Dan Erwin

The Flip Side of Happiness

Too much of a good thing can backfire. And that, research reveals, includes happiness. It’s intriguing to find significant research explaining the downside of emotions. Not least because I’ve always been intrigued with the upside of bad emotions and the downside of good emotions. Anger, for example, has an upside. And, in a never forgotten experience with a client, paranoia—at least for a lawyer—can have an upside too.

American culture is all about the pursuit of happiness. We’ve institutionalized that pursuit in the Declaration of Independence. But we understand the governmental caveats to that pursuit to assume also that we don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.

Still, I’m not a happiness-hater. Normally I have more than my fair share of happiness...

Do Your Conversational Skills Need Upgrading?

More and more research is revealing that conversational skills can put you ahead of the game. Sure you need cognitive ability and emotional insight, but it's the ability to converse well that's tied to career success and even to innovative competence.

For example, one study investigated implicit communication strategies on complex team tasks. The researchers contrasted project team conversation: teams which readily shared goal information without being asked, versus teams that were reactive—teams whose members had to be questioned to gain goal information. In the study which involved 13 teams of four people performing the collaborative tasks, they found that the five teams with the fastest task completion times and lowest idle times exhibited higher rates of conversation and free-flowing sharing. In contrast, the five teams with the slowest completion times and longest idle times were primarily reactive. So people with proactive conversational and deliberative communication skills are far more successful performers.

In another example, Robert Baron and a colleague developed a 30-item social skills inventory to study such conversational skills as social perception, social adaptability and expressiveness.  Research on 159 independent sales contractors and 71 top high-tech executives found some startling revelations.  The higher the social competencies, the greater the financial success of both independent sales contractors and the top high-tech executives.

Who makes the money and who gains the opportunities? ...

"It's Just African!"

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...

Four Reasons Why Managing Data Scientists Is Different. . . Even Unique

Managing smart professionals can be difficult, but managing data science professionals can be even more difficult. Cultural differences--understanding how a culture thinks--are rarely clear to most business people, other than when they surface in difficulties. So understanding these differences early on limits the potential for friction and conflict.

MIT’s Roger Stein lays out a number of issues impacting organizational relations between data scientists and other disciplines.

Dynamic and self-correcting.  As a result, timing and final project outcomes can be difficult to plan. Messy is the appropriate term. In contrast to

You Don't Need an IQ Score to Figure Out How Smart That Guy Is

How can you figure out the smarts of a colleague without having a consulting PhD? I shouldn’t be giving this away, but the basics are actually so simple that anyone willing to keep her eyes glued and ears open to another person can figure out that person’s basic work smarts. Quickly and easily. By testing and watching for three simple behaviors.

But first, does it really matter how smart that person is? You bet your sweet bippy it does. You want to know whether you can trust his advice, whether he’ll have much to add to a new team project, whether he can be counted on to meet his objectives, whether he can accept added responsibility and even whether he’ll make an effective manager.

Before I lay out my secret, remember this. . . 

Poking Holes (Constructively) in the Martin-Zimmerman Hullaballoo

One of the most difficult conversational issues is to keep significant disagreement from curdling into bitter politics. But using the right tools, it can be done in both politics and business. Take, for example, the Martin-Zimmerman case.

By this point in time, most Americans know the facts in the case. A teenager, Trayvon Martin, was pursued and killed. The shooter, George Zimmerman, was acquitted by the six member all female jury, on his claim of self-defense.

By now, also, most Americans have heard opinions on both sides of the continuum. Al Sharpton has claimed that the acquittal of George Zimmerman is an “atrocity” and one of the worst situations that he has seen.

On the other side, Ann Coulter has compared the coverage of the case to the KKK. Affirming the verdict, she also said that Democrats have "never bought into the criminal justice system" and that it was a "cop out" for activists to call for a trial.

Dan Erwin's Three Best Columns from the Past Weekend

Rachel Donaldio at the New York Times on "When Italians Chat, Hands and Fingers do the talking." If you have trouble reading nonverbals, the Italians are great at gestures. I'm not talking obscene gestures, but they can do those too. It's a fine art in Rome. They can talk animatedly on their cellphones or smoking cigarettes, and gesticulate with "enviably elegant coordination." Some gestures are simple, like the side of the hand against the belly signifying hungry, or asking when the next bus will arrive which gives you the familiar shrug of the shoulders which means, "Only God knows." If you live in the Upper Midwest where gestures barely exist other than the extended middle finger which means the same universally, the Italians have news for you. Gestures have a history--and so does lack of gestures. That's actually quite useful info. The times article has a number of pictures for the curious. But if you feel like a novice, a great place to begin is with my blog, Listening to nonverbals. You'll find a number of relevant blogs by using the custom google on my site and searching "nonverbal."

Jeffrey Kluger in Time Magazine on "The Happiness of Pursuit." The opening line is catchy: "If you're an American and you're not having fun, it just might be your own fault." What follows is a cultural, psychological, philosophical, religious, neuroscientific and popular analysis of authentic happiness. Whewww!

I Was Bullied, I Think

 

I’ve sat on the sidelines reading blogs and articles on bullying for several months. There’s been a lot written about the subject, yet, I really didn’t know how to respond. Still, by some definitions, I was bullied as a kid. At the same time I’m unable to identify with what are defined as bullying consequences. I can’t possibly think of myself as a victim or scarred. So I was actually delighted to see that the opinion pages of the Minneapolis Star Tribune did its readers a great service with the posting of two opposing perspectives on March 18.**

The Strange Rejection of Career Competencies

Rejection may be too strong, perhaps rebuff. But it is weird how little, with the exception of the Harvard Business Review and Wharton folk, is blogged about the fundamental competencies of career success. Could it be ignorance? Or just needed insight on how to succeed in business? Or even that business people have got their basic competencies down pat?

To read most human resource blogs, you’d think that the key to personal success is somehow found inside the billion dollar works of the Mark Zuckerbergs, Sheryl Sandbergs, Sergey Brins and Steve Jobs of the world. Although those folk and their ilk represent great media successes, they are, in fact, highly unrepresentative of more than 98% of the successful business population.

. . . . Where is US economic dynamism?

We Are What We Quote

Sunday's NYT opinion article of the above title and written by Geoffrey O'Brien brought a huge guffaw. A couple years ago I wrote an analogous post entitled, You are what you blog. But O'Brien's spin on the issue is exceptionally wise. Why? Because specific statements in aphorism form, especially in business and personal life, certainly about business relations, are nearly literal quotes from others.But research in anthropology and rhetoric finds that our use of these quotes is indicative of our internal life. 

It's quite easy to figure out what's going on with most bloggers, for example, when we pick up on the fact that they seem to be quoting the same people or the same ideas regularly. Business, for example, used to quote Peter Drucker or Jack Welch. But now, along with Jeff Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, business bloggers regularly quote internet marketers, big data and iCloud gurus, Seth Godin and occasionally Malcolm Gladwell. Steve Jobs is worshipped. Tom Peters is passe. Krugman, Brooks, DeLong and Friedman still get plenty of attention, even though David Leonhardt is sometimes more substantial or immediately pragmatic and useful.

What's quoting all about? 
Central quotes have a lot of practical applications. You can use them in after dinner speeches, writing blogs, and they may even serve as a model for a post or book that we're writing,

But as O'Brien writes, at a deeper level a person's embedded quotes are a response to a much deeper and even more profound human compulsion. As noted above, rhetoric and anthropology support that conclusion. In short, we do not select or use quotes willy-nilly. We choose them because they resonate with us.

A quoting parable
But, significantly, understanding how a quote works for a person can be a highly revealing aspect of that person's personality, motivations and values. As a consequence, quotes provide a way to understand, inform and even manage another person more successfully.

To get at what's actually under a single quote, here's a family of origin example that's brought laughter to our family for years, yet 14 years later is terrifically revealing. When my precocious grandson, Evan, was a little past three years of age and at our summer lake place, he sat one noon on the carpeted floor in the great room, looking at the stones they'd picked up that morning. His uncle, a geologist was naming them and explaining their background, and Evan was completely infatuated. His swim trunks were wet through and soaking the carpeting. His mother called down to him, "Evan, take off your wet shorts and toss them up to me." He turned momentarily, looked at her with that hilarious, somewhat disgusted look that only three or four year-olds can muster, and responded, "I've been thinking about that," and went right back to examining his rocks and getting a geology course. The quote had obviously been internalized.

His grandmother and I dissolved in a pool of laughter. I looked at my daughter and asked where that came from. "It's an exact quote from his father," she responded. It told us an awful lot about that little twerp.

Quote analysis
There are a number of ways to look at this quote. Underneath every quote are any number of stories. Stories, of course, create our world, our perspective and ultimately our behaviors. They can be liberating or enslaving. And, they define us. 

This is a classic comic quote. I don't merely refer to the fact that it's funny, ha ha, and we laughed long and hard. Technically, all comedy is a statement about a person's ability to succeed in life through his own wit, strength and wisdom. Harry Truman's, "The buck stops here," is identical in form to my grandson's quote. A more weakened version is the often-used, "I accept full responsibility." 

Our response
In some families, the kid would have been paddled for such a statement. But he was--and is--the way he was because our family encourages independence of thinking and action, taking charge of one's life, finding the things that interest us, learning in every setting. What some view as meddling, irresponsible or presumptious behaviors, we tend to view as leadership. Thus, my grandson remains self-confident, open to newness and learning--behaviors that were obvious in that quote from the three-year-old. 

Organizational quotes
When Harvey Golub was at American Express Financial Planners in Minneapolis, the ether was filled with quotes about and from Harvey. "The King (Harvey) said. . . ,"  or, "Harvey will figure it out." But they were not limiting quotes. Most of them gave wide parameters and lots of freedom to people, resulting in a highly successful organization, the most profitable in American Express' portfolio for a number of years. 

The quotes were inevitably comic or fairy tale. Fairy tale is the sense that someone will come in and rescue the situation. The John Wayne stories of the cavalry coming in to rescue the settlers from the marauding indians is classic fairy tale. Thus, if a problem at Amex was especially difficult, it might be pushed up the ranks to Harvey and his team with a Harvey fairy tale quote.

There's a lot more in quotes than meets the eye. They can be very telling.

Flickr photo: christa.mary