Work Matters

Category: Evidence-based Management

  • Politicians and Persuasion: When to Use Abstract Versus Specific Messages

    As I was reading research this morning for our scaling project, I came across a series of studies that has implications for both politicians and — perhaps organizational leaders — who wish to persuade others to like and support them.  The question tackled by these studies in paper by Hakkyun Kim and his colleagues in the Journal of Consumer Research was when "influencers" are better of using vague, abstract high level messages — ones that are more about "why" — versus concrete, specific, implementation oriented messages — ones that are "how" to get things done.

    Their general hypothesis was that, given the way that people "represent" events in their minds, vague and abstract messages fit with their attention and expectations when the event is far in the future, but as the event draws closer, they become more concerned about concrete details as the practicalities begin to loom. Here is part of their argument:

    For instance, a traveler preparing to leave for a vacation to Cancun the following morning is more likely to process information about speedy check-in for international flights – a low-level, concrete piece of information that is related to the feasibility of the vacation, as opposed to information about the quality of sunsets on the East Coast of Mexico – a high-level, abstract piece of information that is related to the desirability of the vacation. When processing information that does not match their mental representation, people are less likely to experience fluency, and thus may provide a less positive evaluation of the event.

    They used this kind of logic to design a series of laboratory experiments where subjects were exposed to vague versus concrete messages from hypothetical U.S. Senate candidates and asked them to evaluate how positively or negatively they viewed the candidate.  The key  manipulation was whether the election was far off (six months away) or looming soon (one week).  As predicted, abstract messages were more persuasive (and promoted more liking) when the election was six months away and concrete message were more persuasive when it was one week away.

    This study has some fun implications for the upcoming elections.  Let's watch Obama and Romney to see if they keep things vague and abstract until the final weeks of the campaign, but then turn specific in the final weeks.  But I think it also has some interesting implications for how leaders can persuade people in their organizations to join organizational change efforts.  The implication is that when the change is far off, it is not a good idea to talk about he nuts and bolts very much — a focus on abstract "why" questions is in order.  But as the change looms, specific details that help people predict and control what happens to them are crucial to keeping attitudes toward the change and leaders positive.  

    This is just a hypothesis based on this research. Laboratory subjects and the strangeness of political campaigns may not generalize to organizational settings, but it seems like a plausible hypothesis. Now I am going to start looking at some cases of organizational change to see if it actually seems to work. 

    Any reactions to the hypothesis or suggestions of cases to check out?

    P.S. Here is the reference: Kim, Hakkyun, Akshay R. Rao, and Angela Y. Lee (2009), "It's Time to Vote: The Effect of Matching Message Orientation and Temporal Frame on Political Persuasion," lead article, Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (April), 877-889.

  • Powerful Men Talk More, Powerful Women Don’t Because It Damages Their Likeability, Power, and Effectiveness

    Perhaps one of the men cropped3

    The depths of societies ingrained sexism — and the degree to which successful women understand it is a fact of life that requires constant vigalance and adjustment — never ceases to amaze and trouble me.  A new study in the Administrative Science Quarterly (Volume 56, pages 622-641) by Yale faculty member Victoria L. Brescoll presents a trio of studies that examine gender, power, and volubility (talking time).  The headline above contains the upshot.  Here are some details:

    1. In a study of United States senators (using data from 2005 and 2007), more powerful male senators talked quite a bit more on the senate floor than less powerful male senators. But there were no significant differences between how much powerful female senators talked compared to less powerful female senators.

    2. This finding was replicated in a controlled experiment — again, more powerful men talked more, more powerful women didn't. Additional analyses suggested that powerful women hesitated to talk more because they were concerned about "potential backlash," that they would be seen as less likable, "out of line," domineering, too controlling, would lose power, and be less effective.

    3. These fears of backlash were confirmed in a third study. The basic set-up was that research subjects were asked to assess hypothetical male and female CEO candidates –one who tends to express opinions in meetings and the other who tends to keep opinions to him/herself.  The effects — the ratings by both male and female subjects — were troubling.  The talkative male CEO candidate was rated as more suitable for leadership than the less talkative one on measures including whether or not the person should be hired, is entitled to power, and competence.  BUT for the female CEO, the exact opposite pattern was seen. The female CEO candidate who withheld their opinions were rated more highly than the female candidate who tended to express their opinions.

    Pretty disturbing, huh?  But it does show that the paths to power for women and men are quite different.  The blabber mouth approach works for guys, but backfires on women.

    The question is — what can be done about this problem? Certainly a bit of self-awareness is in order, but I do wonder if there are ways to dampen or reverse these effects by developing organizational cultures — through employee selection, socialization, rewards, and punishments — in the right way. There are some organizations I work with where more talkative and opinionated women do seem to get ahead, and others where the women who get ahead learn to talk less.

    In any event, powerful women are often quite adept at finding ways to press their opinions without increasing their talking time. One trick I have seen is that they feed their opinions and evidence to talkative male colleagues "backstage" and convince these guys to present such opinions and evidence as their own in meetings. 

    Thoughts?

    P.S. The entire paper is available here.

    P.P.S A big thanks to Carol for sending me the cartoon, just perfect!

     

     

     

  • An Asshole Infested Workplace — And How One Guy Survived It

    Even though it has been five years since The No Asshole Rule was published in hardback, I still get 15 or 20 emails a week about issues pertinent to the book — descriptions of workplace tyrants and creeps, on how to avoid breeding them, and on what to do about them when you work with one — or a lot of them.  

    This blog would contain nothing but "asshole stories" and I would be posting a couple times a day if I reported them all. Clearly, that would be both boring and depressing.  And I am interested in other things. But every now and and then, I get one that is so well-crafted that I feel compelled to post it. I got a great one yesterday. 

    I don't want to put the whole email here both because it is so detailed and because I don't want to reveal any names. But the fellow who wrote this had quite an experience and did a great job of describing how he fought back. Here are some key excerpts (with some deletions to obscure identities):

    His note starts:

    I just finished reading The No A$$hole rule for a second time (I use $ instead of "s" just in case your email filters emails with the word "A$$hole," though I'd bet it does not. I'm just airing on the side of caution). Here is my reaction. Feel free to use my full name and any contents of this email in any of your published works. Back in 2005, I began my second job out of college working as a project manager at a marketing company. It was, and still is, a family business consisting of about 100 total employees.   Here is a snippet what I endured, for nearly 7 years, from the A$$hole Family.

    This is a partial list of behaviors in the cesspool where he worked:

    • If I was eating something, a bag of potato chips for example, the President would walk into my cubicle, stick his hands in the bag, then look at me and say, "Can I have some?"
    • Someone would walk into my cubicle and have a conversation with the person in the cube across from me…while I was on the phone!
    • A coworker of mine made a mistake on a project, so the VP of Sales sent the client an email, copying my boss, which said something to the effect of, "I just fired ____. This mistake was completely unacceptable, and please accept my apology. We don't tolerate people like that here…" Ironically enough, it was a lie; ____ was never fired, but just moved off the account.
    • The family members would routinely yell across the entire office to one another
    • I was having a meeting with a vendor in a conference room. The door was shut. The Sales Consultant walked in, sans knocking, and proceeded to say, "I need this room" and set her things on the conference table. And no, she had not reserved the conference room; reserving a conference room in this company was far-too-advanced of an idea.
    •  [A married couple] who also worked at the A$$hole company were going through a divorce. They routinely had shouting and yelling matches, followed by slamming drawers, desks, and just about anything else that could make a loud noise and disrupt everyone in the office.
    • [One family member] often spoke to me like I was a 5-year old child (she did the same to most underlings, especially the men), and always loudly enough so everyone in the surrounding area could hear that I was being thrown under the bus. She liked to make an example of her victims. Oddly enough, she apparently has a Psychology degree (No offense to you at all, Dr. Sutton).
    • [Another executive] was famous for bullying vendors, yelling at them on the phone, slamming desks and drawers, etc.. He would also do this by using his blue-tooth ear-piece and his cell phone as he walked around the office, yelling on the phone.
    • They hired another A$$hole (You wrote that A$$holes tend to hire other A$$holes). He was most lethal behind a computer, where he would send scathing emails to co-workers. However, he would not limit his exchanges to emails, as my colleague would often complain that he said things—NOT in private—like, "If you think you need a raise, then maybe you should quit and get another job."
    •  I literally witnessed my manager turn into an A$$hole overtime due to over-exposure to the A$$hole Family. In the beginning, he was an optimistic, friendly, driven, trustworthy manager. 6+ years later, he scowled and glared at co-workers; he became two-faced; I lost trust in him.

    I love this summary, it is sad but funny at the same time:

    There is such an infestation of A$$holes at this company that someone should tent the building and spray it with A$$hole insecticide. I could go on for pages about these stories. I wish I had documented more of them, because some of them were really funny.

     Then, he tells us how he too started catching the sickness — as I have written here many times, bad behavior is contagious. Thank goodness, he and his colleagues hatched exit plans:

    After working there for a year, I realized that I was turning into an A$$hole: I was losing my temper with vendors on the phone; my stress-level was getting too high to manage; and I started to send more scathing emails. It also started to affect my personal life, as I would come home from work and lose my temper with my partner for no reason. I then realized that I needed to get out. Nothing I could do would help me manage this job long-term. So, 3 of my colleagues and I all made a pact to get new jobs as quickly as possible.

    Finally, I was especially taken with his description of the things he did to cope with the infestation of assholes around him, many are consistent with my survival tips, others are new twists and turns. Here is most of his list:

    •  I confronted [a boss] about him throwing me under the bus. I explained to him that after throwing me under the bus, I become anxious, nervous, embarrassed, and I cannot concentrate, which greater increases my chances for making mistakes. My solution was to instead speak to me in private about a way that we can work together to reduce any mistakes and increase productivity for our whole department. He never threw me under the bus again (to my face, anyway), but he never took me up on the offer to speak with me about how to help improve my job performance, as well as my co-workers. 
    • Wrote in my daily journal (this was a tremendous small win; I could vent my frustrations and focus on my strategy to get out of the A$$hole Factory. I still write in my journal)
    • Using any downtime at work to apply for other jobs
    • Using the "I have a doctor's appointment" excuse to go on job interviews
    • The President/CEO ran for a political post. I voted for the other guy.
    • Working as hard as possible at my job, so that when I left, it would be difficult to replace me
    • Wear headphones to drown out the A$$holes yelling across the office at one another
    • Piled things like my briefcase and books near the entrance to my cubicle so A$$holes could not enter un-invited
    • Deleted scathing emails and never responding to them instead of responding and escalating into email World War III
    • Gave 2 weeks notice: No more, no less

    Again, I don't usually provide so much detail, but this fellow did such a brilliant job of showing what an asshole infested workplace looks and feels like, the negative effects it has on everyone in its grips, and of listing the little and big things he did to cope with it.  And, thank goodness, he realized he needed to escape and eventually got out — while protecting himself along the way. 

    I won't name him (even though he said it was OK, I think a bit of discretion is in order). But I do want to thank this anonymous reader for taking the time to write me such a long note and for doing it so well.

  • More Evidence of Self-Enhancement Bias: New Study of Tailgating

    Colorado-State-Patrol-Tailgating

    For better and worse, one of the most well-established studies in the behavioral sciences is that we human-beings tend to have inflated and often wildly inaccurate evaluations of our skills and actions — this is sometimes called self-enhancement bias.  I have written about this here before, in discussing David Dunning's book Self-Insight, which shows that this tendency for self-delusion is especially pronounced in areas where we are most incompetent!   As I wrote then (and dug into in Good Boss, Bad Boss to explain why self-awareness is so difficult for leaders — especially bad leaders):

    In a survey of thousands of high school seniors ,70% of respondents rated their leadership ability as above average while only 2% rated their leadership ability as below average, and — turning to my own profession — 94% of college professors say they do above average work.

    The pile of evidence for self-enhancement bias grew a bit lately, with a new study on tailgating.  As USA Today tells us:

    Michelin is putting out a little research that shows that 74% of drivers say someone tailgated them in the past six months. But only 11% admit to having tailgated someone else.

    The lesson from all this is if you think that problems are always caused by other people around you and are rarely if ever to blame, well, that might be good for protecting your tender ego, but it is a lousy mindset for identifying and repairing your flaws!

    P.S. The picture of of a billboard in Colorado.  Good fun.

     

  • Final Exam: Design the Ideal Organization. Use Course Concepts to Defend Your Answer

    That is the final exam question that I've been using for about a decade in my graduate class "Organizational Behavior:An Evidence-Based Approach" in our Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford.  Students get 3000 words to answer the question.  I put in on the course outline so they can see it the first day of class.  I do so because I want propsective students to decide if they can deal with a class with so much ambiguity and pressure to write well and because I want students to start thinking about their paper from the first day of class.  I encourage and reward them for being as creative as possible, while at the same time, weaving together concepts related to major themes in the class such as leadership, employee selection and socialization, motivation and rewards, interpersonal influence, group dynamics, organizational change, innovation, and organizational culture. 

    As I tell the students, this is a really hard question.  In fact, so hard, it is difficult for me to answer even after studying the topic for over 30 years. I guess I did answer it in at least one of my books, The No Asshole Rule, although that was a lot longer than 3000 words.  After a decade or so, I have read about 1000 answers to this question.  Every year, I go through the same process with it.  About a week before the papers are due, I start having second thoughts about it as I talk to the students about their struggles with answering such an open-ended question. After all, this is the Stanford Engineering School, and while some our students write beautifully, for many others, this is the first time they have faced such an open-ended writing assignment.  Then, the same thing happens every year.  The pile of papers come in, I start reading them, and I am delighted with the overall quality and dazzled by the best papers — and pleased by the creativity and even joy the students so many students convey. 

    The range and quality of the papers was especially striking this year.  I believe it was largely because my two course assistants, Belinda Chiang and Isaac Waisberg , did such a great job of giving students feedback during the five writing assignments that led up to the final.  I won't list all the titles and themes of the 84 papers we received.  Quite a few were variations of web-based start-ups, as there is a lot of that at Stanford, especially in the School of Engineering.  

    But here are some of the most intriguing ones:

    A nationwide professional wrestling company that "empowers its wrestlers to create quality shows and programming."

    "The Ministry of Love," a government agency on the imaginary planet of "Natan" that has a population of 3 million people and a declining fertility rate.  The mission of the ministry to increase the birth rate via love.  The key roles are "Venuses" who develop ideas and "Cupids" who implement those ideas.

    An ideal organization for a high school "Queen Bee" who "rules the hallways with a fist full of Prada and enough hairspray to glue flies to the walls."

    A non-profit hospice, that nurtures employees "while they deal with the emotions of death on a daily basis."

    Heaven.  Yes, that heaven — where management has two goals 1. provide people with an afterlife fair to their conduct before death and 2. Encourage people to do good on earth.

    "The Ideal NBA Franchise: Transforming the Golden State Warriors into Champions."  This is a tough job as our local basketball team is a perennial loser.

    Revamping the The National Kidney Foundation of Singapore

    "Mystical Weddings," a wedding planning agency located in India.

    The ideal organization for a family.  This was written by a student who had been a dad for just two weeks.  He was suffering sleep deprivation and other stresses and decided to imagine a better solution.  It was touching and made lovely use of course concepts — incentives, influence, and group norms, for example.

    Finally, the most outrageous and one of the best papers in terms of writing and application of course concepts (written by a female student) was: "Living the dream — would you like to to be the third wife of Tom Brady?  A blueprint for the polygynous family."  I never heard of the word "polygynous."  It means polygamous — one husband, multiple wives, the Big Love thing.

    As I said, although I was tempted to abandon this assignment yet again this year, when I read the papers, I was — as usual — struck by how well the best students apply the theory, evidence, and cases from the course in brilliant ways that I could never possibly imagine.  Also, the assignment reveals students who can define but not really apply concepts, as well as those rare students who haven't learned much course content. 

    I am wondering however, if I should open it up next year so that students can produce something other than a paper that uses course concepts to design the ideal organization.  Perhaps they could do a film, a presentation, or design a game that answers the question in some compelling way.  For the most ambitious students, given the entrepreneurial frenzy at Stanford, perhaps taking steps to start your own ideal organization (and telling me what you've learned) might satisfy the requirement as well. I am not sure if this is a good idea as it is hard to beat good old fashioned writing. But I am toying with it.

  • The Virtues of Standing-Up: In Meetings and Elsewhere

    I was thinking back to some of the experiences I had over the last few weeks teaching classes to both Stanford students and executives, and watching some of my fellow teachers and colleagues in action.  I realized that one of the hallmarks, one of the little signs I have learned to look for, is whether people are standing-up or sitting down.  We all learn in school that being a "good student" means that we ought to stay in our seats and be good listeners.  But I kept seeing situations where standing-up was a sign of active learning and leadership.  To give you a a few examples, I noticed that when my course assistants stood up and walked around the classroom, they were more likely to be engaged by students and to create enthusiasm and energy. I noticed that student teams in my classes that stood-up when brainstorming, prototyping, or arguing over ideas seemed more energetic and engaged. 

    Perry and David KelleyAnd I noticed when watching master innovation teacher and coach Perry Klebahn in action at the Stanford d. School that he hardly ever sits down for long, he is always on the prowl, walking over to members of his team to ask how things are going, to give a bit of advice, and to find out what needs to be fixed — and is constantly walking over to to watch teams of students or executives who are working on creative tasks to see if they need a bit advice, coaching, or a gentle kick in the ass to get unstuck. (In fact, that is Perry listening to David Kelley while they were coaching teams — David is the d schools main founder).

    Of course, there are times when sitting down is best: During long meetings, when you want to unwind, when relaxed contemplation is in order.  But these thoughts inspired a couple questions that many of us — including me — need to ask ourselves about the groups we work in and lead: Would it help if I stood up?  Would it help if we all stood up?

    This all reminded me of this passage from Good Boss, Bad Boss (from the chapter on how the best bosses "Serve as a Human Shield"):

    In Praise of Stand-Up Meetings

    I’ve been fascinated by stand-up meetings for years.  It started when Jeff Pfeffer and I were writing Hard Facts, our book on evidence-based management.  We often met in Jeff’s lovely house, typically starting-out in his kitchen.  But we usually ended-up in Jeff’s spacious study — where we both stood, or more often, Jeff sat on the lone chair, and I stood.  Meetings in his study were productive but rarely lasted long.  There was no place for me sit and the discomfort soon drove me out the door (or at least back to the kitchen).  We wondered if there was research on stand-up meetings, and to our delight, we found an experiment comparing decisions made by 56 groups where people stood-up during meetings to 55 groups where people sat down.  These were short meetings, in the 10 to 20 minute range, but the researchers found big differences.  Groups that stood-up took 34% less time to make the assigned decision, and there were no significant differences in decision quality between stand-up and sit-down groups.

    Stand-up meetings aren’t just praised in cute academic studies.  Robert Townsend advised in Up the Organization, “Some meetings should be mercifully brief. A good way to handle the latter is to hold the meeting with everyone standing-up. The meetees won’t believe you at first. Then they get very uncomfortable and can hardly wait to get the meeting over with.”

    I keep finding good bosses who use stand-up meetings to speed things along.  One is David Darragh, CEO of Reily, a New Orleans-based company that specializes in southern foods and drinks.  They produce and market dozens of products such as Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili, CDM Coffee and Chicory, No Pudge Fat Free Brownie Mix, and Luzianne Tea.  David and I were having a rollicking conversation about how he works with his team. I started interrogating closely after he mentioned the 15 minute stand-up meeting held in his office four mornings a week. We since exchanged a series of emails about these meetings.  As David explains:

    “The importance of the stand-up meeting is that it can be accomplished efficiently and, therefore, with greater frequency.  Like many areas of discipline, repetition begets improved results.  The same is true with meetings.  The rhythm that frequency generates allows relationships to develop, personal ticks to be understood, stressors to be identified, personal strengths and weaknesses to be put out in the light of day, etc.  The role of stand-up meetings is not to work on strategic issues or even to resolve an immediate issue.  The role is to bubble up the issues of the day and to identify the ones that need to be worked outside the meeting and agree on a steward to be responsible for it.   With frequent, crisp stand up meetings, there can never be the excuse that the opportunity to communicate was not there.  We insist that bad news travels just as fast as good news”

    The team also has a 90 minute sit-down meeting each week, where they dig into more strategic issues.  But the quick daily meetings keep the team connected, allow them to spot small problems before they become big ones, and facilitate quick and effective action.  

    Stand-up meetings aren’t right for every meeting or boss.  As we saw in the last chapter in the broken Timbuk2 all-hands meeting, part of the problem with that 45 or so minute gathering was there was no place for most people to sit, which fueled the group’s grumpiness and impatience.  The key lesson is that the best bosses constantly look for little ways to use everyone’s time and energy more efficiently and respectfully.  They keep unearthing traditions, procedures, or other things that needlessly slow people down.  In many cases, these speed bumps have been around so long that people don’t even realize they exist or that they do more harm than good.   Try to look at what you and your people do through fresh eyes.  Bring in someone who “doesn’t know any better,” and ask them: What can I do to help my people travel through the day with fewer hassles? 

    What do you think?  How does standing-up help in what you do?  When is it a bad idea?

    P.S. Check out this Wall Street Journal article on stand-up meetings as part of the "Agile" software development process, particularly the "daily scrum."

    P.P.S. Don't miss Jason Yip's article on how to run a stand-up meeting and how to tell when it isn't going well.

     

  • Hollow Visions, Bullshit, Lies and Leadership Vs. Management

    Fast Company has been reprinting excerpts from the new chapter in the Good Boss, Bad Boss paperback.  The fifth  and current piece 'Why "Big Picture Only" Bosses Are The Worst' deals with a theme I have raised both here and at HBR before: My argument is that, although the distinction between "management" and  "leadership" is probably accurate, the implicit or explicit status differences attached to these terms are destructive. 

    One of the worst effects is that too many "leaders" fancy themselves as grand strategists and visionaries and who are above the "little people" that are charged with refining and implementing those big and bold ideas.  These exalted captains of industry develop the grand vision for the product, the film, the merger, or whatever — and leave the implementation to others.  This was one of Carly Fiorina's fatal flaws at HP: she loved speeches and grand gestures like the Compaq merger, but didn't have much patience for doing what was required for making things work.  By contrast, this is the strength of Pixar leaders like Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, and Brad Bird.  Yes, they have grand visions about the story and market for every film, but they sweat every detail of every frame and worry constantly about linking their big ideas to every little detail of their films.

    As Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer show in their masterpiece The Progress Principle, the best creative work depends on getting the little things right.  James March, perhaps the most prestigious living organizational theorist, frames all this in an interesting way, arguing that the effectiveness of organizations depends at least as much on the competent performance of ordinary bureaucrats and technicians who do their jobs well (or badly) day in and day out as on the bold moves and grand rhetoric of people at the top of the pecking order.  To paraphrase March, organizations need both poets and plumbers, and the plumbing is always crucial to organizational performance.  (See this long interview for a nice summary of March's views).

    To be clear, I am not rejecting the value of leadership, grand visions, and superstars.  But just as our country and the rest of the world is suffering from the huge gaps between the haves and have nots, too many organizations are doing damage by giving excessive credit, stature, and dollars to people with the big ideas and giving insufficient kudos, prestige, and pay to people who put their heads down and make sure that all the little things get done right.

    Our exaggerated faith in heroes and the instant cures they so often promise has done a lot of damage to our society too — not just to organizations.  In this vein, I wrote a piece in BusinessWeek a few years back after re-reading The Peter Principle.  I argued that the emphasis on dramatic and bold moves and superstars, and our loss of respect for the crucial role of ordinary competence, was likely an underlying cause of the 2008-2009 financial meltdown:

    If Dr. Peter were alive today, he'd find that a new lust for superhuman accomplishments has helped create an almost unprecedented level of incompetence. The message has been this: Perform extraordinary feats, or consider yourself a loser.

    We are now struggling to stay afloat in a river of snake oil created by this way of thinking. Many of us didn't want to see the lies, exaggerations, and arrogance that pumped up our portfolios. Instead we showered huge rewards on the false financial heroes who fed our delusions. This is the Bernie Madoff story, too. People may have suspected that something wasn't quite right about the huge returns on their investments with Madoff. But few wanted to look closely enough to see the Ponzi scheme.

    I am not saying that we don't need heroes and visionaries.  Rather, we need leaders who help us link big ideas to the little day to day accomplishments that turn dreams into realities.   To paraphrase my friend Peter Sims, author of Little Bets, we need leaders who can weave together the "birds eye view," the big picture, with "the worm's eye view," the nuances and tiny little actions required to make bold ideas come to life.

  • Creativity: Another Reason that Having a Drink — or Two — at Work Isn’t All Bad

    Last April, I had fun writing a guest column for Cnn.Com arguing that having an occasional drink with your colleagues while you are at work isn't all bad:

    In addition to its objective physiological effects, anthropologists have long noted that its presence serves as a signal in many societies that a "time-out" has begun, that people are released, at least to a degree, from their usual responsibilities and roles. Its mere presence in our cups signals we have permission to be our "authentic selves" and we are allowed — at least to a degree — to reveal personal information about ourselves and gossip about others — because, after all, the booze loosened our tongues. When used in moderate doses and with proper precautions, participating in a collective round of drinking or two has a professional upside that ought to be acknowledged.

    Now there is a new study that adds to the symbolic (and I suppose objective) power of alcohol to bring about positive effects. The folks over at BPS Research Digest offer a lovely summary of an experiment called "Uncorking the Muse"  that shows "mild intoxication aids creative problem solving."   The researchers had male subjects between the ages of 21 and 30 consume enough vodka to get their blood alcohol concentration to .07, which is about equal to consuming two pints of beer for an average sized man.  Then they gave them a standard creativity task 'the "Remote Associates Test", a popular test of insightful thinking in which three words are presented on each round (e.g. coin, quick, spoon) and the aim is to identify the one word that best fits these three (e.g. silver).'

    The tipsy respondents performed better on the test than subjects in a sober control group:

    1. "they solved 58 per cent of 15 items on average vs. 42 per cent average success achieved by controls"

    2. "they tended to solve the items more quickly (11.54 seconds per item vs. 15.24 seconds)"

    The reasons they did better and moved faster appear to be lack of inhibition ("intoxicated participants tended to rate their experience of problem solving as more insightful, like an Aha! moment, and less analytic") and, following past research, people with superior memories tend to do worse on this task — because drinking dulls memory, it may help on the Remote Associates Test.  The researchers also speculate that "being mildly drunk facilitates a divergent, diffuse mode of thought, which is useful for such tasks where the answer requires thinking on a tangent."

    I am not arguing that people who do creative work ought to drink all day — there are two many dangers.  As I warned in the CNN piece, booze is best consumed in small doses and with proper precautions.  And of course people who don't or should not drink for health, religious, or other reasons ought not to be pressured to join in the drinking.

    Yet,  this study, when combined when with other work suggesting that drinking can serve as a useful social lubricant, suggest that having a drink or two with your colleagues at the end of the day now and then, and kicking around a few crazy ideas, might both enhance social bonds and generate some great new ideas.  The payoff might include innovative products, services, experiences and the like — if you can remember those sparkling insights after you sober up!

    P.S. The citation is Jarosz, A., Colflesh, G., and Wiley, J. (2012). Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving. Consciousness and Cognition, 21 (1), 487-493

  • The Hallmarks of Great Leaders — and the Needs of Younger Workers — are Timeless

    Fast Company has another excerpt from the new chapter in Good Boss, Bad Boss out today — one that goes against things that many so-called management gurus often say. My main point i those who argue management needs to be re-invented are misguided — they massively overstate the case and have incentives for doing so, but it doesn't stand up to the evidence.  Here is opening of the piece and you can read the rest here:

    A lot of people write business books: about eleven thousand are published each year. There are armies of consultants, gurus, and wannabe thought leaders, and thousands of management magazines, radio and TV shows, websites, and blogs. 

    These purveyors of management knowledge have incentives for claiming their ideas are “new and improved” rather than the same old thing. One twist, which I’ve seen a lot lately, is the claim that management or leadership needs to be reinvented. Many reasons given for this need seem sensible: Gen X and Gen Y require different management techniques; outsourcing, globalization, and information technology means working with people we rarely if ever meet in person; the pressure to think and move ever faster is unprecedented; so many employees are disengaged that they need to be managed so they feel appreciated.

    Yet, no matter how hard I look at studies by academics and consulting firms, or at contrasts between successful and unsuccessful leaders, I can’t find persuasive evidence of substantial change in the kinds of bosses people want to become or work for, or that enable human groups and organizations to thrive. Changes such as the computer revolution, globalization, and distributed teams mean that if you are a boss, staying in tune with followers is more challenging than ever. And, certainly, bosses need to be more culturally aware because many workplaces are composed of more diverse people.

    But every new generation of bosses faces hurdles that seem to make the job tougher than it ever was. The introduction of the telephone and air travel created many of the same challenges as the computer revolution–as did the introduction of the telegraph and trains. Just as every new generation of teenagers believes they have discovered sex and their parents can’t possibly understand what it feels like to be them, believing that that no prior generation of bosses ever faced anything like this and these crazy times require entirely new ways of thinking and acting are likely soothing to modern managers. These beliefs also help so called experts like me sell our wares. Yet there is little evidence to support the claim that organizations—let alone the humans in them—have changed so drastically that we need to invent a whole new kind of boss.

    I'd love your reactions!

    P.S. Note that Gen Y and Gen X really aren't much different than any other new generation of employees in terms of what they want — even though there is a small industry around dealing with these so-called new kinds of workers.  Certainly, younger workers want different things than older workers — but this has always been the case and what they want has always been pretty similar — be they baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, or whatever.  See this piece by Wharton's Peter Cappelli, perhaps the most prestigious talent researcher in academia, where he discusses the evidence, which show a few differences, but nothing dramatic.  

     

  • The Power of the People Around You

    I spent the morning trying to organize and make sense of various materials that Huggy Rao and I have been gathering about scaling.  I came across a most interesting post on "Learnings from 2011" that was apparently written by Xenios Thrasyvoulou, CEO of European-based start-up called Peopleperhour.com, which enables you to hire people "remotely, for small projects or a few hours a week." 

    The post was quite interesting, well-crafted and introspective.  But the advice at the end stopped me in my tracks:

    “Life is too short to waste it with people who don’t get it, whatever “it” may be for you, so make sure you surround yourself with people who do”

    This is such good advice because human attitudes and behaviors are so infectious.  If you are surrounded with a bunch of smart, graceful, caring, and action-oriented people, all that goodness will rub-off on you; and if you are surrounded with a bunch of people with the opposite attributes, that will infect you too.  This is why who you choose to hang out with, hire, fire, spend time with, and avoid has so much influence on everything from acting like an asshole, to building a creative organization, to scaling-ip excellence, to living a happy life. 

    Yet, implementing this philosophy in real life isn't easy.  I would love to hear some ideas about how people make it happen.