Dan Erwin

The Secrets to Success Are Typically Ethnic

You read that title correctly. Success is often ethnic. You know the term. "Ethnic"--of or belonging to a population group made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent. And their strategy for success is very clear. It's all tied up with their model of questioning.

Now, I’ve always been fascinated by how words work--and what they can do to us. I’ve been especially intrigued over the past thirty years by questions—yeah, I’m a question nut! I actually have an entire shelf in my library on the discipline of questioning. My hobby is easily explained. Effective questions are a key to learning and growing. Which means that questions are how we make change. And inevitably, clients hire to me to help them make change.

So, I was glued to a column by the NYT’s Bret Stephens on a new book, The Secrets of Jewish Genius, which I took to be about creativity and problem solving. (FYI: I’m English and Scot--not Jewish.) I’ve long since learned that as soon as I begin to get into disciplines like economics, science, politics, psychology, psychiatry, human resources, fiction, music, etc. and etc., I start running into Jewish writers. Here’s just a brief list: Sigmund Freud, Benjamin Disraeli, Albert Einstein, Franz Kafka, Irving Kristol, Rudolf Serkin, Daniel Kahneman, Jeff Pfeffer, Abraham Maslow, Karl Marx, and Milton Friedman.

So, I was very curious about the answer to Stephens’ thesis question: “How is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?”

Stephens deals with the “Jews are Smart” explanation, commenting that it obscures more than it illuminates. Instead, he chooses to deal with the question of why intelligence is matched by “bracing originality and high-minded purpose.”

The answer to his question is surprising: “Jewish genius operates differently (from other thinkers). It is prone to question the premise and rethink the concept: to ask why (or why not?) as often as how. . . Where Jews’ advantage more often lies is in thinking different.”

There are the two very, shockingly simple, important words that can add significantly to your creativity: why not?

In previous vocations, I made a fetish out of “what” and “how.” What do you need to do and how do you do it? What do I need to do for my clients (my congregation) and how do I pull it off with them (my congregation, students or clients)? It took me quite a few years to recognize that “why” also needs to be part of my problem solving. Why do I think this is important? Why is this necessary? Although I was very familiar with various questioning processes, including Bloom’s extensive Taxonomy, I intended to build my own taxonomy of questions that could be learned quickly by clients. Indeed, my agenda was the need for a simple taxonomy that could be easily taught and used when focused on behaviors. I learned that even smart MBAs from top schools, with background in decision science, had no obvious taxonomy for dealing with human behaviors. My simple taxonomy was a starting place that could be added to as experience required.

Why Am I Open About My Mother’s Dysfunction?

Or, to put it crassly, why share family shit?

On numerous occasions, I have noted that I grew up in a highly dysfunctional family. Some people would not want to share such information, others might not care. Recently, I have gotten more up-front, commenting that my mother exhibited a highly narcissistic dysfunction driven throughout her life by an abandoned child syndrome. The consequence was that she was mean as hell, leaving me on pins and needles from her interactions.

The highly religious people with whom I grew up would have been aghast at hearing me talk or write this openly. Plenty of therapists would suggest that I should have been very cautious about such personal information. And some other folk might suggest that such personal information should not be a part of ordinary conversation.

But during the years of my semi-retirement, I’ve confirmed my openness. From the time of my college days, I did not intend to be defined by a “mother-conflict.” And so, I want to take this opportunity to lay out the values of this openness. In sum, what I decided years ago is that I had a lot more important things to do than take care of a mother who had all the necessary resources for taking care of herself. And this blog will point out three of the factors supporting my decision.

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.

3 Rules for Not Talking About What You Don’t Want to Talk About

I’ve noticed recently that my main coffee group of about a dozen men and women never talk about politics. Not that there would be an argument. I’m well aware that almost all of us are some kind of Democrat. It goes with the St Paul (Minnesota) character. Of course, it might be that all of us are really tired of politics and hope that once the election is over, whoever wins, we can talk about something other than an election.

Recently I asked one of my colleagues why he didn’t talk about politics. He responded that he was really, really tired of it all and had nothing to learn—so he’d wait for the election.

Not talking about what you don’t want to talk about goes on in business all the time. The senior team member suggests that the latest digital strategy is “deeply flawed.” No one questioned the statement. In typical power-related situations, it’s rare for someone to analyze a statement from the standpoint of definitions. The assumption, instead, must be that the listener understands, or the "rules" don't permit that. Yet, the most obvious reason for misunderstanding is failure to go for a definition.

Empathy: Supportive and Manipulative

The scientists of behavior have a lot to say about empathy and emotional intelligence. But review all that’s written by them about the subjects, they never get to the most fundamental how-to, the basic development processes of empathy and emotional intelligence. I couldn’t take what has surfaced over the years and actually lay out the developmental pragmatics. Until, that is, just the last month.

I’m not beating up on myself. Still, it’s personally frustrating that with all my critical work in the field, and my own expertise with emotional intelligence and the sub-category of empathy, I was completely blind to my own processes. The pragmatics were so habituated and so deeply buried in my past, that someone else had to tell me what the hell I was doing. My experience is a classic case of what’s known in chaos theory as the “butterfly effect,” sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Scientists have discovered that very small differences at the start of a complex process with numerous iterations create significant and unpredictable results. That’s how as a teenager I found the beginnings of empathy uniquely—and unconsciously--as a manipulative tool of self-protection. Affirming my mother, after her seemingly senseless weekly bouts of tears and anger with my father, with her version of the relationship twisting and turning over the years. My unconscious empathic learnings partially protected me so that she wouldn’t turn her uncontrollable rage at me. I decided years later, after her death and long-since distancing myself from her, that she was all about profound narcissistic insecurity, compounded by abandoned child syndrome.

My initial conscious understandings of empathy began early in grad school with work in persuasion and influence, a discipline overlapping empathy to a high degree. There, I learned to define what would become empathy in straight forward fashion: the ability to become aware of, sensitive to the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another. It’s often broken out into three segments: understanding the situation of the other, feeling the same emotion of the other person, and then taking action in support—or to the disadvantage--of the other person. Compassion is a highly useful aspect of empathy, but not the only aspect. Empathy can also be used for self-protection and plenty of other objectives. There is a dark side to empathy, too. I’m quite certain that if you were to add up all my uses of empathy, the good far outweighs the bad. But on numerous occasions in business, I’ve used empathy as both a sales tool as well as for competitive advantage. No client has ever accused me of naivete.

My grad work during the late ‘seventies led me to understand what eventually became empathy as the ability to co-create a state of identification or alignment with another. In those studies, the focus is not just on the other person or just the message or just the sender. The definition implies that what’s inside the receiver is just as important as the source’s intent or the content of the message. So, in one sense all persuasion is self-persuasion. We are not persuaded unless we participate in the process of identification with the other. Empathy works exactly the same way. It just usually focuses on compassion.

But, identification with the other can be used for their good or solely for the empathic persuader’s good. Hannah Arendt, the famous (or infamous) U Chicago philosopher who wrote about the Nazi Eichmann and the Jews, argues cogently that compassion should not be brought into politics. My own business behaviors have been reflective of Arendt’s conclusion on numerous occasions. I needed her conclusion to manage my internal conflicts around manipulation. But that’s a subject for another blog.

Using empathy in business

I’ve used emotional intelligence and empathy for decades, but never really understood why the model sometimes worked so well for me. Of course, I was aware that some of us were rather successful in persuasion, while many others stumbled around. And if they couldn’t manage the process successfully, they usually left a business requiring persuasion. But I never thought to do a complete compare and contrast analysis between successful and unsuccessful empathy/persuaders.

Why Strategic Competency Is Especially Difficult to Build

Thirty years ago, I had one of those seminal experiences that are even more important and relevant today. I had been coaching a director-level research manager at a world renown company that has since been integrated into an even larger, international firm. I was essentially supporting the development of highly complex thinking skills.

My focus, at the request of the EVP of Research, was to assist his subordinate in development of strategic organizational thinking skills. These were not merely planning skills, but complex strategic thinking that might result in drastic changes for research, manufacturing and marketing.

Nine months later, when the coaching was nearly finished, the EVP called me into his office, expressing his deep satisfaction with my work. Then he made an unusual statement: “If you can develop these cognitive skills in others, I can keep you busy the rest of your life.”

I laughed and said no, that wasn’t possible. He was very surprised and wanted an explanation why not. I commented that a huge majority of business people were linear thinkers and couldn’t get out of that box to develop strategy, a non-linear competency.

The widespread lack of strategic organizational competency is still present today. For example, major research at Northwestern University finds that most business people are very poor at analogical thinking, an absolute necessity for macro strategy work. They simply lack the kind of educational background to make that possible. Though a lot of technology managers say they can do strategy, their expertise rarely stands up to serious scrutiny.

Second Thoughts on the Trump-Harris “Debate”

I spent part of Tuesday evening last week sporadically watching the interaction, probably seeing 2/3 of the “debate.” I was quite certain that my “helper” who comes the next morning would ask what I thought about it. And probably some of my coffee cronies, too.

As expected, my “guy” wanted to know “what” I thought about it. I responded that I didn’t know yet. But that I was disappointed by the quality of analysis that followed their session. I wondered what had happen to all the “smarts” that was normally floating around presidential debates—and whether positions in political analysis were no longer perceived as career opportunities. Putting off my thoughts about the debate.

But about 10am Wednesday morning it all came together.
Shortly after noon, Wednesday, I noticed that two writers in The Atlantic pulled it all together the same way, but without the explanation I’m offering here. The other writers, leads from our outstanding newspapers, although close, didn’t get there.

Sorry Counselor. Negotiating Boundaries Is What’s Needed.

Not setting boundaries.

What's the difference? Is it substantial? 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 have 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.

How to Recognize Someone Is Using You

It was a seemingly innocent question. But actually, he was just using me.

On Easter Sunday, after spending a rare day alone at home, I decided to grab a small bite and a glass of wine at a local pub. Since I would be alone, I took along a book that I intended to finish. A terrific little volume by Mark Edmundson: “The Age of Guilt.”

I sat at the bar, slowly drinking my cab and enjoying a crabcake, all the while reading and marking up this fascinating book. One of the most intriguing and enlightening works I’d read in years.

My reading habits began in elementary school, developed while I was in seminary, blossomed while I was in the pastorate and a seminary faculty member—and exploded in my consulting business. Although I am a lot more than this, I am my books.

I take a lot of time marking my books and papers, and putting notes in the front of the books and also outlining my research papers notes on an added single page, all making important substance available immediately. I’d be much less a person without my books and my studies. No question but that my effectiveness in church ministry, seminary—and especially in business—was tied to a substantially developing knowledge base and—I don’t want to ignore this—an extensive experience in the performing arts that continually shaped and reshaped my decision making.             

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...

"It's Just African. . .

It’s a stereotype, a racial stereotype. But is it negative, positive or neutral? One thing is certain: identifying African behavior as stereotypical is dangerous stuff.

I've learned from experience to issue caveats about most any racial or ethnic stereotype, admit to stereotyping and beg forgiveness--especially before using an ethnic or racial stereotype. Even then, you're liable to have to push through assumptions, in spite of the fact that the use of stereotype can be highly valuable for explaining behavior.

However, one of my young friends recently expressed his frustration at Nigerian and Somali friends who call to say they're in town and want to go out for a drink the same night. After experiencing this behavior on numerous occasions, he asked why they don't ever give him advance notice so that he won't have to reschedule his time to meet with them. They both responded, "It’s just African." In our diverse culture that kind of information can be highly useful.