Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Thinking outside the box

From Today's NYT:
"When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’,” said Andrew S. Grove, Intel co-founder. In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

"This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path...

"To innovate you have to bring together people with a variety of skills.

"When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems."

This is why we need to think differently about television. This is why old media is threatened.