1. “if you want different results, think differently”
The Revenge of the Yellow Brains: Serendipity and Strategy
Leap over the competition by connecting the dots
Copyright Omegapoint, 2006. All rights reserved
“In his off-hours, usually late at night, Bill Geiser wanders the Web, sometimes
aimlessly but always open-minded about what he might turn up. Often he starts with
a favorite ‘jump site,’ – such as Harvard Men’s Swimming and Diving Page. Then he
follows interesting links. He’s found, among other gems, a world-wide listing of swim
camps that he plans to tap for prospective customers. Sites specific to swimming are
far more productive than the dozens of generic small-business sites. “But no single
site has the franchise on all the information I need,” says Geiser.
“I simply follow a never-ending thread that weaves from site to site.”
- Fast Company
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Anyone who has surfed the Web knows the ‘discovery value’ of hotlinks - the buttons
that connect one URL to another. Start one place on the Web and you'll end up
somewhere you never expected to be, often stumbling across great connections, new
ideas and research that point the way to innovative, new strategies for success.
This progression among web sites resembles the thinking patterns of what the late Ned
Hermann called ‘Yellow Brains.’ According to Hermann, most executives spend their
time analyzing numbers, relating to people or administering projects, using the red,
blue and green quadrants of the brain, respectively. Those businesspeople that relied
upon the yellow quadrant of the brain - conceptual thinkers, designers and
intrapreneurs– had difficulty prospering inside linear corporate culture.

2. To develop an effective business plan, the critical factor is pattern recognition.
But today, by studying Internet connectivity, we are learning how the brain creates
business strategy. By using Yellow Brain thinking in the workplace, ideas, resources
and technologies converge unexpectedly into new products, new channels and new
revenues. Indeed, Yellow Brain thinking is becoming the path to creating competitive
advantage. The outsiders are being seated at the head of the table.
Saying yes to yellow
Nobody understands the Web-link-Yellow Brain connection better than women, who
are the fastest growing segment of Internet users.
“Women will have a greater impact than in business because of their natural talent
for 'web thinking,' - their flexibility, intuition, their broad, contextual long-term
perspective and their imagination which can transform the business world."
- Helen Fisher in The First Sex, Random House
Yellow brains, once the scourge of corporate planners, have also become au courant in
consulting circles.
For proof, simply examine Times Business' Profit Patterns, which offers a powerful
framework for making sense out of a complex business landscape, arguing for a
radically new approach to strategy. Author Adrian Slywotzky, Mercer Management
Consulting, emphasizes the value of seeing patterns where others only see
disconnected events and unrelated ideas. This Yellow Brain skill enables managers to
decipher complex business situations.
Former Coca Cola executive, Sergio Zyman, echoed the idea in a marketing context:
“Everything is related to everything else.”

3. “Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” - Einstein
Yellow Brain thinking drives technological innovation
There is even a software program, www. getsixdegrees.com. that operates using the
Yellow Brain style. The manufacturer, Creo, called it ‘time-freeing’ technology. It
let’s you navigate through projects in a powerful new way by uncovering connections
between messages, files and people, right on your desktop. OneNote from Microsoft
allows you to put text, pictures, audio and video files into one ‘scrapbook’-type
software product so you can allow connections to emerge, emulating the strategic
thinking style of Yellow Brains.
“What we can construct, if we keep notes and survive, are hindsight accounts of the
connectedness of things that seem to have happened: pieced-together patternings,
after the fact.” Clifford Geertz, Wired, May, 1997
Yellow Brain prototype
Many of today’s most interesting business types are Yellow Brains, obviously. When
business guru Charles Handy calls on literature, art, music, poetry, ballet and
philosophy to advocate strategic change, he is using his ‘Yellow-Brain’ thinking skills.
Internet brain
On May 22nd, 1998, we learned in the Wall St. Journal about Yellow Brain Ben
Goertzel, who sees the mind as a collection of processes and processes within
processes. In the interaction among parts and wholes, cells self-organize into organs,
organs into organisms and organisms into organizations.

4. Executives mistakenly think that what they have seen is all that there is.
As a research fellow in Australia, Goertzel was stunned to see his model of the mind
taking physical shape as the Internet, a vast, complex, self-organizing system. Each
Web page was a neuron cluster, each hypertext link a synapse, every human user a
sense organ. If these elements could interact seamlessly - transforming one another -
then perhaps a new global intelligence, a ‘Web mind,’ could emerge.
The developers of the blockbuster online
‘social network’ MySpace would agree.
Hyper-linking leads to hyper-
In May, 1998, Wall St. Journal writer
thinking…which can stimulate
Thomas Petzinger, Jr. summarized that
the human mind is a design model for creative business breakthroughs.
business. According to Petzinger,
information systems need less structure
so new connections can evolve and
creative new workplace structures can emerge. This is yet another example of how
Yellow Brains, those impatient entrepreneurs and ‘rogue cowboys’ of corporate
America, are now redefining what business must become in this, the second chapter of
the Interactive Era.
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For more information:
Lynn Hinderaker
lynn@omegapointmarketing.com
402-884-2031