Surfing Senior Quotes

Many senior executives and those responsible for the development of strategic thinking often try their best to simplify and reduce strategic thinking to a “how-to” model—conforming to the familiar and habitual. Ultimately, this effort restricts their learning techniques to the surf domain and only reinforces planning. Most traditional, formal, and behavioral programs directed at improving strategy performance are stuck in the surf domain. For example,

Our lives, Domenic’s and mine, had been like an unraveling braid for the past couple of years. The proximate cause of our disengagement was a girl: Caryn, my first serious girlfriend. She and I had found each other as high school seniors. My plans to bum around Europe with Domenic after high school became plans to bum around Europe with Caryn. We all ended up going, but we didn’t see each other over there as much as we had planned. Then I went back to start college, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Caryn came with me. Domenic stayed on in Italy, living with relatives in the village where his father was born, in the eastern Appenines, working in a vineyard, learning Italian. (Domenic liked his own kind fine. I envied that.)