Dan Erwin

Why Should You Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer?

It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli in "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator. You’d think that with my easy-going optimism, I’d never write a blog on this subject.  But, au contraire!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to our knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These are also people whom you’ll need in order to get your own personal and organizational objectives met. As both a manager and a consultant, I’ve found a number of people who fit in that same box. In short, I’ve found Machiavelli very useful for my own success.

But there are a number of exceedingly important reasons for keeping your enemies close:

1.    You can learn a lot from people you dislike. Indeed, my best learning doesn’t always come from friends. Often it’s from opponents, adversaries or fence-sitters. They bring a different worldview, perspective and/or ideas on a subject of common interest. There are plenty of times when such a person can help to better my thinking and position on an issue.

2.    You have to keep your enemies close to understand their perspective and interests. One of the persuasion strategies I learned from Bill Howell years ago was the importance of creating a highly representative “panel” of usually about six people who would represent the diversity of commitments or opinions on an issue. If I could frame my proposal in such a way to satisfy the self-interests of each of those six, I was well on the way toward success. That demand, of course, meant that each person had to be close enough to me to be well understood. Truthfully, I usually understood my enemies better than my friends.

3.    When your enemies are close, it’s easier for your allies to work with you. Allies are often the least helpful in analyzing your ideas. Furthermore, your allies may have just as much difficulty with your enemy as you, and that’s part of the reason you’re friends. But your allies will respect you and find it easier to work with you if they know you really understand the lay of the land--and how to appeal to your enemy’s self-interest.

[See also my latest, how to keep your enemies closer.]

Determining the motives of your enemy involves a significant amount of guesswork. One of the best ways to get to know that person is to listen to how he goes about persuading others. People want the world to be congruous with their expectations and in line with their predictions. So when they attempt to persuade others, they use tactics that would be persuasive to them. Observe them, listen to them and analyze what they say and how they say it. From that you can often figure out their interests and their values.

Finally, it needs to be said that you can’t keep your enemy close to you unless you know how to disagree agreeably, understand and share at least some of your enemy’s interests or values, are sometimes transparent with your differences and are willing to interact with that person in a social situation. In such settings it’s important to find out what that person wants that you can give them. Secondly, it’s just as important to figure out the resources you have to offer them in order that they’ll give you what you want. Don’t forget that some of the resources each of us has are information and contacts.

In sum, if you dig deep enough, there are always a few interests and values you share with your enemies. Most of us like to talk about our differences, but in reality we are all far more alike than different. Inherently also, that means that you know how to really converse. But this also implies that you can listen and observe as though that person is the only other person on the planet. Machiavelli is front lobe stuff: keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Flickr photo: unriobravo

The Six Key Competencies for Career Success in the 21st Century

Dissect America’s corporate strategies and needs throughout the past 12 years, sort through the business-related research and anecdotal material, engage executives and entry-level employees, study the best journals and books, engage the top consulting firms and storied business school faculty and you’ll find a phenomenal consensus on the needed competencies for career success. Though these competencies are oriented to parents and college students, they also provide a relevant perspective on learning and career pathing for those already in the workforce.

 

Reduced to the most basic elements, here’s the list of key competencies: 

1.    A technology background or related expertise in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors. You want to major in a liberal arts program outside those technologies? Excellent, but make sure you get four to six STEM courses. (Major in sociology, but add statistics, computer science, etc. Or, major in English lit, dance, German studies, or archaeology, but pick up some STEM background along the way.)

The actual value of the STEM competencies is that they provide the primary means for innovation for both business as well as the nation. They are our ultimate competitive advantage in the global marketplace. In short, without a robust STEM workforce, we will become less competitive in the global economy. However, without the broadly educated liberal arts grads, including those with liberal arts STEM majors—not mere technicians--we lose much of the creativity and intuition crucial in the workplace where fuzzy issues and dense problems, clashes of ideas and deep-seated ambiguities are the status quo.     

 2.    Complex thinking and problem solving. If the faculty in your college major is half-way decent, the subtext, often unstated, is that your major discipline works on the basis of a specific set of cognitive models. My undergrad history major forced me to think big picture, look closely at data and analyze potential causes underlying historical events. Applied to business, I found myself with superb analytical, tactical, cause-effect and strategic competencies. Translated into business categories, here is what one English major learned. In the global marketplace, however, these are merely foundational competencies. You’re going to have to constantly build upon thinking skills. That will include the ability to evaluate evidence, to see patterns in recurring problems, to draw adequate inferences and conclusions, to think metacognitively and to use relevant vocabulary.

3.    Written and oral communication. The demand for communication competencies in the 21^st century profoundly outpaces that of the last century. It’s not merely the multi-lingual nature of a diverse global world or the emphasis upon service economies and face-to-face relations. At bottom it’s the flattened hierarchies with individual responsibilities for every person. Thus, success now requires the ability to use communication to bridge gaps between interdependent groups, to build and use networking intelligence, manage relationships, and create a motivational environment that will inspire the cooperation and contribution of others.    

In this new economy, the majority of more experienced, older workers struggle to communicate effectively. But Gen-Yers seem to have special needs at this point. As a warning, Arthur Levine, former president of the Columbia Teacher’s College and now president of The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, puts it this way: This generation is not very good at face-to-face relationships. The image that comes to mind is two students, sitting in the room they share, angrily texting each other, but not talking. They all want to have intimate relationships, they want to get married and have kids, but that’s hard to do if you don’t know how to talk with another person.

4.    Adaptability, which includes the abilities to respond to and manage change, and know how to learn. Few companies have a career ladder and few careers are linear. Instead, employees will need to adapt to a market which is a dynamic, evolving system in which the further you try to assess the future, the more difficult it is to predict the outcomes. At its heart, adaptability is about the skills of change. It implies the ability to get from where you are now to where you want to go--and along the way, deal competently with the miserable middle between now and then. It also implies focus, constant learning and political smarts.

Adaptability is built upon the recognition that our world never stays the same, that dynamic change, not stability and permanence, is constant. Adaptable people understand that experience and work are chaotic, fragmentary, deviate from cherished values and is given to imponderable ambiguity. Adaptation, itself, comes out of encounters with novelty that may seem chaotic. In trying to adapt, we often have to deviate from cherished values, behave in ways that we’ve barely glimpsed and seize on clues that are merely fragmentary.

5.    Creativity. Most people tend to think of creativity as beautiful designs such as great art, architectural masterpieces or the Apple iPad. The fact of the matter is that though business always needs creative masterpieces, business needs far more creativity and innovation in mobilizing talent, allocating resources, developing processes and building strategies.

 But the most important fact about creativity is that at its heart it is a highly collaborative enterprise, not the lone genius in his/her workroom. The unifying idea about creativity, which debunks a mile-high stack of creativity myths, is that even seemingly solitary artistic pursuits involve improvisation, collaboration and communication. The surprising reminder for many is that nothing is perceived to be creative unless people can communicate that insight to others. One of the more fascinating insights I gained from consulting at 3M, one of America’s greatest creative firms, is that a creative team often searches for others who can communicate the value of their creation. Otherwise, their work is dead in the water. Surprisingly, the keys to creativity are going to be collaboration and communication, making this competency available to anybody who’s willing. Once more: the eccentric, lone genius is the exception, not the rule.

6.    Entrepreneurialism. The first thing most think about this subject is of a business person who builds a business from scratch. That’s merely one very minor reflection of an entrepreneurial, adventuresome spirit. A more generic perspective of entrepreneurialism includes the ability to take initiative and risks in order to put new ideas into play. In short, it’s finding useful and/or profitable solutions to problems. Furthermore, in today’s world the entrepreneurial person regularly rebuilds his job and career in order to adapt to business needs or change jobs.

Entrepreneurialism is tightly related to creativity, especially to its communication side. A study by Hargadon and Sutton showed that the entrepreneurial process was remarkably similar across all companies. It included the ability to capture good ideas, keep the ideas alive, imagine new uses for old ideas, and put promising concepts to the test. One of the fascinating things we know about entrepreneurs is that they are good “noticers.” The Wall Street Journal’s Shellenbarger, for example, writes that entrepreneurs notice “unmet needs and ways to fulfill them.”

What’s most obvious about this new competency set is that a high school degree gets you nowhere, that a bachelor’s is merely foundational and that success in the new economy will require constant learning and growth. Initially, you might think the academic portion of these demands to be a bit much. I’ve found that a typical liberal arts bachelor’s degree, requirements, major and all, provides space for meeting these basic expectations. However you read this blog, don’t miss the point that these competencies form the backdrop, indeed, the new normal for career success. So, go on about the business of acquiring and honing these skills, regardless of where you are in your career.

Flickr photo: city college

The Best Post-Election Quotes: Governors Mark Dayton and Bobby Jindal

After having a both Democratic governor and a Tea-Party Republican legislature for two years, the Minnesota Republicans were swept out of office. Minnesota now has a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature. Here’s Dayton’s comment:

The easier two years are over, and the harder two years are now beginning, because we have the added responsibility to lead. And this is a responsibility I welcome, but given the challenges the state faces and our country faces these days, it’ll be a lot of hard work.

His comment is indicative of the shift to single-party dominance in state governments. Eight years ago, 30 capitals were divided between the parties. After the election only 11 capitals are divided. This is a time for caution, not celebration. Mark Waller, the newly elected Republican leader in Colorado reflects my sentiments exactly: The Democrats absolutely have the votes to do anything they want to do, but that’s a pretty tricky proposition. They’ve got to be very careful about how they do what they do.

And the Republicans

With the Republican shock in national elections, where the House retained Republican control, but without the popular vote, no Republican sounded more intelligent than Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.  He argued that the Republicans need to “stop being the stupid party” and make a concerted effort to reach a broader swath of voters with an inclusive economic message that pre-empts efforts to caricature the GOP as the party of the rich.”

We’ve got to make sure that we are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, big anything. We cannot be, we must not be, the party that simply protects the rich so they get to keep their toys.

The Loyal Opposition

Over the recent years, the American political system has been in disarray. It’s orientation has too often been to power rather than to the good of the country. This is best epitomized by Senator Mitch McConnell’s stated fundamental goal of removing President Obama in the election. To hell with the nation, the community and its needs. Bobby Jindal strikes a more appropriate perspective. His tenure has indicated his focus on serving the community, rather than the mere power needs of the few and the wealthy.

Although the sense of a “loyal opposition” might be useful and exceptionally appropriate, America has no sense of that concept. The concept comes out of parliamentary systems of government and is applied to the non-ruling opposition parties. It indicates that the non-governing parties may oppose the actions of the sitting powers while remaining loyal to the source of the government’s power.

America and Americans could use a modified notion of the loyal opposition in this century. It would understand the source of the government’s power as the electorate and the American community, rather than a monarchy. It would shift the focus to the nation rather than merely upon regaining power. It’s idealistic, but a conversation could be very helpful to educate both legislators and the American constituency.

Why I love politics
David Brooks’ column, urging his readers to see “Lincoln” argues similarly, but from a different perspective. Commenting that we live in an “anti-political moment,” he writes that Spielberg and Kushner’s film “shows that you can do more good in politics than in any other sphere.”

He summarizes my own perspective about politics exactly: You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others—if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical. The challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high vision and low cunning. Spielberg’s “Lincoln” gets this point. The hero has a high moral vision, but he also has the courage to take morally hazardous action in order to make that vision a reality.

To lead his country through a war, to finagle his ideas through Congress, Lincoln feels compelled to ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games, deceive his supporters and accept the fact that every time he addresses one problem he ends up creating others down the road.

Politics is noble because it involves personal compromise for the public good.

Happily, I believe both Dayton and Jindal get that!

Flickr photos: Mark Dayton by easy stand, and Bobby Jindal by Derek Bridges 

How to Use Obama's Academic 'Dream Team' for Organizational Results

Benedict Carey, science editor of the NYTimes, recently revealed Obama’s leading-edge use of social scientists to win the election. In contrast to Republicans, who relied largely on the insights of their pundits, Obama’s success is tied to the work of nerdy professors. You can be very certain that both political parties will be using nerdy profs for the next election. After reviewing the research by Obama’s team, I saw that the lessons are not exclusive to politics: they are also immediately applicable to every business culture.

The group of social scientists from UCLA, Harvard, Princeton, UCSD and Arizona State, which calls itself the “consortium of behavioral scientists,” or COBS, showed how to use "little things" to win.

1.      Princeton’s Susan Fiske’s research has shown that when deciding on a candidate, people generally focus on both competence and warmth. “You can’t just run on the idea that everyone wants to have a beer with you. Some people care a lot about competence.” Romney was recognized as a competent businessman, but was often portrayed as distant and unable to relate to the needs of ordinary people.

In business, it’s more and more important to hire someone who’s both competent and likably warm. Stanford’s Bob Sutton has written about the “asshole theory,” managers who’re competent but not at all likable. They’re destructive to both the organization and their people. Company recruiters need to look not only for the necessary competence, but also for warmth in their candidates. Finding candidates with both those characteristics will inevitably improve organizational success. It’s competence that gets the task done, and warmth that gets the people’s support.

     2.      When it comes to rumors, the best strategy is not to deny the charge (“I am not a flip-flopper”), but to “affirm a competing notion.” Rather than deny that Obama was a Muslim, they constantly affirmed that he was a Christian.

Managers often find that the rumor mill is at work, resulting in employees checking out various conclusions. For example, “I’ve heard that a layoff is in the works.” A strategic response might be, “As you know, we’re facing a difficult economy. We’re currently looking at the best strategies for resolving our financial problem and maintaining effective client relationships.”

     3.      Identifying a person as a voter--“Mr. Jones, we know you have voted in the past”–acts as a subtle prompt for future voting. The persuasion specialist, Robert Cialdini, pointed out that “People want to be congruent with what they have committed to in the past, especially if that commitment is public.”

On many business occasions, you’ll need the support of organizational members to achieve your objective. That might sound something like this, “Joe, last year when we tried to get this project through the management team, you supported the objective and worked very hard, but it failed. Now that we’ve reframed the issue but are still focused on last year’s objective, we’d like to be able to count on your support.”

    4.    Making even a simple plan to vote, including specifying a time.  Dr. Susan Fiske of Princeton said that she received a generic, mass market e-mail from the Obama campaign before the election. It said, ‘People do things when they make plans to do them; what’s your plan?’ Recent research shows that this kind of message is much more likely to prompt people to vote than literature.

Business project objectives should usually result in action plans. Thus, as team leader, you say to Jan, “Jan, you’re on board with this objective. Would you lay out a couple steps and a specific timeline for this phase of the project?”

    5.      Informing supporters that others in their neighborhood were planning to vote. This activity trades on the human instinct to conform. In one piece of research, testing different messages to reuse hotel towels, the message ‘the majority of guests in this room reuse their towels’ resulted in a 41% increase.

Many organizations have found success with complex projects by using clearly defined protocols and processes for working between the relevant groups. So the manager might say to a new employee, “Gina, historically projects like this one that’s complex and spread across several different organizations only succeed when there is a clearly defined mechanism for handling information and tasks between the organizations.”

The success of the Obama strategy is an announcement of significance. It informs us that by better understanding how social reality—the organizational culture—works, a person or an organization’s objectives can more effectively be met, even with “little things.”

Flickr photo: rolandin  

5 Reasons Why Pessimistic Optimism Makes Sense

Sunday’s Parade Magazine had David Gergen’s list of five reasons he’s able to stay optimistic about the United States, even though in the short term he’s pessimistic. I suspect he might have been taking a page from my playbook. You see, both of us are pessimistic optimists—and I’ve been one for nearly 50 years. So early this year I was delighted to read Steven Pinker’s 700 page tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, a well-documented study providing support for long-term optimism about humanity. A short term perspective on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might cause a person to reject Pinker, but that perspective won’t stand the scrutiny of his research. Pinker, instead, looks at the big picture since 1250 BC., and his thesis supports the Gergen/Erwin Thesis.

Gergen’s brief column is worth rehearsing for most anytime. Even though he wrote for “dear voters,” it’s just as applicable after the presidential election. There’s a slight caveat: A growing chorus of experts believe that as long as our political leaders can handle the deficit and spark growth, our future will be much brighter. I suspect they’re smart enough to handle the deficit, especially since it’s really not as big a deal as many would like us to believe. It’s just all about values, choices and compromise. Yeah, I know, the Dunderheads don’t want to compromise today. But in our democracy, long term the Dunderheads just fade away.

Here’s a quick summary of Gergen’s five reasons to stay positive:

1.    Immense technology breakthroughs are unlocking vast resources of natural gas. Schools like MIT are devoting more research to make the US greener and more energy dependent.

2.    American advances in biology, information technology and manufacturing lead the world in addressing human needs.

3.    America continues to reign supreme in higher education. A Times Higher Education study found that 14 of the 20 world’s top universities are American. (The Shanghai Rankings, well known by scholars for its emphasis on research, finds that 8 of the top 10 and 17 of the top 20 universities are American.)    

4.    Republicans and Democrats alike are starting to agree that we need to open our doors to talented foreigners. That, of course, is all about the inevitability of reforming immigration policy.

5.    Gergen’s near unique perspective that two streams of people pouring into the workforce could change the country: veterans from 11 years of war dazzling employers with their expertise, and college graduates who are passing up Wall Street to do socially responsible work. An intriguing statistic: At some top universities, nearly one in five seniors has applied to Teach for America.

Although few writers or intellectuals have overtly espoused pessimistic optimism as a full-fledged reality structure, applicable to all of life, it regularly appears as a subtext to their work and conversation. Admittedly, at bottom it’s a faith-derived intellectual attitude. One of the more well-known and obvious members of the group of pessimistic optimists is Jon Meacham, commentator, former editor of Time, now executive editor of Random House and Pulitzer Prize winner. Though I’ve never heard him refer to it, I suspect some of his perspective is deeply rooted in his classic Episcopalianism. His best exposition of this perspective is in a Time magazine editorial, Keeping the dream alive.

Although pessimistic optimism shares a strong orientation to testing reality, much like secular humanism, it differs in that it is an ultimately optimistic orientation to reality. Though I approach pessimistic optimism from perspectives of both intellectual history and theology, systematic studies in psychological optimism have also found it to profoundly affect human well-being and success. As well, I’ve found in my business of management consulting that the attitudes of those who succeed are strongly oriented to the perspective—even though they’ve rarely thought it through. Conversely, when I dig into those who want to change, at bottom, I find that I’m dealing with the need for new competencies and a fundamental perspective needing surgery to reorient it to pessimistic optimism. Understand clearly: all of life, whether we know it or not, has some faith perspective that can never be fully tested. But pessimistic optimism is easily the most pragmatic, useful and liberating reality structure. 

Flickr photo: by hynkel

Do Employees Want the Boss to Tell Them How to Vote?

Yesterday’s HBR (Harvard Business Review) blog had a lead posting by Gregory S. Casey arguing that employees want their bosses to talk politics—ostensibly so they can make “better decisions.” My first response was total skepticism, leading to questions about the writer’s person and actual agenda. This is how he was identified on HBR: President & CEO of the Business Industry Political Action Committee (BIPAC), Gregory S. Casey has a long record of public service, including as Chief of Staff to members of the US House of Representatives and the Senate. Casey is also a senior partner in the Idaho-based consulting company, Veritas Advisors, LLP. Not enough info to reveal his party relationships or vested interests, but since he was writing from the standpoint of a CEO I could guess.

So, thanks to the internet, I dug still deeper. Yep, I was correct: “Prominent Republican Greg Casey. . . .” Democrats have their strategies for this kind of stuff too, but that was a classical Republican strategy. You know, an appeal to authority (the boss) rather than community (all of us peons). Casey is an admitted political operative.

The blog presents survey “research” from privately held companies. On numerous occasions, I’ve pointed out the inherent weaknesses of survey research. At bottom, survey research is fundamentally polling—just like election polling. Trustworthiness is very, very difficult to achieve by surveys. So, looking closely at his survey research, I immediately noted numerous opportunities for building in bias—thus I seriously doubt its validity. What bugged me was that HBR let an obviously politico put up a post backed by obviously specious research.

In sum, Casey is a political operative using questionable research to achieve a political agenda.

The HBR conflict
What’s going on with HBR’s vaunted political neutrality? Hmmmm. HBR can’t afford to tell you how to vote—even if they could get agreement on a single candidate. But, scrolling down the blogs, I found another post by Stanford’s Jeff Pfeffer, with the contradictory and amusing title, Don’t waste your time telling employees how to vote. So HBR was posting conflicting ideas—smart approach to a conflicted issue. . . if, that is, the readers analyze both blogs.. They put up Casey’s blog first, believing it would gain more immediate attention than Pfeffer’s. You know, it’s always wise to put the most eye-catching post first.

Jeff Pfeffer’s vested interests are very clear. He intends to maintain his reputation as an impeccable scholar and researcher in business and human realities. The few scholars like Pfeffer are exceedingly cautious in drawing conclusions from their research. His livelihood both as consultant and Stanford professor is built on his knowledge base.

Pfeffer, rationalizes his conclusion on more disparate and far better research. Basically, Pfeffer concludes that “given the power dynamics involved in the boss/worker relationship, this (telling employees how to vote) is a bad idea, and not only because it’s, well, a bad idea. It makes no sense because . . . you probably won’t sway them (especially because of today’s employee dissatisfaction, distrust and disengagement [see data in his posting]), It diminishes your influence in other realms. . . . It takes you off-message.”

Pfeffer’s realism
Ultimately, Pfeffer argues a viable perspective, not only because given today’s world, it’s highly realistic. But also because he uses clearly valid research as evidence in his arguing.

Moral of the blog: (1) Always check out the vested interests of the writer, and (2) always check the research evidence before you before you bother with the reasoning. To sum it up, Casey’s recommendation is political nonsense.

Photo: Flickr