Dan Erwin

The Personal Power of Strategic Dithering

“Hold your fire,” “bumble,” “muddle along,” and “don’t be in a hurry to make that decision” is choice terminology. Or, negatively, as in Maureen Dowd’s commentary, dither: “Amateur hour started when Obama dithered on Syria and failed to explain the stakes there.” Any number of commentators have fired off missiles about Obama’s dithering on Syria and all the trouble it gets us into. Maybe, maybe not.

Of course, knowledgeable readers are well aware that dithering, hesitating and being undecided, drives journalists nuts. They’re paid to get the news out and when a politician is holding his fire, they’ve got no news to write about. So dithering becomes an expletive readily applied to slow decision makers. Take it all with a grain of salt.

Dithering can be a highly useful personal strategy. 

The Power of Powerless Speech

Language is power in ways far more literal than most imagine. Check out your local bookstore’s business section and you’ll find a large assortment of books offering their prescriptions for leadership language. You can find books on “power words,” “power talking,” and even “sound like a leader.”

What underlies all of these books is the belief that your communication style impacts your status and productivity at work and in life. Simply put, those who speak assertively tend to get the goodies. It’s surprising to most that something as subtle and nuanced as speech styles should effect matters of great consequence. But it’s true that powerful speakers get hired and promoted faster, get quicker raises and command more respect than those who talk in a tentative, uncertain manner. So, not surprisingly, social scientists have documented a consistent relationship between speech styles and the attainment of status.  

In fascinating research, Alison Fragale, of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, argues that though assertive speech gains the rewards of status, powerless speech, too, can confer. . .

Making Your Point with an Adverbial Monstrosity

The “Letter of the Day” in today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune deserves a gold star. Not just that it tried to put an end to Minnesota’s clueless Michele Bachmann, but also its use of adverbs is a show stopper. 

Raise your hands, kids, as I am, if you’re tired — and I mean nauseatingly, obnoxiously, relentlessly, endlessly, irrefutably, undoubtedly, uncompromisingly, angrily, insanely, regardlessly, intemperately, irrevocably, miserably and even eternally tired — of hearing anything at all on the face of the earth about U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann again.

How Language Shapes Our Thought and Behavior

It has always intrigued me that twenty-year olds spend hours working on core body exercises or their biceps, watching Mad Men or listening to the White Stripes or Kanye West. But, in spite of the ever-increasing demands upon career in today’s world, they often fail to pick up a really good book or intelligent magazine to increase their their language skills. I suspect they're no different than any generation, but they're just obvious about it.

Yet cognitive scientists and rhetoricians have found again and again, through unimpeachable research, that language shapes our thinking and can profoundly affect our perceptions of the world. Put another way, the language we own either limits or enhances the way we see the interactions and events we face every day. Will my boss support me or ignore me? Is there a difference between confidence and competence? Are you born optimistic or is it learned? Is talent innate or developed? Surprisingly, the vocabulary you own, more than the physical objects—the artifacts of the actual event, determines your response to these questions.

Street Smarts on Steroids

Fifty years ago if you had career street smarts, you paid attention to your boss, followed through on his expectations and figured out how to stay out of trouble. That would put you on the career ladder. By the mid 1980s, with the coming of technology and the information age, you learned to “manage your boss,” use technology to achieve some of your boss’s goals, and how to work cross-functionally. The career ladder was dissolving. By the 1990s, street smart workers knew to manage their boss, work cross-functionally and apply technology to their job.  But they also knew, much to their dismay, that neither their boss nor the company was going to take care of them. The career ladder had been "disappeared."

In the 21^st century, work life and career for many has gone to hell in a hand basket. Today, the street smart professional takes it for granted that that he or she will have to manage their boss(s), their work, and their entire career. But how, many ask, do I turn myself into the unique, desirable professional that will be able to open career doors for now and in the future 

FYI: street smart—alert, calculating, shrewd and with the resourcefulness to survive in a business environment.