October 3rd, 2011
This morning, while straining to get my cognitive gears to engage, I stumbled across two tidbits of advice that made the task easier and prepared me for the week ahead.
The first came from Brain Pickings, one of my favorite sites. Proprietress Maria Popova unearthed a 1972 Q&A with the legendary Charles Eames. The whole thing is worth a read, but this exchange stuck with me:
Interviewer: What are the boundaries of design?
Eames: What are the boundaries of problems?
Moments later, reeling from that hip-check to my mind, I learned that someone just executed a business idea I had several years ago. That was irritating — but the pangs of irritation somehow triggered me to remember a line from Karim Rashid‘s Karimanifesto, where he writes:
“Never say ‘I could have done that’ because you didn’t.”
Think on these things, Grasshopper. Happy Monday.
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September 28th, 2011
France’s state-owned railway is facing a vexing problem and — mon Dieu! — it’s looking for advice from Pink Blog readers.
Here’s the le scoop:
Earlier this month, I received an email from Marie-Dominique Bonardi, who’d recently finished reading Drive. She wrote:
I am a professor at Sorbonne University, I teach public relations. I also have my own
tiny PR agency in Paris. I come to you with a case and questions.
The company that runs the train in France has a problem in a station. Smoking is forbidden in trains. But a group of people takes one wagon for themselves, and spends the whole journey smoking and preventing other people from using the wagon.
No one managed to stop them. This has been like that for 10 years. Now
SNCF really does not know how to fix the issue and one of their directors came to me.
Marie-Dominique reached out to me for advice. And I suggested to her that we crowdsource the problem — because PinkBlog readers have an excellent record of devising great solutions to tough challenges (see one such example here).
So . . . over to you, mes amis. What should the train company do?
Offer your solution in the Comments section below. I’ll compile the best (and most interesting) proposals in a subsequent blog post and we’ll send all the recommendations to the French. To get us started, I’ve listed four ideas of my own as the first Comment.
Allons-y!
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September 14th, 2011
(UPDATE: 9/16, 1pm ET — I inadvertently gave out the wrong email address on today’s show. The correct one is mccullpink@me.com. Sorry.)
In the last decade, millions of people have come around to the idea that we’re better off building on our strengths instead of constantly trying to fix our weaknesses. That change in perspective is due, in no small part, to Marcus Buckingham.
Now you’ll have a chance to ask Marcus anything you want on the next episode of Office Hours — Friday September 16 at 11am EDT.
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Office Hours is our new radio-ish show in which I open the phone lines for an hour to listeners across the planet who can ask me and a special guest questions about work, business, life, or any other topic. As we say, it’s Car Talk . . . for the human engine.
And for those who really haven’t been paying attention, Marcus Buckingham is among of the world’s top management thinkers — and co-author of Now, Discover Your Strengths, one of the most influential (and top-selling) books of the past decade.
This week, Marcus launched a new book –StandOut: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution
– which includes a powerful new strengths assessment that builds on what he’s learned in the ensuing years. (I’ve taken the assessment. It’s really interesting. I might even reveal the results on the show.)
To join us on Friday September 16 at 11am EDT, whether to ask a question or just to listen in, simply call 1 (703) 344-2171 and enter this passcode: 203373#. It’s free — and freewheeling.
ADDED BONUS: We’ll be giving away copies of Marcus’s new book to 24 lucky listeners. The only way to win, though, is to tune in.
To hear previous episodes of Office Hours, visit the show’s web page or snag them on iTunes.
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September 13th, 2011
At the heart of most organizations is a disconnect.
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer have shown that making progress on meaningful work is the single most motivating aspect of any job. But . . . many people don’t know what kind of progress they’re making – because their main source of workplace feedback comes only once a year in that hideously awkward and bizarrely formulaic ritual known as the annual review.
Fortunately, several companies and entrepreneurs are now riding to the rescue, armed with techniques and software to irrigate the modern workplace’s feedback desert. But last month, I discovered a tool for individuals that – bang for the buck – is one of the most useful yet.
It’s called IDoneThis — and here’s how it works:
You register for free on the site. Then each afternoon or evening, at a time that you designate, the IDoneThis folks send you an email asking what you’ve accomplished that day. You reply to the email — and IDoneThis compiles the responses. You can then visit your own private online calendar to remember what you achieved — or didn’t — yesterday, last Tuesday, or three weeks ago.
I’ve been using IDoneThis for about a month now – and I’ve found it helpful, revealing, and occasionally disappointing because of what it reveals. It’s not a magic elixir for anybody’s productivity woes. But for me at least, spending 60 seconds each night responding to that IDoneThis email gives me a hint about whether I’ve really moving forward on stuff that matters.
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September 8th, 2011
Michael Marx of Gilbert, Arizona, emailed recently to say, “There can never be enough emotionally intelligent signage.” And he included this example from the parking lot of a nearby Chili’s restaurant:
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September 7th, 2011
Every 45 seconds, a child dies of malaria.
You might feel helpless in the face of such an overwhelming statistic. But there’s something you can do. It’s as easy as a few clicks of a mouse, cheaper than a movie date, and will pay you back many times over. Go to End Malaria Day and click on the big red Buy button to purchase your copy of End Malaria: Bold Innovation, Limitless Generosity, and the Opportunity to Save a Life.
End Malaria is two things: It’s a book about Doing Great Work, with contributions from more than sixty of the best and brightest experts on the subject. And it’s a lifesaver: $20 from the purchase of each book (100% of the Kindle price, 80% of the hard copy price) will send a malaria net to a family in need and support life-saving work in the battle against malaria. Every single copy sold will fight this killer.
End Malaria is joint project of Box of Crayons, The Domino Project, and Malaria No More, whose mission is to wipe out malaria by 2015. With the help of enough smart, generous people (like you!), it can be done.
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September 6th, 2011
A: This popular game show presents an elegant environment for studying the effects of gender on competition.
Q: What is Jeopardy?
Scores of studies have examined the differences between men and women when it comes to competition, but a recent paper called “Girls will be Girls – Especially among Boys” (pdf) takes a clever approach and yields some intriguing results.
In an attempt to understand why men outnumber women in intensely competitive, high-risk fields, two Swedish scientists, Jenny Säve-Söderbergh and Gabriella Sjögren Lindquist, analyzed data from the 2002 season of their native land’s version of Jeopardy!.
The rules of Swedish Jeopardy! are very similar to those of the American version: three contestants gaze up at a big board of categories, select clues that are rendered as answers, and respond in the form of a question. Each correct answer earns the contestant money; each incorrect answer has the opposite effect.
Säve-Söderbergh and Lindquist focused on how men and women play the Daily Double. As you may know, three Daily Doubles pop up randomly in each game. Only the contestant who uncovers the Daily Double gets to answer it, and he or she can wager on the answer any amount of their winnings. Säve-Söderbergh and Lindquist wondered if the gender of the Daily Double contestant or the gender of his or her opponents made any difference in how much a person bet.
Their findings: Yes, gender mattered — though not quite in the way the researchers expected.
First, Säve-Söderbergh and Lindquist found that overall women played more conservatively than men regardless of their opponents. On average, they wagered about 40% of their winnings on Daily Doubles, while men wagered about 60%.
Second, women took smaller risks when playing against two men than they did against a woman and a man or against two women. Women wagered about 22% less in male-dominated settings than they did in female-dominated ones. Men’s wagers were not affected by the gender of their opponents.
Third and perhaps most interesting, “Although women decrease their wagers when competing in a male-dominated environment, women do not differ from men in their performance in these games.”
In other words, women took smaller risks — especially when competing against men — but did just as well as men in their total results.
Of course, as Säve-Söderbergh and Lindquist themselves acknowledge, it’s tricky to extrapolate from a game show to real life. But the research does raise some interesting questions — and seems consonant with other analyses showing that women manage their money more conservatively but more effectively than men.
Please add your thoughts below if you’d like — but remember to do so in the form of a question.
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September 3rd, 2011
Here’s a sign I saw in SoHo during a family trip to New York last month:
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August 22nd, 2011
Sometimes when I’m stuck on a course of action, I use two techniques to help me decide.
One is what I call the “90-year-old me Test.” I imagine I’m 90 and looking back at the decision before. What will I want to have done in this situation? In most cases, the 90-year-old me wants today’s me to take an intelligent risk rather than to avoid one — and to act nobly rather than like an ass.
The other I call the “Viktor Frankl Test.” In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl advises: “Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”
Both techniques are forms of what we might think of as “regret management.” They’re based on the idea that one key to decision-making is to avoid subsequent regret.
That’s why I was intrigued by a new study that fluttered into Pink, Inc., world headquarters during a recent vacation. In it, Mike Morrison of the University of Illinois and Neal J. Roese of Northwestern asked 370 Americans about their lives’ deepest regrets. Here’s a quick summary of the results, some of which surprised me:
- “Lost loves and unfulfilling relationships turned out to be the most common regrets,” though women had far more romantic regrets than men. Family matters were the second greatest source of regret.
- Men were more likely to have work-related (career, education) regrets than women. And in an interesting paradox, “Americans with high levels of education had the most career-related regrets.” In other words, more options seemed to correlate with more regrets.
- Overall, there wasn’t a difference between regrets over actions taken versus actions not taken. Prior research had shown that regrets focusing on action were more common than those focusing on inaction. But people regretted inaction far longer than actions.
At the risk of turning this into an online therapy session, I’m curious to know what sorts of things you regret — and what techniques you use to avoid or mitigate it. Add your voice to the Comments section, which one reader recently told me “was better than the blog itself.” (BTW, I don’t regret that for a moment.)
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August 9th, 2011
Here’s a tip for rounding out your summer reading. Pick up a copy of The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. The book, which pubs today, is one of the best business books I’ve read in many years. (Buy it at Amazon, BN, or 8CR).
The authors — Harvard B-school professor Teresa Amabile and developmental psychologist Steven Kramer (yep, they’re married) — explored the question of when people are motivated and engaged at work.
And to do that, they took a rigorous and painstaking approach. They recruited 238 people across 7 companies — and each day sent these folks a questionnaire and diary form about their day. Twelve thousand diary entries later — you read that right: Amabile and Kramer amassed 12,000 days worth of data — they reached a set of fascinating conclusions.
Chief among their findings: People’s “inner work lives” matter profoundly to their performance — and what motivates people the most day-to-day is making progress on meaningful work.
I asked Amabile if she’d answer some questions for Pink Blog readers about her book and her insights. You can read the interview below. You can also talk to her live later this month on the next episode of Office Hours.
***
Lots of business books talk about the need for bold, audacious goals — and deride those who “think small.” But your book, which is based on research far more rigorous than its counterparts, takes a different stance. You emphasize the power “small wins.” Why are those so important in the performance of individuals and organizations?
Try to remember the last time you – or anyone you know – had a truly enormous breakthrough in solving a problem or achieving one of those audacious goals. It’s pretty hard, because breakthroughs are very rare events. On the other hand, small wins can happen all the time. Those are the incremental steps toward meaningful (even big) goals. Our research showed that, of all the events that have the power to excite people and engage them in their work, the single most important is making progress – even if that progress is a small win. That’s the progress principle. And, because people are more creatively productive when they are excited and engaged, small wins are a very big deal for organizations.
In addition to examining 12,000 daily diary entries from workers, you also surveyed a few hundred leaders — from CEOs to project managers — about what they think really motivates employees. What did you find out?
Our survey showed that most leaders don’t understand the power of progress. When we asked nearly 700 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators (incentives, recognition, clear goals, interpersonal support, and support for making progress in the work), progress came in at the very bottom. In fact, only 5% of these leaders ranked progress first – a much lower percent than if they had been choosing randomly! Don’t get me wrong; those other four motivators do drive people. But we found that they aren’t nearly as potent as making meaningful progress.
Along those lines, many bosses believe that best way to ensure top performance is to keep their charges on edge — hungry and a little stressed-out. But you found something different. Explain.
If people are on edge because they are challenged by a difficult, important problem, that’s fine – as long as they have what they need to solve that problem. But it’s a dangerous fallacy to say that people perform better when they’re stressed, over-extended, or unhappy. We found just the opposite. People are more likely to come up with a creative idea or solve a tricky problem on a day when they are in a better mood than usual. In fact, they are more likely to be creative the next day, too, regardless of that next day’s mood. There’s a kind of “creativity carry-over” effect from feeling good at work.
Yet negative events have a more powerful impact than positive ones. Why?
We were pretty shocked to discover the dominant effect of negative events on inner work life – people’s mostly-hidden emotions, perceptions, and motivations at work. Setbacks have a negative effect on inner work life that’s 2-3 times stronger than the positive effect of progress. When we checked into whether other researchers had found something similar, we learned that it’s a general psychological effect; “bad is stronger than good.” The reason could be evolutionary. Maybe we pay more attention to negatives, and are more affected by them, out of self-preservation. So – because positive inner work life is so important for top performance, leaders should do whatever they can to root out negative forces.
I was especially intrigued by your findings about time pressure. Sometimes it helps; other times it hurts. Tell us what you found.
The typical form of time pressure in organizations today is what we call “being on a treadmill” – running all day to keep up with many different (often unrelated) demands, but getting nowhere on your most important work. That’s an absolute killer for creativity. Generally, low-to-moderate time pressure is optimal for creativity. But we did find some instances in which people were terrifically creative under high time pressure. Almost invariably, it was quite different from being on a treadmill. Rather, people felt like they were “on a mission”— working hard to meet a truly urgent deadline on an important project, and protected from all other demands.
What are one or two specific things individuals can do to improve their inner work lives and increase their chances of making progress on meaningful work?
Religiously protect at least 20 minutes – and, ideally, much more – every day, to tackle something in the work that matters most to you. Hide in an empty conference room, if you have to, or sneak out in disguise to a nearby coffee shop. Then make note of any progress you made (even if it was a small win), and decide where to pick up again the next day. The progress, and the mini-celebration of simply noting it, can lift your inner work life.
What are one or two things bosses can do to re-architect the workplace and its policies to put progress at the center?
Bosses can religiously protect at least 5 minutes, every day, to think about the progress and setbacks of their team, and what enabled or inhibited that progress. The daily review should end with a plan to do one thing, the following day, that’s most likely to facilitate progress – even if that progress is only a small win. I think this practice, if used widely, could make a real difference in organizational performance and employee inner work life. And good inner work life isn’t only a matter of employee retention or the bottom line. It’s a matter of human dignity.
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