Business Insight Zone

Share my glee, friends: today I have four new books on my desk, all of which I’m eager to read.

Alice Schroeder, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Warren Buffett belongs in the same category as William Shakespeare: human and imperfect like all of us . . . but also demonstrably superior to everyone else at what he does best. This authorized biography, which a couple of friends have already recommended to me, promises to spill the beans not just about his investment philosophy and business acumen, but also his complex personality and personal life. Why not study the best?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Tom Peters has put this book at the tippy-top of his must-reads, and recent events in the financial world have been making Taleb look smarter than ever.

Geoff Colvin, Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else

That Geoff Colvin article I raved about the other day? It’s abstracted from this book. Again, if you want to improve your own performance or that of your organization, why not study the techniques of the great?

Joel Spolsky, Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent

For years I’ve been reading the smart, witty takes on management and technology that Joel Spolsky puts into his “Joel on Software” essays. After I praised Joel’s work in a post the other day, someone at his company was nice enough to send me a copy of his book. Even though I do no work in recruiting — much less the recruiting of technical talent — I can hardly wait to imbibe Joel’s insights here. I know from experience that what he writes has application far beyond the world of programming.

Expect reviews of all of these in the coming days/weeks.

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For years I’ve been enjoying Dan Pink’s journalism, not to mention his other appearances around the Internet. But now he’s outdone himself with his pithy, witty new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need. It packs a remarkable amount of career wisdom into a slim package, and best of all — it’s a manga!

In case you don’t share a house with comics-obsessed children like I do, let me explain that manga are a Japanese genre of comic-book-style books. In Japan — and increasingly here — manga address many topics far beyond the superheroes found in the productions of Marvel and DC. In this case, the art of Rob Ten Pas conveys Pink’s story with a visual style that evokes classic tropes of manga as well as Mike Judge’s cult-classic movie Office Space.

Johnny Bunko centers around six core lessons that a sort of fairy stepsister named Diana teaches to our eponymous hero:

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses
3. It’s not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes
6. Leave an imprint.

The author packs a lot of good thinking into a small space, bringing up some pretty big ideas and giving the nod to thinkers like Marcus Buckingham and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Lesson #4, “Persistence trumps talent,” is a major theme of Carol Dweck’s Mindset, which I reviewed a few days ago.)

Pink has also done a great job of promoting his book. In fact, I got my signed copy of Johnny Bunko by entering a contest on Andy Sernovitz’s blog. In that same post, Andy praised Pink for “perfect word of mouth execution” around the book– high praise coming from the man who literally wrote the book on word-of-mouth marketing. The promotion must be working, since Pink’s book has spent months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list.

The fun isn’t over yet. Besides reading the book for yourself and giving out copies to any young career-ladder-climbers you know, you can enter a contest to join Pink on an all-expenses-paid trip to the TED Global 2009 conference in England. All you have to do: Come up with a seventh lesson to go with the six in the book.

Any suggestions?

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Recently I read Carol Dweck’s book Mindset — a book that deserves to reshape the way smart businesses think about developing their people, and the way smart people go about developing themselves. In a follow-up post I’ll focus more on the business applications of Mindset; this time around, I want to give you an overview of its ideas, which have profound application to many areas of life.

The book first came to my attention a while back when Guy Kawasaki did two posts on Dweck and her work. Dweck is a psychology professor at Stanford; in her research, she tries to find out why some people succeed throughout life while others don’t.

We might summarize the explosive idea at the heart of Mindset like this:

To a breathtaking degree, whether people develop and grow in their careers traces back to their fundamental mindsets. People with the growth mindset, who believe that they can improve their abilities and accomplishments through purposeful effort, excel. People with the fixed mindset, who believe that their intrinsic worth is cast in stone, stagnate.

The poisonous mental habits of fixed-mindset people and the virtuous mental habits of growth-mindset people are captured neatly in this [PDF] chart by Nigel Holmes, which is also included in the book.

Dweck’s insights into the two mindsets are so powerful because the mindsets have such pervasive effects. Under the fixed mindset, the poor get poorer: those who have a fixed image of themselves as highly talented believe that things “should” come easily to people like them, so they don’t put forth effort. Those with a fixed image of themselves as untalented erroneously believe that there’s nothing they can do to make their performance better . . . and so they don’t put forth effort.

Effort is vastly underrated.

“The Effort Effect,” an article about Dweck that appeared in Stanford Magazine last year, summarizes these behaviors well:

Students [with the fixed mindset] want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine — and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor.

By contrast,

Students with [growth mindsets] . . . take necessary risks and don’t worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn.

In her book, Dweck details her own research (and others’) that verifies the tonic effects of sustained effort, and of the belief that sustained effort will get you where you want to go. In working with everyone from young schoolchildren to college students to professional soccer players, Dweck has demonstrated the huge impact that people’s beliefs about their ability to improve have on their actual performance.

Darwin was an unremarkable student,
yet produced one of the most influential theories
in the history of science — after half a lifetime of effort.

She also cites many famous examples of high performers who credited hard work and stick-to-it-iveness for their own success. One standout after another — Charles Darwin, Tiger Woods, Jackson Pollock, Jackie Joyner-Kersee — emerged into the spotlight only after years and years of hard, focused toil.

Her examples made me think of something I came across about George Brett, the baseball Hall-of-Famer who was known for his “natural” batting stroke:

“He would get out there and work so long and hard, he had blisters on his hands,” said Denny Matthews, the [Kansas City] Royals’ radio voice since 1969. ‘He would be out there at 2:30 in the afternoon working in the hot sun. Then that evening he would go 3-for-4 and people would say, ‘Gee, what a natural hitter.’ “

Many factors, including how we are raised and how we are taught in school, blind us to examples like this. Far too many of us continue to believe, explicitly or implicitly, that effort won’t be rewarded, or that so much effort ought not be necessary if we’re truly cut out to pursue the matter at hand.

Talent is vastly overrated.

Fixed-mindset types are prone to blame everything and everyone except themselves for their own failings, because they don’t realize — or they can’t admit — that talent isn’t that important, and that their weak performances trace directly back to their own lack of effort.

Whatever genius he possessed, Mozart devoted himself
wholeheartedly, even maniacally, to his work.

Now, people devoted to the idea of the “natural genius” will typically retort with an argument along the lines of “What about Mozart?” But Dweck talks directly about how hard Mozart worked. Yes, he was composing music when he was still an adolescent, but his first ten years’ worth of compostions were for the most part derivative of other composers, and nowhere near the quality of The Magic Flute or the other “genius” works that we associate with him. It took years of dogged effort for even Mozart to become Mozart.

Regular readers of this blog will detect the echo of Anders Ericsson’s work on “deliberate practice,” which emphasizes the unimportance of talent and the inescapable importance of the dogged-yet-shrewd practice habits of Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, Judit Polgar, and other great performers.

Curiously, to me at least, I found no reference to Ericsson’s work in Dweck’s book, and none to Dweck in Ericsson’s massive edited volume, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Why this is, I don’t know, since the two bodies of work seem highly complementary to me. Both Ericsson and Dweck emphasize the importance of a few key things:

• Incremental increases in ability sustained over the long haul;
• Consistent motivation that makes the individual resilient in the face of setbacks;
• An emphasis on learning and improvement rather than status or comforts.

If any of you who are better-versed in academic psychology than I am (not a hard standard to reach!) can enlighten me on potential divisions between the work of Dweck and Ericsson, please do.

We CAN change our brains and our lives.

It should be noted that those with the growth mindset are correct in scientific terms when they express a belief that they can learn and get better. Conversely, those with the fixed mindset are factually, scientifically incorrect when they believe that their mental abilities are fixed.

Why? Over the past couple of decades, breakthroughs in neuroscience have demonstrated that humans (along with many other animals) display a remarkable degree of neuroplasticity. This means that our brains, far from being set like concrete when we reach adulthood, can continue to form new connections and pathways in a virtuous cycle that (a) grows out of new patterns of thought and behavior and (b) enables more new thoughts and behaviors.

Mind you, top performers like Darwin and Edison and Picasso were acting like the brain could do this long before the neuroscientists proved it.

Grinders in sports

What ties together all these high performers is the consistent pursuit of improvement. While many fields of endeavor demonstrate the truth of this, one of Dweck’s clearest chapters talks about how these concepts apply in the world of sports. For all the faults that can lay hidden in sports metaphors, sports’ clear-cut definitions of performance make them a useful domain for studying the underlying principles of excellence.

The sports world is filled with famous examples of “grinders” who succeeded despite limited ability, and of stars who excelled by marrying a greater level of aptitude to a grinder’s mentality. Here are a few examples of my own:

• Pete Rose became baseball’s Hit King by practicing and playing harder than everybody else.
• Football greats Walter Payton and Jerry Rice were famous for doing workouts so hard that other pro players couldn’t complete a training session alongside them.
• Larry Bird honed his incredible shooting ability through endless hours of practice — long after his teammates were out of the gym.
• Ivan Lendl lacked grace on the tennis court, but rode an iron-willed work ethic to eight Grand Slam wins and a record-breaking run as the #1 men’s tennis player in the world.

Lendl understood the advantage that his work ethic gave him over his flashier, more gifted rival John McEnroe, whom Dweck singles out (maybe a wee bit too much) as the poster child for the fixed mindset. McEnroe didn’t like to practice nearly as much as Lendl, and he often complained about bad calls from umpires or anything else that disturbed his need for perfect conditions on the court.

In Dweck’s analysis, McEnroe called attention to those times when he lost under imperfect conditions because it tended to place the blame for the loss on the conditions instead of on the way he himself played. One hallmark of fixed-mindset people is the tendency to portray themselves as victims of outside forces — anything or anyone besides themselves — to explain away their own failures. The psychology of the fixed minset is such that these folks must seek outside explanations, lest their assessment of their own worthiness crumble.

This is in stark contrast to greater champions who have fought through tough conditions. Dweck writes, “as Billie Jean King tells us, the mark of a champion is to win when things are not quite right.” Dweck cites other great champions — Michael Jordan, Mia Hamm, Jackie Joyner-Kersee — for their mental toughness and their ability to muster great performances even under adverse circumstances. Mindset was written long before the 2008 U.S. Open of golf, but Woods’s gutsy performance there, while playing on a broken knee, fits in right alongside Joyner-Kersee’s triumphs in the face of asthma attacks and hamstring injuries.

Basketball fans will remember Michael Jordan’s performance in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, when he scored 38 points in Salt Lake City, despite being seriously ill with a stomach virus. It’s not surprising that Dweck would quote Jordan on the importance of character or mindset above physical attributes:

For Jordan, success stems from the mind. “The mental toughness and the heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have. I’ve always said that and I’ve always believed that.” But other people don’t. They look at Michael Jordan and they see the physical perfection that led inevitably to his greatness.

Plow horses and other admirable types

Dweck spends plenty of time looking at other areas of endeavor, too, including education, personal relationships, and business. Across all of these fields, she undermines the myth of genius and elevates the importance of sustained hard work. Two passages can serve to illustrate her approach:

Experts agree that [Jackson] Pollock had little native talent for art, and when you look at his early products, it showed. They also agree that he became one of the greatest American painters of the twentieth century and that he revolutionized modern art. How did he go from point A to point B? . . .

Dedication is how Jackson Pollock got from point A to point B. Pollock was wildly in love with the idea of being an artist. He thought about art all the time, and he did it all the time. Because he was so gung-ho, he got others to take him seriously and mentor him until he mastered all there was to master and began to produce startlingly original works.

[Jim] Collins [in Good to Great] reports that Alan Wurtzel, the CEO of . . . Circuit City, held debates in his boardroom. Rather than simply trying to impress his board of directors [as someone with a fixed mindset might], he used them to learn. With his executive team as well, he questioned, debated, prodded until he slowly gained a clearer picture of where the company was and where it needed to go . . .

Wurtzel considered himself a “plow horse,” a hardworking, no-nonsense normal kind of guy, but he took a company that was close to bankruptcy and over the next fifteen years turned it into one that delivered the highest total return to its stockholders of any firm on the New York Stock Exchange.

We contain multitudes.

Dweck admits that few of us are all one type — all growth-oriented or all fixed-mindset. In my own experience, I’ve known plenty of people who had growth-minded attitudes when it came to, say, scientific or literary ideas, but fixed-minded ones when it came to, say, physical fitness or relationships. A successful athlete, conversely, might have a lot of confidence in her ability to take on new athletic or social situations, without having similar confidence to launch into graduate school.

The beauty of Dweck’s work is that it opens our eyes to the possibilities for growth across different areas of our lives, while alerting us to the fixed mindsets that may be weighing down our careers, relationships, families, or schooling.

In every case, we can stoke a passionate curiosity and an appetite for open-ended hard work so that we can grow. As Dweck puts it,

The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we’re talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that’s why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.

The verdict: a book that can change your life and work for the better

I had a few quibbles with the book, mostly with its narrative flow. (The editor in me would have suggested one more round of tweaks to the manuscript to clarify a few things.) But these were no more than quibbles, and for the sake of your own growth, if you detect fixed-mindset thinking in yourself, I urge you to read this book and put it to use in your own life and career.

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Next time: the implications of Mindset for savvy businesses.

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Related posts:

• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?
• How well do you tolerate mistakes?

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(Photo credits: Darwin, Mozart, dendrites [CC-No derivatives license], Woods, Pollock.)

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Five years ago, advertising executive Paul Arden published a chutzpah-laden little book titled It’s Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World’s Best Selling Book. Arden’s recent death sent me back to the bookshelf to give the book another look. Here, for your reflection, are some key tidbits from the book, which is written in a highly aphoristic style. Emphasis added.

~ ~ ~

Nearly all rich and powerful people are not notably talented, educated, charming, or good-looking. They become rich and powerful by wanting to be rich and powerful.

~ ~ ~

You must develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end.

~ ~ ~

People who are conventionally clever get jobs on their qualifications (the past), not on their desire to succeed (the future).

~ ~ ~

If you are involved in something that goes wrong, never blame others. Blame no one but yourself.

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Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you.

~ ~ ~

Don’t look for the next opportunity. The one you have in hand is the opportunity.

~ ~ ~

When it can’t be done, do it. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t exist.*

~ ~ ~

Being right is based upon knowledge and experience and is often provable. . . . Experience is the opposite of being creative. If you can prove you’re right, you’re set in concrete. You cannot move with the times or with other people.

~ ~ ~

Start being wrong and suddenly anything is possible. You’re no longer trying to be infallible.

~ ~ ~

Don’t give a speech. Put on a show.

~ ~ ~

Rough layouts sell the idea better than polished ones.

~ ~ ~

Don’t be afraid to work with the best.

~

* This one may need a bit of explaining. He’s saying that, if people tell you that something can’t be done, there’s no sense trying to convince them; you just have to go out and do it so you can show them. He uses the example of Orson Welles, who couldn’t get real funding for Citizen Kane until he had already shot a goodly chunk of it. Until then, the idea wasn’t real.

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A Broken System

The thesis of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It is as provocative as its title. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson seriously believe that businesses can achieve new levels of success — and that employees can achieve new levels of personal happiness — when businesses start treating employees like grownups, by holding them responsible for the results of their work rather than any of the trappings that we’ve come to use as proxies to tell us how hard people work.

I know, “results.” Crazy, huh?

What are the proxy measures we so often use? Things like how many hours you spend in the office, how “busy” you seem to be, and how heavily booked you are into meetings. As the authors emphasize again and again, none of these things actually indicate how good a person is at a job or how well they are performing in the job. Probably we’ve all known people who spent 12 hours a day in the office, yet never seemed to deliver on their projects — or, worse, who actually created more work for others than they ever took care of themselves. And we all know people who wear their busy-ness like a badge.

A Focus on RESULTS

Too many companies — too many of us — have put up with these varieties of nonsense for reasons that have a lot to do with habit and tradition and not much to do with actual productivity. This devotion to the status quo has cost us untold amounts, in terms of both foregone productivity and thwarted human fulfillment. Ressler and Thompson want us to discard these old ways of being for a new paradigm, the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), which promotes results as the be-all and end-all of business, and demotes appearances, trappings, rituals, and everything else to the point that they are no more than optional add-ons to our work experience.

Crucially, in a ROWE the option for adding on these trappings lies with workers, not with management. Management sets the stage by making it very, very clear what sort of results are expected and in what timeframe, but then it frees up workers, both individually and in teams, to achieve results by whatever legal methods work for them. If your graphic designer can work up a logo for a new promotion while sitting in her jammies at her grandma’s house in Manila, who cares? The work got done — the result was achieved — and the business need was met. Even better, the designer is likely to be far more loyal to your company because you let her go visit her old grandma without making a big deal about it, and because you trusted her to get the work done remotely.

The ROWE idea takes full advantage of modern Internet technology, and it embraces the reality that much of today’s knowledge-work can be achieved just as well (if not better) in an environment outside the typical corporate cube-farm.

Embracing Massive Change

Mind you, ROWE also implies huge changes for management — new routines, new areas of focus, and new ways of thinking about everything from staff meetings to “managing by walking around” to performance evaluations, raises, and promotions. Although they don’t spend very much time detailing these implications, the authors are candid and unapologetic about them. In their view, if a ROWE brings better business results while making life easier for workers, it ought to be followed, starting as soon as possible, by every company that can possibly follow it. Q.E.D.

Their assurance about this is not based in theory or abstractions, because they’ve spent the past few years implementing the ROWE method at a little outfit called Best Buy, where the entire corporate staff now adheres to ROWE principles. (Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson wrote the foreword for the book.)

The baker’s dozen of “Guideposts” that spell out these principles are deceptively simple. They include:

• “People at all levels stop doing any activity that is a waste of their time, the customer’s time, or the company’s time.”
• “Employees have the freedom to work any way they want.”
• “Nobody talks about how many hours they work.”
• “Every meeting is optional.”

If the first three examples don’t choke many corporate managers, that last one surely will. You can almost hear the sputtering: “But, but, people have to be in the weekly staff meeting!”

Oh, really? It’s really that important?

The Unexamined Myths of the Old Way of Business

Ressler and Thompson have spent years of work — and they spend the bulk of this book — posing those pointed questions to the Old Way of working. Is it really important that people attend the weekly team meeting? What if they spent that time serving customers or working shoulder-to-shoulder with other team members instead?

Is it really important that you keep track of people’s time? What if someone incompetent works a zillion hours of overtime but still doesn’t get the job done? Shouldn’t you fire that person and hire someone who will deliver results, regardless of how long (or not-long) it takes them?

Does it really show “commitment” to the company to come in on Saturday, come in before 8:00 on weekdays, stay past dinnertime, and so on? There are some very good companies where such overwork is seen as a negative, not a positive, if it hampers the happiness-with-life and overall effectiveness (i.e. the ability to deliver results) of the worker.

The authors raise these awkward questions to bring the focus back to results, and to show how the Old Way of doing things arises, in many cases, from the workplace assumptions of the Industrial Age, rather than from a sober assessment of the way things work today. In a factory setting, one well-trained worker will produce more than another primarily by dint of working more hours on the line, but that’s hardly true — or at least, it’s not necessarily true — of most of the information-driven jobs we see in the modern office setting.

The Dread Affliction of “Sludge”

As Ressler and Thompson go to great lengths to describe, our twisted notions about what constitutes “hard work” and “commitment” often come out in the form of what they call “Sludge.” Sludge is what happens when your co-worker gets in at 9:45 a.m. and you say, “Well, look who decided to join us!” Sludge is what happens in the break room when Jimmy says to Jenny, “Man, every time I want to stop by Meg’s desk and get a quick answer on something, she’s always out taking care of her kid.”

Here’s the point: if Meg isn’t getting her work done, she should be fired. It doesn’t matter if it’s because family duties overwhelm her or because she sits at her desk and reads Craigslist all day. And, more to the point, in the overwhelming majority of cases where the Megs of the world are getting their work done, no one should have the right to criticize her because she happens to want to pick up her child from school. If she’s delivering results, who cares? Jimmy should send her an e-mail and expect an answer by tomorrow — and, by the way, he shouldn’t handle his work such that it all lives or dies based on whether Meg’s at her desk at a given moment. (What would he do if Meg came down with appendicitis?)

A Vision of a Better Future

A Sludge-free working experience is the major goal of the ROWE, and Ressler and Thompson do a good job of preaching this gospel. They pepper their short book with many first-person tales from workers (at Best Buy and elsewhere) who have suffered under the Old Way and benefited from the ROWE method. At times they may go on too much about Sludge,* or about how ROWE principles should be applied to absolutely everybody everywhere,** but that’s a small price to pay for the bracing dose of fresh thinking that this book delivers.

Transforming your company into a ROWE isn’t as simple as snapping your fingers; indeed, the authors spend plenty of time going over details of how it works, and they have an active consulting business dedicated to implementing ROWE for clients. But the principles behind it are breathtakingly simple:

• Give up your old fetish of constant control.
• Embrace the possibilities of modern technology to untether people from old, tedious ways of working.
• Free people up to do great work — work that truly delivers results.

Crazy, huh?

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Related Posts:

• The Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE): a first look.
• What’s YOUR working day like?

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NOTES:

* Or maybe I’m just lucky to work at Hoover’s, where Sludge must run way below average, at least if Ressler and Thompson’s horror stories from the field are any indication.

** An example kept coming to mind as I read this book: Many years ago, I was responsible for the receptionist staff in a busy office on the campus of my beloved alma mater. Most of these receptionists were undergraduates who took the job as a work-study gig — which was fine by me, since I had done the same thing when I was their age. And most of them had no trouble at all understading the demands of the job. But a couple of them had to be reminded more than once that there was a crucial difference between arriving in the office at 7:59 a.m., which was great, and 8:03 a.m., which was real trouble in that we often had VIPs walking in the door for 8:00 a.m. appointments.

Now, maybe in a ROWE the relentless focus on results would make it clear eventually to new receptionists that they really should be there promptly at 8:00. But in the actual environment of that actual office, we didn’t have time to let them to arrive at their own conclusions about the most results-oriented time to arrive, or to come to the conclusion that it was A-OK to come in at 8:05. Our clientele expected better.

This was especially true since plenty of these kids were 19 years old and had never held an office job before. My experience told me then — and tells me now — that they needed to be told, “You’ve GOT to be here promptly at 8:00.” In fact, I was doing them a favor to clarify that particular expected result, which happened to have everything to do with what time they arrived at work. I hope I never delivered the message unkindly, but I’m don’t think that the trust-everyone-always message of ROWE applied in practical terms in that setting.

That said, I stand prepared to be enlightened.

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