Jeremy Gershfeld is listening

Can we grow together when we’re apart?

2020-06-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

We can — if we include important cues that are often missed when we’re not in the same physical space. Our lives have a new reality: more distanced work because of the Covid-19 safety precautions. Especially online, we can carefully address unspoken but essential cues — that one broadcasts as well as receiving from the person you are working with. The result? A far richer exchange can emerge. We can transform our online communication from something that often lacks chemistry and cohesion to something much more. We can create an Online Developmental Culture, which will surpass attempts at less present in-person communication, while keeping each other safe in the time of the pandemic.

I interview candidates for high-level positions. I look for leadership characteristics that go beyond the capacity to understand a colleague’s perspective. I find and develop leaders who can lead with a self-aware presence. People who simultaneously challenge themselves and support their colleagues through how they listen and reflect on work. These qualities translate to more productive interactions, more engagement, and ultimately a stronger office culture.

The leadership qualities I’ve mentioned work very well when one is able to see colleagues face to face. They are critical when colleagues are not able to meet together in one space. Especially in Covid-19 times, I look for important cues from this type of leadership that can be used to improve work and connection when meeting in person is not feasible.

By practicing these cues you will start noticing the difference.

Lead with presence, the embodiment of self-awareness; both emotional and intellectual. When you are aware of your own presence, you become sensitive to the emotional and intellectual states of others. This leads to a stronger resonance in communication.
Showing that you are listening, by repeating what was said. When I facilitate work over video chat, I make sure that one colleague repeats back what their colleague has said. This establishes that the person on the other side was indeed listening, giving valuable feedback that there is a connection. The person who is listening follows up by asking if that was characterized correctly. This kind of listening opens the door for people to engage with you.
Asking questions that encourage reflection on projects. By reflecting on work that has been completed, leaders encourage the team to use self-reflection as a tool for continuous development. Asking these questions can help your team improve processes or give them a psychological boost by allowing the team member to explain how they addressed a difficult or complex issue.
Insist on a psychologically safe atmosphere. Leaders set the tone for this by displaying vulnerability. This vulnerability can be reflected back as empathy to their colleagues. A psychologically safe atmosphere allows team members to grow and take risks that can lead to process or content improvement.
Belonging cues: People feel trust when they sense that people care about them. This is especially important when you don’t see each other in the office. Leaders can schedule office hours for people to check in for any reason. When people check in during office hours, an opportunity is created for a leader to ask questions about how their colleague is doing that go beyond the work.
Individual contributions and confidence: People often rely on office interactions to remind them of their personal contributions and identity within an organizational culture. A leader will support each person’s sense of contribution, and help grow this sense, as well to amplify these voices in the group.

This level of communication goes beyond productivity, though when people feel engaged — productivity always rises. It builds important connections between colleagues that can be easily missed when people don’t see each other in person.

These leadership cues, while simple, are not always easy to practice when one is focused on a work project. I often facilitate these online interactions, teaching colleagues how to observe and communicate with greater presence. This is part of building a developmental culture. When the daily practice of the developmental culture becomes habituated, the results speak for themselves.

Cutting edge learning culture transforms a law firm’s business

2020-01-06T10:27:00.001-08:00

Chicago-based law firm goodcounsel has been bringing long overdue and much-needed innovation to the practice of law. By strategically utilizing technology both in its internal operations and its delivery of client services, goodcounsel enables its attorneys to focus on high-value issues and to pass through savings to many clients in the form of fixed-fee (rather than hourly) matters. goodcounsel’s startup clients, innovators in their own right, appreciate these improvements to traditional legal practice.

Innovation requires leadership and risk-taking – not skills that law schools teach. In order to succeed in its entrepreneurial ambitions, goodcounsel’s founder Ken Obel knew that he would have to tailor the firm’s hiring process to screen for certain personal qualities and then invest significantly in creating a firm culture that nurtured and developed these qualities. To do that, he turned to organizational consultant Jeremy Gershfeld to serve as goodcounsel’s Director of Culture and Learning to lead the effort to create a firm-wide culture of learning and individual development.

A learning culture helps an organization become more efficient and productive. Research also indicates that employees stay in their jobs longer because they have higher job satisfaction. These benefits are achieved through a culture that promotes continuous improvement. People who experience growth in their skills and in their roles tend to stick around. Learning culture, however, isn’t achieved by goal setting, but through a process of learned behaviors and actions.

Jeremy Gershfeld formalized a program of regular feedback sessions between colleagues at all levels, utilizing the structure of peer coaching. In this format, the person receiving the feedback facilitates the person giving the feedback to understand how they can improve their work process together. These feedback sessions happen in a leadership-driven psychologically safe learning atmosphere, where people are encouraged to explore mistakes for learning, as opposed to a performance atmosphere, where mistakes are hidden at best, and punished at worst.

In their own words, two attorneys at goodcounsel reflect on this culture:

Joyce Chen comments that

“goodcounsel cultivates transparency, trust, and accountability. Of the many unwritten rules at large law firms, here are a few: hide what you don't know so that others don't think less of you, and hide what you do know so you reap the benefits on your own. At goodcounsel we trust that others in the firm who know more about the topic in question will provide the necessary guidance so that learning is expedited.”

First-year associate, Elmer Thoreson has been impressed by how quickly he has gotten up to speed. Noting that it takes 3-5 years for a new associate to become profitable in a typical law firm, Thoreson remarked that goodcounsel’s specific learning culture has made this initial training period dramatically shorter.

“I experienced a mixed message when interning elsewhere. While interns and first year associates were told to ask questions if they needed help, the unspoken understanding was that if one did so, you were wasting partners and associates' time. This was a mixed message and a powerful disincentive to actually ask any questions. It slowed down the learning process immensely. goodcounsel emphasizes a safe learning environment that explicitly encourages new employees to ask questions. In my first 9 months, I built my legal knowledge, helped with process improvement, expanded my knowledge of document automation, led internal meetings, and directly helped clients with real world issues. I have received deliberate cues from everyone at the firm encouraging my growth; people listen to my ideas and give specific feedback designed to help me learn. Perhaps most importantly, the firm has helped me understand my behaviors that impair my professional growth and provides me with the tools to start working on areas I need to devolop.”

Chen’s leadership development at goodcounsel took a leap forward when she converted the concept feedback for colleagues from sensitive criticism of their work into the notion of helping her colleagues to develop their skills. Thoreson was more than happy to gain the necessary professional skills with a faster learning curve, but he also expressed an aspect of organizational culture that is hard to replicate: a sense of belonging, which he will extend to other members of the firm over time. This will enable the group to keep the pace of innovation and quality that founder Ken Obel has set for the group, while maintaining continuity; a trait that is often missing with companies that live at the cutting edge of innovation.

Actionable Plan for the Business Roundtable

2019-09-20T13:25:00.001-07:00

Many have welcomed the Business Roundtable’s statement entitled “The Purpose of a Corporation,” whose signers include the leaders of Apple, Walmart, and Amazon, among other leading American corporations. The Roundtable’s statement aims to change the balance of interests between corporate shareholders and their stakeholders such as employees, shifting emphasis investing in employees, protecting the environment, as well as dealing ethically with suppliers.
The founders of the B corporation movement welcome this, arguing for “value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders.”
Nell Derrick Debevoise makes recommendations to actuate the Business Roundtable Statement.
She advocates for

Investing in employees, and
Facilitating innovation and change

I agree with Debevoise’s proposal, and would add an actionable plan to this advice:
Develop a learning culture, which harnesses all the collective talent and resources from your company. This means relentlessly collecting feedback and ideas in a psychologically safe environment. This is not new. Management gurus such as Edgar Schein from MIT have been advocating for decades to solicit feedback from everyone across the organization. When employees perceive that management cares about what they have to say, beyond lip service, they become more engaged and become invested in the collective work process.
Debevoise writes, “Building businesses that effectively serve all stakeholders, rather than just maximizing profits in a narrow interpretation of ‘shareholder value,’ requires a different approach.”
Reaching out to your employees, while having a process to evaluate their ideas, will maximize these intellectual and creative resources. It is an investment that employees will welcome, and will certainly facilitate innovation and change by how you process the feedback. The track record of the most innovative companies are the ones that effectively harness the best ideas from all of their people.

Why employee engagement programs fail

2019-09-09T13:13:00.002-07:00

*You will also find this article here on LinkedIn.

I received a report commissioned by the APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center). The 2019 Survey of 231 HR professionals on engagement practices.

The report detailed all the ways companies use tactics to keep employees engaged and happy. There’s good reason to do this. An engaged employee is a more productive employee that sticks around.

The research bears this out.

The Corporate Leadership Council (2004) found that the most engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their organization.
A meta-analysis on employee engagement published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (2002)shows that companies with more engaged employees have a 51% higher productivity rate when compared to those with a lower number of engaged employees.
A Towers/Watson study from 2009 showed an increase in shareholder value of 9% with higher employee engagement.

In 2019, contemporary management practice understands this.

The APQC report went on to describe how retaining employees is the top objective (74%) behind organizations’ investments in employee engagement, followed by increased employee productivity (56%).

Companies realize that employee engagement is important to retention and productivity, and consistent with contemporary business practices, are increasingly utilizing metrics to measure employee engagement through surveys.

Defining engagement as employees “committed to their organization’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, and are able, at the same time, to enhance their own well-being (The MacLeod Review).”

The APQC survey states that:

“Roughly one-third of respondents indicated that their organization is very or extremely effective at using analytics in support of employee engagement.

42% of managers believe they support employee to a great extent, and 41.6% of managers believe they support employee engagement to a moderate extent.

36.8% leaders do their part to a moderate extent to engage employees, in addition to 40.7% of leaders believe they engage employees to a great extent.”

Much of the data describing management’s attempts at employee engagement comes from how people think of employment engagement strategies. It is often the responsibility of HR, who might be given a budget to promote office happy hours.

Besides happy hour, typical efforts often include:

· Road map for success

· Flexible work hours/location

· Mini-celebrations for a job well done

· Recognition in the form of financial bonuses

· Giving leave early on Friday

In isolation, these all seem like nice perks that promote engagement. Despite these efforts, in 2018, an overwhelming 87% (Forbes) of employees reported not being engaged, despite the surveys of managers, which report exactly the opposite.

The most obvious question to ask: What are the disconnects between the managements’perceptions of employee engagement and their employees’ responses?

Besides the possibility of misleading data on employee engagement, the short answer is that it’s because employee engagement is treated as an add-on to the organizational culture. In these cases, employee engagement is meant to keep the employees satisfied enough to ensure high retention to limit the cost of replacement, but it is not baked into the culture as a strategy for business growth.

Employees canfeel when engagement is an afterthought, not a cultural strategy and can perceive it as disingenuous.

Employee engagement must be central to a business strategy, not as an add-on engagement tactic.

Engaged employees know their work satisfaction and professional growth are important to theirorganization. In this situation, engagement is thought of as central to the operating strategy, rather than an HR issue. Employees who are truly engaged experience their jobs differently. When an organizationprioritizes professional and personal growth, a different sense of belonging is established. People who understand how their work impacts the organization, and feel they have a voice, are bound to feel invested in the organization. Employees experiencing engagement like this are also likely participating in a growing organization.

Engaged employees whose personal growth mirrors their organization’s growth usually have these things going for them:

· Their voice is both heard and valued by the leaders of the organization.

· They have the resources to do their job effectively.

· Have the space to make mistakes and learn from the mistakes, rather than being chastised for mistakes.

· They experience the opportunity to grow both personally and professionally

· They have direct knowledge how their contribution affects the whole.

· They experience direct and regular feedback about how they are doing, with a clear understanding of how to keep growing.

· They have an opportunity to offer direct and regular feedback to management on how they are doing, with management demonstrating that they are listening.

Engagement is a business growth strategy, not a retention strategy. Give employees a voice and a system for them to communicate their ideas. Show that management is listening.

Create a space where the environment is safe for learning. Create a system that allows people to give feedback to learn, rather than performance feedback, where people are scared to make mistakes. Feedback should be safe and encouraged to go both upstream and downstream.

Communicate with words and deeds that personal and professional growth is essential to the culture. Set up processes to make sure everyone’s development is accounted for. There is nothing more engaging than feeling like you’re growing personally and professionally.

Employees will reward an organization with commitment and a sense of belonging that go a long way towards a healthy culture. You will also be taking advantage of your biggest resource: Your people.

LEGO looked in the mirror and challenged its own innovation culture.

2016-02-29T09:21:00.000-08:00

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In Brick by Brick, (2013) David Robertson chronicles the toy company LEGO - from its struggles to deal with the disruption of interactive computer games in the 1990’s - through the brand’s successful rebound in the early 2000’s. This book is about LEGO looking in the mirror and challenging the tenets of its own vaunted innovation culture. A major theme was that LEGO didn’t understand the risks associated with its attempts to expand into new markets. The risks they took to broaden their market appeal had the unintended effect of diluting their product and alienating their best customers. Ultimately, LEGO achieved its comeback by infusing the creativity and discipline normally associated with the characteristics of a fine artist into its original culture of innovation.

LEGO’s initial reaction to its declining market share in the 1990’s was to lean on its creativity; they expansively developed ideas to enhance the competitiveness of LEGO’s product line. They were going to disrupt the marketplace, not be the disrupted.

LEGO attempted to crowdsource for ideas, achieve market disruption with complex interactive video games; they built creative teams across the globe to develop captivating story lines for new products while pursuing new markets within a Blue Ocean strategy.

What followed were a few hits, but many more misses - resulting in a precipitously declining bottom line. One of the main complaints was that, while chasing new markets, many of the new products lacked enough “LEGOness” which alienated its core customers. Robertson writes that by 2003, LEGO group sales had plunged 30 percent compared with 2002 as well as losing leadership position across its core markets.

LEGO responded to this crisis by rearranging their senior management structure to pull out of the crisis. The new leaders included Kristiansen as the face of the company; Knudstorp as head of strategy and heir apparent; and Ovesen as CFO. (99)

When Ovesen arrived at Lego, and he told Knudstorp: “I have never seen so much shit in my life. Everything is broken. You’re not making any money. You can’t even forecast your sales, and people are so happy. I can’t believe it.” (102)

While the LEGO was fighting for survival, outsiders simultaneously revered the company as the “most admired company in Denmark.”

The culture within the company continued to believe their press, even though the profit and loss sheet described an outlook that was far more dismal.

Robertson writes that, “The notion that LEGO was not a toy but an idea - and an undefined idea at that, was so opaque, it opened the way for designers to create products that were far removed from the very qualities that had defined LEGO in the minds of customers.” (107)

LEGO initiated a rebound from rock bottom as the leadership team examined which factors catalyzed the decline, as well as examining how its initial response to develop innovation and market disruption precipitated the decline further. They came to realize that its attempts at innovation and disruption were not wrong, but rather misguided with false confidence. LEGO had been successful with their brick and play systems, so they intuited that they would be successful on the virtual front with computer games. The lack of experience within these new frontiers left the company overmatched with competitors who did have experience within this digital realm. LEGO’s ability to engage the core customer with the brick system became lost in translation with the dilution of their product.

The story of LEGO’s decline in the 1990’s is one about how an organizational culture that embodied innovation developed appetite for risk - for which it paid a high price. Fortunately for LEGO, the story didn’t end there – it continued with how the resilience within LEGO allowed it to learn and adapt from the consequences of its own risk taking. LEGO was a company who initially dealt with a changing marketplace by relying on its well-developed culture of innovation, with a misplaced faith that its innovative culture would inoculate it from disruption.

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow (2011), describes risk tolerance and risk aversion. He notes that when the odds are stacked against us, we feel that we don’t have much to lose; we will risk more. On the contrary, when we have a sure thing, our tolerance for risk diminishes, at the precise time when we can actually afford to risk a little more.

LEGO experienced an increased appetite for risk in the 1990’s because it was worried that it was going to be disrupted out of the toy industry by computer games. It had misplaced confidence that it could understand the video game industry as well as it understood its own toy niche. This led to other errors in judgment also described by Kahneman.

Kahneman explains how taking risks based on intuition is rewarded in correlation with how much experience one has within the said domain. LEGO had little experience with strategies such as disruptive technologies (interactive video games), and original content; LEGO overestimated how much they comprehended these markets. When LEGO attempted to widen its appeal with these forays, they ended up with losing tickets.

Knudstorp understood this miscalculation, and started the turnaround with a renewed focus on disciplined product development. As LEGO changed how it considered its approach for resource deployment, they began to benefit from the wisdom accrued while enduring the mistakes it made on the first go around.

This time with more discipline.

When the financial bloodletting stabilized, LEGO was able to return to their ideals of innovation, with a new twist: a vision gained from the wisdom of their experiences.

Innovation towards new markets integrated with their identity:

“Obviously LEGO, but never seen before.”

LEGO returned to its efforts at innovation with crowdsourcing, seeking Blue Ocean markets, developing computer games, as well as independent characters that were integrated into larger media platforms, but with the “Obviously LEGO, but never seen before” mantra.

Learning from its experiences, LEGO returned to its innovative ways, this time with a formalized approach to guide their actions. (173)

The innovation approaches were divided into:

· Product innovations for new toys and platforms.

· Communication innovations for improving the customer engagement.

· Business innovations for pricing models, product launches and new distribution channels.

· Process innovations for cultivating insight research, cutting development time.

Knudstorp and Robertson outlined an “innovation matrix,” a process, which coordinated LEGO’s actions throughout the company:

1. Meeting with the team that has a new product or service concept, and place the innovation in the appropriate column in the matrix.

2. Brainstorming complementary products, services, business models, etc., that could make the core innovation more successful.

3. Ask who will work on these complementary innovations.

4. Consider staffing, funding, and review.

LEGO developed detailed profiles of its customers’ demographics and psychographics, evidenced by the Bionicle team, which made strides to ‘understand the world as seen through children’s eyes’ and use those insights to build more desirable toys. (177)

Knudstorp concluded: “Innovation flourishes when the space available for it is limited. Less is more.” (116)

This is strikingly familiar to how a performing classical musician differentiates their performance from simply playing the notes exactly as written. The performing artist executes the notes and rhythms with a high standard of discipline; however, it is their depth of experience that allows for successful creative interpretation of the music.

The artist manipulates the sound from their instrument; they play with the relationships between the notes, all within the exact standards of what is written. The innovative performance emerges from a deep understanding of both the context of the music and the vessel from which they express it. The artist’s impulse is to express something new within the specific directions of the composer; they explore color of sound, dynamics and direction within these parameters. On the contrary, the novice musician with the creative impulse might take liberties that render the interpretation bizarre and out of bounds much of the time, sprinkled with a few exceptions of coherent artistry.

An artist successfully captivates their audience by executing an idea that is at once familiar and new. The familiarity allows consumers to process a notion from common experience; the new idea integrates the familiar with an impulse to develop new meaning. This combination becomes a pivotal engagement. “Obviously LEGO, but never seen before.”

Innovation works when you have parameters. A classical musician creates their greatest art from within the boundaries of the composer’s direction.

Using intuition with risk taking is rewarded when we have much experience within a field of knowledge. The depth of knowledge often informs our “gut” instincts about where to proceed, and chances of success are greater. The danger is that we can mislead (sometimes with wishful thinking) ourselves about how much knowledge and experience we have, precisely because our presumed knowledge about one aspect of a field of knowledge leads to overconfidence in realms we know less about.

The lesson LEGO understood in recovery was to limit their risk taking within parameters of expanding what they already know. If the desire is there to grow into unfamiliar markets, invest properly in knowing those markets.

Ovesen is quoted, citing Apple: “the world’s most innovative companies are also the most disciplined. You have to have great control over all the basics; only then can you start to be truly innovative.” (108)

References:

Kahneman, D., Tversky, A. (1979)."Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk". Econometrica, 47 (2), pp. 263–291.

Kahneman, Daniel. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Robertson, David (2013). Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the global toy industry. Crown Publishing Group, New York, NY

Listening to the Kinetic Melody learned from good Habit Design

2015-12-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

As a classical musician, I’ve been thinking about how we learn melodies, especially the ones that capture our attention.

At its heart, a melody is just a pattern of notes and rhythms that appeal to us as we listen. The harmony is processed in the auditory cortex of our brain, while the rhythm stimulates activity in our motor cortex. When the combination of these sensory processing functions is coherent, we have a pattern that pleases us. Perhaps the tune also disrupts us to pay attention with surprising dissonances, which resolve into satisfying harmonies, while slyly integrating the pattern into our subconscious minds.

The neuroscience of how rhythm and harmony form into catchy melodies tells us a great deal about how we can design similarly sticky habits to improve our daily function in business and life.

With melodies and habits top of mind, I’ve come across the work of the Russian neuropsychologist Aleksandr Luria, who wrote about kinetic melodies. He explains the difficult process of recruiting complex neural systems to take an implement (pen/pencil) and convert abstract thought into a physical representation on paper.

In The Working Brain, (1973) Luria describes how the physical act of writing is a “process of isolated motor impulses, each of which is responsible for the performance of only one element: a graphic structure.”

Robert Ochsner (1990) takes this farther by describing the kinetic melody as two implicitly related melodies, (visual and auditory). The writer visualizes and auralizes the words he wishes to write.

Ochsner explains how the visual melody determines how much text the eye takes in as feedback; the auditory melody regulates the inner voice as it matches what the visual cortex processes.

The networks of the visual cortex and the auditory cortex interact to produce the kinetic melody, which gives impulse to the muscles in the hand, wrist, arm, and shoulder to produce the graphic shapes represented as written language.

Implicit with continued practice, these skills become more efficient. With each iteration, the “kinetic melody,” takes less effort to reproduce.

Voilá… a habit of sensory integration has formed.

The kinetic melody reinforced ideas from a conversation I recently had with Michael Kim, the CEO of Habit Design. His company specializes in training organizations to improve personal and organizational wellbeing, productivity, stress management, and performance through the neuroscience of creating new habits.

Kim explained that a behavior (habit) is built by designing a cue, followed by a reward, and finished by repeating with multiple iterations. The habit becomes a neural pattern that is automated. This is essentially the same as a remembered melody with different sensory inputs. An aural melody remembered is a sensory pattern within the auditory cortex. A kinetic melody is a sensory pattern within the visual cortex and parts of the brain responsible for the motor cortex.

In Habit design, the cue is a signal, which reminds us to act out a certain behavior. We hear the start of the catchy melody we know and want to hear it to its conclusion. If a habit is already formed, the cue will largely be subconscious. In good habit design, we can identify the cue, learning the start of the kinetic melody. When we act out the behavior, we are playing the melody imprinted on us, driving towards the reward, the resolution of the kinetic melody. When we become aware of the sensory processing of the cue, behavior and reward, we can change the tune to something we prefer, similar to changing the station on the radio.

Sensing the Balance of Dynamic Tension in Organizations

2015-10-28T11:09:00.003-07:00

This past July (2015), I visited Ann Arbor, MI to attend the Denison Consulting workshop on organizational culture. I was intrigued with how they examine organizational culture through the different traits of Mission, Consistency, Adaptability and Involvement.

Denison Consulting proposes a systemic value of these cultural elements by describing how a “successful organization is one that links the mission, purpose and goals of the organization to create a shared sense of ownership, commitment and responsibility for its employees.”

I understand that these values are linked.

Of interest, however, is the question:
How do these traits interact to form a cultural profile?

Denison answers my question by describing the interaction as a dynamic tension between:

Mission and Involvement traits, which represent the balance between centralized leadership (mission) and decentralized management style (involvement.) In this dynamic, an organization weighs leadership directions from the few, or soliciting direction from the many. The other balance Denison refers to is: The interplay between Adaptability (to the needs of the marketplace) and Consistency (steady internal values and process.)

Of this dynamic tension, Denison considers a thriving culture to be one, which balances the ability to adapt to the marketplace while maintaining internal consistency. In their words,

“It is not an either/or proposition.”

I’ve been considering this idea of dynamic tension:

If the value of establishing one’s cultural dynamic into proper balance is significant, how does an organization go about finding what and where this balance is?

The Dialectic

The balance of tension between traits resembles the philosophical construct of the dialectic; of which Merriam Webster defines as tension or opposition between two interacting forces or elements.

Many use the dialectic to balance two opposing ideas in order to get the truth of a matter.

Balancing tension to make music

I play and teach the violin and viola. When one is playing a string instrument such as the violin or viola, the sound emerges when the bow is pulled across the string in a perpendicular motion at a specific contact point. If the string is bowed too close to the fingerboard, the string speaks easily because the tension is low; the drawback is that the sound is hazy and unfocused. If one bows too close to the bridge, a large amount of pressure is needed to produce a sound at this point, because the string tension is very high. The result is something hard and scratchy.

There is, however, a specific contact point with ideal tension. This Goldilocks intersection between bow and string, results in a tone, which feels like a harmonic truth. The sound emerges with not too great of force or effort, yet the release of vibration energy is surprisingly powerful. At advanced levels of technique, manipulating the variety of tension between the bow and string is largely responsible for how a musician colors their sound to create art.

Consider that the bow moves through this contact point with variable speeds and pressures, which create louder and quieter sounds, increasing the palette of colors. Imagine multiple musicians playing together, combining different notes and rhythms; the variety of tensions become quite apparent. They are representative of the harmonies and dissonances in music.

Where does the contact point resonate in your organization?

Denison’s organizational culture survey (DOCS) exposes deeply held assumptions, which permeate organizations beyond the spectrum naturally observable to its members.

Look below the surface...

If one is looking to find where the tension exists between one’s Mission/Involvement or between Adaptability/Consistency, the DOCS will expose it.

What to do with the Data?

The data from the Denison Survey (DOCS) will tell you if you are playing too close to the fingerboard with a fuzzy sound, or are playing too close to the bridge, sounding harsh and scratchy. The difference between an organization’s mission talking points and the discovery of the organization’s underlying assumptions provide the dialectic tension necessary to hear your company’s sound.

The exact tension required between Mission/Involvement or between Adaptability/Consistency may be industry specific. The requirements of this tension might be geographically specific. The Denison Survey gives each organization a chance to listen to their specific culture, with the implicit opportunity to determine whether they like what they hear, and what they want to hear.

The feedback value of listening to one’s practice

When a music student is practicing, they find it difficult to hear exactly what they sound like because they are caught up in the details of just trying to play their instrument. The more experienced performer (and practitioner) is precisely attuned to what they sound like when practicing, which enables them to prepare a performance to a higher level.

They are constantly aware of their contact point, both in practice and performance.

MADMEN Post Merger: Acquiring the (vanishing) White Whale - What does culture have to do with it?

2015-05-06T13:58:00.000-07:00

When Roger Sterling cut the deal to sell Sterling Cooper and Partners to McCann Erickson, he thought he was saving his firm. It turns out that they were just being tossed into the larger culture of McCann as a trophy acquisition.

If Jim Hobart and McCann wanted more value from his purchase of SC&P they would have been better served to prepare their new employees for life aboard the mother ship.

Otherwise, the culture shock is likely to result in a vanishing asset.

If we define organizational culture as the shared basic assumptions of the group, mostly unstated ideas for “how things are around here,” then culture couldn't be more different between SC&P and McCann.

How will Peggy fit this new culture?

SC&P is small and nimble, able to take creative risks that might be killed off in a larger environment. McCann has enormous resources, powerful relationships, and a cultural inertia that easily resists challenges. The senior leader of McCann, Jim Hobart, essentially acknowledged that they acquired SC&P for the white whale, Don Draper; he amounts to another trophy creative director (in a large trophy case filled with them.) They could care less about the accounts coming on board, and the people who service them.

Companies are often acquired for their intellectual capital. Retaining this knowledge base would seem pertinent to the value of the acquisition.

History says that ignoring the incoming culture of the acquired company is the best way to lose the intellectual capital of the purchase. The people in the acquisition simply leave. The acquired value, past the branding, leaves with them.

When thinking about solving problems…Flow past the anxiety

2015-02-02T16:08:00.001-08:00

A nine-year-old boy is practicing his violin. Specifically, he is learning vibrato, a complicated movement coordinating the left wrist, hand and individual fingers in an up and down motion which modulates slightly around a centered pitch.

Learning to do this requires attention to the details of figuring out the biomechanical elements of moving the wrist relative to the fingers, as well as relative to the arm. If you get the wrong proportion, the vibrato doesn’t work well. Patience is required to practice this skill in a methodical manner.

Not every boy this age may be interested in thinking carefully about planning how to develop such a specific skill. Some of this responsibility falls to his dad, who happens to be the author of this article. I realized from the experience of my son learning the violin that the violin aspect of this practice may have been the least of the challenges.

This is not unlike many of the problems we encounter in business when organizing ourselves to solve a problem.

When facing a problem, we often assign far more complexity than is required to solve them.

How often does one start thinking about solving a large problem and experience the frustrating emotions of anxiety, many times wading through much procrastination before settling down to examine and organize the ideas?

It may be that the angst we feel when embarking on a large problem is part of our mind’s architecture.

Our brains often face a tug of war between our emotional brain, offering a quick response to an unresolved issue, and our deliberative brain, which parses through ideas more slowly. (i)

The emotional, gut feeling, right or wrong as it may be, can be helpful if we have a lot of experience with the problem; if we don't, these emotional sensations deliver the equivalent of a car spinning its wheels on an icy incline. The emotions send us thinking about everything and anything other than the problem at hand. Exiting this spinning abyss requires rational planning, from which our gut feelings are of little help. (ii)

Resolving the dissonance

Our emotional brains just want to feel happy. We might turn the problem over and over in our minds until we find a solution, but chances are that our conscious thoughts will incline towards whatever is most entertaining.

The psychologist Daniel T. Willingham comments about our digital age that the promise of amusement is "constant, immediate and limitless. If a YouTube video isn’t funny in the first 10 seconds, why watch when I can instantly seek something better on BuzzFeed or Spotify?”

Isn’t there always something better to do than what I’m doing right now?

Once we’ve started multitasking towards a pleasure fix for our brain, we’ve begun producing the stress hormone cortisol, further clouding our thinking, while pulling our guilt laden procrastinating selves away from working on the problem at hand.

Are we fated to experience these self-inflicted roadblocks when making the attempt to think productively about something difficult?

Often, it is a matter of learning to relax and concentrate through a process which starts by reducing distractions like eliminating the email inbox, followed by examining the conceptual ideas on hand, while separating thoughts of execution.

The process follows these steps:

1. Freeing the mind of distractions, both externally and from one’s own anxiety, is an important first step to simultaneously relax and focus on an issue. A coach can help this process along.

2. Separate conceptual thinking from planning action. Don’t confuse one for the other!

3. Using both pictures and words, translate ideas into rich sensory (visual, audio etc.) images. Our brain is able to process more information this way, and create meaningful and coherent narrative. By understanding how our sensory processing system works, we are able to generate larger bandwidth.

4. Take breaks from this focused multi-sensory thinking. When people rest their minds from focused attention to problem solving, the subconscious mind relaxes. Minds are able to wander. While thinking about other things, we give the opportunity for our subconscious minds to connect the dots from all focused work. Solutions come in the most unexpected places.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes this process of relaxed mind wandering as the brain integrating different senses, leading to a more complex “mapping” of a situation. Translated in lay terms, this more complex mapping allows for deeper understanding, allowing us to organize our thinking at higher levels.

[i] While gut feelings may not provide logical answers to your query, they may be strong indicators of your subconscious beliefs and attitudes on the subject. Working to become aware and understand these beliefs and attitudes can be very helpful, both in the short term and long term. For more on this, see Kahneman, Daniel. (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow.

[ii] To further complicate things, the planning part of our brain is connected to part of our brain which is prone to produce feelings of anxiety. Antonio Damasio, writing in Self Comes to Mind (2014), describes how the insula cortex, active in many of our feelings of emotion, is wrapped in tandem with the anterior cingulate cortex; this region plays an important role in initiation, motivation, and goal-directed behaviors. They are “joined with mutual connections,” meaning that goal-directed behaviors are fraught with emotions, merely from the electrical impulses of a neuro-anatomical neighbor.

Identify and teach the culture

2014-08-12T16:17:00.002-07:00

I just came across an article in the NYT about how Apple used the model of Picasso's sketches: The increasingly simple but continuously elemental bull which helps define the look of its products.

The rest of the piece describes how Apple meticulously teaches its employees this style and ethic, down to hiring Ivy league professors to run their internal courses.

Two ideas are embedded here:
One, the importance of distilling the essential quality which represents one's company, and two, teaching this cultural meme to cultivate the success of the identity.

Adam Silverman of Heath Tiles

2013-06-13T18:56:00.003-07:00

5 Questions for Heath's Adam Silverman

There's a reason why Heath Tiles seems so different from the rest: (If you are thinking about kitchen or bathroom tile, you may know what I'm talking about.)

10,000 hours might not be enough...From Axon Sports

2013-06-12T10:03:00.002-07:00

10,000 Hours Of Practice May Not Be Enough

Other 50% of the ingredients besides deliberate practice?

Working memory
Grit to persevere
I would add: learning to organize one's thoughts as part of the deliberate practice.

From Axonpotential for the original piece.

From Dan Peterson's blog on Axon Sports:
The 10,000 hour theory has become the American dream for developing athletes. Just work hard enough and your gold medal, Hall of Fame, championship ambitions can come true. It is achievable, measurable and finite. Many athletes never quite cross the 10,000 hour finish line, and have used the scapegoat reason, “I just didn’t have enough time to commit to the sport.” However, recent research suggests that while 10,000 hours of deliberate practice may be necessary to achieve world-class status, it may not be the only ingredient to success.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, a research paper by Florida State professor K. Anders Ericsson, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, has been cited in the scientific press over one thousand times earning its own HOF credentials. The gist of it is that Ericsson visited a West Berlin music academy and interviewed violin students and their teachers. First, he asked the students to estimate the number of structured practice hours they had endured up to age 20. Then, he asked their teachers to divide the class into good, better and best thirds. The correlation uncovered showed that the best students had accumulated, on average, over 10,000 hours of practice while the middle group was at about 8,000 hours and the bottom group had not reached 5,000 hours.
After checking this relationship within other groups of skilled experts, Ericsson found similar patterns of 10,000 hours of practice and concluded that innate talent or “what we’re born with” had little to do with becoming an expert in any field, even sports. With that declaration, the dream (and the practice odometer) was launched.
However, since that landmark 1993 paper, other researchers have been finding exceptions to the rule; some experts were crowned with only 3,000 hours of practice while others still had not reached the mountaintop even though they had doubled the 10,000 hour mark.
David Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State, has been searching for the other necessary ingredients for several years. In 2011, he and his colleague Elizabeth J. Meinz found that deliberate practice among pianists did account for almost half of the variance between experts and novices. But in their quest to find out what else mattered to make up the other 50% of variance, they found that working memory capacity, the ability to remember a set of objects while engaged in another task, was also a significant determinant of success.
This month, Hambrick and his team released new research that looked at 14 different studies of chess and music students to find other clues to expertise. Again, they were convinced that deliberate practice alone was not enough.
“The evidence is quite clear,” he writes, “that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice.”
Across those chess and music studies, they found that practice explained about one third of the journey to being world class. One new factor that did emerge was starting at a young age. Logically, someone who started training at age 7 versus 12 would have five more years of practice, but Hambrick found that even when total hours of practice were comparable, the student that started at an earlier age became more accomplished. “This evidence suggests that there may be a critical period for acquiring complex skills just as there may be for acquiring language,” he concluded.
Also, overall intelligence did make a difference, at least for these chess and music students. Those students with a higher tested IQ, including working memory capacity, were also more likely to end up being experts.
Finally, grit, a determined attitude to succeed, also played a role in creating success. The term has been made famous by Paul Tough in his book How Children Succeed, based on the research of psychologist Angela Duckworth. The desire and passion to get better drives the willingness to spend so many hours practicing a skill.
So, what does all of this mean for the aspiring superstar? That practice, as much as possible, is still a necessary evil to getting better at a sport. However, it also confirms that different athletes have different qualities and progress through their journey at different paces. They may need some guidance based on their individual strengths that will help them find the right sport.
“If people are given an accurate assessment of their abilities and the likelihood of achieving certain goals given those abilities,” Hambrick predicted, “they may gravitate toward domains in which they have a realistic chance of becoming an expert through deliberate practice.”

“Art sometimes precedes scientific analysis"

2013-06-01T13:03:00.002-07:00

Temple Grandin concurrs with Eric Kandel. In her recent book, The Autistic Brain, Grandin writes about pattern thinkers, who, as artists, often think in visual terms, which have a certain balance, which is actually pattern recognition, later recognized by mathematical algorithms. Her examples include Van Gogh painting a swirling sky, predicting the turbulence in liquid 50 years later; Pollock, whose splashes and drips predated fractal geometry by 30-40 years. In fact, fractals point the way for experts to determine whether a painting was the work of Pollock or a fake.

If you click on my post about Kandel, he recommends the connection between Klimpt and Freud...

Flow

2013-04-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

I just finished making my way through Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow.

Kilauea volcano lava flow in Hawaii

He writes about achieving "Flow" through organizing one's consciousness through disciplined concentration.

The prescription is as follows:

Set a goal
Become immersed in the activity
Pay attention to what is happening (self-awareness)

Through this process, one learns to differentiate, nurturing a strong sense of self, and to integrate, becoming adept at communing meaningfully with others. The combination of these attributes begets complexity, and the path to living a creative life.

In Csikszentmihalyi's words:
"When a person is able to organize his or her consciousness so as to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life is inevitably going to improve."
"The challenge is not really against itself, but against the entropy that brings disorder to consciousness. It is really a battle for the self; it is a struggle for establishing control over attention. Anyone who has experienced flow knows that the deep enjoyment it provides requires an equal degree of disciplined concentration."
"Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex and it had been before.
It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration."
"Flow begets differentiation and integration: Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. a complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies."

Piano lessons

2013-04-06T06:47:00.001-07:00

In the New Yorker, Jeremy Denk talks about his influential piano teachers growing up.

Sheepdogs and Terrorists

2013-03-08T08:47:00.001-08:00

Alpha dog needs sheep to follow.

From The Talent Code:
Dan Coyle writes about his experiences at the Geek Sports Fan's Super Bowl: The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Predictably, there was talk about data, data, data. However, at a dinner, with European professional futböl (soccer) scouts present, one mentioned the idea of Sheepdogs, Sheep, Corpses and Terrorists on teams at every level. The Sheepdogs were the alpha leaders, Sheep, the followers. Corpses, self explanatory; Terrorists: those who poisoned the team atmosphere. The teams with Sheepdogs and Sheep succeeded, those possessing Corpses and Terrorists, failed.

Not good for teams

Here's the piece on Coyle's blog:
The Talent Code

Sage Advise on reading the markets

2012-12-20T11:52:00.000-08:00

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, of The Black Swan fame, focuses on the problems of randomness, probability and uncertainty.

Taleb explores the psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs.

Of course, many people read his book to glean the secrets of (stock) trading, in which one might predict a massive event, so that you can make lots and lots of money. Perhaps one has an expertise in an area to present an advantage on the market?

Beware, says Taleb:

While many study psychology, mathematics or evolutionary theory and look for ways to take it to the bank by applying their ideas to business, I suggest the exact opposite: study the intense, uncharted humbling uncertainty in the markets as a means to get insights about the nature of randomness that is applicable to psychology, probability, mathematics, decision theory, and even statistical physics. You will see the sneaky manifestations of the narrative fallacy, the ludic fallacy, and the great errors of Platonicity, of going from representation to reality.

Pivoting between Skill and Creativity

2012-10-24T08:01:00.002-07:00

A Multitude, written and performed on the acoustic and electric viola by Jeremy Gershfeld and directed by Paul Elledge, is about skill and creativity. Skill is often a goal oriented pursuit; creativity is powered by curiosity. Achieving a high level of both requires a pivot from one to the other.

Neuroscience influencing our relationship to art

2012-04-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

This is from an interview by Jonah Lehrer of his mentor, Eric Kandel in Wired Science. The Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist recently published The Age of Insight. Kandel points out that the better we understand how our brain processes our emotional/intellectual responses to art, the deeper our relationship becomes to the art, and the artistic process.

I agree. Forget the mystery. It's all about depth of understanding influencing the depth of our relationships.

KANDEL: Why would we want to encourage a dialogue between art and science, and, in a larger sense, between science and culture, at large? Brain science and art represent two distinct perspectives of mind. Through science, we know that all of our mental life arises from the activity of our brain. Thus, by observing that activity, we can begin to understand the processes that underlie our responses to works of art: how is information, collected by the eye, turned into vision? How are thoughts turned into memories? What is the biological basis of behavior? Art, on the other hand, provides insight into the more fleeting, experiential qualities of mind – what a certain experience feels like. A brain scan may reveal the neural signs of anxiety, but a Kokoschka painting, or a Schiele self-portrait, reveals what an anxiety state really feels like. Both perspectives are necessary if we are to fully grasp the nature of the mind, yet they are rarely brought together.
What would the benefits of such an exchange be today, and who would gain from it? The gain for brain science is clear. One of the ultimate challenges of biology is to understand how the brain becomes consciously aware of perception, experience and emotion. But it is equally conceivable that the exchange would be useful for the beholders of art, for people who enjoy art, for historians, and for the artists, themselves. Insights into the processes of visual perception and emotional response may well stimulate new expressions of artistic creativity. Much as Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists used the revelations of human anatomy to help them depict the body more accurately and compellingly, and the Impressionist artists learned about color mixing from the study of color by physicists, so, too, many contemporary artists may create new forms of representation in response to the revelations about how the brain works. Understanding the biology behind artistic insights, inspiration and the beholder’s response to art could be invaluable to artists seeking to heighten their creative power. In the long run, brain science may also provide clues to the nature of creativity, itself.

Kandel: I now have a much better idea of why the Modernists’ portraiture affects us so profoundly, because I realize that they have tapped into the enormous face processing capability of the brain. I now understand why their exaggerations are so effective. They regulate the cells in face patches in the inferior-temporal lobe of the brain. We see how arbitrary use of color can have a powerful affect on our emotions.
We now have an outline of the Beholder’s Share. We see how some people – for example, autistic people – have a difficult time responding emphatically to paintings of faces. I understand better, the nature of ambiguity in art – how each of us sees a slightly different version of a great work of art, and that this interpretation is subject to the creative capability of the brain. I was not aware, before, what a creativity machine the brain is, and how each of us sees a different view of art because we have different brain responses to it, and how, even for simple perception, there is not only bottom-up processing, determined by Gestaltian rules of grouping things together, but there is a lot of top-down processing, which is based on comparing what we see now to what has been stored in memory.

Erased De Kooning Drawing by Rauschenberg

2012-03-13T12:14:00.002-07:00

I found this blog on NPR about erasing space, which lead to this story from Robert Rauschenberg. He visited the famous De Kooning and asked him if he could erase one of his drawings. De Kooning gave him one, but only one that he would really miss.

Why is Trader Joe's so successful?

2012-01-01T10:53:00.000-08:00

This is from Los Angeles magazine:
Enchanted Aisles - Features - Los Angeles magazine

Its about the secretive ownership of Trader Joe's and why it is so successful. In a nutshell:

Joe Coulombe’s (original owner) singular gift to consumers was to evaluate groceries as a museum director would art. More than anything else, this distinction sets Trader Joe’s apart.

Fear is the greatest destroyer of attention

2011-12-29T08:51:00.000-08:00

In Judith Warner's follow-up to Perfect Madness, called We've got Issues, Edward M. Hallowell is quoted about ADT (Attention deficit trait).

ADT is caused at base by overload, by having impossible amounts of work to do and being haunted by the awful sense of the impossibility of getting it done. Fear is the greatest destroyer of attention, because emotion is the on/off switch for executive functioning.

It is interesting in observing attention deficit symptoms, that executive functioning is not solely the responsibility of the prefontal cortex. Fear is limbic.

Japanese firms shop abroad: Armed with a strong yen | The Economist

2011-12-17T06:13:00.000-08:00

Japanese firms shop abroad: Armed with a strong yen | The Economist
When old people retire, they tend to live off their savings. They supply capital to younger, sprightlier, cash-strapped folk, who put it to work and pay dividends or interest to the retirees. That is, roughly speaking, what Asia’s aging archipelago is starting to do.

Physical postures of dominance and the endocrine system

2011-11-10T15:56:00.001-08:00

More on Harvard Social Psychologist Amy Cuddy's research about snap judgements and physical posture:

Cuddy's research has demonstrated that different physical postures are directly linked to the endocrine system showing the links between stances, gestures, and hormones.

Recently, she has begun to study nonverbal cues that drive perceptions of competence, which relate directly to one’s position in the social pecking order: a star athlete, for example, enjoys far higher status than a journeyman. “Dominance and power are highly correlated with perceived competence,” she says, “and people make inferences of competence based on how dominant someone appears.”
“In all animal species, postures that are expansive, open, and take up more space are associated with high power and dominance,” she says. “Postures that are contractive—limbs touching torso, protecting the vital organs, taking up minimal space—are associated with low power, being at the bottom of the hierarchy. Any animal you can think of, when it’s prey, makes itself as small as possible.”
In primates, these postures also correlate with testosterone and cortisol levels. Expansive, high-power postures mean (in both sexes) high testosterone, a hormone that animal and human studies connect with dominance and power, and low levels of cortisol (the “stress” hormone), while the inverse holds for contractive, low-power postures. “Those endocrine profiles are associated with disease resistance,” Cuddy says. “Low testosterone and high cortisol make you very vulnerable to diseases, so you’re more likely to be picked off by whatever comes through. At the top, you’re more disease-resistant.”
Until recently, primatologists believed that those who inherited high-power neuroendocrine profiles became the dominant creatures in their groups, the so-called alpha males or females. “But it turns out that those hormone levels change when you take on the dominant role,” Cuddy explains. “If an alpha is killed and another primate has to take over that position, his or her testosterone and cortisol levels will change in just a few days. Likewise, if you get pushed to the bottom, your hormone profile shifts. It’s both cause and effect. It’s possible that slight innate differences in neuroendocrine profiles are greatly exaggerated by role assignment.”
In a recent paper published in Psychological Science, Cuddy, Dana R. Carney, and Andy J. Yap (both of Columbia) report how they measured hormone levels of 42 male and female research subjects, placed the subjects in two high-power or low-power poses for a minute per pose, then re-measured their hormone levels 17 minutes later. They also offered subjects a chance to gamble, rolling a die to double a $2 stake. The results were astonishing: a mere two minutes in high- or low-power poses caused testosterone to rise and cortisol to decrease—or the reverse. Those in high-power stances were also more likely to gamble, enacting a trait (risk taking) associated with dominant individuals; they also reported feeling more powerful. “If you get this effect in two minutes, imagine what you get sitting in the CEO’s chair for a year,” Cuddy says.

Judging Competence

2011-11-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a Profile of social psychologist Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School from Harvard Magazine Nov-Dec 2010

Her work is about how a person's physical posture gives immediate social cues for others to judge.
Our first impressions register far too quickly for any nuanced weighing of data: “Within less than a second, using facial features, people make what are called ‘spontaneous trait inferences.'"

That's just interpreting body language, one might say?

She also writes about the warmth/competence dichotomy. People will be quick to judge someone as warm and forgive their perceived incompetence; however if they are judged to be lacking in warmth, they better be competent, or will be written off. Cuddy also describes how we want other people to be warm, but we want to be competent.

Warmth is not only perceived first, but accounts for more of someone’s overall evaluation than competence. The warm/cold assessment amounts to a reading of the other’s intentions, positive or negative.

Competence is assayed next: how capable is someone of carrying out those intentions? “If it’s an enemy who’s competent,” Cuddy explains, “we probably want to be vigilant.” Surprisingly, in their self-perceptions, individuals value competence over warmth. “We want other people to be warm, but we want to be competent,” she says. “We’d rather have people respect us than like us.” (Cuddy thinks this human tendency represents a mistaken judgment: “Social connections will take you farther than respect.”)

There’s an interesting asymmetry. Many acts can indicate competence: scoring well on a College Board exam (SAT), for example, or knowing how to handle a sailboat, or deftly navigating through a software application. Demonstrating a single positive-competent behavior tends to broaden into a wider aura of competence: someone with a high SAT score, for example, will be viewed as generally competent. In contrast, a single negative-competent behavior—not knowing how to sail, for example—does not generalize into a perception of overall incompetence: it will simply be dismissed as, say, an unlearned skill. “Positive competence is weighted more heavily than negative competence,” Cuddy summarizes.

With warmth, the inverse applies. Someone who does something nice, like helping an elderly pedestrian across an intersection, is not necessarily seen as a generally nice person. But a single instance of negative-warmth behavior—kicking a dog, say—is likely to irredeemably categorize the perpetrator as a cold person.

In other words, people feel that a single positive-competent, or negative-warmth, act reveals character. “You can purposely present yourself as warm—you can control that,” Cuddy explains. “But we feel that competence can’t be faked. So positive competence is seen as more diagnostic. On the other hand, being a jerk—well, we’re not very forgiving of people who act that way.”

“People tend to see warmth and competence as inversely related. If there’s a surplus of one trait, they infer a deficit of the other.” In a business context, she says, this means that “The more competent you are, the less nice you must be. And vice versa: Someone who comes across as really nice must not be too smart.” This pattern is the opposite of the halo effect: a plus on one dimension demands a minus on the other. The unconscious logic might be: If she were really competent, she wouldn’t need to be so nice; and conversely, the highly competent person doesn’t have to be nice—and may even have reached the top by stepping on others."