Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

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.

~

Next time: the implications of Mindset for savvy businesses.

~

Related posts:

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

~

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

We can get too smart for our own good. Too complicated.

At its worst, this tendency gets us hung up on the most trivial questions: “Which of the 100 new e-mails in my inbox should I handle first?” turns into a five-minute debate with yourself.* “Should the paint in the reception area be ‘eggshell’ or ‘French vanilla’?” turns into an hour-long meeting.†

Skip all that trivia — and winnow your stack of potential tasks / customers / projects / vendors / hires / etc. by applying the simplest possible tests:

• Does this enhance revenue directly — yes or no?
• If all our customers were like this, would they happily make us rich — yes or no?
• Will this project likely give us something useful — yes or no?
• Is this vendor easy to work with — yes or no?
• Does this conversation put me ahead or behind?
• Does this employee make us enough more than he or she costs us — yes or no?

Listen, if you have Hank Paulson’s thankless job, you’re going to have a lot of nuances to consider — and lots of constituencies to satisfy. If you’re building the Large Hadron Collider, ditto. I understand that hand surgery is quite complicated.

But many things in the business world are pretty elemental, if you’ll let them be. For these things, eliminate gray-area thinking and let ‘er rip.

The clarity can be breathtaking.

~

* One good answer: Start with the oldest e-mail and handle each message only once.
† Correct answer: Let the decorator decide what color the paint should be. Don’t solicit opinions.

The bear has come for Lehman.

Richard Fuld is a smart, driven man, and it’s a shame that his long tenure as the head of Lehman Brothers will be forever stained by the 158-year-old house’s bankruptcy. But the stain should endure, since Lehman indisputably bore Fuld’s imprint, and suffered from his decisions.

In this New York Times piece, Joe Nocera aptly summarizes the sort of garden-variety delusion that led to Lehman’s downfall (emphasis added):

[A]fter you get past the mind-numbing complexity of the derivatives that are at the heart of the current crisis, what’s going on is something we are all familiar with: denial. . . .

Last summer, as the credit crisis first gripped Wall Street, Mr. Fuld’s firm . . . concluded that the problems would be short-lived — and that those firms willing to take big risks would be the ones that would reap the big rewards once things calmed down. So Lehman doubled down on mortgage-backed derivatives — not unlike a Florida condo owner buying a second one to flip 18 months ago.

Big mistake. Ever since then, Lehman has had a terrible time admitting the magnitude of its mistake — or properly pricing its securities. As mortgage derivatives became increasingly toxic, they also became increasingly illiquid. So firms were left to set their own “mark-to-market” price. And just like so many homeowners, they kept pricing their securities higher than they should have. . . .

[Hedge fund manager David] Einhorn used to cast Lehman’s mark-to-market pricing as an act of dishonesty. I tend to think it was more like wishful thinking. Either way, the result was the same.

A week ago, even as the government was bailing out Fannie and Freddie, Mr. Fuld went off to seek new capital — something Lehman desperately needed to shore up its decimated balance sheet — from the Korea Development Bank. Why did those talks break down? Because Mr. Fuld wanted more for Lehman than the Koreans thought it was worth. He simply couldn’t face the reality that his firm wasn’t worth what he thought it was.

The rest of Nocera’s article is well worth reading, especially for the way he compares the denial of Fuld et al. to the denial of homeowners across the country who could not bring themselves to admit that their beloved homes could lose value, or that they had erred in taking on too much debt.

~ ~ ~

John Thain is a smart, driven man, and it’s to his credit that Merrill Lynch is ending its 94-year independent history in the arms of Bank of America rather than in bankruptcy.

Last year I opined that it would have been better if Merrill had been able to find a new CEO in-house, but that since it couldn’t, Thain looked to be a great fit for the job. By my reading, Thain was able to steer Merrill away from sharing Lehman’s fate because he wasn’t blinded by his own psychological investment in the firm’s history. He was able to come in with clear eyes and take realistic actions that might have been too painful for one of the company’s old hands.

My perspective is informed by this article by Merrill alumnus Henry Blodget. He provides a useful summary of Merrill’s boom-and-bust history under former (short-sighted) CEO Stanley O’Neal, then talks about the job Thain has done since he took the reins at Merrill.

Thain . . . had been dealt a tough hand, but, unlike his compatriots at Bear, Lehman, Fannie, Freddie, and other firms, he played it well. Specifically, instead of blaming skeptics and short-sellers for Merrill’s sagging stock price, Thain focused on strengthening the firm’s balance sheet. Several times over the next few quarters, he swallowed his pride, took more enormous write-offs, and raised even more capital.

Blodget makes a particularly good comparison between Thain and Fuld:

Over at Lehman, meanwhile, CEO Dick Fuld was dealing with the same problems and implementing the same solutions — but always a step behind.

Unlike Thain, Fuld hadn’t been brought in to fix Lehman — he had built it. So, making the aggressive “de-risking” moves Thain was making would have meant dismantling his own aggressive growth and leverage strategy. . . .

Fuld is human, and he made a mistake common to you, me, and everybody else — he wasn’t able to detach himself from his past actions to make the best decision about what should be done now. But Thain kept himself grounded in reality — no matter how bitter it may have been.

Once again, however, Thain played his weak cards wisely: Instead of wasting another precious day explaining to investors why the market was wrong and the firm’s balance sheet was strong, Thain acted. And this time, he fixed Merrill’s problem once and for all.

~ ~ ~

As Nocera put it in the opening sentence of his article, the prevailing reaction of denial is “How can this be happening?” Thain asked the much better question: “What can we do now?”

It’s easy to point at Fuld after the fact, because by now we know for certain that Lehman is in shambles. But the same errors — or temptations to err — that beset Fuld affect us all.

This is why the very best decision makers take deliberate steps to protect themselves from their own capacity for foolishness. Would that Fuld had done the same.

~

Related:

• Joe Nocera: On Wall Street as on Main Street, a Problem of Denial
• Henry Blodget: The Merrill Miracle: How a company staved off financial doom.
• “Mark-to-model” as a synonym for “wishcasting.”
• Merrill taps the right man.
• Confirmation bias: fight the Procrustean instinct.
  

~

(Picture by hill.josh.)

The dreaded “extras”

Talk to someone who doesn’t know how to budget, and you won’t have to wait long before you hear about “extra” expenses cropping up.

I’ve been there, in my younger days. You find yourself blindsided by the “unforeseeable” need to do $1,000 in repairs on your 10-year-old car. As though older cars never break down, or need replacement parts. A new timing belt? Who could have seen that coming?!

Lack of foresight in business

It’s the same with weak management. Who could possibly have foreseen that housing prices might come off of historic highs? Well, lots of savvy investors did — but lots of un-savvy ones were left holding the bag.

Jamie Dimon may or may not have foreseen the collapse of the subprime housing market, but in any event he prudently steered JPMorgan Chase away from those risks. Warren Buffett doesn’t need to foresee the collapse of bubbles, because he makes a habit of investing in bubble-resistant ways.

Some may say, “Well, sure, but those are two of the best CEOs in the world.” I say, “How do you think they GOT to be the best in the world?” Prudence.

Specifics and trends

Just because you can’t foresee the specific source of a one-off expense, or a bubble’s meltdown, doesn’t mean that you can’t prepare for the likelihood of some expense or disaster. Countless buildings in Japan and California are built to withstand huge earthquakes that may come tomorrow . . . or in 500 years.

The best performers — in business, in personal finance, in the arts, in anything — take prudent risks, risks they can live with. And they don’t act surprised when foreseeable “accidents” happen, because they’ve been preparing all along to deal with them. They’re ready to forge ahead regardless.

Look around you.

In your life, in your career planning, in your department at work . . . are you responding prudently to foreseeable risks? Or pinning your hopes on a rosy future in which nothing “unforeseeable” ever crops up?

Hard as it is to come to grips with painful reality, it’s a lot better than the alternative.

~

(Photo by houseoftext, used under a CC Share Alike license.)

What if it’s just a mirage?

Try this on for size: Half a dozen times today, pause when you come across an assumption — yours or someone else’s — and probe it with questions like these:

• Does it really need to be that way?
• Is that really the reason?
• How do we know?
• What are the data?
• Which part of this is inference?
• . . .

This has been a long-running favorite thinking tool for me, but I was reminded of it with new force a couple of weeks ago when I read this great, short article by my friend Esther Schindler:

Fighting the Superstitions of Software Development: Questioning the Assumptions

[. . .] One of the wisest, most brilliant programmers I ever met had a team lead habit I loved. If you made a technical assertion, Mike would ask, “Is that true?” Mike didn’t ask the question to imply you were wrong; he asked, “Is that true?” to challenge your assumptions and to determine upon what data you drew your conclusions. If you said, “Yes, that’s right. Here’s why…” and made it clear your statement came from somewhere, he’d be satisfied, and you’d earn his respect.

If the programmer stuttered, “Um, I guess it’s true,” instead, more often than not the programmer headed back to his office to find out the real story. Or Mike would help the developer re-examine the assumptions being built into the software. If the assumptions made sense, fine. If not, it was an opportunity to write better code. [. . .]

Give Esther’s article a read — it’s worth your time, even if you’re not a programmer. As you take its lessons to heart, keep in mind that the point of the assumption-questioning exercise isn’t to do these three things:

1. Workplace epistemology. I’ll be the first to confess that I can get highly abstract at times. And it can be interesting to contemplate Deep Stuff as a change of pace from the go-go-go of the daily business grind. But don’t stubbornly keep your head in the clouds with philosophical questions: bring it back to the here-and-now for the sake of your teammates and your projects.
2. Arguing semantics for the sake of semantics. I hate it when someone says, “That’s just semantics” right after they’ve encountered a smart objection to something they said that was tendentious or unclear. Words matter — they matter a lot. But some people seem to relish arguing about the letter of the words at the expense of the spirit of the words. Don’t be one of them.
3. Showing others up. Do we need to spell this out? Super-programmer Mike wasn’t asking “Is that true?” because he wanted to humiliate anyone, but because he wanted to solve the problem. Go out of your way to make it clear (and to make it true) that you want to help find better answers, not tear anybody down.

If you follow Esther’s advice, and you avoid these pitfalls, you’ll uncover all sorts of fruitful avenues for improvement — for yourself, your team, your projects, and your organization.

Really.

~

(Mirage photo by Michael Gwyther-Jones.)

Waaay back in my college-bachelor days, I managed to keep my dance card reasonably full — despite a paltry bankroll and the un-Cary Grant-like face you see in the sidebar — simply because . . . I talked to women.

I know, I know, I am just full of breathtakingly original strategies.

Yet my massively oversimplified approach — talk to lots of girls, be nice to everybody — got me a lot more dates than a buddy of mine. He easily had as much to offer as I did to prospective girlfriends, but he was too full of theories about how he should go about it, when would be the perfect time to make his move, and so on.

Don’t overthink.

Thing is, our smarty-pants brains love to come up with reasons why not, reasons to delay, reasons we’re not ready. And it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about asking for a date, launching a new project, asking for a raise, or starting an entrepreneurial venture.

Sure, sometimes you need to concern yourself with timing. I wouldn’t recommend opening your summer action-blockbuster movie on the same weekend as the sequel to Iron Man, for example. I wouldn’t recommend paying a call to Wal-Mart’s buying offices before your infrastructure can be ramped up to fill any order they might choose to place.

But unless there’s a specific, compelling reason to delay . . . press “Play,” walk right up to the object of your attentions, and ask if you can have this dance.

A confession

Sometimes I struggle with pressing the “Publish” button for posts on this blog. I want to do more homework, or I’m not sure which post I should work on first, or . . . well, it doesn’t matter, does it? The point is, I can be prone to delay.

The antidote: work straight through, get it done, then send it out into the world. If it needs fixing, I can fix it — just like, back when I said something goofy to those college co-eds, I could laugh at myself and say “Let’s try that again.”

How do YOU overcome the tendency to delay?

~

(Picture by Robyn Gallagher.)

Oliver Wendell Holmes said many wise things, but perhaps none wiser than this:

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity,
but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.

Consider:

• We often like things to be simple-simple, because then they’re easy to understand.
• I’ve seen many smart people retreat to complexity as a shield for not knowing what they’re talking about, or else get stuck in complexity because it was easier than breaking free into the simplicity beyond.
• The most impressive minds I’ve ever encountered belonged to individuals who were able to explain the deepest topics in language shorn of all needless jargon and obscurity. They drew on a rich basis of knowledge to convey something simple in its exposition, but profound in its implications.

Now, think about your own business, your own expertise:

• Have you — or those around you — tended to oversimplify?
• Have you been basking in complexity?
• Have you shied away from working out the profoundly simple (richer, unsettling) implications of the way you work, of your company’s trajectory, of your career?

What next steps does this exercise suggest for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments, and later I’ll post my own thoughts.

~

(Photo by Gaetan Lee.)

For a while now I’ve been meaning to read The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s come highly recommended by many, including Tom Peters, who has raved about it repeatedly. I’ll post about it at length once I’ve read the book, but meanwhile I thought I’d share this interesting tidbit from Taleb:

Once again, real life is not a casino with simple bets. This is the error that helps the banking system go bust with an astonishing regularity — I’ve showed that institutions that are exposed to negative black swans, like banks and some classes of insurance ventures, have almost never profitable over long periods. The problem of the illustrative current subprime mess is not so much that the “quants” and other pseudo-experts in bank risk management were wrong about the probabilities (they were), but that they were severely wrong about the different layers of depth of potential negative outcomes.

I remember, just a couple of years ago, a lot of breathless coverage of the financial sector that talked about how all the math had changed when considering risk and leverage.

As Taleb points out, the math didn’t change, but many big and small financiers (plus homebuyers et al.) convinced themselves that it did . . . and so they got it wrong.

Taleb’s larger topic — how we fool ourselves about what we know and what it means — is a topic I expect to revisit again and again. I’m convinced that many of our standard operating procedures in business are grounded upon false assumptions, and that much success in business is there for the taking for any of us who are willing to examine our assumptions.

“Look what I made!”

Think of the joy in the voice of a child who’s just made something. It might not be a striking work of art, and it might not mean anything to anyone besides the child and her parents. But that spirit — of discovery, of possibility — can make a big difference in how the child thinks.

When I talk to people who are unfulfilled in their work, what’s often missing is the sense that they might be able to use their work to discover something interesting, to explore possibilities, or to extend their selves in new directions. They’re stifled — not just logistically but emotionally — by bureaucracy, onerous rules, long meetings, wasted time.

What the heck are you talking about, Tim?

I picture someone asking’ “Did you just say, ‘extend their selves in new directions’? I thought this was a proper, grown-up business blog.”

Too often in the world of work, we pay lip service to ideas like creativity without acknowledging that real creativity usually happens for people who have some emotional — not just financial — vested interest in the outcome of their inquiry. “Innovation” isn’t a strategy you implement in the abstract, or a switch you flip one day when you come into the office. It’s tied to the freedom and positive sense of challenge that people feel while they’re doing their work.

Feel-good mumbo-jumbo?

The other day my blogging hero, Kathy Sierra, said something about this in a tweet:

Amazing how many powerful brain hacks in the past suffered from positioning as ‘new-age-foo-foo’, but now science starts explaining.

Kathy has long used the insights of brain science to help others “kick ass,” as she’s fond of putting it. Since she teaches computer programming, her version of this is centered around users of the software. If you’re building a product, you’ll do well to adopt the same goal. And if you’re a manager, your work ought to center around the people who work for you and how they can excel.

But don’t take my word for it, or Kathy’s. Consider this, from the pioneering psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Finding Flow:

. . . [H]uman beings feel best in flow, when they are fully involved in meeting a challenge, solving a problem, discovering something new. Most activities that produce flow also have clear goals, clear rules, immediate feedback — a set of external demands that focuses our attention and makes demands of our skills.

Ponder that for a sec — all parts of it.

The joy of creation goes hand in hand with bottom-line success

The girl in the picture is “fully involved in meeting a challenge” that has “a set of external demands that focuses [her] attention and makes demands of [her] skills.” In her case, the challenge is making a chalk drawing on the sidewalk, which I’m guessing didn’t require a lot of convincing.

For your team, the challenges will be quite different: to improve some part of sales, marketing, operations, finance, IT, strategy, et cetera. But the sense of joy (read: personal fulfillment) can still be there, along with the meeting of goals (read: business fulfillment), IF the people on your team are allowed to find flow.

Csikszentmihalyi’s research shows that people achieve a lot of satisfaction — even doing things they’re made to do — when the parameters just mentioned apply. But keep in mind: flow requires that people have uninterrupted stretches of time when they can devote their full attention to the problem at hand, just as the girl is giving her full attention to her drawing.

What does this mean for managers?

If you want your people to experience the joy of creation while making hay for your organization, you can start by doing these things:

• Holding fewer and shorter meetings, ideally grouped into narrower bands of the day;
• Abandoning micromanagement;
• Using shorter, more meaningful task lists;
• Working from a realistic sense of time and clear priorities;
• Making a systematic (not to say belligerent) reduction in “workiness.”

Will these changes be awkward? Probably. But consider the upside of giving your people the sense of fulfillment that only comes from kicking butt.

Companies known for their (highly profitable) focus on the joy of creation include Zappos, Threadless, Google, and 37signals. Wouldn’t you like to join them?

~

Related posts:

• Kathy Sierra: BrainDeath by Micromanagement: The Zombie Function
• How Flow is like a good cup of coffee.
• “Workiness” is to work as “truthiness” is to truth.

~

(Photo from the Franklin Park Library’s photostream.)

It seems bizarre . . . but what if it works?

Before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute barrier for the mile in May 1954, running a sub-four-minute mile was supposed to be “impossible.”

We’ve heard some of the same nonsense about remedies for the possible (but overwhelmingly likely) dangers of climate change — that it’s not possible to do anything meaningful about global warming, or at least not without devastating consequences for standards of living worldwide. (Here’s one example.)

Roger Bannister proved that a man could run a sub-four-minute mile without dying or breaking down. And in various corners of the world, individuals and groups are working to demonstrate the same things about living in a more carbon-savvy way. Two examples:

• SmartPlanet: Emirates to build zero-carbon desert city — “Foster + Partners has drawn up a master plan for Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, designed to produce zero carbon emissions, zero waste and to be car-free. It’s being built according to the ten sustainability guidelines called One Planet Living drawn up by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and environmental consultancy BioRegional. Guidelines for building include sustainable materials, sustainable food and water, support of habitats, wildlife, culture and heritage, and to promote equity, fair trade, health and happiness.”
• The New Yorker: The Island in the Wind, by Elizabeth Kolbert — In this article, Kolbert talks about how the little Danish farming community of Samsø has shifted completely to wind power in the past decade.

Will these particular experiments will work on a broad scale? Who knows? Because of the accidents of petroleum wealth and autocratic governance, the United Arab Emirates are able to carry out grand experiments like Masdar City that could be awfully hard to duplicate in, say, Japan. And, as Kolbert makes clear in her article, in Samsø the wind blows all the time.

But my bet is that one of these experiments, or others like them, will come to be regarded in future decades as harbingers for better ways of designing cities and the energy grids that feed them. And in any event, trying large-scale experiments like these is a heck of lot more fruitful than sitting around saying that nothing can be done.

The application for business

Smart businesses are making the same transition. Whether driven by a sense of social responsibility, by the high costs of fuel, or simply by a prudent regard for managing future risks, these firms are trying things to reduce their energy use and improve their carbon footprint.

To the innovators go the spoils?

~

(Picture by Hiddenloop.)