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“It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so, philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.”

Morris Raphael Cohen

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“Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.”

Herbert Hoover

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Ok. I believe every business has an ambition. In fact. I believe every business has different ambitions all at the same time – money, morals, size, Purpose, etc, or simply have one focus ambition. That ambition can come in any size. It is theirs and they hope to attain it or aspire to reach it. That said. I am a pragmatic hope guy. I clearly love instilling hope as part of any business, or Life, vision, but don’t believe in any aspect of false hope. As I have written before while false hope is maybe slightly better than no hope at all, hope should be treated carefully.

To me.

All hope to me should be grounded in some sense of pragmatic and reality.

I, frankly, don’t understand when people suggest you cannot have both.

I, frankly, don’t understand when people suggest you cannot have both idealism and realism.

I, frankly, don’t understand when people suggest you shouldn’t have aspects of both hope & pragmatism, possibilities and pragmatism and idealism & realism.

We should want both AND demand both. It is reaching for the stars and reaching realistically. It is keeping your feet in the clouds and, yet, head on the ground.

But that’s how I think.

I think you can both be idealistic and realistic.

I think it is possible to offer a sense of a difficult/challenging path forward without creating a larger sense of ‘doom or Armageddon’ to create the sense of urgency which we often deem necessary in order to inspire real action.

And, inevitably, that is what this is all about.

How to inspire people not just to inspire but to take action?

How to inspire larger ideas and larger actions?

This is a tightrope all business people walk.

The difficulty on this tight rope is that there will always be people debating, and criticizing, while you walk on this tight rope. They will argue whether the ambition is big enough. They will argue whether the ambition isn’t small enough. They will argue we need more radical change. They will argue we need less radical change. Shit. They will argue we need no change moving forward, but rather reverse some of the changes made.

And you know what?

Some of that, in all of that, is right. Some of the past is awful and some of the decisions we will make for the future, and in the future, will be awful. Conversely, some of all of that will, well, not be awful.

To suggest that there are easy answers or that the steps forward are clear and simple is stupid. Stupid & foolish.

Just to be clear. Within the “Idealism and Realism” debate can be found in the constructive decision which any leader tries to find their own course in leading. We debate all of this shit in our own heads and then we debate it in conference rooms and boardrooms every week.

We are responsible for past decisions and, yet, try to unburden ourselves so that we can make progress.

Simplistically, just because I <maybe> made an awful decision in the past doesn’t mean I will make an awful decision in the future.

Simplistically, just because I maybe offer a hopeful idealistic decision for the future doesn’t mean it is a realistic decision for now.

Simplistically, just because I try and slow everybody down on some idealistic discussion shouldn’t suggest I am any more ‘canny or wise’ than everybody else let alone the person who offers the idealistic hope that people may gravitate toward — it just suggests that maybe I am trying to balance it all with reality <and maybe incorporate the fact that, pragmatically, I would like to incorporate some possibilities for people today & tomorrow>.

 

I will suggest, no, I will tell you the harsh truth getting good shit done within ANY size ambition is hard.

Getting shit done means balancing overreach and under reach.

Balancing possibilities and pragmatism.

Balancing idealism and realism.

Balancing the practical and the hope.

Balancing what people think they want and what they need.

Balancing the majority and the minority. Balancing what is good for one and good for all.

Anything less than that is oversimplification.

Oh. Shit. And then there is context. One can never lose sight of context.

You have to balance the idea, the hopefulness of ‘what could be’, against pragmatically where you have been <what has happened if not what has just happened> as well as where you are.

It is incredibly simplistic to suggest any past decision should be compared to a decision you will make. Just as it would be incredibly simplistic to judge a business leader if they were to take over a large company which was truly heading into a shithole versus a company which had some problems but was, in general, businesswise healthy.

Every transition has its own singular issues. Every situation has its own singular issues. Every business has its own singular issues. And, let’s be clear, every one of those situations has singular problems.

We should all recognize that in the overall life cycle of business problems and opportunities, practical and possibilities, hope & despair, heroes & villains, will appear in different forms – all with the intent to either further our ambitions or steal our ambitions.

This is not cynical, this is … uhm … reality

Whoever becomes a business leader is going to deal with navigating pragmatism and idealism mostly by assessing the problems, or obstacles, to your ambition.

Harping on whatever those problems doesn’t really get you anywhere.

They are what they are.

I could also argue that arguing over idealistic ideas and vision without admitting some pragmatism and practicality doesn’t really get you anywhere. It is not a binary discussion nor are pragmatism and possibilities, idealism and practical, are mutually exclusive.

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“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”

John Galsworthy

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Look. We all hate cynicism, but far too often we confuse it with pragmatism and practicality. I would also suggest we all get tired of pragmatism because, well, far too often it sounds small.

But I would also point out that we all not only get tired, but absolutely unequivocally hate, false hope and unrealized idealism. “Large” unrealized equals zero, nothing, nada. People don’t like a zero, nothing, nada no matter how large the zero, nothing, nada is.

Neither option, looked upon in isolation, is attractive or likeable.

And you know what? A good leader knows all of this. And they do their best to walk the tight rope. They sit down and assess what you have, assess what they could have, assess resources, money, whatever, and figures out, pragmatically, how to get going doing the business of doing business – that desires to attain that ambition.

They may not always get it right and they may not always get done whatever is needed to get done to alleviate the problems, or all the problems, that exist in the here and now. But I would point out that, realistically, you can never alleviate all problems and that problems exist, contextually, no matter if an idealist or a realist, a pragmatist or a ‘possibilities driven’ leader, a hope or a practical leader steps in. The only constant is that problems existed to be addressed, exist to address and will exist to address all to eventually be solved ONLY if both idealism & pragmatism and possibilities & the practical are embraced.

Not accepting that as a business truth is foolish.

Not accepting that as a business truth is, in fact, lazy thinking.

Any business ambition demands both idealism and pragmatism. The idealism is the spark of possibilities and imagination while the pragmatism stops you from simply being a ‘dreamer’ or wasting resources tilting at windmills.

Maybe, just maybe, we should be sitting back and thinking about how you can both be idealistic and realistic.

In the end.

I hate almost all binaries but choosing between pragmatism and idealism is the most distasteful to me.

Every business deserves both idealism & realism, possibilities & pragmatism and grander hopes of individual significance. Every business deserves to think, and believe, it can matter – in its family, neighborhood, community, city, state, country or global. Whatever their ‘mattering ambition’ is they deserve the intrinsic motivation found in that ambition – while grounded in some pragmatism.

Once again, let me say, maybe, just maybe, we should stop embracing just idealism or just realism and see that optimizing the combination is the path to optimizing the future. And while I typically dislike optimizing (it often feels like compromising) maybe, just maybe, in this case, we should all go into the optimizing business.

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“Technology is not nature, but humanity. It is not about tools; it is about how people work. It is equally about how they live and how they think.”

Peter Drucker, the essential Drucker (from analysis to perception)

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“When you improve the performance of a part of a system taken separately, you can destroy the system.”

Russell Ackoff

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“… in the basement of your organization is a diesel-powered database that has a geological strata of decades old data.”

Jarred McGinnis

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This is about the effect automation will have on jobs, employment and, specifically, on 50something employment.

With all the talk about how automation will replace jobs I’d like to take a moment and say that dwelling somewhere within the basement of your organization is a nuclear-powered database with the half-life of decades old data, it is called institutional knowledge and it resides in 50somethings (or people with significant industry and business knowledge & experience). And its about them I speak of today. Business is being transformed, but not by technology or automation. These things are simply liberators of time and mind of, well, people.

So. While this is about the role of 50somethings in the future of work I will begin with the effect automation will have on the future of work. Yes. They are related.

Increased automation

In 1999 The Cluetrain Manifesto laid out the automation issue for us albeit they did so in speaking about the Web (or technology):

Because the Internet is so technically efficient, it has also been adopted by companies seeking to become more productive. They too are hungry for knowledge, for the intellectual capital that has become more valuable than bricks and mortar or any tangible asset. What they didn’t count on were the other effects of Web technology. Hypertext is inherently nonhierarchical and antibureaucratic. It does not reinforce loyalty and obedience; it encourages idle speculation and loose talk. It encourages stories.

Of course, a percentage of jobs will, be replaced by automation. It would be absurd to not acknowledge that factories, and some businesses, will go running to automation in their attempt to efficiently, consistently, produce things 24/7. Entire industries will stare at balance sheets trying to assess what is the automation efficacy bottom line for manufacturing and doing business. A select few of idiots in the service industry will also do the same. I will not put a number on that and regardless of the number the people affected are harmed financially. But I believe the larger number effected will actually be within the 4 walls of businesses themselves. It was Mike Walsh who first made me think of it this way, but let’s assume 80% of a large segment of workers will have automation assume 20% of their current responsibilities. Now. Of course, business will immediately seek to consolidate employees, based on ‘hours worked’ to attempt to lower people costs and efficiently get an ROI from a traditional 40-hour week. Far too many will do this and while in the short term (maybe even a generation) they will do fine because once again they squeezed out costs and squeezed output from ‘less.’ It is a race to the efficacy bottom and simply squeezes out whatever paste is left in the tube rather than seeing if they can redesign the tube to hold more paste.

** note: this is reductionism at its worst. I will state the obvious; the danger of reductionism is it rarely tells us about construction. And businesses, while they may not word it this way, view automation as a way to ‘reduce’ – people, unevenness, human error, costs. The future of business will not be found in reductionism, but rather construction.

“I don’t think our goal should be to create conscious intelligent machines. Everything that makes a machine useful are generally the things that are not human, why do we need to create an emotional, unpredictable, volatile, machine and put it in charge of something mission critical. The whole point of machines is to do they can do the things we don’t trust humans to do consistently.”

Mike Walsh

Which leads me to construction.

The active energy in any business is not technology, its people. Technology can activate energy, or amplify, energy, but generally speaking, at best it is passive energy if not just sustaining energy (when designed well). But my point with automation is that there is an opportunity for it to activate energy (freeing up people) and amplifying energy (maximizing the people energy being generated from automation).

Which leads me to freedom.

Freedom (extra time to do things)

While I believe it would be helpful for business to think about how automation will free up people to use their energy to think conceptually and envision ideas, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out we may actually be circling back to a way of doing business.

Me, being me, tend to think of business issues cyclically and that the tools we develop and design simply solve one problem only to have us circle back only to find that the problem we solved only created maybe an even worse problem (so we go back to original work style). This has to do with machines beginning to do what people don’t need to do so they CAN do what they should do. In the way back business machine we had administrative staff. What they did was the stuff so that the thinkers/guiders/knowledge people could be ahead of the business and seeking out emergent possibilities (and problems/complications to solve). Then technology came along with tools which suggested anyone could do all the administrative things. All of a sudden, those ‘guides’ were being asked to build power points, craft correspondence, type correspondence, schedule meetings, etc. Business, seeking efficiency, actually de-optimized effectiveness. But with automation arising it would appear we would be going back to the old model where knowledge worker ‘guides’ could do what they were supposed to do (create and expand value offered by the business) while technology/machines created the infrastructure to permit them to do so. It seems like business is circling back to a better way of doing things simply by adopting new technology. That was a simplistic overview and I am also relatively confident business will want its cake and eat it too (take the automation AND still demand knowledge workers to do their own doing).

Just to provide some clarification on my thoughts:

As a generalization I have split the work force into three groups: guides, makers, support.

• Guides were the senior-ish people who could think conceptually, perceptually envision emergent opportunities as well as situational problems/challenges. The bulk of their time was in thinking and their doing was more as a facilitator rather than in making.
• Makers were the ones who made the things happen. They analyzed, built, facilitated and, in general, made projects happen on time, on budget and on strategy/mission.
• Support were mainly administrative people. They mainly handled the logistics of business and made sure the right materials were done right, put into the right hands at the right time (and made sure the guides & makers didn’t look stupid).

How those groups have evolved in the business environment.

• Pre-technology

One of the few positive things of the old hierarchy was the really good ‘guides’ had a boatload of people reporting to them. They didn’t really do ‘command & control’ they were actually more like a “queen bee” where everyone in their hive stopped by on occasion to get some guidance, check in on what they may be missing and get some good guidance to avoid obstacles, stem problems and gain some new insights (transferal of learning also occurred). This happened because makers made and support supported and guides guided. It wasn’t a flawless system, but the good guides were invaluable. They thought conceptually, saw systems where connections made things complex, but navigable, and tended to balance progress versus specific goals well. This may have seemed like a bloated system, but in general it optimized thinking & doing and pragmatism & possibilities.

• Technology

We often think of technology in terms of software, but we should also discuss it in terms of tools. Powerpoint, email, Microsoft office forever changed how business was conducted. But more importantly business itself, ever in pursuit of cutting costs and efficiency and profits, saw them as ways to become ‘leaner.’ These tools reshaped how business was conducted and how organizations started believing business should be conducted. In a way that the current ‘push decisions to the edges’ advocates now discuss, business started encouraging ‘support work’ be pushed out to the edges to those actually involved.

Some of the tools business embraced suggested some administrative tasks could become not only ubiquitous, but also be more efficient. I mean, who better to build a presentation than the one actually giving it? Who better to scheduled a meeting than the one who know s who should be in it and the topic? Who better to craft the correspondence than the one who is actually writing it? There was a sense that quality would improve (hiding the real desire for efficiency) if the person responsible did it all. This also bled out into meetings. All of a sudden, the presenter of the ideas was responsible for the set up & crafting of the presentation itself. The unintended consequences are obvious. All of a sudden, the ones who you truly desired to be thinking were actually having to not only learn how to do, but become masters of doing. Philosophically there was nothing wrong with this, but practically speaking business was trying to commoditize everyone on the wrong features.

My point is guides were no longer guides, but also makers and supporters. Makers lost invaluable experience interacting with guides and, well, business just lost support (who offered an important safety net).

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that technology can never replace people, just compliment or supplement – business forgot that. Business emphasized pragmatism over possibilities.

• Automation/technology

Automation, while we often speak of it in efficiency terms, will also offer a business what is called “effective stationarity”. This is the importance of slowness (Jessica Flack, Santa Fe institute). We often talk about movement and adaptability, but every business and organization have some components of effective stationarity. Automation, in many of its forms, will offer a business some structural stationarity.

Now. That said. The opportunity for automation in busines is regaining what I believe was lost, in other words, something that ‘effective stationarity’ offers a business – time to think.

Reflecting on what I just said about original technology eliminating administrative level and responsibilities/doing shifting up versus handing some ‘making things’ off to other people, the consequence was “think time space” was lost. In the future I wonder if machines will simply fill up empty time (encouraged by business leaders who see time as money) or rather because of machines maybe it gives us back some of the reflective time we lost. If I am honest, my business correspondence improved by handing a draft to someone, doing something else, and then reviewing before it went out. My presentations were better when I handed them to someone, did something else, then reviewed it again. You get my point.

To conclude this thought.

All that said, the future resides in the businesses who maximize the new freedom and figure out how to maximize, specifically, the freed up 20%. Which permits me to circle back to Cluetrain Manifesto again. Business is never defined by technology; it is always, defined, and even redesigned, by people. Automation actually helps people navigate around existing obstacles. The obstacles do not get removed, just now mappable and navigated. People, unencumbered by these old obstacles, gain new freedom to craft news ways of doing things and even seeing things – conceptually and perceptually. In my opinion, the future of work, automation or not, will demand both conceptual and perceptual thinking, and ideas, and the environments in which those ideas can thrive (I call this the Conceptual Age Organization).

Which leads me to the fact we have some of these people sitting around right now – 50somethings+.

The experienced conceptual thinkers – the 50somethings+

Ok. 50somethings. Many of these experienced business people were extremely successful in a hierarchy, albeit chafing within the system, but have deconstructed their faith in hierarchy system without losing their faith in the business of doing business. If that sounds religious it is. I stole that idea from Ann Helen Peterson’s newsletter about “the anti-church of Glennon Doyle.” The point is that you can believe in capitalism, have faith in its potential goodness, and yet still have learned that the system itself is constructed on the wrong things to optimize your faith. These 50somethings may have lived within that system, but all the while, maybe in some small ways and some big ways, were attempting to deconstruct the system to show everyone a new way to live their faith. Automation is releasing many of the binds on the existing system and it is these experienced people who can guide people with their new freedom so that the business itself remains productive and doesn’t fall in on itself finding a new way of doing things.

This is not to suggest business shouldn’t be wary of 50somethings because not all 50somethings are created equal and new systems create new ways to access power (kind of like the televangelist version in business).

** note: I could write an entire book on why I think the business world is breeding crappier managers. In today’s business world when becoming a manager your only management thinking, or how to manage people protocol, is to encourage output, direct others to create output and crap on those who don’t generate output. All I can say is ‘garbage in, garbage out.’

To be clear. There is a relatively small percentage of 50somethings who have the ability to straddle generations <attitudinally> and have the ability to insert themselves into the younger generation’s minds and desires to strengthen the engine of progress rather than stall the engine.

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Not all 50somethings+ are created equal. Yeah. I am not suggesting all 50+ people are the same. And this generalization may be translatable to other age groups, but let me suggest there are three groups:

• Over 50 and all they know and believe in is what they were taught when they were in their 20’s.
• Over 50 and they have all the knowledge they need to be on their own and like being on their own (I call these builders)
• Over 50 and have accumulated iterative learning over the years and have a unique combination of old and new (and like renovating)

** note: Builders versus Renovators 

The first group is lost in the past. They will struggle because their thinking and ideas and even their vocabulary can be out of date. They will suck at transformation or renovation. Their hope is finding someone who needs to work on their internal construct of how to get shit done. But mostly these are the people when we were young, we thought were ‘out-of-touch’ from the real world (or chuckled to ourselves because they would throw out up to date buzzwords acting like they knew what was going on).

The second group has accumulated enough knowledge and expertise and confidence where mentally they have flipped from ‘working for someone’ to ‘working for myself.’ They have recognized their ability to build. And they like building (which is different than transforming). They would suck at transforming because they want to run the place and not simply be an enabler for the organization to shift. They could possibly be out of touch or they could be leading edge entrepreneurs. But it doesn’t matter because they are now going forward as their own boss.

The third group are the renovators. Companies should be fighting over these people. They are old but not old. They are experienced but still learning. They have a solid thinking construct but flexible in application. They may have their quirks (because I believe all of us older people start feeling more comfortable in our own skin and therefore are a little less worried about ‘fitting in’) but also tend to be more interested in the result than worrying about step by step how they get there. They can actually make the current buzzword understandable by using past functional learnings to explain them.

** note: When I say “fighting for these people” I don’t mean to suggest that companies should be stockpiling these people at the expense of young energetic fresh thinkers and doers. I am simply suggesting that companies need a good tier of these types to transform themselves when, frankly, a lot of companies need to be ‘transforming’ into a conceptual thinking learning organization. I am also not suggesting there should be a direct correlation between % of 50somethings in population and % of 50somethings in the makeup of business organizations. That would seem kind of silly to me.  But the numbers are pretty compelling that organizations should seek that third group of over 50ers. In 2009 The PEW Center had a study outlining the current generation gap is the largest in the almost 50 year history of the study. In that study an astounding 79% of Americans believe that there is a generation gap in the ways young and old think and believe. Truly the only way to bridge that gap within an organization and eliminate generational divisiveness is to have older experienced people who can effectively communicate with all age groups AND think conceptually.

50somethings can be the biggest enhancer of progress. Experienced business people do have some idea of what’s going to happen and this, in turn, affects what they do in the present. This is imperfect foresight, but foresight nonetheless which leads to probability management rather than predictability management (which is critical to conceptual thinking and systems thinking management). A polymath-like experience offers a quasi-rationality to form useful models the organization can work within effectively and efficiently. These experienced guides create the vague outlines within the abstract and make them concrete enough to enable progress.

** note: I am not suggesting these 50somethings have to be as good as the young at technology or whatever new innovative techniques out there yet to be discovered, in fact, it may benefit them to not be or even try. Their value is in their heads and experience and the nudging of ‘what can be’ using selected knowledge from ‘what was’ grounded in principled thinking. In fact. Let’s call it ‘selective principles learnings’ that can be effectively articulated.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

L.P. Hartley

Which leads to me how effective guides guide.

Manage and navigate, not command and control.

While I will begin by pointing out this small cadre of experienced 50somethings have deconstructed the command and control and have embraced managing freedom and navigating emergent concepts & thinking and have a unique ability to manage and navigate, a guide (regardless of age) will have an ability to lead messes.  Paradoxically, automation, intended to help better put pieces of the business together better, actually makes things messier. That’s the unintended consequence of automation just as technology or the Web did originally to business. let me explain (this is a derivative of an idea the Cluetrain Manifesto offered us in 1999). Automation is simply an extension of the deconstruction of hierarchy and command & control technology began. This may come as a surprise to the business leaders grasping for straws to hold together that thing they love called ‘control’. Automation will actually further deconstruct control which is actually a good thing because the future of business resides in lack of control, asymmetry and messiness. Automation further bulldozes the organization charts and exponentially enhances the potentiality of conversations, thinking, ideas and conceptual problem solving & opportunistic adaptation. Despite the automation, the business will have little symmetry, just some pockets of traction & consistency, and plans based on the automation are basically a fool’s errand or simply an acceptance of some basic acceptable mediocrity. True future of work automation businesses will be, well, messy. And they will demand a tier of experienced mess managers. Maybe they become ‘freedom navigators and guides.’

** note:  I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that, freedom given does not mean that it is freedom well used (I imagine a number of democratized organization or decentralized organizational theory advocates would agree with me). After residing within a command & control industrial system since birth (school sealed that deal) people need to be taught how to optimize their new freedom.

Why? The business who gives the freedom without some guidance (effective Guides) will begin looking at that freedom as ‘bad ROI’ or some failed experiment or some short-termerism viewed poor decision.

In conclusion.

The future of automation depends on the future of people in business. Social behavior and human imagination are inescapable. You either ignore the importance of human connectivity or optimize the interactions people do have. And while business is only becoming more complex and dynamic, I would argue this is where simplicity plays a role because human interactions are actually the simplest relationship within complex systems. Yes. It is a causal, linear, issue in business (and linear moments are gold mines for a business).

The future of business is found within a contradiction – automated and asymmetrical conceptual and perceptual. Pragmatism and possibilities. It will be, simultaneously, the maximization of automation and the unautomated human curiosity to explore. This continuous learning and curiosity is important because complexity, and complex dynamic systems, always have an inherent degree of randomness tied to those who use or interact with the systems (everything is connected with everything and, people, in general, create randomness). Automation, in the end, is about freedom and the future of work will not be defined by those who optimize automation but rather by those who optimize freedom the people in the organization have gained (assuming the business doesn’t use automation as an excuse to “downsize”, i.e., embrace reductionism).

Ponder.

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“Where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon. A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. One cannot look at a horizon, it is simply the point beyond which we cannot see. One never reaches a horizon. It is not a line, it has no place, it encloses no field, its location is always relative to the view.”

James Carse

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Let me begin by suggesting a company has one of 2 choices to meet its objectives:

– enable innate desire for meaningfulness

– exploit people as resources

Most companies build an environment somewhere in the wretched hollow inbetween with a practical emphasis on the latter and superficial emphasis on the former.

That said.

Technology plays a significant role. It plays a role because it amplifies. It is here that I will suggest that morality, ethics and empathy need technology. Yes. I just said that. The destiny of all those things are dependent upon technology. If that is so then I imagine I could say society’s fate resides in the hands of technology. That may seem backwards in that all of these things reside in humans, not technology. Well. They do but technology will either flatten, amplify or even extend the reach of all. I am certainly not suggesting that technology will guarantee morality or ethical behavior, but I would suggest improving technology increases the likelihood that morality and ethical behavior becomes more pervasive (expansive) all of which are integral to a healthy culture.

Technology, in and of itself, is nothing. Without people, without people generating content, it is a passive tool regenerating itself to its own purposes. Yet. Once humans become involved technology begins to amplify – amplify divides, fragments, groups and tribes. It is within the fragmentation aspect in which we begin to pause on the benefits of technology with regard to society. The fragmentation, the phrasing of ideas, ideologies, values, norms and actual ideological commitments just begin to blur the greater truths associated with each. Fragments get emphasized to strengthens pieces of views all the while blurring larger issues.

Today I propose a business model which proactively seeks anticipatory triggers to predict emergent activity and yet keeps people’s heads on a swivel for the unseen triggers which activate ‘surprises’ or opportunities.  And that is where technology can play a role – a significant role.

It is a business environment in which technology is a distributor of data, and knowledge (Intelligence Driven Software) and data drives strategic decision-making. This means Data drives potential, not just efficiency in decision-making & strategy, but effectiveness. The value of an AI infrastructure, leaning on algorithms, is that knowledge tends to pool rather than trickle throughout. AI (algorithms) become the irrigation system for institutional knowledge, data, individual knowledge and resources. In fact. Algorithms may actually be the order needed to provide the guardrails to an emergent organization.

Note: Some thoughts on the Intelligence Based Software (IBS) Concept

At its core this intelligence software is an iterative knowledge distribution system grounded in both predictive (recognized) patterns and emergent (unpredictable) patterns.

I envision a two stream of intelligence, one predictive and one emergent. The concern with having only a predictive stream, one based on boundaries, is even constantly evolving technology cannot outrun problems or be fluid enough to recognize emergent patterns (even technology doesn’t know what it doesn’t know). So, I envision a software intelligence/information distribution infrastructure which is rigid enough in one stream to consistently distribute useful intelligence, based on recognized symbols/words/topics, to have pattern recognition and, yet, have another stream which is fluid enough to reimagine patterns.

The intent is to find the optimal newness in intelligence, i.e., purposefully build in some intelligence dissonance with the information flow with the objective to both captures defined ontologies as well as escape from defined ontologies. Bottom line. Context matters. If we change the circumstances, we change the inspiration. The intent is to inspire from the known and the unknown.

This is an ambitious idea. it seeks to corral the ambiguity in the larger system of intelligence, as expressed by humans, and share it with people with enough clarity of the complexity challenge that someone, or someones, become curious enough to conceptualize ideas. This idea is an attempt to appeal to the rationality, and irrationality, of thinking minds. Explore the recognizable patterns, the easiest to replicate resources efficiently against, and explore the unrecognizable patterns which may represent the most effective velocity opportunities.

This is where I connect business culture to technology.

I would argue a business needs a culture to even envision the potential of an Intelligence based Software (IBS) structure. What I mean by that is:

(a) simply placing IBS into a business will not generate any meaningful behavior response (note: this is similar to most digital transformation plans),

(b) simply getting people to use an IBS system will not generate any meaningful results, and

(c) meaningful behavior and meaningful results are only achieved if the culture embraces the idea of people being augmented by IBS.

We should always remind ourselves of what James Carse said, “Since a culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other we may say a culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their moralities, their modes of communication.”  While I (slightly) hesitate to suggest people, technology (software) and information, each by themselves, are simply discernible bits of something that are actually nothings, I will suggest in a Conceptual Age frame of mind those things are nothing until they actually “do with each other” and collectively create progress. a culture forges them all together into something worthwhile.

From a larger perspective one could suggest the Cloud is the key to making it all work but the truth is, from a more granular pragmatic aspect, it will most likely be cognitive algorithms (intelligence-based software). Yes. Progress, and agility, isn’t tied to access of knowledge, but rather use of knowledge by individuals and individuals interacting with each other. Its within the collective interaction, culture engaging with a system, from which continuous improvement and progress is found. I would be remiss if I didn’t note that the truth is if you have to “reskill” your employees, it’s a reflection that you have not created an organization in which people are “continuously skilling”. Create a business that is continuously improving, even its employees, and you will never have to “reskill.” In fact. Just create a Conceptual Age organization and you are set (but I am biased).

One of the questions I asked myself is not only can an organization be 100% emergent, but if it actually were could it have a healthy culture (because culture does need some predictability)? Well. I believe yes and no. Yes because people behavior naturally arcs toward predictive, repetitive, behavior and rhythms. So, while the structure may encourage 100% emergent, people will inevitably seek some aspects of predictable. That also explains the no. No replication of systems & process ignores the fact replicable activity is where pockets of efficiency reside and without any replicable behavior optimal organizational efficacy can never be achieved. And maybe this is where I touch on Purpose a bit because I envision someone saying to themselves “well, if the organization has a Purpose, that would probably resolve his concerns.”

Individuals can have a Purpose and, in fact, if tap into Purpose are happier, healthier and more productive.

I do not believe Business has a Purpose in the sense Purpose is typically discussed. I don’t believe ‘shareholder value’ is a Purpose, it is simply an objective (which creates systems in the business to achieve). I believe business has intentions. These intentions can get masked by visions or missions, both of the which can play valuable roles, but I believe a business should lay out its intentions. An intent to contribute to the environment. An intent to act with integrity every day. An intent to engage with community. Within these intentions the people IN the organization then have a variety of paths they can choose to walk on – and clearly see where paths do not lie. I hesitate to call these principles because, well, they seem simply like intentions. With intentions understood a business can have a community of people interested in working coherently (some people may call this culture) and pursue quests to fulfill those intentions.

“Community is the fact that we work toward the same goal, that we accept our respective roles in order to reach it.  Values is the fact we trust each other. And, culture?   Culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit. That matters because most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

Fredrick Backman

In having intentions and pursuing quests the business rely less on not having to tell people what they cannot get away with and encourage them more to go do what they can do. People gain knowledge, get better at whatever they do (and how they think), there is continuous improvement, progress is achieved (for the individual and the business), quests are pursued and everyone feels a sense of meaning in having contributed. That is possibly the best summary of what I envision a Conceptual Age Organization is.

With all of those positive organizational attributes there is a technology truth: “The computer is a moron.” (Peter F. Drucker) Ok, it’s not, but it has its limitations. On this topic I am reminded of Intelligence Analyst Walter Laqueur in 1988 “A World of Secrets” saying “the need for Human Intelligence has not decreased, but it has become fashionable to denigrate the importance of humans assets because technical means (technology) are politically and intellectually more comfortable.” This came at the height of the struggle going on in the world of intelligence between those who deny the usefulness of agent and those who defended the worth of Human Intelligence in the face of the technological revolution.  At the time the New York Times estimated, from intelligence officials, 85% of all information gathered came from all the hardware sources (ELINT/SIGINT/PHOTINT/RADINT) opposed to information gained by spies (HUMINT).

The ultimate conclusion the intelligence experts reached was “what’s the good of knowing the SIGINT without knowing what the motive is.” In other word, technology shows, humans understand. AI, technology, will never replace humans.

Which leads me to organizational culture, the difference between collaboration and the collective acting coherently and technology. Organizational collaboration, technically, doesn’t need to be led. I will also suggest that collaboration does not guarantee success. Collaboration, done poorly and in the wrong culture, can actually lead to mediocrity. What s much better for a business is a community of people, collectively behaving in a coherent way, pursuing a common quest. Technology can play an integral role.

Technology offers the public transportation of data, knowledge and words – to & from the cloud to the people. At the core of this business model I am suggesting (an emergent conceptual organization) is the relationship between people and accessible knowledge through technology.

The cloud elevates all businesses to the level of the best generic technology. Think of it as the common power grid from which a business opens up for business daily. But the power of the cloud is it elevates the greater potential of any business as it taps into shared information to supplement, & compliment, the institutional data – while maintaining privacy of the institution itself.

While the cloud represents an almost limitless pool of ever-growing knowledge and data, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the cloud, in and of itself, can be just as stupid, if not stupider, than any one individual. More knowledge, used poorly, simply makes one stupider rather than smarter. The collective knowledge is only as good as who uses it.

As a corollary, individuals, and small groups of people, within an institution (augmented by the cloud collective knowledge) get smarter iteratively (even if they misuse knowledge because they learn from mistakes). Conceptually they get smarter than the cloud due to understanding of context.

I say all of this because in a conceptual age, in which understanding concepts and implementing well against them being the objective of the institution, these separate ideas should remain separate & distinct from each other. This must remain so because conversely, the more similar the two concepts get the more stupid both ideas get (arcs toward mediocrity in terms of response to emergent concepts).

“In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all.”

Booker T. Washington

Once again. the collective mind, the cloud, can be just as stupid as any one single less informed individual. A large quantity of collected data/knowledge does not guarantee smart solutions in contextual conceptual environments. In general, people create smart solutions, therefore, an emergent organization must balance the collective and individual(s) collaboration to command the highest order of value against emergent opportunities. And, in general, technology creates organizational stupidity when the culture does not embrace it’s thinking potential and simply use it as tools to ‘do’. The smartest organizations will be the ones in which there is a strong culture attracted to the benefits of technology and, specifically, an Intelligence Based Software system constantly feeding them predictive and emergent knowledge to assist them thinking conceptually about the business at hand.

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“When leaders and organizations develop skills without cultivating energy, the result is organizations (and schools) filled with spiritless specialists.”

Zach Mercurio

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Bastian Lehman, the CEO of Postmates:

No competitive advantage should come at the expense of workers.

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Leda Glyptis wrote this in one of her pieces: “It took me a long time to admit to myself that hard work delivering results is not the same as work that has an impact.”

Early in your career you are demanded (pressured) to show you can get things done. Results is the key to unlocking pay, respect, promotion and even some independence (getting your boss of your back). I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that early in your career getting things is mostly tied to some specialist role (although if you pay attention you learn that getting things done well incorporates a lot of generalist, and relational, aspects).

That said.

I was slightly different than Leda in that I always sensed impact was more important than simply generating results. It made my career tricky, or, as one co-worker said to me later in Life “you always liked to do it your way.” The difficulty in focusing on impact is that most people want to focus on process with regard to creating impact. To be clear that process does not have to always be efficiency. Business, if you generate results, can be quite accommodating to an effectiveness ideology. Regardless. Business, in focusing on results, tends to encourage spiritless engagement. Now. They would never tell you that. They speak of culture, passion, caring about your work, etc. ad nausea in fact. But. Deliver results and business can overlook a lot of shit. The problem is, well, inevitably you cannot overlook that shit. If you are really honest with yourself a career of results can feel a bit hollow. It will feel a bit like you missed something. You may not know exactly what you missed but if nudged a bit you’ll most likely speak of some missing engagement aspect.

Simple doing only contains, and retains, a certain amount of value. And when you assess that value, while it does have value, it doesn’t quite measure up to the highest value you may see when you look around. And, well, for a results person, this may feel like assessing your results and finding them wanting a bit.

** note: on specialists and specialism. To be clear, I am not anti-specialist. In fact, specializing can be quite rewarding. In fact, being a spirited specialist can be incredibly rewarding. I would argue to be a spirited specialist one would be a craftsperson with their skill. I believe it is Jackson & Jackson, “How to Speak Human”, who pointed out the shift from craftsmanship to professionalism (where we went from being a profession, and having a profession, to creating an industry of professionalism. This distinction is most likely the difference between spirited specialist and spiritless specialist. I am a self-proclaimed generalist, loving knowing some about many things, and yet I can be quite envious of the specialist who sees their specific skill as a craft and wield it as a craft. Ponder.

Now. It would be silly to not admit that the internet, or technology, hasn’t played a role in this.

All the internet has done is tightened the gap between mediocre professional experience and talented young learner.

Oh.

In addition, it has blurred the value in true professional experience <what to do with what you actually learn> and learning.

Oh.

In addition, the internet <and our generation in its insane focus on simplifying everything> have blurred the contrast between what is truly complex and what is truly simple.

Oh.

In addition, the internet, in combination with an insanely stupid focus on short term results defining a decision/choice, has created an impression speed has more value than, well, anything else. In other words what experience truly brings, ‘slow down a little to speed up’ skill, is more challenged than ever before.

All the digital age has done is commoditize experience perception-wise and it is up to someone with experience to decommoditisize it in reality. It is was true yesterday, true today and will be true tomorrow. Not everyone can do any job and a complex job can never be simplified.

All of this leads me to the fact Zach Mercurio, author of The Invisible Leader and the best speaker on Purpose I know, talks about impact all the time. Sometimes people miss that as they navigate their own visceral response, and biases/opinions/attitudes, as he speaks about Purpose.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while. How do so many extremely talented people become so miserable in organizations?”

Zach Mercurio

Impact, from a personal perspective, once you get your head wrapped around something other than results, is fairly easy.

Impact, from a business perspective, is trickier – but rather simple and easy.

When I was doing strategy work for businesses I kind of became known for my ‘better’ strategies and questions.

How does this make a person better?

How does this make a life better?

How does this make the society better?

How does this make things better for a person in making the world better?

While, yes, products and services are inevitably problem solvers and people buy products & services to solve problems, that simplistic value equation/assessments provides the opportunity for that product and service to:

• Absolve itself for any accountability beyond simply solving that problem
• Miss the opportunity value of not being spiritless (while I do not believe Purpose adds value I do believe when embedded there is a halo effect of intangible value)

‘Better’ forces a business to ask some hard questions.

Now. While Zach and I would most likely have a healthy debate on how tightly I attach value to impact, in my view, a business has to. This, in my opinion, is not to the detriment of individual assessment of impact (in fact I think it can often create a healthy layer). Better is an easy thing to grasp. Yeah. Maybe too easy in its ability to morph into some possibly not-really-that-better things but, in general, it provides a compass toward good, not bad.

Business, being business, has always wanted to quantify ‘better’ inevitably seeking to shift it into the results category.

** note: this is why I almost always balk at empathy, authenticity, mindfulness in business because I believe they are embedded and not objectives, but business will always seek to quantify (assess results)

If you decide impact is more important than results, you are in for a rocky road. If you don’t believe me, just watch Alain de Botton’s Tedtalk “Gentler philosophy of Success.”  Impact is intrinsically more satisfying, yet, society (and business) inherently embraces extrinsic results. If you generate the results, society rewards you, yet, it still sometimes feels like a hollowish satisfaction – that there must be something more or, well, better.

Look.

If I am honest, I am sure I played the role of a spiritless specialist at some points in my career. It was probably uncomfortable, but I did it. It’s quite possible I was within the generation navigating the change from “industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education,  mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, combine[d] with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization and organizational bureaucracy” ( Toffler) to, well, a shift to the opposite and this puts certain demands on people to ‘do’ to bridge from an old way of doing things to a new way of doing things.

If I am honest, part of my career impact has been navigating this shift.

** Note: I am willing to place navigating this shift in the ‘impact’ category because I believe this was a positive shift for business, people and society, albeit, it’s a work in progress.

If I am honest, analyzing oneself on impact is hard. Its hard because we are hardwired, with some real reasons, to results. Therefore, some days, even if you write down how you made an impact each day, you will find yourself holding pencil above the paper not really sure what to write. Some days you will find no real victory, just the attempt.

And this is where results, impact, purpose and mattering all come crashing together. Results, impact, purpose and mattering are not typically short-term actions. What I mean by that is you do something, or somethings, ‘feel’ like you may have made some positive impact, but not see any direct correlation (ever) or correlation is ambiguous or correlation is days, months, years away. In the end impact is simply feeling like you have done something to make something, or someone, better in some way (but results can provide a short-term dopamine hit).

And maybe that is also where I land on Purpose (with a capital P). I believe Purpose is an outcome, not an objective. But I also recognize people like objectives. Maybe if everyone would center some Purpose objective on something simple like ‘better’ – better today than I was yesterday and ‘somehow making things better for someone’ – I believe you will attain the objective of Progress. And I would argue that if you attain Progress, I am fairly sure you will have positive impact which, in my pea like brain, should fulfill some Purpose.

In the end.

Results and impact. Parents, school, society, even peers, will bludgeon you with results judgment. From an early age we are taught this is how to not only assess yourself but assess yourself versus others. I am not going to suggest that, in a whole cloth way, this is wrong because at some point you do need to assess some truths with regard to your skills or even your own behavior. But we need to get a grip on how we view results. We need to understand that results are often a means to an end – the end being impact. Maybe we should ponder Viktor Frankl from Mans Search for Meaning:

“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”

Results have consequences not just to ourselves, but to others. And maybe that is where I will end. I think we all know this; it just takes some awareness to become truly aware of it. We all know the world is bigger than “I”; it just takes some choice to do something about it.

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“In a so-called information society, minds are not only the most important economic asset — companies with minds make money; companies with money and no minds lose the money — it’s the same thing in everything. The networks are not programmed by technology; technological tools are programmed by minds. So the human consciousness [is the source], because everything now depends on our ability to generate knowledge and process information in every domain and activity. Knowledge and information are cognitive qualities from the human mind. Yes, human minds usually are connected to bodies, which means that you have to take into consideration the overall system of human existence, social services support, etc. But fundamentally, the human mind has always been, but more than ever now, the source of wealth, power, and control over everything.”

Manuel Castells Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

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I get annoyed by telling people to get out of comfort zones and I get even more annoyed when someone says it with regard to conceptual thinking.

First. I bet 80%, maybe 90%, of everything you would like an employee to improve upon & learn is within their comfort zone. Let’s stop telling people they have to be uncomfortable. They can be comfortable AND learn shit.

Second. Almost all concepts have one foot in the present and one foot in the future (or within an emerging opportunity). That’s the strength of a concept. It leverages existing resources and institutional wisdom to gain velocity within newly existing opportunities (the best concepts are actually a version of Loewy’s ‘optimal newness’).

Regardless.

Institutions, themselves, have a version of a comfort zone. It is what I call “Institutional Debt” (this is the organizational version of what software industry calls “technical debt” where suboptimal software is created by less-than-well-crafted coding added to software infrastructure not created to optimize the addons).

** note: Tech debt is something accrued when code is written in a suboptimal way. The term originated with programmer Ward Cunningham in a 1992 report

Because of this ‘debt’ Institutions struggle to “see forward.” In other words, one part of their institutional debt is a disproportional blindness to emergent aspects and the other part is a blindered vision on current situation. The organizational has to be organized to constantly augment its situational awareness so that institutional wisdom is not a constraint and incoming wisdom increases the value of the existing parameters. Another part of institutional debt is actually found in the systems themselves and the last institutional debt is how the people OF the institution think about the systems themselves.

As Peter Drucker said, “People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete – the things that should have worked but did not, the things that once were productive and no longer are.”

Conceptual thinking, or iterative strategic thinking, reduces institutional debt.

Institutional debt has obvious problems but the one least discussed is how they create a version of  “wicked problems.”  This is grounded in the truth the more you ignore it, the more it builds up and becomes impossible to ignore. More and more a business which is less focused on emergent opportunities will build debt in outdated ideas, misguided thinking on what’s important and processes which have seen better days (once worked but are having diminishing positive returns).

I believe saying “change is hard” is misguided. Change is actually easy – once you see a reason to change and the benefit of the change.

We fool ourselves into believing change is hard because we confuse it with risk. Much of business change has to do with shedding institutional debt BUT the people actually do not see it as debt – but wisdom.

And this is where Conceptual thinking shines.

There is a massive value in working with other thinkers, who do not think the same you do or you may not even know particularly well, focused on developing concepts against a common vision. To be honest, I cannot figure out of this is an argument for, or against, remote working. What I do know is that people who have a common vision, a common desire and a common view on what progress looks like, will naturally cluster. It is quite possible its easier in physical proximity but that’s a different issue for a different day. All I know is that Conceptual thinking, and actually using concepts to mutual benefit of the business, levels up everyone and everything.

Why do I feel so confident saying that? Conceptual thinking is the anti-matter to Institutional debt matter.

I will end with two quotes:

“Augmentation is fundamentally a matter of organization”

 

“Past wisdom must not be a constraint.”

Institutional debt is fundamentally a matter of organization, therefore, augmenting existing wisdom and thinking is a matter of organization. I hesitate to call this “culture” because I believe it is more attitude and intentions. If an organization clearly states its intentions, and attitudinally believe the organization should be continuously making progress against those intentions, conceptual thinking is the pathway forward for a Conceptual Age Organization seeking to insure it sheds its Institutional debt.

After reading about deconstruction and reconstruction thinking with regard to what I believe is how business thinking should be, one could easily become fearful of “frozen.” In other words what I have described to date with the Conceptual Age and a Conceptual Age organization, in which it seems that every person in the organization is being barraged by a knowledge-based software with random information and being asked to make sense of it all, well, it sounds overwhelming. It also sounds like there must be a direct relationship between information received and information used. If it sounds like that then, of course, we all recognize that when people get overwhelmed, they ‘freeze’ – make no decisions. I’d suggest that success within complexity, and complex organizations , is more like ‘obliquity’ – achieving complex objectives indirectly.

So let’s think about how we achieve this obliquity within the Conceptual Age organization business model idea.

It was Daniel Schmachtenberger who said we are “making more and more consequential decisions with worse and worse sensemaking to inform those decisions.” The basis of this thought, in business, is the consequence of a business environment invested in “data dumps” on people who are, for the most part, not particularly data literate. In pragmatic terms we have more knowledge and information than what we know what to do with. The cognitive complexity of most problems, and opportunities is beyond the capability of a single mind. This does not mean everything needs to be met with collaboration (in fact collaboration may actually mean a worse conclusion than a single mind incapable of assimilating all knowledge) but it does mean individuals need to become better at sensemaking and conceptual thinking. Now. There are two sides to this equation. The human mind and what is presented to the human mind in terms of knowledge and information. I will set aside the mind as a given (capable of reaching clarity and data assimilation) and focus on the input. In a Conceptual Age Organization, I am suggesting an Intelligence Driven software parsing out knowledge in ways that engage cognitively within a conceptual, sensemaking, framework. Rather than think about this in an ‘overwhelming’ way I choose to view the possibilities in terms of effective information distribution is all about the mental narrative battle. The challenge, and opportunity, is to distribute knowledge and, yet, eliminate cognitive load. Returning to Daniel Schmachtenberger, it is he who suggests society & civilization is suffering from a damaged information ecology. I am simply suggesting building a business model grounded in a healthier information ecology.

With that in mind, what is a healthier information ecology in a Conceptual Age organization? Well. Let’s accept the fact that all ideas can be weaponized – for opportunities or to make something worse. With that acceptance the organization should seek to create a battlefield on which the combatants, the employees, can be successful. We need to not only create the technological tools, but wield the technological tools in a way which can shape the thinking, and concepts, from which business potential can be achieved. As Marshall McLuhan said “we shape the tools and the tools shape us.”

This is where nuanced algorithm delivery of information matters. There is a “zone” in which information provided will generate a “return on information.”

In 1957 John William Atkinson wrote Motivational Determinants of risk-taking Behavior in Psychological Review. He suggested that if you can choose the grade of complexity <difficulty> of a task most of the decisions are taken in a mid-complexity-level. Too easy tasks or too difficult tasks can neither provoke a strong feeling of satisfaction nor a strong disappointment and vice versa.

Highly motivated people often choose a realistic complexity of tasks whereas low motivated people choose tasks that are finally to easy or too difficult for them.

Now. I would debate JW Atkinson because I believe if I set aside the fact bills have to be paid at some point, I would say he doesn’t give ‘appeal of success’ enough emphasis. Especially if the appeal of success is tied to “doing something” or maybe better said ‘doing something that may truly matter.’

What I mean is that if you consciously decide to ‘go big and win big <or lose big>’ your satisfaction criteria changes and, therefore, you are willing to plow your way through more complexity and difficulty.

That said.

This chart, and concept, is quite similar to the one Ian Leslie outlined in his book Curious about Curiosity.

Low knowledge discourages curiosity in that they don’t know enough to focus the pursuit (its kind of like lack of return on energy). Either we find it difficult to believe it would be interesting to pursue this knowledge or, with no knowledge, it can feel too daunting a task.

This means having medium knowledge, aware but not an expert, increases curiosity (and the pursuit of knowledge). High knowledge discourages curiosity because we feel like we know I well enough there would be diminishing returns if we invested in out curiosity to get more.

Ian Leslie notes that neither of these things make someone incurious, this simply showcases the walls we put up against certain curiosity.

We willingly enter the “curiosity zone” when we know something, but not too much.

This is all a derivative of George Lowenstein’s “information gap” – the gap between what we know and what we want to know – and curiosity is actually a response to this gap.

Now. People being people, if upon entering the information gap our curiosity is faced with too much complexity it will likely veer off on a different tangent.

This is where I circle back to complexity. Complexity and curiosity are linked.

See enough complexity and your curiosity views it as a puzzle to solve, but too much complexity and it becomes a mystery. Puzzles have definitive answers. Mysteries are messier and often do not have clear answers and you have to get comfortable with the truth you inevitably end up with probabilities. The truth is complexity, itself, is a mystery to be managed and navigated and complications are puzzles.

That said.

I would argue the business of the future will use algorithms to deliver knowledge to individuals so that they purposefully step into information gaps, gain the data & knowledge they need to navigate the curiosity zone and make decisions, isolate probabilities and pursue progress (which is typically found in more knowledge and more about navigating the information gaps businesses inherently have).

Look. I don’t think I am different than most people. We all want to ‘do something.’ And I would argue most of us like to solve complexity. that doesn’t mean we want to fight it 24/7 just that we get a lot of satisfaction in facing down the mysteries of complexity and still figure out how to make some progress with, or within, it. I believe we know, consciously or subconsciously, that effectively navigating complexity maximizes, well, everything – life or business. I also believe we understand that today’s complexity is only going to get more complex. I also believe that while complexity can be frustrating and we can doubt we can solve complexity, in general we know complexity can always be navigated. That said. Not everyone has a map nor has the time to figure out the map. But what we do know is that the enemy is complications – complications are roadblocks to potential within the complexity. therefore, simplistically, success opportunities, good decisions, exist within complexity only if complications can be removed.

I am not a personal branding fan, but in this case I think most everyone would like to be able to say “in a complex world we navigate complexity to uncover, and eliminate, complications blocking potential.”

I say that we would all like this because I also believe most people are confident enough to think they can get the resources they need to solve any problem they can actually see (or any opportunity they can see clearly enough).

 

• • • • Complexity is a given.
      • Complexity is expansive.  Tapping into it maximizes potential. It is networked and non linear both of which are what makes a people, or business, successful.
      • Complicated is reductive. It keeps things from potential. It is a linear connection which no longer works efficiently or effectively.
      • Simplicity cannot exist without complexity. It is embracing complexity to the benefit of people, business, systems, communication etc. or. Maybe better said. Efficient bundling of complexity to increase effectiveness.

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It is standard operating procedure in today’s world, whether you like it or not, that people are expected to cope with increasing complexity, change and diversity. The tricky part is that complexity IS the nature of things, not things themselves. It was Russell Ackoff who labeled these interconnected systems as ‘messes’. This means looking at things, or something, close enough and it only seems to get bigger in its connectedness (degrees of consequences and connections). This means decisions do not hold true to a cause & effect, but rather shifting contexts with shifting consequences.

Simplistically this means in a complexity world people are asked to tackle a much greater diversity of problems/opportunities. All the while we seek to maintain some of the efficiencies of life (or the business) – the rituals, replicable events, etc. – but to get ahead, or maintain some progress, knowledge and information has to be absorbed to meet the demands of future problems/opportunities.

Complexity demands structure AND flexibility. And while that sounds almost impossible if not uncomfortable, I will remind you of Atkinson “Motivational Determinants of risk-taking Behavior” and Leslie’s “curiosity zone.” We are capable enough, all of us, to navigate complexity if placed in the right mindset and if the appropriate knowledge connects with our curiosity.

Once curiosity is engaged one can see existing patterns as well as new patterns.

** note: this human pattern recognition is tied to the algorithm-based Intelligence based Software idea I have wherein I suggest two threads of information flow – predictive and emergent – are created in aligning Cloud, institutional knowledge and individual potential/thinking.

Anyway.

Let me end on this thought about decision making and complexity.

Discovery has always been grounded in knowledge – the known and the unknown. People knew about gravity before Newton nailed it down, knew Earth circled the sun, effective building of structures and even Columbus knew the world wasn’t flat when he decided to set sail <fairly common knowledge the world wasn’t flat to sailors>. Yet we spend a lot of time seemingly reeducating ourselves on what I would call “institutional knowledge”. We do that a lot in business too.

I imagine my point is that “institutional knowledge exists” <even in basic principles> and we loop back on it throughout the knowledge lifespan challenging it. I would also point out that this knowledge, or any knowledge I imagine, is progressed by how it is articulated. And then proof varies depending upon the technology (or whatever is needed to prove) at that time. I say all that to suggest that there are no real secrets or 100% mysteries. The truth is humans, given the right knowledge & information in the right context (not too complex and in an information gap), figure things out no matter how complex it may appear. And in doing so they take the old thought or knowledge and bring it slightly further along than where it last rested.  That is called ‘progress.’ And that is also my proof that complexity is expansive, if not infinite, because when complications are solved & removed, complexity just expands to accommodate more people, ideas, curiosity and activity.

I will end where I began – “obliquity.” The process of completing complex objectives indirectly. Accepting complexity and tackling complexity are distinctly different things. Acceptance is simply recognition it exists, and go forth. Tackling is an agreement you will wrestle with complexity. To me, a Conceptual Age organization demands acceptance, if not celebration of, complexity but not tackling it. In other words, accepting complexity is an indirect means to an end in that you can seek solutions without trying to solve it.

Ponder.

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“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

André Gide

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I am always wary of those who come out blazing by speaking “the truth.” I believe rarely are things black & white. In fact. I believe truth is often contextual and often slippery to get a hold of.

Now. Let’s not confuse facts with truth. Lots of facts exist. And in a mutually exclusive environment someone can hold up a fact as a single-minded fragile truth. The difficulty is that everything is connected with everything and a single fact does not ever live in a world solo. It rubs elbows within a community of other facts. And as they rub against each other they create, well, truths. Truth is a combination of facts.

I would also suggest truth is often elusive. In that I mean if you care about truth and are a truth seeker you are always in the pursuit of truth as facts replace facts (as facts tend to do).

Now. I want to be careful. Yes. There is truth in the world. Even if some facts change all they do is change the shape of most truths, not make them ‘untruths.’ I do believe we sometimes forget that. Simply because a fact changes does not make the whole become irrelevant. It can, but most times it does not.

I believe rather than discussing truth, or a truth, as static we should refer to it in, well, progress terms. The pursuit of truth is one of progress.

Things may arc toward truth (assuming there is active involvement in the pursuit of), but that arc is not smooth nor does it actually move in one direction. Truth, itself, is uneven in that in its combination of facts those facts can reside in the past, present and future as well as within the truth itself and ‘with-out’ (correlative connectedness). Truth is, well, very often emergent. Therefore, we truth seekers deal with many wrong turns, stops (which look like dead ends but aren’t really), doom loops and a variety of backtracking trips. All in all, though, things continue moving toward Truth. Truth is often contextual, often situation-specific and often can take on a slightly different hue when viewed by different people.

Truth changes. Truth changes in some unexpected and unpredictable ways. Being blind, or remaining purposefully ignorant to that, shifting of truths can cost you, well, Truth itself.

Anyway.

I have been called optimistically cynical. I guess I question everything upfront (or maybe one would hope as I have become older I can judge what to question and what to accept upfront), but always believe great things can come of the pursuit of truth (rather than use the cynicism to drag me away from accepting a truth).

I would like to believe I am one of those people who are constantly seeking truth.

I would like to believe I collect facts and seek the coherence that shapes truths.

I would like to believe I am one of those people who sees truth as kaleidoscopes of colors rather than simplistic black & whites.

Well. I may not be, but it is certainly a good objective to try to attain. Maybe I am simply a truth seeker work-in-progress.

Well, even if you never find truth, I could argue that trying to achieve that objective is not the worst thing in the world. In fact. Maybe it is the only way to get to Truth.

————————–

“The best is the enemy of good.”

Voltaire

———————–

I am sure everyone has either heard of, or read, the book “Good to Great.”

I am not as sure everyone has heard Voltaire’s “the best is the enemy of good.”

Well. Voltaire only beat the book by about 200 years and all while trying not to die in a duel or get his head chopped off.

Two points with this quote.

First is my personal soapbox. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it isn’t smart. I didn’t need an entire book to tell me about good to great. Voltaire said it in one line.

A shitload of people in the past, who never used technology let alone electricity, said a shitload of smart things that are relevant today. One could ask “how the hell could do they do that?” If one asked, I would remind everyone that principles, and principled thinking, are timeless and while past events are contextual, past thinking tends to adapt to context.

Ponder.

Second is the truth behind the thought. You can settle for good or you can do something better. I don’t need a book for that either. What we mostly get wrong in business, and life, is thinking we need to worry about doing ‘bad shit’ or doing something wrong. That is actually the least of our worries. Why? Because for the most part doing bad shit, or doing things wrong, is never satisfying. People, in general, are satisfaction seeking entities. This is where ‘good’ comes into the picture. Good can be quite satisfying. In fact. Good can become addictive if that is all you want. Good can be done in extremely high quantities. But. I would be remiss if I did not point out no matter how many ‘goods’ you do they will never attain the quality of a ‘best.’ I will not suggest everyone should do ‘the best’ or even seek to do ‘the best’ every single time. If we are honest, that is an energy sucking way of life. What I will suggest is that good is so seductive it is the enemy of best.

Yeah. I just flipped the quote.

Yeah. I am pretty sure that is what Voltaire was trying to tell you.

Ponder.

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“… it’s time for me to push you out of your comfort zone. It’s time for you to be 100% honest with yourself.

You’ve had your entire adult life to accomplish your financial goals.

I’m looking at your profile and you’re not even close to where you need to be, much less where you want to be.

It’s time you fix your broken plan, bring in Mr. Trump’s top instructors and certified millionaire mentors and allow us to put you and keep you on the right track. Your plan is BROKEN and WE WILL help you fix it.

Remember you have to be 100% honest with yourself!”

———–

Trump University Playbook

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“It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot. “

—

Ernest Hemingway

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“Do you like living paycheck to paycheck? … Do you enjoy seeing everyone else but yourself in their dream houses and driving their dreams cars with huge checking accounts?

Those people saw an opportunity, and didn’t make excuses, like what you’re doing now.”

———-

Trump University Playbook

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Ok. Let’s address the elephant in the room. We all, all of us, believe we deserve some things.

Yeah.

Deserve.

Opportunity in Life. Keep what we have. Earnings for work and more earnings if we believe we are producing ‘harder work.’ Happiness. All of those things, plus, whatever you may want to add.

I state that as a Life truth so I can talk about the responsibility of a ‘promiser of things’ to us. Because if what I have outlined in the ‘deserve column’ is a Life truth, an accepted attitudinal thread in society, then someone seeking to tap into that thread bears a responsibility.

So let me talk about this responsibility.

An empty promise may be the worst promise someone can ever offer you.

I sometimes call it “false hope.”

** note: offering an empty promise can have different depths ranging from seemingly well intended (to inspire some positive action) to outright lie (snake oil salesman)

And let me be clear. Lots of people, myself included, find any promise of hope so attractive that it is incredibly easy to not look behind the promise to see if it is full or empty.

Inevitably, people receptive to empty promises are people most likely to feel a need. And when I say “feel” it can very easily edge into the personal “what I deserve” mental space.

This is also a very common space for a lot of people. We see the promise and look around us and, well, say things like:

“I am smart enough.”

“I am capable of this.”

And.

“I deserve this” as much as anyone else (particular the ones I am looking at who have it)

In the marketing and behavior world this is called “managing the need perception.” Conceptually, the higher someone drives up someone’s “I need” attitudes, the more likely they are see ‘something’ instead of ‘empty’ in the promise.

At its core this is not about risk in choices <the downside to my choice>. This is more about embracing hope <the upside of my choice>. And that is where ethics and morality come into play for the ‘promiser.’

I feel qualified discussing this because the majority of my business career has been all about ‘offering promises and hope for something.’

You learn very very quickly that as a promiser you can sometimes become blinded to the potential emptiness aspects of what you will offer and there is a natural allure to focusing solely on potential of the ‘better or best’ aspects of what you will offer. I imagine the decision on what to do with your promise is a combination of integrity and true business. Because, yeah, I want people to buy my shit, i.e., to see the promise that resides within what I have to offer. And, yet, experience shows you thru customer feedback and the retail clerks dealing with past buyers and online forums that not everyone you sold your promise to actually had their hopes met.

Those weigh on you.

Well. They weigh on you if you have any ethical compass.

The ones who have no, or little, compass are the ones who adamantly state one of two things :

• Some people are not happy with anything <”they are being unrealistic”> – i.e., “ignore the bitching”
• Look at how many people are not saying anything bad – i.e., “the sales justifies my behavior”

Look. I am not suggesting this is as easy as I just pointed out. As someone who has sat in boardrooms and looked at increasing sales and complaints and reviews it is incredibly easy to justify your own beliefs in your own products, services or company.

It is inherent in your business acumen if you are even worth a half a shit because part of what most likely makes you successful in business is belief in yourself, your business and your idea.

That said.

The best of the best business people constantly weigh how they manage what people think and what they are going to be asking someone to do when they make their personal commitment to your business, product & idea.

The majority of us business schmucks wander somewhere in the middle. Sometimes getting it right and sometimes getting it wrong <in the balance>, but inevitably our pendulum swings mostly in the middle of fairness, honesty and ethical.

The worst of the worst, the snake oil salespeople, never weigh what they are asking people to do and solely focus on ‘promise fulfilled’ … and damn the ones who didn’t, or couldn’t, attain the promise of what could be.

I admired the first group. They had figured out how to be steadfastly ethical and successful in business. Kind of the no compromise, in a good way, candidate.

I struggled to deal with the last group. They believed a sale was a sale, any profit was good and the burden of responsibility resided solely on the buyer.

All that said.

Trump is a snake oil salesman.

Just as a reminder, during the depression when times were hard people bought snake oil as a hopeful salve for whatever was troubling them.

They were con men dedicated to an unethical targeting of a slightly naïve, hard working, mostly struggling but good hearted people who desired some easy salve for some of their ills.

And, yeah, someone could argue “buyer beware.” But that is at its core … well … bullshit. Sellers actually have, and should have, more responsibility than the buyer. A seller, more often than not, knows what someone can afford and what they cannot afford as well as whether their hopes are even in the realm of possibility.

This means if as a promiser you see that they have little or no chance and that a bad decision on the buyer’s part would have a high likelihood of not only not delivering upon their hopes but actually could tangibly negatively affect their lives, the promiser has a responsibility, no, an obligation to do what is right.

Using Trump as the example I could suggest he is only really guilty of unethical opportunism. However, I would actually suggest he is guilty of 2 things:

<1> assuming his life objective should be the life objective of everyone <winning is all that matters>, and

<2> moral relativism – which he disguises within what he calls ‘not political correctness.’

All that said. Opportunism, at its core, is directly related to what we people believe we deserve. We people inherently build blocks on which we stand of things we believe we deserve.

The basics: food, health, education, place to live.

But it gets a little trickier once we actually get, and have, something. We believe we deserve what we work for and once we attain something that ‘level’ is the new normal for ‘I deserve.’ That is something psychologists call “hedonic adaptation.” And this happens at all income levels because anyone at any level can feel stretched or challenged economically <while still actually being rich beyond belief in terms of what is available to all of us 24 hours a day>.  All people are seemingly continuously seduced by the urge to acquire, and acquire more, and indulge <when the opportunity arises>. All people attach the thought of ‘deserve’ once they have acquired some level, some things or some status. You earned it <in your mind> therefore it is yours.

I don’t have anything against it. And I certainly understand the psychology of ‘once you have something not only do you not want to not have it anymore … but you want more’ <or the next step up>.

Money leads to lifestyle upgrades. But, once again, that is fraught with conflict. Once you achieve the income you desired … well … you go back to desiring more. And imagine if you become stagnant? Yikes. Our natural ‘adaptation’ anger kicks in.

But this also means that people inherently overreach because we try and reach out for ‘more than what I have.’ We inherently believe we are smart enough and capable enough to be better than what we are today.

Uhm.

If only we had the opportunity.

This belief, oddly enough, is exacerbated by failure <sometimes>. The more we fail when attempting to reach something we believe we inherently deserve, well, we will overreach even more to compensate for the time we didn’t have what we deserved <psychology research shows this>.

** note: this entire concept gets exacerbated if one does not have money, tried to work, and, yet, seemingly opportunity is always slightly out of their grasps or they feel like opportunity may have once existed but no longer exists. this idea would be at the core of what some people call “white class victimization.”

And this is where the true slippery slope of unethical opportunism rears its ugliest head. What this means is that unethical opportunism is most often driven by digging into what we believe we maybe not deserve, but what we would naturally attain if given the opportunity <this is a sly version of ‘deserve’>.

Most of us simply feel we deserve a chance. Deserve a chance for something better. The ‘degrees’ of what someone feels they will deserve will vary by person. And suffice it to say there will always be a group of people who believe they deserve significantly more than what they have and because of it will roll the dice <although they will not see it as much of a gamble as someone else>

But the bottom line is that 99% of us feel we deserve something better.

Which leads me back to Trump. The Trump ‘promise’ sounds big and luxurious and exclusive, but it fails the majority and rewards the minority – the majority being the everyday American and the minority actually being the wealthy (or some specific niche segment of people because he is a transactional segmentation snake oil salesman).

Frankly. In a country in which maybe our most impending problem is massive inequality between the haves and the have nots that is a recipe for disaster.

At minimum … it is guaranteeing false promises to the majority.

And Trump gets a little worse in this scenario than the typical ‘empty promise’ seller. A president cannot simply promise people wealth, opportunity for growth if they invest in him, cash their check as they cash in on the ‘promise’ and then ignore their ultimate result <success or failure> while moving on to the next scheme or promise.

Well. He could. Shit. He has <in business>.

But that is not what presidents or good leaders do.

And it certainly is not what America deserves.

In the end.

When you feel like you are getting screwed or that the system is rigged in some way against you, your sense of ‘I deserve more & better’ is heightened.

We all do it.

It is difficult to fight that feeling.

And, you know what? Sometimes we will not be successful fighting the “I deserve” monsters in our heads.

And maybe that is my biggest point.

A good leader knows we will not be successful fighting them off all the time and will not take advantage of our weakness.

Trump, all his career, has fed off the carcasses of this weakness. I don’t mean weak people just the natural weak moments in human nature.

He is a taker.

The world will always have takers and the world will always fall for takers. That doesn’t make being a taker good. Nor does being a taker mean you would be a good leader.

=====================

“I believe the world is divided in three groups: givers, takers and the few that can balance both impulses. If you are a giver, it is wise to define your boundaries because takers will take what you allow them to; all givers must learn to protect that about themselves or eventually, there is nothing left to give.”

Tiffany Madison

=========

Look. Here is the biggest problem with trying to sell empty promises.

It builds cynicism and erodes hope.

While I could certainly highlight ‘lost lives’ I will instead highlight ‘killing hope.’ That is the biggest price we pay for buying empty promises.

And, I have to tell you, that is why I hate, abhor and despise people who purposefully, and knowingly, sell empty promises and false hope.

We all deserve opportunities. And we all deserve receiving something as a result of hard work.

We do not deserve empty promises.  And we certainly do not deserve someone who suggests a future in which the majority will most likely, eventually, sit back in their worn chairs and think: ‘sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.’

Remember. Someone seeking to tap into our thread of “I deserve” feelings bears a responsibility. That main responsibility is to our hope. Someone who steals our hope is not worthy of us, or our vote.

=================

“In a finite game, the rules are fixed until there is a winner, but in an infinite game, the rules must change during the course of play.”

James Carse

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“If life’s journey be endless, where is its goal? The answer is, it is everywhere.”

Rabindranath Tagore

================

While this is about finite versus infinite, it is really about winning or success.

• a commitment to the future versus a commitment to a conclusion in the present.
• using resources or using ambition.
• repeating behavior instead of reinterpreting, reimagining, principles for new contexts.

Now.

This piece may not be for people who like specific goals and milestones, but for a joker like me who likes the randomness of life and finds pleasure not in linear success, but the spontaneous successful moments that appears in life the whole idea of infinite is far far more appealing to me than the Finite.

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”

Jorge Luis Borges

Let me be clear.

There is absolutely a need for ‘finite’ type activity. Some people prefer working toward specific objectives and finite activity has value in its, well, finiteness. That said. As Goldratt suggested about business: “there is no finish line.” The grander objective of any business is never something finite, it is actually infiniteness – thrive-ability for an unforeseeable length of time. And that thrive-ability is actually grounded in, well, complexity (and the finite tends to thrive on simplicity).

The complexity that everything is connected with everything & the difference between beginning & ends is simply one’s perspective. cause & effect is a linear idea in a non linear world.

The complexity of reinterpretation based on context wherein ambition to meet the needs of a situation trumps simply using resources available.

The complexity in recognizing that progress has no finish line and that successes are just situational (but should still be celebrated).

Now.

This entire idea is outline in James Carse’s book “The Infinite and Finite Game.” The book is not a read for the faint of heart. Fascinating, interesting and, at times, unintelligible. Yet, at its core, it explores what is actually at the heart of the challenge facing the business world – must we view things in a finite way to be successful or if we viewed it in a infinite way could we get out of the horrible cycle of shortermerism, profit over people, traditional hierarchy, and the general muck business seems to be mired in.

Anyway.

The most visible concept of finite in business is gamification. That alone should make everyone dislike gamification. It is simply a series of challenging people to work in an endless array of games where there is a winner or loser.

But the finite/infinite relationship comes to life in a variety of other ways.

Abstract versus tangible:

Infinite is abstract. Finite is tangible. Unless you can tether the infinite with some narrative, some vision, some story, some metaphor, running a business with an infinite mindset is going to feel a lot like chaos. And it may actually be (although it may not be in that there are other surrounding principles which permits the organization to act in a coherent way).

Another abstract versus tangible aspect is value. Now. Most businesses do not discuss finite versus infinite in terms of Finite value versus Infinite value. They should.

In business Finite value can most often be found in maximizing a transaction (between purchaser and enterprise) – maximizing present value.

Infinite value can most often be defined in maximizing a life (of a business enterprise) – maximizing future value.

Ponder.

Cooperation:

Carse suggests finite versus infinite is about competition versus cooperation.  This is an important distinction because rivalry, or competition, is self-terminating. If business were a 100-yard dash this may be okay (maybe), but its not. The purpose of any business is actually to be infinite where its life has no foreseeable conclusion and progress has no foreseeable stopping point. Once again, in Goldratt’s words: there is no finish line.

I would point out that this is really about decision making. Good decision-making needs good sense making. I imagine I am suggesting sense making demands we remove competition (and its unsavory companion – rivalry) to be successful.  I imagine I am suggesting true, effective, collaboration cannot exist within competition environment. I imagine I am suggesting collective sensemaking is collaboration. I imagine I am suggesting shelving a ‘benefit now, disadvantage later mindset’ tied to tangible finiteness and tapping into infinite value.

Ponder.

Emergent:

While we cannot control the future, we can certainly control the conditions of how the future we want is constructed. This is actually probabilities management, not goals management (kind of the business version of “push versus pull” marketing strategy). That said. Emergent defies most planning (finite management) and embraces ‘smart strategic opportunistic” behavior (potential management). Yes. There has to be an artful balance of finite, self-interest/transactional, and infinite – the larger greater good (self-interest cannot be separated in the long run from the interests of the world” Daniel Schmachtenberger) . Emergent demands a buy in between the individual and the collective wherein the individual ‘self authors’ (autopoietic) with an accepted vision of the larger group so that all decisions & actions remain coherent.

** Note: Autopoietic – self authoring.  Society is emergent in that people self-author their own definitions of success and self-narrative (meaning in the world & society) versus society establishing the definitions with which an individual should judge themselves (and be judged).

** Note: autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-), meaning ‘self’, and ποίησις (poiesis), meaning ‘creation, production’) refers to a system capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. The original definition can be found in Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living (1st edition 1973, 2nd 1980)

I would suggest Emergent could be called deterministic chaos in that Complex systems are both deterministic (when constructed well) and chaotic (when working well). Therefore, success is found in both constraints and in the unconstrained, the finite and the infinite.

Ponder.

Abstract pattern recognition:

Part of infinite is shifting patterns or maybe the ongoing instability of patterns, therefore, finite resides within the pattern itself. Now. Power has always resided in the tangible which inevitably arcs toward simplicity (if not oversimplification). Yet. When external events disrupt the pattern then we, individuals/organizations/society the effectiveness of existing patterns becomes less effective, new aspects into patterns yet to be defined and then new patterns occur. It is important to note that most existing patterns do not function when conditions change.

“Humans reproduce geometrically while resources reproduce arithmetically.”

Malthusian Theory

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out no business can exist without any pattern or pattern identification. Patterns identify structure and all business needs some structure. That said. Finite tends to define patterns in a static way (linear) and infinite tends to define patterns from an abstract perspective (coherence). Both have some value although the former is fragile and the latter is antifragile.

Ponder.

Idealism versus realism:

Idealism versus realism is often a debate between abstract and tangible as well as possibilities and pragmatism. When someone says “I am being practical” 99% of the time they have resolved themselves to a binary world in which the choice making, the decision, is some simplistic fork in the road. The truth is crossroads are more roundabouts rather than some ‘road not taken’ type decision.

That, my friends, is the finite versus infinite mindset.

“La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d’une vie libre et indépendante”

(“The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life”).

Claude Bernard

Every business demands realism. The issue is when that realism suffocates the idealism.

Ponder.

In the end.

The most basic aspect of finite versus infinite is transactional versus long term value. Present value versus future value. And while both have roles it would be a mistake to solely choose one over the other.

Look. The truth is people, to be at their best, need to have some core consistency (passion, vision, character, whatever), some finiteness, in order to be free enough in the infinite universe to be successful.

Not to get too philosophical but a successful business is always a fragile balancing act between being independent from the external environment and actually of the external environment. In other words, balancing the finite and infinite. Business demands not only recognition of the finite versus infinite aspects of business itself but also the people who make the business work.

Ponder.

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“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”

Stephen Chbosky

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