Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Why Groups Cheat: Complicity and Collusion

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Why Groups Cheat: Complicity and Collusion News broke out that accounting behemoth Ernst & Young revealed this week that its employees cheated on ethics exams and is being fined $100 million. That’s one of the biggest fines ever levied against an audit firm.

It’s absurd that specialists who’re responsible for keeping things straight and steering moral enterprise cheated on ethics exams! Ernst & Young’s leadership evidently disregarded the internal reports about the cheating. Perhaps because when people identify so strongly with a group, they’re much more swayed to view the group’s actions positively and accept that group’s norms.

Research by Vanderbilt University’s Jessica Kennedy and colleagues suggests that high-flying people are sometimes more inclined than low-ranking people to adopt what their group recommends to them, even when it represents an ethics breach. Power sometimes provokes people to so strongly want to identify with their group that they’re willing to overlook when the group’s collective actions cross an ethical line. This affinity is, therefore, impelled to sustain transgression, instead of stopping its spread, especially when the odds of being caught and punished are slim.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. The Poolguard Phenomenon
  3. Shrewd Leaders Sometimes Take Liberties with the Truth to Reach Righteous Goals
  4. Power Inspires Hypocrisy
  5. The Ethics Test

Stop Trying to Fix Things, Just Listen!

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Just Listen, Don't Solve Their Problems In these distraction-packed times, it’s harder than ever to create the mental and physical space necessary to really listen—actively listen—to another person.

A common listening pitfall is trying to have all the answers. Instead of fully hearing out a friend, you’re scrolling through your brain, being all frustrated that this problem has an obvious solution concocting a hasty fix to their seemingly complicated issue.

As a listener, your most important job is to listen with curiosity and immerse yourself in the person’s message. Just try to understand the person and listen to their feelings. Validate their suffering, take their perspective, and let them know you understand. That’s often what people want most.

Idea for Impact: To be a better listener, talk with each other about the ways they’d like you to give support. People have different ways in which they prefer to seek and provide support.

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When Your Team is Shorthanded

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When Your Team is Shorthanded When your team is understaffed and/or overwhelmed, remind your supervisors about the pressures you’re dealing with. Ask for more resources without being perceived as a whiny opportunist.

  • Prioritize and focus. Decide what goals are truly significant—to you, your team, your company, and your customers. Comb out anything that doesn’t have a justifiable economic impact or isn’t aligned with the company strategy. Meet with your boss and your team to make sure everyone’s aligned with your tailored priorities.
  • Align expectations and manage up. Engage your team on what you could collectively do differently to provide better results with greater efficiency. Have daily and weekly priorities. Use short, frequent meetings to increase your team’s work momentum. Let small successes be a motivational tool.
  • Get credit for your good work. Make the most of the understaffing by recasting yourself as an asset to your company amidst this apparent upheaval. With the buoyant jobs-market and a heavier workload for those left behind, you may never be in a better negotiating position.

Idea for Impact: If your team is understaffed and overworked, you don’t need to suck it up and try to do it all. Don’t keep your head down and let the burden of responsibilities stymie your personal and team goals.

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  4. No One Likes a Meddling Boss
  5. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity

You Need a Personal Cheerleader

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You Need a Personal Cheerleader Many people credit some of their success to others who believed in them and urged them on when their confidence abated. A personal cheerleader could be a companion, friend, or family member who believes in you, takes an eager interest and encourages you, and helps lift your self-confidence, even if they raise some practical questions.

This cheerleader could indeed be a mirror through which you can see yourself. Somebody who encourages you to process and think through your experiences and reframe mistakes as opportunities to learn. Somebody who can help you notice things you do well, however small.

Idea for Impact: A personal cheerleader is a pivotal element of a meaningful, resilient life. Curtailing negative self-talk is difficult when you’re trying to build your self-confidence.

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The Best Advice Tony Blair Ever Got: Finding the Time to Think Strategically

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As former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reported at a 2012 event at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, it’s easy to get so absorbed by the pressures of doing that you rarely ever disentangle yourself from the chock-full of activities and the clutter that can choke strategic thinking.

As the leader of the Opposition, when I went to see him in 1996 at the White House, he explained that one of the hardest things when you get into the government is finding the time to think strategically. It’s being able to create the space so that you’re focused on what you really know counts because otherwise, he said, the system will take you over. You’ll be in meetings from 8:00 in the morning till 10:00 at night, and you think you’re immensely busy, but the tactics and the strategy have all got mixed.

The Best Advice Tony Blair Ever Got from Bill Clinton: Finding Time to Think Strategically What happens in leadership is that things come at you the whole time. If you’re not careful, you’ll spend your time dealing with one situation after another. You lose your strategic grip on what’ll determine if you’re a successful government. Many of these crises are real, and you must deal with them. But when you judge your government in history, no one will remember any of them. You’ve got to create the space to be thinking strategically all the time to change the world.

Idea for Impact: It’s your strategic thinking, more than any other single activity, that can influence what you’ll achieve as a leader. Find ways to create more “head time” amid the busyness.

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  5. Turning a Minus Into a Plus … Constraints are Catalysts for Innovation

How to … Nap at Work without Sleeping

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How to Take the Perfect Nap

Make nap time the new coffee break. A quick snooze boosts productivity and improves memory and problem-solving.

Bill Anthony’s The Art of Napping at Work (1999) states that a shot of shut-eye was an indispensable afternoon pick-me-up for some of history’s greatest achievers, viz., Aristotle, Eleanor Roosevelt, John D Rockefeller, Leonardo da Vinci, Lyndon B Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Napoleon, Salvador Dalí, Thomas Edison, and Winston Churchill.

'Take a Nap Change Your Life' by Sara Mednick (ISBN 0761142908) According to the University of California-Irvine sleep researcher Sara Mednick, you don’t want to get into a deep sleep because you need to be alert. Her Take a Nap! Change Your Life (2006) uses the term “sleep inertia” to describe the inability to shrug sleep off after a nap. This impaired state worsens as you go deeper and deeper into sleep. So the trick is to avoid getting deep sleep.

If you nap about twenty minutes, you’ll be in light sleep, which is easy to get out of. In other words, twenty minutes is long enough to reach Stage 2 sleep, but short enough to ward you off from waking up groggy.

Idea for Impact: Go ahead and snooze for 20 minutes, ideally sometime between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. If you need help regaining alertness after the alarm goes off, step into bright light or splash your face with water. The post-nap energy spike can last for several hours.

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Inspirational Quotations #951

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Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.
—Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Japanese Novelist)

There is scarcely anything more harmless than political or party malice. It is best to leave it to itself. Opposition and contradiction are the only means of giving it life or duration.
—John Witherspoon (American Clergyman)

Billions are wasted on ineffective philanthropy. Philanthropy is decades behind business in applying rigorous thinking to the use of money.
—Michael Porter (American Management Theorist)

When there is no peril in the fight, there is no glory in the triumph.
—Al Alvarez (English Critic, Poet, Novelist)

The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it’s a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.
—Jonathan Lethem (American Novelist, Essayist)

The word career is a divisive word. It’s a word that divides the normal life from business or professional life.
—Grace Paley (American Author)

The first duty of a government is to give education to the people
—Simon Bolivar (Venezuelan Patriot)

The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.
—Elizabeth Gilbert (American Novelist)

There is not a string attuned to mirth but has its chord of melancholy.
—Edwin Paxton Hood (English Nonconformist Divine)

Nothing is such an obstacle to the production of excellence as the power of producing what is good with ease and rapidity.
—John Aikin (British Educator)

The mere lapse of years is not life. To eat, to drink, and sleep; to be exposed to darkness and the light; to pace around in the mill of habit, and turn thought into an instrument of trade-this is not life. Knowledge, truth, love, beauty, goodness, faith, alone can give vitality to the mechanism of existence.
—James Martineau (English Unitarian Theologian)

I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.
—Sylvester Stallone (American Actor)

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.
—Ivy Baker Priest (American Politician)

Book Summary: Jack Welch, ‘The’ Man Who Broke Capitalism?

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The Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022) by New York Times columnist David Gelles contends that the pernicious greed spawned by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch is exceptionally responsible for exposing the structural failings of capitalism in the recent decades.

'The Man Who Broke Capitalism' by David Gelles (ISBN 198217644X) The danger inherent in any ideology grows stronger when it starts to thrive because it swiftly morphs into temptation—a voracious appetite for ever better “returns” in the present case. Welch was surely the most visible catalyst and a much-imitated champion of brutal capitalism. But Gelles’s narrative draws his book’s long subtitle (“How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America”) excessively, thrusting ad nauseam the well-founded thesis against Welch’s ploys and “the personification of American, alpha-male capitalism.” See my previous articles (here, here, and here) about how the faults of Welch’s strategy become evident many years after his retirement.

Gelles does an agreeable job of outlining the socioeconomic paradigm that has made modern western capitalism’s shortcomings ever more apparent. Starting with influential economist Milton Friedman’s decree in the ’70s that the one and only social responsibility of a business is to maximize profits, Gelles explains the revering of Welch’s “downsizing, deal-making, and financialization” strategy. Without balance, it provided short-term benefits for shareholders, but the long-term well-being of corporations and society lost out. What is most pertinent to the power of capitalism is a sense of restraint.

Summary of 'The Man Who Broke Capitalism' by David Gelles Capitalism isn’t irretrievably bound to fail, as Gelles rightly argues, but it needs to be rethought. It’s morally incumbent upon the social order to inhibit the embedded incentives that create powerful tendencies towards short-termism. Gelles offers no more realistic, objective insights than the familiar solutions prescribed by our career politicians.

On the whole, Gelles’s pro-Fabian polemic falls short of a fair-minded assessment of the epoch’s economic forces. Indeed, many of Welch’s tactics were timely and necessary, but he pushed them farther and longer. Too, Gelles fails to study counterexamples of many corporate leaders who’ve thoughtfully copied Welch’s playbook and helped their businesses and communities prosper, not least because they were restrained enough to avoid Welchism’s blowbacks.

Recommendation: Speed Read The Man Who Broke Capitalism for a necessary reappraisal of the legacy of Jack Welch. There isn’t much eye-opening here, but author Gelles affords a relevant parable about the power of restraint and the time- and context-validity of ideas.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Power Corrupts, and Power Attracts the Corruptible
  2. The Checkered Legacy of Jack Welch, Captain of Wall Street-Oriented Capitalism
  3. Lessons from Peter Drucker: Quit What You Suck At
  4. The Cost of Leadership Incivility
  5. Shrewd Leaders Sometimes Take Liberties with the Truth to Reach Righteous Goals

A Quick Way to Build Your Confidence Right Now

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How to Feel More in Control Guilt, anxiety, and fear usually manifest as a creeping mindset of what’s lacking. You feel you’re not enough, and you don’t have the resources you need to achieve your goals.

Lack of confidence will probably hold you back more than you may acknowledge. Be mindful of your thoughts and address these negative thinking patterns. Notice how you speak to yourself—harping only on what isn’t enough of or what isn’t working doesn’t instill your self-assuredness.

When you spiral about what is lacking, try the Abundance Mentality—it empowers you to believe in your extant ability. You can make do with what you have and overcome any difficulties. This isn’t some naïve “can do” temperament, but it’s an earnest endeavor to muster hope and agency instead of doubt and helplessness.

Idea for Impact: The less you do, the less confident you’ll feel.

Don’t wait until you feel more confident—often, more ruminating leads to analysis paralysis. Self-confidence comes from successful experiences, and to create these successful experiences, take action.

Take a low-risk action to increase your confidence. Assume you’re the most confident self you’ve ever been and do what that self would do. Prioritize your choices and direct your resources to pressing needs, ignoring other goals.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. A Bit of Insecurity Can Help You Be Your Best Self
  3. How to Embrace Uncertainty and Leave Room for Doubt
  4. You Can’t Know Everything
  5. Accidents Can Happen When You Least Expect Them: The Overconfidence Effect

Inspirational Quotations #950

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It is not easy to be a pioneer—but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment; even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.
—Elizabeth Blackwell (American Physician)

The most dangerous of our impulses reign in ourselves against ourselves. To dissolve them is a creative act.
—Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Austrian Author)

Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.
—Carolyn Kizer (American Poet)

Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender of attachment to results, because there follows immediate peace.
—The Bhagavad Gita (Hindu Scripture)

Fools follow after vanity, men of evil wisdom. The wise man keeps earnestness as his best jewel.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)

When the wish for peace is genuine, the means for finding it is giving in a form each mind that seeks for it in honesty can understand.
—Helen Schucman (American Psychologist)

It takes no genius to observe that a one man band never gets very big.
—Charles A. Garfield (American Psychologist)

Top management is supposed to be a tree full of owls-hooting when management heads into the wrong part of the forest. I’m still unpersuaded they even know where the forest is.
—Robert C. Townsend (American Businessman)

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.
—Lucretia Mott (American Social Reformer)

There is no kin equivalent to knowledge.
There is no friend equivalent to knowledge.
There is no wealth equivalent to knowledge.
There is no happiness equivalent to knowledge.
—Subhashita Manjari (Sanskrit Anthology of Proverbs)

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
—W. Somerset Maugham (British Novelist)

Luck is loaned, not owned.
—Norwegian Proverb

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.
—Edward Teller (American Nuclear Physicist)