Connect… Then Lead: HBS Professor John Kotter

One of my most popular posts from July 8, 2013

Harvard Business School Professor John P. Kotter

Years ago I was invited to join a newly forming Intel marketing group comprised primarily of Ivy League MBA‘s, with a few of us Intel veterans thrown into the mix to create some cross-fertilization in the group. This was the famous period of Harvard MBA’s belief that they were all marketing gods, and needed only to be ruthless: greed was good. One of my Harvard educated Intel colleagues related a story of HBS students playing an allegedly “friendly” game of football on the green next to the Charles River. One player suffered a compound fracture of his leg. While waiting for an ambulance, a member of the other team came up and demanded to know when the game would resume. Everything was about competition and one-upmanship. To this day I remember fondly (believe it or not) that this was also the mantra of our Intel group. Who got the girl on Friday night: who got stuck with the bar tab. There was a big scoreboard in the sky tabulating the imaginary results. Perhaps against the odds, our group survived and succeeded famously. Many of us are still very close personal friends. One is the godfather of my son.

Ray Rund, one of my Intel colleagues, and Harvard MBA told me another story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.” They all thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become the meanest “sons-of-bitches in the valley.” Ray amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed. The book version of Kotter’s course is now 30 years old, but is still as relevant as ever. It is filled with case studies of “hard asses” who failed miserably.

I have often explained Kotter’s point to others by using the example of an old WWII film clip of Lord Louis Mountbatten, leading the beleaguered British commandos in Burma against overwhelming Japanese forces. Mountbatten was standing on a pedestal in some godforsaken Burmese village, with his troops standing at attention in rank. The first thing Mountbatten did was to beckon his troops to break rank and come up near him. The old film clip speaks volumes about Mountbatten’s intuitive understanding of leadership.

Specialists in organizational behavior probably like to debate these points, pointing out the Peter Drucker “high task, low relationship” approach to change management. Basically, like the George S. Patton “school of management” in the film, kick ass and take names until the organization submitted to his will. As the film shows, this approach has its drawbacks.

Ironically, I had learned Kotter’s lesson in leadership in my first assignment at Intel, managing 250 people running a semiconductor manufacturing operation. On my first day, my manager introduced me to my people, half-jokingly saying to them, “Let’s see how long it takes you to break your new supervisor!” Clearly, I needed to get with their program. Just for the record, my manager, Dean Persona and I became fast friends. My employees had the knowledge of how to get the job done, and I did not. It is a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. I managed to get the respect of my people by respecting them. When an extra effort was required, I could ask for that extra effort, and it was given willingly. Others failed miserably in their jobs while I rapidly rose to bigger and better things.

When I noticed this HBR blog post on leadership, titled “Connect…Then Lead,” I thought of Kotter, who is still teaching at Harvard. I also see another potential case study of failure developing now. For all of the good intentions of this manager, he is failing to understand Kotter’s lesson about leadership. This manager professes openness. This manager made a point to take a very modest office and leave his door open. But despite these superficial moves, in reality, the substance of his management style is that of an austere, autocratic manager who isolates himself behind a wall of handlers who manage access to him, even reading all of his emails, which is offensive to many. It takes weeks to schedule a simple meeting with this manager if you can successfully maneuver the gauntlet of handlers. Then the meeting will typically start late, only to be ended by another handler interrupting the meeting, tapping on their watch, to extract the manager early from the meeting, because he is so “busy” he must move on. He demands that his schedule is cleared for his own priorities.

The rudeness and distant behavior of this manager is obviously having a serious impact on the manager’s effectiveness with his people, but the manager seems more interested in his own matters. It has been noted by some that it is not uncommon for autocrats to view themselves as being open and welcoming toward their people when in reality the manager’s true behavior exhibits an extreme distance, lack of sensitivity, and the subordinates are intimidated by his overbearing personal style. This is all laid out in Kotter’s books and in the following HBR Blog article. History seems to repeat itself.

Andrew Carnegie, a scion of the Gilded Age of Monopolists at the turn of the 20th Century, is noted for this quote about the importance of his employees…

“Take away my factories, my plants, take away my railroads, my ships, my transportation; take away my money, strip me of all these, but leave me my men and in two or three years, I will have them all again.” Despite Carnegie’s megalomaniacal tendencies, he nevertheless seemed to understand the importance of having a strong bond with his people.

Connect, Then Lead

Reblogged from the HRB Blog

by Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinge

Building Personal Resilience

I have been giving some serious thought to the importance of personal resilience in times of adversity. Terry Fox comes up as a prime example of resilience that has inspired people all over the World. But how do such people develop it? Can it be learned? It is a character trait that appears difficult to measure, only appearing in certain people and not others when faced with a severe personal challenge. It is something that all management professionals should ponder carefully because such challenges will most certainly appear in their careers.

I have been giving some serious thought to the importance of personal resilience in times of adversity. Terry Fox comes up as a prime example of resilience that has inspired people all over the World. But how do such people develop it? Can it be learned? It is a character trait that appears difficult to measure, only appearing in certain people and not others when faced with a severe personal challenge. It is something that all management professionals should ponder carefully because such challenges will most certainly appear in their careers.

When I think of resilience, I visualize it as an infographic showing “resilience” at the intersection of three circles: self-reliance, perseverance, and resourcefulness, but there is a staggering variety of infographics, some of them so complex as to be unhelpful. I think in this case, the simpler the better. There are short online courses on the subject, but I recommend devoting an hour or so of quiet personal time to reflect on it. You may need it in these uncertain times.

Building Resilience

REBLOGGED FROM THE HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

April, 2011

Martin J. Siegelman

Douglas and Walter, two University of Pennsylvania MBA graduates, were laid off by their Wall Street companies 18 months ago. Both went into a tailspin: They were sad, listless, indecisive, and anxious about the future. For Douglas, the mood was transient. After two weeks he told himself, “It’s not you; it’s the economy going through a bad patch. I’m good at what I do, and there will be a market for my skills.” He updated his résumé and sent it to a dozen New York firms, all of which rejected him. He then tried six companies in his Ohio hometown and eventually landed a position. Walter, by contrast, spiraled into hopelessness: “I got fired because I can’t perform under pressure,” he thought. “I’m not cut out for finance. The economy will take years to recover.” Even as the market improved, he didn’t look for another job; he ended up moving back in with his parents.

Douglas and Walter (actually composites based on interviewees) stand at opposite ends of the continuum of reactions to failure. The Douglases of the world bounce back after a brief period of malaise; within a year they’ve grown because of the experience. The Walters go from sadness to depression to a paralyzing fear of the future. Yet failure is a nearly inevitable part of work; and along with dashed romance, it is one of life’s most common traumas. People like Walter are almost certain to find their careers stymied, and companies full of such employees are doomed in hard times. It is people like Douglas who rise to the top, and whom organizations must recruit and retain in order to succeed. But how can you tell who is a Walter and who is a Douglas? And can Walters become Douglases? Can resilience be measured and taught?

Thirty years of scientific research has put the answers to these questions within our reach. We have learned not only how to distinguish those who will grow after failure from those who will collapse, but also how to build the skills of people in the latter category. I have worked with colleagues from around the world to develop a program for teaching resilience. It is now being tested in an organization of 1.1 million people where trauma is more common and more severe than in any corporate setting: the U.S. Army. Its members may struggle with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but thousands of them also experience post-traumatic growth. Our goal is to employ resilience training to reduce the number of those who struggle and increase the number of those who grow. We believe that businesspeople can draw lessons from this approach, particularly in times of failure and stagnation. Working with both individual soldiers (employees) and drill sergeants (managers), we are helping to create an army of Douglases who can turn their most difficult experiences into catalysts for improved performance.

Optimism Is the Key

Although I’m now called the father of positive psychology, I came to it the long, hard way, through many years of research on failure and helplessness. In the late 1960s I was part of the team that discovered “learned helplessness.” We found that dogs, rats, mice, and even cockroaches that experienced mildly painful shock over which they had no control would eventually just accept it, with no attempt to escape. It was next shown that human beings do the same thing. In an experiment published in 1975 by Donald Hiroto and me and replicated many times since, subjects are randomly divided into three groups. Those in the first are exposed to an annoying loud noise that they can stop by pushing a button in front of them. Those in the second hear the same noise but can’t turn it off, though they try hard. Those in the third, the control group, hear nothing at all. Later, typically the following day, the subjects are faced with a brand-new situation that again involves noise. To turn the noise off, all they have to do is move their hands about 12 inches. The people in the first and third groups figure this out and readily learn to avoid the noise. But those in the second group typically do nothing. In phase one they failed, realized they had no control, and became passive. In phase two, expecting more failure, they don’t even try to escape. They have learned helplessness.

Strangely, however, about a third of the animals and people who experience inescapable shocks or noise never become helpless. What is it about them that makes this so? Over 15 years of study, my colleagues and I discovered that the answer is optimism. We developed questionnaires and analyzed the content of verbatim speech and writing to assess “explanatory style” as optimistic or pessimistic. We discovered that people who don’t give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local, and changeable. (“It’s going away quickly; it’s just this one situation, and I can do something about it.”) That suggested how we might immunize people against learned helplessness, against depression and anxiety, and against giving up after failure: by teaching them to think like optimists. We created the Penn Resiliency Program, under the direction of Karen Reivich and Jane Gillham, of the University of Pennsylvania, for young adults and children. The program has been replicated in 21 diverse school settings—ranging from suburbs to inner cities, from Philadelphia to Beijing. We also created a 10-day program in which teachers learn techniques for becoming more optimistic in their own lives and how to teach those techniques to their students. We’ve found that it reduces depression and anxiety in the children under their care. (Another way we teach positive psychology is through the master of applied positive psychology, or MAPP, degree program, now in its sixth year at Penn.)

In November 2008, when the legendary General George W. Casey, Jr., the army chief of staff and former commander of the multinational force in Iraq, asked me what positive psychology had to say about soldiers’ problems, I offered a simple answer: How human beings react to extreme adversity is normally distributed. On one end are the people who fall apart into PTSD, depression, and even suicide. In the middle are most people, who at first react with symptoms of depression and anxiety but within a month or so are, by physical and psychological measures, back where they were before the trauma. That is resilience. On the other end are people who show post-traumatic growth. They, too, first experience depression and anxiety, often exhibiting full-blown PTSD, but within a year they are better off than they were before the trauma. These are the people of whom Friedrich Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

I told General Casey that the army could shift its distribution toward the growth end by teaching psychological skills to stop the downward spiral that often follows failure. He ordered the organization to measure resilience and teach positive psychology to create a force as fit psychologically as it is physically. This $145 million initiative, under the direction of Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum, is called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) and consists of three components: a test for psychological fitness, self-improvement courses available following the test, and “master resilience training” (MRT) for drill sergeants. These are based on PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment—the building blocks of resilience and growth.

Testing for Psychological Fitness

A team led by the University of Michigan professor Christopher Peterson, author of the Values in Action signature strengths survey, created the test, called the Global Assessment Tool (GAT). It is a 20-minute questionnaire that focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses and is designed to measure four things: emotional, family, social, and spiritual fitness. All four have been credited with reducing depression and anxiety. According to research, they are the keys to PERMA.

Although individual scores are confidential, the GAT results allow test takers to choose appropriate basic or advanced courses for building resilience. The GAT also provides a common vocabulary for describing soldiers’ assets. The data generated will allow the army to gauge the psychosocial fitness both of particular units and of the entire organization, highlighting positives and negatives. At this writing, more than 900,000 soldiers have taken the test. The army will compare psychological profiles with performance and medical results over time; the resulting database will enable us to answer questions like these: What specific strengths protect against PTSD, depression, anxiety, and suicide? Does a strong sense of meaning result in better performance? Are people who score high in positive emotion promoted more quickly? Can optimism spread from a leader to his troops?

Online Courses

The second component of CSF is optional online courses in each of the four fitnesses and one mandatory course on post-traumatic growth. The implications for corporate managers are more obvious for some modules than for others, but I’ll briefly explain them all.

The emotional fitness module, created by Barbara Fredrickson, a professor of emotions and psychophysiology at the University of North Carolina, and her colleague Sara Algoe, teaches soldiers how to amplify positive emotions and how to recognize when negative ones, such as sadness and anger, are out of proportion to the reality of the threat they face.

Family fitness, too, affects work performance, and cell phones, e-mail, Facebook, and Skype allow even soldiers on combat duty, or expats on assignment, to remain intimately involved with their families. A course created by John and Julie Gottman, eminent psychologists specializing in marriage, focuses on building a variety of relationship skills—including fostering trust, constructively managing conflict, creating shared meaning, and recovering from betrayal.

The social fitness module, developed by John Cacioppo, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and an expert on loneliness, teaches empathy to soldiers by explaining mirror neurons in the brain. When you see another person in pain, your brain activity is similar but not identical to what it is when you yourself are in pain. The module then asks soldiers to practice identifying emotions in others, with an emphasis on racial and cultural diversity. This is at the heart of developing emotional intelligence—and diversity in the U.S. Army is a way of life, not just a political slogan.

The spiritual fitness module, created by Kenneth Pargament, a professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University, and Colonel Patrick Sweeney, a professor of behavioral sciences and leadership at West Point, takes soldiers through the process of building a “spiritual core” with self-awareness, a sense of agency, self-regulation, self-motivation, and social awareness. “Spiritual” in CSF refers not to religion but to belonging to and serving something larger than the self.

The response to trauma includes shattered beliefs about the self, others, and the future.

The mandatory module, on post-traumatic growth, is highly relevant for business executives facing failure. Created by Richard Tedeschi, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the Harvard psychologist Richard McNally, it begins with the ancient wisdom that personal transformation comes from a renewed appreciation of being alive, enhanced personal strength, acting on new possibilities, improved relationships, or spiritual deepening. The module interactively teaches soldiers about five elements known to contribute to post-traumatic growth:

1. Understanding the response to trauma (read “failure”), which includes shattered beliefs about the self, others, and the future. This is a normal response, not a symptom of PTSD or a character defect.

2. Reducing anxiety through techniques for controlling intrusive thoughts and images.

3. Engaging in constructive self-disclosure. Bottling up trauma can lead to a worsening of physical and psychological symptoms, so soldiers are encouraged to tell their stories.

4. Creating a narrative in which the trauma is seen as a fork in the road that enhances the appreciation of paradox—loss and gain, grief and gratitude, vulnerability and strength. A manager might compare this to what the leadership studies pioneer Warren Bennis called “crucibles of leadership.” The narrative specifies what personal strengths were called upon, how some relationships improved, how spiritual life strengthened, how life itself was better appreciated, or what new doors opened.

5. Articulating life principles. These encompass new ways to be altruistic, crafting a new identity, and taking seriously the idea of the Greek hero who returns from Hades to tell the world an important truth about how to live.

Master Resilience Training

The third and most important component of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness is the master resilience training for drill sergeants and other leaders, given at the University of Pennsylvania; at Victory University, in Memphis, Tennessee; at Fort Jackson, South Carolina; and by mobile teams working with troops in Germany and Korea. MRT can be seen as management training—teaching leaders how to embrace resilience and then pass on the knowledge. The content of MRT divides into three parts—building mental toughness, building signature strengths, and building strong relationships. All three are patterned after the Penn Resiliency Program and use plenary lectures, breakout sessions that include role playing, work sheets, and small-group discussion.

Building mental toughness.

This segment of MRT is similar in theme to the online emotional fitness course for individual soldiers. It starts with Albert Ellis’s ABCD model: C (emotional consequences) stem not directly from A (adversity) but from B (one’s beliefs about adversity). The sergeants work through a series of A’s (falling out of a three-mile run, for example) and learn to separate B’s—heat-of-the-moment thoughts about the situation (“I’m a failure”)—from C’s, the emotions generated by those thoughts (such as feeling down for the rest of the day and thus performing poorly in the next training exercise). They then learn D—how to quickly and effectively dispel unrealistic beliefs about adversity.

Next we focus on thinking traps, such as overgeneralizing or judging a person’s worth or ability on the basis of a single action. We illustrate this as follows: “A soldier in your unit struggles to keep up during physical training and is dragging the rest of the day. His uniform looks sloppy, and he makes a couple of mistakes during artillery practice. It might be natural to think that he lacks the stuff of a soldier. But what effect does that have on both the thinker and the other soldier?” We also discuss “icebergs”—deeply held beliefs such as “Asking for help is a sign of weakness”—and teach a technique for identifying and eliminating those that cause out-of-kilter emotional reactions: Does the iceberg remain meaningful? Is it accurate in the given situation? Is it overly rigid? Is it useful?

Finally, we deal with how to minimize catastrophic thinking by considering worst-case, best-case, and most likely outcomes. For example, a sergeant receives a negative performance evaluation from his commanding officer. He thinks, “I won’t be recommended for promotion, and I don’t have what it takes to stay in the army.” That’s the worst case. Now let’s put it in perspective. What’s the best case? “The negative report was a mistake.” And what’s the most likely case? “I will receive a corrective action plan from my counselor, and I will follow it. I’ll be frustrated, and my squad leader will be disappointed.”

Building signature strengths.

The second part of the training begins with a test similar to the GAT—Peterson’s Values in Action signature strengths survey, which is taken online and produces a ranked list of the test taker’s top 24 character strengths. (See the sidebar “What Are Your Strengths?”) Small groups discuss these questions: What did you learn about yourself from the survey? Which strengths have you developed through your military service? How do your strengths contribute to your completing a mission and reaching your goals? What are the shadow sides of your strengths, and how can you minimize them? Then the sergeants are put on teams and told to tackle a mission using the team members’ character-strength profiles. Finally, the sergeants write their own “strengths in challenges” stories. One sergeant described how he used his strengths of love, wisdom, and gratitude to help a soldier who was acting out and stirring up conflict. The sergeant discovered that the soldier felt consumed by anger at his wife, and the anger spilled over to his unit. The sergeant used his wisdom to help the soldier understand the wife’s perspective and worked with him to write a letter in which the soldier described the gratitude he felt because his wife had handled so much on her own during his three deployments.

The third part of MRT focuses on practical tools for positive communication. We draw on the work of Shelly Gable, a psychology professor at UC Santa Barbara, which shows that when an individual responds actively and constructively (as opposed to passively and destructively) to someone who is sharing a positive experience, love and friendship increase. (See the sidebar “Four Ways to Respond.”) The sergeants complete a work sheet about how they typically respond and identify factors that may get in the way of active and constructive responses (such as being tired or overly focused on themselves). Next we teach the work of the Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck on effective praise. When, for example, a sergeant mentions specifics (as opposed to saying something general like “Good job!”), his soldiers know that their leader was paying attention and that the praise is authentic. We also teach assertive communication, distinguishing it from passive or aggressive communication. What is the language, voice tone, body language, and pace of each of the three styles, and what messages do they convey?

Enhancing mental toughness, highlighting and honing strengths, and fostering strong relationships are core competencies for any successful manager. Leadership development programs often touch on these skills, but the MRT program brings them together in systematic form to ensure that even in the face of terrible failures—those that cost lives—army sergeants know how to help the men and women under their command flourish rather than flounder. Managers can change the culture of their organizations to focus on the positive instead of the negative and, in doing so, turn pessimistic, helpless Walters into optimistic, can-do Douglases. Frankly, we were nervous that these hard-boiled soldiers would find resilience training “girly” or “touchy-feely” or “psychobabble.” They did not; in fact, they gave the course an average rating of 4.9 out of 5.0. A large number of them say it’s the best course they’ve ever had in the army.

Enhancing mental toughness, highlighting and honing strengths, and fostering strong relationships are core competencies for any successful manager.

We believe that MRT will build a better army. Our hypothesis is being tested in a large-scale study under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Sharon McBride and Captain Paul Lester. As the program rolls out, they are comparing the performance of soldiers who have been taught resilience by their sergeants with that of soldiers who haven’t. When they are finished, we will know conclusively whether resilience training and positive psychology can make adults in a large organization more effective, as they have done for younger people in schools.

A version of this article appeared in the April 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review.

What Is The Most Important Leadership Quality?… Humility

I personally have seen in my past career, and personally experienced how simple humility is a key characteristic of leadership. This may seem counter-intuitive but it is not. People are drawn to the charisma of a leader who is also simply humble, and who appreciates the values of those he or she leads. A leader like that can get subordinates to follow them anywhere. I think there may even be an inverse relationship in human behavior between hubris, and leadership success. By that I mean that the more arrogant and overbearing a person, the more insecure he may actually be, and therefore less successful in the subjective art of leadership.

In a bizarre sequence of events this week, I have yet again witnessed someone literally self-destruct as a leader due to their failure to exhibit simple humility and to be aware of other stakeholders, whose support or not, could make or break the leader.. Successful leadership is a fragile thing, a subjective human experience. I have written about this phenomenon previously on this blog.

Tragically, I witnessed this person’s Waterloo in real time, as did many others. It was there for all to see. It is a very serious matter for everyone to consider carefully and to also realize that it will be a terribly hard learned lesson, and life changing experience for the person experiencing it. Fortunately, in my own career, I somehow dodged this bullet and learned the lesson of leadership humility early. Thank you to my early management mentors, colleagues, and Harvard Professor John Kotter.

I make this point because I came across a LinkedIn discussion in the Harvard Business Review group, “What is the most important leadership quality?” Many traits have been proposed in the discussion, the leading ones being integrity, management communication skills, ethics, trust, and humility….

Believe It Or Not: Rituals and Superstition May Help You Ace A Job Interview

Baseball players, particularly pitchers, are known for being superstitious. These superstitions have been immortalized by characters like Pedro Cerrano, the Cuban center fielder and his doll Joboo, in the film Major League. Real life examples abound. But it now turns out that research has shown that following personal rituals may increase your self-confidence and actually help you ace a job interview or a big presentation.

The role that rituals and superstition play in nailing a job

interview

Alison Wood Brooks used her own research when she interviewed for a job at Harvard Business School this spring. ”Academic job interviews are very intense,” she said. “They ask you very difficult questions.”

So she started preparing for questions and the lecture that would come after a day of packed interviews. Her ritual of preparation followed the pattern she’d established earlier in her career for giving academic talks. “I always pack the same outfit and get ready in the same order. I lay out the outfit, shower do my hair and makeup and put on the suit,” she said. “I practice the talk exactly once” wearing the heels she’d be wearing. Then she heads out the door.

Her ritual worked. Brooks started in July as an assistant professor at Harvard.

An array of rituals—from deep breathing and then a drink of water before a presentation to spinning the basketball before a free throw—allow people to improve their performance at a crucial moment in their career. Pre-performance rituals can improve confidence, concentration, and emotional stability.

With a PhD from the Wharton School, Brooks has studied everyday anxiety in individuals for years as well as workers’ concerns “about deadlines, when they have to meet with a boss, when they have to perform under pressure.” She’s found that ”people have very complex rituals that are very ingrained in their lives,” and in their work.

Her recent research, conducted with two University of Chicago professors and a Wharton School professor, was presented at a panel on the value of rituals at the Academy of Management conference in September.

Brooks and her fellow researchers asked test subjects to sing “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey with a karaoke machine. They were told they would be evaluated on their singing accuracy, measured by voice recognition software. The request definitely raised their stress levels, she noted.

Some participants completed a five-step ritual beforehand: They drew a quick sketch of their feelings, sprinkled the drawing with salt, counted to five, crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash. Those participants sang better after the ritual than those who sat quietly for a minute; they also reported lower nervousness.

Another test involved a math problem, Gauss’s modular arithmetic task. Some participants followed the same ritual detailed above, another group was asked to wait two minutes before completing it, and others watched and answered a couple questions about an unrelated video clip of a coral reef. One group drew a tree and others drew their feelings, an unconnected and a connected ritual, respectively.

Those who performed the connected ritual did the best at solving the math problem. “The connected ritual was more effective than the distraction alone, and much more effective than an affectively unconnected ritual as well as simply waiting,” the researchers wrote in a paper presented to the Academy of Management conference last month.

“There’s some sort of calming essence doing something sequential and ordered. It sort of increases your sense of self” and may slow your heart rate, Brooks said.

Other papers from Academy of Management session indicate that ”avoidant action” like throwing salt or knocking on wood make people feel like they’re reducing risk, lowering their concerns or reversing a jinx. Rituals also may improve people’s sense of control and alleviate grief. At work, team rituals may reinforce desired behaviors and create a shared identity, a professor from Milan writes in the Harvard Business Review.

What is Brooks’ advice for creating a ritual before a key job interview or conversation with their boss? “It depends if the person believes in good luck,” she said. “Having a superstitious element is very helpful.”

Connect… Then Lead: HBS Professor John Kotter

Harvard Business School Professor John P. Kotter

I have often explained Kotter’s point to others by using the example of an old WWII film clip of Lord Louis Mountbatten, leading the beleaguered British commandos in Burma against overwhelming Japanese forces. Mountbatten was standing on a pedestal in some god forsaken Burmese village, with his troops standing at attention in rank. The first thing Mountbatten did was to beckon his troops to break rank and come up near him. The old film clip speaks volumes about Mountbatten’s intuitive understanding of leadership.

Ironically, I had learned Kotter’s lesson in leadership in my first assignment at Intel, managing 250 people running a semiconductor manufacturing operation. On my first day, my manager introduced me to my people, half-jokingly saying to them, “Let’s see how long it takes you to break your new supervisor!” Clearly, I needed to get with their program. Just for the record, my manager, Dean Persona and I became fast friends. My employees had the knowledge of how to get the job done, and I did not. It is a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. I managed to get the respect of my people by respecting them. When extra effort was required, I could ask for that extra effort, and it was given willingly. Others failed miserably in their jobs while I rapidly rose to bigger and better things.

When I noticed this HBR blog post on leadership, titled “Connect….Then Lead,” I thought of Kotter, who is still teaching at Harvard. I also see another potential case study of failure developing now. For all of the good intentions of this manager, he is failing to understand Kotter’s lesson about leadership. This manager professes openness. This manager made a point to take a very modest office and leave his door open. But despite these superficial moves, in reality the substance of his management style is that of an austere, autocratic manager who isolates himself behind a wall of handlers who manage access to him, even reading all of his emails, which is offensive to many. It takes weeks to schedule a simple meeting with this manager, if you can successfully maneuver the gauntlet of handlers. Then the meeting will typically start late, only to be ended by another handler interrupting the meeting, tapping on their watch, to extract the manager early from the meeting, because he is so “busy” he must move on. He demands that his schedule be cleared for his own priorities.

The rudeness and distant behavior of this manager is obviously having a serious impact on the manager’s effectiveness with his people, but the manager seems more interested in his own matters. It has been noted by some that it is not uncommon for autocrats to view themselves as being open and welcoming toward their people, when in reality the manager’s true behavior exhibits an extreme distance, lack of sensitivity, and the subordinates are intimidated by his overbearing personal style. This is all laid out in Kotter’s books and in the following HBR Blog article. History seems to repeat itself.

Andrew Carnegie, a scion of the Gilded Age of Monopolists at the turn of the 20th Century, is noted for this quote about the importance of his employees…

Connect, Then Lead

Reblogged from the HRB Blog

by Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinge

The Case For Fewer (Better) Entrepreneurs

In this post from PandoDaily, Francisco Dao hits the mark. Max Marmer of Startup Genome has also written in a similar vein on the Harvard Business Review blog, that we are over celebratising entrepreneurship. We need to be discouraging a few more people from entrepreneurship, based on sound assessment of character, which should also be the first criteria for investment as well. Dragon’s Den and Silicon Valley reality TV need to go!

Paul Polman: Corporate Strategy Visionary

My undergraduate and graduate students may find this an interesting topic for discussion and debate.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21567062-pursuit-shareholder-value-attracting-criticismnot-all-it-foolish-taking-long

Reading this week’s Economist, I literally “stumbled upon”, not the Web app, an editorial on the resurgence of long term corporate strategy. Translated succinctly, long term corporate strategy means simply that quarterly performance and shareholder dividends take a back seat to longer term corporate goals. The Economist opinion piece sensibly admits that the singular focus on short term profits has led to cynical and perverse manipulation of income statements, via warped compensation plans based on share price and so on. Global accounting practices like the “double Irish” and the “Dutch sandwich” can probably be partially attributed to this kind of thinking. Wall Street is awash in “short-termism” as the Economist points out. The deluge of early corporate dividends this month, in anticipation of the “fiscal cliff,” are also probably related.

I carried on to read that management guru Peter Drucker was quoted as saying that “long-term results cannot be achieved by piling short-term results on short-term results.” Roger Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto has called short-termism “a crummy principle that is undermining American capitalism.” Whew! That is pretty strong stuff.

But the “piece de resistance'” for me was learning more about Paul Polman, the CEO of Unilever. I have my favorites in management, and they are exclusively bold leaders and mavericks: Ted Turner (founder of CNN and America’s Cup sailor), Larry Ellison of Oracle, and Richard Branson, among others. Gordon Moore is another bold leader, who was ahead of his time, as the visionary leader of Intel, driving the continual SLRP (strategic long-range planning) process that involved us all. I have added Paul Polman to my list of management guru’s. Polman is one of those corporate leaders who has risen above the battle to see the layout of the entire battlefield, and is ordering a charge toward long-term corporate thinking. Polman is one of those people who is showing us the way out of our current mess. I can attest from personal experience that managing long-term strategy and execution is way more fun than answering to the accounting department.

The more I think about this issue, the more compelling it seems to me. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, when asked recently about “shareholder value,” declared his obligatory allegiance to it, but in the same breath cautioned about the rapid acceleration in the corporate life-cycle and the need for constant innovation and re-invention. Starbucks CEO, Howard Shultz, in describing his company’s long standing goal of corporate social responsibility, bridles a bit at his need to produce quarterly results at the expense of the goals.

I am also sensing a connection to our infatuation with and “celebratizing” entrepreneurship. Some seem to feel that the right strategy is to foster the development of new Mark Zuckerberg‘s. Really? Is that it? Max Marmer, my outspoken favorite, CEO of Startup Genome, wrote on the Harvard Business Review blog about the “Danger of Celebratizing Entrepreneurship” http://ow.ly/eZChc. He and others technology luminaries have also spoken out on the lack of Big Ideas in entrepreneurship. All of these threads seem tied together in a ball of short term greed, as Polman describes it.

The dilemma is that you cannot be all things to all people. It is my fervent hope that Paul Polman, Roger Martin, and Max Marmer will all help us find a middle ground that restores long term corporate vision and dramatically improves our performance in innovation by resurrecting the Big Ideas.

Big Data: The Next Frontier in Competition, Innovation and Productivity

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation

This report from McKinsey adds to the list of similar reports coming from the HBR blog and numerous other sources, emphasizing that Big Data is here, and is going to have a huge impact on all business. What has become known as “Big Data,” refers to the terabytes and zettabytes (that’s a 1 followed by 21 zeros) of data that have been collected and stored on each one of us…for better or worse. Data mining is the industry that is emerging to make commercial sense of Big Data. It is a well-known fact that more data has been collected on us in the last two years, than in all of the previous years of computing combined.

Last week, PBS Newshour featured an election eve story about the Obama campaign‘s use of data mining. In the story, Obama election canvassers revealed how they were using Big Data and data mining to target their efforts. Rather than slog through neighborhoods knocking on every door, the Obama team had devised an ingenious field system using smartphones, GPS and mountains of data about the people living at each address. Each home that fit a precise profile that indicated their tendency to perhaps vote for Obama, or would be open to persuasion, was marked with a blue flag on the smartphone. The propensity to support Obama was determined by statisticians and mathematicians at Obama HQ, house by house, using a highly complex database of household information. This was not just income and age. It included information about magazines, organizations, that had already been shared publicly by the household. This dramatically improved the effectiveness and productivity of the field workers pounding on doors. From the election results, we now know that this system is worth its weight in gold.

Last term, UBC Faculty of Management 3rd year students investigated the emerging new “data mining” industry. We learned from example videos that data mining was being used to solve highly complex management, operational and marketing problems that had hitherto seemed unsolvable. Also, traditionally, assessment of industry trends had been highly subjective gut level judgments by expert researchers. Things like fashion trends, and video gaming preferences were thought to require mostly observation and guesswork. However, Harvard Business Review and other journals are seeing that Big Data is being mined to solve even these seemingly intractable problems.

The emergence of Big Data and data mining is essentially very similar to Chaos Theory, and the emergence of mathematical algorithms that solved the problem of apparent chaos in nature, which was discovered to actually follow an elegant order.

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