SOPHISTICATED FINANCE

Fall 2018 Courses

 

This Fall I am teaching two courses at FIU in the Honors College:

1. The Fourth Industrial Revolution    This course is for two semesters. The course starts with an introduction to industrial revolutions and the writings of Carlota Perez. I used to start with Thomas Kuhn, but that was heavy going for undergraduates. Then we read Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell, a researcher at Santa Fe Institute. Stephen Hawking said that complexity will be the science of the 21st century. We finish the semester reading The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur. One of my students, an engineering major, said that every engineer should read this book the first week of engineering school. The book reading is supplemented by several current articles, which are included in this first-semester reading list,  Download 4IR Reading List F2018.  After setting the stage with Perez' writings, the course moves into an exploration of the technologies of the 4IR--artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, gaming,  bio-sensors--to name a few. Much to my surprise, last year the students admitted that they did not know much about the technologies. This year we go deeper into the technologies. 2nd semester we explore the social, economic, political and environmental issues of the 4IR, which the students need to understand to fully function as citizens. Income inequality and the environment are two recurring themes, as I see these topics as the two critical issues of the 21st century. Course project will be to propose what the government will be in 2050. Students work in teams to perfect their collaboration skills.
2. Thinking, Design and Impossible Problems   This course is for two semesters. For several years I have been teaching a course on thinking disguised as an entrepreneurship course. What I realized is that better thinkers produce better entrepreneurs. This year I am just unabashedly teaching a course on thinking and the real objective is to help the students think like a genius. The readings, the authors, everything except the professor, is about the mental frameworks of genius level people. In part, the course was inspired by the first reading in the course, The Evangelist of Molecular Biology. This article is about James Watson, who won a Noble Prize for his work on DNA, and how he almost became an ornithologist. One day he realized that he would make no real contribution to humanity in ornithology, looked for a new field of study, and found molecular biology and genetics. From this article, I realized that high potential students need to be immersed in the thinking and writings of geniuses in order to better understand their alternatives. First book in the class is Melanie Mitchell's book on complexity (described above). One of the best frameworks for thinking about problems is to model them as a complex system. The second book is Ray Dalio's Principles: Life and Work. Dalio is a legendary hedge fund manager and a well-known advocate for the use of mental frameworks to address problems. Similar thinking and approach to another legend--Charlie Munger. The first-semester reading list  Download TDIP READING LIST F2018 also includes several articles. Many of the articles focus on inter-disciplinary approaches to problems and new fields where modeling is being used for the first time, such as mathematics, computer science and neuroscience. Each weekly class the students present their analysis of a different impossible problem and the course project will probably be to explain why art and science will converge in the 21st century. Students can work on all the problems in teams or individually. 

 

Image credit: Tomorrow Today Global

The Trilogy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution--Nature-Design-Technology

My professional life revolves around entrepreneurship in its many forms, the Fourth Industrial Revolution--4IR (that the World Economic Forum correctly started heralding a few years ago) and how these two themes intersect around opportunity, wealth creation and social innovation. One of the devices to understand the 4IR is what I call the Trilogy, which was written about by Daniel C. Wahl in the very good article, "Facing Complexity: Wicked Design Problems". The Trilogy, which is a device to simplify the 4IR, is that this revolution can be understood as the convergence of nature-design-technology. Until today I would have said go away and study complexity science, artificial intelligence, bio-mimicry, slime mold, design thinking and 10-20 other concepts and then the Trilogy is obvious. Today I had a realization. 

Fashion represents the Trilogy. Please remember my twenty years in retail and retail consulting. Now one might argue that fashion has existed from before we left the caves (all of intellectual history beginning from the first drawing on a cave wall) and you would be correct. Remember, it could be that all of human history can be understood through the lens of the Trilogy-nature-design-technology (see this article on the Krebs Cycle of Creativity). Now back to explaining the Trilogy in terms of fashion.

 

Now almost everyone can understand fashion in terms of design, at least it is superficially obvious. Technology is much the same, with different fabrics and colors being the result of technology. Where it becomes interesting is when we consider the role of nature in fashion. Of course, nature is where we introduce the human-centric focus and that leads us to the drape of the clothing on the body, the equally important emotional engagement of the wearer and most importantly to the question of customer self-esteem. What the fashion example makes clear is that every consumer opportunity, product or solution should be considered in the terms of the trilogy, whether you were sitting outside a cave or a modern design studio. As you venture forth in the 4IR remember one does not understand fully until one can explain the issue or opportunity in terms of nature-design and technology.

 

Note: The Krebs Creativity Cycle is not obvious and takes awhile for people to appreciate its utility. I will do a followup post to explain its utility in more detail.

 

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My Latest Writing on Entrepreneurship and Complexity

For the last five years most of my thinking and teaching has revolved around three major areas:

1. Entrepreneurship
2. Creativity and learning
3. Complexity science

Today on Medium I published an essay on these subjects and how they explain many of the large market opportunities that consistently have repeated throughout history:

The Foundation of Entrepreneurship: Large Market Opportunities that have Repeated for 40,000 Years

If anyone thinks the essay is suitable to develop as a book, let me know by email.

Information, Capital and Blockchain

If you study complexity science you soon realize that reality is energy and information. If you study physics, one school of thinkers believes reality is binary [0,1] otherwise known as bits of information. This may not come as a surprise if we study Claude Shannon’s seminal work in information theory, which sparked the Third Industrial Revolution and the digital era. As we look at the Forth Industrial Revolution we see that information continues to be important in areas such as AI, IOT and robotics. So maybe we can conclude this information concept is important, even if we cannot tell what happened to Schrodinger’s cat or that tree in the forest.

Last week a friend was talking about healthcare and he asked me who had the most money in the healthcare system? The answer,  the insurers. Who has the most information in healthcare? The answer, the insurers. Historically, those who controlled the greatest amount of information were able to amass the greatest amount of capital. If you think about the enormous valuations of Google, FB and Baidu, one realizes that their platforms have chokehold on information from which they extract enormous value.

If you study the Blockchain and its distributed network of highly secure information, one realizes that this infrastructure eliminates the opportunity for information choke points and the related value capture. Now you know why the non-speculators are excited about Blockchain. The economics of value creation through information will remain intact but the value will be shared widely and not concentrated the way it is today.

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Talks, Seminars and Workshops I Do

This morning somebody asked me for a list of talks and workshops that I do. A current list is below.

1. The Secret to Successful Entrepreneurship. 4 hours, 8 hours, or 3 days. Entrepreneurship is a popular topic in the media, schools and the workplace. It is also critically important to individuals looking to manage their economic well-being in this new century. However, there are three key concepts in entrepreneurship that get little attention: fear, assumptions and opportunity. Fear holds one back but where does this fear come from. Assumptions are the land mInes that blow up most companies. Picking the opportunity is where one lays the foundation for the scalable business. These topics can be presented individually in half-day or full-day seminars or all together in a comprehensive 3-day workshop. Everyone will need to be an entrepreneur to successfully function in the new era of the 21st Century. This talk is where one can learn the fundamentals.
2.  The Five Step Process to Convert Passions into Innovation. 4 hours, 8 hours, or 3 days. Innovation is perhaps the most popular word that no one defines correctly and consistently creating innovative solutions is always more challenging than it should be. Using the five step approach taught in this program, anyone can create innovations. This approach is not based on design thinking or the other traditional approaches to creativity, but rather draws its inspiration from early childhood development—1-Passion, 2-Discovery, 3-Creativity, 4-Invention, 5-Innovation. Depending on the depth of understanding desired, this topic can be presented in half-day or full-day seminars or in a comprehensive 3-day workshop. If you are interested to learn the lessons every genius throughout history has taught us, this is the event for you.
3. The Five Themes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 4 hours, 8 hours, or 3 days. Klaus Schwab, Chairman of the World Economic Forum, coined the phrase the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” to describe the current period of technological innovation and the resultant massive social, economical and political changes we can expect. While it is important to understand the underlying technologies, the social consequences are more dramatic than any period in history. Whether in half-day or full-day seminar or a 3-day workshop format, this presentation explores the technologies and five major themes that explain the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Anyone trying to prepare and educate people for the 21st Century should attend this event.
4. Social Entrepreneurship: Capitalism Redefined. 4 hours, 8 hours, or 3 days. Capitalism came under attack on many fronts as a result of the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. In simple terms it might be said that the corporates forgot their responsibility to society. On the other hand capitalism is the most efficient way to address social issues at scale, as evidenced by the over 1.5 billion people who have escaped poverty in recent times. To blend this efficiency of capitalism with an integrated approach to solve the most pressing social problems, that challenge is what gave rise to social entrepreneurship. Whether in half-day or full-day seminar or a 3-day workshop format, this presentation defines social entrepreneurship, outlines the special features of its business model and showcases how existing companies can use social entrepreneurship and how non-profit organizations can convert to social entrepreneurship. How to start a social entrepreneurship venture is covered in the 3-day format.

Much of the content for these talks has been put together over the last 12-18 months from lectures I have given at various universities. Many people have heard me teach or speak on these topics at StartUP FIU. Many of my colleagues at StartUP FIU can also speak on these topics, if you wish.

Patterns that Repeat in CS and Biology

In the latest book that I am writing, on how to find the business opportunities that have repeated multiple times over the last 40,000 years, I draw on insights from complexity science. Think of complexity science as an alternative to chemistry to explain the relationship between physics and biology. Two different languages and ways of thinking to explain the same events.

A fundamental part of complexity science is the concept of a network. Examples of networks are the Internet, Facebook and every "community". In a chapter on organizations in the book I make the point that great organizations are a stack of networks. For example, if we look at a great university like Harvard or MIT, we can understand them by their networks: students, faculty, alumni, institutes of learning, research partners, etc. These networks process information separately but compliment the whole of information. Fail to create a strong network in any one of these categories, and the university probably fails to achieve greatness. 

This morning I was reading an article by Ray Kurweil, futurist and authoity on AI who trained at MIT with the late Marvin Minsky. Kurweil tells the story that multi-layer neural nets were proposed in the 1960s but were rejected by Minsky and his associates. Such networks are commonly used in AI today. The point of the story--multi-layer neural nets look an awful lot like stacked networks in great organizations.

Patterns that repeat in nature and in computer science are the basis for powerful thinking frameworks. Keep your eyes open for stacked networks.

My Summer Reading List

This year's reading list is shaped in part by a new course I want to teach, "Cognition, Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence". Also, I am still trying to answer some questions for a new book on market opportunities. All of this is increasingly tied together by my growing interest in evolution and biology. For several years I have told my students to think like ants. Now I have enough background to defend the position.

The recommended readings are:

1. "The Master Algorithm" by Pedro Domingos  The book is a history of artificial intelligence with a focus on machine learning (no math). The notion of a master algorithm that can create all knowledge is a very interesting idea.
2. "Money Changes Everything" by William Goetzmann  A history of money. Should be the first reading in every introductory finance class.
3. "Our Mathematical Universe" by Max Tegmark  Reconsiders the age old question of what is reality. 
4. "The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf  A biography of the first naturalist scientist--Alexander von Humboldt
5. "The Evolution of Everything" by Matt Ridley  Questions many traditional explanations of issues and shows that evolution is a better explanation
6. "The Pre-history of the Mind" by Steven Mithen  Scholarly work on the cognitive origins of art, religion and science.

 

 

Companies Need to Keep Learning

This video on Big Think describes corporate learning at IBM. Corporate learning is the company-wide method to provide lifelong learning to IBM employees. The program covers mostly current topics in IT but, of course, that is IBM's domain. Format appears to be a MOOC.

Most interesting part of the story is that the CEO established the program and teaches a course once a month. Leadership from the top makes the commitment and objective obvious.

I think that more formalized, high value corporate training will become a big business opportunity. The business environment is becoming more complicated as AI and Big Data are more integrated into day-to-day business. Companies are increasingly narrowing the range of their business expertise partly by relying on third party providers, which will require companies to be extremely vigilant in their area of expertise. Lastly, knowledge is doubling every 13 months, which means there is 8 times more knowledge every three years. Such a scale of growth in knowledge puts pressure on companies to help their employees to stay current.  

Design Thinking Miami

(Concept from Stanford Design School)

Saturday I went to a workshop hosted by Design Thinking Miami. I went to see how some one else teaches design thinking. In 3.5 hours we went through an exercise to develop a new wallet for our "partner" in the workshop. I had about half the time, 1.5 hours, to interview my partner on his needs, ideate and build a prototype. My partner was a young design student and most of the people had professional reasons to be there. Two notable exceptions: a litigator who thought design thinking would be useful to lawyers trying to better understand the other party to the litigation and a mother (HBS MBA) who thought design thinking should be taught in elementary school. After a 30 minute conversation I am not convinced that we need design thinking in elementary school. Critical thinking will suffice. All in all, I recommend Design Thinking Miami events to anyone who wants to learn about the subject, brush up their skills or meet some people you don't see every day. 

I had one observation from the event. I prefer a slower pace to design thinking. Having five minutes to interview on needs or ideate solutions is not enough time, but it was done this way for the workshop. However, what I noticed is that all the novice design thinkers in a rush to complete the task in five minutes tended to refrain from criticizing or voicing prejudices. In a sense the fast pace made the novices more open minded and less critical, which is one of the key techniques in design thinking. One is more open minded when one is less judgmental. 

The takeaway: When you have to solve a complex problem, set a very fast pace for the process so people do not have time to be judgmental, if you are working with novices to design thinking. For more experienced practitioners, I recommend a more normal pace.

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3 Types of Innovation

Innovation has become such a buzzword that I almost do not want to write this post. 

Daniel Isenberg at Babson has a quote that is helpful:

"The true enemy of growth for firms is stagnation, and the reality is that most small businesses are stagnant....

One way to combat stagnation is through innovation. What many do not realize is that there are at least three types of innovation, that each type has a specific use and that different levels of management have responsibility for each one.

Grounded Ideas provide the incremental improvements that bring about best practices and excellence in operations. These responsibilities can be delegated to managers.

Blue Sky Ideas are insights that bring about revenue growth through tactical and strategic insights. They are a C-level responsibility.

Spaced Out Ideas are insights that create new business concepts by re-framing a problem. They are a C-level responsibility, but after you have found product/market fit the C-level execs are better served to focus on blue sky ideas. (Christensen's disruptive innovation is in this category.)

More of the over 20 posts on innovation and disruptive innovation:

1. More on Disruptive Innovation

2. Blackberry, Microsoft and Nokia

3. Business Model Innovation

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A Caution about the Internet

In 2009 I wrote a post with a very good Geek & Poke cartoon (shown below), "Web 2.0 is not an epistemology". This story from Business Insider, "All-Girls High School Photoshops Students' Yearbook Photos To Make Them Look Thinner", might be about the female image, but I think it better serves as a reminder of the questionable quality of information found on the Internet (and everywhere). A story from The Creativity Post, Symbols and Facts, is another interesting take on this theme.

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Einstein's Use of Metaphor

For several years I have been studying design thinking and creativity. Much of this material has found its way into the classes I teach. As a result of this work I now believe that design thinking is the best front end process to develop a business concept. I couple it with "business model" to complete the development of a new business.

One issue that has troubled me for about two years is Einstein's comment that "he visualized the theory of relativity before he worked out the formula". Until today I could not understand how one thought visually. Turns out that visual thinking uses the images as metaphors and metaphor is well known to be the highest form of thinking (that produces creativity).

This new understanding came from this superb article, "Picasso and Einstein Got the Picture". If you are interested to understand higher level thinking, read and re-read the article. The article also provides the basis to understand the relationship between mathematics, music and art (another theme I have been trying to understand for a long time.)

The new theme I will be pondering is whether the use of metaphor in thinking can be taught. If math were taught visually I think that might be a good first step. We will see where this goes. Stay tuned for the next 2-3 years to see the answer. Usually takes that long to find a good answer to a question like this one.

Happy New Year.

Plan Less

I think it is debatable whether the best management thinkers today are at Santa Fe Institute (SFI) or the U.S. Army. Both groups share at least one common interest—complexity--as contrasted with the complicated. SFI's approach to complexity tends to focus on advanced mathematics. The U.S. Army's approach involves design thinking and is comparatively more understandable. Today's post comes from The U.S. Army Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual via the Farnam Street blog.

 

When should one plan? Much less often than you think. I am not advocating one go mindlessly through life, although it may be less stressful, but rather that one use alternatives to planning. A quote from the Field Manual:

 

"Planning applies established procedures to solve a largely understood problem within an accepted framework. Design inquires into the nature of a problem to conceive a framework for solving that problem. In general, planning is problem solving, while design is problem setting. Where planning focuses on generating a plan—a series of executable actions—design focuses on learning about the nature of an unfamiliar problem." (My emphasis)

Planning, a series of executable actions, applies in situations that are deterministic and likely to be expressible in numbers. Sales forecasting, architecture, engineering are some disciplines that are largely deterministic. Much larger are the domains that do not lend themselves to mathematical approaches, such as most things that involve politics, emotion and the arts. In these areas, design thinking is one peferred approach. 

 

If we consider managing a business, perhaps the startup effort to find product/market fit lends itself more to design thinking. Maybe growing a business from $30-100 million in annual revenue is more of a planning exercise, until you need to revamp a product, react to a monster competitor entering the market or adjust for a law change (think Uber). Actually most of the events affecting customers or products are not handled by planning. This type of event is not deterministic in nature. Design thinking and framing the problem correctly are a better approach, which is why you can plan less. 

 

Happy holidays.

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Another Example from Mathematics of the Study of Creativity

Many genius and near genius people have studied thinking and creativity. Another example is the work of the mathematician Jacques S. Hadamard.

In this post from Farham Street, "Einstein on The Essential Feature of Productive Thought", the correspondence between Einstein and Hadamard is discussed. Hadamand went on to publish "An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field".

This quote of Einstein from the correspondence is well known but still interesting.

"The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined."

 

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Physics and Economics

A story at the Santa Fe Institute led me to this fascinating article, "Arrogant physicists — do they think economics is easy?". A few quotes from the article.

1. "This is precisely why many physicists, myself included, are convinced that modern economics is indeed, in an important sense, “held back because of a deficiency of mathematical tools and techniques”
2. "The economy is a vast and complicated set of arrangements and actions wherein agents—consumers, firms, banks, investors, government agencies—buy and sell, speculate, trade, oversee, bring products into being, offer services, invest in companies, strategize, explore, forecast, compete, learn, innovate, and adapt. In modern parlance we would say it is a massively parallel system of concurrent behavior. And from all this concurrent behavior markets form, prices form, trading arrangements form, institutions and industries form. … One of the earliest insights of economics—it certainly goes back to Smith—is that these aggregate patterns form from individual behavior, and individual behavior in turn responds to these aggregate patterns: there is a recursive loop. It is this recursive loop that connects with complexity. Complexity is not a theory but a movement in the sciences that studies how the interacting elements in a system create overall patterns, and how these overall patterns in turn cause the interacting elements to change or adapt. … Complexity is about formation—the formation of structures—and how this formation affects the objects causing it." Brian Arthur Complexity Economics
3. "To look at the economy, or areas within the economy, from a complexity viewpoint then would mean asking how it evolves, and this means examining in detail how individual agents’ behaviors together form some outcome and how this might in turn alter their behavior as a result. Complexity in other words asks how individual behaviors might react to the pattern they together create, and how that pattern would alter itself as a result. This is often a difficult question… And so economics early in its history took a simpler approach, one more amenable to mathematical analysis. It asked not how agents’ behaviors would react to the aggregate patterns these created, but what behaviors (actions, strategies, expectations) would be upheld by—would be consistent with—the aggregate patterns these caused. It asked in other words what patterns would call for no changes in micro-behavior, and would therefore be in stasis, or equilibrium." Brian Arthur Complexity Economics

Interesting notion that economics was in part defined by the math available at the time.

I also find the description of economics as a complex system one of the better descriptions of complex systems. This could, however, just be explained by the fact I understand more about economics than physics or quantum mechanics.

A related article from Santa Fe Institute.

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Computational Creativity

You may recall last week's post, "An Observation on Thinking", in which I speculated on the way thinking evolves. My hypothesis was mathematics--computer science--artificial intelligence--cognitive learning, based on examining the lives of several great thinkers.

Today I came across this story, "What is Computational Creativity?" The author defines "computational creativity" using a definition from the Computational Creativity Conference Steering Committee :

"Computational creativity is a multidisciplinary endeavour that is located at the intersection of the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, philosophy and the arts....The goal of computational creativity is to model, simulate or replicate creativity using a computer, to achieve one of several ends.."

Not surprising, the computers are being programmed to think in ways very similar to the founders of AI, Minsky and Simon.

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Seeing to Learn

Fast Company has an interesting post on Flannery O'Connor's cartoons. Ms O'Connor was also a very accomplished author, which provides additional data for the thesis that creative people frequently master a second art.

This quote from O'connor I found particularly interesting.

“For the writer of fiction,” she said, “everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.”

"This way of seeing she described as part of the “habit of art,”. She used the expression [habit of art] to explain the way of seeing that the artist must cultivate, one that does not separate meaning from experience. And like any other habit, it has to be developed over time and through practice."

The notion of seeing is a central theme in creativity, both literally and figuratively. Many geniuses say that they saw their solutions in their mind before they tried to articulate them. This suggests that creativity involves a more basic process such as seeing rather than language or writing.

The notion of not separating meaning from experience is also a powerful tool. If one takes pictures of dolphin swimming in the ocean, the experience is the photography. If one merely observes the dolphins there are opportunities to derive many "meanings". I think this is part of the reason I do not like videos. In the video the experience of the story is choreographed to make the writer's point. If I am just observing life real time I create the meaning.

 

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How to Work with a Mentor

This Fast Company post,"Startup Failing? You Might Be Asking The Wrong Questions" is an excellent article on thinking, learning and mentoring. Today I will just discuss working with a mentor.

Last week I did two mentoring events. The first event was the Women's Success Summit, produced by Miamian Michelle Villalobos. 300 women and me. What could be more fun? In a 30 minute session anyone in the audience had 30 seconds to describe their business and their problem and then I was supposed to give advice. Out of 7 questions, three people asked for specific solutions to problems. The other four had ideas and wanted to know how to turn them into a business. The three with specific questions could benefit from a mentor. The other four souls should probably come to one of my workshops on how to develop a business concept. They were pre-mentor.

The second mentoring event was the monthly session hosted by the FIU Pino Entrepreneurship Center. This group was all male except for my good friends Lauren and Karyne from Pino Center who organize this event. Four thirty minute mentoring sessions. 1 person had a specific question (his second startup). One person had a fully developed business concept and he wanted to stress test it before he talked to investors. That's fair and I think he got some good advice. 1 person without a business concept (workshop candidate) and one wacky person idea that will never, ever get done. . Doable, but one in a billion. Not suitable from mentoring. 

As Fast Company said:

"There are plenty of people who'd love to help you with your business; you just have to ask, but they don't have time to waste helping you figure out what your actual problems are. Get the most out of a potential mentor by approaching them with specific questions you've already identified and they've probably answered for themselves."

I struck out the point about "time wasting". Mentoring is not a billable hours business, but you get more benefit from the mentor the more well thought out the question. If you are not sure whether you have a business concept, you probably don't and you are a workshop candidate. 

I would like to do a radio show where people call in with questions about how to grow their business. Weekly co-hosts with specialties. Sponsor/advertising inquiries welcome. 

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An Insight on Thinking from the iPhone 5S

This morning I had breakfast with a successful young businessman who a few years ago graduated from Yale. Suffice it to say, a very smart guy.

While he went to pick up some food, I noticed his brand new iPhone 5S. I have not spent much time with the phone so I figured I had a few minutes to check it out. As soon as I brought up the home page I stopped exploring the phone. This man's phone was organized so differently from my iPhone that I started thinking about why it was organized so differently. His phone had many, many different collections of apps organized into boxes labelled "productivity", "business", etc. and did not even use the second home page for apps. Each box had about ten individual apps inside. When he returned with his food, I asked him why he organized his apps the way he did. He first answered that he did not like to flip through pages to find apps, but that could not be the real answer because we all flip pages constantly on our iPhones. I suggested to him that the way he thinks is using frameworks. He fits new ideas into existing frameworks. The "productivity" box was a framework. Framework thinkers excel at analysis and deductive thinking.

My iPhone uses multiple home pages and almost no boxes to collect related apps. That form of organization suggests to me that I am more of a pattern recognition thinker (individual icons match to the app) and not passionate about a subject, such as music. Pattern recognition normally suggests more creativity and inductive thinking. I must be the exception that proves the rule.

One of the smartest people I know has an iPhone home page that is almost evenly balanced between boxes of apps and individual apps. The boxes all have many apps inside. She excels at problem solving and operations.

Three data points do not establish a valid theory. More research is required to prove me correct about home page organization reflecting thinking styles or strengths. However, the next time you interview a new hire candidate, perhaps you should ask to see their phone. Note: A mix of boxes and individual apps on the home page, but where the boxes have few apps inside, probably suggests a lower quality thinker. Only one box filled with many, many apps probably signals a person's passion, which may or may not be consistent with job requirements.

Comments about how you organize your phone home page and what kind of thinker you are can be posted below.

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