Simon Pont: An interview by Bob Morris
Simon Pont is a writer, commentator and brand-builder. Hollywood movie studios, Icelandic investment banks, British chocolate bars and Middle Eastern airlines figure amongst his time on the inside of Adland.
He is the author of The Better Mousetrap: Brand Invention in a Media Democracy, and a novel, Remember to Breathe.
His next project, Digital State: How the Internet is Changing Everything, is scheduled for worldwide release (June 2013) through Kogan Page.
Simon is also Chief Strategy Officer at agency network Vizeum, though when asked, he has always wanted to say he is a spy.
He has never been a spy.
He is however married and has three children.
Here is a brief excerpt from my interview of him. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: Before discussing The Better Mousetrap, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth? How so?
Pont: It has to be family. Family: in the true multi-generational sense of the word. My parents set the moral compass, and I’ve always felt myself hugely fortunate to have been brought up with an emotional safety net that was unconditional, that was always there. I’m now a parent, and parenthood is the most incredible, off-the-chart seismic shift, as far as life-stages go. At least, it has been for me. My future personal growth will inevitably be defined by my children and the positive role I want to try and play in their lives.
Morris: The greatest impact on your professional development? How so?
Pont: You know, there’s never been one stand-out Mr. Miyagi type figure in my career, radiating warmth and charisma and setting the standard. There have been a couple of Buddy Ackerman types – and there’s no need to name real names – but what I am very conscious of is that overall, I’ve actually been very fortunate. There’s been a sizeable cast of characters, mostly very good and only a few questionable, who I’ve learned from. And that’s been hugely instructive in helping me decide what kind of professional I want to be, and the kind that I don’t. But to name a few names for all the right reasons, I’d happily cite Moray MacLennan, Hans Andersson, Jon Wilkins, Greg Grimmer, and Hamish Davies. In each case, and each in their own way, we’re talking about hugely impressive, inspiring, and fundamentally very decent human beings.
Morris: Years ago, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please explain.
Pont: I don’t think there’s ever been just one! I think careers are twisty-turny things full of great highlights, 50-50 judgements calls, and a few near-disasters. Along that road, with hope, you bump into a fair few moments of revelation.
Morris: To what extent has your formal education been invaluable to what you have accomplished in life thus far?
Pont: For me, a formal education’s been very important. It’s a good, solid grounding, but it’s also been the necessary series of experiences – from which I now understand how I work, think about things, explore ideas, investigate themes, and then, put those thoughts together. Quite simply, you have to read a lot of words, and put a lot of words down, before you get to a place where you find your own process and writing approach.
Morris: What do you know now about the business world that you wish you knew when you started working full-time? Why?
Pont: Stop playing at being a grown-up and just be a grown-up. I think that’s fair advice to anyone in the early days of their career. By definition, when you start out in business, you’re naive, because your only former points of reference are academia and being a student; in most respects, being a “kid”. And it’s only experience that takes the edge off that immaturity. But there is a ‘but’. Once you’ve entered the business world, you’ve entered it, so you might as well stop “pretending”, stop play-acting, drop the pretence, and go at it full-tilt. I think real credibility and success comes from believing in yourself and what you’re capable of, even if you don’t have so much “experience” to draw upon. It’s not an easy message, of course, but self-doubt only gets in your way. So don’t have any. Or at least, work on editing it.
Morris: Of all the films that you have seen, which – in your opinion – best dramatizes important business principles? Please explain.
Pont: That’s a terrific question. I’m a big film fan. Swimming with Sharks and Wall Street are brilliant yesteryear windows on the working world. Margin Call, from 2011, is another great snapshot on a particular moment in time – but that’s not what you’re asking. Citing movies about the work-place isn’t the same as a movie that necessarily dramatizes business principles.
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To read the complete interview, please click here.
Simon cordially invite(s) you to check out the resources at this website:
Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 12/3/12)
I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:
BOOK REVIEWS
Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a Twenty-First Century Leader
Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell
Leapfrogging: Harness the Power of Surprise for Business Breakthroughs
Soren Kaplan
The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers
Bill Conaty and Ram Charan
Rework
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Strategy for You: Building a Bridge to the Life You Want
Rich Horwath
INTERVIEWS
Tony Tjan (Cue Bal) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant
The New York Times
William N. Thorndike, Jr.: An interview by Bob Morris
The Thought Leader Interview: William J. O’Rourke
Ann Graham
strategy+business
Michael J. Mauboussin: An interview by Bob Morris, Part 1
Yves Doz and Keeley Wilson: An interview by Bob Morris
COMMENTARIES
“3 words that’ll change your life”
Steve Tobak
CBS MoneyWatch/CBS Interactive Business Network
“How to Keep Your To-Do List Fresh with the 3-Day Rule”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
John Cleese on “5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative”
Maria Popova
“How to resolve the current ‘gridlock’ in the federal government
BOB
“Allies and Acquaintances: Two Key Types of Professional Relationships”
Reid Hoffman
“How to Create a Vision that Motivates Your Team”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR
“The One-Minute Change That Will Transform Your Company”
Lisa Earle McLeod
Fast Company
“Fighting the Fears That Block Creativity”
Tom Kelley and David Kelley
HBR
“How can we use social media to differentiate our company from our competition?”
BOB
“Lincoln and leadership”
Schumpeter column
The Economist
“Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation”
Malcolm Gladwell
The New Yorker
“Resilience Quotations: Part 3″
BOB
“Two Routes to Resilience”
Clark G. Gilbert, Matthew J. Eyring, and Richard N. Foster
HBR
“What if I cannot afford a consultant?”
BOB
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To check out these resources and other content, please click here.
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Mindset: A book review by Bob Morris
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Carol S. Dweck
Ballantine Books (2008)
How to achieve sustainable growth of intellectual capabilities with the right mindset
More recently, in Extraordinary Minds, Howard Gardner observes that exceptional individuals “have a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.” Dweck suggets that those with this talent seem to have a growth mindset. Readers will appreciate her strategic provision of a “Grow Your Mindset” section at the conclusion of each chapter. She poses direct questions, reviews key points, and suggests several different ways to think about how to expand and enrich mindsets to fulfill one’s potential at home, at work, in the community, and wherever else has special relationships.
These are among the subjects, topics, and passages that caught my eye:
o ”Is Success About Learning — Or Proving You’re Smart?” (Pages 16-17)
o ”Mindsets Change the Meaning of Failure” (32-39)
o ”Mindsets Change the Meaning of Effort” (39-44)
o ”Negative Labels and How They Work” (74-80)
o ”Leadership and the Fixed Mindset” (112-114)
o ”Groupthink versus We Think” (134-136)
o ”Mindsets Falling in Love” (148-157)
o ”Bullies and Victims: Revenge Revisited” (165-171)
o ”Sending Messages [to Children] About Process and Growth” (177-179)
o ”Teachers (and Parents): What Makes a Great Teacher (or Parent)?” (193-202)
I am among those who think that Mindset is among the most important books published during the last decade. While re-reading it again, I was reminded of three key points that help to explain much of human behavior: First, that almost all limits are self-imposed; next, that there is much we cannot control or even influence but we [begin italics] can [end italics] control how we respond to what happens to us; finally, that taking full advantage of a growth mindset requires a commitment no less demanding in terms of its nature and extent than a commitment to peak performance. For example, revelations about such a commitment after decades of research by Anders Ericsson and his associates at Florida State University. (For more about that research, read his HBR article, “The Making of an Expert,” and one or more of these books: Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Geoff Golvin’s Talent Is Overrated.) Thank you, Carol Dweck, for helping so many of us to gain a better understanding of who we are, and, of greater importance, of who and what we can perhaps become with a growth mindset.
Olympic Champions, and Olympic Participants, and that 10,000 Hour Rule
So, as I have watched a few of the events from the Olympics, and I’ve been thinking about the 10,000 hour rule. And I am ready to state the obvious: putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing.
First, a refresher. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, described the 10,000 hour rule. To summarize, it takes 10,000 hours to get really world-class good at anything. (Gladwell got the idea/concept from Anders Ericsson).
And then, in the book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, we learn that just any old 10,000 hours is not good enough. You need to put in “deliberate practice” — lots and lots of deliberate practice – in order to get better and better. In other words, you practice with the intent to get better. This kind of practice is exhausting, and almost always needs a very knowledgeable coach, with terrific motivational skills. (A coach who “can correct with creating resentment.” John Wooden).
Now, back to the point of this post: I am ready to state the obvious: putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing. Here’s what I mean.
As we watch the Olympics, we see pretty clearly that some athletes have developed a work ethic superior to others. But there are plenty of athletes who put in pretty much the same kind of time, had the same high level work ethic, as the “winners” who beat them when the starter pistol went off.
So, putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing. In sports, you need the 10,000 hours, plus the right coach, plus a little luck, plus maybe the right genetic makeup, plus…
Plus, plus, plus…
The more we learn, the more we learn how critical the next “plus” might be.
Now, let me back up. If we were not so fixated on winning the gold, we might come closer to admitting that the 10,000 hour rule does in fact guarantee success. Even making an Olympic Team; or, even being good enough to compete in an Olympics Trials Qualifying Event to try to make the team, takes massive skill. So, why is that not “success?” It certainly should be.
And we do know that in many cases, coming in second is every bit a “win.” Did you see the depth of emotion on the faces of Kelci Bryant and Abby Johnston after they won the Silver Medal in Synchronized Diving? They may not have won the Gold, but, it was the first diving medal at all for the USA since 2000, and the first ever medal for the USA in this particular event. Yes, the Chinese duo were better. Noticeably better. But these two young women were the second best in the world, and their 10,000 hours paid off.
Kelci Bryant, left, and Abby Johnston of the USA show off their silver medals from after finishing second in 3-meter synchronized diving. (By Kyle Terada, USA TODAY Sports)
Maybe we could say this: maybe 10,000 guarantees nothing. But a failure to put in 10,000 hours does guarantee something – you won’t make it to the top without putting in those 10,000 hours.
Now – the other challenge. One reality about this kind of world-class accomplishment is that these athletes show up, every day, with a coach watching and “coaching” every moment. Wouldn’t all of us get better at our jobs if we had that kind of individual coaching, motivating, “pushing us to the limit” daily encounter? I think so.
Work ethic, plus coaching, plus deliberate practice, plus constant feedback, plus measurable goals, plus… The road to true success really is a challenging road.
Rebecca Costa: An interview by Bob Morris
Rebecca Costa is a sociobiologist who offers a genetic explanation for current events, emerging trends and individual behavior. A thought-leader and provocative new voice in the mold of Thomas Friedman, Malcolm Gladwell and Jared Diamond, Costa examines “the big picture”– tracing everything from terrorism, crime on Wall Street, epidemic obesity and upheaval in the Middle East to evolutionary forces. Costa spent six years researching and writing The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction. In her book, she explains how the principles governing evolution cause and provide a solution for global gridlock. The success of Costa’s first book led to a weekly radio program in 2010 called Rattler Radio. In 2011 the program was renamed and syndicated as The Costa Report, currently one of the fastest growing radio programs on the Central Coast of California.
A former CEO and founder of one of the largest marketing firms in Silicon Valley (sold in 1997 to J. Walter Thompson), Costa developed an extensive track record of introducing new technologies. Her clients included industry giants such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer, Oracle Corporation, Seibel Systems, 3M, Amdahl, and General Electric Corporation. Raised in Tokyo, Japan, Costa lived during the Vietnam conflict in Vientiane, Laos, where her father worked in covert CIA operations. She attributes her ability to see the “big picture” to her cross-cultural education and upbringing. She graduated from The University of California at Santa Barbara with a Bachelors Degree in Social Sciences.
Here is an excerpt from my interview of her. To read the complete interview, please click here.
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Morris: Before discussing your brilliant book, The Watchman’s Rattle, a few general questions. First, who has had the great influence on your personal growth? How so?
Costa: I spent my formative years in Japan. My Japanese grandmother was a Zen Buddhist. Her reverence for nature had a huge impact on how I now view my place in the natural world.
Morris: The greatest impact on your professional development? How so?
Costa: In 1975, I picked up a copy of Edward Wilson’s watershed book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, and it changed my life. With enormous clarity and compassion, Wilson forged the connection between evolution and the behaviors or modern man.
Morris: Was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) years ago that set you on the career course you continue to follow? Please explain.
Costa: Like many college students, once I graduated from the University of California I returned home. At the time my parents were living in a suburb next to what would later become Silicon Valley. I found a job at a technology company and worked in Silicon Valley through the eighties and nineties when there was explosive growth. It was during this time that I began keeping notebooks. According to the founder of Intel, Robert Noyce, data densities would double every 18 months. But any evolutionary biologist knows that adaptation is very slow – sometimes occurring over millions of years. At some point, human progress would exceed the capabilities that humans had evolved to that point in time – and what then?
Morris: To what extent has your formal education proven invaluable to what you have accomplished in your life thus far?
Costa: It was the combination of my education as an evolutionary biologist and my experience with accelerating technology, while working in the heart of Silicon Valley, that caused me to become concerned about the future of humankind. I knew that the day would soon come where life would become too complex, too over-featured, too specialized for the man on the street to navigate competently, let alone the leaders of entire countries.
Morris: Let’s say that you are hosting a private dinner party and can invite any six people throughout human history as your guests. Who would they be and what would you be most interested to learn from each? Why?
Costa: That’s an easy one. Charles Darwin would be seated at the head of the table. 153 years ago he discovered the most important principles which govern all life on earth. And that includes us, whether we like it or not. Next to Darwin I would like to seat Ghandi, Richard Feynman, Hemmingway, Kant, and Edward Wilson. What? Only six? May I have that table extension please?
Morris: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you first entered the business world full-time?
Costa: That I am driven by fear. Fear of failing, fearing of being judged, fear of embarrassment, fear of being poor, fear of giving the wrong answer, fear of being unprepared or ignorant. I was successful in business, but it never did a thing to make me feel safe.
Morris: Opinions are divided (sometimes sharply divided) on the importance of charisma to effective leadership. What do you think?
Costa: The problem with charisma is that it’s just like trying to be funny. The worst thing a person can do is try to be funny. The same goes for charisma. Authenticity is the only charisma that works.
Morris: In recent years, there has been severe criticism of MBA programs, even those offered by the most prestigious business schools. In your opinion, which area is in greatest need of immediate improvement? What specifically do you suggest?
Costa: The MBA has come and gone and is no longer relevant. Teaching people how to solve problems – how to think their way out of a jam with speed and agility is the new talent executives need. That and computing skills.
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Rebecca cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:
http://rebeccacosta.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld7wDqHXeoI
http://www.rebeccacosta.com/the-costa-report
A Fast Track to 10,000 Hours of Practice
H. James Wilson
Here is an excerpt from an article written by H. James Wilson for the Harvard Business Review blog. 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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Have you completed your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice?
The idea that 10,000 hours (about 1 year and 51 days total) of practice is what you need to gain expertise in performance-based fields was initially popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Outliers. The research results he focused on emphasized the benefits of practice for fine-motor activities like playing the piano. But more recent studies show the upside of the 10,000-hour benchmark for collaborative knowledge work — the type of expertise required to create, or lead, or grow a company. For most of us, of course, logging that much deliberate practice may seem unattainable in today’s time-scarce business environments. Employees barely have enough time to complete job responsibilities, no less find extra hours to practice their skills. (Even if your company generously put aside two-and-a-half work weeks per year for you to practice skills, it would still take you 100 years before you hit the 10,000 hour benchmark).
But what if deliberate practice was your job, and the way your organization did business? Then you and colleagues could feasibly hit this threshold for mastery in as little as 5 years. Here are three tips, grounded in our recent Babson Executive Education study of over 500 companies, to accelerate this process:
Try experimentation. Previous studies show that experimentation is one of the most fundamental forms of deliberate practice we can engage in. By performing more of their work in the form of experiments, employees can synchronously advance projects while putting hours in toward their 10,000. This synchronicity can result in stronger organizational performance, according to our data. Experimentation-oriented organizations, one-quarter of our survey sample, are more than 4 times as likely to have achieved greater than 20% growth over the past year compared to others in the sample.
How is an experimental approach different than business as usual? Much of conventional organizational work is about planning and analyzing how to act, often on a large scale; risk is controlled by repeatable processes and standard routines. Rather than planning to do things, experimenting means doing things in a new way on a small scale. You get quick feedback, allowing you to make timely adjustments and improvements. On seeing the results of your action, practitioners can adopt the new way, discard it, or modify it and try again.
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H. James Wilson is senior researcher at Babson Executive Education. He is co-author of The New Entrepreneurial Leader: Developing Leaders Who Shape Social and Economic Opportunity (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011). You can visit him at Twitter.
Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters
Illustration Credit: David Plunkert
Here is an article written by David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz that was featured in the The New York Times (November 19, 2011). I urge you to click on the links to che vk oyt the sources to which the arricle refers. Also, I highky recommend a recently published book, The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else Does, written by George Anders and published by Portfolio/Penguin (2011). This is a “must read” book for anyone involved in — or at least interested in — talent recruitment and/or talent management. I also think Anders’ book could serve as the foundation of talent evaluation and performance review initiatives.
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HOW do people acquire high levels of skill in science, business, music, the arts and sports? This has long been a topic of intense debate in psychology.
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Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice — and a lot of it. In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing. By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best” players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good” players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled.
Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability. Summing up Mr. Ericsson’s research in his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”
David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent Is Overrated, adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.”
But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.
Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.
In our own recent research, we have discovered that “working memory capacity,” a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. In one study, we assessed the practice habits of pianists and then gauged their working memory capacity, which is measured by having a person try to remember information (like a list of random digits) while performing another task. We then had the pianists sight read pieces of music without preparation.
Not surprisingly, there was a strong positive correlation between practice habits and sight-reading performance. In fact, the total amount of practice the pianists had accumulated in their piano careers accounted for nearly half of the performance differences across participants. But working memory capacity made a statistically significant contribution as well (about 7 percent, a medium-size effect). In other words, if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.
It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.
None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.
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David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz are associate professors of psychology at Michigan State University and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, respectively.
The Two-Second Advantage: A book review by Bob Morris
The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future — Just Enough
Vivek Ranadivé and Kevin Maney
Crown Business (2011)
The power of prediction-based talent: Intuition on “the other side of complexity”
At least a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, “I don’t care a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” I was again reminded of that observation as I began to read this brilliant book in which Vivek Ranadivé and Kevin Maney explain how and why we can achieve success (however defined) by anticipating the future “just enough.” The book’s title refers to what is often the difference between success and failure. However, with all due respect to the co-authors’ intentions, I do not think the greatest value of this book can be measured in terms of time; rather, in term of proceeding through the simplicity of raw impulse through the complexity of probable implications, multiple perspectives, and potential consequences to “the other side of intuition” at which correct decisions can be made almost spontaneously. The U.S. Airways pilot, Chesley Burnett (“Sully”) Sullenberger III, who successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River off Manhattan, New York City, on January 15, 2009, offers an excellent case in point. Once aware of the circumstances, he made the correct decision with little (if any) consideration of options. The same is true of countless other airline pilots as well as diagnostic surgeons (especially in hospital emergency rooms) and military leaders in combat who quite literally must make life-and-death decisions.
Long before Malcolm Gladwell published an article in The New Yorker that later was developed into a book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Michael Kami (in Trigger Points, 1988) and then Andrew Grove (in Only the Paranoid Survive, 1999) explained how and why, as Ranadivé and Maney describe it, “judgments made in two seconds are often more accurate than those made after months of analysis.” For decades, we have known – as revealed by a wealth of research in psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious — that mental processes can work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information.
However, there is an “if” (a HUGE “if”) and it is this: Those who wish to develop a more predictive brain, one that can quickly process huge chunks of information, and then act upon that information, must be willing to commit the time and the attention required. That’s what Sullenberger demonstrated when deciding to land the plane on the river. Wayne Gretzy always claimed that his advantage was knowing where the puck would go. Larry Bird describes his advantage differently but makes the same point: “When I’m playing basketball, everybody else seems to be moving in slow motion.” It probably took all three about 10,000 hours of highly disciplined, iterative practice under strict, expert supervision to develop that capability…plus some luck such as being in the right place at the right time, with the right support, while developing various skills under the right conditions.
That said, the fact remains that few people are prepared to make such a commitment of time and effort and even if they did, it is possible but unlikely that they could achieve success comparable with what super talents such as Gretzky, Bird, Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan, and Yo Yo Ma have. However, Ranadivé and Maney are convinced (and I fully agree) that many of those who read this book with appropriate can, over time, work their way through the complexity to a point at which they have increased their predictive talent. How? By increasing their knowledge and understanding of previous efforts (i.e. what works, what doesn’t, and why), by strengthening their ability to recognize early-indicators of imminent probabilities (e.g. a quarterback “reading” a defense to know what to do next), and sharpening their ability to identify root causes after recognizing symptoms (e.g. an ER physician diagnosing a stranger who is near death after an automotive accident). The process of personal development that Ranadivé and Maney explain can be completed by almost anyone, anywhere, whatever the given circumstances may be.
A brief commentary such as this can hardly do full justice to the wealth of information, insights, and wisdom that Ranadivé and Maney provide. I also wish to commend them on the lively style with which they present their narrative. To those who read this commentary, I offer two assurances. First, any limits on your development – one that is guided and informed by the material in this book — will be self-imposed. The two-second advantage must be earned and there are no short cuts. Also, the opportunities for applying what Vivek Ranadivé and Kevin Maney offer throughout any organization are unlimited, whatever the size and nature of that organization may be.
50 Psychology Classics: A book review by Bob Morris
50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do; Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books
Tom Butler-Bowdon
Nicholas Brealey Publishing (2006)
An excellent guide to sources that can help us to “make a real difference” in our lives
Note: This is one of volumes in the 5o Classics series, each available in a softbound edition and priced at less than $15.00. In my opinion, the vaue of the material in each volume is worth far more than that.
Previously, I read and reviewed Tom Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Success Classics and was not surprised to find that his most recently published volume in the 5o Classics series is their equal in terms of the quality and value of the material provided. Butler-Bowdon employs essentially the same format for the three volumes: brief background on each source, major insights, final comments, and mini-bio of author.
The “great thinkers” he discusses in 50 Psychology Classics are also organized in alphabetical order, although I would have preferred (one man’s opinion) that they had been organized within discrete thematic clusters, and not in alphabetical order but in terms of sequence of influence. Sigmund Freud followed by Carl Jung and Alfred Adler and then Anna Freud followed by B.F. Skinner, for example. Frankly, as I checked out the table of contents, I was initially surprised to see Edward de Bono, Howard Gardner, Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Goleman, Steven Pinker, Gail Sheehy, and William Styron among the “iconic figures” listed so I read their segments first and, sure enough, Butler-Bowdon explains the inclusion of each.
In the Introduction, he provides an overview on the development of modern psychology as a field of study, once “early titans” (e.g. William James, Sigmund Freud, Jung, and Adler) had written books that the general public could understand. Within the Introduction, he also suggests seven themes that offer different perspectives on “who we are, how we think, and what we do” and assigns to each a cluster of relevant commentaries. Readers can then decide which themes are of greatest interest to them, and, on which selections to focus. For example, five sources are suggested for “Tapping the unconscious mind: Wisdom of a different kind.” They are:
The Gift of Fear (Gavin de Becker)
My Voice Will Go With You (Milton Erickson by Sidney Rosen)
The Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud)
Blink (Malcolm Gladwell)
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Carl Jung)
I read some books in the series cover-to-cover sequentially; with others, I hop around back and forth in random fashion; with still others, I read strategically after checking out the table of contents, as I did with this one. My guess (only a guess) is the latter approach will work best for most readers and many may decide what to read and in what order after reviewing the seven thematic clusters in the Introduction. For those who feel overwhelmed by the number of books in print and need help selecting what will be of greatest interest to them, the volumes in the 50 Classics series will be especially valuable.
Butler-Bowdon functions brilliantly as an erudite “travel agent” for readers, but also as an enthusiastic “tour guide” who then accompanies them from one “landmark” to the next. One of this book’s several value-added benefits is that Butler-Bowdon discusses several authors and works of which many (if not most) of his readers may have been previously unaware. He also does a skillful job of comparing and contrasting perspectives on a specific subject as in this volume, for example, when noting that a “central idea in Adlerian psychology is that individuals are always striving toward a goal. Whereas Freud saw us as driven by what was in our past, Adler had a teleological view – they we are driven by our goals, whether they are conscious or not.”
Those who share my regard for this book are urged to check out the other volumes in the 50 Classics series. To those in business, I also highly recommend several volumes in the Capstone reference series written by Des Dearlove, notably The Ultimate Book of Business Thinking.
Jennifer Prosek: An interview by Bob Morris
Jennifer Prosek
Jennifer Prosek is the founder and CEO of CJP Communications (CJP), where she leads many of the firm’s key accounts. Under her leadership, the firm has become a leading international public relations and financial communications consultancy with offices in New York, Connecticut and London. With more than 70 professionals, the firm ranks among the top 35 independent public relations firms in the US, and among the top five financial communications consultancies in the UK. The secret to CJP’s success has been Prosek’s ability to develop, motivate and deploy her employees to be more entrepreneurial within their own positions. This strategy is the premise of her first book, Army of Entrepreneurs: Create an Engaged and Empowered Workforce for Exceptional Business Growth, which is based on the unique business model of CJP and is now available from AMACOM, a division of the American Management Association.
Prosek received her MBA from Columbia and is a frequent lecturer at leading business schools, including Columbia, and entrepreneurial and business groups. Recent speaking engagements include the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, Forté Foundation, The Royal Bank of Scotland Marketing Summit and British-American Business, Inc. She is on the board of directors of the New York City Partnership for the Homeless.
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Morris: Before discussing your book, a few general questions. First, when and by what process did you formulate the management strategy (i.e. Army of Entrepreneurs) based on a military model? Was CJP Communications founded before or after that? To what extent (if any) are the strategy and the firm related?
Prosek: CJP was founded before the Army Model was born. The Army model was started after a few frustrating years of failing to grow the business at the desired pace, and coming to the realization that perhaps we had not tapped our employees to the greatest degree.
We asked ourselves whether we could teach our staff to think more like owners and encourage them to contribute to the business in new ways.
We started with the notion that, if they understood more about how the business ran and were included in idea generation and decision making at all levels, they could be more effective. This premise led to the “Army of EntrepreneursTM” model, which helped us achieve the business growth we were seeking.
At this point, we have been engaged in the model for more than 10 years so it’s hard to separate the company from the model. The company is the model. I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell, who talks about something called the “talent myth.” He says that it is important to make the system the star in a company; I couldn’t agree more. This is what we have tried to do with the Army of EntrepreneursTM.
Morris: What are some of the most common – and perhaps dangerous – misconceptions about employee empowerment?
Prosek: Among the most dangerous misconceptions is that a program or model can empower all employees. True empowerment is authentic and individual and is expressed differently by each employee. Too many companies launch campaigns and slogans that are more “flavor of the month club” empowerment programs rather than true commitments. Employees are smart, they will respond when employee empowerment efforts are real.
Morris: Much has been said and written in recent years about “followership.” My own opinion is that there are times when supervisors lead and other times when they defer to direct reports who then “take the lead.” What are your own thoughts about it?
Prosek: When people are confident and inspired enough to handle new tasks – whatever the level – they should be empowered to do that, with guidance from a supervisor. It’s tricky because you need supervisors, but those supervisors must be talented enough to know when to pull back and let someone run, and when to step in. As an entrepreneur I’d rather give them a long rope and if they trip, let it be a teachable moment. Great people almost always avoid tripping; they simply surprise themselves by being able to do things they never expected they’d be able to do.
Morris: Opinions are divided (sometimes sharply divided) about 360º feedback. Some want it to be transparent, others want it to be anonymous, and still others want to have nothing whatsoever to do with it. Your own thoughts?
Prosek: I think feedback is essential. We do like 360-degree feedback and generally keep it anonymous so that it is indeed authentic.
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