Work Matters

  • The Best Book Cover Ever? The Denial of Aging

    The Denial of Aging
    I was exchanging emails with a Harvard University Press editor named Elizabeth Knoll and I commented that the cover of C.K.  Gunsalus' The College Administrator's Survival Guide is one of the best I had ever seen.  The designer, according the jacket cover is Jill Breitbarth. By the way, the contents of this Guide are also fantastic! 

    Well, when I mentioned how much I liked that cover, Elizabeth sent me a link to another Harvard cover, the amazing one above, which after some confusion (note this post is corrected), turns out to be by Gwen Nefsky Frankfeldt — apparently now retired.    I can't vouch for the book itself, but especially given the title, that might be the best book cover I have ever seen.  I am 58 and there are times when feel like I am that guy with big white beard! 

    Tell me what you think, and if there is a cover you believe is even better, I would love to see it.

    For fun, here is other cover I liked so much

    The-College-Administrator-s-Survival-Guide-Gunsalus-C-K-9780674023154

     

     

  • Boring = Good? Inspirational = Bad?

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    That is the title of weird interview that just came out in INC this month, which I did with Leigh Buchanan.  And the above drawing is by Graham Roumieu. 

    Here is the story on the INC website. The title is different online than in the print version, they call it "Thoroughly Counterintuitive Approach to Leading."  

    Leigh is always fun to talk to, and after having done interviews on both The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, she has emerged as one of my favorite journalists.  For starters, she has such a sense of fun — most of us involved in doing and working with management are entirely too serious — I certainly plead guilty.  Leigh has the rare ability to talk about real ideas while at the same time conveying the absurdity of so much of organizational life .  She is also a great editor. In every interview I have done with her, I've rambled incoherently on for an hour or so, and she somehow put it in a form that made sense.

    This new interview a conglomeration of some of the stranger ideas from the various books I have written, especially Weird Ideas That Work along with some new twists.  As with weird ideas , I offer these ideas to challenge your assumptions (and my own) and to prompt us all to think.  I don't expect you to agree with them (I am not even sure I agree with all of them), but there is actually a fair amount of evidence and theory to support each of these sometimes uncomfortable ideas.

    To give you a taste,here is how the interview kicks-off:

    Leigh: You and I have been e-mailing about leadership traits, and at one point you suggested, “Good leaders know when to be boring, vague, emotionally detached, and authoritarian.” Under what circumstances might such traits be desirable? Start with boring.

    Me: There are two situations in which it’s a good idea to be boring. One is when you’re working on something but, so far, all you’ve got is bad news. Under those circumstances, any outside attention is bad.

    Don Petersen was the CEO of Ford after the Iaccoca era, and he was responsible for turning the company around. He told me a story about being invited to speak at the National Press Club. He didn’t want to do it. At the time, Ford had no good cars at all. But he and his PR chief decided he would go and give a speech about the most boring subject they could think of. At the time, that was safety. He practiced speaking in the most boring way possible, using the passive voice and long sentences. He put up charts that were hard to read, and then turned his back to the audience to talk about the charts. After that, the press lost interest in him for a while, so he could concentrate on doing the work.

    The other situation is when you’re dealing with controversy. Stanford used to have this brilliant provost, James Rosse. When Jim talked about something like the school’s Nobel Prize winners, he would be animated and exciting and charismatic. But when he had to talk about something like the lack of diversity on campus, he would ramble on for 20 minutes while looking at his feet. I thought it was brilliant

    And so it goes.  I hope you enjoy and I think Leigh for being such a delight to work with and for reminding me not to take myself so seriously.

  • Job Interview Advice: Go Heavy on the Perfume or Personal Charm, Not Both

    I was interviewed this morning for a Woman's Day story on job interviews.  As usual, just before talking with the journalist, I poked around peer-reviewed studies a bit.   I found quite a few traditional ones, but there was one that was weird but rather instructive.  It was a 1986 study by Robert Baron on the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.  In brief, the design was that 78 subjects (roughly half men and half women) were asked to evaluate a female job candidate.

    In one condition, she cranked-up the non-verbal charm, in the other she did not. As the article explains:

    Specifically,she was trained to smile frequently (at prespecified points), to maintain a high level of eye contact with the subject, and to adopt an informal, friendly posture (one in which she leaned forward, toward the interviewer). In contrast, in the neutral cue condition she refrained from emitting any nonverbal behaviors. These procedures were adapted from ones employed in several previous studies (e.g., Imada & Hakel, 1977) in which nonverbal cues were found to exert strong effects upon ratings of strangers. Extensive pretesting and refinement were undertaken to assure that the two patterns would be distinct and readily noticed by participants in the present research.

    In another condition, she wore perfume:

    Presence or absence of artificial scent. In the scent present condition, the confederates applied two small drops of a popular perfume behind their ears prior to the start of each day’s sessions. In the scent absent condition, they didnot make use of these substances. (In both conditions, they refrained from employing any other scented cosmetics of their own.) The scent employed was “Jontue.” This product was selected for use through extensive pretesting in which 12 undergraduate judges (8 females, 4 males) rated 11 popular perfumes presented in identical plastic bottles. Judges rated the pleasantness of each scent and its attractiveness when used by a member of the opposite sex. “Jontue” received the highest mean rating among the female scents in this preliminary study.

    The design was alternated so the subjects in different groups evaluated these imaginary job candidates with perfume or without, or with non-verbal charms or without, and researchers also examined the impact of having both perfume and charm, or neither.   The results are pretty amusing but also useful. It turns out that having just perfume and just charm seemed to lead to high ratings by both male and female interviewers.  BUT there was an interesting gender effect.  The blend of both perfume and charm did not put-off female interviewers, but it did lead to lower evaluations for male interviewers.

    This is just one little study, but it is amusing and possibly useful — if you are woman and being interviewed by a guy, the blend of perfume and positive "non-verbals" might be too much of a good thing!

    This is not a path-breaking study, but it is cute. And I it is interesting to know that Mae West sweet saying that " Too much of a good thing can be wonderful" has its limits!

    P.S. Go here to see the complete reference and the abstract.

  • A Different Version of the Creation Myth

    

     

    A big thanks to Carol Murchie for sending this my way.

  • Check-out J. Keith Murnighan’s “Do Nothing” for Strange and Fact-Based Advice

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    Kellogg professor J. Keith Murnighan, my colleague and charming friend, has just published a lovely  book called "Do Nothing." I first read the manuscript some months back (and thus could provide the praise you see on the cover) and I just spent a couple hours revisiting this gem.

    This crazy book will bombard you with ideas that challenge your assumptions.  His argument for doing nothing, for example, kicks-off the book. I was ready to argue with him because, even though I believe the best management is sometimes no management at all, I thought he was being too extreme. But as I read the pros and cons (Keith makes extreme statements, but his arguments are always balanced and evidenced-based), I became convinced that if more managers took this advice their organizations would more smoothly, their people would perform better (and learn more), and they would enjoy better work-life balance.

    He convinced me that it this is such a useful half-truth (or perhaps three-quarters-truth) that every boss ought to try his litmus test:  Go on vacation, leave your smart phone at home, and don't check or send any messages. Frankly, many bosses I know can't accomplish this for three hours (and I mean even during the hours they are supposed to be asleep), let alone for the three weeks he suggests.  As Keith says, an interesting question is what is a scarier outcome from this experiment for most bosses: Discovering how MUCH or how LITTLE their people actually need them.

    You will argue with and then have a tough time resisting Keith's logic, evidence, and delightful stories when it comes to his other bits of strange advice as well.  I was especially taken with "start at the end," "trust more,"  "ignore performance goals," and "de-emphasize profits."  Keith shows how the usual managerial approach of starting out relationships by mistrusting people and then slowly letting trust develop is not usually as beneficial as starting by assuming that others can be fully trusted until they prove otherwise.  He will also show you how to make more money by thinking about money less!

    As these bits suggest, Keith didn't write this book with the aim of telling most bosses what they wanted to hear.  Rather his goal was to make readers think, to challenge their assumptions, and to show the way to becoming better managers by thinking and acting differently.  In a world where we have thousands of business books published every year that all seem to say the same thing, I found Do Nothing delightful and refreshing — not just because it is quirky and fun, but because Keith also shows managers how to try these crazy ideas in low-risk and sensible ways.

     

  • Total Institutions, Productivity, and Unemployment

    This isn't an original idea, but it has been gnawing at me lately.  As we all know, unemployment in the U.S. remains frighteningly high — and is  worse in many parts of Europe.  We still haven't really dug our way out of the meltdown.  At the same time, the hours worked by Americans remain incredibly high.  See this 2011 infographic on The Overworked American.  About a third of Americans feel chronically overworked.  And some 39% of us work more than 44 hours a week.

    I was thinking of this because I did an interview for BBC about Google — you can see the piece here.  I think it is done well and quite balanced.  It shows all those lovely things they do at Google to try to make it so good that you never want to go home — the classes, the great food, the laundry service, the massages and so on.   And I do believe from many conversations with senior Google executives over the years that they care deeply about their people's happiness and well-being and seem — somehow — to have sustained a no asshole culture even at 32,000 people strong.  That "don't be evil" motto isn't bullshit, they still mean it and still try to live it.

    But as I said in the BBC piece, although they are more caring than many of their competitors, the result is that many great tech firms including Google border on what sociologist Erving Goffman called "total institutions."  Examples of total institutions are prisons, mental institutions, the military (at least the boot camp part) — places where members spend 100% of the time.  The result is that, especially here in Silicon Valley, the notion of work-life balance is pure fiction most of the time (Sheryl Sandberg may go home at 530 every day, but the folks at Facebook did an all-night hack-a-thon right before the IPO.  I love the folks at Facebook, especially their curious and deeply skilled engineers, but think of the message it sends about the definition of a good citizen in that culture). 

    To return to Google, about five years ago, one of the smartest and most charming students I ever worked with had job offers from two very demanding places: Google and McKinsey.  Now, as most of you know, people work like dogs at McKinsey too.  But this student decided to take the job at McKinsey because "My girlfriend doesn't work at Google, so if I take that job, I will never see her."  He took the McKinsey job because at least that way he would see her on weekends.  I am pleased to report that I recently learned that they are engaged, so I guess it was the right choice.

    Note I am not blaming the leaders at Google, Facebook, or the other firms that expect very long hours out of their people.  It is a sick norm that seems to keep getting stronger and seems to be shared by everyone around here — indeed, my students tell me that they wouldn't want to work at a big tech firm or a start-up where people worked 40 hours a week because it would mean they were a bunch of lazy losers!  I also know plenty of hardcore programmers who love nothing more than spending one long late night after another cranking out beautiful code.  

    Yet, I do wonder if, as a society, given the blend of the damage done by overwork to mental and physical health and to families, and given that so many people need work, if something can be done to cut back on the hours and to create more jobs.  There are few companies that are trying programs (Check out the "lattice" approach at Deloitte).  But it seems to me that we would all be better off if those of us with jobs cut back on our hours, took a bit less pay, and the slack could be used to provide the dignity and income that comes with work to all those people who need it so badly. 

    I know my dream is somewhat naive, and that adding more people creates a host of problems ranging from higher health care costs to the challenges of coordinating bigger groups.   But in the coming decades, it strikes me as something we might work together to achieve.  There are so many workplaces that have become just awful places because of such pressures to work longer and longer hours:  large law firms are perfect example, they have become horrible places to work for lawyers at all levels.  There is lots of talk of reform, but they seem to be getting worse and worse as the race for ever increasing billed hours and profits-per-partner gets worse every year.  And frankly when I see what it takes to get tenure for an assistant professor at a place like Stanford, we are essentially expecting our junior faculty to work Google-like hours for at least seven years if they wish to be promoted, I realize I too am helping to perpetuate a similar system. 

    I would also note this is not just a "woman's issue."  Or even a matter of structuring work so that both men and women can be around to raise their kids, as it sometimes is described.  Sure, that is part of it.  But I think that everyone could benefit from a change in such norms. Indeed, about five years ago, a managing partner of a large local law firm did a survey of attitudes toward part-time work and was surprised to learn that male associates who didn't have children were among the most enthusiastic supporters of part-time schedules.  Interestingly, they were supportive partly because they couldn't use the "kid excuse" to cut back their hours and resented covering for colleagues who could and did leave work earlier and take days off to be with their children — they resented having less socially acceptable reasons for cutting back days and hours. 

    What do you think?  Is there any hope for change here?  Or am I living in a fool's paradise?

  • “I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole”

    The No Asshole Rule emphasizes that one of the best ways to avoid the negative effects of workplaces that will leave you feeling demeaned and de-energized is to carefully assess your boss and colleagues during the interview and recruitment process.   Guy Kawasaki and I had fun with this challenge a few years back when we developed a list of 10 signs that your future boss is likely to be a bosshole.  In this spirit, I got a remarkable note the other day from a fellow who used his job interview to determine that his future boss was likely to be an asshole. Note the often subtle signs he observed.  This are his exact words, I just removed a couple key sentences (with his permission) to protect his identity:

    Dr. Sutton,

    Just wanted to thank you.  I read your "no Asshole rule" book on the plane my way to an interview.  I suspected from our initial phone interview that he could be a jerk.  I decided to take a new approach to the interview…to see how he interacted with shop floor employees and people that worked directly for him, to see how he spoke to me, and his verbal and visual actions, to see if I wanted this position instead of trying to impress them so they want to hire me.  I watched people that worked for him stand away from him when talking to him.  I saw he never smiled, and no one smiled at him.  He passed people on the line without so much as a nod to them.  And to top it off, he cut me off TWICE when I was talking like I wasn't even speaking, and then once even rudely didn't even PRETEND to listen to me as I talked about my background. In fact, I believe he started looking around and saying "uh huh, uh huh, uh huh" rudely "rushing me along" about 15 seconds into my background discussion.  To top it off, I remember you saying "assholes hire assholes", so I asked him if he had recommended the hiring of the people on his current team, and he boldly bragged "I hire EVERYONE on my team, it is all MY decision"…so I turned down the offer.  I believe in my heart, I would have worked for an asshole. .  And life is too short to do that again.

    I find this guy to be very astute.  What do you think of his analysis?

    What are other signs that you look for that a future boss — or colleague –is likely to be a certified asshole?

  • New Research: Thinking About Your Mortality Makes You A Better Person

    A pointer to this from Australian Chris Barry came in my email this morning.  Here is what Ken Vail and his co-authors found:

    Contemplating death doesn't necessarily lead to morose despondency, fear, aggression or other negative behaviors, as previous research has suggested. Following a review of dozens of studies, University of Missouri researchers found that thoughts of mortality can lead to decreased militaristic attitudes, better health decisions, increased altruism and helpfulness, and reduced divorce rates.

    Some of the specific effects were quite interesting — everything from being more peaceful and cooperative to exercising more and quitting smoking. I especially liked this study described in the summary in ScienceDaily:

    Even subconscious awareness of death can more influenced behavior. In one experiment, passers-by who had recently overheard conversations mentioning the value of helping were more likely to help strangers if they were walking within sight of cemeteries.

    The researchers suggest one reason for such effects (based on something called terror management theory) is that  "people deal with their awareness of mortality by upholding cultural beliefs and seeking to become part of something larger and more enduring than themselves, such as nations or religions." 

    So that is my happy thought for the day: Think about your death, it is good for you and those around you!

    P.S. Here is the source: "When Death is Good for Life: Considering the Positive Trajectories of Terror Management," published online on April 5, 2012, in Personality and Social Psychology Review. 

  • The Narcissistic Personality Quiz

    I sent out a tweet the other day about a study showing that men who score high on a narcissism test appear to experience more stress than those who score low (but not narcissistic women).  Stress was measured by "cortisol levels,"   a hormone that  "signals the level of activation of the body’s key stress response system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis." 

    You can see a report about study here.  I thought the most interesting part was the link to the 40 item Narcissistic Personality Quiz, which is based on the measure in this paper: Raskin, R. & Terry, H. (1988). A Principal-Components Analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and Further Evidence of Its Construct Validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(5). Note that Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is one of the best and most rigorous psychology journals, so the source is excellent.

    Try taking the quiz. I just did and scored an "8,' which suggests a low level of narcissism.  I confess, however, that I am wondering if my low score was a reflection of my lack of narcissism or of my knowledge of the narcissism literature in concert with a bit of self-delusion.  I also confess that I completed it a second time as if I were one especially narcissistic boss that I once worked with.  That boss (in my opinion) earns a 32 — a very high score as above 20 indicates narcissism.  The quiz omits one thing this person did which indicates narcissism:  It was amazing how, no matter what the topic, how within 3 minutes, every conversation with that boss always became conversation about what a successful and impressive person he was and all the people who admired him and his work. 

     If you really are the mood for self-assessment, you can take both this quiz and the (less scientific) Asshole Rating Self-Exam or ARSE.   That way you can find out if you are a narcissist, a certified asshole, or both!

    Enjoy.

  • 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.