Dan Erwin

Business Coaching Is a Two-Way Street

I’ve worked with senior executives in major international firms for more than twenty years. It’s been a very satisfying career with seemingly endless, delightful clients. In the first three years I had five or six resistant clients—and that was the end of the uncommitted. Five out of a total of nearly 500 very committed clients over more than twenty years. Early on, if I thought a potential client was not committed to learning, that was it. I never had an uncommitted client after the first few years.

Typical of my clients was one woman, a marketing director at the Pillsbury Company who stopped me one day at the elevator on one of the upper floors of the Pillsbury building. She initiated the conversation by saying that she knew I’d never met her, but that she’d been after her vice-president to fund my services for her for nearly three years. He’d finally said yes, and she wanted to start immediately.

She began with general statements about her role and expertise. Then she went immediately to what she wanted to know about herself and her expertise and how her colleagues perceived her. She understood that I had an extensive interview process that could provide unlimited, often unusual colleague information about herself that could guide her development and identify any strategic weaknesses. This diagnostic material, far more than the extensive battery of tests and measures, makes it possible for the client, with my support, to leverage their strengths and shore up their strategic weaknesses—often with new competencies.

How to Get Buy-In for Your Ideas

Many people do not seem to recognize that getting buy-in for their ideas is not only key to organizational success--but also to personal and career success. This is an issue that does not seem to go away or get old. Furthermore, the inter-disciplinary set-up of businesses today just makes the competency both more difficult and more valuable.

Surprisingly, there is a definite process for how actionable recommendations evolve and gain acceptance. When I say “process” I’m revealing that much of communication is built upon protocols. To a degree, communication process can be compared to software development process—to coding.

Surprisingly, there is a definite process for how actionable recommendations evolve and gain acceptance. When I say “process” I’m revealing that much of communication is built upon protocols. To a degree, communication process can be compared to software development process—to coding.

What Do the Important People at Your Firm Really Want from You?

A recent study from McKinsey focused on a slightly different, but related question: "what do shoppers (“important people”) really want from personalized marketing?" I chuckled, reading it, because it reminded me as an executive development specialist of what my clients (my “important people”) really wanted from me. The McKinsey stuff provides immensely transferable ideas.

Nearly all their suggestions apply by analogy to those of us who are taking care of our own career. Those who want the support of significant people, including bosses, or others inside or outside of their firm.

A Call for Community: UCBerkeley

In an intriguing and very human response, two Berkeley profs--an Israeli and a Palestinian--got together to write a call for community. Though brief, I want publish the note from the Chancellor, Carol Christ and the two faculty.

October 12, 2023
Chancellor Carol Christ sent the following message to the Berkeley campus community Thursday afternoon.

We are increasingly concerned by the growing prevalence of online threats, doxxing and harassment connected to the conflict between Israel and Hamas. We decry any calls for violence in any form or support for terrorism as we continue to mourn the loss of innocent life. We understand this rhetoric is creating deep fear and concern among many members of our campus community. With that in mind, we want to share an extraordinary message, written by two of our faculty, one who is Palestinian and one who is Israeli:

To our students,

We are two professors on this campus who disagree, vehemently. But we have always treated one another with respect and dignity. We love this campus with its diverse communities and all of our students and are heartbroken to hear of incidents of near violence between students in recent days. We will not...

How to Live to Become a Healthy Ninety-Year Old

I just turned a very healthy 89 years old. What’s intriguing about it are all the questions I get. At least eight or ten times over the past four months, people have asked about my  age. After being asked that often, I’m a bit “ho hum” about it. What’s the big deal? Another day. Another year.

On a couple of  occasions, I set up my audience to ask my age in order to make a point. But the rest of the questions were out of the blue. On my trip to Italy early this year, observing my active stance, a number of young people asked my age. One tourist, an athletic trainer from Ireland, had my picture taken with him standing beside me to show to his father, a seventy-year-old who’s “not taking care of himself."

But surprisingly, as soon as I respond to the request about my age, no matter the conversation, it turns immediately to one question: “How did you do that?”

What Can the Use of Statistics Do For You?

For many the question about statistics may be whether there is any real reason to fully understand how to use statistics. After all, you may have only so much time in the day. But the answer to the question is a strong, absolute yes. Using statistics strategically can be an unusually powerful game plan in many personal and work situations.

But let’s begin with some very basic statistic examples, the kind Harper’s magazine publishes on a single page in every issue. To a significant degree they are more fun than relevant. Here are a few from the recent issue:

-Amount spent on the average U.S. date: $73

-Percentage by which Democrats are more likely to trust the Wall Street Journal than Republicans: 36

-Percentage increase last year in the amount of credit card debt held by Gen Z adults: 40

-Percentage of U.S. adults 50 or older who play video games at least once a month: 45
-Portion of U.S. adults who consider Michelangelo’s David to be pornographic: 1/5

-Percentage of Americans who currently own an electric vehicle: 4

-Percentage of Americans who say they’d never buy an electric vehicle: 41

-Minimum annual number of fortune cookies produced worldwide: 3,000,000,000

Well, so much for that highly relevant information!

These are the simplest kind of statistics. What really brought this post into existence was a recent episode with a colleague who was obviously distressed over what I considered an ordinary, flawed statistic. It became clear at that very moment that most people have little understanding of how evidence in the form of statistics works—what it does rhetorically. That’s especially true since very few have ever engaged in high school or college, or had college course in statistics.

So I thought, based on my own expertise, it just might be helpful for some of my readers to understand just how and why statistics often serve as powerful proof. And hopefully then, my readers will be able to make better decisions around statistics. . .

and most importantly, be able to use statistics for their own personal and career advantage.

The Zig-Zags of Creativity and Innovation

Given the choice between the myth of the natural genius and the sobering reality of hard work, popular culture usually opts for the myth.  ---BD Burrell

When you’re getting advice about creativity or reading one of the many books about the subject, you need to be careful—very careful—because many, if not most, perpetuate our highly Western, misleading and individualist cultural ways. That typically means that we’re going to have to go digging into our own mindset and belief system to deconstruct and reframe these wrongheaded beliefs if we want to really understand creativity and innovation.

In his marvelous book, Explaining Creativity, Keith Sawyer psychologist and jazz pianist, describes four key errors and summarizes their problems—all very useful for today’s organizational emphasis on innovation. His insights will liberate you from demanding, painful, unrealistic expectations. Admittedly, however, the truth will give you heartburn as well as a lot of often painful, hard work.

**Creativity is fun.  When you get into the state of flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) and peak experience, creativity is extremely positive and self-actualizing. But it takes a lot of years and training to achieve flow.

So as Sawyer indicates, the “fun” is extremely, uncomfortable hard work. What a few would consider the “flow” of creativity is more deathly boring or extremely stressful. Once more: creativity and innovation are just plain hard work.

As a preaching pastor and seminary faculty member (22 years) and also as an evergreen blog writer (10+ years), the demands of creativity have always been part of my professional life. Creative writing is a mix of stress and self-actualizing. For the last three months, I’ve been working on a major writing project—a single chapter on the creative use of the humanities. It requires a lot of research, reading, writing and rewriting. And a lotta smarts on positioning and rhetoric. Sometimes it moves very fast, and other times it’s very difficult to get the writing moving.  It’s a strange mix of personal delight and satisfaction along with a lot of stop/start, stop/start pain.

“Sure you’re smart, but. . .”

A fascinating interview of Duke Energy's Lynn Good: “Effectiveness comes from those qualitative things that give you the ability to network, communicate and lead people toward an outcome they can’t see.”

Lynn Good
I regularly read interviews of senior officers and CEOs in newspapers and magazines. As often as not, my responses follow a number of critical patterns. The most typical response to the interview is so what else is new? Not that insights necessarily need to be new to be valid or significant. But just as often I respond with thoughts like, that’s really off focus, that wouldn’t make much sense in most companies, that’s not a transferable principle, you really don’t get it, why did you go there, or. . . well, you get the point.

But I found myself nodding in high agreement, even delight, with the comments of Lynn Good, the CEO of Duke Energy. It started out with the focused, analytical thoroughness of her answers to questions. The naturalness of her business identity as CEO, the straightforwardness with which she responded to the interview and her insistence upon the nuances and complications of business leadership are unusual in today’s business world.

Family of origin
Lynn Good obviously comes from superb parenting with a father as a marine turned high school principal and a mother who also taught school, both with a solid work ethic. You recognize her intense, almost matter-of-fact sense of accountability in the answer to questions about what she learned from her parents: They demonstrated accountability to me through actions. When I was growing up, we had a widow living next door to us. So the habit was that if we went to the grocery store, we called her first. If we cut our yard, we cut her yard, no questions asked.

Leadership
Yet unlike many of these interviews, this is not a “look at me.” It is an inquiry into the nature of leadership, enhanced by intimacy and a rich knowledge of the task. Intriguingly, the vocabulary reaches a level of emphasis that is rare: There is a comfort level with people you’ve known for a long time—when you’ve been in the foxhole with them. But when you bring an organization together (she led the merger of Progress and Duke Energy), you need to be agnostic about background, and to interview on capabilities and track record.

Good’s support of her work force is not a hollow, thoughtless allegiance. Rather, she demonstrates the ability to express solidarity and criticism simultaneously. With people at this level in their career, it’s no longer about whether you are the smartest subject-matter expert in the room. It’s whether you can be effective in leading a diverse team. Can you adapt? As you think about developing people through their careers, you’re looking for that transition from being the smartest person in the room — and caring so much about that — to being the most effective. It’s about how to develop a team. It’s about how to solve something where the solution isn’t obvious.

Career focus
Predicting career success, like predicting organizational success, can be delusional. . .

Eight Keys to Credible Political Candidates

These ideas have hit the shitter when it comes to a lot of voters. Still, it’s important to reinforce them, even in situations like today where a lot of voters belong to the category of the stupid. That’s a tough statement to make, but a recent Atlantic article by the ever insightful, always intelligent Jonathan Haidt, makes the point that a lot of voters fit the category. He begins with a rough translation of the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, showing how it fits the context for the last 10 years or so.

“In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said: ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’”

As Haidt points out, Babel is the best metaphor for confused, fractured America in the 2010s, and for the broken nation we now inhabit. “Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”

Growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s, there were plenty of Republicans who were willing and capable of governing. And the East Coast WASPs (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants—a tautology if there ever was one—all Anglo-Saxons are all white) were a lot more interested in governmental leadership than building their financial edifice. Those days are dead and gone.

Given the Babel metaphor, it’s time to revisit voting and political credibility.

So, what makes for a truly credible political candidate? Back in August 2012 I shared David Banks Star Tribune article where he begins with some smart definitions of what makes for credibility.  And credibility, in Banks' mind, doesn't mean ideologically correct.  So, with sincere hope that this might be of value to voters, I'll list eight of Banks' keys, make a few comments about them, broadening his emphasis to all legislators

“Setting” Boundaries Versus “Negotiating” Boundaries

Is there a substantial difference? Or are they just two words for the same thing? And does it really matter? Prior to the 1950s, they would have been just two words for the same thing. That is, if anyone ever used the term “negotiating” boundaries. The practice of “negotiating” boundaries comes primarily out of the 1980s with the flattening of business hierarchies and the strong orientation to women’s rights. With the exception of sales negotiation, it was rare to talk about negotiating relationships until the mid-1980s. And since then there has been tons of research and some training solely in the practice of negotiating interpersonal boundaries. In simple terms, setting boundaries is one individual determining boundaries for others. Negotiating boundaries is two or more creating a workable agreement on the boundaries between them.

So, there’s a significant difference between setting and negotiating boundaries. Major business leaders as well as many community leaders recognize these differences even without distinguishing between the two terms. But, ask the right questions and they can clarify immediately. I’ve learned, sadly, that these same professionals are typically incapable of using the negotiation competence in their family. Shifting competencies from one context to another without training is highly problematic—even for top business school grads. Similarly, lower level bureaucrats, patriarchal families, pastors, the Roman and Evangelical churches, small and medium-sized privately held owner-firms lack insight to the distinctions and sometimes have a lot of resistance on their hands as a result of their ignorance.

Creating still more difficulty, my psychologist colleagues have no rhetorical format for negotiation. Common formats provide the means for improving, changing or even rejecting former ways of communicating. Without a common format, they’re always attempting to reinvent the wheel, a strategy which readily results in failure or limited success. They talk a good talk about “setting boundaries,” but lack awareness of the extensive implications of differing boundaries. This is surprising, because the counseling profession knows that ignoring or flagrantly setting boundaries is one of the major causes of family breakdown. And there are plenty of other people and organizations in the dark and looking at abject failure because of their ignorance and unwillingness to operate on the basis of negotiating boundaries.

The role of power
Although I’ve never heard anyone make the distinction between setting and negotiating, it’s time to start using the rhetoric much more carefully. Why? Because, the distinctions are primarily about power: who’s got it and what are the most effective ways to use it.

In business organizations power is traditionally viewed from three perspectives: vested, expert and network. Simply put, vested power is the legitimate power given to an individual to run teams, projects or disciplines within an organization. Expert is the power conferred on an individual who has the necessary knowledge others require for success. And network power is that of a person who knows a terrific amount of people who are capable of providing the necessary support and insight which individuals or groups require to succeed. Obviously simplistic, but occasionally useful clarity.

However, as a result of the unique work of the French academic, Michel Foucault, we understand that power is a lot more complex than the above little model. Foucault emphasizes that where there is power, there is also resistance. So, it’s all the more important to understand that successful power has much more to do, for example, with how a person or an organization chooses to organize ideas, make comparisons, and locate new ideas, often metaphorically, within highly respected old ideas. To an obvious degree, knowing what to say, how to say it, and what not to say in a given culture can be powerful negotiation strategies. That kind of expertise is usually necessary for successful boundary negotiation, which at its core is a matter of interaction around “I’ll do this if you’ll do that.” Simple relationships can sometimes be negotiated in three minutes, while major organizations or nations may take ten to twenty years to negotiate their differences in order to achieve mutual goals...