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Great companies don't focus on information. They focus on turning information into information that cannot be ignored.

The fact that the Web is distracting is not an accident. It is the Web's hyperlinked nature to pull our attention here and there. But it is not clear that this represents a weakening of our culture's intellectual powers, a lack of focus.... Maybe set free in a field of abundance, our hunger moves us from three meals a day to day-long grazing.... Perhaps the Web isn't shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Information is not always powerÂ…Privilege and power accrue to those who have the capacity to define the systems within which information will be exchanged.

For all its promise, the Internet is too noisy a place. It brings us information in real time and at no cost, but it will never displace those who provide real insight and leadership. The ability to spot the trends in the glut of information is a human art. The future will provide a premium for leaders who offer such wisdom, and an audience willing to pay them.

Attention is the currency of the information age.

The truly successful managers and leaders of the next century will. . . be characterized not by how they can access information, but by how they can access the most relevant information and differentiate it from the exponentially multiplying masses of non-relevant information.

The outside figures will always remain unsatisfactory for the simple reason that the important things that happen outside the business happen at the margin, and so they are not expressed in figures until it's too late. They are qualitative changes. You can quantify them, but you don't really understand the relationship quantitatively. I've been struggling with this for 40 years, and I'm not the only one. There is basically no solid geometry to early qualitative changes that can tell you whether they are significant or not. You cannot easily convert a qualitative change into quantities.

Please accept the fact that the human race is split three ways: some people can take in information by looking at figures, some by looking at graphs, and a third group only by touching it, feeling it, or writing it.

On our global information superhighway, the last thing we need is additional lanes or more information. In fact, to accelerate effective information exchange and collaboration, we need more rest stops. We need someone to guide us in processing information. Rest stops are integral to sifting through the heaps of data to get to the golden nuggets of information that will help the bottom line grow.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Where we once went to great lengths in this country to find information-like walking from one town to the next-and we were concerned with not having enough information, now we're more concerned with winnowing down the amount, even avoiding the constant barrage. A reduced amount of useful information seems preferable to skimming everything possible.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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People still have anxiety about how to assimilate a body of knowledge that is expanding by the nanosecond. Misinformation and mayhem are rampant. Information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand.

Information anxiety is the black hole between data and knowledge. It happens when information doesn't tell us what we want to know. Our relationship to information isn't the only source of information anxiety. We are also made anxious by the fact that other people often control our access to information. We are dependent on those who design information, on the news editors and producers who decide what news we will receive, and by decision-makers in the public and private sector who can restrict the flow of information. We are also made anxious by other people's expectations of what we should know, be they company presidents, peers, or even parents.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Finding, winnowing, sorting, and organizing information takes priority over creating it. After all, the Library of Congress wouldn't be of much value if all the books were piled randomly on the floor. The way information is presented and organized becomes as important as the content.

People have been saying for a long time that the widespread availability of information would democratize organizations, and that the upward and downward movements of information would be replaced by horizontal ones. I just don't see it happening.

In fact, the widespread availability of information is making it easier for senior executives to check on and control every movement of people at lower levels. So, I think it has created a more unequal distribution of power.

In the information technology world we tend to make everything explicit. We don't understand how to design for the sub-conscious mind - we design for the conscious mind and we only pay attention to content. But humans pay attention to context as well as content, that's how we make sense out of the world. Indeed...content without context is often meaningless or dangerously mis-interpretable. When you are having a conversation you are paying as much attention to the body language, intonation, pauses and rhythm of the talker (all part of the context) as to the content. So what's the equivalent of reading body language? In the physical or social worlds there are all kinds of subtle cues we unwittingly use to keep ourselves orientated. We can process astronomical amounts of information this way without feeling particularly stressed. IT overlooks this.

In the old days, things didn't change quite so fast, and media or more accurately genres with a given medium had a chance to stabilize. Then we would subconsciously appropriate a genre and know how to read the content through the lenses of that genre. But today things are changing so rapidly that you don't have that much stability in many of the genres which actually makes reading content more complicated. People tend to forget the social resources we use that scaffold our ability to interpret things, to make sense out of the content.

The availability of information is perhaps the single most significant contributor to corporate change. As Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase concluded almost 70 years ago, the boundaries of the firm are defined by its transaction costs. "A firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction on the open market," Mr. Coase, now a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Law School, wrote. In the past, those costs were determined largely by information. Who could supply the needed goods? At what quality? For what price? Were better prices available? Better quality? Could delivery be guaranteed more quickly?

Hard to acquire and imperfect, information contributed to high transaction costs, which in turn led firms in many industries to vertically integrate...Today, as the costs of sharing and using information fall, companies and their industries have an impetus to "de-integrate," according to the Coase theory. The trend is accelerating as the Internet and other services give companies access to even more information. The impact: The threshold of cost set by the availability of information can no longer define the firm's or the industry's boundaries.

The result is industry value chains that are undergoing almost continuous evolution. The morphing value chain - you might call its new form a value web, an extended enterprise, or (our favorite) a value constellation - challenges firms that thrived with an integrated approach. The best value-capture mechanisms may now lie outside the individual firm's boundaries. Yet the value created by a firm may be necessary to the viability of the entire constellation. The nature and definition of the firm are also undergoing profound changes, thanks to the ubiquity of information. The firm is shifting from a self-contained value-creation and -capture apparatus into one part of an interdependent community whose members continually negotiate responsibility for value creation and the right to value capture.

When our mind gets too much information, we either ignore most of it or group it into chunks. This is how we make decisions about information really quickly, and our brains are hardwired this way. When we were troglodytes, we had to make a rapid decision when something jumped in front of us to either run away or club it on the head. We are simply not able to process all the details of a situation, so we group things based on their characteristics, and use the nature of the group itself to decide what we should do with it. This is the only way we have of surviving the complex world we live in without sitting and thinking about everything for hours at a time.

I don't think the issue is too much information. More important is decision overload. We believe that every person, or organization, can only make so many competent decisions in a given amount of time. Up until the point that we change our biology, there are some fixed limits on the speed by which we individually process information. However, there are enormously powerful tools by which we can extend the amount and extend the capacity of, for example, how information is organized. The simplest example is our telephone numbers. Why do they come in a grouping of three and four instead of just throwing all seven at you. It's because you can't remember seven very easily, but you can remember three and four. That's a primitive example of what might be called chunking information. We can handle more information if we can chunk it, and we can chunk it at higher and higher levels of complexity, and we can employ better models of organizing information. If you have powerful models, you can just handle a lot more.

If all your information is tailored to what you want to know, you may miss that which you don't know you want to know, and should.

There is a near-universal tradeoff between richness and reach of information. Richness is variously the amount, quality, specificity, recency, or trustworthiness of the information shared in a transaction; and reach is the number of people or entities involved. Typically, we can transact with lots of richness if we are willing to give up reach (a conversation) or with lots of reach if we are willing to give up richness (a newspaper ad). But we cannot have both at once.

The most powerful force subverting conventional value chains, partly because it acts as a catalyst and accelerator for all the others, is a revolution in the economics of information. Information has always been the glue that held value chains together. The cost of getting sufficiently rich information to suppliers, channels, and customers made proprietary information systems and dedicated assets a necessity, and gave vertical integration its leverage.

That glue is now melting. Universal connectivity and common communications standards are enabling the open and virtually cost-free exchange of information of all kinds. Companies share product designs, CAD/CAM parameters, logistics information, and financial data with equal ease both inside and outside the corporation. New intermediaries are emerging to support interconnection, facilitate comparison, guarantee performance, and make markets. Searching and switching are vastly simpler and cheaper than they used to be.

These trends have two simultaneous effects. On the one hand, proprietary links give way to markets. Witness the outsourcing trend: companies can now make use of key activities in the value chain without owning them. On the other hand, opportunities for rich communication and collaboration between customers and suppliers are greater than ever. Both these developments undermine vertical integration, replacing it with a highly flexible mix of new coordination mechanisms, ranging from the ruthlessness of the spot market at one extreme to the most strategic of partnerships at the other.

Wolfe argues, in a distinction particularly powerful as we grapple with the limits to the information age, that information is what machines can pass back and forth, or construct by analysis, while meaning is what only people can make. Meaning, as he defines it, is a macrophenomenon that involves making larger sense out of smaller bits, while information reduces larger complexity into smaller, and presumably more manageable, units. Information communicates through signs; meaning, through symbols. For those who seek information, context is only noise; for those concerned with meaning, context is everything. Information and meaning, in short, work at cross-purposes. Communication is possible within the terms of information theory, but interpretation is not.

Monitoring interaction at the level of thought tracing...limits the marketer to the realm of information. But the marketer desires to operate in the realm of meaning because marketing in its fullest sense is the making of meaning. Monitoring of interaction in a world of ubiquitous connectivity does not solve the problem. It increases the amount of information available to marketing but it does not alter the capacity to infer and construct meaning.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

When you look at the productivity vs. activity scale, most of the things on your desk, in your files, and in your mail are activity, not productivity. As a blind person, I am fortunate enough to have people who take volumes of printed material and reduce them to the items that I have determined to be productive. If you can do this in your work life by using your own eyesight, you will have the best of both worlds.

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann once said to me that he thought the most valued personal trait in the twenty-first century would be a facility for synthesizing information. Increasingly, I am convinced he was correct. The ability to decide what information to heed, what to ignore, and how to organize and communicate that which we judge to be important is becoming a core competence for those living in the developed world.

Every chunk of knowledge has a limited shelf life; at some point that knowledge becomes obsolete, or, as we say, turns into "obsoledge" - ideas and assumptions that have been falsified by change and surrogates or proxies that are no longer appropriate to the topic at hand. In fact, given the acceleration of change, companies, individuals, and governments base many of their daily decisions on "obsoledge."

Information should not be plentiful or easy to share. Information sharing that makes data readily available is more of a curse than a cure. A manager's biggest decision will be rationing scarce attention. New information technologies that help filter and redirect e-mail and telephone calls can certainly help, but ultimately management decision-making is all about setting priorities. Good managers tend to want to identify and track the "essential few" things that help them make good strategic decisions. Ultimately, it comes down to the single thought, "What activities am I personally responsible for managing?" Bad managers are often simply overcome with information. The explosion of information and accessibility of it preys on the human weaknesses of many managers, which is a belief in total accessibility and a yearning for total awareness and absolute control. Attitudes like this ensure that technology cannot be a salvation.

If you gave away every idea you ever had, people would still step up to ask you to help them, or do it for them. The same can't be said if you don't share with them at all. ...As our friend Sean D'Souza likes to say, "Give the ideas. Sell the system."