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.

LEADERSHIP: A Master Class

I have just learned about a new series of DVD programs, produced by More Than Sound, and hosted by Daniel Goleman. The video collection also includes a bonus interview with Peter Senge, Senior Lecturer in Leadership and Sustainability at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

“Leadership: A Master Class allows individuals and organizations alike access to top-level training on developing emotionally intelligent management skills from world-class experts,” says Goleman. “Executives, HR directors and leadership coaches now have at their fingertips a comprehensive, easy-to-use library of proven-effective techniques from these masters in their respective fields.”

The series includes:

HIGH PERFORMANCE LEADERSHIP with George Kohlrieser, professor of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at IMD, and author of the internationally bestselling book, Hostage At The Table: How Leaders Can Overcome Conflict, Influence Others, and Raise Performance. His most recent book is Care to Dare: Unleashing Astonishing Potential Through Secure Base Leadership.

THE SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT LEADER with Warren Bennis, pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies, university professor and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California.

AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP with Bill George, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, and former chairman and chief executive officer of Medtronic.

TODAY’S LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE with Howard Gardner, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and was named one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world.

THE LEADER’S MIND with Daniel J. Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute.

TALENT STRATEGY with Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a top global expert on hiring and promotion decisions, and senior adviser of the leading executive search firm Egon Zehnder International.

CREATE TO INNOVATE with Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and director of research in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School.

GETTING BEYOND YES with Erica Ariel Fox, lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, and part of the internationally acclaimed Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON).

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To obtain more information about the series, please click here.

Daniel Goleman is the author of the international bestsellers Emotional Intelligence, Working with Emotional Intelligence, and Social Intelligence, and the co-author of the acclaimed business bestseller Primal Leadership. He was a science reporter for the New York Times, was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and received the American Psychological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his media writing. His latest book is The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights, published by More Than Sound (2011). He lives in the Berkshires.

HBR Guide to Getting the Right Work Done: A book review by Bob Morris

HBR Guide to Getting the Right Work Done Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (2012)

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker

This is one of the first volumes in a new series of anthologies of articles previously published in Harvard Business Review, in this instance 27 of them, in which their authors share their insights concerning a major business subject, in this instance getting the right work done.

As is also true of volumes in other such series, notably HBR Essentials, HBR Must Reads, and HBR Management Tips, HBR Guides offer great value in several ways. Here are two: Cutting-edge thinking from a variety of primary sources in a single volume at a price (about $12.50 from Amazon in the bound version) for a fraction of what article reprints would cost.

The material in this volume is organized within nine sections. All of it is of outstanding quality and value. Some of it is of special interest to me, as indicated:

o Section 1: GET STARTED
Of Special Interest: “Being More Productive, An Interview with David Allen and Tony Schwartz”
Do you need the right system or the right frame of mind?, conducted by David McGinn (Pages 23-31)

o Section 2: PRIORITIZE YOUR WORK
Of Special Interest: “Get a Raise by Getting the Right Work Done”
Focus on the work that will bring the greatest reward — for your organization and for you,
Peter Bregman (35-38)

o Section 3: ORGANIZE YOUR TIME
Of Special Interest: “Stop Procrastinating — Now”
Five tips for breaking this [some believe] bad habit, Amy Gallo (53-56)

o Section 4: DELEGATE EFFECTIVELY
Of Special Interest: “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?”
Delegate, Delegate, Delegate, William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass, with a commentary by Stephen R. Covey (87-107)

o Section 5: CREATE RITUALS
Of Special Interest: “Use a Ten-Minute Diary to Stay on Track”
The best way to spend the last ten minutes of your day, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer (125-131)

o Section 6: RENEW YOUR ENERGY
Of Special Interest: “How to Accomplish More by Doing Less”
Take breaks to get more done, Tony Schwartz (135-137)

o Section 7: TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR E-MAIL
Of Special Interest: “Simplify Your E-mail”
Three folders will do it, Gina Trapani (153-156)

o Section 8: MAINTAIN YOUR NEW APPROACH
Of Special Interest: “Sustaining Your Productivity System”
You’ve become productive! Now keep it up, Alexandra Samuel (165-168)

o Section 9: EXPLORE FURTHER
Of Special Interest: “More Productivity Books to Explore”
Summaries of three popular titles by Covey, Morgenstern, and Allen, Ilan Mochari (171-174)

The material was selected to help those who read this book improve in areas that include prioritizing, staying focused, working less but accomplishing more, ending bad habits and strengthening good ones, formulating to-do lists that really work, dismantling overwhelming projects into manageable parts, avoiding or eliminating e-mail overload, and refueling energy.

If you need assistance in any of these areas, this book will be of invaluable assistance, both now and in months and years to come.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: A book review by Bob Morris

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
Cal Newport
Business Plus (2012)

How and why “the craftsman mindset is the foundation for creating work you love”

Curious, I checked on the etymology of the word “career” and learned this: Origin in 1530s, “a running, course” (especially of the sun, etc., across the sky), from M.Fr. carriere “road, racecourse.” Only centuries later (early 1800s), through the evolution of usage, did the word’s meaning emerge as the “course of a working life.” I mention all this because one of Cal Newport’s primary objectives is to help his reader select the most appropriate career course and remain on it while achieving near-, mid-, and long-term goals; then, if and whenever necessary, adjust the course, pace, and focus to accommodate unforeseen changes. Viewed as a journey, Newport also calls it a “career mission” that serves as “an organizing principle to your working life. It’s what leads people to become famous for what they do and ushers in remarkable opportunities that come along with such fame.”

Years ago during a commencement address at Stanford, Teresa Amabile urged the new graduates to do what they love and love what they do. I think that is excellent advice. I also agree with Newport that it is also very important to develop capabilities, skills that will “trump passion in the quest for work you love.” That is why Newport focuses on what he calls “the craftsman mindset,” one that focuses on what you can offer to the world. Unlike “the passion mindset” that focuses on what the world can offer you, the craftsman mindset “asks you to leave behind self-centered concerns about whether your job is ‘just right,’ and instead put your head down and plug away at getting really damn good. No one owes you a great career, it argues; you need to earn it — and the process won’t be easy.”

Here are a few of the dozens of passages that caught my eye:

o   Rule #1: ”Don’t Follow Your Passion” (Pages 3-26)
o   The Science of Passion: Three Conclusions (14-19)
o   Craftsman Mindset vs. Passion Mindset (49-55)
o   Rule #2: ”Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You” (29-101)
[Note: Newport explains that this comment was made by Steve Martin during an appearance on "The Charlie Rose Show."]
o   “The Career Capital Theory of Great Work” (42-57)
o   Rule #3: ”Turn Down a Promotion/or Control” (105-143)
o   “Control Traps” (115-131)
o   “The Law of Financial Liability” (137-141)
o   Rule #4: ”Think Small, Act Big/The Importance of Mission” (147-197)

Newport devotes the final chapter to a brief but revealing discussion of his own “quest” to (a) answer the question, “How do people end up loving what they do?” and (b) obtain a faculty appointment at a university. He explains how he achieved both objectives.  Near the end of the book, he observes, ”Once you build up the career capital that these skills generate [and others value highly], invest it wisely. Use it to acquire control over what you do and how you do it, and to identify and act on a life-changing mission. This philosophy is less sexy than the fantasy of dropping everything to go live among the monks in the mountains, but it’s also a philosophy that has been shown time and again to actually work.”

No brief commentary such as mine can possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of the information, insights, and counsel that Cal Newport provides. However, I hope that those who read this review will have at least a sense of what his purposes are and how well he serves them. Presumably he agrees with me that it would be a fool’s errand to attempt to act upon, immediately, all of his suggestions. Read strategically, highlight whichever passages are most important, formulate a “game plan,” and then proceed with both determination and patience during your own journey of self-discovery. Bon voyage!

The Winner’s Brain: A book review by Bob Morris

The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success
Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske with Liz Neporent
DeCapo Press/Perseus Books Group (2011)

How and why your brain can help you to become the best person you can be

Note: I recently re-read this book, first published in 2010, and value what it offers even more now than I did then.

Opinions vary as to how much (on average) people use of their brain’s capacities but there seems to be almost unanimous agreement among neuroscientists that it is possible to increase those capacities through a combination of mental and physical exercises, nutrition, and an increasing understanding of what the brain is, does, and can do. Hence the great value of this book. With Liz Neporent, Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske identify and then rigorously examine eight strategies that great minds use to achieve success (however defined) and what those with less-than-great minds can learn from them.

As they explain in the Introduction, “Our definition of Winners encompasses the usual conception: people who meet with extraordinary success in the particular aspects of life they value most…The kind of Winners we are talking about revel in the journey toward their goals almost as much as the destination itself, and they strive for the type of success that helps make the world a better place.”  This is precisely what Teresa Amabile had in mind years ago when offering career advice during a commencement address at Stanford: “Do what you love and love what you do because what you love is what you’ll do best.” Brown and Fenske include dozens of such Winners in this book, telling their stories that (whether they realize it or not) “illuminate the science and the theories” on which the eight strategies are based.

These are among the passages that caught my eye:

o  On how and why a Winner’s Brain operates differently than the average brain
o  Five essential elements of success
o   “The Winner’s Profile Quiz”
o  Five BrainPowser Tools
o  The Eight Win Factors
o  How and why thinking about yourself can help you to become a Winner
o  How to cultivate the drive to win
o  How to make emotions work in your favor
o  The role of ”remembering: when developing a Winner’s Brain
o  How to ”bounce back” into success
0  How to reshape your brain to achieve greater success
o How to maintain, protect, and enhance your Winner’s Brain

Brown and Fenske selected a diversified group of Winners who generously share, as indicated earlier, personal stories that (whether they realize it or not) “illuminate the science and the theories” on which the eight strategies are based. Their diversity demonstrates that Winners can be found at all levels and in all areas of society. Of even greater significance, this diversity offers a reassurance that Winners [begin italics] can be developed [end italics] at all levels and in all areas of society.

Long ago, Oscar Wilde observed, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske agree, extending that insight to suggest, “And here’s how you can become the best person you can be.” In other words, a Winner.

Power Questions: A book review by Bob Morris

Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others
Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas
John Wiley & Sons (2011)

If you don’t know the right questions to ask and how/when to ask them, you’ll never find the right answers.

I do not know of another business thinker, indeed another person, who asks better questions than Andrew Sobel does and that is a talent he has developed over several decades. Each of his three previously published books was written in direct response to an especially serious business question and his latest book is no exception: How to build relationships, win new business, and influence others? Sobel and co-author Jerold Panas offer and discuss 337 “essential” questions that can obtain information that will help to achieve these three separate but interdependent objectives.

How so “interdependent”? If an organization does not build and constantly strengthen relationships with everyone involved in the given enterprise, it will lose its most valuable employees, clients, and allies and, for the same reasons, fail to replace them. True, this company “influences others” but in all he wrong ways.

Sobel and Panas organize their material within 35 chapters that contain a total of 42 questions (five in Chapter 35) within a narrative significantly enhanced by anecdotes that illustrate the power of questions that can either strengthen or weaken a relationship, increase or reduce the chances of achieving a desired objective. Then 293 additional “Power” questions are provided in the final section, “Not Just for Sunday.”

I really appreciate how cleverly Sobel and Panas frame their material in a reader-friendly fashion. For example, they pose a question and then suggest how and when to use that question most effectively. One of my personal favorites is “Is this the best you can do?” apparently one that many others such as Steve Jobs and Henry Kissinger have frequently posed. Sobel and Panas note that use of this question should be reserved for occasions “when it is especially desirable for someone to do their very best and push themselves to their strained and stretched limits.” I agree. They then suggest when specifically to use the question and alternative versions of the question, and alternative versions of it. This is a clever format repeated throughout the book. Here are three other “Power Questions” that caught my eye:

“What did you learn from that?” (Chapter 16)
Comment: Every setback (don’t call it a failure) should be a valuable learning opportunity.

“Can we start over?” (Chapter 8)
Comment: What isn’t working, what isn’t happening, will often reveal what will. The Lakota suggest never feeding a dead horse.

“What do you wish you could do more of?” (Chapter 25)
Comment: The best career advice I ever encountered was offered by Teresa Amabile during a commencement address at Stanford. In effect, do what you love (and are passionate about) because you will then be doing what you do best. People do not necessarily have to change a position to do what they do best and love most.

Some of the power questions work best in a career situation, others in a personal situation, and still others in both. Think of the 337 questions that Sobel and Panas pose and discuss as a base, a foundation, on which to build skills first exemplified by Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC).

To those who are about to read this brilliant book, I presume to suggest they keep this question in mind: In which situations will asking the right questions be most important to me? For some people, this may well be the most valuable book on building healthy relationships that they will ever read…but only IF they continuously apply effectively what they have learned.

 

Talent, Passion, and the Creativity Maze

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer 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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We live in a world mad for talent. From Hollywood and sports to executive search firms and HR departments around the globe, everyone seeks that special mix of natural abilities and attitudes that will make performance pop. A few months ago, Douglas Conant wrote a terrific blog post on how to find talented candidates for a job. When evaluating a potential hire, Conant looks for a strong mix of three qualities — competence, character, and skill as a team player. He gives great advice on how to find such a person. But he’s missing a crucial ingredient.

That ingredient, at least as important as the talent package described by Conant, is passion for the work — what psychologists call intrinsic motivation. Without it, no amount of talent will yield great performance. For 35 years, we have been exploring how motivation affects creativity. In studies involving groups as diverse as children, college students, professional artists, and knowledge workers, we have found that people are more creative when they are more strongly intrinsically motivated — driven by interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and a sense of personal challenge in the work they are doing.

Arthur Schawlow, a Nobel laureate in physics, said it eloquently: “The labor of love aspect is important. The successful scientists often are not the most talented, but the ones who are just impelled by curiosity. They’ve got to know what the answer is.”

Intrinsically motivated people are more creative because they engage more deeply with the work. Imagine a task you have to do — say, an important marketing problem you have to solve at work — as a maze you need to get through. Most business problems have multiple solutions that would work, multiple exits from that maze. Often, there is one clear, straight path out of the maze — the standard solution that everyone uses for this type of problem. If you’re extrinsically motivated, perhaps by a looming deadline or fear of a negative evaluation, you’re likely to take that safe path. The solution works, but it’s boring; it doesn’t move things forward. But if you’re intrinsically motivated, you love the hunt through the maze for a more interesting — and likely more creative — solution.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Teresa Amabile is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She researches what makes people creative, productive, happy, and motivated at work. Steven Kramer is a psychologist and independent researcher. They are co-authors of The Progress Principle (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011); please visit its website.

 

 

 

 

Three Ways to Turn Setbacks into Progress

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer  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.

Artwork: The Big Mobile (2004), 3rd Biennial of Contemporary Art of Valencia

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People can’t do their most productive, creative work unless they are highly engaged in their projects. According to the progress principle, of all the events that can keep people engaged and happy at work, the most important is simply making progress on meaningful work. The progress can be great or small, and the meaning can be as noble as trying to cure diabetes or as common as providing a useful service to a customer.

There is a dark side to the progress principle. Of all events that can destroy engagement, joy, and productivity at work, having setbacks or being stalled in the work is number one. Our research revealed that, on 76% of peoples’ very best days — days in which they were happy and highly engaged — they had made some degree of progress in the work; only 13% of those best days had setbacks. By contrast, only 25% of people’s worst days showed any progress, while 67% had setbacks. Even worse, the negative effect of setbacks on engagement is two-to-three times the positive effects of progress.

The obvious lesson for managers is that they should do everything in their power to support the daily progress of their workers, and reduce impediments to progress as much as possible. But there will always be setbacks. The innovative work that contemporary organizations need for survival is often hard and complicated, so problems are inevitable. What can a manager do to keep people engaged, productive and creative when things do go wrong? Here [is one of] three suggestions:

First, don’t treat setbacks as failures, but rather as challenges and learning opportunities. It is common wisdom that we learn from our mistakes, but too many managers seem to forget this and try to assign blame when things go wrong. Listen to the words of Alvin, one of the 238 participants who took part in our research:

“So far every solution I’ve developed for this project does not meet with the cost constraints. I’m becoming very frustrated with not finding the acceptable answer. Around here, not finding a solution is perceived as not being competent!”

Clearly, Alvin had a difficult problem to solve, but rather than being able to sense any forward progress, he was beaten down and made to feel incompetent. Contrast this quote from Tim, who worked for a different company with a very different attitude about setbacks:

“I showed the project manager the results I got and told him that there was a mistake in one of the trials. He said that is all right, as long as we know what we did.”

In the end, Tim and his team had a stunning success, while Alvin and his team never found an acceptable answer.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Teresa Amabile is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She researches what makes people creative, productive, happy, and motivated at work. Steven Kramer is a psychologist and independent researcher. They are coauthors of The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).

Bill Kling (American Public Media Group) in “The Corner Office”

Bill Kling (Photo Credit: Librado Romero/NYT)

Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Bill Kling who is founder and president emeritus of the American Public Media Group, a producer of public radio programming and owner of radio stations and services. He says his parents taught him the importance of unstifled creativity.

To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.

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Sometimes, You Need to Blow the Fuses

Bryant: What were some important early lessons for you?

Kling: I think we sometimes undervalue the experiences we have as small children. I used to go to my grandfather’s farm, where they didn’t have electricity. But he had this enormous radio, and it sat on the table next to his rocking chair. It was run on batteries, and it had a big antenna that went out to the orchard. I was younger than 7, and I’d sit on his lap. Out in the country with an antenna and a well-powered radio, you could pick up stations from all over the country.

So he would tune in to St. Louis or New York or New Orleans, and I just thought that was fascinating. It had to have had an influence on my lifelong interest in radio. I think we often undervalue the importance of giving young kids that kind of hands-on experience. It may not lead to their deciding what to do with their lives, but it’s surprising what they will absorb — and maybe their lives will turn out differently.

Bryant: What about your parents? How did they influence you?

Kling: They were wonderful. They absolutely left me alone. They left me up in my attic room to take everything apart and blow everything up and try everything I could try. I think I blew probably two dozen fuses as I tried different things. I took radios apart. I wanted to know how they worked, and then I wanted to know how I could make them better. I wanted to repackage them in some cases.

I can remember one point where I pulled a plug out of the wall about half an inch and then put a metal piece of an erector set across the two pins just to see what would happen. But they never said, “Why did you blow that fuse?” They just put in a new fuse. I think letting a kid’s imagination run is really important — though I don’t recommend that particular experiment.

Bryant: What do you consider the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

Kling: Let me start by answering the question this way: I don’t think that there is one formula for leadership. There are cheerleaders who are really good at motivating people. There are innovative leaders who are really good at conceiving of products or spotting talent and who have a great vision for the company. There are leaders who are strong on personality, leaders who are strong on creativity. Some of the most effective leaders don’t fit a mold. The ones who I think make a real difference tend to be totally different from the standard definition. I think the strongest criterion is creativity or innovation.

I couldn’t have stayed, and shouldn’t have stayed, long term in this job if that wasn’t a characteristic of my personality, because the company would have stagnated. I could have been the best leader around, but after 10 years, it probably would have peaked. I can remember a very difficult time of trying to get our FM radio signal to extend from 50 miles to 100 miles. Now new technology allows us to be heard and seen anywhere in the world, streaming live, with full fidelity.

Bryant: Tell me more about your leadership style.

Kling: I think every C.E.O. needs an executive team to be balanced to fit their strengths. The key elements, such as strategy, innovation, management, finance, don’t need to be in any single position — but they need to be there in the executive team. It’s terrific if you can walk through the halls and say hello by name to every employee. I can’t. It’s terrific if you can stand up at a staff meeting and do it in a way that people feel really good about your company. I can do that. But you never have all the pieces.

A mentor of mine taught me that every perspective is additive, because every person sitting in a room is looking at things differently. Each of them has a different perspective. They come from a different way of thinking and different experiences. And their collective perspective gives you a better outcome. So you have to value the perspectives and try to organize those perspectives in some useful way that lets you go forward. Anybody who tells you that they can do it all themselves needs an ego adjustment.

Bryant: Have you received any feedback over the decades about your management or leadership style that caused you to make adjustments?

Kling: I think that I was generally perceived as aloof. That’s probably accurate. But not for the reasons you would think. It’s difficult for someone who has grown up with the company and who knows the veteran employees so well, to then find that there are so many other employees whom you don’t know well. And if you don’t know them well, you feel bad about it.
Corner Office

You may feel awkward when you don’t know enough about some people to make them feel as much a part of the company as you want them to feel or know enough about what they have to offer the company. And so you kind of avoid interactions with them. That’s a mistake because inevitably they have something to offer. And that comes off as aloof.

I’ve been on boards with C.E.O.’s who can stand up and say: “Here are 15 people who we promoted this month. And here are their names and here are their birthdays,” and they can recite the names of their children. They know everything about them. And I’m just in awe of that kind of ability to connect with employees.

I think it’s your DNA. It’s your personality. If you’re the kind of person who can’t resist walking around the floor and your mind absorbs names well, they’ll stick because there’s something about each person that intrigued you. That’s motivating to the employees. Other leaders spend more time thinking about what’s the new thing, what’s being invented right now that’s going to put us out of business unless we embrace it. I think you can’t easily do both. If you can do both, you’re probably underemployed.

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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his new book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.

SUGGESTED  READINGS

The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer

Serial Innovators: Firms That Change the World
Claudio Feser and Daniel Vasella

The Secret: What Great Leaders Know – and Do
Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller

 

How leaders kill meaning at work

Here is an excerpt from still another outstanding article written by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, featured online by The McKinsey Quarterly (January 2012), published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete article, obtain information about the firm, access other resources, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.

Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in four avoidable ways.

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle [Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press, August 2011], found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what we call “inner work life”: the constant flow of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that constitute a person’s reactions to the events of the work day. Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, inner work life affects the bottom line. [See Sangeeta Agrawal, James W. Asplund, James K. Harter, Emily A. Killham, and Frank L. Schmidt, “Causal impact of employee work perceptions on the bottom line of organizations,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, July 2010, Volume 5, Number 4, pp. 378–89.]  People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it’s not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it.

In our book and a recent Harvard Business Review article [See Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, “The power of small wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011, Volume 89, Number 5, pp. 70–80.], we argue that managers at all levels routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions. These include dismissing the importance of subordinates’ work or ideas, destroying a sense of ownership by switching people off project teams before work is finalized, shifting goals so frequently that people despair that their work will ever see the light of day, and neglecting to keep subordinates up to date on changing priorities for customers.

But what about a company’s most senior leaders? What is their role in making—or killing—meaning at work? To be sure, as a high-level leader, you have fewer opportunities to directly affect the inner work lives of employees than do frontline supervisors. Yet your smallest actions pack a wallop because what you say and do is intensely observed by people down the line. A sense of purpose in the work [See Robert Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best . . . and Learn from the Worst, New York: Business Plus, 2010; and Sutton’s related article, “Why good bosses tune in to their people,” mckinseyquarterly.com, August 2010.], and consistent action to reinforce it, has to come from the top.

[Next, Amabile and Kramer identify and then discuss the "four avoidable ways" or “traps” by which "leaders kill meaning at work. To read the complete article, please click here.]

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Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School and co-author of the aforementioned The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work.  Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Steven Kramer is an independent researcher and writer in Wayland, Massachusetts. He is also co-author of The Progress Principle. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology from UCLA, and his doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Virginia.