The Art of Delay: How Waiting Can Improve Decision-Making

1. 1B1/2

2. WAIT!

3. “The central element of good decision-making is a person’s ability to manage delay.” —Frank Partnoy, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay

4. THE SIN OF “SEND”

5. CONRADHILTON, at a gala celebrating his career, was called to the podium and asked,“What were the most important lessons you learned in your long and distinguished career?”His answer …

6. “Remember to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub.”

7. “EXECUTION ISSTRATEGY.”—Fred Malek

8. LONG Tom Peters’ EXCELLENCE! HOW DESIGN LIVE CHICAGO/05 May 2015 (presentation slides at tompeters.com; also see our fully annotated 23-part Master Compendium at excellencenow.com)

9. Enterprise* (*at its best):An emotional, vital, innovative, joyful, creative, entrepreneurial endeavor that elicits maximum concerted human potential in the wholehearted pursuit of EXCELLENCE in service of others.****Employees, Customers, Suppliers, Communities, Owners, Temporary partners

10. “It may sound radical, unconventional, and bordering on being a crazy business idea. However— as ridiculous as it sounds—joy is the core belief of our workplace. Joy is the reason my company, Menlo Innovations, a customer software design and development firm in Ann Arbor, exists. It defines what we do and how we do it. It is the single shared belief of our entire team.” —Richard Sheridan, Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love

11. Our MissionTO DEVELOP AND MANAGE TALENT;TO APPLY THAT TALENT,THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, FOR THE BENEFIT OF CLIENTS;TO DO SO IN PARTNERSHIP; TO DO SO WITH PROFIT.WPP

12. “The role of the Director is to create a space where the actors and actresses canbecome more than they’ve ever been before, more than they’ve dreamed of being.” —Robert Altman, Oscar acceptance speech

13. #3: Provide a pride- worthy job.* #2: Help people be successful at their current job.** #1: Help people grow/ prepare for an uncertain future.*** *“Provide a secure job.”—NOT POSSIBLE IN 2015. **Success is NOT enough, circa 2015. ***Society—and profitability—demands this. (Or should!)

14. “Management” as conventionally perceived is a dreary/ misleading/constrained word. E.g., mgt/standard usage = Shouting orders in the slave galley. Consider, please, a more encompassing/more accurate definition: “‘Management’ is the arrangement and animation of human affairs in pursuit of desired outcomes.” Management is not about Theory X vs. Theory Y/“top down” vs. “bottom up.” Management is about the essence of human behavior, how we fundamentally arrange our collective efforts in order to survive, adapt—and, one hopes, thrive. (E.g., candidate for #1 management document: Constitution of the United States of America—228 years of Excellence.)

15. Context: 1,000,000 Robots and the Exponential Function

16. “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” —Albert A. Bartlett

17. China/Foxconn: 1,000,000robots/next 3 years Source: Race AGAINST the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

18. “Since 1996, manufacturing employment in China itself has actuallyfallen by an estimated25 percent. That’s over30,000,000fewerChinese workers in that sector, even while output soared by 70 percent.It’s not that American workers are being replaced by Chinese workers. It’s that both American and Chinese workers are being made more efficient [replaced] by automation.” —Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

19. “Human level capability has not turned out to be a special stopping point from an engineering perspective. ….” —Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, Professor of Robotics, Carnegie Mellon, Robot Futures “The intellectual talents of highly trained professionals are no more protected from automation than is the driver’s left turn.”—Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

20. “Software is eating the world.” —Marc Andreessen

21. Persado(vs. copywriter): emotion words, product characteristics, “call to action,” position of text, images Up To $250 To Spend On All Ships In All Destinations. 2 Days Left (1.3%) vs. No kidding! You Qualify to Experience An Incredible Vacation With Us :-) (4.1)“A creative person is good but random. We’ve taken the randomness out by building an ontology of language” —Lawrence Whittle, head of sales Source: Wall Street Journal/ 0825.14/ “It’s Finally Time to Take AI Seriously”

22. “In his eloquent 2009 book, The Thinking Hand, the distinguished Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa argues that the growing reliance on computers is making it harder for designers to imagine the human qualities of their buildings—to inhabit their works in progress in the way that people will ultimately inhabit the finished structures.” “Calculative power grows. Sensory engagement fades.” Source: Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

23. “CAD software has gone from a tool for turning designs into plans to a tool for producing the designs themselves.The increasingly popular technique of parametric design, which uses algorithms to establish formal relationships among different design elements, puts the computer’s calculative power at the center of the creative process. In the most aggressive application of the technique, a building’s form can be generated automatically by a set of algorithms rather than composed manually by the designer’s hand.… The transition from sketchpad to screen entails, many architects believe, a loss of creativity, of adventurousness. A designer working at a computer has a tendency to lock in, visually and cognitively, on a design at an early stage. He bypasses much of the reflective and exploratory playfulness that springs from the tentativeness and ambiguity of sketching. Researchers term this phenomenon ‘premature fixation.’ ” —Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

24. The New Logic: Scale w/o EmploymentKodak: 1988/145,000 employees; 2012/bankruptInstagram: 30,000,000 customers/13 employees(WhatsApp: 450,000,000 customers/ 55 employees/Valued @ $19,000,000,000)Source: Robert Reich’s Blog/0316.15

25. AI/Be Careful of What You Wish For Hawking Gates* Musk Etc. *“I don’t understand why people are NOT concerned.”

26. 1/49:WTTMSW

27. WHOEVER TRIES THE MOST STUFF WINS

28. “We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version#5.By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10.It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how toplan—for months.” —Bloomberg by Bloomberg

29. Culture of Prototyping“Effective prototyping may be THEMOST VALUABLECORE COMPETENCE an innovative organization can hope to have.”—Michael Schrage

30. “You can’t be a serious innovator unless and until you are ready, willing and able to seriously play.‘Serious play’is not an oxymoron; it is the essence of innovation.”—Michael Schrage,Serious Play

31. “FAIL. FORWARD. FAST.”High Tech CEO, Pennsylvania“FAIL FASTER. SUCCEED SOONER.”—David Kelley/IDEO“MOVE FAST. BREAK THINGS.”—Facebook

32. “In business, youREWARDpeople for taking RISKS.WHEN IT DOESN’T WORK OUT YOU PROMOTE THEM—BECAUSE THEY WERE WILLING TO TRY NEW THINGS. If people tell me they skied all day and never fell down, I tell them to try a different mountain.”—Michael Bloomberg

33. “If things seem under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” —Mario Andretti, race driver “I’m not comfortable unless I’m uncomfortable.” —Jay Chiat “If it works, it’s obsolete.” —Marshall McLuhan

34. WTTMSASTMSUTFW

35. WHOEVER TRIES THE MOST STUFF AND SCREWS THE MOST STUFF UP THE FASTEST WINS

36. LBTs*** *Little BIG Things **A(nother) variation on WTTMSW

37. Bag sizes = New markets: $B Source: PepsiCo

38. Big carts = 1.5X Source: Walmart

39. Las Vegas Casino/2X:“When Friedmanslightly curvedthe right angle of an entrance corridor to one property, he was ‘amazed at the magnitude of change in pedestrian behavior’—the percentage who entered increased fromone-thirdto nearlytwo-thirds.” —Natasha Dow Schull, Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

40. We Are What We Eat.We Are Who We Hang Out With.Manage It.

41. Diversity: “IT IS HARDLY POSSIBLE TO OVERRATE THE VALUE OF PLACING HUMAN BEINGS IN CONTACT WITH PERSONS DIS-SIMILAR TO THEMSELVES, AND WITH MODES OF THOUGHT AND ACTION UNLIKE THOSE WITH WHICH THEY ARE FAMILIAR. SUCH COMMUNICATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN, AND IS PECULIARLY IN THE PRESENT AGE, ONE OF THE PRIMARY SOURCES OF PROGRESS.”—John Stuart Mill

42. “You will become like the five people you associate with the most—this can be either a blessing or a curse.”—Billy Cox

43. The “We are what we eat”/ “We are who we hang out with” Axiom:At its core, every (!!!) relationship-partnership decision (employee, vendor, customer, etc., etc.) is a strategicdecision about:“Innovate, ‘Yes’ or‘No’ ”

44. “Who’s the most interesting person you’ve met in the last 90 days? How do I get in touch with them?”—Fred Smith

45. WE ARE THE COMPANY WE KEEP! MANAGE IT!

46. Social Business/ Customer Control/ Big Data

47. “What used to be ‘wordofmouth’ is now ‘wordofmouse.’You are either creating brand ambassadors or brand terrorists doing brand assassination.” —John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution: Overthrow Conventional Business, Inspire Employees, and Change the World

48. Welcome to the Age of Social Media:“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.Also, the Internet and technology have made customers more demanding, and they expect information, answers, products, responses, and resolutions sooner than ASAP.”—John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution

49. Welcome to the Age of Social Media:“The customer is in complete control of communication.” —John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution: Overthrow Conventional Business, Inspire Employees, and Change the World

50. “I would rather engage in a Twitter conversation with a single customer than see our company attempt to attract the attention of millions in a coveted Super Bowl commercial.Why? Because having people discuss your brand directly with you, actually connecting one-to-one, is far more valuable—not to mention far cheaper! … “Consumers want to discuss what they like, the companies they support, and the organizations and leaders they resent. They want a community. They want to be heard. … “[I]f we engage employees, customers, and prospective customers in meaningful dialogue about their lives, challenges, interests, and concerns, we can build a community of trust, loyalty, and—possibly over time—help them become advocates and champions for the brand.” —Peter Aceto, CEO, Tangerine (from the foreword to A World Gone Social: How Companies Must Adapt to Survive, by Ted Coine & Mark Babbit)