I met with two top executives this morning. One of the participants runs a small creative agency. Another manages a manufacturing company 1000 times bigger. One is a man, the other a woman. One has seemingly unlimited resources, the other has to scrape for every dime. Here are some of the results of the meeting:

• one left the meeting with a plan to rearrange top management to make the company more responsive, quicker to market, and more innovative. “We’ve been doing things the same way for years. I feel like this is going to really open up the future for us.”
• one left the meeting with three things to do immediately to re-energize and re-engage employees. “I’ve been worrying about this for over a year. This is the first time I feel like I know what to do.”
• one left the meeting with a plan to identify, recruit, evaluate, and reward employees based on behaviors and attitudes vital to the company’s success. “This is something I’m going to put in place right now, It completely changes how I think about my business.”
• one left the meeting with an idea worth tens of thousands of dollars over the next year. “I can’t believe I never thought of this.”
  

Can you guess who’s who?

It doesn’t matter. You don’t get fresh ideas from people who are just like you. You get them from people who are different. It always matters who is in the room, but maybe not in the way you think.

When leaders work together to help each other succeed, good ideas come from surprising places.

Forget thinking outside the box. Think outside your brain.

Andy Clark poses an interesting problem in Natural Born Cyborgs. A guy asks a woman on the street, “do you know what time it is?” She says, “Yes, I do.” She then looks quickly at her watch and says, “It’s 10:22.”

Is the woman telling the truth when she says she knows the time? I’m inclined to agree with Clark that she is.

But here’s the problem. A teacher asks his class, “Who knows the capital of Albania?” One student says, “I do.” He gets up, excuses himself, leaves the room, walks to the library reference section, and starts opening books. Forty-five minutes later, he walks back in the room and announces, “It’s Tirana.”

Is the student telling the truth when he says he knows the capital of Albania? most people would think he’s not.

Suppose someone asked you, “Do you know the Capital of Albania?” and you said, “Yes. It’s Tirana.” We’d probably all agree that you know the capital of Albania. You have the appropriate fact stored somewhere in your brain, and you can quickly reproduce it on demand. That’s what knowing something means, isn’t it?

Sure it is. And yet, I’m still inclined to agree that the woman who needs to glance at her watch knows what time it is. With Clark, I’d argue that it’s fair to say that you know the answer to a question if you know how to locate that answer quickly, whether you you have to look inside your own brain or elsewhere.

After all, it does take time to retrieve an answer from your brain. And sometimes it takes longer than others. If I were asked, “What’s the capital of Romania?” I might have to think for a moment or two before coming up with Bucharest. These days, I might even have to think a bit longer than a moment or two. But I’d get it in the end. And I think that should count as knowing, don’t you?

So if it’s not the fact that it takes some time to retrieve the answer that determines whether someone knows something or not, can it be that you have to get it from your own brain to count it as knowledge? That just doesn’t make sense to me. I believe, like Clark, that our minds extend beyond our brains. We ought to recognize that and take advantage of it.