Will You Recognize the Next Great Idea?

Vantage Point - the podcast for critical thinkers.

Suppose every idea reached you anonymously, judged only on its merit. How many of the ones you'd actually accept come from the sources you'd never have expected?

In this episode
A definition and a hard look at the episode's theme, plus 13 of Eli's aphorisms, Dr. Jonas Salk, born 1914 in New York to European Jewish immigrant parents, gave the world the polio vaccine and wiped the disease off the face of the earth, Dr. Jonas Salk, Alan C. "Ace" Greenberg, and Fred Hassan, longtime chairman of Schering-Plough from great minds, a "What If?" to ponder.

Eli’s Aphorisms
“Turning education over to AI and robots will be about as effective as kissing through a glass window.”
“Doing well and doing good are not the same thing, but they go together very nicely.”
“Go ahead and make mistakes — just don't do anything stupid." (Fred Hassan, longtime chairman of Schering-Plough, built research teams unafraid of "grand mistakes," as long as nobody did anything stupid.)”
“When you think you're thinking out of the box, look around — you may just be in a bigger box.”
“This is not about throwing the old sources out. It's about letting the new ones in.”
“Go ahead and make mistakes. Just don't do anything stupid. Mistakes are good when they serve as learning events.”
“Because you never know where the next great idea is going to come from. And you don't want to miss it.”
“Cognitive biases lead to perceptual distortion, narrowed options, faulty judgment, and lost opportunities.”
“Leaders not only have to think out of the box — they have to make sure they're just not in a bigger box.”
“Truly original ideas come from more places, arise and develop much faster, and reach much farther than ever before.”
“Our biases aren't easy to shed, but shed them we must.”
“Greenberg wasn't arguing against education. He was arguing against credentialism.”
“Don't ask where this person went to school. Ask: is this person smart, hungry, resourceful, and determined to succeed?”

From Great Minds
“while his medical-school classmates went into private practice and made fortunes, he went into research instead. When Salk's own lawyers told him, on the eve of release, that he hadn't patented the vaccine and a patent would take another year, he shut the conversation down: a year of delay meant roughly 60,000 more cases of polio, many fatal, many in children. The vaccine shipped in 1954 with no patent. Eli was part of the final human trial as a first-grader — he got the real vaccine, not the placebo, and keeps his Polio Pioneer card on his desk. Salk's own words: "Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors." Eli names Kizzmekia Corbett, who led the final work on the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and was scooped up by Harvard within days of the announcement, as a Salk for our own time.” — Dr. Jonas Salk, born 1914 in New York to European Jewish immigrant parents, gave the world the polio vaccine and wiped the disease off the face of the earth
“Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors.” — Dr. Jonas Salk
“The firm wanted people not with an MBA, but with PSD degrees — poor, smart, and a deep desire to become rich.” — Alan C. "Ace" Greenberg
“When we built research teams, we built with people who were not afraid to make mistakes. We call them grand mistakes — just as long as we don't do anything stupid.” — Fred Hassan, longtime chairman of Schering-Plough

What If?
July 11, 1804 — the duel between Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, who as much as anyone built the country from its founding: the Treasury Department, the idea of public debt, the U.S. Coast Guard and later the Navy, the Bank of New York, the New York Post, trusted advisor to George Washington. Hamilton was also almost always right and never held his tongue about it, which cost him — an immigrant from St. Kitts and Nevis at age eleven, product of a mixed-race, illegitimate marriage, scrappy and unpopular with the era's power players. He pushed Burr to the point of challenge. On the field at Weehawken, New Jersey, both men insisted on standing for themselves rather than sending seconds; they took ten paces, turned, and fired. Hamilton missed. Burr didn't. Hamilton was barged back across the river to his home in lower Manhattan and died the next day. What if Burr had missed instead? Eli isn't a historian and won't pretend to be one, but he'll leave you with this: had Hamilton lived — a most persuasive arguer, the kind of man who won people over simply by spending time with them — there very likely would have been a President Alexander Hamilton, and probably no Civil War.

This episode is supported by Vantage Point's Executive Sponsor, Stephen Bozer, SVP of Human Health at Flavine.

Also supported by Major Sponsor Bergen Volunteers, neighbors serving neighbors across 70 towns in Bergen County since 1966.

Also supported by Major Sponsor Kardam Consulting, strategic counsel for the business of making medicine.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

This is Vantage Point, the podcast for critical thinkers, where we make sense of and excel in our lives, our jobs, and our world. We're not political, just critical. Thank you for joining each week as we continue in our campaign to revive critical thinking. I'm your host, Ellie Amdur. Happy to have you with us and looking forward to continuing our march together. If you've enjoyed the journey so far, if you've gained something from it or believe you will, or if you know someone who might, please forward this or repost. Today, we'll take a close look at how critical thinking turns ideas into practicality. Before we do that, here's something I want to let you know. Starting this week, we are adding a second weekly episode to the lineup. So keep an eye out this Thursday and every Thursday from here on. This week's is a fun one. What happens when 11 days just vanish and an entire country loses its mind over it? Okay, back to today's topic. Let's ask the question: will you recognize the next great idea? Suppose, as the leader of your organization, you decided that starting immediately, all ideas were to come to you anonymously, and the source would be revealed only after you evaluated the idea on its own merit. How many ideas that you ultimately accept do you think would come from expected sources or unexpected sources, or new sparks and non-traditional sources, or from the usual same old, tired, boring chair warmers? Because of a phenomenon called cognitive bias, our own construct of reality, a reality we often seek in advance, tends to override objectivity in assessing the input. As such, cognitive biases can easily lead to perceptual distortion, narrowed options, faulty judgment, and lost opportunities. Groundbreaking work on cognitive bias was done by Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli psychologist and economist, noted for his work regarding the psychology of judgment and decision making, as well as behavioral economics. For his work, beginning in the 1970s, Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Kahneman's work challenges the assumptions we make regarding our own human rationality. If we apply in everyday scenarios what he states, we start to realize the frailties and foibles of our decision-making processes and the biases that make them vulnerable. We freely use the term paradigms, but that is not the root of the problem. Paradigmatic constructs are caused by the more fundamental and systemic cognitive biases. For example, we're more likely to freely accept ideas from senior members and leaders of the team than from young members of the project team. Or from executives with three degrees, not smart, creative, fearless thinkers with the ink still wet on their bachelor's degrees. Why? When ideas are presented to us, the immediate need is for us to be persuaded. Persuasion, we know, depends on four factors. Factor number one, credibility. The idea must be believable, sensible, and practical to one degree or another, or any combination of those characteristics. Factor number two, authority. The idea must come from someone whom we recognize as an authoritative voice. How we assign real or perceived authority is often a pathology all its own. Feedback you get back in. But this is an intimate dance performed together by the persuader and the persuaded that serves as milestones along the path to recognition of the persuasion itself. It's not just an end result, it's part and parcel of the process. The more these four factors are given equal values, the more objective the process becomes, and the more reliable the decision will be. That is cognitive objectivity, which we commonly call open-mindedness. But when, for instance, we assign too much authority to an individual simply because of age, seniority, position, or credentials, or when we dismiss others for exactly the opposite characteristics, we engage in cognitive biases and we endanger the integrity of our thought processes and ultimately our decisions. In this age of unparalleled nature, pace, and scope of change, keep that phrase in mind: nature, pace, and scope. Leaders not only have to think out of the box to use a worn-out cliche, but it fits here. They have to make sure they're just not in a bigger box. One of my greatest warnings to all my clients when you think you're thinking out of the box, look around. You may just be in a bigger box. Ideas, truly original ideas, come from more places, that's the nature. Arise and develop much faster, that's the pace, and reach much farther, that's the scope, than ever before. Nature, pace, and scope. And our cognitive biases will only get in the way. They're not easy to shed, but shed them we must. For example, Alan C. Greenberg, the iconic legendary Ace Greenberg, who was long time head of Bear Stearns in its heyday. As a matter of fact, he held a position for 15 years, 1978 to 93, had a famously contrarian attitude towards hiring MBAs. As you'll see, he was not the biggest fan of MBAs. In a May 5, 1981 internal memo to his executive team, Greenberg noted that other Wall Street firms were making a point of recruiting MBA graduates. Bear Stearns, he argued, should continue doing something different. His memorable formulation was the firm wanted people, not with an MBA, but with PSD degrees rather than simply any MBA credentials. PSD stood for poor, smart, and a deep desire to become rich. Greenberg wasn't really literally banning MBAs. He wrote openly that if someone with an MBA applied to Bear Stearns, Bear Stearns would not hold a degree against the candidate. His point was that routine credentials were secondary to favorable traits. And when I do my presentation to you on new models of hiring and team building, that's where it comes from. He also strongly favored promoting people from within. Greensburg's philosophy reflected his own experience, having come to Wall Street without an elite school pedigree and was rejected by several firms before Bear Stearns hired him. Keep in mind, this is a guy who came to the United States as an immigrant with barely a dime in his pocket. He subsequently rose to become one of Wall Street's best-known and clearly most successful executives. There's an interesting irony in Greenberg's little acronym. He wasn't really arguing against education. He was arguing against credentialism. His hiring question was essentially don't ask where did this person go to school? Ask, is this person smart, hungry, resourceful, and determined to succeed? Surely there have been other successful executives, but on Wall Street, in that period of time, there were many executives, but there was only one, Alan C. Greenberg. He collected this and many of those other unusual management memos in his delicious little book, Memo from the Memos from the Chairman. It attracted the eye of Warren Buffett, who wrote the foreword for it. So let's get back to the opening hypothesis to think about our openness to new ideas from new sources. Will you recognize the next great idea? Because you never know where the next great idea is going to come from. And you don't want to miss it. This is not about throwing the old sources out, it's about letting the new ones in. Let me take a break. Turn this over to our sponsors, and I'll be back. This episode is really about not letting bias about where an idea comes from, stop you from recognizing a good one. And that is exactly the spirit our sponsors have shown in backing this show early. Thank you to Stephen Boser, our founding sponsor. And thank you to Cottom Consulting for standing behind this work. And since we are on the subject, I want to mention something new. Vantage Point is now looking for a few more sponsors to join them. We came out of nowhere in June with no advanced advertising, and by our first week, we were already in the top half of 5 million podcasts worldwide. By week eight, we were in the top quarter. If your organization wants a personal connection with a thoughtful, engaged audience while it is still early, I would love to talk. Sponsorships are limited, so if you are interested, come visit my website, eleander.com. I am back as I threatened I would be with a handful of aphorisms. Which, thank you for all your feedback. I'm getting a lot of positive results and reviews from. My aphorism number one for today. Turning education over to AI and robots will be about as effective as kissing through a glass window. There are just things that AI and robots can't do, and we can. Studied pre-med and decided to go to med school. And when he finished medical school, he went into research. All of his classmates went into private practice and made oodles of money. Jonas Salk did not. Jonas Salk changed the world. He went to the University of Pittsburgh, began working in the laboratory, made so many great advances that they named the laboratory after him and gave him a staff of researchers to run it. Fast forward a little bit to 1953, when the research had been going on since the end of the war. And he produced the vaccine. The Eisenhower administration had seen to it that six pharmaceutical companies get together and make sure that they were ready, willing, and able to produce one dose of the vaccine of the vaccine for every person in America, and then as many more as they could for people around the world. And they told him it it it protects the rights to the product and you know blah blah blah. You all know what a patent does. And Salt, who was also very intuitive, interrupted them and said, Hold everything here. How long will this take? What's involved? And so they explained the process. You do this, you do that, and you file this paper and that paper, and you're on another trial, and blah blah blah blah blah and you go on and on and on and on. And he lost patience and he said, Just a second now. How long is this gonna take? And one of the lawyers responded, probably another year or so until we get the patent. And Salk shut the conversation down and said, No way. Now we're into 1954 now. The vaccine is ready, it's going out. And they tried to argue to save the the uh the patent reservation, and Salk explained to them that for us to wait another year, 60,000 people or so will come down with polio. A very significant portion of them will die, many of them children. Do you want me to approve that? And because he had control over it, he gave the vaccine to the health administrators of the Eisenhower administration, and they vaccinated everyone in America, or almost everyone. On a personal note, I can tell you that I was part of the final human trial in a school that I was where I was going to school, where I was in first grade, in Mamarinick, New York. And half the uh subjects got a placebo and half got the real vaccine. I was the recipient of the real vaccine, and I have my polio pioneer card on my desk at home to prove. Jonas Salk potentially saved my life and the life of tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of others. Because, as he said, our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors. I think we have a Jonas Salk among us. I think that that person is Dr. Kismesia, Kismecia Corbett, who made the final progress in developing the mRNA vaccine against COVID 19. It wasn't ten seconds after that was announced that she was scooped up by Harvard. They gave her a lab, and now she's busy doing what Jonas Salt did. If you thought when I started this riff that I was exaggerating by calling him one of the most important persons of the century, now do you feel the same way? Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors. Okay, let's get into our what if section of the episode. And I think we're going to attach this to what we discussed about endangering the integrity of our thought processes. I take you back to 1804, July 11th, when a bitter dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr came to a culmination in a way that many were done in those years with a duel of pistols. Aaron Burr was vice president of the United States. Alexander Hamilton, as much as anyone, if not more, contributed to building this country from the very beginning. Alexander Hamilton created our Treasury Department. He created and championed the idea of public debt. He built the United States Coast Guard and later the United States Navy. He established the Bank of New York. He established the New York Post newspaper. And he was a trusted advisor to George Washington and to others as well. One of our Alexander Hamilton's problems was, if I can say this in the slang version, he had a big mouth and never held it closed when it came time to criticize others. The problem for them was that he was always right. He was absolutely brilliant. And when people talk about the most intelligent, most intellectual leader of the country in the early days, they talk about Thomas Jefferson. I beg to differ. Alexander Hamilton was above and beyond. Never was a popular favorite of many of the uh players at that time because he arrived here at the age of eleven from St. Kitts and Nevis. He was the product of a mixed race, illegitimate marriage. He was scrappy. He was almost always right. And he was appreciated for many things that he instituted, but at a certain point one would get annoyed or worse by Alexander Hamilton. Well, he made Vice President Burr reach that point. And Burr challenged him to a duel. They both lived in New York. They chose the field, the open field in Weehawk in New Jersey. And on the morning of July 11th, the duel took place. Now many times people sent in their seconds to deal with the duel. But Burr and Hamilton agreed that they had to fight it out like two men. So you hear the drum roll, you hear everybody lining up, etc. etc. etc. And they took the ten paces, turned, and fired. Hamilton missed Burr. Found its target, the midsection of Alexander Hamilton. He was taken by barge across back across the river and brought to his home in Lower Manhattan, where he died the next day on July 12th. What if Burr missed? What if the day ended with the two of them going home? Historians love this question. We could go on and on, and I'm not a historian, so I'm not going to pretend to be one, but I but I do appreciate what one thing that could have happened and one thing that could not have that might not have happened. We could very easily have had a president, Alexander Hamilton. Because if people weren't ready to be persuaded and convinced by Alexander Hamilton, they wound up being so when they spent some time with him. He was a most persuasive arguer. And I'm going to leave you with this. Had Alexander Hamilton lived, had Aaron Burr missed, there probably would have been no civil war. If you're interested, the books on Hamilton are plentiful. They're worth reading. Coming up in the next few weeks, we're going to take an entirely new look at hiring and tea building. I'm going to tell you the story about ascending Everest, and we're going to look more clearly where ideas come from. In the meantime, thanks for listening. Thanks for being with me. Thanks for being my audience. And thanks for sharing the ideas. Talk to you next time. Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.