Books

Elevate Timing from Art to Science // Book Summary of Daniel Pink’s ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’

May 29, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (2018) explores how the quality of the decisions we make are correlated with their timing.

Pink is an expert on motivation and management, and an author of such best-selling books as Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) and To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (2012.) He describes When as not so much a “how-to” guide for making the most of our lives, but as a “when-to” manual for individual and group work.

The Best Times of the Day to Make Optimum Decisions

Pink’s principal theme is chronobiology—the science of how the body’s biological clocks can influence our cognitive abilities, moods, and attentiveness.

Drawing on scientific research on the science of timing, Pink concludes that the mental acuity, creativity, productivity, temper, and frames of mind for most folks follow an identifiable “peak-trough-rebound” template. Most people get their best work done in the mornings, suffer a trough of mental weariness in the afternoon, and experience a late-evening burst:

Our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of a day. During the sixteen or so hours we’re awake, they change often in a regular, foreseeable manner. We are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others. … [R]esearch has shown that time-of-day effects can explain 20 percent of the variance in human performance on cognitive undertakings.

Needless to say, this “peak-trough-rebound” phenomenon is fairly universal but differs among individuals. There are “larks” who do remarkably well in the mornings and “owls” who tend to embrace their late night productivity habits.

Optimizing Your Day with Daily Rhythms

According to Pink, “peak-trough-rebound” is attributable to the body’s relatively low temperature when we wake up. The increasing body temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness, which consequently “enhances our executive functioning, our ability to concentrate, and our powers of deduction.” As the morning evolves, we become more focused and alert until we hit a peak. Then our energy level wanes and our alertness declines, only to be restored in early evening.

Pink concludes that mornings are good for decision-making and that errors increase in the afternoons. Studies recommend that we schedule surgery in the mornings when surgeons tend to make fewer mistakes and avoid petitioning a traffic ticket in the afternoons because judges tend to be less considerate than in the mornings.

“Breaks are Not a Sign of Sloth but a Sign of Strength”

Pink emphasizes the risks of clouded judgment that characterizes the afternoon “trough.” As an example, Pink speculates that the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 was about the time of day—it’s captain’s ill-fated decisions were made in the afternoon following a night of no sleep.

With case studies of error-reduction in hospital operating rooms, Pink suggests “vigilance breaks” (quick team huddles for reviewing checklists and verifying courses of action) and restorative breaks (naps, short physical activities, or mental diversions) during troughs to “recharge and replenish, whether we’re performing surgery or proofreading advertising copy.”

“Timing is Everything” and “Everything is Timing”

Based on the mentioned studies’ correlations and causations, Pink offers advice further than daily scheduling—from marriage to switching careers and sports:

The best time to perform a specific task depends on the nature of that task. Identify your chronotype (Pink offers an online survey,) understand your task, and decide on the most suitable time. Do not let mundane tasks sneak into your peak period. Additionally, if you’re a boss, understand your employees’ work patterns and “allow people to protect their peak.”
Tasks that need creativity and a flash of insight (rather than analytical perspicacity) are best done during the late-evening recovery period when the mind tends to be less inhibited and more open to inventive associations.
Harness the psychological power of beginnings—New Year’s Days, birthdays, and anniversaries are all natural times to make resolutions and start working on goals. Other opportunities for fresh starts include the first of the month, the beginning of the week, and the first day of spring.
“Lunch breaks offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being”—especially for “employees in cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs.”
Afternoon coffee followed by 10- to 20-minute naps and leisurely daily walks are “not niceties, but necessities.” Drink a cup of coffee just before a nap—the 25 minutes it takes for the caffeine to kick in is the optimal length of a restorative siesta.
Morning workouts are best for people aiming to burn fat, lose weight, or build sustainable exercise habits. Folks trying to reach personal bests should seek out the afternoons, when physical performance tends to reach its zenith.
Studies suggest that people are most likely to run their first marathons at ages ending in 9—but those ages are also when people are most prone to cheating on their spouses.
According to one survey, switching jobs every three to five years in your early career can lead to the biggest pay increases.

Recommendation: Skim Daniel Pink’s ‘When’ for the Life Hacks

Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing offers little fresh substance. Many of the cited studies’ implications, causations, and correlations are open to debate.

A speed-read of When, especially of the takeaway points at the end of each chapter, can offer some practical tips about when you are likely to be creative, focused, and least error-prone.

Parenthetically, the third and the final section on “Synching and Thinking” is out-of-place to Pink’s principal theme of timing, even if the case study of the synchronized effort that constitutes the Mumbai Dabbawala lunchbox delivery system is interesting. Pink explains that the importance of “syncing up” with people around you through a collective sense of identity and a shared purpose is “a powerful way to lift your physical and psychological well-being.”

Complement skimming Daniel Pink’s When with Michael Breus’s The Power of When (2016; Talk at Google.)

How Mindfulness Can Make You Better at Your Job // Book Summary of David Gelles’s ‘Mindful Work’

April 4, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Mindfulness Simply Means Being Aware and Being Present

Most religions and spiritual practices encourage some sort of meditation and mindfulness. However, the specific practice of bringing your attention and your focus to the present moment, and observing and accepting the experience as is, is most commonly associated with the Eastern meditative traditions.

Mindfulness is an element of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path to nirvana (enlightenment.) The Buddha taught that a mistaken perception of reality inevitably leads to suffering. Mindfulness is the primary means of bridging that gap between how things seem to be and how they really are.

Attending to What Happens to Our Minds, Hearts, Attitudes, and Actions

In its secular form, mindfulness is but a practice of consciousness. It is heedfulness or awareness of your subjective thoughts, behaviors, and experiences—without evaluating or judging them.

Mindfulness can help you, through direct experience, become more comfortable with your life and to be better able to cope with the problems and issues in your daily life.

The heightened mental receptivity, together with an increased sensitivity to the environment, better openness to new information, and a sharper decision-making are understood to produce a great number of physiological and psychological benefits.

Mindfulness is the Best Antidote to Anxiety

In a world that barrages us with information and demands us to be incessantly active and reactive, mindlessness is being embraced increasingly in the mainstream culture. As a supplement to yoga, and without any specific religious association, mindfulness is today practiced as a way to prevent being swept away in an avalanche of thought, activity, and emotion.

David Gelles’s Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out provides a remarkable account of the ever-increasing adoption of meditation-based mindfulness. Prominent American corporations such as Google, General Mills, Aetna, and Ford have built mindfulness-themed employee wellness initiatives to foster a happier, more productive workplace.

Gelles brings a business journalist’s objectivity to draw together his experience of practicing meditation for 15 years. He also reviews scientific research that has evidenced how people who have a mindfulness routine are less distractible and better at concentrating, even when multi-tasking.

Scientific research is making the benefits clear. Studies show that mindfulness strengthens our immune systems, bolsters our concentrative powers, and rewires our brains. Just as lifting weights at the gym makes our muscles stronger, so too does practicing mindfulness make our minds stronger. And the most tried-and-true method of cultivating mindfulness is through meditation.

Gelles discusses the teachings of many key influencers in the development of the mindfulness movement. The rising popularity of meditative mindfulness in the West has its genesis in a retreat organized in the ’70s by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk and teacher. One of his attendees, the University of Massachusetts psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, integrated Hanh’s teachings with yoga and medical science, and created the popular eight-week “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” course. Over the decades, other psychologists developed mindfulness-based interventions that allow patients to observe their cognitive and behavioral processes.

Gelles summarizes much of the recent research that has confirmed the centuries-old Eastern wisdom about mindfulness practices. Developments in contemplative neuroscience have corroborated the effects that meditative mindfulness has on supporting the body’s immune system and counteracting the symptoms of burnout.

Indeed, mindfulness seems to change the brain in some specific ways. Broadly speaking, mindfulness increases activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex, an evolutionarily recent region of the brain that is important for many of the things that make us human. This region is the seat of much of our higher-order thinking-our judgment, decision making, planning, and discernment. The prefrontal cortex is also an area that seems to be more active when we are engaged in pro-social behavior—things like compassion, empathy, and kindness.

Some studies have shown that folks who practice meditation have a less perturbed amygdala. That means that the brain is less vulnerable to interpreting many flight-or-fight stimuli as threats and triggering anger, stress, or a defense reaction.

Meditative Mindfulness in the Emerging Context of Consumer Culture

Gelles warns that capitalism and commercialization could, due to many increasingly-visible entrepreneurial teachers, complicate something as seemingly simple as observing one’s breath and paying attention.

I’m sympathetic to the skeptics, who worry that a noble practice is being quickly corrupted by modern marketing. But having witnessed mindfulness in action for fifteen years, it is clear to me that rarely, if ever, does exposure to meditation make someone a worse person. On balance, the folks who become more mindful tend to be happier, healthier, and kinder. Nevertheless, it is worth addressing the various critiques of mainstream mindfulness, if only to put them to rest.

…

Even today, some of the most popular gurus in America have demonstrated a penchant for bling that strikes many as being out of touch with their mantra of inner peace. Bikram Choudhury, the litigious yoga teacher, cuts the figure of an oligarch, driving around Beverly Hills in a Rolls-Royce and sporting a gold-encrusted Rolex. A Thai monk with a taste for Louis Vuitton luggage and private jets had his assets frozen by authorities in 2013.

A Few Minutes a Day is All You Need to Reap the Benefits of Mindfulness

Recommendation: Read David Gelles’s Mindful Work. This helpful tome offers a succinct rundown of the benefits of mindfulness. In an era where our culture is increasingly questioning the frenzy of activity and reactivity that has entrenched the current way of life, mindfulness will continue to draw many mainstream practitioners for its ability to promote stress-reduction and produce improvements in one’s overall emotional state and outlook on life.

Indeed, mindfulness is about much more than simply observing sensations as they occur. It is about what happens to our minds, hearts, and actions when we deliberately continue these practices for weeks, months, and years. Mindfulness is a practice that allows us to achieve more sustainable happiness and to grow more compassionate. And over time, mindfulness requires one to confront thorny concepts like impermanence and compassion.

What Your Messy Desk Says About You

March 13, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Appearances are Important

Your office and desk must seem organized. A messy office or a cluttered desk can not only impede your space and cramp your style, but also affect how your peers and superiors perceive you.

Clutter can drag you down, sap your energy, and reduce your efficiency. However, if clutter is your style, you should have every right to work the way you like to work.

A messy desk isn’t a professional flaw, but clutter may reflect of your competence. Untidiness can give an impression that your job may be too much for you to handle, or that you can’t get your thoughts and information organized.

How to Conquer Your Paperwork Crisis

As opposed to sorting through everything in your drawers, desktop, and filing systems, consider removing the whole lot somewhere else and only allowing the important things back.

Stephanie Winston, author of The Organized Executive, famously wrote that each clutter represents a decision not made. In this bestselling book, she recommends the “TRAF” system, a precursor to the “Inbox Zero” discipline that I’ve previously discussed on this blog. TRAF is an acronym for the four decisions you must make on each piece of paper that arrives at your desk. You can Toss it away, Refer or delegate it to someone else, Act on it, or File it if it absolutely deserves to be achieved. Don’t keep anything merely for reasons of habit or for sentimental reasons.
Don’t start tomorrow with today’s mess. Spending ten minutes at the end of your workday gearing your desk up for the next day can help you stay organized.

After you’ve taken steps to reorganize your office, sustain your system. Look for ways to further streamline and fine-tune your organization framework.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Let Clutter Spin Out of Control and Affect Other’s Perceptions

Taking too much time to organize can be just as ineffective—don’t end up spending so much time organizing that you don’t have the time to do anything else. (This is one of the shortcomings of David Allen’s Getting This Done system.) Learn to put things away as soon as you’re done working on them.

Being organized not only means less time wasted looking for things, but also rewards you with a greater sense of control and a favorable professional image.

Writing Clearly and Concisely

February 13, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In my judgment, most books should be booklets, most booklets essays, most essays articles, most articles paragraphs, and most paragraphs should be statements.

It is far more important to write well than most folks realize. Writing not only communicates ideas, it also generates them—in the minds of both the author and the reader.

Effective Writing is a Lifelong Pursuit

One of my 2018 goals is to peruse two classic texts on writing clearly and concisely: William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (1918) and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (1980.)

Strunk and White affirm that brevity is the essence of good writing in these three sentences:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Succinctness, simplicity, and humanity are also dominant objectives in William Zinsser’s On Writing Well.

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re-examine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it’s beautiful? Simplify, simplify.

On Writing Well is a celebrated guide to concise, unmistakable, and well-crafted writing. The book has sold several million copies worldwide, and is a required reading at many a university course.

Good writing doesn’t come naturally, though most people seem to think it does … Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.

Zinsser’s central premise is that good writing is the result of hard work, not inborn talent. The book’s particular strength is in Zinsser’s selection of paragraphs by great writers, and his instruction on how to learn from those writers: “Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.”

On Writing Well is a must-read for anyone who writes and desires to his or her prose. Read Derek Sivers’ helpful synopsis of the book.

Books I Read in 2017 & Recommend

January 5, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Management & Leadership: Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management. Drucker’s conception for the organization as an integral part of society, his elucidation of the nature of managerial and leadership tasks, his emphasis on good governance, and his prescription for effective leadership have served managers well over the decades. The Practice of Management is one of those books that Drucker’s admirers tend to appreciate more with every successive reading. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Self-Help: Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours. A learning addict’s approach to learning new things to a good-enough level—but not to perfection. “In my experience, it takes around twenty hours of practice … to go from knowing absolutely nothing about what you’re trying to do to performing noticeably well. … It doesn’t matter whether you want to learn a language write a novel, paint a portrait, start a business, or fly an airplane. If you invest as little as twenty hours in learning the basics of the skill, you’ll be surprised at how good you can become.” [Read my summary.]
Management: Leigh Branham’s The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave. Discusses many ideas for employee “engagement practices” in great specificity to help managers and leaders keep their antennae up for signs of employees’ bitterness and discontent, and correct before they lose their best and brightest people. This practical volume can also help employees discuss and resolve their workplace needs and aspirations. [Read my summary.]
Influence & Leadership: Jeswald Salacuse’s Leading Leaders. “You need to take account of the interests of the persons you would lead. Leaders will follow you not because of your position or charisma, but because they consider it in their interest. Your job as a leader is to convince them that their interest lies with you.” [Read my summary.]
Education & Teaching: Howard Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind. To enable the highest degrees of understanding, any skills instruction must be systematically reinforced by instruction in which the deployment of the skills makes holistic sense. [Read my summary.]
Psychology & Self-Help: Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Habitually, your narratives and emotions dictating your actions. Frankl’s key message is that amid the various stimuli and responses, you have the freedom to choose your responses to any given set of circumstances. Frankl also introduces “logotherapy,” the psychotherapy system he conceived to help you uncover a sense of purpose in life and survive nearly anything. [Read my summary and my notes on Frankl’s exposition of the meaning of suffering.)
Biography & Entrepreneurship: Howard Schultz’s Pour Your Heart Into It. According to the ‘founder’ of Starbucks, Starbucks succeeded because the company offers more than just good coffee. The extraordinary growth of Starbucks derives from the corporate values he endorsed, viewing people as being more important than profits. The Starbucks marvel is not only about economic growth and brand success, but also about its socially conscious corporate ethos. [Read my summary.]
Biography & Leadership: Nicholas Carlson’s Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! Beyond the tome’s gossipy narrative of Mayer’s management style, readers of this page-turner will be interested in Yahoo leadership’s strategic and tactical missteps. Particularly fascinating are how Yahoo missed opportunities to buy Google and Facebook when they were mere startups, the rebuffing of an acquisition bid from Microsoft, a lack of strategic focus, the leadership skirmishes with activist investors, the revolving door at the CEO’s office, and an Asian-asset drama. [Read my summary.]
Biography & Leadership: Donald Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure. Celebrated Coca-Cola executive Donald Keough offers a predictable, yet insightful—even if circuitous—exploration of ten (and a bonus) leadership mistakes. A worthwhile read for its many nuggets of business history, including his take on the infamous New Coke debacle. [Read my summary.]
Management & Leadership: Jeffrey K. Liker’s The Toyota Way. Toyota’s long-term standing as the epitome of quality production is undeniable. According to Liker, the genius of Toyota lies in how it has steadily institutionalized common-sense principles for waste reduction and continuous improvement. “Toyota is process oriented and consciously and deliberately invests long term in systems of people, technology and processes that work together to achieve high customer value.” [Read my summary.]

Also, my book recommendations from 2016, 2015, and 2014.

The four books I re-read every year are Benjamin Graham’s Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor, Phil Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

You may be interested in my article on how to process that pile of books you can’t seem to finish and my article on why we read self-help books.

Wish you all very enlightening reads in 2018! Recall the words of the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who said, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

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.

How to Learn Anything Fast // Book Summary of Josh Kaufman’s ‘The First 20 Hours’

September 4, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Every Discipline, Hobby, or Sport Has Its Learning Curve

One of your core productivity principles should be to learn to do things to a good-enough level—but not to perfection.

In the pursuit of self-improvement, when you start to study a field, it seems like you have to learn hundreds of principles and skills. If you’re interested in no more than gaining an adequate amount of fluency in any skill, you have only to identify the crucial few core principles, learn them, and diligently practice them “in the trenches.”

According to self-described “learning addict” Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast, with a bit of strategy, you can learn just about any skill to a sufficient level with twenty hours of focused effort:

In my experience, it takes around twenty hours of practice … to go from knowing absolutely nothing about what you’re trying to do to performing noticeably well. … It doesn’t matter whether you want to learn a language write a novel, paint a portrait, start a business, or fly an airplane. If you invest as little as twenty hours in learning the basics of the skill, you’ll be surprised at how good you can become.

Learning is Fun but it is also Dedicated Work

One of the real challenges for rapid skill acquisition, according to The First 20 Hours, is to get past the beginner’s blockade, which is the frustration that occurs when learning something new doesn’t come as naturally as you’d hoped for. The solution is to build in focused learning time into your daily routine.

Make dedicated time for practice. The time you spend acquiring a new skill must come from somewhere. Unfortunately, we tend to want to acquire new skills and keep doing many of the other activities we enjoy, like watching TV, playing video games, et cetera. “I’ll get around to it, when I find the time,” we say to ourselves. Here’s the truth: “finding” time is a myth. No one ever “finds” time for anything, in the sense of miraculously discovering some bank of extra time, like finding a twenty-dollar bill you accidentally left in your coat pocket. If you rely on finding time to do something, it will never be done. If you want to find time, you must make time.

The First 20 Hours tells you how to use the initial learning time to maximum effect and have as steep a learning curve as possible. To learn a skill, you must deconstruct the skill into its constituent subskills and learn enough about each subskill to be able to practice effectively and self-correct. For instance, Kaufman finds a shortcut to learning how to play the ukulele by memorizing the three chords needed for the majority of songs, which happen to be C, F, and G.

How to Learn Anything Faster

The first three rambling chapters of The First 20 Hours introduce many general principles of rapid skill acquisition and effective learning. The six succeeding chapters give Kaufman’s firsthand accounts of how he applied these principles to learn yoga, programming, touch-typing, a Chinese board game called Go, ukulele, and windsurfing. The chief takeaways from these chapters are,

Study, by itself, is never enough. If you want to get good at anything where real-life performance matters, you have to practice that skill in context.
Invest your limited time on the sub-skills with most payback and avoid those elements of the skill that are non-essential.
Create mental models and checklists for remembering the things you need to do each time you practice. It helps make the learning process more efficient.

Recommendation: Skim Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast. Start with the author’s TED video and then speed-read the first three chapters (39 pages) and the prologues. Read the subsequent six chapters only if the subject matter particular skills fascinate you—these monotonous chapters expose the many nuances of the trial and error in the course of learning.

How to Manage Smart, Powerful Leaders // Book Summary of Jeswald Salacuse’s ‘Leading Leaders’

August 22, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Most Valuable People are Often the Most Difficult to Manage

As you climb the career ladder, you will find yourself working increasingly with many other powerful leaders—both inside and outside your organization—who hold the key to your success. Often, you may share responsibility and control with a variety of leaders over whom you may lack authority and influence. Compared to others you’ve worked with in the past, many of these leaders will be more talented, ambitious, competitive, accomplished, assertive, controlling, and ego-centric.

According to by Jeswald W. Salacuse’s Leading Leaders (2005), driving change when you lack influence over other leaders requires you to tread carefully. You must employ all the diplomatic and tactical skills at your command. “Your ability to lead other leaders arises not just from your position, resources or charisma, but from your will and skill.”

The Only Way to Lead Leaders is to Do What is in Their Interests

Salacuse’s central idea in Leading Leaders: How to Manage Smart, Talented, Rich, and Powerful People is that your success depends exclusively on your personal ability to negotiate shared and conflicting objectives, and subordinate your interests to theirs. “Move your followers to take action by characterizing a problem or challenge in such a way that it is in their interests to do something about it.”

To do this, you must determine the interests of those you wish to lead and then make it loud and clear to them that you are indeed serving their interests. This requires meticulous listening, reframing of your objectives in terms of their interests, and respecting their authority and autonomy.

Salacuse breaks the challenge down into “seven daily tasks,” each of which takes a chapter in Leading Leaders.

How to Direct and Negotiate the Vision: To negotiate a compelling vision for your organization that other leaders will buy into, decide on your direction for them and then have a strategic conversation on that subject. Lead an open discussion that allows for their enthusiastic participation. Do not impose your new vision from the top. Through a series of premeditated questions, pilot them to your conclusions. Such collaboration ensures that the leaders will own and support the decisions you select for them. Learn to identify those internally influential people relevant to your objectives and appeal to them. “Beware of becoming so intoxicated by your own vision that you fail to see clearly the reservations that members of your organization may have about pursuing that vision enthusiastically.”
How to Integrate and Make Stars a Team: Your job as the leader is to make sure that all the members of your organization understand that they have common values, shared history, and collective interests. Focus on communication. Demonstrate both by word and by deed that you put the interests of the organization above your own. Understand the nature of the cultural differences that may divide your organization’s leaders and then seek to find ways to bridge any gaps. “Deal directly with other leaders who are spoilers by converting them or isolating them.”
How to Mediate and Settle Leadership Conflicts: The more autonomous the other leaders are, the greater the odds of conflict over turf, power, style, and goals. A leader must intervene and mediate when other leaders come to disagreement. When conflicts arise, read between the lines. Observe the adversaries’ interactions, and find ways to improve communication. Look beyond the conflicting parties’ stated positions; probe for deeper interests. Work as a bridge, and find areas of agreement that can resolve the conflict. Consider how you could apply the six mediation power tools (incentives, coercion, expertise, legitimacy, reference, and coalition) most effectively to resolve conflicts. “A mediator, unlike an arbitrator or judge, has no power to impose a solution.”
How to Educate People Who Think They are Already Educated: Approach your teaching role tactfully. Leaders tend to be proud and sensitive—they may begrudge being treated as unqualified, unskilled, or inexperienced. Before you instruct them, make sure you understand their frame of reference. To the maximum extent possible, do your educating one-on-one, rather than in groups. Actively involve and invite their contributions. The command and control method of instructing them will be ineffective. Instead, use the Socratic Method—ask questions that encourage people to discover the truth for themselves. “In leading leaders, the most effective instrument is not an order but the right question.”
How to Motivate and Persuade Other Leaders: Learn as much as you can about other leaders—their backgrounds, interests, and their goals. Design the specific, personalized incentives that will accord with their interests—only individualized incentives persuade people to act in desired ways. Agree on future goals for the short term, medium term, and long term, and show how those goals relate to those of your organization. Be open and transparent with information so everyone knows where they are and where they are going. “Motivate your followers by envisioning a future that will benefit them and communicating that future to them in a convincing way.”
How to Represent Your Organization to the Outside World: As a leader, you are always on the stage. Everything you do will be subject to scrutiny. Your every action and statement, whether in public or in private, can affect your organization’s relationships with the outside world—customers, competitors, regulators, media, investors, and the public in general. Actively manage their perceptions and expectations. If those interests are dysfunctional or unworkable, seek to change or transform them through one-on-one diplomacy. “One of the most important functions that leadership representation serves is the acquisition of needed resources.”
How to Create Trust to Get the Most out of Your Leadership: People will trust you not because of your appeal, charm, or foresight, but because they’ve decided that aligning with your leadership will move their interests forward. Understand the people you lead and know their interests. Manage their expectations and deliver what you’ve promised. Reinforce your communications during problems and crises. Be consistent and predictable in your actions. “Openness is not just an easy smile or a charming manner; it refers to the process by which you make decisions that have implications for your followers’ interests.”

Tact and Diplomacy Matter More When Leading Other Powerful Leaders

Recommendation: Read Jeswald W. Salacuse’s Leading Leaders. This excellent book’s insights make a great template for the basics of executive leadership. You can especially learn how to gain persuasive skills in situations where you may not have much influence.

Beyond the academic pedantry (the author is a professor of law, diplomacy, and negotiation,) the abundant examples from political leadership are far more multifaceted than the narratives in Leading Leaders tend to imply, but they serve as good cases in point.

Leading Leaders offers a matchless resource in documenting what constitutes effective emotional leadership, which is, in spite of everything, all about persuasive power and influence to get things done through people. The key learning point is, “In developing your leadership strategies and tactics, you need to take account of the interests of the persons you would lead. Leading leaders is above all interest-based leadership. Leaders will follow you not because of your position or charisma but because they consider it in their interest. Your job as a leader is to convince them that their interests lie with you.”

Our Vision of What Our Parents Achieved Influences Our Life Goals: The Psychic Contract

July 14, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Understanding Others’ Motivations is a Key to Building Better Relationships

Understanding others’ deep-held motivations involves recognizing what drives them, why and how they want to work, work styles they may adopt in various circumstances, and what levers you have to motivate them.

Take for example Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a motivation hypothesis used widely for several decades now. Represented as a pyramid, this hypothesis proposes that people are motivated to fulfill basic subconscious desires such as food and shelter before trying to fulfill higher-level needs such as affection and prestige. Even though academics have extensively debated its specifics, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has provided a handy framework to value the multifaceted composition of human motivation and to understand how to engage others.

The Relationship between Your Own Vision of Success and Your Parental Influence

One less-known framework for understanding the provenance of people’s life goals—their deep-seated aspirations for want to achieve in life—is the “Psychic Contract” hypothesis, a concept that dominates The Anatomy of a Great Executive (1991) by John Wareham, a leadership psychologist from New Zealand.

According to Wareham, a psychic contract is a set of “deals” we subconsciously strike with our parents early in life. Our life-goals are defined primarily by our own vision of what our parents achieved—and what they failed to achieve:

As we grow we absorb the values of our parents, and are conditioned to improve (albeit marginally) upon their achievements. We strike a psychic contract with them whereby “success” in life is defined by the attainment of a similar social positioning, which we later embark upon attaining, sometimes very consciously, but often entirely unconsciously.

Throughout our lives, we unintentionally adhere to our psychic contracts, despite the limitations they place on us. We use our psychic contracts to not only define and approach our life goals but also think about how we measure success.

We consciously measure success in terms of milestones and standards instilled by our parents.

As a rule of thumb, about three quarters or more of people in westernized culture seek first to equal, then marginally to improve upon the lifestyle or status level perceived to exist in the childhood home.

Psychic Contract Theory: Children are Programmed to Want to Do as Well as or Better Than Their Parents

In The Anatomy of a Great Executive, Wareham goes into depth explaining how we can know our own psychic contracts and how we can reset our goals to give ourselves permission to succeed. Here are some other prominent learning points:

Our psychic contract is based on our birth order, our parents’ birth order, and roles we play relative to our parents in our families.
The so-called “prime parental injunction” sits at the heart of our conscious. We go through our lives trying to become the people our parents wanted us to be. Even people who spend their lives trying to become exactly the opposite of what their parents wished are still influenced by this injunction.
Every person has a pre-programmed financial comfort level. Most of us strive to reach this level; but once there, we slow down—not because we are lazy, but because we have fulfilled our inner desires and don’t need more. Wareham cites the example of commission-based sales people who, after earning adequate commission to reach their financial comfort level, tend to be less aggressive in selling cars to customers for the rest of the month.

Idea for Impact: “Psychic Contract” is a handy and thought provoking—if unsubstantiated—hypothesis to understand how your and other people’s deep-seated life goals are established. It can give you one more data point in trying to figure people out.

You Too Can (and Must) Become Effective // Summary of Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive

May 30, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Peter Drucker (1909–2005) is widely regarded as the most outstanding thinker on the subject of management theory and practice. He was amazingly prolific—he produced 39 volumes on management and leadership and worked right until his death a week before his 96th birthday.

Drucker’s The Practice of Management (1954) played a pivotal role in the recognition of management as a professional discipline. In this influential book (see my summary here,) Drucker explained what management is and how managers do their jobs.

In his bestselling The Effective Executive (1967,) Drucker defined effectiveness as getting the right things done and efficiency as making resources productive. His pivotal message was that effectiveness must be learned because effectiveness is every manager’s job. That’s what are managers get paid for—“the executive is paid for being effective.” Moreover, “Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform, and not to please their superiors.”

Five Practices of the Effective Executive

Drucker devotes five chapters of The Effective Executive to five practices that have to be acquired to be effective. Introducing these effectiveness practices, Drucker writes, “Whenever I have found a person who—no matter how great in intelligence, industry, imagination, or knowledge—fails to observe these practices, I have also found an executive deficient in effectiveness.”

Effectiveness Habit #1—Know Where Time Goes: “Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.” In addition, “Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control.” Using the three-step time logging, time analysis, and time budgeting practice, effective executives know where there time goes. They exert themselves to make certain that they invest their time in line with their values and priorities.
Effectiveness Habit #2—Focus on Contribution: Whatever your span of responsibilities—supervisory, managerial or leadership—you are accountable to your ‘external’ stakeholders. These stakeholders measure your performance solely by your ability to identify opportunities and get things done through the resources you have. Drucker writes, “Effective executives focus on outward contributions. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, ‘What results are expected of me?'” Effective executives have a clear understanding of their contribution and their results.
Effectiveness Habit #3: Make Strengths Productive: “Effective executives build on strengths—theirs and others. They do not build on weaknesses. They do not start out with the things they cannot do.” Effective executives understand and build on the strengths of themselves, their team, and their organization to make everyone productive and to eliminate weaknesses. The only weaknesses that have a bearing—and must be remedied—are the ones that hinder effective executives from exercising their strengths.
Effectiveness Habit #4: Live Priorities: “Effective executives concentrate on superior performance where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to stay within priorities.” Setting priorities is easier; the hard part is sticking to the decision and living the priorities. To get things done, focus on one task at a time or two at the most; three is usually impractical.
Effectiveness Habit #5: Systemize Decision-Making: “Effective executives make effective decisions. They know that this is a system—the right steps in the right sequence. They know that to make decisions fast is to make the wrong decisions.” For Drucker, decision-making was a matter of wisdom and sound judgment—making a choice between alternatives but seldom between mere right and mere wrong. “The sooner operating managers learn to make decisions as genuine judgments on risk and uncertainty, the sooner we will overcome one of the basic weaknesses of large organizations—the absence of any training and testing for the decision-making top positions.”

Idea for Impact: Teach yourself to become effective. Commit these five tasks to memory and practice them. Read The Effective Executive—it will have a profound effect on your performance.

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Books

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Optimizing Your Day with Daily Rhythms

“Breaks are Not a Sign of Sloth but a Sign of Strength”

“Timing is Everything” and “Everything is Timing”

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Attending to What Happens to Our Minds, Hearts, Attitudes, and Actions

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A Few Minutes a Day is All You Need to Reap the Benefits of Mindfulness

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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.

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How to Learn Anything Faster

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The Most Valuable People are Often the Most Difficult to Manage

The Only Way to Lead Leaders is to Do What is in Their Interests

Tact and Diplomacy Matter More When Leading Other Powerful Leaders

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Understanding Others’ Motivations is a Key to Building Better Relationships

The Relationship between Your Own Vision of Success and Your Parental Influence

Psychic Contract Theory: Children are Programmed to Want to Do as Well as or Better Than Their Parents

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Five Practices of the Effective Executive

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