Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Archives for May 2020

When One Person is More Interested in a Relationship

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The American sociologist Willard Waller coined the term “Principle of Least Interest” to describe how differences of commitment in a relationship can have a major effect on the relationship’s dynamics.

In The Family: A Dynamic Interpretation (1938,) Waller noted that, in any relationship (romantic, familial, business, buyer-seller, and so on) where one partner is far more emotionally invested than the other, the less-involved partner has more power in the relationship. In a one-sided romantic relationship, for example, the partner who loves less has more power.

Moreover, appearing indifferent or uninterested is a common way by which people try to raise their own standing in a relationship. Recall the well-known “walk away” negotiation tactic—tell a used car salesman, “this just isn’t the deal that I’m looking for,” and he may call you the next day with a better offer.

An imbalanced relationship can only last for a while.

A nourishing relationship shouldn’t involve a constant struggle for power.

Idea for Impact: Watch out for relationships where the other seems to care less about the relationship than you do. Such relationships can drain you dry.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The High Cost of Winning a Small Argument
  2. The Likeability Factor: Whose “Do Not Pair” List Includes You?
  3. How to … Deal with Less Intelligent People
  4. Managerial Lessons from the Show Business: Summary of Leadership from the Director’s Chair
  5. Why Your Partner May Be Lying

Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future // Books in Brief

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In Five Minds for the Future (2006,) developmental psychologist Howard Gardner argues that succeeding in a rapidly evolving world requires five proficiencies:

  • The Disciplinary Mind: “Individuals without one or more disciplines will not be able to succeed at any demanding workplace and will be restricted to menial tasks.”
  • The Synthesizing Mind: “Individuals without synthesizing capabilities will be overwhelmed by information and unable to make judicious decisions about personal or professional matters.”
  • The Creating Mind: “Individuals without creating capacities will be replaced by computers and will drive away those who have the creative spark.”
  • The Respectful Mind: “Individuals without respect will not be worthy of respect by others and will poison the workplace and the commons.”
  • The Ethical Mind: “Individuals without ethics will yield a world devoid of decent workers and responsible citizens: none of us will want to live on that desolate planet.”

Gardner is best known for his work on multiple intelligences—the theory that cast serious doubts about the simplistic concept of a “single” intelligence, measurable by something like IQ. Gardner’s notion that “there is more than one way to learn” has transformed education in the U.S. and around the world.

Recommendation: Speed-read Five Minds for the Future. Written through the lens of a skills-development policymaker, Gardner’s theses and prescriptions aren’t ground-breaking but make for thoughtful reflection. Complement with Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind (1991; summary.)

Wondering what to read next?

  1. This is Yoga for the Brain: Multidisciplinary Learning
  2. Creativity by Imitation: How to Steal Others’ Ideas and Innovate
  3. Four Ideas for Business Improvement Ideas
  4. Wide Minds, Bright Ideas: Book Summary of ‘Range: Why Generalists Triumph’ by David Epstein
  5. You Can’t Develop Solutions Unless You Realize You Got Problems: Problem Finding is an Undervalued Skill

How to Improve Your Career Prospects During the COVID-19 Crisis

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Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has plunged the world into despondency and uncertainty, it’s easy to worry about your career prospects, feel risk-averse, and become inert.

However, if you could look beyond the short-term challenges, now’s a good time to take on new skills, tend to your network, and accelerate your long-term career prospects.

Here’s how to take a bit of initiative and think creatively about your career during the current lockdown.

  1. Reflect upon your goals for your life and career. Think clearly through the steps you must take to realize your aspirations.
  2. State clearly your aims. If you want to earn more or get a better responsibility, speak to your boss about what it’ll take to secure a promotion.
  3. Seek specific feedback, but don’t just reflect on the past. Asking for feedback puts you—not your boss—in the driver’s seat. Ask lots of questions and decide what you could do to make a positive change.
  4. Redefine your goals at work. Identify worthwhile measures of success. Agree on targets that stretch but don’t strain.
  5. Work with your boss to find gaps in your experience. Find projects where you could develop and use those skills.
  6. Don’t try to do everything. Prioritize. Ask yourself, “Where do my strengths lie?” Focusing on one or two areas could help you isolate and sharpen the necessary skills to move up.
  7. Seek out new opportunities. Be alert to points of diminishing returns on learning new skills.
  8. Take the lead on a project that others don’t find particularly interesting (see Theo Epstein’s 20 Percent Rule.) You could not only learn by way of broader experiences and gain confidence but also become more visible to management and situate yourself for a promotion.
  9. Offer to share responsibility. Take an interest in your colleagues’ work. You could win over grateful allies and open up new opportunities within your company.
  10. Reevaluate what’s essential. To the extent possible, divest yourself of the boring, time-wasting, frivolous, and worthless—anything that doesn’t “move the ball down the field.”
  11. Pursue side projects. Cultivating knowledge and trying out new skills during your free time is a definite path to career reinvention.
  12. Seek out mentors. Make the right contacts. Bear in mind, those who influence decisions may not necessarily be the ones at the top.
  13. Begin actively networking. It’s never late to put together a range of experts whose knowledge and experience you could tap into.

Idea for Impact: Mulling over how to improve yourself and enhance your career is a great shelter-in-place project. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once declared, “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Every Manager Should Know Why Generation Y Quits
  2. Five Questions to Spark Your Career Move
  3. Before Jumping Ship, Consider This
  4. How to … Know When it’s Time to Quit Your Job
  5. What’s Next When You Get Snubbed for a Promotion

Make ‘Em Thirsty

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Sony’s Akio Morita, like Apple’s Steve Jobs, was a marketing genius. Morita’s hit parade included such iconic products as the first hand-held transistor radio and the Walkman portable audio cassette player.

Key to Morita’s success was his mastery of the art of the pitch. Morita pushed Sony to create consumer electronics for which no obvious need existed and then generated demand for them.

The best marketing minds know how to create a customer—previously unaware of a problem or an opportunity, she becomes interested in considering the opportunity, and finally acts upon it.

Coca-Cola marketers are but creating a thirst by showing the fizzle a freshly poured glass in Coke ads. “Thirst asks nothing more,” indeed.

The marketing guru Seth Godin has said, “So many people are unhappy … what they have doesn’t make them unhappy. What they want does. And want is created by the marketers.” Recall the old parable,

A sales trainee was trying to explain his failure to close a single deal in his first week. “You know,” he said to his manager, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

“Make him drink?” The manager sputtered. “Your job is to make him thirsty.”

Idea for Impact: Whether you realize this or not, you’re in marketing, as is everybody else. You’re constantly pitching your ideas, skills, time, appeal, charm, and so forth. Study the art of the pitch. Master the art of generating demand for whatever it is you have to offer. Learn to “make ’em thirsty.” Marketing is everything.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points
  2. What Taco Bell Can Teach You About Staying Relevant
  3. Restless Dissatisfaction = Purposeful Innovation
  4. The Emotional Edge: Elevating Your Marketing Messaging
  5. Airline Safety Videos: From Dull Briefings to Dynamic Ad Platforms

It’s Probably Not as Bad as You Think

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The 20-40-60 Rule, believed to be written by humorist Will Rogers for his movie Life Begins at 40 (1935,) states,

When you are 20, you care about what everybody thinks of you.
When you are 40, you don’t care about what people think of you,
and when you are 60, you actually understand that people were too busy thinking about themselves.

In essence, don’t agonize about what other people are thinking about you. They’re perhaps busy worrying over what you’re thinking about them.

The 20-40-60 Rule became popular when venture capitalist Heidi Roizen cited it (incorrectly attributing it to the actress Shirley MacLaine) at a 2014 lecture at Stanford. First Round Capital’s Review has noted,

People have enormous capacity to beat themselves up over the smallest foibles—saying the wrong thing in a meeting, introducing someone using the wrong name. Weeks can be lost, important relationships avoided, productivity wasted, all because we’re afraid others are judging us. “If you find this happening to you, remember, no one is thinking about you as hard as you are thinking about yourself. So don’t let it all worry you so much.”

Idea for Impact: Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over Your Mistakes

Chances are, people around you aren’t nearly as critical of you as you are of yourself. No one’s going to remember or care about your mistakes, and neither should you.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Care Less for What Other People Think
  2. The More You Believe in Yourself, the Less You Need Others to Do It for You
  3. How To … Be More Confident in Your Choices
  4. Ever Wonder If The Other Side May Be Right?
  5. Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?

A Superb Example of Crisis Leadership in Action

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It is in a crisis that leaders show their mettle. The New York Times notes,

The master class on how to respond [to a crisis] belongs to Jacinda Ardern, the 39-year-old prime minister of New Zealand. On March 21, when New Zealand still had only 52 confirmed cases, she told her fellow citizens what guidelines the government would follow in ramping up its response. Her message was clear: “These decisions will place the most significant restrictions on New Zealanders’ movements in modern history. But it is our best chance to slow the virus and to save lives.” And it was compassionate: “Please be strong, be kind and united against Covid-19.”

Our political leaders’ responses to the current COVID-19 crisis are particularly instructive about how leaders should act in a crisis:

  • Lead from the front. Initiate quick, bold, and responsible action, even when it carries political risk. Don’t be overcome by panic.
  • Think the crisis through. Weigh your options carefully, and then make the call confidently. Stay focused. Don’t let stress impede your problem-solving capabilities.
  • Avert an information vacuum. Any gap in the available information will be filled by guesswork and speculation.
  • Provide an accurate picture of what’s going on. Be transparent and honest right from the beginning. Acknowledging the gravity of the situation and being clear about how you’re going to collectively address the crisis leaves your constituencies with a sense of confidence in your message.
  • Choose your words carefully. Don’t create a false sense of security. Avoid making throwaway comments that might be misconstrued.
  • Communicate often. Fine-tune your message. Update your analysis and reaffirm your assurance of support. Keeping everyone in the loop diffuses fears and uncertainties.
  • Empower employees to be part of the solution. Invite and respond to employees’ feedback and concerns. They’ll need to know they’re being heard.

Idea for Impact: When a crisis hits, constituencies fall back on their leaders for information, answers, confidence, and direction. Set the appropriate tone for the organizational response by being supportive, factual, transparent, open-minded, calm, and decisive.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Leadership is Being Visible at Times of Crises
  2. How to … Declutter Your Organizational Ship
  3. Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data
  4. Tylenol Made a Hero of Johnson & Johnson: A Timeless Crisis Management Case Study
  5. Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth?

Inspirational Quotations #839

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Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever…
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) (Danish Novelist, Short-story Writer)

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
—Leonardo da Vinci (Italian Polymath)

A well governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Stoic Philosopher)

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?
—William James (American Philosopher)

Perhaps the most distinguishing trait of visionary leaders is that they believe in a goal that benefits not only themselves, but others as well. It is such vision that attracts the psychic energy of other people, and makes them willing to work beyond the call of duty for the organization.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Hungarian-American Psychologist)

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
—Harper Lee (American Novelist)

Big words seldom accompany good deeds.
—Danish Proverb

To live each day as though one’s last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing—here is perfection of character.
—Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome, Stoic Philosopher)

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (French Philosopher)

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
—George Santayana (Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher)

We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

A docile disposition will, with application, surmount every difficulty.
—Marcus Manilius (Roman Poet)

Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
—Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) (American Humorist)

If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.
—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (American First Lady)

Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.
—Helen Keller (American Author)

Reproof on her lips, but a smile in her eyes.
—Samuel Lover (Irish Writer, Artist, Songwriter)

Comfort is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being “comfortable”.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)