The never ending struggle for motivation

Photo by Personal Development Blog

I just finished reading the epic fantasy novel The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie. It is an amazing book by one of the best epic fantasy authors I know today. I am amazed by how many great quotes from this book I accumulated in my Kindle clippings file. I wanted to share one with you as I believe it resonates with the internal struggle each of us has every day:

Another stretch of silence, then Shivers turned to look at him. ‘You’re a decent man, aren’t you, Craw? Folk say so. Say you’re a straight edge. How d’you stick at it?’

Craw didn’t feel like he’d stuck at it too well at all. ‘Just try to do the right thing, I reckon. That’s all.’

‘Why? I tried it. Couldn’t make it root. Couldn’t see the profit in it.’

‘There’s your problem. Anything good I done, and the dead know there ain’t much, I done for its own sake. Got to do it because you want to.’

‘It ain’t no kind o’ sacrifice if you want to do it, though, is it? How does doing what you want make you a fucking hero? That’s just what I do.’

Craw could only shrug. ‘I haven’t got the answers. Wish I did.’

Shivers turned the ring on his little finger thoughtfully round and round, red stone glistening. ‘Guess it’s just about getting through each day.’

‘Those are the times.

‘You think other times’ll be any different?’

‘We can hope.’

I think I never read such a well written portraying of the never ending debate between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

The profit or the right thing? Take the job that offers more money or the one that inspires you? Do something safe or something daring?

For some the answer is obvious. The internet is filled with authors who will tell you that you should always chose “the right thing”. I tend to agree.

And still… I find myself doubting… I find it hard to follow this advice. I know people around me find it hard to. I know that the fact that it is a hard means it is probably worth it.

And still…

The ingenuity of the quote above is that it recognizes this struggle. It recognizes that for some people the obvious answer is not that obvious. It’s about making a decision every day at a time. And it leaves us questioning what should we base our hopes upon?

How is your struggle going?

Elad

Book review: Practical Wisdom by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe

Photo by Amazon

A few days ago I finished reading Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe’s new book Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. I love reading and the thought process that comes with the process of reading. As a result I tend to recommend a lot of books. However, usually my recommendations are not universal but specific. Once in a while I come across a book that I think everybody must read. Practical Wisdom is at the top of that list.

The authors have a few basic claims. We need more wisdom in our lives. Not the wisdom of sages or scholars but practical everyday wisdom that will help us live better lives and make better decisions. Wisdom is the act of performing a particular social practice well—being a good friend or parent or doctor or soldier or citizen or statesman—and that means figuring out the right way to do the right thing in a particular circumstance, with a particular person, at a particular time.

Wisdom, however, is not about intelligence or intellectual capacity. Because we are all born to be wise. The problem is this wisdom needs to be nurtured, cultivated and encouraged. It requires mentioned, coaching, modeling and time to develop. We, as a society, are doing just the opposite of that. We are waging a war against wisdom. Because of different societal process our society has turned more and more to rules, incentives and standardization. As the authors put it:

The assumption behind carefully constructed rules and procedures, with close oversight, is that even if people do want to do the right thing, they need to be told what that is. And the assumption underlying incentives is that people will not be motivated to do the right thing unless they have an incentive to do so. Rules and incentives. Sticks and carrots. What else is there?

While these tools are sometimes useful, they are usually effective only in the short-term and have unintended consequences. They are unable to provide for the changing complex needs of the environment in which people operate in, and thus, lead to unwanted results:

Rules and incentives may improve the behavior of those who don’t care, though they won’t make them wiser. But in focusing on the people who don’t care—the targets of our rules and incentives—we miss those who do care. We miss those who want to do the right things but lack the practical wisdom to do them well. Rules and incentives won’t teach these people the moral skill and will they need. Even worse, rules can kill skill and incentives can kill will.

Rules are aids, allies, guides, and checks. But too much reliance on rules can squeeze out the judgment that is necessary to do our work well. When general principles morph into detailed instructions, formulas, unbending commands—wisdom substitutes—the important nuances of context are squeezed out. Better to minimize the number of rules, give up trying to cover every particular circumstance, and instead do more training to encourage skill at practical reasoning and intuition.

More than that, this reliance on rules and incentives is eroding our ability to develop wisdom and makes people who go into professions like medicine, law and education with a desire to influence and do good, hate their jobs or act in ways that are contrary to what they wanted to do when they decided to join the profession.

The challenge is to find a way to enable people to earn their livelihoods and create a viable organization without having payoffs completely control what people do—without having payoffs demoralize both the people and the practices in which they engage.

The book is a wonderfully written call to stop treating people like cogs. A call to stop measuring things just because we can and then leading our lives according to these measurements. It is an attempt to point out that there is more about being alive and working, than just thinking about outcomes, money and bottom line measurable results. It try to challenge the assumption of “one right way” and “top-down” control that is like a cancer in our societies. It is an attempt to point out to the Obliquity of our business and work. It is a praise to human judgment and ability to do good. It describes the world I want to live in and the kind of work life I want to lead. It is the book I wish I could have written. Read it. Today.

Elad

A theory of justice, conflict resolution and collaboration

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In this interesting post on the MIX (management innovation exchange), Leigh Weiss discusses the concept of collaboration and what an important part conflict plays in it. I found this example to be particularly fascinating:

Some groups use a visual symbol – a yellow card, for example – in meetings as a way for individuals to signal that they have an objection or that they feel their view (or someone else’s) is being overlooked. Bob Sutton and other management researchers have noted the tendency for senior people to dominate conversation within meetings. Raising the yellow card signals that the objector is acting within the group-defined agreement of behavior and serves as a cue to remind the others that the group has agreed on the necessity and value of conflicting opinions and debate

Similarly, Larry Prusak writes in HBR.org about the lessons NASA learned from its failures to embrace dissent in the past, which include, among other things:

• Bringing many and varied experts and interested parties together in one room, where they could listen to one another and discuss their findings and opinions.
• Conducting widespread, “democratic” polls (rather than, say, providing information to a few senior managers who would make the decision themselves).

At a fist glance the yellow card or the “democratic” polls seem like trivial ideas. Why do we need a sign? People can just raise their hands and talk! Why do we need a “democratic” (which probably means secret) poll? If people have objections they will just say them out loud.

However, in case of conflict, there is a lot of power to be found in pre-agreed upon resolution mechanisms. In the heat of an argument or a content-based conflict there it is difficult for the parties abandon their standpoints in order to agree on how to agree. When done in advance, it would be easier for the parties to think of it as fair, as it is not connected in their minds to the current debate. It is similar to the ideas proposed by John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice:

Specifically, Rawls develops what he claims are principles of justice through the use of an entirely and deliberately artificial device he calls the Original position in which everyone decides principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. This “veil” is one that essentially blinds people to all facts about themselves that might cloud what notion of justice is

If you are a team leader it might be wise to develop pre-agreed upon mechanisms to settle conflicts. These mechanisms should be decided by the team before hand, when people are ignorant to their side of the conflict and to their interests in it. When people perceive these mechanisms as fair in advance it would be hard for them to argue against them in real-time, which will enable better conflict management that will lead to the needed collaboration.

What are your mechanisms for conflict resolution? Are they determined before or during a conflict?

Elad

What you don’t stand for

I was reading an article titled building Your Company’s Vision By James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras (the authors of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies), when I came across this quote:

The point is that a great company decides for itself what values it holds to be core, largely independent of the current environment, competitive requirements, or management fads. Clearly, then, there is no universally right set of core values. A company need not have as its core value customer service (Sony doesn’t) or respect for the individual (Disney doesn’t) or quality (Wal-Mart stores doesn’t) or market focus (Hp Doesn’t) or teamwork (Nordstrom doesn’t). A company might have operating practices and business strategies around those qualities without having them at the essence of its being. Furthermore, great companies need not have likeable or humanistic core values, although many do. The key is not what core values an organization has but that it has core values at all.

I love this quote. Many reasons. The main reason – it exemplifies the fact that sometimes what you are not, is just as important as what you are. What isn’t there can often trump what is. The point is that it is not only about choosing some core values. It is about making the choice to begin with thus excluding other choices. Making a deliberate decision to say – this is what I am, which means I am not something else.

We have, in the westernized world, a culture built around stories of great success. Of people who did it all. And we get a sense that we can have it all. But we can’t. Nobody, be it company or individual, ever does everything well. It is those who choose, make tradeoffs and focus that become the best.

I think people easily forget this. This is why you have so many value statements about core values that are not worth the paper they are written on. It is easy to say these are the values I want to stand for. It is easy to say we will focus on customer service. It is much harder to admit that the values we stand for mean that we don’t stand for other things. That our focus on customer service has to come on the expense of something else.

So, what do you, your team or your company stand for? what don’t you stand for?

Elad

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Small decisions, fake sun-glasses and celebrating contradictions

Photo by NightRPStar

I have always been fascinated with small decisions and how one such decision can lead to a spiral that ends in enormous unwanted results in the future. Last semester, while still down at AGSM MBA, I took a business ethics class and noticed that in a lot of the cases we talked about, the current ethical dilemma was rooted in a small and sometimes insignificant decision in the past.

Then I read this post describing a very intriguing experiment:

…[The] psychologists Francesca Gino, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely asked two groups of young women to wear sunglasses taken from a box labeled either “authentic” or “counterfeit.” (In truth, all the eyewear was authentic, donated by a brand-name designer interested in curtailing counterfeiting.) Then the researchers put the participants in situations in which it was both easy and tempting to cheat. In one situation, which was ostensibly part of a product evaluation, the women wore the shades while answering a set of very simple math problems — under heavy time pressure. Afterward, given ample time to check their work, they reported how many problems they were able to answer correctly. They had been told they’d be paid for each answer they reported getting right, thus creating an incentive to inflate their scores. Unbeknown to the participants, the researchers knew each person’s actual score. Math performance was the same for the two groups — but whereas 30 percent of those in the “authentic” condition inflated their scores, a whopping 71 percent of the counterfeit-wearing participants did so. Why did this happen? As Gino puts it, “When one feels like a fake, he or she is likely to behave like a fake.” It was notable that the participants were oblivious to this and other similar effects the researchers discovered: the psychological costs of cheap knockoffs are hidden. The study is currently in press at the journal Psychological Science.

And that got me thinking. Here is the comment I made on that post:

It [the research described above] actually explains the downwards trends in ethics over time and the fact that a small unethical decisions might lead to a major issues in the long run. It also reminds of the broken windows theory. As soon as we are already faced with something broken, it is easier for us to act “broken” ourselves. The importance of small choices is so significant it is almost too hard to understand it.

As always I try to translate such thoughts to the world of management and to the way managers connect with their employees. I think there are a number of implications:

1. There is no such thing as a small decision. Our every act matters. And in the things that are important, like praise and recognition and helping people excel, we are tested every day. We don’t know what deciding not to engage in such activities today means for the future.

2.While thinking about the possible outcomes of the every possible decision is impossible and paralyzing, it is important to realize that the biggest issues started small. If you decide to go down a certain path, you create momentum which is hard to recognize and hard to stop. Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo says in interview for the book Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition by Guy Kawasaki (You don’t have to read the whole book but read this chapter and page 365):

Good people don’t rush in to do evil where angels fear to tread; instead they start by straying only a small way away from their moral center and each successive step down is hardly different, barely noticeable, until it is too late and their behavior is shocking and may even be awesome or awful.

3. Finally, I write here in this blog that managers should stop with trying to create rules. I believe in employee autonomy and in practical wisdom. At the same time, I wrote this in my e-book:

I believe in doing things right because they are right. In obeying the rules because they are rules. I believe that there are certain things that are just not done. We have so many rules around us. Some are better, some are worse. But the sad thing is, that we are used to breaking them every day. Just think about jaywalking or avoiding certain tax payments or taking something from your office when you are not supposed to. I believe rules are there for a reason and we should follow them because they are there. Because it is right. If the rules are wrong, it is all right to try to change them. In fact, we must try and change wrong rules. But there is a legitimate way to do that. And as long as they are valid rules, we should obey them.

This might seem contradictory. It might be. I have also grown and changed in the year and a half that passed since I wrote those words. At the same time part of my philosophy is that we should celebrate contradictions – F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “the true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time”.

Elad

Widespread transparency

Photo by Arenamontanus

Everybody who ever worked in any kind of an organization has felt the same way. “What the hell are the guys up there thinking?”; “I do all the work down here and I am not sure how what I do relates to what the company does?”; “How do I make a difference?”.

Here is how Anthony Tjan from the Harvard business review blog describes it:

Here’s a test. Ask five to 20 of your employees to explain what your company’s customer value proposition is. How many different answers do you guess you’ll get? Answer: somewhere between five and 20. This is, of course, in addition to the response, “What the heck do you mean by a value proposition?”

When is the last time you thought about how much your team understands about what is your business and about what the team actually does? When I was in the Israeli Air-Force I headed training for new soldiers. I had a couple of new instructors working with me and before the course started we sat down to have a chat about what the new course is going to be like. I planned to have a short discussion of what we were generally trying to accomplish and then move on to the urgent administrative staff. But when we started the discussion I realized, after a few short questions, that was what obvious to me regarding the training, the way it is built and handled and its objectives, was not that clear to them. We ended up spending more than two hours just talking about the big pictures. After a few weeks on the job, one of my teammates came up to me and said: “you know, if we haven’t had that discussion, I would have handled a lot of my daily interactions totally differently. Thanks for that”.

I remember thinking after that about how things that are obvious to me as a manager of that team were not at all obvious to my teammates. Years later I was reminded of this story when I read about the “curse of knowledge” in the great book “made to stick”. The curse of knowledge basically means that we have problems explaining things because we already know them, which makes it hard for us to imagine how someone who does know what we know see it. This means we need to actively seek where our assumptions about the knowledge of other people are wrong.

However, I think that if we look at it from a broader managerial perceptive, it is about creating a culture of widespread transparency. It could be, as Anthony Tjan claims, that it will be about transparency in what is our value proposition It could be financial transparency that helps low level managers and employees make decision. And it could be leadership transparency. But all of these are part of the same mechanism of creating a widespread transparency. A way to engage our teammates, employees and followers and a way that allows them to make the right judgment calls and decisions. To implement strategy below the c-level strategy. In this complex but highly fast paced and fast communicated world, this kind of culture will have to be the norm.

So, what have you been doing to create a widespread transparent environment?

Elad