Don’t you find bookshelves overwhelming these days?
Can anyone read them all?
For those of us who grew up before smartphones, social media and streaming, there was time to sit and read for hours.
But now the big shift, for me, is that books have stopped being definitive sources of knowledge.
The ideas in them often fail to connect with the complexity of reality.
Say you have a problematic situation at your firm. Can you roll out a 2×2 matrix and solve it? Will a SWOT be enough?
No. We know that the specifics of the situation matter. What you do depends on what you find when you go and look at what’s going wrong.
That’s why, as I get older, I am less willing to accept simple universal solutions to real-world problems, even if they’re fossilised in books.
We need to be willing to learn – and find knowledge, wherever that is now.
It’s a process of inquiry rather than an application of expertise.
Handcrafted insight 