Random Things

The most disruptive, unforeseen, and just plain awesome breakthroughs, that reimagine, reinvent, and reconceive a product, a company, a market, an industry, or perhaps even an entire economy rarely come from the single-minded pursuit of the busier and busier busywork of "business." Rather, in the outperformers that I've spent time with and studied, breakthroughs demand (loosely) systematic, structured periods for reflection — to ruminate on, synthesize, and integrate fragments of questions, answers, and thoughts about what's not good enough, what's just plain awful, and how it could be made radically better.

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The catch is that most companies don't know how to reflect. They've been finely engineered, instead, to do. So here's how to craft your own reflection items.

Why. On the odd occasion most boardrooms reflect, reflection often starts with "how." But that's the lowest order question. The biggie, the more productive, provocative question to start with, is: why are we here — really? Here's an example of a "why" reflection item: "Are we really just here to sell more sugar water? Or is there a bigger, more resonant, and fundamentally worthier goal we could — and should — be pursuing, like ensuring no human being goes thirsty?"

What. From why, move to "what." What are the competencies that let you achieve, attain, accomplish your "why"? Does your current "what" support your desired "why" — or not? For example, if you're just here to sell sugar-water, then "innovating" slightly new flavors of soda every few months, and finding novel markets to "sell" it in (read: competencies in product innovation and mass marketing) is probably good enough. But if you have the impertinence to exist for bigger reasons, then you're probably going to upgrade your "what" to support it. Like, for example, if you're here to ensure no human being goes thirsty, then mere humdrum "innovation" of flavors isn't good enough — you're going to have to rethink "what", and redefine a new set of breakthrough competencies (perhaps in radically efficient water cycling).

Which. After "what", ask "which." Which products, services, partners, and assets underpin the most productive, efficient, effective ways for you to bring your competencies to life — and which don't? Does your "which" ignite your "what"? If you're here to "innovate" sugar water, then thinking in terms of orthodox buyers and suppliers might do the trick. But if your "what" is bigger, like slaking the world's thirst, then you're probably going to have to upgrade your "which", too — to, for example, include impoverished, thirsty people, and water-poor communities as vital partners in a micro water (re)distribution grid.

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If that's what to reflect on, here are a few tips for how to reflect better.

Primarify. When many companies reflect, they choose to use third-, fourth-, or fifth-hand data. "Hey, Billy Bob — what do you think of this XYZ survey about ABC, commissioned by 123, for 789?" But nth-hand data is, by definition, an off-the shelf commodity — hence, it's often empty of deeper insight. Better reflection is built on primary data — preferably, face-to-face interaction. So get busy talking to your customers, investors, buyers, suppliers.

Qualify. Garbage in, garbage out: reflection isn't just about numbers. It's about why the numbers happen in the first place, and what the numbers really mean to humans. So to reflect best, you need a rich matrix of "qualitative data" that your questions and answers can germinate in. What does that mean? Just people's perspectives about human experiences.

Simplify. The jargon that's so beloved of boardrooms and beancounters is kryptonite to reflection. The best reflection isn't simplistic — but it is simple, cast in concepts that have meaning outside the boardroom, because it's those concepts that indicate that what you're reflecting has breakthrough potential. "Cross-functionalizing the marketing mix to drive incremental revenue generation opportunities" isn't reflection (and heaven knows few breakthroughs ever lie down that path). Conversely, "we will reduce the number of thirsty people in the world" is a reflective statement — simple, resonant, meaningful.

That's not to say you'll instantly solve every big problem just by reflecting. But you might get a tiny bit closer. And it's those small steps that count.

Insanity cycles aren't as rare as you think. Sometimes they are the repetitions of actions which lead us to destinations we don't want to be in. They could include:

- Trying to fix something that isn't fixable

- Attempting to go through obstacles vs. going around them

- Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (a classic)

- Worrying about something that's out of your control

- Making mistakes and making the same mistakes over again

- Forgetting your limitations and the limitations of others

In short, insanity cycles are much less about the insanity and much more about the cycle. Break the cycle and you stop the insanity.

Why does the corporate world use language so inefficiently? Why turn a simple thing like "talking to a client about their needs" into a five-step process (distinguished, no doubt, by an acronym)? Do companies think that they create net value when they brand a common thing like human conversation as a one-of-a-kind, complex process – even after the costs of being opaque, jargonistic, and long-winded are taken into account?

I assume that a large proportion of people become cynical at the sound of corporate-speak. Is it reasonable to expect that language in the business world will become more transparent and down-to-earth in the future? Or do you expect that corporate-speak will continue to serve the (perceived) need to brand the commonplace or to affect a marketable expertise – clarity, concision, and common sense be damned?

My speculation: People disagree in corporations, often virulently, or they would disagree if enough real debates were allowed to reach the surface.  The use of broad generalities, in rhetoric, masks such potential disagreements and helps maintain corporate order and authority.  Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone's opinion or points into an incoherent whole.  Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form.  

Real "straight talk" very often is not compatible with authority, as it breeds conflict.  Do political leaders give us much real straight talk?  Do CEOs in their public addresses?

(Researchers) have found that our types of purchases, their size and frequency, and even the timing of the spending all affect long-term happiness. One major finding is that spending money for an experience — concert tickets, French lessons, sushi-rolling classes, a hotel room in Monaco — produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending money on plain old stuff.

"It's better to go on a vacation than buy a new couch' is basically the idea," says Professor Dunn, summing up research by two fellow psychologists, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas Gilovich.

... Thomas DeLeire, an associate professor of public affairs, population, health and economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, recently published research examining nine major categories of consumption. He discovered that the only category to be positively related to happiness was leisure: vacations, entertainment, sports and equipment like golf clubs and fishing poles.

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.

We wouldn't want to stop it. It's the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it's the same process at work. [1]

No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. [2]

As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can't compete with Facebook.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

via paulgraham.com

Higher education institutions do decently with knowledge transmission. Unfortunately, they do dismally transmitting skills. Pun intended, that's — apparently — not their job. That's also why "human capital" debates and investment policies going forward should weight skills over knowledge. When I look at who is getting hired, purported knowledge almost always matters less than demonstrable skills. The distinctions aren't subtle; they're immense. How do they manifest themselves? These hires don't have resumes highlighting educational pedigrees and accomplishments; their resumes emphasize their skill sets. Instead of listing aspirations and achievements, these resumes present portfolios around performance. They link to blogs, published articles, PowerPoint presentations, podcasts and webinars the candidates produced. The traditional two-page resume has been turned into a "personal productivity portal" that empowers prospective employers to quite literally interact with their candidate's work.

Unsurprisingly, this simultaneously complements and reinforces the employer-side due diligence that's emerged during this recession: firms have both the luxury and necessity to find the best possible candidates for open positions. Yes, they're looking for appropriate levels of educational accomplishment but, really, what they most want are people who have the skills they need. More importantly, they want to actually see those skills — be they written, computed, designed and/or presented. Professional services firms I know now don't hesitate to ask a serious candidate to demonstrate their sincerity and skills by asking them to show how they might "adapt" a presentation for one of the company's own clients. Verbal fluency and presence impresses headhunters and interviewers. But the ability to virtually demonstrate one's professional skills increasingly matters more.

This is part of the vast structural shift in the human capital marketplace worldwide. Firms have the ability and incentive to be far more selective in their hires. But project managers and professionals also have the bandwidth and desire to showcase their skills. The resume is rapidly mutating away from a documentary string of alphanumeric text into a multimedia platform that projects precisely the brand image and substance a job candidate seeks to convey. Did they teach you that in college or grad school? Of course not. Will you learn that by hanging around LinkedIn or Facebook? Probably not.

Is this how human capital markets will become more efficient and effective tomorrow? Absolutely. You've got to have skill to show off your knowledge.

Just about all sabotage is self-sabotage.

We don't get forced to eat that cookie, we choose to. And so the diet is ended.

Marketing self-sabotage is fascinating to watch and understand. Consider the college application: it's primarily an opportunity for teenagers who aren't sure of where they want to go to undercut their chances by exposing their uncertainty. The lizard brain, the voice in the back of the head that wants security and safety--it's not eager to go to a college that might be 'too hard' or 'too good'. The easy thing to do is to scale back the effort, not do what works, but do what feels right instead.

Or consider the way we resist opportunities to lead, to connect, to do work that matters. We don't resist because we're not capable of it... we resist because if our marketing fails, if we don't get the job or earn the trust, then we're off the hook. No promises made, which means no promises to keep.

Years ago, social scientists introduced the broken-windows theory of crime control, which posited that if a neighborhood looked orderly and cared for — with no graffiti or broken windows — potential wrongdoers would be dissuaded from committing crimes there. Now psychologists have proposed a similar theory, which suggests that people can be induced to behave virtuously when their environment smells as clean as it looks.

It's the Macbeth principle of morality, says Katie Liljenquist, professor of organizational leadership at Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management and lead author of the new study, to be published in Psychological Science. "There is a strong link between moral and physical purity that people associate at a core level. People feel contaminated by immoral choices and try to wash away their sins," says Liljenquist. "To some degree, washing actually is effective in alleviating guilt. What we wondered was whether you could regulate ethical behavior through cleanliness. We found that we could." 

In two separate experiments, researchers were able to influence participants' behavior by exposing them to "cleanliness" in the form of a common cleaning agent's odor — in this case, citrus-scented Windex. It turned out that people who sat in a room spritzed with Windex were more likely to act fairly and charitably than those sniffing unscented air.

The first experiment involved an anonymous game of trust. The 28 study participants were told they would be "receivers," with whom a group of anonymous "senders" had been instructed to invest money. Participants were told that each sender had been given $4 and told that any part of it invested with receivers would be tripled. The job of the receiver, then, was to decide what portion of the dividends to return to the sender.

In reality, there was no sender, and each study participant received $12, making it seem as though the senders had entrusted them with the full $4 they had been given. But would the receivers reciprocate that trust or exploit their unidentified investors? On average, those in the plain-smelling room returned $2.81 to the sender, pocketing the lion's share of the money. But those bathed in the scent of Windex sent back an average of $5.83, returning the senders' blind faith.

The scientists insist they didn't overdo it with the Windex, just a few spritzes — so we can rule out brain-cell death or intoxication-induced generosity as reasons why those receivers gave back so much of the booty. Rather, Liljenquist says, "a moral awareness was awakened in a clean-smelling environment."

In the second experiment, researchers aimed to manipulate people's propensity toward charity. Ninety-nine participants were assigned to either a Windex-scented room or a neutral-smelling room and given a packet of tasks to complete. Included in the packet was a flyer soliciting volunteers and donations to the charity Habitat for Humanity. As expected, people in the Windex-sprayed room were more inclined to volunteer and give money than those in the unscented room — 22% of those in the clean group said they wanted to donate money, compared with 6% of the controls.

According to co-author Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, society relies on incentives, in the form of rewards and punishments, to encourage people to conform to certain standards of behavior. "Economists and even psychologists haven't been paying much attention to the fact that small changes in our environment can have dramatic effects on behavior. We underemphasize these subtle environmental cues," he says.

Liljenquist says the real-life implications of the study could be as simple as an office investing more in janitorial supplies than in expensive and intrusive surveillance equipment to keep workers in line. Other olfactory researchers suggest, however, that perhaps it wasn't the clean smell that made people more virtuous in the new study, but rather the smell of citrus; that is, people may have behaved better because they smelled something they liked, rather than something "clean." "It could be simply that a positive smell creates a positive mood, which encourages positive behavior. You cannot conclude it is cleanliness per se," says Brown University psychologist Rachel Herz, author of The Scent of Desire. To rule out the confounding factor of good smells, she says, the study's authors could have added a third room to the experiment scented with recently baked chocolate chip cookies, for example.

Nevertheless, both morality researchers and olfactory scientists agree that people do strongly associate physical cleanliness with purity of conscience. It is the notion at the heart of adages like "cleanliness is next to godliness" and evidenced by the widespread use of cleansing ceremonies to wash away sins in various religions around the world. (Truth be told, that practice is merely an extrapolation of an evolutionary strategy to avoid disease.)

For their part, Liljenquist and Galinsky say they controlled for the good-mood effect by giving participants in the second experiment a mood-screening questionnaire. They also say their results are consistent with existing literature on cleanliness and morality. For instance, in one of Liljenquist's earlier studies, she found, among other things, that cleaning hands after writing about a moral transgression made people feel less guilty about it. Other researchers have also tackled the issue of morality and smell, but from the opposite end of the spectrum. A paper published last year in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin revealed that people are more critical and judgmental about certain moral issues when exposed to the vapors of a — ahem — fart-scented spray.

Yes, fart spray is a commercially available product. Incidentally, according to a psychologist who has worked with it in experiments, it is nearly impossible to rid upholstery of it. Citrus-scented Windex certainly makes for a nicer lab environment, which perhaps has something to do with Liljenquist's continued interest in this line of study. "Research on how to stay on the moral high ground and promote virtue," she says, "is something I find refreshing."