Work Matters

Category: Evidence-based Management

  • Why the Sharp Distinction Between “Individual” and “Group” Brainstorming is False in Real Teams

    I wrote a post earlier in the week about how the claim in The New Yorker that brainstorming "doesn't work" is an oversimplification.  I gave various reasons:  Most of this research is done with novices rather than skilled brainstormers, only looks at one measure (quantity), and ignores how brainstorming is done and the impact it has in real organizations.  As I have been thinking about this research a bit more and of the brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I studied at IDEO years ago, that I see at the Stanford d.school, and especially, that I've seen in recent weeks in some very skilled groups I have seen in action, something struck me:

    The comparison between group and individual brainstorming that underlines this research is false, or at least irrelevant, because both happen at once when skilled practioners do it.

    When a skilled facilitator calls a brainstorm, he or she usually gives the topic in advance and asks members of the group to do some individual thinking about it before the gathering; for example, I once went to a brainstorm at IDEO on how to give an itchless haircut.  I dutifully went to a stylist and asked her to give me an an itchless haircut  She did things like wrapped my neck really tight with the top of the smock and put a bunch of talcum powder on my neck.  So I came prepared to add some ideas. The funniest part was one designer who tried to talk his barber into giving him a haircut while he hung upside down.  It was a crazy idea, but the notion of using gravity to solve other design problems was not — so having this story in the IDEO culture was useful.   

    In addition to the routine practice of encouraging solo idea generation before the group meets (and most relevant to the research) is that if you watch skilled teams, there is a blend of individual and collective idea generation going on most of the time DURING the brainstorming session.  Typically, in a group of say 6 or 7 brainstormers, you will have 2 or 3 people talking about the idea that is in play at the moment — one written on a post-it, written on the board, illustrated with a drawing, or a quick prototype.  Meanwhile, the other 4 or 5 people are half listening, writing ideas on post-its, drawing, building something, or semi-tuning out and just thinking about how to mix their ideas with with those they are hearing and seeing around them.

    There is a method called "brainwriting" where members write ideas on slips of paper, then pass their ideas to each other, and generate new ideas in response to others — all in silence.  As least one experiment shows that brainwriting enables people to develop more and apparently better ideas compared to brainstorming alone. This research is interesting in that, when you watch the best brainstorming groups, although they don't work in silence (the solo brainstorming happens before they meet in many cases … and since they are working in ongoing projects, they have time for individual silent contemplation afterwards as well), people are constantly switching between "solo" mode to generate ideas and "social" mode to share their ideas, listen to others, and build on the ideas of others 

    Real groups do "brainstorming" in much messier ways than it is sliced-up in psychological experiments, but the headline here is that in practice, if you watch how the pros do it, it entails a blend of individual and group idea generation — even during group gatherings.  This insight is, I think, important because skilled brainstormers are constantly switching between "solo" and "social" mode and the best facilitators — I think of people like Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley at the Stanford d.school — constantly take steps to help brainstormers switch back and forth between these modes in the moment.

    Again, I don't want to defend brainstorming too strongly because there may well be better methods for facilitating idea generation and creativity in general .  As I said last time, I do believe that teaching groups how to fight well is probably more important than teaching them how to brainstorm (and a lot harder) if you want to spark creativity, a point made well in The New Yorker story.  I also believe — and can show you evidence, notably from the late Robert Zajonc — that it  is impossible for human-beings to withhold judgement about anything they encounter (despite instructions to do so during brainstorming).  But I confess to be annoyed by the conclusion that "brainstorming doesn't work" because it is based on research that is largely irrelevant to how it is actually done in teams and organizations that use it routinely.

  • Do You Have a GOOD and SIMPLE Performance Evaluation Form?

    As many of you know, I have expressed considerable skepticism about whether performance evaluations are even worth using, if they do more good than harm.  And Sam Culbert has gone the next step with his book, Get Rid of the Performance Evaluation. 

    Even though this debate will continue to go on, the fact is that lawyers, HR executives, and the force of tradition — and some rational reasons as well — mean that most organizations aren't going to be getting rid of these things anytime soon. As such, I was talking with a senior HR executive and she asked me if I knew of any examples of good and simple performance evaluation forms — the one her firm uses is way too complicated and she is looking for ideas about how to simplify it. 

    I thought that was a great question. If we must use these things, they might as well be as short and effective as possible, despite their limits.  Can anyone help?  Has anyone ever used one or used one now? 

    Please describe it in as much detail as you can and you get bonus points for sending a picture or pdf or something like that of the form.

      Thanks!

    P.S. I just did a Google search for "Performance Evaluation Forms" and there are a lot of images of them… but it is tough to tell which are good or bad from looking at them — I bet the form itself is a lot less important than the quality of conversation that happens before, during, and after people get the feedback.

  • More Evidence That Sleep Deprivation Turns Employees Into Assholes (Due to Loss of Self-Control)

    Those of you who have followed this blog, and especially, Good Boss, Bad Boss will know that a pile of evidence already shows that sleep deprivation turns people grumpy, insensitive, and dulls their cognitive abilities — in other words it turns them into dumb assholes.   An interesting newish paper adds to the pile of evidence.

    A pair of interesting studies on sleep deprivation were published in the October issue of the Academy of Management Journal by Michael Christian and Aleksander Ellis.  In both a field study with 171 nurses and a more controlled laboratory study with students, they found that when people suffered sleep deprivation, they suffered both a loss self control (measured with items like "my will power is gone" and reverse-scored "I feel calm and rational") and to feel more hostile (measured with items like "scornful" and "disgusted").  In turn, these foul emotional states led the nurses to engage in more workplace deviance, things falsifying receipts for reimbursement, dragging out work to get overtime, used drugs or booze on the job, said something hurtful to someone at work, and intentionally working slower.  The ugliness observed in the workplace was replicated in a more controlled experiment with 75 students" half the students were kept awake by the experimenters for a night in the lab and the other half arrived from a good night's sleep in the morning.  The results were replicated in the lab study, and the added twist was that the experimenters created a situation where there was an incentive for students to steal an answer sheet for a test they took, and there was more stealing by the sleep deprived students.

    This study is a nice contribution because it uses two methods and shows that lack of self-control and hostility appear to be important reasons that sleep deprivation is so vile.  I always find this kind of research quite disturbing because so many important decisions are made by people who are sleep deprived.  This include thousands of doctors who are serving their residencies in emergency and operating rooms right now as well as the corporate and government officials who made all those major decisions during the financial meltdown in late 2008.

  • New CEO Studies: Nuances of Narcissism, Flattery, and Opinion Conformity

    ASQ CoverI got my copy of the Administrative Science Quarterly in the mail the other day. You can see the cover to the left, it is famous for pretty pictures like this one by Signe Pike, whose mother Linda Johanson is the managing editor (and has been for at least 30 years I can recall).  I was one of two associate editors for four years in the 90's and, although I liked doing it in many ways because the work was challenging and I especially liked working with Linda, the weight of having to write over 100 decision letters a year on papers (which would be sent out for evaluation by three anonymous peers first) eventually wore me down. 

    Academia is petty and I can be touchy, so I got especially tired of the hostility from people who got papers rejected as many academics have big egos and turn hostile in the face of rejection (ASQ is the most prestigious organizational research journal and rejects over 90% of papers submitted.   It is so picky that it has been running late for years — note the June 2011 issue just came out this week.  But the quality is always very high.).  There is even one author who is still mad at me because some 15 years later because, even though we accepted his paper, we wouldn't let him publish it until he fixed his lousy writing.   I never thought I would be teaching freshman English to an Ivy League professor, but he needed it.

    The journal has been in good hands in recent years, with the last editor being my scaling co-author Huggy Rao from Stanford and the new editor being Gerald Davis from  The University of Michigan (who I worked with when he was a Stanford student 20 years ago or so). 

    Perhaps because I had just wrapped-up a doctoral seminar on leadership, there were two articles that really caught my eye.  I wasn't shocked by the findings, and you likely won't be either, but was pleased with the rigor.  The three studies from two articles were done in different ways, but the upshot is that CEOs are swayed heavily by praise and ass-kissing of all kinds, especially narcissists, and the effects aren't pretty. In short:

    If you are a CEO, these studies show how hard it is for you to wade through and tune out all the bullshit and ass-kissing that come with the job.  Those flattering stories that the press wants to write about you are dangerous to your organization's health — especially if you are narcissist, but even you are not. And all that insincere ass-kissing and agreement from your board and your management team may help them get ahead, but can hurt you and your company. It can fuel an inflated self-assessment of your skills, cause you to cling to failing strategies, hurt your firm's long-term performance, and cost you your job.

    I offer more details about these studies if you want to learn more; if all you want is the headline, I suggest you stop here.

    The first was by Arijit Chatteerjee and Donald Hambrick, which compares highly narcissistic CEOs to to their less narcissistic peers in two studies. The first was a sample of 152 CEOs from 134 computer hardware and software firms.  I loved their measures of narcissism: how prominently the CEO was pictured in the annual report; the number of times the CEO's name was mentioned in the typical press release; and the difference in compensation (both cash and non-cash) between the CEO and the next highest paid executives.  They argue this measure is reliable and valid because these items were fairly highly inter-correlated (.71 was the Cronbach's alpha for measurement geeks) and they also had a panel of experienced security analysts rank 40 of the CEOs in terms of narcissism, which further supported their ranking method.  

    The findings of this first study focus on how narcissism appears to serve as a filter for outside cues.  The highly narcissistic CEOs were less responsive to whether recent firm performance was good or bad — they tended to continue to make equally risky investments (more risk was indicated by spending more money on R&D, big capital expenditures, and acquisitions of new companies) regardless of recent performance.   In contrast, their less narcissistic peers became more cautious in bad times and tended to take bigger risks during good times.  The most interesting finding was about media praise.  The less narcissistic CEO's weren't affected much by media praise, but the highly narcissistic ones tended to make considerably riskier investments after getting praised in the media.

    So the upshot is the narcissists were swayed more  by "social praise" and less by recent performance!

    Their second study dug into something called "acquisition premiums," the well-documented tendency for companies to overpay when they buy another company.  This was measured by comparing the acquired company's stock price four weeks before the acquisition was announced to what it was finally sold for.  The authors used a different sample of 131 big acquisitions (over 100 million) across diverse industries, and measured narcissism the same way as in the first study.  They found some interesting parallels to the first study: Recent media praise tended to have a stronger effect on the acquisition premiums paid by highly narcissistic CEOs.  A single flattering article was associated with paying a 7% larger  premium among the less narcissistic  CEOs (28% versus 35%) and a 14% premium (29% versus 43%) among the highly narcissistic CEOs.

    In short, this research suggests that most companies pay big acquisition premiums, that recent media praise makes it even worse for all CEOs, and especially worse for narcissists.

    The second article, which I will describe more briefly, is by Sun Hyun Park, James Westphal, and Ithai Stern. It looked at the impact suffered by CEOs who are surrounded by people who engage in (relatively) more intense and frequent flattery (e.g., offering exaggerated compliments) and opinion conformity (e.g., expressing agreement even when they don't quite agree) as measured by surveys of their board members and top managers.  These very persistent researchers managed to gather these kinds of data about 451 CEOS.  The findings probably won't surprise you much:

    More flattery and opinion conformity was linked to CEOs having more favorable evaluations of their own strategic judgments and leadership skills, being less likely to make strategic changes when firm performance suffered (just like the narcissists in the first study), and more to prone to lead firms that suffered persistently poor performance.  The authors also present suggestive evidence that flattery helps bring down CEOs in the end, that it not only is linked to weaker long-term firm performance, it increases the chances that those very same ass-kissing board members are going to fire the CEO when things turn south.

    James Westphal and his colleagues have published many studies like this one that show how the social psychology of CEOs, boards, and top teams color their behavior in often discouraging ways.  For example, an earlier study by these folks suggests that engaging in flattery is a smart personal strategy for board members want to gain additional lucrative appointments, as ass-kissing is associated with getting more board memberships — especially for white males, but not so much for women and minorities!

    As I said at the outset, none of this will likely surprise you.  But it adds further fuel for skeptics who argue that CEOs are at least as irrational as the rest of us. 

    Taken together, this research provides lots of evidence about how boards and top management teams ought to act when selecting and dealing with CEOS and about the hazards that  CEOs face — and hints about why it is so hard for both CEOs and those who oversee them to do the right things.  The headline for me is that praise and flattery often benefit those who provide it, but can be dangerous to those who recieve it.

  • On Saving the American Health System: Dr. Donald Berwick’s Farewell Speech

    Don Berwick is an American hero and also a victim of the obscene stalemate in Washington; the one being heaped on us by our Congress that has a 9% approval rating.  Most people that I know with a score that low would have the self-respect to quit rather than to point fingers at others.  Well, as part of this mess, Congress wouldn't approve the appointment of Dr. Don Berwick, who is a true American hero because he is among one of the real leaders of the movement to save American health care.  Before coming to Washington, the organization he led, a small non-profit called the Institute for Health Improvement, organized and guided an effort in American hospitals that — by doing simple, evidence things like hand washing, raising the bed when people are on a respirator, and other small but effective things — saved more than 100,000 lives by some estimates.  This little non-profit recruited over 3000 hospitals that had over 70% of the beds in the U.S. to participate in this effort to reduce preventable deaths.

    Obama, recognizing his greatness, appointed him as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Or he tried to. Our do nothing — or actually do nothing but screw the other side — Congress opposed his appointment, so Obama did one of those sneaky interim appointments that Berwick to keep the position for 17 months before being forced out.  The New York Times Joe Nocera did a great piece on him, check it out. 

    The thing I would especially emphasize is that Berwick is not and has never been about ideology, he is about effectiveness and cost-cutting is central to everything he does and advocates.  Perhaps he wasn't mean and tough and selfish enough for our broken system; it is a shame that a guy who does everything possible to put patients first would be fired by people who do everything they can to put themselves first.

     I urge you to read his amazing farewell address. Get it here: Download Ihi forum don berwick 12-15.dat.Consider a few key parts. Here are his five principles — and unlike people in Congress who TALK about doing things — Berwick's organization has already led efforts to DO such things and continues to do so every day. He gets fired and they keep their jobs?  I quote:

    This is our task… our unwelcome task – if we are to help save health care from the cliff. To reduce costs, by reducing waste, at scale, everywhere, now.

    I recommend five principles to guide that investment:

    1. Put the patient first. Every single deed – every single change – should protect, preserve, and enhance the well being
    of the people who need us. That way – and only that way – we will know waste when we see it.

    2. Among patients, put the poor and disadvantaged first –those in the beginning, the end, and the shadows of life. Let us meet the moral test.

    3. Start at scale. There is no more time left for timidity. Pilots will not suffice. The time has come, to use Göran Henrik’s
    scary phase, to do everything. In basketball, they call it “flooding the zone.” It’s time to flood the Triple Aim zone.

    4. Return the money. This is the hardest principle of them all. Success will not be in our hands unless and until the parties
    burdened by health care costs feel that burden to be lighter. It is crucial that the employers and wage-earners and unions and states and taxpayers – those who actually pay the health care bill – see that bill fall.

    5. Act locally. The moment has arrived for every state,community, organization, and profession to act. We need mobilization – nothing less.

    To show these aren't just theories or pipe dreams, look at these examples from Dr. Berwick's speech:

    It is not possible to claim that we do not know what to do. We have the templates.

    If you doubt it, visit the brilliant Nuka care system at Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage, which just won the Baldrige Award. I visited in October. Thoroughly integrated teams of caregivers –physicians, advanced practice nurses, behavioral health specialists, nutritionists, and more – occupying open physical pods in line-of-sight contact with each other all day long, weaving a net of help and partnership with Alaska Native patients and families. The results: 60% fewer Emergency and Urgent CareVisits, 50% fewer hospitalizations, and 40% less use of specialists, along with staff turnover 1/5th as frequent as before the new care.

    If you doubt that we know what to do, visit Denver Health or ThedaCare or Virginia Mason, and see the Toyota principles of lean production learned, mastered, adapted, and deployed through entire systems and into the skills and psyches of entire workforces. The result, over $100 million in savings at Denver Health while vastly improving the experience and outcomes of patients.

    If you doubt that we know what to do, contact George Halvorson at Kaiser Permanente and ask him how they have reduced sepsismortality – sepsis is the cause of death in 24% of seniors who die in California hospitals. Kaiser-Permanente has driven down sepsis mortality by nearly half – to 11% in less than three years.

    Then, Berwick said to the colleagues he was leaving at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services:

    Let me put it simply: in this room, with the successes already in hand among you here, you collectively have enough knowledge to rescue American health care – hands down. Better care, better health, and lower cost through improvement right here. In this room.

    The only question left is: Will you do it?

    Shame on us as a country for allowing this man to be fired and for bickering and backstabbing while the solutions appear to be at hand.  Can't we join together to do the right things?

  • What Are Good Things About Having A Lousy Boss?

    I have a weird question for Work Matters readers, one I've been fretting over for a couple weeks. 

    What are some GOOD things about working for a BAD boss?

    I would love to hear your thoughts on this odd question.  Here is the story of how it came about.

    About two weeks back, I enjoyed a long dinner with a couple good friends of mine — whose names must be kept anonymous given the facts that follow.  I generally like to name names, but in this case, I will not out them and will also omit identifying information (and change a couple key descriptions) to protect both the innocent and the guilty.

    To get back to our dinner, we were among the first people at the place and the last to leave because we were having so much fun talking many different topics — why incremental innovation is sometimes under appreciated (well, not in China… and look how they are doing) and why breakthrough innovations are overqualified, how the best way to influence your spouse is through your kids rather than directly, and why the 130 proof bourbon that the bartender gave us to try was a cool idea — especially because the ice cubes sink in it — but too much like drinking lighter fluid for our tastes. 

    But this blog post is about the topic we kept coming back to, the idea that, well, bad bosses aren't all bad.  Of course, we all had suffered through bad bosses, and had seen them do all kinds of damage.  BUT — and this the thread I thought I would raise here — during the course of the conversation, we all started realizing that a bad boss — especially the kind who doesn't really have the power to hurt you very much — can be a great thing in some ways.  The notion that you can learn a lot about what NOT to do from a bad boss has been around for decades . A charming version of this argument is in Robert Towsend's classic Up The Organization, where he asserts that much of what he learned about being a good boss came from working for such awful bosses at American Express early in his career.

    The focus of our conversation about bad bosses, however, turned a different direction that I am still fretting over.  One of my friends had just ended a long stint working for a lousy boss, one who could be a selfish asshole at times and was a legendary backstabber and narcissist.  He talked about how great it was that this selfish jerk had been removed from his management job and was now working a line job again, and how his new boss was thus far amazing — selfless, open, always thinking about was good for his group rather than himself, listening all the time, practicing constant empathy. This guy could be the poster child for Good Boss, Bad Boss.

    Then, my other friend chimed in and talked about how he wished he had such a boss because his current boss was so lame.  She was inept in many ways, especially committing sins of omission: not going to meetings she should, not answering emails no matter how important, not following through on commitments, not jumping into help his team when she said she would, not having the guts to deal with performance problems, not reaching outside of the organization to develop a stronger network, and perhaps worst of all, constantly spending time planning and talking and brainstorming — but pretty much being unable or unwilling to actually get anything done.  This boss could be the poster child for The Knowing-Doing Gap.

    Then, however, the conversation took an interesting turn that still gnaws at my mind. The guy with the good boss said to the one with the bad boss "Be careful what you wish for, I got the great boss I want, and it has disadvantages."

    He went on to explain that, when he had that inept boss, he felt obligated to take only minimal steps to help his organization.  He did everything he could to avoid contact with his boss — and would never lift a finger to help that asshole succeed.  He wasn't the only one in his group who reacted that way: Alienation was high and the commitment was low throughout.  But he didn't just mess around at work. He devoted his energy to developing a big book of business and for developing a great reputation among clients.  In other words, and this is the key point, he was treated sufficiently badly by his boss (as were others), that he felt free to act largely in his self-interest.

    BUT with this new and nearly model boss, he and many of his colleagues are spending much more time working to help the organization in all sorts of ways — to recruit new people, to repair broken procedures, to attend every group meeting, to develop business that helps the organization and not necessarily themselves.  As a result, he is spending far less time doing things that benefited only him, and as a result, not only is making a bit less money, he is having less fun too. He now feels compelled to do things that he doesn't like to benefit his group and organization — because he respects and admires his boss so much, and didn't want to let him down.

    Then, we started quizzing my friend who still had the bad boss.  Our friend has become a total star in recent years.  The work his team does is bringing in a third of the group's revenue, he has freedom to do what he wants, his boss is rather afraid of him so almost never tells what to do, he is making a lot of money, and — while he is still doing many things to help his group succeed — he is far more respected both inside and outside the organization than his boss.  As my friend with the new good boss warned him, if you got your dream boss — or worse yet they gave you your bosses job — you might feel great in some ways.  But your life would change for the worse in other ways.  You would start doing more things that benefited your organization that were not in your pure self-interest, you would spend more time doing things to help others that you would rather not do, you would go to more meetings with people who are of no interest to you –and even dislike — because doing so was for the greater good.

    The conversation went back and forth in this vein for awhile, and although all three of us still believe that bad bosses suck on the whole, we started wondering if a more general, elaborate, and evidence-absed argument might be made about the upsides of working for a loser.  In this post, there are some hints:

    1. You can learn what NOT to do.

    2. If you just have ordinary competence, you look like a genius compared to your boss.

    3.  You don't feel compelled to waste time doing extra things that help your group and organization.  After all,  if they aren't doing much for you or are treating you badly (via your boss), why should you do anything to help them?

    3. Your boss is so inept at implementation that it isn't worthwhile going to meetings, generating ideas, or suggesting now paths the organization might take. None of it will happen in anyway, so why waste your time?

    4.  A lousy boss probably needs you more than a good boss — and thus you may have power — because you keep bailing him or her out, bringing in money or clients that he or she is too inept to do, and performing other competent acts that protect the boss and make the boss look better than he or she really deserves.

    5. If the boss leaves (perhaps is fired — but in too many organizations lousy bosses get promoted), and you get the job, people will think you are brilliant because of the power of psychological contrast. (I am cheating here, as this is really about an advantage of taking a position last held by a horrible boss).

    I am partly having fun here and partly serious.  Yet as we talked about the good and bad bosses my friends had, and other bosses we had known and worked for, we realized that there are some perhaps under appreciated advantages to having a bad boss.  I am not sure how far to take this, but for now, perhaps we could have some fun. Let's try a little thought exercise and look at the same thing as everyone else, but to try to see it differently.

    So, once more, I want to hear from you:

    What do you think? What are some other advantages of working for lousy boss?

  • Strategy & Business Lists Hard Facts Among Decade’s 10 Most Significant Books

    Strategy and Business just released a list of the 10 "most significant books" published between 2001 and 2010.  They looked back and selected one book for each year.   I am pleased to announce that, for 2006, they picked the book that Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote about evidence-management.  Here is what they said:

    2006
    Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton (Harvard Business School Press). By explaining the causes of common managerial errors (casual benchmarking, repeating what worked in the past, and following unexamined ideologies), Pfeffer and Sutton pointed the way to better decision making.

    Jeff and I are delighted the selection; we believe that, although some organizations are making progress toward using evidence rather than making bad gut decisions, doing what they have always done, or mindlessly imitating seemingly successful organizations, that our workplaces would be far more effective if decision-makers made a commitment to using evidence-based practices when possible, especially when making important decisions (unfortunately, they seem to do the opposite too often).  

    If you want to listen to a fun interview about the power of evidence-based management, check out the recent Planet Money interview with Harrah's CEO Gary Lovemen, who we talk about a lot in Hard Facts. It starts out with a quote/joke from Gary that also appears in our book, something like "There are three ways to get fired at Harrah's: Stealing, sexual harassment, and not having a control group."  Although he is joking a bit, taking an evidence-based approach has given Harrah's a huge competitive advantage.

    Here is the rest of the list.  You can read about each in more detail here in the original story.

    2001
    Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins 

    2002
    Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

    2003
    Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround, by Louis V. Gerstner Jr

    2004
     Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds, by Howard Gardner

    2005
    The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits, by C.K. Prahalad

    2007
    Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas K. McCraw

    2008
    Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter, by Pankaj Ghemawat

    2009
    Managing, by Henry Mintzberg (Berrett-Koehler). The iconoclastic Canadian professor made the best case of his career for a more holistic, humane view of managing, which he convincingly declares is as much art as science. 2010

    2010
    Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, by Boris Groysberg

    We are honored to be included in such a great group.  Of this list, my favorite three are probably "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance," "Prophet of Innovation," and "Chasing Stars." My candidates for the best books of 2011 are The Progress Principle and, because of impact, Steve Jobs of course.

  • The Power Of The Roles We Take: A Very Old Study And Related Thoughts

    I recently had a rather painful meeting with a group of friends that I all admire.  I need to keep things vague to protect both the guilty and the innocent. But I was amazed — perhaps flabbergasted is a better word — to see how my friends who had taken and devoted enormous energy to their leadership roles couldn't help but defend their every move.  They denied problems that seemed obvious and when they could bring themselves to actually acknowledge a glaring problem,  they minimized its impact and quickly turned conversation to how minor this problem was compared to all the other truly wonderful things they were doing.  

    Then it hit me.  Well, of course, I know why this is happening.  As numerous psychology studies show,  people generally have self-serving biases, are motivated to present positive and flattering self-images (to themselves and others), and the roles we play in life are so powerful that they can quickly overwhelm our ability to process information objectively and can reverse any previously critical or negative views we once had about those roles. 

    The lesson, of course, is that we all need to be very careful about the roles we take in life — the organizations we join and lead, the kinds of people we hang out with, and the like — because even if don't like the people and the values they represent, and perhaps just take a job because we need or want that job — odds are that we will become more (or much) like the people we are around and the values associated with the positions we hold. 

     In particular, I was reminded of a very old study called "The Effects of Changes in Roles on the Attitudes of Role Occupants," which was published by Seymour Lieberman in Human Relations in 1956. The study was fascinating in that Lieberman was able to gather data during a "naturally occurring experiment" where people who worked in a manufacturing company switched roles — in some cases moving from a worker to foreman and in other cases, moving from a worker to a union steward.   The numbers were not large, only some 58 people changed roles.  But the magnitude of the effects were quite large, especially among the new foremen. They changed their attitudes markedly, turning pro-management, pro-company, and anti-union within 6 months of taking their new jobs.  For example, 70% of the new foremen reported seeing the company as a better place to work than the did when they were workers, while only 26% had no change in opinion. 74% believed that the union should have less say in setting standards than they did when they were workers.  And on and on. The new union stewards also expressed stronger pro-worker and pro-union sentiments than when they had been workers, but the effects were not as pronounced. 

    Then, there was an interesting twist that Seymour Lieberman took advantage of; as a result of a downturn, about a third (8) of the 23 workers  who had been promoted to foremen were then demoted to workers, while the other two-thirds remained foremen.  The numbers here are very small, and while modern studies have replicated related findings with more rigor, it is still interesting to see that the 8 workers who returned to being workers soon developed pretty much the same anti-management and pro-union sentiments as their fellow workers; but those who remained as foreman retained their pro-company and pro-management attitudes.

    I am writing about Lieberman's old study partly for sentimental reasons, as it was done at The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, where I hung out and sometimes worked as a doctoral student.  It was was one of the first research papers I ever read about the power of roles and how they can erase and reverse opinions and attitudes that we believe are core parts of who we are and aspire to be.  

    My old warm memories aside, there have since been many other studies on the power of situations to overwhelm our personalities and attitudes (indeed, you could argue that the power of situations over personalities is an assumption that drives many if not most experiments done by psychologists). Again, the lesson is that we all need to be very careful of the roles we take and realize that they will probably change us more than we change them — I am not trying to be fatalistic, but this is an evidence-based statement.  Sometimes this is a good thing, especially when we join a group composed of noble and skilled human-beings.  But every manager and leader out there ought to be aware that no matter how self-critical and self-aware you might be, the very act of taking leadership role will likely make you defend and support your organization more vehemently than the facts likely justify.   At moderate levels of reality distortion, this probably isn't a bad thing as it instills confidence in yourself and others.  But the damage can be severe when you and your company are screwing-up royally, and you can't see the flaws or any good reason to make repairs.

  • Bad is Stronger than Good: Why Eliminating the Negative is More Important than Accentuating the Positive

    I  had a piece appear today in the Wall Street Journal called "How a Few Bad Apples Can Ruin Everything," a topic I have written on before and her, especially, in Good Boss, Bad Boss.  A fun discussion of bad apples can also be found on This American Life; check out the opening interview of this episode with Will Felps, who has done some cool research on how bad apples have a disproportionately negative effect on group performance. 

    The underlying theory and evidence for my argument that bad apples do so much damage, and more broadly destructive emotions and incompetence undermine performance and well-being so much, that the first order of business for any boss is to eliminate the negative rather than accentuate the positive (I am not discouraging goodness and excellence… but getting rid of the bad is importance for achieving greatness).  This perspective is inspired by a masterpiece of an academic article called "Bad is Stronger Than Good," which was published in 2001 by Roy F. Baumeister and three other colleagues. If you want to really dig in, I invite you to download Bad is Stronger Than Good.. it is very detailed but readable.

    Essentially, the authors meticulously go through topic after topic — personal relationships, learning, memory, self-image, and numerous others — and show that bad packs a much stronger impact than good. They review a couple hundred diverse studies to make this point, and as they say at the end, the consistency of their findings about the disproportionate impact of bad things (compared to the power of good things)– like negative emotions, hostility, abuse, dysfunctional acts, destructive relationships, serious injuries and accidents, incompetence, and on and on — is depressingly consistent across study after after study. 

    One implication for managers and numerous other influencers in organizations is that, while bringing and breeding great people, and encouraging civility, competence, effort, and other kinds of goodness is an important part of the job, such efforts will be undermined if you aren't constantly vigilant about eliminating the negative, which includes dealing with people who are bad apples.  Baumeister and his colleagues also do suggest that another implication is sheer volume — overwhelming strong bad stuff with lots of weak good stuff.  I will discuss that approach at the end of this post.

    By coincidence, my doctoral course on leadership is reading and discussing this article today, so I re-read it closely this weekend, and it just knocks my socks off.  Here are just a few quotes from the article that got my attention:

    This one explains why bad could be so much stronger — we are selected to focus on it:

    From our perspective, it is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We believe that throughout our evolutionary history, organisms that were better attuned to bad things would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have increased probability of passing along their genes. (p. 325)

    On bad versus events:

    A diary study by David, Green, Martin, and Suls (1997) examined the effects of everyday good and bad events, as well as personality traits. Undesirable (bad) events had more pervasive effects on subsequent mood than desirable (good) ones. Although each type of event influenced the relevant mood (i.e., bad events influenced bad mood, and good events predicted good mood) to similar degrees, bad events had an additional effect on the opposite-valence mood that was lacking for good events. In other words, bad events influenced both good and bad moods, whereas good events influenced only good moods. (p. 327)

    How long the impact of everyday events lasts was studied by Sheldon, Ryan, and Reis (1996). Bad events had longer lasting effects. In their data, having a good day did not have any noticeable effect on a person's well-being the following day, whereas having a bad day did carry over and influence the next day. (p.327)

    On close relationships.  Note the implication is that if you do something bad in a close relationship, you've got to do at least five good things (on average) to make up for it:

    On the basis of these results, Gottman (1994) has proposed a revealing diagnostic index for evaluating relationships: He proposed that in order for a relationship to succeed, positive and good interactions must outnumber the negative and bad ones by at least five to one. If the ratio falls below that, the relationship is likely to fail and breakup. This index converges well with the thrust of our argument: Bad events are so much stronger than good ones that the good must outnumber the bad in order to prevail. Gottman's index suggests that bad events are on average five times as powerful as good ones, at least with regard to close relationships. (p. 329)

    The article goes on and on in this vein, digging into seemingly every possible nuance, and constantly concluding that "bad is stronger than good.:  Here are a some excerpts from the wrap-up toward the end:

    Let us briefly summarize the evidence. In everyday life, bad events have stronger and more lasting consequences than comparable good events. Close relationships are more deeply and conclusively affected by destructive actions than by constructive ones, by negative communications than positive ones, and by conflict than harmony. Additionally, these effects extend to marital satisfaction and even to the relationship's survival (vs. breakup or divorce). Even outside of close relationships, unfriendly or conflictual interactions are seen as stronger and have bigger effects than friendly,harmonious ones. Bad moods and negative emotions have stronger effects than good ones on cognitive processing, and the bulk of affect regulation efforts is directed at escaping from bad moods (e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging good moods). That suggests that people's desire to get out of a bad mood is stronger than their desire to get into a good one. (p. 362)

    Bad parenting can be stronger than genetic influences; good parenting is not. Research on social support has repeatedly found that negative, conflictual behaviors in one's social network have stronger effects than positive, supportive behaviors. Bad things receive more attention and more thorough cognitive processing than good things. When people first learn about one another, bad information has a significantly stronger impact on the total impression than any comparable good information. (p.362)

    Bad stereotypes and reputations are easier to acquire, and harder to shed, than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger effects than good feedback. Bad health has a greater impact on happiness than good health, and health itself is more affected by pessimism (the presence or absence of a negative outlook) than optimism (the presence or absence of a positive outlook). (p.362)

    Their closing paragraph, implies — albeit weakly– to one solution to overcoming the power of bad.

    Although it may seem pessimistic to conclude that bad is stronger than good, we do not think that such pessimism is warranted. As we have suggested, there are several reasons to think that it may be highly adaptive for human beings to respond more strongly to bad than good. In the final analysis, then, the greater power of bad may itself be a good thing. Moreover, good can still triumph in the end by force of numbers. Even though a bad event may have a stronger impact than a comparable good event, many lives can be happy by virtue of having far more good than bad events.

    I think this implied solution of working extra hard to crank up the good to drown out the bad is certainly part of the answer.  But, to me, another and probably more effective solution for managers is to work doggedly to screen out and stop bad people and bad behavior at every stage.  This means dealing with it via big things like recruiting, selection, training, rewards and punishments, and removing people; and, just as important, paying attention to the little things like  giving people feedback when they are destructive.   Another implication I emphasize is that self-awareness is important so that we realize when we are being bad and damaging others — and damn well better work on changing our attitudes and actions.

    I know this is a long and detailed post.  My view is that you can read the lighter and more bouncy piece in the Wall Street Journal, so I thought I would use this post to geek out a bit and dig into the underlying research. 

  • Is It Sometimes Rational to Select Leaders Randomly? A Cool Old Study

    This term at Stanford, I am teaching a doctoral seminar on leadership.  Of course, this one of the broadest and most confusing topics on earth.  I am not qualified to teach a seminar on love or religion; so, for me, this is the most vexing topic I can teach.  The topic for the first meeting was "cynicism."  I started out by assigning academic papers that brought evidence and perspectives that undermined conventional assumptions about leadership and that even questioned why scholars bothered to study the topic at all (my friend and co-author Jeff Pfeffer raised this question in a 1977 paper called "The Ambiguity of Leadership").

    The most entertaining paper we read was by S. Alexander Haslam and a long list of coauthors, called  "Inspecting the emperor's clothes: evidence that random selection of leaders can enhance group performance" (Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1998, pp. 168-184).  The two key studies in the paper entailed assigning student groups to play various versions of the "survival exercise" (see some of the variations here), where the group imagines that they have experienced some kind of disaster and are stranded (a plane crash, a broken car in the desert, and a nuclear war were used in these studies).  The group's task is to rank order the importance of a dozen or so items that might help them survive the ordeal (e.g., a compass, map,  loaded pistol, newspapers, cigarette lighter).  The performance of the group is determined by comparing their rank-ordering to those produced by experts.  This is, of course, just a simulation of reality.  But I've participated and led these exercises and they are quite engaging — I suspect many of you have had similar experiences. 

    Overall, the researchers compared the performance of these student groups under four conditions:

    1.  A leader selected via a formal selection process (self-ratings by group members)

    2. A leader selected by an informal process (group members had a discussion and picked a leader)

    3. A leader who was randomly selected.

    4. No leader selected. 

    The consistent finding was that groups with RANDOMLY selected members performed significantly better than groups in all other conditions, and there weren't significant differences found between the other conditions.  The researchers also did some follow-up surveys, and revealed some mildly interesting findings; notably, groups with randomly selected leaders rated their leaders as LESS effective even though their performance was BETTER.

    The authors assert that this rather surprising finding — which was fairly strong and replicated across two (albeit modest) studies — occurs because performance on this task requires cooperation, input, and effort from all group members.  They suggest that the very act of selecting one individual, of singling him or her out as better than the rest or simply focusing attention on that person, undermines the group's sense of unity and shared identity. They suggest that doing so may lead to social loafing.   As they put it, in describing the impact of a contest for the "best" leader:

      'In effect, their thoughts about the leader may have been of the form "if you're so wonderful, you can get on with it.' 

    I am still not entirely sure that these arguments are right, but I guess they make some sense (although they do not quite explain why groups that did not select leaders at all did equally badly — the researchers suggest this is because the leadership role is necessary).  Yet the study, imperfections aside, is provocative.  I like it because it challenges so many deeply held assumptions about groups and organizational life.  I especially like how it implies that just THE PROCESS of selecting the leader can provoke group dynamics that undermine the performance of the group as a whole.  That is worth considerable attention as this is something that selection committees and such often forget — and consistent with findings from many corners of the behavioral sciences that show "what you do is as important as how you do it."  Also, while the survival games probably do not generalize well to most tasks in organizational life, another possible implication is that, if you are doing a task where no one has any special expertise or experience, you might try randomly selecting your leader.

    What do you think? Does this have any implication in real life, or is it just one of those crazy studies that is irrelevant to real people and organizations?

    P.S. As veteran readers of this blog may remember, I have written about the virtues of randomness before; check out this post about Karl Weick's cool ideas about randomness and wisdom.

    P.P.S. Do not miss the link to the study from Arie below.  More evidence that randomly promoting people might work! Thanks Arie, fantastically weird.