The Right-Brainers shall save us

Dan Pink highlights a recent Barron’s interview with Jeremy Grantham—he was one of the first to warn of a credit crisis a few years ago.  Mr. Grantham explains what got us into this fix (italics added):

I ask myself, “Why is it that several dozen people saw this crisis coming for years?” I described it as being like watching a train wreck in very slow motion. It seemed so inevitable and so merciless, and yet the bosses of Merrill Lynch and Citi and even [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson and [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke — none of them seemed to see it coming.

I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained — but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.

So it’s more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored.

If you look at the people who have been screaming about impending doom, and you added all of those several dozen people together, I don’t suppose that collectively they could run a single firm without dragging it into bankruptcy in two weeks. They are just a different kind of person.

So we kept putting organization people — people who can influence and persuade and cajole — into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don’t have those skills.

It reminds me of micro-level health care thinking.  So if you don’t have any creatives/weird ones/right-brainers in your c-suite, the opportunity is now upon.  Black swans happen.  How is your management team dealing with the reality of (significantly more) difficult health care times ahead?  Diversity is a start (read: people that think differently than you!).