Dan Erwin

Is Happiness All It's Cracked Up to Be?

The conversation was never predictable except for the timing and context. Usually I’d been coaching the exec for five or six sessions. Typically he (always “he”) was in his forties, at the director or vice-president level, very bright and had already made enough money to live his life in whatever fashion he desired. We had fifteen minutes remaining of our planned time so he leaned back, smiled and said something like “You seem to be a very happy, fun guy.” My story line is predictable: “I’m married to a wonderful woman, have three glorious daughters and love my work. My life is very meaningful.” “Meaningful? Tell me more,” was the usual response.

So just this past year when Roy Baumeister and his colleagues took on some “key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life,” I was hooked by the research. Would it confirm my own decisions?  

What's It Like to Be Uninsured?

Research Professor Joseph Feinglass of Northwestern University’s medical school finds that living without insurance can be lethal. In the US the uninsured have fewer doctor visits, receive less preventive care and have worse, often far worse health outcomes.

A personal experience is illuminating. Last week, as a result of a doctor’s appointment (no copay or charges) I picked up a prescription of 14 tablets of antibiotics for a cost of $4.00. Without insurance the antibiotics would have cost $380.00 and the doctor’s appointment $243.00. As a senior my monthly total insurance outlay is $150.90. An uninsured, if they could afford it, would have paid a total of $623.90.

Big picture
My picture of what it’s like to be uninsured, though illuminating, is barely indicative of the problem...

My Two "Favorite" Buzzwords

Over three decades of business consulting, no two terms have continued to surface more, given me more business projects, occupied more of my time and yet seem utterly devoid of any actual meaning than these: leader (or leadership) and strategy. Upon hearing them from many individuals and reading about them again and again, I’m often reminded of McBeth: these words are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 

The buzzwords surface everywhere in business, sometimes in overwhelmingly disparate contexts. “This guy is a great leader,” “she really needs to learn to lead,” or “you need a leadership experience.” Another context can be even more career dangerous. “I’d like to promote him, but he isn’t strategic.” Or, in one of the most lucrative coaching jobs of my career: “She’s open to working with you, and she really needs to become more strategic.” Now retired, she was one of the most well-placed women in American business. In sum, these buzzwords are like love. Everyone knows they exist, but few can define them with precision. And sometimes, like failures in love, they can’t execute either.

If you’ve done your research and some thoughtful, critical analysis, you know that thinking strategically is typically confused with planning. Similarly, leader or leadership is a context-driven catch-all. What it means coming from one mouth is not what it means coming from another. And what it means in one firm is not what it means in another. Like Humpty-Dumpty, words mean just what any person chooses them to mean — neither more nor less.

And that means when training you’d better ...

Carol Dweck on Learning to Fulfill Your Potential

Carol Dweck's diagram contrasts the "fixed-mindset" with the "growth-mindset." Those with a “growth mindset" recognize that struggles can be overcome with “effort, strategy and good instruction.” A description of her eureka moment, the basic research, how others have grown and how you can use her insights, follows the diagram. 

    

 

Stanford’s Carol Dweck has spent her career studying failure and how people react to failure. Her research revealed that not all people react by breaking out in hives. Though most hated failure, some thrived under the challenge of failure. This was the puzzle for her.

After chewing over the results ...

When Can You Trust an Expert?

Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller, Blink, begins with the memorable story of art experts asked to determine whether a magnificent example of a kouros, a sculpture of a striding boy, was genuine. Several of the experts had a strong visceral reaction in their gut. They believed it was a fake. But they were not able to say what it was that made them uneasy.

Their decision was a classic case of intuition. The experts knew it was a fake but didn’t know how they knew that. Those who read the story and the book might have come away with an almost magical view of intuition. That would be a wrong conclusion for later in the book Gladwell reveals that he does not hold that position. So how did the experts recognize it was a fake?

Not magic
Expert intuition actually involves both fast, intuitive thinking (system 1) and slow, deliberative, more logical thinking (system 2). In that first phase, a plan or tentative decision comes to ...

"Scaling Up Excellence"

Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao’s new book, Scaling Up Excellence, is one of those books you’ll go back to again and again.

Plenty of people know exactly what scaling is, but more don’t. I’ve got a lot of clarity on where I first encountered the term in business fifteen years ago--and the demands that were asked of me. A long-time friend and client wanted to make some very important culture changes in his leadership team. When we started our conversation, the focus was very clear and he kept going back to it over several interactions. He wanted the best scalable competencies to enable his leadership team to interact successfully with the company’s clients.

By scalability we refer to the ability of certain mindsets or competencies to expand from the few to the many.  

The scalable competencies that we decided on were able to enhance and expand the ...

Bad Is Clearly Stronger Than Good

One of the most useful and pragmatic studies over the past decade is that of Baumeister and colleagues, “Bad is stronger than good.”  The research finds that the greater power of bad events and bad feedback over good is found in everyday events, major life events, close relationship outcomes, romance, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions and learning processes. That means that bad emotions, bad parents and bad feedback have more impact that good ones. The research and its applications are so significant that I want to pull out a few issues from the study. I’ll write a blog on its application to a very significant, recurring business context in the next week or so.

I first began to understand this stuff decades ago when, as a preaching professor, I was studying the role of neurotic guilt in preaching. Neurotic guilt is what is felt when a person has no control over an event, but as a result of parenting, advising, teaching or preaching feels that he is culpable anyway. Many of my students, growing up in profoundly legalistic families and churches, became subjects of neurotic guilt on a weekly or even daily basis. Indeed, by the time I got them as twenty-year-olds, most had great difficulty understanding the distinction between moralizing and the Christian Gospel. What parishioners would be getting, I realized, was a shitload of neurotic guilt every Sunday morning. On top of that, ...

The Art of Problem Finding

For the past month I’ve been studying the notion of wisdom, especially as seen in the elderly. I’ve learned that to a significant degree wisdom is about the kind of intelligence a person accesses, develops and uses. The intelligence of the truly wise goes far beyond the usual notions of decision making and IQ. For example, Patricia Arlin, in an illuminating study, focuses upon wisdom as the art of problem finding.

What Arlin emphasizes is that problem finding is not just solving an actual, clear-cut problem. First, it’s discovering, envisaging, going into deeper questions that will lead you to the important problems. Once you’ve surfaced a number of problems, you’ve got a second questioning task: which of these problems is/are truly important?

Years ago, Robert Merton, the American sociologist, interviewed a number of Nobel laureates about how they decided which problems are truly important. Merton said that the laureates he interviewed “uniformly express the strong conviction that what matters most in their work is a developing sense of taste, of judgment in seizing upon problems that are of fundamental importance.”

A Fracking Good Question

In a recent blog, John Hagel points out that influence is becoming more and more challenging. Yet the ability to influence others is the key to setting big things in motion both on an organizational and individual level. What tool, he asks, is the most valuable for dealing with that challenge? It used to be that the person and organization with the best answers had the most influence. But now, he argues, it is the person and organization with the best questions.

That’s not immediately obvious. What Hagel understands is that though the industrial economy of the 20^th century was based on flows of materials (hard, measurable stuff), today’s economy is based on flows of information (soft, ambiguous stuff). We built our influence through great manufacturing businesses because ...

Why Leadership-Development Programs Fail

In an insightful and practical paper, McKinsey addresses four reasons why leadership programs fail. Three were standard fare, but with a thorough-explanation, rationale and suggested resolution of the problem. The fourth issue was especially insightful. It’s one that’s very difficult to deal with in group sessions, but very significant. I’ve dealt successfully with it in one-on-ones, but it’s a different animal, especially tough in group sessions. I’ll explain the why and how further on, moving beyond what the McKinsey report has to say.

Since there’s fairly widespread knowledge about three of the insights, I’ll summarize them briefly. McKinsey emphasizes that failure comes from overlooking context, decoupling reflection from real work and failing to measure results.

--Overlooking context. Expertise in one situation does not guarantee expertise in another. So successful training will focus upon the specific organizational and/or group context. Limit the development to two or three issues for effective learning. My program typically works with an executive in face-face situations for a year, inside the organizational premises. That includes about 15 sessions, exceptionally ...