Principles of Failure

Moving

2011-11-27T13:09:00.000-08:00

When I started this blog a lot of experienced bloggers told me I should just get my own domain. It's cheap, easy and provides more creative control.

I wasn't sure at the time, but now I know they were right. I finally understand.

So, from now on I'll be blogging at principlesoffailure.com.

Same great content, even better site. Check it out.

Are Better Algorithms the Solution to Information Overload?

2011-09-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

As a young child my grandfather would take me to the dump with him and let me wander through the piles of rubbish while he unloaded our trash. Of course we never brought anything but worthless garbage to the dump but I always found a few useful items in other people's waste to take home with us.

Sometimes surfing the internet feels like going to the dump with my grandfather again. I climb over piles and piles of garbage looking for the good stuff.

The promise and curse of the internet is an abundance of information. So much information is available it's not uncommon to hear people referring to this wealth as "information overload." Most often we're not overwhelmed by information, we are overwhelmed by sifting through all the junk trying to find what we want.

One of the early attempts to structure the vast online information landscape was Slashdot (1997), a social bookmarking site that allows users to comment on and vote up popular stories. Following Slashdot, sites like StumbleUpon (2001), del.icio.us (2003), Digg (2004) and Reddit (2005) followed similar methodologies.

These sites allow users to see what other people think is good, noteworthy or worthwhile. What they don’t do is personalize their recommendations to each user. Everyone who visits the site sees exactly the same recommendations.

Today, hundreds of cutting edge applications are taking advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning--as well as a boom in online social networks--to create even more effective ways of curating our information.

Early Approaches

Before we ever had an internet people were telling us what we would like and what we should do. Reviews of plays, books and movies were popular ways of figuring out what was worthwhile. As

America

became more mobile travel guides like Michelin provided advice on where to stay and what to eat while on vacation.

These reviews provided a professional opinion but of the least personalized type. The advice was the same no matter who was reading it and was based on the experiences of a cadre of elite experts. Popular opinion was used when available but few venues provided measurable data. Movie theater receipts and record sales were two notable exceptions.

The explosion of connectedness facilitated by the internet however, allows for collaboration and democratization as never before. Rather than recommendations from a handful of elites, we can crowdsource recommendations from the billions of people with access to the internet.

We can get restaurant recommendations that aggregate the combined wisdom and experiences of thousands of people with sites like UrbanSpoon, Zagat and the new Dinevore. These sites use user-generated information to make recommendations (though Zagat still uses professional critics too).

Like box office blockbusters and “Top 40” hits, review sites which rely on user interaction tell us what's popular but not necessarily what we are personally going to like. The whole appeal of recommendations is to find more of the good stuff and avoid the garbage. But what if the garbage is popular? In other words, what if we are in the minority? How do we find the things we like?

Predicting Future Happiness

Knowing what we're going to like is a tough nut to crack. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert elaborates on how difficult it is in his excellent book, Stumbling on Happiness. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding happiness.

Dan Gilbert claims everyone is bad at knowing what will make us happy in the future, yet we constantly engage in this predictive activity. Not merely for ourselves but for others as well. Whether we're entrepreneurs attempting to make a product people will like or a romantic partner trying to endear ourselves to our lover, we are making predictions about what will please someone else.

Ultimately all of these recommendation systems are trying to do the same thing, predict future pleasure. When prediction systems work well we're thrilled with the recommendation. We go to a restaurant we've never been to before and we love it, we see a movie we knew nothing about and it blows us away.

The problem with using aggregated data is that it frequently misses the point. Sometimes we go to a restaurant for all the wrong reasons; to make someone else happy or send social signals. How many people have eaten at Sardi's for reasons other than the quality of the food or had dinner at Masa as a way of displaying their wealth and status?

What we really need is a structure that takes human bias and subjectivity out of the system, a way to reduce the noise automatically, even mechanically, and see patterns in the way people behave. The computational power and consolidated data available on the internet provides a rich soil for such fruit.

More Complicated Tools

Some recommendations are mechanical in nature. Amazon recommends Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children because you bought Night Circus and other people who bought Night Circus also bought Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

As opposed to the popularity contest of the "I liked it so you'll like it too" recommendation system, purely mechanical systems follow the "this goes with that" principle. No matter how unpopular your particular niche interest is, people with the same taste reveal implied recommendations through their purchases or viewing habits.

Last.fm is another site that looks at revealed preferences. It recommends music by asking you to pick an artist or song you already like. It matches the music you said you liked with music other people who enjoy that music also like. People who like James Taylor for example, also like Jim Croce.

This type of algorithm-based recommendation was the first to really make customized recommendations. You may not like Jim Croce, but it only recommended him because you told the algorithm something about yourself--that you liked James Taylor.

Everyone who goes to Amazon or Last.fm get recommendations specific to their tastes as expressed by some input. But everyone who buys that book or selects that song will get the exact same recommendation. In this way it is somewhat customized but not quite personalized.

Bundle is a recommendation site that let's you get a little more specific. It uses aggregated credit card data along with demographic information about the card holder to build mechanical recommendations for products and services. Users can filter their recommendations by specifying the demographic category they fit into and then seeing what similar people bought.

The Ultimate in Personalization

In order for recommendations to accurately predict what you will like, sites need to know a lot more about you. Dan Gilbert concludes his book with the advice that we will be happiest if we follow the recommendations of people who are similar to us. Most of us surround ourselves with people we share interests with and call them friends.

Not surprisingly, as social networking sites became popular people began looking to them for recommendations. These sites provided the crowdsourcing benefits of aggregated input with the customization of being pulled from people similar to ourselves. Surely the websites, movies and music being recommended on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ would be the most accurate.

Aside from knowing how far your high school buddy ran this morning or what he had for breakfast, one of the benefits of social networks is the ability to reduce the internet to a manageable size. Friends acting as curators of the internet naturally recommend things they find interesting. And because our friends are likely to have the same tastes we do, we'll probably find them interesting too.

This combines the curation and up voting aspect of social bookmarking sites with the personalization of our specific network of friends allowing (theoretically) the recommendations we received to be uberspecific to our tastes.

Did I hear a chuckle? Anyone who's been on social media knows it hasn't worked out that way. The logic was sound but didn't take into consideration how our behavior changes online. When developing friendships was constrained to people we personally met and it grew organically from shared interests our friends were a good reflection of our preferences and interests.

But in the online social world things are different. We "friend" people we knew when we were younger but haven't been in touch with in decades, we connect with people at work for political reasons that have nothing to do with shared interests, we follow people because they follow us and following back seems like the right thing to do.

In other words, online friendships mean little when it comes to analyzing our preferences and social media curation is pretty much a joke.

Even under the best of circumstances I wouldn't recommend the same thing to all my friends just because I liked it. If I know my friends well enough to know their preferences I would only recommend things I thought they would like. And those recommendations would be different for different people.

What are the Best Algorithms Now?

The most personalized recommendations will be those which are able to take into account a whole host of factors. Not just what book you bought today, but all the books you've bought in the past and how much you liked them. It will take into consideration which books people who have preferences similar to yours have liked (whether you are friends with them or not).

That's what GoodReads is doing. You tell the site which books you've read and how much you liked them and it matches your library with libraries similar to yours so you can find books you haven't read that those people liked. It creates a specific profile of you so recommendations are different for everyone based on their specific reading history.

One of the most advanced movie recommendation engines is run by Netflix which uses factors such as how much your preferences have changed over time and how likely you are to overrate a good movie after seeing several good movies in a row. The downside is, because these systems are built entirely on your preferences they need you to rate a lot of books and movies before they can accurately predict what you will like.

Pandora Radio on the other hand, creates a profile of your preferences and then "learns" what type of music you'll like by seeing which songs you give a "thumbs up" or a "thumbs down" to. Pandora is built on an index of song characteristics called the "Music Genome Project" which has been so successful many new sites have attempted to map other "genomes."

Jinni recommends movies based on its Movie Genome and StartupGenome attempts to gauge the viability of a startup company based on certain characteristics of its genome. But in many ways these attempts still rely on what people say they like. The real advancements in recommendations will be when machines will be able to learn what our preferences are without us having to tell them. The highest rate of error in prediction technology is the difference between what people say they like and what they actually do.

Future Advancements

We will get this right. It's only a matter of time before artificial intelligence advances sufficiently to predict our future happiness at least as well as we can. In fact, AI will probably be better at it since it will be based on the actual outcomes of choices rather than on a biased perception. But they will only be as good as the data they have to work with.

It will require a lot more information than is currently available including how our personal thought processes works and when we're likely to be lying to ourselves. For example, I may say I'm adventurous when it comes to eating but every time I go to a Filipino restaurant I get something safe. I can continue to rationalize why I got the crispy pata yet again and probably convince myself I'll try the balut another time, but the data of my historical choices reveals my true preferences. (I've never tried balut.)

This collection of preference data is already taking place online. Every time we look something up on Google it stores the search. Recommendation engines (if given access) could build a picture of the things we're interested in by using this data. That's why police detectives always seize suspects' computers and analyze their browsing history. Were the suspects searching for "ways to poison someone with household products" or "how to rob a bank"?

I'm not saying this to be alarmist or to suggest the internet knows too much about us. Quite the contrary, I think it needs to know much more. The more our thought processes get recorded online the better the recommendations will be.

If you're interested in finding out more about AI and Machine Learning, Stanford is offering online classes this fall for free. Go to http://www.ai-class.com to register. But hurry, classes start October 10.

I'll see you there. Or maybe not, last I heard over seventy thousand people had registered to take the course. I'm glad I don't have to grade those papers.

America’s Economic Lottery: A Love Story

2011-01-11T20:00:00.001-08:00

[photo by Kirstea]

You can also listen to this post as a podcast below:

This is a story of unrequited love, the story of a lopsided romance. It’s about a man who cherished an idea so deeply he could not see the truth, a man so enamored with the love story in his mind he could not perceive reality. It’s a tragedy from one perspective--as all love stories ultimately are--but it’s also a story of rebirth as illusion gives way to reality.

This is my story. And my erstwhile lover…well, you’ll meet her momentarily. She was both my muse and my demon, my inspiration and my condemnation. You see, every once in a while you meet someone so attractive, so alluring and radiant, so surprisingly blunt they consume your thoughts. They make sense of a chaotic world and make you feel good about yourself. They make your chest swell with pride before you even realize you’re doing it.

“It was all within my grasp, all within my control.”

I was twelve or thirteen when I fell in love with neoclassical economics. She was so elegant, so mature and wise. She was youthful but had an ancient soul. She explained the world to me and I believed it--every bit of it--and it clarified why the world was the way it was. She showed me the future, a land of promise and opportunity, just waiting for someone who really wanted to take it. It was all within my grasp, all within my control. I was limited only by desire. All my efforts would be rewarded.

When I was discouraged, thoughts of her comforted me. When I was successful I could hear her effusive praise. She was the smiling hand that patted my back, the sparkling eyes full of pride. She was the shoulder to assuage me, the hand that cradled my defeated head.

Eventually she let me down. Or rather I let myself down. I realized the world wasn’t what I thought it was when I was with her. Ultimately I realized she was never really what I had made her out to be. Yes, she was elegant and full of promise but the love was never real, the woman was a creation. I misinterpreted her and made her into something she was not. All evidence to the contrary I continued to believe she loved me back and that distorted my thinking.

And that’s how it is with love, you want to believe it so you do.

Walter’s passion

When Walter started a graphic illustration company he didn’t expect to become rich, famous or influential, he was simply doing what he’d seen his peers do and what people in America had always done. He was making a living. In his mind that meant opening a business—if you were fortunate you succeeded, if not you failed and had to start all over again.

To Walter, America had always been an agricultural society where people grew up understanding a simple formula: grow more than you consume, sell the surplus, reinvest in what worked, and pray for good weather. As the economy transitioned into an industrial machine the vagaries of weather patterns mattered less and less. Where previously, prosperity had been closely linked to factors outside of our control, the industrial revolution convinced us our success was completely within our own power to determine.

When Walter’s company failed to attract clients and bills continued to pile up it became apparent his business was a failure. If we believe the deterministic premise above we must conclude it was his own fault. Walter was not the victim of a draught or a late-season frost. He had failed in some fundamental business skill. He had improperly marketed his services, taken on too much debt, expanded too quickly or failed to provide value-added services.

“We see things in successful people, things we don’t see in ourselves.”

But failure was not the end of the road. Determined to succeed he collected himself, dusted himself off, relocated, regrouped and opened another business. He was presumably smarter this time--having learned from his own mistakes--and more business savvy. But his second company fared no better than his first.

There are certain things we see in successful people, attributes we don’t see in ourselves. We look for these missing pieces, these essential ingredients to triumph, and find them in passion, desire, and self-discipline. We tell ourselves, those who succeed are those who want it the most or who force themselves to put in long hours, endure hardship and turn back the approaching tide of failure by sheer force of will.

Everyone will tell you it’s that fire in the belly which gives successful people a divine claim on victory. You cannot justly withhold success from someone who wants it so badly it infects every fiber of their being. As romantic as this notion seems, as right as it feels to our soul, it’s just not true. It is neither passion nor skill alone which guarantees success.

The Library of Smith

From around 300-50 BCE the Library of Alexandria was the repository of all written knowledge and was alleged to have contained every published work of the time. Today the largest library in the world is the United States Library of Congress which holds almost 22 million books but still only claims to preserve a “representative sample” of all published material rather than every book ever published.

Large as these examples are they are infinitesimal compared to a theoretical library conceived by Daniel Dennett. The Library of Babel, as Dennett describes it, contains not books actually written but every book it is possible to write. It contains volumes of every combination of English words possible and therefore, by definition, contains every book ever written and every book which will be written in the future, as well as billions of volumes of nonsense.

Building on Daniel Dennett’s conceptual Library of Babel, Eric Beinhocker uses the Library of Smith (named after the original economist Adam Smith) to represent the landscape of all possible business plans including every conceivable business idea.

“The really great ideas tower above the landscape as mountains rising from flat plains.”

Imagine each business plan were evaluated, rated and plotted on a near-infinite grid using height to represent usefulness. Many business plans would be useless blather but the good ones, the ones society could benefit from, would rise from the landscape of mediocrity. The really great ones would tower above the landscape as mountains rising from flat plains.

On the landscape of the Library of Smith, the winners are those which create a more efficient use of the world’s resources. When this happens the world is better off because less of its resources need to be used to meet people’s needs or alternately the same amount of resources can be used and improve the world’s condition.

The highest peaks in this landscape are the ideas which revolutionize how things are done, that turn conventional wisdom on its head and make Herculean leaps in productivity. These ideas make their discoverers rich but also make society much better off by providing a way to use resources most economically.

Exploring, discovering and inventing

To discover where the highest peaks are on the landscape of the Library of Smith let’s imagine we send out explorers with a simple mandate, find the highest ground. These economic explorers are placed randomly on the grid and simply look around them choosing to step toward a square higher than the one they are on. When there is no higher ground they stay put.

This simplistic exploration would allow us to get to a high state of efficiency but there would remain places which would be out of reach. Peaks surrounded by a lower ridgeline for example. Areas of localized super-performance would trap explorers because once at the peak a step in any direction would be downward.

To give our hypothetical society a better chance of reaching the highest, most economically efficient peaks, we need to prevent explorers from getting caught on intermediate ridgelines. Let’s modify our explorers' mandate. They will continue searching for the highest ground immediately around them, but every so often they will leap in a random direction.

“We want these explorers to succeed but we know many of them will fail, some miserably.”

Wherever these leaping explorers land they start looking again for higher ground. Models have shown this technique to be more effective in producing positive results but it also produces some catastrophic failures. Explorers leap into deep pits or from a relatively high position to a lower one. Still, the overall outcome is positive with more explorers finding previously unreachable peaks.

As a society we want these explorers to succeed because we all benefit from their discoveries. Unfortunately we cannot guarantee their success. In fact we know some of them will fail. And that’s the crux of the capitalistic dichotomy; it creates an economy which is wildly successful in the aggregate, but which requires a small number of people suffer miserably.

Predicting success

No one really knows which businesses are going to succeed. I mean that. No one. I have a friend who keeps the books for a flower shop which has been on the brink of failure for years. Several years ago, when she first started working there, my friend told me, “I’m going to start looking for another job. This place is going to be out of business in a month.”

The shop was in debt, had no inventory controls and had over-purchased underperforming supplies: baskets nobody wanted, miles of ribbon in off colors. The shopkeeper was constantly taking money out of the till for personal expenses and putting off paying business bills and rent. They were doing little to no advertising and provided no customer service. It was only a matter of time. Months perhaps, if not weeks.

But somehow the shop would survive crisis after crisis. It has for years. Whenever I see this friend, who still works for the same florist, she still tells me the store is about to close. Nothing has fundamentally changed about how the store is run over the years, they just seem to get an influx of orders when it’s crucial for their survival.

“No one can predict business success with confidence. No one.”

Now this is just one shop but I could tell you many more similar stories. Other stores that did everything wrong but somehow survived and I could tell you about plenty of stores which were well capitalized with a solid business plan but still didn’t make it. No one can predict business success confidently. Evidence of this is everywhere.

If success could be determined in advance venture capitalists would get the same return as U.S. Treasury bonds. There would be no stock market because everyone would dump the losers and buy the winners. Every investor has access to the same information, but some think company X will succeed, others think it will fail.

But if it’s not effort and passion and knowledge that determine success, why does it look that way? Why does the economy seem to reflect neoclassical theory? Because some people must suffer.

Choosing our glasses

It’s okay to think about suffering if we can assign it to personal failings; the person who doesn’t wear their seat belt, the one who eats raw chicken, the idiots who jump off tall buildings and try to deploy a parachute before hitting the ground. These people make choices which directly cause their own suffering and they get what they have coming. The glasses through which we view the world influence the policies we enact, the causes we support and the way we treat others.

So it makes a huge difference in our attitude whether we think business success is self-determined or random. If we believe success is as random as an explorer arbitrarily jumping onto a high peak we have compassion on the failed businessman. But if success is a product of our own behavior, the losers only get what they deserve. All events are interpreted by the lens through which it is observed.

It’s the same with love. It not only rejuvenates us and makes the world seem much more interesting, but it actually causes us to reshape our perception of events to conform to our beliefs. It literally blinds us to the truth by making it impossible for our brains to see our lover’s actions for what they are. It alters the shape of the lens through which we see the world.

“When attraction strikes, it resonates to our core.”

Who knows what forms our concept of the ideal theory or the ideal woman, what combination of youthful experiences makes us prefer fair skin over a deep tan or hesitant, stilted conversation over polished banter. But whatever shapes our preference for theories or mates must reside deep within us because when attraction strikes it resonates to our core.

Not some superficial attraction but one that works its way to the center of our heart. Subtly at first, invisible to the senses, but then we suddenly we realize we’re in love, that we have been for months and are just now becoming aware of it. Even when we know it’s not real, that the attraction was false and one-sided, the feelings are impossible to ignore. It’s a disease you can survive but never fully recover from. A sickness which only needs a hint of encouragement to return with full force.

We rarely think about these glasses of perception, they develop over time and the things we see through them just seem natural and right. But we can choose to see things differently. We can change our prescription if we want to, if we see a need to.

If at first you don’t succeed

After Walter failed three times you might think he’d get the hint, he wasn’t cut out to be in the animation business. But he started again and this time got a toe hold producing short cartoon features. Before long Walter Disney’s company was making money and becoming well known in the industry. Today The Walt Disney Company is a global empire and while Walter passed away in 1966, no one can dispute he was an extraordinary success.

And that’s the allure of neoclassical theory, the siren song that tells us we were right to believe in hard work and devotion as the determinants of success. I only have to hear her name to feel my body react. My heart races, my mood brightens, I become expectant--though for what I’m never quite sure.

“In order to see the world clearly I must forever fail.”

She says something innocuous to me and I turn it into a love song. I interpret everyday courtesy as a lover’s deference. It’s said perception defines reality but this is only partially true. Our perception does not define other people’s reality, but it does define our own.

I want it to be real, to feel my attraction reciprocated, to fulfill the romantic fantasies of loving looks and implied flirtations. To see the world so simply again, so wonderfully and purely explained. And I know I will never be free. We can reinterpret events so easily, see a compliment as a slight and vice versa depending on how we think the other person feels about us. And amazingly we can revise and reinterpret these memories well into the future as new information impresses itself upon us.

All it takes is a hint of success for me to believe in self-determination again, to think I was right to love her all along. Any crack of sunlight will cause me to believe in love again and I know that would be a mistake. In order to see the world clearly I must forever fail.

Don’t Look at Me

2010-11-03T18:51:00.001-07:00

[photo by Zanthia]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

My earliest memory is of visiting my great-grandmother Herdegen. She lived in a trailer on my grandfather’s farm in Cheboygan, Michigan. It sat behind his house where the grass grew waist high until the stalks bent under their own weight, their dark green length bowing in apparent deference to a silver egg-like throne. Her home was a remnant of a travel trailer which she shared with a long-haired white lap dog who had a hard time keeping her hair.

The air inside was stale and pungent, the unventilated accumulation of lost dreams and sorrow. Though it was the middle of the day she was lying in her bed at the rear of her home.

“Come here,” she said. Her voice raspy and quavering.

While only in her eighties a hard life had taken its toll and she was pale, wrinkled, and frail. She spent all of her time in the trailer with the shades drawn. Inside it was cluttered and hadn’t been cleaned in years. My great-grandmother was not a messy person but her dog was, and evidence its rude nature was abundant.

"My mind ran toward it, not pulled by what was in front of me but propelled by what was behind."

She held out a hand to me. Not a soft and welcoming hand, not the smooth feminine hand one would appreciate being touched by, but a gnarled and bony hand, its knuckles swollen, its fingers curled in a prolonged muscle spasm. As I appraised the shaky appendage thrust toward me in the dim light, I saw she had feces smeared between her fingers. Whether hers or the dog's I didn't know but I recoiled at the thought of her grasping me in a warm embrace of human or canine excrement.

She was our oldest living relative at the time, the familial doyenne, and though her physical presence had long ago deteriorated the force of her influence was ever present. I looked at her hand and the crap between her bony fingers, I smelled the foulness of it rising over the accumulated stench of her filthy trailer and my mind froze. I could neither advance nor retreat. My legs, stiff as charcoal sticks, were immovable as I clung to my father’s pants. Looking away I hoped she would disappear, that I would wake up and realize I had simply wet my bed again.

“Come here,” I heard again in the back of my mind.

I stared at the carpet and didn’t move. I stared at the crumpled balls of tissue held rigid and tightly packed together with dried snot. I stared at the accumulation of generations of bread crumbs and the frayed edges of her old wool sweater draped over the arm of a chair she never used. And I stared at the white dog hairs that clung to everything like a light dusting of slender, straw-like snow. My mind ran toward it, not pulled by what was in front of me but propelled by what was behind.

My dad said something apologetic and leaned down to kiss her.

Child prodigy

I was never what I wanted to be. Never the object of my own adoration. Art was a refuge from my life and I poured my frustrations out on thick paper. When I was ten my mother convinced an art instructor at Kent State University to allow me to attend his class.

“I know every mother thinks their child is brilliant,” she told him. “But look at some of his work. You’ll see he has…” a gift, she wanted to say but dared not be so presumptuous. “You’ll see he has potential.”

At first I was thrilled to be among adults as an equal, our brooding teacher circling the minefield of easels, his floppy beret cocked just so. His path weaved in and between his students who were intent on a bowl of oranges and a draped sheet, gently cascading to the floor. He stopped to consider my rendition and admired my shading technique.

“Your fabric, it's so light, like a dust,” he gushed. “Very nice.” My cheeks flushed as I imagined my classmates’ jealous stares.

I reveled in my celebrity status as a child prodigy but the college scene proved too much for me. My fellow artists tried too hard to pull off an affected look of arrogance in shabby, second hand clothes, intentionally stained with the feckless evidence of our passion. One classmate’s threadbare jeans were marked just above the right knee with excess paint from the brushes she cleaned there; her slender arm, as she sketched and gazed, absentmindedly placed her pencil against her thigh as though to wipe it clean as well.

"No one is going to encourage you to develop your artistic abilities after the third grade."

The rebellion, the angst, the false gravitas and rhetorical posturing of my fellow students wore on me. And then there was the constant pressure to produce.

“Stop pestering me for my sketches,” I barked at my poor mother one evening. “How am I supposed to find time to sketch when I have to learn how to reduce an improper fraction?”

When my schoolwork began to suffer, art had to take a backseat to academics for a while. I dropped out of my college art class midway through the first semester.

It’s interesting to reflect on the fact so many companies are searching for creative talent these days, when so much emphasis is put on math in schools at the expense of creative pursuits. It's all well and good to occupy yourself with crayons and washable markers while you’re young, but no one is going to encourage you to develop your artistic abilities after the third grade.

Yet regardless of how distasteful it is, or how bad you are at it, every American will be forced to study math until they graduate from high school. This may have been what America needed in the 1950s--mathematicians and engineers--not now. Now computers are taking over math-intensive fields and we’re realizing the mistake of smothering generations of creative development.

Disillusionment

There’s always been a mystique surrounding the creative process. It seems the real masterpieces are produced by tortured individuals holed up in austere solitude, wracked by their own personal torment. They must be either pitied or revered, these creative geniuses. We read their thoughts, their manifest expressions of turmoil, with slack-jawed amazement and shed admiring tears at the product of their disturbed minds. We revel in our fortune at experiencing such artistic perfection and curse a fate which left us with such club-like hands and feeble minds.

My left brain constantly berates my right for its banality. Is it possible you could have an original thought you pathetic imposter? My portraits look like cartoon characters and my landscapes akin to a pitched roof house with four-paned windows framing a door, the sun shining brightly from the upper right corner in straight rays. I wish I’d never had a creative thought than these urges without hope of release.

"This may be one reason so many brilliant artists are frequently despondent."

Where is the originality, the spark? Who can see the world like Amedeo Modigliani or Paul Manship? If only I could paint like that or sculpt. Perhaps if my life were more miserable it would happen. But in the end I take the hint and pack up my childish tools—the charcoal sticks and gum erasers, the sketchbooks and canvases. I put them in boxes marked “Siddhartha’s art stuff” and move them from house to house unopened.

A 2008 study by Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes examined the relationship between depression and artistic expression. Their paper The Dark Side of Creativity reveals a link between negative emotions and increased creative output. "Historical and empirical data have linked artistic creativity to depression and other affective disorders" they write, but there is also evidence for "strong situational factors influencing creativity."

Essentially, they found social rejection increased artistic creativity and this effect was strongest in those with a biological propensity toward depression. This may be one reason so many brilliant artists are frequently despondent. Luminaries such as Henri Matisse and Francisco de Goya battled depression and, from what I understand, Hemingway and Dostoyevsky would occasionally feel blue as well.

Resurgence

In my mid-teens I again pursued collegiate art education, this time in Washington, D.C. Closer now to my classmates in age but no better able to relate to them. I had few friends. My social retardation however gave me plenty of time to work and my persistent social rejection fueled my creative drive. Yet for all my forward momentum I was rudderless and still uncertain whether I was more inclined to overthrow the government or paint a masterpiece.

On a class trip to the Corcoran Art Gallery I found what had been missing from my art education: conceptual art. The gallery was displaying a collection of works by Jonathan Borofsky and I was thrust into heaven. Staring at his giant, two-dimensional signature piece, Hammering Man, repetitively hammering without constructing anything, I saw my life. Counting, the three foot tall stack of lined notebook paper containing the meticulously handwritten numbers from 1 to 2,346,502, spoke to my soul.

But I was enthralled by another piece in one of the Corcoran's back rooms. It was a closed door from behind which emanated the muted sounds of intermittent hammering. I stood there for several minutes marveling at the subtle message of workmen laboring in anonymity and then smiled thinking how embarrassed I'd be if it turned out not to be a work of art at all but actual workmen constructing another display on the other side of the wall.

But that's also the beauty of conceptual art. It's not about the artist, it’s about the viewer. It’s about an emotional revelation, a reaction to the observation. It's conveying an idea that naturally wells up from within the observer, not imposed by the artist but facilitated by him. The true art is not in the presentation but in the conceptualization of the experience.

"Beauty does not have to be created, it exists for us to find."

When I left home at sixteen I thought, now is my chance to live an artist’s life. I took a bus to Chicago and lived on the street then traveled south and rented a small house in Augusta, Georgia. There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house. Not a chair or a table. I slept on a piece of cardboard on the bedroom floor. The nights were interminable, relentlessly hot and unbearably humid. I cultivated an artistic scowl and didn’t wash my hair.

I lived on a pittance reading by the light of a bare bulb and eating raw potatoes. In this artistic atmosphere I was determined to really break out. My intention was to produce a series of paintings, bold canvases in the primary colors, but after Blue I became disillusioned and cynical. I let my mind wander and began noticing art all around me. I saw the beauty in the mildew growing around the edges of the bathroom tile. I marveled at the rigidity of cracked linoleum and the ants which ate dead cockroaches off the floor.

Just as there is beauty in nature, conceptual art can occur organically and unintentionally. I began to see beauty in everything. Rusted air conditioners sitting in forlorn windows, the siding beneath them stained by the rusty discharge. Even bags of garbage whose contents provided the unconstructed but perfect composition of humanity’s discarded byproducts caught my eye. These were as random and enjoyable as the natural world, as fulfilling as a sunset or a mountain skyline. Beauty does not have to be created, it exists for us to find.

Finding art all around us

It was a catharsis of sorts, this realization of art’s omnipresence. My need to create, and to punish myself for my lack of ability to create, withdrew. I left art behind and became a missionary and after a couple years joined the Navy eventually finding myself in Pensacola, Florida as a flight instructor.

An acquaintance was moving and asked for my help which I was happy to provide. When I arrived at his house however I was overwhelmed by the scene. The small depression era house he and his wife were renting was barely 800 square feet. They don’t even make houses that small anymore. The owner, probably realizing the property’s only value was in the land, had let it deteriorate over the years and was renting it for just $300/mo.

It wasn’t the dilapidated condition of the house which amazed me however, it was the amount of detritus inside. Piles upon piles of old newspapers and fast food wrappers. A half used tube of chapstick whose contents had melted out onto the floor collected dog hair and dust balls. A lost sock and a Happy Meal toy sat next to a dusty jar of home canned peaches and I wanted to sit down and just take it all in.

"The earth spins on, I thought, wasting both the trivial and the rare."

I thought taking a break from helping them pack to stare at their cluttered house might make them uncomfortable so I came back later that evening and broke in when I knew they'd be gone. I stood alone in their abandoned refuse and studied it carefully. I thought of the one time I had seen my great-grandmother and remembered her immured in her lonely trailer. I pictured a frightened great-grandson refusing a tender embrace. I imagined the pain of such a moment in the twilight of one’s life.

I thought about that moment and then I imagined leaving her trailer and saw myself looking back over my shoulder to see an old woman with her hand outstretched. I presumed she would be in pain but instead I saw her mouth bent in a gentle smile and in her eyes understanding and contentment. I never saw her after that visit but I like to pretend she understood.

In the Pensacola evening I lay down upon the filthy floor of a squalid house and in the long light of evening’s protracted departure I looked at the lopsided ceiling fan coated in dust and the grease from a hundred smoky dinners and my eyes grew bleary at the beauty of it all. The earth spins on, I thought, wasting both the trivial and the rare.

“Time is the school in which we learn,” wrote Delmore Schwartz. “Time is the fire in which we burn.”* And so it is. All things will pass away, both the common and the divine; but we'll never know the beauty we don’t find.

*From “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day” Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge.

(15:08) Don’t Look at Me

2010-11-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

Don't Look At Me by Siddhartha Herdegen
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The Transformative Value of Fine Art

2010-10-22T16:50:00.001-07:00

[photo by wallyg]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

Americans are passionately, stupefyingly, electrifyingly in love with the rags-to-riches story. It speaks of limitless opportunity, the nobility of the downtrodden and of the inextinguishable hope we harbor for a better tomorrow. We crave these ideas, devour them like ice cream or buttered beets. They represent the apogee of American idealism and are the sine qua non of America's implicit promise: all your hard work will be rewarded.

Born in 1883, Chester Dale was the son of a Manhattan department store salesman. A contumacious, red-headed boy, he could not be constrained. His father sent him to Peekskill Military Academy for some structure but Chester spent most of his time and all his allowance at the nearby horse track. At the age of fourteen he decided Peekskill wasn't for him and made his way to New York City where he got a job on Wall Street as a runner.

"He had a passion for art and the wealth to acquire it."

The stock market wasn't all that different from the race track and he soon worked his way into a job as a broker and, by the age of 35, into a large fortune as well. This was the Roaring 20's and fortunes were being made overnight. He was one of the first to recognize how valuable public utilities could be and soon became a tycoon. Timing, as they say, is everything and Chester had it in spades. He made his money before the Great Depression and had the good fortune to hang onto it when the economy faltered and then fell.

His wife Maud had a passion for art and had piqued his interest in the French Masters years earlier. He began collecting famous French works and then his tastes expanded; in addition to Eugene Delacroix and Jacques-Louis David, Chester bought works by Renoir, Van Gogh and Monet. The catalog of his collection reads like that of a well-funded museum. He acquired modern works from Picasso and Matisse. Salvador Dali painted his portrait as did Diego Rivera and Guy Pène du Bois. He had a passion for art and the wealth to acquire it.

While many former men-of-means were liquidating their estates, Chester Dale was filling his Manhattan apartment with bargain-basement masterpieces. Between 1926 and 1936 Chester bought over 500 paintings and 30 sculptures. When space ran out in his Plaza Hotel apartment, he started filling a five storey mansion at 20 East 79th Street in New York City. During the dark night of America's economic collapse the art world had a new benefactor and his name was Chester Dale.

Shrewd love

But Chester was not just an art enthusiast, he was a skilled investor. With the help of his wife, an artist and art critic, he learned how to recognize works of lasting value. The pieces he acquired throughout his life were worth much more at the time of his death than he had paid for them. So while his collection helped both to conserve prominent, historic works of art and to support the work of living artists, it also served to build his personal fortune.

How good an investment is art? It's a difficult question to answer with art tastes and trends considered fickle at best. To attempt to authoritatively track art as an investment seems a fool's errand. But for several years two NYU professors from the Stern School of Business have been trying to answer that very question with some confidence. Michael Moses and Jiangping Mei looked at repeated sales of the same works of art dating back to the late 19^th Century. The result is the Mei Moses Fine Art Index.

"George Gershwin used to stare at one of Chester's prized Cezannes seeking inspiration."

The index now tracks the recorded sales of thousands of pieces of art and gives annualized returns for a number of art categories. In their latest report (July 2010), the Mei Moses All Art Index is up 13.4% since the end of 2009 with the Contemporary and Impressionist & Modernist Indices leading the way. The long term annualized returns for art are comparable to equities over the past fifty years with stocks narrowly beating out art 9.4% to 8.9%.

The major disadvantage to investing in art, as Mei and Moses point out in their 2002 paper Art as an Investment (.pdf), is the "heterogeneity of artworks and infrequency of trading." Unlike stocks, which trade continuously and behave as fungible commodities in the marketplace, each work of art is unique and can remain off the market for generations as it’s passed from heir to heir. Artwork tends to be cherished by its owners and treated as a part of the family. Chester Dale, who remained childless, at times referred to his paintings as "my children."

But its longevity and singularity is also the upside of owning art; you get to enjoy it. No one ever said, "Step into my study, I want to show you the 200 shares of Intel I just bought." A quality work of art however, can bring years of enjoyment to generations of family members and friends. It can be appreciated by houseguests and a source of endless conversation. George Gershwin used to stare at one of Chester's prized Cezannes seeking inspiration.

National Gallery of Art

Throughout his life Chester lent pieces to various galleries and museums but when he died in 1962 the bulk of it was given to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I took my daughters to see the Chester Dale exhibit a few weeks ago and it is absolutely extraordinary. The scope of the collection alone is awe inspiring. I tried to imagine what his houses must have looked like with all those magnificent pieces decorating various rooms, glass curio cases filled with delicate Hummels in between I suppose.

The National Gallery categorizes works and displays similar periods together, the East Building displaying 20^th Century artists and the West Building housing Renaissance through early 20^th Century works. Because Chester's collection spans these periods it was split between the two buildings, but this year, and through next July, the entire collection is on display on the ground floor of the West Building.

While Chester welcomed many guests into his home-turned-art-museum, the works he preserved and loved could not be enjoyed by the vast majority of humanity. It’s likely he left his collection to the National Gallery because, as one of the most visited art galleries in the world, so many more people would be able to appreciate the art he had collected during his lifetime. These inspirational and masterfully crafted works were too valuable to be seen by only a few.

"Its virtue is that it makes us feel good."

There’s something to be said for the transformative power of fine art. It’s in the definition of the term itself: “art which serves no practical purpose.” Why then do we have it? We have all seen buildings, furniture, automobiles, and even appliances which could be considered works of art. But in each of these cases they also have some function beyond their aesthetic beauty.

Fine art on the other hand, has no purpose aside from being a work of beauty which pleases the senses. Its virtue is that it makes us feel good. And humans have craved it from the earliest days of our existence. Sure, some cave drawings were communicative in nature and were intended to convey information. The fact we find them beautiful today may only be a function of improved communication technology. But even in these earliest societies there are examples of art produced solely for the pleasure of its visual appeal.

How technology changes art

I’m not an art cognoscente but I know some works are considered “important” as well as being pleasant to view. Some of these challenge the social or political status quo, some usher in new artistic techniques and still others allow us to see inside a world we had never before imagined. They are not merely well crafted examples of the medium, but catalysts which transform the world in which we live.

The invention of photography eliminated the need to reproduce scenes manually, but we still use hand-drawn images for their aesthetic qualities. Sometimes the goal is not to capture an object or scene as it actually looks, but to capture the essence of what we see in it. These pieces move us, they provoke and inspire us, and they distill, from our base natures, nobility. As an aficionado I claim art is as valuable a tool in shaping the world as math or science.

Now, if we truly believe there are works of art which are valuable for humanity, that produce some social benefit beyond their utilitarian functionality and that have the ability to change our world, wouldn’t we want them to be as widely distributed as possible? While we can debate the value of our “advanced” society in terms of individual happiness and social harmony, there is no questioning the fact we are infinitely more knowledgeable and prosperous today than our ancient ancestors.

"The world has advanced on our ability to quickly transfer knowledge from one person to another."

The critical mechanism for humanity's exponential advancement has been the ability to transmit information from one person to another. From the development of written language, which allowed information to be transmitted between people who never personally saw each other, to the printing press, which enabled the mass production and distribution of these writings, the world has advanced on our ability to efficiently transfer knowledge.

The linked computer networks of today have lifted our ability to share ideas to unprecedented levels, providing an almost instantaneous transfer of thoughts from one person to everyone else. Perhaps in some future society technology will have advanced to the point our thoughts will be connected to the consciousness of everyone in our network and when one person learned a new language or skill, everyone would know it.

In the waning days of Chester's life a new generation was being born, a generation through which the world would enter a digital age of enlightenment. The art collection Chester Dale amassed contained many important works, but it was constrained by its physical nature to be viewed by a relatively small audience. With the ability to digitalize information the education and cultural experiences once available only to the rich would soon be available to everyone in the world.

We're all rich now

In the early days of the internet age people were still unsure of the value of such a connected system. What would it be used for? What types of applications were needed? Brewster Kahle graduated from MIT in 1982 with a degree in computer science and engineering. In 1989, Brewster developed the Internet’s first publishing system, Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), and unknowingly set in motion his destiny. In 1996 he began a lifelong project of immense scale and unimaginable ambition--to collect the world's accumulated knowledge in one enormous online database.

Brewster Kahle’s massive archival project, the Internet Archive, is a repository of information on the order of the ancient Library of Alexandria which was fabled to hold every published book of the time. In the 2^nd Century B.C.E. this is impressive but comprehensible. But Brewster’s Internet Archive holds more than just books. It houses movies, television programs, radio shows and even archived internet sites from the web's earliest days. It’s a feat which boggles the mind and is only made possible by the digitalization of information.

Brewster has amassed over 2.5 million publically available texts which are free to download and view on your laptop or eReader. But because Brewster prefers to read physical books he has also devised an ingenious way of getting books into the hands of those without internet access or a local library. His bookmobile, a simple cargo van, travels around dispensing books like a traveling library but without a return date. The van has internet access, a printer and book binding equipment onboard. At a cost of about $0.01/page the bookmobile can print and bind a copy of any book in their archives. That means the accumulated knowledge of humankind is available for about $3 per book.

"During Chester’s lifetime you had to be a multi-millionaire to afford the majestic collection of art he had access to."

Now imagine a similar repository for great works of art and that a traveling van could print and frame an actual-size reproduction of an influential work of art you could hang on the wall in your house. A high quality giclee could provide a cost effective, high quality image produced on canvas or watercolor paper to replicate as closely as possible the original work. Imagine impoverished families living around some of the greatest works of art ever produced. Imagine members of these families inspired to pursue their artistic dreams, develop their own creative talents and to see their value to humanity as more than manual labor.

While their lives barely overlapped, and their paths never crossed, in many ways the dreams of both Chester Dale and Brewster Kahle were the same, to give the public access to the accumulated wisdom of humanity. One through collecting great works, the other through distributing them on a massive scale. During Chester’s lifetime you had to be a multi-millionaire to afford the majestic collection of art he had access to, but today we can all be as richly immersed in fine art through the digitalization, transmission and reproduction technologies Brewster helped develop.

(14:00) The Transformative Value of Fine Art

2010-10-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

The Transformative Value Of Fine Art by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Discover What Motivates You

2010-09-30T19:09:00.002-07:00

[photo by Felix63]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

It’s such an emotional rush to walk into a clean kitchen. Well, it is when it’s been cleaned by your child. When you have four children you just get used to your house never being quite as tidy as you would like it to be. And when those children get old enough to make themselves something to eat, you can pretty much plan on not seeing a clean kitchen again for a while. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the kitchen so thoroughly cleaned.

I could feel my muscles relax as though I were getting a Swedish massage while standing there in the doorway. My eyes swept through the room, across the counters, table and stove—all clean. This is how life should be I thought with self-satisfaction, we’ve finally arrived. Could it really be true, all those years of cajoling our kids had finally paid off?

“None of us is the person we wish we were, but we're also not the person we think we are.”

This was not the first time one of our daughters has cleaned the kitchen but it was particularly rewarding in that neither my wife nor I had been forced to threaten a fine, imprisonment, or bodily harm to get it done. Ever since our oldest child could load a dishwasher we’ve struggled with getting our children to do their chores and she’s going to college next year. That's a lot of struggling. But here we are, on the cusp of a brand new life. A life of cleanliness.

This is not a post about how to raise your children. I’ve long ago realized I’m no expert in that area. My current philosophy is children are just going to make messes. They’re going to ruin carpets and break things, sometimes even hurt themselves. It’s not something we have much control over. They are born with their own unique personalities and predispositions, all we can do is facilitate their development. Some things must be done in a civilized society however, and keeping a clean house is one of them.

No, this post is not about raising children, it’s about motivation; what motivates our children and what motivates each of us. And if you think it’s odd for me to question what motivates myself let me explain. I have always thought I knew what my motivations were but the more I have thought about it, the more I've realized I didn’t really know. In real life none of us is the person we wish we were, and due to our biased perspective, we're also not the person we think we are.

Motivate me

I’m the kind of person who likes to get the right answer when questioned, to do well on tests, etc. So whenever I have asked myself what’s motivating me to do a particular thing I usually come up with the most appropriate response--the one I think is most admirable to others--which is not necessarily the most accurate. I don't do this deceptively, or with any conscious attempt to appear pious, it's just the answer that "feels" right to me.

But when I really think hard about motivation it all gets a little fuzzy, starting with the word motivation itself. If you can believe it, people actually disagree on how to define motivation. For me it's as simple as this: motivation is what causes you to do the things you do. You can be motivated by love, greed, altruism, and anger. Sometimes it’s a desire to experience pleasure or avoid pain. Sometimes it’s simply the comfortable feeling of maintaining habits we established long ago.

“Money can act as an intrinsic drive to improve our performance and as an extrinsic motivator.”

It’s true, we're frequently motivated by money but it’s more complicated than it appears at first glance. Money has no inherent value but acts as both an intrinsic and extrinsic motivator. We may think of money being a primary motivator for disadvantaged people but many wealthy people see money as the scoring mechanism for life; the more money you have, the better you are at playing the economic game. So money can act on our intrinsic drive to improve our performance and as an extrinsic motivator in its role as a proxy for all the things we can purchase.

These two broad classifications, intrinsic and extrinsic, are the way experts categorize motivation. A big part of America’s success has been attributed to the Puritan Work Ethic the early pilgrims embodied. They were motivated by personal pride in quality workmanship and the notion that any job worth doing was a job worth doing well.

Juggling intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

As a student of economics I have always had a soft spot in my heart for extrinsic motivation. It seemed to explain a lot of human interactions and was much more predictable. If I wanted someone to change their behavior I simply had to offer them a financial incentive to do so. While I like to think my motives are more pure, it always seemed feasible other people were viewing the world through paradigms based purely on self-interest.

Some economists take this to the extreme, even claiming the most altruistic acts are somehow extrinsically motivated; taking into account the promised rewards to be received in the afterlife. The Puritan Work Ethic, they say, was not intrinsically motivated at all. It was motivated by the Puritans' attempting to secure their reward in the eternities or to attain a higher social status in this life by signaling to their contemporaries their chosen status.

“Signaling is most often done subconsciously and in more subtle ways.”

Signaling theory, recently fashionable in economic explanations of inexplicable behavior, claims people are motivated to make seemingly irrational choices for the purpose of signaling their desirability to others. When this is done ostentatiously, on a conscious level, we call it “posing”, “flaunting”, or “conspicuous consumption”, but most often it is done subconsciously and in more subtle ways. The interesting thing about signaling is, it takes our desire for community acceptance (an extrinsic motivator) and uses it to strengthen our intrinsic motivation (to feel good about ourselves).

Richard Ryan and Edward Deci examined the connection between internal and external incentives. Their paper Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations (.pdf) concludes we use social context to support intrinsic motivation. When we satisfy our need to feel connected with others, to be seen as personally effective, and to be autonomous, we are more able to maintain our inner drive and to appropriately respond to external incentives. They conclude intrinsic motivation is in effect tied to extrinsic factors.

The Ryan and Deci study reminded me of Dan Pink's fascinating explanation of intrinsic motivation from his latest book Drive (captured in this entertaining video). Pink’s claim is, extrinsic motivators, such as money, don’t work well when it comes to the performance of cognitive tasks. They work fine, he says, when tasks only involve following a pattern or performing a routine job but when it comes to creativity or problem solving, people need intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery, and purpose, to drive their performance.

Is it one or the other?

In the case of motivating my children I have most often taken an expectancy approach, pointing out the connection between their behavior and subsequent rewards and punishments. They could learn through repetition what outcome to expect for certain behavior. It seems reasonable to me that people want to do what preserves or improves their happiness. But did my extrinsic motivations of punishments and rewards detract from their intrinsic motivation to do the job simply because it needed to be done?

This question led me to a study by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini. They attempted to determine if adding an extrinsic motivation would affect intrinsic motivation. Their approach was to add an external, monetary, incentive to parents who were late picking their children up from a daycare center in Israel. Before the study, parents were not fined for picking up their children late, they were motivated to arrive on time out of an intrinsic sense of politeness or social duty.

“Extrinsic motivation seems to have negated the intrinsic drive to be on time.”

During the study, parents who picked up their children late were given a modest fine. Now the parents were not only motivated by their intrinsic sense of duty but also by an extrinsic punishment. One would have expected tardiness to decline. In fact, the exact opposite of what economist predicted occurred, more people started arriving late.

The lesson Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) draws from this example is one of motivation. Parents are, presumably, busy—that’s why their children are in daycare—and they try to accomplish as much as possible prior to picking up their children. Before the fine was imposed people felt an intrinsic motivation to be there on time, but once the extrinsic motivation was introduced it seems to have negated the internal drive to be on time. When the intrinsic motivation was replaced with an extrinsic one, the cost/benefit calculation was different, and the outcome unexpected.

Surprising outcomes and tough decisions

Interestingly, when the study was concluded the daycare center stopped charging a fine for late pick-ups but parents continued arriving late. It appears as though once the motivation had become extrinsic, the removal of the incentive wasn’t replaced with the original intrinsic incentive. When the external motivation was removed they continued to act as though the motivation was still extrinsic, the cost had simply been reduced.

In another study by Lepper, Greene and Nisbett, Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward (.pdf), children who showed a propensity to draw when provided with art materials were divided into two groups, one of which was given a reward for drawing. When the extrinsic reward was no longer available the rewarded group was less inclined to continue working on drawing than the control group.

“People are notorious for acting on emotion, then justifying with logic.”

When my wife and I discussed the possibility of making our children's allowance contingent on their completing the household chores, I felt hesitant. Would the extrinsic reward (or punishment, depending on how entitled to their allowance they felt) flip some switch in their head causing them to refuse to do chores in the future without payment?

With the Lepper, Greene and Nisbett study in mind I advocated not tying the children's allowance to the completion of their chores because, I argued, they should feel a sense of personal responsibility to keep their house clean. I was afraid once they were used to getting paid to keep the house clean they'd always expect it. I could see them as middle-aged women sitting in a filthy house wondering who was going to pay them to clean it.

Why all our motivational theories are wrong

While all of these studies on motivation are intriguing I'm not convinced they tell the whole story. We are complex creatures and are motivated by multiple factors. With all the forces influencing our decisions we never really decide on a course of action for just one reason. It is a combination of factors that cause us to act, not all of them rational. People are notorious for acting on emotion and then justifying with logic.

It may appear we are motivated by one thing--in fact we may claim to be motivated by only one thing--but how often have you questioned your motives in a critical way and determined, if you were honest with yourself, there were other factors motivating you? To assert there is only one motivation for each of our actions smacks of a simplified scenario which does not match reality. We are all motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors in all our decisions.

The real value of these studies for me is the possibility there is a switching mechanism which causes us to disregard a previously powerful motivation. In the Gneezy and Rustichini daycare study, parents felt an obligation to arrive on time until a fine for lateness was imposed. The fine should have been additive and increased the likelihood they would arrive on time but instead it appears to have changed their motivation from an internal one to an external one.

“Time will tell what affect our efforts have had, but I see rays of sunshine.”

Whether it’s raising children, dealing with subordinates or analyzing our own behavior, understanding why people do the things they do is a major part of getting the results we want. While it’s tempting to simplify the situation and assign an “intrinsic” or “extrinsic” label, if we do we will have failed to see the beautiful complexity of the human condition.

In the end, we did not pay our children to do their chores but that does not mean we didn’t use extrinsic motivation. We charged them a fine for making us do their chores, we withheld privileges and gave them extra work sometimes. But we also tried to reinforce the idea we all pick up after each other in our house, it’s part of living in a community. We gave them the freedom to structure their own lives as much as possible and whenever we could, allowed natural consequences to occur.

Time will tell what affect our efforts have had, but I see a few rays of sunshine coming through the clouds and, for tonight at least, a clean kitchen.

(12:27) Discover What Motivates You

2010-09-30T19:09:00.001-07:00

Discover What Motivates You by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Discover What Motivates You.mp3 (11683 KB)

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Failure of Leadership Portends Continued Struggles in Africa

2010-09-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

[photo by Picture Taker]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

I recently overheard my daughters singing along to the popular Shakira song Waka Waka. It's a fun, rather addictive melody made world-famous by her stunning performance at the closing ceremonies of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in Johannesburg. The rest of the day I found myself reflexively humming the chorus "…this time for Africa."

As I repeated this phrase it got me thinking about the vast and beautifully diverse but still tragically impoverished continent of Africa and whether it may be, as some have suggested, on the cusp of a dramatic period of economic growth. In recent decades we've seen explosive growth in other regions of the world such as South America, the Far East and, most recently, in Asia.

As emerging economies become developed economies, investors inevitably begin looking for The Next Big Thing; the next idea, technological innovation or geographic region primed to experience spectacular growth. The fifty-three nations comprising the continent of Africa are collectively the world’s perennial hard luck story. Their position at the tail end of every list of human achievement is a given.

"They've been losing for so long the laws of probability practically demand they win."

Yet they are rich with natural resources and it makes sense for them to developmentally catch up with the rest of the world at some point. In fact, their current ranking of last place among inhabited continents makes even modest improvements appear dramatic, so Africa seems a likely contender for the next economic growth spurt.

At gambling tables from Monaco to Macau hordes of amateur statisticians would swear it's a mathematical certainty their luck is about to turn. And there seems to be a similar sentiment with Africa. It's as though they've been losing for so long the immutable laws of probability practically demand it's their turn to win.

Africa is a complicated place. And while questions of causality abound, I believe good leadership has to come first. Everything hinges on the ability of each country to independently create the conditions necessary for economic expansion. It will only be through the combined efforts of African leaders the continent will finally break free from its tenacious bonds. But in my view, Africa will not be the next area of economic growth because it cannot get its political house in order.

A frank assessment of foreign direct investment

I am just a novice economist but I have a particular interest in the economics of poverty and have studied the economic condition of the African continent for years. As one who loathes poverty and suffering I would be thrilled for Africans to collectively achieve a higher standard of living. To see their current condition as an inchoate world power is appealing to me on an instinctive and emotional level.

"China will be unable to continue investing because of more pressing needs within their own country."

Certainly there are hopeful signs. Chinese investment in African countries has increased as their growth forced them to seek raw materials to fuel their economic expansion and find new customers for their goods. And this investment has not decreased despite the worldwide economic downturn.

But sadly, I believe hopes of seeing Africans collectively get their economic act together are misguided and unrealistic. While Chinese investment has been increasing, it will not be the salvation of the continent in the long term. Chinese economic success will plateau in coming years as China will have to deal with political issues at home. (For more background see Ian Bremmer's comments in this Barron's interview.)

Nor can Africans count on Chinese investment to bring them out of their cultural quagmire. Not because the Chinese are uncommitted to continued investment, nor because they will no longer desperately need the resources Africa has to offer, but because China will be unable to continue such investments while addressing more pressing needs within their own country.

In every comparison of human wellbeing I can think of, the continent of Africa comes in dead last: per capita GDP, mortality and morbidity rates, educational attainment, and crime and corruption statistics. What positive data can be found is almost un-African. The few bright spots lie at the continental extremes-- those countries along the Mediterranean and in South Africa.

Are we asking the right questions?

Most anthropologists believe humans, that is Homo sapiens, originated in Africa and spread throughout the world from there. According to this view, Africans have been around longer than any other people. Africa is the cradle of mankind. Shouldn't they be more advanced then? More technologically developed or culturally superior? More socially harmonious if nothing else.

Instead we see them lagging in every indicator of advancement we can measure. What is it about the continent which seems to restrict their economic progress and social development? I have asked myself whether we're being ethnocentric in the metrics we use to measure success. It's conceivable. We're naturally inclined to believe the things we are concerned about and good at are the things everyone else should be concerned about and good at as well.

"If it's not measured, how can we get to the heart of what is successful in Africa?"

Can a case be made that Africans are achieving success in ways western researchers overlook? If there is, I haven't seen it. Knowing we're inclined to see success measured in Western terms I've tried to look at the situation with fresh eyes.

I've assumed the questions we've been asking are the wrong ones and asked what other criteria we might use to capture what is unique and special about the development of Africans. Maybe they are doing some things well. But if it's not captured in economic data, health outcomes, educational attainment, violence statistics or measures of government corruption, how can we get to the heart of what is successful in Africa?

When I look at indices such as the Human Development Index and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index I get discouraged. Time and again the collected data show Africa as the world laggard in metrics that matter.

Why what we've been doing hasn't been working

Every time I travel to Africa I love it. I love the history and cultural diversity, I love the people and the rich combination of different landscapes. Granted, I don’t live in Africa and their success or failure as a continent will have little impact on my life, but I genuinely want them to succeed.

Wealthy and well-intentioned people want to help but they are unsure how best to provide assistance. C. K. Prahalad, whose book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid provided direction to a generation of corporate idealists, advocated a self-sustaining capitalistic model of assistance while others, like Britain’s Tony Blair, have called for increased foreign aid.

To be sure, there are complex issues at work here. No one is certain of the casual factors. Does good governance lead to economic prosperity and human growth? Does literacy and good health increase economic drive? Does prosperity and education cause people to demand better governance and health care?

Philanthropists have grown weary of throwing money into a bottomless pit. Decades of aid appears to have done little to alleviate suffering or produce any lasting change in living conditions. The continent desperately needs commercial investment but investors dislike uncertainty and are wary of corrupt and ineffectual governments.

Likewise, aid donors don’t want to their money used to support oppressive or corrupt regimes. Investors don’t want to invest until there is sufficient infrastructure and educational development to support production. This creates a system in which potential leaders are encouraged to get their share, and their people’s share, before it’s all gone and they’re left with nothing. It is in essence a waiting game, each person hoping someone will do something to get the ball rolling in the right direction.

Africa finds itself in a conundrum of massive scale and supreme importance. What it desperately needs are national leaders who can inspire their respective countries to excel, to take the initiative and propel one of these factors forward so others will follow.

The lack of African leadership

Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese billionaire and founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, has been perennially bullish on African economic prospects. He has funded the development of the Index of African Governance, an annual assessment of progress toward good governance by African nations, and the $5 million Ibrahim Prize for African Leadership which recognizes “honest, democratic governance.”

Unfortunately, the foundation has failed to find a suitable recipient for the Ibrahim Prize in the past two years. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation is quick to point out the bar has been set intentionally high to encourage extraordinary leadership and it is not expected to be given out each year. Still, considering there are fifty-three countries and almost one billion people in Africa, the inability to find one suitable candidate says something about the state of governance on the continent.

"Do you see indications of a rapid economic expansion in Africa?"

Rachel Gisselquist, research director for the Index of African Governance and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, is a wealth of knowledge regarding African governance. She specializes in comparative politics with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa and has spent years doing research in over 25 African countries.

I recently spoke with Dr. Gisselquist about her work in Africa and her research for the Index. I was interested in what trends she had observed and, as an African expert, what her thoughts were about where the continent was headed. Her optimistic assessment of her experience was that there is a general improvement in governance throughout Africa as a whole but progress was slow and segmented.

While I understand a bit about politics and economics, I’m not well-versed in African affairs. Given her years of experience with the data I wanted to know her gut feeling about the future of Africa. "Do you see indications of a rapid economic expansion in Africa?" I asked her.

Some people do, she admitted, “but that’s not my finding. I see hopeful signs of improvement, but dramatic growth is not just around the corner.”

I echo her assessment. My apologies to Shakera, but without courageous, visionary African leaders we can dance and sing Waka Waka all day without changing the continent's future. While many people yearn for their success, it's Africans who will determine when it's "time for Africa."

(10:55) Failure of Leadership Portends Continued Struggles in Africa

2010-09-13T19:59:00.001-07:00

Failure Of Leadership Portends Continued Struggles In Africa by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Failure of Leadership Portends Continued Struggles in Africa.mp3 (10239 KB)

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The Best Job I Ever Had

2010-08-18T20:24:00.001-07:00

[photo by Wisconsin Historical Images]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

My favorite job was working for a restaurant called Frontier Pies in Provo, Utah. As the name indicates, they were known for their delicious pies and had an extensive bakery to keep the refer stocked with their soul-satisfying goodness. I worked in the bakery as a pie maker.

I was in my early twenties and once again working my way through college, still hacking away at an associate's degree. To save money I was living out of my car and needing to be at work at five in the morning was a good excuse for being caught sleeping in the parking lot.

I loved those mornings. Climbing out of the back of my 1979 Volvo station wagon I would stand in the chilly morning air and savor the stillness of the city. Provo, a bustling college town, is normally a hub of frenetic activity but in the predawn hours it was bathed in tranquility.

I would stand in the parking lot aware of the inadequacy of my thin shirt against the cold but content to give it another minute or two before going indoors. I would breathe deeply through my nose and let my chest swell, eyes closed, while I sucked in nature's goodness.

It was as though the air came rushing down from the mountains to expand my spirit and I could taste, more than smell, the earthy goodness of its origins. I felt like a king, the master of my destiny. As though nothing were impossible and no door was closed to me.

My cold body would shiver in rebellion at my protracted delay and I would say to myself, don't tell me what to do. I'll go in when I'm ready. And I'd stand there a few more minutes until my body finally relented and said, okay; stay as long as you like. And that's when I'd go in.

Happy stomach, happy life

The head baker Angela, having arrived before me and lit the stoves, would be playing music in the bakery as I walked in from the cold. A wall of warm oven-air and the smell of flour would greet me with open arms as I entered.

On the counter would be a handwritten note, the items listed in pencil: coconut, banana, German chocolate...She had already counted the leftover pies from the day before and written out a list of the pies we needed to make that day. She made the fruit pies and I made the cream pies. We'd work on the lemon meringue and pecan together.

"We were like free-floating electrons, dislodged from our former homes."

I liked this arrangement as it allowed me to work essentially on my own. I baked the crusts and cooked the pudding. If any of the crusts broke--and at least one always did--I would dip the broken pieces into the fresh pudding and maybe put a little whipped cream on it.

Best breakfast ever.

But that would only whet my appetite. As I worked throughout the morning I would help myself to spoonfuls of pudding and even whole pieces of pie if I felt like it. I would say, on average, I ate a whole pie each day.

The waitstaff started showing up at ten to get ready for the lunch rush. We were like free-floating electrons, dislodged from our former homes, carelessly floating through the Utah autumn air until we found another atom to revolve around. Line cooks fired up the grill in time for me to get an early lunch before heading off to class.

Life as performance art

It was a curious ballet we danced; the dainty waitresses in their freshly pressed uniforms were the royalty of our world. The cooks, the sweaty, harried and crude antagonists.

“Where’s my Navajo Taco?” a waitress would snap. “I put that order in twenty minutes ago.”

“You want to come back here and run the grill?”

“I’ve got customers waiting, Rich.”

“And I’ve got ten orders in front of yours, Amber, so keep your skirt on.”

She’d cool her heels in the break room commiserating with fellow malcontents while Rich wiped his hands on an already filthy apron and sneered at her back as she walked away. It was a constant struggle of who worked for whom in the kitchen.

"Busboys have to please just one constituency, the waitresses."

The dishwashers were under no such illusions. Unseen and unspoken to they pushed racks of dishes through the spray of super-heated water and slid on the greasy dungeon floor. Their hunched backs wet with condensing steam, they kept their eyes averted as they humped piles of clean glasses to the drink station.

The busboys played the jesters, largely uninvolved in restaurant politics. They had no beef with the cooks, no frustration with the dishwashers. Busboys have to please just one constituency, the waitresses who would share their tips at the end of their shift.

There was all the normal drama which accompanies college-aged kids, relationships mostly, the occasional car trouble or school problem. But mostly it was a world unto itself and people who left were never heard from again and those who arrived were quickly assimilated.

It was simple and distracting; it was enticing at times and demanding at others. It was money in my pocket and food in my usually empty stomach. And in the end I remembered it all as delicious fun.

The best or the happiest?

In many ways Frontier Pies was my favorite job, but it was not the job which did the most for me. It did not demand much of me nor teach me invaluable life lessons. It did not take me to the breaking point and then push me further.

That was a job I had eight years earlier.

I was 14 and had recently dropped out of school. I had moved to Denver to live with my father who had a job in a plastic molding factory.

“What are you going to do?” he asked me.

“I thought I’d take some time off,” I said. “Try to figure things out.”

“I think you need a job.”

The factory had a policy about familial employment: no direct relations could work together. My father got around this by saying I was his nephew.

“I told ‘em you just turned 18. Happy birthday.”

I was sure no one would believe I was eighteen but they never said a word. My only previous job had been a paper route so being at the factory was adventurous. I had to be careful not to spill the beans about our real relationship and my actual age. It was a world of us and them; I felt like a secret agent.

I loved hanging out with my dad too. I felt like a man. It seemed to put us on equal footing, my dad and me. I wasn’t his son, I was a peer. We worked the huge machines side by side as they spat out the freshly molded plastic, still warm to the touch.

It's not about doing the easy thing

When lunch time came the break room filled with people intent on sucking in as much satisfaction as possible from a pack of cigarettes, so we took our lunch on the factory floor. It was eerily quiet as we passed each other peanut butter sandwiches and ziplock bags of carrots.

The normally raucous equipment sat idle and made our voices seem tiny in the enormity of the factory. We spoke quietly then and sometimes not at all, lost in our own thoughts. When I’d eaten my sandwich I’d often lie on the cement floor and stare into the exposed metal rafters. The solid girders and supporting braces forming a dusty, steel web.

I would imagine the world turned upside down and what it would be like to walk among those beams and climb over the enormous ventilation ducts. Then I’d close my eyes and savor the sweet odor of heated plastic that still hung in the air like the memory of a kiss.

"I was moved to the graveyard shift and my father was laid off."

But the work was tough and the adventure began to wane. Eventually it receded altogether leaving only the drudgery with which every factory worker in the world is familiar. The repetition of task and the monotony of the interminable eight-hour shift ground away at my spirit, and even the momentary pleasure of watching a barn swallow building a nest in the rafters was not enough to lift my mood.

As winter rolled around the economy took a turn. I was moved to the graveyard shift and my father was laid off. I was ready to move on.

“I think I’m going to quit,” I told my dad one night as I got ready to leave for work.

“Why’s that?”

I told him the way I’d been feeling and I think I actually used the phrase, “this job is killing me.”

How I learned to do hard things

He gave me some great advice, though I’m not even sure he knew how valuable it was when he said it. I’m sure he didn’t know how profoundly true it was or how it would affect me for the rest of my life. He was just speaking from his heart and conveying a lesson he’d learned from experience.

“You seem to be unhappy with this job. And I can see why you would feel that way. You can leave if you want,” he said, “but don’t leave because the job made you quit.”

He said I should keep working until I felt like I was in control of the situation, that when I felt as though I could stay or go, then the choice would truly be my own.

"When I told my body and mind who was in charge, they eventually listened."

“If you leave now, when things are difficult, you’re letting the situation control you. You’re letting circumstances determine the course of your life. If you bow to pressure now, you’ll give in for the rest of your life. You’ll always be thinking, ‘this is hard, I want to quit.’ Make sure when you make a decision it’s because it’s the right decision not because you couldn’t stand the alternative.”

I did stay on at the factory and it got worse before it got better. But my dad was right, I could overcome my feelings. I could force myself to do hard things. And when I told my body and my mind who was in charge, they eventually listened.

I ended up working there for another year and when I did leave it was on my own terms, not because I had to get out of there. It was not the funnest job I ever had but I think I learned the most. I learned to appreciate my ability to direct my life and not to let hard things push me around.

My job at Frontier Pies was nowhere near as demanding, but it didn't cause me to grow as much either. The reality is, I probably never would have had the job at Frontier Pies except for the self-management skills I learned from my factory job. You could say one was my vegetables and the other dessert.

Which was the "best job"? It's hard to say.

(10:16) The Best Job I Ever Had

2010-08-18T20:22:00.001-07:00

The Best Job I Ever Had by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Why We Need Time to Think

2010-08-11T20:09:00.001-07:00

[photo by jhoc]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

It was the kind of summer evening everyone envisions when they build a deck; warm, peaceful, and unconstrained by demands on attention or time. I was in the backyard of my brother-in-law's house in Utah and we were watching the day’s last rays of sunshine climb the peaks of the Wasatch Mountains.

It was 2007 and popular sentiment had turned against the war in Iraq. I had returned from a tour there the previous year--and besides I was the only member of the family in the military--so I was the resident expert on the war. I'd be the first to tell you "being there" doesn't qualify anyone as an expert, but people who haven't gone think veterans might have some inside information.

The conversation turned to the war and what I thought was going to happen, and whether we should stay there or get out. At that moment I had no idea within three years I'd be working for the Navy's Central Command and planning for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011. At that point our conversation was pure speculation.

I told him asking me whether we should stay or go was like asking a guy who works at a Kraft cheese factory if Kraft Foods, Inc. should acquire ConAgra. Sure, he works for the company, but mergers and acquisitions are so far from his area of expertise he has no pertinent insight.

These are the kind of opinions which proliferate on the internet; intelligent, well thought out arguments from people with no special knowledge or insight. These arguments can have value but generally only serve to clutter an already crowded space. The problem these days is not a lack of commentators but a lack of knowledgeable commentators.

Readers need to draw the line

I look at a black and white photograph of men sitting in front of a barber shop and imagine conversations about the local news and what people had heard of the world from newspapers or the radio. I imagine in such a situation you could know everything there was to know after a few afternoons in a rocking chair.

In the past people had too much time to ponder and not enough information; they were hungry to learn of anything new and because information was hard to come by they had to rely on the intelligent assumptions and postulations or their neighbors and friends. Today these factors are reversed. We have too much information and not enough time to ponder.

"I’m not telling anyone to stop producing content."

And the assumed facts and logical conclusions of even the most intellectual barbers just get in the way of hearing from those who know. But I’m not telling anyone to stop producing content. I think we need good content and as far as I’m concerned new ideas are always welcome.

There is still a great need for information to be digitalized and made accessible online, but there’s an even greater need to collect the information already available into a usable format. Many of today’s innovations are built around information curation; sifting through all the repetitive or meaningless information out there to gather what’s meaningful to you.

Ultimately the onus falls on the reader to decide what they want and how much of it they need. Content producers will adjust accordingly. I’ll admit up front this is hard for consumers to do. I’ve personally spent hours at a time, on more than one occasion, reading article after interesting, informative article only to be left with nothing but a vague sense of leftover thrills.

When do we take time to digest what we're reading?

Sometimes I feel like a kitten in a laundry dryer, tumbling around without understanding anything. Sure it's warm in there, but I'm bouncing from one thing to another so fast I never have time to enjoy it. Every day several newsletter digests show up in my inbox with links to relevant topics. Facebook updates and Twitter feeds also point out things I may be interested in.

At some point I need to digest all this. At some point it needs to affect my thinking or my behavior in order for it to be useful. This week an essay by William Deresiewicz caught my attention (emailed to me by a colleague). The essay was the text of a speech he delivered at West Point and appeared as Solitude and Leadership in The American Scholar.

"We have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going."

Deresiewicz points out the need for more solitude and quiet time for thinking. “We have a crisis of leadership in America," he says. "For too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them.” This, he claims, is a symptom of not spending enough time in thoughtful reflection. I agree.

I agree because I see it in my own life and in my routine. Too often, given a few extra minutes in my schedule, my inclination is to read one more article, one more blog post, one more essay rather than contemplate a concept or idea I've recently been exposed to.

Steve Tobak, writing for Bnet, makes this observation: “I’ve often noted that a key attribute of successful executives is their ability to digest large amounts of data from lots of sources and use that to formulate new ideas and make smart decisions that aren’t just unique, but oftentimes fly in the face of conventional wisdom.”

Reading deeply and learning to think

This, Tobak goes on to say, comes from reading deeply rather than superficially as we do when scanning the headlines or gobbling up short blog posts and tweets. To make smart decisions and come up with new ideas takes training and practice. It takes understanding a situation deeply enough to recognize what the root problem is and spending the time to figure out how to attack it.

Decision making, envisioning, devising new solutions. These are the areas we need leaders working in today. "In a knowledge economy," Margaret Heffeman says, "where thinking and creativity are the raw materials from which products and profit flow, brains are assets." Thinking is a valuable capability.

"Make time in our day to ponder the really important things."

We no longer need smart people to be able to remember mountains of information. We need people who can think, analyze, and synthesize. We need people who can focus long enough to delve into a subject and find not the first, or second answer, but the third, fourth, or fifth. Are we giving ourselves the opportunity to develop this ability?

That evening, three summers ago, as I sat and talked to my brother-in-law was not about finding out new facts. It was about sifting through different ideas, about developing a thought process, about considering assumptions and asking the questions "Why?" and "Why not?"

As we consider how to adjust our information diets I suggest we look for three types of content: things happening now that may affect us, deeply thought out stories by people knowledgeable in a subject, and inspiring writers who motivate us to action. And then make time in our day to ponder the really important things we come across.

(7:27) Why We Need Time to Think

2010-08-11T20:05:00.001-07:00

Why We Need Time To Think by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Why We Need Time to Think.mp3 (6986 KB)

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Communication Means Taking Risks

2010-08-02T20:19:00.001-07:00

[photo by luigig]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

Warfare is never pleasant but I imagine it was particularly brutal as Vespasian fought to suppress the Jewish uprising on the Roman's eastern frontier. Failing to make progress against Jerusalem, he had turned his attention on Galilee and summoned his son to assist in the war.

In the mid-first century the Roman Empire encompassed most of Europe, North Africa and the Levant. But in 66 C.E. the inhabitants of Judaea rebelled against their Roman rulers and Vespasian was sent to quell the uprising.

As Titus was preparing to come to his father’s aid with fresh troops from Egypt, he inspired them to fight courageously by, according to the historian Josephus, telling them that those who died fighting valiantly would be rewarded in the afterlife.

It was important to motivate the soldiers for what was sure to be a bloody battle. Should he have appealed to their sense of national pride? Should he have offered them money? A petition that failed to inspire his troops could lead to disillusionment and apathetic warriors.

"Roman orators practiced these gestures to add emphasis to their speeches."

While the text of his speech is lost to history, it was likely a rousing exhortation. The Romans were known for their ability to communicate well and had developed oration as an art form. Even going so far as to incorporate specific hand gestures to help convey feelings.

Today Italians are still known as passionate speakers who often communicate using their hands. Viewing a speaker’s gesticulations from afar, I have even grasped the meaning of some conversations without hearing a word that was said.

A clenched fist in front of the chest is almost universally recognized as a sign of heightened emotion and showing your palms coveys honesty. A raised hand, palm forward, is a symbol of allegiance. Roman orators practiced these gestures to add emphasis to their speeches.

Whatever it was Titus said, it apparently worked. The Romans conquered Galilee and then Jerusalem, finally defeating the Jewish uprising in 71 C.E. They continued to expand their empire to the east. During the reign of Emperor Antoninus Pius the Romans built a 6000 seat amphitheater in Philadelphia (now known as Amman, Jordan).

Going Out On A Limb

Last year I visited the Roman ruins on a trip to Amman with some friends. Their massive scale is still impressive and a testament to the importance Romans placed on public gatherings and effective communication. The acoustics are so good it continues to be used today for performances without electronic amplification.

It was on this trip I met Vaclav, a rugged eastern European who exuded strength and confidence. My friends had met him earlier in the day while we lounged in the Dead Sea. I had been savoring floating effortlessly while at the same time trying not to get water in my eyes, so had missed meeting him at the beach. The first time I saw him was when he joined us later that day at Books@Cafe for dinner.

Books@Cafe is a popular expatriate hangout in Amman; a trendy bookstore/restaurant with a retro-70s decor. If I lived in Jordan that’s where I’d spend most of my time. It’s like being ensconced in velvet and surrounded by books and food, three things I find irresistible.

I was especially enamored with the rooftop seating and its royal ambiance; its vibrant soundtrack gave me a feeling of casual self-confidence. But when Vaclav walked in I was immediately intimidated. He had the confident swagger and firm grip of a Roman senator.

My insecurities and self-doubts came flooding in. Who was this guy and how could I possibly have anything in common with him? He appeared to come from a highly educated and well-traveled family, a far cry from my own background.

"It could have gone either way, a comment like that."

Unfortunately, he arrived later in the evening and the kitchen had already closed by the time he got there. The portions at the restaurant were generous, and I’d only eaten half of my entrée so it crossed my mind he might want it. Had he been a well-known friend I would have offered it to him but I hesitated to make such an offer to a stranger.

His manner was social and relaxed though and we quickly fell into a friendly give and take. He said he wished the kitchen was still open and I said, “Well, you look like the kind of guy who’s eaten his share of leftovers” as I handed him my plate.

It was a risk to be sure, but he responded with a smile. “I have eaten a lot of leftovers,” he said taking my half-eaten meal.

It could have gone either way, a comment like that. It could have been irritating or offensive or even confusing. But his response encouraged our fledgling bond. It conveyed more than friendliness, it said I get you.

Communication Is A Two-Way Process

Leadership requires good communication but that doesn’t mean it’s always safe communication. Communication can be risky and effective. In fact, most really inspiring communication is also risky. Only those who share our interpretation of the world can hear our frequency.

When we go out on a limb and the other person meets us halfway it does more than communicate information, it reveals a connection. We are exposing a bit of ourselves and finding a receptive and appreciative audience.

My friend Matt Townsend is a communications expert. Several years ago he shared an important insight with me regarding communication. Most people think of communication as a one-way transaction with a sender and a receiver.

The classic model says the sender conceives of and encodes a message and the receiver decodes and interprets the message. When communication issues arise we look to blame the sender for improperly encoding the message or the receiver for inaccurately decoding it.

According to Matt, however, communication is not a one-way process in which data flows only from sender to receiver, but a two-way process in which the receiver actually affects the message being sent by their instantaneous, and often subliminal, feedback.

When we’re telling a funny story to a receptive audience we will often become more animated and embellish the story, feeding off the listener’s energy. Likewise, we often truncate our message when it appears the listener is disinterested or irritated.

"Communication is a two-way process in which the receiver affects the message being sent."

We’ve all had the experience of being reprimanded and then forced to answer the question, "Did you really think that was a good idea?" The expression on our inquisitor’s face certainly affects how we respond to that loaded question.

As I spoke with Vaclav that night in Amman my dialog was bolstered by our common sense of humor and a certain tolerance for shared food. We found we had other things in common too, like a zest for running and having spent time in a Hungarian prison.

Well, I haven’t exactly spent time in a Hungarian prison but I have spent three months on a submarine which is a close approximation.

The point is, we all have to take risks when we communicate. We risk saying the wrong thing, being misunderstood and misinterpreted and we risk missing the mark as we try to understand the subtle feedback being sent by the person who's trying to understand us.

As we parted that evening Vaclav thanked me again for my generosity. "The food tasted great too," he said.

"Well, better than Hungarian prison food," I said as I got into a taxi.

In return he gave me a Roman gesture of irreverent disdain. While I doubt it was a gesture ever used by any orators in Titus's day, it effectively communicated his feelings and showed me he's not afraid to go out on a limb.

In this case I met him halfway.

(8:20) Communication Means Taking Risks

2010-08-02T20:16:00.001-07:00

Communication Means Taking Risks by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Write, Talk, Think

2010-07-22T17:59:00.000-07:00

[photo by Carlo Nicora]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

I've been enjoying a wonderful summer vacation the past few weeks. I spent most of the time in Utah, doing anything but thinking or writing. It was blissful, but then I got back and had to start thinking again. And now I’m back to writing as well.

I think it's funny when writers talk about how hard it is to write. Not because writing is easy but because talking about the difficulties of writing is too common to be interesting for anyone besides the writer himself. It's like a bank teller flopping down beside you on the couch and sighing, “I had to count money all day.”

“I’m like a child refusing to take his medicine.”

Yeah, that's pretty much your job. We all know bank tellers count money and we all know writers write. Writing is work, the “manual labor of the mind” as John Gregory Dunne famously observed. I find writers who talk about the difficulties of writing a bit self-indulgent.

This summer I was reading a bestselling author talk about the difficulties of writing and it occurred to me it's not really hard to write it's just hard to write well. Not even so much writing well by any objective standard as writing in a way that meets our own expectations.

Why We Think Writing is Hard

We can all put words down on paper. It's not much harder than speaking, which seems pretty effortless for most people. At least it’s effortless until you turn on a video camera. I can write at times with relative ease, but put a camera in my face and suddenly I’m an idiot.

I think talking in front of a camera is difficult for the same reason writing can be difficult; it's permanent. If done poorly it becomes a lasting record of our incompetence.

A friend of mine shot a short video while we were visiting Beirut a few months ago. While walking along the corniche I had been tossing out Robert Frost quotes like candy at a parade but when he unexpectedly pointed the camera at me and told me to recite “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” I completely clammed up.

Not that I don't know the poem—it's one of my favorites—but the thought of being captured on a permanent medium made me literally clamp my jaw shut. In the video I appear to be a child refusing to take his medicine. I looked down to get away from the camera only occasionally glancing back to see if he was still pointing it at me.

Our Fear of Looking Bad and Being Pompous

In some ways writing is hard because it's more permanent than simply talking. When we talk we can say whatever we want without fear of attribution, it’s usually forgotten so quickly it doesn’t even matter what we say. Even when it’s remembered it’s debatable what was actually said.

When there's no record it's easy to claim the other person is misremembering what we said or that they misheard in the first place. Once it's on the record however, recorded on tape or in writing, it becomes much harder to change our story.

“Let me tell you why your writing sucks.”

But there's another reason writers like to talk about writing being a lot of work; it's a plea for compassion. It's saying, you may not like this but I've put a lot of work into it so please don't be harsh. An author who declares writing to be a breeze or a particular piece to have been effortless is simply asking to be slammed by critics.

There's nothing people love more than telling a pompous blowhard he's not as good as he thinks he is. You think you can just whip off a blockbusting manuscript? Let me tell you why it sucks. If you think writing is easy, we feel like saying, it's because you're doing it wrong.

Getting Our Thoughts in Order

While in Utah I had many leisurely conversations with my siblings, all of whom live in the Salt Lake Valley. Talking with my family is a particular treat for me because we have similar interests and the same quirky sense of humor. It’s the kind of humor not everyone appreciates but around each other no explanation is necessary which makes for fluid and fulfilling discussions.

After a particularly enjoyable conversation with one of my brothers I told him he should be writing a blog so everyone can enjoy his unique insights. His response was typical of other people I’ve talked with about blogging. He said maybe he would start writing when he got his thoughts together. Right now they’re all works in progress.

“I think my writing should become outdated over time.”

I can understand that; most of my thoughts are works in progress too. But that doesn’t stop me from writing about them. In many instances it forces me to resolve inconsistencies and to tighten my thinking. His primary concern though, when it came right down to it, was that he didn’t want to be locked into a position when he hadn’t yet fully explored all the alternatives. He didn’t want to be on record as stating one thing when later he might reach a different conclusion.

The Fluidity of Intellectual Exploration

This is a fair concern; we all have the need to be consistent with our statements. Prominent psychologist Robert Cialdini cites this need as one of his six Rules of Influence. Once we say something aloud we’re more likely to defend that position and less likely to change our opinion in the future. Writing something down has an even more powerful effect.

But I don’t see blogging as a series of position papers. For me blogging is a discussion, a way to talk ideas through and develop my thoughts. I hope others find my blog useful, either as a mental diversion or a jumping off point for their own analysis of an idea. Even more than that however, I hope people provide other perspectives and interpretations which help me see an idea I’ve been thinking about in a whole new way.

Writing need not be the end of thinking. It can be, and in my opinion should be, a form of external thinking and an invitation for discussion. I think my writing should become outdated over time. I hope it does. Any person who has the same opinions at sixty as they did at twenty has wasted forty years of life.

If we want to grow intellectually, we need to be constantly reevaluating our positions and questioning our arguments and assumptions. Our perspectives should change with experience and circumstances. The world is ever-changing and our thoughts need to adapt as well. While there are many who value consistency, I would rather see growth.

We need to always be thinking, talking or writing about ideas. Otherwise we merely exist.

Write, Talk, Think (6:36)

2010-07-22T17:56:00.000-07:00

Write, Talk, Think by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Write, Talk, Think.mp3 (6193 KB)

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Six Reasons Business Leaders Must Understand Islamic Finance

2010-06-14T20:25:00.001-07:00

[photo by ecreyes]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

To be blunt, Islamic finance will change the world. It already is—which is why every business student and aspiring leader must understand this fast-growing force in the financial marketplace.

As long time readers of this blog know, I like to talk about our worldview. It’s what makes us who we are. I have talked about worldview in relation to developing vision and inspiring everyone to want to be a leader. Also in my post on what every leader needs to know about human nature.

I believe our worldview informs our opinion of what facts to accept and which to reject. It is the primary filter for our biases. One of my favorite Talmudic verses says, “We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”

When most westerners think of Islam they see images of nomadic camel caravans, blowing desert sands and white robed Arabs. While these images are not entirely inaccurate given Islam’s origins, they reflect a sadly outdated perception of the Islamic World today.

“According to economic theory interest rates should tame the business cycle.”

During Islam’s Golden Age (~700-1200 C.E.), Muslim societies ruled from Mauritania and Spain in the west, encompassed most of central Asia and stretched as far east as New Guinea. While ruling parties and political systems have changed over the years, most of these countries still contain Muslim majorities.

This diversity of culture, climate and ethnicity defies the simplistic stereotyping of Islam as a Middle-Eastern religion. As different as these nations are however, there are many similarities in their social norms and laws depending on how closely the government embraces Islam.

In many of these countries there has been a resurgence of Islamic pride and a desire to practice Islam more devoutly. This has led to a rapid expansion of Islamic financial institutions throughout the Muslim world and beyond.

What is Islamic Finance?

Islamic finance differs from conventional finance in that Islam prohibits charging interest on loans. It is sometimes referred to as ethical investing as it prohibits investment in organizations which are involved in any immoral activity such as the production of pork products, alcoholic goods or gambling operations.

The prohibition on interest is particularly interesting to me as a conventional economist. Interest is fundamental to our system—indeed our entire understanding—of capital markets. Interest is the price of money and regulates the supply and demand for present and future resources.

According to economic theory interest rates should tame the business cycle. As we’ve seen in recent years, it’s not doing its job very well.

“You can easily see how this would artificially inflate the money supply.”

Advocates of Islamic finance believe that by not allowing interest they in essence create a full reserve banking system rather than the fractional reserve banking system we use in the United States and throughout most of the western world.

In a fractional reserve banking system banks only have to hold a small percentage of their inventory of money on hand, in the U.S. about 10%. This means for every $1000 a person deposits in the bank, the bank can lend out $10,000. You can easily see how this would artificially inflate the money supply.

By creating a de facto full reserve banking system, Islamic banking should not fall victim to such inflationary pressures. It’s not a sure bet but apparently neither is fractional reserve banking.

Six Reasons Why Understanding Islamic Finance Is Essential:

1. The Islamic world is growing. Muslims are 20% of the world’s population and the pace of population growth in majority Muslim countries is nearly 1% higher than the rest of the world. In a competitive economy, it will become increasingly important to cater to this growing market.

Most of these countries lie in a corridor from Northern Africa through the Middle East and throughout Central Asia. Many forward thinking businesses regard this region as a candidate for rapid economic development in the coming decades.

2. In the last thirty years, the Islamic world has become more devout. This has led to a steep rise in Shari’ah compliant banking practices in majority Muslim countries and in some western countries where there is a high concentration of Muslims (such as the United Kingdom and Canada). Much of the world’s energy wealth is concentrated in majority Muslim countries and there is a desire to invest these funds in halal (Shari’ah compliant) financial instruments.

3. Islamic finance is growing. Since the mid-1970s, Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) have grown at an explosive rate of 20-30% a year. The Banker magazine’s November 2009 survey confirmed that in 2008 - during the worst financial crisis in global memory- IFIs experienced an amazing 28.6% growth rate. There are now more than 600 IFIs worldwide with assets of nearly $1 trillion.

4. Islamic financial products don’t appeal only to Muslims. Many non-Muslims IFI clients appreciate the application of Islamic financing principles such as asset-backed lending and full-reserve banking. These principles are built on the holistic concept of community responsibility and benefit.

Citizens of many countries are asking themselves if the beneficial effects of easily available unsecured credit are worth the social consequences (for example, where debt is more freely available, people have a tendency to underestimate risks).

5. Financial institutions are reevaluating their approach to risk management. Even though they may not refer to their products as “Islamic”, many banks are increasingly offering essentially Shari’ah compliant options for their customers.

In fact, Silicon Valley venture capital firms have been practicing Islamic financial principles for years without explicitly stating this fact. In November 2009 GE Capital, tacitly acknowledging the appeal of Islamic finance, announced it would issue a $500 million Shari’ah compliant sukuk (Islamic bond).

6. Because—as Thomas Friedman famously observed—the world is flat. As business leaders today look for ways to break into new markets and find blue water opportunities, they will increasingly find themselves interacting with Islamic customers. While oil prices have receded from their 2008 highs, they are still high by historical standards and the world shows no sign of weaning itself from this precious resource anytime soon.

Money will continue to pour into Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds for decades, making Muslim customers an attractive demographic. An understanding of Islamic principles will be essential in developing relationships with these customers.

Biased companies will lose economically

While some in the west will continue to resist integrating Islamic financial principles into their portfolio due to religious biases, history has shown they will cede a competitive advantage by doing so. It’s ridiculous to me that any business would voluntarily choose to forego profits bases solely on an uninformed worldview.

Those bold enough to examine their own cultural biases will see there is no reason to recoil from doing business with Muslim countries. Yet too often when I talk to people about Islamic finance their first reaction is to make some joke about Muslims.

I recognize we all have biases. I have struggled to become aware of the lens through which I am viewing the world and to set it aside as much as possible, or to at least acknowledge its presence. In the process of discovering my own paradigm I recognized how much our cultural paradigms influence every aspect of our behavior; not only our behavior but the very perceptions which lead to our behavior.

“Knowing my bias exists I’m willing to grant there are other ways of seeing the world.”

When I first went visited a Muslim country I wasn’t sure what to expect but I soon realized people there are much like people in every other country. Their customs may be peculiar to us but their human desires align very closely with our own.

I do not know that Islamic finance is superior to conventional finance nor am I trying to imply that it is. I merely recognize it as a growing part of the accepted business practices throughout the world. My own worldview makes it difficult to see anything besides conventional finance as viable, but knowing my bias exists I’m willing to grant there are other ways of seeing the world.

If there are people who want to try a system of banking independent of interest I believe we can find a way to accommodate it.

Experimentation is the heart of adaptation. When we try new things we can see what works, what doesn’t work and what works best. It’s the only way we improve.

(9:19) Six Reasons Business Leaders Must Understand Islamic Finance

2010-06-14T20:20:00.001-07:00

Six Reasons Business Leaders Must Understand Islamic Finance by Siddhartha Herdegen
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You Can’t Predict the Past

2010-06-11T21:56:00.001-07:00

[photo by The Wandering Angel]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

Sometimes there is a convergence of ideas on the internet. Maybe we’re all reading the same sources so we’re all thinking the same thing. Maybe it’s in the water. But for whatever reason it happens from time to time that bloggers express similar ideas at the same time, independently.

In the past two weeks several posts have got me thinking about the same concept. They may not seem related but they fit together in my mind. A couple weeks ago Justin Kownacki wrote a post about the future of media.

In his post he talks about how successful filmmakers are always pushing boundaries and experimenting. Doing something new instead of what other people were doing, or what they did in the past. They broke out by not following the rules. They made their own rules and other people followed.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Sounds a lot like a leader.

“Predicting the future instead of just repeating the past.”

He makes some other good points too. Like creating an experience people enjoy. But I’ll let you read the post. It’s worth the trip. I just wanted to point out the part I thought was pertinent to my thought process.

The next thing that caught my attention around this business of what’s next and predicting the future instead of just repeating the past was a tweet by Chris Brogan. Chris tweets a lot and I’m not on Twitter all that much but fortunately I caught this one. A simple, short tweet with a link to Rentalic.com.

On June 8 Chris tweeted this: “@chrisbrogan Interesting. Peer to peer renting - http://bit.ly/98AZJG”

Interesting to be sure. It’s a site where ordinary people, not businesses, rent out common household items at nominal rates. The site coordinates the process of linking owners and renters, processes the financial transaction, and provides an umbrella organization to facilitate trust.

Economic viability produces unpredictable opportunities

As an economist I was instantly intrigued. There are many items which are used infrequently and require a significant financial investment yet still fall below the threshold of profitability to make them a commercially viable item for rental companies.

These would be things like bread machines, ice cream makers, cameras, bicycles.

Or items which would be profitable for commercial ventures but which the owner uses frequently enough that it makes more sense to buy it rather than rent it every time.

Things like tents and camping equipment, skis, power tools, perhaps artwork.

It’s interesting to see what people will come up with to rent once there is an efficient system for doing so. And that’s really the point. This would not have been practical prior to the internet NOT because people didn’t have the same stuff lying around and the same desire to use it.

“These didn’t exist, not because there was no need but because they weren’t viable.”

It didn’t happen because there was no efficient mechanism for coordinating it. That’s what the internet does best: coordinates people. It reduces the transaction costs for bringing buyers and sellers together in the marketplace.

We’ve seen what this can do with companies like eBay, Amazon marketplace and Etsy. Suddenly the ability to open a store with practically zero overhead cost is available to everyone. Then peer to peer lending services like Prosper, Lending Club and Kiva became practical.

Book lending sites like Paperback Swap and now peer to peer rentals are made possible by the great coordinating power of the internet. These are all service which didn’t exist ten years ago not because the need did not exist but because it wasn’t economically viable.

So the internet, by reducing coordination and transaction costs, provided an environment where these latent needs could be fulfilled.

How we can be ready to take advantage

On June 9, Julie Roads wrote a piece which really resonated with me. It was titled I’m Training for Everything. It was ostensibly about exercise but it was really about how we live our lives. If we’re improving ourselves, educating ourselves and informing ourselves we’ll be ready to take advantage of opportunities as they arise.

This is essential training because we don’t know what will happen in the future, what opportunities there will be for us. We can’t predict what doors will open or what possibilities, not economically viable now, will become economically viable in the future due to technological advancement.

Successful people are often those who have the right skill set when an opportunity presents itself. They did not know those opportunities were coming, could not have predicted them, but they had to prepare for them in the past.

How do we do that? How do we know what to prepare for? I suggest we do two things: pay attention to what’s happening today and consciously think about future applications. And do what Julie does; get the most out of the experiences that are given to us.

We can also think about what’s going on around us rather than simply passing through. As Julie says, “there are always lessons to be learned.”

Don’t waste your time predicting the past

Another post that needled me this week was by Shawn Christenson writing on Nathan Hangen’s blog Build Your Empire. On June 10 he wrote a post on marketing but it was really about doing something new. It was about all the people who are shouting, “Look what I’ve done. You can do it too by doing the same thing I did.”

The problem is, the landscape is changing. Technology is making things possible which weren’t possible before and some things which worked in the past won’t work now or in the future.

I know, I know, some things never change. There are bedrock marketing principles and business models but let’s face it, the people who are touting their plan aren’t going to teach you some tried and true marketing principle you heard when you were in high school. They’re going to give you some tip or trick which worked for them and tell you it will work for you too.

“You have to predict the future, not what’s happened in the past.”

I’m not saying it won’t. A lot of people made money flipping houses in the early part of this decade, but it’s not the right environment for it now. You have to know what is coming in the future not what happened in the past.

It does no good to predict the past. What we need to think about today is what’s coming in the future.

Where are consumers going? What needs do they have which could not be filled before but can be filled in the future?

Finally, Jane Friedman sent me a link to a video she took at BEA 2010. It’s a short video of Clay Shirky talking about the future. As always with Clay, insightful and entertaining stuff. He gives a great example of how McDonalds was doing research on what to serve next for breakfast.

It’s about knowing what people are looking for or as Justin Kownacki put it, pleasing the audience. It’s about thinking through the opportunities available with new technologies.

Predicting customer needs

What’s different today then twenty years ago? Ubiquitous credit cards, online payment mechanisms which make micro-payments possible, internet coordination, lower retail overhead, location specific mobile devices.

Think about all the services you use today which would be impossible without those advances. What other opportunities are they opening up?

I was on a conference call today with Chris Brogan and Sonia Simone talking about figuring out how to monetize a blog. The biggest take away from their conversation: figure out what the customer needs to buy not what you need to sell.

Brilliant.

Leadership is being bold; it’s thinking audaciously, not just following those who went before you but figuring out what’s next. Leaders challenge the status quo. They don’t ask “how do I do that?” they ask themselves “what’s next?” They develop and innovate by using their creative brain to link concepts.

As Julie said, “train for everything” by developing an inquisitive intellect. Since we can’t predict the past, let’s work on predicting the future.

(8:18) You Can’t Predict the Past

2010-06-11T21:55:00.001-07:00

You Can't Predict The Past by Siddhartha Herdegen
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When You Shouldn’t Give 110%

2010-06-09T21:26:00.001-07:00

[photo by Julian Mason]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

I have to tell you I’m sick of the whole notion of giving 110%, and here’s why: it’s a meaningless phrase without a timeframe.

In order to figure out what 110% is you first have to know what 100% is and if you’re talking about a person’s ability to perform, the very idea of knowing what 100% looks like is dubious. It’s highly doubtful the person themselves know what they’re capable of so it’s impossible for anyone else to know.

To back up my point on this let me refer you to Holly Brooks who said, “…I suppose you could say that I didn’t know what I was capable of.” And Lindsay Dominguez, “I didn't know what I was capable of until I dove right in the deep end and swam to the surface.” And to countless others who would say the same thing.

We have no idea what our physical, mental or emotional limits are.

Some would say, sure you don’t know what you’re capable of but saying give 110% means give it all you’ve got. Push yourself until you’re at what you think is 100% and then push some more out. That’s what it means to give 110%.

“Our maximum sustainable capacity would be something much less.”

Okay, let’s go with that premise. So, 100% would be the maximum we’re capable of. We should be striving for our maximum capacity and then, since we don’t really know what that is, go a little further. Our perception of what we can do is the theoretical 100% and when we give 110% we’re really just reaching our actual 100%.

Seems pretty sound as a theory, but let me point out this maximum capacity is only achievable for a very short time. For all physical activities we can perform at such high levels of intensity for a few minutes at best.

It’s unlikely our boss wants to see maximum performance for five minutes out of the day. More likely she wants our maximum sustainable effort which would be something much less. As we have all experienced, the less we push ourselves the longer we can perform at that level.

It would be wonderful if we could perform at our level of maximum capacity indefinitely but sadly this is not the case. There are limits to everything, including our ability to think in a focused way.

I would venture to estimate a level of about 60-70% of maximum effort to be sustainable for an entire day. And repeatable the following day ad infinitum assuming we get a full nights’ sleep.

Added effort comes at a cost

Because I’m giving 65%, when my boss says, “Folks, I need you to give 110% on this,” I’ve got some reserves. I can pull out the stops and surge ahead. The question now is, for how long?

There’s a tradeoff between extra effort today and my ability to give extra effort tomorrow. The general rule in running is to rest for one day for each mile you race. So, for example, I may run several miles every day at my 60-70% pace but if I race a 5K on the weekend I should take three days off running for recuperation.

Presumably in the race I’m going all out, 100%.

Following this formula, marathon runners should not run for almost a month after a competitive race. I don’t know many marathoners who follow this guideline (but then I don’t know many competitive marathon racers) but a lot of my friends take a couple weeks off and then only run very light days. Short runs at a slower pace than normal training runs.

“Both come at a cost to future performance.”

The same thing happens with our mental capabilities. We can exceed our normal, sustainable limits for a while but only at a cost. The payback comes over the days or weeks following the intense effort.

Even while we’re exerting ourselves we need to know how long it must be sustained so we can pace ourselves. I don’t run marathons at the same pace I run 5Ks. I’m capable of running faster than my marathon pace, but not for 26 miles.

When your boss says, “Okay folks we’ve got to step it up. Everyone give 110%.” The next thing to follow should be a timeframe for how long maximum effort needs to be sustained. This rarely happens.

Instead we’re left to wonder whether we should be running our 5K pace or our marathon pace. Both are faster than our indefinitely sustainable pace, and both come at a cost to future performance.

When do we recuperate?

The unfortunate thing about putting in maximum capacity performance at work is we usually end up having to recover on our own time. That means our evenings and weekends are full of substandard capability if not all out lethargy. Our families end up paying for the cost of increased productivity for the company.

The bottom line is that old economic saw, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Any performance beyond our maximum sustainable level is going to cost us capacity later. Someone has to bear that cost, the company in decreased performance later or our family who suffers from decreased capacity during our leisure hours.

So, when should we not give 110%? That’s up to you to decide. But when you’re making the decision take into account the fact you’re increased performance is a subsidy to the organization. In most cases I would make this investment.

“Yes and no are not concepts on a graduated scale.”

But if you don’t think the investment will be compensated later, either in decreased workload or increased compensation, I would seriously consider maintaining a sustainable pace.

Just because you’re capable of increasing your performance doesn’t mean you’re obligated to.

On a side note, I wanted to point out to Randy Jackson (whom I suspect reads this blog), there are cases where exceeding 100% makes sense. If we define 100% as the maximum sustainable effort then clearly we have the capacity to achieve 167%.

But when we’re talking about “yes” and “no” these are concepts not on a graduated scale. We can have less than 100%, as in 60% yes, but we can’t have any more than 100%.

In this case 110% yes doesn’t make any sense, nor does 10,000%, 1,000,000%, or 1,000,000,000% yes. Once you’ve reached the maximum, you’ve got all there is.

On a related note, I wanted to point out to my daughter, repetition of the word “please” falls into a similar category. Once you’ve said please once, additional instances do not add to the politeness of the request and do not increase the likelihood of it being granted.

(7:10) When You Shouldn’t Give 110%

2010-06-09T21:24:00.000-07:00

When You Shouldn't Give 110% by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Five Steps to Evaluate a Good Idea

2010-06-07T23:23:00.001-07:00

[photo by qwrrty]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

I was at a friend’s house recently and their kid was being obnoxious. I mean, seriously obnoxious.

(If you’re one of my friends who have children and I was recently at your house you’re probably starting to get offended because you think this was you. Don’t be so narcissistic, more than likely it wasn’t you.)

But I was at their house and their darling offspring was driving me nuts. Just being a child mostly—whining, throwing stuff, complaining—but in the most irritating way possible. And I remembered something I had learned about myself when I was in my youth. I don’t really like children.

I have four children of my own, by the way. And I love them dearly. I just don’t like other people’s children.

How can this be? How can a person who doesn’t like children love his own children so deeply? I don’t know. It’s a psychological trick our minds play on us to perpetuate the species I suppose. But it’s a fact of life; we all love our own children.

“I just don’t like other people’s children.”

This is not just true of heartless childhaters like me; it’s true of people who coo and goo over the little bundles of joy as well. They may adore all children, but there’s a special place in their heart for their own little darlings.

Perhaps we love them so much because they are a part of ourselves and we all love ourselves.

We love the way we look, the way we think, the way we smell. Have you ever looked in the mirror and thought the person looking back at you was ugly? Okay, maybe I have too, but only on rare occasions. Usually when I see myself I’m pretty impressed.

Sometimes walking quickly past a store window I’ll just catch a glimpse of my reflection and think, “Wow! Who was that handsome guy?”

Idea happy

We are all in love with our own ideas too. The ones we come up with are the ones we think are best. It’s hard to evaluate them objectively. So, if we’re bound to like our own ideas, how do we know if our ideas are any good? It’s like asking, how do I know if I have an annoying child?

You need to be able to view your darling from another person’s perspective. We haven’t yet figured out how to do that with children but we do know how to do it with ideas.

It’s a five step process:

1. Write it down

2. Evaluate your stake

3. Vet your information

4. Question assumptions

5. Examine the consequences

1. Write it down

The first thing you need to do is write it down. Our brains are squishy—they’ll change quickly and easily, switching from one side of an argument to another. We naturally evaluate all sides of an issue.

If I were to ask you whether it’s a good idea to include discount coupons inside boxes of cereal you could probably think of several reasons it would increase sales and several reasons it wouldn’t. If I later told you studies had shown it to be ineffective you would probably say to yourself, yeah, that’s what I thought.

“Your mind would tell you that’s what you thought all along.”

You would think that was your conclusion because you actually did think about it. The problem is, you also thought it might be a good idea too and you didn’t commit to one answer. So whether it turned out to be a good idea or a bad idea your mind would tell you that’s what you thought all along.

Our brains think of a lot of variations and adaptations to our ideas. Unless we capture our ideas in black and white, our minds will dance around situations and come up with the feeling our idea works when, in fact, it wouldn’t have worked if we hadn’t changed it for one scenario and then changed it back for the next.

2. Evaluate your stake

Ask yourself what you have invested in the outcome. This is essential because the more you have to gain from your idea being right, the more you will think it is right. Likewise, the more you have to lose if it’s wrong, the less likely you will be able to find its flaws.

This is what happens when I play chess. I’m evaluating three moves ahead but I’m not seeing my opponent’s best moves, I’m seeing the moves my opponent could make which would be best for me. I’m convinced they’re his best moves because I have something to gain from being right.

Many people earning under $36,000 a year think it’s a great idea to increase taxes on those making over $250,000. Predictably, those earning over $250,000 a year don’t agree. Why do you think this is? There are some cogent arguments for both positions but my guess is neither group is evaluating this proposition on the merits of those arguments alone.

You may not always be for the idea which benefits you—especially if there is a strong moral prohibition against it, such as cheating. And just because it benefits you don’t necessarily mean it’s a bad idea either. It just means you need to look at it closely, knowing you’re going to be predisposed to like it.

3. Vet your information

It’s helpful to nail down exactly what information it is you’re using to develop your idea. Our brains are incredible repositories of information and many octogenarians can remember things they learned in elementary school without much effort. Like the world being flat or the sun revolving around the earth.

Sometimes these facts are outdated. By being specific about sources of information it allows you to check their currency and accuracy. Look at the sources and see if they’re reliable.

If you’re relying heavily on one source of information you should ask yourself what their stake is in the information being accepted as accurate. Just because a study was conducted by scientists doesn’t mean it’s free from bias. Scientists are human too and when they evaluate their data there is often room for judgment.

In some cases it would also be wise to talk to people who are currently working in the field and see what sources of information they use and trust.

4. Question assumptions

Aside from facts our ideas frequently make use of assumptions. We don’t have information on everything so we have to make a lot of assumptions. It’s not a bad thing. But you want to be aware of what assumptions you’re making.

It’s best to write these down too as you’ll want to examine each one carefully.

Ask what facts the assumption is descended from and whether it is a logical assumption based on the facts. Then ask what other assumptions could be made. Is it a reasonable conclusion based on the facts? Is it the only conclusion?

“What are the implications if your idea is widely adopted?”

Again, be careful about bias. Assumptions are the area it’s easiest for our biases to influence our decisions because once an assumption has been accepted our mind treats it as a fact and no longer questions it. We see no need to continually evaluate it.

This is particularly dangerous when the facts change due to new information but our assumptions never get questioned because we don’t recognize the connection between those changed facts and our inferences.

5. Examine the consequences

Once you’ve determined the veracity of the information your idea is based on it’s time to follow it to a logical conclusion. What are the implications if your idea is widely adopted? What ideas does it conflict with?

This is sometimes done first but should usually be done last. If it’s done in the early stages of evaluating an idea and a conflict with a previous idea or viewpoint arises, it’s easy to throw out the new idea. But sometimes the new idea is actually more sound and if you’ve done the background evaluation recommended above, you’ll know this.

When you determine there is a conflict with a previously held thought or belief use this five step process again on the existing idea and see where its weaknesses are. You may find upon reflection, the old idea wasn’t as robust as you’d always thought.

Finding our ideas flawed is never fun, no one wants to believe they’ve got a rotten child. But by using these five steps we can dispassionately determine if we’ve got a child we can let out in public or whether they should be locked in the basement.

In my experience, more should be kept indoors.

(8:38) Five Steps to Evaluate a Good Idea

2010-06-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

Five Steps To Evaluate A Good Idea by Siddhartha Herdegen
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Why You Don’t Need Passion To Be Successful

2010-06-05T20:52:00.003-07:00

[photo by Afroswede]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

You don’t need to follow your passion to be successful; you need to follow your passion to be happy. There’s a big difference.

We’re all looking for satisfaction in life. This generally comes when we can do the things we’re passionate about. So passion is helpful in selecting a career that will be fulfilling.

In the past we’ve put off pursuing our passions until tomorrow preferring to work hard today to prepare for a future free from anxiety about the necessities of life. At which point we could wholeheartedly pursue our passions without defaulting on our financial obligations or risking financial ruin.

Two things have happened to make us rethink that plan.

Unrestrained consumption and black swans

The first thing that happened was that we found ourselves spending instead of saving. Working for the future is fine, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

We were both working like dogs at jobs we hated in order to enjoy life later and spending the money today on things we wanted right now. It doesn’t take Adam Baker to figure out you’re not going to have money to retire on if you’re spending it all today.

The second thing that happened was a realization that investments we thought were safe turned out not to be. Not just money invested in the stock market, which went down instead of up, but money invested anywhere whose value was diminished by inflation.

“You’re not going to have money to retire on if you spend it all today.”

So, we had to recalculate our economic choices. Our mental discussion probably sounded something like this: “If I’m going to have to work forever, I might as well do something I love.” And thus started the pursuit of our passion-as-vocation dream.

But the word “passion” gets thrown around a lot. I’ve heard it when successful people talk about any number of activities concerning both vocations and avocations. Everyone, it seems, needs to be passionate about what they’re doing. There’s a passion for passion out there.

It seems anything we want to be successful at we need to be passionate about. Aside from just a “gee-shucks” homey truism that seems like it ought to be right, is there anything to be said for this aphorism? Let’s examine this proposition in a critical way.

What people mean when they say this

We all know, people will repeat anything that sounds good without giving it much thought. So we need to ask, what do people mean when they talk about passion and, is it true we need to be passionate in order to be successful?

There are certainly plenty of examples of people who are passionate and successful, but the question is, do you need passion? To show that passion is essential it’s not enough to show multiple examples of successful people with passion, there needs to be an absence of successful people without passion. And this is simply not the case.

There are many highly successful people who have succeeded through a combination of dedication and hard work. The vast majority of successful people are the ones who have a plan and just keep plugging away rain and shine.

“Everyone, it seems, needs to be passionate about what they’re doing.”

Some of them are passionate about what they’re doing, but most of them aren’t. Some people are just committed to seeing it through. Others are successful because they are able to muster a lot of enthusiasm for the projects they’re involved in.

There are many paths to success, but most successful people take one of these two routes. So it seems that while there’s no single formula for success a good start is commitment and enthusiasm. If you have these two things, you stand a good chance of being successful.

People who are passionate about their work are excited about what they’re doing and they’re also dedicated to it.

So does that mean we do need passion?

I think most people use the word passion as a proxy for excited and dedicated, but passionate doesn’t just mean excited and dedicated.

It makes sense to use it this way. You have to be excited about your business or you’ll never convince people to buy from you or follow you. And you have to be dedicated to sticking with it even when progress is slow and times are tough.

There is a certain degree of contagiousness to excitement. When I’m around a person who is excited about what they’re doing it often makes me excited too. But I’ve also been around a lot of successful people who express themselves in an understated way but nevertheless connect with me on a deep level because of the strength of their idea.

And I’ll say this about commitment; I’m not passionate about car maintenance, but I’m committed to it. There are many things I don’t want to do yet am willing to do out of a sense of dedication or devotion. I wouldn’t say I’m passionate about any of those things.

I’ve discussed the idea of developing vision in a previous post. You will recall it was a process of discovering what is unique and compelling about our personal worldview. When arrived at in this way, our vision is likely to be something we’re passionate about.

The intersection of excitement and commitment

I would say passion is a deeper form of connection than either enthusiasm or dedication. Excitement and devotion may flow from passion but you don’t need to feel passionate to get excited or be committed. In other words, while passion can contain excitement and commitment, it does not mean excitement and commitment.

This is a common logical fallacy which assumes if all squares are rectangles, than all rectangles are also squares. Clearly this is not true. Neither is it true that simply because a passionate person has enthusiasm and devotion that passion is the only way to obtain these characteristics.

It is also true a person can have both excitement and commitment without being passionate. From a business perspective it could be represented by the Venn diagram below.

I can run a business without passion and I can have a hobby I’m interested in but not committed to. Many people will tell you, you have to be passionate about writing if you want to be successful. But an author can write without needing to write.

John Gregory Dunne, a prolific and successful author, said famously, “Writing is the manual labor of the mind.” Not the sort of thing you say about your passion.

Sure, there are people who are compelled to write but these writers are not the only successful ones. In fact, there are people who feel passionate about writing who remain unpublished and unread.

The ‘True Meaning’ of passion

Some people prefer the ocean, others the mountains. There are city people and country people, folks that like going out and those that like to stay in. We all have individual preferences.

And passions, like individual preferences, appear from nowhere, beyond our understanding and control, to dictate how we live our lives. In many ways the supposed necessity for passion appears to be just another reason to explain and justify failure.

One can be forgiven for not having a natural endowment of passion for your chosen field. (Though there’s a subtle condemnation here for those who chose their field poorly. “You should have followed your passion” they will be told.)

“I’m not passionate about car maintenance, but I’m committed to it.”

So when we talk about excitement and commitment as being synonymous with passion we’re devaluing and manipulating the word for our own benefit, bending it to our desires. Let’s leave passion in its rightful place, a place of honor and awe, as the most personal of connections.

A better definition of passion would be: Passion is a deep connection to an idea, a strong bond which creates a feeling of desire. It contains elements of both commitment and excitement but is not limited to them.

When we have used the techniques I discussed previously to develop our vision, we will naturally be passionate about it because they come from our unique and deeply held beliefs. But our vision does not have to be our vocation.

We don’t need passion to be successful; we need it to feel fulfilled.

(8:28) Why You Don't Need Passion To Be Successful

2010-06-05T20:52:00.001-07:00

Why You Don't Need Passion To Be Successful by Siddhartha Herdegen
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SEEKING: Fresh Observations

2010-06-04T23:54:00.000-07:00

[photo by dalbera]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

My father was a creative type, always looking for something new. His vision kept him seeking a different situation, a better life. We moved from small town to small town as he pursued his dreams enthusiastically yet unsuccessfully. In the height of my youth we lived on a half acre lot in Kent, Ohio.

It was a residential neighborhood but my father plowed up half the back yard and put in a garden. Yes, half the back yard. That’s a pretty big garden. I have no idea why he did it, I just came home from school one day and he was in the back yard with a rented Rototiller churning the grass into rich, black soil. I stood dumbfounded.

Not that I had any respect for landscaping. The previous summer I had been bored to death and when my dad couldn’t take it anymore he told me to go out back and dig a hole. I took our spade to the far end of the yard and started digging for China.

“In elementary school, art was a subject just like math.”

It was an enormous pit by the time I was done, it could easily hold three adolescent boys and must have been five feet deep. My older brother and I played in it all summer. It was like a reverse tree house. I had watched plenty of episodes of Hogan’s Heroes and had visions of digging a network of tunnels all around the neighborhood.

That made perfect sense to me; tilling up half the yard for a garden didn’t. Knowing my dad, he was just trying to save a few bucks on groceries. That was the kind of thing he did though. He’d get an idea in his head and just wouldn’t let it go.

How we view creativity

It’s interesting how we’ve come to view creativity as something you’re born with. It seems a convenient classification for anything that’s difficult because, after all, if you have to be born with it you can be forgiven for not having that particular talent.

Many people put leadership in the same basket. There’s no sense putting time and effort into developing leadership skills since it’s either something you’ve got or you haven’t. Yet it’s been shown repeatedly that people can learn to be better leaders.

“Companies are increasingly seeking out those with creative talents.”

I’m not saying everyone who practices enough can play the cello like Yo-Yo Ma, there are people with unique gifts, but certainly everyone can learn to play the cello. Everyone can learn to be a leader. And everyone can learn to think creatively.

Society has undervalued creativity for a long time, opting instead to focus on math and science. Do you remember when you first started elementary school? Art was a subject just like math. But after a couple years, unless you were highly talented, the art classes went away and the math stayed.

Working in the garden

The garden became “family time”. We had long conversation in that garden about my father’s plans and dreams while he was pulling weeds and I was avoiding pulling weeds. I kept making him show me what the leaves of a carrot looked like.

“You see how that looks like grass,” he’d explain once again. “That’s a weed. The one with all the tiny leaves, the kind of bushy looking one, that’s a carrot.”

“Oh, that’s the carrot.”

“You know, Siddhartha,” he smiled at me, “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution!”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“That’s Cezanne,” he explained.

“The guy with the dome house?”

My dad talked endlessly about building a geodesic dome house. “They’re the most energy efficient structure you can build because of the spherical design,” he would say. I didn’t know anything about heating or cooling costs but I knew they looked awesome so I loved to hear him talk about it.

“No,” he said, not taking the bait, “the artist.”

So we all need to be artists?

I was never going to be a great artist but I certainly enjoyed art more than math. Why not give me the option of studying art instead of math?

Imagine a school curriculum where they only taught math for a few years and, unless you were really good at it, the math classes went away and everyone studied art. Would we see creativity as the natural path and only people who were born with a unique talent for math became engineers and scientists?

I’m not an expert in epistemology but I have a feeling the outcomes we get are based not on a natural endowment of gifts but on the talents we value. Our culture has placed a great deal of emphasis on math-based knowledge for quite a while but we are beginning to see a shift toward creativity-based knowledge.

“The revolution is in valuing fresh observations, in seeing things creatively.”

It’s going to take a new way of thinking about what’s “natural” and what can be taught. We are seeing companies increasingly seeking out those with creative talent. In a recent survey 1500 CEOs were asked which leadership quality would be most important for CEOs to possess over the next five years. Their overwhelming response was “creativity”.

The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind – computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers.

But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.

Daniel Pink A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

Cezanne’s revolution

Perhaps the revolution is in valuing fresh observations, in seeing things creatively. When we allow ourselves to think of creativity as a valuable asset we don’t need to feel indulgent when we practice our favorite creative activity.

Whether your preference is photography, painting, poetry or prose each of us has a creative outlet. From dancing, sculpting and decorating to singing, playing music and composing, we can nurture the part of our brains which has been neglected for so long and given short shrift.

We no longer are a society whose fortunes rise and fall on the number of scientists and engineers we produce but increasingly on the ability of our business leaders to develop innovative approaches and new solutions to vexing problems.

There is room for creativity at every level in an organization. Every employee should see their position as an opportunity to improve the overall enterprise and develop unique ways of examining their responsibilities.

As a society we all benefit from new innovation. What have you freshly observed?

(7:04) SEEKING: Fresh Observations

2010-06-04T23:53:00.000-07:00

Seeking: Fresh Observations by Siddhartha Herdegen
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What Every Leader Needs To Know About Human Nature

2010-06-03T20:58:00.001-07:00

[photo by independentman]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast]

In my last post, The Number One Reason Leaders Fail, I made the comment it’s “in our DNA” to follow. I did not literally mean there was a “following” gene; I just meant humans have a propensity to follow. I said that for the same reason I would say it is in our DNA to be lazy.

Both of these traits are driven by our quest for efficiency. I have written before about our natural inclination to conserve mental energy in the post, Rules are for Lazy People. We also have an inclination to conserve physical energy.

Our compulsion to innovate is motivated by our desire to work less. In essence it is our drive to conserve energy which creates our ability to get more done. Yet at the heart of it, at each stage of the process, it is an effort to get the most done with the least amount of work.

“It’s a lot easier to criticize a solution than to come up with one.”

Being a follower has a similar attraction and payoff. We follow because human nature tells us it’s easier than leading. The leader does the tough innovative mental work, we just have to decide if we agree or not. As anyone who’s ever been in a group trying to solve a problem will tell you, it’s a lot easier to criticize a solution than to come up with one.

The reason it’s easier to criticize a solution than to develop one is because coming up with a solution takes innovation. Criticism only takes comparison.

We’re very good at comparing things. It’s easy. Whenever we have a difficult decision to make it’s usually because there are a lot of choices. It’s too overwhelming to independently evaluate each choice on its own merits so we use some macro criteria to narrow down the choices to a manageable range.

How we manage choices

I recently moved to Annapolis, Maryland to take a job teaching leadership at the United States Naval Academy. As part of the moving process I had to find a house. As anyone who has had to look for a house before knows, there are a lot of choices—most involving highly subjective criteria.

For each preference we can easily define a ceteris paribus ranking on a better/worse scale. But taking all the consideration together is an impossible mental overload so we make broad choices which narrow down the options.

Big decisions about what school district to live in, how many bedrooms we need and how much we’re willing to pay narrow down the field to a more manageable number of choices. If we can get it down to three or four houses our brains are pretty good at making a comparison and coming to a decision.

“Our choices are irrational because we compare rather than evaluate.”

In Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, he points out how our buying choices can be irrational because of our propensity to compare rather than evaluate. This leads clever marketers to place their products in arrangements that make comparisons easy and advantageous for their product.

It’s easy to compare three different mp3 players or mobile phones, but much harder to invent a new one. Similarly, it’s easier to decide who to follow than it is to be a leader.

In our effort to avoid hard mental work we look for someone who already has a similar worldview and follow them. The closer their worldview is to ours, the more comfortable it feels. If we find someone whose vision matches our perfectly, it’s euphoric.

So following a leader is comfortable, natural and desirable.

Why it’s not what you think

Some people resist the idea of following. It seems limiting and they sense it’s taking something away from their freedom to make independent choices. It’s human nature to resist domination.

But keep in mind, following does not mean “doing what someone else tells us to do”. That feels uncomfortable and we generally rebel against such a situation unless we have a good reason to keep our emotions in check.

For some, the luxury of not thinking is a strong enough motive to overcome their instinctive rebellion against being told what to do. For most of us though it takes something more, like wanting to keep our jobs…or stay out of jail.

Having worn handcuffs a few times in my life I can attest to their ability to inspire cooperation. Nothing quite says, “Do you really want to go down this road?” like cold, steel restraints.

“It’s easier to decide who to follow than it is to be a leader.”

There is a segment of the population who has a hard time taking direction. I’m part of that group. For some reason our desire to rebel against authority is stronger than most people’s. But we’re happy to follow, because following is a different dynamic. It’s not doing what another person tells you to do; it’s choosing to align ourselves with their vision.

When we have chosen to align our worldview with someone else’s we get the energy efficiency of not having to innovate without the cost of compromising living the way we want. This is naturally appealing.

But there is an additional human drive at work here, one we’ve all felt and strived to recreate—the drive for connection.

Leaders connect with followers

Humans are social animals; we thrive in communities. We’re constantly seeking out people to connect and bond with.

I think everyone can relate to the expansive feeling of being around people you just clicked with. It’s a heart-racing, chest-pounding, skin-tingling experience. Connection is thrilling.

The process of identifying a leader you’re willing to follow is a lot like this because they are a person you identify with on a deep level. They share your belief system, see the world the way you do and have an inspiring vision of future possibilities.

This is why leadership works where management doesn’t. People genuinely want to do things for leaders because we believe in the cause. We want them to succeed and we want to help them do it.

“It’s human nature to desire connection and community.”

I think following resonates with us in a visceral way which is why we’re all followers of someone.

When we decide to follow, we don’t turn our whole life over to them and say, show me the right way. We follow multiple people, each of whom we feel has a vision we can share for a particular area of our life.

Maria Killam has great insight on decorating, but I don’t ask her for financial advice. Adam Baker knows a lot about finances but I don’t ask for his career advice. Penelope Trunk…well, I’m not sure I’d ask her for career advice either, but she has some great ideas on lifestyle design.

You have to pick your leaders for their strengths and be a leader where your strengths lie.

So when I said following was in our DNA I was referring to our natural drive to avoid mental work by picking a person to follow instead of forging a new path and this instinctive desire to find connection and be part of a community.

It’s a big part of who we are.

(7:02) What Every Leader Needs To Know About Human Nature

2010-06-03T20:56:00.000-07:00

What Every Leader Needs To Know About Human Nature by Siddhartha Herdegen
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The Number One Reason Leaders Fail

2010-06-01T22:51:00.001-07:00

[photo by Sabrina Campagna]

[Note: You can also listen to this post as a podcast.]

Rallying behind an inspirational leader is one of the most intensely thrilling experiences we can have in life. We yearn to follow, it’s in our DNA.

We want to be part of a team united behind a common cause, to feel our efforts are for the greater good and to pull alongside our friends and teammates.

Nothing is quite so uplifting or unifying as a strong leader and nothing is quite as disappointing as a failed one.

We’ve all been there too. When the organization disintegrates and followers are frantically trying to guess who everyone else is going to follow so they can get there first. We can feel the organization giving way like unstable ground beneath our feet.

Why does this happen? What causes successful leaders to suddenly fail?

Failure to delegate.

When leaders spend too much time on non-visionary tasks they lose the ability to lead their followers and the organizations fall apart.

This generally happens for one of three reasons:

1. The leader fears losing control

2. The leader doesn’t trust anyone else to do it right

3. The leader doesn’t want to burden anyone by asking them to help

Delegation

As the organization is growing it requires more management to keep things running smoothly and coordinate the efforts of the team. Yet many leaders are reluctant to let loose of the rains and allow others to manage.

These leaders soon become overloaded with management tasks and are unable to keep their vision fresh and vibrant. Their rallying cries become stale slogans and cliché sound bites.

In order to avoid this workload burnout, leaders need to delegate those tasks which do not deal directly with their central role of declaring a clear and inspiring vision to their followers.

Often this has the added benefit of bringing in someone more suited to the task of managing the organization. Most leaders think they’re good managers, and some are, but the best leaders are not the best managers.

When great leaders hire great managers both are more effective.

When leaders are able to decrease their workload they are more able to engage their followers, respond to their needs and spend the contemplative time necessary to keep their vision vital and new.

“The best leaders are not the best managers.”

When leaders focus on leadership the organization will experience renewed growth and those within the organization benefit from a recharged sense of purpose. As duties and responsibilities flow down to those in the lower ranks they will experience a sense of ownership in the team and a feeling of being needed.

When followers feel needed in an organization they develop stronger ties and are more likely to become vocal advocates. As unlikely as it sounds, studies have shown those who did a favor for someone else were more likely to feel positive feelings toward that person than toward someone who did them a favor.

Noted author Daniel Pink explains in his book Drive, people are motivated by the need to feel autonomous. When leaders delegate tasks to their followers they get a sense of autonomy.

So followers are more satisfied in organizations where leaders delegate tasks and leaders are more capable of leading in organizations where leaders delegate, so why doesn’t every leader do this?

The leader fears losing control

In some cases leaders are reluctant to delegate managerial functions because they fear their role will be diminished if they are not seen as ‘running’ the operation.

By maintaining all the higher level organizational functions leaders give themselves the trappings of authority. Like the king’s crown; it provides visible evidence they’re the person in charge.

The leader doesn’t trust anyone else to do it right

Leaders can also be blinded by their own abilities. Leaders are generally people who are driven to achieve and to set high standards for themselves. Because of this they are likely to see themselves as more capable than others of doing all the tasks in an organization.

In order for leaders to get out of the way and delegate more, they need to accept that the benefits of delegation are greater to the organization than any decrease in efficiency due to less proficient workers doing non-leadership tasks.

Cultivating a sense of what’s best for the organization will help leaders conquer their reluctance to let go of tasks they are capable of doing themselves but which should be delegated.

The leader doesn’t want to burden anyone by asking them to help

The final reason leaders may not want to delegate is their reluctance to burden their followers. This is in many ways the same as the first reason, just manifest differently.

In both cases leaders feel afraid of losing control of their organization but in the first case they feel their position is secured by exercising managerial control, or positional authority. In many ways this is a fear that people are not following because they share an ideal but because the leader is in charge.

When this feeling is manifest as leaders being afraid to burden their followers it is because they feel people are following out of convenience rather than out of commitment. These leaders are quick to point out the benefits of joining the organization rather than pointing to their vision statement.

When leaders feel followers are only self-interested, they don’t want to strain what they feel is a tenuous connection. In reality however, those ties would be strengthened by asking for followers to step up and participate.

While some followers will be lost, they are not the ones who were committed in the first place. In some instances leaders can even use delegation to cull the ranks of casual followers.

There are many skills a leader must develop in order to be effective; developing vision, connecting with people and inspiring followers. But once the organization begins to grow, the leader also needs to know how to delegate or the organization will collapse.

(6:16) The Number One Reason Leaders Fail

2010-06-01T22:39:00.001-07:00

The Number One Reason Leaders Fail by Siddhartha Herdegen
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How I Conquered My Fear of Failure

2010-05-31T23:45:00.001-07:00

[photo by HeyRocker]

You can also listen to this post as a podcast.

Fellow blogger Kelly Diels recently talked about how she manages her fears. Here’s how I conquered one of mine.

I grew up with hard-working parents who never had enough money to live on. We were always close to the edge and it wasn’t beneath my folks to find dinner in a dumpster behind the local grocery store.

People cringe when they hear that but really, it sounds worse than it is. Once you get them home and cleaned up, they’re just like all the other expired groceries in the cupboard. And frankly, some of the most fun I had with my dad growing up was finding salvageable stuff in dumpsters.

One of the downsides to it however; I was always aware of how close we were to not making it. I grew up with a fear of ending up broke and homeless. It always seemed to be just around the corner.

When I was sixteen years old I took a Greyhound bus to visit my grandparents on their farm in northern Michigan. It was summer and my grandfather always needed help bringing the hay in. I was looking for an adventure and even at that age traveling alone didn’t bother me.

To the contrary, it empowered me; when I traveled by myself I felt a surge of freedom, as though I could go anywhere. I was high on life and life’s endless possibilities.

I was young and spirited and it was summer. My days were spent in the fields but my mind was always somewhere else. I thought about traveling to Europe or exploring the Canadian wilderness. I envisioned quaint Swiss villages along the Alps and majestic Canadian mountain ranges carpeted with evergreens as far as the eye could see.

“I’m in Chicago…I’m just not coming to your house.”

The work was hard but it felt good to sweat in the sun and to be treated like a man. I felt a great sense of accomplishment riding back to the barn on top of a trailer piled with the freshly baled hay I had stacked. I spent a few weeks on the farm and when the hay was all in, took another bus to see my uncle who lived in Chicago.

On the way to my uncle’s house however, a funny thing happened. I decided not to go. I had always been afraid to be homeless but there, in Chicago, I suddenly decided to try it out. I called my uncle from the bus station.

“So, you’re not coming to Chicago?”

“No, I’m in Chicago. I’m just not coming to your house.”

“Why in the world not?”

“I just thought I’d stick around downtown and see if I could earn some money. I’ll call you if I need anything.”

He tried to convince me to come stay with him. I could be gone all day if I wanted but at least I’d have a place to sleep. I couldn’t tell him that was the point, I didn’t want to have a place to sleep. I didn’t want to have anything I didn’t earn myself.

I like how Danielle LaPorte explains the difference between fear management and fear leadership but I’ll save you the trip and just tell you, I was in fear management mode.

I found a day labor place called Ready Men right downtown, filled out a short information sheet and sat down with the rest of the guys waiting for work. It was a rough looking crowd with used up faces and tired clothes, shoes splitting at the seams. I would later refer to it, the way other regulars did because of its clientele, as “Ready Bum”. I untucked my shirt.

When they looked at me I looked right back, hoping not to look scared but also not look like I was staring. I was sending out a vibe I hoped was saying “I’m one of you”. Given I’d had a shower in the last week and a haircut within the last year this was difficult to pull off.

“Everything in that place was ancient and neglected.”

It was ten in the morning and I didn’t realize it but I’d come during the doldrums between the morning crews that got called at eight and the afternoon crews called at three. The people who stuck around in between were the people who were desperate enough to hope for anything and those with nowhere better to be.

They chatted amongst themselves and picked through the collection of cigarette butts on the floor to see if there was anything worth lighting. Or they dozed, absently swatting flies. I looked at the broken linoleum tiles and noticed how they’d been worn smooth from use, the exposed glue beneath them catching dirt in swirling patterns.

I wondered how long the place had been there and how many nameless men had worn the wooden benches smooth by sitting, waiting, squirming, slouching. It was like driftwood, smooth but not flat. I ran my hand along the bench. Everything in that place was ancient and neglected.

The room was long and narrow with filthy pane glass windows in the front and a small counter at the rear beneath an opening five feet up the wall. This is where they handed out the jobs and it attracted our gaze like the blue light of a backyard bug zapper. As though if we could just catch his eye he might suddenly motion for us to come up there for a job he was saving for someone special.

When three o’clock rolled around I was lucky enough to get called for a second shift job. He passed the slip down to me with the factory’s address.

“You give this to the supervisor when you get there,” the guy at the counter told me. “You need money for the bus?”

“Oh, no thanks,” I said. “I got it.”

I was working in a metal fabrication plant making what looked like loaf pans. The supervisor gave me the ten minute rundown on what to do and what not to touch. I was supposed to pull them out of a solution and stack them on a cart. Just like stacking hay, I thought, but a lot lighter. Piece of cake.

At midnight all the workers left the factory and I started wandering around looking for a place to sleep. Ready Bum was closed and the city looked more forbidding than it had in the daylight.

I found a piece of cardboard in an alley and lay down but was startled awake some time later by the guy who apparently lived there. His piece of cardboard. Sorry.

My body surging with adrenaline I wandered around for a while again surveying the empty streets, evaluating options for sleeping places. Walking down an alley I noticed the security bars covering an apartment window were directly beneath the raised ladder of a fire escape.

Climbing the bars I was able to ascend the fire escape to the roof. There wasn’t much up there but at least I’d be undisturbed. I huddled on the leeward side of a chimney and drifted off.

“Just like stacking hay, I thought, but a lot lighter. Piece of cake.”

Somewhere before dawn I was awakened by the sound the “L” clattering past my building. It had begun to drizzle—just a light mist—and I sat on the black tar looking out over the downtown skyline. To my left was Lake Michigan and to the right, the iconic Sears Tower.

I only had a couple bucks and a work voucher in my pocket that was worth around $20. I had no food or shelter. No security whatsoever. But at that moment I took a deep breath of the cool, moist Chicago air and I felt like an absolute king. I felt like Chicago was my city and my opportunities there were limitless.

I knew there were days of hard living ahead (I spent a week there being “homeless”) but I knew I would get through them. I knew if I could make it through a day, I could make it through a week. And if I could make it through a week I could survive.

I knew if I could step off a bus in Chicago with only a couple dollars in my pocket and survive. If I could make enough money to get something to eat and find a place to stay, I had nothing to fear from financial ruin.

It was a lesson I needed to learn in order to be fearless with finances, to get over my worries of “what happens if…” In most instances the worst case scenario is going broke, and now I knew I didn’t have to fear that anymore.

So when Dave Doolin, writing on his blog about passion being the new cool, asks this probing question: what drives you? The fear of being broke?

I can honestly say, not me. Not anymore.

(7:57) How I Conquered My Fear of Failure

2010-05-31T23:42:00.001-07:00

How I Conquered My Fear Of Failure by Siddhartha Herdegen
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How I Conquered My Fear of Failure.mp3 (7458 KB)

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Nurturing Imagination in a Reality-Driven World

2010-05-29T21:57:00.000-07:00

[photo by Per Ola Wiberg]

As children we are indulged. We can live in a fantasy land and have imaginary friends, develop elaborate and impossible plans and draw innumerable pictures of unidentifiable objects. We could call it whatever we wanted and our parents would simply say, “Oh, yeah. I can see that now.”

Somewhere along the line though we get the subtle message imagination is okay for kids but mature people must live in the real world. People no longer think it’s cute when you tell them about your island home where dragons live or introduce them to your best friend Poon, the wooden spoon.

That’s kind of sad. Because imagination is the Christopher Columbus of our minds. Sometimes it falls off the edge of the world but sometimes it discovers a new land that turns out to be pretty useful.

Sure, it may not be India like he thought it was, but it’s still useful.

“Find some time to be bored out of your mind.”

In order to find new ways of thinking we have to allow ourselves to look foolish and to fail. Failure and success are two sides of the same coin, they come together. Failure is only a result, not a value judgment.

As adults our minds have become used to suppressing our creative impulses and we have to relearn how to use those skills. It takes practice. Here are some ideas which should help:

Get isolated

Spend time alone, without distractions. Getting away from people and attention-demanding media allows our mind a chance to breathe. I would even go one step further and say, find some time to be bored out of your mind.

As a child I spent many hours being dragged from one place to another by my parents. Rarely was this a playground or a toy store. Most often it was a place where sitting quietly was the only appropriate activity. This meant I spent a lot of time finding mental activities to occupy my imagination.

When was the last time you were really bored? We live in an information abundant society; there are always plenty of diversions if we want to find them. We have to consciously make time to think without distractions.

Don’t be bound by reality

Too often people suffocate their ability to think imaginatively by only considering what is possible. But the really great ideas start with what we wish the world were like and work backwards to how we can get there. Sometimes the answer is we can’t.

As children we are mostly ignorant of the constraints around us. We think it’s quite possible animals think like humans and just can’t express themselves in our language. We allow our minds to imagine wondrous things because we don’t yet know they’re impossible.

“Idea people know what it’s like to have an idea kicked in the gut when it’s down.”

There will be a time when we’ll need to ask some hard questions about possibilities and practicalities, but imposing these restrictions too soon stifles our ability to let our minds envision something beyond what currently exists.

Surround yourself with people who value creativity

Every idea needs a cheerleader, someone who will say, “You can do it” even if we’re not sure we can. The great thing about idea people is they know what it’s like to have an idea kicked in the gut when it’s down. Creative friends will pick your idea up and carry it home to recuperate.

When we’re still young everyone around us is going through the same mind-expanding, thought-exploring phases we are so it’s easy to have conversations about the things we imagine. We’ve got a ready audience who will not only treat our ideas as valuable but will join in the creative process.

As we get older, fewer people want to explore the world of make believe. We have to consciously seek these people out and make a comfortable place to discuss ideas. It’s amazing how much an idea changes when it’s expressed to someone else. We need to give our ideas this growth opportunity.

Get the blood flowing

Fostering imagination is not all about seclusion and isolation; it’s also about getting out into the world and experiencing life. You will probably find some of your best ideas come when you’re engaged in, or just after, a physical activity. Running, hiking, and climbing all get the blood flowing and help spur creativity.

During our youth this just came naturally. Running around, climbing trees, building a fort, going swimming. We could find so many ways to exert ourselves we never had to think about it. It was just a natural part of life.

“Expressing our ideas to others lets them grow.”

Now that our lives are more sedentary it takes a commitment and an intentional plan to provide opportunities for physical exertion. It’s not just for the sake of our health we should incorporate exercise into our lives; we need it to nurture imaginative thinking as well.

Some affirmations

Sometimes we need to prime the pump, especially if it’s been a while since we’ve exercised our creative muscles. When we’re trying to inspire ourselves to come up with creative ideas it helps if we focus on one particular area of exploration. Then actively think about the following two thoughts.

1. Give yourself permission to think big. Tell yourself not to think about the restrictions of reality right now. For most of us it’s a habit we have grown used to over years and it may take a while before we really believe it’s okay. So keep telling yourself this until you believe it.

2. Be intentionally extreme. Really take ideas to the maximum and see what lies on the outskirts of what we can conceive. Doing this forces us beyond the everyday ideas and affirms what we just told ourselves, that it’s okay to think big.

Some exercises

After finding a spot without distractions give yourself a substantial amount of time for undisturbed thinking. Then give yourself a prompt. This could be two words selected at random from a dictionary—or from any book really. Just pick two random numbers, the first is the page number the second is the row. Use a word on that row.

Ex: 1. Use two words selected at random and see if you can form a connection between them or apply them to a particular problem you’re having. Our minds are very good at finding connections, you will usually be able to form an idea even if only a ridiculous one. Consider how that idea could be applied.

Ex: 2. Find a picture in a magazine. Use something in the picture as a prompt. It could be an object, a word, or the layout itself. Choose two items and find a connection as above.

Ex: 3. Don’t stop with your first idea. The best ideas are rarely the first ones developed. Take your idea and use it as a prompt to build on. Continue this process two or three times.

A final thought

As with any new skill, the most important thing is to practice. When we do things repeatedly they become easier.

Learn what works well for you and what doesn’t. Find out which people are most receptive to your craziest ideas and what activities help you get blood flowing to your brain.

In time you will find using your imagination can be quite fun. You may even discover what it’s like to be a child again.

(7:27) Nurturing Imagination in a Reality-Driven World

2010-05-29T21:45:00.001-07:00

Nurturing Imagination In A Reality - Driven World by Siddhartha Herdegen
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