October 2011

About once a month, the partners at High Lantern Group gather a small list of interesting, provocative, and contrarian items that shed light on what makes great strategic positioning and thought leadership. We are happy to share them with you – and hear from you about ideas worth sharing.

Six Ideas That Made Us Think

Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1.  Washington’s Over-Inflated Egos

Indispensable, bipartisan list of Washington blowhards and public nuisances:  The New Republic’s annual list of overrated DC thinkers. The description of omnipresent CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria is dead on:

He is a barometer in a good suit, a creature of establishment consensus, an exemplary spokesman for the always-evolving middle. He was for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it, and now is an active member of the ubiquitous “declining American power” chorus.

2.  Has Technological Progress Stalled?

Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and Facebook angel investor, is down on the future. His long meditation on how progress in technology has slowed in the last few decades is brimming with his own brand of Atlas Shrugged politics. It does, however, contain many memorable nuggets on the disconnect between government and technology:

Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research.

3.  Reading Is Better on Paper

Print is not dead, yet. According to this study, readers are more likely to skim over articles while reading on an iPad than holding a printed page. By examining eye movement patterns, the researchers found that although people spend the same amount of time reading an article on an iPad as they would in a newspaper, the concentration and retention is much higher in print:

A more detailed analysis shows that the eyes linger longer on the paper version…This increased concentration results in a better retention of printed articles. After reading, only 70% of participants recall an article read on an iPad, compared with 90% for paper!

4.  Technology’s Oligopoly

Read Fast Company’s Big Think piece on the future of technology’s Big Four: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The author believes that their obsession over patent protection may be their ruin:

It’s almost as if they’d never studied Microsoft’s decline in relevance. The software giant never resumed its place as an agenda setter after its antitrust trial in the late 1990s. The suit consumed so much time and brainpower that the company fell behind on a decade’s worth of trends. That’s the risk in today’s patent wars: the more time Page spends defending Android, the less effort he puts into making sure Google is actually inventing new stuff.

5.  Why Leadership Depends on Teams

Earlier this month at the Council on Foreign Relations, Stanley McChrystal, former U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, engaged in a very thoughtful conversation with Tom Brokaw about America’s wars.  There is much about Pakistan, Afgahnistan, and U.S. diplomacy – but there are also some shrewd observations about winning hearts and minds and about the “plywood” theory of leadership:

In reality, war, like a lot of anything else, is teams. And it’s not just teams of soldiers. It’s teams of different organizations. To be effective, we had to have the 46 nations of the coalition. We had to have different federal agencies. We had to have the 1,700 nongovernmental organizations that operate in Afghanistan in a rough, shared purpose…When you pull plywood together, it’s really just pieces of wood that, by itself, are worthless. You can break them with your hands. When you glue them together, plywood’s pretty formidable. And when you glue organizations together with leadership–because we’re all made of just normal people—that’s the concept. It’s how do you build teams and glue them together.

6.  Martin Wolf’s Critical Questions About Steve Jobs

Of the thousands of Steve Jobs appreciations, Martin Wolf’s in The Financial Times stands out, largely because of the series of provocative questions he asks and answers about the Apple founder. Here, for example, is how he responds to the question:  Could Steve Jobs have been anything other than American?

Steve Jobs ran towards the future more successfully than any other businessman of my lifetime. It is impossible to create the future if one does not start with the belief that it can be far better than the present. This was what the Florentines believed in the 15th century. It is today a defining characteristic of American civilisation, albeit perhaps a waning one.

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