Category Archives: Psychology

People, Time and Money

People, Time and Money

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you want the next job, figure out why.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting the job you have.
When you don’t care about the next job it’s because you fit the one you have.

A larger salary is good, but time with family is better.
Less time with family is a downward spiral into sadness.
When you decide you have enough, you don’t need things to be different.

A sense of belonging lasts longer than a big bonus.
A cohesive team is an oasis.
Who you work with makes all the difference.

More stress leads to less sleep and that leads to more stress.
If you’re not sleeping well, something’s wrong.
How much sleep do you get? How do you feel about that?

Leaders lead people.
Helping others grow IS leadership.
Every business is in the people business.

To create trust, treat people like they matter. It’s that simple.
When you do something for someone even though it comes at your own expense, they remember.
You know you’ve earned trust when your authority trumps the org chart.

Image credits: Unsplash

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Empathy is a Vital Tool for Stronger Teams

Empathy is a Vital Tool for Stronger Teams

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

In the fast pace of today’s organizations, it’s easy for teams to focus solely on tasks, deadlines, and results. However, truly high-performance teams – and their leaders – understand that their strength lies not just in productivity but in the relationships they build.

Empathy plays a crucial role in this process, enabling teams to build trust, foster open communication, and maintain resilience, even in challenging times.

This is why empathy is not just a “soft skill” – it’s a powerful leadership tool that can elevate team dynamics to new levels. Whether you’re navigating tough decisions, managing conflicts, or trying to boost morale, applying empathy can enhance collaboration and performance.

This card is designed to guide you in bringing more empathy into your team’s dynamics.

As part of our Team Dynamics Cards, it belongs to a comprehensive suite of leadership growth and team dynamics tools aiming to boost team collaboration, performance, and communication. We develop such tools and approaches to ignite team discussions, inspire self-reflection and guide actionable steps.

Check it out below and get in touch if you would like some guidance on how to work with this for your team(s).

Today’s Card: Empathy in Team Dynamics

Stefan Lindegaard Empathy QuoteCategory: Culture & Mindset

We delve into the significant role of empathy in fostering positive team dynamics. Empathy, the ability to understand and share others’ feelings, can foster a team environment characterized by collaboration, understanding, and productivity. It’s a crucial ingredient for managing individual roles, decision-making, performance under pressure, and the creation of shared values and goals.

Principles:

  1. Promoting Understanding and Respect: Foster an environment where team members understand and respect each other’s perspectives and recognize each member’s unique contributions.
  2. Empathy in Conflict Resolution: Use empathy to address and resolve conflicts, helping teams navigate disagreements in a respectful, satisfactory manner.
  3. Fostering Psychological Safety through Empathy: Build a psychologically safe space where individuals comfortably express thoughts and emotions, assured of empathetic understanding.

Reflection Questions (10 mins):

  1. Reflect on a situation where empathy within your team led to a significant positive outcome. What was the situation, and how did empathy play a role?
  2. How would you rate the level of empathy within your current team? What impact does it have on your team’s dynamics?

Action Questions (30 mins):

  1. Identify specific ways your team can foster understanding, respect, and empathy in day-to-day interactions. How can these actions lead to improved team dynamics?
  2. Consider a recent or upcoming challenge your team is facing. How can empathy play a role in the decision-making process, conflict resolution, and maintaining morale under pressure?

Get in touch if you and your team would like to know more about our Team Dynamics Cards and how we can tailor this to your needs and interests. You can read more about our learning hub and community on https://www.stefanlindegaard.com

Image Credits: Pexels

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It is Okay to Feel Stuck

It is Okay to Feel Stuck

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you’re stuck, it’s not because you don’t have good ideas. And it’s not because you’re not smart. You’re stuck because you’re trying to do something difficult. You’re stuck because you’re trying to triangulate on something that’s not quite fully formed. Simply put, you’re stuck because it’s not yet time to be unstuck.

Anyone can avoid being stuck by doing what was done last time. But that’s not unsticking yourself, that’s copping out. That’s giving in to something lesser. That’s dumbing yourself down. That’s letting yourself off the hook. That’s not believing in yourself. That’s not doing what you were born to do. That’s not unsticking, that’s avoiding the discomfort of being stuck.

Being stuck – not knowing what to do or what to write – is not a bad thing. Sure, it feels bad, but it’s a sign you’re trekking in uncharted territory. It may be a new design space or it may be new behavioral space, but make no mistake – you’re swimming in a new soup. If you’ve already mastered tomato soup, you won’t feel stuck until you jump into a pool filled with chicken noodle. And when you do, don’t beat yourself up because your lungs are half-filled with noodles. Instead, simply recognize that chicken soup is different than tomato. Pat yourself on the back for jumping in without a life preserver. And even as you tread water, congratulate yourself for not drowning.

Unsticking takes time and you can’t rush it. But that’s where most fail – they climb out of the soup too soon. The soup doesn’t feel good because it’s too hot, too salty, or too noodly, so they get out. They can’t stand the discomfort so they get out before the bodies can acclimate and figure out how to swim in a new way. The best way to avoid getting stuck is to stay out of the soup and the next best way is to get out too early. But it’s not best to avoid being stuck.

Life’s too short to avoid being stuck. Sure, you may prevent some discomfort, but you also prevent growth and learning. Do you want to get to your deathbed and realize you limited your personal growth because you were afraid to feel the discomfort of being stuck? Imagine getting to the end of your life and all you can think of is the see of things you didn’t experience because you were unwilling to feel stuck.

Stuck is not bad, it just feels bad. Instead of seeing the discomfort as discomfort, can you learn to see it as the precursor to growth? Can you learn to see the discomfort as an indicator of immanent learning? Can you learn to see it as the tell-tale sign of your quest for knowledge and understanding?

If you’re not yet ready to feel stuck, I get that. But to get yourself ready, keep your eye out for people around you who have dared to get stuck. Learn to recognize what it looks like. And when you do find someone who is stuck, tell them they are doing a brave thing. Tell them that it’s supposed to feel uncomfortable. Tell them that no one has ever died from the discomfort of being stuck. And tell them that staying with the discomfort is the best way to get unstuck. And thank them for demonstrating the right behavior.

Image credits: Unsplash

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A Tumultuous Decade of Generational Strife

A Tumultuous Decade of Generational Strife

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The physicist Max Planck made many historic breakthroughs, including a discovery that led to quantum theory. Still, he lamented that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Clearly, that’s not only true for scientific truths. Every generation rejects some notions of their elders, explores things on their own and adopts new ideas. Some of those ideas will survive, but others will ultimately be rejected, which always causes some acrimony. Even Aristotle complained about the “exalted notions” of the youth.

Yet this time is different. Because the Boomer generation was so large, and Generation X so small, those who came of age in the 1960s essentially ruled for two epochs. The rising Millennial generation, which is now the largest, holds starkly different values than Boomers. Over the next decade, as Millennials come to predominate, we can expect tensions to rise.

Revamping The Workplace

I still remember one incident early in my career. I had taken a job in national radio sales and the first few months were devoted to an intensive training course. One day that featured particularly nice weather, my fellow trainees and I decided that, instead of bringing our lunch back to the office, we would eat it in the park.

Our Boomer bosses were irate and insulted. The problem wasn’t that we took too much time for lunch, but rather that we took too much pleasure in it which, in their eyes at least, violated the social contract. As trainees, we were supposed to “pay our dues,” not to enjoy ourselves and our brief respite from the daily grind was seen as something akin to insubordination.

Millennials won’t stand for that kind of treatment. As this article in Harvard Business Review explains, they require a better work-life balance, more flexible schedules and constructive feedback. They demand to be respected and chafe at hierarchy. The younger generations of today don’t expect to “pay dues,” they seek a greater purpose.

Businesses that do not heed the Millennial’s demands are finding it difficult to compete. Millions of Boomers retired early during the pandemic, which led to severe labor shortage and the Great Resignation. Over the next few decades, as the younger generations take charge, we can expect a very different workplace.

Rethinking Economics

In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman proposed a radical idea. He argued that corporate CEOs should not take into account the interests of the communities they serve, but that their only social responsibility was to increase shareholder value. While ridiculed by many at the time, by the 1980s Friedman’s idea became accepted doctrine.

It wasn’t just Friedman, either. As the Boomer counterculture of the 60s and 70s gave way to the Yuppie culture of the 80s a new engineering mindset took hold. Much like the success of business was boiled down to its stock price, the success of a society was boiled down to GDP. “You manage what you measure” became an article of faith.

It has become clear that approach has failed. In fact, since Friedman’s essay the American economy has become markedly less productive. Our economy has become less competitive and less dynamic. Purchasing power for most people has stagnated. By just about every metric you can think of, our well-being has declined since the 1970s.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the younger generations have rebelled. While the Boomers remember the Reagan years of the 1980s fondly, Millennials and Zoomers only see a record of failure. From the Great Recession to the Great Resignation, they see a dire need to change course and will not be assuaged by rosy economic statistics. They want a better quality of life.

Reshaping Society

When the Boomers came of age in the 60s it was an era of rising prosperity. Perhaps not surprisingly, many prioritized self-actualization and sought to “find themselves.” The scandals of the 1970s made them suspicious of the establishment and the Reagan years, along with the fall of the Soviet Union, reinforced their faith in individual agency.

Millennials have seen this ideology fail. Besides the lack of productivity growth and stagnation in wages, they have seen 9/11 traumatize the nation and pave the path for an ill-considered war on terror that cost trillions and devastated America’s standing in the world. Many carry significant educational debt and had their careers derailed by the Great Recession.

Research from Pew finds other important differences. While the Millennial generation is the most educated in history, with almost 40% holding a 4-year degree, they are worse off financially than their predecessors. Many continued to live with their parents as adults and delayed getting married and starting families. They are also far more multicultural than previous generations.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Millennials have rejected the 1980s “greed is good” ethos of the Boomers and tend to focus on experiences rather than materialistic signaling. Also, while the younger generation’s passion for inclusivity is often overstated, they have grown up in a world far more accustomed to seeing marginalized groups in powerful positions.

Brace Yourself for a Tumultuous Decade

The almost seismic shift in values that the transition from Boomer to Millennial dominance represents would be enough to set the stage for conflict. What will make this decade even more difficult is that the demographic impact is hitting at the same time as other important shifts in technology, resources and migration patterns. The last time society has endured this much of a pressure cooker was the 1920s, and that ended badly.

We are already feeling the effects. The mismanaged “War of Terror,” the Great Recession and then the Covid pandemic undermined faith in institutions and paved the way for the rise of popular authoritarianism and the decline of democratic institutions. The battle for the liberal world order is being fought in, of all places, Ukraine, as I write this.

What I think should be most salient about our situation at this point in history is that we are here because of choices that were made. Yes, there were cultural and economic forces at play, but the Boomer generation chose to value the individual over the community, shareholders over other stakeholders and to embrace GDP as a proxy for the overall health of society.

We can, as Ukraine has been doing for the past twenty years, make different choices. We can choose our communities over ourselves, resilience over optimization, and to nurture rather than to dominate. Most of all, we need to invest to increase the productive, environmental and human potentials of our society so that we can better face the challenges ahead.

Make no mistake. This will be a struggle, as all worthy things are.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Four Deadly Business Myths

Four Deadly Business Myths

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

The unicorn is perhaps unique among myths in that the creature doesn’t appear in the mythology of any culture. The ancient Greeks, for all of their centaurs, hydras and medusae, never had any stories of unicorns, they simply thought that some existed somewhere. Of course, nobody had ever seen one, but they believed others had.

Beliefs are amazing things. We don’t need any evidence or rational basis to believe something to be true. In fact, research has shown that, when confronted with scientific evidence which conflicts with preexisting views, people tend to question the objectivity of the research rather than revisit their beliefs. Also, as Sam Arbesman has explained, our notions of the facts themselves change over time.

George Soros and others have noted that information has a reflexive quality. We can’t possibly verify every proposition, so we tend to take cues from those around us, especially when they are reinforced by authority figures, like consultants and media personalities. Over time, the zeitgeist diverges further from reality and myths evolve into established doctrine.

Myth #1: We Live In A VUCA Business Environment

Today it seems that every business pundit is talking about how we operate in a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world. It’s not hard to see the attraction. Conjuring almost apocalyptic images of continuous industrial disruption creates demand for consulting and advisory services. It’s easier to sell aspirin than vitamins.

The data, however, tell a different story. In fact, a report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, falling from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

Today, in part because of lax antitrust enforcement over the past few decades, businesses have become less disruptive, less competitive and less dynamic, while our economy has become less innovative and less productive. The fact that the reality is in such stark contrast to the rhetoric, is more than worrying, it should be a flashing red light.

The truth is that we don’t really disrupt industries anymore. We disrupt people. Economic data shows that for most Americans, real wages have hardly budged since 1964. Income and wealth inequality remain at historic highs. Anxiety and depression, already at epidemic levels, worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The recent great resignation, when people began leaving their jobs in droves, helps tell this story. Should anyone be surprised? We’ve been working longer hours, constantly tethered to the office even as we work remotely, under increasing levels of stress. Yes, things change. They always have and always will. We need to adapt, but all of the VUCA talk is killing us.

Myth #2: Empathy Is Absolution

Another favorite buzzword today is empathy. It is often paired with compassion in the context of creating a more beneficial workplace. That is, of course, a reasonable and worthy objective. As noted above, there’s far too much talk about disruption and uncertainty and not nearly enough about stability and well-being.

Still, the one-dimensional use of empathy is misleading. When seen only through the lens of making others more comfortable, it seems like a “nice to have,” rather than a valuable competency and an important source of competitive advantage. It’s much easier to see the advantage of imposing your will, rather than internalizing the perspectives of others.

One thing I learned living overseas for 15 years is that it is incredibly important to understand how people around you think, especially if you don’t agree with them and, as is sometimes the case, find their point of view morally reprehensible. In fact, learning more about how others think can make you a more effective leader, negotiator and manager.

Empathy is not absolution. You can internalize the ideas of others and still vehemently disagree. There is a reason that Special Forces are trained to understand the cultures in which they will operate and it isn’t because it makes them nicer people. It’s because it makes them more lethal operators.

Learning that not everyone thinks alike is one of life’s most valuable lessons. Yes, coercion is often a viable strategy in the short-term. But to build something that lasts, it’s much better if people do things for their own reasons, even if those reasons are different than yours. To achieve that, you have to understand their motivations.

Myth #3: Diversity Equity And Inclusion Is About Enforcing Rules

In recent years corporate America has pushed to implement policies for diversity, equity and inclusion. The Society for Human Resource Management even offers a diversity toolkit on its website firms can adopt, complete with guidelines, best practices and even form letters.

Many organizations have incorporated diversity awareness training for employees to learn about things like unconscious bias, microaggressions and cultural awareness. There are often strict codes of conduct with serious repercussions for violations. Those who step out of line can be terminated and see their careers derailed.

Unfortunately, these efforts can backfire, especially if diversity efforts rely to heavily on a disciplinary regime. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out long ago, strict rules-based approaches are problematic because they inevitably lead to logical contradictions. What starts out as a well-meaning effort can quickly become a capricious workplace dominated by fear.

Cultural competency is much better understood as a set of skills than a set of rules. While the prospect of getting fired for saying the wrong thing can be chilling, who wouldn’t want to be a more effective communicator, able to collaborate more effectively with colleagues who have different viewpoints, skills and perspectives?

To bring about real transformation, you need to attract. You can’t bully or overpower. Promoting inclusion should be about understanding, not intimidation.

Myth #4: People Are Best Motivated Through Carrots And Sticks

One of the things we’ve noticed when we advise organizations on transformation initiatives is that executives tend to default towards incentive structures. They quickly conjure up a Rube Goldberg-like system of bonuses and penalties designed to incentivize people to exhibit the desired behaviors. This is almost always a mistake.

If you feel the need to bribe and bully people to get what you want, you are signaling from the outset that there is something undesirable about what you’re asking for. In fact, we’ve known for decades that financial incentives often prove to be problematic.

Instead of trying to get people to do what you want, you’re much better off identifying people who want what you want and empowering them to succeed. As they prosper, they can bring others in who can attract others still. That’s how you build a movement that people feel a sense of ownership of, rather than mandate that they feel subjugated by.

The trick is that you always want to start with a majority, even if it’s three people in a room of five. The biggest influence on what we do and think is what the people around us do and think. That’s why it’s always easy to expand a majority out, but as soon as you are in the minority, you will feel immediate pushback.

We need to stop trying to engineer behavior, as if humans are assemblages of buttons and levers that we push and pull to get the results we want. Effective leaders are more like gardeners, nurturing, growing and shaping the ecosystems in which they operate, uniting others with a sense of shared identity and shared purpose.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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Is it Time to ReLearn to Work?

Is it Time to ReLearn to Work?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

In white-collar industries where remote work is not only viable but often highly productive, we are still struggling to find a post-pandemic formula for integrating office attendance into our weekly routine. Continuing to waffle, however, does no one any good, so we need to get on with things. Part of what has been holding us back is that we have been talking about getting back to the office as an end. It is not. It is a means. The question it begs is, what is the end we have in mind? Why should we get back to the office?

Let’s start by eliminating one reason which gets frequent mention—we can manage better. This is not a good why. Supervision is an artifact of a prior era. Digitally enabled work logs itself, and we can hold each other accountable for all our KPIs, OKRs, and MBOs without having to be collocated. Managers may feel more in control with people in sight, but that is a poor return on the overall commute investment entailed.

A far better reason to return to the office is to reactivate learning. The biggest problem with remote work is that we do not learn. Specifically, we do not:

  • Learn anything new about ourselves, because we need the input of others to do so.
  • Learn new soft skills, because online courses don’t cut it.
  • Learn about our teammates, because video calls lack the needed intimacy.
  • Learn about our customers, because we need to go to their offices to do so (going to our offices would at least let us share the ride)
  • Learn about the current state of our company, because that kind of thing never gets published.

In short, just as our children experienced a learning gap at school, so we inherit the same dynamics with remote work. We consume the skills we have, but we do not develop the ones we need next. We are harvesting, but we are not seeding, and there will be a reckoning if we do not alter our course.

So, there is a good why for returning to the office, but that in turn begs the question of how? Here we need to be clear. We do not know how. We do not know what is the right formula. Unfortunately, waiting won’t help either, so now what?

Let me suggest that the best course of action is to implement a clear policy effective immediately with the following provisos.

  1. We publicly acknowledge that we suspect this policy is wrong.
  2. We are putting it in place for 90 days.
  3. We want everyone to abide by it religiously so that we get the right signals.
  4. We will review the policy publicly and transparently after 90 days and implement a new policy at that time.
  5. We will put that policy in place for 90 days, following the same protocols as before.
  6. We will rinse and repeat until no longer necessary.

The point is, we have to get on with getting on, and running the experiment is the fastest way to get there.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Profiting From Fear and Mistrust

Profiting From Fear and Mistrust

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When I lived and worked in Ukraine, it was commonplace to see men in camouflage fatigues and Uzi’s in the waiting rooms of offices around town. They weren’t there as security, or to rob the place, but to help transfer money between businesses. It was cumbersome and inefficient, but in an atmosphere of mistrust, it was a necessity.

In most countries, we’re still a long way from armed couriers as a daily routine, but according to Edelman’s recent Trust Barometer, we’re headed in that direction. Entitled “Innovation in Peril,” it details an overall collapse of confidence, finding that roughly two thirds believe that journalists, government leaders, and business executives, are “purposely trying to mislead.”

That’s a problem for all of us. Mistrust is corrosive to the norms that help our society run efficiently and the costs are very real. Our lack of trust in government prevents us from making needed investments. Suspicions about law enforcement undermine public safety. Mistrust in the workplace undermines performance. We desperately need to rebuild trust.

The Value Of Trust

Trust isn’t our natural state. Economists have developed a number of models to show how fragile it can be. For example, in a prisoner’s dilemma, two suspects are brought in for questioning. If they both stay true to each other, they get the best collective outcome, but if each follows his or her own self-interest, both will confess and get the worst overall outcome.

Related concepts are the tragedy of the commons, in which everybody has access to a common field to graze their livestock, depleting the resource so that everybody’s herd suffers, and the free rider problem which often occurs with respect to public goods. These situations are known as Nash equilibriums because nobody can change their preference without making themselves worse off.

When you take a moment to think, it’s kind of amazing that we operate with as much trust as we do. Local businesses faithfully serve communities for years, even decades. Corporations spend billions to build brands and governments work to earn legitimacy. That is what allows us to easily transact business throughout the day. When trust collapses, we get Uzis in waiting rooms.

Yet it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. Research by Accenture found that “trust events” cost businesses billions of dollars every year. For example, a consumer-focused company that had a sustainability-oriented publicity event backfire lost an estimated $400 million in future revenues. Another company that was named in a money laundering scandal lost $1 billion.

Profiting From Our Mistrust

Our brains are geared for mistrust in a number of ways. The first is a bias for loss aversion. We will do more to avoid a loss than we will for an equivalent gain. That makes trust hard to build and easy to lose, which is why the “trust events,” like those cited in the Accenture study, are so costly.

Another contributing factor is availability bias, our tendency to overweight easily accessible examples, such as a specific trust event, and ignore vague concepts, like years of good service. Once we accept a belief, our confirmation bias will lead us to seek out information that supports our prior beliefs and reject contrary evidence.

These effects are multiplied by tribal tendencies. We form group identities easily, and groups tend to develop into echo chambers, which amplify common beliefs and minimize contrary information. We also tend to share more actively with people who agree with us and, with little fear of rebuke, we are less likely to check that information for accuracy.

That, essentially, is the economics of disinformation. Fear breeds mistrust, which makes us feel insecure and leads us to seek out people we identify with to reinforce our beliefs. Research suggests media companies, especially social media companies, profit from the passions that the most polarizing information unleash in the form of greater engagement with their platforms.

Facts, Identity and Fear

We tend to think of truth as a simple matter of knowledge and understanding. We see the world as a set number of facts and believe that any disagreements arise from a lack of clarity about what the true facts are. In this view, mistrust can be corrected by better access to good information. Once people are informed, how could there be any disagreement?

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. In fact, a study at Ohio State found that, when confronted with scientific evidence that conflicted with their views, people would question the objectivity of the science. Another thing to consider is that, as Sam Arbesman explained in The Half-Life of Facts, our ideas about what’s true changes over time.

We can’t rigorously test every proposition, which is why we adopt the views of those around us, a phenomenon that psychologists call social proof. What makes the effect even more insidious, is that the relationship is reciprocal. We internalize the ideas of the tribes we join and then propagate those same ideas to others, intensifying the echo chamber.

Our beliefs are far more than mere acceptance of sets of facts, but become inherently part of our identity. Wars are not fought over ideologies because people disagree about empirical evidence, but because they see their sense of selves under attack. If truth is a force for good, then those who refuse to accept our version of it are, in the most basic sense of the word, evil.

From Victimization To Empowerment Through Purpose

Our ability to trust others is, to a great extent, a function of how we see ourselves and our situation. If we see ourselves as secure and in tune with our environment, it’s relatively easy for us to build bonds of trust. If we feel those around us share our values, it’s easier to feel a shared sense of identity and purpose.

However, if we see our surroundings as hostile, we will take steps to protect ourselves and that, to a great extent, is where we are at today. First the Internet, and then social media have tended to promote and juxtapose the most extreme elements, creating an atmosphere of heightened conflict among tribes, which further undermines our sense of security and trust.

This is what Marshall McLuhan meant when he wrote that the global village would result in a “release of human power and aggressive violence” greater than ever in human history. When we are confronted with ideas and values that are different from our own, it can feel more more like an assault and an affront than a refreshing interaction with the variety of life.

Here Ukraine offers a lesson. Over the past decade it has built a new identity and found a new purpose. Today most Ukrainians, especially the younger generations, feel a stronger affinity for European values than for their post-Soviet past. In fact, they have so internalized their European ambitions that they are willing to risk a war to maintain them.

We have a similar challenge before us. If a common identity is forged from shared values and shared purpose, on what foundation will we build our future? To what common project can we devote our energies? What are our ambitions and how best might we fulfill them? These are the questions that we need to answer if we are ever to rebuild the bonds of trust.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Are You Time Affluent?

Are You Time Affluent?

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When you have more than enough money, you have money affluence. With it, you can buy what you want, eat what you want, drive what you want, and travel where you want. But to have this unallocated money, or discretionary money, you probably need to spend a heck of a lot of time working. Climbing the ladder takes a lot of time. And once you’re at the top, you probably have a lot of commitments that pull hard on your calendar. Odds are, if you have unallocated or discretionary money (money affluence), you likely don’t have unallocated or discretionary time (time affluence).

If you have money affluence, but no time affluence, what do you really have?

To understand how much unallocated time you have, here’s an example day. You get up at 6:00 am, leave for work at 6:30, commute for an hour to arrive at work at 7:30, eat at your desk, leave work at 5:00 pm, arrive home at 6:00 and go to bed at 10:00. If this is your day, you have four hours of unallocated time per workday. I know this doesn’t include the realities of cleaning, cooking, yard work, paying bills, running errands, kids’ sporting events, and a number of other commitments, but makes the upcoming math work well and doesn’t demand we acknowledge we have little to no unallocated time.

In the contrived day described above, you’re getting enough sleep but not much else – no exercise, no time to relax during lunch. And, it’s likely you’re trading sleep for the time needed to accomplish the practical realities of daily life. But, let’s just say you have four hours of unallocated time. If you have four hours of unallocated time per day, do you think you have time affluence?

If you reduce your commute to thirty minutes, you have an extra hour of unallocated time (five). That doesn’t sound much, but you increased your unallocated time by 25%. And if you add thirty minutes of unallocated time for lunch and thirty minutes of exercise during the workday, you add another hour of unallocated time, increasing your unallocated time to six hours, or a 50% increase over the four hours of the baseline. But, to be clear, when you assign an activity of your choosing to unallocated time, it’s still unallocated time, but it may be helpful to think of it as discretionary time.

And if you tell your boss that for your first hour of work (from 7:30 to 8:30 am) there will be no meetings, no email, no phone calls, no Skype, no Slack, you increase your unallocated time by another hour, bringing your total up to seven hours, or a 75% increase in unallocated time.

As it stands, the world will take your unallocated time unless you protect it. And you won’t free up more unallocated time unless you grab your calendar and proactively squeeze out some time for yourself.

If you have money affluence, but no time affluence, you don’t have all that much.

Image credits: Pixabay

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Eliminating Customer Anxiety

Eliminating Customer Anxiety

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

If you have been to a Disney theme park, you know about standing in long lines. There are also signs that tell you how long your wait will be. Guests like this.

When you use Uber or Lyft for transportation, they not only tell you how long before your driver arrives, they also show you a map where you can track how close (or far) the driver is from where you are waiting.

When you order anything from Amazon, you receive at least three emails. The moment you place an order, you receive an email confirmation. Another email shows up in your inbox to let you know your order has shipped. And then, another email is sent once the order arrives, sometimes with a picture of the box sitting on your porch. This is one of the reasons customers love Amazon.

Let’s stick with Amazon for a bit longer. It’s not really the multiple emails that customers love. It’s the information. And why is this information important? There are two (at least) byproducts from these emails that can’t be ignored.

  • The first is confidence. Without confidence, why would a customer want to do business with a company again? Confidence also comes from a predictable experience.
  • The second is eliminating – or at least reducing – anxiety. This takes confidence to a higher level. The sharing of information gives customers a sense of control.

In all three examples – Disney, Uber and Amazon – there is communication. Even if it’s over-communication, customers are drawn to companies that provide information that reduces their anxiety, whether they know it or not. And once a customer experiences the pleasure of an anxiety-free experience, again, whether they know it or not, they may question why they would consider doing business with a competitor.

Shep Hyken Customer Anxiety Cartoon

Not all customers will realize this right away, unless you tell them. Consider making it part of your value proposition. Nordstrom did this with their extremely liberal and hassle-free return policy. Lifetime warranties on products give customers confidence and reduce anxiety because they know will be taken care of if there is a problem.

For my entire career I’ve preached that good customer service and customer experience sets you apart from the competition. Customer Experience (CX) is table stakes. Customers want to do business with nice, knowledgeable people. Take that to the next level by being easy and convenient to work with, in essence, eliminating friction. And now I want you to consider the next step. Find ways to reduce and eliminate anxiety. When you put all three of these together – great service, convenience and low or no anxiety – you have a CX triple threat!

Image Credits: Pexels

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Purpose Matters Because …

Purpose Matters Because ...

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When the Business Roundtable issued a statement in 2019 that discarded the old notion that the sole purpose of a business is to provide value to shareholders, many were dismayed. Some thought it was just another example of misguided altruism by “elites.” Others saw it as a cynical and disingenuous ploy.

Yet the primacy of shareholder value is hardly a well-established economic principle. The concept does not appear even once in Adam Smith’s seminal treatise, The Wealth of Nations. In fact, it is a relatively recent idea and when the economist Milton Friedman first proposed it in 1970, it was considered radical, even subversive, certainly not to be taken as gospel.

It has also been tremendously unsuccessful. Since Friedman’s essay we have become less productive, not more. One reason for the poor results is that Friedman and others like him failed to recognize that our economy is made up of people, not inanimate pieces of data that make up economic charts, and these people search for meaning and purpose in their lives.

Failed Cartesians

Often regarded as the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes was obsessed with human fallibility. Cursed with imperfect senses and emotions that can warp logic, he sought to build a new intellectual foundation based on cool, rational thought. “I think, therefore I am,” he wrote, proving that at least one thing could be known without referring to the use of the senses.

Descartes’ ideas led to the Rationalist school of philosophy as others tried to build on his work. The idea that, through pure reason, we could see truths with greater clarity held enormous attraction for intellectual giants such as Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. Unfortunately, other than in the field of mathematics, little was achieved.

That didn’t stop others from trying though. In the early 20th century, the Vienna Circle arose in response to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and others in order to create a logical system to guide human affairs. Wittgenstein himself would later disown it and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems would eventually expose the whole exercise as a failure.

Undeterred by centuries of failure, business consultants have tried to sell the same idea to executives. Yet despite fancy names like scientific management, financial engineering and six sigma, these didn’t fare any better. One study found that of 58 large companies that announced Six Sigma programs, 91 percent trailed the S&P 500 in stock performance.

Still, many remain undeterred. The idea of an infallible technocracy is just too tempting for many to resist.

The End Of History And The Washington Consensus

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History to great acclaim. The Cold War had ended and capitalism was triumphant. Communism was shown to be a corrupt system bereft of any real legitimacy. It seemed that, as many philosophers had predicted, we had reached an end point in which human sociocultural evolution was complete.

A new ideology took hold, often referred to as the “Washington Consensus,” that preached fiscal discipline, free trade, privatization and deregulation. The world was going to be remade in capitalism’s image. Countries that hit hard times would be offered aid from multilateral institutions like the IMF and the World Bank in return for favored policy reforms.

Many pointed out that international bureaucrats were mandating policies for developing nations that citizens in their own countries would never accept. Strict austerity programs led to human costs that were both significant and real. In a sense, the Soviet error was being repeated. Ideology was being put before people.

Yet Fukuyama’s message had been misunderstood. His book was not meant as a prophecy, but as a warning. He pointed to the ancient Greek concept of thymos, a spirited blend of dignity and pride, to caution against rationalist explanations for human behavior. Given a choice between a well trod path and one less certain, he predicted that many will “set their eyes on a new and more distant journey.”

The Silicon Valley Myth

I was working on Wall Street in 1995 when the Netscape IPO hit like a bombshell. It was the first big Internet stock and, although originally priced at $14 per share, it opened at double that amount and quickly zoomed to $75. By the end of the day, it had settled back at $58.25 and, just like that, a tiny company with no profits was worth $2.9 billion.

It seemed crazy, but economists soon explained that certain conditions, such as negligible marginal costs and network effects, would lead to “winner take all markets” and increasing returns to investment. Venture capitalists who bet on this logic would, in many cases, become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

The conditions for increasing returns, however, only apply to a narrow swath of businesses, mostly limited to software and electronic gadgets. Nevertheless, entrepreneurs and their investors became convinced that they could apply the Silicon Valley model anywhere, leading to high profile failures like WeWork and Theranos.

That’s the Silicon Valley myth, that the rational logic of code can be applied to any problem. It’s the same fantasy that has been repeated throughout history, handed from Cartesians to logical positivists to “scientific” managers and now to the software engineers, puffed up with stock options who can’t seem to understand why everyone else doesn’t “get it.”

The costs have been substantial. Evidence suggests that the billions wantonly plowed into massive failures are crowding out real businesses. Productivity has been depressed for half a century. The Facebook papers revealed a culture that has lost its way, so single-mindedly focused on optimizing engagement it lost sight of the humanity it was supposed to engage.

Identity, Dignity And Purpose

If you believe in a rational Cartesian universe, a business is little more than a set of transactions. The nature of the firm, in this view, is simply to minimize transaction costs and skilled managers should focus on maximizing bargaining power among stakeholders in order to build a sustainable competitive advantage. Yet the world doesn’t actually work that way.

Consider the ultimatum game. One player is given a dollar and needs to propose how to split it with another player. If it is accepted, both players get the agreed upon shares. If it is not accepted, neither player gets anything. If the world was completely rational, the second player would accept even a single penny. After all, a penny is better than nothing.

Yet decades of experiments across different cultures show that most people do not accept a penny. In fact, offers of less than 30 cents are routinely rejected as unfair. It offends people’s dignity and sense of self. For many of the same reasons, there is increasing evidence that financial targets don’t motivate employees. No one wants to be a cog in someone else’s wheel.

That is the value of purpose. It bolsters, rather than undermines, our identity. When people feel that they are part of a common project, they feel a sense of ownership, that they are ends in themselves rather than means to an end. It uplifts, rather than demeans, us. It fortifies, rather than undermines, our spirit.

What separates great leaders from mediocre managers is that the leaders do more than calculate, they provide meaning to an endeavor that makes it more than merely a common enterprise. It becomes a collective mission.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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