How and why most of what we call “thinking” really isn’t

In the latest of five bestselling b0oks, Unthinking: The Surprising Forces Behind What We Buy, Harry Beckwith shares a number of especially valuable insights and I have consolidated several of them in these two mosaics of excerpts:

“We could excuse our foolishness…by recognizing that most of what we call thinking really isn’t. During our decision making, the organ that that processes our data sits on the sidelines while our feelings do the work. When our feelings reach their decision, they summon our brains to come in and draft the rationale, a task it does so well that it manages to convince us that it’s right – and that it was in charge the whole time.

“We experience the world through our senses, particularly our eyes: we think with them…We shape things and then they shape us…Design has become the great value-added feature: we think with our eyes…We love beauty and nothing looks more beautiful to us than something simple…But of all the forces [that influence a decision], none surpasses reputation…reputations change our experiences. If we think a concoction will sprout hair, for example, we soon see hair…Reputations create our expectations, and out expectations change our perceptions.”

*     *     *

Harry Beckwith is a frequent guest lecturer for many national corporations, including ABC, Inc., BellSouth Corporation, Norwest Corporation, and Marsh & McLennan Companies, Inc., among others. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His published works include the aforementioned Unthinking as well as Selling the Invisible, What Clients Love, You, Inc., and The Invisible Touch.

To read my interview of Beckwith, please click here.

Trust in the Competence + Goodness of Leaders = Effective Leadership – (A Lesson Gleaned from All The Devils Are Here)

Leadership is all about trust…  If people trust their leader(s), anything is possible.  If people lose trust in their leader(s), almost nothing can hold against the onslaught.

This Friday at the First Friday Book Synopsis, I will be presenting my synopsis of All The Devils are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera.  This idea about trust is one of their vivid, profound, powerful conclusions.  In this case, they reflect on the loss of trust in the system and its leaders.  And that loss was, in every sense of the word, devastating.

Here are a couple of quotes, from near the end of the book, to help us understand this:

“Without reciprocal trust between the parties to any securities transaction, the money stops.  Doubt fills the vacuum, and credit and liquidity are the chief casualties.  Bad news, whether it derives form false rumor or verifiable fact, then has an alarming capacity to become contagious and self-perpetuating.” (Alan “Ace” Greenberg, former Bear Stearns chairman).
and
“The way I think about the crisis is that it occurred because of the systemic abuse of trust in capital markets.  The blowups of subprime, then of Bear Stearns, and then of Fannie exposed massive lies.  Then we went from a collective belief in soundness to a collective belief in insolvency.” (John Hampton, Australian financial analyst and historian).

I think this is right, and significant.  And it simply works like this:  the average worker is something of a “prisoner,” utterly dependent on the direction set, the decisions made, by people way above his or her pay grade.  And, in some sense, this is also true of the average borrower, investor…  in other words, all of us.

When good decisions are made, then the results can be wonderful and profitable and truly successful.  When bad decisions are made, then the best work and the best workers in the world can not “save the company” from those bad decisions.

And so, people act they way they do because of the trust they have (or, the lack of trust they have), in their leaders.  When that trust is broken, morale is broken, the future is uncertain, and everything feels, and is, “broken.”

And that trust is shaped by two major factors:  the competence of the leaders, and the morality and integrity of the leaders.  In other words, it is the combination,  competence + goodness, that matters.  Take away either, and trust is destroyed.

So whatever else the task of the leader is, it is certainly this:  winning, maintaining, and continually being worthy of, the trust of the people they lead and the people they serve.

———

If you will be in the DFW area this Friday morning, come join us for the First Friday Book Synopsis.  Just click on home on this page, and click on the “Register Now” sunburst. the

The power of a well-told story

Steve Denning, Annette Simmons, and Doug Lipman have written brilliant books about storytelling; more specifically, about how to write an effective business narrative.

Don Hewitt

It is worth noting that CBS’s 60 Minutes is the longest running prime-time television show in history. In fact, its #1 ranking for five consecutive years has been equaled only by All in the Family and The Cosby Show. Its creator and producer, Don Hewitt, once explained the reason for its success: “Even the people who wrote the Bible were smart enough to know: Tell them a story. The issue was evil; the story was Noah. I latched on to that.” The title of the memoirs that Hewitt later published is Tell Me a Story.

Storytelling is universal. Our ancestors covered their caves with the PowerPoint presentations of their time: the images they painted to tell stories about the hunt. Then and now, we need stories; a story is a single coherent whole out of a lot of parts. Aesop, Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Confucius, and the followers of the Buddha all knew it; every religion has memorable stories at its center.

How to get into and then capture people’s hearts and souls? Hewitt answered with a simple strategy that today’s most successful companies follow every day: “At 60 Minutes, we do what everyone should be doing: Tell me a story. Learn to do that well and you’ll be a success.”

WordPress 3 Site Blueprints: A book review by Bob Morris

WordPress 3 Site Blueprints: Ready-Made Plans for 9 Different Professional WordPress Sites
Heather R. Wallace
Packt Publishing (2010)

This book has prepared me well to work with technical and graphics specialists whom I have retained to transform my website into ”fully-functional, dynamic” WordPress website. That is to say, Heather Wallace and her colleagues have provided a comprehensive and cohesive briefing on how I can actively participate in the aforementioned, step-by-step process. I do not fully understand all of the material provided in Chapter 2 (“Building a Community Portal”), for example, and it is at least possible that another of the nine WordPress websites may prove to be more appropriate. But at least I have learned what questions to ask as well as how best to express my wishes and intentions as various steps are completed in the process.

Whichever one of the nine different professional WordPress sites is selected, Wallace and her colleagues provide two valuable appendices. In the first, the reader learns how to set up and configure Akismet, WP-DB-Backup, WP-reCAPTCHA (also creating new API keys), and Maintenance Mode. The reader is also introduced to WP Hide Dashboard. (Note: The WP Hide Dashboard plugin is well-suited for usage on all of the sites featured in this book.) Then in Appendix B, the reader learns how to install themes from the WordPress Free Themes Directory and plugins from the WordPress Free Plugin Directory. Additional information can be obtained by clicking here.

I also highly recommend Tessa Blakeley Silver’s WordPress 3.0 jQuery and Brandon Corbin’s WordPress Top Plugins, both also published by Packt in 2010.