Business Insight Zone

This is what I get for waiting to do a job “the right way.” For months now I’ve been meaning to write a review of Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. It’s a good book, albeit with flaws, that has lots of important ideas about “deliberate practice.” But the review I have in mind would probably rival my Russian-novel-esque treatment of Edward Hallowell’s CrazyBusy, and who has the time for that?

So, for now here are pointers to three items on Talent is Overrated that I’ve found useful:

1. You don’t get better at writing essays by writing more essays. In this post, G. Brett Miller draws on his U.S. Army experience to confirm Colvin’s observation that the military, at least in peacetime, does a much better job than the mainstream of corporate America at performing deliberate practice. Key quote:

When I left the military and joined the corporate world, what struck me most was how little practicing — and how little learning and improving — anyone did. For anything.

It’s worth pondering Miller’s comparison of the typical corporation to the military in wartime.

2. Software coder Mark Needham offers a straightforward summary of the concepts of the book in his detailed book review. Although he uses some examples from the world of computer programming, nontechnical readers will also get a lot from his clear exposition of the book’s principles.

I particularly like Needham’s call “to create shorter and more effective feedback cycles for individuals to help them to get better.” This is a real challenge for companies that are married to annual reviews as the main (or only!) means of regular feedback, but it’s a challenge that must be overcome if the principles of deliberate practice are to take hold in an organization.

3. At his Three Star Leadership Blog, Wally Bock takes Colvin’s book down a peg in “Talent is Overrated is overrated and overpriced.” Bock praises Colvin for laying out important precepts — talent is overrated, and you will need a lot of time working on your skills — but suggests that readers might be as well served to read Colvin’s FORTUNE articles on the subject (to which he links), along with a related item from the Harvard Business Review.

Bock also says that, in the book,

There’s too little attention paid to other factors that influence success like coaching, family support, developmental assignments, and luck. There’s virtually no discussion of the fact that for leadership and other business skill areas, learning and doing intertwine.

I liked the book better than Wally did, but I do agree that Colvin didn’t do as much as he might’ve to explain specifically how his paragons of business deliberate practice, Jeff Immelt and Steve Ballmer, used deliberate practice to ascend the heights of corporate success.

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I’ll give a more detailed critique of the book soon. Meanwhile, what are your thoughts?

• If you’ve read Talent Is Overrated, what do you think of it?
• Even if you haven’t, what do you think of the premise that deliberate practice can improve business performance?

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Related:

• Deliberate practice in a nutshell.
• Deliberate practice in the working world.

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. . . as I slump to the end of a tiring — but inspiring — week.

1. Quoth Bill James:

People take information and build knowledge. When you give them new information they will create new knowledge, absolutely and without question.

I take this seriously, not particularly in its baseball context, but because Hoover’s has worked hard for many years to bring high-quality, relevant information to businesspeople. All the time I’m thinking more about how we can do this better, not just in the sense of supplying information better and faster, but in the sense of helping you turn it into new knowledge that fuels your business.

That’s just a sketch of a much bigger idea — more to come.

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2. You may know that in many cases I’m a foe of business meetings, but I had a great one today. After I came out if it, I tweeted this, half in jest:

A good meeting is one you come out of with a hit list in hand.

After discussing it with a friend — who rightly stumped for the benefit of having a clear meeting agenda — I followed up with this:

Sharp clarity going in, severe clarity coming out should be the goal of a meeting.

If a meeting doesn’t exhilirate you, or scare you a little, or give you relief by answering some of your burning questions . . . what good is it?

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3. Something to think about if you find you’re having a hard time thinking:

The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. . . . Our brains can generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.

How can you improve your own attention? Or your customers’? Or your employees’? It might make a big difference to your business.

Related:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.

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Photo by fauxto_digit, used under a Creative Commons license.

Jakob Nielsen raises a very good point in this BusinessWeek piece about businesspeople’s use of Twitter:

If you care about productivity, don’t check your Twitter feed while you’re trying to get work done. Disruptions are deadly for productivity because it takes several minutes to reorient the brain every time you go off track looking at something else.

It’s a point I’ve hammered on before, one that grows out of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research into “Flow”: we don’t — we cannot — sink down into a piece of work until we’ve spent at least 15 or 20 uninterrupted minutes on it. This is when we get “in the zone,” lose all track of time, and lose any self-consciousness about the work we’re doing. We just work.

Much as I love Twitter, using it heavily makes you prone to exactly the types of interruptions that are likeliest to diminish your ability to do your best, deepest, most “Flow”-driven work.

But . . . right after the snippet quoted above, Nielsen said:

Stick to checking updates once per day — for example, during lunch. All the tweets will still be there.

Not so — at least not for many power users of Twitter. Many of the heavy users who extract lots of value from Twitter do so by dipping into it throughout the day, and it doesn’t work for them to check it once per day. By dipping in frequently, they can sample the current flow of tweets and engage in active-but-transient conversations that won’t be current later on.

So, good use of time or bad use of time? Or, to put it a different way: do you let the brain win, or do you let Twitter win?

I don’t have the answer, but I have two questions that I’d like YOU to answer:

1. How would you decide whether frequent use of Twitter throughout the day was a worthwhile use of your brain, in business terms?
2. How many areas of your everyday work besides Twitter violate the concept of “Flow” along the lines of what Nielsen describes? (Hint: e-mail.)

I look forward to your answers in the comments. Hit me with your best shot!

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Related posts:

• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
• Book review: CrazyBusy, by Edward Hallowell.
• How Flow is like a good cup of coffee.
• Fewer meetings should lead to more “Flow.”

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Photo by Laszlo Ilyes, used under a Creative Commons license.

Climb that hill!

Is your mindset fixed, telling you that what’s so is so and unlikely to change?

Or is it attuned to growth, leading you to look for ways to do things differently, make things better, try again?

The growth-vs.-fixed dichotomy is at the heart of Prof. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, which I reviewed here last year, and which I recommend to anyone. Many years of painstaking research by Dweck revealed that a growth mindset was the common denominator for many high performers across diverse fields of endeavor.

My guess is that the state of the economy has driven a lot of people into fixed-mindset-land. But I’m sure that we would all benefit from a society-wide conversion to the growth mindset.

• What are you doing to prevent the fixed mindset from taking hold?
• What can you do to promote a growth mindset for yourself, your team, your entire organization?

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Photo by Rudi Riet, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Plain as the nose on your face.

The question comes to mind after reading these lines from Merlin Mann:

Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like, gang. And, eventually somebody will figure out (and publicly admit) that Kutiman, and any number of his peers on the “To-Sue” list, should be passed from Legal down to A&R.

Everybody knows the business has moved from legal to binary files. The question now is how much more lead time old media companies and other IP-obsessives can afford to burn by pretending it’s otherwise.

It’s hard to change your ways. It’s hard culturally, socially, and neurologically.

But you’ve got to do it if you want to get better outcomes.

What’s obvious to you by now? Are you acting on it?

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Related:

• Being wrong.
• Western Union and record labels.
  

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Photo by Dave Scelfo, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Are your thoughts and obligations packed together this tightly?

The Attention Deficit Doctor

Dr. Edward Hallowell is psychiatrist who’s known best for his groundbreaking work on Attention Deficit Disorder. He coined the term “Attention Deficit Trait,” or ADT, to refer to the ADD-like symptoms that affect so many of us today because we overstimulate ourselves with too much information, too many obligations, too many inputs.

If you suffer from ADT — no shame in that — here’s a three-point summary of Hallowell’s book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD:

• “Owing to disorganization, frustration, and the feeling of being overloaded, the person tends to waste his or her creativity, energy, and talent, getting more and more buried under unmet obligations, unfinished projects, and piles of books or papers waiting to be read.”
• The antidote is straightforward to describe, but difficult to implement: “In order to cope with the many demands of everyday life and the information overload each day brings, a person needs to be able to stop and think, to pause over one point long enough to extract what matters before moving on. . . . Life is a powerful accelerator these days; what separates the successful from the frustrated is the quality of their brakes and their ability to use them.”
• Working harder or faster will never be the solution to this problem, because of basic constraints in how our brains work; Hallowell takes considerable pains to describe these constraints and how to work with them instead of against them.

If any of this rings a bell for you, I encourage you to find a time to set aside your busyness long enough to read what follows. And if this review prompts you to read CrazyBusy, so much the better. I wouldn’t call it a timeless classic, but it is a highly informed analysis of our current maddening ways of doing business — personally and collectively — and it’s loaded with wise prescriptions, both scientific and philosophical, for how you can turn down the “crazy” in your life by turning down the level of “busy” that plagues so many of us.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Book Review

Let me tell you a little story at my own expense. Last year, after writing about Read more

One of these days I’ll review Talent Is Overrated at length. (You may recall that it’s been on my desk for a while.) Meanwhile, here’s a short distillation of the core ideas on “deliberate practice” that Geoff Colvin captures in that book — and that Prof. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues laid out in their research.

Talent isn’t the issue — well-designed practice IS. Practice is well-designed when it’s:

• specific & technique-oriented
• high-repetition
• paired with immediate feedback.

Big performers often don’t display the most “talent” when they’re starting out. What they DO display is:

• self-regulation
• an ever-growing base of knowledge
• powerful mental models for organizing / accessing / using that knowledge.

That’s it. Don’t worry about how much talent you have for whatever-it-is you’re passionate about. Just start practicing better.

Fellow deliberate practice buffs: have I captured the key ideas here?

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Related posts:

• Deliberate practice in the working world. (Big omnibus post, lots of links to other reading.)
• The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action.
• This is how you get better: deliberate practice.

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Image by Vincent Liu, used under a Creative Commons license.

A friend used that acronym — a new one for me — in a Twitter conversation recently. It means:

Learned Something New Today

This could be the mantra for many a successful otaku.

Wait, what? Otaku? LSNT? Is this a jargon lesson, or a business blog? (Quick answer: both!)

Otaku is a Japanese term meaning someone “with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga, and video games.” A buff, a nut, an XYZ-head.

The Otaku Scientist

I learned about otaku a couple of weeks ago while I was reading through Mark McGuinness’s fabulous series of posts about Charles Darwin’s creative process. Here’s the key bit from the post “Darwin’s Voyage of Discovery”:

Visiting the Darwin exhibition [at the Natural History Museum in London] was a bit like spending time in the company of a charming but obsessive friend. We all know them — people who never shut up about football or cooking, or who reinterpret every conversation in psychological or political terms. They can be fascinating, but you sometimes wish they would change the subject. I got the impression Darwin hardly ever changed the subject. It seemed to be constantly on his mind. Even he found it wearying — while working on his theory of evolution he used to play billiards every evening, in an attempt to ‘drive the horrid species out of my head’.

The Japanese have a word for this kind of obsessive person - ‘otaku‘. It means something like ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’. A classic otaku has an encyclopaedic knowledge of things like manga comics or technology, but you can also be an otaku about any subject. We’ve seen before on the Lateral Action that obsessive behaviour is often critical to creative achievement - whether in Michelangelo’s countless drawings, Brian Wilson’s marathon recording sessions, or Stanley Kubrick’s mind bogglingly detailed research for his films.

Darwin was clearly an evolution otaku. His curiosity about the natural world combined with the questions he had inherited from past thinkers, leading to the habitual observation, questioning and thinking to which he attributed his success. His obsession manifested firstly in the meticulous observation and collection of specimens during the voyage of the Beagle, and later in the endless hours of study and reflection through which he worked out his theory. The fact that he was an otaku meant he persisted when the dabblers gave up.

The Otaku Coach

This reminds me of something I read a while back about the greatest professional (gridiron) football coach of this generation, Bill Belichick:

“Perhaps his most unheralded virtue, but one that explains plenty to me, is his innate curiosity,” [Belichick's friend Rob] Ingraham wrote in an e-mail message. “Bill wants to know what makes things tick, and when applied to his passion for football, this extends to every facet of the game: ‘What makes this blitz work? How do you counter this blitz? How can you disguise this blitz? How can we vary this blitz? Who can I call tonight to talk blitzes with?’

“You get the picture,” Ingraham added. “No stone goes unturned because his curiosity drives him to learn everything he can, which he then absorbs, thinks about, mixes into the boiling pot with the other ingredients and ultimately prepares to dish out on some poor unsuspecting sap. It’s been said that he’s not Mr. X’s and O’s, but rather Mr. A to Z, the complete package. I believe that his curiosity has been the catalyst in bringing all this together. Not unlike some other accomplished gents throughout history!”

Now, I doubt that Belichick will go down in world history like Darwin or Michelangelo, but the theme is the same: he’s an otaku of football, and a lifetime of studying the game hasn’t dimmed his fire to learn yet more about it.

What about you? Are you an otaku for your passions? Are you committed to LSNT — every day?

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Photo by skycaptaintwo, used under a Creative Commons license.

“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”
–René Descartes

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Let me explain it the way I understand it. Anyone in the audience with better neuroscientific chops (read: “anyone in the audience”) should feel free to correct or expand on what I say here.

1. The frontal lobe of the brain is the seat of human creativity. It is the place where novel thoughts arise and new relationships between things are imagined.
2. The frontal lobe of the brain shuts down in the face of fear or worry, at which point the “lower” centers of our brain in the cerebellum kick in to carry out things like the fight-or-flight instinct. This is handy when you’re confronted with a tiger, but less handy when you’re wondering how you’ll pay the bill for your kid’s braces — or, more to the point, how you’ll hit your work targets for the month.
3. The cerebellum is extraordinarily powerful for carrying out habitual tasks — brushing your teeth, touch-typing — but cannot generate creative thought. Yet it will take over forcefully under conditions of stress.
4. If we want to balance our daily tasks in a way that harnesses the natural functions of our brains, we should form powerful habits around the parts of our days that can be made routine, while warding off anxieties so that our frontal lobes can come up with deep, creative, or cool solutions to our challenges.

If you’re responsible for just yourself in business, how can YOU form more powerful habits while warding off anxieties?

If you manage others, how can you help THEM do these things?

(This is part of what I was talking about when I talked about brain-friendly habits this morning.)

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Image by Hatchibombotar.

The other day I was making the case to a friend that Cary Grant was both the best and the most significant movie star in the history of Hollywood. I fully believe this, but after the fact I realized my wording came from a Benjamin Schwarz review in The Atlantic, in which Schwarz quotes David Thomson, who called Grant “the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema.”

After I sent that Atlantic link to my friend, I stumbled across this monumental Pauline Kael summa on Grant’s life and career. I managed to pull myself out of it after a few thousand words; as much as I love Grant (and love Kael’s writing), there are simply too many other things that need doing in a day. But before I abandoned the piece, I came across this gem, which meshes with everything I’ve read about deliberate practice:

ARCHIE LEACH found his vocation early and stuck to it. He studied dancing, tumbling, stilt-walking, and pantomime, and performed constantly in provincial towns and cities and in the London vaudeville houses. . . . The music-hall theatre became his world; he has said that at each theatre, when he wasn’t onstage, he was watching and studying the other acts from the wings.

How are you promoting the habits of deliberate practice in yourself? In your organization?

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Related posts:

• Deliberate practice in the working world.
• The work ethic of Will Smith: “deliberate practice” in action.
• This is how you get better: deliberate practice.
  

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Image source.