“You Bug Me. Now Science Explains Why.”

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Traffic. Mosquitoes. People who snap their gum. People who crack their knuckles. There are so many things in the world that are just downright annoying.

But what makes them annoying? It’s the question that NPR Science Correspondent Joe Palca and Science Friday‘s Flora Lichtman set out to answer in their new book, Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, published by John S. Wiley & Sons..

For instance, why is hearing someone else’s phone call more irritating than just overhearing a normal conversation? In an interview with Morning Edition’s Renee Montagne, Lichtman explains why this is so grating.

Flora Lichtman (Photo: Adina Lopatin)

“It’s half of a conversation,” she says. “Your brain goes into this mode where you start trying to predict what that person is going to say next. The thing that’s frustrating about a cellphone conversation is that it’s very hard to predict, which is one of the things that we found makes something annoying.”

A study by a graduate student at Cornell University experimented with this idea of predicting speech by taking half of a conversation and garbling the words. Even though the test subjects couldn’t understand half of what was being said, the annoying effects went away. “It’s not just about the sound intruding your space,” Lichtman says. “It seems to be about the speech itself.”

Most people have something that particularly annoys them. For Lichtman, it’s people who clip their nails on the subway in New York. That combination of someone else’s hygiene habits and the sound of the clippers sets her teeth on edge.

For Palca, the annoyance that tops his list is unexplained delays.

NPR’s Joe Palca finds unexplained delays — Why is the plane not boarding? Why is traffic not moving? — most annoying.

Science Friday’s Flora Lichtman is most annoyed by not being able to control her annoyance.

Joe Palca (Photo: Kathy Hudson)

“You’re in the airport and a flight is supposed to go at 10,” he says. “At a quarter to 10, they haven’t boarded the plane. And then at 10, they haven’t boarded the plane. And at 10:15 they haven’t boarded the plane, and nobody is telling you why.”

There are, however, a few things out there that are universally annoying — like fingernails on a blackboard.

“It seems to be something intrinsic about that mix of frequencies,” Lichtman says. “The change in volume rapidly — it’s called ‘rough’ in acoustics — most people’s ears don’t like that stimulus.”

While there are plenty of irritants in the world, there aren’t a lot of ways to alleviate that sense of annoyance. Palca points out that they’re part of human life, and they’re something that everyone has to deal with from time to time.

But there are some techniques that people can use — for example, distracting yourself if you’re stuck in a long line, or something Palca calls “cognitive restructuring.”

“You can tell yourself that that mosquito is just a part of the life flow of the world and I shouldn’t be mad,” he says. “It’s just trying to do what it was genetically programmed to do.”

Basically, though, the bottom line is that you’re stuck, it’s annoying, and that’s part of life.

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Are You Annoying?

In doing research for the book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman asked personality psychologist Robert Hogan of Hogan Assessment Systems Inc. to design a short test that would tell how annoying someone is. Do you dare to find out? Rate how strongly you agree with the following statements on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1= Not at all and 5= Strongly agree.

Take The 20-Question Quiz by clicking here.

Christine Lagarde – At the IMF, Could She Bring Some of that Change for the Better?

The chorus of support is growing for Christine Lagarde to lead the IMF.  I think it is safe to say that a woman might be a wise choice after the apparently criminal, and despicable, inexcusable, utterly depraved behavior of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  (Yes, I know that he is innocent until proven guilty.  But I’ve read the accounts…)

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde - Headed to the IMF?

I wrote of Christine Lagarde’s insight on the difference between men and women on this blog back last October:  Women Approach Business Differently than Men – Insight from Christine Lagarde.  Her words sound practically prescient…  It would be worth it to read my full blog post, but here is that key phrase:

“You were a former CEO. Do you think women have a different way of approaching business or approaching the public sphere?” Amanpour asked.

“Yes,” said Lagarde, who is the only female finance minister in the Group of Seven industrialized countries. “I think we inject less libido, less testosterone …”

Now, the chorus grows in support of Lagarde to head the IMF – French Government Says China Would Back Lagarde As IMF Chief:

China would support Finance Minister Christine Lagarde as the next IMF chief, the French government said on Tuesday, backing which would put her firmly in pole position to succeed Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

I have read, and written, quite a bit about the kinds of changes for the better that women in leadership positions can bring to organizations.  I think this will be interesting to watch – and potentionally bring some of that change for the better.

“Corporations Are Natural Sociopaths” – Insight from Geoffrey James (with a Smackdown of Ayn Rand)

Bob has a column up today about overrated business books – “7 Vastly Overrated Business Books.”  I read through the article linked to, written by Geoffrey James.  Admittedly it is only one man’s opinion about these books (Geoffrey James), but I found this provocative paragraph prompted by Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:

Essentially Rand’s business philosophy is that the generation of wealth is, by itself, a positive and moral act simply because it creates jobs.  What Rand completely misses is that corporations are natural sociopaths that can, must and will take advantage of society at large if not restrained by laws and regulations.

I agree with Mr. James.  He may be using a little hyperbole, but it does seem that there is a group of people who believe that corporations somehow will be provide the wisdom, the ethical course, to lead us to the promised land.

I suspect I spent too many years in ministry, and I have been shaped by one clear teaching found in the Christian Scriptures:  (actually, building on what Christians refer to as the Old Testament):  “There is none righteous, no not one.”

In other words, corporations may not always be guided by good, right, ethical principles…  (Subprime mortgage crisis, anyone?)  In other words, trust – but verify.  And therefore, provide guidelines, correctives (laws and regulations).

I don’t know that I agree with all of the opinions of Mr. James – but this one warning is worth paying careful attention to.

7 Vastly Overrated Business Books

Here is an article written by Geoffrey James for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Most business books are awful, some are mediocre and a (very) few are truly useful.   And then there are business books that aren’t exactly dreadful, but have reputations that have been bloated way out of proportion.

You see them on corporate shelves everywhere and they’re cited at meetings, conferences and seminars, but when you dig a little deeper, and think about their contents, you’re forced to wonder WTF the fuss is all about.

This post identifies some highly popular business books which, in my view, are absurdly overrated.  I’m sure there are many true believers out there who will disagree, but I can’t help but wonder whether somebody hasn’t been drinking some Kool-aid by the gallon.

[Here are the first two. To read the complete article, please click here.]

This book espouses the popular viewpoint that management is mostly a matter of common sense: specific goals, specific praising and and specific reprimands (as a comment below succinctly puts it.)

However, when people think common sense are sufficient for a particular task, they tend not to pay much attention to it, assuming that common sense alone will get them through.  In fact, management is a collection of highly-specialized skills including applied psychology, coaching, business acumen, and system analysis, not to mention an increasing amount of knowledge of computer technology, law and even international relations.

There is no panacea for good management, and it’s certainly not going to be contained in a book that essentially treats management as being easy-peasy.  The belief in common sense as a panacea is always the result of mental laziness. It’s wrongly assumed that a person with “common sense” will make good decisions, while people with real expertise will act like impractical egg-heads. That’s BS.

The result of the “management is just common sense” movement has been nothing less than a rampant epidemic of bad management.  What happens inside most companies (especially at the middle management level) is that the same problems keep coming up month after month, year after year, because managers are relying upon “common sense” to fix them.  It just doesn’t work.

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Back in the day, leaders waited until some kind of independent biographer decided that their accomplishments were worthy of being immortalized in a book.  Today, however, business leaders seem obligated to write self-congratulatory paeans that give new meaning to the word “vomitable.”

What’s even more annoying about this book (and indeed the entire genre) is that it reflects the diseased notion of the “heroic CEO” who singlehandedly causes a company to be successful.  Funny, but I thought that good managers were supposed to give credit to the team, not plaster their face on a book.

The kind of thinking reflected in this book is exactly what results in obscene pay packages for CEOs.  Indeed, Jack Welch was no welcher when it came to awarding himself a panoply of perks. Meanwhile, his vaunted business strategies consisted primarily of downsizing and outsourcing, regardless of the impact that it had on society at large. As for his legacy, he’s left a company where the senior management is evidently proud that the firm, due to lobbying and influence-peddling, didn’t pay any taxes.

It’s amazing to me that anybody takes this kind of self-interested hype seriously, but there’s no lack of imitators.  One wonders when business readers will finally conclude that enough is enough…

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Geoffrey James has sold and written hundreds of features, articles and columns for national publications including Wired, Men’s Health, Business 2.0, SellingPower, Brand World, Computer Gaming World, CIO, The New York Times and (of course) BNET. He is the author of seven books, including Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (translated into seven languages and selected by four book clubs), and The Tao of Programming (widely quoted on the Web as a “canonical book of computer humor”.) He was also co-host of Funny Business, a program on New England’s largest all-talk radio station and has given seminars and keynotes at numerous corporations, including Rackspace, Gartner, Lucent and Houston Industries.

Manage Without Micromanaging

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

Both new and experienced managers can struggle with how be involved in their employees’ work without micromanaging.

You want to be hands-on and provide support, but still give them autonomy to make decisions. There are two stages where it makes sense to engage more deeply: preparation and review.

When the employee is laying out the plans for her work, your role is to ask crucial questions: Who should be involved? How does this fit into your goals?

These conversations will assure you the employee is prepared and ready to act on her own. When the project is complete, do a post-action review.

Reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what the employee learned. There’s no need to get involved in between unless the employee is a novice or problems arise.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “How to Get Involved Without Micromanaging People” by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback.

To read that article and join the discussion, please click here.