A fine video on the topic of practical wisdom by Barry Schwartz.  I was particularly taken on his point of view on “practical wisdom.”

“Practical wisdom,” Aristotle told us, “is the combination of moral will and moral skill.” A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives. A wise person knows how to improvise,as Luke did when he re-washed the floor. Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician — using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. You need the time to get to know the people that you’re serving. You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. And you need to be mentored by wise teachers.”

We are all like Goldilocks when it comes to choices.

For most of the things in our lives, we have too many choices and the differences are miniscule.  Walk down any aisle in your favorite supermarket, warehouse club, or electronics store if you need an example.

We hate making choices in situations like these.  There is more information than we can manage in working memory.  We become overwhelmed.  So rather than make a choice, we pick.

Making a choice means we have considered reasons for doing something.  We can discern the distinctions, they are relevant, and they are meaningful.

Picking something means the opposite.  We are not able to discern meaningful, relevant, or interesting distinctions (even if they exist).  So we give up and go with the (red, cheap, tall, short, closest, easiest, etc.) one.  Any reason will do as long as it makes the confusion stop.

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With great care I draw your attention to an article by Lee Siegel called The Zero-Sacrifice Presidency.

Obama tells us that we can have quality, universal health care without increasing the deficit. He tells us that he intends to have the 9/11 detainees given a fair trial in a civilian court but assures us that the trials will end in convictions. He declares that he will wage war in Afghanistan, but pledges to start bringing the troops home in 18 months. And everybody nevertheless takes these contradictory, irreconcilable statements seriously, as they parse, analyze, scrutinize Obama’s every word for some kind of coherent meaning. The president is like the character Chance in the novel and movie Being There, whose every fatuous utterance was celebrated for its profundity.

Some of Obama’s defenders chastise his exasperated listeners for their inability to detect the president’s “complexity.” But a fantasy of universal popularity that panders to every conflicting interest simultaneously is not the same thing as “complexity.” It is complexity if I tell my wife that I have to move to another state where I know I can find work, but that I realize the strain it will put on our marriage, and that I know the effect it will have on our child, and that I am aware of the consequences of such an attempt if I don’t find a job, having spent so much money on moving and establishing myself in a new place. It is not complexity if I tell my wife that I have to move to another state where I know I can find work, but that I will be back next week, and with lots of money.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my caution is based on two points.  The first is that I was and largely still am an Obama supporter (though I fully admit my reasons may not be rational).  The second is that I made a promise to myself that I would stop writing political screeds. So why this? [Read more →]

I’ve been following with great interest the newly invigorated Republican party doubling down on the very themes that seem to have put the collective all in this mess. One theme in particular that seems particularly stunning is the point of view that says government is bad, government involvement in the private sector is worse and the answer is tax cuts. Just to digress on the last point, how do tax cuts for business make sense when they’re all bleeding red ink?

I get the point about excessive involvement by anyone in my affairs, personal or business, but just stir things up, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Canada. This from Fareed Zakaria in a piece called Worthwhile Canadian Initiative . . .

Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers. Canadian banks are typically leveraged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and European banks at a frightening 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse business culture, but it is also a product of old-fashioned rules on banking.

There’s more. This, on the beast that has apparently consumed us, real estate lending . . .

Canada has also been shielded from the worst aspects of this crisis because its housing prices have not fluctuated as wildly as those in the United States. Home prices are down 25 percent in the United States, but only half as much in Canada. Why? Well, the Canadian tax code does not provide the massive incentive for overconsumption that the U.S. code does: interest on your mortgage isn’t deductible up north. In addition, home loans in the United States are “non-recourse,” which basically means that if you go belly up on a bad mortgage, it’s mostly the bank’s problem. In Canada, it’s yours. Ah, but you’ve heard American politicians wax eloquent on the need for these expensive programs—interest deductibility alone costs the federal government $100 billion a year—because they allow the average Joe to fulfill the American Dream of owning a home. Sixty-eight percent of Americans own their own homes. And the rate of Canadian homeownership? It’s 68.4 percent.

Well drats, that’s inconvenient. Two completely different public policies, one socialist, that subsidizes housing and the other that let’s people make housing choices on their own merits like a proper marketplace, both producing the same levels of home ownership. Oops. Except in this case, the socialists are us.

And then there’s that soggy truth that by keeping a tight rein on the the admittedly much smaller economy, the Canadian government sits now on a surplus, without a single bank upside down, delivering better health care outcomes, at lower cost. But none of that could possibly apply here.

Matt Taylor is a legend in big-time problem solving.  I love this list of axioms . . .

axiom: a self-evident or universally recognized truth; maxim. An undemonstrated proposition concerning an undefined set of elements, properties, functions, and relationships; postulate (from the Greek, “that which is thought fitting or worthy”) –The American Heritage Dictionary

1. The future is rational only in hindsight.

2. You can’t get THERE from HERE but you can get HERE from THERE.

3. Discovering you don’t know something is the first step to knowing it.

4. Everything someone tells you is true: they are reporting their experience of reality.

5. To argue with someone else’s experience is a waste of time.

6. To add someone else’s experience to your experience–to create a new experience–is possibly valuable.

7. You understand the instructions only after you have assembled the red wagon.

8. Everyone in this room has the answer. The purpose of this intense experience is to stimulate one, several, or all of us to extract and remember what we already know.

9. Creativity is the elimination of options.

10. If you can’t have fun with the problem, you will never solve it.

11. The only valid test of an idea, concept or theory is what it enables you to do.

12. In every adverse condition there are hundreds of possible solutions.

13. You fail until you succeed.

14. Nothing fails like success.

Tags: MattTaylor, MG Taylor, ValueWeb, Axioms

I’m with Nicholas Kristof.  Thank goodness the long cold winter of willful stupidity is thawing. Referring to the ascendancy of Barrak Obama . . .

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.

So excuse me if I gag on this:  Uber-economist Greg Mankiw, writing in today’s NYT, advises Prez elect Obama to . . .

LISTEN TO THE ECONOMISTS During the campaign, Senator Barack Obama assembled an impressive team of economic advisers from the nation’s top universities, including Austan D. Goolsbee of the University of Chicago and David Cutler and Jeffrey Liebman of Harvard. The campaign’s director of economic policy, Jason Furman, is a smart, sensible and well-trained policy economist. I know: he is a former student of mine.

It would be a good idea to pay close attention to what they have to say.

Leaving aside that Mankiw is an economist and the crew he cites are pals, the implication that the children should go back to the little table so that the propeller heads can set things right is as wrongheaded as it is offensive.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of intellect, education, and all around smarts.  But let’s be clear on three points . . .

1. Propeller heads where the arms merchants of the mess we’re in right now. 
2. Economists aren’t a singular breed.  Find one who thinks one thing and I’ll show you another who thinks the opposite.
3. Economists as a group have been miserable failures at predicting nearly everything (with some exceptions). In the history of the dismal profession, you can count on no hands the number who have been able to call the tops or bottoms of markets with any more accuracy than a third grader.

I realize this sounds like a knee-jerk reaction because it is. Smart people are as capable, often more so, as the rest of us of making really bad decisions.  Or to put it another way, high IQ and multiple degrees isn’t necessarily a surefire defense against the litany of thinking traps that cause smart people to make bad decisions.  I’m sure I’m sure I’m projecting here, but I think a more sensible recommendation would sound like this . . .

1. Spend as much time as possible exploring the problem you’re trying to solve.  Solving the wrong problem really well gets us nowhere.  
2. To do that, make sure you consult with people who don’t agree with you.  Seek divergent and disconfirming points of view.
3. Pull decision making into the open.  The level of opaqueness these past years has been crippling.  Set up lots of war rooms with big visual maps of the problem as you currently understand it.  Keep looking at it, as long as you can.  You’ll be surprised at the insights serendipity will offer you.
4. If you really want to change things, insist on more dialog and less advocacy.  We’ve seen enough staking out positions to last us seven lifetimes.  
5. Generate a wide range of alternatives.  No party has a lock on good ideas.  Certainly no economist does.  Consider really weird ideas. Trailing after something that seems initially absurd often leads to unexpected insights.
6. You’re going to have to make trade-offs.  Make your decision criteria absolutely clear.  Insist on intellectually honest debate and advocacy. Once you make a decision, make it clear to us why you made the trade-offs you made.  Give us visibility into your process.
7. Be honest about uncertainty.  The cool you project gives you plenty of rhetorical room to remind us that nothing is certain. There will be outcomes we don’t expect or even want.  That’s just how these things work.  But don’t shrink behind the kind of bullheaded bluster that was the trademark of the last guy (and don’t descend into the weird self-doubts of the Carter years).

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.

The subject of narcissism is at first an unlikely candidate for a blog about decision making. Or maybe not. A lengthy piece in the Washington Post opines that, wait for it, we westerners have descended to new depths of self-centeredness. Why? Not the least reason is that we have been conditioned for more, more, more, and it’s showing.

Entitlement is something that’s part of human narcissism. It’s an ego thing that transcends generations. When something goes wrong for others, it’s their fault. When something goes wrong for us, it’s not ours; it’s the fault of external forces. We project blame.

This projection often antagonizes a situation. Feeling entitled to something you aren’t getting leads to frustration, which leads to bratty behavior and confrontation. Nearly 80 percent of Americans say rudeness — particularly behind the wheel, on cellphones and in customer service — should be regarded as a serious national problem, according to a study by the opinion research firm Public Agenda.

An airport is a petri dish for rude behavior: a bunch of people in close quarters under time constraints. Stress and impatience lay down the welcome mat for brattiness.

"You have people screaming at customer representatives at airports because it’s snowing out — as if they’re entitled to have a sunny day," says professor W. Keith Campbell, who specializes in the study of narcissism at the University of Georgia. "That’s where it gets out of hand. With entitlement, the issue is, yeah, there are certain times where we’re entitled and other times we’re not. The problem is when we have that meter wrong."

It’s unreasonable to spend an hour on hold, in other words, but there are situations when basic entitlement turns into self-infatuation and blatant disrespect for others. All of this is tied to the feeling of not being satisfied, of thinking that some force is blocking the way to a goal we think we deserve.

"The question is, ‘What the heck is enough?’ " says writer and psychologist Carl Pickhardt, who specializes in parenting and child development in his private practice in Austin. "I see that all the time. A couple comes in for marriage counseling, and they ask me, ‘Are we happy enough?’ Somebody’s at a job they like, but are they successful enough? People have to make that choice. We are a dissatisfaction market society. Advertising constantly creates the notion that whatever we have is not enough. We can declare independence of that."

But how? It’s about realigning our expectations and then squelching the nagging voice in our minds that propels our discontent. Pennsylvania psychologist Pauline Wallin calls this voice our "inner brat," which is an evil twin to our "inner child." After years of counseling clients who routinely made mountains out of molehills, Wallin dived into the concept, named it and produced the book "Taming Your Inner Brat: A Guide for Transforming Self-Defeating Behavior."

Taming Your Inner Brat

Pauline, Ph.D. Wallin. Wildcat Canyon Press 2004, Paperback, 264 pages, $10.17

This sense of it’s never enough is the ego getting in the way of what might otherwise pass for a rational decision process. Public Exhibit A from just this week is the news, shocking and depressing, that the righter-of-wrongs himself, Elliot Spitzer, has apparently been caught on a Federal Wiretap arranging to meet a prostitute.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has been caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel last month, according to a person briefed on the federal investigation.

An affidavit in the federal investigation into a prostitution ring said that a wiretap recording captured a man identified as Client 9 on a telephone call confirming plans to have a woman travel from New York to Washington, where he had reserved a hotel room. The person briefed on the case identified Mr. Spitzer as Client 9.

Even if you can’t stand the idea of motorcycles, you should spend a few minutes playing around with the Vincent Motors Configurator . . .

If you’re interested in motorcycles, perhaps you should avoid it. This thoroughly engaging doodad allows you to wile away the hours not only dreaming about the brand-new throwback Vincent you can’t afford, but to dream about it in specific, customized-for-you detail. Brilliant.

People have two relationships with choices. One is that they are overwhelmed by the choices they perceive they face. Sometimes that’s because there are too many. Sometimes that’s because of the perceived consequences (in which case the problem isn’t with the choices, it’s with the outcomes you associate with the choices).

More often, we have too few choices, or at least two few interesting choices. There are lots of reasons for that, most of which have to do with being stuck in a rut . . . a rut of defining the problem in the same old ways or looking in the same old places for solutions.

The Vincent Motors Configurator is brilliant on the last point. It gives you lots of ideas. And because the company wants to sell you a bike, it gives you lots of ideas about how to think about and dream about their bike.

It’s brilliant for another reason as well (there, I’ve used that adjective thrice now). It engages the user in a branded transaction. That means it has done the following . . .

Involves the customer

Engages information for trust. With every mouse click, you’re trusting the brand more and giving the company more information.

Adapts the experience based on the interchange.

Delivers the essence of the brand.

I have a paper on the Branded Customer Experience. Email me if you’re interested.

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Tags: VincentMotors, Configurator, midlife rider, motorcycles, lust