United States – understand-culture

Intuition

Intuition. Latin intuitio: immediate understanding, recognition, seeing; to understand a situation, problem, dilemma immediately and without discussion or reflection. “Dein Verlangen nach Intuition blockiert den natürlichen Fluss der Wahrnehmung.” Your desire to be intuitive blocks the natural flow of perception. (Irina Rauthmann, German writer)

“Intuition, sprunghafte Einsicht, deren Schritte nachzuholen sind.” Intuition, sudden and erratic understanding whose steps need to be retaken. (Dr. phil. Manfred Hinrich, German philosopher, professor, journalist, author of childrens books)

“Intuition ist der natürliche Gegenpol zur Konzentration – nutzen sollte man beides, jedes zu seiner Zeit.” Intuition is the natural opposite of concentration. Both should be used, but at the right time. (Rüdiger Keßler, German philosopher)

“Intuition ist Intelligenz mit überhöhter Geschwindigkeit.” Intuition is high speed intelligence. Unknown.

Limited, but Relevant

Americans prefer gathering limited, but highly relevant, information, and fast. Comprehensiveness costs time, and must be justified by its value. All information sources should be considered, provided that there is sufficient time. Americans also accept subjective (non-quantifiable) information sources, such as personal references. Their credibility, though, is judged based on experience (track record) and reputation.

For Americans, however, information gathering serves the pragmatic purpose of information analysis, which in turns serves decision making. Information gathering, thus, is seen early in direct connection with the end goal. If enough information has been collected in order to perform good analysis, there is no reason not to move on to the information analysis step in the decision-making process. Information gathering is not an academic exercise.

Because Americans also see the complexity inherent in many decisions, they prefer to break down decisions into sub-decisions, into particulars. This allows for more focus on key elements of the broader decision. The analysis of the information should then be quick and pragmatic. Objective tools are helpful and should be used, but also combined with experience and common sense. Americans are willing to trust their intuition.

Making collaboration across functions a reality

Fast-changing global markets put a premium on simplifying processes radically and breaking through silos.

Companies have long struggled to break down silos and boost cross-functional collaboration—but the challenge is getting more acute. The speed of market change requires a more rapid adaptation of products and services, while customers increasingly expect an organization to present them with a single face.

Even well-established multinationals routinely fail to manage operations end to end. The result: interactions with customers are sluggish; complex, customized products are hard to create on time and on budget; and blocked lines of communication make new sales and distribution channels difficult to navigate.

The basic principles for improving performance—imposing stretch targets from the center, empowering cross-functional teams, standardizing processes, tightening up execution—are mostly familiar. But making these things happen is a different matter. In many companies, ownership of processes and information is fragmented and zealously guarded, roles are designed around parochial requirements, and the resulting internal complexity hinders sorely needed cross-business collaboration.

What’s more, in our experience, companies that apply traditional solutions (such as lean and business-process reengineering) either exhaust their managers with efforts to rework every process across business units or, by contrast, focus too narrowly within functions.

Our observations of 25 companies in a wide range of industries in Europe, Asia, and North America have led us to conclude that perspiration is as important as inspiration in addressing these challenges.

Here’s the story of how two companies launched new approaches successfully. One needed to focus narrowly to fix a critical process that compromised its core business. The other, swamped by the complexity of its processes, required a broad-based transformation.

Knowledge Is Power, But Not In The Way You Think

She was that person everyone liked, but no one could work with. Eventually, she was fired. Her biggest issue was that she was a hoarder—of knowledge. Jenny (not her real name) thought knowledge was power and while she was smart about creating it, she never wanted to share it.

Jenny was right. Knowledge is power. But she was wrong about what do to with it. Actually, knowledge can change the world—or the company—but only when it is shared, and shared in the right ways.

Information density describes a situation where many people in a company know many important things. They know them in the moment—in real-time when it counts most to inform their decision making. The information-dense company is one in which people are informed and in which there is a level of radical transparency.

“Paralysis by Analysis“

‘Paralysis by analysis’ – a phrase often used in the American business context – describes over-thinking that leads to a reluctance to make a decision, and in doing so exhausts the available time in which to act.

In Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Cat the fox boasts of hundreds of ways of escaping while the cat has only one. When they hear the hunting dogs approaching, the cat climbs quickly up a tree while the fox in his confusion was caught. The moral: “Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon.” In Hamlet, Shakespeare writes of Hamlet’s flaw of thinking too much: “sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.”

Analysis: ‘In the final (or last) analysis’ means when everything has been considered. This phrase is used to suggest that a statement expresses the basic truth about a complex situation. Late 16th century. Medieval Latin from Greek analusis, from analuein unloose.

Reluctance: Unwillingness or disinclination to do something. Ambivalence: The state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. Hesitation: The action of pausing or waiting before saying or doing something.

comprehensive

Comprehensive: covering completely or broadly. First known use 1614. Synonyms: all-embracing, all-inclusive, broad-gauge, compendious, complete, encyclopedic, cover-all, cyclopedic, embracive, exhaustive, full, global, inclusive, in-depth, omnibus, panoramic, thorough, universal. Antonyms: imperfect, incomplete, partial.

Evernote’s Context

This is how Evernote – evernote(dot)com – describes their new service called Context:

„As you use Evernote, our Context algorithms try to find other information that is likely to be useful and relevant to whatever you’re working on. Our goal is to show you information that will help you improve the quality of your work, without you having to think about searching for it. It’s like having a super smart research assistant always by your side.

Currently, Context can display three types of information when it finds something relevant to what you’re working on: your prior notes, shared notes from your coworkers if you’re an Evernote Business user, related news and articles from Dow Jones and our other partners, and relevant people from LinkedIn. In the future, we’ll add other sources that we think would be helpful to Evernote users.“

Thumbs Up or Down

In the American movie Interstellar, when earth begins to become uninhabitable, 10 astronauts are sent through a wormhole to a group of planets orbiting a supermassive black hole. These astronauts are supposed to explore the planets to see if they are inhabitable or not.

However, when communicating their findings back to earth, they don’t transmit long lists of data. Instead, if the area they’ve explored could sustain human life, they simply activate the “thumbs up beacon.”

Don’t hoard information

Is it just poor workflow or is it willful information hoarding! A good friend emailed me recently about the concept of information hoarding at work. I write and speak extensively about individuals who sabotage coworker performance and productivity at work.

The act of withholding information is a common tactic used by difficult and uncooperative employees. This article outlines examples of information and power hoarding, both aimed at maintaining the offending employee’s informal power at work.

Blink

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. This influential non-fiction book explores the power of snap judgments and rapid decision-making. Gladwell argues that some of the best decisions are made in an instant, based on intuition and limited information, rather than prolonged analysis. The book is filled with real-life stories where quick thinking leads to effective outcomes, capturing the American preference for speed over perfection .