Book Shelf: Start With Why by Simon Sinek

Overview

Entrepreneur Simon Sinek “hit rock bottom” in late 2005. He had started his own consulting business in 2002, but three years later, he ran out of passion. Dead-ended, Sinek thought about what made him happy. He wondered why some leaders and companies succeeded and others do not. He realized that inspirational leaders identify a purpose and follow it. The actions they take and what they make is secondary to achieving their mission. Sinek calls this leadership process the “Golden Circle”: It starts with a vision (the “Why”), then moves to implementation (the “How”), and then conquers the product or service (the “What”). Unfortunately, many leaders have this pattern backward. They first focus on what they do and how; then they try to differentiate their product based on price, quality or features. 

3 Key Points

• Why great leaders want to inspire their customers, rather than manipulating them into buying;
• What inspirational leaders do to build employees’ and customers’ trust; and
• How to hire others who share your vision.

Take-Aways

• Inspirational leaders start by identifying their purpose, cause or vision.
• They follow the concentric rings of the “Golden Circle,” starting with establishing their mission with “Why” in the center, then moving outward to “How” and then “What.”
• “Why” stems from your core purpose, the reason “you get out of bed in the morning.”
• Your How explains the ways your product or service is unique and desirable.
• Your What defines the obvious aspects of your product or position with your firm.
• Less successful leaders and companies work from the outside in: What-How-Why. Successful organizations and leaders work from the inside out: Why-How-What.
• This is because “people don’t buy What you do, they buy Why you do it.”
• Visionary leaders rely on their gut or intuition and can identify a void in the market before their potential customers spot it.
• Set out to do business with your ideal customers: those who share your beliefs and will recruit others to your cause.
• New hires who share your passion are “good fits” and will be your best employees and your company’s future leaders.

Summary

Inspirational Leadership

Regardless of size or industry, great leaders know the reasons that they do whatever they do. They follow their passion and have a vision they can articulate. In the early 1900s, several Americans wanted to be the first person to fly an airplane. Samuel Pierpont Langley was an educated, well-connected Harvard math professor with wealthy friends and a $50,000 government grant. Wilbur and Orville Wright had no education, no high-end connections and limited finances. On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers made their dream come true. They started with their reason Why – their purpose – and inspired those around them. “There are leaders and those who lead.” Those who lead are more common, but real leaders motivate and inspire you.

“Inspiring leaders and companies...think, act and communicate exactly alike. And it’s the complete opposite of everyone else.”

“Manipulation Versus Inspiration”

Most sellers manipulate rather than inspire. Businesses influence customers by leveraging price, promotions, fear, peer pressure, aspirations and novelty. Such manipulation harvests short-term transactions, but it doesn’t earn long-term customer loyalty. Businesses say their customers choose them because they offer the best products or services at the right price. In reality, companies often don’t know why their customers act as they do. Instead, managers make assumptions that they use as the foundation for decisions. Firms may conduct research, collect information and seek advice, but, even after analyzing all that data, sellers still make mistakes.

“Imagine if every organization started with Why. Decisions would be simpler. Loyalties would be greater. Trust would be a common currency.”

For example, merchandisers routinely drop their prices to entice potential customers. Once customers get accustomed to paying reduced prices, they don’t want to pay the full price, which cuts profits. Some firms offer promotions instead of cutting prices, such as “two for the price of one” or “buy X, get Y free.” Many ads and public-service announcements use fear-based messages, such as the popular 1980s commercial featuring an egg being cracked into a hot skillet: “This is your brain” (the egg); “This is your brain on drugs.”(the egg sizzling). “Any questions?” Fear is the most powerful manipulator. Peer-pressure marketing preys on fear and emotion – as when a seller tries to convince you its product is best because celebrities or experts use it.

“There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it, or you can inspire it.”

Aspirational messages and innovation are more subtle forms of manipulation. While fear focuses on the negative, aspirations focus on the positive or on something you might desire. Aspirational statements include such messages as, “In six weeks, you can be rich” or “Drop 10 pounds fast.” Companies tout innovations, but in a fast-paced market, innovations don’t stay unique for long. Manipulation instills “repeat business” – that is, “when people do business with you multiple times” – but not loyalty. Customers who feel loyal “are willing to turn down a better product or a better price to continue doing business with you.” Firms must earn such loyalty, but instead many use manipulation to gain repeat customers and must keep manipulating to maintain their business.

“Companies with a clear sense of Why...ignore their competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of Why are obsessed with what others are doing.”

“The Golden Circle”

Great leaders follow a pattern called the Golden Circle. Like a target, the Golden Circle starts with a small bull’s-eye with “Why” in the center, surrounded by a larger circle marked “How” and then surrounded by the biggest circle labeled “What.” Most individuals and companies can define what they do. They can usually articulate how they do it and the elements that differentiate them from their competitors. However, only a select few can identify their Why.

“The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe.”

When it comes to marketing, most companies pursue the standard What-How-Why approach. They should reverse the order, explaining first their Why and their How, and then their What. For example, if Apple were a typical company, its ads might read: “We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. Want to buy one?” But, a more realistic ad for Apple might read, “[In] everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. And we happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?”

“Successful succession is more than selecting someone with an appropriate skill set – it’s...finding someone...in lockstep with the original cause around which the company was founded.”

The second message doesn’t rely on any of the usual manipulations. Apple has loyal customers who believe in the company’s philosophy. Other technology firms might make beautiful, simple products, but Apple resonates with customers because they appreciate its vision.

“When an organization defines itself by what it does, that’s all it will ever be able to do.”

Leaders who define their companies according to what they make or how they make it paint themselves into a corner. Without realizing it, they become just like everyone else and compete on price, quality, service, and the like. Each new competitor in the marketplace makes it harder for those organizations to differentiate their offerings, and the manipulation must begin anew.

“Loyalty to a company trumps pay and benefits...We don’t want to come to work to build a wall; we want to come to work to build a cathedral.”

Gut Decisions

Consumers want to do business with those they trust, so they seek companies that seem to share their values and beliefs. These sellers make shoppers feel part of something bigger than themselves. People make instinctive decisions based on emotion. Specifically, the basic, emotionally driven limbic brain makes gut decisions before the higher-level, more rational, deductive neocortex comes into play. When people make complex decisions, they tend to dismiss objective facts and figures and rely more on instinct.

“If there were no trust...no one would take risks. No risks would mean no exploration, no experimentation and no advancement of the society.”

Neuroscientist Richard Restak, who writes about the power of the limbic system in The Naked Brain, says that when people are forced to make decisions based on data alone, they take more time and usually overanalyze the situation. He believes gut decisions “tend to be faster, high-quality decisions.” Choices that aren’t rooted in emotion can lead people to doubt whether they made the right decisions, but those with reliable gut feelings seldom second-guess their choices.

“If the levels of the Golden Circle are in balance, all those who share the organization’s view of the world will be drawn to it and its products like a moth to a light bulb.”

Great leaders rely on their instincts or intuition. They can identify a void in the market before their customers detect it. In the 1970s, San Antonio businessman Rollin King decided to replicate the success of a short-distance, low-cost airline named Pacific Southwest. King had an unlikely business partner, Herb Kelleher, his divorce lawyer and friend. Pacific Southwest served California, and King and Kelleher’s new Southwest Airlines initially served only Texas by providing flights linking Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. But King and Kelleher wanted to appeal to the common person by creating an airline that was cheap, easy to use and fun. They saw their main competition as ground transportation, not other airlines. Southwest became a business legend by remaining profitable every year while other airlines struggled. United and Delta tried to follow Southwest’s model by creating their own low-cost air carriers. Both failed within four years because they didn’t following their own sense of mission or purpose.

“We do better in cultures in which we are good fits.”

Building Trust

Building trust with customers has two components: First build trust with your employees and then back your words with actions. Continental Airlines suffered trust issues in the 1980s and 1990s until the arrival of CEO Gordon Bethune. Continental ranked last in on-time arrivals and customer satisfaction and suffered from high employee turnover. Bethune did away with the locked doors on the executive suites at corporate headquarters and made himself accessible to employees. He often worked alongside them, even handling bags when necessary, and he instilled a team-oriented culture. Bethune set out to fix Continental’s abysmal on-time performance record, which was costing it $5 million a month in extra expenses. He offered every single employee $65 each month that the airline ranked in the top five for on-time performance. He sent these checks separately from regular paychecks to underscore his message.

“You don’t hire for skills; you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills.” (Herb Kelleher)

People perform at their best when they’re part of a culture that fits their values and beliefs. Great leaders find good matches and hire people who believe in the company’s cause or purpose. In 1914, Englishman Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica’s frozen terrain and reach the South Pole. Winter came early, and he and his crew became trapped in ice for 10 months. Shackleton and some of his men traveled 800 miles in small lifeboats to bring help to the rest of the crew. Nobody on his crew died or tried to overthrow his leadership. Why? Shackleton had hired the right people. His newspaper ad read, “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” Shackleton found people perfectly suited to the job at hand; he found what every company wants and needs: “good fits.”

“Great leaders...inspire people to act...Those who truly lead...create a following of people who act not because they were swayed, but because they were inspired.”

Tipping Points and Bell Curves

In his 2002 book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses “connectors” and “influencers.” He identifies a “tipping point” that occurs when ideas or behaviors spread rapidly, like a virus. Advertising and marketing executives try to build momentum for their products by reaching out to “influencers.” Gladwell had several predecessors – notably Everett M. Rogers and Geoffrey Moore. Rogers described how society embraces new ideas in his groundbreaking 1962 book, Diffusion of Innovations. Moore followed up 30 years later with Crossing the Chasm, explaining how and why people adopt new technology. The “Law of Diffusion of Innovations” follows a bell curve, in which 2.5% of people are “innovators” on one end of the curve. Then, 13.5% are “early adopters,” and the “majority” falls in the middle with 34% adopting new technology early and 34% adopting it late. Far on the other leg, 16% are “laggards.”According to Moore, innovators and early adopters push us. They are the first to try new approaches, ideas and technologies. They trust their intuition and take risks. As consumers, they’re willing to pay more or be inconvenienced to be first. Most people fall in the majority; they try something new after they know it works. Laggards are the last ones to adopt something new. They, for example, still refuse to get cellphones because their landlines work just fine. Recruit innovators and early adopters who believe in your product and mission. They will recruit others to your cause.

Finding Your True Believers

Your true believers are out there; you just have to find them. You need action-oriented people to make your vision a reality. You need people focused on how to be your implementers. Even inspiring, charismatic leaders need followers to create vehicles for moving their ideas forward. Where would Steve Jobs have been without Steve Wozniak, or Bill Gates without Paul Allen, or Walt Disney without Roy Disney? In each pair, the visionary leader defines the Why and the second person implements the How. Inspirational leaders (“Why types”) need steady “How types” to keep them grounded.In 1957, Walt Disney said he’d be in jail “with checks bouncing,” if not for his brother, Roy. Walt admitted that he never knew how much money he had in the bank, but Roy always knew. Walt was the thinker; Roy was the doer. While Walt drew cartoons and dreamed of making movies, his brother had the idea of licensing the cartoons and selling them as merchandise. Roy founded the Buena Vista Distribution Company, which became part of Disney’s film empire. When people who focus on the Why join those who carry out the How, they can change the world.Even with success, individuals and companies must stay connected to their original vision. Individuals who succeed or companies that become too large risk losing that spark. They must hold on to it, so their endeavors continue to have purpose and earn profits.

Reflecting Back

A true sense of why you do what you do comes from looking inside yourself and reflecting on your life. Ponder where you’ve been and how your purpose can lead you where you want to go. Author Simon Sinek experienced an internal shift away from his Why. Three years after starting his consulting business, he was depressed and certain he was going out of business. Someone explained to him how the brain works and taught him that buying behavior is rooted in biology. Sinek thus discovered his Why and set out to “inspire people to do the things that inspire them.”

About the Author

Simon Sinek is an optimist and adjunct member of the RAND Corporation. His book Start With Why expands on his popular TED Talk, “How great leaders inspire action.”

Book Shelf: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Overview

Have you ever wondered why some people can adopt a healthier lifestyle or realize professional achievement, while others flail and fail? Journalist Charles Duhigg attributes this dichotomy to habit and explains that successful people have learned to control and change their habits. First, they had to understand that the three steps of the “habit loop” – “cue, routine and reward” – determine what individuals do without thinking. By analyzing how undesirable habits such as overeating, excess drinking or smoking operate in that loop by satiating cravings, people who want to change can control habits that may seem to control them. 

Summary

• How people’s habits influence their lives,
• How habits work and
• How people can change their bad habits.

Take-Aways

• Habits are actions people first decide to do deliberately and keep doing subconsciously.
• People can change their bad habits if they learn how habits operate.
• The “habit loop” has three stages: a “cue” propels a person into a “routine” to reach the goal of a “reward.”
• Understanding how your habits fit these habit loop stages can help you change them.
• Correcting habits is hard because they fulfill cravings that demand satisfaction, but you can learn not to respond to a habit’s cue and rewards with the same old routine.
• Starbucks teaches employees willpower by training them to remain calm in the face of “inflection points” – situations that are likely to weaken their self-discipline.
• Altering “keystone habits” can jump-start good new behaviors or change bad old ones.
• Giant retailers, such as Target, sell to consumers by analyzing their shopping habits.
• Paul O’Neill of Alcoa, Howard Schultz of Starbucks, football coach Tony Dungy and Martin Luther King Jr. shaped change by destroying old habits and creating new ones.
• Debate continues about how much responsibility people have for their adverse actions and how much blame they can place on their habits.

Summary

A Matter of Habit

A habit is an activity that a person deliberately decides to perform once and continues doing without focus, often frequently. Think about the complicated procedures you automatically employ to drive your car. Habits develop because the human brain is wired to seek ways to conserve energy. Researchers who study the science of habits observe that patients who lose their memories due to illness or injury still retain the ability to carry out their habits. A patient named Eugene suffered from a damaging attack of viral encephalitis and could no longer even draw a rough floor plan of his home, but he could still find the kitchen when he wanted a snack. He proved that “someone who can’t remember his own age or almost anything else can develop habits that seem inconceivably complex – until you realize everyone relies on similar neurological processes every day.”

“Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.”

“Automatic behaviors” reside in the deep brain’s basal ganglia, which translate deeds into customary actions by using a process called “chunking.” For example, picking up your car keys is a chunk of behavior that immediately triggers the other chunks involved in driving.

“Your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.”

The three-stage “habit loop” also develops in the basal ganglia. In the first stage, the brain seeks a “cue” that will put it into automatic pilot and indicate what it should tell the body to do. The second stage is the “routine,” or the ensuing habit. Then comes the “reward,” which teaches the brain whether the loop in question is “worth remembering for the future.” When the cue and the reward connect, the brain develops a strong feeling of expectation, leading to a craving and the birth of a habit. Unfortunately, the brain does not judge whether the new habit is beneficial or detrimental, so hard-to-break bad habits get rooted. However, you can change destructive habits and adopt new, positive ones by understanding and managing the cue-routine-reward loop. Focus on your cues and rewards, and alter your routine to thwart the craving.

“As we associate cues with certain rewards, a subconscious craving emerges in our brains that starts the habit loop spinning.”

Pining for Pepsodent and Begging for Febreze

Claude Hopkins made a fortune marketing Pepsodent toothpaste by inventing advertising tactics designed to trigger “new habits among consumers.” Brushing your teeth was not a nationwide habit in the US in the early 20th century, but Hopkins understood that if he marketed a desire (that is, a craving), he could make Pepsodent indispensable in Americans’ daily lives. He built the craving to get rid of “tooth film” in order to achieve the reward of “beautiful teeth.” In addition, Pepsodent provided a minty-fresh feeling in the mouth. Hopkins marketed that feeling and created a national toothpaste habit.

“Cravings...drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.”

Similarly, Procter & Gamble mastered the habit loop to sell Febreze, an odor-destroying air freshener. After much trial and error, P&G marketers learned that shoppers did not want to admit that their homes smelled bad. Instead, they wanted to reward themselves for housecleaning by making the air smell nice as “a little mini-celebration.” After P&G’s original Febreze ad campaign failed, its next sets of ads portrayed the product as providing a way to add a satisfying finishing touch to a newly cleaned room – and sales skyrocketed.

“To change an old habit, you must address an old craving. You have to keep the same cues and rewards as before and feed the craving by inserting a new routine.”

Researchers found that the brain begins to look forward to the reward that a habitual routine provides. Encountering the right cue sends the brain into a “subconscious craving” that sets off the habit loop, leading to the routine and the reward. However, this process is not inevitable. Individuals can analyze their cravings to learn which one impels the habit. Similarly, people can manipulate their cravings to better ends; for example, if you value the endorphin rush of exercise, your routine of taking a run every morning can become an automatic habit loop.

“Asking patients to describe what triggers their habitual behavior is...awareness training, and, like AA’s insistence on forcing alcoholics to recognize their cues, it’s the first step in habit reversal training.”

“The Golden Rule of Habit Change”

Florida football coach Tony Dungy understood the power of habit. Managing the low-achieving Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he realized that if his players could alter their habits and not overthink their plays, they would win more often. Instead of modifying his players’ cues, he changed their routines. That is the basis of changing a habit: “Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.” Dungy taught his athletes a smaller number of plays but regularly drilled them in applying those plays whenever they got the appropriate cues. This helped the Bucs succeed, though they still couldn’t win big games in a pinch. When the Bucs fired Dungy in 2001, he went to the Indianapolis Colts and built a cohesive, winning team using the same strategy.

“Some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization...Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.”

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) offers a similar approach when it helps members set out to change the habits that surround their drinking. While addiction can have physiological aspects, AA focuses on the habit loop and seeks to “shift the routine” when someone encounters cues that lead to drinking. If a person drinks to forget, unwind or feel less nervous, the next step is to determine the causes of that feeling of apprehension. AA’s solution is to replace the routine of drinking with a routine of companionship – talking to other alcoholics about the craving and the feelings it sparks instead of finding refuge in a bottle. AA’s approach to alcoholism has spread to treating other addictions (food, cigarettes, drugs and gambling). AA teaches that individuals must examine their cravings closely and determine what drives them.

“Cultures grow out of the keystone habits in every organization, whether leaders are aware of them or not.”

Additionally, people who wish to change their habits must embrace a belief that says they can change. For some, this has a spiritual element; for example, AA incorporates God in its famous 12 steps. Anyone who wants to change a behavior needs the “capacity to believe that things will get better.” For alcoholics, that means being confident that they can meet life’s challenges without a drink; for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, it meant being firmly convinced that they could win under challenging conditions. This sense of belief is always more effective if it occurs in a group – such as the community of an AA meeting or of a team in the National Football League.

“Just as choosing the right keystone habits can create amazing change, the wrong ones can create disasters.”

Habits That Change Other Habits

When Paul O’Neill became CEO of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), he startled its employees by focusing on workplace safety. He did so because he recognized that organizational habits have the power to drive change. He focused on a “keystone habit” – one that, if altered, can cascade through a firm and force other changes in seemingly unrelated areas. He knew the “habits that matter most are the ones that – when they start to shift – dislodge and remake other patterns.”

“A movement starts because of the social habits of friendship and the strong ties between close acquaintances.”

Organizations develop habits that help them do business or accomplish their goals. O’Neill’s focus on worker safety forced Alcoa to restructure the way it worked, and that made it not just safer but also leaner and meaner. Changes in safety procedures affected all areas of its business: “Costs came down, quality went up and productivity skyrocketed.” Keystone habits also can have this impact in individuals’ lives. For example, someone who exercises more tends to smoke and drink less, eat more healthful food and become more productive. Keystone habits force “small wins”: transitional accomplishments that help people realize that great successes are possible.

“It grows because of the habits of a community and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.”

Starbucks’s rules for employees inculcate the concept of willpower, which research identifies as the pre-eminent habit determining personal success. Just as scholars achieve positive results in other areas of their lives when they practice academic self-discipline, Starbucks workers improve their lives and careers after they learn the willpower of being cheerful no matter what crops up in their workdays. The willpower they learn to exercise is evocative of the famous “marshmallow experiment” in which researchers told little kids that they could have one marshmallow right away or two if they waited 15 minutes alone with the treat in front of them. The ones who could wait proved to be more successful throughout their schooling based on their “self-regulatory” skills at age four. People can learn willpower as effectively as they can learn to play a musical instrument or speak a foreign language, though once you master willpower, you must keep it exercised and in shape, just as you would work to keep your muscles toned.

“It endures because a movement’s leaders give participants new habits that create a fresh sense of identity and a feeling of ownership.”

Starbucks teaches employees willpower by focusing on “inflection points” – situations that are likely to weaken their self-discipline (like dealing with dissatisfied patrons). Employees practice routines for handling discontented customers so they can perform them habitually. Fittingly, the company calls this approach “the LATTE method.” Its steps are: “Listen, acknowledge, take action, thank and explain.” CEO Howard Schultz also instituted a policy of giving staffers “a sense of agency” – knowledge that the company values their opinions and independent decisions.

“This is how willpower becomes a habit: by choosing a certain behavior ahead of time and then following that routine when an inflection point arrives.”

Good organizational habits can grow from crises. At Rhode Island Hospital, a mistake in the operating room (OR) showed that employees were using a keystone habit incorrectly. To avoid conflicts, nurses had flagged demanding doctors’ names with color codes; nurses knew that if a physician’s name was listed in black, they had to capitulate to that doctor’s demands without question. This led to a crisis that ultimately spurred OR teams to develop better habits. Now teams complete a checklist together before any procedure.Organizational habits keep firms functioning; without them, companies would descend into squabbling factions. These habits allow truces; Rhode Island Hospital’s new OR checklist enables doctors and nurses to set aside any disagreements and practice safely. Similarly, a serious fire in London’s King’s Cross subway station in 1987 spurred the Underground’s authorities to teach better employee habits and create a disaster plan to ensure future passenger safety.Companies also can foretell and, in some ways, control the habits of their patrons. For example, the retailer Target carried out an analysis of consumer data to try to enable them to predict when customers were expecting babies. Their “Guest ID” data program indicated that patrons’ shopping habits changed most dramatically when they underwent a milestone in their lives, such as getting married, moving to a new residence or starting a family. Expectant mothers’ shopping habits underwent a predictable change. When that happened, Target sent them coupons for baby items. To avoid concerns that such policies were intrusive, Target mixed the coupons, “sandwiching” the baby discounts among other items. Similarly, the promoters of OutKast’s song “Hey Ya” helped propel it onto the Top 40 list by sandwiching its radio play between established hits to make “Hey Ya” seem just as familiar to the public as those songs.

Habits in Societies

The 1950s Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott arose in part from “social habits,” which “can change the world” when people engage in them forcefully. Dressmaker Rosa Parks was deeply connected to her community: She had “strong ties” to family and friends, and “weak ties” to her seamstress work and church acquaintances. When police arrested her for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person, the black community rebelled. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders created “a feeling of ownership” in her cause to mobilize black residents to boycott and join other civil rights struggles. Parks’s weak ties – like her work for local white families – spread the movement to areas of the community that otherwise might not have become engaged.Similarly, a young pastor named Rick Warren built his Saddleback megachurch in California partly on the basis of social habits. He wanted to make churchgoing more social and less of a chore by teaching people “habits of faith.” He created small, self-run groups that met outside of Sunday services. The members read and studied the Bible but also were highly social. They discussed the issues they faced daily and supported each other. The weak ties of the main congregation branched out to minigroups with strong ties that built “self-directing leaders,” a phenomenon of social habits.

Are People Responsible, or Are Their Habits to Blame?

Society struggles with the notion of habits and asks how much responsibility people bear for habitual actions. Is a gambler who feels sad at home (her cue) and who then gambles away her money (her routine) to blame if she puts her craving for stress relief (her reward) ahead of her family’s stability? Is a man suffering the lifelong habit of sleepwalking culpable if, in an unconscious “sleep terror” – an affliction called “automatism” – he strangles his wife? Research suggests that if the brain has no chance to intercede deliberately, the answer is no. A jury did acquit a man who killed his wife in his sleep, but just as creditors don’t let gamblers escape their debts, society appears to assume that people bear some responsibility for habits such as gambling.Given determination and belief, people can change their habits if they can examine and analyze them to unravel understandable cues, routines and rewards.

About the Author

Charles Duhigg is an investigative journalist for The New York Times. His previous works include Golden Opportunities, The Reckoning and Toxic Waters.

Book Shelf: Everyday Bias by Howard J. Ross

Overview

Diversity consultant Howard J. Ross shows how to free yourself from biases you probably don’t even know you have. The problem is that biases are unconscious. As a result, you may be unaware of some of the reasons underlying your actions and reactions. Maybe you have rejected a job applicant who resembles someone you don’t like, or you might choose a presidential candidate based on height. Maybe you have missed great opportunities because of a hidden antipathy against certain groups of people or an unacknowledged assumption about gender roles. If you increase your awareness of your biases, you can take steps to circumvent them – as do orchestras that audition players behind a screen to bypass race, age and gender biases, and just hear the music. Ross explains the evolutionary roots of bias, and outlines strategies for finding and defusing individual and organizational prejudices. He recounts fascinating research findings, such as the one featuring radiologists so intent on spotting cancer cells that they didn’t notice the inch-tall image of a gorilla that researchers had superimposed on the X-ray.  

3 Key Points

• How biases develop,
• Why most biases are unconscious and
• How to mitigate the influence of unconscious biases.

Take-Aways

• All human beings have biases.
• Most of these biases are unconscious; you’re unaware of them.
• You may never know when you’ve based a reaction or decision on an unconscious bias.
• Biases are a product of the way the brain tries to categorize everything it experiences.
• Instead of trying to eliminate your biases, grow more aware of them.
• Becoming conscious of your biases allows you to seek alternative perspectives.
• Businesses and other organizations have biases.
• A culture’s institutions, such as its media, help reinforce widely held biases.
• Examine every stage of your business’s processes for hidden biases.
• Fight bias with small changes, like using neutral pronouns in job descriptions.

Summary

Gut Feelings

Everyone has biases. Over a lifetime, you and every other human being compile a mental database of judgments, beliefs and prejudices. You draw on this resource to make virtually every decision. But, you usually won’t know you’re checking in with your hidden biases because this database is stored in your unconscious mind. It filters your decisions beyond your awareness.

“Human beings are consistently, routinely and profoundly biased.”

Hidden biases explain why subjects in one experiment consistently gave higher ratings to a student application when they thought it came from a male. Corporate recruiters favored a résumé when they thought it came from a white applicant rather than from a black applicant. Environmental conditions can influence decisions: College admissions officials rated applicants higher when they interviewed them on sunny days and lower when they met on rainy days.

“We not only are profoundly biased, but we also almost never know we are being biased.”

People around the globe strive to erase such biases. Nations, states and communities have outlawed discrimination, instituted speech codes, and launched initiatives to foster tolerance in schools, businesses and other organizations. Society has made progress in racial equality, women’s rights, and the acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

“Hidden prejudices and biases are surprisingly influential underpinnings to all the decisions we make, affecting our feelings and, consequently, our actions.”

But intolerance and inequality persist. The results are often unfair and sometimes tragic. Disparities affect how hospitals treat patients of different races. Women’s salaries lag behind men’s. African Americans go to jail at a much higher rate than white Americans. Gay teenagers are four times more likely to kill themselves than straight teenagers. Since the recession began in 2008, anti-immigrant sentiment has increased in the US and Europe.

“Possessing bias is part and parcel of being human. And the more we think we are immune to it, the greater the likelihood that our own biases will be invisible or unconscious to us!”

Most prejudices are invisible to the people who hold them. Your unconscious biases have power only because you remain unaware of them. Increasing your awareness and enlarging your consciousness enables you to confront and undermine the power of your biases.

“Sometimes, dealing more effectively with unconscious bias involves something as simple as just noticing the bias.”

Pigeonholes

Biases cause mischief, but their presence makes sense in evolutionary terms. The world was a dangerous place for humankind’s primitive ancestors and they needed to sense danger instantly and decide how to react. They learned to categorize people, things and animals quickly and to assign values to them: safe or unsafe, friend or foe. They automatically categorized a new person or situation by searching their memories for similar phenomena from the past. To stay safe, they had to make snap judgments based on superficial cues.

“One of the most effective ways to begin to ‘dis-identify’ with our biases is through exposure to people and groups we harbor biases against.”

The human brain still functions this way: People unconsciously size up strangers by their clothes or accents. You might reject a job candidate because he or she resembles someone you don’t like. You may come up with a conscious reason that’s a rationalization for your gut reaction. Because your biases are unconscious, you can’t determine how much influence they have.

“This is the world we live in today. A self-referential world fueled by a constant flood of information that affirms our already strongly held biases.”

Not all of your biases come from personal experience. You pick up many prejudices because your culture widely supports them. Human beings need a sense of belonging to a group. Cultural standards and norms reinforce that feeling of belonging and unity by inculcating biases against outsiders. Electronic media reinforce group biases. Every political ideology, for instance, has websites and cable TV channels that affirm their adherents’ biases.

“There are now dozens of peer-reviewed studies that demonstrate that liberals and conservatives don’t react differently to the world we are seeing: We each see a different world!”

The Mechanisms of Bias

The way the brain filters reality causes you to create biases. Its mechanisms include:

“The fact that most people are not aware of their bias has almost no bearing on whether or not it is there, or whether or not it motivates our behavior.”

• “Selective attention” – Your consciousness focuses on the things it deems important and ignores others. A famous experiment illustrated how this works: Researchers asked subjects to watch a video of an informal basketball game and to count the number of times the players passed the ball. The subjects were so focused on counting the passes that about half didn’t notice when a man in a gorilla suit walked into the middle of the court, beat his chest and walked off. Subjects saw the gorilla, but their brains failed to process or register the image. Selective attention is useful for navigating a world filled with constant, competing stimuli.
• “Confirmation bias” – When you use this filter, you unconsciously seek information that supports your preconceptions. You see this bias in action when political commentators respond to current events. Liberal and conservative pundits each “cherry pick” from the same information to support their own perspectives. This also happens in business. For example, when you identify people as “high-potential,” you probably give them more opportunities to demonstrate competence, thus confirming your expectations.
• “Pattern recognition” – Your brain will always try to discern repeating patterns in your experiences. When you experience something new, your brain tries to fit that event into an existing template. If a person you see routinely acts in a threatening way, for instance, you assume that he or she will continue that pattern when you next meet.

“Unconscious influences dominate our everyday life.”

Taming Bias

The benefits of controlling your biases are obvious. You can take your decision making off automatic pilot. Businesses can tap talent from a wider pool. A more diverse student body would enrich the experience of getting an education.

“Our minds quickly go to the solutions that make the most sense and often miss other possibilities that are right in front of us.”

Why do biases endure? Perhaps they linger because society attacks the problem from the wrong direction. It tries to suppress biases, to shame people out of their prejudices. This approach is more likely to provoke defensiveness, guilt and denial than to inspire change. Acknowledging that everyone has biases and trying to increase each person’s awareness of them would be more productive.

“Knowing not to believe everything you think is a good start toward managing bias.”

Pull your hidden biases into the light to figure out strategies for defusing their influence. Sometimes merely being aware of a bias can reduce its power. That’s what happened with a bias that researchers identified among professional basketball referees. Researchers found that white referees called fouls on black players more frequently than on white players. Black officials called fouls on a disproportionate share of white players. After the study became well known, the discrepancy practically vanished, even though the league took no special initiatives to address it.

“We have a largely unconscious tendency to see ourselves in a positive light.”

Making Bias Less Powerful

Cultivate your awareness of hidden biases and drain their power by following six steps:

1. Accept that biases are normal and universal – Feeling guilty about your biases is counterproductive and probably leads to “self-recrimination, denial or self-justification” rather than progress. Once you accept the universality of bias, try to identify your individual biases. One useful way is to take the online “Implicit Association Test.” This test may help you unravel your unconscious attitudes toward people of different groups. You can also unearth some biases by reflecting on the “narrative” of your life – the string of experiences from which you’ve constructed your unique filter on the world. Think about the culture you grew up in and the institutions you participated in, such as your school or house of worship. When you identify the root of a bias, you can consciously “reframe” it. For instance, if you have a negative bias against a racial group, you can change your narrative by seeking stories of people who overcame such biases.
2. Learn to observe yourself – When you turn your focus away from the outside world and observe your own reactions to life, your thinking becomes less automatic. Biases generally take advantage of the fact that people rarely focus on the present. They usually respond to the moment by drawing on their memories of past interactions or fear. However, if you heed the present, you can catch your knee-jerk responses in action and modify your behavior.
3. “Practice constructive uncertainty” – Human beings have automatic responses because the brain tries to reduce uncertainty as quickly as possible. To your brain, uncertainty signals danger. Defuse these programmed responses by pausing at the moment of uncertainty. Analyze what’s happening, and try to differentiate between the event and your interpretation of it. Observe your reaction and interpretation, and consider alternative reactions and interpretations. Choose the “most constructive, empowering or productive” way to handle the event, and put it into action.
4. Pay attention to uncomfortable moments – Sometimes you may feel discomfort around certain types of people or events. The automatic reaction to such a situation is the “fight or flight” response, which calls for making an assessment and deciding whether you need to defend yourself or run. Stop and try to discern if you are truly responding to the current circumstances or if you are unconsciously linking them to past events.
5. Get to know people from other groups – If you have negative feelings about a particular group of people, get to know someone from that group or learn about the group’s history and culture. The more you know about a person or group, the harder it is to cling to a stereotype.
6. “Get feedback and data” – People often judge the effectiveness of their actions by how those actions make them feel rather than assessing the results by gathering measurable data. To learn if your responses really represent your best thinking or are unconscious reactions, look at the evidence.

“Creating More Conscious Organizations”

Businesses and other organizations develop biases. Be on the lookout for “collective biases” any time you hear the phrase that’s “the way we do things around here.” You’ll find these biases in every decision a group makes in different areas, including hiring, work flow and marketing. When you become aware of these biases, you can put mechanisms in place that lead to more rational decision making.A great example of outsmarting unconscious bias comes from the way symphony orchestras addressed the underrepresentation of women in their ranks. Before 1970, orchestras were about 95% male, a ratio that may have reflected the bias of those who chose the musicians. Beginning in the 1970s, major orchestras instituted blind auditions: They identified candidates by numbers instead of names, and had them play their music from behind a screen. Blind to bias-triggering cues such as race or gender, the listeners could focus entirely on the quality of each person’s musicianship. The number of female orchestra members has increased an average of 25%.Other organizations can use analogous tactics to mitigate the effects of bias. Since the goal is to expand the consciousness of the organization, this effort will differ from the usual ways you might cultivate diversity. Usually, organizations attempt to contend with bias or prejudice by discouraging prejudicial behavior. The result is a culture of “political correctness” that hides the issues you need to examine. Teach your team members to become aware of biases, to learn how biases affect their performance, as well as to work to mitigate those biases.

Signs of Bias

Examine every aspect of your business for signs of bias. Create an organizational map, drawing on employee or customer surveys, focus groups and other data sources to discern patterns in your treatment of various groups. For instance, can you find a consistent pattern in the way your recruiters rate résumés from female and male job applicants? Interview former employees to discern their inside and outside views of your processes.Many of the antibias measures you put in place will be small, but they can have a big impact. For instance, in employee evaluations, eliminate assessments that rate employees with number scores or descriptors like “good” or “poor.” Such ratings invite bias because different supervisors may interpret the rankings in different ways. Utilize a narrative approach, in which you tell employees “what they should stop doing, start doing and continue to do.”

About the Author

Howard J. Ross, professor in residence at the Bennett College for Women, founded the diversity consultancy Cook Ross. He also wrote ReInventing Diversity: Transforming Organizational Community to Strengthen People, Purpose & Performance.

Book Shelf: Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert

Overview

You, like most people, have probably made poor decisions regarding the future. For proof of human folly, you have only to look at the large number of divorces, jobs walked away from, failed start-up businesses and attics filled with junk someone "had to buy." Families regret their goofy vacations – then take the same awful trips the following year. And the observers who ask, "What could they possibly have been thinking?" make the same sorts of mistakes in their own lives. As a Yiddish proverb says, "Mann tracht und Gott lacht" – "Man plans and God laughs." So what's going on? Why are people such poor prognosticators? Psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, with great wit, that the human imagination, along with the other cognitive abilities people use to forecast happiness, are fatally flawed. Based on extensive psychological research, his book posits that, regarding life's future milestones, most people would do better asking someone else what to do rather than making their own decisions.

3 Key Points

• Why people have such a difficult time planning for their future happiness
• How perception, imagination, memory and the brain's cognitive faculties often play tricks on you as you try to decide what will make you happy
• Why asking the advice of someone with experience may be the best way to make a choice; and
• Why most people don't do this.

Take-Aways

• Human beings are unique because they think constantly about the future. No other creature can perform this cognitive feat.
• Planning for the future takes place in the frontal lobe of the brain. People with serious injuries to this area live strictly in the present.
• Most people don't predict their future needs and desires accurately.
• Instead, they make numerous cognitive errors.
• They unthinkingly treat what they imagine as if it accurately represents what is to come.
• They invent details – yet don't take the facts into account.
• People think concretely about recent events and those in the near future, and abstractly about events in the distant past or distant future.
• The first time you experience a pleasure is the best. The good feelings diminish the more often you repeat the experience.
• Your brain employs a "psychological immune system" to ward off unhappiness.
• People routinely reimagine the facts of their lives to see themselves as they prefer.

Summary

"Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow"

Human beings are the only creatures that truly plan for the future. The squirrel burying nuts in anticipation of winter is mindlessly following a survival script that is hard-wired into its brain. This is also the case for other animals whose actions suggest they are making plans. The ability to think about the future is central to the operation only of the human brain. Humans alone can imagine something that does not exist in the present. In fact, one philosopher called the human brain an "anticipation machine." Mature humans understand the concept of "later."Studies show that people spend approximately 12% of their time thinking about the future. People devote a lot of time trying to imagine or anticipate what will happen – in particular, how happy (or unhappy) they will be with their choices. This is because to feel happy and mentally stable, people need to feel in control of their lives. The need to have an effect on the world is fundamental to humans – which is why babies enjoy knocking over piles of blocks, and why elderly people become depressed when they cannot care for themselves. People anticipate the future because they want to do something about it.

“When people daydream about the future, they tend to imagine themselves achieving and succeeding rather than fumbling or failing.”

People interpret the past, deal with the present and plan for the future based on their experiences. But their experiences, including those of happiness, are subjective, and their brains distort reality. Happiness is an extremely important emotion. Just about everyone attempts to plan to enhance it. Nevertheless, it's impossible to define. It is a subjective state, and it does not correspond to anything in the real world. Individuals can point out things that make them happy, and neurologists can see patterns in the brain activity of happy people, but you can never know whether what you feel when you say you are happy is the same as what other people feel. You can say only that it is what it is, or, as the poet Alexander Pope wrote, "Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?"

“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy.”

People are extremely poor prognosticators of their own happiness. They use their imaginations to estimate their future happiness. However, the imagination is a terrible happiness-planning tool, for these three reasons:

1. "Realism"
2. "Presentism"
3. "Rationalization"

“The frontal lobe – the last part of the human brain to evolve...and the first to deteriorate in old age – is a time machine that allows each of us to...experience the future before it happens.”

"Realism"

When people plan for the future, they use their imaginations to accomplish two goals:

“Experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see.”

1. Foresee the future – "I'll live year-round in Miami."
2. Determine how they'll feel about it – "I'll love going to the beach every day!"

Unfortunately, the imagination often comes up short regarding the second point. This is due primarily to inherent problems with human memory and perception.

“Awareness can be thought of as experience of our own experience.”

Memories are not always realistic. The brain must store so many memories that it ends up using shaky shortcuts to do so. Sometimes, it retains only a portion of an event and fabricates the details as necessary. Yet the fabrications seem as real in the mind's eye as the actual events.

“Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their forms reveal the artist's hand every bit as much as [they] reflect the things portrayed.”

Perception operates similarly. The brain combines sensory stimuli – images, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile impressions – with feelings, thoughts and beliefs to create perceptions. In fact, in many cases, the feelings precede the perception, as counterintuitive as this may seem. The human brain evolved in the midst of a world full of dangerous situations. Responding quickly was more important than correctly identifying the danger. So, in retrospect, people may misidentify the cause of their feeling. For example, in an experiment, researchers had a woman approach men as they were crossing a narrow, swaying suspension bridge and ask them if she could conduct a survey. After the survey, she gave the men her phone number. She asked another group if she could conduct her survey after they had crossed the bridge. The men she'd questioned on the bridge were more likely to call her. They had been in a state of physiological arousal caused by fear – but they attributed their feelings to the woman, and concluded they had been attracted to her.In addition, as with memories, the brain fills in perceptual details. Although everyone's eye has a blind spot, people do not see a black hole in the middle of their field of vision. The brain fills in the missing part of the image.

“The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what the eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.”

People do not so much see, hear or understand the world as interpret it. Thus, while they think they are experiencing reality, in fact they are experiencing an extremely good facsimile of it. The psychologist George Miller wrote, "The crowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world."

“People misremember their own pasts by recalling that they once thought, did and said what they now think, do and say.”

Because memories and perceptions are in part fabrications, they are often unreliable guides to future feelings. Yet, people uncritically accept the images their brains provide as true, even when their brains make up or leave out important details. In computer language, the problem is the old one of "garbage in, garbage out." The data on which people base their decisions is, unfortunately, seriously flawed "garbage."

"Presentism"

The brain derives the details it uses to enhance memories and perceptions from current experience. Thus, people assume that what they do, say, perceive or feel now is the same as it would have been in the past, and they imagine that it will also be the same in the future. A boy has no doubt that he will cherish into his seventies the purple and black Demon Hunter tattoo he has just lavishly inscribed across his back. When researchers ask people who have eaten recently what they will eat the following week, the people always underestimate their appetites – because they are not hungry at the moment.

“We fail to recognize that our future selves won't see the world the way we see it now.”

The imagination activates the visual cortex exactly as the eyes do when you actually see something. It provides the associated emotions as well. Thus, if you conjure up the image of someone you dislike, your pupils dilate and your blood pressure rises – you get angry. This applies to all of your senses and emotions.

“We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion.”

What happens if you're imagining the future – as people spend so much of their time doing – yet at the same time you're feeling bad about something in the present? Because your brain uses the same areas for real memories as it does for imaginary ones, and because you assume your feelings are consistent in the past, present and future, the bad feelings color – often dramatically – your predictions of events and your feelings about them.When the brain must choose between a real image and an imaginary one to fire up a specific sensory area, it chooses the real image. The brain operates on a policy of "reality first." For that reason, if you're trying to conjure up an image in your brain, you close your eyes – so the objects around you won't interfere with your imagination. And if you're imagining a future event and your emotional response to it, your current positive or negative perceptions of the real world will take precedence over what your mind's eye creates. This may distort your feelings about future events. In effect, you are trapped in the present as you try to predict the future.

“Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case.”

"Rationalization"

Reality is often ambiguous. Optical illusions that confuse the senses illustrate this phenomenon. For example, in one well-known drawing, the foreground and background keep changing places. Are you viewing a goblet or two faces in profile? You can view the picture either way with equal accuracy. However, if you have a reason to interpret an ambiguous perception one way rather than another, the "flickering" will no longer be random. Instead, your brain will choose the image you prefer. Thus, if experimenters reward their subjects for seeing one image in the drawing rather than the other, the subjects will hold on to the image for which they receive the reward. This choice happens quite unconsciously.

“Foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go there or do that.”

People desire an unambiguous, logical world. Consider this experiment: Researchers asked test subjects to watch a computer monitor on which they flashed negative words such as "hate," "vicious" and "horrid" for milliseconds – viewers perceived them subliminally. Later, when they asked the subjects to rate each other, they did so negatively. When the researchers flashed words such as "dumb" and "retarded" on the screen, the test subjects did poorly on intelligence tests. When they flashed words such as "old" and "infirm," the subjects acted lethargic. Later, when the researchers asked the subjects why they reacted as they did, none said, "I don't know." Instead, they manufactured answers and, for example, claimed they felt tired. The test subjects, confronted with their meaningless or ambiguous behavior, immediately provided a rationalization.The brain inherently leans toward positive, clear, rational interpretations of events – past, present and future. It provides "psychological immune systems" that keep people's spirits buoyant. Thus, even if an experience is negative – living next to a polluted river, for example – the brain will try to provide a positive perception of it – "It sure is pretty watching the lights reflect off the river's oil slicks at night!" The French enlightenment writer Voltaire made fun of this human tendency with his character the philosopher Dr. Pangloss, who maintains that "things cannot be other than the way they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. For instance, noses were made to support spectacles, hence we wear spectacles."You may not realize you have unconsciously developed a faulty but emotionally satisfying positive response to a current bad situation. Obviously, however, any judgments you make based on such distorted feelings will be quite flawed. You could easily repeat your mistakes.

"Corrigibility"

Since memory, perception and imagination are often so faulty, how can you make choices that will make you happy? Studies indicate that you should ask others – "surrogates" – what they did in circumstances similar to yours. If your surrogate is happy about a particular choice, then you probably will be too. Asking an experienced surrogate is the most reliable and credible predictor of happiness and emotional satisfaction.Most people, however, refuse to use this surrogate approach. The reason is simple: They are convinced of their individual uniqueness and special qualities. This is especially true regarding the emotions – past, present and future. Thus, most people find it illogical to ask surrogates about their experiences in order to predict their own. They believe that, since they are unique, an outsider's suggestions will not be relevant. They assume the surrogate's emotions and ideas will be different from their own. In fact, however, the surrogate method works, because most human beings are alike.

Making the Same Cognitive Errors in the Future

Because most people, when it comes to their future happiness, do not want to ask anyone else what to do, they rely instead on their own, faulty cognitive powers. They turn to their cooked-up memories and shaky perceptions to try to predict future events and how they will feel about them. Thus, they will continue to repeat errors in judgment over and over. In all likelihood, they will continue to be unhappy with their poor choices.

About the Author

Daniel Gilbert teaches psychology at Harvard. He is a pioneer in the research of "affective forecasting" – the forecasting of one's emotional state in the future.

Book Shelf: Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman

Overview

The topics that Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman addresses are both complex and integral to the human mind: He asks you to think about thinking by considering how your mind habitually contradicts itself, distorts data and misleads you. His prose is lucid, his reasoning rigorous and his honesty refreshing – more than once Kahneman illustrates conflicted thinking with examples from his own life. The result is a fairly slow read, but an ultimately rewarding experience.If you liked “Predictably Irrational” or “Stumbling on Happiness” or any of those pop-psychology books, well, this is the Godfather of all of their work. Huge thorough book gives a great overview of much of his work.

3 Key Points

• How your mind works “fast and slow,”
• How your “two selves” affect your perspective, and
• How to think better.

Take-Aways

• To understand how thinking works, consider this model, which says people use two cognitive systems.
• “System 1” works easily and automatically and doesn't take much effort; it makes quick judgments based on familiar patterns.
• “System 2” takes more effort; it requires intense focus and operates methodically.
• These two systems interact continually, but not always smoothly.
• People like to make simple stories out of complex reality. They seek causes in random events, consider rare incidents likely and overweight the import of their experiences.
• “Hindsight bias” causes you to distort reality by realigning your memories of events with new information.
• “Loss aversion” and the “endowment effect” impact how you estimate value and risk.
• Your “two selves” appraise your life experiences differently.
• Your “experiencing self” lives your life; your “remembering self” evaluates your experiences, draws lessons from them and decides your future.
• These two contrasting systems and selves disprove economic theories that say that people act rationally.

Summary

Your “Two Systems” and What They Mean

When you have to make sense of something, you think about it. To understand this process, consider a model that says people apply two cognitive systems.The first is “System 1,” or the mental processing that reads emotions and handles your automatic skills, like driving your car or adding two plus two. System 1 takes over your thinking when you comprehend simple statements (such as “complete the phrase ‘bread and . . .’”), instinctively turn to see where a noise is coming from or grimace when you see a gruesome image. System 1 supplies associated meanings (including stereotypes) rapidly and involuntarily.

“Although System 2 believes itself to be where the action is, the automatic System 1 is the hero of the book.”

By contrast, you use “System 2” when you’re focusing on specific details, like counting or figuring out how to complete your income tax forms. System 2 applies effort consciously, such as when you do complicated math, try new physical activities or search for a specific person in a crowd. System 2 thinking is slower, but you need it for methodical thinking processes such as formal logic.

“The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it.”

Human beings tend to value the measured System 2 while dismissing the mechanical System 1, but reality is much more complicated. These mental processes engage in a “division of labor” when it comes to thinking, and they constantly interact. You usually live in System 1’s world, where its fast processing is extremely efficient. In fact, you can be reasoning about a task in System 2, get tired or distracted, and find that you’ve shifted over to System 1 without realizing it. If you’ve ever puzzled over an optical illusion, you’ve experienced what happens when these two systems work at cross-purposes.

Duality and Collaboration

Which system you use and how you think depends a lot on the effort you are expending. If you are doing something easy, like strolling on a known path, you’re using System 1 and have a lot of cognitive capacity left for thinking. If you push the pace to a speed walk, System 2 switches on to maintain your effort. Now try to solve an arithmetic problem, and you’re likely to stop walking altogether; your brain can’t handle the additional burden. Recent lab studies show that intense System 2 concentration lowers the body’s glucose levels. If your System 2 is busy, you’re more likely to stereotype, give in to temptation or consider issues only superficially.

“People who are ‘cognitively busy’ are...more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language and make superficial judgments in social situations.”

System 1 likes to jump on the straightforward answer, so if a seemingly correct solution quickly appears when you face a challenge, System 1 will default to that answer and cling to it, even if later information proves it wrong. System 1 performs rapid “associative activation.” Pair two words, or a word and an image, and your mind will link them, weaving a story from those scraps of information. In the phenomenon of “priming,” if you see the word “banana” followed by the word “vomit,” your mind creates an instantaneous connection that causes a physical reaction. Similarly, if exposed to the word “eat,” you will more likely complete the sequence S-O-_-P as “soup” rather than “soap.”

“A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.”

If you want to persuade people, appeal to their System 1 preference for simple, memorable information: Use a bold font in your reports, try rhyming slogans in your advertising and make your company’s name easy to say. These tendencies are markers of System 1’s larger function, which is to assemble and maintain your view of the world. System 1 likes consistency: Seeing a car in flames stands out in your mind. If you see a second car on fire at roughly the same spot later on, System 1 will label it “the place where cars catch fire.”

Making Meaning, Making Mistakes

System 1 prefers the world to be linked and meaningful, so if you are dealing with two discrete facts, it will assume that they are connected. It seeks to promote cause-and-effect explanations. Similarly, when you observe a bit of data, your System 1 presumes that you’ve got the whole story. The “what you see is all there is” or “WYSIATI” tendency is powerful in coloring your judgments. For example, if all you have to go on is someone’s appearance, your System 1 will fill in what you don’t know – that’s the “halo effect.” For example, if an athlete is good looking, you’ll assume he or she is also skilled.

“When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise.”

System 1 is also responsible for “anchoring,” in which you unconsciously tie your thinking on a topic to information you’ve recently encountered, even if the two have nothing to do with one another. For example, mentioning the number 10 and then asking how many African countries belong to the United Nations will produce lower estimates than if you mentioned 65 and asked the same question. System 2 can magnify your mistakes, though, by finding reasons for you to continue believing in the answers and solutions you generate. System 2 doesn’t dispute what System 1 presents; rather, it is the “endorser” of how System 1 seeks to categorize your world.

“Facts that challenge...basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed.”

The natural tendency to focus on a message’s content rather than its relevance affects your ability to judge. People seize on vivid examples to shape their fears and plans for the future. For example, media coverage of dramatic but infrequent events like accidents and disasters – as opposed to dull but common threats like strokes and asthma – sets those events up as anchors that people use to make wildly inaccurate assessments about where the risks to their health lie.People also reason incorrectly when they don’t recognize the “regression to the mean.” Over time, everything tends to return to the average, but people create and apply “causal interpretations” to what are, in effect, random events. For example, if a baseball player who has a strong first year subsequently falters in his sophomore slump, sports fans will ascribe the decline to any number of rationales – but, in reality, the player was probably just more fortunate in his initial outings than in later ones.

“The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.”

Distorted Reality and Optimism

Simplification is at work in the “narrative fallacy,” or the mind’s inclination toward the plain, tangible and cohesive instead of the theoretical, contradictory and vague. People derive meaning from stories that emphasize individual characteristics like virtue and skill, but discount the role of luck and statistical factors. You will tend to “focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen.” Due to “hindsight bias,” you will distort reality by realigning your memories of events to jibe with new information. And when telling stories about events you’re involved in, you tend to be overly optimistic and predisposed to overvaluing your talents relative to those of others. You also will give your knowledge greater weight than it should have.

“We are confident when the story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no competing scenario. But ease and coherence do not guarantee that a belief held with confidence is true.”

This intense, pervasive optimism is useful for the economy in many ways because entrepreneurs and inventors tend to start new businesses all the time, notwithstanding the overwhelming odds against them. Despite knowing that roughly only a third of enterprises make it to their fifth anniversary, more than 80% of American entrepreneurs rate their ability to beat that statistic as high; fully a third “said their chance of failing was zero.”

Experts and Risk

System 1 influences how candidly people assess their own “intuition and validity,” which means that not all experts always provide great counsel. Expertise relies on an individual’s skill, “feedback and practice.” For example, firefighters’ repeated practice in weighing the risks posed by specific types of fires and their experience in extinguishing those fires give them an impressive ability to read a situation intuitively and identify crucial patterns. Similarly, an anesthesiologist relies on regular, immediate medical feedback to keep a patient safe during surgery.

“Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be.”

However, don’t put too much trust in the judgment of experts in fields where challenges vary greatly, where luck determines success, and where too great a gap exists between action and feedback. Those who predict stock values and political contests, for instance, are prone to fall into this category. Because System 1 lulls experts with “quick answers to difficult questions,” their intuition may be flawed, but your System 2 is unable to detect those inconsistencies.

“Organizations that take the word of overconfident experts can expect costly consequences.”

You’re especially prone to unclear thinking when making decisions about risk and value. Most people are “loss averse”: You hate to lose $100 more than you like winning $150. But financial traders tend to demonstrate less of an emotional, System 1-type reaction to losses. Individuals also suffer from the “endowment effect”: When something belongs to you, even if only for a brief period of time, you tend to overestimate its value relative to the value of things you don’t own. Homeowners exemplify the endowment effect, often overvaluing their properties.When you combine all this with the fact that people misjudge how likely rare events are or, alternatively, give rare events too much weight when making decisions, you have the foundations of the modern insurance industry. How you frame risk shapes your evaluation of it. For example, if you hear a life-saving vaccine has “a 0.001% risk of permanent disability,” your reaction is much different than it would be to the same treatment that leaves one of 100,000 individuals forever incapacitated. Yet the two are identical. When you take all these tendencies into account, it is hard to believe any economic theory based on the idea that people are rational actors. But making good decisions depends on paying attention to where your information comes from, understanding how it is framed, assessing your own confidence about it and gauging the validity of your data sources.

“Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion.”

“Two Selves,” One Mind

Just as two systems interact in your mind, two selves clash over the quality of your experiences. The “experiencing self” is the part of you that lives your life; the “remembering self” is the part that evaluates the experiences you have, draws lessons from them and “makes decisions” about the future. For the remembering self, happiness is not cumulative, and the final stages of any event play a critical role in your recollection of its quality. For example, when researchers asked subjects to evaluate the life of someone who lived happily to the age of 65, relative to someone else who lived happily through 65 but was only moderately content for another five years, the subjects rated the first life as more desirable.

“The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from experience, and it is the one that makes decisions.”

Your remembering self’s evaluation of your life story is one part of how you judge whether you are happy. You rate your life by standards or goals you set. The moment-to-moment assessments of your experiencing self provide the other side of your happiness. These conclusions may conflict because they account for different aspects of reality. Work benefits and status that affect “general job satisfaction” do not shape people’s everyday moods at work. Instead, job context contributes more to happiness, including such factors as chatting with co-workers and being free from “time pressure.”The things you pay attention to have major implications for your mood. “Active forms of leisure,” like physical activity or spending time with good friends, satisfy you a lot more than the “passive leisure” of, for example, watching television. You can’t necessarily change your job or your disposition, but you can change what you focus on and how you spend your time. Focus shapes your self-assessments: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”

“The way to block errors that originate in System 1 is simple in principle: recognize the signs that you are in a cognitive minefield, slow down and ask for reinforcement from System 2.”

Your two selves are intertwined with your two mental systems: System 2 constructed your remembering self, but your tendency to weigh experiences by their final moments and to favor “long pleasures and short pains” comes from System 1. The relationship between your selves holds implications for philosophers and policy makers. You would make different decisions about which social, health and economic issues to address, and how to address them, depending on whether you see the perspective of the remembering self or of the experiencing self as primary.In general, recognizing how these different mental systems work can help you realize that the purely rational beings favored by economic theory are fictional, and that real people need help making better judgments in their financial and life choices. Understanding how your mind works can help you advocate for policies that take those issues into account. The converse is also true: Because your mind doesn’t function optimally in all instances, rules should protect people from those who would “deliberately exploit their weaknesses.” Because individuals find it difficult to catch glitches originating in their own System 1 processing, an organization can operate with more methodical rationality than can the separate individuals within it. 

About the Author

Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus at Princeton and a Nobel laureate in economics, has written extensively on the psychology of judgment and decision making.

Pete Carroll's Book Recommendations

When I mentor folks, or even in my client work, I emphasize the context of decision making. Too often people look at the end result of someone's performance, or a flashy title--they see the external outcomes.It's an illusion. What matters is someone's internal processing. When people are looking outside of themselves for advice, common questions include:

• Looking for guidance on how to get to the next level? Who do you look to?

• See someone who's career or life situation looks appealing? How did they get there?

• Want to learn a skill that someone else is good at? How did they learn what they know?

It's so important to understand their influences, beliefs, and underlying values. If you are looking at a leadership figure for advice, ask what they read. It can give you a lot of insight into how they think, what motivates them, and how they define success.

The Road to Character by David Brooks--via USAToday. The book draws upon historical figures like Dorothy Day, George Marshall, Augustine, George Eliot, and President Dwight Eisenhower to show how selfless qualities sometimes considered to be old-fashioned in today’s individualistic society can lead to a greater good. The common thread in each tale is a humbling triumph. In each path, however, there first comes rock bottom.

It has affected my language in almost everything I tell them about leadership and serving each other.

Grit by Angela Duckworth.--via The Next Big Idea Club This book is a great read for anyone interested in psychology and personal development. Grit describes what creates outstanding achievements, based on science, interviews with high achievers from various fields and the personal history of success of the author, Angela Duckworth, uncovering that achievement isn’t reserved for the talented only, but for those with passion and perseverance.

In terms of being resilient, we can find ways to instill resilience by training people to believe that they have abilities that allow them to maintain hope. The reason you bounce back is because you know you have a chance and you believe.

Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Successby John Wooden. via The News Tribune When it comes down to it, success is an equal opportunity player. Anyone can create it in his or her career, family, and beyond. Based on John Wooden's own method to victory, Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success reveals that success is built block by block, where each block is a crucial principle contributing to lifelong achievement in every area of life. Each of these 32 daily readings takes an in-depth look at a single block of the pyramid, which when combined with the other blocks forms the structure of the pyramid of success. Join John Wooden and Jay Carty to discover the building blocks and key values--from confidence to faith--that have brought Coach to the pinnacle of success as a leader, a teacher, and a follower of God.

In the bottom-right corner as a foundation of his “Pyramid of Success” for leaders and coaches, Wooden wrote: “Enthusiasm: Brushes off upon those with whom you come in contact. You must truly enjoy what you are doing.”

The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey. via Sports IllustratedWith more than 800,000 copies sold since it was first published thirty years ago, this phenomenally successful guide has become a touchstone for hundreds of thousands of people. Not just for tennis players, or even just for athletes in general, this handbook works for anybody who wants to improve his or her performance in any activity, from playing music to getting ahead at work. W. Timothy Gallwey, a leading innovator in sports psychology, reveals how to

• focus your mind to overcome nervousness, self-doubt, and distractions

• find the state of “relaxed concentration” that allows you to play at your best

• build skills by smart practice, then put it all together in match play

Whether you're a beginner or a pro, Gallwey's engaging voice, clear examples, and illuminating anecdotes will give you the tools you need to succeed. "Habits are statements about the past, and the past is gone." (page 74)

The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday--via Sports IllustratedThe book draws its inspiration from stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Ryan Holiday shows us how some of the most successful people in history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—have applied stoicism to overcome difficult or even impossible situations. Their embrace of these principles ultimately mattered more than their natural intelligence, talents, or luck.

Book Shelf: Turn the Ship Around

Overview

The US Navy operates with a traditional “leader-follower” management structure. Corporations call this command and control. In the Navy, officers make decisions and enlisted personnel carry them out. This structure is a tremendous source of frustration and inefficiency while giving leaders the illusion they are “in charge.” These limitations were at a breaking point aboard the USS Santa Fe – once the worst performing nuclear submarine in the US fleet. In 1999, Commander L. David Marquet assumed command of the Santa Fe and developed an innovative management system known as “leader-leader.” This transformed the Santa Fe into a top-performing sub. Marquet explains how to implement leader-leader and how to use his “deliberate action” and “I intend to” management strategies. Applicable lessons for executives, HR managers, entrepreneurs, business students and professors, and anyone at sea.

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Key Points

• Captain L. David Marquet inherited the worst-performing, worst-morale submarine in the fleet and turned it into the best-performing by deviating from the traditional “leader-follower” (command and control) model and implementing a “leader-leader” model.

• In the leader-leader model everyone thinks and acts like a leader.

• Over the next 10 years, more submarine captains came from the Santa Fe than any other submarine. The new system improves morale and performance and builds leaders.

• Telling people they are “empowered” is inherently contradictory as it presumes you are the one giving them power. It reminds them that they have no power.

• Instead of telling sailors what to do, Marquet had them state their intentions. The “leader” gives intent, not instructions, and the team gives its intentions.

• Giving control like this rests on technical competence and organizational clarity.

• Giving control is fundamentally scary for leaders and needs to be done in small steps.

• Organizations based on intent generate a bias for action, not permission.

• “Deliberate action” – a process in which the Santa Fe’s sailors plan their work and say aloud what they are going to do – became an effective strategy for preventing mistakes.

• Marquet moved “authority to information” instead of moving “information to authority.”

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Summary

How Bosses Kill Motivation

Most people are enthusiastic when they begin new jobs. They have innovative ideas and suggestions to share with their supervisors. But most inadvertently shut down their new employees pretty quickly, telling them to be “team players” and follow instructions. Such top-down direction destroys initiative and turns motivated, positive employees into depressed cynics who go through the motions. This frustrates both bosses and followers. Such disengagement costs US firms $300 billion annually. As a former commanding officer in the US Navy’s submarine fleet, Captain L. David Marquet has firsthand experience with disenchanted employees who perform at substandard levels.

“A nuclear-powered submarine is an unlikely place for a leadership revolution…it operates in an unforgiving environment.”

The Navy’s attitude about leadership – like the approach of the typical boss – can also foster disenchantment. The Navy divides people into “leaders and followers,” the traditional leadership model. The leader-follower model promotes rote followership. It functions particularly badly for intellectual work. When people see themselves as followers, they stop thinking and do as their bosses say. Some leaders get around the leader-follower dilemma through “empowerment” of their employees. But providing empowerment – arbitrarily telling someone they can make limited decisions for a short period of time – only reminds people that they have no real power.

Everyone’s a Leader

As the captain of the USS Santa Fe, a $2-billion nuclear submarine with a crew of 135 men, Marquet replaced leader-follower management with “leader-leader,” a system he developed based on treating everyone as a leader. When each employee is a leader, agility, efficiency, productivity and morale improve. Leader-leader organizations are more resilient than leader-follower ones. Yet everything about a submarine is unforgiving. Deadlines shape all decisions and actions. Mistakes can be deadly. No one is ever more than 150 feet away from the control room. In this challenging environment, hierarchy is unavoidable, but how hierarchy is used can be shaped. Most hierarchies push information (at the bottom) to authority (at the top). Onboard the USS Santa Fe, Marquet pushed the authority for making decisions toward the bottom, where the information is native.

“People who are treated as followers treat others as followers when it’s their turn to lead. A vast untapped human potential is lost as a result of treating people as followers.”

When Marquet assumed command of the Santa Fe, it was the poorest-performing nuclear submarine in the fleet. It had the worst retention rate of all submarines. A candid photo of crew members not paying attention to their duties became notorious – a prime example of what sailors on submarines must not do. Within a year of taking over, thanks to changes Marquet made in its management and operations, the Santa Fe became the fleet’s top-performing submarine in numerous categories – including, most satisfyingly to Marquet, the number of crew members who re-enlisted at the end of their service.

Before Deploying

Submarines operate at sea away from their home ports for deployments that last six months. They may sail 30,000 miles during a deployment, stopping at in-transit ports only for repairs and resupply. Submarines represent the tip of the naval spear and often operate in “hostile waters,” ready to take the fight to the enemy at all times.

“Followers… have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy and passion.”

On December 15, 1998, 25 days prior to formally assuming command, Marquet first boarded the submarine. As he walked through his inspection, the crew’s downtrodden demeanor made a strong impression on him. He knew that feedback constantly reminded the crew members that they served on the submarine with the fleet’s worst reputation. They were humiliated, embarrassed and dejected.

“People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers.”

Marquet’s lack of deep technical knowledge about the ship’s sophisticated onboard systems proved to be a catalyst to discover a better approach than telling people what to do. Marquet asked the men: “What are the things you are hoping I don’t change?” “What are the things you secretly hope I do change?” “If you were me, what would you do first?” “What will be our biggest challenge to getting Santa Fe ready for deployment?” “What are your biggest frustrations about how Santa Fe is currently run?”

The Minimum Required

To familiarize himself with the sub, Marquet had the chief petty officers escort him around the spaces they supervised and explain their jobs. He learned that the crew members were obsessively concerned about not making mistakes, which biased the organization even more strongly toward waiting to be told what to do and not taking initiative.

“When you follow the leader-leader model, you must take time to let others react to the situation as well.”

One conversation Marquet had with a crew member deeply disturbed him. When he asked the sailor what his job was, the man cynically replied, “Whatever they tell me to do.” This was an insulting response to an honest question from a superior officer. The sailor communicated that he saw himself only as a follower avoiding responsibility for his work.

“Create a space for open decision by the entire team, even if that space is only a few minutes, or a few seconds, long.”

Marquet learned that this was a typical attitude among Santa Fe crew. The men on the Santa Fe felt that they were trapped. Pervasive faulty work under stress caused mounting errors, which in turn lowered the already poor morale. In turn, bad morale worked against anyone who tried to take the initiative to make things better. On the Santa Fe, things had been going from bad to worse. Marquet had his work cut out for him.

The New Commanding Officer

On January 8, 1999, Marquet assumed command of the Santa Fe, operating out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. His plan included changing how information moved on the Santa Fe. Normally, in the Navy, information moves up the chain of command from the enlisted men to the officers, who then make decisions according to what they’ve learned. Marquet intended to keep the decision making close to the crew level, where information originates. Marquet describes this strategy as “Don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.” He was determined to change the crew’s orientation from “error reduction” to excellence.

“We were going to deconstruct decision authority and push it down to where the information lived.”

Marquet began this transformation with the Santa Fe’s chief petty officers. Tradition holds that “the chiefs run the Navy,” and that’s how Marquet wanted operations to flow onboard the ship. To make sure the chiefs had the necessary authority, Marquet changed the navy regulation for who authorized vacation – and gave them the authority to control vacation for their sailors. Previously this rested with the second in command. From now on, enlisted men would only have to get the chiefs’ permission to go on vacation. For men stuck on ships for months at a time, the person who decides vacation carries great authority. In return for this concession, the chiefs agreed to be responsible for performance in their divisions. This would include their crew’s “watch bills, qualification schedules, and training school enrollments” – just about everything important to how Santa Fe operated.

“Chiefs in Charge”

This major change – putting the chiefs in charge – vastly improved performance. Directly connecting the chiefs, who were responsible for making sure work got completed, with the enlisted ranks, who did the work, proved to be very effective. It resulted in “greater commitment” and “greater engagement.” The principle was to “push authority to information” not information to authority. A leading chief, Andy Worshek, assisted Marquet with the initiative to place the chiefs in charge.

“In our modern world, the most important work we do is cognitive; so, it’s not surprising that a structure developed for physical work isn’t optimal for intellectual work.”

Marquet also changed the way the crew greeted visitors as they boarded the Santa Fe. The standard greeting became the “three-name rule.” Now, a sailor would say, “Good morning, Commodore Kenny, my name is Petty Officer Jones, welcome aboard Santa Fe.” Marquet also began to engage in “short, early conversations” – as short as 30 seconds – with members of the crew. In these conversations, he didn’t tell sailors what to do. Instead, he provided a helpful perspective that clarified their role and gave them more control over their own actions and activities.

“I Intend To”

One of the fundamental leader-leader changes Marquet instituted was the practice of having subordinates say “I intend to” and then explain the actions they planned to undertake. Marquet stopped giving explicit orders to his subordinates. Instead, they would muster the organizational details they were responsible for, say, “I intend to” to him, and then detail their specific plans. At this point, if he agreed with their intentions, Marquet would say, “Very well.” With this confirmation, the subordinates could proceed with their work.

“As you work with individuals to develop their vision for the future…establish specific, measurable goals.”

For example, an officer might say, “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. We are in water assigned to Santa Fe, water depth has been checked, all men are below, the ship is rigged for dive, and I’ve certified my watch team.” And Marquet would say, “Very well.” This seemingly minor change to the conversational interplay between the crew and the commander shifted ownership to his subordinates.

“With emancipation we are recognizing the inherent genius, energy and creativity in all people, and allowing those talents to emerge.”

Initially, Marquet wouldn’t ask questions about the proposed action. This dynamic prompted subordinates to communicate their thoughts and explain their thought process up front. Subordinates had to consider their actions as if they were the commander of the ship. Rather than one officer thinking, one leader giving orders, the sub now had “135 independent, energetic, emotionally committed and engaged men thinking about what [they] needed to do and ways to do it.”

No “Top-Down Monitoring”

Initially, the Santa Fe relied on a “tickler system” that was a check on the status of all tasks. The officers kept their various status reports in a binder in the executive officer’s stateroom. Every week, the Santa Fe’s officers would conduct a “tickler meeting” to go over the status of each operation or project, and to categorize what the ship needed to do and what it had not yet done.

“Leaders like to hang a list of guiding principles on office walls for display, but often those principles don’t become part of the fabric of the organization.”

The tracking system’s message to the crew that someone above them was tracking, monitoring and evaluating their performance poached ownership of their jobs. Monitoring suggests that those lower in the hierarchy don’t truly own their jobs. Marquet got rid of the tickler system. He put department heads in control of their own departments. This allowed them to own their jobs and focus on the work, not on cataloging and monitoring tasks. Sailors and officers became “responsible for their own performance and the performance of their departments.”

“When the performance of a unit goes down after an officer leaves, it is taken as a sign that he was a good leader, not that he was ineffective in training his people properly.”

Another innovation Marquet introduced was “thinking out loud.” This involved not just permitting but actively encouraging the delivery of information in context among enlisted personnel and officers. This ran counter to the standard system of communication, which is to focus on a “formal atmosphere” that discourages chatting. But an excess of context is far better than too little. Quality decision making involving the team requires context.

“Deliberate Action”

“Mistakes just happen” is a common excuse when things go wrong. But mistakes come from a lack of focus, and the crew learned to avoid them. On a sub, serious problems can develop quickly if someone inadvertently happens to “turn the wrong valve” or “open the wrong breaker.” If a crew member doesn’t pay attention and acts “automatically,” the ship could face an unexpected and completely avoidable problem – maybe even an emergency.

“When you’re trying to change employees’ behaviors, you have basically two approaches…change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior; or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.”

Following one mistake, instead of punishing the crew member, Marquet repaired the environment by instituting a policy of deliberate action. Before any crew member would take an action, he paused briefly and stated aloud precisely what he intended to do – and then did it. This brief pause and clear statement forces the crew member to think about what he is getting ready to do. This prevents people from acting on autopilot and making mistakes due to inattention. The introduction of deliberate action was “the single most powerful mechanism” for eliminating mistakes and increasing excellence.

From Worst to Best

Thanks to Marquet’s development and institution of the leader-leader strategy, the Santa Fe transformed from the worst nuclear submarine in the US Navy to the best. It developed a record number of new leaders. Leader-leader became a path for attaining excellent performance and developing a solid cadre of superior leaders.

About the Author

A 1981 US Naval Academy graduate, L. David Marquet served in the US submarine force for 28 years. He is the former captain of the USS Santa Feand a highly requested global keynote speaker.

Book Shelf: Focus

Overview

• Applying three categories of focus – “inner, other and outer” – is essential for a highly functioning life.

• “Selective attention” is the ability to focus on one task in spite of “sensory and emotional” distractions.

• Staying on target suppresses any emotional interference and helps you to remain cool under pressure.

• Emotions intrude on focus; completing a task is more difficult when you’re upset.

• Attention grows stronger and sharper with use, exercise and practice.

• In a “wandering” state of mind, you pause for self-reflection, contemplate future scenarios, hatch ideas or question assumptions.

• Self-awareness comes from recognizing internal cues and interpreting them accurately.

• Focused empathy takes three forms: “cognitive, emotional and empathic concern.”

• Today’s youth, members of the first digital generation, are growing up more attuned to devices than to people.

• Every leader must focus a firm’s attention where it’s most needed and most productive.

Recommendation

Daniel Goleman, author of the mid-‘90s classic Emotional Intelligence, turns his attention to the subject of attention – and explains why focus is essential for navigating life, performing at your best, leading others and, ultimately, improving the world for future generations. His explanations of brain functions are useful to business people and educators. Ironically, Goleman meanders a bit throughout the book, almost like a stream of consciousness, and his efforts to incorporate issues that seem to matter to him – such as climate change and economic inequality – which feels a little tangled. Still, he’s at his best when thoughtfully explaining how people think and feel. His simple explanations of the workings of the human brain, and his depiction of focus as a triad of attention paid to “inner, other and outer” targets make reading his work more than worthwhile. Goleman compares attention to a muscle you can flex and strengthen. For a buff psyche and enhanced mental tone, try this attention workout.

Key Points

• How your brain exerts attention;

• How to use three kinds of focus; and

• How to build your focus to enhance your learning, performance and leadership.

Summary

Paying Attention

How well you pay attention affects every aspect of your life. Effective focusing skills enhance mental processes, including understanding, learning, listening, being creative and reading other people’s signals. Most people underestimate focus or overlook its importance.You need to exercise all three categories of focus – “inner, other and outer” – to function well in life. Inner focus refers to heeding your gut feelings, values and decision-making abilities. Other focus pertains to how you relate to and connect with other people. Outer focus allows you to get by in the larger world.

“Focus is not just selecting the right thing, but also saying no to the wrong ones.”

“Selective Attention”

Someone writing poetry on a laptop in a busy coffeehouse is demonstrating selective attention – focusing on one task and ignoring external stimuli. Such distractions are either “sensory” or “emotional.” Sensory distractions like shapes, colors and sounds stimulate your senses. Emotional lures cut through the clutter to draw your attention, like hearing your name called in a crowded restaurant. Emotions intrude on focus; completing a task is more difficult when you’re upset.

“Though it matters enormously for how we navigate life, attention in all its varieties represents a little-noticed and underrated mental asset.”

The brain’s prefrontal region is responsible for selective attention. The more you focus on one thing, the better your performance. Staying on target suppresses emotional interference and helps you remain cool under pressure. Controlling your attention by focusing on one thing, then moving on to the next, indicates sound mental health. Jumping from one thing to the next multiplies any feelings of helplessness and anxiety.You focus more easily when you’re doing something you enjoy. Feeling in the zone or the “flow” results from immersion in an activity you find rewarding, inspiring, stimulating or intellectually challenging. In contrast, repetitive, unfulfilling tasks cause disengagement, boredom and apathy.

“While the mind sometimes wanders to pleasant thoughts or fantasy, it more often seems to gravitate to rumination and worry.”

Two semi-independent systems make up the human brain. The lower brain’s massive computing power operates just below consciousness, coming into the forefront only when jarred by something unexpected. At such moments, the bottom brain, active in the subcortical circuitry, communicates with the top brain, or neocortex.

“People who are tuned out not only stumble socially, but are surprised when someone tells them they have acted inappropriately.”

Bottom brain activity is involuntary, reflexive and fast. It functions constantly, handling rote behaviors and filtering information and stimuli. As it continually learns, it adjusts your perceptions. Emotion sways the bottom brain. The top brain, which is under your conscious control, is the locus of voluntary focus, active when you choose to watch a sunset, plan your day or learn a new task. Sometimes the bottom and top systems share mental activities to optimize your results with a minimum of exertion. For example, as you master a task like driving, the top brain learns and then the bottom brain takes over. Performing the task becomes almost instinctive.

Midbrain circuitry notices things on a neural level, such as a baby’s cry or a spider on the floor, and signals to the top brain. The brain’s amygdala checks your surroundings for threats and sends alarms when it spots danger. When your amygdala senses a threat, it commandeers your emotions until the top brain analyzes the danger; then it defends you or sends calming signals.

“While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.”

Never Mind

Your “wandering mind” – where your thoughts travel when not engaged in a mental task – is the brain’s default setting. In this state, people pause for self-reflection, contemplate future scenarios, hatch ideas, dwell on memories or question their assumptions. Brain scans show that the area for focus – the “executive system in the prefrontal cortex” – activates during downtime.

“Setting aside some regular reflective time in the daily or weekly schedule might help us get beyond the firefight-of-the-day mentality, to take stock and look ahead.”

While your mind wanders, your sensory systems dim. Doing activities that do not require a laser focus frees your mind to ramble. Focusing sharply on one activity quells outside stimuli, such as buzzing phones. Sustaining deep attention can be draining. To replenish, take breaks, meditate, exercise or do something fun.

Self-Awareness and Self-Control

Self-awareness comes from recognizing internal cues and interpreting them accurately. “Gut feelings” are messages from the insula, the area in the brain’s frontal lobes that acts as a nerve center for your internal organs. People in sync with their emotions have high-functioning insulae and a strong inner voice. The insula’s signals help you intuitively form a value system, which becomes more concrete as you articulate it to yourself and practice it.

“Video games focus attention and get us to repeat moves over and over, and so are powerful tutorials.”

Self-awareness is a focus that works as an internal compass. It governs your actions and aligns them with your values. Willpower and self-regulation are functions of “executive attention.” Focusing on achieving a goal requires exercising self-control to subdue your impulses and ignore intrusive emotions. An iconic study by the psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1970s measured the willpower of young children. In the “marshmallow test,” researchers told four-year-olds they could eat a marshmallow right away or they could wait a few minutes and get two marshmallows. Left alone with one marshmallow, the children who successfully waited for the extra treat succeeded by distracting their focus from the marshmallow by using fantasy play or singing songs. The continuing study eventually showed that the children who could delay gratification at age four performed better in all aspects of their adult lives.

“Kids who can ignore impulse, filter out what’s irrelevant, and stay focused on a goal fare better in life.”

I Feel for You“Cognitive empathy” is a top-down brain function that enables you to look at things from another person’s point of view, understand what that person is thinking and feeling, and manage your emotional response. When your emotions align with someone else’s, you experience the bottom-up response of “emotional empathy.” A top-down/bottom-up response, called “empathic concern,” leads to taking helpful action.You have to focus to tune in to other people’s nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and to perceive their emotions. You feel another person’s suffering – a hardwired physiological response – in your amygdala. Attention centers inside the brain connect with its areas for social sensitivity, giving humans the ability to feel compassion and manage their emotional reactions. Compassion and concern grow naturally from empathy, the feeling people want and expect from doctors, bosses and family members. For example, patients are more likely to sue for malpractice when their physicians share fewer signs of empathy and consideration, even if their rate of error matches that of more outwardly empathetic doctors.

“Self-awareness...represents an essential focus, one that attunes us to the subtle murmurs within that can help guide our way through life.”

Everyone’s social acuity falls on a continuum from socially oblivious to highly intuitive. People who fail to notice social cues often act inappropriately, missing nonverbal messages or misreading context. They’re often unaware when they make social gaffes, such as being rude or speaking too long or too loudly. Where you fall on the social hierarchy affects your ability and desire to read others. Columbia University research reveals a direct correlation between power and attention: The higher your rank, the less heed you pay to other people’s thoughts and feelings.

“While we are equipped with razor-sharp focus on smiles and frowns, growls and babies, as we’ve seen, we have zero neural radar for the threats to the global systems that support human life.”

System Navigation

No single area of the brain deals exclusively with system recognition and comprehension, but the mind uses the brain’s parietal cortex to recognize patterns. The ability to read and navigate systems is a learned process, separate from self-mastery and empathy. System navigation is an essential life skill. People understand systems indirectly, by developing mental models during firsthand experiences and by absorbing distributed knowledge.Pandemics and climate change are systemic problems that people learn about by gathering data, identifying patterns, and noticing peaks and disturbances. For example, “big data” collected by Google and analyzed with sophisticated software identified areas of flu outbreaks within 24 hours. The brain readily perceives immediate threats, but your perceptual system is blind to long-term dangers, such as the thinning of the ozone layer.

“Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.”

Practice Makes Perfect, Sometimes

Psychologist Anders Ericsson’s research about expertise laid the foundation for the “10,000-hour rule,” which holds that achieving the highest possible level of performance takes at least 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately, the rule is only partly true. Practice makes close-to-perfect only if it’s conducted in a “smart” way – that is, if the person who is practicing uses that time to make adjustments and improvements. How much attention you pay during practice is crucial. Productive practice includes feedback, which is why dancers practice in front of a mirror.

“The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.”

Professional athletes, experts and other high performers counteract the brain’s natural inclination to make routines automatic and to transfer them to the bottom mind. They use focus, skill development, refinement and positivity to strengthen their brain circuitry. Feeling upbeat is a crucial requirement for productive practice. Positive emotions ignite the brain’s left prefrontal area, making people feel motivated, aware and energized.Mindfulness refers to the practice of paying “attention to attention.” Meditation focuses on your inner state and develops your capacity to observe yourself in the moment without judgment. It strengthens focus by improving your ability to sustain attention. The meditation cycle rotates through the following four steps: “The mind wanders, you notice it’s wandering, you shift your attention to your breath and you keep it there,” until your mind wanders again.

“Attention works much like a muscle – use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.”

Games and Cognitive Skills

Playing video games generally diminishes brainpower. Certain games do improve some cognitive abilities, including “visual acuity and spatial perception, attention switching, decision making and the ability to track objects.” “Smart games” that improve focus and boost cognitive function may become educational tools. Such games provide:

• Specific goals for different levels of play.

• Feedback and pacing geared toward each user.

• Challenges that progress in accordance with players’ skills.

• Different contexts for applying a particular set of skills.

In the Classroom

Some schools are adding “social and emotional learning” (SEL) practices to their curriculum in order to help children self-regulate. For example, the “stoplight” exercise instructs kids to think of a traffic signal when they become upset or overstimulated. The red light means: Take deep breaths and try to calm down. A yellow light cautions kids to pause first, then reflect and come up with alternative behavior. A green light encourages them to try a solution.The constant lure of technology waylays young people’s attention and compromises their interactions with other people. Today’s youth, the first digital generation, grow up more attuned to devices than to people. They may develop cognitive skills for navigating the virtual world at the cost of the kind of person-to-person attentive skills needed to build rapport, empathy and social dexterity. Adults are not immune. They may find it hard to read more than a couple of pages, listen to a speech longer than five minutes or stop constantly checking their smartphones. However, the ability to pay attention grows stronger with use, exercise and practice.

Attention in Organizations

Every effective leader must focus a firm’s attention where it’s most needed and productive. Triple focus provides direction. First comes inner focus: Heed your behaviors and the effects of your actions. Leadership requires knowing your values and communicating your vision to inspire and motivate others. Other focus means developing an organizational strategy to provide a road map of issues and goals that require attention. Great managers develop interpersonal skills and can effectively listen, respond and collaborate. Using outer focus, leaders absorb the big picture, visualize complicated systems and foresee how their decisions will play out in the future.

About the Author

Science journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee Daniel Goleman wrote The New York Times bestseller Emotional Intelligence.

Book Shelf: Strength Based Leadership

Overview

This leadership book supports its advice, guidelines and recommendations with solid research. Gallup Inc. is a well-known polling company and has done far more research on leadership and the social sciences than any author could do alone. Here, Gallup executives Tom Rath – already a best-selling author – and Barry Conchie extrapolate significant findings on leadership from their company’s mountain of research. They explain what, from their perspective, superior leadership requires and what a leader’s followers seek. Their book comes with unique access codes to leadership strength assessment. In a world of mixed opinion and vaguely defined authority, this is an empirical approach to understanding leadership by way of consistent data. It also approaches the concept of leadership with the idea of “followership” (a term coined by Barbara Kellerman) which it doesn’t really address directly.

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Key Ideas

• Over the years, Gallup Inc. has conducted massive research about leadership, which has led to several findings:

• The most effective leaders remain true to themselves.

• Superior leaders ensure that they have quality people to lead.

• Mediocre leaders often mistakenly try to become expert in all leadership areas.

• In contrast, great leaders always concentrate on their individual, landmark strengths.

• Leaders must understand their personal assets and liabilities.

• These attributes can be clustered under “executing, influencing, relationship building” or “strategic thinking.”

• The StrengthsFinder program helps leaders identify their primary leadership strengths.

• While no one leader can possess all the primary leadership skills, you can assemble work teams that have the entire palette.

• Leaders learn what their followers need and then supply it.

Summary

Accentuate Your Strengths

Gallup Inc. knows about leadership. Its staffers have conducted more than 20,000 interviews with key leaders. In 50 years of polling people about their leaders, Gallup studied more than one million workplace teams. Its researchers asked 10,000 followers about the leadership characteristics that matter most to them.

“A leader needs to know his strengths as a carpenter knows his tools.”

Based on its research, interviews and studies, Gallup lists the three most significant factors in exercising strong leadership:

1. “The most effective leaders are always investing in strengths”– Managers must concentrate on their own strengths and on those of their employees. Some 73% of employees say they are more engaged when their firms focus on their personal abilities. Only 9% of staffers feel engaged when companies fail to make this effort.

2. “The most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people and then maximize their team” – Well-rounded individuals do not make the best leaders. This may sound like abject heresy, but Gallup research shows that well-rounded individuals turn out to be mediocre leaders. However, the best work teams always are well-rounded.

3. “The most effective leaders understand their followers’ needs” – These leaders work extremely hard to fulfill their employees’ requirements.

Knowing Your Strengths

As a leader, you must know your strengths and capabilities so you can work to get the most from them, and to expand and enhance them. Leaders who are self-aware can leverage their primary assets. But many leaders lack self-awareness. Often, managers are completely in the dark about their own personalities, or their leadership assets and liabilities. Gallup researchers routinely encounter leaders who don’t know where they are strong or weak. For instance, many leaders tell researchers that they are particularly good at developing their employees, but Gallup’s interviews with those employees sometimes show the exact opposite: The leaders in question more often demoralize, instead of developing, their followers.

“While two leaders may have identical expectations, the way they reach their goals is always dependent on the unique arrangement of their strengths.”

Prominent leadership researcher Dr. Donald O. Clifton was the “father of strengths psychology.” Starting in the 1960s, he and his Gallup and academic colleagues initiated more than 20,000 90-minute interviews with business and government leaders, including some former heads of state. Clifton’s researchers used performance data to determine how successful the interviewed business leaders were and how they carried out their work. The most startling finding was that these leaders did not share any particular strength. As Clifton explained, “What great leaders have in common is that each truly knows his or her strengths...There is no definitive list of characteristics that describes all leaders.”

StrengthsFinder

Clifton and his team developed the StrengthsFinder program, a tool you can use to assess your strongest skills. The more you know about yourself and your leadership abilities, the more self-confident you will be. Such confidence leads to greater earnings, more satisfying careers and fewer health problems.

“At a company-wide level, nothing creates stability as quickly as transparency.”

No single leader can possess every leadership quality, but you can organize executive leadership teams whose members muster an array of complementary skills. Although organizations should customize teams to pursue particular goals, few companies approach team building this way. Instead, many leaders try to make their work teams mirror their personal traits. They seek members who resemble them. When you organize a team, that’s the wrong way to go.

“You are a leader only if others follow.”

Instead, realize that:

• “Strong teams are magnets for talent” – Good employees want to join successful teams.

• “Conflict doesn’t destroy strong teams because strong teams focus on results” – Debate is a source of strength, not weakness.

• “Strong teams prioritize what’s best for the organization and then move forward” – They adopt a long-range view.

• “Members are as committed to their personal lives as they are to their work” – Team members find time for their families.

• “Strong teams embrace diversity” – Focus on individual members’ leadership strengths, not their demographic characteristics.

The Four Primary Areas of Leadership Strength

Gallup’s research indicates that the most successful leadership and work teams unite individuals with complementary strengths and assets.

“I’ve never met an effective leader who wasn’t aware of his talents and working to sharpen them.” (Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander)

The StrengthsFinder system identifies 34 individual leadership themes, which can be sorted into “four domains of leadership strength”:

1. “Executing” – Leaders who are strong in this domain get things done. They can turn airy plans into concrete reality. How they execute depends on their particular leadership abilities. The themes associated with these leaders are: “achiever, arranger, belief, consistency, deliberative, discipline, focus, responsibility” and “restorative.”

2. “Influencing” – Leaders who are strong influencers can rally backing for an idea or develop political support for a project. Their paths to building influence depend on their particular capabilities. For example, a leader with strong self-assurance does not have to go overboard to sell a concept. This leader radiates inner confidence, so people automatically assume that his or her ideas are good. A leader with strong communication skills will create compelling word pictures about a new idea to impel others to support it. Themes and traits associated with this area are: “activator, command, communication, competition, maximizer, self-assurance, significance” and “woo.”

3. “Relationship building” – These leaders can turn a group of disparate individuals with different backgrounds into a finely honed team that works toward a common goal. A leader with strong “harmony” skills can keep a group enthusiastic about its team efforts, while leaders with strong “developer” skills may act as mentors to spur their team members to grow. The themes in this area are: “adaptability, developer, connectedness, empathy, harmony, includer, individualization, positivity” and “relator.”

4. “Strategic thinking” – This leader helps his or her team maintain its long-range focus. For instance, a content-oriented leader can explain how a team can use the past to shape the future. The themes in this area are: “analytical, context, futuristic, ideation, input, intellection, learner” and “strategic.”

“A leader is someone who can get things done through other people.” (Warren Buffett)

Each of the following leaders illustrates one of these four facets:

Executing – Wendy Kopp

As a senior at Princeton, Wendy Kopp chose “educational inequity” as the subject for her senior thesis. Studying this subject showed her that many children in depressed urban areas receive inferior education. A leader who strongly emphasizes responsibility as her theme (as well as putting energy into achievement, competition, strategy and relating to other people), Kopp organized other students to discuss the issue. She learned that while many of them would willingly volunteer for postgraduate teaching assignments in urban areas, they had no straightforward way to do so. Kopp decided to establish a “national corps of teachers” to organize such volunteers. After securing financial support, she started Teach for America, a national teachers’ program that college graduates have embraced. One year, it received in excess of 25,000 applicants for teaching posts, and it has already assisted more than three million students.

Influencing – Simon Cooper

In 2001, Simon Cooper became president of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, a prestigious luxury hotel chain. Most of its customers ranked the Ritz-Carlton in Gallup’s “95th percentile” for “customer engagement.” Cooper wanted more. Driven by his strong “maximizer theme” (along with “woo, arranger, activator” and “significance” themes), he told his employees that any Ritz-Carlton hotel in the “94th or 95th percentile” of customer engagement was operating in a dangerous “red zone.” The “yellow zone” was for hotels “in the 96th or 97th percentile.” He set a goal that all hotels should achieve “green zone” status, reaching the 98th percentile or above. The results? In his first seven years of leadership at Ritz-Carlton, Cooper set new records in customer engagement – and in profitability.

“Relationship Building” – Mervyn Davies

Standard Chartered is a huge international banking firm. Headquartered in London, it has a workforce of 70,000 people and operations in 70 countries. Mervyn Davies is the firm’s chairman and former CEO. He has a strong futuristic leadership theme, along with strengths as an achiever, relator and learner with positivity. At a time when most international banks were trying to expand in North America and Europe, Davies focused on Africa, India and the Middle East. Thanks to his vision, Standard Chartered is one of only a few large banking firms that not only survived the 2008-2009 economic crisis but actually expanded during it. In terms of leadership, Davies says, “You must know yourself, know the people around you and then get on with it.” Much of his success is due to his relator theme. As the head of Standard Chartered, he constantly went out of his way to communicate openly about his activities and his reasoning. This transparency enabled Davies to develop crucial “relationships with key shareholders, business partners, customers and employees.”

“Strategic Thinking” – Brad Anderson

Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson’s primary leadership strengths are context, ideation, input, learner and connectedness, all in the leadership area of strategic thinking. Before Anderson became president of Best Buy, the big box electronics chain paid its salespeople on a commission basis like most consumer electronic companies. The result? As soon as customers entered the store, anxious salespeople surrounded them and quickly tried to sell them high-priced and high-commissioned equipment. Using focus-group research, Anderson learned that, as a result of this policy, customers did not trust Best Buy. They felt that entering a store was like strolling onto a used-car lot. Anderson, then a member of the firm’s board, and Dick Schulze, the chain’s founder, recommended moving “away from a commissioned sales model.” This was a very successful move for the company, and many of its competitors quickly followed suit.

Following Up with Followers

The best way to learn what followers think about leadership is to ask them, so Gallup did. From 2005 to 2008, it asked 10,000 respondents, “What leader has the most positive influence in your daily life?” Gallup asked these participants to “list three words that best describe what this person contributes to your life.”

“The best leaders get to live on.”

More than a tenth of those Gallup polled used the same words to describe what they seek from their leaders:

• “Trust” – In leadership, nothing matters more than trust. Without it, only one in 12 employees feels a sense of engagement with their firm. With it, “better than one in two” workers feel connected. Associated concepts include “respect, integrity and honesty.”

• “Compassion” – Employees want their leaders to care about them. When staffers know that their leaders care, productivity and profitability expand. However, most leaders do not exhibit compassion toward their employees. This is a big mistake. Closely associated concepts include “caring, friendship, happiness and love.”

• “Stability” – Employees want leaders they can depend on, for example, in knowing they will get paid reliably and on time. Associated concepts include “security, strength, support and peace.”

• “Hope” – Most employees (69%) who feel buoyant about their future prospects at their companies become fully engaged in their work. Without this positive feeling, only 1% feels a sense of engagement. To improve this, leaders must guide people to feel positive about the future. Associated concepts include “direction, faith and guidance.”

What All This Means

Your success as a leader depends entirely on the people who follow you. To gauge your achievement, consider the number of other leaders that you train and develop. That is the ultimate measure of effective leadership.

About the Authors

Tom Rath heads Gallup’s workplace research activities. He is the author of StrengthsFinder 2.0. and Wellbeing, and the co-author of How Full Is Your Bucket? Barry Conchie leads Gallup’s executive leadership consulting practice.

Book Shelf: The 4 Disciplines of Execution

Overview

Strategy without an effective method of execution is worthless. Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling – all FranklinCovey consultants – provide a process for realizing “wildly important goals.” They offer a simple yet effective four-step formula for execution, from goal setting to application and accountability. Although the concepts are basic, the clear instructions for implementation make this book a standout. Unfortunately, some of the content verges on being too promotional of FranklinCovey’s training, services and products. Setting the sale pitch aside and focusing on the advice, the book offers a clear strategy manual to all business leaders that roughly translates to effective project/program management.

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Key Ideas

• Implementing strategy amid the “whirlwind” of daily work is difficult.

• Identify your firm’s goals by detecting which changes would exert the greatest impact.

• The “4 Disciplines of Execution” (4DX) is a strategic process for achieving “wildly important goals” (WIGs).

• Discipline 1 teaches you to set a target. To achieve a WIG, define a measurable, specific time frame based on getting from one place to another by a set deadline.

• Discipline 2 identifies activities that provide the greatest leverage for achieving the WIG.

• “Lead measures” are actions that affect the outcome, while “lag measures” report the success of past activities.

• Discipline 3 calls for visible scoreboards that show how team members are performing.

• Discipline 4 instills accountability through weekly meetings called “WIG sessions.”

• The roll-out process includes extensive training for leaders and employee coaching.

• The 4DX principles also work well in helping you achieve personal goals.

Summary

Strategy Blockers

Executives implement some strategies easily with a single order. They initiate such changes as designating investments, revising compensation or hiring additional staff simply by asking the appropriate managers to make it happen. However, more ambitious strategies require people to change their behavior, which is seldom easy. For example, if you ask your sales team to use new software when they already like what they’re using, you’ll hit resistance even if the new program is compatible. As Jim Stuart, an originator of the “4 Disciplines of Execution” (4DX), stated, “To achieve a goal you have never achieved before, you must start doing things you have never done before.” Resistance to change is a major hurdle in implementing a new strategy.

“When you execute a strategy that requires a lasting change in the behavior of other people, you are facing one of the greatest leadership challenges you will ever meet.”

What else causes poor execution? Employees fail to implement strategy, first, because they often do not understand their organization’s goals. In one survey, most frontline people could not reiterate what their firm’s executives identified as its top three goals. In addition, employees said they rarely felt committed to a goal even when they knew what it was. Or, if they knew about the goal, they didn’t know how to contribute toward its fruition. And in most cases, managers didn’t hold workers accountable for making progress toward company objectives.

Discipline 1: “Focus on the Wildly Important”

Another obstacle to implementing strategy is the “whirlwind” – that is, “the massive amount of energy that’s necessary just to keep your operation going on a day-to-day basis.” Simply keeping up with daily demands takes most people’s time and energy. Achieving big goals in addition to staying on top of business is difficult. The four disciplines of execution will enable you and the teams in your company to execute important goals even as the work world swirls around you. Select one or two exceptionally crucial goals. Examine the abundance of good ideas. Then take on the challenge of saying no to some so you can concentrate your company’s time and energy on one or two “Wildly Important Goals” (WIGs) that really matter. This enables your staff to focus on the firm’s top priorities without the whirlwind blowing them off course.

“The greatest challenge is not in developing the plan: It’s in changing the behavior of the frontline teams that must execute it while managing the never-ceasing demands of the whirlwind.”

To identify your WIG, ask: “If every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?” Some corporate WIGs emerge from the whirlwind, such as an existing activity that is underperforming or broken, like poor customer service or escalating costs. WIGs that derive from outside the whirlwind are strategic matters, like new product launches, competitive threats or fresh opportunities. Many WIGs originate from “finance, operations or customer satisfaction.” Once you’ve chosen your firm’s WIG, the challenge is to implement it throughout your organization so that each team pursues one or two WIGs that support the company’s WIG. Follow four rules:

1. “No team focuses on more than two WIGs at the same time” – Achieving a WIG requires a keen, undivided focus. Do not let other demands dilute your attention.

2. “The battles you choose must win the war” – All activities must work toward accomplishing the WIG.

3. “Senior leaders can veto, but not dictate” – Middle managers must determine how their teams will support the WIG. If they set up a top-down process, their teams won’t feel high levels of commitment to the WIG.

4. “All WIGs must have a finish line” – State the finish line by using the WIG formula “from X to Y by when.” This declares that the organization will progress from this point to that point by a set time. WIGs must have a clearly defined, measurable and targeted achievement completed in a specific time frame. For example, “Increase...annual revenue from new products from 15% to 21% by December 31st.”

“When a team moves from having a dozen we-really-hope goals to one or two no-matter-what goals, the effect on morale is dramatic.”

To implement Discipline 1, determine the best WIG for your business. Seek input at every level of your organization. Encourage ideas from each team by asking which facet of its work needs most to be improved and what the team’s “greatest strengths” are in terms of putting them to use in attaining the WIG. Rank the resulting suggestions by importance. Test the top-ranking concepts by asking if each proposed goal is measurable, achievable and specific to its team. Make sure it supports the companywide WIG. Choose ideas that test well and meet every condition. Then put them into the WIG formula (from X to Y by when) in the simplest terms beginning with a verb, such as, “Raise annual inventory turn rate from eight to ten by fiscal year end.”

Discipline 2: “Act on the Lead Measures”

This discipline identifies the actions that will give your firm the most leverage toward achieving its WIG. In this step, each team delineates specific activities with measurable targets that will move it forward in reaching its WIG as part of reaching the firm’s WIG.

“The principle of focusing on the vital few goals is common sense; it’s just not common practice.”

Apply two kinds of measures to gauge your progress: “Lag measures” report whether you’ve completed a goal by computing your success after you act, for example, consumer satisfaction reports and revenue calculations. Unfortunately, by the time you receive the results of lag measurements, you have already completed the activities they cover. “Lead measures” are more within your control. While a lag measure might report your car’s repair record, a lead measure might note how much routine maintenance you’ve done to prevent repairs. Thus, lead measures can be predictive and can influence lag measures.

“Like a compass, the WIG provides clear, consistent direction toward a result that’s wildly important.”

Younger Brothers Construction identified reducing accidents and injuries as its WIG. Management ascertained that enforcing strict compliance to safety standards in six areas would provide the best lead measures for reducing accidents. Managers required shift supervisors to check their crews’ adherence to specific standards daily, in spite of constant whirlwind distractions like shipping delays, vendor issues or foul weather. Within months of focusing on lead measures, the firm’s safety record, according to its lag measurements, improved radically.

“What you ultimately want is for each member of your team to take personal ownership of the commitments they make.”

To implement Discipline 2, determine which lead measures have the highest impact on the WIG. Consider what new actions you can take, how to leverage your team’s strengths and where you can improve its weaknesses. Rank ideas by importance and ask these questions about each one:

• “Is it predictive” and “influenceable?” – Both these traits are essential.

• “Is it an ongoing process” or a one-time event? – Work toward a continuing effort with a goal.

• “Is it a leader’s game or a team game?” – Give the game to the team.

• Is it measurable and “worth measuring?” – Measurements create motivation.

“People will work hard to avoid disappointing their boss, but they will do almost anything to avoid disappointing their teammates.”

Once you determine the top activities, commit the list to paper in specific, measurable terms. Make each person accountable for taking a planned action by a set time.

Discipline 3: “Keep a Compelling Scoreboard”

Telling staffers exactly how they are performing creates engagement and dedication. Scoreboards drive action, promote problem solving, and boost energy and intensity. When you show progress visually, people feel excited. Seeing that they are winning is very motivational. An effective scoreboard meets these criteria:

• “It has to be simple” – The scoreboard must indicate clearly where the team is and where it needs to be.

• “It has to be visible to the team” – Computer data may help managers but lots of information alone won’t motivate the team. Put the scoreboard where everyone sees it.

• “It has to show lead and lag measures” – Viewers must be able to see quickly the result they want to reach (lag measure) and what they can do to attain it (lead measure).

• “It has to tell you immediately if you are winning or losing” – The scoreboard must communicate at a glance how participants are performing.

“The whirlwind is urgent, and it acts on you and everyone working for you every minute of every day.”

To put Discipline 3 into action, work with your team members to design a large, visible players’ scoreboard. Participants will be more invested if they participate in creating the scoreboard. First, choose what type of graph you want to display, whether it’s a bar chart, a pie chart or an X/Y axis diagram. Keep it simple, clear and easy to read, so you can display lead and lag measures. Update the scoreboard weekly. You will see that “people play differently when they are keeping score.”

Discipline 4: “Create a Cadence of Accountability”

The discipline of accountability keeps WIGs from blowing away in the whirlwind. Create a sense of personal responsibility through weekly WIG meetings that follow a set agenda and that concentrate only on the status of the execution of the big goal.

“Basically, the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”

WIG meetings have three components: First, participants report on the status of their commitments. Next, they “review the scoreboard” and discuss what is working and what they should adjust. Then they define what they need to achieve by the next session. These meetings are great motivators because, in addition to being accountable to their boss, employees are accountable to each other, which is more inspiring. “WIG sessions” promote creativity and innovation because teams collaborate to overcome obstacles. As they work on advancing the lead measure, they share experiences and ideas and bring out the best in each other. In action, “the WIG session is like an ongoing science experiment.”

“The challenge is executing your most important goals in the midst of the urgent!”

For the purposes of implementation, these sessions should not cover anything but the status of your WIG. The meetings work best when you hold them at the same time and place, on the same day of each week. Keep them to a half hour. Leaders should set an example by reporting on their WIG commitments each time. Together, teams commemorate successes, share what they’ve learned and help each other overcome obstacles. Keep the whirlwind out of your WIG sessions.

4DX Installation

To ensure that 4DX is successful within your organization, you should put it into operation as an ongoing process, not a one-time occurrence. Involve all of your firm’s leaders and their teams, rather than working with just a few leaders at a time. Train your managers to head this effort. To roll out 4DX in your company, follow this tested, results-oriented six-step process:

1. “Clarify the overall WIG” – Follow the 4DX procedure for identifying your company’s wildly important goal.

2. “Design the team WIGs and lead measures” – Commit two days to training leaders in the concepts of 4DX. Once leaders have absorbed these ideas, they can work with their teams to identify WIGs that support the organization’s WIG. These managers should define the lead measurements they’ll need to put in place.

3. Run a “leader certification” workshop – Teach leaders how to create a scoreboard, manage a WIG session and prepare for launching 4DX within their teams.

4. Conduct a “team launch” – Kick-off 4DX in two-hour team meetings. The agenda is to teach the 4DX principles, review the organization’s WIG and describe the lead measures. Conclude the meeting with a practice WIG session.

5. Execute “with coaching” – Once you’ve launched 4DX, stay on track and work through problems with the help of a coach who has expertise in the four disciplines.

6. Organize “quarterly summits” – Leaders report to upper management in quarterly meetings. This gives them the opportunity to practice accountability and receive recognition for their successes.

4DX in Your Life

True to FranklinCovey’s philosophy, the four disciplines are not only an effective tool for accomplishing goals in the workplace but also in life. One man used 4DX to lose weight. His WIG was to lose 80 pounds by his son’s high school graduation six months away. He identified his lead measures as walking several miles daily, limiting calories and not eating in the evenings. He kept a tracking chart on the kitchen wall, and he reached his goal in time for his son’s graduation. As in SixSigma, OKRs, or PMP methodologies—you can’t change what you don’t measure.

About the Authors

Chris McChesney, a developer of the 4DX program, and Jim Huling, who has more than 30 years of experience in corporate leadership, are both consultants with FranklinCovey, where Sean Covey is an executive vice president and runs global operations.