Drop Anchors Carefully

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A few years ago at a Sioux Falls, ID supermarket, the owners experimented with marketing labels next to cans of soup. Some days the label said “10% off regular price, limit 10 per customer,” and on other days it said “10% off regular price, no limit per customer.” Shoppers purchased twice as many on the days with limitations. The sense of scarcity set an anchoring effect, and the number 10 set a mental anchor of the amount of cans they should buy. So, those presented with the limited availability felt a mental urge to buy more.

Similarly, if I ask you, “Is the oldest dog in the world older or younger than 60 years?” and then I ask you, “How old is the oldest dog?”, your answer will be higher than if I just ask you “How old is the oldest dog in the world?” You know instinctively that a 60 year old dog is completely nuts, but it will still have a psychological priming effect and sway your guess upwards. Significantly upwards it turns out. Your dog-age guess will be over a decade above your guess without the suggestion of a 60-year old dog.

Mental anchors are everywhere, and quite effectively used in negotiations. The above example is from Daniel Kahnemann’s new book Thinking Fast and Slow. In his chapter on the anchoring effect, he also points out that we are much more susceptible to psychological anchors during times of stress and anxiety. If we are in a stressful state and someone suggests a point of direction, or an idea to consider, we are much more likely to accept and build on that idea, instead of patiently and thoughtfully questioning it. In another Kahnemann-type example, if you are nervous and I ask even a ridiculous question like, “Is your arm getting numb?” You are far more likely to believe your arm might actually be getting numb instead of reject such a nutty suggestion.

Consider this next time you speak your mind: In times of stress with mounting deadlines, you can more easily make your case but you do so at the expense of allowing the thoughtful contribution of the team. And then sacrifice the voice of the community who might have a more powerful collective idea than you. Create a space to allow considered contribution. You will almost always create a stronger result.

[Cool cartoon from Andertoons – check them out]

Mindset Exercise: Resources vs. Resourcefulness

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[one_half]Think of a failed project or effort in your life, choose below and finish this sentence:
“I can’t do that because I don’t have the ____________”

  • Time
  • Money
  • Technology
  • Contacts
  • Experience
  • Management Support

[/one_half]

[one_half_last]
Now think of a successful effort, choose below and finish this sentence:
“We pulled off a great success because we had the _______________”

  • Creativity
  • Determination
  • Care
  • Curiosity
  • Passion
  • Resolve

[/one_half_last]

Thank you Tony Robbins

Make it Human, Connect with the Impact

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There’s a small trick, a small shift in thinking, in mindset, that can translate to immense performance gains. It’s this: connect personally with the impact, the change or result of what you do. Let me give you an example. Adam Grant is a talented young professor at the Wharton School and he conducted a study a couple years ago in which he worked with a group of students at the University of Michigan. These students were earning a little extra cash by making cold calls to alumni to raise money which would go to scholarship fund. The fund was used to help finance the tuition for students accepted at the university but unable to afford the tuition.

So Grant and his colleagues divided the students into three separate groups and had them perform activities for just 10 minutes before their call shift. With one group, the students could do whatever they wanted for 10 minutes before their calls. Check out facebook, text their friends, whatever. The second group was asked to read letters for a few minutes from people who had benefitted from the scholarship fund that they were working on, and then talk about the contents of the letter with their peers for a couple minutes.

The third group was also given a handful of letters to read together, but after a few minutes in the break room, they got a surprise. The call organizer would say, “We have a special guest on the phone.” And on the phone was a real recipient of the scholarship fund the students were working on. And for just 5 minutes, the students talked on a speaker phone in the break room with the beneficiary. They could ask questions about where they were from, what classes they were taking, what they intended do after they graduated, etc. Just for five minutes.
At the conclusion of the five minute phone call with the beneficiary, the organizer would say “Remember this when you’re on the phone—this is someone you’re supporting.”

That’s it. A ten minute intervention to connect the callers with the impact, the difference, the real goal of their work. The result? 250% increase in revenue performance sustained over a month after that one single intervention. 250% better than their peers that had no direct contact with the beneficiaries.

Take an opportunity to find and talk to the people who actually consume, touch, experience, contact what you offer or what you create. It will remind you of why you do what you do. It will lead to higher quality, integrity and excellence in craftsmanship and relationship with your customer. And higher performance too. How does 250% sound?

The Velocity of Learning

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You don’t often think of learning as having a speed, a velocity, but it does. The classic notion of practice involves putting in the hours, doing the time, right? But there is a striking difference in the quality of practice that leads to accelerated learning. And it isn’t about watching the clock, it’s more about purposeful practice. Purposeful practice is found right on the edges of your ability, at the intersection of challenge and ability when you are successful perhaps 50-75% of the time. Not so much easy success that gains overconfidence and loss of challenge, and not so much difficulty that it creates a sense of stress and anxiety.

But the only why to find that sweet spot is to try, to get in action. Particularly when trying to acquire new skills or new behaviors the aim shouldn’t necessarily be to stop a trait or practice, but instead think about starting new behaviors and habits. Dan Coyle told a marvelous story about visiting the Shyness Clinic in Palo Alto, CA where they focus on building new habits toward developing what they call “social fitness.” The folks that come to the shyness clinic often have arrived at a point where their social anxieties and shyness have become a real hindrance and barrier to connection. The clinicians and psychologists there believe that much like developing physical fitness, or leadership or creative capacities, so too can people develop social fitness.

A simple exercise might involve asking participants to approach two people per day in a public place and simply ask them the time of day. And then graduate to asking a store manager where the restroom is, for example. For a final exam a participant was asked to go to a supermarket and intentionally drop a whole watermelon on the floor and work with the market employees to deal with the mess and apologize for the accident. Such a scene would be an appalling thought to someone suffering from acute shyness. But over time, with incremental social practice and repetitive purposeful practice and interactions, the participants could build the social and emotional capacities to envision such an incident, and effectively deal with it in a public social setting.

And remember the practice needs to be in context, under real conditions, with a little stress, a little challenge such that you are on the edges of your ability. For example, instead of asking the soccer team players to shoot twenty penalty kicks at the end of practice, instead stop the scrimmage in the middle of practice and have a player shoot just two, under pressure, in the middle of the game.

Your product is not what you sell, it’s the difference you make

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Your product is the impact you make, the change you affect, the experience your product delivers. Your product is the result, the causatum, the punch. Sell cars? No, you don’t sell a car, you sell utility or transport or identity or experience or speed perhaps. In pharma? – you don’t sell drugs, you sell health and well-being. Clothing retail? – your product isn’t jackets and boots, it’s warmth and style and durability and expression of taste.

It starts at the beginning – teachers and educators certainly aren’t selling, they are creating idea agents, young people interested and willing to learn, excited and touched by ideas they put into action. My wife, a high school science teacher, should justifiably be proud when she talks to a former student who was inspired to enter teaching, or go into microbiology, or well… go into any discipline related to science because they were touched in a meaningful way in her class in high school.

And if you are in the the business I’m in – the learning business, you aren’t selling books, courses, classes or video learning, your product is behavioral change. Your product is impact – the difference those ideas make.

Early this year, Tim Sanders gave the keynote address at our annual client conference, Perspectives. Afterwards, a woman approached him to congratulate and thank him for his message, she said “Thank you for a wonderful presentation, but I still don’t understand. What are you selling?” Tim smiled and said, “I’m selling success, your success.”

It doesn’t matter if you are in sales, you are still selling – ideas, solutions, change, experiences, expertise. But understand your product might not be what you think it is. The core asset in your arsenal to make an impact is between your ears – your brain and your willingness and ability to engage and affect change through whatever products or services you happen to be representing. The course, the textbook, the video, is merely a transit mechanism. It’s the vehicle for ideas.

Your difference is the difference you can make, representing something you believe it. But remember the quality of the interaction matters. As Susan Scott says, “The conversation is the relationship.”

Why can’t a cell phone be like a cow?

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I’m grateful for an interview the other day with Iqal Quadir, Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. When Iqbal was quite young, growing up with his siblings in a village in Bangladesh, he was asked by his mother to walk about 10km to another village to fetch medicine. He spent all morning walking to the village to discover the doctor was out attending to patients in other villages and retrieving supplies. So Iqbal spent the afternoon walking home with his pockets empty.

Years later after moving to the U.S. and receiving degrees from Wharton, he became a Wall Street banker. He recalls having another unproductive day in the early 1990s transporting data across Manhatten on floppy disks (remember floppies?). Mobile phones were still in their infancy – expensive, heavy, and with scarce connectivity. But understanding Moore’s Law (processing speed, transistor density, pixal concentration, memory capacity, etc…all doubling every two years), Iqbal knew that in the coming years mobile phones would become cheap, powerful and ubiquitous. If this was to be true, he reasoned, then why not begin the journey now to provide mobile phones to villagers in his home country of Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh, a source of entrepreneurial capital might be a cow or goat to provide milk to sell or convert to cheese. If having a cow or a goat could be the seed of an entrepreneurial venture in a Bangladesh village, then why couldn’t a cell phone be one also? As Quadir put it, “Why can’t a cell phone be like a cow?”

Why couldn’t people in rural environments in Bangladesh use mobile telecommunications technology as an entrepreneurial technology, just as many use land, livestock, and other local resources to start small businesses? If land could yield crops to sell, or a goat to harvest milk and cheese to sell, Quadir rationalized that someone could take out a micro-loan to purchase a mobile phone that could be shared—rented—by members of the community. In this way, a mobile phone could be an asset to an entire village. As Quadir likes to say, “Connectivity is productivity.”

Quadir took this argument to Grameen Bank, a micro-credit lender that could realize the potential, as well as to Telenor telecommunications of Norway, which could help provide the infrastructure. As of this writing, Grameenphone has nearly 40 million subscribers and is still expanding.

This system of microlending has vastly increased the productivity and standard of living of the people of Bangladesh, spawned an untold number of entrepreneurial ventures employing cell phones, and of course brought some wealth to Grameen Bank and Telenor. But the impetus for such an innovative initiative started with Quadir’s recognition that connectivity equals productivity, and his strong sense of purpose and meaning in giving back to his native country.

Money is a by product of contributing value and meaning

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As the legend goes, Peter Drucker was once asked by a business owner to review his financial statements and see if he could find better, more innovative, ways to make money from studying, and tweaking, his financials. To which Drucker replied, “You don’t make money, you make shoes. Work on making shoes. The money is just a by-product.”

The lesson reminded me of an interview I had with Yvon Chounaird, founder of Patagonia, who said in the interview, “Over the past forty years I have yet to encounter a business problem that cannot be solved by focusing on product excellence and product integrity.” Despite, and because of, the magnificent growth Patagonia has enjoyed over the years, Yvon and Patagonia found sustainability by consistently refocusing their attention on quality and excellence. The journey was not without various hurtles and faltering moments while those around him were distracted by financial growth alone. For the full story see this interview.

But my point is this: Everyone I talk to is talking about building meaning in their work – building meaning into their everyday life and endeavors, As Teresa Amabile reminds us, progress in meaningful work is what motivates and engages us. We’re preparing for an upcoming event with Benjamin Zander, renowned conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, and I listened to him talk recently about the importance and value of contribution, as opposed to competition. They aren’t the same thing – competition is when you mentally compare, evaluate and attempt to trump. Contribution has no such relative marker. Contribution is when you try, when you show up and muster what you got – hopefully from a source of practice and competence – but nevertheless a real try.

Dispel your worries of competitive evaluation, and focus on your best, and give toward your best efforts with honest intention.

Why Change is Hard – Embrace the Unfamiliar

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Sometimes you make a leap. Perhaps you buy that new car you’ve been researching, or that slick new piece of software or technology you’ve been eyeing. And suddenly you see it everywhere and wonder if you weren’t on the cutting edge after all. Once you’ve gone through the diligence and effort, it’s become familiar and suddenly you see it everywhere. The same is true about out networks and connections – we know what we know and whille we think we adapt the new, and are open to new experiences, we readily default to the familiar, the known.

The same is true in organizations, and the change initiatives, new processes and designs that we start to adopt can get unhinged by our urge to retreat to the familiar. This psychological effect was documented years ago as the Mere Exposure effect. One of the more classic examples involved showing subjects, and their friends, pictures of the subject – both straight photographs, and a mirrored version, as the subject would see themselves in the mirror every day. Consistently, the subjects found the reversed image more appealing, and the acquaintances found the straight photograph more appealing. Of course because each image is exactly as it appears to themselves, and as it appears to their friends in the world. How we see the world is the most familiar and our most attractive and comfortable version of the world.

An important recognition here, confirmed in the studies, is that the more we expose ourselves to new ideas, the more familiar they become. To create change, in ourselves and within the ways we work, embrace the unfamiliar.

Gratitude = Meaning = Performance = Happiness

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The results were clear: Higher levels of optimism, increased life satisfaction, and decreased negative feelings were all associated with students’ expressions of gratitude. By the follow-up three weeks later, students who had been instructed to count their blessings showed more gratitude toward people who had helped them, which led to more gratitude in general.
– Jeffrey Froh, Professor, Hofstra University

I have three kids, currently with a combined age of twenty-one. The other day I was musing on how to teach gratitude to them and posed this question to my five year old at the kitchen table: “Annie, would you name three things you are grateful for?”
“What’s grateful?”
“Thankful. What are three things you are thankful for?”
She thought for a moment and said, “Santa Claus!” Cute. She also said painting with her grandmother and playing with our dog. A good start. Gratitude, just like creativity, can be learned. The importance and power of engaging ourselves in our work, connecting with the people and world around us, and deviating from convention to create new value, defines our potential in this creative age.

Jeffrey Froh, Hofstra University, did this cool study in which he and his colleagues, tracked 221 students and divided them into three groups, asking each group to think about 1. things they were grateful for and liked about school, 2. things they found to be a hassle and not fun, and 3. a control group they asked nothing of.

Pretty simply, they asked group one to spend just a few minutes each day identifying up to five things they were grateful for, and measured their school performance and engagement from both their perspective and the perspective of their teachers. Essentially, they found these students to be happier (by their own account), and more engaged in their work (by the teachers account), and…wait for it, they got better grades. Not only that, the effect lasted beyond the duration of the study itself. Finally consider the effect of extrinsic rewards in this study:

“Evidence from research with adolescents indicates that gratitude is incompatible with the pursuit of materialistic or extrinsic goals and that it positively predicts academic achievement, mental health and well-being—outcomes that are negatively predicted by materialism.”

Lessons from Challenger, Build Hope and Be Accountable

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“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
— Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Richard Feynman, renowned physicist, was asked in 1986 to help understand what happened in the Challenger disaster. He not only gave a famous testimony to Congress describing the O-ring failure that led to the catastrophe, he also led a more quiet inquiry conducting interviews of the NASA engineers and leaders. He devoted the latter half of his book What Do You Care What Other People Think? to his experience working on the Rogers Commission. One of his sober conclusions was that the engineers on the ground building the componentry had a much different perspective than than the leaders in the organization. He found that, while the engineers estimated a catastrophic failure upon launch of only 1 in 100, the management’s estimate was closer to 1 in 100,000 This disconnect is linked to what I wrote about in a previous post about the power-poisoning effect Stanford professor Bob Sutton found through his research.

Sometimes in our grandiose vision for change and mission we can lose sight of the details that matter so dearly in execution. Do this:

  • If you’re on the project, speak the truth.  Regularly.   Although unfortunately it is true leaders like only good news, by concealing ugly truths you are only sabotaging your own efforts.
  • If you’re leading the charge, ask and take time to understand the details. A disconnected leader isn’t leading – they are pontificating without honest accountability. Accountability is about understanding the goals, giving honest responsibility and getting out of the way of individual efforts without compromising results.

Build hope and vision, yet remain accountable, because ultimately, if you own the solution or project, see it through to success.