Dan Erwin

How to Recognize Someone Is Using You

It was a seemingly innocent question. But actually, he was just using me.

On Easter Sunday, after spending a rare day alone at home, I decided to grab a small bite and a glass of wine at a local pub. Since I would be alone, I took along a book that I intended to finish. A terrific little volume by Mark Edmundson: “The Age of Guilt.”

I sat at the bar, slowly drinking my cab and enjoying a crabcake, all the while reading and marking up this fascinating book. One of the most intriguing and enlightening works I’d read in years.

My reading habits began in elementary school, developed while I was in seminary, blossomed while I was in the pastorate and a seminary faculty member—and exploded in my consulting business. Although I am a lot more than this, I am my books.

I take a lot of time marking my books and papers, and putting notes in the front of the books and also outlining my research papers notes on an added single page, all making important substance available immediately. I’d be much less a person without my books and my studies. No question but that my effectiveness in church ministry, seminary—and especially in business—was tied to a substantially developing knowledge base and—I don’t want to ignore this—an extensive experience in the performing arts that continually shaped and reshaped my decision making.             

How to Understand Artificial Intelligence Two Completely Different Ways

One of the basic characteristics of truly intelligent people is that they take advantage of new situations, have a natural curiosity and a thirst for knowledge. They are eager to learn about different areas of life, including people, culture, animals, history and the world. Intelligent people recognise that others have information and insight that they can share which will help them grow, expand their wisdom, and enhance their intelligence.

How does this play out
Having worked with a great deal of very intelligent people, one of the unique characteristics about this thirst for knowledge is that they look for different ways of understanding. Sometimes this plays out in striking metaphors. Other times in plays out in exciting analogies. And sometimes it's a person from one discipline talking about another discipline and revealing how differently they think about another person's discipline.

Propositional versus Non-Propositional Swearing

Back on June 11, I posted a blog affirming that swearing is good for you, information that was drawn from Emma Byrne's book ("Swearing Is Good For You")--and personal experience. In that post I narrated my occasional strategic swearing and commented on its extreme usefulness. Part of the reason I'm so fascinated by the subject is that my rare experience of swearing around Pietists drove them nuts and they just didn't know how to deal with me as a result. So I suspect there are a lot more than religious pietists who also misunderstand swearing--even though it's a regular occurrence in many forms throughout the American culture and workplace.

To gain a better understanding of swearing, here's a bit more information. The beginning place is to understand that scientists and linguists make a distinction between propositional and non-propositional swearing. The distinction is useful.

Swearing Is Good for You

In a fascinating little book titled in this blog post, Emma Byrne lays out "the amazing science of bad language." The two blurbs on the back cover of the book are more than enough to gain a reader's attention. 

"A good book about bad language by a trash-talkimg woman? Sign me up! Swaring Is Good for You makes science feel downright celebratory." Mary Norris, best selling author of Between You and Me.

"I"m evangelical in my defense of swearing, not just on the grounds of freedom of expression, but because swearing is beneficial to us both as individuals and as a species. Is this book an attempt to justify rudeness and aggression? Not at all. I certainly wouldnt want profanities to become commonplace: swearing needs to maintain its emotional impact in order to become effective. So I'm not necessarily encouraging people to swear more, but I do hope they'll give swearing the respect it fucking deserves.  --From the Introduction.

A Personal Perspective on Crisis

. . . all kinds of crises.

More and more people find themselves in situations that get labelled “crisis.” But very few of us will have to engage in the messy stuff of crisis leadership. In fact, most of us end up on the sidelines, sometimes trying to make sense of the situation and other times taking sides. If not overtly, then covertly.

Of course, newsmakers and entertainers would have us believe that we are almost always in crisis, a perspective that’s more wrong than right. But crisis language keeps surfacing regularly, even though it’s unnecessary and unrealistic. My basic attitude over the years is to begin with the obvious fact that we live in a 24-hour world, not a 12-hour world. By that I suggest that since the at the 1980s, digital innovation intends to keep the eyes and ears of John Q Public on news and entertainment. So, conflicts and crises are the best process for doing that. In my mind that understanding eliminates a lot of the interactions that are called “crisis.”

The Bias for Doing . . .

And the Lost Art of Thinking

On numerous occasions as a management consultant, I asked execs about how much time they took to think about process, innovation and strategy. Often, the response was that they didn’t have time to think. A couple said that they were paying me to do the thinking. A compliment, but very unwise. And I provided a very deliberate rationale for refusing that business opportunity.

So how did we get to the place where managers don’t realize that thinking is part of their job?  
In a very thoughtful and fascinating article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Duncan Simester pointed out that the bias for doing, not thinking, is built into business. Companies succeed by creating a successful business model—and then scaling it massively. Massive scaling requires a “finely tuned system with highly standardized processes.” So, getting promoted requires “almost a singular focus on execution.

In other words, it requires action more than thinking.” So guess what? It’s inevitable that we focus on what we get rewarded for. And in business, that’s execution.