Archives for June 2020

Don’t Let the Latecomers Ruin Your Meeting

June 29, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Latecomers not only demoralize and disrespect those who turn up on time and have to wait around but also hurt the meeting’s productivity—especially if you have a tight and structured schedule.

Always start and end your meeting at the appointed time. Are your attendees tardy because they know that you don’t start the meeting promptly? Do you tend to wander off-topic?
Confirm that there’re enough chairs in the meeting room. A latecomer can disrupt a discussion by dragging chairs over from other meeting rooms.
Don’t reprimand or embarrass a latecomer during the meeting. Speak to her later. Does she understand that she has a clearly defined role in this meeting? (People are often late to events because they’re not entirely convinced about whether they really want—or need—to be there.)
Don’t go over an agenda item to help a latecomer catch up. Recapitulate the key points only if the latecomer’s inputs are necessary to what’s left on the agenda.
If you have a chronic latecomer, check if he has a schedule-conflict. Confirm that his participation is still relevant. If he doesn’t want to—or need not—attend the entire meeting, pull him to the top of the agenda. Let him contribute and leave.
Try to corral the chronic latecomers by stopping by their desks en route to the meeting.
Could you make the meeting more beneficial for all your attendees? Invite suggestions for mutual gain so that everyone feels more productive.

Also, be alert to power trippers who get a small thrill in keeping others waiting, and then requiring you to start over or recapitulate when they arrive.

Inspirational Quotations #847

June 28, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi

We like someone because, we love someone in spite of.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

Be bold. If you’re going to make an error, make a doozy, and don’t be afraid to hit the ball.
—Billie Jean King (American Tennis Player)

Fools are more to be feared than the wicked.
—Christina, Queen of Sweden (Swedish Monarch)

Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.
—Michel Foucault (French Philosopher)

Those who eat too much or eat too little, who sleep too much or sleep too little, will not succeed in meditation. But those who are temperate in eating and sleeping, work and recreation, will come to the end of sorrow through meditation.
—The Bhagavad Gita (Hindu Scripture)

Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings.
—Howard Gardner (American Psychologist)

It is love alone that gives worth to all things.
—Teresa of Avila (Spanish Carmelite Nun, Mystic)

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
—Barbara Kingsolver (American Novelist, Essayist)

Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is a much higher and truer courage.
—Wendell Phillips (American Abolitionist)

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
—Andre Gide (French Novelist)

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
—Bertrand A. Russell (British Philosopher, Mathematician)

We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)

You never find yourself until you face the truth.
—Pearl Bailey (American Singer, Actress)

Easy way to soften a piece of feedback or criticism: turn periods into question marks.
—Ben Casnocha (American Entrepreneur, Investor)

For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.
—Lily Tomlin (American Comedy Actress)

Always fall in with what you’re asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever’s going. Not against: with.
—Robert Frost (American Poet)

The only thing new in this world is the history that you don’t know
—Harry S. Truman (American Head of State)

Why Your Employees Don’t Trust You—and What to Do About it

June 25, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you have trouble getting employees to trust you, perhaps one—or more—of the following reasons are to blame:

You don’t model what you say.
You make promises you can’t keep.
You guard and selectively disclose information.
You don’t allow your employees to exercise their judgment.
You ask for input from your employees and ignore them.
You seek to monitor everything—including time spent on social media.
You tend to shift the blame.
You avoid giving credit where credit is due.
You ignore workplace concerns and problems until they become more significant problems.
You have double standards (employees tend to be especially very alert to this.)

Management scholars have suggested that trustworthiness entails three attributes: competence to perform tasks reliably (your ability,) having benign intentions (your benevolence,) and acting consistently with sound ethical principles such as fairmindedness, sincerity, and honesty (your integrity.) If you can exhibit these three attributes credibly and dependably, all will trust you. Get any of these three attributes wrong, and your standing will suffer.

Here are a few actions you can take to rebuild trust within your organization:

Communicate openly. Listen. Value everyone’s opinions equally. Involve employees in decision-making. Be as transparent as possible.
Empower employees. Encourage them to use their best judgment to identify and solve problems. Don’t be unnecessarily rigid with enforcing rules.
Make everyone accountable. Take responsibility. Invite and listen to feedback. Communicate expectations. Invest in commitments.

Idea for Impact: Trust is reshaped—strengthened or undermined—in every encounter

If your employees don’t trust you, then they won’t do what you need them to, and they won’t stick around long.

Trust is a consequence of your actions, not merely an intention or message. Trust is truly behavioral; it is complicated and fragile. Trust must be hard-fought, hard-earned, and hard-won every day, through actions, not words.

How Can You Contribute?

June 22, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The celebrated management guru Peter Drucker urged folks to replace the pursuit of success with the pursuit of contribution. To him, the existential question was not, “How can I achieve what’s been asked of me?” but “What can I contribute?”

Drucker wrote in his bestselling The Effective Executive (1967; my summary,)

The great majority of executives tend to focus downward. They are occupied with efforts rather than with results. They worry over what the organization and their superiors “owe” them and should do for them. And they are conscious above all of the authority they “should have.” As a result, they render themselves ineffectual. The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward goals. He asks: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.

The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness: in a person’s own work—its content, its level, its standards, and its impacts; in his relations with others—his superiors, his associates, his subordinates; in his use of the tools of the executive such as meetings or reports. The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results.

Peter Drucker: Focus on Contribution - How Can You Contribute? Pursuing contribution versus—or as well as—success pivots you away from self-focus and helps engage in meaningful relationships with your employees, peers, and managers.

In his celebrated article on “Managing Oneself” in the January 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review, Drucker clarified,

Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, What should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself—as it was for the peasant or artisan—or by a master or a mistress—as it was for domestic servants.

There is no return to the old answer of doing what you are told or assigned to do. Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Idea for Impact: Take Responsibility for Your Contribution

Focusing on contribution instead of efforts is empowering because it compels you to think through the results you need to deliver to make a difference and identify new skills to develop. “People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves,” as Drucker remarked in The Effective Executive.

Inspirational Quotations #846

June 21, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi

You can be pleased with nothing if you are not pleased with yourself.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (English Aristocrat, Poet)

The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
—Charlie Munger (American Investor, Philanthropist)

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
—F. H. Bradley (British Idealist Philosopher)

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
—Thomas Szasz (Hungarian Psychiatrist)

Sadness flies away on the wings of time.
—Jean de La Fontaine (French Poet)

Love without friendship is like a shadow without the sun.
—Japanese Proverb

My definition of success is to live your life in a way that causes you to feel a ton of pleasure and very little pain—and because of your lifestyle, have the people around you feel a lot more pleasure than they do pain.
—Tony Robbins (American Self-Help Author)

Foolish indeed are those who trust to fortune.
—Murasaki Shikibu (Japanese Diarist, Novelist)

Hold on to your dreams for they are, in a sense, the stuff of which reality is made. It is through our dreams that we maintain the possibility of a better, more meaningful life.
—Leo Buscaglia (American Motivational Speaker)

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it—as long as you really believe 100 percent.
—Arnold Schwarzenegger (Austrian-American Actor, Politician)

Public opinion is a weak tyrant, compared with our private opinion – what a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.
—Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)

Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.
—Charles Dickens (English Novelist)

Stains are not seen at night.
—Hebrew Proverb

Gifts make slaves as whips make dogs.
—Inuit Proverb

I believe that the testing of the student’s achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
—Carl Rogers (American Psychologist)

Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (English Poet)

Surrounded by Yes

June 18, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Social-Media Impose “Censorship” Through Recommendions and Filters

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other media companies have built unbelievably powerful tools for collecting and organizing personal data. They’re developing and perfecting algorithms that track your activities and accumulate repositories of seemingly-trivial social media data.

They know whom you hang out with and what you like. And they can make extraordinarily good deductions about your demographics, social influences, political partisanship, social and economic preferences, and everything else. They’re influencing not just what content you see, but also which sites you visit in the first place.

These companies’ intentions are modest enough: to feed you the news you’re likely to want and to expose you to the kind of products and services you’re likely to respond to. The pages you’re shown are tailored for who you are, where you live, whom you interact with, and what you’ve previously clicked on.

The purveyors of the internet make money from advertising and paid subscriptions. Their goal is stickiness: they need traffic to thrive and prosper. Their success depends on their ability to draw you, keep you longer, and persuade you to return before you choose to leave.

Recommender systems have an enormous influence on the discourse you’re exposed to.

There’s a dangerous consequence here. What you should realize is that Google, Facebook, and Amazon have become gatekeepers of everything you see on the internet. Their content filtering and recommender systems are substituting editorial judgment. They’re not neutral and, given their economic objectives, often serve to amplify your biases.

The problem with filtering and recommender systems is that everybody likes them. The content you’re fed with is, in a sense, an endless stream of affirmations that you’re right—you’ll see more of what you’re interested in and associate with others who share your viewpoints. The consensus view is reinforced—the world seems to agree with you. Everything feels more normal!

On a broader scale, as people converge to likeminded people in virtual neighborhoods, you tend to operate in an intellectual bubble. Left to all these devices of today’s information-consumption patterns, much of your opinions and judgments are subjective, imprecise, incomplete, narrow-minded, or utterly unapprised.

All this has made it difficult for you to seek out contrasting views even if you feel so disposed. When you do venture out, all you’ll see are trolls who get offended by the slightest of disagreements—any attempt to challenge their beliefs is taken as a grievous insult. These trolls resort to bumper sticker-rhetoric, name-calling, demeaning attacks, and ill-informed declarations.

Idea for Impact: There’s Great Value in Listening Carefully and Charitably to Ideological Opponents.

Reach out. Consider alternative world-views that may cause you to philosophize differently. Find well-intentioned, respectful people who can challenge your viewpoints. Associate with ideological challengers who can help you improve your understanding of conflicting perspectives.

In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (2008,) neurologist and author Robert Burton argues that certainty is an emotion just like anger, passion, or sorrow. Once you develop a “that’s right” disposition about a subject matter, your brain subconsciously protects you from wasting its processing effort on problems for which it has already found a solution that you believe is good enough, and is continuously reinforced. In other words, your cerebral laziness could subconsciously lead you to “do less” by simply embracing a cast-iron certainty rather than re-examining your assumptions.

Don’t be lazy. Doggedly examine your biases and prejudices.

Leo Burnett on Meaning and Purpose

June 15, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Adman Leo Burnett (1892–1971) founded a global advertising agency that ranks among the titans of the trade. Burnett and the company that bears his name produced such famous brand icons as the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, Jolly Green Giant, Maytag Repairman, and Pillsbury Doughboy.

Burnett pioneered the ‘Chicago School’ of advertising, wherein product campaigns centered on the inherent appeal of products themselves. Burnett’s advertisements used meaningful visuals to evoke emotions and experiences. This approach contrasted the time-honored use of catchy catchphrases and clever copy describing the products’ features. The models in Burnett’s campaigns resembled ordinary people rather than celebrities.

“When to Take My Name Off the Door”

After 33 years at the helm of his company, Burnett officially retired at age 76. He delivered a remarkable valedictory (film clip,) reminding his colleagues of his advertising agency’s core values and its high creative standards.

Let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door.

When you lose your itch to do the job well for its own sake—regardless of the client, or the money, or the effort it takes.

When you lose your passion for thoroughness…your hatred of loose ends.

When you stop reaching for the manner, the overtones, the marriage of words and pictures that produces the fresh, the memorable, and the believable effect.

When you stop rededicating yourselves every day to the idea that better advertising is what the Leo Burnett Company is all about.

When you begin to compromise your integrity—which has always been the heart’s blood—the very guts of this agency.

When you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourselves into acts of opportunism—for the sake of a fast buck.

When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big—rather than good, hard, wonderful work.

When you lose your humility and become big-shot weisenheimers … a little too big for your boots.

When you start giving lip service to this being a “creative agency” and stop really being one.

Finally, when you lose your respect for the lonely man—the man at his typewriter or his drawing board or behind his camera or just scribbling notes with one of our big black pencils—or working all night on a media plan. When you forget that the lonely man—and thank God for him—has made the agency we now have—possible. When you forget he’s the man who, because he is reaching harder, sometimes actually gets hold of—for a moment—one of those hot, unreachable stars.

THAT, boys and girls, is when I shall insist you take my name off the door.

Idea for Impact: Leaders are Meaning-Makers

Burnett’s valedictory is a potent reminder of the power of meaningful organizational values and a leader’s role in upholding his company’s principles-based DNA.

Organizational values are at the heart of the long-term success of a company. When these values grow fainter, the company may no longer reflect the intended culture. The organizational values will no longer clarify, inspire, and bind the company’s customers, employees, partners, investors, and other stakeholders.

As the steward of a company’s culture, a leader is responsible for institutionalizing—not merely individualizing—a sense and meaning in the workplace. And, as Burnett demonstrates, an effective leader passionately expresses what the company stands for and shares personal lessons learned in that process.

Burnett’s name is still on the door.

Inspirational Quotations #845

June 14, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi

Life itself is the proper binge.
—Julia Child (American Cook, Author)

Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at.
—Jeff Bezos (American Businessman)

Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and contentment, and increases the capacity for service.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
—Mary Oliver (American Poet)

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (Science-fiction writer)

How much folly there is in human affairs.
—Persius (Roman Poet)

All great victories, be they in politics, business, art, or seduction, involved resolving vexing problems with a potent cocktail of creativity, focus, and daring. When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go—carving you a path. “The Things which hurt,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, “instruct.”
—Ryan Holiday (American Author)

It takes time for a fruit to mature and acquire sweetness and become eatable; time is a prime factor for most good fortunes.
—The Vedas (Sacred Books of Hinduism)

Genius is an intellect that has become unfaithful to its destiny.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (German Philosopher)

Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.
—Toni Morrison (American Novelist)

Silence is the first door to spiritual eminence.
—Adi Shankaracharya (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)

Schools currently excel in encouraging children to express opinions, but are deficient in encouraging children to say, for example, “Oh, that’s different from my perspective … tell me more.”
—Warren Farrell (American Educator, Activist)

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.
—Baruch Spinoza (Dutch Philosopher)

As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.
—Haruki Murakami (Japanese Novelist)

Why Is (Was!) Airline Boarding a Mess?

June 11, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Prescript: I drafted and pre-scheduled this article late last year … who would have imagined that life, and the airline industry specifically, could be utterly derailed by a lethal virus?

Boarding an airplane is one of the most inefficient aspects of flying.

There’s no money to be made when a plane is sitting on the ground. Little wonder, then, that airlines have attempted for decades to improve the boarding process—usually with little to no success.

Airlines and airports have engaged industrial engineers, logistics experts, and university researchers to study how to get passengers into their planes in a timely fashion. They’ve experimented with back-to-front, window-to-aisle, every-other-row, and many seating combinations thereof. The improvements have turned out marginal at best.

A Little Too Theoretical to Work Well

No airline seems to have cracked the code for efficient boarding because of the same old reasons—much of the sequencing models and organizing tests are a little too theoretical for reality and are reductive about human behavior.

All the boarding methods have an implicit assumption that passengers are orderly and don’t create frustrating bottlenecks. But, when it comes down to it, passengers simply can’t lend themselves to the airline’s preferred boarding order. Passengers don’t show up at the gate on time and organize themselves precisely in the airline’s prescribed sequence. Once onboard, they don’t place their carryon bags into bins promptly and clear the aisle swiftly.

To make matters worse, airlines need to treat some passengers preferentially—the highest paying customers, loyal frequent flyers, military personnel, people with special needs, and families with young kids must board before general boarding. Then there’re complications arising from making passengers pay for carryon bags. Passengers with bare-bones tickets are not only given middle seats but also inconvenienced enough to board in the end and then scramble for overhead bin space for their bags.

All these complexities add a significant burden on gate agents and flight attendants, who, while making every effort for an on-time departure, must monitor passengers boarding when they must, carrying paid-for carryon bags, and using overhead bin space near their seats.

Basic Human Nature is the Inhibiting Factor

Given the not-so-orderly-and-decorous tendencies of humans, no one boarding method has statistically proved to be consistently and reliably better than others. As a result, airlines fall back on a variety of general boarding schemes, usually some combinations of back-to-front and window-to-aisle arrangement.

In my experience, the “free-for-all” seating that Southwest Airlines operates appears the fastest. Southwest’s passengers don’t get assigned seat numbers, so they have the freedom to sit anywhere they want. They line up for boarding in the order they check-in and reach the gate. Once onboard, they move quickly to find the best available seats and keep out of each other’s way. Southwest is also helped by the fact that passengers tend to have fewer and smaller carryon bags because Southwest doesn’t charge for checked luggage.

How to Clear Your Mental Horizon

June 8, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

This anecdote about a reclusive Nobel laureate is scarcely practical advice, but an excellent reminder of the importance of eliminating internal and external distractions.

Peter Higgs is not a fan of modern technology. The British theoretical physicist, 84, is so consumed with work that he has never sent an email, looked at the internet, or used a cellphone. He’s so cut off from modes of modern communication that he didn’t know he’d won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics—for his 1964 paper predicting the Higgs boson, which imbues other particles with mass—until a neighbor congratulated him on the street. “I resent being disturbed in this way,” says Higgs. “Why should people be able to interrupt me like that?” Because they want to keep in touch? “But I don’t want to be in touch,” he laughs. “It’s an intrusion into my way of life, and certainly on principle I don’t feel obliged to accept it.” He doesn’t own a TV, but not because he lacks interest in the outside world. “I don’t regard television as the outside world,” he offers dryly. “I regard it as an artifact.”

And, the Guardian notes that Higgs isn’t interested in being accessible:

Higgs struck upon his [Higgs boson] theory while walking in the Cairngorms one weekend in 1964. An unworldly and donnish academic, he was so immersed in particle physics research that when his first son was born he was miles away in a university library, and so remote from contemporary reality that to this day he owns neither a TV nor mobile phone, and only acquired his first computer on his 80th birthday.

Make Conditions as Favorable as Possible

Good jobs are overwhelming, and accomplishing important things is really, really hard. As the following anecdotes will illuminate, many of the greatest achievements in life are often accomplished by people who (1) have a particular desire that becomes the foundational building block for everything they do, (2) focus on what they want to achieve, and (3) divest themselves of internal and external distractions.

The physicist and 1965 Nobel laureate Richard Feynman famously invented the falsehood that he’s irresponsible so that he could avoid mundane tasks. He wrote, “I tell everybody. “I don’t do anything.” If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions … “No! I’m irresponsible. … I don’t give a damn about the students!” Of course I give a damn about the students, but I know that somebody else’ll do it! … because I like to do physics, and I want to see if I can still do it. I am selfish, okay? I want to do my physics.”
The American crime writer James Ellroy said, “I’m interested in doing very few things. I don’t have a cell phone. Don’t have a computer. Don’t have a TV set. Don’t go to movies. Don’t read. I ignore the world so I might live obsessively.”
Asked about his vacations, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog once revealed that he has never taken vacation, “I work steadily and methodically, with great focus. There is never anything frantic about how I do my job; I’m no workaholic. A holiday is a necessity for someone whose work is an unchanged daily routine, but for me, everything is constantly fresh and always new. I love what I do, and my life feels like one long vacation.”

Idea for Impact: Find the Focus That’ll Take to Do Your Best

Success is a product of unremitting attention to purpose. Avoid, disconnect, eliminate, automate, delegate, reduce, or minimize mundane concerns and routine affairs that could dissuade you from focusing on what you want to achieve.

Archives for June 2020

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Trust is reshaped—strengthened or undermined—in every encounter

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Take Responsibility for Your Contribution

Wondering what to read next?

Social-Media Impose “Censorship” Through Recommendions and Filters

Recommender systems have an enormous influence on the discourse you’re exposed to.

Idea for Impact: There’s Great Value in Listening Carefully and Charitably to Ideological Opponents.

Wondering what to read next?

“When to Take My Name Off the Door”

Idea for Impact: Leaders are Meaning-Makers

Wondering what to read next?

A Little Too Theoretical to Work Well

Basic Human Nature is the Inhibiting Factor

Wondering what to read next?

Make Conditions as Favorable as Possible

Idea for Impact: Find the Focus That’ll Take to Do Your Best

Wondering what to read next?