The January 18 issue of Newsweek has an interesting article, “Your Brain Online” written by Sharon Begley. The article provides answers to the question,” How is the Internet changing the way you think?” which was recently asked of 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and scholars on http://www.edge.org/.
Her summary is that while the internet and information revolution have influenced our thinking habits (mostly in a negative way), it fundamentally hasn’t shifted the way that our brain works. The article quotes cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard who says, “Electronic media aren’t going to revamp the brain’s mechanisms of information processing,”
Our brain has been evolving for over 50,000 years. It’s hard to imagine that it could change significantly in a forty-year timeframe. Yet, the number of people who seem to be so willing to jump on the bandwagon believing that things have changed that drastically surprises me.
This isn’t new. I remember building courses during the eCommerce boom. The courses were title eCRM, eSupply Chain, or eStrategy. It turned out that 90% of the course content was basic principles of CRM, Supply Chain, and Strategy. Yet, for many people, 100% of the content was new. They believed that the entire world of commerce had suddenly shifted. Of course, there were new twists to account for the new technology. But, the fundamentals remained the same.
Ironically, this type of short-term thinking is one of the issues that Begley addresses in her article. Begley quotes Evgeny Morozov, an expert on the Internet and politics. “Our lives are increasingly lived in the present, completely detached even from the most recent of the pasts … Our ability to look back and engage with the past is one unfortunate victim.” Morozov also argues that the internet is casing the, “disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence”
As leaders, our job is to ensure that we don’t lose the lessons of the past as we look toward the future. We must recapture and encourage reflection, retrospection and reminiscence. Certain lessons from the past can and should still apply. I’m not suggesting that we live in the past. We should exploit the opportunities provided by technology. However, instead of moving things forward, we often are trapped in a cycle of rediscovering old principles and lessons as if they were new. Doing so slows technology’s progress rather than speeds it.
As leaders we need to resist the trap of short term, myopic thinking. Technology opens many new doors. The people who will exploit it are the ones who understand how business works, what customers need, and how to engage their workforce. This is why the words of Peter Drucker continue to ring true decades after some of them were written. Don’t view new technology with blinders. Understand the context in which it is being used and you will use it successfully.
