TELL YOUR BOSS TO LEARN TO WIN

I am still looking for a job. But sometimes, I admit, I’m not looking very hard. Why?? Because I get to read, and read and… read. This week, I read about aviation financing: wet leases, dry leases, moist leases (strange sexual metonony here?!). I learned about cross-border mergers and regulatory comparison between EU, US and other anti-trust/competition regimes. I explored the GE-Honeywell merger fallout. I listened to Schoenberg and Sibelius, Lou Reed and electronic music. I read Paul Krugman’s paper regarding a ‘third-order’ explanation for the 1997 Asian Crisis through excess asset price inflation. In other words, I READ STUFF. A lot of stuff, if I may so myself. One article, however, struck me. Occasionally, I reread and resort old papers and files. And I found a paper I had saved by Tony Schwartz. Schwartz queried, impetuously, ‘Are You Learning As Fast As The World Is Changing?’ According to Schwartz: “Translation: You're not going to learn faster (or deeper) than everyone else if you seek inspiration from the same sources as everyone else”. And I would ask: Have you (the reader) ever asked yourself or, God forbid, the boss that question? Perhaps you should. Now. Today. To be fair, Schwartz admits the difficulty. (Even if the boss is more or, possibly, less enthusiastic). As he says in this passage, which I quote verbatim since it requires so little additional effort to do so: “A few months ago, after I gave a talk about innovation to a gathering of executives from the world of food retailing, one frustrated member of the audience asked for some advice about dealing with her boss. "My boss likes to say, 'I want a totally new idea — and three examples of where that idea has worked before.'" The audience roared in recognition of the oxymoronic absurdity of the boss's sentiment, as did I”. And, of course, quoting verbatim is the point here. Schwartz indicates that most learning is, if not exactly second-hand, taken from other disparate sources. (A process he mischievously refers to as ‘R&D: Rip off and duplicate’). On Steve Jobs – “As Jobs talked about the original Macintosh computer, he talked less about semiconductors and software than he did about painting, music, and art. "Ultimately it [creativity] comes down to taste," he explained. "It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then trying to bring those things in to what you're doing...I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world." There’s a whole mental and conceptual world waiting to be (re)discovered. And you should tell your boss about it!