JACK MALCOLM

Month: September 2012

  • Book Recommendation: So Good They Can’t Ignore You

    I’ve been following Cal Newport’s ideas for a while now, so when I learned that he was coming out with a book, I pre-ordered it from Amazon. I was not disappointed. If you have a child or know someone in college who is trying to figure out what to do with their life, or even if you’re north of fifty and still wonder what you’ll be when you grow up, then this book is for you.  So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, is so good that you shouldn’t ignore it.

    The central premise that sets this book apart from so much life advice that is out on the market is that following your passion is terrible advice. There are two main reasons for this: first, very few people at a young age know enough about life to choose something to be really passionate about, and even if they do, they are bound to be wrong. If Steve Jobs had followed his early passion, maybe he would have made a dent in the universe as a Buddhist monk.

    Second, while most people would love to have a job that allows them to be creative, make an impact on the world, and have control over how they choose to spend their time, jobs like that are rare and valuable, and the only way to get something valuable is to offer something in return. And the only way to be in a position to do that is to master a difficult skill. Passion doesn’t waive the laws of economics, and if it’s not difficult it won’t be rare.  The book cites the example of Julia, who quit a secure job in advertising to pursue her passion of teaching yoga. Armed with a 4-week course, she quit her job, began teaching, and one year later was on food stamps. Here’s a hint: if a four-week course is enough to allow you to set up shop, do you think you might have a little competition?

    Taking the economic model a step further, the book argues that you must develop career capital, which comprises skills, relationships and a body of work. The long and arduous process of building your capital also opens up your options and refines your own understanding of what you really like to do and what you can be good at.

    Newport offers the craftsman mindset in place of the passion mindset. The passion mindset asks what the world can offer you in terms of fulfillment and fun; the craftsman mindset forces you to look inside and ask what you can offer the world. You have to create value to get value, and that takes time and deliberate practice. It’s the only way to get so good that they can’t ignore you. The nice benefit is that rather than being good at something because you love it, you love doing something because you’ve gotten good at it. (Note the similarity to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset.)

    What’s the little idea? Another idea that Newport challenges is the common advice that you should have a big idea—set a big hairy audacious goal for your life and then work backward from it. The master plan approach certainly works for some people, but how many people do you know who have actually lived their lives that way? Instead, you should work forward from where you are, taking small steps that expand your capabilities and build up your career capital. In this way, more options and possibilities open up. Newport compares career discoveries to scientific discoveries, most of which occur in what’s called the “adjacent possible”, or just on the other side of the cutting edge of current knowledge. Although I never thought of it that way, that’s exactly how my training and consulting career has progressed. Any time I’ve developed new material it’s because a client has asked me to develop something for them that is just outside my current knowledge or skill set.[1] It’s close enough that they and I have the confidence that it can be done, but different enough that it leads to new material. In this way, I keep learning more and more and develop more career capital that in turn makes me even more valuable to the market.

    The book is well-written. Newport emulates Malcolm Gladwell’s technique of telling individual stories to illustrate the main point in each chapter. In addition, the arc of the stories follows a master story thread through the book, so that you feel like you are brought along on his quest to figure it all out.

    Here comes the part I did not like about the book, and I would not devote so much space to it if the author were not an MIT PhD, just beginning his career as an assistant professor of computer science.

    The methodology in the book is suspect in two ways. While its stories are the book’s great strength, the plural of anecdote is not data, and it’s surprising how little hard data we’re given. I certainly buy in because it makes sense and it matches my own life experience, but someone with a more skeptical point of view may be a tougher sell.

    Here’s an example. Between the ages of ten and twenty, I had an absolute passion to be a fighter pilot that I followed with a laser focus, so much so that I only filled out two college applications, to the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy. When my straight shot to my goals was sidelined by a vision problem in my sophomore year at the Academy, my passion was up in smoke and I haven’t found anything since to quite match it. So, my own experience supports Newport’s hypothesis. But then I think of my friend Dirk, who followed the same path—except that he stayed on it and recently retired after a long and distinguished career doing exactly what he wanted to do.

    In at least one case, where he does use a peer-reviewed study for support, he overstates the case. Citing a paper by Amy Wrzesniewski, he states that the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but those who stayed around long enough to be good at what they do. If you read the actual paper, you won’t find that conclusion, and in fact the author stresses that the sample size of 24 is too small to draw any firm conclusions.

    That said, I strongly recommend this book to just about anyone, regardless of where you are in your career.

    Related articles:

    Bad Advice from the Passionistas

    The Talent that Really Matters

    Hard Work, Yes, But on What?

     

    [1] I call it the “dream of fields” approach: If they come, I will build it.

  • USE This Structure with a Hostile Audience

    The only way to bring them to your side is to go over and get them

    Presenting to a skeptical or hostile audience is usually a very bad idea, and strategic presenters do everything possible to shape opinions and gain supporters before the actual event. If you can’t do that, it’s often a good idea to “lose early”, because failed persuasion attempts often make the intended target even more committed to their original positions.

    Yet, in real life you can’t always choose your battles. The prospect may be so high profile that you have to at least go down swinging, or you may have an important project that you’re trying to obtain funding for internally. In this situation, you will need to put away your standard structures and deploy an indirect approach that will to maximize your chances of success. I call it the USE structure, which stands for understand, small agreement, explanation.

    Understand:

    With most presentations to high level decision makers, it’s a good idea to give them your bottom line up front; it works because it reinforces an existing level of shared understanding. That shared understanding is precisely what’s missing with a skeptical audience, so it’s exactly the wrong approach to take with skeptics. If you do, their likely reactions will be either to ignore you or to begin formulating counterarguments in their mind as they listen.  If that happens at the beginning of your presentation, nothing you say afterwards is going to help.

    The most important principle is to begin with something they agree with. If you think of yourself and your audience standing on opposite sides of a chasm, you can’t yell across the gulf and compel them to cross over—you have to cross over and get them. That means you begin from their point of view and work backward: What parts of it are non-negotiable? What parts are based on incorrect or incomplete information? What has changed since they formed their opinion? As Covey said, “Seek first to understand, then be understood.”

    (One side benefit of this is that, by taking their perspective, you might learn something that improves your own perspective or position. It will also help you to temper your goals for the presentation. Because minds can usually only be changed a little at a time, aim for something challenging but attainable.)

    By starting with their point of view, you’re showing yourself to be reasonable and well-informed.  You’re also enlisting the persuasive power of similarity (showing you’re like them) and reciprocity (give them the gift of understanding and they are more likely to give it back). Besides, you may surprise them a little bit, which definitely helps get their attention.

    It’s not enough to thoroughly research and understand their point of view; you also have to show that you understand their point of view, by articulating their position as well as they can. For excellent demonstrations of this, check out any editorial in The Economist.

    Small agreement

    So, you’ve crossed the chasm to their side and now you want to bring them over to yours, but the chasm is usually too wide to cross in a single jump. You need to get them to a safe position somewhere in the middle. You do this by getting them to agree to a smaller point, which then makes it possible to cross the rest of the way. When opposing sides see the situation in pure black and white, the only way for them to agree is for one side to “lose”. When the issue is what shade of grey you’re talking about, there is scope for agreement.

    Here are three of the many ways to get a small agreement:

    Reframe: Reframing is about getting them to look at a different aspect of the situation than the one they are focusing on. For example, in sales presentations, one of the most common sources of skepticism may be that your solution is perceived as too expensive. Your job would be to change the frame: maybe to look at the total lifetime costs rather than the upfront price; or reframe it as an investment so that they will focus on the return instead of the cost.

    Change the analogy: Everyone reasons by analogy—that’s the essence of learning from experience. The trick is to understand the analogies your audience is using to view your proposal, and then either stress the differences between that situation and this one, or get them to substitute a different analogy. When presenting to customers, the most powerful analogies are those that compare your approach to the way that they do business.

    Reversal: This is a form of verbal jiu-jitsu which uses the weight of their own argument to lead them where you want them to go. “You’re right: we did have problems with the last implementation. But because we learned from it, that’s what makes us the best qualified to make sure it goes exactly right this time.”

    Explanation

    There’s not much to say here, because you will know your own best reasons that support your position. Just make sure that what you say in this part of your presentation connects to the “US” part. I’ve seen too many presentations where the presenter did a great job showing empathy and understanding for the audience’s point of view, then ruined it by merely bolting on something generic at the end.

    In summary, it may be uncomfortable to contemplate presenting to a hostile audience, but you will have no greater satisfaction than winning them over, when you USE the right approach.

  • Leading Without Authority, Especially When You Have Plenty

    Do you wear your authority for all to see?

    Congratulations, you’re now in charge. Maybe you’ve been promoted to sales manager; or maybe you’re now a general manager or even CEO. With all that newly-issued authority, things are going to be much easier—no more selling for you; now you can just tell people what to do and it will get done, right? You get to set the vision, craft the strategy, and make the big decisions; everyone else’s job is to get on board and make it happen.

    If so, you’re making the same mistaken assumption that Dwight Eisenhower did. After a lifetime in the military, he was used to issuing orders and being reasonably confident that they would be followed. As President, he found that the order was only the beginning, not the end. If so, you’re making the same mistake that I’ve seen in some sales organizations I work with. When I warn sales leadership that implementing a new sales methodology can be difficult, most of them confidently tell me that they will mandate its use, as if that is all that needs to be done.

    Authority is like a life jacket. It will keep you afloat in a pinch, but if you need it, you’re already in trouble. And when you’re not in trouble, it just slows you down. Although safety experts recommend that you keep an actual life jacket on or nearby at all times while on the water, leaders should reach for their authority only as a last resort.

    The old “Because I said so” model just does not work anymore. It might have worked when managers did the thinking and employees did the manual labor (and even then it had its limitations), but today almost everyone is a knowledge worker, and often they know more than you do about their jobs. Smart bosses surround themselves with even smarter people, but smart people don’t want to be led by you or anyone else—they want you to create the conditions where they can do their thing without being bothered.[1]

    There’s also a big generational shift going on. Millenials are much more likely to question why they should do something. With jobs being scarce, they might keep their questions to themselves, but you can be sure that if the question is rattling around in their minds it can drag down their performance.

    Finally, in today’s business environment things are too complex, and are moving and changing too fast for any one person to know and control everything. You simply can’t be there to exercise your authority when people need to decide and act; you have to trust them to act on their own initiative, in line with your strategies, intentions, and values.

    Authority may in the short run get you the performance and effort you demand, but only persuasion gets you discretionary effort, where people do more than asked because they want to, not because they have to. Only persuasion works when you’re not around, or when you run out of sticks and carrots.

    So, what does this mean to you? In short, you still need to sell, explain, and inspire. The tools that you use to persuade are more important than ever.

    Listening: If you’re the boss, you need to listen more, not less. Research shows that people in authority tend to discount others’ advice[2], and 360° feedback programs show that leaders rate themselves as much better listeners than their subordinates do. Are you learning from others, or do you think you know it all? Are you making it safe for others to disagree or to bring bad news?

    Asking: Are you immediately solving problems, or are you asking questions to help people solve the problems themselves? Are your questions driven by genuine curiosity, or are they directives dressed as questions? (Leading questions are bad, don’t you agree?)

    Telling: Are you communicating frequently? Are you framing your communications in terms that tap into intrinsic motivation? Are you clear? Do people know where they stand with you? Are you consistent?

    Acting: Do your actions match your words? Are you setting the example that you want others to follow? Do you follow up on what subordinates tell you?

     

     

    [1] See the excellent article, “Leading Clever People”, by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Harvard Business Review, March, 2007.

    [2] “Power, competitiveness, and advice taking: Why the powerful don’t listen,” Tost, Gino, Larrick, 2012.