data.insights.ideas

It’s amazing how we latch onto the intangible. We enjoy things that we cannot touch (beautiful weather) or taste (the spatial arrangement of living quarters) or, for that matter, any sense within our natural repertoire.

I couldn’t help but think of the intangible when reading Paul Graham’s most recent essay around industrial cities their correlation to individual ambition. According to Paul:

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.

When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

That’s not quite the same message New York sends. Power matters in New York too of course, but New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.

As 10,000+ college graduates begin to transcend the streets of New York over the next two months, they have no idea what’s about to hit them: “You should be hipper. You should be better looking. You should be richer.” These are the underlying messages of a city so attractive to the aspiring workforce, a city “with a fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits.”

However, if you’re strong enough, smart enough, you can make your own path and dodge “neanderthals in suits” along the 6 train downtown. The returning value on intangible assets like knowledge, ideas and passion push you above the “richer” meritocracy of New York City to a place that’s only rivaled by the company you keep.

I’m fortunate enough to abide by, and have amazing friends who appreciate the intangible.

May 28, 2008, 12:15pm

College teaches you how to think. Working teaches you how to process. Entrepreneurship teaches you how think and process.

These verbs may have a similar implication, that is constant utility of brainpower, but they bear a different meaning when combined: strategic imagination.

I first heard this phrase from Umair Hague in a post called How Strategic Imagination Happens. At its core, strategic imagination enables you to “imagine fundamentally new possibilities for truly strategic behaviour.” The idea, though, is to find a balance between imagination and behavior. As Umair states, “Strategic imagination is tremendously difficult because it requires us to put aside yesterday’s tired assumptions and orthodoxies, and begin to actively rethink from scratch the way value can be, should be, must be, will be created. The surest, most lethal killer of strategic imagination is being reined in by orthodoxy: thinking that tomorrow must be like yesterday.”

Forgetting the past and focusing on the future is sometimes the most difficult task of one’s undergraduate career. Every class, every test and every paper serve as milestones of a learning path, built on tenets from every passing second. You tend to focus on the “now.” I noticed friends succumbing to academic orthodoxy. It wasn’t until Graduation Day that classmates began to appreciate freedom: vacation from scheduled classes, meetings and writing.

However, once the vacation ended and the work day began orthodoxy set-in once more. New graduates learned the value of process, tasking items as efficiently as possible. If they were lucky, they applied some thought before actionable tasks. (This is, to say, that where they work and what they work on is a “lethal killer of strategic imagination.”)

Now, if you applied strategic imagination while in college, or at work; you did the right thing. I fear college and corporate America is anesthetic toward breaking rules, making it more difficult to have “a profound appetite for revolution: a profound ability to let go of yesterday’s stale, tired, and thoroughly toxic orthodoxies - to explode the shrunken, stunted strategic imagination the industrial-era firm suffers from.”

May 20, 2008, 4:37pm