking, and then thinking about thinking about thinking
• 2. Gloptimization: global optimization, as compare to local optimization
  • Active avoidance of local optima
  • Think of your business as lots of rocks, want to get to the Himalayas, but you might get trapped on Kilimanjaro
  • You'll have a sugar high from getting to Kilimajaro
  • Tries to inculcate mental habits associated with global landscapes

Cognitive pragmatists not only think about what I should do, but also what should I think, how I should think, and why

• e.g. you've gained weight, saying because it's true, as opposed to the suit, etc.
• Point: there's choice on what you say, and what you focus on
• Cognitive pragmatists focus on the value of believing some things over others
• Instead of just choosing between a trade off, they think about an expanded value set
• When do you stop? (or else it becomes obsessive-compulsive)

Evidence that you think it's helpful to be a cognitive pragmatist:

• Sterman:  those who do best are those who first think about to approach the problem, before attacking the problem

Judgement in the future, often is based on a few data points

• Linear regression, simplicity, doesn't mean that we have multiple ways to look at the past
• Could be straight line, curve, or exact fit
• Choice isn't given by data, have to make an a priori choice
• On what basis do I make the choice?

Gloptimization:

• Trapped in local optimum, how to get to the global optimum?
• Instead of making rest the default mental state, make it search
• Intensify the search
• Occasionally, through in curve balls

Suspension of disbelief:

• Engineer's view:  probability optimality, deductive logical closure
• Marketer's view:  Has a lot of information to deal with, looking for face validity and inductive logic
• Mental model clash, resulting in contempt, i.e. you just don't understand
• Understanding requires extended suspension of disbelief

What do sophomores do?

• Sophomores are the subjects of psych experiments
• Kruglanski and Webster
• They seize on and idea, and then freeze it, ignoring alternatives
• Then they justify it, and refute alternatives
• After fortress is build, go back to step 1
• This is pessimistic to make integrative thinkers
• Have to suspend disbelief at least long enough to understand it

Reason for knowing this is to have people reflect

Suspension of belief:

• Two metaphors:  (a) management is all aobut selling, vs. (b) management is all a negotiation
• Want to wade in the complexity

Sophomores suspend belief by ...

• Believing it before they understand it
• Hold it in our minds, and then decided whether it is correct or not
• Experiments of Dan Gilbert: Keep holding the belief, even if it's not discredited
• But in Langer's work, can make the belief formation process more flexible

Interactive reasoning:

• Conversation, on what I think and what you think
• There's also what I think you think, and what you think I think
• Should go to deeper levels, alternatively, we don't have grounds for our words to make sense to each other
• Mindless attibution layer, but deeper, a "first understanding" layer
• Can draw conclusions before, during and after meetings, and compare

Sophomore reasoning:

• We'll have false attributions

Walk the talk: all of the preceding are in the mind, can you get your being to take this

• Follow with behaviour?

Mental model responsiveness:

• Model A with an outcome (failure)
• Change the mental model, but then change the behaviour with the mental model
• This is difficult, will is something that represents a muscle

Sophomores:

• If you proofread a text, then it makes it hard to stop watching a boring movie
• If you first make a non-obvious choice, it makes it hard to persist in attempting to solve a difficult puzzle
• If first suppress an undesirable though, it makes it harder to suppress signs of amusement

Need to think about how to train the will

• e.g. if hungry, don't eat, listen to Mozart

These are four modules, out of a projected 7 or 8, to understand the nuts and bolts of integrative thinking

Research project will be called "winking at reality"

[Question]

Effect of self-confidence on suspending belief or disbelief

• Not precise enough
• It talk about self-efficacy, ability for me to conduct a task, it's better
• Self-confidence particularized to a skill set

Skill of integrating different information processing styles, e.g. Hogarth's work on moderating and modifying and integrating

• Yes, but interested in specific linkages between processing styles, and what managers do
• Connectionist styles and interactions, but end up with Rumelhard and Chomsky, and managers will say leave me alone
• Trying to understand the phenomena
• This recaps structural arguments, but in a much phenomenological context