Dan Erwin

The Four Competencies of Leadership

It’s wonderful—perhaps because it’s so rare—to reread something that you started using thirty years ago and discover that it’s still highly relevant. Desktops were just beginning to show up and technology organizations were starting to use organizational networks. Organizations began to flatten and the need for leading started to surface. The talk was all about leading, not managing.

The Pillsbury CIO had a lot of money but little leadership talent on his team. So he tracked me down and asked me to work with a number of his new managers. I had done some coaching in R&D--as an experiment--and on a fluke, he brought me in.

I’d first encountered leadership material in grad school in the 1960s. I understood the distinction between managing and leading and could observe the differences. I was also quite certain leadership could be learned—a minority position at the time...

The Marshmallow Test. . . .

Or, how innate is willpower?

Back in the 1960s, Walter Mischel created a simple, but ingenious, experiment to study delayed gratification. The now famous "marshmallow test" presented a group of four and five-year-old kids from Stanford University's nursery school with a difficult challenge. They were left alone with a treat of marshmallows. They were told they could help themselves at once, or, if they waited for up to 20 minutes get two marshmallows.

Mischel, now an eighty-year-old of Columbia University, reveals that the original purpose of the test was to learn how kids delay gratification. It was not to assess how well they did. But his own children, who had attended the nursery school, told him years later about how well socially and academically their friends from the pre-school who delayed their eating were doing.

Mischel dug into their anecdotes and found--to his surprise--a number of...

Deep Smarts, Deep Thinking and Metacognition

Whenever I write a blog about a subject like thinking, I inevitably face up to the fact that blogging about thinking doesn’t easily grab readers. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are a lot more exciting, even though they’re not nearly as needful or valuable. Deep thought is the kind of stuff that more mature clients are after, especially when they face serious decisionmaking or strategic needs.

Deep smarts is the engine of every organization. You can’t really progress without them. And you’ll manage a lot more effectively if you understand what they are, how they are built and cultivated—and how they can be transferred to others. In this blog, I intend only to describe deep thinking.

In the new Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2^nd edition), Keith Sawyer summarizes the differences between “deep learning” and “traditional classroom practices.” His summary was so explicit and so perceptive that...

The Death of the Lone Genius

Slowly, very slowly, the research and some journalists are killing off the notion of the lone genius. You know, that American mythology of individual superiority applied to creativity. Like John Wayne’s rescue before the barbarians get to you, the lone genius is all nonsense. But the myth of the lone genius will require a cruel death of many cuts. It’s one of our most deeply held and cherished beliefs--even though dead wrong.

The latest cut is delivered by William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic. He writes rather bluntly that the “truth is that the geniuses weren’t really quite as solitary as advertised. They also often came together—think of the Bloomsbury Group—in situations of intense sustained creative ferment.”

Does it really matter?
That’s the question. And the answer is a clear-cut affirmative.

Organizations succeed—or fail—based on...

Text, Tweet or--Email? Try Prairie Dogging.

It’s become a recurring storyline for newspapers, magazines, tv and the web. Joe, for example, was a leading candidate for a good position in a hot firm. Before the final recommendation the recruiting firm checked out his use of social media. There was no badmouthing of his current firm. But a 20-something, Joe had sent one “harmless” picture of sexting while in college and the picture was still there. No recommendation for Joe! Even though he was now embarrassed by his college prank, there’s practically no disposal. And the recruiter found it.

Surveillance monitoring is nothing new. At the least, it dates back to the beginning of Henry Ford’s assembly line in the early 20^th century. (I suspect the Egyptians were monitoring their slaves’ production of granite block for the pyramids.) Ford’s systems were set up ...

Do You Have An Immunity to Change?

Humans differ significantly in their ability to make change.  As a personal coach to executives for more than thirty years, it’s obvious that these differences are the status quo. Desire and motivation aren’t enough—even when it’s literally a matter of life or death.

Some, it seems, have a profound immunity to change.  Often, they understand the need for change and they may even understand what the change might look like. But for some reason they seem stymied, and unable ...

You Know a Lot More Than You Can Tell

Or, it's not only who you know in the organization, but also what you know about how the organization works.

The ability to speak a language, use algebra, design and use complex processes or work with complex equipment requires all sorts of knowledge that is rarely known explicitly, even by expert practitioners. The same is true of the knowledge of "how" an organization works, it's real priorities and deeply held impressions. This "tacit knowledge" in the form of "rules" and "mental models" has far-reaching consequences and impacts our career futures.

I've always liked to pride myself in the fact that as a consultant I only lost three gigs over the past thirty years, often staying with clients for a couple decades. But in all three instances my failure was tied to the fact that I was simply unaware of the organizations' unique, tacit mental models--its "rules"--by which people worked.

In a previous post, I commented that knowing the organizations' gossip often held keys to figuring out the "rules" or "mental models." I learned that one way to get at these "rules" was to finish interviews with the question "how do you get in trouble in your organization?"

Some essential mental models
As a result of an in-depth study of two major organizations and an analysis of a dozen or so other organizations, I've learned that there are nearly a dozen issues providing potential for organizational rules or out-of-awareness mental models. Typically, however, a division or group won't hold tightly to more than 3 or 4 mental models built on these issues. But knowledge of those mental models can ...

How to Get Smarter

"You're Telling Me I Can Develop My Intelligence?  Like a Muscle?  I Don't Believe It."  

I'd have thought by now that most people would understand that you can grow your intelligence.  But no, the notion is still a shock to the system.  As one acquaintance put it succinctly:  "That can't possibly be true." He got riled up about it, but I suspect that's merely a bit stronger than what 99% of the adult population believes.  In fact, check it out (or check yourself out).  Most people still believe that a person is born smart, average or dumb--and stays that way for life.

Research over the past twenty years has shown beyond a doubt that the brain is more like a muscle.  It gets stronger, a lot stronger, when you learn--and keep learning.  Use it or lose it. 

David Brooks pulled all this together in a fascinating column on human nature in which he summarizes the developmental issues, pushing back on over-zealous evolutionary psychology and innate beliefs.  I quote the article:

The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations...

Nothing Really Works All the Time

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

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

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

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

An Intriguing Use of Evidence-Based Management

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

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

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

DOES IT PAY TO BE A NICE GUY?

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