The Leader's Voice

Mrs. Tittlemouse

Richard Collins recently finished a wonderful BBC radio 4 series about Beatrix Potter's tales to shed light upon (perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, perhaps not) business practices and business consultants. Greg Dyke, formerly BBC's Director-General and Janet Brooks, a director in Monument Group private equity investors were guests and commentators.

Margaret Thatcher once suggested that "Ginger and Pickles," by Potter was "the best business book an entrepreneur could read." The series has sparked a small debate in the UK with the Financial Times, Guardian, and The Deal Magazine weighing in on the series.

Perhaps Collins is right to use Potter's tales to instruct adults, since Potter herself started a small farm after her publishing success and when she died in 1943 she left over 20 operating farms totaling 4,000 acres with hundreds of employees. Of course her Peter Rabbit brand is worth an estimated $500 million.

The best take on this, in my opinion, is the piece The Economist ran. It's in the January 23rd to January 29th issue, under Schumpeter's article "The Tale of Mr. Jackson." It's worth your time as a read, especially their take on consultants.  

Above the Law & The Slippery Slope

Have you ever said, "Do what I say, not what I do?" Or words to that effect. Those of us who are parents have certainly engaged in behavior we admonish our children to abstain. Perhaps we let ourselves off the hook by saying, "Well, I'm older and wiser and I understand the consequences of what I do better than my immature kids, so it's okay if I do it."

And maybe that's okay. But what about those times when we let ourselves off the hook because of feelings of power? Like, "I'm the PARENT - you are the CHILD." Our power as parents defends our rights to abuse the ethical position we advocate. Maybe we don't make our beds, use profanity, or over-imbibe. But it's okay - these are little things and we are entitled since we are older, wiser, and more importantly, in positions of power.

Carry the familial example into the world of commerce and we fry a different kettle. An upcoming article in Psychological Science by Joris Lammers at Tilburg University and Adam Galinksy at Northwestern University show that power indeed corrupts and those with power feel entitled to abuse ethical guidelines. Our everyday experience that power grants immunity from unethical behavior can range from the petty, "I didn't make my bed," to the perverse, "I took the pension plan because I was angry over being forced out of my own company" (this is my imaginary quote of actual claims made by the lawyer for Hank Greenberg, formerly of AIG). 

The Lammers and Galinsky article has been reviewed here and here. I recommend reading both the media reviews and the article itself when it is published.

What's also fascinating about how power corrupts is how we watch the powerful abuse it and often do nothing. Max Bazerman at Harvard University has an astounding career as a social scientist observing, testing, and reporting on a variety of issues like power, decision-making, and negotiation. One of his studies, with Francesca Gino at the University of North Carolina, shows that when the powerful abuse their power slowly over time, we follow along without objection. In some cases we follow blithely, not even noticing the erosion of moral or ethical judgement. 

But Bazerman and Gino warn us all in their analysis, "We like to believe only a few bad apples cross to the other side. In fact, under certain conditions, most of us can be expected to engage in unethical behavior."

Time for me to make my bed. (and wash my mouth out with soap - see my prior post, "Mood and Morality," on the power of washing as moral cleansing).

Reasoning by Analogy

Steven Pinker in his book The Stuff of Thought wrote, "Rather than occasionally reaching for a metaphor to communicate, to a very large extent communication is the use of metaphor." (emphasis is mine)

An abundance of research has appeared over the past twenty years about metaphorical and analogical reasoning. One researcher looks at the group of people we would think least likely to use analogy or metaphor in their work: SCIENTISTS.

What's fascinating is that these brainy, hard-working folk not only use analogy and metaphor - apparently when they do it assists problem-solving and innovation. Kevin Niall Dunbar studies scientists as they are working and has found that they will use analogies at the rate of three to fifteen per hour in laboratory discussions with other scientists. 

From a communication standpoint I have argued from my own research that metaphor and analogy are as important as facts or emotions in creating meaning, conveying context, explaining ideas, persuading, and other communication categories, especially leadership communication. Dunbar's research suggests that helping others learn to generate and use analogy and metaphor not helps them communicate better, but enables them to think better.

Pinker suggests, "It could be that 95 percent of our speech is metaphorical, if you go back far enough in language."

There are those who oppose the use of metaphor in science, most notably Susan Oyama. I've read her books Evolution's Eye and the Ontogeny of Information. She argues that metaphors for all their uses can lead us astray in our analogical reasoning and therefore we should abandon them.

The problem with her thoughtful commentary (if you read her books, have a dictionary handy - it's hard but worthwhile slogging to get through some of her analysis) is that our brains can't stop producing metaphor and analogy because that's how they work. And in the light of Dunbar's research the benefits far exceed the limitations.

One final note about Dunbar's research. He shows that the metaphorical structures scientists use who know a lot about a particular field of study are different than the ones they use to convey those ideas to those outside their field of knowledge. This is a very important finding. It means the better science and engineering communicators are more gifted or better skilled at using analogy and metaphor to convey ideas to outsiders.

My own observation is that this is true of any field of expertise and is not strictly limited to scientists.

Mood and Morality

 
 

Those of us in the leadership development field argue leaders should regularly affirm ethical standards and be clear and consistent about philosophies, including moral and ethical postures. Could it be that this very act pumps up the collective “moral bank account” and could lead to unintended consequences? 

We also regularly advise or coach managers to help individuals see their better natures, to engage in a type of positive self-talk. Our intentions are good, but our advice backfires in some specific ways that we should know and should pass along.

And finally when we as trusted advisors find ourselves in a conflict of interest we may unintentionally create difficulties with a client because we may believe that simple “full disclosure” of the conflict paves the way for continued conversation.

The articles I've written about and linked here provide some insight.

Learning and Forgetting

Tom Peters has quoted Dee Hock (founder and former CEO of the VISA association) for a long time who once said, "The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your minds, but how to get the old ones out."

New brain science points to this statement's truth. Mark Histed, Anitha Pasupathy, and Earl Miller demonstrated in a study published in Neuron that when it comes to learning, success sticks with us, but failure does not. Failure, perhaps, is as immediately tossed out, as success is immediately stored. Once stored, success biases us towards what was successful. The researcher's suggest their findings may help us understand how to link reward to trial and error when learning (although I it seems apparent from their paper "learning" means learning a known useful skill, not necessarily "learning" writ large).

In the January-February, 2010 issue of HBR, Scott Berinato wrote about this study. He quotes Miller' caution on connecting this research project's results to the workplace in too concrete a manner. Miller suggests since our brain knows how to learn from success, perhaps we should pay more attention to how we fail.

One of the best ways to get outside our own success trap might be to learn from others' success. Which leads me to another Dee Hock quote:

"It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom."

Daydreaming at Work

When I was a young salesman at AT&T I was sitting quietly at my desk, daydreaming about several of my clients and how I was going to get them to accept some relatively bad news about upcoming changes to their communication costs. My boss walked by my cube, saw me sitting there and asked, "Ron, what are you doing?"

Annoyed I said, "Thinking."

"Well, stop that and get to work," he barked and stomped on to spread more motivation to the troops.

While we all may concede that mental rehearsals of future events is a good strategy, it might have other benefits as well.

The use of fMRI technology to study the brain is a relatively new thing, but it has been around long enough that people are beginning to notice stuff that they are not deliberately trying to study. Like the fact when the technicians ask you to lie in the scanner and let your mind go blank, it can't be done (when first noticed, it fascinated some researchers). Even when defocusing, the brain's activity is pretty intense. 

Back in 2008 a group of researchers showed that the brain's "default network," the way it operates when not attending to a task (lying in a scanner) is not as fully developed in youth as in adulthood. In this case "network" means the overall connections between very disparate portions of the brain. These researchers speculated on several different ideas about how this network develops over the course of life.

A paper completed in September, 2009 by Ming Song, Yong Liu, Yuan Zhou, Kun Wang, Chunsui Yu, and Tianzi Jiang demonstrates that the smarter you are, the more connections you have. Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli and John Gabrieli speculate about this research in a recent Scientific American article.

This type of hard evidence suggests we should become better at learning how to develop these connections in a person's life over time. It lends support to the idea of learning something new (exercising brain parts you don't normal use), developing a larger appetite for a range of activities we know are associated with different brain regions (music, art, math, group interaction, etc.). It has even been suggested that developing the ability to intentionally daydream might help stimulate greater connectivity. Mental rehearsals are a type of directed daydreaming, so who knows, maybe it not only helps prepare for a specific task - it could help make you smarter over time.

So maybe we should teach children to daydream well instead of not daydream at all. And maybe we should not be so quick to axe the arts and music departments' budget.

Popular versus Profound

Eric Jacobson posted a LinkedIn discussion concerning the best leadership books. He cited the nominations from three LinkedIn groups: ExecuNet Executive Suite, The Talent Buzz, and the Keller Graduate School of Management. These groups created a list of 64 books they think are the best. Eric is asking for more recommendations to get to a 100. The list is posted here and while I'm tempted to recreate the list in this post, unfortunately the list is so poor (with a few terrific exceptions) in my opinion that I just can't bring myself to do it.

I did a short review of the books cited and categorized them in the following manner:

  6  CEO perspective (written by a CEO)

  2  Communication oriented

  5  Fable 

  2  Fiction

  6  Historical perspective or biographies of historical figures

15  Opinion (some by business people, some by scholars)

14  Research oriented (actually had research evidence beyond anecdotal)

  9  Religiously oriented (by religious leaders or those with a strong religious bias)

  5  Sports (written by former athletes or those in the sports field)

About a third of the books had more to do with personal excellence or ethical training than leadership per se. And while there were 14 books that contained some actual research, the range of research was very limited. Eric Jacobson's LinkedIn post suggested that the authors most frequently cited were Welch, Maxwell, and Drucker - when in fact the frequency titles go to Maxwell and Kotter.

What dismays me the most is how generally we allow fable, opinion, and anecdote devoid of research to inform. Case histories, fables, and advice from the "been-there-done-that" can provide perspective and inspiration, but frequently they are poorly rooted in serious research. As a result this "advice" can cause people to engage in behavior that is not only NOT leadership-like, it can be detrimental.

The authors that were not mentioned demonstrates the sad state of affairs for serious leadership. Not mentioned were Kouzes and Posner, Argyris, Zaleznik, Kets de Vries, Tichy, Conger, Bass, Hamel, McCall, Mintzberg, Handy, Belbin, Birkenshaw, O'Reilly, Tushman, Kanter, Porter, Prahalad, - just to cite a few serious researchers off the top of my head. 

I fear we still live in an age where we would rather be guided by anecdote than research, believe leadership development is easy when it is hard, and default to "feel good" training instead of serious, difficult development. If we trained Olympic athletes in the manner most corporate leadership development is conducted (based on the Jacobson reading list I'm discussing in this post) then we would run the 100 meters in about 13 seconds, pole vault at about 12 feet, and swim the 50 meter freestyle in about 40 seconds.