Humility is the New Smart
Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age
In nearly every industry, smart machines are replacing human labor. It's not just factory jobs-automated technologies are handling people's investments, diagnosing illnesses, and analyzing written documents. In order to endure, we need a dose of humility and to cultivate important abilities that smart machines don't have (yet): thinking critically, creatively, and innovatively and building close relationships with others so we can collaborate effectively.
Humbled!
Humility Is The New Smart is honored to be on The USMC #KrulakCenter for Innovation and Creativity's 2020 List of Best Books
Table of Contents
Part 1: A New Mental Model for the Smart Machine Age
Chapter 1: The Smart Machine Age: A New Game Requires New Rules
Chapter 2: NewSmart: A New Definition of “Smart”
Chapter 3: Humility: The Gateway to Human Excellence in the SMA
Part 2: NewSmart Behaviors
Chapter 4: Quieting Ego
Chapter 5: Managing Self: Thinking and Emotions
Chapter 6: Reflective Listening
Chapter 7: Otherness: Emotionally Connecting and Relating to Others
Chapter 8: Your NewSmart Behaviors Assessment Tool
Part 3: The NewSmart Organization
Chapter 9: Leading a NewSmart Organization
Your NewSmart Organizational Assessment Tool
Epilogue: Our Invitation to You
More about Humility is the New Smart
Your job is at risk—if not now, then soon. We are on the leading edge of a Smart Machine Age led by artificial intelligence that will be as transformative for us as the Industrial Revolution was for our ancestors. Smart machines will take over millions of jobs in manufacturing, office work, the service sector, the professions, you name it. Not only can they know more data and analyze it faster than any mere human, say Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig, but smart machines are free of the emotional, psychological, and cultural baggage that so often mars human thinking.
So we can’t beat ’em and we can’t join ’em. To stay relevant, we have to play a different game. Hess and Ludwig offer us that game plan. We need to excel at critical, creative, and innovative thinking and at genuinely engaging with others—things machines can’t do well. The key is to change our definition of what it means to be smart. Hess and Ludwig call it being NewSmart. In this extraordinarily timely book, they offer detailed guidance for developing NewSmart attitudes and four critical behaviors that will help us adapt to the new reality.
The crucial mindset underlying NewSmart is humility—not self-effacement but an accurate self-appraisal: acknowledging you can’t have all the answers, remaining open to new ideas, and committing yourself to lifelong learning. Drawing on extensive multidisciplinary research, Hess and Ludwig emphasize that the key to success in this new era is not to be more like the machines but to excel at the best of what makes us human.
The 5 NewSmart Principles
I’m defined not by what I know or how much I know, but by the quality of my thinking, listening, relating, and collaborating.
My mental models are not reality—they are only my generalized stories of how my world works.
I’m not my ideas, and I must decouple my beliefs (not values) from my ego.
I must be open-minded and treat my beliefs (not values) as hypotheses to be constantly tested and subject to modification by better data.
My mistakes and failures are opportunities to learn.
What People Are Saying
“Machines will soon be smarter than we are and do most of our jobs. Hess and Ludwig provide valuable insights into the roles that humans will play and how we can adapt to the new realities. The values they prescribe are so uplifting for humanity that I wonder why we can’t start now; why do the machines need to evolve before we do?”
—Vivek Wadhwa, Distinguished Fellow and Professor, Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley
“This book has a very important message: new forms of relationships and a more humane attitude toward each other will become essential ingredients of a new way of being. Humility, more personal relationships, and collaboration will no longer be options but the key to health, productivity, and a sense of well being.”
—Edgar H. Schein, Professor Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of Helping, Humble Inquiry, and Humble Consulting
“I loved this book. Drawing from research on human cognition, the authors explain why all of us are ill-equipped to cope with the coming smart machine age. And they offer a path forward in the form of five NewSmart principles, which are profound and powerful. This is a book about new thinking—the kind of generous, curious thinking that will allow us to thrive in a world in which machines do so many things better than we ever will.”
—Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School, and coauthor of Building the Future
Selected Articles about Humility
