See you in January!

Taking a little year-end/new year break.

Wishing you a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and a wonderful winter holiday season.

I'll be back in January with some more ideas to think about in 2009!

Choosing the frame that complements the picture.

A famous experiment by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky went as follows:

Imagine that the US is preparing for an outbreak of an unusual disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative medicines to combat the disease have been proposed.
Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the medicines are as follows:

If treatment A is undertaken, 200 will be saved.
If treatment B is undertaken, there is a one-third probability that 600 people will be saved and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.

Which one of the two treatments would you prefer?

Kahneman and Tversky found that a substantial majority of people would choose treatment A.

Then they gave another group of people the assignment but with the following description of the (same) options:

If treatment A is undertaken, 400 people will die.
If treatment B is undertaken, there is a one-third probability that nobody will die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people will die.

They found that, in this case, a clear majority of respondents favored treatment B! But the treatments really are exactly the same in both cases…!? How come people’s preferences flip although they are confronted with the exact same set of choices (be it described slightly differently)?

It is due to what we call “framing effects”, and they greatly affect people’s preferences and decisions.

For instance, In the first case, treatment A is described in terms of the certainty of surviving (which people like), but in the second case it is described in terms of the certainty of dying (which people don’t like at all!). Therefore, people choose A when confronted with the first treatment description, while in the second case they favor B, although the treatments are the same in both situations.

This effect is quite omni-present. How you frame a problem or solution to someone (e.g. your boss) is going to influence substantially what option he is going to prefer. How the people who work for you frame a situation while presenting to you, is also going to determine what you will choose.

Did I frame this in a way that can be of help to you?

The Ultimate Productivity Habit

I was lecturing in one of my classes the other day and noticed that NO ONE was writing anything down. Now I realize that not everything I have to say is important, but the fact that no one was writing anything made me think about the lost art of writing.

I do believe if something is important enough to remember, it’s important enough to write down. This doesn’t just apply to class notes or random to-do tasks or events to put on your calendar. I write down everything: goals, ideas, what I spend money on and useful thinking points from books. The reason to write isn’t to keep records, but to be more aware.

Writing focuses your thinking. When you write something down, you aren’t just creating a paper record, you’re changing the way you think about it. Writing down a goal changes a whim into a conviction. Writing down your expenses changes excessive spending from a bad habit to a conscious choice. Writing down your idea turns a vague suggestion into a clearer concept.

Writing is like an upgrade to your thinking. In the normal flow of thought, you can’t edit typos and make adjustments. If you get distracted, it can be hard to return to your place. And since your short term memory is only about 5-9 items long, you can’t think over more complex ideas.

When you start writing things down, you have an upgraded level of thinking about them. Writing things down makes you more aware of opportunities and problems, like a temporary boost to your IQ.

What Should I Write Down?

Obviously you can’t write down everything. You can’t write down everything said in a conversation. Writing down everything you eat or everything you do can eat up a lot of time. Writing is valuable because it forces you to focus, so writing down everything would ruin the purpose.

You should write down anything you feel needs more clarity. If you need to get in touch with how you feel about something, write about it. One of the best exercises I ever did came from the Julia Cameron book "The Artist's Way" in which she suggests you wake up every morning and just write 3 handwritten pages of whatever comes to you mind. It does not need to be profound thoughts, just write and keep writing whatever is on your mind until 3 pages are filled. You will be surprised after awhile how this exercise will focus you on your concerns, and more importantly what you can do about them.

Trust me when I say that this exercise changed my life. No kidding.

If something is important and worth getting done, it is probably worth writing down. Ask yourself what things could use more focus in your life. Writing isn’t an instant cure that will immediately make you more productive. But it makes you far more aware of what needs to be done and how well you are doing it.

If there is a part of your life that is unknown, inconsistent or in poor shape, you should consider writing more down about it. Write down ideas and make records while you’re working on it, and spend time writing your thoughts when you’re taking a break. If you can keep writing for a few weeks, it can reveal solutions to problems you didn’t even realize you had before.

I suggest committing yourself to writing something down for at least a month. Writing isn’t a natural habit, we weren’t born with the skill and it’s one of the first pieces of technology we had developed. As a result, if you don’t commit to continuing it for a few weeks, you probably will return to relying only on your short-term memory. Thinking is good, but writing plus thinking is even better.

Monkey Business

Here's an experiment that involved 5 monkeys, a cage, a banana, a ladder and a water hose. Tell me what you think.

The 5 monkeys were locked in a cage, after which a banana was hung from the ceiling with, fortunately for the monkeys (or so it seemed…), a ladder placed right underneath it.

Of course, immediately, one of the monkeys raced towards the ladder, intending to climb it and grab the banana. However, as soon as he started to climb, the researcher sprayed the climbing monkey with ice-cold water. In addition, however, he would also spray the other four monkeys…

When a second monkey tried to climb the ladder, the researcher again sprayed the monkey with ice-cold water, and applied the same treatment to its four fellow inmates; likewise for the third climber and the fourth one. They all learned their lesson about how things work: they were not going to climb the ladder again – banana or no banana.

But the experiment did not stop there. In order to watch what happened, the researcher replaced one of the old monkeys with a new one. As expected, the new monkey spotted the banana, thinking “why don’t these idiots go get it?!” and started climbing the ladder. Then, however, it got interesting: the other four monkeys, familiar with the cold-water treatment, ran towards the new guy – and beat him up. The new guy, blissfully unaware of the cold-water history, got the message: no climbing up the ladder in this cage – banana or no banana.

When the researcher replaced a second old monkey with a new one, the events repeated themselves – new monkey ran towards the ladder; other monkeys beat him up; new monkey does not attempt to climb again – with one notable detail: the first new monkey, who had never received the cold-water treatment himself (and didn’t even know anything about it), with equal vigor and enthusiasm, joined in the beating of the new guy on the block.

When the researcher replaced a third monkey, the same thing happened; likewise for the fourth until, eventually, all the monkeys had been replaced and none of the ones in the cage had any experience or knowledge of the cold-water treatment.

Fianlly, a 5th new monkey was introduced into the cage. It ran toward the ladder only to get beaten up by the others. But ask yourself this: why would these all new monkeys beat each other up over the banana, when none of them ever experienced the cold water treatment? Probably like human because they learned: "that’s the way we do things around here”…

I got this story from a colleague. It reminded him – and me – of quite a few of the organizations we have seen. Over the years, all firms develop routines, habits and practices, which we call the firm’s “organizational culture”. As I am sure you know, these cultures can be remarkably different, in terms of what sort of behavior they value and what they don’t like to see, and what they punish. Always, these habits and conventions have been developed over the course of many years. Very often, nobody actually remembers why they were started in the first place... Quite possibly, the guy with the water hose has long gone.

Who do you want to be? The monkey that goes along, or the one who questions “the way we do things round here?” You may initially take a beating being an agent of change, but actually you might be doing something valuable for the organization. And there's a banana in it for you if you learn to question the status quo...

Taking a Short Break

This 2 minute diagram is meant to represent a person, possibly me with hair, stepping away from his keyboard. I am taking a break for a number of days and don’t expect to be back on this blog until late August or September. In the meantime feel free to comment on the historical entries posted here, or look for the debut of www.EdwardKurpis.com coming live in late June or July.

The last few weeks have been rather interesting ones for me workwise. It is an exciting time, but unfortunately I can’t explain why at the moment. There is a lot to be pondered, and so I find myself doing a lot of pacing up, forth, back and down:

This is why I need a break...and some new shoes. See you soon.

Picasso's Top 7 Tips for a Better Life

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor and creator in many creative fields. He’s perhaps the most well-known painter from all of the 20th century.

He also had some interesting things to say about life that are applicable to management. Here are my 7 favorite tips from him.

1. You have to believe to be able to do.

“He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.”

This is a great quote because it doesn’t just say that you should “believe in yourself!” It explains why you need to believe in yourself and your ability to do something to actually do it.

The funny thing is that it’s hard to see how much your beliefs control your performance and how you see your world when you are used at looking at things from just one perspective.

When you think you can do something instead of not, your perception of that thing changes. And your perception of yourself too. Without those changed perspectives it will be hard to find the courage, motivation, enthusiasm and whatever else you may need.

If you think you’ll fail, you are likely to hold yourself back or even trip yourself up (sometimes unconsciously). If you on the other hand think you can do something your mind will start to find solutions and focus on fixing things instead of whining about them. From all of the stimuli around you things, solutions and opportunities will just start to pop up. Without that focus on the right thing, on your ability to do, your mind may not find the resources and solutions that are needed.

2. Push your limits.

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

Pushing yourself and stretching is necessary to grow. And the more you push yourself the quicker you can grow.

But it can be scary. My best tip so far: stay present as much as you can while doing something you cannot yet do.

This can greatly decrease possible negative feelings that are holding you back. And with those feelings out of your mind and body it becomes easier to focus, to feel positive feelings and actually perform well and learn to do whatever you have set your mind upon.

3. Don’t wait for inspiration or the right moment.

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.”

Inspiration can show up on its own, waltzing in through a door or a window. But doing things that way makes work inconsistent – both in quality and quantity - and you spend a lot of time waiting.

I find that it’s better to follow Pablo’s suggestion and just start working. For the first minutes what you do may suck quite a bit and it’s hard going. But after a while inspiration seems to catch up with you. Things start to flow easier and your work is of a higher quality.

If you feel inspired one day that’s great. Use your inspiration. But don’t limit yourself to the moments where you feel inspired or you feel like the moment is just right to do something. Act instead. A lot of the time you can find inspiration along the way. Or accomplish whatever you want to do despite the moment not looking just as you would like it to.

4. Act.

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

“Action is the foundational key to all success.”

I know. If you have been reading this blog for a while you may have noticed that talk about taking action is included in a lot of the articles. But that’s because, as Picasso says, action is the foundation. Without taking action any information – no matter how useful – will be pretty useless. This is also the part of personal growth or just life that is often forgotten or perhaps avoided.

It’s scary. It can feel difficult to do it. Or you may not feel like it’s the right moment now. But developing a habit of taking more and more action can make a huge difference.

5. Ask the right questions.

“Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.”

It’s easy to ask yourself the wrong questions. To ask yourself questions that just will give you answers that confirm that you are incompetent, foolish, wrong and tell you that your future is limited. Questions that will sink you instead of help to lift you up.

So instead, ask yourself empowering questions.

• When having a seemingly negative experience ask yourself: what is good about this? What can I learn from this? There is always something you can learn and have use for to create positive experiences later on.

• When interacting with others ask yourself: How can I bring even more value (understanding, help, practical solutions, fun, excitement etc.) to this interaction?

• In just about any situation you can always ask yourself: what’s great about this situation/experience? This is a quick way to shift your mood and thoughts into more positive, resourceful and empowered forms through gratitude.

There are of course many more empowering questions you can ask yourself. I think the main point is to reframe the questions you ask yourself into positive questions that open up - instead of closes – the door to opportunities and possibilities.

6. See the hidden beauty by not judging.

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”

One of big advantages of becoming more present in your everyday life is that you decrease the amount of analysing and labelling you do to the things/people in your surroundings. You don’t judge as much.

This might sound strange but in the moments when you are present the ordinary world becomes more interesting and wonderful. Colors can seem brighter. Your see more aliveness in trees, nature and in people. You see the wonder of all your man-made gadgets and stuff. Things that most often seem common, routine and boring become fascinating and something you can appreciate.

It’s like you are observing your world with more clarity and curiousness. Like a little kid again, discovering things while they still feel fresh. Before they have just become walking, talking and growing labels with years of associations and thoughts attached.

7. It’s not too late.

“Youth has no age.”

Don’t let social conditioning tell you what you can or cannot do just because you are of one age or another. Age is most of the time just in your head anyway. Take tip #1 into consideration and choose for yourself what you can do. And use tip # 6 and ask yourself the right questions instead of ones that limit you.

And, remember, the present moment is all there ever is anyway. So don’t get caught up in the past too much. Most of the time you really don’t have to act consistently with what you have done before. If you do, then that’s your choice. And you can decide to do something different too. Right now.

It is really only too late to change if you look at your life as a time-line. If you learn to become more present, if you learn to live more in the now, much of that thinking just falls away. You realize that you can consciously choose and do pretty much whatever you like in the present moment and built a future with new possibilities.

Managing through un-bear-able situations

Our story starts at a bridge over a deep lake in northern Nevada. A bear was making its way across the bridge one Saturday in 2007, when some vehicles crossing the bridge scared the bear into jumping over the edge. Somehow the bear caught the ledge and was hanging on for dear life. There it is, hanging on by its fingernails. It manages to pull itself up, but now there’s no way to get off the bridge and back to safety. I guess most of us have felt like that sometimes. We’re startled into making a sudden decision, hoping to find a place of safety, only to find ourselves going over the edge and facing a long, long fall towards certain disaster. We manage, somehow, to cling on and prevent the fall, but now we’re stuck. We can’t see a way out. We have nowhere to go and no route back to security.

Stuck in a dark place

The authorities, alerted to the bear’s plight, decided that nothing could be done to help before nightfall. So there’s the bear. Darkness is coming on. It can’t get off the bridge. It has no food or water.

What would you do?

I suspect many of us would panic and maybe even put ourselves at risk of falling into the ravine below. We would certainly want to do something as quickly as possible to get out of our dilemma.

The next morning

The bear, however, had a better idea. When the authorities returned on Sunday morning, they found the bear sound asleep on the ledge.

In our action-obsessed society, everyone is constantly urging everyone else to “do something” to cure any bad situation. The last option that comes to mind is often the best: to stay patient, retreat, and consider our options.

The current financial mess is a good example. Banks and finance houses got themselves — and us — into this mess by a mixture of greed, limited ethics, and deciding that nothing mattered much except short-term profits. Regulation was ignored or evaded by a mixture of accounting sleight of hand and the creation of novel “investment vehicles” that were outside the regulations, because no one had dreamed them up before. The result was easy profit, followed by the current period of staring into the abyss and knowing that you have no obvious way out.

What do they do? Do they wait patiently to see what occurs, to see which loans are, in reality, good ones and which have to be written off to experience and a hard lesson learned?

No, they yell loud and long for a government safety net. Are those the same folks who despised regulation and “government interference” in the market when times were good? Who loudly proclaimed the idea that “the market is always right” and asked only to be left alone?

Indeed they are. Only now they’re in a mess — entirely of their own contriving — they want the rest of us, the taxpayers, to bail them out.

The bear didn’t yell, but it did get a safety net.

Rescue comes

After securing a net under the bridge, the rescuers tranquilized the bear, which promptly fell into the net. The net was lowered to the ground. After a few minutes, the bear woke up and walked out of the net.

Let’s look at similar situations as they affect individuals. We get into a mess and feel trapped. Maybe we start to panic. There’s no clear way out. And no authorities on hand to bring us a safety net.

What do we do?

Most people start running around, frantically trying to find a solution. If the bear had done this on the ledge of the bridge, the chances are it would have fallen off. The same is true for us.

No one’s mind works clearly when they feel stressed and panicky. That makes managing hard to do. But, if we succumb to the urge to “do something,” it’s very possible that we’ll grab onto the first seemingly viable answer that presents itself..."satisficing ." It may help us out, but it’s much more likely to make the problem worse

Learning the lesson

Like all the best stories, this one has a moral. The bear was panicked by circumstances (the vehicles on the bridge) into making a bad move. It jumped out of the way, over the edge of the bridge, and found it was hanging on by its nails over a drop into disaster.

Somehow it was able to pull itself up onto a narrow ledge. Now it’s safe from instant death, but still in a very bad situation, with no obvious way out.

When you’re confronted with a bad situation, sometimes the best solution of all is to do nothing, sleep on the problem, and carefully assess your alternatives. Patience often succeeds where immediate action may only makes things worse. Leadership through careful consideration of your options frequently works better than action for action's sake — for people and bears.

The top 5 business maxims that have to go

Much well-known business advice is sadly obsolete but can still be found in articles, business books and, not least, in daily use in the workplace. It seems that some companies are still guided by thinking that is sadly out of date - if it was ever true to begin with.

The worst of these old maxims are not only wrong, they’re bad for people and bad for business. Businesses who use them are making their employees unhappy and are harming the bottom line.

Here’s my pick of the top 5 business maxims in serious need of an update - with a suggested replacement for each.

Old maxim #1: Failure is not an option

Meaning: We absolutely, positively must succeed.

Guess what: No matter how many times you repeat this maxim, failure remains an option. Closing your eyes to this fact only makes you more likely to fail. Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because:

• People who work under pressure are less effective
• People resist reporting bad news
• People close their eyes to signs of trouble

This is especially true when it’s backed up with punishment of those who make mistakes. Peter Drucker provocatively suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting. Admitting that mistakes happen and dealing constructively with them when they do makes mistakes less likely.

Also, failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Closing your eyes to failure means closing your eyes to these opportunities.

New maxim: Failure happens. Deal with it.

Old maxim #2: The customer is always right

Meaning: The customer is king. We satisfy our customers’ every need.

No. No, no, no. This tired business maxim often means that loyal hardworking employees are scorned in favor of unreasonable customers. It also, ironically, results in bad customer service.

“The customer is always right” makes employees unhappy and unhappy employees almost always give customers bad service.

New maxim: Happy employees means happy customers.

Old maxim #3: Never be satisfied

Meaning: You can never be satisified and complacent in business. You’ve always gotta want more.

This is a bad mistake which rests on a very fundamental misconception, namely that being satisfied means that you stop acting. That satisfaction breeds complacency and therefore that a happy, satisifed company will be passive. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a constant sense of dissatifaction in an organization sends one powerful message: We’re not good enough! The irony is that this results in worse performance.

People who constantly appreciate all the good in their organization and express their satisifaction create a much more positive working environment characterized by more:

• Motivation
• Energy
• Self-confidence
• Happiness at work

This is not about closing your eyes and pretending things are great if they’re not. It’s about appreciating the fact that people in constant states of dissatisfaction erode an organization’s will and ability to act. The trick is to appreciate what you have and still aim for more.

Replacement: Always be appreciative but never complacent.

Old maxim #4: Nice guys finish last

Meaning: We can’t be too nice in business. In fact, being nice may hinder your career and impede results.

That’s just not true, of course we should be nice at work. This doesn’t mean that you have to be nice to all of the people all of the time, but it means that you absolutely can be a nice person and succeed in business. Unpleasant people hurt the bottom line. In a networked world reputation matters, and it’s more important to be generous and likeable than to be ruthless and efficient.

New maxim: Nice guys get the job done.

Old maxim #5: Grow or die

Meaning: A business is either growing or dying. A business can’t be successful if it’s not growing.

It’s interesting to see how growth has been elevated to an automatic good, questioned by very few businesses and executives. Growth certainly has some positive effects especially because it creates new possibilities and challenges for an organization and its people. I’m not saying that growth is bad but that growth isn’t always right for every business. Sometimes a business might be better off spending a quarter or a year not growing but simply consolidating existing business. Consequently not growing or even shrinking does not automatically represent business failure.

That’s what Semco’s CEO Ricard Semler meant when he said this:

There is no correlation between growth and ultimate success. For a while growth seems very glamorous, but the sustainability of growth is so delicate that many of the mid-sized companies which just stayed where they were doing the same thing are much better off today than the ones that went crazy and came back to nothing. There are too many automobile plants, too many airplanes. Who is viable in the airline business?

If someone asks me, ‘where will you be in 10 years’ time?’, I haven’t got the slightest idea. I don’t find it perturbing either if we said, ‘look, in 10 years’ time Semco could have 500 people instead of 3,000 people’; that sounds just as interesting as 21,000 people. I’d hate to see Semco not exist in 10, 20, 50 years’ time, but what form it exists in, what business it’s in and what size it is are not particularly relevant.

Growing also entails its own risks, especially fast growth on borrowed money. This almost killed Patagonia in the early 90’s. Founder Yvon Chouinard says this:

It was back in 1990 or so and we were growing the company by 40 to 50 percent a year and we were doing it by all the textbook business ways — adding more dealers, adding more products, building stores. Growing it like the American dream, you know — grow, grow, grow. And one year we predicted 40 to 50 percent growth and there was a recession and all the sudden we only grew 20 percent. And at the same time, our bank was going belly-up and we had cash-flow problems and it went to absolute hell. And I had been the person who had never bought anything on credit in all my life. I always paid cash for everything, and to have to call someone and say, “I’m sorry, I can’t pay my bills this month,” was killing me. And I realized that I was on the same track as society was — endless growth for the sake of growth.

That’s when I decided to put the brakes on and decided to grow at a more natural rate — which basically means that only when our customers want something do we make more, but we don’t prime the pump.

New maxim: Grow when you gotta.

Wrap-up

The scary thing about maxims is that they’re often accepted unquestioningly because they come in the shape of old addages which are repeated - a little like nursery rhymes used to educate children. That means it’s not enough to oust the old maxims we need to replace them with new ones that are guaranteed to bring better results for people and for the bottom line.

Annual Mary Kay Seminar

Managing organizational culture?

How Not To Run A Meeting

(I do not endorse the book plugged at the end of the clip.)