YouSaid · the spoken record

Ross Dawson

lines on the record: 67
first: 2022-08-19
most recent: 2022-08-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Contradicts your feelings to be able to be effective in this everyday, perhaps almost every moment process we have of filtering the information which we barrage with. So attention is critical. And I think this is not just about focus. I think we shouldn't be thinking, say, we either focused or we're not focused. There are many different types of attention that we need to give. One of them is simply scanning. All right, here are my set of sources. This is the thing which I think we'll find information. I'm going to efficiently scan through those. Then I'm going to spend some time. I want to assimilate something. All right, this is something which is worth my spending my time on. I'm going to spend my time on that. I'm going to assimilate that into my thinking. And that is a different form of attention. You also have deep diving where we actually say, I am going to go and spend a block of time, going to cut out everything else. And this is where I'm actually developing my frameworks. I've been able to think in depth around what I'm doing.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we could use to frame our thinking, literally build our frameworks for thinking, which enables us to understand. The third power is that of filtering, where from all of the world information we see, we need to be able to choose what it is that matters to us, what actually assists our thinking, and what is irrelevant or even detracts from our thinking. So this is sort of our part of us being able to say, well, what sources do we use? What sources do we not use? Well, what are the nature of how we use different, you know, what I describe as portals, be they in terms of digital device going direct to media, going to individuals, going through aggregators, setting those up correctly and so on, but also being able to understand what it is that enhances our mental models and that includes, of course, looking for contradictory thinking, things that can evolve or improve our thinking as opposed to simply confirming.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Relevant to me and what is not. The second one is framing, and this is particularly critical because information is information. It's not knowledge. It's not expertise. It's not understanding. It's not the ability to make better decisions. So we need to pull the information together into frameworks that are actually represent our understanding of what the world looks like, of how this economy is working, what's happening in this industry, what's the nature of this company, what its driver's success are. And so this is where we can use some structures, this idea of connected thinking, this idea of connecting the notes. How do we pull together the pieces to build our level of understanding? And I believe that visual tools are particularly valuable in this. There's a number of different structures which we can use, but we can use mind maps or content maps or just as a number of different ways to build networks between concepts. A number of tools.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we need to choose those means. What do I need to be expert in? Who do I want to become? What are the areas of my health or my family's health or well-being that I want to be interested in? What are my passions? I am passionate about, whether it's the football or art or other things, these are other things which there is a reason why. So that purpose has to be the starting point for us to understand what information is relevant to us. And if we're just focused around particular investment portfolios, again, we can have a frame around that. The why, but also the framing of those areas of interest, what Warren Buffett calls the circle of confidence, being able to find. This is the areas in which I can be and want to be an expert, and this is the path to I can be an expert. This is the reasons why and I can frame that. And this guides me in being able to work out what information is.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Purpose, framing, filtering, attention, and synthesis. So to just expand a little on those. Purpose, we need to know why we look at information in the first place. There's a universe of information. A lot of it is tantalizing. Oh, that looks interesting. But if there's no reason why, good reason why we should be looking at it, then perhaps we shouldn't be. There's other information where they do have a good reason to look at that. And so this starts really from our higher order objectives. What is it we want to achieve? What are our goals? What are our objectives?”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The years who I describe as information masters, those people who are inherently able to thrive, prosper, just to be excel in a world of unlimited information. And many of them are investors, be they professional investors, individual investors, institutional investors. I do a lot of work with the institutional investment community or venture capitalists, where I think it's a lot more interesting in the sense that they have far less quantitative data to be able to assess when you're looking, of course, at early stage companies compared with the public companies.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And becoming not only doing this kind of work with major organizations, but being a futurist specializing in quite a few different industries. So most of my work looks at the future of particular industries. So I do have specific deep expertise in future financial services, professional services, media, and technology. But I also do substantial work in the future of education, government, retail and health. And I also do a lot of work on future work and future of organizations. So all of these domains, of course, mean that I myself have quite a lot of information that I have to deal with in my everyday work. So when I give my speeches, one of the most common questions at the end is, how on earth do you keep on top of everything? And partly my book is a way of cataloging what I have observed myself doing, but also the many people that I know and have worked with over”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wrote an article 25 years ago called Information Overload Problem or Opportunity. And by view, of course, at the time was that it was an opportunity. Of course, since then, we have also quite a lot more overload. And this has been shaped not just in my time. So this was actually coming from financial markets, so it went from Merrill Lynch, worked for Thompson Financial, I was global director of capital markets at Thompson Financial. And what I saw in the financial markets was that this was a place where people had more information than anyone else. And this was particularly the time when early in the days of the internet or pre-internet, and their ability to create value, to be able to make trade decisions, to assist their clients, to be able to structure effective deals was based on their ability to take an unlimited amount of information and to be able to make better decisions from that. So that's the original place that I saw this and built my thesis. And so since then, as you said,”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Declaring themselves as ultimately sovereign entities. And so that's an organization of a kind. We think of nations and corporations quite different. They are, of course, at the moment. But there could be some blurring of that as we evolve.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think the broader point being here is that traditional organizational structures have limited. The limited company has many benefits. It has a lot of flexibility, has a lot of structures, obviously thrived in the Alwinian evolution of the economy over the last centuries. But we can certainly envisage, and I think imagine that there are going to be more adaptations or variations on economic structures. So we're starting to see there's already a legislation in at least one US state to enable DAOs to exist where there isn't necessarily a human center or director or core. And we will see more legislation enabling that, whether the legislation is there or not. We will see more and more of these structures flourish. And I suppose a parallel to this was the very much discussed the network state by Balaji Surinavassan, which has just come out, which looks at this idea of conglomerates of individuals.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you catalogue the array of organizations that call themselves DAOs today, there's a lot and it's growing rapidly. However, I feel that those are a relatively crude manifestations of the original vision of DAOs. I mean, they are simply aggregates of individuals using crypto platform, sometimes using voting structures to be able to achieve their aims. And they were in the news recently when there was a DAO which was trying to buy the original Declaration of Independence, failed, but it was, yeah, that didn't need necessarily crypto structure to do it, but it was an effective aggregation. So I think it is inevitable. There's more and more, I think, very, very, very interesting entrepreneurs that I know that are discussing ways to be able to reshape their organizations at DAOs in the not too distant future. So I think we're going to see not just more of that in the news, but more actually substantive shifts to new organizational structures.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that it is automation at the center, humans at the edges. And so this is where essentially the AI or the systems or the structures or the processes in the middle are the ones that are essentially the managers, allocating work, allocating Effective leaders have understood for a long time that you can only achieve anything of scale if you're giving autonomy to talented people as opposed to directing them what to do.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A whole array of different ways in which they are not just using their staff. So this starts to build a world in which it is more and more tenable to be an individual, to have many options, to be able to create not just a business, but also a portfolio of different work opportunities and to have more and more choices around that. trend has I think been very evident for the last decade has accelerated further and I don't see nothing which is pulling us away from that. In fact if we start to push forward for example looking at the rise potential rise of distributed autonomous organizations so crypto or blockchain based organizations where essentially the original description of Vitalik Buteran was the founder of Ethereum who came up with the concept of distributed automated organizations”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose it has, if anything, accelerated. I just accelerated it and brought more to bear, shifting from an economy where organizations at the center of the economy to one where the individuals at the center of the economy. And so this has been manifested in a number of ways. Part of it is that power more broadly is shifting from institutions to individuals, from governments to citizens, from organizations to their customers, to health institutions to patients, and from employers to employees. So this particularly particularly put in the current job situation. And so that's one thing individuals have more power. But we're also starting to see that organizational boundaries are blurring. So more and more people are, in fact, the majority of Fortune 500 companies are using, say they are using extensively in some form, external labor, be they freelancer platforms, distributed innovation,”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At all fronts, and so we pulled back to the present, and so it does require some discipline, it does require us to make an effort to carve out the time, to realize the energy is important to be thinking about, you know, not just next month, but next year, three years, five years, seven years, if we want to have a successful organization for successful investments in five years or ten years, we do need to have some kind of a sense of what the world will look like, what will be shaping that, and what it is we can do to take advantage of those or to be able to make those trends even better.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Educated ways of thinking about the future. And that includes not necessarily predicting, say that we predict that this will happen, but that there are these potential paths. And these are the things which could shape those parts. And these are the things we could influence the ways in which we can shape those paths to potentially be more favorable to us as individuals or as companies or as a society. So my role as a futurist as I see it is to help leaders, organizations to think more effectively about the future, to probably think more about the future than they might have otherwise, so that they can act better in the present by understanding some of those forks in the road. We all need, I think almost everybody needs to think more about the future than they do. We get pulled back to the present. The present is very demanding. It's demanding of our attention. There's all sorts of things arising.”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are many types of futurists or people call them foresight professionals in some cases? There are many disciplines and many approaches. There are 43, I think 44 last count university programs around the world that train, educate people in foresight practices or PhD programs. There's a lot of rigor and discipline to the art and science of thinking about the future. And many, I suppose, philosophical differences, as you would expect in any discipline. So my particular approach is, I suppose, to the broader consensus in the discipline, which is you can't predict the future. The future is inherently unpredictable. However, we do have evidence. We have hints and guesses and clues and things that give us some way to think in a structured way about the future. So it's not as if we know nothing about the future. We do have some evidence which allows us to make some”
2022-08-19 · We Study Billionaires · TIP470: How to Leverage Information to Serve You Best w/ Ross Dawson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT