Random Things

Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) and Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) have long advised companies what to do. But both suggest that the secret to high performance for individuals is deciding what not to do.

For instance, if you're reading this column at your desk, somewhere within an arm's length is your "to-do" list. Many of us can't imagine daily life without it. A to-do list focuses our attention and delivers a delicious dose of dopamine to our brains each time we cross off an item.

Peters has nothing against to-do lists, but he says that they're insufficient – that we should also create "to-don't" lists. He recommends that we specify and enumerate what holds us back – the actions, behaviours and obligations that sap our energy, distract our attention and therefore ought to be avoided.

"Get rid of all the clutter that undermines your sense of focus," Peters has advised. Your to-don't list can help you illuminate what belongs on your to-do list. As Peters puts it: "What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do."

Meanwhile, Collins has reached a similar conclusion. Years ago, when he was a graduate student, a professor told Collins that he wasn't leading a disciplined life, but merely a busy one.

She asked him how he would change his behaviour if he learned one day that he had just inherited $20 million but that he had only 10 more years to live. In that situation, she asked him, what would you stop doing? Thus was born Collins's counterpart to Peters's innovation. He calls it a "stop-doing list" – and he compiles it once a year.

"A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not," Collins wrote in 2003. "It is the discipline to discard what does not fit – to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort – that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life."

The key insight of both Peters and Collins is that we spend too much time on addition and not nearly enough on subtraction. Yet it's only by taking away what doesn't matter that allows us to reveal what does matter.

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So I urge you to give the Peters or Collins method a try – and make a list of your own. Lists have a peculiar resonance in our lives – a power to shape our behaviour in ways that other language forms often cannot match.

After all, God didn't offer Moses a few paragraphs of prose on Mount Sinai. Instead, he presented his commandments as a list. And, as it happens, eight out of 10 of them tell us what not to do.

The barriers to obtaining power aren’t so much competitors or external circumstances, but ourselves. If you really want power, you need to be willing to make the tradeoffs required and then get out of your own way. Some of the most important reasons people don’t seek power are:

• The effort required. I don’t know of any powerful people who don’t work a lot. Esserman sleeps little and so does Rudy Crew, the former school superintendent in New York and Miami-Dade County who was named the best school superintendent in the U.S. in the spring of 2008. CEOs travel constantly and are always “onstage,” working and thinking. Great results require enormous energy and effort. Some people think they want power, but aren’t willing to devote the time. As marketing guru Keith Ferrazzi told my class, “you have to work really, really hard. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but don’t count on it.” Studies of genius in every field ranging from art to science to athletics show that while individual talent matters, it is practice and coaching - effort — that is the key to success. Why would attaining power be any different?

• The time spent on strategic relationships. Most people, naturally enough, want to spend their time with friends, family, and close work associates. The problem is that people who are closest to you are also more likely to be close to each other and to have the same information and contacts as you do. In other words, they can provide you mostly redundant information and contacts. That’s why network research consistently shows the importance of weak ties — people whom you don’t know particularly well but who enable you to access different information and social networks.

• Loss of privacy. People in power are under intense and constant public scrutiny. As former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd learned, in positions of great power, there is no such thing as a private dinner. Not only will people be watching your every move, and feeling free to comment on job-irrelevant things like the car you drive and whom you hang out with, when you have power, any mistake you do make won’t be as readily forgiven. Higher power means your actions have higher stakes, and higher consequences means less latitude. This constant scrutiny is stressful, and some people would rather have more privacy and autonomy.

• Fragile egos. People like to feel good about themselves, and one thing that people do to maintain their self-esteem is to engage in self-handicapping. Specifically, if you don’t try — or try too hard — any setback or failure won’t have the same implication for your actual abilities. In the power domain, people sometimes “opt out” of the competition, choosing to believe they are above “playing the game.” That way they don’t have to confront the inevitable setbacks.

Psychologists have spent years trying to discover the answer to the question: "What makes innovators different?" In one of the most thorough examinations of the subject, Harvard researchers spent six years and interviewed 3,000 executives to find out. According to the Harvard research, the No.1 skill that separates innovators from noncreative professionals is "associating"—the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. The three-year Harvard research project confirms what Jobs told a reporter 15 years earlier: "Creativity is just connecting things."

This notion of making creative associations through seeking out new experiences is worth exploring more closely, as it plays a significant role in the way Steve Jobs has generated one innovative product after another, and another, and another. Jobs is a classic iconoclast, one who aggressively seeks out, attacks, and overthrows conventional ideas. And iconoclasts, especially the successful ones, have an "affinity for new experiences," according to esteemed Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns.

 

Exposure to novel people and places

Steve Jobs doesn't see things differently from the rest of us. Jobs perceives things differently. Vision is not the same as perception; perception separates the innovator from the imitator. Vision is the process by which photons of light hit the photoreceptive cells of the eye's retina and get transmitted as neural impulses to different parts of the brain. Perception, as Berns points out, "is the much more complex process by which the brain interprets these signals." Dozens of individuals saw the graphical user interface at the Xerox PARC facility in Palo Alto, but it was Jobs who [in 1979] perceived it differently. He had an epiphany, a massive jolt of creativity.

The key to "thinking differently" is to perceive things differently through the lenses of a trailblazer. And to see things through these lenses, you must force your brain to make connections it otherwise would have missed. When Steve Jobs studied calligraphy, it was such a novel experience that it ignited his creativity. When Jobs spent time meditating in an apple orchard, he experienced something new and it led to some creative insights. When Jobs visited India in the 1970s, he experienced something radically different from his life in a California suburb. And when Jobs hired musicians, artists, poets, and historians [to build the Macintosh], he was exposing himself to new experiences and novel ways of looking at a problem. Some of Jobs's most creative insights are the direct result of novel experiences either in physical locations or among the people with whom he chose to associate.

Does Steve Jobs see things differently? Yes. Is this skill unique to Jobs? No. You can learn to be more creative as long as you keep in mind that your brain will fight you every step of the way. By pursuing new experiences and thinking differently about common problems, you are asking your brain to expend energy when its natural role is to conserve as much as energy as possible. It's not easy, but by forcing yourself out of your comfort zone—physically and mentally—you will kick-start the firing of synapses, improving the odds of generating new ideas that have the potential of transforming your business and your life.

Sustainability has come to hold two meanings for social enterprises. The first refers, as usual, to the soundness of our organizations' financial footing. The people who pay for a social venture's services are not always the same as those who use them. From a practical standpoint, this doubles our organizations' workload as we pursue the work to provide our products or services plus the work to secure the funding for those products and services. More recently, revenue-generating models have become the ideal;
everyone is searching for a way to survive without perpetual philanthropic infusions.

There are organizations that price their products for their (generally poor) clients and generate funds like any other manufacturer of goods, only with the added plus of making a difference through what they sell. Other organizations look for offshoots of their social work that can be monetized and marketed. The tension between mission and financial urgency can be acute. We must be vigilant about not over-charging the very people we are trying to help, or spending so much time generating a saleable product that the social impact for our clients declines.

The second definition of sustainability refers to the durability of that social benefit. It's wonderful to work in a community and improve lives, but what happens once we've moved on to the next site? Can our clients maintain what we've started or will our constant presence and intervention be required? This issue feeds back into our development of models that scale. We may have to add entirely new programs to our original simple offering to ensure that our efforts have lasting benefits.

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition posits that there are five stages people go through:

1. Novice
--wants to be given a manual, told what to do, with no decisions possible

2. Advanced beginner
--needs a bit of freedom, but is unable to quickly describe a hierarchy of which parts are more important than others

3. Competent
--wants the ability to make plans, create routines and choose among activities

4. Proficient
--the more freedom you offer, the more you expect, the more you'll get

5. Expert
--writes the manual, doesn't follow it. 

For me this is a quick & easy reference to benchmark my expectations for the people I work with. It's important to recognize that some people are experts and treating them like novices will be counter-productive and unmotivational. You get the best results by giving them the freedom to surprise you. Of course the flip side is also true and if you give a junior person too much freedom you'll probably end up with a mess on your hands

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we've found are most effective for our clients:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Surveys of organizations find that the vast majority of rude and inappropriate behaviors, such as the shouting of profanities, come from the offices of those with the most authority.

Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. 

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A few years ago, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, began interviewing freshmen at a large dorm on the Berkeley campus. He gave them free pizza and a survey, which asked them to provide their first impressions of every other student in the dorm. Mr. Keltner returned at the end of the school year with the same survey and more free pizza. According to the survey, the students at the top of the social hierarchy—they were the most "powerful" and respected—were also the most considerate and outgoing, and scored highest on measures of agreeableness and extroversion. In other words, the nice guys finished first.

This result isn't unique to Berkeley undergrads. Other studies have found similar results in the military, corporations and politics. "People give authority to people that they genuinely like," says Mr. Keltner.

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Now for the bad news, which concerns what happens when all those nice guys actually get in power. While a little compassion might help us climb the social ladder, once we're at the top we end up morphing into a very different kind of beast.

"It's an incredibly consistent effect," Mr. Keltner says. "When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive." Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that's crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

Why does power lead people to flirt with interns and solicit bribes and fudge financial documents? According to psychologists, one of the main problems with authority is that it makes us less sympathetic to the concerns and emotions of others. For instance, several studies have found that people in positions of authority are more likely to rely on stereotypes and generalizations when judging other people. They also spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.

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Although people almost always know the right thing to do—cheating is wrong—their sense of power makes it easier to rationalize away the ethical lapse.  In other words, the feeling of eminence led people to conclude that they had a good reason for speeding—they're important people, with important things to do—but that everyone else should follow the posted signs.

The same flawed thought processes triggered by authority also distort our ability to evaluate information and make complex decisions.

Decision making. Decision making is where a company's values come to life (or death, depending). When a company is forced to choose between two alternatives, that choice sends everyone a powerful signal about how to behave. It's easy to say, "we care about quality and we care about profit." But when forced to choose between shipping a low-quality product to make profit numbers and slipping a ship date until a product is ready for prime time, what actually happens will speak volumes about what this company values most. The CEO is almost always party to such difficult decisions, and can shape them to help shape the culture.

Who participates in decisions also sends a signal. If one function (marketing, finance, customer service) regularly gets their way, the others gradually take second place. If one person speaks just loudly enough to shut everyone else down, you get a culture that values heat over light.

When a company regularly preaches one set of values, and the CEO condones decisions that trumpet a different set of values, you'll create a cynical culture. One high-tech CEO preached quality but knowingly released defective products and simply budgeted for the subsequent recall. Employees circulated articles extolling the company's commitment to customers, with handwritten margin comments tallying up the lies.

Compensation. People do what you pay them for, which makes money, titles, and responsibility powerful shapers of culture. A CEO who promotes friends and family member sends a clear message: if you're a high performer, great. But family comes first, regardless. Young companies are just forming compensation systems. Thoughtful design is important. Tying customer service bonuses to number of calls per hour can cause reps to shortchange customers just to make call quotas. A culture will develop that's time oriented, rather than customer oriented.

One way compensation warps a culture is by rewarding outcomes over process. For several years in the early 2000s, mortgage lenders's compensation was tied to outcomes — mortgages written — rather than process (quality underwriting). Oops. Compensation has huge cultural implications, and the CEO has final say on compensation.

Mistake Management. The final piece of invisible culture is how mistakes are handled. If mistakes are punished, you'll build a risk-averse, sycophantic culture that plays it safe rather than thinking outside the box. If mistakes are treated as learning and supported by the reward systems, you'll grow a culture that is willing and eager to experiment and innovate.

1. Goal of affiliation
In the most part humans are social so they want to be liked. Rejection is no fun and we'll do almost anything to avoid it.

We reciprocate because it sends a message about our sociability. We try to elicit liking from other people by behaving in ways we guess will be attractive, like agreeing with them or complimenting them.

Not only do we want approval from specific people, we also want it from society at large (see this article on conformity). We want the things we do, think and believe to be broadly in line with what others do, think and believe. It's not impossible to be different, but it is difficult.

The techniques of liking and reciprocity mentioned above both clearly play on our desire for affiliation, as do many other techniques of persuasion and influence. Most people are joiners and followers so influencers like to give us something to join and someone to follow.

2. Goal of accuracy
People who don't care about doing things correctly never get anywhere in life. To achieve our goals in what is a complicated world, we have to be continually trying to work out the best course of action.

It could be accuracy in social situations, such as how to deal with the boss or how to make friends, or it could be accuracy in financial matters like how to get a good deal, or it could be accuracy in existential matters. Whatever the arena, people are always striving for the 'right' answer.

Influencers understand our need to be right and so they try to offer things that appeal to our need for accuracy. For example, experts or authority figures influence people heavily because they offer us a 'correct' view or way of doing things, especially one that we don't have to think too carefully about.

The techniques of social proof and scarcity both nag at our desire to be accurate because we assume other people are likely to be right and we don't want to miss out on a bargain.

3. Goal of maintaining positive self-concept
People want to protect their view of themselves because it takes a long time to build up a semi-coherent view of oneself and one's place in the world.

We work hard to keep our world-views intact: we want to maintain our self-esteem, to continue believing in the things we believe in and to honour whatever commitments we have espoused in the past. In an inconsistent world we at least should be self-consistent.

Persuaders and influencers can leverage this goal by invoking our sense of self-consistency. A trivial but instructive example is the foot-in-the-door technique. This is where an influencer asks you to agree to a small request before asking for a bigger one. Because people feel somehow that it would be inconsistent to agree to one request and then refuse the next one, they want to say yes again.

People will go to surprising lengths to maintain their positive view of themselves.

The best managers take a different approach to juggling their leadership, production, and administrative duties. As a result, they actually have more face-to-face time with employees than do their less-effective peers. Seventy-five percent of respondents who said they have effective managers interact with them at least daily, compared with 62 percent of those who judged their managers to be less effective. Employees who say they have effective managers also feel more comfortable working independently. Hence, a paradox: Better managers have more contact with their people, which makes employees feel more capable of working with less manager contact.

The best managers, in other words, act like micromanagers—they spend more time with employees, not less. So why don't employees perceive this extra attention as micromanagement? Both Towers Watson data and our consulting experience suggest it comes down to how the effective managers use their time: They don't just get work done. Instead, they match tasks with individuals' personalities and abilities.

And this attention to customizing individual jobs does not pertain only to knowledge workers. Research has shown that people in such diverse jobs as nurses, secretaries, and factory workers can benefit from personalization. For instance, one study divided hospital custodians into two groups. One group followed the standard job description, which involved little interaction with patients and other staff. They defined their job as cleaning—nothing more. Members of a second group went out of their way to interact with patients, visitors, and others in their unit. These people saw themselves as playing an important role in patients' experience. And they probably didn't think they were being micromanaged by the supervisors who helped them redefine their work.

So how do supervisors micromanage the right way?

They don't just coach employees. Some manager coaching styles can leave employees feeling stifled and patronized. Good managers, in contrast, help employees establish a constellation of learning contacts. The more we study how learning takes place in organizations, the more we understand that employees benefit from having access to multiple sources of advice, counsel, and knowledge via a confidante, mentor, or discreet manager from another department.

They don't empower people. Instead, they foster autonomy. Empowerment is a zero-sum game, where the manager's power diminishes by the amount given to the employee. Autonomy refers to something subtly but importantly different. Essentially, it means self-rule. Rather than subdividing a given quantity of power, autonomy adds to the total amount of power available to do work. Fostering autonomy requires managers to recognize and support individuals' discretion and control in deciding how to do their work. Employees who take intellectual ownership of their jobs are more likely to feel stimulated and engaged and less likely to feel suffocated by managerial attention.

They don't just administer organizational reward programs. Rather, they play a key role in delivering a fair and engaging "deal" to employees. Towers Watson global research shows that, more than ever before, employees believe they must be self-reliant when it comes to ensuring that their deal with the organization yields value to them commensurate with their investment of ability and effort. When we asked who has primary responsibility for career management and other key elements of their deal with the organization, respondents to our global study responded overwhelmingly, "I do." Our survey results showed that among employees:

• 75 percent say they, not their companies, have primary responsibility for their financial future.

• 57 percent say they must provide for their own retirement income.

• 51 percent agree that they have the principal responsibility for addressing their health-care needs.

• 76 percent agree that they have the main responsibility for ensuring their individual health and well-being.

What is the manager's role in supporting the exchange of value between individual and organization? Effective managers act as brokers, ensuring that engaged employees contribute to business success and that the business provides commensurate rewards. They also translate, making the enterprise strategy clear to employees in ways that apply to their own work. Most important, they are architects. They construct individualized reward portfolios, using such elements as learning opportunities, project assignments, and organizational network introductions to ensure that each employee has a deal customized for his or her personal needs and circumstances.

How then should we reinterpret the notion of managing small? First, as suitably precise, rather than too detailed or stifling. Second, as efficiently calibrated for people who work autonomously but who nevertheless need occasional support, guidance, and information. Finally, as appropriately frequent, rather than infrequent. Positive micromanagement focuses on what people want and need from managers, rather than on what managers must do to feel in charge. Avoiding micromanagement by drawing back and adopting a laissez faire approach is the wrong response. The right response is to remain supportive and available but away from center stage. Employees are the main actors in the workplace drama; managers should remain in the wings, offering advice and direction when employees say they need it. Under this redefined form of micromanagement, an able manager attends to the right small things so that self-directed employees can take charge of the big ones.