Dust off the thinking cap

It’s been a long time since I attended an event that was both uplifting and demoralizing at the same time. On the 8th February I attended an event hosted by EMC on the subject of Big Data. Credit to EMC, they organized some wonderful, thought provoking speakers and kept the naked product sells to a minimum. The speakers included two TED fellows (www.ted.com), one of which was a professor of mathematics at Oxford University, and the other was another charismatic, uber smart guy who, now that he has charted the different phases of war such that he can successfully predict military outcomes, was essentially in the process of starting up and running a privately owned equivalent of the CIA, (there were also another 2-3 geniuses on show that day as well). The quality of the presentations and the ideas contained therein was fantastic – to be intellectually bombarded and challenged for a whole day was uplifting. The demoralizing part was the realization that this day was indeed exceptional, and that unfortunately the vast majority of my working life (and no doubt that of many other people), is all about reducing all manner of semi-complex and interrelated events to such a degree that all that life becomes is the efficient execution a very long list of simple tasks which in themselves are rarely stimulating or very meaningful.

The whole power and importance of thought and ideas was brought home to me in one conversation during the day with the CIO of a major payments company. He’s a Geordie from Gretna Road (the same street as where I went to school), so he tends to have pretty straight forward views… he said to me, “Aidan, the logistics today are so bad (no air conditioning and insufficient (uncomfortable plastic) chairs), that if this had been organized by one of my team, then I would be ripping them a new ar*shole tomorrow. The only reason I am still here is because the content and quality of thinking on show is excellent. This has been one of the most useful days I have had in a long time.” I don’t think I’ll ever get to the stage where I’ll say to my teams that the style of a deliverable isn’t important so long as the content is there, but the day really did underline for me the value of good quality thinking and how I don’t do enough of it as we all chase the next set of quarterly numbers.