Dan Erwin

Do and Don’t Do What Your Parents Tell You: Don’t Lie, But Tell Stories

The most widely used book on persuasion and influence in the business community is—by far—Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The psychology of persuasion. Overall, the book is #276 in Amazon’s books. It’s #1 in consumer behavior, #13 in motivational books and #20 in success books. I recommend it highly for every person’s bookshelf.

But the author is utterly blind to what makes his book a phenomenal success, never mentioning the key factor, yet, ironically, maximizing it throughout the book. It’s clear that the driver of his book’s influence is hidden in plain sight. It’s a glorious and very lucky form of blindness.

Cialdini’s book is a set of six principles, “weapons of influence.” But the book is loaded with. . . STORIES. The most basic weapon of influence is not one of his six principles, but story. I don’t expect psychologists to know or understand that. After all, psychology has become the scientific study of mental functions, self-reported behaviors, white rats and finger movements. Language use and function, in contrast, belong to the discipline of rhetoric—that human symbolic effort to bring about cooperation. As a result, rhetoricians often focus upon how various forms of ...

Employee Engagement: "There is no there there."

There is a terrific amount of opinion, written and otherwise, about employee engagement. But it looks as though what Gertrude Stein said about her home town of Oakland, California, is also true of employee engagement: “there is no there there.”

If you can deal with the challenge, you’ll want to go through Rob Briner’s thought piece on employee engagement from the perspective of evidence-based decision making. It’s readable, straight-forward and solid. As Briner’s article states up-front, he intends to “stimulate deeper and more critical thinking about employee engagement from an evidence-based practice perspective.”Briner is Professor of Organizational Psychology at the University of Bath (UK) and a leader in the field of evidence-based management.

Briner reveals that the current status of evidence on employee engagement is not a pretty picture.

The Evidence Based Management Collaborative is located at Carnegie Mellon and includes both academics and practitioners. EBMC focuses on empirical research, exactly what you’ll gain from Rosenzweig’s brilliant book, The Halo Effect. Briner also has a superb picture of the evidence hierarchy, with “expert opinion, anecdotes and case studies" at the bottom of the hierarchy. 

The thought piece, excerpted below, addresses two fundamental questions about engagement:

• Do increases in engagement cause increases in performance?
• Do engagement interventions cause increased levels of engagement and subsequent increases in performance?

Salvation by Disruption

Wow! Did the sparks fly when Harvard’s historian, Jill Lepore, took on Harvard’s Business professor, Clayton Christensen. He regularly writes in the Harvard Business Review and she, you may not know, regularly writes in the New Yorker. Just in case you also don’t happen to know, for the past 89 years, The New Yorker, may well be the most respected literary magazine in the world. In an occasionally elitist observation, I periodically comment that you can’t consider yourself an intelligent person unless you read the New York Times, the Economist—and The New Yorker. Feel perfectly free to give me the finger on that comment.

The New Yorker doesn’t usually write about business. But it has no qualms writing about shakers and movers. So Jill Lepore gave us six, small print, three column pages on “The Disruption Machine” and Clayton Christensen.

Still the real issue is not the flying sparks, but the substance of her argument about what “the gospel of innovation gets wrong.” And at that point, we need to pay attention. Seems like everyone agrees with her. And Christensen, backed into his corner, just about agrees too. . . .

Nothing Really Works All the Time

Ten years ago the Wharton School of Business named Andy Grove the most influential CEO of the previous 25 years. Yale’s Jeffrey Garten called him a “superb model for future generations of CEOs.” Beyond his obvious success at Intel, why the accolades? Harvard’s Richard Tedlow answered the question best: “Grove has escaped natural selection by doing the evolving himself. Forcibly adapting himself to a succession of new realities, he has left a trail of discarded assumptions in his wake. “

Discarding assumptions can be very wise. Business proverbs, those single phrase assumptions, often need to be dumped too. Although I occasionally hear it today, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” was a mantra in most exec suites 20 years ago. The execs who didn’t break a significant number of their ideas and processes are on the streets today. “Keep it simple stupid (KISS)” is another one that still floats around. It’s being challenged by a chaotic, highly complex global economy.  

Thus far, no one seems to be challenging “Work smarter, not harder.” It, too, is filled with a significant amount of baloney.  

In 2014, it’s only half right—at best!
I first encountered the proverb ...

An Intriguing Use of Evidence-Based Management

Recently one of my long-term clients, a C-Suite exec who’s into evidence-based management competencies, was asking about the whole business of research. He was curious about some examples of really practical research. So we talked about Disney’s attention to what they call “dissonant details” that can undermine guests’ good cheer in their parks. From there, of course, the conversation went to the conclusion of more than 200 studies that makes it very clear that “bad is stronger than good.” A little bit of bad inevitably undermines a whole lot of good.

Then he asked about other examples of systematic research. I suggested the “nice-guy” studies, work that hasn’t been quite as front and center recently, but remains just as informative and practical. He was especially intrigued by their usefulness in identity formation for younger managers. The underlying question the research addresses is whether it really pays to be a nice guy.

Since I haven’t written about the subject for several years, here’s my original posting from 2009.   

DOES IT PAY TO BE A NICE GUY?

Although research has been dealing with this question for nearly 50 years, it has only been in the last seven or eight years that the answer has become firmly established. Nice guys of both sexes, the kind of warm, friendly people you like to be around, have some of the stuff that makes for relationship success...

Intelligence Is Still Alive and Well

Although, on occasion, I doubt it. Still these excerpts from two great commencement addresses are salutary. The first excerpt might be entitled something like “How to deal with liberals who act like the Tea Party.” And the second, “C’mon! Passion is an obsolete concept for careers.”

Of the ten or so excerpts in Sunday’s Times, most began with a warning for faculty and students who would close down opposing viewpoints. That, of course, was a reference to Condoleeza Rice, Christine Lagarde and Robert Birgeneau, formerly UC Chancellor, all of whom were deemed persona non grata after an original invitation to speak at three major schools.

Two excerpts are exceptional.
The first, a satire by the journalist, Bob Garfield, was at Albright College in Pennsylvania, one of those old and classic liberal arts institutions for which the East is rightly famous. For the rhetorician Kenneth Burke, satire always connotes this question: “In the name of God or the Devil, at this stage in our history, where in Hell's name are we?” And satire, with its parody and mockery, is “often the handiest way to make clear just where we are.”

So here’s Bob Garfield:
 “I just can’t tell you how disappointed I am with you...

What Happens When Your Theory No Longer Works?

All of us have our own theories about how relationships, careers and life are supposed to work. Typically, they are implicit, but they are just as powerful when we don’t recognize them. As I noted in a recent blog, theories sneak up on all of us. Our theories impact reality in profound ways that most never see, never think about or are even willing to believe. But our social theories profoundly influence how we think about ourselves, how we think about our world and how we act, even when a theory is now obsolete.

One of the most classic theories about work and pay was destroyed back in the 1930s by Henry Ford. The theory was that you should pay your worker as little as possible and expect 12 hours work a day. The old man looked at the Model T that he was making and trying to sell for $500 and decided that theory would no longer work. His market was limited by the poor salaries he paid his employees. Much to the chagrin of American business and Wall Street, Ford nearly tripled the salaries of his employees overnight, putting them on an eight hour day just so they could buy the car they built and have the time to drive it around. Wallah! There you have it. Ford became one of the richest men in the world almost overnite. . .

The Arc of Policy Is Long But Bends Toward Justice

But the current statistics are quite problematic. And not easily sloughed off.

I’ve read the journal, Foreign Affairs, off and on for more than thirty years. It’s neither Conservative nor Liberal—and also presents opposing perspectives. Sometimes the different perspectives are in the same journal, other times they appear over a few months. But they are inevitably written by an expert in the field, an academic, government official or a business expert. And here’s one on which every business person needs to do some reflecting.

The article to which I refer in the title, America’s Social Democratic Future, is by Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona. Kenworthy initially steps above the fray to look at the national policy over the past 100 years, demonstrating that the opponents of our unique, American-style social democracy are fighting a losing battle. But then he digs into the current problems we face. I’ve reread the article at least three times, not least because his economic, statistical interpretations are especially meaningful.

Here is his interpretation of three problematic issues we currently face.

First, the United ...

How Social Science Sneaks Up on All of Us

For many people in business and politics, social science doesn’t appear particularly impressive. Its relevance for practice and the nitty-gritty of business may seem doubtful. But the fact of the matter is that social science impacts reality in profound ways that most never see, never think about or are even willing to believe—at least when first faced with the facts. Social science, however, profoundly influences how we think about ourselves, how we think about our world and how we act. And that’s true whether or not a given theory is right or wrong.

Ferraro, Pfeffer and Sutton devote a paper on economics’ language and assumptions, showing how social science drives our perspective on economics. I was reminded of their study when I read the latest blog by Roger Martin on How to win the argument with Milton Friedman. Martin notes that the argument that the trade-offs between shareholders and the rest of society, the particularly framing of Friedman’s argument, has won the last 50 years. It is, he writes, a very clever way of setting up his argument, but won’t stand up to scrutiny. And he sets out to debunk the framing. Of course, it drives some of his readers nuts, but that’s ...

Does Reading Make You Smarter?

I thought the affirmative answer to that question was both obvious and credible. Until I read some of the irrelevant and stupid responses to Dan Hurley’s recent article in the Guardian in which he discusses the impact of reading on all three categories of intelligence . The nonsense helped me understand why so many distrust science, think climate change is fabricated, believe the world was created 6,000 years ago and despise high intelligence.

The research
Still, for the rest of us the research is immensely credible. And there’s a lot of it. One major group of studies emphasizes the “Matthew Effect” in academic achievement. The term is taken from the biblical passage that describes the rich-get-richer and the poor-get-poorer phenomenon. Children who experience greater difficulty reading, get less practice, read less, and delay their own development—and may never develop anywhere near their actual ability...