In Pursuit of Balance: Innovation, or Simply Talking Too Much? by Arjun Gupta

As an intern who started at Dorrier Underwood in May, I found myself struggling to stay present at a June company retreat on Google+. Each day was eight continuous hours of talking about clients, sales projections, and a lot of consulting jargon. I tried to stay focused. I really, really did. But about every 15 minutes we would hit a topic that I could barely understand, much less contribute to.

And so, despite my best efforts, I would check the scores of World Cup games or simply zone out. When it got really bad (though this only lasted 10 minutes, I swear), I started streaming the Nigeria-Argentina game from my laptop.

Why did this happen? Part of the learning curve is that Dorrier Underwood is a very forward thinking company. They are management consultants, but rather than focusing on streamlining operations the way a McKinsey might, their specialty is corporate culture and the human dynamic within organizations. This lends itself to a lot of talking about empowerment, beauty, and other abstract topics.

Which in and of itself is quite innovative. It turns out culture and “making meaning” is one of the next frontiers of competition—evinced by everything from Daniel Pink’s bestselling A Whole New Mind to interviews with top executives to articles in industry journals as well as the enthusiasm with which Dorrier Underwood clients respond to our work.

To be an architect of better culture in a company, you have to have quite an open corporate culture yourself, no?  And indeed we do. At Dorrier Underwood, open communication is of the utmost importance, and team members are free to voice any thoughts. We’re quite a talkative bunch.

Where I am going with this?

In seven words: people on our team talk too much.

Let me explain.

Someone will comment about how the description of a distinction reminds them of a poem they read and will expand on this idea for two minutes. It would be fine if it stopped there. But then someone else comments on their comment. And then someone else has a comment about that. Each of these comments requires at least 45 seconds to do it justice, and keep in mind that these are all high-level, abstract ideas in the first place.

Which made it very hard to keep track of where the conversation was going, and it became all the more difficult to stay focused. Because what was I focusing on? Someone’s sub-sub-sub-sub-comment to a comment about a poem?

I’m slightly exaggerating here, but you see the point. Simplicity is sophistication. Conciseness is prestige. In this day and age we’re inundated with information at every turn; the real value-creators are the ones who make sense of it.

And here is, I think, where the trouble occurs. It’s a balance to strike.

I understand that allowing people to talk freely, to explore thoughts leads to insights that would’ve never occurred focusing only on the problem at hand. In fact, in The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo, Gallo specifically advocates that one seek out new experiences and conversations, that one pick up a book from the humanities section if one usually reads business, etc.  He says innovators explore things that seem to have no relation to business, which causes the brain neurons to fire more rapidly and often than when they are only exposed to the expected and the usual. The increased amount of neural activity, of course, is conducive to breakthroughs and ideas.

But at the same time, Gallo later goes on in the book to talk about how Steve Jobs had a laser-like focus on the projects he was working on and would entertain no thoughts about anything else. Something Tim Cook, current CEO of Apple said: “We are the most focused company I know of….We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number, so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we choose.”

Something the painter Hans Hofmann said: “the ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

And finally, Steve Jobs himself: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

So what would I like? To figure out how to strike that balance. Retaining the spirit of Dorrier Underwood’s innovative culture is important. Maybe we can designate certain times where team members are freer to run wild with their thoughts on a call. We can certainly coach each other when we notice a tangent that’s unraveled a bit too much.

I don’t know what the answer is, it’s just something to think about. The ironic thing is that my essay about getting to the point took a while to get there. So it’s easier said than done.