Ross Dawson was interviewed recently on the We Study Billionaires podcast about his new book Thriving on Overload.
We Study Billionaires is the flagship podcast of The Investor’s Podcast Network, with more than 90 million downloads. All credit to host Trey Lockerbie for fielding such great questions.
Here’s an excerpt:
Trey Lockerbie:
Fascinating. And one of the main reasons I wanted to touch on your background is to give the listeners an idea of the amount of information you are continuously digesting to create strategies for companies in vastly different industries. Your new book is all about how to thrive with the relentless amount of information that is directed at us daily. How has your experience working in these different industries shaped your frameworks that you lay out here in the book?
Ross Dawson:
I wrote an article 25 years ago called Information Overload – Problem or Opportunity? And by view, of course at the time, was that there’s an opportunity. Of course, since then we have also quite a lot more overload. And this has been shaped not just in my time. So this was actually coming from financial markets. So I went from Merrill Lynch, worked for Thomson Financial. I was the global director of Capital Marx, Thomson Financial. And what I saw in the financial markets was that this was a place where people had more information than anyone else. And this was particularly the time when early in the days of the internet or pre-internet and their ability to create value, to be able to make trade decisions, to assist their clients, to be able to structure effective deals, was based on their ability to take an unlimited amount of information and to be able to make better decisions from that.
Ross Dawson:
So that’s the original place that I saw this and built my thesis. And so since then, as you said, in becoming not only doing this kind of work with major organizations, but being a futurist specializing in quite a few different industries. So most of my work looks at the future of particular industries. So I do have specific deep expertise in future financial services, professional services, media and technology. But I also do substantial work in the future of education, government, retail, and health. And I also do a lot of work on future of work and future of organizations. So all of these domains of course, mean that I, myself, I have quite a lot of information that I have to deal with in my everyday work. So when I give my speeches, one of the most common questions at the end is, how on earth do you keep on top of everything?
Ross Dawson:
And partly, my book is a way of cataloging what I have observed myself doing, but also the many people that I know and have worked with over the years who I describe as information masters, those people who are inherently able to thrive, prosper, just to excel in a world of unlimited information.
Watch the full episode, read the transcript and get links to resources at We Study Billionaires.
Thriving On Overload will be released on September 6. You can pre-order it now.
Image: We Study Billionaires
