Chapter 2 – Bland Bold Balance
Avoid the Allure of Unhealthy Balance
The tug of balance comes not just from an
aversion to choice, but from an attraction to bounty. Alexander Chernev, a
Northwestern professor, conducted an experiment that revealed how easily we can
trick ourselves into thinking more is better than less, even when it's clearly
not. Picture two trays of food. The first has a full bowl of chili coated with
cheese, and the second has that same bowl of chili but also a small green side
salad. In Chernev's study, people who were shown only the chili guessed that it
contained 699 calories, but the people who saw both the chili and the salad
guessed the combined meal to contain 656 calories. And what's worse, people who
identified themselves as dieters thought the salad had even bigger powers of
deduction. Chernev describes his finding as “The Dieter's Paradox.” On the
simple objective measure of calorie estimation, the dieters consistently
guessed that more food equaled less calories, so long as the extra food added
balance. And so obesity rates go up, even as the number of ads touting
low-calorie foods explodes. It's as if dieters think adding a few more healthy
foods will reduce their total consumption.2
We make similar miscalculations at work,
piling tasks onto our to-do list. When we work on an extra task, we might
imagine we're being more productive. After all, it's more impressive to see a
juggler successfully juggle four flaming torches than two. But too often our
heroic attempts simply slow our progress. Research on the work output of
Italian judges showed that those who work on many cases at the same time get
less done than those who work on one case at a time. In their paper called
“Don't Spread Yourself Too Thin: The Impact of Task Juggling on Workers' Speed
of Completion,” Coviello, Ichino, and Persico show that “judges who keep fewer
trials active and wait to close the open ones before starting new ones dispose
more rapidly of a larger number of cases per unit of time.”3 Like the judges, leaders
are too often bogged down by a heavy caseload. In the name of balance or
efficiency we load up our plates with too many commitments and risk
overreaching to the point of dilution and inefficiency.
Chapter 3
Automatic Accountable Collaboration
The Rare, Productive Joy of Working Alone
Meetings are ritualized collaboration, with more
talking about the work than doing the work. A calendar full of meetings indicates
a collaboration binge. U.C. Berkeley Professor Morten Hansen wrote Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid
the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results,
which contains the most complete and compelling research on the subject of
collaboration at work. Based on rigorous research into efforts to work
together, he points to times and places when collaboration produces values and
also to instances when it creates waste. One stunning example of waste that Hansen
shares, based on academic research he did with his colleague Martine Haas,
shows how collaboration can hurt sales efforts. Based on an examination of 182
teams trying to win a contract for a professional services firm, Hansen and
Haas showed that the more time a team spent getting help from others, the less likely the team was to win a deal. The
teams “assumed that collaborating with other … experts … would bring even more
benefits,” Hansen wrote. “It didn't. In fact, it brought only pain—time and
effort involved in collaborating, which was time and effort the sales team did
not spend making an even better bid.”5
Hansen says that collaboration only makes
sense when there is a payoff greater than the pain from collaboration. He calls
this payoff the “collaboration premium.” Communicating and keeping people on
the same page is time-consuming and imperfect. Collaborate advisedly, only when
the value of the diversity of perspectives is truly needed, not because a
variety of perspectives is interesting or safe. And when people do need to work
together, save the time and money spent on team-building events. Another
researcher has shown that teams that get along don't necessarily get better
results.
Cambridge Professor Mark de Rond has
studied teams to unlock what leads to great results. “A focus on interpersonal
harmony can actually hurt team performance,” he says in his aptly named book There Is an I in Team: What Elite
Athletes and Coaches Really Know About High Performance.6 De Rond is a sacred cow
tipper of the first order, taking on Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. Where
Goleman celebrates the importance of team harmony, de Rond lauds internal competition
as an important but underappreciated ingredient in team success. Too often,
complains de Rond, experts point to the virtues they hope to be important, such
as collaborating nicely with your team members, instead of simply reporting the
facts of the case, as discomfiting as they may be. From a retail store chain in
the United Kingdom to surgeons in Afghanistan to improv comedians, de Rond
documents how helpful internal competition can be to long-term positive
outcomes.
The biggest benefit to a culture that
focuses on the “work” half of teamwork is that as collaboration goes down,
accountability goes up. Rather than diffusing accountability across the group,
individuals are accountable for outcomes. Groups within organizations can still
be collectively accountable for results, but when goals are set for individuals
it's easier to spot the weak link in the system.
The point is not to highlight the
struggles of underperformers, merely to shame them. The point is to break team
members out of the habits of learned helplessness and create patterns that flex
the right muscles at the right time. Leaders must face their own fears and
trust their own and others' ability to do the work. Stepping back and allowing
others to struggle is one of the hardest tenets of leadership, but it's
necessary for growth. Allowing for growth doesn't preclude training, coaching,
and support—it just means that in the end, everyone must be responsible for
their own piece of the puzzle.
Being alone by default also values and
savors collaboration when the time is right. If everyone is working
independently toward specific outcomes, the areas where collaboration is
necessary become inescapably clear. Putting everyone together all the time
means that the instinct to collaborate trumps the need to collaborate, and it
becomes unclear who or what can really contribute to results.
Chapter 4
Narcissistic Useful Creativity
Tokyo-based New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi highlights
Sony's place among Japan's faltering tech sector, saying in an April 2012
article that Sony must “fight for its life” despite an “astonishing lack of
ideas.”2 Tabuchi charts Sony's
decline from a position of leadership in consumer electronics to barely hanging
on. Tabuchi isn't alone. Newspapers, magazines, and business books have also
highlighted the shame of Sony's inability to generate anything standard-worthy
since the Trinitron TV and the Walkman, both of which are relics of the last
century. So Sony failed because of a lack of creativity. Right?
Wrong. In fact, Sony's failures stem from
too much creativity. Instead of listening to the market with humility, Sony's
engineers crammed their best technology into an MP3 player that was too
cumbersome to use. Instead of taking care of their customer's needs for
simplicity, they took care of their own engineer's need for complexity.
Engineers inside Sony viewed the storage technology used by Apple's iPod as
boring and beneath them, and so they went their own way. These innovators had
brains full of ideas. Their problem wasn't too few ideas: their problem was too
much narcissism. Proud Sony engineers joined the company to invent industries
in Japan that would lead the world, not imitate innovations coming from Korea,
China, or America. They wanted to invent something new as part of their legacy.
With the advent of the individual
electronic music track in the late 1990s, Sony had everything it needed to create
a transformational entertainment product. But rather than adapting to what the
market wanted, Sony created something new. Instead of learning from the market,
they tried to teach it. This is not evidence of a shortage of ideas. It's a
failure of leadership.
Sony's issue is just an outsized version
of what leaders face every day. When leaders are creative just for the sake of
innovation, for an ego boost or a moment of self-congratulation, creativity
backfires.
Scratching the Itch of New
Teresa Amabile is, among other things, a guru of
creativity. Since her seminal work in the early 1980s she's helped the world
think critically about how creativity works. She's on the faculty of Harvard
Business School and continues to think about, study, and share her findings on
creativity. Amabile defines creativity as the “production of novel and useful
ideas in any domain.”3 So if it's not useful, it's not creative. But leaders too
often celebrate an idea for its novelty alone, without regard to its
usefulness. What passes for creativity in the workplace is often merely a new
idea. Engineers don't get patents for using someone else's idea, and CEOs don't
get on the cover of magazines for pragmatically adopting another leader's
approach. Novelty generates more social rewards than usefulness, so leaders
tend to discount the usefulness of old options and overvalue new ones.
Scott Barry Kaufman, a New York University
cognitive scientist who studies creativity, says our search for the unexpected
is both deep-seated and endless. “If you present an idea as new,” he says,
“people will get a dopamine hit, regardless of whether or not the idea is true
or good. This is why it's important to use conscious thought to contemplate the
automatic emotional consequences of the dopamine rush and decide whether or not
the idea really is effective or whether it's just designed to scintillate.”
This tendency to overestimate how much
variety will satisfy us is called “diversification bias” and was first studied
by Daniel Read and George Loewenstein while at Carnegie Mellon.5Read and Lowenstein's experiments show how we think we want
more variety than we end up wanting. They did many studies on a wide range of
subjects, but my favorite was their Halloween experiment. The candy that a
trick-or-treating kid chooses is a very serious decision, and one that yields
important insights into our natural human preference for novelty.
In the experiment, two neighbors conspired
to systematically vary the choices kids could make. Some randomly selected kids
got to pick two candy bars at one house, but none at the next-door neighbor's
house. Another group of kids, meanwhile, got one candy bar at each house. At both
houses the kids were picking from a bunch of Three Musketeers™ and Milky Way™
candy bars. Every one of the kids who picked two candy bars at the same time
picked one of each. But less than half of the kids who got one candy bar at
each house got one of each. Considered separately, the kids picked their
favorite candy bar twice. But the kids who had the chance to pick two bars at
the same time opted for diversity. There was no payoff to their diversity,
though. They merely ended up with less of their favorite. Back at home,
enjoying their Halloween bounty, kids eat their favorite candies first, of
course. As the authors report about anyone who predicted they'd appreciate more
variety than they usually do: “They first consume the goods they prefer the
most and then turn to the less desirable items.”6
We grown-ups look for new candy bars at
work. Our natural tendency to overestimate how much we'll prefer variety has
been shown in several other experiments across adults. Because of the
diversification bias, we seek out something new to add to our portfolio of
projects. New must be better than old, right? Think of Sony and their thousands
of new products from video game players to TVs to music. Meanwhile Apple's entire
product line can fit on a kitchen table. One of those, the iPhone, accounts for
more revenue than Sony's entire annual sales. Both companies are creative, but
Apple seems to have more of a maniacal focus on useful creativity.
Creativity should be pragmatic, not
prideful. When it's pragmatic, creativity exists to solve an important,
unsolved problem. When it's prideful, it exists to boost the ego of the
creator. Narcissistic creativity doesn't just waste the narcissists' time.
Think of the leader who puts on a dazzling magic show of idea generation. It's
impressive to witness these acts of genius. The problem is, when a magician is
in the room, everyone else becomes part of the audience. Creative people leave
us impressed with them, eager to watch the next magic show.
Don Draper, the charismatic ad agency
creative director on AMC's Mad
Men, works his magic in a 1960s workplace. When he bids to introduce
Kodak's slide projector wheel, the Carousel, he tells the prospective clients,
“The most important idea in advertising is new. It creates an itch. You simply
put your product in there as a kind of Calamine lotion.” But Draper goes on to
suggest that Kodak should position its product as nostalgic, because creating
nostalgia creates a sharp pain that the product can relieve. As he goes on, Don
uses the carousel to show charming pictures of his own family as they grew up,
including his own wedding pictures. But we know those family pictures betray
Don's constant womanizing. It's part of the genius of Matt Weiner—Mad Men's
creator—to use the charismatic power of creativity to force the audience to
reconsider notions of virtue and vice. How can someone who behaves so badly be
so likable? Part of the mix of Don's richly irreconcilable character is his
irresistible creativity.
Watch out for the narcissists at
work—research shows them to be clinically charming. As researchers from
Stanford and Cornell showed in a 2010 study, it's easy to be tricked into
thinking you've seen creativity when you've just seen charm. Students who rated
highly on tests of narcissism had their pitch for a new movie idea rated more
highly than their more humble counterparts. But when independent assessors
rated the written version of the ideas, the narcissists' ideas were rated to be
no better than the rest. As the authors of the study put it, “Although
narcissists do not necessarily generate more creative ideas, they are able to
convince others that [their] ideas are more creative because their high levels
of confidence, enthusiasm, and charisma correspond to commonly held prototypes
of the creative personality.”7 So what looks and feels like creativity may simply be
narcissism.
Creativity, and its corporate cousin,
innovation, propel leaders to success in business and life. Without them,
nothing would change, and our lives would be an endless series of frustration
and a lack of learning. With narcissistic creativity, however, leaders can harm
their business just for the short-term payoff of good feelings and
congratulations.
In his book The Upside of Irrationality,
Duke economics professor Dan Ariely describes how Thomas Edison was fueled by
his own narcissistic creativity, denying that Nikola Tesla's alternating
current (AC) was a better global energy solution than his own direct current
(DC). Despite the opportunity to profit greatly from Tesla's work (Tesla worked
under Edison when he invented AC), he couldn't admit that his protégé's idea
was superior to his own. If you've ever plugged anything into a wall in your
home, then you know how doomed Edison's narcissistic creativity turned out to
be: AC was the scalable power solution that the world needed.8 As Edison's eventual
commercial success demonstrates, narcissistic creativity can be overcome,
through persistence and, as Edison put it, perspiration. But I think that in
the past hundred years or so, we've learned a few things that can help
narcissists recover without so much sweat.
Chapter 5
Process Outcome Excellence
Seven Steps to Make Your Excellence Meaningful
1. Lower the Stakes
The dumb jock is an old stereotype that persists.
And in many cases, there is data to support the stereotype. Dropout rates are
higher and grade point averages lower than the population-at-large for athletes
recruited to colleges to play football and basketball. Thomas Dee, an economics
professor at Swarthmore, wanted to understand more about the reason for the
lower performance. More than eighty students at Swarthmore agreed to
participate in the study. About half of them were on one of Swarthmore's NCAA
sports teams. When the students signed up they were simply told they were
taking part in an experiment to understand cognition. During the experiment the
students were paid $15 to take a test. The questions were pulled from the GRE,
the standardized test given to applicants to grad school.
Before they took the test, Dee primed some
of the student athletes to get them thinking about themselves as an athlete.
The primed student athletes were asked how much time they spent playing and
practicing. The other student athletes were asked some dummy questions about
how they got around campus. Priming is used to test the phenomenon of
“stereotype threat.” Claude Steele, the pioneer of this research, has shown
that “where bad stereotypes about groups apply, members of these groups can
fear being reduced to that stereotype.”9Researchers have shown over and over that reminding people that
they belong to a negatively stereotyped group can create anxiety that lowers
performance.
And that's exactly what happened in Dee's
experiment at Swarthmore. The athletes who were primed to think of themselves
as athletes did fourteen percent worse on the test than the athletes who had
been asked how to get around campus. Fourteen percent is a significant drop—the
difference between a letter grade. That's a full point drop in GPA.10
When Emerald Archer was doing her PhD
research at U.C. Santa Barbara she wanted to understand stereotype threat
outside of a campus environment. She examined the stereotype that women perform
worse than men in marksmanship exercises in the U.S. Marine Corps. She
presented her findings in a paper called “You Shoot Like a Girl: Stereotype
Threat and Marksmanship Performance in the U.S. Marine Corps.”11
Shooting is core to the identity of a
marine, and every marine must qualify on an M-16. Once again, the data supports
the stereotype. On average, 68 percent of women qualify on their first attempt
compared to 88 percent of men. And 23 percent of men are classified as experts,
the highest level, while only 15 percent of female Marines attain that level.
Archer wanted to know why.
She designed an experiment much more
dramatic than the GRE test. Marines, both male and female, were invited to the
rifle range to shoot a few rounds. They were told this was an experiment to
test performance under a variety of conditions. All of the marines were given a
page of written instructions before they started firing at targets at a
distance of 300, 400, and 500 meters (more than a quarter of a mile!). On their
instruction sheet, some of the marines were primed to think of the experiment
as a test of the stereotype that women perform worse than men, while others
weren't.
The stereotype threat effect held up on
the rifle range as it had in the classroom. The female Marines primed to think
that their gender was the subject of the test generally shot worse than the
women who weren't primed to think that way. According to Archer, a female major
said she felt added pressure on the rifle range because “she didn't want to be
responsible for giving other female Marines a bad name.”
But there was a surprise twist to the
experiment that Archer didn't see coming. Half of the male Marines had also
been primed to think of the experiment as a test of gender. So do you think the
men primed to think of the experiment as a test of their dominance would
perform better or worse than the men who weren't primed?
It turns out they performed worse. The
prime had exactly the same effect on the men as the women. When women are told
that men do better than women, anxiety lowers performance. Tell men the same
thing and they seem to face the same anxiety, even though they're being
reminded of their group's superiority. As Archer points out, “it is possible
that the additional anxiety felt by male marines to confirm that they are
indeed better than female marines led to their underperformance.”
Leaders who are out to prove something on
behalf of a larger cause create unneeded anxiety that lowers performance. When
a young leader needs to prove to the world that he can present with as much confidence
as his older counterpart, he creates anxiety that lowers performance. When an
older executive feels the need to prove she can be just as innovative as her
younger counterparts, she risks foolishly overreaching. The man who needs to
show how male leaders can be compassionate or the female salesperson who needs
to prove she can be as strong as any man creates unhealthy brain clutter that
clogs up performance.
The first step for you to achieve
excellence as a leader is to lower the stakes. Don't make everything you do a
campaign for some larger group. If you want to hit the target, forget about the
group you're a part of. Excellence is a tough aim to achieve without trying to
change a stereotype along the way. Remove any priming that reminds you of your
membership in some negatively stereotyped group and narrow your focus to the
task at hand.
5. Start a Meaningful Journey with a Meaningless Map
In the harsh winter of the Swiss Alps, a
Hungarian army troop on a training mission was stuck. The lieutenant in charge
sent a small group of soldiers to scout the best way forward and return to the
troop by nightfall with a recommendation on the best way back to the base. A
snowstorm started soon after the scout team left, and the lieutenant wondered
if he'd sent the scout team out on a suicide mission. By the second day when
the scouts hadn't returned, the rest of the troop feared the worst. But on the
third day the scouts made it back to join the troop and brought with them an
incredible story of good fortune.
By the end of the second day, the scouts
had become completely disoriented, with no agreement on which way to go to
return to the troops. Then one of them found a map beneath their food supplies.
The next morning they followed the map around mountains to make their way back
to the troop. The lieutenant asked to see the map. “This isn't a map of the
Alps. This is a map of the Pyrenees mountains 1,000 kilometers away!”
This story was first told by Hungarian
Nobel Prize–winner Albert Szent-Gyorgi and was used by business professor and
organizational psychologist Karl Weick to make the point that “if you're lost,
any old map will do.” As he says, “A map provides a place to start from, which
often becomes secondary once an activity gets under way. Just as a map of the
Pyrenees gets people moving so they can find their way out of the Alps, a map
of the wrong competitor can get people talking so they find their way into the
right niche.”
Chapter 6
Outcome Process Fairness
6. Check Up on Others
But sometimes, some of us worry about
others for a very different reason: because we want them to suffer. As Abbink
and Sadrieh say, “There is a danger of overstating the kindness of human
nature.” I had hoped to reveal in this chapter that all the emerging science on
the nature of fairness proves we're more interested in being more altruistic
than one might assume. I hadn't planned on showing that sometimes some people
are, in fact, out to get us. Thanks for raining on my parade, Abbink and
Sadrieh.
Think of their research as a third step in
the evolution of economic research on human interaction. First, economists
believed that we are all rational actors, looking to improve our own situation.
Second, a new set of researchers (Fehr and Rabin) argue that we aren't so
selfish after all. Good news: we care about our fellow man. We engage in
prosocial behavior. Then Abbink and Sadrieh come along and say, in essence: Yes, we agree that the old guys got
it wrong—we're not simply rational actors trying to make ourselves better. But
the new guys—the behavioral economists—get it only half right. We're not only
interested in helping our fellow man. Sometimes we want to hurt him, just for
the fun of it.
To test the degree of antisocial behavior,
Abbink and Sadrieh invented a game called “The Joy of Destruction.” In the
game, played at the University of Amsterdam, participants are paid to give
their opinions on a series of Dutch advertisements. Two participants who don't
know each other work side by side, earning €1.20 for each ad they review. The
participants—let's call them Hansel and Gretel—are led to believe they're
serving as test customers for ads. Then, after they've given their opinions,
but before they are paid the fee, there's an unexpected twist.
Abbink takes one of the participants
aside—let's say Hansel—for a private conversation and offers him a surprise
opportunity. Hansel can cut Gretel's pay. Gretel will never know it was Hansel
who cut the reward; Gretel will be given a bogus explanation related to departmental
budget. Hansel won't get any additional pay no matter what he chooses to do.
Abbink and Sadrieh designed the game so that the reduction in pay would be
completely anonymous and completely without benefit to the punisher. In other
words: half of the research subjects in the game have a chance to reduce
someone else's pay for no good reason.
The results stun me. Many of the
players—up to 40 percent of them—exercised their power to reduce the pay of
their new colleague, just for the fun of it, with no benefit to themselves.
This is different from the spite in the Clara story. Clara wanted to even
things out by punishing her sister. But in this test, some research subjects
wanted to hurt others, no matter what the score. Your belief in fairness may
lead you to wrongly assume that if you have someone else's best interests at
heart, then they also have your best interests at heart.
Chapter 8
Backstage Onstage Preparation
With constant testing we become
conditioned to equating responsible preparation with exhaustive memorization
and independent analysis—the more the better. We cram information into our
brains and spew it back out onto a multiple-choice test. It's natural to hold
on to the mental model of preparation that made us successful as students. But
the game has changed. We have to stop overpreparing and mispreparing for a test
that will never come.
Other remnants of our schooling do harm as
well. For example, the concept of academic specialization hurts us if we
narrowly define our expertise as limited to our one field of study at the cost
of cultivating complementary skills. A+ obsession, another trap, tricks leaders
into preparing for the satisfaction of a mental A+. If you've ever graded
yourself or others on their preparation, you may be a victim of this pernicious
mania. Even diplomas can seductively whisper in our ear, “You've arrived.
You're done learning.” This is not to suggest diplomas aren't valuable or shouldn't
be a source of deep pride. However, although diplomas help frame our future
success, leaders must match knowledge with growth-oriented qualities like an
appetite for constant learning, ability to take and learn from feedback, and a
willingness to change one's mind.
In our youth, many of us participated in
the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts and can instantly recall the motto, “Be
Prepared.” We likely heard this adage as a voice egging us on to prepare more
backstage. But Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement, described
the motto as not just an activity of the mind, but of the body as well. In
order to be prepared, one must approach a task holistically, thinking through
possible scenarios and training the body so that when the moment comes to do
your duty, you're conditioned to act. Baden-Powell built scouting around
performance-based badges that pull students out of classrooms, books, and
solitary learning and into the world to perform over a hundred different
hands-on activities. The scouting model achieves true readiness not through
disembodied study, but through integrated preparation that couples mind and
body training with performance.
Before the Internet made shipping products
and services an instant act, product development life cycles took years. In the
old model, anything that hit the stores had to be polished. Now, crowds fund
half-baked ideas through supportive communities, and Fortune 500 companies test
product assumptions under the safe haven of “beta” status. As I pointed out in Chapter
Five on excellence, in the recent Facebook IPO filing, founder Mark Zuckerberg
included a section on “The Hacker Way” to reclaim the positive merits of the
word “hacker.” Zuckerberg describes it as “an approach to building that
involves continuous improvement and iteration.” But although norms are
changing, many of us find it hard to let go of our impulse to fully bake
everything.
A friend of mine landed a job at Google
right out of college. An alien to Silicon Valley culture, she found herself in
a strange world that challenged her notions of preparation. Before Google, she
interned at a law firm for a boss who praised her exacting eye for detail and
reverent regard for being right before speaking up. Google released incomplete
work as beta products and generally regarded everything as an experiment to
learn from. The philosophy was: why waste time getting it right instead of
simply shipping it and getting it right in real time? At first, she watched,
bewildered, convinced that the company was letting products and features ship
before they were ready. Finally, she let go of her preconceptions, embraced
quick execution, and joined the high-speed, just-ship-it attitude that has led
to Google's impressive track record of rapid product introductions.
Our brains shape our preparation habits
too. Roughly one in five Americans suffers from anxiety disorders, according to
the National Institute of Mental Health. A 2001 Gallup poll found two in five
Americans are afraid to speak in front of an audience.2 Fear and anxiety
originate from a place deep in our brains and many of us find that compulsive
overpreparing quiets our protesting brains like Xanax. Overpreparation may be
comforting, but it has unintended consequences. When we prepare to calm our
nerves, we're slowly falling in love with our work in a way that makes us less
open to feedback. Not to mention we waste time that could have been spent more
productively.
A clue from a study on jazz and the brain
hints at the neurological roots disconnecting preparation and performance. A
pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists examined the brains of six jazz
pianists performing well-memorized C-scales and improvised tunes. They used
MRIs to isolate blood flow patterns for each activity. In both scenarios,
improvising (that is, going off script) resulted in reduced blood flow to the
part of the brain linked to planned actions like self-censoring. At the same
time, improvising increased blood flow to the part of the brain linked with
self-expression and individuality. In other words, switching from prepared to
improvised activity changed brain states.3 The findings present an interesting
trend and suggest that the brain actually does have to switch gears as it goes
from prepared to improvised activity, at least in music.
Unless you take tests for a living, the
predominant form of preparation in our culture does you no favors. Leaders must
scrutinize and shift their mental model of preparation to maximize performance
at work. Don't use preparation as a drug or a crutch.
Seven Ideas to Take Your Preparation to Center Stage
4. Pretotype
The year is 1970 and you're in a conference room
in upstate New York. Ashtrays pepper the table and smoke rings emanate from
serious expressions. A debate rages. IBM, in the business of typewriters and
computers, has a decision to make. Personal computers haven't taken off in the
mass market and keyboards are a major culprit. Thirty years ago, most managers
didn't type. Typing proficiency, or lack thereof, blocked the way to mass
market adoption.
Abuzz about a new technology concept, the
room fractures around opinion. The technology that could change the game? Voice
recognition. If IBM developed speech-to-text technology, typewriters would no
longer be needed. Early focus groups loved the idea. What could be easier than
speaking? Development will be challenging and costly. Investing the amount of
money needed into research and development would effectively be betting the
company on the success of voice recognition technology. Should they do it? What
would you do? Will people behave like they say they will and buy the
technology?
Legend has it that because they couldn't
afford to make it, IBM came up with a most clever solution to test out the
concept. They invited a focus group to come in and had them dictate to a
computer. In an adjoining room, a super-typist instantaneously typed the
testers' words. The group of testers, previously enthusiastic about the idea,
found that in reality, dictating to a computer made their throats sore, was
noisy, and was inappropriate for confidential or sensitive messages. Through
early testing, IBM made the wise decision not to move forward with the
technology.
Alberto Savoia, serial entrepreneur,
retells this story to describe an idea he calls “pretotyping,” a more memorable
variant of “pretend-o-typing.” Before spending the money to develop a
prototype, IBM found a tremendously low-cost way to test user interest and
saved time and money. “Make sure you're building the right ‘it’ before you
build ‘it’ right,” Savoia advises. Translating IBM's pretotyping wisdom to
preparation for leaders, leaders know the value of getting feedback early when
preparing. Next time you have a big work task to do, find a quick and dirty way
to figure out what would actually be valuable work and save doing it well for
when you have the “right ‘it.’”
Chapter 9
Extinguish Your Backfires
It's not easy to spot sacred cows, even
for experts in leadership. Byron Hanson, one of my friends and colleagues from
Duke CE, is a Canadian scholar of leadership who has lived on and off in
Australia, his wife's native country. In 2004, Byron and three friends of his,
each of whom was also recognized as an expert in leadership, set out on a
five-day walk through the Fitzgerald River National Park, which cuts through
the rugged bush country of Western Australia. It was an adventure they'd been
planning for over a year, and the four fit guys in their thirties were eager to
tackle the challenge. They geared up with forty-pound packs of food, camping
equipment, water, and water storage (as there would be no sources of water on
the trek). They also carried a satellite phone as there is no mobile coverage
in the Fitzgerald. They pushed their way through with optimism. They had
planned well, including water drops that had been strategically left at certain
spots along the trek by a support person a few days earlier. There was no path,
and each step was a plodding exercise in fighting through prickly bushes,
stepping on and over loose rocks the size of soccer balls, all while staying
alert for signs of dehydration and snakes. They kept trudging along, but at a
slower pace than they'd planned when they scheduled their water drops.
On day two as the sun set, they flipped on
their headlamps to see their way along the vast sand dunes that hug the
isolated coastline of the park. They should have reached their first water drop
four hours earlier. One of Byron's friends, Troy Hendrickson, who now teaches
with Byron at Curtin Graduate School of Business in Perth, Australia, noted
that they'd only been able to cover 1 km/hour for the previous eight
consecutive hours due to the harshness of the terrain—much slower than their
plan.
“What was unsaid was unbelievable,” said
Byron. After the four proud men finished the last of their water and the
temperature began to plummet, the anxiety rose, but no one spoke. Finally,
after a few frantic calls on the satphone with the park ranger to get some
bearings, just before midnight they stumbled onto their water source and
pitched a hurried camp for the night. Exhausted, they studied their map and
determined an early start would be required if they were to make the next water
drop the following day. “It was all about the plan,” Byron recalled. “Even
though we were exhausted and behind our schedule, we just stuck to the plan.”
The next day, about five hours in, it was becoming clear that the hikers were
not going to make the next water drop and again no one was saying anything.
They just continued to labor through the thick bush. And then Gavin Rainbow,
the most inexperienced hiker in the group, said something that proved to be the
turning point. As the group was looking at the map and trying to find a way to
the next water source, he said: “You know, we could just go back.”
“That simple comment made us all pause,”
remembers Byron. “We never even thought about going back or about even thinking
of an alternative way out until that moment. We had our heads down driving to a
destination and were not willing to see other options.” So in that moment the
group finally opened up to their reality, changed course, and found their way
out safely.
“Our journey ended up being more about
exploring our egos than Australian bush,” said Byron. “And the irony was, these
topics were what I was right in the middle of studying for my Ph.D.” Byron and
the boys couldn't see the nature of their challenges because they were blinded
by their sacred cows. They needed a new way of seeing the world.
For them, their sacred cows were
completion, follow-through, and masculine adventure. Inside the workplace, we
don't have freezing temperatures and parched mouths to lets us know we're in
danger. The sacred cows at the workplace do their damage in a more subtle way.
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