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A Monday Morning Memo for the Clients and Friends of Roy H. Williams

Hear Memo

You walk into a room, empty but for a table carved from crystal. Girdling the table are 11 other persons whose occupations are similar to yours.

You place ten thousand dollars on the table, your gift to the group. Each of the other 11 does the same. But this is a magic table. You don’t walk away with your own ten thousand. You get the entire hundred and twenty.

And so does everyone else.

The crystal table is a metaphor. Its benefits are real, but the stakes are much higher than a mere hundred and twenty thousand dollars. And you need not bring any cash. Bring instead the things you’ve learned over the years – your failures and successes, your experiments and discoveries, your golden nuggets of experience.

And everyone else will bring theirs. Are you beginning to see the power of a Peer Group?

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By Roy H. Williams

Hear Memo... Horizontal Thinking 

American education teaches a subject vertically, narrow and deep. And the deeper one plunges into the subject, the narrower it gets. Specialization.

1a. Liberal Arts
1b. Literature
1c. Spanish Literature
1d. Spanish Literature of 1492-1681
1e. Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
1f. Don Quixote de La Mancha by Cervantes (1605)
1g. Symbolism in Don Quixote

And then you write your master’s thesis:

1h. Sancho Panza as a Figurative Symbol in Don Quixote de La Mancha

Our educational system has taught us to value vertical, deductive reasoning. This is why our logic is so often binary: if-then, either-or, right-wrong. This is the logic of technology.

But vertical thinking is most powerful when augmented by a horizontal viewpoint since the lateral perspective will often spy answers that lie outside the vertical path.

Horizontal thinking will recognize a pattern it has seen, even when that pattern was observed in a completely unrelated field.  (The cognoscenti will remember this technique as Business Problem Topology.) This "pattern recognition" often allows the horizontal thinker to correctly predict an outcome from what appears to be too little information.

Intuition is unconscious, horizontal thinking.

Purely horizontal thinking is known as daydreaming. Fantasy. Mysticism. The purely horizontal thinker has a thousand ideas but puts none of them into action. He or she sees the big picture and all its possibilities but has little interest in linear, step-by-step implementation.

Purely vertical thinking leads to compliance, conformity, and a false sense of knowledge. (False because it’s often just memorization in disguise. The student knows what to do without understanding why.) The purely vertical thinker is a nit-picker, a legalist, a tight-ass.

The healthy mind is capable of switching from vertical to horizontal thought and back again.

Problem solving is horizontal thinking adjusted by vertical analysis. But the implementation of that solution will require step-by-step, vertical action modified by horizontal adjustments as the need arises.

Read his books and you’ll recognize Lee Iacocca as a horizontal thinker who implements his ideas vertically.

Iacocca sees patterns, then takes sequential action to accomplish what he has seen in his mind.

"When you stop to think about it, most of the great companies of our times began as upstarts – little Davids taking on big Goliaths." – Lee Iacocca, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? p. 159    

Horizontal thought is how Iacocca rescued Chrysler from the brink of disaster. It's how Peter Ueberroth organized the wildly successful Los Angeles Olympics and generated a surplus of 250 million dollars. It's how Amazon.com and eBay came to be. It's how the Prius and the iPod were born.

Wizard Academy teaches you how to see the answers that lie outside the vertical perspective.

Are you a little David? Do you want to learn the techniques of the great innovators?

Come to Wizard Academy and we’ll teach you how to defeat the Goliath in your life.

Yours,

Roy H. Williams

How to Sell Radio Advertising and Make it Work
is horizontal thinking applied to the future of radio. If radio is your business, you need to be here June 24-25.

Rate the Wizard Chronicles

"There'll be two dates on your tombstone/ And all your friends will read 'em/ But all that's gonna matter is that little dash between 'em..." - Kevin Welch

 

"A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way." - John C. Maxwell

 

"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook." - William James

"... consists of seeing what everybody has seen... and thinking what nobody has thought." - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, in Irving Good, The Scientist Speculates (1962)

Part Two. Fractal Self Similarity.
Thriller as the Soundtrack to Casablanca.
 
By Roy H. Williams

Hear Memo...

Today we’re going to fart around a little. You up for it?

Of course you are.

Much has been written about how the 1973 album by Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon, synchronizes with The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a shockingly appropriate soundtrack. The movements of the actors seem to be choreographed to the rhythm and tempo of the music. The lyrics of the songs often describe exactly what is happening on the screen.

Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz follow a similar, archetypal pattern of tension and release. Consequently, one can be overlaid above the other with surprising synchronicity.

Chaos, in science, is a higher level of order than can fit into the human brain. It is a more complex degree of organization than you and I can comprehend. Chaotic systems are not random; they are magnificent.

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Part One. Reconciling the Challenge Pattern to the Guide Pattern
By Roy H. Williams

Hear Memo... 

Half your brain sees a hierarchy.
Deductive reasoning is a product of this.
Vertical. Sequential. Objective. Scientific. Hard facts. Details.
"Be for what is."

The other half sees connectedness.
Intuition is a direct result.
Horizontal. Chaotic. Subjective. Relevant. Relationships. Big picture.
"Recognize the pattern."

Intuition is a form of pattern recognition. Wordlessly it whispers, “I’ve seen this behavior before. I know what happens next.”

We call these whispers “hunches,” “gut feelings”, “premonitions.”

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is what happens when these whispers get too loud.

We are pleased when a mystery is solved.
Another way of saying this is, “We are pleased when the Challenge pattern resolves into the Guide pattern.”

That’s when things come together and “make sense.”

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