ben damiano 7/23/23 ben damiano 7/23/23

Admiration: Yuval Noah Harari

A great piece of advice has been “find something or someone to admire”.

When we spend time with people or things or places, we admire we learn and grow.

We usually are inspired, our goals enhanced, our benchmarks raised though we may also feel envy and diminished in comparison.

In a life of limited time, we can spend our hours being exposed to and learning from those we admire, or the things we admire whether they be a book or painting or a place or we can spend time enraged, complaining, while surrounding ourselves with those less accomplished so we feel better in comparison.

Most of us do both but when we feel ourselves in a downward spiral maybe we should say to ourselves “let us spend time with something or somebody we admire!”

Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, author and philosopher who is an extra-ordinary thinking and feeling filled human being who tells stories while warning us about stories, who explains technology while being suspicious about technology and a person who will change the way you perceive and understand things.

He is one of many people and things I admire, and this is the first of a series of posts that will focus on these individuals or things.

Here is Yuval’s website which is teeming with goodies: https://www.ynharari.com/

Yuval’s three books’ Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st century are each absolutely incredible and are worth reading and re-reading.

Long before data was cool Yuval pointed out that there was a new religious order called “dataism” which he described eight years ago in the Financial Times like this:

”For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.

Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all. Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimized by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimized by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes the authority of algorithms and Big Data.

This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.”

Yuval has been studying AI for 8 years and has some very interesting perspectives including that AI is the first human tool created that can make decisions and is capable of creating ideas!

The Atomic Bomb could not decide to launch itself or a piano to will itself to create a Beethoven sonata but AI can.

To illustrate his thinking have listed below 10 perspectives shared by Yuval in a recent conversation with Lex Fridman that is nearly three hours long and is worth every minute of your time. You can listen to it as a podcast or watch it on You Tube. Both embedded below:

The Twilight of Homo-Sapiens: In less than one hundred years Homo-Sapiens may not exist for a couple of different reasons. One possible path is that we destroy ourselves due to nuclear war or climate change or some other calamity. The second is we harness AI and Biotech in ways that give us so much power that we re-program our minds and bodies and create a new generation of us as different from homo-sapiens as homo-sapiens are from Neanderthals.
Intelligence and Consciousness are very different: Machines can be intelligent but they are not yet conscious and cannot feel. Life is basically feeling and reacting to sensory experiences and at its core is suffering.
Stories Rule: From religion to economics, humans have thrived due to our ability to create, believe in and distribute stories. Look under most power structures and you will see a scaffolding of stories. We fight over stories. There are human stories like the US Constitution that can be changed and there are God Stories like those in religion which are infallible and cannot be modified.
AI will feel very human and create intimate feelings because it focusses on us, listens to us and knows what stories will resonate with each of us: Algorithms already have hijacked our attentions and modern AI is learning our culture by imbibing all our stories and art. Today in a world where so many people are lonely Chat GPT resonates because it listens to us, answers us, and feels more empathetic than another person. Increasingly the machine understands us better than we understand ourselves.
Without conversations and learning and checks and balances democracy will not exist: Once upon a time politicians in Congress would debate each other and be open to change their minds. This is no longer true. In Israel, the Prime-Minister is trying to remove the checks and balances of their Supreme Court, and this has divided the nation. The world is constantly changing and requires lots of people and perspectives. Truth is complex. Growth does not happen by telling simple stories, closed minds and hating all those who oppose a point of view. Insularity and Messiah complexes lead to disasters such as Putin living in his own mind building a reality free unhinged story about Ukraine.
How Liberals Differ from other “isms”: Liberals answer “yes” to the following three questions of whether a) individuals should choose their government, b) select their work and c) find their mates. Conservatives are liberal regardless of their economic and market beliefs. Fascists and nationalists and communists are different in that they believe a leader or national interest, or a certain class matters more than individuals. Aspects of life such as human rights, or beauty or truth matter little.
Why other “isms’ are popular: Fascists and nationalists endure because they blame other people for a world which many feel is spinning out of control and where we feel left behind. These simple stories never find any fault with those who follow the ideology but blame a cabal of “they” and “them”. They do not traffic in truth because truth is complicated and painful and very few people want to deal with reality.
The idea of powerful cabals who operate in secret is nonsense but believed all the time for the issues facing people: Yes, there are small groups who might have massive power like President Xi of China and his Standing committee, but they are not secret. You cannot be all powerful if nobody knows about you. As importantly you can be very powerful, but the world behaves in ways nobody can control. Everything that the US tried to do in Iraq ended up doing the exact opposite. It gave birth to Isis. Strengthened Iran. Massively hurt the US in lives lost, treasure expanded, and soft power diminished. There is no “they” who are so powerful and secret, but we are all susceptible to stories that pin our and society’s troubles on others.
Feminism is probably the most successful revolution in history: Across eons regardless of geography or time with rare exceptions patriarchy ruled and women were second class citizens with few rights. Without firing a shot or breaking an egg a revolution, which is still underway around the world called Feminism is spreading and it is the one that has inspired everything from Gay rights to more.
Reinvention is the only strategy: Nobody can predict the future and it is changing fast. Computer coding may be done by AI soon and many programming jobs which were seen as jobs of the future may disappear. Translation in real time by your phone and other technologies is already replacing the need for translators and learning languages. Industries will rise and fall, and change will accelerate. The only way forward is to be flexible, upgrade one’s mind and skills and continuously reinvent. It is easy to become deluded and make up stories that insulate us from changing but life is change. Adaptation requires courage, an optimistic mindset, help from others and a sense of compassion.

ben damiano 7/16/23 ben damiano 7/16/23

5 Keys to Ensure Professional Relevance.

Professionals across the world, across industries and across all levels (but particularly middle to senior executive levels) are grappling with the issue of relevance.

1) Are our businesses and business models relevant?

2) Are our organizational designs, incentive plans, and talent relevant?

3) Are our partners, suppliers, and the way we tap into external resources relevant?

4) Are our positions and roles relevant?

5) Are WE still relevant?

While we may give voice to the first three there is no doubt we are also concerned about our own roles and our own capabilities.

This hold true whether we work in a company of a hundred thousand or are self-employed.

Business Models

The past decade has made clear to every business and individual that the biggest threats and opportunities to any business comes from outside our category or competitive set.

The moment one benchmarks only against current competitors or historical performance and cost data one has begun a slide into irrelevance.

Dollar Shave club came for Gillette.

Google came for the newspapers and classified advertising.

Tesla and Uber came for the auto industry.

Netflix and Spotify and Substack came for the content industry.

Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs is coming for Anthem, United Health and other PBMs.

None of these were spotted or taken seriously till they did significant damage to the leaders.

Completely new ways of marketing in a world of empowered purpose driven people, innovative experience and data driven storytelling is challenging every marketer and agency and media company.

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls and what the era of the Third Connected Age of AI, Block Chain, AR/VR and 5G ( read here about what real 5G is already changing experiences and expectations when it is deployed in private networks) are coming for.

They are coming for all of us, but they are also coming to help us re-invent and turbo-charge ourselves, our companies, our growth, and our future.

We are in Re-Inventing Times!

To Re-invent we should consider the blank sheet of paper exercise:

a) Identify a challenge or opportunity.

b) Assume we have every asset we currently have.

c) Do not constrain our solution except that we need to keep within the law, what is technologically possible today and some goal to break-even or show results in x months.

Every team that does this exercise will come up with amazing ideas to address challenges or opportunities and will realize that most constraints are self-imposed. If we do not do what we have imagined we can to address our challenges and seize our opportunities to re-invent someone else will and they will clean our clocks

Organizational Structure

The future does not fit in the containers of the past.

Most companies’ organizations and incentive systems have been optimized for their past or existing business rather than the world we are moving into.

If we want people to work together but we measure how our individual units do, we will not gain collaboration.

If we want people to think multi-platform and multi-media but we promote and incentivize magazine page sales, or radio or tv inventory we will fail to transform.

If we try to manage tomorrow and today with the same teams, we will have a diluted today and a non-competitive entry into tomorrow.

If we delude ourselves in thinking scale, marketing spending, brand and access to resources create a moat we will find that what we have done is build walls and laid the seeds of self-defeat in a world where data, eco-systems, ideas, talent, and access to modern marketplaces are the new scaling drivers.

In addition today we also have to design organizations that incorporate in-person and remote teams and grapple with how to combine and integrate and set expectations.

And if we blame Wall Street, “Management” or some other factor no customer or client will really care.

It is just fear and bad leadership.

Companies and management that thrive bend structures and processes to adapt to change.

Change and marketplaces do not bend to fit our yesterday’s shapes and business models.

At minimum consider a model of “schizophrenia”. Develop a team to optimize for tomorrow with its own specific goals and incentives while focusing the rest of the organization to maximize today with their own goals and incentives. Both teams report to the same management and are aware of each other’s goals and can swap talent and resources as necessary but need to focus on their goals.

Partnering Ecosystem

No individual is an island and no company in a connected world can prosper without great connections to other individuals or companies whether they be suppliers, partners, sources of talent, technology, and other platforms.

In a world of Amazon Web Services, Azure, Shopify, Open Ai, Upwork which are bring new sources of solutions, talent, and scale while at the same time every service provider is upgrading themselves to remain competitive, all of us need to ensure that we have the best people, the best processes, and the best value as we partner with the marketplace.

All smart managers are asking if we are investing enough in upgrading and resourcing talent. (If we work for ourselves are we investing enough in ourselves? ) Are we ensuring tight co-ordination with our partners and suppliers? Are our external resources constantly iterating and improving to help give ourselves and our companies an edge?

Management Relevance

Today managers are buffeted from every direction.

There is a “de-layering” mania underway as companies try to find cost savings and increase agility to cope with transformational times.

This is most acute in technology companies where between twenty and twenty five percent of employees have been let go with a particular emphasis on mid-level management and anyone who is not a revenue contributor or a maker, builder, and creator.

At the same time there is a deepening generational mindset divide with many Gen-Z youth holding senior management in low regard wondering what they do and contribute besides allocating, monitoring, and delegating while senior management looks askance at middle and lower management who are refusing to work “hard-core” painting them as crybabies and softies who need a kick in the pants and a dose of reality.

The market meanwhile wonders whether many legendary CEO’s have lost the plot or are just not fit for the times. Bob Iger of Disney in his return seems overwhelmed and tonally off, David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery seems to be experimenting and destroying brand value at CNN and minimizing the best brand in content HBO by Maxing it and managing a multibillion-dollar firm by trial and error the way a start-up CEO might. Howard Schultz in his final months as CEO seemed to come off as a curmudgeon talking about the good old days who appeared to be anti-labor and off putting to a new generation with new issues who are living in current times.

These three legends as well as other senior management are far more aware of reality and have shape shifted before and continue to shape shift. Howard Schultz course corrected and then made an inspirational choice for a successor. Bob Iger faced the facts including the possibility that the cradle he forged his career in which was ABC may no longer be fit for purpose.

Every individual and manager can continue to be successful in a transforming world. The issue is how to see, think and feel differently and then execute, iterate, and improve to remain relevant.

Provide personalized guidance and nuances versus mandates. Be a coach versus a boss. Communicate clearly and be transparent versus thinking that information and data is power. And be open to receiving and giving feedback including recognizing the turd on the table.

Personal Relevance

The scale and rate of technological, demographic, mindset and global change (The Four Shifts) means the half-life of knowledge and skills are growing shorter and shorter.

This places a premium on having to learn new skills while simultaneously unlearning skills.

Take any senior or middle manager for drinks and sooner or later you will discover we are all struggling with how we can add value to a world which seems to be so different and alien.

The competitors are different, the category dynamics are changing, the talent landscape and the workspace seem to be shape shifting in ways we do not recognize.

At the same time the workload is increasing, the expectations rising and change which sucks is coming so fast that we a) cannot hope to wait it out till we retire, b) have the time to manage our today while preparing for our tomorrow c) fake it with buzz word bingo (AI! Data Lake! Personalization! Platform Strategy! Disruption!) or playing for time by launching task forces or hiring consultants to do landscape overviews, competitive benchmarking, and scenario planning which everyone else can see and we know ourselves is nothing but doing the 3D dance of delaying, dawdling and dithering.

Companies do not grow or remain relevant unless managers grow and remain relevant. Every individual is a manager in that they manage themselves.

We will all spend the rest of our lives in the future which begins as early as tomorrow, so we must find our time today to prepare for tomorrow or there will not be a tomorrow.

The future is bright for all of us in what may be the most exciting times.

All we must do is upgrade ourselves to continue to remain relevant.

Ai-Volution of Culture

Clearly remaining relevant will include staying on top of Ai.

One of the Boards I serve on is a company called Quilt. Ai and they are holding an incredible event at The Times Center, New York on September 6, 2023, where they will bring together marketers, storytellers, builders, and technologists to understand the fundamentals of AI, discuss the integration of it into their business, and how to use it for good.

Quilt have provided me with access to a limited number of FREE tickets for people who might want to attend. Speakers will include the Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Financial Times, an Oscar nominated director, the head of a major museum, Fashion leaders, pioneering CMO’s and technologists. Everybody will get lots of free books, content, and software subscriptions. You can read about the event and sign up by clicking here and get in for free with my code: rishadxquilt ( limited number of free passes so do sign up if you can be there).

It will also be streamed globally.

Event Link: https://www.quilt.ai/september-event

My code: rishadxquilt

ben damiano 7/9/23 ben damiano 7/9/23

Every Second Counts.

What is your purpose?

Is it too late to re-invent yourself?

What happens when you come to a fork in the road?

How do you motivate a team?

What does it mean to care and to have high personal standards?

A perspective on all these topics is shared in 30 minutes of some of the finest television you will ever see. It is the 7th episode of the Second Season of The Bear. (Link to see it free in North America or with a VPN at the end of the post.)

What is amazing about these 30 minutes is that you can watch it without knowing anything about any of the previous episodes or even the premise of the show except that the character Ritchie who is featured in this episode is at loose ends, estranged from his wife, trying to find his purpose at work and worried he has run out of time. His cousin who is starting a new restaurant sends him to train at three star restaurant.

I believe every CEO or team leader should screen this episode for their teams because it is about all the things that are key to successful companies and teams but delivered in a way that is amazingly impactful.

And it is also about life, the passing of time, second chances and the realization that what makes moments special is that many things every day will never happen again and there is the extra-ordinary in the ordinary day.

The episode reminds us that for great work and great teams and a great life one needs:

1. High Standards

The importance of craft, caring and operating at the highest level every day.

How sweating the details and repeated practice is key to great craftsmanship.

Why the best teams perform every day as if they are in the Super Bowl.

2. Respect

The importance of respecting others and having self respect.

“I just need you to respect me. I need you to respect the staff. I need you to respect the diners. And I need you to respect yourself.”

3. Leadership and Communication

The great Duke basketball Coach K’s talk on leadership and teams is integrated into the story where he says:

“Be on a team. Surround yourself with great people. Learn how to Listen. Converse. Don’t make excuses. Figure out a solution. You do not have to figure it out yourself. You are part of a team.”

But one sees teamwork and communication as every person plays off each other in a restaurant from front of the house to back of the house.

You can see it below ( Click on the link to see it on YouTube since it cannot be embedded here)

4. The importance of customer focus, customer delight, and customer intelligence.

We often read about why one should know each customer and customize solutions for them.

There is a five minute segment in this show that illustrates and teaches more about these topics than dozens of powerpoint decks.

There is even an example where someone outsources from a competitor to keep a Client delighted. ( Deep Dish pizza is part of this story that is all I will say).

5. Why time is all we have and we need to believe in others and our selves and never give up .

There is a five minute scene which is probably some of the most moving television ever created as the Chef of the restaurant speaks about her challenges and journals she discovered from her father… it is a cameo from the Oscar Winner Olivia Colman…

She discussed her setbacks and how she resurrected herself.

She talks about discovering her fathers journals and letters after he where he wrote down everything he saw or noticed.

She notes he seemed to be saying..

Do not forget this moment.

Do not forget this interesting strange detail.

She ends by

And he’d sign of each letter the same way….(and then she gets called away and Richie figures out how her father signed off…)

You can watch a bit of it here or the twitter link below and it will leave you different…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1673153448680869889

And here is one piece among many of how amazing these five minutes are: Five minutes of greatness: https://decider.com/2023/06/29/the-bear-olivia-colman-cameo-season-2-episode-7-forks-guest-stars/

6. Integration of flow and craftsmanship.

In the two minutes below one sees the level of craftsmanship from writing to photography to music ( yes Taylor Swift also is incorporated into the story), a sense of place ( the show is a love story to my hometown Chicago) and much more. This episode of The Bear is not just about purpose, time, teamwork, craftsmanship and flow but it is a product of these inputs.

And if you want to know how they made everything look so real…well they shot it in a Michelin starred restaurant of course: The Real Restaurant: Ever…https://www.theringer.com/tv/2023/7/5/23783009/the-bear-season-2-episode-7-forks-richie-stages-ever-restaurant

Hope you take the 30 minutes to watch the entire episode.

It might be the best uses of your time.

Here is where you can watch The Bear for free (all episodes are terrific but this post is about Episode 7 of Season 2 which is called “Forks” and is probably among the best). Outside the US please use a VPN. Hulu has some of the most amazing television from “The Old Man” to “Atlanta” and you may want to stick around after the free trial ( more great stuff here than majority owner Disney’s property Disney+ which is basically a Star Wars and Avengers franchise with a sprinkle of Pixar and a dash of Simpsons. Which is why Bob Iger has come around to the fact he needs it not just because Comcast can force him to buy the rest from them)

ben damiano 7/2/23 ben damiano 7/2/23

Remaining Relevant in an AI Age.

The history of AI is over 80 years old.

You can learn and view its developments here at the online Computer History Museum site.

After many ups and downs, false dawns and surviving many winters AI or what Ted Chiang, the author calls “Applied Statistics” has arrived due to a combination of access to swaths of training data available on the Internet, massive increases in computing power and several breakthroughs in neural network design.

Today a combination of daily breakthroughs and exponential improvements combined with tens of billions of dollars of capital means that every company, every job and every one of us will be impacted by AI.

How do individuals and firms adapt and thrive in what clearly will be a new landscape?

3 steps.

1) Embrace. 2) Adapt. 3) Complement.

Embrace

It’s 1977 and a new movie titled Star Wars: A New Hope is released and in it a General Dodonna ends a briefing to his fighters (which includes Luke Skywalker) with the words “May the Force Be With You” (watch this scene from what is now nearly five decades ago not just for the line but how far film making technology has advanced and hear the line first time it was said…it was not Obi-Won Kenobi or Yoda.)

It's 1599 and somewhere in England a play by William Shakespeare is staged during which the following lines are spoken (listen to them voiced by John Gieguld to understand why Shakespeare is best heard and not just read):

"We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."

Both Shakespeare over 500 years ago and George Lucas 50 years ago shared the first rules of thriving in changing times.

Align with the force.

Go with the flow.

Every individual and organization should and must spend time learning and understanding this new tsunami.

It is real. It is powerful and it is moving extremely fast.

Yes, there are lots of issues from copyright to impact on employment to a terminator like bot getting all of humanity, but the genie is out of the bottle, there is no going back or time for individuals or organizations to dither.

As an individual it is essential to begin to understand Re-Generative AI including prompt to text (e.g., GPT-4), prompt to image (e.g., Mid Journey), prompt to audio (e.g., Voice lab) and prompt to video (e.g. Runway ML). One way to keep up daily is to subscribe and read this free daily note called Ben’s Bites.

Another good place to start experiment with prompt to text is here at Pi (Inflection AI a one-year-old company which powers Pi this week raised 1.3 billion dollars from Microsoft and Nvidia among others.)

Adapt

Organizations need to re-think and re-visit every aspect of their products and services to see where productivity can be enhanced, product and services augmented, and completely new innovations launched.

And it is not as simple as automating and speeding up things as we have learned from a lawyer using AI to help in a legal case only to find that the AI had made things up (and increasingly this will be a huge issue) but a far deeper re-architecting of the business versus just a re-skinning or a re-structuring to cut costs.

The three big questions are:

a) What can be AI enhanced and what should not?

b) How will the AI product be built/trained and what quality control will ensure that the result is safe and legal among other things?

c) How will the organizational design and talent allocation change to incorporate these new capabilities?

For most companies there is good chance that AI technology itself will become a commodity like ingredient.

In fact, smaller companies (outside of the mega cap tech companies that are funding and driving AI investments) are likely to benefit more from AI since it will now make amazing capabilities affordable to everybody.

Size maybe less of a competitive advantage.

Well thought out processes for yesterday may become anchors to change.

And even senior management who cannot adapt fast (AI is scaling so quickly it is wishful thinking for senior folks to believe one can delay things till retirement) will become a competitive disadvantage.

But a key to adaptation will be how to attract and retain talent to work in new ways to complement the AI.

Because the future will not be just an AI age but an HI age

HI= Human Inspired.

Complement

Successful individuals and companies will complement the power of computing machines and software.

They will do this by enhancing, training, and bending what the technology can enable with creativity, storytelling, empathy, provenance, humanity, insight and imagination.

There will be a premium on building and attracting talent who are strong in the 6 C’s.

Three of these have to do with individual competence (Cognition, Creativity, Curiosity) and three how we connect with each other and the world outside our minds (Collaborate, Communicate, Convince).

Cognition is simply learning to think and keeping our mental operating system constantly upgraded. This requires deliberate practice and sustained work. Improved cognition is achievable and essential in a world where the computing operating systems are constantly improving.

Creativity is connecting dots in new ways, looking beyond the obvious and this skill will be key as AI powered computers, data crunch and co-relate faster than we ever will.

To be human is to be creative.

Creativity is at its heart the way we deal with a world of change by adapting, evolving, and re-inventing.

We need to learn and feed this inside us. The future will be about data driven storytelling and not just data or storytelling and the ability to leverage modern machines and algorithms to unleash connection and meaning will depend on creativity.

Curiosity is simply being alive to possibilities, questioning the status quo and asking what if? Today the key competitor or opportunity in any category comes from outside it.

Being cognitively gifted, creative, and curious will not be enough since we are living in a connected world where eco-systems, teams and linkages is how ideas are born, value created, and long-term careers forged. For these we need to hone and build and train for three other skills which are key since a great part of Human Inspired work is not just how to work alongside the machine but work alongside other humans.

Collaborate: Collaboration is key to work in a world where API’s (Application Protocol Interfaces) are not just about handshakes between software/hardware but between individuals with different skills, teams in different countries, partners, suppliers and much more.

Communicate: Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to present. It may be so old school but watch the people who succeed, and they are good at communication. And all of these can be taught and learned. One can use GPT to write the first draft and have Mid-Journey come up with great visuals for presentations and use other AI tools to provide amazing starter ideas and be a great co-pilot but Human Inspired means taking these outputs to the next level and requires communication skills.

But communication is not a one-way street and as important as it to write, speak and present it is as critical to be able to listen, to hear and to understand what others are saying with an open mind and a sense of empathy since this will also be a differentiating advantage in an AI age.

Convince: Every one of us is a salesperson regardless of what we believe our title is. This is true even if we do not sell anything at work. We must convince colleagues of our points of view.

We all must learn to convince and learn to sell often finding ways to sell something different than what the machines may recommend.

Time has proven that technology while bringing with it risks and downsides over time is a massive positive force for humanity.

The future is bright and all we must do is open our eyes, heart and minds and seize the benefits of this amazing era.

ben damiano 6/25/23 ben damiano 6/25/23

How to Think.

The Photographer's Eye by John Szarkowski is a fantastic overview of photography which is based on an exhibition curated by him for MOMA in 1964.

The book selects photographs from the entire history of photography up to 1964 both by famous photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston but also work by amateurs to illustrate challenges and opportunities faced by photographers.

Szarkowski identifies five keys to see like a photographer: 1) The Thing Itself, 2) The Detail, 3) The Frame, 4) Time and 5) Vantage Point.

Each one of these five are also great tools to use to improve thinking for personal and business decisions.

Photographer Unknown

The Thing Itself

“The first thing that the photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it; unless he did, photography would defeat him. He learned that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness, and that to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligence both acute and supple.”

One of the keys to proper thinking is to see the situation for what it is.

To face reality. To collect the facts. To not have FOFO ( the fear of finding out).

If we traffic in magical thinking, look away from the problem and assume away what is real it is hard to think straight.

The Detail

“The photographer was tied to the facts of things, and it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth. He could not, outside the studio, pose the truth, he could only record it as he found it, and it was found in nature in a fragmented and unexplained form—not as a story, but as scattered and suggestive clues.”

Every challenge and opportunity lies in the details. One or two key variables that the enterprise turns on. Forgetting that interest rates could go up and that you can not lend in the long term while borrowing in the short term led to Silicon Valley Bank’s implosion.

Similarly in the sea of data lies the pattern which reveals the meaning.

In hindsight the key details and critical data are obvious. But to reveal what drives the machine and makes the clock tick we need to analyze and scenario plan.

The shifting of parameters often reveals the key variables we take for granted or need to be aware of.

Ask what key details or critical data that drive assumptions. And then think about when they change what new new risks or opportunities are created?

The Frame

“Since the photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it had extended in four directions. If the photographer's frame surrounded two figures, isolating them from the crowd in which they stood, it created a relationship between those two figures that had not existed before.

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it.”

Framing a problem is a key to solving it.

If one does not start with the right question the solution might never have a chance of being correct.

Similarly framing a situation or an offer is key to how someone looks at it.

Everything is in context with everything else and this ability to frame is an essential tool to the best problem solvers and sales people.

Time

“All photographs are time exposures of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time. This time is always the present. Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only that period of time in which it was made. Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.”

Placing things in perspective from a past, present and future lens allow one to stress test one’s thoughts.

Scavenging the past reveals treasures for the future but stay frozen in the past and there will be not future to treasure. So it is critical to both move forward from yesterday to today as well as backward from tomorrow to today.

In addition, it reminds us that timing is key to understand when to launch a product or service.

Too soon or too late is a problem as is too slow or too fast.

A decision that can be reversed should be made fast versus one that cannot should be marinated in time.

Photographer Unknown

Vantage Point

“Much has been said about the clarity of photography, but little has been said about its obscurity. And yet it is photography that has taught us to see from the unexpected vantage point, and has shown us pictures that give the sense of the scene, while withholding its narrative meaning. Photographers from necessity choose from the options available to them, and often this means pictures from the other side of the proscenium showing the actors' backs, pictures from the bird's view, or the worm's, or pictures in which the subject is distorted by extreme foreshortening, or by none, or by an unfamiliar pattern of light, or by a seeming ambiguity of action or gesture.”

In a famous Japanese movie Rashomon truth depends on where one stands. The same crime when viewed from four vantage points lead to different conclusions as to what actually happened..

Being able to think from the perspective of a buyer if one is a seller, from a disrupter if one is a legacy company or having the empathy to understand other peoples perspective are key to clear thinking.

So next time when making a decision or evaluating a situation 1) look hard at the situation or thing itself to make sure the facts are understood, 2) parse the detail and the data, 3) frame the question or the solution, 4) interrogate it with time scenarios and 5) view it from different vantage points.