Are Information Technology "digitised brains" trying to interface with sluggish 2500 year old brain software?

Some potential software conflicts are revealed in School Of Thinking Lessons by Dr. Michael Hewitt-Gleeson... A small excerpt follows...

Picture a maze. The kind of maze used to test the cleverness of laboratory rats and mice. When a smart rat finds its way from start to finish it gets the cheese as a reward. How does the rat do this? -- Strategically, there are two ways: (1) find the 'right' pathway, or (2) create a 'much better' pathway.... Rats are always restricted to the first strategy, humans need not be.

In business, growth is slow because most of the people most of the time use the first strategy. Why? Because this is what they were taught to do at school. This 'follow the right pathway' is a very slow strategy and is why most people are such slow thinkers.

At school we were taught to either get the 'right' answer and be rewarded, or, to be punished if we do not avoid 'mistakes'. This leads to the argumentative "I-am-right" and the defensive "you-are-wrong" behaviour which is so childish and time-consuming and can be seen, embarrassingly enough, when parliament is televised.

Business is not at all like school nor is it like the parliament. At school all you have to do is be right, in business you have to survive. The kind of thinking necessary to be successful at school is quite different to the kind of thinking needed to be successful in business. In business, fast is first!

Today's business imperative is velocity. Speed. Information Technology is the engine of speed and IT has emerged as the key component of competitive advantage. Business leaders view IT no longer as an overhead but as a strategic asset.

Bill Gates, love him or hate him, is a business genius. He says, "If the 1980s were about Quality and the 1990s were about Reengineering, then the 2000s will be about Velocity."

The control of nearly all business activities has already been digitised: customer information, marketing, ordering, purchasing, financial transactions, product design, market research, inventory and training. Now that the internet has connected these databases, most transactions can take place online at internet speed and this is ecommerce. The strategic advantage of ecommerce is speed.

Ecommerce is business heaven, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week! Ecommerce means getting to the customer first. Being first to understand what the customer wants, and being first to get back to the customer with what the customer wants.

In business, there is no alternative to growth. This means there is no alternative to ecommerce because ecommerce equals growth and growth at an accelerating rate. In today's market it's 'first-in-first-served' with an increasing emphasis on being first.

An X10 company maintains its competitive advantage -- quick response in changing markets, swifter customer service, faster company growth -- and so it depends on the tempo of its information. It also depends on the speed with which that information can be shared. This requires speed of thought.

The biggest challenge for investors and players alike is to get their head around the speed at which this IT boom is taking place. CEOs, directors and managers need a clear strategy that keeps their thinking, if not ahead of their technology, at least caught up with it.

Recently an Australian billionaire contacted me on this matter. He'd just invested $14 million in IT software for his global enterprise and he now wanted to accelerate the speed of thought of his organisation. As information can be shared in real-time by managers, employees, suppliers and distributors for a better return on information it becomes necessary to upgrade their speed of thought and this may require an investment in enterprise-wide training to develop innovation skills and thinking strategies.

What is the current brain software in standard use by corporations? Corporations are currently using the Greek software logic as the standard brain software. Logic was installed into employees' brains by the education system imported from Europe 200 years ago. Discovered by Thomas Aquinas in the middle ages, the logic brain software was designed 2500 years ago by the Greek thinker, Plato. Yet Plato could learn a lot from most young Australians. Today's ten-year-olds, living after Galileo, Darwin and Einstein have an unfair advantage over Plato and Aquinas.

We'll look at this in more detail in the coming lessons. We'll see how Plato's logic is reactive. It's driven by judgement -- right/wrong -- which is very slow. There seems little point in expecting too much thought speed from company's brains that are interfacing with a sluggish 2500 year old brain software!

******* In a previous SOT lesson we learned about Dr. Michael Hewitt-Gleeson's "Career Acceleration Program"...

In the early 70s I started the Career Acceleration Program called CAP. The Career Acceleration Program had three principles:

• 1) whatever it is you’re doing someone, somewhere, is already doing it in a much better way; so,

• 2) instead of just learning by experience, which is so slow, one could spend some time searching for that much better way; and,

  3) then one could just leapfrog to the 'much better way', bypassing experience, and thereby accelerating one's progress into the future.

The CAP strategy was not about being 'right' but about acceleration, about being faster. If that was a valid idea in the 1970s it’s de rigeur in the 2000s. Speed, the rate of speed, and the accelerating rate of speed is now a natural daily part of X10 thinking. Speed is not something to fear, to avoid or to embrace once in a while when required. It’s normal. It’s every day. It’s the usual way of operating as an X10 thinker and our brain can adapt to it just like it adapts to any other type of daily mode.

Bottlenecks
To increase speed the first thing is to remove the bottlenecks. A bottleneck is a visual model of what happens when an open flowing highway comes to a narrow part of the road and speed is decelerated, sometimes to a stand still.

Bottlenecks inhibit speed.

In your own life, in your own work, in your own environment what are the bottlenecks? In your network, if someone's not connected then connect them up. If people are connected and can talk to each other the less they need to go through you. Don’t be a bottleneck. If in order to go from A to C they have to pass through B and you’re B, then find a way of connecting A directly to C and remove the bottleneck.

In the X10 enterprise sales people are not the only ones who can talk to customers. Everyone can talk to customers. The dispatch man can talk directly to a customer, not just through you. The software engineer can talk directly to a customer not just through you. Create pathways, open up, create connections. The more direct communications between everyone the less bottlenecks. The fewer pathways, the fewer connections, the more bottlenecks.

Here are some random speedtips. You can use or adapt them in any way you find useful. Mostly they are here to help you think about speed in a more deliberate way:

Speedback.
Speedback is another way of saying faster feedback. Making decisions are based on feedback. The slower the feedback the more difficult it is to make a decision. How can you speed up the feedback that you get in your organisation? In your life? Can you X10 the people who give you feedback? Can you X10 the opportunities for feedback, X10 the ways in which you collect feedback? Speed up your feedback to create speedback.

One of the world's great fortunes was created during Napoleonic Europe by old Rothschild and his sons. Rothschild spread his five sons around Europe (symbolised today by the five arrows) and used carrier pigeons to speed up the feedback necessary to make informed investment decisions. While the rest of Europe relied on horses to bring messages the Rothschild family used carrier pigeons and created for themselves a darwinian or unfair advantage in the dog-eat-dog investment market. Investing at the speed of pigeons. Today we can get feedback at the speed of light through the internet and through other wired systems. It’s all there, the work’s been done. Find 10 ways that you can increase your speedback through internet speed.

Speedhelp
If you’re using a web site as a part of your business speedhelp is an important service to offer. Speedhelp may consist of a number of things. FAQs online, service tips and, most importantly, access to live assistance instantly online. The Speedhelp Button: Press the speedhelp button and you’ve got a live person helping you, instantly. Suppose I’m a customer considering two similar offers, one incudes speedhelp, the other has no speedhelp. If I can get live help instantly, 24/7, then the offer with the speedhelp meme is the fittest offer and is more likely to survive.

Customspeed
Customspeed means 'customise but with the imperative of speed'. How quickly can you customise your offer to each individual customer? In an ideal world -- and you may never quite get there -- every customer at any time should be able to have a customised offer. Customspeed is how you move from where you are now, towards that ideal world. What are 10 ways that you currently customise your offer? What are 10 ways that your customers are prevented from having their offer customised? How can you find ways to customspeed those areas?

Smartspeed
Anything that can make you smarter, much faster, is an added value. Anything that can make a product, a company, an offer much smarter in less time than the competitor is an added value and that’s a smartspeed. Customers love smartspeed so it has great WOM potential.

From the customer’s point of view the more often they use your brand the smarter that your offer should get. Your offer must learn what the customer wants, and be better and better at giving it. The faster your offer can learn the better it has smartspeed. This may involve a product or a relationship. In a relationship with a customer or an employee or anybody the faster you get smarter about what the other person wants and what they need, the better you’re using smartspeed in a continuous learning cycle.

Using smartspeed over time enables you to anticipate what the other person wants and be there ahead of time. On the internet of course this can be done with robots. There are internet sites that collect experience from the customers' use and then anticipate that use. When customers feel they get smarter every time they use your offer that's smartspeed. When an individual feels that they are smarter or better off every time they come into contact or association with you or your business that's another variation of smartspeed.

Regis McKenna, the marketing guru who put Apple's Macinosh on the map looks at smartspeed as a way of getting into 'real time'. In his recent book Real Time he says," Almost all technology today is focused on compressing to zero the amount of time it takes to acquire and use information, to learn, to make decisions, to initiate action, to deploy resources, to innovate. When action and response are simultaneous, we are in real time. For managers all over the world, the buzz is about time to market, just-in-time manufacturing, quick time, Internet time, time-based management. In companies, as in life, we seem to be feeling the strain of an evolutionary resetting of some internal, organic clock. Real time occurs when time and distance vanish, when action and response are simultaneous."

Smartspeed may even mean less is more. As you get to know them better, instead of making them sift through all your product brochures it may be just giving them a one sheet executive summary which answers exactly the questions they want. Instead of blitzing customers with a FAQ bank of 100 frequently asked questions it may mean, in time with smartspeed, there's only three questions that need to be answered. Less can be more. Speed and acceleration often means discarding baggage, getting rid of unwanted information that slows us down. This requires a filtering process. Selection and rejection.

the foregoing are Excerpts from School Of Thinking Lessons
'Fast is first' from course 'newsellcoaching'
'Ten ways to increase your speed.' from course 'newsellcoaching'

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