Choice Paralysis: General Motors, meet General Xiang Yu

I think we've all heard the saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." Call me goofy but I've always interpreted that as meaning "when you're done lying to yourself and making excuses, you'll drop the bullshit and get on with all those amazing plans of yours." The student and the teacher is us.

NYT - The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

He is one of the role models in Dan Ariely’s new book, “Predictably Irrational,” an entertaining look at human foibles like the penchant for keeping too many options open. General Xiang Yu was a rare exception to the norm, a warrior who conquered by being unpredictably rational.

Most people can’t make such a painful choice, not even the students at a bastion of rationality like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Dr. Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy (and they weren’t even asked to burn anything).

Might have to get this book (after mine's done, no excuses, remember?). But like so many books lately, there's really a simple theme that modernism and b-school insularity needlessly over-complicates at every turn (How else to keep those bonuses and WACC charts viable?).

Options. Keeping them open. People cutting their own OODA loops. Hmmmm, vaguely familiar framing....

Cash means comfort and options. And time. And, when you're already the victim of really insular choice-making, defined by who you think you are rather than by why you do, more options is not what you need. Nor more time. You end up being very proud of all your options. You invite folks over to look at them. And you tell everybody who'll listen how hard you've been working on your collection; and that you really must get around to sorting it one day.

Then they ask "which is your favorite?"

And you do not know.

Then, they ask "why'd you start collecting?"

You don't have an answer.

Tom [Guarriello] wanted to know why I keep saying GM has too much money in the bank. Well, 125,000 pensioners and Wagoner's pleas notwithstanding, money is not GM's problem. It's their excuse. Cash is not their bane.

Soul is. And GM's has wanderered off.

I once wrote somewhere that the problem with Daimler's and Chrysler's merger was that they hadn't lived in sin together. Not to any meaningful degree anyway, and, without a simple requirement: Once enough hot, rough, draining and sweaty rapid prototyping had steamed up the windows and, uh, "preferences" were known (Dirty Secret Soulmates!), the marriage (we don't do "deal" here, baby) should have been signed in blood, on a dog-eared 1969 copy of June Autoweek. Maybe cigars or Don Shermans afterwards. But definitely Jaeger. Lots of it. And Strohs. And Moet. Shooken up and sprayed wildly. Then a wild orgy of kimono-opening top to bottom with get out jail free cards from accounting and PR.

And then, something really good: Let's make catalytic converters obsolete in 20 years. While cranking out the baddest, sexiest rides since, since.... well, forever. Now go!

And no, that last paragraph wouldn't have been optional. Nor Extra, neither.