Category: Management

Quiet Author Founds Start-Up to Help Introverts

(p. 10) Last month, 50 executives from General Electric gathered on the fourth floor of a SoHo office building for a “fireside chat” with Susan Cain, the author of the 2012 book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” which has sold two million copies worldwide.
. . .
A talk about “Quiet” she gave at a 2012 TED conference has been viewed more than 11.6 million times online. And she has delivered more than 100 speeches since then, sometimes commanding five figures for an appearance. (She also does pro bono work, she stressed.)
. . .
“Writing a book is rewarding,” Mr. Godin said he told her. “But it doesn’t change most people’s lives.”
And so Ms. Cain, who has been coached in public speaking, is now promoting Quiet Revolution, a for-profit company she has started that is focused on the work, education and lifestyle of introverts, which she defines roughly as people who get their psychic energy from quiet reflection and solitude (not to be confused with people who are shy and become anxious in unfamiliar social situations). Extroverts, by contrast, thrive in crowds and have long been prized in society for their ability to command attention. Many people share attributes of both, she said.
Ms. Cain and Paul Scibetta, a former senior executive at J. P. Morgan Chase whom she met when they both worked at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in the 1990s, have set up a Quiet Leadership Institute, working with executives at organizations like NASA, Procter & Gamble and General Electric to help them better understand the strengths of their introverted employees.
. . .
Mike Erwin, a former professor of leadership and psychology at West Point who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, invited Ms. Cain to speak to cadets in 2012 after he finished reading “Quiet.” He didn’t understand students who were reticent to talk in class or who wanted to explore every risk before jumping into a task. “I’m an extrovert,” he said. “And, as I look back at my career, I wrote off a lot of people who didn’t speak up or want to be in charge.”
In May, he was appointed chief executive of the Quiet Leadership Institute, where he is helping project managers at NASA learn how to lead teams populated with introverts (a common personality type in science). At Procter & Gamble, Mr. Erwin said, executives in research and development are exploring, among other things, how to help introverts become more confident leaders.

For the full story, see:
LAURA M. HOLSON. “Instigating a ‘Quiet Revolution’ of Introverts.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sun., JULY 26, 2015): 10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 25, 2015, and has the title “Susan Cain Instigates a ‘Quiet Revolution’ of Introverts.”)

The Cain book mentioned above, is:
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012.

Give Entrepreneurs “the Solitude They Need to Think Creatively”

(p. R1) . . . , numerous entrepreneurs and CEOs are either self-admitted introverts or have so many introvert qualities that they are widely thought to be introverts. These include Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, Larry Page, co-founder of Google, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, Marissa Mayer, current president and CEO of Yahoo, and Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.

As entrepreneurs, introverts succeed because they “create and lead companies from a very focused place,” says Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” and founder of Quiet Revolution, a website for introverts.
. . .
Many people believe that introverts, by definition, are shy and extroverts are outgoing. This is incorrect. Introverts, whom experts say comprise about a third of the population, get their energy and process information internally. Some may be shy and some may be outgoing, but they all prefer to spend time alone or in small groups, and often feel drained by a lot of social interaction or large groups.
. . .
Introverts not only have the stamina to spend long periods alone–they love it. “Good entrepreneurs are able to give themselves the solitude they need to think creatively and originally–to create something where there once was nothing,” says Ms. Cain. “And this is just how introverts are wired.”
. . .
While extroverts are networking, promoting or celebrating success, introverts have their “butt on the seat,” says Laurie Helgoe, author of “Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life is Your Hidden Strength” and assistant professor in the department of psychology and human services at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, W.Va. “An introvert on his (p. R2) or her own is going to enjoy digging in and doing research–and be able to sustain him- or herself in that lonely place of forging your own way.”
They don’t need external affirmation
Another important characteristic of introverts is that they tend to rely on their own inner compass–not external signals–to know that they’re making the right move or doing a good job. That can give them an edge in several ways.
For instance, they generally don’t look for people to tell them whether an idea is worth pursuing. They tend to think it through before speaking about it to anybody, and rely on their own judgment about whether it’s worth pursuing.
With extroverts, the need for social stimulation, for getting the idea in front of other people, can make them leap before they’ve thought something out, Ms. Buelow says. “It’s very important for them to get outside feedback and motivation.” Feedback is great, of course. But at a certain point a leader needs to decide on a plan and execute it.
Following their own compass also helps introverts stay focused on a venture. Extroverts can get sidetracked by seeking external validation, such as awards or media attention for a project, which can divert them from their main goals. While introverts welcome external validation, they won’t let it define them or distract them. “It’s about keeping the long-haul perspective,” Ms. Buelow says.
What’s more, because introverts aren’t looking for outside events to validate their plans–or themselves–they don’t take setbacks as personally as extroverts. Somebody who relies on external affirmation tends to take setbacks personally and may get dispirited if the company hits a rough patch.
. . .
. . . , in a 2009 study looking at how introverts and extroverts approached an “effortful task,” Maya Tamir, director of the Emotion and Self-Regulation Laboratory at Boston College and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, found that extroverts sought a happy state while completing the task, while introverts preferred to maintain a neutral emotional state.
“The introverts’ happy space is a quieter space with less interruptions,” says Ms. Buelow. “They won’t have that overstimulation.”

For the full commentary, see:
ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN. “The Case for the Introverted Entrepreneur; Conventional wisdom says you need to be an extrovert to start a successful business. That’s wrong for all sorts of reasons.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., August 24, 2015): R1-R2.
(Note: ellipses added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the title “Why Introverts Make Great Entrepreneurs; Conventional wisdom says you need to be an extrovert to start a successful business. That’s wrong for all sorts of reasons.”)

The Cain book mentioned in the commentary quoted above is:
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012.

The Helgoe book mentioned in the commentary quoted above is:
Helgoe, Laurie. Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2013.

The Maya Tamir article mentioned above, is:
Tamir, Maya. “Differential Preferences for Happiness: Extraversion and Trait-Consistent Emotion Regulation.” Journal of Personality 77, no. 2 (April 2009): 447-70.

Science Is a Process, Not a Set of Settled Conclusions

(p. A11) Are there any phrases in today’s political lexicon more obnoxious than “the science is settled” and “climate-change deniers”?
The first is an oxymoron. By definition, science is never settled. It is always subject to change in the light of new evidence. The second phrase is nothing but an ad hominem attack, meant to evoke “Holocaust deniers,” those people who maintain that the Nazi Holocaust is a fiction, ignoring the overwhelming, incontestable evidence that it is a historical fact.
. . .
. . . , the release of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in 2009 showed climate scientists concerned with the lack of recent warming and how to “hide the decline.” The communications showed that whatever the emailers were engaged in, it was not the disinterested pursuit of science.
Another batch of 5,000 emails written by top climate scientists came out in 2011, discussing, among other public-relations matters, how to deal with skeptical editors and how to suppress unfavorable data. It is a measure of the intellectual corruption of the mainstream media that this wasn’t the scandal of the century. But then again I forget, “the science is settled.”

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “The Unsettling, Anti-Science Certitude on Global Warming; Climate-change ‘deniers’ are accused of heresy by true believers; That doesn’t sound like science to me.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 31, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date July 30, 2015.)

Institutional Improvements Can Sometimes Be Designed, Rather than Only Spontaneous

A distinguished school of libertarian and neo-Austrian economic thought argues, following F.A. Hayek, that institutional improvements only arise from spontaneous order, and never from conscious design. There is something to their argument, but the designs of Alvin Roth provide counter-examples.

(p. A13) Mr. Roth’s work has been to discover the most efficient and equitable methods of matching and implement them in the world. He writes with verve and style, describing many market malfunctions–from aboriginal tribes in Australia arranging marriages for children not yet born to judges bending every rule in the book to hire law clerks years before they have graduated from law school–and how we ought to think about them.

Mr. Roth’s approach contrasts with standard debates over free markets versus government regulation. We want markets to be thick, quick, timely and trustworthy, but without careful design markets can become thin, slow, ill-timed and dangerous for the honest. The solution to these problems is unlikely to be regulation legislated from on high. Instead what Mr. Roth practices is nuanced market design created mostly by market participants. Mr. Roth found, for example, that even though the problems in the market for gastroenterologists and law clerks looked the same (hiring started years before schooling ended), the solutions had to be subtly different because of differences in culture, history and norms.

For the full review, see:
ALEX TABARROK. “BOOKSHELF; The Designer of Markets; In some markets, price isn’t the determining factor. You can choose to go to Harvard, but Harvard has to choose to accept you first.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., JUNE 16, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 15, 2015, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Matchmaker, Make Me a Market; In some markets, price isn’t the determining factor. You can choose to go to Harvard, but Harvard has to choose to accept you first.”)

The book under review is:
Roth, Alvin E. Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2015.

Intel Entrepreneur Gordon Moore Was “Introverted”

(p. A11) “In the world of the silicon microchip,” [Thackray, Brock and Jones] write, “Moore was a master strategist and risk taker. Even so, he was not especially a self-starter.” Mr. Moore possesses many of the stereotypical character traits of an introverted Ph.D. chemist: working for hours on his own, avoiding small talk and favoring laconic statements. Indeed, as a manager he often avoided conflict, even when a colleague’s errors persisted in plain sight.
. . .
After two leadership changes at Fairchild in 1967 and 1968, which unsettled its talented employees, Mr. Moore departed to help found a new firm, Intel, with a fellow Fairchild engineer, the charming and brilliant Robert Noyce (another of the “traitorous eight”). They also brought along a younger colleague, the confrontational and hyper-energetic Andy Grove. Each one of the famous triumvirate would serve as CEO at some point over the next three decades.

For the full review, see:
SHANE GREENSTEIN. “BOOKSHELF; Silicon Valley’s Lawmaker; What became Moore’s law first emerged in a 1965 article modestly titled ‘Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits’.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 26, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed names, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 25, 2015.)

The book under review is:
Thackray, Arnold, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones. Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Canny Outlaws in Education and at Hogwarts

(p. 174) Interestingly, the union members in some of the schools run by Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school group with a solid educational track record, did not boycott the benchmark tests. The reason that they refused is revealing. Green Dot’s exams are created by a panel of teachers from its schools and are regularly reviewed for effectiveness and modified by the teachers. The tests have more credibility with the teachers than the tests for the rest of the district’s schools, which are written by an outside company, imposed from above, and don’t mesh with year-round schedules.
The quiet resistance of canny outlaws and the vocal protests of others are signs that teachers dedicated to preserving and encouraging discretion and wise judgment are not going quietly into the night. These teachers are not people who simply rebel at rules or who are just committed to their own ways of doing things. They are committed to the aims of teaching, a practice whose purpose is to educate students to be knowledgeable, thoughtful, reasonable, reflective, and humane. And they are brave enough to act on these commitments, taking the risks necessary to find ways around the rules. We suspect that many of our readers are canny outlaws themselves or know people who are: practitioners who have the know-how and courage to bend or sidestep for-(p. 175)mulaic procedures or rigid scripts or bureaucratic requirements in order to accomplish the aims of their practice. We admire canny outlaws in the stories we tell ourselves about such people and even in some of our children’s stories. We read the Harry Potter tales to them because Harry, Ron, and Hermione are canny outlaws who gain the guts and skill to break school rules and stand up to illegitimate power in order to do the right thing to achieve the aims of wizardry, indeed to save the practice itself.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Insights More Likely When Mood Is Positive and Distractions Few

If insights are more likely in the absence of distractions, then why are business executives so universally gung-ho on imposing on their workers the open office space layouts that are guaranteed to maximize distractions?

(p. C7) We can’t put a mathematician inside an fMRI machine and demand that she have a breakthrough over the course of 20 minutes or even an hour. These kinds of breakthroughs are too mercurial and rare to be subjected to experimentation.

We are, however, able to study the phenomenon more generally. Enter John Kounios and Mark Beeman, two cognitive neuroscientists and the authors of the “The Eureka Factor.” Messrs. Kounios and Beeman focus their book on the science behind insights and how to cultivate them.
As Mr. Irvine recognizes, studying insights in the lab is difficult. But it’s not impossible. Scientists have devised experiments that can provoke in subjects these kinds of insights, ones that feel genuine but occur on a much smaller scale.
. . .
The book includes some practical takeaways of how to improve our odds of getting insights as well. Blocking out distractions can create an environment conducive to insights. So can having a positive mood. While many of the suggestions contain caveats, as befits the delicate nature of creativity, ultimately it seems that there are ways to be more open to these moments of insight.

For the full review, see:
SAMUEL ARBESMAN. “Every Man an Archimedes; Insights can seem to appear spontaneously, but fully formed. No wonder the ancients spoke of muses.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 23, 2015): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 22, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Kounios, John, and Mark Beeman. The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. New York: Random House, 2015.

Too Many Rules Results in “Adherence Instead of Audacity”

(p. 159) . . . Wong found a distinct downside to this division of labor. “Put all the directed requirements together and the life of a company commander is spent executing somebody else’s good ideas.” Too many rules and requirements “removes all discretion” and stifles the development of flexible officers, resulting in “reactive instead of proactive thought, compliance instead of creativity, and adherence instead of audacity.” These are not the kinds of officers the army needs in unpredictable and quickly changing situations where specific orders are absent and military protocol is unclear. The army is creating cooks, says Wong, leaders who are “quite adept at carrying out a recipe,” rather than chefs who can “look at the ingredients available to them and create a meal.” Wong found a number of top brass who agreed. Retired General Wesley Clark observed that senior army leaders have “gone too far in over-planning, over-prescribing, and over-controlling.” The consequence, according to retired General Frederick Kroesen, is that “initiative is stymied, and decision making is replaced by waiting to be told…. There is no more effective way to destroy the leadership potential of young officers and noncommissioned officers than to deny them opportunities to make decisions appropriate for their assignments.”
The same thing can be said about public school teachers.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: first ellipsis added; second in original.)

Officers Used to Learn from Trial and Error in Training Their Units

(p. 156) In the army, wartime experience is considered the best possible teacher, at least for those who survive the first weeks. Wong found another good one–the practice junior officers get while training their units. The decisions these officers have to make as teachers help develop the capacity for the judgment they will need on the battlefield. But Wong discovered that in the 1980s, the army had begun to restructure training in ways that had the opposite results.
Traditionally, company commanders had the opportunity to plan, (p. 157) execute, and assess the training they gave their units. “Innovation,” Wong explained, “develops when an officer is given a minimal number of parameters (e.g., task, condition, and standards) and the requisite time to plan and execute the training. Giving the commanders time to create their own training develops confidence in operating within the boundaries of a higher commander’s intent without constant supervision.” The junior officers develop practical wisdom through their teaching of trainees, but only if their teaching allows them discretion and flexibility. Just as psychologist Karl Weick found studying firefighters, experience applying a limited number of guidelines teaches soldiers how to improvise in dangerous situations.
Wong’s research showed that the responsibility for training at the company level was being taken away from junior officers. First, the time they needed was being eaten away by “cascading requirements” placed on company commanders from above. There was, Wong explained, such a “rush by higher headquarters to incorporate every good idea into training” that “the total number of training days required by all mandatory training directives literally exceeds the number of training days available to company commanders. Company commanders somehow have to fit 297 days of mandatory requirements into 256 available training days.” On top of this, there were administrative requirements to track data on as many as 125 items, including sexual responsibility training, family care packets, community volunteer hours, and even soldiers who had vehicles with Firestone tires.
Second, headquarters increasingly dictated what would be trained and how it would be trained, essentially requiring commanders “to follow a script.” Commanders lost the opportunity to analyze their units’ weaknesses and plan the training accordingly. Worse, headquarters took away the “assessment function” from battalion commanders. Certifying units as “ready” was now done from the top.
The learning through trial and error that taught officers how to improvise, Wong found, happens when officers try to plan an action, (p. 158) then actually execute it and reflect on what worked and what didn’t. Officers who did not have to adhere to strict training protocols were in an excellent position to learn because they could immediately see results, make adjustments, and assess how well their training regimens were working. And most important, it was this kind of experience that taught the commanders how to improvise, which helped them learn to be flexible, adaptive, and creative on the battlefield. Wong was concerned about changes in the training program because they squeezed out these learning experiences; they prevented officers from experiencing the wisdom-nurturing cycle of planning, executing the plan, assessing what worked and didn’t, reevaluating the original plan, and trying again.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: italics in original.)

More Detailed Rules Reduce Ability to Improvise, and Result in More Deaths

(p. 41) How do wildland firefighters make decisions in life-threatening situations when, for instance, a fire explodes and threatens to engulf the crew? They are confronted with endless variables, the most intense, high-stakes atmosphere imaginable, and the need to make instant decisions. Psychologist Karl Weick found that traditionally, successful firefighters kept four simple survival guidelines in mind:
1. Build a backfire if you have time.
2. Get to the top of the ridge where the fuel is thinner, where there are stretches of rock and shale, and where winds usually fluctuate.
3. Turn into the fire and try to work through it by piecing together burned-out stretches.
4. Do not allow the fire to pick the spot where it hits you, because it will hit you where it is burning fiercest and fastest.
But starting in the mid-1950s, this short list of survival rules was gradually replaced by much longer and more detailed ones. The current lists, which came to exceed forty-eight items, were designed to specify in greater detail what to do to survive in each particular circumstance (e.g., fires at the urban-wildland interface).
Weick reports that teaching the firefighters these detailed lists was a factor in decreasing the survival rates. The original short list was a general guide. The firefighters could easily remember it, but they knew it needed to be interpreted, modified, and embellished based on (p. 42) circumstance. And they knew that experience would teach them how to do the modifying and embellishing. As a result, they were open to being taught by experience. The very shortness of the list gave the firefighters tacit permission– even encouragement– to improvise in the face of unexpected events. Weick found that the longer the checklists for the wildland firefighters became, the more improvisation was shut down. Rules are aids, allies, guides, and checks. But too much reliance on rules can squeeze out the judgment that is necessary to do our work well. When general principles morph into detailed instructions, formulas, unbending commands– wisdom substitutes– the important nuances of context are squeezed out. Better to minimize the number of rules, give up trying to cover every particular circumstance, and instead do more training to encourage skill at practical reasoning and intuition.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Jury Out on Whether Bossless Zappos Will Succeed

(p. A1) Brironni Alex was so good at answering telephone calls and emails from customers at Zappos.com Inc. that the company promoted her to customer-service manager.
But when the online retailer adopted a management philosophy called Holacracy, she lost her job title and responsibility for performance reviews. Since the end of April, Zappos has zero managers to oversee employees, who are supposed to decide largely for themselves how to get their work done.
“I am managing the work, but before I was managing the worker,” says Ms. Alex, 26 years old, now part of a team implementing Holacracy throughout Zappos. Ex-managers haven’t been guaranteed another job and could have their pay cut next year, though Zappos says that is unlikely. Ms. Alex says the changes give her more time for a workplace diversity committee and to perform on the Zappos dance team.
The shake-up has been jarring even for a company famous for doing things differently. Earlier this month, Zappos said about 14%, or 210, of its roughly 1,500 employees had decided Holacracy wasn’t for them, and they will leave the retailer.
They were offered at least three months of severance pay by Zappos Chief Executive Tony Hsieh, who wrote in a 4,700-word memo in March that the company hadn’t “made fast enough progress towards self-management.”
. . .
(p. A10) Mr. Hsieh, 41, concedes that Holacracy “takes time and a lot of trial and error.” He still has faith that the system empowers employees “to act more like entrepreneurs” and stokes faster “idea flow,” collaboration and innovation, he says.
. . .
Research shows that the value of flat organizations is mixed, though highly motivated workers who thrive on creativity generally are best suited for going bossless.
The results at Zappos will be watched closely because it has long embraced employee independence even while striving to meet exacting customer-service standards. “Delivering Happiness,” a 2010 book by Mr. Hsieh, was a best seller and spawned a management consulting firm.
. . .
“They are adopting Holacracy as more how to get to the next level, as opposed to how to fix something broken in their system, which is actually one of their unique challenges,” says Brian Robertson, 36, the inventor of Holacracy. The term comes from the word “holarchy,” coined by writer Arthur Koestler for self-organizing units that combine to form a larger organization.

For the full story, see:
RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN. “Going Bossless Backfires at Zappos.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 21, 2015): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is MAY 20, 2015, and has the title “At Zappos, Banishing the Bosses Brings Confusion.”)