Shut Up, He Explained

We have entered an era of over-communication surpassing the grotesque, reaching for the obscene. Enough, already!

The proliferation of PCs, email, cell phones, palm devices, PDAs, pagers and a myriad other forms of electronic support for the human need to process professional and social life is rapidly depriving us of the will to think clearly, analyze correctly and take decisive action.

Get this: you can have unlimited amounts of digital data and infinitesimal information, multi-megabytes of information and negligible knowledge, trillions of morsels of knowledge and little wisdom, wisdom being what you do about what you know. In context, information is not power. Nor is knowledge. The real power of any individual is wisdom. It takes lifetime effort to distill.

Slathering layer upon layer of electronic prostheses onto the act of thought does not automatically enhance the quality of that thinking. Spending more and more hours as slaves to these electronic tyrants does not implicitly improve intellectual performance.

In fact, our proliferating electronic crutches often add noise to the equation and detract from our ability to deliver. The light we might wish to shine on a high-priority problem is invisible in arenas in which the glow of thousands of display screens is already blinding. The kernels of wisdom and correct thinking at the heart of informed decision-making and decisive execution are becoming buried in seemingly limitless mountains of 1s and 0s that are clogging our intellectual arteries.

Now, thanks to the miracle of digital systems, we can communicate in moments every fleeting whim that invades our fuzzy little minds. And we do!

Increased bandwidth will only exacerbate this problem. Instead of making communications easier and more efficient, these systems only encourage a rising tide of electronic drivel. The noise level is rising relentlessly, the wisdom proportionately shrinking. End point: a ‘professional rave’ in which the participants are suspended—many unwillingly—in a sea of meaningless non-communication, contemplating their own inconsequential navels.

Visit any world city (Paris or London, Tokyo or Mexico City, New York or Los Angeles), and witness the armies of people walking and driving with one of those ubiquitous devices clamped to the ear or chained to the wrist, a somnambulist glaze in their eyes; see them in restaurants and on airplanes, eyes focused on laptop screens; visit them at their desks, getting nanosecond-current on-line quotes of their momentary wealth or typing in vital messages to associates. At the theater, hear management’s hapless pre-show pleading, often ignored: “Please turn off your . . . ”

These people may think they are working. Actually, they may be gumming up the works. They are also, without acknowledging the reality, distancing themselves from the real people and events they might think they are manipulating but comprehend imperfectly. Many offend others in their immediate environment with noisy, self-important twaddle.

A consultant who specializes in resolving manufacturing problems puts it like this: “An hour on the floor with the working stiffs will tell you more than a week at a workstation.”

Still these devices proliferate. They are insatiable. They demand attention, service. We now rely on them for self-authentication. In the process, our communications-obsessed and self-anointed ‘digerati’ are not accelerating but often delaying the very results they wish to achieve.

Try this: sit with paper and pen (parchment and quill, if you prefer). Spend a couple of hours writing an analysis of the situation for which you have responsibility. Consider the end result you wish to achieve; appraise the nature and point of view of the people you want to influence, and what specific action(s) you wish to elicit from them; map out the systematic sequence of events that must come between now and salvation, whatever form that salvation may take.

Now, go back and remove 85% of it. Delete adjectives and adverbs, trim all verbal fat. Reach not more than 5-6 conclusions (the span of effective, short-term human comprehension). Then, only then, communicate the result. The rest is, or should be, silence.

Recall Winston Churchill, addressing Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1940: “Pray tell me, on one side of a piece of paper, how you propose to address the German U-boat menace in the Atlantic in the next five years.” A complex challenge. Winnie got what he asked for. It worked.

Instead of the props of PowerPoint and the momentum of massive data-base stores of ‘information,’ users will be forced to rely on—gasp, shudder!—real life. In place of endless hours massaging minutiae and passing on every momentary mental impulse, time may now be spent—oh, horrors!—deliberating deeply.

The by-product is a valuable resource: by keeping all the tedious, inconclusive, defocused front-end mess to ourselves, we will be saving our friends and associates incalculable amounts of their time.

We may even be able to achieve the results—profitability from a dot.com as a single, typical example—that we wish fervently to attain.

It is time to take a stand. In the words of the great Ring Lardner: “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”