Note: the ideas in this post have been significantly refined and turned into a book. The treatment here is somewhat obsolete as a result, but the spirit of my revised arguments remain the same.
Suppose a job candidate walks into your office and hands you a resume. It proclaims, “strategic, systems thinker.” You wince, and almost throw her out right there, but since other parts of her resume look promising, you decide to give her a chance and proceed with the interview. Now ask yourself, how would you actually probe if there is any substance behind the candidate’s claim to strategic abilities? Here is a very good answer: ask the candidate to tell a story. Not any old story, but a relevant one, like how she views the history of development of her field. Or how she views her own personal trajectory. If you can’t figure out why this is an excellent question, read on.
has made something of a specialty of writing compact and focused books around single clear ideas. His latest, a tiny little book called The Dip, is his most abstract yet, but still fits the mold and develops a single punchy idea. The idea is this: there is a transient dip in the effort-to-returns graph of any project, and deciding what project to quit, and when, in terms of this graph, is a critical skill. It is almost too much of a complex idea for him to handle, but he just makes it. It is interesting to see him arrive at a fresh insight into a problem that has nearly a half-century long history in the context of an academic model of decision making called the multi-armed bandit. His fresh and original take provides some insight the bandit mathematicians never stumbled upon, but at the same time, he seriously underestimates the complexity of the idea, and the difficulty of operationalizing it.
by Howard Gardner. Do you have what these two authors think is the kind of mind that will dominate the future? Are you sure you want such a mind, even if they are right? Let’s get to the answers through some right-brained meandering.
