Laura Vanderkam: An interview by Bob Morris

A New York City-based journalist, Laura Vanderkam is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, published by Portfolio/Penguin Group (2010). She is also the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues (McGraw-Hill, 2007), which the New York Post selected as one of four notable career books of 2007. She is a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors, and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, Reason, and other publications. She specializes in translating complex economic, policy or scientific ideas into readable prose, and making people say “I never thought of it that way before.” A 2001 graduate of Princeton, she enjoys writing fiction, running, and singing soprano with the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, an organization for which she served until recently as president, and which specializes in commissioning new music from composers under age 35. She lives in the city with her husband and their two young sons.

Here is an excerpt from my interview of her. To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Morris: Before discussing any of your books, a few general questions. First, please share your thoughts about achieving and then sustaining an appropriate balance of what is most important in one’s life.

Vanderkam: I think we have to look at what we do best and others cannot do for us. For most of us, this is nurturing our careers, nurturing our families, and nurturing ourselves (by which I mean getting enough sleep, exercising, and focusing on personal passions like volunteering). When you devote most of your hours to these priorities, life feels pretty good.

Morris: Given your response to the previous question, in your own life as well as what you have observed in others’ lives, what seem to be the most serious challenges to such balance? How best to avoid or overcome them?

Vanderkam: Many of us make ourselves busy with things that don’t matter. We volunteer for projects that we don’t care about, we spend time on housework or errands that don’t need to be done or don’t need to be done to the standard we’re doing them, or we spend time at work on things that aren’t advancing our careers or our organizations. We also watch a lot of TV.

Morris: As I read several of your articles for various publications, I was struck by the range and especially by the diversity of your interests. You seem to have an almost insatiable curiosity about so many subjects. Is that a fair assessment?

Vanderkam: It is true that I love to learn about new topics. Sometimes that makes my professional life harder, as I don’t achieve economies of scale in my writing, but on the plus side, I don’t get bored. Today I’ve been researching the Korean-American community in New York, environmental issues in lawn care, and the Ramona Quimby series of children’s books. How random is that?

Morris: To what extent has your formal education (e.g. Princeton) had a significant impact on your career thus far?

Vanderkam: I am very grateful for my Princeton education, and I learned a lot in college. I studied with some excellent writing teachers including John McPhee, and I took classes such as art history, and the Bible in Western cultural tradition, which had me reading great works of literature. But, of course, the most useful aspect of my education now is the network. For instance, the executive at Portfolio who facilitated their acquisition of 168 Hours is a Princeton grad.

Morris: Here’s a subject on which opinions are sharply divided. Given the emergence of various electronic reading devices, do you think the bound volume is an endangered species?

Vanderkam: I hope not! I own a Kindle and love how quickly I can get a title and start reading, but I love the feel of turning pages, too, and I like to mark up my books. I like seeing them on my bookshelves, just as I like holding a physical newspaper as I drink my coffee. I think there will be many ways to enjoy books in the future.

Morris: To what does the title of your first book, Grindhopping, refer?

Vanderkam: I made up the word “Grindhopping” to mean those who hop out of the corporate grind to do their own thing. Broadly, the book is about the rise of self-employment among young people.

Morris: The subtitle, Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues, certainly caught my eye. Are you suggesting that success (however defined) can be achieved without paying any dues (however defined)? In fact, how do you define “dues”?

Vanderkam: By paying your dues, I mean climbing the corporate ladder to finally get to a place where you can do interesting, creative work. That’s one approach, or you can just start doing interesting, creative work on your own, see if you can get people to pay you for it, and build your career that way instead. That’s what I’ve done. I have nothing against working hard – in fact, I’m all for it! But if you’re going to work hard, why not make sure you reap the rewards of it?

Morris: As I read the book, I was reminded of Teresa Amabile’s admonition, expressed in a Harvard Business Review article almost 20 years ago, that people should do what they love and love what they do.

Vanderkam: That’s great advice. You will have more energy for the rest of your life working 50 hours a week in a job you love than 30 in a job you hate

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

You are cordially invited to check out the resources at her website by clicking here.

Maria Konnikova: An interview by Bob Morris

Maria Konnikova is the author of the New York Times bestseller, MASTERMIND: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. She writes the weekly “Literally Psyched” column for Scientific American, where she explores the intersection of literature and psychology, and formerly wrote the popular psychology blog “Artful Choice” for Big Think. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Observer, WIRED, Scientific American MIND, and Scientific American, among other publications. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she studied psychology, creative writing, and government, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Psychology at Columbia University. Before returning to school, she worked as a producer for the Charlie Rose show on PBS. She lives in New York City.

Here is an excerpt from my interview of her. To read the complete interview, please click here.

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Morris: When and why did you decide to write MASTERMIND?

Konnikova: It grew our of a series of pieces I wrote for Big Think and Scientific American, called “Lessons from Sherlock Holmes.” I stumbled on the idea of using the Holmes stories to illustrate a few psychological concepts—and it clicked into place. The more research I did, the more convinced I became that it would make for a good lens for a book on the mind.

Morris: Were there any head-snapping revelations while writing it? Please explain.

Konnikova: I never realized before just how frequently I multitask and how often my focus strays from my writing. Writing MASTERMIND made me confront my media-tetherdness, so to speak.

Morris: To what extent (if any) does the book in final form differ significantly from what you originally envisioned?

Konnikova: Surprisingly, it doesn’t. I basically followed my initial outline and proposal.

Morris: What are the defining characteristics of “mindful thought”?

Konnikova: Mindful thought is just a way to describe presence of mind: a mind that is focused on the present moment and is able to both acknowledge and dismiss any internal or external distractions that may arise.

Morris: You suggest that for Sherlock Holmes, “mindful presence is just a first step.” Please explain.

Konnikova: To Holmes, mindfulness isn’t an end in itself. It’s a means toward the type of clear thinking that allows him to tackle problems, solve cases, catch criminals. Sure, he gets all of the benefits of mindfulness—mental sharpness, emotional benefits, and the like—but they are by-products and not the end goal. Mindfulness is the prerequisite starting point for the type of thinking he needs to engage in to become—and remain—the world’s best consulting detective.

Morris: In various films about Holmes, especially those featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the character Dr. John H. Watson’s primary function seems to provide comic relief. Sometimes he asks questions that many of those who watch the film have. In your opinion, what is his primary function in the works of fiction written by Arthur Conan Coyle?

Konnikova: He is decidedly not comic relief—although you must admit, Holmes’s quips at Watson’s expense are fairly hilarious. Watson is a worthy companion; remember, he is a trained medical doctor and not just a random who-knows-what. He helps Holmes clarify and sharpen his thinking, helps him avoid the pitfalls of reasoning to which even the greatest detective is prone, and sometimes even serves as the source of a key insight (or reprimand) that will solve the case.

Morris: What are the most significant differences between System Watson and System Holmes?

Konnikova: For those who have read Daniel Kahneman’s wonderful Thinking Fast and Slow, the difference is simple. Watson is System 1, and Holmes, System 2. System Watson is the fast, natural, largely effortless, reflexive system. System Holmes is the slow, largely effortful, reflective system. The one frees up our cognitive resources for other things; the other, takes them up for deeper reflection.

Morris: Early in the book, on Page 21 to be specific, you observe, “To Sherlock Homes, the world has become by default a pink elephant world.” Please explain.

Konnikova: It’s my way of illustrating a concept that dates back to the work of philosophers like Spinoza and that has more recently been explored by the psychologist Daniel Gilbert. In order to understand something, we must first believe it. Only then can we disbelieve. So, if I say “pink elephant,” you must for a brief instant visualize an actual pink elephant, before your brain jumps in to say that that’s a false statement and pink elephants don’t actually exist. The pink elephant is an egregious case; obviously, it is false. But in real life, false statements get past our correction radar all the time: we believe it and then never take the time to disbelieve. And so, our minds become populated by pink elephants. Holmes is skeptical from the get-go. No matter how innocuous something may sound, he questions it with the same severity.

Morris: I have read most of the research results produced by K. Anders Ericsson and his associates at Florida State University and am aware of the need to supplement mindful motivation with brutal training: deep, deliberate “practice, practice, practice” for (on average) at least 10,000 hours under expert and strict supervision. Here’s my question: Is that what is required to master the Holmes methodology? Please explain.

Konnikova: Yes, that is certainly part of it, as I say repeatedly. Nothing comes without practice, and Holmes has been honing his methodology for years and years. We can’t expect to catch up right away. That said, no, we don’t need 10,000 hours to begin to change the way we think and approach the world. We don’t have to become first-class detectives; just more mindful thinkers.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Maria cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:

Her website

Her blog at Scientific American

Her Amazon page

How to craft a message that sticks: An interview with Chip Heath

Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Chip Heath co-conducted by Lenny T. Mendonca and Matt Miller. It was featured in The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete interview, check out a wealth of free online resources, and learn more about the firm, please click here.

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The key to effective communication: make it simple, make it concrete, and make it surprising.

The ability to craft and deliver messages that influence employees, markets, and other stakeholders may seem like a mysterious talent that some people have and some don’t. Jack Welch, for example, created ideas that inspired hundreds of thousands of GE employees. But many other leaders are frustrated to find that key messages sent one day are forgotten the next—or that stakeholders don’t know how to interpret them.

Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, has spent the past decade seeking answers to that question. His research has ranged from the problem of what makes beliefs—urban legends, for instance—survive in the social marketplace of competing ideas to experiments that show how winning ideas emerge in populations, businesses, and other organizations. Earlier this year Heath published his findings in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, written with his brother, Dan, who founded a business that specializes in this very subject.

In July 2007 Chip Heath spoke with Lenny Mendonca, a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Matt Miller, an adviser to McKinsey; and Parth Tewari, who was then a Sloan fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, about the key principles for making an idea “stick” and how executives can use them to communicate more successfully. The conversation took place at Stanford.

The Quarterly: Let’s start by defining success. What is a sticky idea?

Chip Heath: A sticky idea is one that people understand when they hear it, that they remember later on, and that changes something about the way they think or act. That is a high standard. Think back to the last presentation you saw. How much do you  remember? How did it change the decisions you make day to day?

Leaders will spend weeks or months coming up with the right idea but then spend only a few hours thinking about how to convey that message to everybody else. That’s a tragedy. It’s worth spending time making sure that the lightbulb that has gone on inside your head also goes on inside the heads of your employees or customers

The Quarterly: Give us an example of a sticky idea.

Chip Heath: John F. Kennedy, in 1961, proposed to put an American on the moon in a decade. That idea stuck. It motivated thousands of people across dozens of organizations, public and private. It was an unexpected idea: it got people’s attention because it was so surprising—the moon is a long way up. It appealed to our emotions: we were in the Cold War and the Russians had launched the Sputnik space satellite four years earlier. It was concrete: everybody could picture what success would look like in the same way. How many goals in your organization are pictured in exactly the same way by everyone involved?

My father worked for IBM during that period. He did some of the programming on the original Gemini space missions. And he didn’t think of himself as working for IBM—he thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. An accountant who lived down the street from us, who worked for a defense contractor, also thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. When you inspire the accountants you know you’re onto something.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research examines why certain ideas – ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths – survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. His research has appeared in a variety of academic journals, and popular accounts of his research have appeared in Scientific American, the Financial Times, the Washington Post,BusinessWeek, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Los Gatos, California. He has co-authored two books with his brother Dan: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

Lenny Mendonca is a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, and Matt Miller is an adviser to McKinsey. The co-authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Parth Tewari, who helped initiate and shape this interview. Tewari recently left Stanford to become the India director of TechnoServe (a nonprofit organization that helps create business solutions to fight poverty), where he is using these ideas to shape his communications.

Lessons about evolution from bird watching

Dan Ariely

Here is an excerpt from an article co-authored by Amit and Dan Ariely. Note how, once again, insatiable curiosity drives someone to understand phenomena, in this instance the possible correlations between physical characteristics of birds and their behavior. In his recently published book, The Corner Office, Adam Bryant identifies five characteristics that all great leaders share in common. One of them is insatiable curiosity.

To read the complete article and check out other resources, please click here.

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For the past few weeks, my 8-year old son Amit and I have been observing birds, paying attention to their individual and particular behavior.  We noticed that some of the birds we observed were different in their physical characteristics like color, shape and size, and that these traits varied with their behavior. This made us wonder about the possible evolutionary links between the appearance of the birds on one hand and their respective behavior on the other.

The first difference that stood out to us was between the small and large red birds. Although the larger ones were about twice as big, their ability to fly was about the same — but what was very different about the two kinds was that the larger red birds were much more aggressive and caused more damage when they attacked. Of course, the evolutionary reason for this difference in aggression seems straightforward; as the subtype of birds gets larger, they need more food, and with this increased requirement, aggression becomes an important survival skill.

The yellow subtype of birds were slightly more of a challenge to figure out. Other than being yellow, their general characteristics were similar to the red birds — but Amit and I couldn’t help but notice their tendency to suddenly fly at much higher speeds relative to the red birds. We speculated that the evolutionary reason for this difference must be that the red birds, by virtue of their threatening color, are less appealing to predators, and as a consequence they never needed to develop enhanced speed to escape. In contrast, the yellow birds practically invite predators to dine with their appealing color. With this clear disadvantage the yellow birds are forced to rely on an alternative survival mechanism, in this case the valuable skill of speed.

Another interesting feature of the yellow bird is that it is sharper, perhaps because it is a species connected with the woodpecker family.  The yellow birds’ sharpness might also help it further when it needs to break down a structure or cut through wood – which again is most likely connected to their need to compensate for their color disadvantage.

The blue birds were fascinating in their ability to self-replicate, and in all of the cases we observed they produced exactly three offspring. We wondered why the blue birds evolved to produce offspring at such speed and timely consistency, and we determined that the evolutionary reason for this must be that because the blue birds are small and relatively slow, they had to develop a skill for efficient reproduction, thereby hedging their bets and increasing the potential to pass on their genes.

The white birds were even more puzzling. On multiple occasions, we watched them drop their eggs while still in flight, naturally crushing the egg. Initially this seemed to be a counter-evolutionary strategy, but once we inspected the discarded eggs we realized that these eggs were abnormal, and it was probably the white bird’s strategy for dealing with eggs that have a low potential for survival. One additional observation in support of this hypothesis is that the white birds seemed to be much healthier, lighter and happier after the eggs were discarded.

Of course there were many other birds as well, including one particularly interesting black bird, and Amit and I are thinking of continuing to pursue this bird-project for a while. In fact, we are already getting somewhat addicted to it, and we just learned that there are plenty more birds to observe in Rio.
But what really baffles us is this: why are these birds SO angry?

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Dan Ariely is the James B Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University. His books include Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions and The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home.

He also publishes widely in the leading scholarly journals in economics, psychology, and business. His work has been featured in a variety of media including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Business 2.0, Scientific American, Science and CNN. He splits his time between Durham NC and the rest of the world.

What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast

Here is an excerpt from another lively and informative article written by Laura Vanderkam 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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Mornings are a mad-cap time in many households. Everyone’s so focused on getting out the door that you can easily lose track of just how much time is passing. I’ve had hundreds of people keep time logs for me over the past few years (you can see some of mine here and here), and I’m always amazed to see gaps of 90 minutes or more between when people wake up and when they start the commute or school car pool.

That would be fine if the time was used intentionally, but often it isn’t.
The most productive people, however, realize that 90 minutes, 120 minutes or more is a long time to lose track of on a busy weekday. If you feel like you don’t have time for personal priorities later in the day, why not try using your mornings? Streamline breakfast, personal care and kid routines. Then you can use 30-60 minutes to try one of four things:

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

1. Play, read, or talk with your kids. Mornings can be great quality time, especially if you have little kids who go to bed soon after you get home at night, but wake up at the crack of dawn. Set an alarm on your watch, put away the iPhone, and spend a relaxed half an hour reading stories or doing art projects. If you have older children, aim for a leisurely family breakfast. Everyone talks through their plans for the day and what’s going on in their lives. If family dinners aren’t a regular thing in your house, this is a great substitute.

2. Exercise. You shower in the morning anyway, so why not get sweaty first? Trade off mornings with your partner on who goes out and runs and who stays home with the kids. Or, if your kids are older (or you don’t have any) work out together and make it a very healthy morning date.*     *     *

Note: Are you looking for a better start to your day, or to use your time more effectively in general? I’d like to do a few time makeovers of readers over the next few weeks. Email me if you’d be interested in logging your time, trying a few strategies, and sharing what you learn. Thanks!

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Laura Vanderkam, a New York City-based journalist, is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think.  Called “a great read” by Natalie Morales on The Today Show, and “intriguing” by the Chicago Tribune, 168 Hourslooks at how Americans spend their time now and in the past, and how we can all spend it better. Laura is also the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues, which the New York Post selected as one of four notable career books of 2007. She is a member of the USA Today board of contributors, and her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, City Journal, Whole Living, Good and other publications. She enjoys running and singing soprano in the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, and she lives with her husband and two young sons.

5 Ways To Stop Procrastinating By Friday

Laura Vanderkam

Here is an article written by Laura Vanderkam 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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We all have one: some big, horrible, awful-sounding task that we’d prefer to put off to next month. Or never. Unfortunately, procrastination doesn’t really mean pushing something to the future, because if you’re worried about it, a postponed task has a sneaky way of consuming a lot of mindshare in the present. Here are a few ways to finally get moving:

1. Do a “home inspection” on the problem. I’m in the middle of buying a house. Part of the process is finding a disinterested yet expert third party to spell out exactly what’s wrong with the property and how to fix it. I think this is a concept that should be used more broadly. Survey several other parties (a spouse, close friends, your mentor) to tell you what they’d do with your particular project. You may discover that the Biggest Editing Job Ever just requires moving a few paragraphs around.

2. Break the project into concrete steps. Say you need to give a speech. This sounds like a huge undertaking, but it’s really more like seven much smaller projects. You need to figure out a thesis, make an outline, find some key statistics and anecdotes, write a draft, practice it, revise, then practice it in front of others and ask for their feedback. All of these sound infinitely doable.

3. Figure out how long each step of your task will take. We tend to overestimate how much time things we hate to do consume. I hate doing the dishes, so I used to think I spent like an hour emptying the dishwasher each time. Then I looked at the clock and found it takes 5-7 minutes. Likewise, if you hate cold-calling people, you may be telling yourself that making 5 cold calls will take all day. It won’t. It will probably take less than an hour. Don’t you feel silly fretting all week about something that will take less than 60 minutes?

4. Block your task in first thing in the morning. Do it before you expend any energy on checking emails or even saying hello to your co-workers. If possible, make it the only thing on your to-do list for the day. Often, if we’re dreading a task, we hide it in the middle of 20 other goals. Then, we feel like we’ve done something when we hit 19 of 20… but not the thing we really know we should have done. Don’t give yourself that satisfaction. Force yourself to sit there twiddling your thumbs if you’re not attacking the problem.

5. Use blatant bribery. Kids get stickers for going to the dentist. Why shouldn’t you? If you knock off your dreaded task by 9:30AM, give yourself permission to loaf the rest of the day. And have ice cream for lunch, a margarita after work or whatever it takes to create such positive feelings that you’re never tempted to procrastinate again.

Laura Vanderkam, a New York City-based journalist, is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. Called “a great read” by Natalie Morales on The Today Show, and “intriguing” by the Chicago Tribune, 168 Hours looks at how Americans spend their time now and in the past, and how we can all spend it better. Laura is also the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues, which the New York Post selected as one of four notable career books of 2007. She is a member of the USA Today board of contributors, and her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, City Journal, Whole Living, Good and other publications. She enjoys running and singing soprano in the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, and she lives with her husband and two young sons.

The Joy of Housework

Laura Vanderkam

Here is another post at Laura Vanderkam’s “Just a Minute” online newsletter. She is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, published by Portfolio/Penguin Group (2010).

To check out all the resources that Vanderkam offers, please click here.

To read my interview of her, please click here.

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Much has changed in the last 50 years. Perhaps most notably? Our relationship with our brooms. While American men are spending more time tidying (a more than 100% increase from 1965 to 2000), American women are spending a lot less.

Back in 1965, married mothers spent around 35 hours per week tending their homes. Labor market economists consider 35 hours the definition of a full-time job. These days, it’s under 20 hours per week, and among women who work full-time, it’s down to 14. 
 
I ponder these statistics every time my raft of April magazines arrives, many celebrating spring cleaning in vivid detail. Real Simple in particular is prone to creating artful spreads on cleaning your grout with lemon; this April’s issue features a stack of neatly folded towels (and a fluffy chick) on the cover.

In her monthly letter to readers, editor Kristin van Ogtrop has an explanation for this rather retro obsession: Olympia Snowe likes to clean! At a Fortune conference not long ago, Snowe (the senator from Maine) mentioned that she cleans to relax. Van Ogtrop viewed this as a sign of progress. “It’s perfectly all right for a powerful, accomplished woman to admit that she likes to clean — no one will bat an eye.” Of course, “perhaps the only reason a U.S. senator likes to clean is because she doesn’t have to.” I kind of buy this explanation myself. When you don’t have to clean, you can turn it into a luxurious experience, buying high-end Caldrea products that have more in common with aromatherapy than Mr. Clean.
 
Or perhaps there’s more to it than that.

Cleaning is “so satisfying because it usually has a clear beginning, middle and end,” van Ogtrop writes. “There is a direct correlation between effort and reward. The results are measurable and almost immediate.” There is a striking parallel with cleaning out one’s inbox. When you delete an email, or file it, or answer every note, you feel like you’ve done something.
 
But have you? It’s tempting to slake our desire for accomplishment with easy wins.

But at the end of your life, will you be proudest of your clean house and empty inbox, or the non-profit you managed, the books you wrote, the children you nurtured?

Women actually spend more time interacting with their children these days than they did in 1965, even though far more of us participate in the labor force as well. Our declining devotion to housework was a big factor in making this possible. An April scrubbing may be nice. But a romp in the spring mud with your kids might be better. 
 
All the best,
 
Laura

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As noted, Laura Vanderkam, a New York City-based journalist, is the author of 168 Hours. She is also the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues. She is a member of the USA Today board of contributors, and her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, City Journal, Whole Living, Good and other publications. She enjoys running and singing soprano in the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, and she lives with her husband and two young sons.

How To Get a Raise (And Get Your Kid to Eat His Veggies)

Here is an article written by Laura Vanderkam 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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Many of us dread negotiations. We approach these high-stakes interactions with trepidation, and would rather spend our time doing just about anything else.

But that’s because we have mistaken notions about what negotiation means, says Stuart Diamond, professor of a famed negotiation class at UPenn’s Wharton School, and author of the new book Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World (Crown Business). “Every human interaction involves negotiation, from kids and relationships, to jobs and travel, to shopping to chatting, to politics and diplomacy,” he says.

That knock-down meeting on pricing is a negotiation, but so is a colleague’s request for a phone number, or your offer to read your child a story before bed. And unfortunately, “almost everyone does it wrong,” Diamond reports. “That is, they don’t meet their needs very well.” We tend to create conflict rather than actually solve problems. Diamond shared the most effective strategies for getting what you want.

Vanderkam: What is the biggest mistake people make in negotiations?

Diamond: Not understanding the other party enough to know how to persuade them. If you don’t understand them, the negotiation, if you can get it done at all, takes a much longer time. Someone may not want to buy from you because they perceive your customer service is bad because they heard something somewhere. Unless you take the trouble to find out why, you will not know what to do.

It’s about them [the other party]. Finding, understanding and valuing the pictures in the head of the other party is more important than any collection of facts, resources or evidence that you can muster. That’s because it’s “them” that you need to persuade.

Once you have the pictures in their head, you know what it will take to get them to meet your needs, and where to start.

Vandderkam: What about the hardball tactics?

Diamond: The traditional ways – threats, power, walking out, invoking alternatives, good cop & bad cop – just make others resentful and cause retaliation. That means terrorism, malicious obedience at work, the child kicking and screaming on the floor. Valuing their perceptions (as a starting point) gets them to listen more and be more persuadable.

Vanderkam: What is the best way to start off a negotiation?

Diamond: Address emotions first. The world is an irrational place. In fact, the more important the negotiation is to the parties, the more irrational (emotional) they are. Emotional situations call for emotional payments: empathy (focusing on their emotions), concessions, apologies, listening. They don’t call for rational solutions. Mentioning “win-win” in an emotional situation is therefore irrelevant, because emotional people aren’t listening to logic. First you need to understand and empathize with their emotion. At the same time, the more emotional you get (including anger), the less effective you are. Take a break or lower your expectations, since dashed expectations are a big cause of emotion.

Vandderkam: Is there an efficient way to advance a negotiation?

Diamond: First, make a people connection. When people like you, they are six times as likely to meet your needs than if you have no connection with them.  And that means service providers of all types.  Ask about them, find out who they are. You need to actually be curious. If you don’t really care about them or a relationship, then you will get less because they will sense you are phony. Either get another negotiator who does care, or find something about them in which you are interested. There must be something with which you can make a connection.

Second, trade unequally valued items from any source. All of life is about quid pro quo. If you want something, you have to give something, whether in business or your personal life. But it doesn’t have to be money or even part of the deal. It can be anything that another party values. It can be a business title, a corner office, college advice, sports tickets, any intangible item including respect or just listening. TV time for homework. A lower price for business referrals. The key is to give things you don’t care as much about but which they value, and get things they don’t care as much about but which you value. The more you find out about what they value, the more things you have to trade for what you want. This greatly expands the pie.

Vanderkam: Can I use these strategies to negotiate with my kids? I really want my 3-year-old to eat his vegetables.

Diamond: Kids are easy to negotiate with. You just need to understand their perspective. I have been negotiating with my 8-year-old son since he could understand language. Kids have little power, so they like to control things. So I let him pick restaurants and otherwise make decisions for the family as much as possible. So he is always in a debtor situation with me. If he doesn’t want to do something, I say, “Well, didn’t daddy let you do X?” It greatly increases the chances he will do what I want. Or I trade him.

Trading doesn’t have to be a bribe. After all, adults work for salary. So I might trade vegetables for ice cream or the zoo or something else the child wants. “I’ll give you something you want if you give me something I want.” It teaches the child a big lesson in life, quid pro quo. Or I might find out what about the vegetables the child doesn’t like and mix them with something the child likes. Adults do this with sauces. It’s not unreasonable for the child not to like something. Explore creative possibilities.

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Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam, a New York City-based journalist, is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. Called “a great read” by Natalie Morales on The Today Show, and “intriguing” by the Chicago Tribune, 168 Hours looks at how Americans spend their time now and in the past, and how we can all spend it better. Laura is also the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues, which the New York Post selected as one of four notable career books of 2007. She is a member of the USA Today board of contributors, and her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, City Journal, Whole Living, Good and other publications. She enjoys running and singing soprano in the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, and she lives with her husband and two young sons.

Making the emotional case for change: An interview with Chip Heath

Chip Heath

In this excerpt from an interview with McKinsey & Company’s Allen Webb, Chip Heath interprets Switch for denizens of the C-suite. Supporting the interview are two case examples excerpted from the book. To read the complete interview, check out other resources, and/or sign up for a free but limited access subscription to The McKinsey Quarterly’s website, please click here.

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In conversation and in excerpts from his recent book, a leading expert on organizational behavior explains why change often stalls and how top executives can use psychology to keep it going.
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The Quarterly: Could you please quickly summarize the core ideas in Switch for the benefit of those who have not yet read it?

Chip Heath: The core idea is that there are two sides to the way human beings think about any issue. There’s the rational, analytical, problem-solving side of our brains, which may think, “I need to eat less.” But there’s an emotional side that’s addicted to impulse or comfortable routines, and that side wants a cookie. At work, the rational side may say that the company needs to go in a different direction. But the emotional side is comfortable with the old ways of thinking and selling, and it has great anxiety about whether the company can change successfully.

My favorite metaphor for this dynamic comes from the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who talks about a human riding atop an elephant. The Rider represents our analytical, planning side. The Rider decides, “I need to go somewhere, here’s the direction I want to go,” and sets off. But it’s the Elephant, the emotional side, that’s providing the power. The Rider can try to lead the Elephant, but in any direct contest of wills the Elephant is going to win—it has a six-ton advantage. So part of achieving change, in either our lives or in organizations, is aligning both sides of the brain by pointing out the direction for the Rider but also motivating the Elephant to undertake the journey. Of course, the Path the Elephant walks down matters too. High-ranking executives can shape that Path, that environment, and make the journey easier even when the Elephant is less motivated.

The Quarterly: In helping companies to work through these conflicts and smooth the road to change, how useful is a senior executive’s formal power?

Chip Heath: The Rider–Elephant conflict may be a reason not to press too hard on formal levers. It’s not enough for people to intellectually understand that an organization must start moving in a different strategic direction. People need to be motivated.

Our typical way of communicating speaks primarily—and in a lot of cases almost exclusively—to the Rider. It builds an intellectual case for change and relies on formal authority. In government, legislators have formal authority to change the rules of the system. The US Congress once changed the national speed limit to 55 miles an hour, for example. Did that automatically change behavior? As a parent, does formal power change the behavior of your teenagers?

It’s not enough to show intellectually that we need to change and then to decree what those changes will be. If it were, a lot more organizations would succeed in making strategic shifts. Formal power is tremendously useful, but if we start by wielding it we probably haven’t aligned the Rider and the Elephant. And if we rely only on the formal levers of power to lead, we may get too far ahead of people—they understand that they must change, but the motivation hasn’t kicked in.

The Quarterly: What’s an example of the kind of formal power you think executives mistakenly exercise and an alternative that might be more effective?

Chip Heath: Consider how change initiatives are typically rolled out. In many organizations, a change initiative consists of 35 slides in a PowerPoint deck analyzing the reasons for change. There’s nothing in the deck that helps employees believe that “We’re the kind of people who can successfully make this change.”

GE overcame this problem when they started talking about “ecomagination.” CEO Jeff Immelt said, “There’s a broad social trend toward finding more sustainable ways of doing business, and if we can take advantage of that, we will be well-positioned for the future.” GE did a green audit, looking for places where they already had industry-leading green products, and started highlighting those existing products for employees. One was an LED3 lighting system that produces great light with 10 percent of the electricity used by other systems. GE then said, “We’re the kind of people who can succeed in this new business environment that’s more and more focused on sustainability.” That motivates the Elephant.

The Quarterly: In Switch, you use the term “bright spots” to describe internal success stories like GE’s LED system. Could you say a bit more about the power of bright spots?

Chip Heath: Many companies try change themselves by benchmarking other organizations and borrowing their procedures or practices. The irony of benchmarking is that we’re essentially telling organizations to be more like GE or Apple or Nike. As Dev Patnaik, the author of Wired to Care,4 said to me one time, we know this doesn’t work on a personal level: we resist when members of our families say, “Be more like your brother.” The principle of bright spots is that you shouldn’t try to be more like Apple; you should try to be more like yourself at your best moments. Think about what you’ve done in the past, or what you’re doing now, that has worked tremendously well.

People have a tendency, especially in a change situation, to focus on the negative. Lots of research supports this negative focus—for example, if you ask sports fans what happened over the weekend, they dwell on the games their favorite teams lost. Companies too focus on the problems and not the bright spots.

I won’t say there’s no value in benchmarking. But if you believe that organizations differ in their cultures, capabilities, and structures, there’s something fundamentally odd about saying that you want to be more like another company that has a very different culture, structure, and set of capabilities. At the very least, the idea of looking to your own bright spots is a useful addition to your tool kit.

The Quarterly: What’s your view of the notion that change is easier when you have a “burning platform” from which to motivate it?

Chip Heath: That is one of the silliest pieces of business jargon. The idea of the burning platform is that people only change when they’re scared. But fear, as an emotion, creates tunnel vision. Police officers call this “weapon focus”: crime victims can often give great descriptions of the weapon, but nothing about whether the assailant was tall or short or had facial hair, because they focus on what evoked their fear.

That kind of tunnel vision is devastating in times of change. If you’re doing everything basically right and you just need to improve execution, you can scare people and they’ll execute better and faster. But that’s not true of most change situations, where you need to be doing something new. Fear is the worst motivator here because it makes people work harder at what they did in the past.

The Quarterly: In Switch, you talk a lot about “identity.” Why is that important?

Chip Heath: My Stanford colleague Jim March says there are two very different kinds of logic for making decisions. One is the logic of consequences. We’re great in business at changing behavior by changing consequences. If we want customers to buy more, we lower prices. If we want salespeople to sell more, we increase their bonuses. But the second kind of logic is the logic of identity. Many of the most profound decisions we make in life are made because of identity, not consequences. When our newborn child cries at night, we don’t undertake a net present value analysis of how much more valuable an hour of sleep would be. We get up because we are a committed mother or father.

That’s useful in business, especially in a change situation: if we can harness the power of identity, it helps motivate the Elephant to undertake a long, arduous journey. In a change situation, you want creativity and flexibility—and that’s more likely to come from identity than from consequences. Consequence-based logic is great at narrowing people’s focus, but it can backfire for the same reason. If you give people incentives to sell a lot of mortgages, for instance, they will do so. But they’re not necessarily selling the right mortgages to the right people.

Most successful companies have a distinctive identity in our minds. I can picture the identity of a Wal-Mart or a Southwest or an IBM employee. I have a harder time picturing the identities of some of their competitors. Intel recently has been running a national ad campaign that features its own employees. It’s called “Our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars.” Ajay Bhatt, one of the coinventors of USB, is shown walking into a company canteen and being surrounded by adoring employees. The point is that what they value at Intel may be different from what’s valued in the outside world, but if you’re the next Ajay Bhatt, you want to work for Intel, where your talents will be respected. Another great example of a company that motivates employees by giving them a sense of identity is Brasilata.
How can senior executives create appropriate identities?

Chip Heath: They don’t have to be invented from whole cloth, because, again, you can build on bright spots. For example, when Lou Gerstner came to IBM it had a long tradition of selling “big iron,” or large mainframe computers. But there was also a division selling solutions that might or might not involve IBM hardware. Its employees had an identity as problem solvers for customers. Gerstner seized on that existing expertise and rolled it out as IBM’s strategy.

As a top leader, you want to use your platform to celebrate people, like Ajay Bhatt, who create and sustain your company’s identity. At Brasilata, they tell stories about great innovations from frontline employees. In identity-based logic, we think about how “people like us” behave in order to uphold an identity. Celebrating case studies of success is exactly what a company should do.

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The Quarterly: What messages do you want to leave with senior executives who are seeking to catalyze change?

Chip Heath: Pay attention to creating an emotional case for change, not just an analytical one. Scale up bright-spot successes. And use your power as a top leader to smooth the path to change. Your people are ready to step up to the plate, but if systems or procedures are getting in the way of change, you are the one with the power to eliminate them.

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Chip Heath is currently a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-author with his brother Dan Heath of two books, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2007) and Switch: How To Change Things When Change is Hard (2010). He has also published research in such academic publications as Cognitive Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Quarterly Journal of Economics, and his research has been reviewed in publications including Scientific American, Financial Times, Washington Post, and Vanity Fair. Heath graduated with a BS in industrial engineering in 1986 from Texas A&M University and received a PhD in psychology in 1991 from Stanford University. He currently serves on editorial board of Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Interview: Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam

A New York City-based journalist, Vanderkam is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, published by Portfolio/Penguin Group (2010). She is also the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues (McGraw-Hill, 2007), which the New York Post selected as one of four notable career books of 2007. She is a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors, and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, City Journal, Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, Reason, and other publications. She specializes in translating complex economic, policy or scientific ideas into readable prose, and making people say “I never thought of it that way before.” A 2001 graduate of Princeton, she enjoys writing fiction, running, and singing soprano with the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, an organization for which she served until recently as president, and which specializes in commissioning new music from composers under age 35. She lives in the city with her husband and their two young sons.

Morris: Before discussing any of your books, a few general questions. First, please share your thoughts about achieving and then sustaining an appropriate balance of what is most important in one’s life.

Vanderkam: I think we have to look at what we do best and others cannot do for us. For most of us, this is nurturing our careers, nurturing our families, and nurturing ourselves (by which I mean getting enough sleep, exercising, and focusing on personal passions like volunteering). When you devote most of your hours to these priorities, life feels pretty good.

Morris: Given your response to the previous question, in your own life as well as what you have observed in others’ lives, what seem to be the most serious challenges to such balance? How best to avoid or overcome them?

Vanderkam: Many of us make ourselves busy with things that don’t matter. We volunteer for projects that we don’t care about, we spend time on housework or errands that don’t need to be done or don’t need to be done to the standard we’re doing them, or we spend time at work on things that aren’t advancing our careers or our organizations. We also watch a lot of TV.

Morris: As I read several of your articles for various publications, I was struck by the range and especially by the diversity of your interests. You seem to have an almost insatiable curiosity about so many subjects. Is that a fair assessment?

Vanderkam: It is true that I love to learn about new topics. Sometimes that makes my professional life harder, as I don’t achieve economies of scale in my writing, but on the plus side, I don’t get bored. Today I’ve been researching the Korean-American community in New York, environmental issues in lawn care, and the Ramona Quimby series of children’s books. How random is that?

Morris: To what extent has your formal education (e.g. Princeton) had a significant impact on your career thus far?
Vanderkam: I am very grateful for my Princeton education, and I learned a lot in college. I studied with some excellent writing teachers including John McPhee, and I took classes such as art history, and the Bible in Western cultural tradition, which had me reading great works of literature. But, of course, the most useful aspect of my education now is the network. For instance, the executive at Portfolio who facilitated their acquisition of 168 Hours is a Princeton grad.

Morris: Here’s a subject on which opinions are sharply divided. Given the emergence of various electronic reading devices, do you think the bound volume is an endangered species?

Vanderkam: I hope not! I own a Kindle and love how quickly I can get a title and start reading, but I love the feel of turning pages, too, and I like to mark up my books. I like seeing them on my bookshelves, just as I like holding a physical newspaper as I drink my coffee. I think there will be many ways to enjoy books in the future.

Morris: To what does the title of your first book, Grindhopping, refer?

Vanderkam: I made up the word “Grindhopping” to mean those who hop out of the corporate grind to do their own thing. Broadly, the book is about the rise of self-employment among young people.

Morris: The subtitle, Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues, certainly caught my eye. Are you suggesting that success (however defined) can be achieved without paying any dues (however defined)? In fact, how do you define “dues”?

Vanderkam: By paying your dues, I mean climbing the corporate ladder to finally get to a place where you can do interesting, creative work. That’s one approach, or you can just start doing interesting, creative work on your own, see if you can get people to pay you for it, and build your career that way instead. That’s what I’ve done. I have nothing against working hard – in fact, I’m all for it! But if you’re going to work hard, why not make sure you reap the rewards of it?

Morris: As I read the book, I was reminded of Teresa Amabile’s admonition, expressed in a Harvard Business Review article almost 20 years ago, that people should do what they love and love what they do.

Vanderkam: That’s great advice. You will have more energy for the rest of your life working 50 hours a week in a job you love than 30 in a job you hate.