Tom Friedman is probably the most celebrated writer in America. His opinions and books are read across America and around the world. It is not a reach to say that Tom Friedman is viewed around the world as America’s voice of reason. Mr. Friedman is a genius in making complex events simple and creating (or borrowing) phrases that tell the story. His last book, The World Is Flat, brought the consequences of the Internet revolution to readers in a way that others could not.
We respect Tom Friedman and enjoy reading his articles. So we listened intently last Sunday when Mr. Friedman introduced his new book “That Used To Be Us” on NBC’s Meet The Press. The subtitle of the book is “How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented”. Mr. Friedman is an excellent speaker and he gave a succinct precis about the mistakes made by America during the past decade.
Then it struck us. Tom Friedman is not an outsider who came recently to America to study the past decade. He lived and worked in America while America made these critical mistakes and “fell behind in the world America invented”. In other words, he saw the ‘mistakes’ happen in real time on his watch but he did not see the ‘mistakes’ or understand them in real time.
While these ‘mistakes’ were happening, Mr. Friedman was busy studying the Internet Revolution that occurred several years before that. That study resulted in his celebrated book, The World Is Flat. Unfortunately, as he was publicizing the that book, he completely missed the next phase of the “Flat” revolution. As he told David Gregory, he missed the advent of Facebook, Twitter, the Cloud Platform, Skype, the phase he now calls going from connected to hyper-connected.
The inescapable conclusion is while Mr. Friedman is brilliant at analyzing the past, he consistently fails to understand the significance of events unfolding today or the challenges we are likely to face in the near future.
Analytical Intelligence
Everyone knows that Tom Friedman is an exceptionally intelligent man. But not many realize his intelligence is of a specific kind. This type of Intelligence, we call Analytical Intelligence. This intelligence bestows the ability to look at past events, collect the data about them, analyze the data and come up with rational & insightful conclusions. Often businesses utilize data profiling solutions in order to glean helpful insights from their large quantities of data effectively. Tom Friedman possesses a very, very high degree of Analytical Intelligence.
Analytical Intelligence is basically Backward Looking Intelligence. It is the type of Intelligence most prevalent in Journalists, Professors, TV Anchors, Reviewers, most Wall Street Analysts and in other professions that mainly reward analysis. It is the Intelligence taught in Colleges and rewarded in Society.
Backward Looking Intelligence, while useful and commercially rewarding, often fails at looking at the future or even the near future. This failure is the origin of the phrase “fighting the last battle”. Analytically intelligent people are trained to study past data, analyze it, interpret it and distill logically derived conclusions. But no one can obtain future data, let alone study it. So Analytical Intelligence becomes useless or a liability when looking into the future or the fast moving current state.
This is why a superb Analytical Intelligence like Mr. Friedman’s was unable to discern America’s mistakes while they were being committed.
Mentor & Protege?
On Thursday, Tom Friedman was invited on CNBC Squawk Box by his young colleague and friend, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. Mr. Sorkin was a financial reporter with NYT in 2007 & 2008. His job was to cover Lehman Brothers. Unfortunately for America, Mr. Sorkin did not either see the problems at Lehman while they were mounting or did not sufficiently alert his readers despite what he saw.
After Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Mr. Sorkin began studying it. He wrote a very successful book about the fall of Lehman titled Too Big To Fail. This book later turned into a movie. This is a perfect case study of Analytical Intelligence and the commercial rewards it provides. Recently, CNBC invited Mr. Sorkin to co-anchor Squawk Box, CNBC’s Flagship 3-hour TV Show.
Today, Europe is going through its own 2008-like financial crisis. European Banks need capital as badly as Lehman did in 2008. This should be the perfect forum for Mr. Sorkin to exhibit the insights he acquired in studying the collapse of Lehman. So far, he has been unable to provide any such insight or demonstrate any special ability to understand what lies ahead for Lehman-like European Banks.
This is similar to Mr. Friedman’s inability in 2004 to understand the impact of Facebook, Twitter while he was studying the impact of similar technological innovations of 1998-2001.
This is not meant to criticize either Mr. Friedman or Mr. Sorkin. It is not their fault. It is simply the shortcoming of their Analytical Intelligence.
The Other Type of Intelligence
Successful leaders, great scientists and innovative businessmen are blessed with a different intelligence, Forward Looking Intelligence, or what we call Instinctive Intelligence. Steve Jobs is a perfect example. He changed the way we listen to music. He invented products that have captured the imagination of the world, he has changed the ways people behave. His intelligence created the future rather than studying the past.
Looking in to the future is very hard and so people with forward intelligence often fail before they eventually succeed. They also find it difficult to express themselves clearly because their instincts are hard to explain. The Analytically Intelligent often heap ridicule on such people because they are unable to offer cogent analysis or data to support their ideas.
Ronald Reagan, perhaps the most successful President in recent times, is a great case study of Instinctive Intelligence. He was prescient in understanding what path America needed to take. He won the Cold War, he defeated Inflation and launched a 25 year bull market. He restored America’s power and prestige.
But while he
was achieving this, the Press, TV Anchors, and America’s corps of Analytically Intelligent thinkers heaped ridicule on him and called him unintelligent or dumb. But today, after two decades, the same Analytical Intelligentsia treat him with reverence.
America’s Best Analytical Intelligence
Sorry, Mr. Friedman, that isn’t you. You are not even in the same ballpark. That honor goes to Candidate Barack Obama.
Candidate Obama’s 2008 campaign was absolutely brilliant. His analysis of the mistakes of the prior Administration was sound and superbly constructed. His oratory was spell binding. He explained to America why and how mistakes had been made in the past. And then he asked American people to believe in the change he promised.
Candidate Obama exuded Analytical Intelligence. No wonder Journalists swooned over him and Chris Mathews of MSNBC said he felt a tingle in his legs when he listened to Candidate Obama. The candidate was one of their own, a brilliant man whose Analytical Intelligence, they thought, was a heaven sent gift to uplift the American people from their non-analytical stupor.
Candidate Obama was really intelligent. He never described the change he was promising in any detail. He never revealed any plan to implement the change he promised. He simply asked people to believe in the change he would deliver. And based on the brilliance of his analysis, America made the leap of faith that some one who could analyze so brilliantly could also execute effectively.
America now knows better. President Obama has proved that being brilliant at backward looking intelligence is very different from being effective at forward looking intelligence. The greatest campaigner we have ever seen has morphed into a President that Jennifer Rubin of Washington Post described as “completely in over his head”. America agrees with Ms. Rubin. That is why the majority of Americans think the country is going in the wrong direction, backwards.
Reagan was gifted with prescient Instinctive Intelligence but weak Analytical Intelligence. Obama is gifted with brilliant Analytical Intelligence but weak Instinctive Intelligence. One would have been a terrible professor and the other a brilliant professor. One became a great President, the other, not so much, at least so far. That is the biggest difference between the two types of Intelligence.
But the two are not mutually exclusive. In the vast majority of cases, Instinctive or Forward Looking Intelligence is sharpened by substantive hands-on experience in doing a task or function. Such experience in most cases involves both success and failure, sometimes an emotionally draining failure.
Consider for example, the best combination of Analytical and Instinctive Intelligence that we have seen recently. President Bill Clinton had won, lost and again won gubernatorial elections in his native Arkansas. By the time he became President, Mr. Clinton was an experienced executive and a superbly instinctive politician.
When economists, strategists returned after meeting with President Clinton, they invariably admitted that Clinton was the smartest brain in the room. When economists, strategists returned after meeting with President Obama, they said Obama thought he was the smartest brain in the room. This type of arrogance is another difference between Instinctive or Forward Looking Intelligence and Analytical Intelligence.
Just watch Tom Friedman when he appears on a TV Show. You can see that Friedman thinks he is the most intelligent brain on the set.
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