You Need To Think Laterally.

I was asked to contribute to a book reading list for CEO’s.

The list is here.

It includes the great and the good recommendations. Many I have read and enjoyed.

But equally, they are quite narrow. All a short iteration, a few steps, from each other.

The scale of the coming impact on people and companies will be unlike anything felt for a 100+ years.

By one estimation 25m small and medium sized businesses (SMB) could go bust in the coming three years (in the US alone). By way of clarification, that is every single SMB. Sounds far fetched? Well, in the good times the attrition rate is at about 50%. Turn off the economy, millions and millions lose their jobs and factor in an emotional shock reverberating through huge swathes of the population, and its pretty easy to see how this will come to pass. The emotional shock alone will shift behaviours for a generation. Add in debt and doubt and a little death, and the impact will be deep and far reaching.

Great.

Surviving and thriving will require different, lateral thinking, not just ‘me too’ iterations of the last management fad.

Over 3,000 years ago, while our Celtic grandparents were bashing barrels of shit out of each other, Polynesian pioneers were criss crossing the Pacific on rafts steered by the most sophisticated technology of its day. Maybe the most sophisticated technology ever made. The Wayfinder.

The Wayfinder was chosen as a child and reared to navigate. He learned to use the full spectrum of his senses, unconstrained by our five, to feel the ocean, to see the starts and pull islands from the sea.

They sensed their way across the biggest ocean in the world.

At a similar time, a young man was saying goodbye to friends and family and walking off into the Australian bush. Like thousands of young men before him he was heading off on Walkabout. A journey where boy becomes man. A journey to learn the tools and ways of the land, to learn symbiosis, to learn to survive and thrive in some of the harshest lands in the world.

The ingenuity and wisdom and insight which powered each of these journeys is available to us all.

It is alive in our human condition.

Pioneering LSD academic to spiritual leader, Ram Dass (who started life as Dr Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary’s experimenter in arms in the 1960’s) speaks to it eloquently.

It’s not that we lack ambition, its that we’re not ambitious enough….

The world is crying out some ‘new’ thinking.

We don’t for lack for problems or challenges.

Rather than turning the pages of the newest management fad, why not reach back for wisdom and insight which has stood the test of time? Insight and wisdom road tested over millenia? And in so doing you might tap into the pools of ingenuity and wisdom which lie deep inside, waiting for ignition.

To lead a company transformation, or your own personal transformation, to adapt and evolve into the coming flux, maybe its time for a modern day walkabout?

The route to surviving is lateral thought.

And for that we must dig deeper and go back further.