Charles Munger commencement speech at Harvard Business School in 1986 contains this gem of a paragraph:
Most people early achieve and later identify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They became people of whom Philip Wylie observed: ‘you could not squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn’
I find myself early in 2015 as a consultant, writer and speaker, with a growing list of items, topics and pieces of research in the Critical Thinking area. I am very restless about this because I can’t classify it/them as ‘another topic’. These are nagging me all the time.
I am convinced that the only way to equip yourself for the business of 2015 and beyond is a serious clean up of mental cupboards, a Spring cleaning of managerial toolkits and ideas, a daily diet of healthy scepticism about ‘how to run business’. My words are chosen carefully. I did not say throw it all out of the window. It’s a self-criticism clean up. An un-learning clean up.
Those in the organization with more self-critical questions, more willingness to diet, more readiness to see different worlds instead of one, should get the biggest bonuses.
Here is a challenge for HR: find those people, protect them, nurture them, clone them. That’s it. That’s the plan.