Steve Jobs: Ten Secrets for Great Presentations

Holy Smokes, Bullets Kill! (And Other Presentation Tips) Before planning your presentation, according to Carmine Gallo, it is critical to know the question that matters most to your audience: "Why should I care?"1 You need to think about how to inspire your audience. Simply trying to sell them something doesn't cut it. As Carmine writes, "Your widget doesn't inspire me. Show me how your widget improves my life, and you've won me over."2 Here are Steve Jobs' ten secrets for insanely great presentations.3 Plan in analog. Brainstorm in advance of creating your presentation. You can use pen and paper, a whiteboard or, better yet, a mind map. DO NOT use PowerPoint®to create your presentation—it will be used only in the final step! (More on this later.) Create Twitter-friendly headlines. Describe your product or service in 140 characters or less. Preferably, a lot less. Steve introduced the MacBook Air® as simply, "The world's thinnest notebook." About the first-generation iPod®, he tweeted: "It's one thousand songs in your pocket." Introduce the villain. Steve saw a presentation as a three-act play that must tell a story, but what is a story without a hero and a villain? Before he introduced the famous 1984 ad to a group of Apple salespeople, he set the stage, casting "Big Blue" as Goliath. "IBM wants it all," he warned, and defiantly asserted that only Apple stoodin its way. His dramatic moment sent the crowd into frenzy. While the villain doesn't have to be a competitor, it must be a common foe that your audience will want to join with you in rallying against. Your product is then revealed as the conquering hero. Create visual slides. As Carmine writes, "Neuroscientists are finding that the best way to communicate information is through text and pictures, not text alone." As for bullet points, Steve never, ever, used them and neither should you. Carmine has a section in her book titled, "Bullets Kill" that describes why you should avoid using PowerPoint to create your presentation. "Think about what happens when you open PowerPoint. A blank-format slide appears that contains space for words—a title and subtitle. This presents a problem. There are very few words in a Steve Jobs presentation. Now think about the first thing you see in the drop-down menu under Format: Bullets & Numbering. This leads to the second problem. There are no bullet points in a Steve Jobs presentation. The software itself forces you to create a template that represents the exact opposite of what you need to speak like Steve!"4 Take a look at the following comparison of bullet-point slides compared to the same information, presented visually. Practice, a lot. Most people read their presentations off of their PowerPoint slides. This is why most presentations are boring. Steve treated every slide as piece of poetry and every presentation as a theatrical event. He wasn't a natural presenter; he worked very hard at it. Rehearse your presentation, toss the script and look at your audience. Practice at making it look effortless. Obey the ten-minute rule. It's a scientific fact that the brain gets tired after ten minutes. Steve's presentations typically lasted an hour and a half. He would break them up into short intervals of ten minutes or less by interspersing videos, demonstrations, or guest speakers. Don't let your audience get tired or you'll lose them. A great way to keep your audience's attention when presenting information is though sequencing, which builds the story within a visual one step at a time, making the information much easier to digest. Dress up your numbers. We often deal with large numbers or data that an audience can't comprehend without context. Breaking them down and presenting numbers visually can overcome this. Notice how much more effectively the chart below illustrates sales figures as opposed to a matrix of data. Reveal a 'holy smokes!' moment. Maya Angelou said, "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them fe el." Steve Jobs always produced a memorable moment in a pre sentation. When he introduced the MacBook Air, he told his a udience that while everyone had seen manila envelopes floating around the office, what they had never seen was someone pulling a notebook computer out of one—which is precisely what he did. The audience went wild and images of that moment remain emblazoned in people's minds four years later. Sell dreams, not products. When it looked at the iPod, the world saw a music player. What Steve Jobs saw was a tool to enrich people's lives. Howard Schultz of Starbucks didn't have a passion to sell coffee; his vision was to create an experience: a 'third place' between home and work where people would want to gather. The dream met the customer's need and the product sales took care of itself. Have fun! When was the last time you saw someone enjoying giving a presentation? Steve Jobs had fun in every keynote. He made jokes at his own expense. While most people give presentations to deliver information, Steve always created an experience that his audience would enjoy and remember. Most importantly, he sold them on becoming a part of his dream, not his product.

How the Underground Economy Works, by Robert Neuwirth

Why Black Market Entrepreneurs Matter to the World Economy

• By Robert Capps
• December 16, 2011  | 

Soon, two-thirds of the world's workers will be part of street economies, Neuwirth says.
Photo: Jessica Dimmock

Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.

“There are the guys who sneak stuff out of the port. The guys who get it across the border. The truck loaders and unloaders. All working under the table.”

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.

Wired: And it’s growing?

Neuwirth: Absolutely. In most developing countries, it’s the only part of the economy that is growing. It has been growing every year for the past two decades while the legal economy has kind of stagnated.

Wired: Why?

Neuwirth: Because it’s based purely on unfettered entrepreneurialism. Law-abiding companies in the developing world often have to work through all sorts of red tape and corruption. The System D enterprises avoid all that. It’s also an economy based on providing things that the mass of people can afford—not on high prices and large profit margins. It grows simply because people have to keep consuming—they have to keep eating, they have to keep clothing themselves. And that’s unaffected by global downturns and upturns.

Wired: Why should we care?

Neuwirth: Half the workers of the world are part of System D. By 2020, that will be up to two-thirds. So, we’re talking about the majority of the people on the planet. In simple pragmatic terms, we’ve got to care about that.

Wired: You talk a lot about wares that are sold through tiny kiosks, street stalls, and little informal markets. Where do those goods come from?

Neuwirth: The biggest flow of goods is from China. It’s no secret that China is the manufacturing engine of the planet. In a lot of ways, they’re more capitalist than we are. If someone wants something made—even if that person isn’t licensed—a Chinese factory will make it. It’s also easy to deal with China. You can go to the local Chinese consulate and get a tourist visa within a couple of hours. You can’t say the same about coming to the US. So African importers, for instance, travel to China and commission Chinese firms to make goods for them to sell in Africa.

Wired: But it’s not all Chinese manufacturers, right? In your book, you write about how huge international corporations want to get their goods into informal markets.

Neuwirth: Sure. Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive: They sell lots of products through the little unregistered and unlicensed stores in the developing world. And they want their products in those stores, because that’s where the customers are.

Wired: How does that work?

Neuwirth: Basically, they hire a middleman. Procter & Gamble, for instance, realized that although Walmart is its single largest customer, System D outposts, when you total them up, actually account for more business. So Procter & Gamble decided to get its products into those stores. In each country, P&G hires a local distributor—sometimes several layers of local distributors—to get the product from a legal, formal, tax-paying company to a company willing to deal with unlicensed vendors who don’t pay taxes. That’s how Procter & Gamble gets Downy fabric softener, Tide laundry detergent, and all manner of other goods into the squatter communities of the developing world. Today, in aggregate, these markets make up the largest percentage of the company’s sales worldwide.

Wired: You write that there are even street-vendor-specific brands.

Neuwirth: Absolutely. A good example is UAC Foods, which is based in Nigeria but active throughout West Africa and traded on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. It’s a highly formal company that was originally incorporated by the British more than 100 years ago. UAC Foods owns hotels and restaurants, but it also has this product called the Gala sausage roll. You never find Gala being sold in normal stores. It’s sold only by unlicensed roadside hawkers and at roadside kiosks. Basically, UAC recognized that this product wasn’t going to sell well in a normal store. But sausage rolls are in demand where people are on the go, when they need a quick snack on the side of the highway or in a traffic jam. So UAC relies on this informal phalanx of thousands of unregulated hawkers who sell Gala sausage rolls all over the streets of African cities. This is UAC’s distribution channel for this one product.

Why The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and other books on self-help, positive thinking, and homegrown theories of “excellence” are bad for you.

Required Reading

by Thomas Frank

Harper’s Magazine Easy Chair (June 2011)

Omar Khadr is a prisoner at Guantanamo who pleaded guilty last year to killing an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. His case was controversial because he was captured on the battlefield at age fifteen, making him a child soldier and therefore, by the conventional thinking on these matters, not responsible for his actions. His case has also drawn international attention because he is a Canadian citizen, and because allegations of torture have surfaced on several occasions. To make things even more fraught, there is his family background: Omar is the son of Ahmed Khadr, a well-known Al Qaeda fundraiser who was killed in a shootout with Pakistani security forces in 2003.

Thanks to a plea bargain, Omar Khadr will serve only eight more years behind bars, and most of those will probably be in Canada. In preparation for his eventual repatriation and release, his defense attorneys have been providing him with educational materials in order to bring him up to speed with his peer group. The texts deemed necessary for his reentry into Canadian society include Romeo and Juliet and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006).

Meanwhile, according to people familiar with Khadr’s case, American law-enforcement personnel have recommended a very different curriculum to ease his return to civil society. His required reading: Stephen R Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989).

I was unable to get those law-enforcement people to confirm or deny assigning Khadr the book. It is, we know, a popular item in the Guantanamo prison library, along with the Harry Potter series and various other titles chosen for their lack of graphic violence, sexual content, or descriptions of potential terrorist targets. Indeed, according to a Defense Department spokesperson, “approximately half of the [prison] population” has read Covey’s book.

Khadr is definitely among them. And regardless of whether it was assigned to him or not, I was struck by the idea of a Guantanamo prisoner reading one of the best-known titles in American management literature. In the genre of prison favorites, one thinks of Soul on Ice (1968) or In the Belly of the Beast (1981). But here we have a prisoner in one of the nation’s harshest lockups teaching himself to set goals, be proactive, and care about others. What use would a man living in such a place have for “win/win solutions” or “empathic listening”? And why, I wondered, would our government encourage a man many believe to be a terrorist to read a book that promises to make him more “effective”?

One obvious answer suggests itself: the process of “deradicalization”, which has so often been discussed in connection with Guantanamo detainees. In most cases, deradicalization is supposed to involve religious instruction emphasizing peacefulness, often administered by an Islamic cleric. But perhaps our counterterrorism strategists have discovered a secular counterpart for this exercise.

Just last year, in fact, Stephen Covey’s company, FranklinCovey, issued a monograph describing the book’s potential role in reforming incarcerated criminals. Once upon a time, it tells us, most prison reform programs were “faith-based”. Now the idea is to build them upon the rock of managerial science: prisoners will thereby learn valuable techniques for relating nonviolently to others, and after their release, they can discuss their “acquisition of a new mindset” with “a prospective employer”, presumably one familiar with Covey’s self-ameliorating gospel.

Should you peruse federal contracting databases, you will also find that FranklinCovey does a brisk business with the departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security. It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to wonder whether a DOD bureaucrat, at some FranklinCovey seminar over the past few years, decided that The Seven Habits would make an ideal twelve-step program to a jihad-free life.


Just for fun, let’s take as our hypothesis that The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is being used as a device for deradicalization – that it is seen, in some quarters, as a means to neutralize the nation’s enemies, to teach them the folly of their ways. It would not be the first time the United States used books for such purposes. During the Cold War, literature was constantly deployed to show the world that we were a people of taste and freedom and vanguardish ebullience, not the greedy philistines some imagined. The CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom operated in thirty-five countries, and underwrote intellectual journals in Britain, Australia, France, Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines. What’s more, the literary weapons of those days often bore the patina of genius. Say what you like about such deradicalizing artifacts as the 1950 anticommunist anthology The God That Failed, which was distributed far and wide courtesy of the CCF. At least it featured writing by people like Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender, and Andre Gide.

Today the Congress for Cultural Freedom is long gone. The public diplomacy that has taken its place is not a subtle thing. It is a matter of branding and spin and one blunder after another. In the years after the 9/11 attacks, when we launched various initiatives to counter the anti-American sentiment that was reported to be ubiquitous in the Muslim world, the top job went to a series of PR people and veterans of Madison Avenue – most infamously Karen Hughes, a woman who spoke no Arabic and who committed a memorable series of gaffes overseas. She was followed in the post by James K Glassman, the coauthor of Dow 36,000 (1999).

But if The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to be our generation’s God That Failed – the stealth device that’s supposed to defuse the hate and suspicion of the world, one reader at a time – I fear that things may be even worse than this sorry record of public diplomacy suggests. Consider, for starters, exactly who is reading Covey’s text at Guantanamo. Omar Khadr is twenty-four years old. Were he to draft his resume, it would reveal that he spent the last nine of those years in prison cells of varying degrees of wretchedness. Before that, he absorbed a course of intensive instruction in a fundamentalist movement that is deeply unpopular in the US, and then picked a fight with the strongest military in the world in some awful corner of a desolate and impoverished land.

The Seven Habits, meanwhile, is a book written for Americans who feel that their present contribution to the planet’s richest economy is not quite fulfilling enough. It is a handbook for senior executives suffering anomie as they cruise gated communities in their purring BMWs – and for junior executives who don’t yet have that BMW, but want to work their way up from the Camry they currently drive.

To dampen the ardor of the most alienated people on earth, then, we have chosen an unusual tactic: management theory. It would be hard to imagine a less suitable offering for the target audience. Maybe if they required Guantanamo inmates to read Wuthering Heights (1846)? A biography of William Randolph Hearst? Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967)?

Think about it this way and the episode begins to seem like another depressing benchmark in the triumph of the banal. The part of American life that The Seven Habits represents – the culture of self-help, positive thinking, and homegrown theories of “excellence” – is precisely the face we tried to conceal during the Cold War.

Then again, I could be wrong. Perhaps the officials who are reportedly walking Khadr through Covey’s book know precisely what they’re doing. Perhaps there’s a method to their motivating. To figure it out, I sat down and read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, looking for clues to its usefulness in fighting the Global War on Terror, or at least in helping to deradicalize suspected terrorists.

Covey announces early on that his work is the culmination of his study of American “success literature”. But his method is really to formalize, with an amazing fastidiousness, traditional bits of business folklore, organizing them with numbers, charts, and important-sounding category titles. He tells us about the “four life-support factors”, the four “quadrants” of the “time management matrix”, the five “ingredients” of a “good affirmation”, and the various “generations” of time management (and of these, please note that “the fourth generation of self-management is more advanced than the third in five important ways”).

You or I might laugh at such hokey pseudoscience. To prisoners who know little about the Western world, however, a book that identifies the “six paradigms of human interaction” might sound downright authoritative. Maybe, they will think, this book really is a philosophical treatise in the grandest sense: a handbook for human existence, not merely a self-improvement guide for troubled bosses.

That’s certainly what it claims to be. In a 2004 foreword, Covey asserts that the “solutions” he proposes are “based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history”. They are applicable everywhere and in every historical epoch. Much is made of “natural law” and the attunement of the title’s “seven habits” to said law. Then there are the “personal mission statements” the book encourages us to write, which are small-scale versions of the US Constitution. After all, notes Covey, that document also lacks any sort of expiration date:

The Constitution has endured and serves its vital function today because it is based on correct principles, on the self-evident truths contained in the Declaration of Independence. These principles empower the Constitution with a timeless strength, even in the midst of social ambiguity and change.

Now, wiseacres like you and I might think that such universal claims would limit the value of The Seven Habits in any sort of propaganda campaign. Surely they would ring false to readers not already convinced of the overwhelming superiority of the US Constitution. And what would such readers think of the suggestion that the answers to the great problems of mankind are to be found through a study of the triumphs and travails of American businesspeople?

But, again, that would be missing the point. The Seven Habits is a book with a worldwide presence; the FranklinCovey website lists offices in every region of the globe, from which its hordes of consultants fan out and “enable greatness” among the local business class. The book has been translated into thirty-eight languages and hit the bestseller list in South Korea, Japan, and (predominantly Muslim) Malaysia. On YouTube, Indonesian schoolchildren can be seen singing a simplified version of its precepts. Apparently the text’s thorough Americanness is no handicap at all. On the contrary: it is the deradicalizing payload smuggled in under the sweet fog of self-help.

Come to think of it, maybe The Seven Habits would make a good propaganda vehicle after all. It promises to help you “change”, to make you successful, but the changes it suggests largely aim to bring you into conformity with American business practice. You are what needs to change, not the world.

This is not a premise unique to The Seven Habits, of course. Inducing acquiescence is the object of nearly all modern management literature. The genre exists to persuade the world that the market is a benevolent deity, that the corporation is its worthy representative here on earth, and that the sooner you understand that, the better.

Let’s recall, in this connection, that management favorite of the 1990s, Who Moved My Cheese? (1998). It was, I thought, a parable of worker powerlessness before the market deity, that invisible cheese-moving hand. The course of wisdom, the book taught, was for us to submit to the ineffable makers of “change”, even though they “moved” our “cheese” hither and yon. To question those powers, as in the book’s title, was to brand yourself a recalcitrant good-for-nothing. Managers everywhere bought the thing in bulk and required their workers to read it, and for good reason: it was a weapon of class war.

And so is The Seven Habits, albeit in a friendlier and far more palatable form. It, too, is a book about “change” – but again, the change is all on you. The ways of the economy, remember, are fixed, natural, and eternal; it is up to us to bring ourselves into “harmony” with them, to “rescript” ourselves. “Anytime we think the problem is ‘out there‘”, Covey writes, “that thought is the problem“. Don’t concern yourself with external conditions – like, say, your indefinite detention on a tropical island not of your choosing. {*} Concern yourself with how you think about external conditions.
__________
{*} Imprisonment is a recurring theme in The Seven Habits. Two of the book’s most memorable stories come from prison memoirs, in which convicts learn important lessons about themselves while incarcerated. Then there is the woman in the audience at a Covey lecture who tells him that his wisdom made her feel “as though I was being let out of San Quentin”.
__________
It is a technique for autohypnosis, a guidebook for remaking ourselves in a manner more analogous to the universal “human consciousness” that Covey has somehow divined. And so from our desire for self-improvement comes a form of meekness, comes submersion in the team.

But suppose the Guantanamo detainees don’t buy it. Suppose they’re precisely the canny Al Qaeda operatives many pundits believe them to be, and that they’re wise to our government and its literary ploys. Suppose the book’s powers of deradicalization aren’t as great as they seem. Suppose the prisoners are pretending to internalize the book’s hyper-Americanness and its message of “change”, but are in fact paying attention only to the parts about managing your time better and “sharpening the saw”.

Then we would have achieved the exact opposite of deradicalization. We would have filled dangerous people with all sorts of useful tips for making even more mischief than before. We would have created a bunch of highly effective jihadis.

It’s happened before. One self-described fan of The Seven Habits was the deceased Saudi businessman Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden who was suspected of having established the Al Qaeda beachhead in the Philippines. Here was a man who seems to have been highly effective indeed, but who clearly cared little for the universal principles of the US Constitution and the US business class.

I started this essay bemoaning the decline of American propaganda from highbrow to middlebrow, but maybe the best solution is to sink all the way to the bottom of the taste hierarchy. Maybe we haven’t gotten banal enough. Maybe, to win this war, the ugly American needs to do his stuff.

What the Guantanamo inmates need to learn, then, is the opposite of effectiveness. They need to become lazy and self-indulgent. They need to grasp the pointlessness of getting things done. They need to become American-style consumers, not American-style executives – and least of all American-style aesthetes.

Let us outfit every cell at Guantanamo with a recliner and the full universe of cable TV, including Spice Platinum. Set each prisoner up with a Snuggie, a crate of Hot Pockets, and Grand Theft Auto. Their curriculum will be limited to a single habit, one that comes naturally in our culture: take it easy, do what feels good, and remember, it’s always someone else’s problem.

Which countries are Americans relocating to the most?

Which countries are Americans relocating to the most?

August 2nd, 2011 by Mike Morabito

 

Recently it was reported that the number of employees taking a relocation has risen to its highest level in the last two years. Where do you think most of these people are moving to?

In July, UniGroup Worldwide put out their “Migration” report that was cited by the Wall Street Journal. This report highlighted which countries American’s relocated to from the US, as well as what countries people are relocating from to the US. The results indicated some interesting statistics which included a rise of 46.7% of the numbers of American’s relocating to China for work over the last 3 years. However, the UK still receives the highest percentage of international relocations from the US at 24%.

What are the top countries to move to from the US?

1. United Kingdom
2. Germany
3. China
4. Australia
5. France
6. Switzerland
7. The Netherlands
8. Japan
9. India
10. Singapore
11. Malaysia
12. Brazil
13. Belgium
14. Italy
15. Israel

What percent of US employees relocate to each country?

Which countries have seen the most relocation growth from the US?

From the Wall Street Journal article:



This chart indicates that although the UK still receives the most assignees, China is quickly growing in the number of employees taking an international relocation to the country. The growth in China is to be expected with an average of 10% growth rates in their economy over the last 30 years which has no signs of slowing down. With this type of growth many employees are interested in taking an international relocation to China because of employees looking for a chance to go global to advance their careers. As these growth rates continue more companies will be looking toward leveraging local leadership in China to advance into other Asian emerging markets as well. Additionally companies will continue to focus on relocating employees to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as well to expand into their local and surrounding emerging markets. As an indicator of this Brazil made the top 15 list for the first time in the last 4 years.

How to Stay Employed

Companies don’t need brainy people


By Lucy Kellaway


A few days ago, I had lunch with a man who until recently held one of the biggest jobs in British business. Over the foie gras, we discussed (in ascending order of interest): the view from the executive dining room, the charms of small children, the news judgment of the Financial Times and mid-life crises.

Finally, the conversation swung round to the problems of the well known company he used to run. One of the main difficulties, he said, was that it employed too many intelligent people.

At first I thought he was joking. Surely companies need as many bright people as possible. You need a super bright person at the top, a John Browne figure. Under him, you need more bright people, one of whom will eventually take over. Further down, you want a layer of clever middle managers. And, at the entry level, you must hire the best and the brightest you can get your hands on.

Not at all, said my lunch companion. There is nothing worse than a managerial meeting of brilliant minds, all seeing multiple sides to complex problems. What you need are energetic people with gusto who get things done. They can be smart - but they must not be cerebral. Big companies need one or two heavy-duty analytical brains: beyond that, declining returns set in. When recruiting for future senior managers, companies should forget about Oxford and Cambridge and hire a much broader range of less academic people.

The lack of a connection between the conventional academic brain and business success was underlined last week by a survey showing that what unites Britain's top entrepreneurs is not so much their daring or brilliance, but their difficulty with reading. Alan Sugar and Richard Branson, to name two: both dyslexic and neither of them graduates.

I used to think it was the other way round: that the university stars did not go into business because they thought it was boring and looked down on it. The closest to true business they ever got was McKinsey, which, I hope we all agree, is not the same thing at all.

But the idea that it is business that cannot cope with, and possibly does not need, big brains is one that I am warming to. So long as a company is managed in a sensible way (a slightly heroic assumption), it does not matter if the vast bulk of employees are somewhat below average intelligence. It is not just that the indians need not be bright, the chiefs need not be particularly bright, either.

Think what characterises the really intelligent person. They can think for themselves. They love abstract ideas. They can look dispassionately at the facts. Humbug is their enemy. Dissent comes easily to them, as does complexity. These are traits that are not only unnecessary for most business jobs, they are actually a handicap when it comes to rising through the ranks of large companies.

I have heard two sad stories from friends of mine in the last couple of weeks that make the point. Both have first class degrees from Oxbridge. Both started brilliantly in business careers but are now, 15 to 20 years later, coming unstuck.

Friend number one works for a very large and very successful US company. He was writing a report for the board on a complex, nuanced subject, and wrote a complex, nuanced report. The simple-minded man above him sent it back saying that three points are the most the company tolerates, as a matter of policy. He has now been told that he is too creative and too analytical, that he must pull his socks up, or down, as the case may be.

If complexity is a problem for companies, dissent is a bigger one. Friend number two has fallen at this post. Before I tell you her tragic tale, I want to go into a brief detour on a pet subject.

For all the talk of diversity, big companies are spectacularly undiverse in terms of thought, and becoming more so. If you are too bright or too bolshie to sign up to the babble, you are not going to get anywhere.

One of the greatest corporate fallacies is that companies want people who "think out of the box". This is one of the most irritating phrases in the English language. Where and what is this box? And what is so bad about it? In fact, companies really want people to think inside the box at all times. They demand assent, not only on what the company ought to be doing but also on how individuals are feeling.

Back to friend number two. She has a senior job in a successful UK company. Recently, she went on a top management bonding weekend, full of all the usual morale-raising nonsense. As an intelligent person, she found this an uncongenial way of passing her free time. Still, she choked back her feelings and settled down to fill in the endless questionnaires.

"Irony is one of my favourite forms of humour", said one of the questions. In the fine tradition of Jane Austen, she ticked the box. Alas, this was the wrong answer. Companies cannot tolerate irony - it is much too threatening. She is not going to be fired, but it has been made clear to her that unless she seriously rethinks her sense of humour she might fit better somewhere else.

I suspect that matters are getting worse for the intelligent person in business. Dissent was never really possible in companies (and mostly for good reason). But at least in the old, autocratic days this was explicit. If you said something that your boss disagreed with, he shouted at you. This was not a great situation for the free thinking mind, but at least it was honest.

Now bright people are told to think freely, but are ostracised when they do.

If you think your company is different, can I suggest you start the week with a little experiment? At your first meeting, try saying something - anything - way outside the box and let me know what happens to you. I have a feeling it is not going to be very nice.