Dan Erwin

“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. . .

What Can You Do If Your Boss or Colleague is a Real Asshole?

 
How do you deal with people who treat you like dirt? That’s a question you can read in social media, hear in the coffee shop or around the water cooler and just about any place two or more people gather. Bob Sutton’s first book, The No Asshole Rule, began to clarify this issue. But since its publication in 2007, it has brought him more than 8,000 emails and hundreds of interactions asking for more help. Thankfully, in this latest book, he answers all these questions in spades.

Upfront, let me bias you. This book is a masterpiece that nearly everyone will want to devour, share and keep as a reference. If you don’t need it today, you will eventually be racking your brain for insights that Sutton already has available. So why reinvent the wheel?

The book is unique among business books. It’s not merely for senior managers and executives—like too many business books--it will be useful for professionals at all levels. Furthermore, it’s immensely concrete and readable. And Bob’s delightful wit rolls on as if on casters. If you’ve read his blogs and previous books, you know he’s Yoda-like and you’re going to learn a lot of very practical human stuff and have fun doing it. In addition to the constant flow of how-to and anecdotes which illuminate his ideas, you’re going to get a load of research and relevant studies that you can readily understand and put to use. . .

What Are You Reading? Here Are Five for the Intellectually Curious

George Packer at the New Yorker on Black Friday and the Race to the Bottom. Why did Black Friday, beginning on Thanksgiving Thursday this year, and continuing into Shopaholic Saturday and Sunday poop out so badly? And why, with the usual brawls over towels and TVs reported on YouTube, did retailers like Walmart and Target take a total hit of more than $1.7 billion less than last year? Packer answers the question and wonders why, with too many Americans now working low-paying jobs stocking inventory and ringing up merchandise, those same stores don't understand that their workers are too poor to buy the products in the big-box stores. You'd think those same firms would be leading the protests for higher wages. Why, when moderate Southern businessmen spoke up for higher wages during the civil rights era, do you not hear that rhetoric today? It may be that America is still waiting for the first retail C.E.O. to see what’s in front of his nose.

Morten Hansen at HBR.org on How John F. Kennedy Changed Decision Making for Us All.  Many of us know that the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was a fiasco, probably the worst decision he ever made in . . .

Why Are the Most Successful Entrepreneurs Older Than Age 40?

Debunking the entrepreneurial myth. 

So why did Mark Zuckerberg hire Sheryl Sandberg? 

With all the hype about successful 20-somethings, you’d think that they had entrepreneurialism all sewed up. Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, Paul Allen and Bill Gates with Microsoft, as well as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with Apple are often touted as typical entrepreneurs. And that once you break 30, it’s all over for you. Sorry, but that’s not at all the case—and those innovators are not the typical.

On Assholes, Jerks, Bullshitters and the Righteous

One of my long term colleagues, a former seminary prof, recently got such a kick out of this blog, written last year, that I thought I'd publish it again. It doesn't actually fit a 4th of July audience. But historically, we Americans have had and still do have our share of these folk. You may find these expletives especially useful for analyzing some politicans, political operatives and commentators in this 2012 political season. 

I orginally wrote this as a defining response to the use and misuse of expletives. Rhetorician that I am, I decided that verbal accuracy in expletives could be helpful. Since then, I've decided on the title for the fourth category of frustrating people: the righteous.

Although some may think that Bob Sutton of Stanford fame started this discussion with his recent book, The No Asshole Rule, Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosophy prof, beat him to the punch in 2005. Frankfurt’s tome, though scholarly, is little more than a brief essay entitled, On Bullshit. Still, his work provides a useful analysis of the subject.

Let’s frame the issue this way. I’m approaching these personalities as a serious attempt to build your vocabulary and your street smarts. In fact, the haphazard or spontaneous labeling of someone as an asshole or bullshitter provides little in the way of realistic cues for effectively managing such a person. And as most will admit, it’s very important to learn how to manage these difficult people.

Yeah! What I’m suggesting is that if you’re pissed enough with somebody’s behaviors to label that person with a hostile pejorative, do it accurately.

What’s actually driving my blog, though, is a comment that one reader made on a previous blog , Five questions for testing relationship behaviors. She began with a compliment and ended with a consciousness-raising insight:

It's possible that you've misconstrued the situation based on your own experience and assumptions but from what I read here, you are pretty smart and well educated and there are a lot of jerks out there. Sometimes you have to go with your hunch (that the guy is a jerk) unless he starts to show otherwise.

So in the interest of workplace relationships and rhetorical accuracy, I intend to deal with four frustrating personalities, including assholes and bullshitters. In a later blog I’ll make some suggestions for dealing with them in the workplace.

Sutton defines assholes as employees who are insensitive to their colleagues: corporate bullies, bosses who just don’t get it. He writes that they are flat out rude, selfish, uncivil, mean-spirited, and don’t really seem to care about whom they step on. He goes on to distinguish the asshole as a person whose language and relationships leave people feeling threatened and demeaned. I believe that assholes are planful and intentional which makes them very painful.

Frankfurt makes it clear that bullshitters are in a different category. He compares bullshit to humbug. Bullshit, he writes, is short of lying and those who perpetrate it misrepresent themselves in a certain way. The bullshitter is always trying to get away with something, and has no interest in the truth of what he or she says. These folks, when trading their wares, seem to be intense, even passionate when telling stuff that they want you to think is significant. But it’s not “for real.” Like assholes, their behaviors, too, are quite intentional.

I’ve never seen an analysis of jerks. However, jerks exist in a still different category. Contrary to Sutton, I think it’s a miscalculation to confuse assholes with jerks. In my mind, assholes have a pretty strong sense of what they’re doing and they delight in it. Jerk behavior, like muscle spasms, is involuntary and not usually intentional. Jerks, in contrast to assholes or bullshitters, are socially dumb and dumbly unaware. They merely blunder on in their ways and can’t read the body language that they get from other people.

Though many think of these characters as male, that’s merely because in the corporate world male managers outnumber managers of the other sex.  I have it on good authority that there are plenty of females who fit these categories, especially in retailing and the restaurant industries.

I don’t have a colorful name for the fourth category, but I can spot them from a mile away or within seconds of a conversation. I’m troubled because they are showing up more and more in the workplace, made visible because of the growth of religious fundamentalism. Since writing this last year,I've now decided to call them "the righteous." Indeed, many of them are actually among the “professionally religious.”

When I was in the parish ministry, which, by the way, was loads of fun and a glorious experience, I stayed away from these people as much as humanly possible. I often held a quiet little party when they left the church. They were religious in the worst sense of the word. Always sincere, and, oh god, were they humble (at least they wanted everyone to think that of them), often inept, except that they inevitably presented themselves as paragons of virtue, goodness and religion. Although there are more and more men fitting this category, women seem to have a lock on the personality structure.

A few years ago, I was bitching to another seminary faculty member about a certain church organist, complaining about her uninspiring performance and lack of organ color (I’m a nut about great organs and great organists). He suggested that she might not last. I commented, to his laughter, that she was “very sincere, extremely religious and terribly humble, all of which meant she’d keep the church organist position forever.” In my mind, that personality is a form of well-practiced religious bullshit that many parishioners think goes with the territory and which some seem to believe to be appropriate. It is not involuntary, like the jerk, but quite intentional.

What An Overseas Experience Can Do For You

Few work experiences offer more immediate, personal insight than an overseas internship or international job.

Once a month, for more than a year, my first international job meant a quick flight from Minneapolis to Sao Paulo to work with a client at 3Ms main Brazil plant. Although my senior client was an Italian-American New Yorker, my first experience in the cross-cultural, organizational politics of Brazil was never-to-be forgotten. Having grown up in the Eastern and Southern European diversity of Detroit in the 1940s and ‘50s, we made certain our three daughters got out of Minnesota homogeneity and took to Europe for part of their college experience. My youngest worked in Greece for nearly a year after graduating. They, too, found those experiences to be of great, pragmatic benefit.

Phyllis Korkki, in Sunday’s Times, recommends overseas internships for those able to able to float the airfare and expenses, in spite of fact that they are often “all work and no pay.” Korkki emphasizes the importance of finding host companies that will provide a great deal of value to the student. They’ll gain the opportunity to improve language skills and what may be more important, understanding a different culture. Her caution makes a lot of sense: “People have internships on the brain,” but it’s important to choose the right time and place for them. 

Korkki doesn’t deal with my own reasoning for encouraging international experience for every student who can possibly dig up the change for six months or a year. Yeah, I’m well aware that parents are liable to have to continue paying the same American college or university for their kids’ international experience. But if you’re a part of the class that’s willing and able to dig up the shekels for it, it’s an experience that will bring a lot of value to the younger generation whether or not they are planning for an international job.

Similar values and rewards also come from managerial tenures in international settings. Though most corporations recognize international experience as a plus, the more backward organizations may penalize the employee, in one way or another, for outside the US (OUS) experience. As a result managers may need to weigh the career pluses and minuses at his current organization. But the experience may be richly rewarded in another organization. Whether or not the organization rewards you for your experience, the values you can receive from that experience are significant.

Much of the international learning applies directly to the US organizational experience.
Cultural boundaries define us because they stable systems of behaviors and cognition. When a person is placed in another stable system, he or she is forced to learn behavioral and thinking ways that differ markedly from their original system. This gives them inherently different ways of perceiving their own American organization. They are far better at conceptualizing present and potential differences.

People of one culture immersed in another gain a highly useful understanding of different “realities.” Our own culture teaches us what to see and what to ignore. Experience in another culture teaches us that another culture sees and ignores different things. Opportunities in Greece, for example, are closely tied to family relationships. An outsider may be shocked by the direct question of “how much do you make?” Or, “how much did that cost?” If the foreigner is reluctant to answer that question, he may be foregoing unwittingly the proffered acceptance as a friend. Effective product and process designers can use the experience of different realities to focus on design questions from many different angles, often providing significant innovations to their American company.

Adjusting to different beliefs about the workplace.
International experience can make it far more easy for a person to adjust and manage today’s endless reorganizations and restructuring. The classic intercultural experience deals with many of the various workplace questions today’s organizations are focusing upon. How much planning should precede action? How are incentives, rewards and control best managed? How much conformity and initiative are expected? What does an effective work setting look like? And how do diverse ethnicities and religions affect expectations?

Putting important experiences into appropriate perspective.
Managers inevitably draw an infinite number of conclusions from important, conflicted or questionable experiences. What did my boss mean by that? Is he suggesting that I’m going to get laid off? Does he expect me to be at this meeting? Was his anger directed at me? What kind of changes does he expect of me?

But international experience puts that analysis in front of our noses. We’re forced to resolve questions about the meaning of language and gesture. We learn quickly that different cultures organize and process information very different than our American way. Objective facts don’t mean much in many cultures and social values can pose much difficulty. Business practices like making appointments and contacts differ. Negotiating with some cultures can force us to completely rethink how we normally go about the process. Etc., etc.

Emphasizing the role and value of street smarts.
Although a lot of less experienced employees don’t understand the value of street smarts, that ability to deal effectively with all kinds of people and levels of hierarchy, an intercultural experience brings all kinds of issues to the fore. Sometimes the issues are shockingly immediate and embarrassing. It may be a misunderstood gesture, failure to understand how time is used, or even the American penchant for getting to business without taking the time to exercise a different culture’s social protocols and relationship behaviors.

The struggles for business success are now international, not merely local. The reality is that each of us comes from a long line of ancestors who were raised in many different cultures, even though we’ve been Americanized to the hilt. Success in today’s business world will require more and more intercultural moxie. An international experience will be key for many of us.

The Authenticity and Effectiveness of Flattery

To a shocking degree, mentors and the training folk fail to develop the exceptionally important practice of ingratiation, pejoratively known as “brown-nosing,” for their trainees. A surprising number of people believe you should keep your head down, your nose clean and take what life throws at you. Yet the truth of the matter is that the world is sometimes not a very nice or fair place, and you’ll pay for that naiveté.

In a recent blog on managing up, How to "wow' your boss, I noted that ingratiation was one of the key strategies for managing up. Because of a number of emails regarding my post, I’ve decided to enlarge on the subject of ingratiation.

Indeed, studies show the unwillingness to engage in ingratiation, the term researchers use for flattery, sucking-up, brown-nosing and a host of other expletives as a motivational inducement, often results in career and life failure. Acting like everyone gets what he deserves is liable to mean that you’ll miss out on an awful lot: work satisfaction, gaining more favorable evaluations, better leadership opportunities, personal motivation, and even more tips if you’re a hair stylist or waiter. Of course, there are a number of possible reasons for this failure, the most obvious being sheer ignorance and forgetfulness. The traditional adage has a lot of believers: “He gets paid for this. Why should I compliment him?” Even more look down their nose at ingratiation, viewing it as inappropriate and beneath their dignity, questioning its ethical foundation.

Ingratiation, the ultimate art of emotional intelligence, is to become more attractive and favorable to another by deliberate communication strategies. Surprisingly, the psychological findings are that if you fail to use this interpersonal tool, you are not only limiting your own power base and overall career and life success, but also inhibiting the achievements of its recipients. So brown-nosing is not only good for you, it’s also extremely good for its targets.

Why does ingratiation work?
Research, dating back as far as 1963, has found three explanations for the effectiveness of ingratiation. Ingratiation tends to increase liking. As my readers know, the joint powers of liking and competency are the single most important characteristics in the persuasion toolkit. Likable people who are also competent have a lock on the rewards of career and life.

Ingratiation can also create a strong sense of similarity. Studies show that perceived similarity between people, what rhetoricians call mutual identity, is a door-opener for effective communication and persuasion. Most any effective salesperson, walking into a client’s office, searches immediately for similar interests to grease the conversation. Similarities are not only ice-breakers, but also relationship-builders.

Research reveals that positive labeling of a person, otherwise known as stereotyping, can result in significantly positive consequences. We know that negative stereotypes, like thief, sex deviant, card shark, or cheat, affect the self-concept and behavior of a person. But a study at Yale, by Robert Kraut, was designed to test whether ingratiating with (positive) stereotypes or labels can also lead to a change in self-concept. Specifically, Kraut wanted to find out whether labeling a person as charitable and generous had a stronger impact than negative labeling as a “noncontributory.” He found that positive stereotyping caused more powerful results, even, than the negative. So flattery produces changes in the target’s self-concept that, in turn, lead to changes in the target’s behavior. In short, flatter a person regarding a positive behavior, and the person will not only live up to the flattery, but give you more.

Three categories of ingratiation
The original studies of ingratiation by Edward Jones (1963) identified three basic types or categories of flattery. They are reflected by the psychological research on ingratiation. The first and most obvious category is paying compliments. “I have a lot of admiration for your leadership skills. You really get the job done.” A derivative of this category is having a third party deliver the compliment. “Dan thinks your leadership skills are just what this firm needs.”

The second form of flattery is opinion conformity. This involves agreeing with the target’s statement, ideas, and views. A variation of this technique is to initially disagree, then yield, creating the impression that the target has changed your mind. “You know, although at first I rejected your solution to that problem, I’ve decided you’re really correct.”

The third category involves good, old-fashioned bragging, talking about one’s own expertise or experience to influence another’s evaluation of oneself. The first two categories focus the flattery on the target directly, for the purpose of gaining power with that target. In contrast, the third category increases liking and respect by focusing on oneself. One of my best friends, a well-placed clergyman, commented to me last summer that he didn’t mean to be name-dropping. Ha! But while on vacation in London last Spring, he “spent three hours in a private conversation with Prince Charles.” Now that’s how to push the envelope on gaining personal favor by name-dropping. Though most would not view bragging or name-dropping as a form of brown-nosing, it’s clearly a means of gaining favorable acceptance from the other, the very heart of ingratiation.

So you don’t like to use flattery?
Is ingratiation an unethical influence strategy? Only if the ingratiator believes the flattery or positive social labels used are false. If the ingratiator believes in the praise he is offering, there’s no ethical problem in focusing on the positive side of things. Ingratiation is a highly sophisticated form of street smarts. Yeah, I know. Everyone claims to hate brownnosers--unless the brownnosing is directed at them.

But, a lot more than ordinary business skills are necessary to get ahead in today’s highly competitive workplace. Indeed, it’s often necessary to bend the rules of fair play or ignore them completely if you want to succeed. Complain all you want about the lack of justice, but it’s inevitable that you’re going to have to be vigilant and proactive to ensure your own success.

Indeed, contrary to conventional wisdom, hard work and high performance won’t guarantee a promotion or even career success. In his latest book, Power, Jeff Pfeffer warns of the weak link between job performance and career outcomes. Indeed, systematic research reveals that job performance doesn’t guarantee you a promotion. High performance may actually hurt you because your boss wants to keep you in your high-performing role. Furthermore, high performance may not even be that important for keeping your job. In sum, high performance doesn’t do much for your career or for job security. You’re going to have to do something else. And that something else is to make your bosses feel better about themselves by apple-polishing.

So, ingratiation is an important skill in the toolkit for career success. Although it takes time and practice to become astute in its use, ingratiation is a means of persuasion, a motivational inducement that can significantly modify a person’s feelings, moods and emotions. It can be a highly successful tool for jump starting your boss’ drive to support you and your career. It is performance, coupled with the political skill of ingratiation, which will help you rise through the ranks.

Flickr photo: lyk3 On3 tym3

It's Not "An Eye for an Eye," but "Two Eyes for an Eye."

Don’t take “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” too literally.

Most of us are familiar with the deeply held notion of an eye for an eye. In an intriguing study of interpersonal relations, Boas Keysar and his colleagues at the University of Chicago found that reciprocity, what he calls “giving and taking,” is asymmetric. People reciprocate generosity fairly equally the first time around, less so as time goes on. But selfish acts are treated quite differently. If you screw somebody, they’re going to screw you back twice as much—or more.

Overall, conflicts (taking) between people escalate rapidly, while generosity and compassion (giving) sputter out pretty easily.

We like to think that reciprocity is a simple give and take, “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” But the sentiments of that well-worn aphorism don’t square with reality. The research found that relationship (social) exchanges, in contrast to dollar-based exchange of goods and services, simply don’t work on a fair market basis. The study revealed that social exchange is based upon the meaning and interpretation of the social actions rather than on the objective value of those actions. That includes positive versus negative behaviors, compliments versus insults, rewards versus punishments, and helping a colleague versus hurting a colleague.

Keysar said, for example, that if you’re kind and let someone go in front of you, that driver may be considerate in response. But if you cut someone off, guess what? That person “may react very aggressively, and this could escalate to road rage.” The same rules operate in work settings.

Another experiment, using money as the exchange in a game, showed that taking quickly escalated as players became increasingly greedy over repeated exchanges. In a companion money experiment, the study confirmed that the act of taking inevitably has a far bigger impact on people’s responses than the act of sharing.

In sum,

1. Generosity is rewarded, but there is a tendency on the part of the recipient for it to weaken and sputter out.
2. Acts of taking have a far bigger impact on people’s responses than acts of sharing.
3. Taking escalates negative actions quickly--proportionately faster and larger than giving.
4. Relationship exchanges and responses, both positive and negative, are based largely on the personal interpretation of the actions, rather than the objective value of those actions.

Some work implications:

1. Rewarding generosity.

--Overtime work to achieve boss’s goals will be rewarded (however, continual overtime can be taken for granted, and lose its impact).

--Donating resources and time (occasionally) to colleagues will ingratiate you to them, making reciprocal rewards available.

--If you want support for your good deeds, you’ll need to interpret the deed to the relevant persons and self-advocate.

--Significantly effective and “useful” hierarchical and peer relations require a personal reputation of liking and respect.

2. Acts of taking.

--Refusing to support a colleague’s project can result in lack of support for your project, even when the person sees your project positively.

--Critical and negative feedback may do more harm to your relationship than good. Be very cautious, contract to give critical feedback, and match the negative feedback with the positive.

3. Escalating negative acts.

--Never, never burn your bridges, it’ll always cost more and more.

--If you have an image problem and people don’t think well of you, better to demonstrate your positive qualities in a new setting where you don’t have to overcome so much baggage.

--Loss of trust may be difficult, even impossible to repair.

4. Exchanges tied to interpretations.

--Rewards won’t be granted solely on the basis of your deeds and generosity no matter what the actions. Personal interpretive and advocacy strategies are needed to “grease” the relationship.

--Interpret your repayment of generosity to the original giver. He or she may not otherwise understand.

--People trust their first impressions, whether of taking or giving. After the first impression, changes are difficult.

--Make self-advocacy the rule, not the exception.

There you have it: street smarts par excellence! Hope it helps.

Boaz Keysar, Converse, Wang and Epley, (2008) Reciprocity is not give and take. Psychological Science, V.19, N.12.

Photo: Flickr, by Manoj Trikila

How to Exploit Personal Vulnerability

You blush. Confused and discomposed. Embarrassed. You’re found out. You know the rule in business: don’t let anyone know what you don’t know. Keep up a good front. Don’t trap yourself and have to admit ignorance. Never, never open up and admit to personal vulnerability on any business subject. 

For nearly all of us, vulnerability is a very helpless feeling. Our guard is down and we believe we’re open to emotional attack and censure. Why is that? Surprisingly, the answer is that we’ve learned that’s the way we should respond when our ignorance and missteps are found out. We didn’t come by it naturally. You won’t experience embarrassment from a 3 year-old. We think that way, so that’s the way our gut responds. It’s NOT that our gut responds and then we think that way. And since feelings are most prevalent in vulnerable situations, we search for ways to deal with those horrible, unnerving feelings.

 

Quite a few years ago, before I became familiar with Martin Seligman’s orientation to learned helplessness and optimism, I wondered whether there wasn’t a non-psychological way of looking at embarrassment and vulnerability. I was unconvinced that therapy had anything to offer.  At the time, I’d been studying work from the Chicago Center for Decision Research and was especially intrigued by the studies on “framing. I’d had some success applying the process to business problems and wondered whether it could also be applied to personal, behavioral problems. Framing, I suspected, offered a different way of looking at feelings of vulnerability.

Framing

Business people intuitively know something about frames. They refer to them when they talk about “thinking outside the box,” “not being on the same page,” or “it’s all in how you look at it.” Frames simplify and guide our understanding of a complex reality. We experience frames when we meet people who just seem to immediately “click” with us. And we’re also dealing with frames when we try to talk with others who just don’t seem to “get it” no matter how much we try to explain. A frame is a mental window that both focuses and limits what we perceive.  Similar frames make it very easy to talk with clients. Different frames make it nearly impossible. Indeed, buried within every decision is a frame that circumscribes way we think about each. A new frame can move us beyond a debilitating perspective that only frustrates, providing us with more useful ways of thinking and deciding about important matters in both business and personal life.

Frames determine and limit problem resolution

The way we frame an issue determines the solution. Frames work like that. Our attachment to them is both emotional and cognitive. Furthermore, they’re usually out-of-our-awareness until we dig into our thinking and look at them. Good framing is both an art and a science. In both personal life and business, you’ll find that understanding, using and replacing frames will have a distinct advantage. And, as Russo and Schoemaker comment, if you can’t, you may wake up one morning to find yourself framed.

The key issue in my experience of vulnerability was the recognition that if I viewed the experience as solely an emotional experience, the only possible out was psychological. But the research on therapy, I knew, is not very encouraging. Half the time, counseling doesn’t work. So out the window went that approach.  Thus, I wondered whether the insights on framing couldn’t be applied to emotionally-laden experiences such as vulnerability. But how?

What causes the sense of embarrassment and vulnerability?

That brought me to the place where I began to analyze the causes of my feelings of vulnerability, wondering whether it wouldn’t respond to reframing. My undergrad background was in history, a background which caused me to first focus on my thinking about my thinking rather than on the experience of vulnerability, itself.

In attempting to reframe vulnerability—or any issue—I ask a number of questions:

• What are the most important objectives to aim for?
• What are the yardsticks, reference points and boundaries inherent in my old frame? How might someone else approach these measures?
• What biases might my old frame entail?
• How can I bring in other perspectives?
• What do I know about vulnerability and its typical resolution?

I played with the problem of vulnerability and framing for quite a few months, trying to understand how vulnerability affects us and answer those questions. What stuck in my craw was the key rule that business people “never let someone know what you don’t know” My gray matter eventually moved from that point to one specific conclusion: Inevitably, vulnerability is an announcement that there’s something I don’t know—and may need to learn.

And that was the new frame. Vulnerability in business is not about the emotions of fear, embarrassment, humiliation, or even disappointment. It is fundamentally about a lack of knowledge and that’s the problem that needs to be resolved—not my emotions. That insight took me out of trying to resolve my emotions to developing my knowledge of business process, managerial relations and just plain old street smarts. In short, I moved from being controlled by fearful emotions, to controlling the experience and making it a learning opportunity.

I’ve concluded that vulnerability (and embarrassment) is certainly nothing over which I need to get my shorts all tied in a knot. It’s merely an announcement of the need to learn something. Nothing more. So when I start feeling a blush creep up my neck, the question readily comes, sometimes out loud: “What is it that I don’t know?” Or, “Obviously, you guys are enjoying this. What’s so funny, and what am I blundering about?” I have completely and pragmatically reframed the issue as a matter of my business and relational knowledge that needs to grow.

BTW: If you believe I’m being too hard on the emotions, you might pick up Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism. That’s exactly what he recommends.

"Blindspots: The 10 Business Myths You Can't Afford to Believe."

I wish I had written this book. It’s desperately needed, has a built-in audience, and is written by a Gen-Yer for business Gen-Yers on the make for business success. My friend, Alexandra Levit, challenges the big ideas that so many believe, but are so damned wrong. She does it in a gracious, thoughtful, reasonable fashion, with illustrations that are eye-popping, leading-edge research, and a great deal of fun. Her delicious writing just sneaks up on you. Furthermore, she focuses on what will make you successful in today’s world, not yesterday’s. 

I think it was Lindsey Pollak, the well-known career blogger, who’s written that Gen-Yers lack street smarts. Well. . . in this book, Levit goes a long way toward resolving that problem. And before I sign off on this paragraph, I need to emphasize that though she’s written to her youthful audience, her ideas are just as needful and just as relevant to all the generations. And yeah . . . all the professions. I’ll allude to that in a few paragraphs. 

As the title reveals, she deals with those silly ideas that some, perhaps most believe are gospel truth. Let’s look briefly at a few of them without spilling the beans. Hopefully, it’ll entice you to run to Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com before the sun sets. 

Alexandra begins with the historically monstrous, American myth that “overnight success is possible.” She went right for the illustrative jugular by demythologizing Susan Boyle’s first round performance on television and YouTube that pumped the “overnight success” of a singer who supposedly had never sung in public before. Sounds fascinating, says Alexandra. But that wasn’t exactly the way it happened. Susan attended the Edinburgh Acting School and sang at churches and karaoke bars, and trained with a professional voice coach before auditioning for musicals. But Alexandra’s recommendations for achieving success flow right out of the same research of the more academic works of Jeff Pfeffer’s reality stuff on power and Teresa Amabile on small wins. But Levit is immediately practicable, providing some very concrete recommendations for setting goals, coping with setbacks and keeping your goals from getting the best of you. 

In another chapter she completely discredits that nauseating Midwestern and Geek belief that if you work hard at your job and are good at it, it’ll be the key to success. There are a number of reasons for success, but the reality is that there’s a very weak link between job performance and career outcome. Among the sub-topics for that chapter are, Why knowledge isn’t power, The popularity factor, Getting on the executive radar, and Promoting yourself without bragging.  Here Alexandra recommends, among other things, that one way to establish that needed public persona is by becoming the go-to person on a particular subject. Be a perpetual learner and showcase your knowledge by serving as an organization spokesperson and creating a convincing online brand. 

In today’s economy, her debunking of the myth that really essential people don’t get laid off is exceptionally valuable. The driver for job security isn’t necessarily that of taking on the role of essential employee. It’s rather easy to confuse the good work you’re doing with the organization’s bigger picture. Those two don’t inevitably overlap. It’s not just essential businesspeople that get laid off. If you’ve been around medical clinics and law firms, you should know that both essential physicians and lawyers have gotten laid off. And essential teachers? Well, ‘nuff said. You hope that lay-offs just happen to poor performers, but the truth is that even top performer get laid off. Especially useful in this chapter is a long set of clues that your demise is imminent. 

I was curious to find out whether Alexandra would deal with the “passion” myth. Yep. There it was in the place of honor. Last on the list, the most prominent place to put an important chapter. Do what you love and the money will follow is a swell way for a title to get at the real issue. It’s a set-up for both debunking passion and reframing strengths into more useful recommendations, and Alexandra succeeds at both. I had to chuckle at her comment that passion is not a panacea. The cliché, “starving artist,” she writes, came about because the dream of millions to become an artist results in only a lucky few being able to make a living off their job. Their passion got them nowhere. 

While reading Blindspots, I couldn’t help but think of that study at Google that demonstrates the fallacy of deeply held beliefs—and the power of accepting and acting on evidence, even when that evidence clashes with ingrained beliefs. Like most tech companies, Google believed that the most important quality for managers is deep technical expertise. They believed the best bosses left people alone and mainly, when needed, helped people with technical problems. That’s not what the research showed at all. When Google examined what employees valued most in a manager, technical expertise ranked last of eight attributes they examined. What did employees value most in a manager? Google found that the keys were asking good questions, taking time to meet with people, and caring about those employees lives and careers. They’d been hiring on the basis of their beliefs, but their beliefs were dead wrong. And the employees suffered as a result. 

Studies show that we see what we believe.  In other words, believing is seeing and not the opposite. Alexandra Levit’s book challenges many, perhaps most, of our beliefs with great research, enticing illustrations and a great deal of reasonable sense. This is a book that’s chock full of great ideas and practicable recommendations. It’s an ambitious career work containing a striking series of vignettes illuminating how to become a successful businessperson today’s world. It provides the kind of intelligence and street smarts needed for careers in the New Economy. It shrugs off the irrelevant, the obvious and the trite, landing us squarely in reality. Michael Port’s comment is right on: “Hard-hitting, honest, and course correcting . . . What it really takes to be successful in business.”

See my list of "Good Books" on the left margin