I continue to be shocked about the thinking on intelligence. Just the other day I was reading a new post by a leading business scholar and he commented that business people are (permanently) limited by their general intelligence. It's as though the growth mindset doesn't exist. Yet Carol Dweck, Anders Ericsson and their colleagues have done hundreds of studies revealing that intelligence is not fixed: we can grow our intelligence. Their research puts the lie to the notions of fixed intelligence. So why is it so easy to fall back into old thinking and old habits outside the new growth model? Here are five reasons:
For more than 100 years society has said that success is about being more gifted than others. It's emphasized the notion that failure measures you. Effort, we've heard is for those who can't make it on pure talent. ..
I have been an unabashed, naive lover of romantic comedy for years. Still, I was surprised by how much I learned from numerous interviews of the male lead of the Bridgerton romantic comedy, Rege Jean Page. He has a lot to say about culture, literature, drama, movies—and Bridgerton. So much that I decided a blog was in order. But an analysis, not a review. With the added interview input from Rege, a new video paradigm is both confirmed and enhanced. So, here goes.
First, let’s dispose of the notion from several critics that the Bridgerton series is escapism. Saying a movie is an escape is different than saying it’s escapist. Chris Van Dusen, the writer-producer said the series was a “great escape for the holidays,” not that the series itself is escapist. Calling the series escapist is a sign the critic is either attention seeking or a certified ignoramus. At its core, escapism is the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy. Escapist behavior typically involves things like substance abuse, compulsive gambling, reckless driving, or dangerous sports. Generally, they are behaviors that put your health or wellbeing at risk, things you wouldn't normally do, and might regret later. Rather than escapist, in some ways, Bridgerton is, among other things, a social statement. And Rege emphasizes that point.
Romantic comedy, like Bridgerton, is fiction—and all good fiction is rhetorical. Good fiction, like Bridgerton, influences—it persuades and creates. It does things to its audience. The Bridgerton series is a fascinating, and—yes—superb romantic comedy. It’s romantic in the sense that the plot circles around feelings of excitement and mystery in love. It’s comedy in the technical sense: the plot moves along by the wit and wisdom of the characters in the story. In Bridgerton, uniquely, a terrific number of characters move the plot. And it is also fantasy in that it creates images that are on occasion unrealistic or improbable. Images that we might desire in our dreams—what some writers label “magic.” This is the background for Shondaland’s new video paradigm.
By starting out with the notion of fiction, I’m emphasizing my belief that stories have the power to pull people together—or push them apart. Stories can also make relationships possible and even better. The genre of comedy, which Bridgerton is filled with, inevitably forces us to redo our values. Revaluing those underlying assumptions that guide our lives and behaviors, sometimes obviously and other times unconsciously. At least a third of the population is completely unaware of the impact of comedy, unaware of what it’s doing to them. Consequently, when people trust a power person, they can easily put themselves at the mercies of stories, stories that are going to unconsciously impact them. Very clearly, Trump’s stories, even though nutty, crazy and dead wrong, did it to several hundred non-thinking people—largely by mutual osmosis. Fiction can pull readers out of their heads. And we suffered on January 6 as a result.
So, in the following, I’ll analyze Bridgerton and call your attention to a number of important issues in the series, indicating that Shonda Rhimes’ Bridgerton is actually a new video paradigm.
Rege Jean Page One of the things that caught my eye in the first episode was the fierce intelligence of the male lead, Rege Jean Page. As an exec coach, I’m always assessing the intelligence and abilities of a client. After more than fifty-years of assessing intelligence, these antennae are always up. Of course, a player can just be using the script he was given. But in this instance the actor’s verbal ability, accenting language, inserting verbal commas, subtle nonverbals, pauses, the ability to reflect feelings on the end of his consonants, the slight pause before punching the most important word in a sentence, the language not only with a glance, but evoking communication with his positioning, dance, hands, a simple ice-cream spoon (that hit Twitter and the internet like a bomb) and even a wine glass, all scream a rare dramatic intelligence. He’s Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings and very much the societal heartthrob. “Darcy as a 21st century fuck-boy” is Page’s immortal description. Such dramatic intelligence focuses attention perfectly on his characterizations, suggesting there must be more to life, reshaping sensibilities and offering triumph over the challenges we inevitably face. His Bridgerton persona is so well developed, not just with his love partner, that what is offered through his dramatic intelligence drives the immense viewership of this Netflix blockbuster...
Can psychological therapy provide the competencies executive coaching actually requires?
It’s not the first time that a psychiatrist has written about credentialing business coaching. Over the past twenty years there have been at least two articles in the Harvard Business Review by other psychiatrists pointing to the need for credentialing in psychology or psychiatry for the business coach. My hackles inevitably go up reading these articles. The current article, which appeared in Psyche Ideas, is a critique of business coaching by a Stanford psychiatrist, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. His conclusion is that coaching must be “defined and regulated so that mental health interventions can be offered by the experts trained to deliver them.” What adds fuel to the issue is the loosey-goosey goal of the Coaching Federation “to inspire the client to maximize potential.”
The conclusion that managers need a mental health intervention is a serious error—and an obvious power grab. Having worked extensively--one-on-one--with senior managers and executives for nearly 35 years, I’ve found that mental health has almost never been the issue. The psychiatrist and Coaching Federation not only misunderstand the needs of most executives, but they lack any awareness of the personal drives and psychological health of all but a very few managers.
My experience and education Though neither a psychiatrist nor a registered psychologist, I hold a PhD in communications and modern rhetoric and an MDiv, along with the equivalent in post-doc course hours of a master’s in psychological foundations, including highly relevant subjects such as tests and measures, practice theory, abnormal, clinical, adult learning and informal supervision by a psychological mentor. In addition, my background includes extensive counseling as senior pastor for an eleven-year period in two university related churches, and eleven more years teaching and coaching preaching and communications for both Protestant and Catholic seminary students. Uniquely, I also coached maximum-security prisoners at Oak Park Heights, Minnesota. An additional 35 years were spent as executive coach of more than 500 senior managers and executives from more than a dozen industries in Fortune 100 and 500 corporations across the country, as well as in Latin America and Europe. Among my clients (with typically a year or more of personal coaching) were MBA grads of Harvard, Chicago, Northwestern, Tuck-Dartmouth, Wharton, and yes, Stanford—as well as others from major public universities. That also included major experiences coaching clients from the fields of law, medicine and architecture as well as Continental and Brit Europeans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Israelis—and members of the LGBT community. Most importantly, my background in rhetorical criticism, an extensive competency providing exceptional tools for both diagnosis and development of various forms and contexts of personality and relationships, brings profound insight to executive coaching. For example, with rhet crit you become a better “noticer” and can observe and then coach in ways simply not available to psychology—feeling the end of a person’s consonants and getting at meanings and subtexts reverberating in emotions. That competency lies outside the awareness of psychologists and those from other disciplines. The fact that major firms recruited me on a recurring basis over the years, points to their belief in the validity of my various approaches and insights. My point? The proliferation of differing tools in the social sciences and varied approaches for business coaching, the size--and what one executive called the “weird diversity” of my client base--meant that client need determined the necessary tools, a need that was never purely or even largely psychological.
What’s my beef? Begin here: We now know that in any kind of problem solving the way you define a problem determines the way you resolve the problem. But still more important—and rarely mentioned—is that the tools you bring to the problem determine the way you define the problem. Until physician’s insurance rates skyrocketed as the cost for malpractice, it used to be said that if you take a medical problem to a surgeon, he’s going to recommend “cutting.” That’s why today’s surgeons need a clear rationale for Insurance to be willing to pay. Similarly, if you take an executive’s needs to a psychologist or psychiatrist, you can be damned certain they’re going to recommend a psychological resolution for the issue. And though psychologists regularly reject the notion of “medical model,” they are controlled unconsciously by its power. That’s true whether or not there are better and more efficient non-psychological ways to resolve the issue.
Dr. Aboujaoude is an example of this problem, writing that the common topics for leadership coaches are the “bread and butter of many a therapy session.” That’s simply not true. Obviously, the writer has little experience in business. If, for example, you take DSM-5, the standard set of diagnostic criteria for the American Psychiatric Association, nothing, absolutely nothing in all those psychiatric categories fits typical business requests for help, nor are executive needs satisfied by “bread and butter” therapy. In the psychiatrist’s attempt to create a semantic world bounded on all sides by psychology, he got caught up in his psychological shorts.
Common development issues The common developmental topics for executive coaches are determined not only by the basic performance needs requested by a client—even when off-base and wrong, but also by the organizational strategy and the cultural emphases of a given time period. For example, the 1980s were strongly oriented to basic management vs. leadership competencies, team skills and, I realized early on, the often, profound needs of significantly introverted IT people with a deficit of interpersonal competencies. The 1990s were oriented to working with flattening hierarchies, more interactional conversation, ordinary exec needs (like time-management or small-talk) and internal client-based, cross-cultural teamwork. The early 2000s, to more cross-disciplinary communication, complex teamwork, more technology management, decision process, business empathy, and—as the research and my experience reveal--ever more profound interpersonal deficits.
At the virtual swearing in of his political appointees, Biden essentially told his appointees that if he catches “anyone of them treating someone else poorly, he’ll drop-kick them off the roof of the White House.”
Here’s his statement. “I am not joking when I say this, if you are ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot,” No ifs, ands, or buts. Everybody, everybody is entitled to be treated with decency and dignity. That’s been missing in a big way the last four years…. I’m confident you have the capacity to do it. We’re gonna be judged. We are gonna be judged whether or not we restore the integrity and competency in this government…. I need your help badly. We have to restore the soul of this country, and we’re counting on all of you to be part of that. It’s not hyperbole. The only thing I expect with absolute certitude is honesty and decency—the way you treat one another, the way you treat the people you deal with. And I mean that sincerely,” he said.
He clarified that even further with a letter to his staff, telling them, “I would like to take a moment to make something clear to everyone. I do not expect nor do I want any of you to miss or sacrifice important family obligations for work. Family obligations include but are not limited to family birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, any religious ceremonies such as first communions and bar mitzvahs, graduations, and times of need such as illness or a loss in the family.” Trump, on the other hand, expected aides to skip important family functions to sit in the residence with him while he binge-watched Fox News...
Surprisingly, the most powerful source of false information is neither Trump nor the Russian trolls. It’s a unique American business model that drives the false information.
With all the hullaballoo about false information, the Russian trolls and Trump's ritualized falsehoods on Twitter, I’ve been at a loss to understand the reality and the actual facts behind all that’s going on. So I was delighted to see the data and insights in an article by Vera Tolz in the December 3 issue (“Shortcuts”) of the London Review of Books. Tolz holds an endowed professorship in Russian Studies at the University of Manchester (UK). My review is indicative of a slight bias toward Brit scholarship on issues like this.
The data presented and the resulting conclusions offer a far better background for our understanding of fake information and Russia’s supposed role in it. In addition, given the Washington riots of January 6, which happened after the article was written, we now have a far richer understanding of the role of the internet.
As Tolz argues, Trump’s November 5 press conference in which he claimed he won the election and there had been massive voter fraud are indicative of the fact that we had learned nothing from the election of 2016. The left claimed the press and broadcasters were indulging the right. In contrast, the right claimed that the media hadn’t indulged them enough.
Russian trolls? By that time, there was a strong liberal consensus that much of the internet misinformation had come from Russia. Pro-Trump Russia wants to disrupt elections, create chaos and interfere with balloting. Tolz points out that both the States and the UK have fallen into the trap of believing in this “information war” paradigm. The paradigm assumes that the main threats to both countries come from the outside. A fact the data does not support.
It’s true that a history of Russian trolls attempting to
Ford Prefect, that alien from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse never quite understood earthlings’ peculiar “habit of continually stating and repeating the very, very obvious, as in ‘It’s a nice day,’ or ‘You’re very tall’.” He considers, then rejects the theory that human mouths seize up if not continually utilized. He finally concludes that if human beings “don’t keep on exercising their lips…their brains start working.”
That was how the late Douglas Adams expressed a common high-flown opinion about “empty chatter”: it is trivial, or perhaps worse, a substitute for real speech and thought. “Should we talk about the weather?” sings Michael Stipe of REM in “Pop Song 89.”
As a business consultant, I learned that plenty of managers—and execs held that view in spades, that is--until I educated them. Evidently my education worked rather well, because probably twenty-percent of my several hundred clients over the last 15 years of my business consulting wanted help in small talk. One CFO at a multi-billion-dollar firm hired me for only that purpose. His wife had told him on several occasions after cocktail parties that he needed to learn how to do small talk. She was right on. It took eight to ten sessions to learn how. I never quite got over laughing all the way to the bank over teaching a business person how to do small talk.
But I eventually realized my judgment was unfair. Until I got started in the pastorate in the 1960s, I didn’t know how to do it either. But I quickly realized in the very first year out of seminary that I’d be in deep-doo-doo without small talk. So, I eventually became an expert in the subject. In the 1960s no one had ever written about small talk. But today there are plenty of books on the supposedly inane subject of small talk, many of them quite inadequate. Inadequate because they are tone deaf to the subtexts of small talk.
Donald Trump is a declaration of indifference and the rejection of the values making our democracy possible—a human, political disaster with anti-democratic instincts. After working through endless newspaper, magazine and journal articles by some of our best writers, my frustration with the various lines of thinking left a number of issues very much unanswered. One thing was clear: Trump is leaving a reality structure behind, the so-called “Trumpism,” that can still impact our lives destructively. So, this “political disaster” offered a fine case for the sensemaking process—a rhetorical strategy that can clarify situations, offer highly useful explanations for both individuals and organizations, and create new, constructive ways for thinking and behaving.
Sensemaking is an unusually helpful tool because it creates the potential for change, adaptation, differing iterations, strategic decisioning and reality structuring. Nagged by Trump’s rhetoric and unsatisfied with most of the journalism, I decided to look more seriously at his rhetoric after the first debate with Biden. The September debate was a central, inherent learning opportunity that ought not go to waste.
From the start, the most obvious conclusion was that the interaction was not a debate. Trump interrupted with the obvious intent of keeping Biden from responding or making any contribution to a “debate.” So, no interaction, no conversation and no debate.
Notice, here, that I began my analysis with a conclusion. A crucial property of sensemaking is that human situations are progressively clarified, but this clarification often works in reverse. I can’t say it strongly enough that working backwards usually provides more insights and a richer sense of options. The conflict between ideas, sometimes weak and other times strong, always surfaces better insights than starting from scratch.
For example, though I had read tons of stuff about Trump, including analyses of his narcissism and constant lying, one of the more intriguing insights was Jay Tolson’s comment. In the Hedgehog Review, he wrote that what we got from Trump was a lesson in the authoritarian style. Tolson’s overall perspective is built upon the notion that we have an unhinged president who shamelessly lied and interrupted his way around a decent opponent while ignoring a moderator who tried vainly to uphold rules that both he and Biden had agreed upon. By definition, the debate was an attempt to concentrate power in his own hands, an analogy of his political attempts, too.
Expecting silence, I got the glories of Saint-Saens from Samson and Delilah. I was on my phone, holding for a technician to help me resolve a computer problem. The song went on with the rich, emotionally dark sounds of “my heart at the sound of your voice,” with even the harp and a wailing clarinet or oboe in the distance. And then the half-falsetto of the tenor’s response. Entranced I hoped the technician wouldn’t come on too soon. I wanted to hear the end of the aria.
So it finished. Then the technician came on, “how may I help you sir?” I was stopped in my tracks by her voice.
We interacted for probably thirty seconds, then I interrupted. “You have an absolutely gorgeous Black voice,” I said. I could hear her smiling over the phone as she said, “Why, thank you sir.” Without waiting, I asked that she send kudos to the choice of music. “I’d never heard Saint-Saens while waiting for a technician.”
Then she went on with her questions and directions. In the middle of it, she stopped and without any context, she asked, “how did you know?” “I used to be a singer,” I said. “And I first heard Leontyne Price in the early 1960’s. I’d never heard such gorgeous sounds. I learned that only Blacks can make that sound. And that it is present in their linguistic placement of sound.” To my surprise and delight, she confessed, “I wanted to do opera, but I wasn’t good enough.” She was oozing with warmth and intelligence. You could recognize it in the vocabulary she chose, the arrangement of her words, the way she framed her questions and answered with unusual clarity, quite capably moving the conversation along to achieve both our objectives. And so, she fixed my computer problems, then taught me how to do it for myself—and wished me happy holidays.
The cover of this week’s Economist, that British bastion of business, intelligence, culture and policy, has a ragged, torn US flag flying over a government building. Above the flag is this lead: “Why it has to be Joe Biden.” In three articles, the magazine makes a strong case for Biden for the American voter. The subtitle of the first article summarizes their case: Donald Trump has desecrated America’s values. Joe Biden offers the prospect of repair and renewal.
Though, happily, Joe Biden has won the election, I think it’s important to think through all the Trump damage from over the past four years so we can make sense out of the coming years—and especially the interim between the election and the inauguration. And also, understand how much work the Biden administration has to do, a lot of which will be completely new and different for this century.
The Economist (10/30/2020) ticks off Trump’s failures, including regressive tax cuts, damaging deregulations, especially environmental policy, the debacle of health-care reform, and the cruel immigration separation of children from their parents. But they also allude to welcome changes between Israel and Muslim states, demands on NATO support for defense, and China’s recognition of us as a formidable adversary.
But, the Economist’s bigger dispute with Trump is over something far more fundamental: the desecration of the “values, principles and practices that made America a haven for its own people and a beacon to the world. Those who accuse Mr. Biden of the same or worse should stop and think. Those who breezily dismiss Mr. Trump’s bullying and lies as so much tweeting are ignoring the harm he has wrought.”
