- PowerPoints make you productive (Wikipedia)
Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker took up the mantle for twitter-reading, YouTube-watching, blog-scanning, email-reading multi-taskers in an Op-Ed in last Friday’s New York Times. In what amounts to a direct critique of Nicholas Carr’s recent remarks on hyperlinks and his new book, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Pinker says that claims that our cerebellums are being re-wired to think less and react more are overblown.
Pinker scores valid points with familiar arguments from this camp. The move to the written word from an oral tradition, for example, was thought by the ancients to be a memory crutch and would inhibit good conversations and interactions. Sound familiar?
I can’t talk about whether there is a permanent rewiring of the brain, but I don’t see how Pinker and his cohorts can deny the productivity draining aspect of too much digital interactivity.
It was amusing for me to read how Pinker claims his academic friends manage to hack out PowerPoints and monitor emails while producing first-rate work.
None of the academics I’ve ever worked with were very good at using their Microsoft Office products. They usually had an underling (or overworked grad student) do it for them. And that goes double for many high-level executives I’ve observed in the for-profit world.
Life is far different in the carpeted corporate trenches.
In my recent experiences in cube-land, I’ve seen how many mid-level positions have taken on the flavor of a customer rep in a call center. You really do have to be glued to your desk to respond quickly to emails, handle phone calls, and monitor tweets all while making a valiant attempt at starting a longer-term task.
I’ve noticed that going off-line in these quasi-response-center environments is frowned upon: there’s more status (and better reviews) to be gained by claiming to be available “24/7”.
Yes, many of these companies realize that this kind of worker behavior is “reactive”, instead of “pro-actively” heading off problems before they trigger a cascade of emails, tweets, and PowerPoints.
But few executives do anything other than paying lip service to these ideals.
It was with some surprise I read that General Motors new CEO, Ed Whitacre, is publicly calling for significant changes to this automaker’s rusting digital bureaucracy.
According to a recent article in the Financial Times he is said to have a low tolerance for PowerPoint presentations and to question the need for thousands of reports that remain unread in managers’ inboxes.
Most interestingly, Whitacre has closed down most of the over 3,000 internal web sites that have propagated over the years on GM’s intranet.
It may be that some of us can handle the onslaught of digital content, but for the rest, not being forced to scan another report or view another horrid internal sales web site is one less attention deficit we can live without.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Steven Pinker and the Internet (roughtype.com)
- Mind Over Mass Media (nytimes.com)
- No, The Internet Won’t Make You Stupid (techcrunch.com)
- Is GM’s Corporate Culture Really Changing? (businessinsider.com)
- The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People (danariely.com)
- What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (amazon.com)
