Archives for October 2017

Making Exceptions “Just Once” is a Slippery Slope

October 30, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Keeping Our Commitments Unwaveringly is Tough

The Harvard business strategy professor Clayton Christensen (of The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997) fame) often tells a story from his college days when he played basketball for his university team. His team worked hard all season and made it to the finals of some big tournament. The championship game was scheduled on a Sunday.

Christensen is a pious Mormon. Playing on the Sabbath (the “seventh day” is holy occasion and has a particular purpose, i.e. rest and spiritual renewal) was against his religious beliefs. The basketball team’s coach asked Christensen to break the rule for that big game, “I don’t know what you believe, but I believe that God will understand.” His teammates prodded him, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule, just this one time?”

Christensen prayed to God for guidance. After some reflection, he concluded that he would not play in the finals because he did not want to violate the Mormon way of life and break his personal rules: “Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed.”

Willpower is Character in Action

Christensen’s team, however, played without him and won the basketball championship.

Discussing this experience in writings such as How Will You Measure Your Life? (2012,) Christensen says,

Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be.

…

If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. That’s the lesson I learned: it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary—your personal moral line—is powerful because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again.

For Christenson, the opportunity cost of missing the championship game was large. Therefore, the marginal cost of breaking his rules “just this once” was comparatively trivial. However, the bigger damage of yielding to demands of the circumstances was larger yet, given his religious devotion.

Idea for Impact: Life becomes so much simpler if you decide what you stand for, stick with your values 100% the time, and make no exceptions.

It’s easy to lose your emotional footing and resist temptations, especially when you feel pressured or depressed, or face some other persuasive incentive.

It’s easy to unearth some justification to infringe a little upon your principles or break commitments you’ve made to yourself.

However, conceding “just once” is a slippery slope—the proverbial thin end of a wedge. If you allow yourself to compromise just the once, you can wind up doing it frequently.

In contrast, if you make up your mind to follow 100% on some standard, all of your prospective decisions are made.

Life becomes so much easier when you no longer need to expend your willpower on internal moral deliberations or justify/ regret your poor choices.

Inspirational Quotations #708

October 29, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi

Time is the wisest of all counselors.
—Plutarch (Ancient Greek Historian)

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
—Martin Luther King, Jr. (American Civil Rights Leader)

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
—W. H. Auden (British-born American Poet)

Before you agree to do anything that might add even the smallest amount of stress to your life, ask yourself: “What is my truest intention?” Give yourself time to let a yes resound within you. When it’s right, I guarantee that your entire body will feel it.
—Oprah Winfrey (American TV Personality)

One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
—John W. Gardner (American Government Official)

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

There is more to life than increasing its speed.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

I have feelings too. I am still human. All I want is to be loved, for myself and for my talent.
—Marilyn Monroe (American Actor)

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
—John Dewey (American Philosopher)

Probably no man ever had a friend he did not dislike a little; we are all so constituted by nature that no one can possibly entirely approve of us.
—E. W. Howe (American Novelist)

A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind.
—William Shenstone (English Poet)

You can always tell a real friend; when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.
—Laurence J. Peter (Canadian-born American Educator)

A budget tells us what we can’t afford, but it doesn’t keep us from buying it.
—William Feather (American Publisher)

A Little-Known Public-Speaking Tip

October 27, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

If you’ve expected to address an audience that you aren’t familiar with, it can be difficult to connect with your audience and build a rapport.

Ask the organizer for the names of a half dozen people who will be in the audience.

Contact them and find out about their backgrounds and their expectations for your presentation.

Thank them when you start your speech.

Doing this homework, identifying the specific requirements, and customizing your presentations will impress the audience. Whatever the topic, audiences respond best when speakers personalize their communication.

How to Respond to Others’ Emotional Situations

October 25, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 3 Comments

People Tap Into Their Support Systems to Gain Perspective on a Challenging Situation

When people get unhappy, they need a shoulder.

When they get vulnerable, they need a hand.

When they get upset, they need an ear.

People approach their loved ones when they get emotional and want to convey the pain they feel.

Above all, under the direct influence of their anguishes, people like to rant and rave. Once they come to terms with whatever caused their aggravations, they’re ready move on.

Contrary to normal assumption, human nature is such that people are not always looking for others’ advice. Even when patients go to a shrink, they tend to already know the answer to the question they are posing. They just want their shrink (or any interlocutor) to agree with their decision and support them whether the shrink shares their judgments or not.

To Respond to Emotions, Stop Trying to Fix Problems and Just Listen

When a friend, coworker, or employee approaches you when he is upset, use empathic listening to understand his emotions.

The University of Florida’s Dr. Richard Rathe recommends a technique he calls BATHE (Background-Affects-Troubles-Handling-Empathy) that he says has been effective in handling conflicts with staff, family, and friends:

Background: Ask questions about the situation. Don’t ask for details at this time. Try to understand the different expectations and feelings at play. Steer clear of trivializing the situation.
Affects: Ask about how the situation affects your friend and how it makes him feel. Remember that people are often not entirely aware of their own emotions. Strong emotions often set off knee-jerk reactions that people come to regret later.
Troubles: Ask what agitates your friend most about the present situation. Try to explore the symptoms and causes of those emotions even as you withhold your judgment. Suppress your instinctive emotional reaction, stay open-minded and sensitive, and hear out the full message before you respond. Bear your friend’s foibles by reminding yourself that perhaps he has entirely valid reasons for feeling, acting, and speaking as he does.
Handling: Ask how your friend is handling the conflict or the crisis. Broach similar circumstances in the past. Skillfully ask questions that encourage him to focus on actions. Mention options he may have not yet considered. Even baby steps can strengthen your friend’s sense of self-worth and turn out positive emotions.
Empathy: Express sympathy, understanding, and support for your friend’s position and sentiments. Tell him you understand what happened to him from his perspective, even if you differ with his response. Identify specific sentiments (e.g. anger, embarrassment, or regret) to communicate to him that you understand how he feels. Tell him that his feelings are completely reasonable—which they are, given his point of view. Reinforce your friend’s plan to deal with the problem.

Idea for Impact: Empathy makes you easy to confide in. The feeling of being listened to without judgment compels your friend to respond with patience. Only then can he open up his mind to being influenced by you.

How to Guard Against Anything You May Inadvertently Overlook

October 23, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The World is More Inundated with Uncertainties and Errors Than Ever Before

Checklists can help you learn about prospective oversights and mistakes, recognize them in context, and sharpen your decisions.

I am a big fan of Harvard surgeon and columnist Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto (2009.) His bestseller is an engaging reminder of how the world has become so complex.

The use of the humble checklist can help you manage the myriad of complexities that underlie most contemporary professional (and personal) undertakings—where what you must do is too complex to carry out reliably from memory alone. Checklists “provide a kind of a cognitive net. They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us—flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness.”

Gawande begins The Checklist Manifesto with an examination of the characteristics of errors from ignorance (mistakes you make because you don’t know enough—“much of the world and universe is—and will remain—outside our understanding and control”), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes you make because you don’t apply correctly what you know.) Most human and organizational failures involve the latter.

The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works.

The surgery room, Gawande’s own profession, is the principal setting for many of the book’s illustrative examples of how the introduction of checklists dramatically reduced the rate of complications from surgery. He also provides handy stories from other realms of human endeavor—aviation, structural engineering, and Wall Street-investing.

Getting Things Right, Every Time

Checklists are particularly valuable in situations where the stakes are high enough, but your impulsive thought process could lead to suboptimal decisions.

The benefits of checklists also feature prominently in the thought-provoking Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition (2012.) The author, Credit Suisse Investment analyst and polymath Michael J. Mauboussin, argues that checklists are more effective in certain domains than in others:

A checklist’s applicability is largely a function of a domain’s stability. In stable environments, where cause and effect is pretty clear and things don’t change much, checklists are great. But in rapidly changing environments that are heavily circumstantial, creating a checklist is a lot more difficult. In those environments, checklists can help with certain aspects of the decision. For instance, an investor evaluating a stock may use a checklist to make sure that she builds her financial model properly.

A good checklist balances two opposing objectives. It should be general enough to allow for varying conditions, yet specific enough to guide action. Finding this balance means a checklist should not be too long; ideally, you should be able to fit it on one or two pages.

If you have yet to create a checklist, try it and see which issues surface. Concentrate on steps or procedures, and ask where decisions have gone off track before. And recognize that errors are often the result of neglecting a step, not from executing the other steps poorly.

In addition to creating checklists that are specific enough to guide action but general enough to handle changing circumstances, Mauboussin recommends keeping a journal to gather feedback from past decisions and performing “premortems” by envisioning that a imminent decision has already been proven wrong, and then identifying probable reasons for the failure.

No Matter How Proficient You May Be, Well-designed Checklists Can Immeasurably Improve the Outcomes

The notion of making and using checklists is so plainly obvious that it seems impracticable that they could have so vast an effect.

Investor Charlie Munger, the well-respected beacon of wisdom and multi-disciplinary thinking, has said, “No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.” And, “I’m a great believer in solving hard problems by using a checklist. You need to get all the likely and unlikely answers before you; otherwise it’s easy to miss something important.”

Idea for Impact: Checklists can prevent many things that could go wrong in the hands of human beings, given our many well-documented biases and foibles. Well-designed checklists not only make sure that all the can-be-relied upon elements are in place in complex decision-making, but also provide for flexibility and room for ad hoc judgment.

Inspirational Quotations #707

October 22, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi

When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.
—Anonymous

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.
—Thomas A Kempis

It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
—Abraham Lincoln (American Head of State)

When the thief has no opportunity to steal he considers himself an honest man.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren’t started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better—and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.
—Hubert Humphrey (American Head of State)

Just as you have the instinctive natural desire to be happy and overcome suffering, so do all sentient beings; just as you have the right to fulfill this innate aspiration, so do all sentient beings. So on what exact grounds do you discriminate?
—The 14th Dalai Lama (Tibetan Buddhist Religious Leader)

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
—W. Somerset Maugham (French Playwright)

Faith is kept alive in us, and gathers strength, more from practice than from speculations.
—Joseph Addison (English Essayist)

Success is a matter of understanding and religiously practicing specific, simple habits that always lead to success.
—Robert Ringer (American Entrepreneur)

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.
—Vita Sackville-West (English Gardener)

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
—Lee Iacocca (American Businessperson)

Competency Modeling: How to Hire and Promote the Best

October 16, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Standardized tests, intelligence exams, and personality assessments have been in vogue for centuries for selecting job candidates and promoting employees. For instance,

In Plato’s Greece, civil service candidates were required to pass difficult physical and cognitive tests.
In China, the Han and Tang dynasties administered tests of literary style and the classics to hire the establishment bureaucrats. Aspirants were required to pass multiple three-day provincial exams and then take a final exam in the imperial capital.

Modern hiring practices have centered on the idea of competencies—specific behaviors, skills, knowledge, and pertinent experiences—identified for successful job performance.

Harvard psychologist David McClelland first proposed the idea of ‘competence’. In 1973, he introduced a then-revolutionary idea that transformed how companies hire and promote people. In his influential paper, titled “Testing for Competence Rather than for Intelligence,” McClelland made a case that a candidate’s GPA, IQ, or scores from intelligence or aptitude tests were not all as valid predictors of job success as was then imagined.

McClelland argued that another set of factors—“competences”—were better measures for explaining job success. To hire the best person for any job, McClelland recommended that organizations,

Begin by analyzing people who now have the job and people who held that job previously.
Classify the star performers—say the top 10%—by some logical and meaningful metric.
Compare the star performers to people who are merely average by a systematic method.
Identify the traits, characteristics, and behaviors in the star performers and not in the average performers.
Hire and promote people who have demonstrated the distinct traits and behaviors of the star performers.

Over the years, McClelland’s paper has evolved into “competency modeling,” a widespread methodology that is now at the heart of how many companies manage talent and achieve professional development for employees.

Not only are competencies often hard to define and understand, but testing for competencies through simulation or evidence is very difficult. Not to mention of how hard it is to assess employees quickly. Hence, at many “competency-driven” companies, human resources departments have dedicated teams to develop and implement competency models (see example from 3M, the Minnesota-based industrial and consumer products) to hire, train, evaluate, and promote employees.

Competency models form the baseline criteria for identifying high-potential employees, and succession management procedures.

Inspirational Quotations #706

October 15, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi

Faith is a function of the heart. It must be enforced by reason. The two are not antagonistic as some think. The more intense one’s faith is, the more it whet’s one’s reason. When faith becomes blind it dies.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

If we put the emphasis upon the right things, if we live the life that is worth while and then fail, we will survive all disasters, we will out-live all misfortune. We should be so well balanced and symmetrical, that nothing which could ever happen could throw us off our center, so that no matter what misfortune should overtake us, there would still be a whole magnificent man or woman left after being stripped of everything else.
—Orison Swett Marden (American New Thought Writer)

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (American Head of State)

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals—that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
—Honore de Balzac (French Novelist)

Knowledge cultivates your seeds and does not sow in you seeds.
—Khalil Gibran (Lebanese-born American Philosopher)

The underdog often starts the fight, and occasionally the upper dog deserves to win.
—E. W. Howe (American Novelist)

Love is the strongest force the world possesses, and yet it is the humblest imaginable.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.
—Jim Bishop (American Journalist)

In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
—Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)

A little neglect may breed great mischief. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; and for want of a horse, the rider was lost; being overtaken, and slain by the enemy. All for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.
—Benjamin Franklin (American Political leader)

Archives for October 2017

Keeping Our Commitments Unwaveringly is Tough

Willpower is Character in Action

Idea for Impact: Life becomes so much simpler if you decide what you stand for, stick with your values 100% the time, and make no exceptions.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

People Tap Into Their Support Systems to Gain Perspective on a Challenging Situation

To Respond to Emotions, Stop Trying to Fix Problems and Just Listen

Wondering what to read next?

The World is More Inundated with Uncertainties and Errors Than Ever Before

Getting Things Right, Every Time

No Matter How Proficient You May Be, Well-designed Checklists Can Immeasurably Improve the Outcomes

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?