I’ve come to a, perhaps rash, conclusion. The majority of challenges we face in business–at least selling–can be traced back to the HP-35 handheld scientific calculator. No it wasn’t learning Reverse Polish Notation–though I did struggle with that for a few days.
Prior to the introduction of the HP-35, I had to understand arithmetic. I learned how to add/subract, multiply/divide. I learned the structure of mathematics, and how to use mathematics and arithmetic formulas to get answers. I understood how those answers were derived, the reasoning logic underlying those numbers.
Of course, as I did long division or complex multiplication, square roots or exponential calculations, I would make some errors. But because I understood how arithmetic and math worked, I could often see that something didn’t make sense, I could go back check my work and understand my error.
But my HP-35 destroyed all of that. And it’s been downhill since that time.
The HP-35 made it totally unnecessary for me to understand how to add/subtract, multiply/divide. I didn’t have to understand how math and arithmetic worked. I didn’t have to understand how I got answers. The HP-35 just gave me the answers.
It made things much easier for me, in some sense. It always gave me the answers. But in many ways it dumbed me down. Since I no longer understood the logic underlying the answers—occasionally, I would get something wrong and not realize it. I would present something that was completely in error, looking like an idiot.
Or when I got a result that didn’t seem to make sense, I no longer had the ability to go through the thought process—had I used the wrong formula, did I enter the numbers in the wrong order, did I make a mistake in my thinking? I had lost the ability to figure out where I might have gone wrong.
I struggled when, in orals, my professors asked me to explain my answer and how I got to it. I pulled out my HP-35, showing them the numbers I typed in and the answer it gave me. But I couldn’t explain how I got to the answer. Why it made sense, or what it meant to the problem I was solving. I just had the numbers the HP-35 displayed to me.
As I look at much of what we encounter today, I realize the root of all our problems is the HP-35. Things went downhill after it was announced in the early 1970’s.
The other day, someone had the audacity to ask me the percent 65 was of 100. Fortunately, I had the calculator on my iPhone to help figure that out.
Today, we rely on being given the answers. We have our scripts, our playbooks. We have tools that give us the answers. All we have to do is type a prompt into ChatGPT and it gives us an answer. We don’t know how to evaluate the answer–is it a good or bad answer, does it address the issue we intended in the right way.
We’ve come to rely on working from the answers. We accept them because we have lost our ability to think about them, assess them, question them. And when the answers don’t give us the results we expected, we don’t have the ability to figure out what went wrong. Did we use the wrong formula, did we make a mistake in our assumptions? Did we miss something important?
Or maybe we gave the right answer but to the wrong question?
What’s more important than the answer–the questions our scripts tell us to ask, or the way we handle an objection, or the content our tools provide–is the understanding of what the answers mean. Or the understanding of what we might change and why to get the answer we need.
And then, today, we are face with thing that often don’t have the answers. Or there may be many right answers. How do we figure things out? How should we think about the issues? What should we be looking for to get the answers or to choose the right one.
Perhaps we should focus less on the answers but rather the questions, the problems, the issues that impact the answers and what they mean. Perhaps we should develop our capabilities to figure things out?
Damn you HP-35! Who would have guessed that close to 51 years ago you would create so many problems for us? (Thank goodness I had my iPhone to subtract 1972 from 2023)
When’s the last time you or anyone you know went someplace new without following their GPS device to the letter?
Hilarious Michael. I often set my GPS for places I know the directions, often to monitor traffic. But I frustrate it too often, when I choose my own options. I’m envisioning it building the intelligence—-Dave, make a U turn in 200 feet……. Dave MAKE a U turn in 400 feet….. Dave MAKE A U TURN IN 600 FEET…… Dave, YOU BETTER LISTEN TO ME!!!!!
For me it was the National Semiconductor “Mathemetician” (1976), using RPN. After hitting “enter”, you could go make lunch while it toggled for a few minutes to come up with the answer….
😉
Now my Polish citizenship has finally been granted, I’m even more proud to have mastered RPN (on a 12C). The HP calculators also used stack registers. Last in, first out and no parenthesis (or dinner jacket) required.
my first foray with a GPS device was in a Hertz rental in Manchester.
OXFORD St duly typed in, and Directions given.
It was of course the wrong Oxford St.
I do use GPS daily now, Google Maps,
{In which I corrected my own address
as it had me at the wrong end of the street
to the great frustration of Amazon delivery drivers.}
but I know better than to trust it when it tries to take me off-road.
Frome Slide rule through HP-35, it helps if you understand the algorithm.
as for AI Chat Bots, well, I continue to check for my Copyright IP turning up.
One of my early GPS adventures—I’d actually been using GPS for a few years. But I was rushing to a very important meeting. It was a rental car. I programmed in the intersection of two streets, my client was located in a building at the intersection.
I reach the intersection about 15 minutes before the meeting, can’t find the building.
Turns out, both roads were crescent shaped and intersected twice—50 KMs apart. By the time a realized that, I was already late. Broke all speeding laws. Customer was gracious, we chuckled a little…..
Now I type in the address, I’ve learned to never use intersections any more.
Separately, I still have my K&E slide rule and it’s leather case. To look cool, we use to have it dangling off our belts as we wandered campus. In reality it made we physics nerds more easily identifiable.
Thanks Brian!