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The Conference Board Review® Article
The Future of Advice
New rules for giving and getting.
By Michael Schrage
Michael Schrage is a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School's Center for Digital Business and a senior adviser to MIT's Security Studies Program. His last article was a review of The Collaborative Enterprise and Competition in the Sept/Oct 2007 issue.
Being asked to write about "the future of advice" spurred the obvious twenty-first-century response: I Googled "the future of advice."
Barely five minutes later, I had no fewer than five useful references, an amusing vignette, and the name of an MIT colleague who had published peer-reviewed papers on "advice software."
Polite e-mails to names gleaned from Google searches elicited helpful e-mailed advice on the future of advice. Articles, blog links, and a Dilbert cartoon were attached. A couple of further exchanges evolved into real-time mobile-phone conversations that expanded my just-in-time advisory network. I quickly transcribed and circulated online this advice about advice for comment.
The advice about advice about advice sharpened my thinking and raised new expectations about the future meaning and value of advice. The responses and experience were invaluable.
With all due respect to Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, and Montaigne, the timeless wisdom of advice is being relentlessly refined and reinvented in the context of instant, interactive, and global access. The postmodern cliché of convenience is that technology has brought about a worldwide information revolution. This is both truth and truism. But while good advice is surely good information, good information is not necessarily good advice.
The distinction isn't subtle. Consider this rhetorical experiment: Wherever the word information appears in the context of executive leadership and decision-making, substitute the word advice. The change is subversive. "Seeking timely information" converts to "Seeking timely advice"; assuring the "free flow of quality information in the enterprise' becomes the "free flow of quality advice in the enterprise"; "disruptive innovations in information technologies" are now "disruptive innovations in advice technologies"; and, yes, "the information revolution" becomes "the advice revolution."
A global revolution in business advice is as important to future business success as any worldwide revolution in business information. Technologies for "good advice" require different senses and sensibilities than technologies that manage "good information."
Why? Because individual, interpersonal, and organizational expectations and behaviors around "good advice" are inherently different from those surrounding "good information." Technology fundamentally alters the enterprise economics and ecology of "good advice" in ways that transform how — and how often — executives seek, offer, and use it. There's hardly a senior manager alive who doesn't find thorny e-mails forwarded by challenged — or challenging — subordinates and colleagues with a subject line urgently asking: How should I respond? The response surely contains information but almost always in the form of advice.
"I've learned to assume that whatever advice I send on e-mail will be forwarded to people I may or may not know," says a twenty-plus-year Merrill Lynch executive. "That used to piss me off. Now it means whatever advice I send is better thought out and spell-checked." Has he ever forwarded sensitive advice without the knowledge of the original sender? "All the time," he laughed. "But I'm discreet about it."
This has little to do with well-mannered "netiquette" and almost everything to do with consciously branding oneself as adviser and advisee. What kind of adviser do you want to be? Why? How do you want to be seen as a solicitor and receiver of advice? Do your devices make your giving or your taking of "good advice" more difficult than it needs to be? And how do you know? The effective executive had better have good answers to those questions.
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the March/April 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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