Work Matters

  • Assholes Who Turned Out to Be Right and Other Thoughts About Creative People

    In the fog of my first couple weeks after surgery, I missed some intriguing developments.  Thanks to you folks who read this blog, I got some great emails to help me stay in the loop.  As I was wrestling with my email inbox last night, I found a note from Patrick with a link to a fantastic — troubling, enlightening, and funny — story at cracked.com (which looks to me like a cross between Mad magazine and The Onion, but is more fact-based — they apparently have been around since 1958) on The Five Biggest Assholes Who Ever Turned Out to Be Right, which was posted on April 23rd. 

    I was taken by the post because the author, Dan Seitz, did such a great job of finding people who were annoying, nasty, stubborn, mean-spirited, and otherwise socially inept or personally despicable, but  had championed unpopular but good ideas (or in some cases, ideas that were just different from the prevailing wisdom but they were dismissed because the ideas were advocated by an alleged asshole).  I urge you to read this quite detailed story, where you can learn about the exploits, quirks, and ideas of alleged assholes including baseball player Jose Canseco (he claimed that many stars, including himself, were using steriods, which turned out to be true), scientist  Peter Duesberg (very unpopular because he claimed that AIDS is not caused by HIV, which made him so unpopular that his colleagues and others have — until recently — been ignoring his potentially breakthrough work on the causes of cancer), Harry Markopolos (who admits that he combines the worst characteristics of a math nerd and frat boy — but spent 9 years pressing his accusations that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme).  

    My favorite asshole who was right, however, is Fritz astronomer.  See this description from the American Museum of Natural History for more details.   But as Seitz tells us:

     

    21945 To give you an idea of how charming Fritz Zwicky was, when he was
    working at Aerojet, a bunch of customers from the military, including
    two admirals, showed up for an appointment to check on his progress.
    Zwicky met them at the gate demanding that they     leave
    because they weren't scientists and were therefore absolutely
    unqualified to look at the stuff they were, um, buying. Outside of work,
    his solution to winning arguments was to try and punch people, which
    was mostly found adorable because he was a little old man who could be
    pummeled easily. It became less adorable when he said things like "I myself can think of a
    dozen ways to annihilate all living beings in one hour," and his
    scientific partner was afraid Zwicky was out to kill him.

    BUT he was right in serious ways, even though it took decades  for his colleagues to find that out because they thought these were just wacky ideas from "Crazy Fritz" (pictured to the left).  As Seitz tells it:

    Needless to say, the whole "total lack of people skills" thing made
    him so popular and beloved he got the nickname "Crazy Fritz." So it was
    easy to ignore Zwicky while he was off doing crazy things like inventing
    most of modern astronomy.
    The term "supernova"? He invented it.

    Plus:

    He also developed the theory that allows us to know how old the
    universe is. Dark matter? He was among the first to theorize about it.
    Gravitational lensing, i.e. using stars to look at other stars? He laid
    out the theory 40 years before it was actually proved correct. Zwicky was so ahead of his time, and so annoying, that it was
    basically routine in the 70s to say "Yeah, Fritz Zwicky thought of this
    40 years ago but nobody took him seriously because he was a crazy
    douche    ."

    Stories like these, especially the one about Fritz, are important to remember because — although people who are stubborn, trample over everyone else, are unable or unwilling to use the most basic social graces, and treat others like dirt clearly deserve to be called assholes and may not be worth the trouble no matter how brilliant they are — they are less burdened than most of us by pressures to think like everyone else. They may be  in a better position, as the first scientist to isolate Vitamin C — Albert Szent-Gyorgi — famously suggested (I am paraphrasing),  "To look at the same thing as everyone else, but to think of and see something different."  

    I wrote a lot about people with this talent in Weird Ideas That Work, especially in the chapter on "slow learners."  I would also add, however, that there are many people who think for themselves and stubbornly stick to unpopular ideas regardless of social pressures and prevailing wisdom, but aren't assholes.  A good example was Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who did irritate people by pushing ideas they disagreed with, but was known as usually charming and well-loved.  He won a  Nobel Prize on Physics and many experts believe he deserved one, possibly two, others (e.g., Feynman solved a problem that another researcher won another Nobel for years later — but the paper with the solution just sat in his drawer for many years because he never got around to sending the paper to an academic journal).

    He also "went rogue" as member of the Rogers Commission that investigated the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle — and despite pressures to stop from the head of it — did his own interviews with NASA scientists and engineers that led him to believe that the explosion was caused by O-rings that failed under cold temperatures.   If you have never seen it, his demonstration to congress (which some members of the commission tried to stop) that when an O-ring was put in beaker of cold water, it became brittle and more likely to break, was the pivotal moment in the investigation — it is a beautiful example of breaking down a problem to its esssence. Feynman's role on the Rogers Commission is instructive because, although he fought with the head of the commission William Rogers about the independent action he took and was famously called "a real pain" by Rogers, he wasn't doing it to be an asshole. He was doing to get to the truth.  Rogers probably thought he was an asshole, which reminds me that it is label that people should hesitate to use and accept as true, because it is often applied simply to people who disagree with us, are more successful than us, or who simply act or think differently than than us. 

    If you are in a group or organization where people who simply look, think, or act differently than everyone else are labeled as assholes, and the best you can be is a perfect imitation of everyone else around you, well, the odds are no one is thinking very much and there isn't much original thinking going on.

    In short, although being oblivious or indifferent (or naive, by the way) to what others thing can help people see and develop new ideas (and is a hallmark of assholes at times), I think it is important to keep in mind that not all original thinkers are assholes (the trick is to see things differently and not to cave in when people don't like your "different ideas").  I should also point out that not all assholes are original thinkers.  There are plenty of mean-spirited jerks out there who mindlessly follow the crowd and are incapable of original thinking.  

    P.S. Also note that the post at Cracked reminds us of another cost that assholes inflict on themselves and others — if you are branded as an asshole, people are more likely to reject your ideas, even if they are right.  The negative reactions they have to YOU color their reactions to your ideas.  One solution, by the way, is if you are an asshole with good ideas, you might work with a more socially adept partner who is more skilled at selling your ideas.

  • The Creative Process Gone Wrong

    One of my students, Rob, just sent me a link to this video on how the design of the stop sign is ruined by a bad creative process — unfortunately, this parody resembles the process in far too many organizations and teams that try to do creative work in real organizations.  It is funny but disturbing.  He
    saw this in Tina
    Seelig's     class, who teaches a fantastic class on the creative
    process.  

    This video brought to mind three things:

    1. One of the main sicknesses you see in this video is a failure to kill ideas. Most of the ideas are, on their own, sort of logical. But when you mash them all together, the complexity ruins the experience for the users and the designers end up doing many things, but none very well.  See this post about Steve Jobs on the importance of killing good ideas for more on this crucial point. 

    2. Th process in the video, where a good idea isn't shown to users or customers, but each internal voice adds more and more, and forgets the big picture in the process, also reminds me of the stage gate process at its worst, where it each stage, the product or service is made worse as it travels along. 

    3. Finally, if you want a great companion innovation video, check out Gus Bitdinger's amazing song "Back to Orbit," which he wrote and performs. I wrote a bit more about it here.  It was Gus's final project for an innovation class that Michael Dearing and I taught a few years back, and he does an amazing job of summarizing the key points of my favorite creativity book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball.   It sort of addresses both the problems in the stop sign video and the solutions — and in general is a delight and very instructive on the creative process. 

    This all raises a broader question: What are the most important things a boss can do to speed and improve the creative process.  Certainly, talking to customers and users to identify their needs and test your ideas is standard and increasingly, so is the advice that you've got to kill a lot of good ideas, not just bad ones.  I have also always been enamored by the power of a fast and civilized fight, and touch on a lot of other related topics in Weird Ideas That Work.  Also, don't miss Diego's 17 Innovation Principles at Metacool;I especially like #17: It's not the years, it's the mileage. But I also know that there are some essential elements being left out here… what would you add?

  • The Dangers of a Harried Boss

    The always insightful Wally Bock made a great comment in response to my last post, where I asked about the conditions under which performance evaluations actually seemed to work.  Wally, drawing on his research on effective versus ineffective supervisors, reported (in part):

    The result
    was that when time came for the official, on-the-company-form,
    performance review, their sessions were very different from their
    less-effective peers. Top performing supervisors took more than three
    times as long for the session.

    Wally's comment got me thinking because, as I thought about the difference between good and bad bosses, it made me realize that — although good bosses are concerned about using their time well, and especially, making sure not to waste their people's time — that they tend to think and act as if it is more important to do things as well as possible than to do things as quickly as possible.  Indeed, some of the work bosses I can think of always seemed to be focused on finishing whatever they are doing at the moment so they can get on to the next thing.  The result, unfortunately, is that they spend their days rushing around, doing one thing after another badly. 

  • CNN’s Campbell Brown Departs With Class

    In this era of finger-pointing, blame-storming, and circular firing squads, no one seems to be willing to admit mistakes and language is carefully parsed to avoid by lawyers, spin doctors, and executives to avoid taking personal blame or at least take as little responsibility as possible when the shit hits the fan.  One of my favorite vague terms is when executives or their spokespersons say "mistakes were made," but don't do say by whom  (they carefully omit terms like '"by me" or "my company). In contrast to this relentless stream of self-serving horseshit, CNN's Campbell Brown showed massive class and honesty in her announcement yesterday that she was stepping down. As the AP reported: 

    Brown said it was her decision to leave. She said she could say she
    was leaving to spend more time with her two young children or pursue new
    opportunities, and both would be partly true.

    "But I have never
    had much tolerance for others' spin, so I can't imagine trying to
    stomach my own," she said. "The simple fact is that not enough people
    want to watch my program, and I owe it to myself and to CNN to get out
    of the way so that CNN can try something else."

    Huh? No excuses? No finger-pointing?   Perhaps the exceedingly lame BP officials could learn something Campbell Brown's authentic "no bias, no bull persona."  From what I can tell, bull, BS, distortion, and finger-pointing are their primary response to the oil spill in the Gulf.   The lawyers may rush in and complain that they must act like way because of liability, the interests of the shareholders, and so on — but I think even the shareholders are losing patience with BP's bullshit and am willing to bet that these leaders lame responses will cost a lot of them their jobs.   For an interesting comparison, check out CEO Michael McCain's actions at Maple Leaf Foods, and how he responded when his company's tainted product was linked to at least 10 deaths — he apologized and accepted responsibility, and never, once, made any statement meant to minimize perceptions of damage by his firm or made excessive claims about progress that was being made to reverse the problem. 

    As for Campbell, thanks for all your great work over the years, and thanks for being such a breath air in an era where most public figures seem to have mastered the fine art of claiming the lions share of credit when things go well — and ducking blame when things do not.  By the way, as I have discussed before, there is evidence that managers and CEOs who accept responsibility when things go wrong — and propose ways to reverse the problems — lead companies that are more effective over the long haul than companies were leaders refuse to accept blame (see my posts here and here).  And managers who use this tactic (accepting blame for setbacks and errors)  are seen as more competent and legitimate. So what Campbell Brown did not only shows class, it may help her career in the long haul.  I certainly hope so.

  • When Do Performance Evaluations Actually Work?

    A couple years back, I wondered aloud here if performance evaluations ought to be eliminated.   This theme has been taken-up with a vengeance by Sam Culbert in his Wall Street Journal article and now his book Get Rid of the Performance Review.  I was thinking about this topic again because Tara Parker-Pope raised the question in her New York Times health blog called "Well" in a post called Time to Review Workplace Reviews?  

    Tara mentions Sam's book and suggests that bad performance reviews may be so distressing that they can damage physical and mental health, as well as productivity.   I am only person mentioned in the article who comes close to defending reviews, but am quoted as saying:  “In the typical case, it’s done so badly it’s better not to do it at
    all.”  I guess I still agree with my quote, but while I think that most performance reviews suck, there are a least a couple companies out there that do them effectively, so perhaps it is going too far to say they should all be eliminated.

    One company  that I know pretty well (the NDA I signed forbids me from mentioning their name) does such a good job of using reviews for both developmental and evaluation purposes, that most people I know who work there report the system is remarkably fair and that it has helped them improve their weak spots (the main complaint is how much effort it takes, but most employees report it is worth the trouble).  And perhaps the ultimate test is that even the people who get negative reviews there and are encouraged to leave the place generally report that it is an excellent and well-managed process.  Now, this company might be as rare as hen's teeth (this is the first time I have ever used this phrase in writing or speaking in my life).  And even in this exemplary company, I have met a few people who complain about the system.

    Yet this and other exceptions raise interesting questions about lessons that we might learn from such "positive outliers," as they call them in medical research and elsewhere:

    1.  Have you been part of a performance evaluation system that actually works?

    2. If so, why did it work? 

    I would be most curious to hear some success stories, given all the failure stories I hear (just look at the 150 or so comments following Tara's post… most are pretty negative…although I am intrigued by the person who reports that being in a place with no performance reviews is even more stressful because people never know where they stand).

    P.S. I also wanted to thank Tara for raising the additional issue of how distressing a bad boss can be and giving a nice plug to Good Boss, Bad Boss at the end of the post.  I am delighted to have a book that The New York Times will actually mention by name, unlike The No Asshole Rule (even though they accepted this advertisement, they called it The No ******* Rule on their bestseller list, and in most stories, they simply say that I wrote a book on bullying and don't list any name).  Although I confess that this (apparently) new found respectability at The Times makes me a bit uncomfortable, as I am always weirdly happy when people from established institutions are offended by my actions. I know it is not a very mature reaction for a 56 year-old professor, but such vestiges of my youth persist.

  • The Power of “Nonsexual Touching” By Women

    Early in my career, I did a bunch of studies on the expression of emotion in organizational life.  My colleague Anat Rafaeli and I studied employees 7/Eleven clerks, grocery store clerks in Israel, bill collectors and police interrogators (I blogged about our research on the good cop, bad cop methods here).  One of the findings that came from Anat's analysis is that both men and women respond positively from warmth and friendliness from women, but not necessarily from men. 

    I also remember an old study of waitresses that showed both male and female customers give higher tips when they are lightly touched by a waitress.  My students always giggle when I talk about the power of non-sexual touching, and the finding that both men and women appear to like being touched by women — but not necessarily men.  The root of all this, at least some researchers argue, all goes back to mothers, who early in life make most of us feel more secure — and gain our compliance — through physical warmth and affection.  Certainly, fathers play that role too, but across societies, women do most of the touching and holding of newborns.   And, of course, even the most affectionate father is incapable of breast-feeding! To return the research on waitresses, I just found it summarized in a 2010 article called called "The Science of Interpersonal Touch," which was published by Alberto Gallace and Charles Spence in the Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews (34:246-259),  They report:

    Crusco and Wetzel (1984) examined
    the effects of two types of touch in a restaurant setting. The
    waitresses in this study were instructed to briefly touch customers
    either on the hand, on the shoulder,
    or not to touch them at all as they were returning their change after
    they had received the bill. Crusco and Wetzel used the size of the tip
    given by the customer to the waitress as their independent variable.
    Surprisingly, the researchers found that the tipping rate of both male
    and female customers was significantly higher in both of the touching
    conditions than in the baseline no-touch condition (a phenomenon that
    has been labelled the ‘Midas touch’ effect; e.g., [Crusco and Wetzel, 1984], [Erceau and Guéguen, 2007] and [Stephen and Zweigenhaft, 1986];
    see also Kaufman and Mahoney, 1999)

    A brand new study follows in this tradition of research on the power of nonsexual touching by women.  A series of experiments by Jonathan Levav and Jennifer Argo just published in Psychological Science shows that both men and women who are lightly touched by a woman on the back are more likely to take bigger financial risk in an investment game than those not touched at all, or touched by a man.  Here is a nice summary of the study if you want to learn more. 

    I always find such studies both instructive and amusing. I also think it is important to note that the new study in Psychological Science doesn't show that the touching by men has a negative effect, it just has no effect.  I find the explanation that this all goes back to the power of moms to be quite fascinating (and I cant think of a better one, perhaps you can).  As Levav and Argo suggest in the opening of their article, there is compelling research on both humans and animals that, when infants suffer from a lack of maternal physical contact early in life, they suffer physical and mental health problems for their rest of their lives.  The most famous studies were done by Harry Harlow on monkeys in 1950's– which among other things– found that a fake cloth mother seemed to be better for infant monkeys then one made of wire mesh or no mother at all (you can read Harlow's classic 1958 American Psychologist article here, I just re-read it and was frankly appalled and fascinated at the same time).

    I wonder, what are some of the other practical implications of this research — and does anything bother you about it?  Indeed, the implications I think of are pretty disturbing.  One implication I thought of is that casinos would make more money if all the dealers were women (this is unlawful, by the way)and they were trained to lightly touch all customers. Come to think of it, perhaps cocktail waitresses at casinos already perform this function, and keep customers sitting and gambling as they wait for their drinks, and, of course, the alcohol itself probably encourages customers to take bigger risks.  So they may be applying this principle already!

  • David Kelley Nails It Again: “The d.school teaches creative confidence.”

    Last Friday, we had an opening gala for the new building (actually it is a massively reconstructed old building) that houses the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford — or as everyone calls it, the d.school.  In fact, if you can take a video tour of the new building.  We were swimming in university officials of all kinds, although since it was the d.school, there were more students and former students than anything else.   Hasso gave a lovely and quite funny speech and the good feelings ran high all afternoon.

    Many interesting things were said that afternoon. Yet, as is pretty much always the case, our founder and inspiration David Kelley (who also was the co-founder, first CEO and driving force behind IDEO) made the most striking observations.  David commented that, yes, we teach many elements the design thinking process to our students (in fact, many are cataloged in this amazing and free document called "The Bootcamp Bootleg," which I think is better than any book on how to practice design thinking than you can buy). He argued however, that the most important contribution that the d.school makes to Stanford students and the people we teach from outside the university too (from elementary school kids, to Girl Scouts, to doctors, to executives) is creative confidence.  David went on to explain that the main tests used to decide who gets into Stanford and who does not, as well as the bulk of the training in the technical aspects of engineering, math, and the sciences, are constructed to that there is a right answer to the question and it is the student's job to find that answer and report it back to the teacher.

    Certainly, such definitive technical knowledge is crucial.  I want engineers who can calculate the right answers so that bridges don't fall down and airplanes don't crash.  As valuable as it is, however, such training — with its focus on individual achievement under conditions under which the right answers are already known — means that a lot of the people who come to the d.school for classes lack both the skills and the confidence to work on messy problems where the faculty don't know the answer (this is very disconcerting to some of our students) and the only hope is to keep pushing forward, observing the world and the people in it, identifying unmet needs, brainstorming solutions, and trying to develop prototypes that work — and failing forward through the disconcerting process.

    The thing I liked most about about David's emphasis on "creative confidence" is that I think he nailed the single most important thing that the d.school does when we are successful.  Yes, the assignments we give people and methods we teach them help on the journey, but as David suggested, the result of spending decades in educational system (this is true of the U.S. and other countries) where those anointed as the best students rapidly uncover the one and only tried and proven true answer (look at the blend of SAT scores and grades used by most colleges for admission decisions, at least 90% of that entails uncovering known right answers) is that some of the "smartest" students freak-out the most when faced with messy and unstructured problems.

    The journeys that we take students of all ages on just about always entail helping people confront and overcome their discomfort with trying to solve unstructured problems (that the faculty have not already solved — and in most cases — don't know how to solve).  When the d.school process works right, that confidence means that, even when people aren't sure what methods to use, they have the energy and will to keep pushing forward, to be undaunted when ideas don't work, to keep trying new ideas, and — as happens — even when the deadline for the project comes and they do not have a decent solution, to believe that if they just had another few days, they would have come up with a great solution.   

    So, although many words were said about what the d.school does at our opening ceremony and many more will be said in the future.  David has, as always, come-up with the best compact summary of what we strive to do: Teach Creative Confidence. 

    P.S. A related argument was made by psychologist Robert Sternberg, who argued that creativity can't happen unless people decide to pursue it. See this post.  But I think David's point is even more crucial, because if people decide to pursue, but lack confidence they can succeed, the are likely to suffer and unlikely to succeed.

  • Bad is Stronger Than Good: The 5 to 1 Rule

    "Bad is Stronger Than Good"  is the title of one of my favorite academic articles, which shows that negative information, experiences, and people pack a far bigger wallop than positive ones.  I touched on this theme in The No Asshole Rule and dig into in detail in the forthcoming Good Boss, Bad Boss. But perhaps the most important finding for most of us is the research on  romantic relationships and marriages: unless positive interactions outnumber
    negative interactions by five to one, odds are that the relationship will fail.      Scary, isn't it?

    Several studies found that when the proportion of negative
    interactions in a relationship exceeds this “five-to-one rule” divorce rates go way up and
    marital satisfaction goes way down.     The implications for all of us in long-term relationships are both instructive and daunting: If you have a bad interaction with your partner, one (or apparently two, three, or four) positive interactions aren't enough to repair the damage.  It apparently takes at least five — at least over the long-term. Related studies on workplaces suggest, along similar lines, that bosses and companies will get more bang for the buck if they focus on eliminating the negative rather than accentuating the positive (although the latter is important, the best evidence suggests that more effort and resources should be focused on getting rid of bad people and experiences).

    P.S. The citation is Baumeister, R.F.,
    Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K.D. (2001). Bad is stronger than
    good. Review of General Psychology, 5, 323-370. Here is a link to the pdf:     http://www.csom.umn.edu/Assets/71516.pdf.

  • Management Snake Oil: A Classic Example

    I was going through my email this morning and there it was, an email containing a classic sign that some vendor was promising more than any management tool or method can deliver.  The headline was "No More Hiring Mistakes Interviewing the Right Way." 

    This suggests they are selling snake oil because they are asserting that, if you use their tool or whatever, you won't make any hiring mistakes.  Perhaps their product or whatever (see here) does reduce the percentage of hiring errors, but there is no hiring method that eliminates all mistakes.  Plus interviews — although useful — are not the best method for selecting new employees (see this classic study for an evaluation of different methods). 

    I don't claim to know anything about this tool, but I do know that these folks are making excessive claims that cannot be supported any sound research,  This is yet another instance that supports a great observation from my hero James March, who once wrote me "“Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and
    most claims of magic are testimonial to hubris.”

  • Washing Your Hands Reduces Buyer’s Remorse

    Psychology Today reports that this finding will be published in Science magazine tomorrow.   The authors suggest that this happens because of the: "clean slate effect": washing may expunge the emotional power of past
    acts–perhaps even good ones–from the mental record.     Perhaps I should have washed my hands after buying my iPad. It might have saved me from writing that ambivalent post about my purchase!