Eric Best: Scenario Thinking – Episode 54

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Eric Best helps business leaders look into the future. As a scenario-thinking consultant, he helps you discover insights that let you formulate an actionable strategy in the face of uncertainty.

Scenario thinking gives you tools to explore the differences between your currently planned future and the one that may actually unfold.

Eric and I talked about:

• his background in journalism, strategy consulting, and scenario planning
• how a couple of inaccuracies in my introduction highlight the power of storytelling
• how pondering multiple plausible futures reminds us that there are also multiple plausible histories
• how exploring a number of possible scenarios can prepare your mind for different possible futures
• the purpose of scenario thinking: to prepare your mind in ways you might not have been prepared for if you hadn’t done it
• his process for conducting a scenario-thinking exercise:
  • identifying the relevant uncertainties in your milieu
  • deciding who will be in the room, who will make up your organization’s “distributed brain” to evaluate the scenarios
  • identifying four equally plausible future worlds and crafting a narrative around them
  • diving into the narrative in each of the four worlds and gleaning insight
• how a 2×2 matrix with axes of your two most important uncertainties can create four possible scenarios to explore – e.g. globalization on one axis and tech development on another in his 1995 analysis of trade and economic trends for Morgan Stanley
• how four scenarios are usually adequate, but also how discovering a fifth scenario is not an uncommon result
• the “craft and art” of managing and keeping engaged big groups of people in collaborative settings:
  • preparing by interviewing all of the participants in advance
  • constraining the scope of the current strategic exploration as you begin
  • assembling in four groups to address each of the scenarios
  • asking, “what do you think is a question that would be worth your answering?” – helps discover actual beliefs about what they should be doing
  • discerning the most important uncertainties within each quadrant
  • following this process – it has never failed him
• the origins of scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell in the 70s
• the importance of giving the scenario-thinking process time, of giving participants a chance to literally sleep on it, which leads to the insight that 2 days is the optimal amount of time for a scenario session
• the importance of assembling in person – “I believe that people need to be physically together to really communicate most fully”
• the importance of being able to literally embody a feeling of truth, to feel an intellectual decision in your gut
• the top-level picture of what’s going on with his approach: influencing people’s intuition, doing it in a very open, creative, abstract space which gets very concrete as the intuition gels
• the importance of listening – because “the most important idea can come from anybody anytime”
• a lesson from Navy research on human attention span which validates my attempt to keep these podcast episodes around 30 minutes 🙂
• the importance of planning and having an intention but also “being open to life as it’s actually unfolding”
• the importance of being equally concerned with the present as you are with your plans for the future, or as his daughter put it, “You know, dad, I don’t want to think so much about the future that I miss the present”

Eric’s Bio

Eric Best is an author, speaker, strategic scenario consultant, and executive advisor. His most recent clients include a crypto-currency enterprise, a major global reinsurer, Wellesley College, and The Conversation, a global journalism effort spanning eight countries. He has an excellent reputation for designing and facilitating executive strategy retreats, using a highly interactive method that draws on the collective intelligence and intuition of the group.

After a 20-year journalism career and a 5,000-mile solo sail from San Francisco to Hawaii and back, he came to Wall Street as a scenario strategist to help Morgan Stanley determine in 1995 what the internet would mean to financial services. He spent the next decade applying scenario thinking within Morgan Stanley and for its global clients to uncertainty in world markets. Since 2007 he has headed his own boutique consulting firm, Best Partners SC.

Eric was part of the core group that developed Global Business Network in Emeryville, California, from a startup in the early 1990s to a preeminent scenario-planning consultancy. He developed strategic scenarios for Motorola, Monsanto, Homestake Mining, Price Waterhouse, Andersen Consulting, and the CIA, and more recently advised Deutsche Bank, Cofra Holding of Switzerland.

As a Morgan Stanley Managing Director, he worked for a wide range of global clients on issues including asset management, Y2K, EMU, the future of warfare, terrorism, China, etc. His scenario-thinking approach in Japan was credited with helping Morgan Stanley avoid a strategic acquisition that cost a competitor $1.2 billion in losses.

If you’d like a quick overview of the practice, Eric has written An Introduction to Scenario Thinking. He is also the author of a 2010 memoir “Into My Father’s Wake,” about solo sailing and growing up in New England.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

If you’ve ever done any serious business planning, you have probably wished at some point for a time machine to let you jump forward to look at your future strategic situation. Eric Best doesn’t have a time machine, but he’s got the next best thing – a time-tested method of evaluating scenarios that may unfold for you and your industry. As you listen to him talk about his approach, I hope you’ll see how scenario thinking can work for you, too. By the way, Eric’s respiratory health is fine, but you may occasionally hear his cat making some rasping noises in the background.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 54 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Eric Best. Eric is the principal at Best Partners. And when you say Best Partners, it’s not like a partnership. Think of partners as a verb. So that’ll give you a hint as to how Eric operates. He could fit in the content strategy world, actually. He has a background in journalism like half the people in content strategy it seems, but Eric took a different path. He had a very distinguished journalism career. He worked for a local paper in Lowell, Massachusetts and he went on to other gigs, including the San Francisco Examiner where he was the enterprise editor. He was a Nieman fellow. He had a very distinguished and a long career in journalism. But after that he realized that his storytelling skills could be applied elsewhere and that led him to a career in consulting. He did that for about five years with an outfit called The Global Business Network, which he helped found and built into one of the most prominent scenario planning of businesses in the world, I guess. And then from there he went onto Morgan Stanley where he worked for 10 years in-house, doing strategy work and scenario planning work. His clients include, boy, all the big ones, Deutsche Bank, and Motorola, and the CIA, and CalPERS, the California state public employee retirement system, and in other consulting companies like McKinsey.

Larry:
So anyhow, Eric has a really distinguished background. I’m delighted to have him on. And Eric, tell the folks a little bit more about yourself.

Eric:
Well, thank you. I don’t want to start by correcting you, but let me just . . . a couple of some small things there. How I went from journalism to consulting wasn’t quite so much about seeing an opportunity to apply storytelling. It was more, I totally ran out of money. I had $904 in August of 1990… Yes, 1990, and I know why I know that. So necessity is the mother of invention. And the second thing is, I can’t claim to have been a founder of GBN Global Business Network. I joined it when it was just starting, getting off the ground. It was founded by five guys, a few who came out of Royal Dutch Shell and some others. And I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to learn something that would turn out to be really great for me. But sometimes I think I illustrate the point that planning is what you do until life happens and then you do what you do because you must or because you want to.

Eric:
So anyway, I didn’t even begin to answer your question a little bit about-

Larry:
Well no, but thanks for fact checking me because your journalism skills are still really strong.

Eric:
Well, listen, it’s also easy to understand why somebody gets an impression and then you describe it a certain way, and that sounds good, and then it gets picked up and repeated. And before, you know it, that’s history. And it’s a good reminder of, well, you know what, history is made of human beings making up stories about stuff they think they know. And I’ve come to the view that this idea of the whole truth is just an idea. You’re never going to know the whole truth no matter even if you think you know the whole truth. You don’t even know necessarily how you came to that conclusion. So we need to be humble in the face of that, I guess.

Larry:
What you just said, is that one of the benefits of scenario planning, this awareness that there’s many options, alternatives and ways of seeing the world?

Eric:
Yeah. I would say, well, the way it came to me is once you acknowledge that there are multiple futures possible and plausible that are worth thinking about, because the world is not going to develop according to anybody’s prediction, it won’t be the way you thought it was going to be, it’ll be some other way. And that’s the whole reason that you would under entertain scenario thinking because you want to prepare your mind for the things that might possibly happen that’ll be different from your official future. Once you acknowledge that there are multiple futures, you should acknowledge that there are multiple histories. If we went into the library and we looked for the history of the Civil War, we would find volumes and volumes and volumes and volumes and volumes. Is one of them true and the rest are false? No, they’re all trying to get at something. And scenario thinking, looking forward, is trying to get at something, which you may identify and name and it will turn out that that actually did happen, doesn’t mean you predicted it. It just means you were somehow clever enough to think about it.

Eric:
But the things that do happen are more likely to be like something you thought about it and therefore you will be more prepared than if you hadn’t thought that. And that’s the whole purpose of doing it. That’s the conceit about the discipline called scenario thinking. It will prepare your mind in ways your mind would not be prepared if you didn’t do it, and that will be a good thing. And I think I could prove that with evidence. But it’s what I believe.

Larry:
No, that makes perfect sense to me. One of the things I like on your website, you talk about how you approach the principles that guide you in your approach to scenario planning. Can you talk a little bit about that, like how you do scenario planning if you’re working with a client?

Eric:
Yeah. So let’s say I’m talking to somebody here who has no idea what we’re even talking about, “Well, what are you talking about?” I would put it to you this way, the future is uncertain. Generally we don’t know what’s going to happen. But we know that we’re in a certain business, not some other business. So if we were in the shipping business, we would care about global warming and the rise of a hundred year storms happening every few years. That would be an uncertainty that we can understand categorically and then we can think about specifically, “Well, wait a minute, how many storms? Where are they happening? Why do we think that’s happening? What do we believe will be true about the severity of storms? Do we have enough insurance?” Okay? So you think about a future in which there are a lot more storms and you say, “Well, an implication of that future is we need more insurance.” That’s pretty straight forward.

Eric:
In any scenario thinking exercise that I do with a client, I start by saying, “Well, who’s going to be in the room to talk about this?” And the answer comes… I’ll work off of an example, I was just in San Francisco doing some work with a company that I can’t name, or I’d have to shoot myself. “Who’s going to be in the room?” “Well, the leadership group.” “Well, who is that?” “Well, it’s about 20 people if you take the direct reports of the CEO and their direct reports. It’s about 20 people. They run the place. They are a collective intelligence. They are a distributed brain.” My process would be, I’m going to talk to each one of them individually, in advance and I’m going to just have a conversation with them about what is it that you worry about, think about, think the future will be made out of that’s uncertain, that matters, that matters to the company. And I get lots of stuff back.

Eric:
On the basis of that, I could tell them or I could bring them into a room and let them tell me what are the most important uncertainties in all of that, which if we just thought about those two big uncertainties in a structured kind of way, they would invite us to think about four different scenarios. Demand is high, demand is low, supply is high, supply is low, but not exactly that, that sort of thing, in which, gee, we see four equally plausible, logically sensible possibilities of the way the world could unfold, and then we’re going to make up stories about how would that world unfold. If it did, what would happen in it? If that happened, what would happen to us? What would we wish we had done if we’d only known that was going to happen? So you go through all of this systematic thinking that’s creative, that’s storytelling. That’s the way human beings really grasp reality.

Larry:
So as soon as you have that story idea planted, you start to tell a story about it? you create the narrative that would that how things would unfold in that scenario?

Eric:
Yeah. As if you have four groups in the room, you’ve divided them up into four for a reason, because you want them to do four scenario constructs, and you’re really trying to explore that logical world. Now, it can get as deep and detailed and quantified as you chose to make it. You could say, “I think in this world the millennials are really going to want to do this, and they’re going to do it.” And that might be enough for the purpose of the conversation. But you might afterwards say, “Well, wait a minute. Exactly how many millennials in New York state do you think there are and how many of them are going to do that? Because we have a big operation in the New York state.” You can go as deep into those weeds as you want in any of the worlds. But the idea is after you’ve constructed the worlds and detailed what’s going on in the world, why are they plausible? Why are they challenging? Why do they matter? What do they suggest to us for all four worlds, each one of which is not a prediction, it’s just a description of the way the world could be.

Eric:
After you’ve listened to all of that, you come back into the present and you say, “Okay, having done all that, so what is it you think we should do more of, less of, instead of, in addition to?” Because you’ve got that distributed brain in the room and you run the engine with this material, and things happen. Smart people have smart ideas and you’re going to get to some interesting conclusions. You may challenge ideas that exist in the company that people thought, “Oh, that’s obvious,” and suddenly they think, “Wait a minute, that’s not so obvious. In fact, I don’t even think that’s true.” And I could tell you stories about that from my own history, seeing an executive in a position of authority going from, “I don’t think the European Union is going to happen.” That’s what he said on Thursday and on Friday at one o’clock he said, “Ah, it’s going to happen. It’s happening faster than I thought. We’re not prepared. I’m going back to the office and we’re going to get onto this.” So it works. It works to change the way people think and feel and act.

Larry:
Interesting. A couple of things about that. I’d love if you could elaborate a little bit on the process where that guy got from one day convinced the EU was not going to happen to where it does. But the other thing you’ve mentioned a couple of times and I’ve read… I haven’t read… I’ve read maybe a dozen articles on scenario planning and talked a little bit, I know very little about it, but is there a magic to that number four? Because that comes up all the time. That seems to be like a convention of scenario planning is to have four scenarios. So I guess-

Eric:
Yeah. Well, so one reason it could be four is if you make a matrix out of the two important uncertainties. So I’m going to pick one that had a big impact in 1995, going to Morgan Stanley for the first time as somebody from Global Business Network, and the two most important uncertainties at that time… There was an axis about globalization, would it continue as it had been? if you asked this question in 1995, Reaganism, Thatcherism, privatization, democratization, big forces at loose in the world which many people could not imagine that that was ever going to stop. They certainly didn’t imagine we would be where we are today in a serious trade conflict and with the levels of political unrest, et cetera, that exists today. Then it seemed almost obvious, almost a foregone conclusion, that globalization would proceed.

Eric:
But we had, as one axis of uncertainty, globalization continues the way it’s been or it doesn’t for reasons that people had trouble coming up with. And the other axis, and this is why you end up with four, because there are four quadrants in a matrix, the other axis was about really technological uptake and development and because of things like Moore’s law, that technology is becoming twice as powerful every 18 months at no change in price, so very, very, very powerful fact and Metcalfe’s law, which has to do with networking effects. People were sitting there saying, “If Moore’s law and Metcalfe’s law go together and continue, there’s going to be such radical change in the direction of the consumer and the end user.” And an example would be, so I have a phone that’s more powerful than anything that was on a U.S. Destroyer in 1972 or something like that. You can find these different examples. Or you could’ve gone to the moon, and then maybe they did go to the moon on the computing power in my iPhone, we saw that this was huge axis of uncertainty, so you end up with four scenarios.

Eric:
Now, it also is true that there are people who will say, “I never use a matrix. I don’t like a matrix. It’s too two dimensional. It’s too limiting,” blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I understand those arguments. The other thing is that human beings can only think of so many things at once, and two scenarios is not enough. It’s just will it or won’t it? It’s up or down. Three scenarios is still not enough because it’s up, down or sideways. The minute you get to four, you’re forcing yourself to think beyond the first three and you’re being forced to do that by something that has some logical integrity because if these are the uncertainties then these four different outcomes are logically possible within those four. And since we’re calling them uncertainties, I guess they’re uncertain. I guess we don’t know how they’re going to turn out. So, what if they turn out in four different configurations, each of which on its own is really worth thinking about?

Eric:
Now, that’s why I say, “Look, it’s not a Monte Carlo simulation, you can’t do 150 scenarios…” And by the way I would encourage you not to do five because four is plenty for what you’re trying to do. Having said that, I’ve had the experience of doing four and discovering a fifth scenario within the framework that turns out to be very interesting to think about. And an example of that would be in thinking through really financial economic scenarios for a big insurance company, the idea that we could be stuck somehow in low return world, low interest rate environment for a really long time has never happened before. That’s unthinkable for people whose business depends upon the interest rate existing. So as we’re right now, we’re going, “Wow, look at this. I know how long ago that conversation was,” and guess what, we’ve been stuck in that low return or that low interest rate environment for much longer than they thought they would be. And that was the fifth scenario we discovered in the conversation. “Hang on, what if it’s not about going further this way or further that way or further this way or further that way? It’s about being here for a really long time. You’ve never been here for a long time.” That’s another example of the power of the thinking, you discover possibilities that are worth thinking about that you had not thought about.

Larry:
You just answered my question about process, I think, in having that quad, that by staying in there you’ve kind of constrained the playing field, but then there’s still a lot of stuff that can show up in there. You said there could be as many as 20 people in a meeting, like the one you just did in San Francisco, how do you manage that, just sort of the top level view of… Did you do activities or workshoppy kind of stuff or is a lot of back and forth conversation? How do you do that?

Eric:
It’s funny, I’ve learned this over such a period of time that there are things I do now without really thinking about them so it’s interesting to try to deconstruct them. So the first thing is it has to be about the people themselves. It’s what they think that they’re… They came into the room as themselves, they’re going to leave the room as themselves, you hope you have some sort of influence on the dynamics among them and you can enable them to have things in their head they didn’t have it in their head before, so they have to be really engaged all the way through. So it’s really simple in one way and then it’s the difference between craft and art. Somebody once said to me, “Well, what you’re really doing is you’re conducting music that’s being written by the people who are playing it.” Yes, that’s a very good way to put it. I’m going to help you write music and four different songs or four different movies that you’re constructing out of your knowledge of the world, your imagination, your sense of the way the world works, your inventiveness, your creativity, et cetera. All of that is going to come into play.

Eric:
So 20 people walk in a room, “I know what we’re going to do, we’re going to talk about what are we doing here. I’ve talked to you, you’ve said things to me, here are some of the things you’ve said. You need to think about what your real strategic question is, and I know something about that because you’ve all talked to me, so here’s some things you said.” And I’ll have a conversation about that, really.

Eric:
So they sit at their four tables and suddenly they’re in a conversation about, “Wait a minute, what is this strategic question that should organize our thinking here? Because we’re not just doing scenarios about everything in the world, we’re doing scenarios about this company now, 2019. And one of the questions that we need to answer…” That would be kind of like if Royal Dutch Shell, where a lot of this work started way back long ago, and a guy that I worked with at GBN was the guy who watched Royal Dutch Shell do scenarios. And in the beginning he said… They would go to a country house, which Shell could afford to do, and drink tea for five days until scenarios emerged. Well, most people can’t do that. So he deconstructed that into eight steps and the eight steps are pretty straightforward, and one of them is… Like shell could say, “Should we build a billion dollar platform, drilling platform, in the North Sea? Yes or no? Let’s do a scenario about that and see if the scenario thinking will help us answer the question.”

Eric:
So my process involves probably, what do you think is a question that would be worth your answering? And that conversation alone in this group of people is tremendously fruitful as they discover what they actually believe individually and collectively about what they should be doing, working on more, more of this, less of that. They know. They have a sense. And then that orders the conversation in the next step, which is if that’s the question, what are the most important uncertainties? And we figure that out, then we have a construct. Then it’s, “Okay you people, you’re going to build the scenario for the upper-right quadrant,” and maybe the CEO is in that quadrant or maybe for a different reason you might think of we’re going to put him in the worst quadrant, in other words where things are not going so well. And then it’s just step by step. And what I’ve learned is good process produces good results. You get smart people, good idea, good process, put them through it, what comes out the other end will be very fruitful, almost guaranteed. It can’t fail. It can only be good, or pretty good, or really good, or wow that was fantastic. But I’ve never ever had the experience of people coming away saying, “I don’t know what the hell we did that for a day and a half, two days for.”

Larry:
Got it. Is that a typical time span to convene a group like that, a day or two or…?

Eric:
Yeah, I’m fond of saying that just because a woman can produce a baby in nine months doesn’t mean nine women could do it in a month. Because the Wall Street attitude is if you ever did it for me in two days, surely you can do it in a day and a half. And if you do it in a day and a half, surely you can do it in a day. And if you can do it today, surely you can do it in a half a day. No, that’s not true. Gestation is real. It takes time. It’s very important to do a certain amount of the process before everybody goes to sleep because when they sleep they think and then when they wake up they have a deeper understanding of what’s going on here. So the second day is very important that it is the second day. Really, two days is the right answer to the question. I have been forced to do it in a day and a half because somebody forced me to, but the fact of matter is I know that we’re leaving some stuff on the floor that we shouldn’t. I can’t tell you what it is. I just know that-

Larry:
Yeah, exactly. It’s one of those things you could only ever learn by trimming it back to some ridiculously short amount and just getting really unsatisfactory results, and who would want to waste the executive’s time on that?

Eric:
It’s been done. I will tell you that that’s been done.

Larry:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a whole… Actually, maybe just let me ask you a little bit, I can picture a whole other conversation about the rise of cognitive work. All of what you just said, I think it’s probably always been true of management work and executive decision making, but there’s something in there now we’re all cognitive decision makers. We’re kind of in this cognitive as opposed to a mechanistic economy now. And I think that kind of thinking that you’re talking about, that probably ripples way down beyond the executive suit, does that make sense?

Eric:
Yeah. I mean, I’m not any sort of a formal student in, let’s say, the evolution of management thinking or the devolution of management thinking. You used an important word there, mechanistic. So I’m somebody who has come to the view that if we’re in the same room together, if we’re physically proximate, there is something going on between us in a, I don’t know, psycho emotional, cognitive, sensory, spiritual atomistic system. I mean, look, you are electrical impulse’s suspended in fluid and there’s space between your atoms, I just can’t see the space, you appear as a physical figure, but I believe that there are things communicated between us on a plane or on planes between us without being able to explain String Theory, I really don’t know what it is, but I think it kind of corroborates the notion that there could be things going on between us. I believe in that.

Eric:
I believe that people need to be physically together to really communicate most fully. And that the scenario conversation by saying right from the start, “Look, we’re going to make up stories about the future, there is a willing suspension of disbelief that has to take place here. We’re going to allow ourselves to think the unthinkable and maybe to speak the unspeakable. We’re going to open ourselves up to, not just think, but to feel.” And one reason for that, and I’ve really become convinced of this, is that decision makers, of course, they think and they apply models and numbers, et cetera, but I don’t believe that a decision maker makes a decision until he or she feels the necessity of it, the conviction about it to make the decision. It’s something that happens below, I’m making a gesture here around my, my collarbone, below here. From here down, the chest, the heart, the guts, possibly even lower, who knows? That feeling of what is true, “I feel it in my gut. I have a sense.” That dimension of human thought, feeling, decision-making scenarios are really attuned to resonate with. You’re able to create that space.

Eric:
And I can tell you different stories from the years, but one in particular, I did scenarios for the global… GIC, global investment… Anyway, basically it’s the sovereign wealth fund for Singapore. And they have more money than you know what to think about and they have a fixed income division, and because they were a client of Morgan Stanley I was asked to go and do scenarios for GIC in Singapore, which I did. And we sat around and we did the scenarios. And I came back the next year to reprise, “what did we say then? What do we think now? How do you feel?” Blah, blah, blah. And I asked the guy who was in charge of GIC fixed income, “So what difference did it make, that whole thing we did last year?” Because I leave the room, it’s a consultant’s dilemma, who knows what happened. He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what happened.” He said, “I sat there listening to the four scenarios and there was some moment when I suddenly realized, oh my gosh, we’re not nearly prepared for the volatility that’s coming. There’s going to be much more volatility than I thought.” And he said, “When I felt that, I realized we have to do something about that.” He said, “So we changed our positions. We changed a lot of our investment positions on the strength of that feeling.” And he said, “And that made the difference to the portfolio for the entire year.”

Eric:
One thought in one guy’s head, who happened to be the guy in charge, so he was empowered to act on his feeling, but it was that feeling that came from all of the scenarios taken together when he listened to all of them and he realized, “Look, they each plausible alone, so any actual mixture of any combination of them is also plausible. And the feeling I’m getting is, wow, we’re not ready for that.” So to me, that’s a good example of what you’re trying to find your way to. You’re really trying to influence people’s intuition about what matters, and you’re doing it in a very open, creative, sometimes abstracted space. But then it gets very concrete about what do you think would be going on.

Larry:
Right. As soon as he had that intuition, action began to unfold that saved that portfolio probably, what, billions in losses or something or-

Eric:
Hard to say. I mean another story that I can tell you about doing the future of Japan a long time ago, in ’97, and on day two, asking the question, so what occurred to anybody last night, long silence. Then the youngest guy in the room said, “There’s no plausible upside to Japan for the next three to five years, period. We’re kidding ourselves,” and there was a dead silence in the room. And then the oldest guy in the room, I checked on this actually, said, “Well then why would we buy anything?” Because at that time Morgan Stanley was thinking, “Oh, it’d be really smart to buy a Japanese broker dealer because Japan’s got all these savings in, 12 trillion yen in savings, wouldn’t that’d be a good idea?” And because this happened in the room, the guy who ran Japan for Morgan Stanley, a guy named Terry Porte, came back to New York and said, “Hey, I know you guys want to buy this broker dealer in Japan. You think that’s a good idea?” “It’s not a good idea. I don’t think we should do it. We should sit and wait and act like a merchant bank until things are clearer.” So that’s what Morgan Stanley did.

Eric:
Merrill Lynch bought Yamichi and lost $1.2 billion. It was immensely reported. I could never convince anybody, “Hey, you should pay me a percentage of $1.2 billion because . . .” That would’ve been cool. But the point is that – an idea came into the room.

Eric:
I also like to say, “Look, the most important idea can come from anybody anytime, but is anybody listening and are they in a position to do anything? And will they actually do something if they feel moved by that idea, that insight that’s actionable? It doesn’t have to happen just at the end of the process. It doesn’t have to just come up towards the top of the list when you’re saying, well, what belongs at the top of the list? No, it could happen anytime.” And the trick is to be open and aware and awake and responsive and also courageous enough to say, “Look, that’s the idea that I’m acting on.”

Larry:
Yep. I love that. I think there’s a lot of people that have the idea that business is just this completely rational decision making process, but you just made a really compelling case for the role of insight and intuition in that whole shooting match.

Larry:
Hey Eric, we’re coming up on time. And before we went on the air, Eric reminded me that there was research… Where was that done? I think you said… Anyhow, that 30 minutes is about the attention span. Can you remind me of that, Eric?

Eric:
Look, I’ve done a lot of sailing in my life, it’s my big love, and… I don’t know. Can I plug my book? Anyway-

Larry:
Sure.

Eric:
Yeah. So there’s a book called “Into My Father’s Wake” that I wrote about sailing alone in the ocean and also trying to grow up as my father’s son, which turned out to be every bit as challenging as sailing alone in the ocean. But in the course of learning a lot about sailing, I ran into this idea that the Navy had done research to find out, well, what is the human attention span? And the answer is that they came back with was 30 minutes, so you can only be on the helm for 30 minutes. And I’ve used that a lot in my life around, “No, nobody’s going to pay attention for more than 30 minutes. They can’t. It’s not their fault.”

Larry:
Right. I love that. Oh hey, I want to give you one chance to… I know we’re coming up on time, on that 30 minutes, but I always like to leave a little room at the end. Is there anything last, anything that hasn’t come up in the conversation or just that you’d like to share with my folks?

Eric:
Well, I’ll just take something that’s contemporary for me. I’ve spent so much of my life in this weird path. I went from journalism, to consulting, to scenario thinking in a big institution and then doing it on my own. So looking out to the future, look in the future, look in the future. Okay? What I find myself saying to my children, whatever that line is about, planning is what you do until life happens.

Eric:
I did kind of a scenario exercise once for a screenwriter who was working on a movie for Steven Spielberg, and the movie would ultimately come into being… Called Deep Impact about an asteroid hitting the earth. And the screenwriter’s Bruce Rubin. And he wrote Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder. Very, very smart, deep, interesting guy, practicing Buddhist. And I went down and spent a few days with him to talk about what would be the scenarios of the way the world would be if you knew an asteroid was coming? And very early in the conversation, he said, “I’ve been sitting here working on this and I’m thinking to myself that really life is all about collisions between bodies of different sizes in time and space, not just people meeting people, things happening, ideas happening.” So it really got me thinking about how, yes, that’s really true, think how your parents met, and then you were born. And those are about collisions, large and small, time and space, and it’s happening all the time. Some people might believe, yes, and it’s a divine plan that’s unfolding. It’s already been written. Some people believe that. I don’t believe that. I believe that it’s unfolding, there’s what happens and then there’s what you do. So you have a plan and then something happens, now what are you going to do?

Eric:
I find myself saying to my kids, “It’s very important to have an intention, maybe a vision of how you’d like your life to be, maybe an ambition that would take time to achieve. Those plans matter. Intention matters. But also what matters is being open to life as it’s actually unfolding.” So what’s happening in the present, and paying attention to what’s happening in the present, and being responsive to what’s happening in the present, even though that was not part of your plan, that’s a very important part of being human as well. And like so many other things, is it abstract? Is it concrete? It’s both. Is it general or is it specific? It’s both. Is it about having a plan or is it about being spontaneous? It’s both. And so how you manage that is a measure of who you are, how you become, how you develop, how you grow.

Eric:
So the thing that, I guess where I’m leading to call this to is I think the most important thing… Okay, how can it be the most important thing? There must be other things that are just as important. A very important thing is to be open, is to be open with your heart, and be open with your guts, and be willing to listen, and listen and try to understand. And don’t be so wedded, as my eldest daughter said to me when she was 14, when she said to me, “You know, dad, I don’t want to think so much about the future that I miss the present.” And I thought, “Wow, you’re a smart kid. That’s good.” So that’s where I’d like to sort of leave it. I think a lot about the future, but I don’t want to miss the present and you shouldn’t either.

Larry:
That’s perfect. Eric. Thanks so much.

Eric:
You’re very welcome.

Larry:
Great talking with you.

Eric:
Thank you. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.