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Does skin color matter to you? Your test results might surprise you.

Do family ties influence voting patterns? Not really, since Obama is an eighth cousin to Dick Cheney and an 11th cousin to G. W. Bush.

If Obama wins will he really be the first black president? No, he’ll actually be the seventh.

What’s my point?

I thought that maybe, just maybe, using high-profile, emotionally-charged information might drive home the realization that your knowledge, even your self-knowledge, doesn’t always match the facts.

Do you look for discrepancies between your knowledge and the facts?

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Don’t you love it when experts and powers-that-be formally study and recognize what the rest of us could have told them—namely that constant interruptions ruin productivity.

Remember years ago when that guy in the next cubicle talked too loudly on the phone, constantly got up for coffee or whatever, popped his head over the cubicle wall (or stuck his head in the office) comment/question and was generally distracting?

The interruptions are still happening, only now they’re in the form of email, instant messaging, texting, twittering and other digital annoyances.

A story in the NY Times tells us that the “biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload.”

Did you know that “A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times… on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day…”

So what’s the tab for the unnecessary interruptions? Is it really high enough to warrant the founding of a non-profit group created specifically to combat it?

I guess that depends on whether $650 billion a year gets your attention.

What’s your/your company’s share of that number?

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I used to be a whiz at names and phone numbers, but not any more. I excuse these lapses with jokes about accessing data with only 1 K of RAM or that my brain is so stuffed that it’s hard to keep track of minor details.

Well, lo and behold, it’s true.

A recent article in the NY Times explains that in older (that’s me:) brains.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers. …much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number.”

What the researchers did was to have both young and older people read text that had extra words thrown in as a distraction; then they asked questions related to the added words. While the younger folks read faster than the older readers, they didn’t process the distracting words.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

But the best part, both for quieting fears about memory loss and bolstering ego, was the comment about what this means.

Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.

“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”

What about you? Where are you on the road to wisdom?

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Be sure to visit my other WW leader/manger – two halves of the whole

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‘Innovation’ is one of the main themes permeating recession-proofing advice, but if you don’t already have an innovation-friendly culture you need to start by rectifying that or it ain’t gonna happen.

As you work to fix any cultural problems you found, you can work on small innovations, too. Just don’t try and implement something that your culture won’t support. Innovation is about the freedom to fail as much as it is about the joy of succeeding. If you’ve trashed your managers or killed the messenger every time something didn’t work don’t expect to change their assumption that it will still happen or rebuild a viable trust level overnight.

And before you start moaning about spending money let’s remember that innovation is not always synonymous with expensive inventions or something that rocks your industry.

• Start with your business processes and open everything to consideration, discussion and improvement.
• Listen to your people—all of them.
  • Don’t make the mistake of thinking that ideas are the province of a certain level or education or position.
  • Administrative staff often knows where more of the speed bumps and bottlenecks are than their bosses, but they need to know that they’re safe before they’ll say anything.
• Rethink your customer care. No matter how good you think it is it can still be improved.
  • Look for ways to do and fix the stuff that you may not have bothered with in good times.
  • Listen to your CSRs because they are your pipeline to your customers.
  • Be proactive by asking your customers for feedback, instead of waiting for a complaint.
• Explore open innovation. It’s “about connecting with others to find new ideas and, often, to co-develop and co-market them.” Open innovation is not about outsourcing.

Remember, a slow-down or recession approach that’s only about cutting costs ignores the obvious. If you don’t innovate now you won’t have anything going for you when the the economy impoves—which it will as it always has.

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