But it’s only until we understand the situation we are in, that we can begin to look at it differently. We are surrounded—literally—by a never-ending stream of information. Increasingly, it will be our ability to manage this constant information flow and to make meaning out of these fragments that will allow us to be successful in the near future. And the near future is today.
PART ONE: PROBLEM
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CHAPTER 1:
AWASH IN BITS AND BULLETS
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK…
In life and in business, we are awash in “bits and bullets.” Bits and bullets are data. Facts. Bullet points on slides. Computer screens full of information. Headlines and scores ticking across the bottom of our televisions 24/7. A constant stream of ads and pitches and talking heads. Sometimes it feels like life has become one big infomercial. And the constant stream of bits and bullets doesn’t stop when we get to work. In fact, it accelerates. As leaders, most of us have never met an e-mail device or a PowerPoint slide we didn’t like. Because technology makes communicating in bits and bullets so easy, we unleash the flood.
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts…they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun, but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric.
– EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY1
No question about it, leaders have a tough job. We are asked to deliver better performance through our people, implement the latest systems, manage goals, communicate and embody company values, and hundreds of other things. We are brokers of information. Leaders above us hand down information we need—division goals, new systems information, competitive data, new products—and then we translate that information, communicate it to our people, and perform against the goals.
Leaders of every stripe, from senior executives and middle managers to salespeople and consultants, spend an inordinate amount of time creating and brokering information, but we spend far less time standing back from that information and asking, “What is the best way for me to communicate this?” Not asking this critical question too often results in the creation of just more bits and bullets. That is, we use the same communication methods we always use the same way we always use them, which means that we whip out the laptop, throw together some slides, call a meeting, and then it’s click, click, click.
NUMBERS OR LIVES?
A couple of years ago, I was at a meeting where Ray Gilmartin, the CEO of Merck, was speaking. The purpose of his talk was to discuss how the economy and regulation were affecting the drug industry. Leading into some of the main points of his talk, he wanted to make sure that people in the room had a strong sense for what Merck had contributed to the world through the company’s development of critical, lifesaving drugs. What happened next was a perfect illustration of the power of stories.
Ray Gilmartin talked about the company’s philanthropy and the amounts that had been given to certain causes. He outlined the drugs, such as Mectizan, that Merck had developed to treat river blindness, and the company’s antiretroviral program to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa and China. Thus began a long list of impressive accomplishments, and as he talked about them, he gave specific numbers for each; 800,000 vaccines of this in Botswana, 1.4 million vaccines of that in the Americas; and list went on.
These were amazing numbers and any company would be very proud. But what was fascinating was how the crowd reacted. He was losing his audience. As he rattled off more and more numbers, people started to tune out. We were getting lost in the bullet points and losing the true value of the message itself. Instead of being duly impressed with the number of lives saved, we were wondering when he would stop.
Then he did stop. Ray Gilmartin became reflective as he stood on the stage; he paused, and then he related this story: Back in 1942, there was a young woman who contracted an infection after a miscarriage and had been hospitalized in Connecticut for a month. For the entire month, she had been running a fever as high as 105 degrees and was in and out of consciousness. Her doctors were desperate to find a treatment for her, but nothing worked. This young woman was going to die. One of her doctors remembered talking to a colleague about an experimental treatment that was largely unsuccessful, but it was worth a try. The doctors managed to secure a small sample from a lab at Merck—half of what existed in the United States at the time. They tried it. This woman, Anne Miller, became the first person in the United States to receive this new drug, penicillin. And it saved her life.
When Ray Gilmartin finished this story, the audience was completely quiet. We were all picturing in our mind’s eye this young woman and the tragic fact that she was going to die. We were picturing our own families and we could feel pain for her family. We were relieved when we were told that she survived and that this new drug had saved her life. This tiny little story had a huge impact. It brought home to us what companies like Merck do. They develop drugs that save people, and all of the statistics in the world about lives saved are not as meaningful as that short story about one person. The story brought each of us into the problem. It created a context to which we could relate. It created an emotional response from us. We could feel it. And it was a great illustration of the difference between stories and bits and bullets.
Our leaders want us to know certain things. They want us to know how to serve customers. They want us to know the mission of the company and how it makes money. They want us to know how to treat each other. In the story above, Ray Gilmartin wanted us to know what Merck cares about and the company’s commitment to taking care of people.
In the first part of this Merck story, we are awash in bits and bullets. At some point in presentations like these (usually in the first five minutes), we are lost in the minutiae, drowning in data. That’s when we all begin to daydream about lunch or that last vacation we took.
But here, Ray Gilmartin snapped us back from oblivion with a great story. One of the things we will see in the coming pages is that it’s the lessons contained in the story that we remember, not the bits and bullets.
“Like desperate Gullivers, we’re pinned down by too much information and too much stuff. By one estimate, the world produced five exabytes (or quintillion bytes) of content in 2002—the same amount churned out between 25,000 BC and AD 2000. Little wonder that Real Simple has been the most successful magazine launch in a decade, and the blogosphere is abuzz over the season’s hottest tech innovation: the Hipster PDA (15 index cards held together by a binder clip).”
– LINDA TISCHLER2
DEFINITION: Bits and bullets, noun: 1. Facts and data, parsed into short abbreviations or phrases. 2. Facts and data devoid of all contexts. 3. Short bursts of information that can be very useful but also frequently make you say “huh?” or “what the…?” Usually accompanied by an itty-bitty dot, such as:
• This is the bullet of a bit.
WE ARE ALL FIGHTER PILOTS
The person in Figure 1.1 is you! And me. All of us. This is the way we live now. And it’s nothing short of revolutionary how much rich information and entertainment is at our fingertips. If information were food, we would be constantly surrounded by the most outrageous perpetual feast ever created.
Several recent surveys have looked at how people in organizations are dealing with this information flow. One survey found that “the average user spent 3 hours and 14 minutes using technologies to process work-related information—just over 40% of an 8-hour workday.”3