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Oct. 12, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
10:07
Episode 258 Scott Adams: Kanye is Using Systems over Goals to Solve Problems
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Hey everybody, come in here.
This is going to be a short one.
I just have one topic.
I really needed to follow up on this whole situation with Kanye in the Oval Office and I'm frustrated by the way the news has covered it so far because I feel like there's this enormous story That's completely hidden by the way we're talking about it, by the fact that Kanye is famous, by the fact it's political.
We're talking about all the stuff that's the window dressing and not really talking about something that really mattered and something important that happened.
Now, if you know my book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big, I talk about building systems as opposed to having a goal.
I'm going to ignore that, whoever's at the door.
So systems are better than goals, unless somebody's texting me and then I'll have to get it.
Nope. And you saw that in display when Kanye was talking about what to do about the inner cities.
And I wanted to just put a little meat on that, if I could.
Let's go to the whiteboard.
Alright, if you're talking about helping the inner cities, and they have a number of problems, not just one, let's look at the difference of a system versus a goal.
A goal would be, hey, let's all get better jobs.
But what do you do? How do you get there?
So a system would allow you to get there, but not tell you in advance how it's going to happen.
So if you had a good system, you could get to a number of different solutions.
You wouldn't know in advance where it's going to end up, but your system would get you there.
So if you wanted to solve things in the inner cities, and let's say that the big things that need to be solved are education and inexpensive housing and jobs and all the obvious things, safety, etc.
You would need attention.
You'd need people that care.
You'd need access to money, access to politicians.
You'd need ideas.
You'd need a lot of energy to get any of this done.
You'd need a lot of money. And then, if you did all these things right, you would create some small test programs, and then you'd run them.
Let me give you a simple example.
The question of stop and frisk came up.
Kanye talked to local leaders and said, not such a good idea.
Other people say the statistics show it works.
Well, one thing you could do is you could pick a neighborhood and you'd say, let's test it in the neighborhood.
It's just a test.
It's only going to last for one year.
At the end of the year, we'll see if we like it or not.
So you could test it in Chicago with perhaps a neighborhood that voted for it.
Maybe you'd say we're not going to do it unless the neighborhood votes by majority that will test it for a year.
But after the year, It's going to go away unless we re-vote it in based on the results.
So almost anything can be shrunken down to something you could test with people who want to test it.
I'm sure you could find a neighborhood where they say, look, things are so bad here, even though there are all kinds of problems with stop and frisk, let's just try it because everything else we tried didn't work.
So that's the idea. You take a big idea, you figure out how you can test it as small.
That's the system. Now when you talk about Kanye, what he was bringing to it, here's the thing people don't understand.
The money has never been the problem.
There are billionaires willing to invest if they can come up with a good pilot that's worth investing in.
The government has enough money.
There's enough money.
There's also, you know, there's maybe a deficit in how much we cared and how much attention we were giving to the area.
But look what Kanye did for that.
Kanye brought the attention.
Kanye, you know, is sort of collectively lifting how much we care about it.
Kanye brought the energy.
Kanye brought the access.
He was literally talking from inside the Oval Office.
He has developed access.
And it's not just political access.
He has access to great designers.
He has access to billionaires.
He has access to the local community.
He has access to both sides of the political aisle.
He has access like almost nobody has access.
Here's what was the biggest thing lacking, in my opinion.
In order for the system to work, and the system in this case is developing ideas, turning them into small tests, getting them funded, and then seeing how the test goes.
All of this didn't work.
And has never worked because of the part that Kanye explicitly said was what he would add to the process.
He's basically embedding himself in Chicago, his old hometown that he said he's going to move to.
So he's basically sort of claiming Chicago as his responsibility.
That's pretty important.
Imagine if everybody of his prominence decided to go back to the town they came from and say, I'm going to claim you.
I may have a second home here or move there, but you're mine to fix now.
So Kanye has kind of said, Chicago, you gave me birth, you made me who I am, I'm coming back.
I'm going to fix you.
The only thing that was missing was what Kanye called ideation centers.
In other words, an organization that's embedded in the community.
And this is very important. It's not something that's airdropped on the community.
It's something that they're working with.
It's a process for coming up with ideas that the community is already supporting because they came from the community.
If Kanye can pull off this part, And we have yet to see if he can do this, but he has all the resources so he can.
If he develops an ideation center, a place to develop ideas, to design them, to package them, package them.
This is important. It's not good enough to have a good idea.
A good idea is worth zero.
You have to understand that a good idea is worth zero.
It has no economic value.
But a good idea that's packaged And brought two people with money, now has developed tremendous value, potentially.
So when you saw Kanye talking about the inner cities and what he could do, etc., he laid out for you a full system.
That absolutely makes sense and I have never seen before.
Have you ever seen this? Have you ever seen anybody say that the part that's missing is the ideation?
We're going to move it. We're going to physically move to the community.
Connect with people.
Get access. Get our caring up.
Get our attention up. Get our energy up.
Flow it through the ideation.
Take it to the money people.
Say, hey, here's my idea.
It's well packaged. Do you want to take it to the next level?
We'll do a small. It won't be that expensive.
You're a billionaire. You can afford it.
Who's going to say no to Kanye with a well packaged, interesting idea that you could try small?
Well, I don't know. It's pretty hard to say no to him.
So what you've seen here is it's innovative and radical and useful.
At such a high level, it's almost invisible.
It seems to me that the media completely missed what happened there.
And what happened there was enormous.
Now, it might come into a little clearer focus when he actually, you know, if he does this, we don't know if he's going to do this, but if he takes it to the next level and opens up some kind of a design ideation center that's sort of Kanye branded and he puts a little time into it, let's see what they can come up with.
You know that I'm working with Bill Pulte on the Blight Authority stuff.
The Blight Authority has cleared large areas of urban land.
They had a lot of blight and crime and broken down homes.
So he's done that already in Detroit and Pontiac and now we're doing the second part which is I'm helping him with just getting the word out to how do we come up with some ideas?
How do we come up with some ideas to test?
Very much compatible with Kanye's plan but Kanye's is better because Kanye is saying let's embed in the community for our plans.
That's a better idea.
So obviously he's good at this.
So, we'll be tracking what Kanye is up to.
If the Blight Authority can ever be helpful in that, I'm sure that we'll look for an opportunity to do that.
And for now, I just want you to put this in this frame, that Kanye took a goal, which is, hey, let's fix the cities.
What do you do with that? We all want to fix the cities, but we need some ideas.
That was the part that's missing.
Ideas that can be tested small.
That's the key. Kanye's on it, and he's doing it.
So this is bigger than you think.
Just keep an eye on it.
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