Business Insight Zone

Dan Markovitz made this comment on my information overload post of the other day:

Paring down the information we receive so that we actually have time to *think* about it is far more important than simply ingesting vast quantities of techno-blather.

This led me to recall a FORTUNE magazine feature from last year early 2006:

Secrets of greatness: How I work

In it, several top performers in various fields (Carlos Ghosn, Vera Wang, Howard Schultz, Wynton Marsalis) talk about their working styles and their working days. For our purposes, I recalled two quotes:

1. From A. G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble:

A key to staying calm is minimizing the information onslaught. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a memo. I write little handwritten notes on my AGL paper, and I send notes, a paragraph or less, on my BlackBerry. I prefer conversations.

(I particularly like it that Lafley seems focused on reducing “the information onslaught” for others as well. He communicates in the way that’s most likely to get the point across and make a connection — not in ways that are going to clog his subordinates’ inboxes.)

2. From Bill Gross of PIMCO:

For a portfolio manager, eliminating the noise is critical. You have to cut the information flow to a minimum level. You could spend your whole day reading different opinions. For me, that means I don’t answer or look at any e-mails I don’t want to. Other than for my wife, I’ll only pick up the phone three or four times a day. I don’t have a cellphone, I don’t have a Black-Berry. My motto is, I don’t want to be connected — I want to be disconnected.

It’s worth pondering that these folks take such pains to eliminate excess information from their lives.

“But wait,” I can hear someone say, “they have assistants and secretaries and . . . and underlings! They can afford to tune out extra information. I can’t!”

I wonder, though, if it isn’t the other way around: maybe it’s because they’ve made a practice of tuning out excess information — to give themselves space to think — that they now have those underlings.

You think?