Read This!

Another mental tool I find useful in understanding an issue is to break it up in three parts with the following questions:

1. Wat are the street smarts?  (Street smarts give an indication of whether there is practical know-how.) It reminds me of Karl Popper’s famous remark when at age 17 he took off from university to become an apprentice in joinery. Said he, only if you have learnt to do things with your hands do you appreciate the material world’s resistance to the execution of ideas. 
2. Wat is the theory behind this?  Is there any theory? Otherwise how can I predict possible outcomes? How can I compare with other approaches?
3. What is the philosophy behind this? Is there a philosophy? Is there a wider framework that reaches beyond the present issue and integrates it into other areas of life?  A very succesful business friend of mine once said ” A business with a clear cut philosophy will succeed.”  Overstated, I think, but with a solid kernel of truth.

The three questions quickly help me to distinguish the fluff from the substance ( all tips, no theory or philosophy) or the impractical from the feasible (all theory and philosophy, no street smarts) or the ponderous and irrelevant, all philosophical fluff and no theory or street smarts.

This is how Coke did the big picture thing in the late 1970s early 1980s. By then it was clear that population growth had stabilized. So, where was increased revenue going to come from? The small picture would focus on getting more marketshare from Pepsi.

But Roberto Goizueta, on of the Titan CEOs in history, not only of Coke, had realized by then that Coke and Pepsi were more or less equals whose main aim was to defend their seesawing #1 and #2 positions. Keeping third parties and newcomers firmly out of contention for the two prime spots.

So, Goizueta performed on of the most daring out of the box, big picture thinking in business history. Hy did exactly what I described in the previous post. He asked what is the genus, the group that carbonated soft drinks belong to? Well, beverages including coffee, tea and also alchoholic beverages. And what had all these in common? Water. Tap water. That was the BIG big picture.

Goizueta decided that Coke would take market share from tap water. (and if Pepsi came along, so much the better!). Total carbonated soft drinks consumption in the US was 22.7 gallon per capita in 1970. Total beverage consumption was 114.5 gallon and tap water 68 gallons. It was from the 86 gallons of tap water that Coke (and Pepsi’s) growth would come from! He formulated the most audacious vision ever: “ I want to see the day that every tap in the world, tuned on fizzes with Coke.” (!)

And the numbers followed. By 2004 per capita tap water consumption in the US had dropped from 68 gallons to 29.1! While other beverages per capita gallons remained more or less the same, carbonated soft drink consumption upped their share of beverages from 12.4% in 1970 to 28.7% in 2004, off setting the plateau in population growth!

For those of you who are only now dropping in on the conversation, its about the value of an outsider’s approach. And I am describing my own way of looking at things. We are still looking at that part where we are  trying to understand the issue.

First we had carefully to list our assumptions, trying our best not to blind to the ” oxygen”   effect – not noticing that which is so ubiquitous that it remains unnoticed. And then have the guts even for a mental experiment to rephrase the assumption in their negative and exlore the consequences. Outsiders notice the absence of oxygen, stuffy rooms that need windows to be opened!

Secondly we look at discovering the pixels, the microscopic building blocks of the situation. The litte squares that are invisible because you focus on the process, not the structure.

Now we have a bash at the big picture. You will remember my anecdote of the Harvard strategy programme, the most asked question: How can I see the big picture?

My own reply to this question come from my background in literature. It’s a simple technique, but effective:

Go the opposite way in which you would in defining a concept. In the most employed method of definition you begin with the genus ( the class)  to which your term belong and then distinguishes it from other members of that class. Example: Reading material, iPad, differs from printed books in this way… In finding the big picture you go exactly the opposite route: You begin by the characterisitics your issue shares with other members of its class, then name the class to which they all belong, and if needs be ask to what higher order of classes, the branch of classes that genus belongs. You trace, so to speak evolution backwards as Dawkins did in his book The Ancestor’s Tale. 

Simple, but effective. You do it all the time when you try to decypher metaphors in poetry!

Immersed in your discipline, the day to day of your job, your vision narrows down to the middle ground. It is as if you are looking at a landscape painting without a background while you are at the same time forced to view from behind the museum ropes, unable to scrutinise the detail from close-up.  

On the one hand you can’t see the wood for the trees.

On the other hand you fail to see what a novice must know and do to accomplish the task. 

The management of The Economist understand this very well. There staff reporters have a general educational background, the famous PPE of Oxford, Philosophy, Politics and Economics. They are placed on a beats that they know little or nothing about, they only remain on a beat for at most five years when they are taken off because they have become too familiar with the topic.  As they say, we ask questsions nobody would dream to ask who is at all familiar with the subject. Sometimes we appear foolish. But it is precisely because we ask the questions nobody else would ask that our reports are fresh, informative and reveal unusual angles.

I like!

Focusing on the forgotten detail, my favourite question is:  What is your pixel?  Pixel?  I will never foret, way back when VGA resolution in colour first appeared on a PC screen, seeing a picture of a mangenta rose (those of you who hail from those prehistoric times will remember; it was the poster pic to show off the amazing properties of VGA) and then zooming in with one of those primitive precursors of Photoshop, until this beautiful rose with its undulating curves and imperceptible colour gradients disappeared in rigid little squares. 

Somewhere in your discipline, in your business the pixels are hidden beneath the surface.

What is your most basic building block, the final frontier behind which you cannot go?

The view from outside works best when being extreme: the very big picture and the microscopic detail.

Thanks to Observer, Chops and Nicolaas who contributed to the previous post.

I was thinking quite a lot about your responses and the value of an outsider’s point of view.

I had always thought that the main vlaue was seeing the wood instead of the trees. The outsider is not immersed in the detail. “Al chinese look alike” for the first time visitor to China. The obvious is in the foreground. It occupies the mind and pushes all else out.

You see the big picture.People with their noses to the grind stone often forget to look up and see how the big picture looks like.

Last year on the Harvard Strategy programme we had a session where you could pick from a list of some 50 questions one question to ask to at least 10 of your fellow participants.  From the 9 or so people who came to me all but one asked the following:  “How can I see the big picture?”

Well. there is a technique ( as there is with thinking out of the box – turning assumptions  into their negatives and see where it gets you, see previous blog).  But before I come to that, what struck me again over the past couple of days mulling about this blog, is that insiders are trapped in the middle ground. They are like cinematographers making a movie without zooming out OR zooming in. The see only the medium distance, the big picture is lost, but so is the detail that they take for granted – like driving a car and unconsciously touching the brake before switching on the ignition.

The outsider brings the big picture view,  “All Chinese look alike,” but also the microscopic, zoomed in view. More tomorrow.

Oh and two other things, I made the switch to the Mac – on advice from a friend bought a Mac mini over the weekend. Will keep you posted.

And I did read the Krugman blogs – not convinced, but will get back to that too.