Present. They understand the business. This doesn’t work if you come from management consulting, and now you’re a general manager who doesn’t really know the domain. That wouldn’t work as well.
You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.
When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but... See more
But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
Marshall McLuhan was spot on here -"people prefer bad news to good news, because bad news provides them with a "survival emotion" while good news threatens them with change
So, it’s very easy not to know north from south because it all looks the same, the ice and the overcast sky. And he said, “Well, you know, it’s just now,” he might have been in his fifties, “it’s just now that I think I begin to understand the ice.” And he’d been living there all his life. Then he said, “And now I’m really too old to hunt.”
You have to know how to seize the moment of the landscape at the right time, because that time will never come back.” - monet
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.