roger so good to get to talk to you today hey it's my pleasure my friend you had an amazing mother growing up what are some of the biggest lessons you learned from her and how did you learn them well it's maybe just by osmosis uh yeah she she was uh an awesome awesome uh lady uh but i think the most
striking thing about um how i learned is is she would answer almost no question uh so the uh if you ask her a question she would typically ask a question back so for example you know if i'd asked her mom you know have you seen my i used to play with tonka those little metal tonka trucks um you know
have you seen my you know blue tonka truck and instead of her answering she would say well roger what's the last time you are absolutely sure that you can remember holding it in your hand uh and then that i think a whole lot about it and then she'd say well uh why don't you go to where you were when you last can
remember having held it in your hand uh and uh and sure enough you know it would it would be there but she didn't say check your bedroom or check this she would she would always be a return return fire with a with a question so she taught me that you kind of have to think your way uh out of things and and
you have the power uh to do that and that may seem fairly simple but as a four or five year old it's a sort of a powerful lesson it's something that we're we're missing today in a lot of ways don't you think yes i i think so i mean i think the education system you know has got a fundamental uh
assumption that the job is to you know unzip the top of your head and pour poor knowledge in rather than to teach you how to think um now i i there are awesome teachers uh and we work with a lot of awesome teachers in our uh our uh i think uh program uh for example who i think are attempting uh to teach the students how to think
but there's just too much of it that is is pouring in knowledge and assuming that that is that somehow makes you more effective and as the former dean of the rocking school you're you're in a position to know that you oversaw some of the most significant changes there in a long time um what would you say is wrong with sort
of like business and education specifically well i yeah that one unfortunately there's a big big problem and uh and it's that business schools do not teach the fundamental problems of business i mean that's that's pretty bad right uh what they teach are finance what they teach is marketing
to teach us hr and as the great greatest management thinker of all time peter drucker said there are no marketing problems there are no finance problems there are no accounting problems there are only business problems and these are problems that that span across sloppily span across a bunch of domains
and and business education has abdicated it doesn't even try to to teach how you think across domains and and that's that's really problematic and it's consistent with with a lot of the huge problems uh in the world uh is is thinking that you can decompose uh things into into little pieces
and and somehow add them up together and they'll add up to the hole that you wish uh does doesn't happen and and business education is is a critical impediment to that as it currently stands so is it right to say that part of teaching people to think better is trying to connect teach them that everything is
connected to everything else in the world yes yeah it is and and that's that's a more daunting task so like i understand why business education abdicates that that's a more daunting uh task and things are less easy to prove right it's much easier to prove as as you would well know saying right you've heard those guys all
else being equal this that causes that right and and you and you and you know all those other things that you have to assume are are equal are not um but if you do hold them uh all constant then you can develop uh and prove a causal relationship between two things so it's sort of easier to write a paper
do a study all of those things if you uh take a narrow narrow lens but that's just not helpful to the world and and so you know i think business education draws in lots of people who would have succeeded without it they're the ones that small percentage of people who can integrate who just learned
learned early on in their life one way or another long before they got to business school how to think integratively uh then they go to business school then they go out and think integratively despite what business school taught them and then the business school said see see like we made that person right
and uh and i just i just don't think that's uh that's the case where should that start that integrative sort of teaching and what should it look like you said he struck me as somebody who's thought about this a lot more than the average person i think i have and uh and i've been taught things that i didn't i for sure
didn't expect or or understand so so as as you may may know i introduced this concept of integrative thinking i wrote a book on it and introduced the concept of it to uh to business education to the rockman school and i had a student a wonderful student by the name of ellie avishai uh who came from an unusual background
primary education she was a school teacher before coming in doing an mba she loved integrative thinking and and said to me as you graduate hey roger i think you can teach this to younger people than mbas and i said okay uh let's see and and we arranged through uh through a friendly friendly
person to test it out at a girls high school an all-girls high school called branson hall and uh and it was spectacularly successful and it was an eye-opener to me because these these uh girls who were grade 10 girls uh so they had definitively six fewer years of formal education right grade
11 grade 12 four years of of undergrad compared to our mbas and our mbas on average have about four and a half years of work experience so they have ten and a half less yeah fewer years of life experience and their ability to come up with integrative answers was a hundred percent as good as uh as the mbas
and so that's interesting i said whoa whoa whoa whoa what does this mean again this means that that additional six years and 10 years of life experience is good for nothing in making making you better at doing doing this thing so that was a real wake-up call then we started teaching teachers high school teachers because we
had this conception you know how foolish we were we had this conception that well you know high school was really pushing it that you know your intellectual development was was just maybe barely ready now that wake-up call was no cure intellectual development is really ready and some primary school teachers came to
our our programs and and our first reaction was oh no no no that's silly they you can't teach it to kids like that i mean that they're just too young to really understand this complicated tech technique and then bless the the teachers the teachers were i think we'll be the judge of that and
they started doing it and so we now have teachers in this in the school system in ontario uh teaching as young as as grade one and two students uh how to do this and here's the cool thing they're really good at it they're really really good at it uh like it is just it is just charming actually to watch these these uh
kids work on solving uh kind of either-or uh challenges and and we have all sorts of fairs at the school they've come in and i always get weepy listening listening uh uh uh to them um in the the bottom line is is that they don't need to be untaught anything right so that's their gigantic advantage
uh they're easily smart enough and they don't have a view already built up that life is full of either or choices where it's a devil or the deep blue sea and you know you just have to suck it up and choose one bad choice over another they don't understand that uh and so when when you say okay there's this there's here's this choice
do we do this or do they do that but here's a technique for figuring out something better they're like sure let's go do it and they're great at it like really good at it you had a four-step uh methodology for teaching that can you walk us through that a bit uh sure so uh so you start with the notion of of uh
taking the two models let's say and and we often use the toronto international film festival as an example you say there are two models of running a film festival like toronto the community oriented film festival anybody can go there are not you know velvet ropes all all over the place there's not a jury
it's just a friendly community a film festival then there's khan on the on the uh on the other side rather than saying let's think about something in in between right away you say let's push those to the extreme the completely exclusive film festival the completely inclusive film festival
right and then and then you lay out how they work how do do do each of those work and produce the outputs that they produce and we ask how does it work for the various uh players involved so how does it work for the community how does it work for the film industry how does it work for the festival itself right uh and and you lay
that out and you say okay here's how here's how this one works and here's here's how khan works and here's how tiff or sundance or or tribeca works so that's one you figure out how they uh they work right and then you ask yourself the question what about these things do we love the most what features what mechanisms
uh do we love of uh of both um and then ask the questions the third step is do what we call these integrative moves because what we've noticed is that there's three kinds of of integrative moves and in the case of the tiff it was what we call a double down so pierce handling who was running at
tiff at the time loved everything about the uh inclusive community oriented film festival i wrote it did for the community loved what it did for the the industry uh i loved what he what it did for the for the festival but he loved one thing about uh khan and that is the buzz that it created that brought the attention of the
international media which made it a wonderful sponsorship opportunity so evian would pay a whole lot of money to make sure that a bottle of evian's on the table when every starlet gets gets interviewed right and so what uh what pierce did is say uh it's come up with this this brilliant notion which is
we can make uh the inclusive film festival even more inclusive in a way that gets us the one thing we want from the other model and that was the people's choice award right so the people's choice award said we will create buzz around who's going to win the prize but the prize won't be an exclusive
prize of an exclusive jury that'll make the audience feel like well it's them it's all about them it's actually all about us so it made the festival more inclusive and got the one thing he wanted from the the other model and now tiff is the most important film festival in the world uh that's the third step the fourth step
is you gotta try it to try to experiment with it to see if it works but that is indeed what they did it's worked better and better every every year and now it's the most important uh film festival in the world maybe not the most famous because khan's been around for so long and famous for so long but anybody in
the industry says toronto is the most important uh film festival in the world so that's that's integrative thinking and and uh you know quite quite frankly we've we've got no place in the world it feels to me where where we're presented all the time with things that are either or you're either
uh i mean look at us politics right you're either uh you know a a trumpian or a or uh or a biden guy and and you know we just take sides and you know battle and you know you know fire missiles at one another it feels as though all of this siloization of education has made people think that i can apply
some narrow perspective on this and it's the only perspective that is worthy uh and if somebody applies a different perspective to it and comes to a different point of view it's because they're either stupid or evil right like that's the explanation rather than saying now that's interesting what do they see
that i don't see is there a way i could integrate some of what they see into what i see to come up with a better better idea there's not we don't seem to be taught the curiosity about that we're taught to evaluate is my idea better than his or her idea yes no if it is then i should beat them into submission right or if it
isn't i should say oh dear they're right and i'm wrong i kind of feel all terrible about being being wrong it's there's there's just not enough curiosity about a better a better way yeah that's really interesting i mean one of the things that strikes me about that i always ask myself when i see somebody
doing something that i wouldn't do or strikes me as odd i'm like what would the world have to look like for that to be the option that i was engaging in right so oh that's good that's good that's that's a that's sort of a variant of the question i asked in strategy which is the most powerful question and
strategy is what would have to be true not what is true what would have to be true for that to be a great idea because that that gets you gets you uh noodling around another logic and and it is possible that by taking pieces of another logic structure you can come up with uh with a better idea i want to come to
strategy in a second but just before we leave integrative thinking here are there limitations to this idea i mean it sounds very novel to be faced with a hard choice with trade-offs and come up with an option that sort of like mixes this either or thinking and where do you see this falling apart
and where do you see it really under applied well i'd see it under applied in the world in general right uh i guess is uh is my view and lots of people just ask me you know about limitations and should you do this all the time and the like and i say listen you know if if the choice is is between
kind of lying on the beach or getting kicked in the groin um you don't need to use integrative thinking i'll take lying on a beach right but it's when it's when you feel like oh i i hate i hate the fact that i have to that i apparently have to choose here so you don't love uh either uh either option either choice
and and you and that's the time that's that's when a little light should go off in your head and say ah stop don't choose because you don't like uh either but i mean i use it all the time i mean i'm feeling all cheery these days about tennis canada uh because uh this monday in the rankings the the men's rankings
in this case in this case we're doing well on the women's side too but in the men's ranking uh canada had three uh players in the top 20. uh interesting fact is that this is the first time in canadian history that we had the most players in the top 20. we were tied with russia russia's got three
we've got three u.s spain all these other powerhouses have have fewer before 2005 when we put in place the tennis canada strategy that's resulted in this we had zero in history um and what was the what was the magic solution uh that transformed us from a nothing country literally a nothing country that was
irrelevant to a leading tennis nation where everybody says how is it that they've got so many great players from a little country that's got snow all the time and the answer is we we looked at the french system which is a more control oriented uh system in the u.s system which is a you know wild west
kind of system and said how can we rather than choose between them come up with a better solution so you can apply integrative thinking to create like incredible uh uh outcomes uh left right center i did at the rotman school too that was a product of integrative thinking choices so i i mean maybe i have a hammer so every
every uh darn thing looks like a nail but i do eat the dog food right i apply this uh to all the tasks that that uh that i have um and it it it's proven to be extremely valuable i uh interesting backside i mean i sort of hit on this as well i went to business school in 2007 and i almost dropped out because i was
just so disappointed in what i was i come from a world of like charlie munger and sort of like interdisciplinary thinking and i got to business school and i was like this is ridiculous right like none of these subjects are connected to each other oh really so that good i'm well i'm i'm glad
i'm glad you uh you figure that out most people don't they they they become indoctrinated into that notion right they come in indoctrinated into the notion that my job as a business person is to figure out into what category this problem that i'm facing falls and then apply that tool ah this is a finance problem so i will
apply the capital asset pricing model or this is an hr problem so i'll apply theory x3y they're they're a tool matcher right and that's and that's why mbas are viewed widely as these incredibly narrow-minded people oh that's so fascinating have you seen i want to come back to that in a second have you seen a lot of
changes in terms of the incoming students like with these girls that you sort of went back to in grade 10 and you taught them integrative thinking have they had like tangible or quantifiable sort of results that are different as a result they it's more anecdotal but yeah lots of them lots of them uh
you know come back to us and tell us tell us stories of what they what they've done and what they've been uh up to although or or they'll go back to their teachers and and and and tell them i mean it is something i'm encouraging the i think people to do is start collecting more data to show the the
effectiveness uh of it uh but we have some great stories there's one of our absolutely fav teachers um uh teaches grade three and four and she was teaching grade three in a big school right that has a bunch of classes of each and the grade four teacher you know came up came up to her you know at that at lunch and said
uh you know in the first week uh let me name a bunch of names uh and uh and you tell me uh whether they were in your section of grade three and she goes you know a b c d e f g and and uh and our and our teacher is like well how do you how do how do you know that and uh and the grade four teacher just says
they're like they behave completely differently they ask a different set of questions uh you know they do this this this this and you know our teacher was sort of like you know that's good but she was a hundred percent a hundred percent accurate and without without without knowing she was a hundred percent accurate in
identifying uh our teachers uh her graduates and then that teacher became a fanatic about it too because she said that they're just better they're just better so good we were talking a little bit while we were um before we started recording about sort of model matching in the nba and how one of the
problems that i had with the mba is it was so siloed and you're given these models here's a finance model here's a strategy model here's a decision-making model and we don't think of integrating those models can you sort of riff on that a little bit and in terms of how that impacts education and the role of models
being maybe the best model we have at the time but not the only model the way i think about business education is that it's it's a thing of visualize like one of those little red toolboxes right you carry you come in as a student with that empty and and you get a bunch of tools you get a hammer and you get pliers
and you get the screwdriver and whatever put in your in your in your tool box and you're taught to size up a problem and ask the question is this is a hammer best for this uh is it is pliers best uh for this is a screwdriver best for this there's a wrench best best for this and so it's this job of matching
a bunch of narrow models to real world problems and that's why mbas unfortunately get get you know uh get criticized for being these sort of you know we had an mba here and he did this silly thing and the silly thing if you analyze what way the person criticized what the mba did it typically falls into the category of
they applied one narrow model to a broad uh a broad question and i understand why they do it that's what they're taught that's literally what they they are taught and you know you can recall this from your own mba you know when you do a case right uh a case study the case has been written to
illustrate a tool right the answer comes from applying a given tool like and you and and we're made to think oh these are just general business situations no they're not the the the writing of harvard business school cases has evolved to this art form which is to write a case that illustrates one narrow uh
tool uh and and and so that's what the business school world uh spits out and it spits it out into a world that's organized that way i always found working with mba is a bit sort of difficult afterwards because they want these packages very much like case studies and and what you're sort of reinforcing without you know
unconsciously i think is that all the information in the package is all the information that you need to make this decision or all the information that's relevant and pertinent and that is so often in real life that's not the case at all we get absolutely what we educate for there's no no question in my in my mind
uh you know the same in economics right there are a thousand partial equilibrium economists for every single general equilibrium economist and so we have economists who who kind of uh know everything about you know whatever fiscal policy but nothing about labor policy or labor economics or
or environmental policy or the likely uh and they and they do that you know i'm not gonna think about all those things but i'm going to i'm going to think about the thing that my model covers and it happens in in medicine too uh uh we had a you know a wonderful lady work with us on applying integrative thinking
to to the medical field uh which is which has been very valuable and worked out well and she was talking about her her uh residency and when she was a resident her attending saying things like could you check on the liver in room 217 right it's not check how mrs smith who has got uh kind of liver problems and
it's literally checked the liver right and she said you know it's it's down to that sort of kind of narrowness we're not even going to talk about the person we're going to talk about uh you know one organ uh in in the body and so we're sort of teaching from from the word goat not to think holistically to think to
think as narrowly as uh as possible and it causes blindness right like we miss obvious things because we're just looking for something to fit this model and then we we want to apply this model that we know and i found this with my i had a computer science degree and then went into sort of the corporate world and then you
know you start managing people and all of a sudden most of my computer science degrees are relevant right computers do what they're told to do you know if there's a mistake it's always with you people are biological systems they're much different and i found a lot of the education that
i had learned just didn't apply anymore but the way that i tended to approach problems was very based on this comfort level with this is how i was taught to approach problems in school and this is my experience and then you carry that with you absolutely and there's a very interesting thing on on
kind of people and a huge difference so our mbas at the rotman school have about four four and a half years of work experience our executive mbas have about 14 or 15 years of work experience so the mbas take on average less than one second year course in the entire ob hrm field right they just don't think that stuff
is important uh at all right they load up on finance and strategy courses more so than any any other courses the embas have an insatiable desire for uh for obhr uh courses because they they have the learning that you that you had when you got into the into the real real world they've been working
in the real world for 15 years and they realize that you know everything is a people uh people issue it you know i i don't think we do a good enough job in in business school and helping these students understand that taking courses in that field understanding more about the people dynamics is important but they
those courses as you well know from having taken it are less replete with with very formal models where you can calculate something right in finance you can calculate yield curves or sharp ratios or whatever and you can do a five forces analysis or a nash equilibrium in your strategy uh
course uh so they feel more comfortable learning a model because they wish the world would behave according to models uh like that quantitative sort of mechanical uh model so they're more comfortable with with that we do that in the workplace too and i notice this with policies and procedures right procedures are
basically like an algorithm that you apply given a certain situation certain inputs and what i discovered is that it just eliminated thinking because people would go oh there's no procedure for the slight deviation from what would happen and i can't respond because at first you can but you lose that ability over time to
actually apply judgment well maybe i shouldn't apply this procedure in this particular case and i have to do something different and that's where this this teaching thinking and teaching judgment sort of comes in and i find that when we get into organizations we actually reinforce this modeled siloed predictable way
of solving problems absolutely i i in there and if we want to go on this vector it gets even worse than what you've described go on [Music] which is which is we we dramatically vastly overuse science um so what what business what you were taught in business school and you tell me if i if i'm wrong on this is that a good business
man or woman businessman in your case if you're going to be a good businessman shane you will make decisions based on analysis yeah right you'll do the analysis and make a decision you're some kind of a corporate floozy if you're just going making decisions without without the in the analysis uh behind it
so you can ask the question where does analysis come from the answer is from aristotle for 2400 years ago for century bc aristotle essentially created science uh the book is called analytic apostle posterior where he where he sort of was the first man in the world to say here's how you can determine and
what he uses the terms you use this here's how you can have a rigorous methodology for determining the cause of a given effect right you experiment experiment watch watch collect data and you can say aha this causes uh causes that okay and and uh all of the the future of science is based based
on aristotle's understanding we think that science came from the scientific revolution bacon newton descartes galileo they formalized what aristotle uh did 2000 years before them so the guy who invented science though pointed out something about science he said he said science this methodology i've used it's for the part of the world
where things cannot be other than they are so you know what does he mean by that well if i let go of this pen what'll happen it'll fall yep if i let go of this pen 10 years from now what's going to happen it's going to fall if i let this go this pen in antarctica it's going to fall that's the part of
the world where things cannot be other than they are right and so so there it makes a whole lot of sense right if i observe all pinfalls that have ever happened in in the past what's it a pretty damn good predictor of the future pen falls in the future right so that's the part of the world where
things can cannot be other than they are and and he said that's what you need to use this scientific reasoning uh method to be rigorous about understanding because you know at one point we thought it fell because all objects like to be closer to mother earth and again and eventually we figured out that no
there's a universal force called gravity that pushes everything down that's the development of of scientific knowledge but the guy who invented science warned he said but there's another part of the world there's another part of the world and that that part of the world is the part of the world where things can be other
than they are right think about think about think about these right in 1998 did you have one of these within one armed lengths of you and you started to get hives if it was more than one arm length away no because it didn't exist the first one existed in 1999 and everything about human life is
different now because because of that that thing that's the part of the world humans interacting uh that where things can be other than they are and you know what aristotle said the guy who invented science said about that part of the world do not use the scientific method why would he say that well if you use
the scientific method to understand how people interact with technology right you will demonstrate to yourself that this could never exist because you've crunched all the data how much do people use smartphones not at all right because they don't exist right you'll predict you'll predict that you'll predict that
it'll continue to be and you'll be like you know nokia and uh and think that feature phones will will rule uh will rule forever but he the guy who invented science said don't don't do that and what he said is in that part of the world the job of rigorous thinking is to imagine possibilities and choose the one
for which the most compelling argument can be made so in the part of the world where things cannot be other than they are science analyze data collect as much data analyze it rigorously to determine causes of effects in this other part of the world imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling uh
argument could be made and he said the job of human beings in that former world is to understand the causes of the effects that we see so that we can optimize the world to that right we observe all these people who smoke getting lung cancer so we can optimize against that by trying to stop people from
from smoking he said in the other part of the world human being's job is to be the cause of the effect they want to see right to change the world in in a better way by imagining possibilities and making those those new things uh come true what we've done is said that is for kind of you know you know bad floozy
type type people the good ones are the ones who always apply science i like that that way of thinking in terms of like how you're explaining it we are taught these models we apply them as if they predict the future but the reality is we're in a constantly evolving and changing environment
and our ability to predict the future is more limited than we think it it actually is i mean if we were able to predict the future we would have seen kovid come in we would have seen a whole bunch of things coming and that sort of relates to your your latest book about how we we hyper we predict this i almost think of it as
this beam of light we predict this beam of light into the future as if that's the only possible future and then we optimize for that particular future so we we um take away margins of safety in the supply chain we i sort of think of it as you know we take margins of safety and we turn them into money which is
what business school in a way has traditionally taught us to do right you know you don't need just in time inventory is better because you have less inventory on the balance sheet all these buffers and this slack that we sort of develop but these buffers and the slack allow us to position for
multiple possible futures they allow us to easily pivot when the world doesn't work the way that we we think it was the problem i see with this and the pushback that i give myself when i think like this is that in the moment being inefficient and positioning for multiple possible futures
is always sub-optimal to somebody who's hyper efficient for this one particular future so in the short run we're always looking like we're behind but in the long run we always win and then we have to deal with this sort of like timeline difference if you're the ceo of a company i mean what's your average tenure it's a
couple years right so you have to sort of like get in do your thing and get out and you're not thinking about it from a long-term point of view but i'd love to hear your riff on this well i mean i i can't do much better riff than you right i mean i think your diagnosis is is uh is bang on and this is this is why i think
a great a ceo and i've talked a lot uh you probably know paul pullman he's if he's a friend of a friend of mine he's always nice enough to say that i taught him a strategy when he used to be at procter and gamble but um we talk about it is that the part of the ceo's job is to create enough of that
discretion so that they can do those things right that that they know are going to be in the interests long term like in your case building up some slack you know for the for the bad times uh because if they don't build that up they will be forced into the 100 efficiency now and that'll kill them sometime in the
future that may not kill them during the time they're ceo but they won't have shown great stewardship for their organization so so i think you're i think you're right and and it's one of the challenges of the modern capital markets right modern capital markets say gimme gimme gimme right
if you're not using some money uh you know uh buybacks uh shares or dividend uh back to me lever your lever yourself up so you're more efficient capital structure all of all of those things are taking away that that optimal amount of slack that that ceo has to make decisions that are good for the company for the long term
to invest in things for for the future um and that's why that's one of the reasons why i think right that america had a huge advantage over the rest of the world for probably 30 40 50 years somewhere between 1930 and 1980 where it had the best capital markets in the world for helping companies grow and prosper
uh i think in 2020 now america has got a capital market that is a detriment to american uh competitiveness because it is causing companies to behave in ways that aren't good for the company its employees america over overall oh double click on that go deeper talk to me about that well i i i
think what we're what we're getting is this taking away of of uh managerial uh slack focusing uh driving managers as much as they can to managing for the short term for the for uh this uh this quarter now you have ceos who who you know who stand against that um but the the pressure is is in in that direction and it's and it's
dramatic uh pressure and and it's causing all these bad things right there are you know studies that say cfos you know 40 of cfos freely admit uh uh that uh they will they will not make an investment that they know is npv positive uh in order to make this quarters uh guidance right so all all of that stuff
is causing companies to to perform less well uh than they than they could and and that's a capital market problem that's that's why i think i think we're going to look back 2050 we'll look back on this period 19 40ish 35 40 ish to say 20 20 25 or 30 uh as this insane period where we
thought the widely held publicly traded corporation was the optimal form and we're gonna we're gonna look back and say what were we idiots thinking you know that that's crazy it it didn't work uh it created created all the wrong uh the wrong incentives and we're going to be into a world of of uh
more controlled uh companies yeah doesn't this create like an arbitrage or almost competitive advantage for private companies or companies that are largely owned by one shareholder when i look back and i look at berkshire hathaway's like track record one of the things i ascribe that to is that buffett and monger controlled
about 40 of the shares until recently so they could sit on cash and not do anything and not worry about an activist investor or you know and what they were really doing i think personally is their positioning for multiple possible futures because they don't know what to do they have no degree of certainty in what
the future looks like tomorrow so we're just going to sit here and position for all of these possible futures the same thing they did in march when people were like why didn't you deploy all this money into the stock market well that's easy to say looking back with hindsight of what what the stock market
has done since then but at the time it's like well cash might become the most valuable thing in the world so we're going to sit on it and position for multiple possible outcomes but it's always sub-optimal and so you need this control which is comes from a private company often or family controlled or
um sort of you could even probably get away with it with a super charismatic ceo but these companies will actually given what you're saying if that's correct they'll have more of an advantage over the next 30 years because they'll be able to build up the balance sheet because they have extra inventory
and they can take advantage of sort of call it the professionalization of management in terms of model thinking which is eliminating slack eliminating and preparing for this next quarter and being hyper efficient on this next quarter i couldn't i couldn't agree more and and you know i've i've actually got an article on this subject
coming out in the january february hbr on what i think is is the we're approaching the tail end of the domination of the widely held publicly traded corporation as the corporate model it's just got too many problems that are arguably getting worse not uh not better and and you know it's one of these
things is there are so many things in life where it's like how how on earth did the logic structure hold for so long right so the view of a board of a widely held publicly traded professionally managed company right is that we need to have the board you know mike jensen as you as i'm sure you know wrote about
this with agency agency theory that that managers are imperfect agents right they have self-control problems they are not necessarily going to manage on behalf of the shareholders right and and so we have to we have to discipline them right to make sure that that the agency costs are not too high what's our tool
well they report to a board of directors who represents who represents shareholders in and they can discipline them now did anybody ask the question what exactly are those board members would they not be agents just like management and so what you're saying is that our solution to the agency problem is
to put a fox in charge of the hen house that's our solution yeah yeah yeah that'll really work well i mean it's like where where on earth did this logic uh come from right there either is an agency problem in which case we have put foxes in charge of the the the hen house or there isn't an agency problem in which case we
shouldn't be bothering with any of this any of this crap but the idea that that a board will discipline discipline uh management is is just an absolute fantasy and that's a core kind of element of the logical structure that guides the workings of the capital markets the equity markets and and the widely held publicly traded
uh companies it's just theater it is theater oh my god but it gives us comfort because we're like oh the board's watching out for us and you know like yeah i totally agree with you yeah i mean i i think i think of boards of directors as being uh like fire insurance that works except when there's a fire
i think they can work there like if you have um i think what i love to see on boards is it's not necessarily a large ownership of the company but a high percentage of the person's net worth involved um sort of like really invested people but they don't meet all these requirements that we're starting to see
in terms of like the ideal board according to the stock exchange and the ideal board according to sort of if you're a person who who might think and apply a little bit of judgment to it are often two very different things right i agree i i mean i honestly think that good versus bad board members the the
key criteria are kind of psychographic ones oh expand on that well they're attitudinal they're they're what does the person think of his or her role in life right uh it's things like that not are they a sitting ceo or were they a ceo or do they have financial expertise or whatever
it's it's how do they how do they behave how do they how do they think about their job and and you know i've written about this too i think the only the only useful reason for wanting to be on a board is is that you think a well-functioning board is integral to the success of democratic capitalism now how many people
think that that's the reason for being on a board not not many like and most of the reasons for wanting to be on a board are bad for the effectiveness of the board right so one reason for being on the board is it's good pay well if you think it's good pay then you will not you will not do anything to sacrifice good pay
uh being on a board is prestigious well you're not gonna do anything that'll sacrifice the prestige uh it's uh good camaraderie with other interesting people well you're not gonna do anything that sacrifices a camaraderie i mean they're all they're all bad reasons for being kind of on a board again one of my
theories in life is if you're putting something together you have to think of what is it that would cause a person of the sort you need to fill the chair that you have designated i i talk about this in terms of bond bond rating right we said uh in the global financial crisis what on earth were these bond raters doing
rating things triple a like with like you know a infinitesimal uh kind of uh probability of default uh and and they were defaulting 100 100 you know how can this possibly be well you've got to ask the question what would cause somebody to willingly sit in a chair called bond raider at moody's or or s p
and i think the only logical answer you can come come to is that they are the only reason they would be in that chair is that they're not particularly good at rating bonds right because if they had a skill set that made them good at rating bonds what chair would they be sitting in it'd be trading bonds
they'd be either sitting in a chair at goldman or morgan stanley or their own or apollo or their own their bond fund so the only people who are who would would think of being at moody's or s p right rating bonds the only people who will do that are definitively less good at rating bonds than the people who are
running the bond the the bond market and and sure enough you know they they came up they came up wanting but that's that's this fallacy of of we we identify jobs for people create that chair and then don't think about whether it is possible to get somebody to sit in that chair that can actually do the
job that we need them uh we need them to do like think about stock brokers right what's the only thing you know about about a person there's only one thing you can know absolutely positively without a shadow of a doubt about a a stock booker the only thing that's for sure you don't know if they're male or
female young or old and but what you know is that they're crummy at picking stocks because if they were good they wouldn't be a stockbroker it would be a hedge fund yeah but this is sort of why i like to see boards with significant personal ownership as a material amount of their wealth because
i think you know maybe it just gives me another narrative for why they're on the board but i think it also gives them a lot of investment in terms of the success or failure of the business and it takes us away from the short-term planning cycle of sort of thinking about it in quarter by quarter basis and start thinking
in sort of like decades and what you have to do and the investments you have to make to make this company not only sustainable but position it for multiple possible futures as things change yeah yeah i mean i'll give you an example for my own life i was on the thompson reuters
thompson and then thompson reuters board for 14 years and and a guy i'd love who is on for all the time i was on was vance operman and the oppermann family owned west their legal publishing company the best the best business in in time it's just a chest up yeah what remote that has yes a gorgeous uh business and and
vance you know ae was in it for the long haul uh last time i checked he's still on the board i've been off the board for like six or seven years so he'd been on the board for 20 or 25 years by now and and uh i don't know how much the operand family has in thompson stock but i think it's still quite a
you know quite a bit from from the from the original uh transaction and yeah he takes his job deadly seriously and thinks about the long haul and and uh and is an awesome uh director he you know he he's probably one of the best directors i've uh witnessed in action so i i i agree skin skin in the game is a good thing uh to be sure
you know that doesn't that that is not you know it's sort of like it's three times sal you know they must own stock that's three times annual board fees and that's for those people unfortunately that's trivial that's trivial your desired desired outcome happens unfortunately and only as a small amount of
the time i totally agree you study you've worked with you've read a lot about leadership are there common patterns to success that you've seen across leaders other than integrative thinking um i mean they they tend to relate to relate to integrative thinking i mean i i think you know great leaders are are uh
you know have as a core characteristic when somebody says something to them that doesn't agree with where their head is now the model that because we all we model everything and we say i you know i'm running this company and you know and i think you know i think this is the best the best product that we that we offer
and somebody somebody comes up to you and says roger that is going south that sucks i don't know why we're investing so much in that a great leader's first reaction is say more you know you know tell me tell me tell me more about why i want to understand why you think that what you see that i don't see
yeah yeah and that's that's because you know it has this like super big knot like knock-on effect right so one it causes your subordinates to all think that if you've got an interesting thought i'm open to open to hearing it i'm not going to just shut that shut that down because it disagree agrees with me so everybody kind of
is more inclined to to think about things and think about things uh uh differently and not be a not be afraid of that and you just get more raw materials because what we learned in integrative thinking is is if we go back to that tif example unpacking how the inclusive festival works and unpacking how they uh
exclusive uh festival works all that unpacking gives raw materials which you can kind of recombine in entirely new ways in associative ways right yeah exactly exactly so when i say this is our best product and we are going to win on the basis of this that's only a set of raw materials that relate to that
theory uh and if i can incorporate in a whole another huge pile of raw materials there's just another pile of raw materials i have access to then then i can then i have a chance of coming up with a much better much more powerful uh solution uh and the person might be wrong right uh you know that that this is not
this is not a terrible product uh but actually there's a weakness in in in this product that by using that person's thinking we can get rid of and so we end up going with the product anyway but in in a different way uh than before that to me is key i think another thing that is that is key is
is and this this may this may sound a little funny but is uh because you could say it contrasts with my view of possibilities but uh the other thing is that they are kind of deterministic right so the great leaders are able to say if if this happens and then this and then this and then this and then this we're screwed
or if this happens it will be on we'll be in the kingpins seed like the less good leaders sort of just say well we're just going to sort of bob and weave our way down the field and and see what see what happens they're not they're not deterministic enough um and so so i like i think stronger leaders are willing to have a
hypothesis about how they think things are going to play out then be open to seeing seeing changes in that but that gives them the boldness to make decisions right because you have to commit assets irrevocably to decisions to be great as a as a company you can't just say well we'll do a little bit of
this a little bit of that and we'll shift and change you have to say at a certain point in time this is worth investing in and we won't be able to get the money back because it'll be invested in a building or invested in a piece of software invested in these in these in these people and so they
they are willing to make those those choices because they say you know unless we do that we're not going to get uh get to this place and i guess the last last one is just i i just don't know any what i think of as great great leaders who don't love other people right i mean if you think people are annoying
and you have to put up with them and put up with their foibles rather than you genuinely love them uh then then i i think it can only be so good uh of of uh of a leader i want to come back to sort of taking bold action here and i think fear often prevents us from taking bold action we might do a
little of something outside of the ordinary but not too much because if we fail and we do something that's far deviant from the norm we're moving out of this gaussian distribution and we're going to the fat tails and we've been taught that we don't want to be in those fat tails unless we're extremely successful
right but this way if we're wrong we're not too wrong and one of the reasons i think that we we like to keep within this narrow maybe call it one standard deviation band is fear and i'm curious as to your view about how we develop courage in the face of fear and the role of narratives
um and the story we tell ourselves and our employees you're absolutely right and uh and you know i've just written written a post on this or the first the first of a three three-part post on on fear they call it fear rules because fear rules us and there are rules for managing managing fear but it is it does come to
uh to telling ourselves uh stories i mean we we create uh fear or make fear go away depending on what story we tell ourselves um and uh and my observation is that because people understand this and understand the debilitating aspect of fear and that's why i that's why i i argue that the in hollywood the number one box
office star of every era of movies played one character and that is somebody who faced fear and didn't act fearfully charismatic unblinking well-dressed james bond sort of ass bond yes or or or tony stark right yeah like they they're they're the same or or arnold uh schwarzenegger or or humphrey bogart it's sort of the
they all play the same character right which is hahaha you know this is i can wisecrack my way through this and and it's it is it resonates so deeply with people because they say if i if only i could do that in the face of fear i i would be sick successful and instead i i am i am ruled by uh by my fear so yeah i i
i i i think most fear we create ourselves right we produce it ourselves as a as a reaction uh and trying to tell yourself a story of of uh how you can sort of deal with that uh is is important and you know people think of my think of me as having been a successful dean at the rotman school bless him um
but they don't there some things things they they don't they don't know um like well we created a completely different economic model that enabled the school to go from from you know having a budget of 13 million in the last year before i got there to 130 million in uh the last year i was dean we needed a new economic model
because the university of toronto economic models were nuts and so you couldn't plan for the future and i went to to rob pritchard the president uh who i hired me and senator the provost who hired me and and said after about three or four months you hired me to make this a great school we can't
sorry uh we can't with the current model and the current model was every year the provost decides how much revenue you have right it's not not things you can do that build revenue it's like they allocate you then i said i just can't do that i here's what i'm gonna i'm gonna do i'm gonna
you know i'm gonna double the size of the program quadruple tuition quintuple the endowment quintuple executive education and get this much money to spend and we'll have a we can have a great business school but in the current economic model that money won't flow to the to the business school so we can't plan plan for it
uh and i said i'd be happy to be pay you a tax and right now our tax is is about you know two or three million dollars a year to the to of 13 million under this plan uh you can get you can have a 40 million dollar tax um but we need a different system and they both said okay okay okay and let's and and we'll work on that and
uh and i said in the meantime can i spend the way i i was planning to spend and they said yes but this was just verbally and so uh i thought they were going to work this through the governance process maybe in six months or nine months it took four years yeah and in those four years i because
we had to go into massive deficit 14 million dollar accumulated deficit which we then came came out of uh completely the whole plan had paying it back so that we were that we were uh plus but for each of those days nights for for four years i had to go to bed with the recognition that if battle cedra the provost lost faith
uh in in his ability to get this different different system through governance through governing council and on all of those people and said roger is running an unauthorized 14 million dollar deficit my career in canada would have been over i would have been i would have been fired uh i would have been
on the front pages of the globe and mail as having as having kind of illicitly spent 14 million uh dollars and i would have probably had to leave the country and go back to the go back to the the states where i went where i had been living not only that i couldn't tell a soul this because if i told anybody that they
started to act that way it would encourage adult to believe that i believe that he might not actually actually do it so i had to live for four years with the sword of damocles literally i literally went to bed and the sort of damage leads was above my above my my head but i mean i told myself
uh you know a story which is just roger are you doing the right thing or the wrong thing you know is this good for the school good for canada good for university of toronto or not yes did you actually ask for permission and they gave it to you verbally yes um and could you you know
go back to the states go back to your old job and pick the pieces pieces up maybe you could never come back to canada again because you'd be such an embarrassment but but uh how how bad is that and i said yeah it's worth it you know this won't kill me it's worth it but that narrative is what gave you the power
to sort of maintain the course yeah yeah um so so i i but i could have told told myself the story you will be crushed um you're a canadian you're an ontarian uh this is your home you would be you would be embarrassed thoroughly your family would be embarrassed everybody would be uh embarrassed uh and i could have
focused on on that and i would have probably caved uh and gone back to edel and rob and say we gotta work our way out of this uh and uh you know we'll we'll change directions and i'll stop spending and you know i don't know whatever and the rottman school wouldn't be the rottman school it is it is today
well luckily it all worked out right like had it not worked out i'm i'm curious to see if he would have thrown you under the bus or sort of uh i guess only only you would know that in him but uh yes and i gotta say edel who then went on to be uh president of uh university of waterloo is great
man and he didn't like i had i had my faith properly properly placed he followed through and it was hard he got a lot of pushback are you doing a special deal and the thing that makes me happiest is is uh then david naylor when he became c uh president of the university of toronto he applied the rottman system to the
whole university it was a it was a better system for for being able to plan for the for the long uh uh for the long term so so i yeah i wanted to make sure adele it'll stood 100 uh by me coming back to sort of the leaders that you've worked with we talked about common patterns of success are there common patterns of
failure or self-sabotage that you see repeated over and over again and otherwise smart decent people yeah yeah i mean a lot of it has to do with this not being not having a sort of a deterministic enough view so the failure mode i see probably more than anything else is somebody who is what i think of as not
strategic right which is that which is that they they sort of believe that they need to always keep all their options open not make big choices uh and sort of see what see what evolves and and and then just react to to uh to what of what evolves uh that's probably that's probably failure mode number
number one if that's connected to and i don't really like people uh that's a that's a sure thing right that's a that's a certain uh kind of disaster and you know it's the three things i talked about and if they're just not curious uh if somebody comes to them with disconfirming kind of data they want to suppress it
rather than rather than absorb it and mine it for for everything they can they can get interesting enough that tends to you know those two things tend to be linked like it is a big system right which is which is you tend to like people if people are this repository of stuff you can't see and you're constantly
learning and yeah you're very curious then they're good then they're good but if instead you're a threat yeah then you just wish you didn't have these annoying people around who are keep on threatening your your prevailing uh point of uh view and the one you prefer to just keep uh and not be kind of messed with by by
anybody so those two things i think uh end up being linked and they're probably haven't thought about this you you raise a good good question it gets me thinking is probably it is linked to the sort of the non-deterministic two right if you if if your model is sort of impoverished
because you aren't absorbing building in other things the chances are it'll be harder for you to come up with with things that you can be confident in to say you know what i think it is time to invest here go here let's bet on bet on this so they probably all those three things are either deficient together or or they're
together and and kind of self-reinforcing you mentioned strategy what is strategy and what's the difference between a good strategy and a bad strategy well i think about strategy as a set of choices that that enables you to invest in a given place uh to win whether that's geography or business or whatever
so it it's it's that set of set of uh choices and what do i mean by winning i mean in the field of play that you choose you have a better value proposition for the customers in that space than uh than anybody else and you know a good strategy is is uh is one that has a logic that holds up to that that
that when when you put it into into action you do uh uh get a better position where you've chosen to play than than any competitor and a bad strategy is one where you're sort of is it you're chasing multiple things you don't understand your sort of flywheel of success like it can be any of those things it's
one kind of bad strategy is a little bit of everything uh you know we're going to do a little bit of here a little bit of there a little bit of there you know um another kind of crummy strategy would be one where where the economics don't enable you to continue it right you can start on it but it's not a
remunerative enough model for you to be able to continue to invest behind it so it sort of uh withers withers away another is is kind of bad strategy is just trying to do the same as everybody else and assume that you're going to win anyway you know that's that's the that's the great managerial conceit
we can we don't have to do anything unique or different uh and we will and we will have unique success i i love that it's i i often think of this quote from a friend of mine which is if you do the same thing as everybody else you're going to get the same results as everybody else so you have to sort of deviate if you want
to deviate results but you need to create an advantageous divergence you have to not only diverge from what everybody else is doing but you have to be correct and that's extremely difficult and when you have it you need to like go all in and run with it a lot of companies today seem like they have a bit of innovation
envy like they want to be the one to create the iphone or go zero to one and just create new markets like facebook or google and there's billions and billions of dollars being thrown at these problems in r d and hiring and the results don't seem to be super effective do you have any thoughts on why
it gets back to what we talked about earlier shane about science right um charles sanders purse who's one of the great american pregnant philosophers with john dewey and that that uh era and william james pointed out that no new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically
now just think about that for a second no new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically why it's linked to what aristotle said right you can't prove something new and different that hasn't happened yet analytically and most innovation processes in the world of big companies
right insist on proof before doing stuffing right so this whole notion of like fintech and all this disruption by little little technology firms is all kind of self-induced and that comes back to sort of the models that were taught if you want in school and the way we look at the world you come to somebody
in an established business and you say i need to spend you know 20 million dollars to prove this idea and you know if 50 of the time it's not going to work and then so you say no well there's no proof that it's going to work because it doesn't fit these models and then they go and start a startup and
you end up acquiring them for like two billion dollars five years down the road but you're only seeing the successful results and you're not willing to tolerate the failure internally exactly exactly i mean and yeah and and in some sense right the you know the enemy like there's an infinite number of enemy that just keeps
pouring over the over the you know your moat right and a bunch of them drown in the moat and whatever but it only takes it only takes kind of one to get across uh and that's and that's the problem so that if if you have an internal system that makes that sets up that we won't do anything unless there's proof right
then you won't do any of those things and there will be an infinite number of these uh these startups and it's interesting you know james march is one of the greatest i think management uh think thinkers yeah and he he wrote about about the importance of delusion and then okay because he said
uh um the economy is underpinned by delusion in in that we do know that nine out of ten kind of startups expire with 100 of the the resources kind of wasted if anybody thought those were the odds that they personally were facing they wouldn't do it but they everybody is deluded self-deluded into thinking
they're going to be the one not the nine and because of that ten people do try and the economy gets the one success but it's only because it's only because there's massive amounts of delusion and so so i mean it is one of the cool cool things about about the the economy is is all these deluded people uh who think
they're gonna be the one keep trying and sure enough that spits out enough successes to change and transform the economy but i think the big companies sit there with their hands behind the tie behind their back and say we don't oh we don't allow delusional people here we actually actively try to eliminate
them through the hiring process through the promotion process through everything absolutely i call that it's interesting i think of that as the stormtrooper problem and we saw this at the intelligence agencies where i used to work and because post bradley manning and pro edward snowden what they really tightened up was sort
of the hiring process and then to get oh really well to get into the agencies and to get a clearance you sort of like increasingly there's this narrow background you could have right you couldn't have you couldn't have gotten in much trouble you you know you generally went to a great school got
good grades uh you didn't sort of stand out in any you know crazy way um and so that they viewed that as interesting so they viewed this as the way to reduce security risk and and it might in fact be but the problem is you get these people into an organization a large organization then you give them a checklist for
promotions you need to do these 10 things and then you'll get promoted and then all of a sudden they wake up at 30 and they're given a problem that you can't google that there's no procedure for that hasn't existed in the world before and you're told to solve it and the problem isn't any one particular person
it's the collective because now what happens is the collective group of people in the room look at that problem through a very narrow lenses and you're not getting sort of the what i used to call the misfits or the deviants or the the people that aren't necessarily a security risk but might have more of a
checkered pass because they got in trouble or they did something wrong when they were in high school or and once you eliminate those people you can't creatively problem solve and then you have to buy your problems and i think we're witnessing that actually play out with intelligence agencies that is
so fascinating that's fascinating i had no idea but i agree i agree entirely with uh with uh your your hypothesis the the way that i think you can see this correct or like see this at like indicators of this being a correct view if it is correct or maybe that it's wrong but the labor component is going up in intelligence
agencies because you're requiring more and more people to solve a very similarly these are scalable problems right these aren't often one-off problems and then the contracting uh budget i bet you is getting much higher to outsourcing um to the misfits to the people that are solving the problems but those would be
interesting indicators that that is actually playing out yeah yeah no that is that's fascinating and i mean it's just such a good example too of of you know it is a complex adaptive system and and you think you can pull a lever and and just not affect anything else yeah yeah and yeah and somehow somehow everything
else is gonna be exactly exactly what you want no you've gotta you just gotta think these things through now some of them you can't think through and you just have to accept the fact that that different things are gonna happen than we think and then be alert to those but i think you can often you know kind
of think through well often they know what they're doing is probably not going to have the results they want but it that it's it's sort of like doing um what's defendable versus doing what's right and especially in politics you end up doing what's defendable versus what you know
is right um because you're you're never gonna fail if you do what's defendable yeah you don't get fired for buying ibm right it's that yeah that that's uh that's a big universal thing yeah and that's again that comes back to fear right if if you are motivated by fear of being fired then then that's that's
uh gonna happen i mean i mean i remember i remember uh interviewing aj lafley you know the famous ceo of of proctor i interviewed him for my work on integrative thinking and uh and i remember like one of the things that really sort of propelled his his uh career because it was such a big success was
going from i don't know if you remember this going from big fluffy detergent a tide would be in a big box fluffy that turned to compact detergent which he saw happening in in japan and said um we wouldn't want them coming here with that innovation and so so he led he led a a an effort to study whether to introduce it in the
us and he introduced it despite the fact that the data didn't support it uh but the verbatims did the qualitative stuff that uh kind of was supportive enough but he he described the as the spend the spending of 200 he got 250 million dollars to do the first thing he and and i'll always remember him
describing it as a fireable offense so he knew that if this didn't work he he was done because it was if straight up fireable offense it wasn't it wasn't a two to one blind uh blind uh uh winner uh and he wanted to do it anyway and it turned out to have made them just and it just was monumentally uh successful it it just
it actually destroyed unilever's u.s uh position so much that they they exited like it was so monumentally successful that propelled him but he described it whatever it was 20 years later as a fireable offense he would not have objected to being fired uh buddy but he wasn't so overwhelmed by the fear of being
fired that that uh that that would have stopped him from from doing it i love that sort of advantageous divergence right um let's talk a little bit about decision making what's the most valuable thing that you've learned about decision making that's hard to transfer to other people i guess i think it is
patience giving yourself the time to roll ideas around as long as they need to be rolled around and not feel the premature need for closure when i'm making a decision imagining a variety of possibilities and not stopping until i have a good divergent set of them then asking about each one of them what would have to be
true for that to be a good idea and then yeah i see each element of the things that would have to be true how how likely do i think they are true now if they're not true how could i how could i maybe make them true uh you know it's part of the part of the world where things can be other than
they are so that's sort of a all those things tend to slow it down uh it's not as though i want to be a whole lot of process but i because you can do it it doesn't have to have many days elapsed but i think people often have this this real desire for closure fast uh and and i i don't um though often i surprise people like i i
say if i had if i had to make this if i couldn't think anymore uh i would do this and they're like oh my god roger you've jumped to that conclusion i said i said you know sometimes you have to right sometimes if if you know it was it was either decide now or or i shoot you in the head you decide
you you decide but then i'm still open you know tell me tell me what about that is is problematic and let's think about it some more so i guess i guess that's that's it having i i um i've learned i guess i mean this is a very good question because i hadn't thought about this but i would i would say that i've
learned or taught myself a process of thinking that slows me down enough for me to absorb greater variety and greater greater logical pieces i think of little logical subroutines a big decision is is stacking together a bunch of logical little subroutines and and i i have a process for for giving
myself time to play around with those oh i could put this one here and this one there you know and and that helps me come up with with what people often think of of the things i do as as wow how do you ever come up with that creative uh solution roger well i kind of slowed down uh is is i think the answer and
i mean i think i i think i have a decent kind of track record of teaching if anybody wants to learn it i can teach people to do that how do you teach them how would you teach me i would just work with you i i think practices is is absolutely the best that's what i've gone to with the companies that i work with i just say
uh shane what's what's a choice that you think you're facing and you say oh i really need to decide whether we're going to invest in this thing or that thing i think good okay and then i would just i would just work you through through a process the way i would i would do it and then and you would
learn by uh doing now i'd explain to you why why are we doing this why you know you you'd say no roger it's either this or this and i'd say no it's not that's not enough variety i want variety and if you can't come up with variety that's no problem go ask 10 people in the organization and and uh don't
stop until you can come back with at least five six seven uh uh that includes uh that includes uh two but i want another three to uh three to five all right and and i'd explain to you why i'd say you don't have enough raw materials i don't like either of your choices uh uh and the reason you haven't made a choice
now is because neither of them are that good if one of them was awesome you'd have already made the choice you wouldn't be asking me so shane uh we need more raw materials uh so go go get them and then then when you come back i'd teach you how to play with the raw materials to
to make to make a better choice and then hopefully you would the next time without me involved in the room you would have slowed yourself down in a similar similar way not thought those are the only two to go for raw materials to ask these what if what would have to be true type questions i have a friend uh
randall stuttman who gave me vocabulary around how i use approach decisions on it and never had vocabulary around it but he basically said you decide as soon as possible or as late as possible but never in between and i was always known for sort of deciding at the last moment because i wanted to keep all my options open and
if i didn't have to decide like why would i force a decision i can get more input i can get more insight into the problem i can see how the environment's changing and playing out and i think that plays to the patient's answer that you gave which i i think is really an insightful sort of response because
so many people just get stuck in the middle they don't make the decision right away they'll make it uh you know in the middle because they just want to get this sort of damocles over the air to their head or they want to stop thinking about it and it's then when you make these really bad decisions i think
because you you've made a premature decision so you're missing all the input or you're clouding all the input that would come afterwards and you're only doing it to get rid of it you're not doing it because you need to make the decision at all you're just doing it because you don't want to have to think about it again
and there's also ways that you can do in your mind where you just sort of like put it down and suppress it but you're constantly gathering new information about like am i right will this prove me right where where's the disconfirming evidence that you know my hypotheses on this is going to be wrong
and you can see the world through your actions too so it also allows you to make a decision possibly but not communicate it which is you saying i know what i would do if i had to decide right now and then you can see the world through those eyes had you made that decision which allows you feedback as well in
terms of what that looks like and i think that that's a really interesting way to frame it yeah you know i hadn't i hadn't really thought of it that way that's a good good insight in some sense in some sense when you force yourself to say this is what i would do if i had to choose now that's the moral equivalent of
putting a prototype out into the market i hadn't thought of it that way because then then you can and you can say oh this happened that that would have made mine a clever decision that happened oops that wouldn't have been so clever it's like a it's like a a prototype and when you do that all the
information you receive at that point you interpret through you having already made that decision which allows you to see the world in this you can sort of like take a step through the store and say what does this look like yeah yeah no no no that's i mean that's so powerful because otherwise because again
you know people talk about data as if data is sort of this sort of very kind of yeah i don't know what intrinsic thing it's not data is only data uh like it floats straight by your head if if you're not looking for it uh and what i interpret you saying in part is you will actually create data out of nothingness right so
stuff you would not have paid attention to and wouldn't have collected as data you now collect this data because it's uh but because your choice your proto-choice your proto-choice makes that that phenomenon relevant uh data and you collect it and then have the ability to use it that you wouldn't have before because it
would have float right by your ear that's intro that's a very interesting uh thought shane see i've learned something from uh from this i'm glad we're chatting i loved i've learned a lot so i want to finish up with one question i'm experimenting with this question so you you can tell me your thoughts on
it which is when you're 90 what is it you want people to say about you uh he was a voice that we will miss yeah that's plain and simple thank you so much for an amazing conversation roger thank you you're awesome at this i would happily do this anytime my friend we'll do it again sometime i'm sure you