This post originally appeared as part of the series leading up to the 7th Global Peter Drucker Forum – “Claiming our humanity – managing in the digital age”.

In his famous “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” lecture, the physicist Richard Feynman arguably seeded the concept of nanotechnology.  While there is technical debate on Feynman’s actual role in catalyzing specific nanotechnology research, his more general point as implied in the title of the lecture is clear: there is no reason we should overcrowd in selective pursuits, intellectual or otherwise.

Almost six decades later, we appear to be doing just what Feynman implicitly cautioned against. We are cornering ourselves in the narrow view that crowds man and machine onto the same tasks. The latest witch hunt is underway and gaining momentum. The witches are the rapid innovation in robotics and computing, slated to replace humans in performing increasingly sophisticated – i.e. “white collar” – tasks and so displace jobs across the employment spectrum.

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If you read business literature you would have come across the quintessential business thinker: charismatic, articulate, and endowed with a keen sense of positioning for ever greater fame and reach. But, as is the case with many other industries, the ones who make it to global fame status are often not the most inspired. Politics permeates even the highest of intellectual echelons. I for one have always pursued substance at the expense of politics and fame. And so, it is natural that I get frustrated when I see initiatives of substance corrupted by mediocrities with titles.
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Design Thinking – background

Design Thinking is all the rage nowadays. It is by far the most commercially viable embodiment of the argument for augmenting creativity in the workplace. According to the DT school of thought, creativity has something to do with open-ended thinking. That is because design, as practiced in both the arts and sciences, is an open-ended endeavor. One could tell Picasso to paint a “good” painting, but adding more specific requirements would likely only reduce the genius of the ensuing work. Similarly, one could not tell Einstein “concentrate on improving Maxwell’s equations” and expect him to come up with the Theory of Relativity.

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Let’s take a simplified scenario of the mechanics underlying the remuneration relationship between a corporation and an employee in the knowledge economy.

The corporation pays a white collar employee a certain salary and benefits. The corporation in turn charges its clients for the work performed by said employee a much higher rate, double or more (!) what the equivalent cost of the employee’s salary and benefits. This difference pools into a so-called “overhead” budget. The overhead budget covers things such as facilities’ rent, but by far, the largest chunk goes to indirect labor, i.e. executives. They in turn are supposed to make life better for everyone: customers – innovative products and services -, employees – job security -, shareholders – profit.

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Emotions – sometimes they save the day, and at other times are the source of embarrassment or outright disaster. Whether regarded as an initiator of success or source of failure, emotions are necessary. That is because emotions provide the illogical response necessary to address that portion of reality that is non-deterministic. When reality exceeds our ability to make sense, in lieu of emotions, we would behave like computer algorithms, stuck in infinite compute loops. For humans, emotions represent an effective mechanism for dealing with high uncertainty and complexity circumstances that would otherwise constitute veritable traps of logic. Quite simply, we have been able to get where we are today more based on our ability to ignore logic than follow it. Every leap of faith that preceded a ground breaking innovation had an emotional impulse behind it. Progress is in effect humanity’s recurring impulse to cut the Gordian Knot.

Since the dawn of human civilization, every time a new technology gets invented, enthusiasts claim that the world will never be the same. And yet, from a societal and human experience point, it always is.

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Many knowledge firms sell skills, embodied by the omniscient subject matter expert. While this may seem like a robust business model, it in fact scales quite poorly. Revenue being directly coupled to the number of “heads” or the firm being held hostage by star “primadonnas” are just two such examples.

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