The Sugary Secret of Self-Control: A book review of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

Illustration by Gary Taxali

Here is an excerpt from an article that appeared in The New York Times (September 2, 2011). It is Steven Pinker’s review of Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney’s Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, recently published by Penguin Press. To read the complete review, please click here.

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Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, Ulysses had himself tied to the mast, the grasshopper sang while the ant stored food and St. Augustine prayed “Lord make me chaste — but not yet,” individuals have struggled with self-control. In today’s world this virtue is all the more vital, because now that we have largely tamed the scourges of nature, most of our troubles are self-inflicted. We eat, drink, smoke and gamble too much, max out our credit cards, fall into dangerous liaisons and become addicted to heroin, cocaine and e-mail.

Nonetheless, the very idea of self-­control has acquired a musty Victorian odor. The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase rose in popularity through the 19th century but began to free fall around 1920 and cratered in the 1960s, the era of doing your own thing, letting it all hang out and taking a walk on the wild side. Your problem was no longer that you were profligate or dissolute, but that you were uptight, repressed, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive or fixated at the anal stage of psychosexual development.

Then a remarkable finding came to light. In experiments beginning in the late 1960s, the psychologist Walter Mischel tormented preschoolers with the agonizing choice of one marshmallow now or two marshmallows 15 minutes from now. When he followed up decades later, he found that the 4-year-olds who waited for two marshmallows turned into adults who were better adjusted, were less likely to abuse drugs, had higher self-esteem, had better relationships, were better at handling stress, obtained higher degrees and earned more money.

What is this mysterious thing called self-control? When we fight an urge, it feels like a strenuous effort, as if there were a homunculus in the head that physically impinged on a persistent antagonist. We speak of exerting will power, of forcing ourselves to go to work, of restraining ourselves and of controlling our temper, as if it were an unruly dog. In recent years the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister has shown that the force metaphor has a kernel of neurobiological reality. In Willpower, he has teamed up with the irreverent New York Times science columnist John Tierney to explain this ingenious research and show how it can enhance our lives.

In experiments first reported in 1998, Baumeister and his collaborators discovered that the will, like a muscle, can be fatigued. Immediately after students engage in a task that requires them to control their impulses — resisting cookies while hungry, tracking a boring display while ignoring a comedy video, writing down their thoughts without thinking about a polar bear or suppressing their emotions while watching the scene in Terms of Endearment in which a dying Debra Winger says goodbye to her children — they show lapses in a subsequent task that also requires an exercise of willpower, like solving difficult puzzles, squeezing a handgrip, stifling sexual or violent thoughts and keeping their payment for participating in the study rather than immediately blowing it on Doritos. Baumeister tagged the effect “ego depletion,” using Freud’s sense of “ego” as the mental entity that controls the passions.

Baumeister then pushed the muscle metaphor even further by showing that a depleted ego can be invigorated by a sugary pick-me-up (though not an indistinguishable beverage containing diet sweetener). And he showed that self-control, though almost certainly heritable in part, can be toned up by exercising it. He enrolled students in regimens that required them to keep track of their eating, exercise regularly, use a mouse with their weaker hand or (one that really gave them a workout) speak in complete sentences and without swearing. After several weeks, the students were more resistant to ego depletion in the lab and showed greater self-control in their lives. They smoked, drank and snacked less, watched less television, studied more and washed more dishes.

Together with intelligence, self-control turns out to be the best predictor of a successful and satisfying life. But Baumeister and Tierney aren’t endorsing a return to a preachy puritanism in which people are enjoined to resist temptation by sheer force of will and condemned as morally irresolute when they fail. The “will” in willpower is not some mysterious “free will,” a ghost in the machine that can do as it pleases, but a part of the machine itself. Willpower consists of circuitry in the brain that runs on glucose, has a limited capacity and operates by rules that scientists can reverse-engineer — and, crucially, that can find work-arounds for its own shortcomings.

Willpower is filled with advice about what to do with your willpower. Build up its strength, the authors suggest, with small but regular exercises, like tidiness and good posture. Don’t try to tame every bad habit at once. Watch for symptoms of ego fatigue, because in that recovery period you are especially likely to blow your stack, your budget and your diet. For that matter, don’t diet in the first place, since it starves the very system that implements self-control. Learn from Ulysses and tie yourself to the mast or fill your ears with wax so temptations are blocked out or you are unable to act on them. The authors also recommend Web sites and software that can audit, broadcast, punish or pre-empt lapses of will — a godsend, in particular, to Internet junkies and other infomaniacs.

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To read the complete review, please click here.

Steven Pinker is Harvard College professor of psychology at Harvard University. His latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, will be published next month.

Richard Rumelt’s reflections on Apple and Steve Jobs

Here is a recent post by Richard Rumelt. He is the author of one of two books to be discussed at the next FFBS session, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters and the Harry and Elsa Kunin Professor of Business and Society at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. I urge you to read the book, rather than try to “fool people” that you have, and visit his website. To do so, please click here.

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When Steve Jobs stepped down from the CEO position at Apple, many people began to reflect on the nature of his contributions.

Under his leadership, Apple has become one of the most successful American companies of all time. Along with Intel, Microsoft, and Google, it has shaped much of what people experience as the new digital economy.

Steve Jobs contribution to Apple has been profound. Steve Jobs is not an engineer himself, yet he has guided Apple into being one of the great engineering companies, in the true sense of what it means to “engineer.” Apple did not invent personal computers, or the mouse and windows interface, nor did it invent digital music players, smartphones, or tablets. What it has done is to engineer products in these categories that are uniquely beautiful, efficient, easy to operate, and a joy to own and use.

This kind of design excellence is very difficult to achieve. It depends on a great many elements all working together and all working at a very high level. Like the excellence of a great film or work of music, the whole can be quickly ruined by a single false note. Steve Jobs’ special genius has been in holding to this very high standard and imposing it on the very talented engineers he has recruited to Apple. Competitors have raced to be first to market or to include the most features in their products, but have built products which are clunky and awkward in comparison to Apple’s.

To fully understand Apple, it is vital to look at the difference between its kind of excellence and cutting edge visionary technology. Back in 1993, CEO John Scully had Apple introduce a tablet called the “Newton.” It was visionary and advanced, attempting to recognize handwriting. Unfortunately, you cannot reliably do that, just as you cannot reliably implement voice recognition. When he returned to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs killed the Newton. The secret of Apple’s excellence is not in living on the unworkable bleeding edge, but in doing exceptionally well that which can be done well with present technology.

Many people and companies want to emulate Apple and study what the company has done. I believe that in trying to learn from Steve Jobs and Apple it is very useful to pay attention to what he did not do. In compiling this short list, I have used ideas and phrases in common use by managers and business consultants:

• He did not “drive business success by a relentless focus on performance metrics.” Success came to Apple by having successful products and strategies, not by chasing metrics.

• He did not “motivate high performance by tying incentives to key strategic success factors.” Apple did not run a decentralized system based on pressuring individuals to deliver targeted business results.

• He did not have a strategy “built through participation by all levels to achieve a consensus which resolves key differences in perspectives and values.” Strategy at Apple is essentially driven from the top.

• He did not waste time on the delicate distinctions among “missions,” “visions,” and “strategies.”

• He did not use acquisitions to hit “strategic growth goals.” Growth was the outcome of successful product development and accompanying business strategies.

• He did not seek to engineer higher margins by chasing rust-belt concepts of “economies of scale.” He left such antics to HP.

Emulating Apple is not easy, but it is not impossible either. We are all surrounded by so-called high-tech products that promise much more than they deliver. I am writing this article on a Dell Inspiron 2305 that is a lovely all-in-one computer but which has a stereo sound system that cannot be heard three feet away. I expected my wife’s HTC Incredible 2 Android phone would provide a seamless interface to Google documents, but there is no such capability. RIM has built its market position on professional grade email, yet is trying to sell a tablet without email capability. Just two weeks ago I returned an HP 4500 Office Jet printer because its drivers refused to install on my Windows 7 64-bit system (a problem reported by many others over two years.)

The secret to emulating Apple lies in its efficiency at excellent design. Indeed, Apple has awakened many people to the value and joy of excellence in design. Not just the prettiness of the box, not just the simplicity of the interface, but the whole sense that a product is the best it can be, for the moment, at what it does.

Also, to see some of my comments in print and video at Apple Changed the Way the World Communicates, please click here.

Squirrel Inc.: A book review by Bob Morris

Squirrel Inc.: A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling
Stephen Denning
Josey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint (2004)

Nuts R Us

Think about it. Who are among the greatest storytellers throughout history? My own list includes Homer, Plato, Chaucer, Aesop, Jesus, Dante, Boccaccio, the Brothers Grimm, Confucius, Abraham Lincoln, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Joel Chandler Harris, L. Frank Baum, and most recently, E.B. White. Whatever the genre (epic, parable, fable, allegory, anecdote, etc.), each used exposition, description, and narration to illustrate what they considered to be fundamental truths about the human condition.

In his previous work, The Springboard, Denning focuses on “how storytelling ignites action in knowledge-led organizations” and does so with uncommon erudition, precision, and eloquence. His narrative covers a period of approximately three years during which he used what he calls “springboard” stories to “spark organizational change” at The World Bank. More specifically, to forge a consensus within that organization to support the design and then implementation of effective knowledge management, first for itself and then for its clients worldwide.

How he accomplished that objective is in and of itself a fascinating “story” but the book’s greater value lies in what he learned in process, lessons which are directly relevant to virtually all other organizations (regardless of size or nature) which struggle to “do more with less and do it faster” in the so-called Age of Information. Maximizing use of their collective intellectual capital is most often the single most effective way to do that.

In this volume, Denning uses many of the same devices which Orwell does in Animal Farm: He creates a stressful situation to which anthropomorphic animals respond; the lead characters discuss what to do; strategies are selected; conflicts and crises immediately develop; tension is increased by the perils the lead characters encounter; ultimately, the situation is resolved. In Animal Farm, the pigs prevail. In Squirrel Inc.,….

Whereas Orwell’s purpose is to dramatize the evils of totalitarianism, Denning’s purpose is to give “detailed advice on how to craft and perform a story that can spark transformational change in an organization” by examining six different kinds of storytelling “which illustrate the impact of storytelling on our work and our lives.” Although this is a fable of leadership, it is important to keep in mind that (a) everyone throughout any organization tells stories of various kinds each day; therefore (b) the value of the information which Denning provides and the recommendations he makes is by no means limited to senior-level executives.

Why a fable? When considering how he could best communicate the various kinds of stories (e.g. “springboard” stories that communicate complex ideas and spark action), their specific uses in modern organizations, and their relevant similarities and differences, Denning “quickly discovered that conveying an understanding of seven types of stories across four or five different dimensions represented a level of complexity not well adapted to text-book style presentation.”

I include that excerpt because many of those who read this book will also find themselves in situations in which they are preparing to make an especially important presentation and use of a traditional format is not appropriate. Their audience will not respond as well to the “textbook-style” as they will to a entertaining as well as informative narrative which seeks to achieve one or more of these objectives:

• To spark action
• To communicate who the speaker is
• To transmit values
• To get everyone working together
• To share knowledge
• To “tame the grapevine”
• To lead people into the future

Here’s the situation. Diana is a fast-track executive at Squirrel Inc. who is frustrated by her inability to convince senior-management to transform the company’s core business from helping squirrels to bury nuts to storing nuts for them. Why should it? Because approximately 50% of the nuts buried are lost, either because squirrels forget where they buried them or the nuts are dug up by human gardeners. Great opportunity for Squirrel Inc. She shares her frustrations with Bartender who is the owner/host of a nectar tavern located high in an oak tree near the Squirrel Inc. headquarters. (He is also this book’s narrator and thus, in several respects, a surrogate for Denning.) Throughout the remainder of the book, Denning focuses on Diana and Bartender’s joint efforts to use effective storytelling to mobilize the support needed to transform Squirrel Inc.

Because Denning is himself a master storyteller, never does his narrative become precious, cute, quaint, darling, etc. Credit him with wit, style, grace, and — yes — intellectual rigor. His characters may be squirrels but the relevance of his material to human experience is profound: “The underlying reason for the affinity between leadership and storytelling is simple: narrative — unlike abstraction and analysis — is inherently collaborative. Storytelling helps leaders work with other individuals as co-participants, not merely as objects or underlings. Storytelling helps strengthen leaders’ connectedness with the world. Isn’t this what all leaders need — a connectedness with the people they are seeking to lead?”

I especially appreciate Denning’s provision of a chart (“Seven High-Value Forms of Organizational Storytelling,” pages 150-153) that clearly and cleverly summarizes all of his core concepts and specific suggestions. It serves as a useful reminder that the most effective story is one that has a crystal clear objective and includes the appropriate elements (e.g. problem to be solved, situation to be explained, value of the information provided). The story must also meet certain requirements of the given purpose. For example, provision of relevant background information and an analysis of current situation before proposing a future course of action, especially one that may seem bold and threatening to others.

For whatever reasons, only in recent years has there been an awareness and appreciation of the importance of the business narrative. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Annette Simmons’ The Story Factor, Doug Lipman’s Improving Your Storytelling, and Storytelling in Organizations co-authored by John Seely Brown, Denning, Katarina Groh, and Laurence Prusak.

The Curse of Being a High Achiever

In the June 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review, “The Paradox of Excellence,” Thomas J. DeLong and Sara DeLong explain how and why high achievers often undermine their leadership by being afraid to show their limitations. Here are some behaviors that, although they may help someone to achieve success, can also get in the way.

To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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The classic high achiever is:

Driven to get results. Achievers don’t let anything stop them. But they can get so caught up in tasks that providing transparency to colleagues or helping others feels like a waste of valuable time.

A doer. Achievers believe, often rightly, that nobody can do it as well as they can. That can make them poor delegators—or micromanagers.

Highly motivated. Achievers take all aspects of their jobs seriously. But that means they often fail to distinguish between the urgent and the merely important.

Craving of positive feedback. Achievers care intensely about how others view their work—but they tend to ignore positive feedback and obsess over criticism.

Competitive. An appetite for competition is healthy, but achievers obsessively compare themselves with others, which can lead to a chronic sense of insufficiency, false calibrations, and ultimately career missteps.

Passionate about work. Intense highs can give way to crippling lows. For achievers, it’s a fine line between triumph and agony.

A safe risk taker. Achievers aren’t likely to recklessly bet the company on a risky move, but they may shy away from the unknown.

Guilt-ridden. Achievers are driven to produce, but no matter how much they accomplish, they feel like they aren’t doing enough.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Thomas J. DeLong is the Philip J. Stomberg Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School and the author of Flying Without a Net (Harvard Business Press, 2011).

His daughter Sara DeLong is a psychiatrist in private practice and community mental health in San Francisco and an assistant clinical professor at UCSF’s Department of Psychiatry.