Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Critical Thinking

The Best Advice Tony Blair Ever Got: Finding the Time to Think Strategically

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As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reported at a 2012 event at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, it’s easy to get so absorbed by the pressures of doing that you rarely ever disentangle yourself from the chock-full of activities and the clutter that can choke strategic thinking.

As the leader of the Opposition, when I went to see him in 1996 at the White House, he explained that one of the hardest things when you get into the government is finding the time to think strategically. It’s being able to create the space so that you’re focused on what you really know counts because otherwise, he said, the system will take you over. You’ll be in meetings from 8:00 in the morning till 10:00 at night, and you think you’re immensely busy, but the tactics and the strategy have all got mixed.

The Best Advice Tony Blair Ever Got from Bill Clinton: Finding Time to Think Strategically What happens in leadership is that things come at you the whole time. If you’re not careful, you’ll spend your time dealing with one situation after another. You lose your strategic grip on what’ll determine if you’re a successful government. Many of these crises are real, and you must deal with them. But when you judge your government in history, no one will remember any of them. You’ve got to create the space to be thinking strategically all the time to change the world.

Idea for Impact: It’s your strategic thinking, more than any other single activity, that can influence what you’ll achieve as a leader. Find ways to create more “head time” amid the busyness.

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Beware of Too Much Information

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Better Decisions Beware of Too Much Information Nearly all decision-making models emphasize the need for much information about the situation and options before making a decision.

Information is worthwhile, no doubt, but information can sometimes be less factual or less precise than it may seem. Besides, too much information may distract you from important issues. Scouting for additional data may cloud the picture rather than arm you with crucial information.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the usefulness and truth-value of the information you have amassed. The solution to being overwhelmed by too much irrelevant information is selecting relevant information—not merely less information.

Bear in mind that there’s always room for new ideas and new perspectives. Review and challenge your current comprehension of the problem you’re confronting. Don’t be afraid to refine your understanding and explore other possibilities.

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Deliver The Punchline First

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Deliver The Punchline First = Get to the Point

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page set about to secure early funding for Google, they initiated a presentation at Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s premier venture capital firms, with the logline “Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible.”

Most busy executives don’t want to sit through a 50-slide presentation. They don’t have the patience to wait for the punchline.

Begin with the conclusion and then go through the rest of your slide deck: your proposals, theses, assumptions, your line of thinking, and the arguments, pro and con.

Meaning, Then Details

Cognitive psychologists have argued that the brain pays more attention to the core of an idea than to its details.

According to the University of Washington molecular biologist John Medina, the human brain craves meaning before details. In Brain Rules (2014,) Medina notes, “Normally, if we don’t know the gist–the meaning–of information, we are unlikely to pay attention to its details. The brain selects meaning-laden information for further processing and leaves the rest alone.”

When listeners comprehend the overarching idea of a pitch, they’ll find it easier to synthesize and digest the information.

Begin Your Next Executive Presentation with the Final Summary Slide First

Most executives have limited willpower and suffer “decision fatigue.” Don’t overload them with less-important details before asking them to decide in your favor. Your “executive summary” slide may be the only one that will get full attention. So make it perfect!

  • Practice, practice, practice. Few people, if any, have the rhetorical ability to make a persuasive 15-second speech about their significant ideas. The best speakers are the best because they rehearse and get feedback.
  • Less is more. After getting prized facetime with executives, many talented young professionals produce large slide decks to dazzle the executives with their intelligence and ingenuity. Don’t.
  • Simplify your “executive summary” message. Perceptive executives tend to be somewhat skeptical of things that ought to be simple but have become too complicated.
  • Meaning, then detail. The brain processes meaning before detail, and the brain likes hierarchy. Start with the general idea and then present information in a structured, hierarchical approach. Make sure that each detail you communicate traces back to the core concept of your presentation.

Idea for Impact: Get to the Point

Tell busy people what they need to know upfront. Communicate like a newsperson: What’s the number one thing your audience needs to know? Say that first. Then build out from there, keeping the most essential particulars up top.

There’s another smart—if devious—benefit of putting the cart before the horse: delivering your “punchline” first can hook your audience with a compelling proposal first, and then cash in on the confirmation bias to sway them to your case.

Spy thriller novelist Graeme Shimmin offers this excellent guide to writing a killer punchline, logline, or elevator speech.

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Can’t Expect to Hold the Same Set of Beliefs Your Entire Life

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The Truth That it's Okay to Change It’s okay to challenge your core values and change.

That’s normal and healthy.

It means you’re able to ability to transcend your current worldview and have an open mind. You’re willing to learn about new perspectives. You’re eager to search actively for evidence against your favored beliefs, discover and challenge your internal biases, and change your core values if they no longer make sense.

Having the freedom to change your core beliefs and being able to reason and reconsider your positions on something is an integral part of being human, as Aristotle writes in his Nicomachean Ethics.

Don’t be more committed to the appearance of consistency than to real growth.

Don’t inadvertently buy into the values that predominate popular culture.

When you have doubts and questions and changes of heart and mind, even on fundamental issues such as faith or political orientation, don’t consider them character defects or moral flaws. You’re just exercising your ability for rational thought.

Life should alter you. It should recondition your soul and mind and refocus your lens. Time and experience—the people you meet, the ideas you stumble upon, and how you discover meaning—should all change you. On religion, say, you won’t have the understanding of yourself and of God and the world that you had ten years ago. And you can bet that the same won’t be true ten years from now.

Challenge your core values and change As a human, you grow and change. Your worldview can—and should—reflect that growth. Regardless of what you feel, think, believe, and profess today, if someday in the future you find yourself in a different place, remember: it’s okay to realign your mind—and to speak it.

Idea for Impact: Rethink everything you previously thought out. It’ll only strengthen your character.

You’ll also discover that you’re rarely offended by other people’s opinions anymore, even when they differ significantly from your own. You’ll be care far more about how people justify and rationalize those views. And you’ll get a better appreciation of the nuances—this is much more important than whether or not someone agrees with you.

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Cancel Culture has a Condescension Problem

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Cancel Culture has a Condescension Problem Cancel culture and wokism have allowed for overly politicized worldviews where people both on the left and on the right are quick to take offence. There is, at present, a strong instinct to censure, anathematize, ostracize, and insist upon punishment for people or perspectives that are deemed unacceptable. Acceptable expression is being forced into ever-smaller confines.

It’s not enough for each faction to point to the hypocrisy of the other. It’s also crucial for each to defend theirs—and the others’—right to say disagreeable and objectionable statements and subject them to empirical and logical assessment.

While we shouldn’t organize our worlds around the sensibilities of those who’re easily distressed, every person should have the right to decide his beliefs for himself, speak freely, and defend his views during civilized discourse. Intellectual inquiry can’t thrive if people can’t express themselves in good faith.

Idea for Impact: Cancel culture is to be kept within bounds if we are to preserve a free society. If we fail to stand up for the right to speech that we dislike, why retain the right for the speech we do like?

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No, Reason Doesn’t Guide Your Politics

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“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” observes the American political scientist Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012,) a captivating voyage of discovery of the social psychology of politics and ethics. Haidt makes a compelling case for why reason and logic aren’t what people use to contend with problems and steer through to the right answers.

Most people’s politics tend to be ill-informed. People don’t engage in deep causal thinking about the consequences of their favored political positions. Information and analyses tend to provoke—not calm—their preconceived judgments.

No, Reason Doesn't Guide Your Politics

Reason is Motivationally Inert

As the Scottish philosopher David Hume noted in his masterful Treatise on Human Nature (1739,) “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Reason becomes subordinate to the passions that have come to life in people’s tribal allegiances and their confirmation bias. People are prone to making decisions derived from instinctive, emotional, and fast thinking of psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1,” not the slow, logical deliberations of “System 2.”

Most people feel good about sticking to their guns, even if they are wrong. They tend to read newspapers, periodicals, blogs, and social media feeds to settle ever more comfortably into their preexisting beliefs. They use their tribes’ “notice boards” not to reassess their established opinions but to have them validated, comforted, legitimized, and intensified.

On the rare occasion that they do converse with someone or read something they may disagree with, they don’t revaluate their judgments, let alone change their minds. They merely use reason as a weapon to discredit contrasting evidence, spot others’ flaws, and convince them that they are wrong. Consequently, reason doesn’t bind but drives differing people apart.

Idea for Impact: The Opinions You are Blind to Could Be Your Own

Be conscious of the internal conflicts brought on by your passions. Seek and assess the counterevidence. Incorporate these counterarguments and strengthen your positions.

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When Exaggerations Cross the Line

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When Exaggerations Cross the Line Many myths and urban legends—even politicians’ infuriating rhetoric—aren’t wholly untrue. Rather, they’re exaggerations of claims rooted in a kernel of truth.

Yes, many of us don’t achieve our full intellectual potential. However, that doesn’t suggest that most people use only 10% of our brainpower.

Sure, men and women tend to differ somewhat in their communication styles. However, pop psychologists such as John Gray have taken this gender difference stereotype to an extreme, declaring “men are from Mars” and “women are from Venus.”

Idea for Impact: Exaggeration is part of human nature. Take care to not cross the line from harmless puffery to reckless overstatements.

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Intellectual Inspiration Often Lies in the Overlap of Disparate Ideas

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From David Chapman’s instructive essay ‘How to Think Real Good,’

Learn from fields very different from your own. They each have ways of thinking that can be useful at surprising times. Just learning to think like an anthropologist, a psychologist, and a philosopher will beneficially stretch your mind.

Leonardo da Vinci---Renaissance man was as much a scientist as an artist I’ve always been an admirer of the “Renaissance Man”—the notion that one should try to embrace multiple streams of knowledge and develop one’s own faculties as broadly as possible. An archaeologist who studies only material culture will think similar thoughts to a second archaeologist who studies only material culture. However, an archaeologist whose studies include anthropology, biology, geology, and metallurgy has the wherewithal to pursue her curiosity down disparate channels and synthesize multiple perspectives.

Idea for Impact: Dabble in multiple disciplines from time to time and try to understand the basic thinking model of each discipline. You’ll think more broadly, redefine problems outside of normal boundaries, and reach solutions anchored in a unique understanding of complex situations.

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Many Creative People Think They Can Invent Best Working Solo

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Many Creative People Think They Can Only Create Working Solo

Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak writes in his memoir, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (2006):

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone.

Teams aren’t automatically better at creativity. In what’s termed “collaborative inhibition,” everyone needs to be happy, so team members talk and talk until they’ve reached a consensus on a decision which is usually the lowest common denominator—something tepid that everyone, worn out from the prolonged discussion, can endorse.

Idea for Impact: The best creative decisions often reflect a unique, opinionated perspective. Look for ways to increase organizational creativity by building better environments in which individual creativity can thrive.

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Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data

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CDC Grappling with Imperfect Science - Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data Yesterday’s New York Times article highlights the complex tradeoff leaders must often make between indecision and acting on insufficient information:

The Omicron variant is pushing the CDC into issuing recommendations based on what once would have been considered insufficient evidence, amid growing public concern about how these guidelines affect the economy and education. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has been commended for short-circuiting a laborious process and taking a pragmatic approach to manage a national emergency, saying she was right to move ahead even when the data was unclear and agency researchers remained unsure. The challenge now for Dr. Walensky is figuring out how to convey this message to the public: “The science is incomplete, and this is our best advice for now.”

The smartest people I know are the ones who understand that they don’t know—can’t know—everything. Yet, they’re ready to act on imperfect information, especially when being slow will be costly.

Idea for Impact: Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can’t reach decisions.

Knowing you’ll never know everything shouldn’t prevent you from acting. The ability to reason and reconsider your position on something is an integral part of rational thought.

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