Playing chess blindfolded
The world of rock & roll, in which I once claimed full-time citizenship, offers up an amazing assortment of humanity to observe—from musicians to dancers to promoters to recording engineers to disk jockeys to music critics and more.
Given the weird, wild, and wonderful personalities in such a universe, it’s inevitable that people will form stereotypes of some of its inhabitants. This, of course, occurs in other parts of life, but seems to happen more in rock-and-roll land.
I've learned a valuable lesson from this: we can do real damage with our "characterizations" of others based on limited information—which can be madly inaccurate and dehumanizing to the individuals we label. Such stereotypes also set up a “self-reinforcing feedback loop” in which we unconsciously look for evidence for our assumptions—and then use whatever evidence we find to validate those assumptions.
A nightclub manager I worked with decades ago presents a perfect illustration of someone unjustly labeled.
A fellow consultant recently inquired about my blog and upcoming book. “What’s the important business concept there?” he asked. “What are you selling? What’s the BIG IDEA?”