Right Attitudes

Inspirational Quotations #826

February 2, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi

Man is a marvelous curiosity … he thinks he is the Creator’s pet … he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn’t it a quaint idea?
—Robert G. Ingersoll (American Lawyer, Orator, Agnostic)

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
—James Baldwin (American Novelist, Social Critic)

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, knowing that once it was all that was humanly possible.
—George Santayana (Spanish-American Poet, Philosopher)

Work spares us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
—Voltaire (French Philosopher, Author)

Man needs his difficulties because they are necessary to enjoy success.
—A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (Indian Head of State, Scientist)

Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.
—Wendell Phillips (American Abolitionist)

More than anything else, I believe it’s our decisions, not the conditions of our lives, that determine our destiny.
—Tony Robbins (American Self-Help Author)

To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.
—Jane Austen (English Novelist)

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
—Robert Penn Warren (American Novelist, Poet)

I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.
—Laura Ingalls Wilder (American Author of Children’s Novels)

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
—Susan Sontag (American Writer, Philosopher)

The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. That’s what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they’ll go through the pain no matter what happens.
—Arnold Schwarzenegger (Austrian-American Actor, Politician)

The virtuous (when injured) grieve not so much for their own pain as for the loss of happiness incurred by their injurers.
—The Jataka Tales (Genre of Buddhist Literature)

Great Leaders Focus on the WHY and the WHAT—Not the How

January 30, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Great Leaders Focus on the WHY and the WHAT---Not the How

The most effective leaders provide their employees with a heartfelt portrayal of the WHY, a precise description of the WHAT, and freedom on the HOW.

The WHY encompasses a vision in a way that matters to people. As Howard Schultz, the Starbucks tycoon once said, “People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust.”

The British-American organizational consultant Simon Sinek‘s passable Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (2009; a good summary) identifies the difference between “giving direction and giving directions.” Great leaders, he explains, motivate with the WHY, a deep-rooted purpose, before defining the WHAT, the product or service, or the HOW, the process.

The latter, the HOW, is to be deprioritized—effective leaders leave it to their employees to figure out.

In contrast, ineffective leaders provide specificity around HOW to complete a task but fail to share the big picture, the WHY.

Don’t live in the weeds. Have faith in the ingenuity of your employees. Give much latitude in how they do things.

Idea for Impact: Define the job. Explain the responsibility. Equip your people with the tools and skills they’ll need. Establish expectations. Identify the standards. That’s the essence of delegation.

Inspirational Mess, Creative Clutter

January 27, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Biographer Roland Penrose (1900–84) writes in Picasso: His Life and Work (1958,)

Disorder was to Picasso a happier breeding ground for ideas than the perfection of a tidy room in which nothing upset the equilibrium by being out of place.

Once when visiting Picasso at his flat in the rue la Boétie, I noticed that a large Renoir hanging over the fireplace was crooked. “It’s better like that,” he said. “If you want to kill a picture, all you have to do is to hang it beautifully on a nail and soon you will see nothing of it but the frame. When it’s out of place you see it better.”

Pablo Picasso - Embrace the Imperfections Creativity Studies suggest that, for some people, messiness can boost creativity by spurring inspiration flow and helping them explore different avenues. One researcher explained, “Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights.”

But don’t use this concept as a crutch to defend your clutter.

Inspirational Quotations #825

January 26, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi

It’s never too late—never too late to start over, never too late to be happy.
—Jane Fonda (American Actress)

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. Learning is to the Studious, and Riches to the Careful. If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him.
—John C. Bogle (American Mutual Fund Pioneer)

Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results.
—Scott Adams (American Cartoonist)

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
—George Sand (French Novelist, Dramatist)

Our notions of happiness entrap us. We forget that they are just ideas. Our idea of happiness can prevent us from actually being happy. We fail to see the opportunity for joy that is right in front of us when we are caught in a belief that happiness should take a particular form.
—Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Religious Leader)

I have already settled it for myself, so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.
—Georgia O’Keeffe (American Painter)

We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given.
—Ryan Holiday (American Author)

The shortest route often has the steepest hills.
—Caroline Schoeder (American Aphorist)

The first time you marry for love, the second for money, and the third for companionship.
—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (American First Lady)

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (American Novelist)

During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews, and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there as no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

Executive Compensation: Pay Them Well, But Not Too Well

January 23, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Our executive compensation system is broken. Surveys show that the average public company CEO compensation is many hundred times that of the average employee. This gaping disparity in pay vis-à-vis the relative value they bring to their organizations is a moral embarrassment to our society, a point that wasn’t lost on the Occupy movement of yesteryear.

The debate over executive pay won’t die away anytime soon. As election year approaches, grandstanding politicians are vying to outdo each other with pledges to implement pubic policies that limit executive compensation, whereas theorists argue that, in a market economy, compensations should be set by supply and demand for executive talent.

Disproportionate executive compensation can demotivate employees The latter position is commonly echoed by company boards and executive compensation consultants—both of whom owe their cushy jobs to the CEOs and their top teams. They assert that leaders need to be provided with personal incentives to attract and motivate them.

Strangely enough, such incentives often demotivate the leaders’ followers. Financial incentives that are directed disproportionately to the leader in isolation often prove downright counterproductive.

Leadership is an outcome of the relationship between leader and follower, and excessively compensated leaders do not engender followership effectively.

This comports with financier J. P. Morgan‘s observations at the start of the twentieth century that the only characteristic common to his failing clients was a tendency to overpay those at the top. As Peter Drucker commented in The Frontiers of Management (1986,)

[J. P. Morgan found] eighty years ago that the only thing the businesses that were clients of J. P. Morgan & Co. and did poorly had in common was that each company’s top executive was paid more than 130 percent of the compensation of the people in the next echelon and these, in turn, more than 130 percent of the compensation of the people in the echelon just below them, and so on down the line. Very high salaries at the top, concluded Morgan—who was hardly contemptuous of big money or an “anticapitalist”—disrupt the team. They make even high-ranking people in the company see their own top management as adversaries rather than as colleagues…. And that quenches any willingness to say “we” and to exert oneself except in one’s own immediate self-interest.

Idea for Impact: Employees’ efforts are devalued markedly under conditions of gross inequality. Pay leaders well (if you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys,) but not too well.

Avoid Decision Fatigue: Don’t Let Small Decisions Destroy Your Productivity

January 20, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Making some decisions depletes mental resources for making more important ones

Every decision you make impacts the quality of successive decisions you’ll have to make, even in unrelated situations.

That’s because, according to the much-debated “muscle metaphor” of willpower, your mental stamina is limited.

As Roy Baumeister and John Tierney explained in their bestselling book on Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011; my summary), you have a finite strength of will for making prudent choices. As you go about your day, your willpower is depleted and “decision fatigue” sets in. Consequently, you’re likely to employ one of two cognitive shortcuts in decision-making: you avoid the act of deciding altogether or make a less-thoughtful, sub-optimal decision.

Don’t get overloaded with so many pointless decisions that your cognitive productivity ends up falling off a cliff.

President Barack Obama claimed that he makes deliberate efforts to avoid decision fatigue so that he can devote his mental energies to things that matter. Michael Lewis quotes Obama in the October 2012 issue of Vanity Fair,

You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits … I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. … You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.

In the same way, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sports a limited wardrobe. He has previously declared that doesn’t waste time and energy to pick his daily outfits: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve the community.”

Avoid Decision Fatigue: Don't Let Small Decisions Destroy Your Productivity

Idea for Impact: Establish healthy routines that can eliminate unnecessary deliberation

Life is the total of all the mundane and momentous choices you make. Being monotonous in handling the former enables you to excel in the latter. Limit decision fatigue by

putting as much of your life as possible on autopilot using routines / rituals and checklists,
limiting the choices you have (read Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less), and
delegating decision-making where possible.

Good routines can provide structure to your day, protect you from your more effective negative impulses, and bring order and predictability to your life. Besides, according to renowned career coach Marty Nemko, “modern life, increasingly defined by unpredictability, can be anxiety-provoking, and routines provide an anchor of predictability.”

Inspirational Quotations #824

January 19, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi

What I fear is complacency. When things always become better, people tend to want more for less work.
—Lee Kuan Yew (Singaporean Statesman)

Insults should be written in the sand, and praises carved in stone.
—Arabic Proverb

Love conquers all; let us surrender to love.
—Virgil (Roman Poet)

No virtue is equal to the good of others and no vice greater than hurting others.
—Tulsidas (Indian Hindu Poet)

Nuns and married women are equally unhappy, if in different ways
—Christina, Queen of Sweden (Swedish Monarch)

People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, “Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.” I don’t try to control a sunset, I just watch with awe as it unfolds.
—Carl Rogers (American Psychologist)

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
—Pablo Picasso (Spanish Painter)

It is not greed that drives the world, but envy.
—Warren Buffett (American Investor)

The contest, for ages, has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power.
—Daniel Webster (American Statesman, Lawyer)

A thousand fearful images and dire suggestions glance along the mind when it is moody and discontented with itself. Command them to stand and show themselves, and you presently assert the power of reason over imagination.
—Walter Scott (Scottish Novelist)

However great the work that God may achieve by an individual, he must not indulge in self-satisfaction. He ought rather to be all the more humbled, seeing himself merely as a tool which God has made use of.
—Vincent de Paul (French Catholic Saint)

Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have, it depends solely upon what you think.
—Dale Carnegie (American Self-Help Author)

In proportion as we perceive and embrace the truth do we become just, heroic, magnanimous, divine.
—William Lloyd Garrison (American Abolitionist)

Friends should be like books, easy to find when you need them, but seldom used.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Standing armies can never consist of resolute robust men; they may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties.
—Mary Wollstonecraft (English Writer, Feminist)

A champion is afraid of losing. Everyone else is afraid of winning.
—Billie Jean King (American Tennis Player)

Why People under Pressure Choose Self-Interested Behaviors

January 17, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi

Why People under Pressure Choose Self-Interested Behaviors Pressure can put people in a state of threat. As I’ve examined previously here, here, and here, pressure can undermine people’s ability to make sound decisions.

Under pressure, people can abandon their inhibitions, cut corners, and loosen up their moral standards. In other words, they are more likely to engage in self-centered behaviors as opposed to pursuing the common good.

People adopt moral standards that dissuade them from unacceptable behaviors. Under normal circumstances, they think sensibly about the costs and benefits when making decisions. However, under pressure, people can be depleted of the cognitive resources they need to act ethically and resist temptations. See my article on the much-debated “muscle metaphor” of willpower.

When people are in that state of emotional and psychological anxiety, the brain goes into a defensive mode. With that, they are more likely to engage in self-interested behaviors that they would otherwise avoid, especially if the payoff for such behavior is high, and the odds of getting caught and punished are low.

How Can a Manager Get Important Things Done?

January 13, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Distinguish the Variances That Require a Manager’s Attention

When critical care facilities in hospitals monitor patients’ vital signs, staff nurses are notified only when vital signs go beyond each patient’s pre-programmed range. Unless the monitoring devices sound an alarm, nurses take for granted that the patient’s condition is stable enough and will receive only routine medical attention.

Management by Exception: How Can a Manager Get Important Things Done The “Management by Exception (MBE)” method is the notion that a manager’s attention must be focused only on those areas in absolute need of his/her engagement.

As a rule, lower-level managers should handle recurring decisions. Only problems concerning extraordinary matters should be referred to higher-level managers.

This “exception principle” emphasizes that executives at the upper levels of an organization have serious restrictions on their time, capacity, and willpower. They should refrain from being caught up in minutiae that can be handled just as effectively by their junior managers.

A case in point: many companies establish protocols that designate the level of authorization required for purchases. Companies delegate authority carefully, prescribing spending limits for each level. For instance, a team leader’s approval is necessary for purchases of over $1,000. A department manager must approve purchases of over $5,000, the divisional leader for purchases of over $10,000, and the CEO for purchases over $50,000.

Managers Just Can’t Do Everything

The exception principle helps managers focus their attention on more worthy matters that justify their attention. Most managers hesitate to manage by exception because of the very human predisposition to focus on the immediate, tangible, and well-defined problems as against the distant, high-priority, challenging, and abstract problems.

In other words, mangers must distinguish programmed decisions from non-programmed decisions. Programmed decisions are routine activities that are well-defined and can be dealt with by using an established protocol. Non-programmed decisions are exceptional or significant endeavors that involve unfamiliar, one-time, and unstructured problems needing higher-level decision-making.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Get Lost in the Thicket of Trivia

As a manager, there are only a few things that you must do. Focus on those and delegate the rest. But keep an eye on how things are going; you are still accountable for any work you delegate.

Decentralize as much decision-making as possible. Establish protocols and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that empower your staff and enable your organization virtually to run itself.

Identify what deviations constitute as an exception and intervene only to solve significant problems.

Inspirational Quotations #823

January 12, 2020 by Nagesh Belludi

Where force is necessary, there it must be applied boldly, decisively and completely. But one must know the limitations of force; one must know when to blend force with a maneuver, a blow with an agreement.
—Leon Trotsky (Russian Revolutionary)

He who influences the thought of his times influences the times that follow.
—Elbert Hubbard (American Writer)

Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
—Simone de Beauvoir (French Philosopher)

If you have ability in a certain area, why not capitalize on it and improve it and use it?
—Wilt Chamberlain (American Sportsperson)

One does not fall “in” or “out” of love. One grows in love.
—Leo Buscaglia (American Motivational Speaker)

Our tendency is to be interested in something that is growing in the garden, not in the bare soil itself. But if you want to have a good harvest, the most important thing is to make the soil rich and cultivate it well.
—Shunryu Suzuki (Buddhist Monk, Author)

Appearances often are deceiving.
—Aesop (Greek Fabulist)

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Clergyman, Aphorist)

When building a team, I always search first for people who love to win. If I can’t find any of those, I look for people who hate to lose.
—Ross Perot (American Businessman)

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (American Abolitionist)

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
—Zora Neale Hurston (American Novelist)

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows. There is no code of conduct to help beginners. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.
—Sophia Loren (Italian Actor)

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.
—Truman Capote (American Novelist)

Nobody should trust their virtue with necessity, the force of which is never known till it is felt, and it is therefore one of the first duties to avoid the temptation of it.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (English Aristocrat, Poet)

The barrier between success is not something which exists in the real world: it is composed purely and simply of doubts about ability.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (American Head of State)

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Making some decisions depletes mental resources for making more important ones

Don’t get overloaded with so many pointless decisions that your cognitive productivity ends up falling off a cliff.

Idea for Impact: Establish healthy routines that can eliminate unnecessary deliberation

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Distinguish the Variances That Require a Manager’s Attention

Managers Just Can’t Do Everything

Idea for Impact: Don’t Get Lost in the Thicket of Trivia

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Wondering what to read next?