The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World. Carl Honore

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СКАЧАТЬ where the average tenure for a global CEO has fallen sharply in recent years. In 2011, Leo Apotheker was fired as the boss of Hewlett-Packard after less than 11 months in the post. Dominic Barton, the managing director of McKinsey and Company, a leading consulting firm, hears the same lament from chief executives around the world: we no longer have enough time or incentive to look beyond the next quick fix. His verdict: ‘Capitalism has become too short-term.’

      Modern office culture tends to reinforce that narrowing of horizons. When did you last have the time to take a long, hard look at a problem at work? Or even just to think deeply for a few minutes? Never mind tackling the big questions, such as where you want to be five years from now or how you might redesign your workplace from the bottom up. Most of us are too distracted by a never-ending blizzard of trivial tasks: a document to sign, a meeting to attend, a phone call to answer. Surveys suggest business professionals now spend half their working hours simply managing their email and social media inboxes. Day after day, week after week, the immediate trumps the important.

      Politics is also steeped in the quick fix. Elected officials have every incentive to favour policies that will bear fruit in time for the next election. A cabinet minister may need results before the next reshuffle. Some analysts argue that each US administration enjoys only six months – that window between the Senate’s confirming its staff and the start of electioneering for the mid-term elections – when it can look beyond the daily headlines and polling numbers to concentrate on strategic decisions over the long term. Nor does it help that we tend to favour decisive, shoot-from-the-hip leadership. We love the idea of a lone hero riding into town with a ready-made solution in his saddle bag. How many figures have ever won power by declaring ‘It will take me a long time to work out how to solve our problems?’ Slowing down to reflect, analyse or consult can seem indulgent or weak, especially in moments of crisis. Or as one critic of the more cerebral Barack Obama put it: ‘We need a leader, not a reader.’ Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and only the second psychologist ever to win the Nobel Prize for Economics, believes our natural preference for politicians who follow their gut turns democratic politics into a carousel of quick fixes. ‘The public likes fast decisions,’ he says, ‘and that encourages leaders to go with their worst intuitions.’

      Nowadays, though, it is no longer just politicians and business chiefs that believe they can wave a magic wand. We’re all at it in this age of bullshit, bluster and blarney. Look at the parade of tone-deaf wannabes vowing to be the next Michael Jackson or Lady Gaga on The X Factor. With so much pressure to stand out, we embellish our CVs, post flattering photos on Facebook and holler for attention on blogs and Twitter. A recent study found that 86 percent of 11-year-olds use social media to build their ‘personal brand’ online. Some of this chest-thumping may win friends and influence people, but it can also drive us into the arms of the quick fix. Why? Because we end up lacking the humility to admit that we do not have all the answers, that we need time and a helping hand.

      The self-help industry must take some of the blame for this. After years of reading and writing about personal development, Tom Butler-Bowdon fell out of love with his own field. Too many motivational gurus, he decided, hoodwink the public with short cuts and quick fixes that do not really work. As a riposte, he published Never Too Late to Be Great, which shows how the best solutions in every field, from the arts to business to science, usually have a long gestation period. ‘By glossing over the fact that it takes time to produce anything of quality, the self-help industry has bred a generation of people that expect to fix everything tomorrow,’ he says.

      The media add fuel to that fire. When anything goes wrong – in politics, business, a celebrity relationship – journalists pounce, dissecting the crisis with glee and demanding an instant remedy. After the golfer Tiger Woods was outed as a serial philanderer, he vanished from the public eye for three months before finally breaking his silence to issue a mea culpa and announce he was in therapy for sex addiction. How did the media react to being made to wait that long? With fury and indignation. The worst sin for a public figure on the ropes is to fail to serve up an instant exit strategy.

      That impatience fuels a tendency to overhype fixes that later turn out to be complete turkeys. An engineer by training, Marco Petruzzi worked as a globetrotting management consultant for 15 years before abandoning the corporate world to build better schools for the poor in the United States. We will meet him again later in the book, but for now consider his attack on our culture of hot air. ‘In the past, hard-working entrepreneurs developed amazing stuff over time, and they did it, they didn’t just talk about it, they did it,’ he says. ‘We live in a world now where talk is cheap and bold ideas can create massive wealth without ever having to deliver. There are multi-billionaires out there who never did anything but capture the investment cycle and the spin cycle at the right moment, which just reinforces a culture where people don’t want to put in the time and effort to come up with real and lasting solutions to problems. Because if they play their cards right, and don’t worry about the future, they can get instant financial returns.’

      From most angles, then, the quick fix looks unassailable. Everything from the wiring of our brains to the ways of the world seems to favour band-aid solutions. Yet all is not lost. There is hope. Wherever you go in the world today, and in every walk of life, more people are turning away from the quick fix to find better ways to solve problems. Some are toiling below the radar, others are making headlines, but all share one thing in common: a hunger to forge solutions that actually work.

      The good news is the world is full of Slow Fixes. You just have to take the time to find and learn from them.

CHAPTER TWO

      CONFESS: The Magic of Mistakes and the Mea Culpa

       Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

      George Bernard Shaw

      On a crisp night in early September, four Typhoon fighter jets roared across the sky above the freezing waters of the North Sea. Locked in a two-on-two dogfight, they swooped, banked and sliced through the darkness at up to 500 miles per hour, searching for a kill-shot. It was a training exercise, but to the pilots it all seemed very real. Strapped into his cockpit, with 24,000 pounds of killing machine throbbing at his fingertips, Wing Commander Dicky Patounas was feeling the adrenaline. It was his first night-time tactical sortie in one of the most powerful fighter jets ever built.

      ‘We’re in lights off because we’re doing this for real, which we don’t do very often, so it’s pitch black and I’m on goggles and instruments only,’ Patounas recalls. ‘I’m working the radar, putting it in the right mode by shortening the range, changing the elevation, all basic stuff. But the plane was new to me, so I’m maxed out.’ And then something went wrong.

      A few months later Patounas relives that night back on the ground. His air base, RAF Coningsby, is in Lincolnshire, an eastern county of England whose flat, featureless terrain is prized more by aviators than by tourists. Dressed in a green flight suit festooned with zippers, Patounas looks like a Top Gun pilot from central casting – square jaw, broad shoulders, ramrod posture and cropped hair. He whips out pen and paper to illustrate what happened next on that September night, speaking in the clipped tones of the British military.

      Patounas was flying behind the two ‘enemy’ Typhoons when he decided to execute a manoeuvre known as the overshoot to a Phase 3 Visual Identification (VID). He would pull out to the left and then slingshot back onto his original course, popping up right behind the trailing enemy plane. But something unforeseen happened. Instead of holding their course, the two rival jets up ahead banked left to avoid a helicopter 20 miles away. Both pilots announced the change on the radio but Patounas failed to hear it because he was too distracted executing his manoeuvre. ‘It’s all quite technical,’ СКАЧАТЬ