Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

This blog is a response to my invitation to GL Hoffman's thoughts on business intelligence.

I laughed when I read GL's opener ... "This Was Intimidating..." But the wit and wisdom I'd looked forward to most ... flowed freely from GL's blog below!

Ellen asking me to write a guest post for her blog, Brain Based Business!!!, is a bit like Derek Jeter asking me to come over to Yankee Stadium to catch some grounders with him.  Sounds fun at first, but there is a very real chance I will embarrass myself, my family, my company and all my dead relatives.  Plus the uniform will make me look like I am wearing tightie-whities from head to toe.  This could get ugly fast.

I learned long ago that I blog best when I don’t think so much.  This is probably very apparent to the readers of my own blog.  Carrying the baseball analogy further, wasn’t it Yogi Berra who said, “Think?  How the hell are you gonna hit and think at the same time?”

So here goes.

I like being around smart people.  I guess they have either bigger brains, or somehow have made better uses of it.  From what I read, it is likely not so much an accident of birth, but upbringing, practice,  experience, education and willingness to adapt that makes one person seem smarter.

In my little hometown of Abilene, Kansas, I was not the smartest kid around but I usually made the honor roll, so whoopee.  One of my earliest claims to fame was that I got to sit down one Saturday morning with Ike Eisenhower, an Abilene native who had asked to meet me because I was about to go off to a military academy just like he had done sixty years earlier.  Anyway, I left his suite that morning thinking very clearly, “That was the smartest person I have ever met.”  I asked such dumb questions and he answered each one graciously.  He must have left our meeting thinking just the opposite about me.

Funny how smart people have since stuck in my mind.

In 1975, I worked part time  in Wichita, Kansas, for the United Way.  I can vividly remember sitting in a big meeting, must have been 25 people there talking over some program.  And like a lot of volunteer-oriented programs, the talking and meeting were a bit out of control.  And then the Director of the United Way for Wichita spoke.  His name was John Rush, and he was the little man, maybe 5 foot six, and very un-assuming, mild, and certainly not charismatic, at all.  This was one of the few times, that I simply sat mesmerized by how John condensed, summarized and then articulated all the opposing views into one or two paragraphs.  Here was someone who could just dominate a room by the power of his mind,er, brain.  It inspired me, truly.

Later, I had a board member of one of my companies who was the same way,  Erwin Kelen is a local, well known board member of young companies.  From Hungary originally (like Andy Grove), he would sit in board meetings apparently nearly asleep until the discussion would wind down.  And then when he spoke, I always felt like just adding, “what he just said.”

There have been other smart people in my life, sure.  But these three stick out because, contrary to the old saying that NO ONE IS 15% SMARTER OR DUMBER THAN ANYONE ELSE, these three were waaaaay smarter,  way-way-way.

Does this mean that only articulate people are smart?  No, I know better.  Or that people who can summarize complex issues and make others understand it better are smarter than those who can’t?  Nah.

What I am saying is that each of us, I am betting, have been exposed to someone like my three.

If you think about it, your life is richer because of it.