Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Critical Thinking

How to … Make a Memorable Elevator Speech

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With an elevator speech, you not only have a short time to elicit someone’s interest but also the added challenge of standing out from the crowd.

Your only goal should be to say something intriguing, memorable, and unique, prompting the prospect to lean in and invite, “Wait … do tell me more.”

I’ve listened to hundreds of elevator languages, and the few that continued out are the ones that sparked a conversation. Sameness and clichés are boring—everything sounds more or less the same. If, on the proverbial elevator, one must decide between ‘different’ or ‘better,’ one would choose ‘different.’ People remember ‘different.’

So, presenting yourself in the best possible light involves saying something snappy and ditching the details. Be concise and coherent, but not vague. Appear mysterious and confident, but not arrogant.

Idea for Impact: With an elevator speech, you’ll be forgotten if you aren’t unique and memorable. Rehearse your message well and be ready to perform it flawlessly at a moment’s notice.

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How to … Prepare to Be Interviewed by The Media

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I’ve never stumbled upon a media guest who’s not been unhappy with the results of an on-camera interview. Most feel they looked nervous or uncertain, bumbled over their words or didn’t get across with clarity, or the interviewer focused on the wrong stuff.

  • Rehearse and practice. Prepare for your interview by dress-rehearsing through your talking points with a colleague. Record it, review the footage, and look at your articulation and body language. Do you appear calm, coherent, and confident?
  • Television draws attention to your posture, energy, and facial expression. Keep eye contact. Focus on the person asking the questions and not on the camera. The more your eyes move around, the less trustworthy you’ll appear. Align how you look with how you want to be perceived—dress in a dark suit to appear serious, roll your sleeves up to appear hard-working, and don a polo shirt if your message is fun and informal.
  • Know your message. Before the interview begins, decide on the three key points you want to get across and stick with them. Three is easy enough to remember. It’ll prevent you from getting caught up in the conversations in your head.
  • Figure out your story. Think through the essence of what it is you need to communicate. Get your facts straight. Think about what you are trying to get across and how you can make that story relevant and understandable to your audience.
  • Restrain yourself from thinking aloud. Keep your anecdotes short; don’t overestimate the fascination your audience will have with your personal life stories.
  • Avoid verbal fillers such as “um” and “ah” that can really hurt how you come across.
  • Allow yourself a second to collect your thoughts and structure your answer. Resist the temptation to think of additional details as you narrate the answer. You can provide a consistent and well-reasoned answer by sticking to the details and structure you had planned for. Be concise. Do not ramble on. Keep your soundbites short and your anecdotes simple.
  • Be prepared to be interrupted and sidetracked. If you have nothing to say about something, say nothing. Better still, if you know what you’ll be interviewed for, have something substantial to say about it and say it regardless of the questions you’re asked. Use transitional phrases such as “I think the real question is …,” “What’s important here is,” or “Let me draw attention to” and redirect the conversation if necessary.

If you’re in a position that requires you to speak to the media often, take a course or get a coach who can train you on becoming an effective spokesperson. An excellent resource is Media Training Bible (2012) by media trainer Brad Phillips.

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Making the Nuances Count in Decisions

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Holding your tongue and withholding a definite opinion is often more prudent than being rapid-fire because the topic at hand may compel a bit of nuance.

These frazzled and frenzied times are the antitheses of active inquiry. No one pays attention. Not anymore. The open-ended conversation quickly devolves into spewing ill-considered opinions. Active inquiry and thoughtful dialog lose out.

No need to shoot your mouth off in response to negative emotional triggers. It’s okay to be ambivalent about some things. It’s good to be skeptical about what you think you know. That’s where the nuance begins.

Idea for Impact: Reality is often more nuanced than you may realize at the moment. Take the time to consume information more deliberately, allowing shades of meaning. Seek first to understand.

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When Anonymity Becomes Cowardice

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A variety of psychological factors contribute to people being nasty online. Rider University psychologist John Suler famously argued that online environments unleash aspects of our personality that we usually keep under guard—a phenomenon he called the online disinhibition effect. With names concealed, there’s no pressure to maintain a public facade. Cyberspace becomes a separate dimension where the usual rules don’t apply. Actions no longer carry consequences. There’s no liability for rudeness and inappropriate behavior.

The disinhibition effect is also called ‘The Gyges Effect,’ after the Ring of Gyges, a mythical invisibility device in Plato’s Republic. The ring grants its owner the power to become invisible at will. Plato considers whether an intelligent person would be just if one did not have to fear any bad reputation for committing injustices.

When Anonymity Becomes Cowardice - The Psychology of Internet Trolls Social media has a way of magnifying some of the worst facets of human nature. By allowing masked identities, as Professor Suler points out, abusers avoid accountability for their conduct and dissociate their online selves from their real-world selves. In real life, combative behavior triggers a victim’s immediate reaction–a change in tone of voice or a counterargument, even aggression. However, these deterrents are missing or delayed in the online world, and social inhibition is removed. Online abusers see their victims as faceless, abstract cutouts with no feelings and undeserving of fairness, compassion, and honesty.

Idea for Impact: Keep away from being nasty online. Awareness and activism are vital to civic duty, but you should seek out actual human beings who know how to converse intelligently on anything they disagree with.

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Why People are Afraid to Think

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Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. (Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel (1916,) pp. 178–179)

Laziness and inability usually coerce people to reject thinking. But, as Russell contends, fear is a non-obvious inhibitor of thought. Not just because meticulous reasoning is demanding but because thinking may occasion an undermining—even revaluation—of our long-held convictions about all sorts of matters—notably religion and ethics.

People reject thinking because we fear it may challenge our equilibrium—how we make sense of the world. We’ll be coerced to see the world anew. As I’ve emphasized previously, once a belief is added to our corpus of viewpoints, we indulge in “intellectual censorship.” We cling to our ideas rather than objectively reassessing and questioning them.

Idea for Impact: Life should alter you. Through conscientious thinking, your worldview can—and should—reflect that growth.

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Do Your Employees Feel Safe Enough to Tell You the Truth?

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Take any corporate scandal or the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and you’ll find lower-ranking voices that tried to be heard within these organizations to prevent or minimize the consequences of the excesses or the accidents.

Some leaders are too isolated from reality and establish an “all’s-good” guise whereby anything other than affirmative becomes an undesirable—unwelcome even—answer to a performance-related question. Such leaders foster a “good-news culture,” where any truth-teller or devil’s advocate is quickly dismissed. Queries such as the cursory “Is everything okay?” elicit information-free, non-answers like “yes” and “great!”

When leaders are disconnected from reality, they become incontestably right. Employees know the rule of the game is to say what’s safe to say. To not tell the truth. To tell the leader just what she wants to hear. Employees would instead go with the flow rather than speak truth to power.

Consequently, business pressures often lead to shortcuts that go overlooked. Risk is normalized. Leaders who cannot tap into the truth get blindsided when the problems blow up because they didn’t nip the problems in the bud. Leaders have only themselves to blame when things go wrong.

Idea for Impact: Insightful leadership isn’t about the privilege of position but the privilege of information flowing upwards. Wise leaders dare to seek information they don’t want to hear. They know how to ask the right questions, look for revealing details, and set up a culture of openness that makes it easy for employees to tell the truth.

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Evolution, Not Revolution

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Innovation often transpires from synthesizing existing ideas in new ways, as the following case study on the iPod will illuminate.

In some sense, the iPod wasn’t a breakthrough innovation at all. It emerged from Steve Jobs’s “digital hub” approach to integrating iMac software for playing, editing, and managing photos, music, and movies. According to Walter Isaacson’s masterful biography of Steve Jobs (2011,) when Apple designers learned that Toshiba had newly prototyped a tiny 1.8-inch hard drive that could hold five gigabytes of storage (that’s about a thousand songs,) they conjured up a digital music player. Apple found that existing gadgets were “big and clunky or small and useless” with “unbelievably awful” user interfaces.

Sony’s Walkman had previously proven the market potential of portable audio players, having sold 200 million units in the two decades before Apple conceived the iPod. Napster had offered digital audio file distribution for over five years. Finger-driven touchscreens were pioneered in the 1960s, and Citibank rolled out touchscreen ATMs in the 1980s. (Apple didn’t offer touchscreens until 2007 with the iPhone.) Hence, the iPod’s innovation was in bringing all these capabilities together in a way that was easier to use and relevant to the consumer. Dartmouth’s strategy professor Ron Adner writes in The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss (2013.)

Apple was three years late [behind Creative, SanDisk, Sony, and Samsung, who had previously launched portable music players]. As we’ll see again in the case of the iPhone, Jobs tended to be late for everything because he wanted everything to be ready for him. Reflecting on catching technology waves in 2008, he said, “Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely, it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years.” Jobs’s discipline paid off.

Idea for Impact: Innovation often builds on existing technological competencies or as a synthesis of smaller innovations.

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Stop Stigmatizing All Cultural ‘Appropriation’

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From The Telegraph over the weekend: a Leeds-based “woke dance school,” the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, “drops ballet from auditions as it is ‘white’ and ‘elitist'” as it “reviews ballet art form as part of a diversity drive.”

Many other performance arts are rooted in other cultural traditions, so should we expect that white folk refrains from performing those because that would be cultural appropriation? Shun yoga, not wear cornrow, and drop taco nights?

Should everyone else avoid trains, cars, computers, and much else because they’re white European originations?

Should people not be allowed to wear clothing, cultivate hobbies, or pursue careers that aren’t reflective of the culture they were raised in?

Look, works of art incorporating racist clichés and caricatural images (such as in The Nutcracker) should be reassessed with a different consciousness. Appropriation is elastic and ill-defined. Not all cultural appropriation is harmful or exploitative, certainly not innocuous cultural appreciation—where elements of other cultures could be used to pay reverence and highlight the historic oppressions of those cultures. Appropriation is but offensive when what’s being appropriated brings problems to the people to who the cultural artifact belongs.

On embargoing ballet, let’s stop denunciations of white pride where it doesn’t exist before. Let’s not fuel resentment with our shrill accusations and ill-thought overreactions and contribute to the rise of white supremacy.

Idea for Impact: Raise cultural hackles only for a good cause, i.e., when there’s real offense intended. Don’t stigmatize valuable cultural interchange. Delimiting features of cultures is contradictory to our goal of creating a diverse, melting-pot society. E pluribus unum.

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The #1 Learning from Sun Tzu’s Art of War: Avoid Battle

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The #1 Learning from Sun Tzu's Art of War: Avoid Battle

The Art of War, Chinese strategist-philosopher Sun Tzu’s treatise on military strategy, is studied not so much for the advice it gives but for the state of mind it encourages. Developed in only six thousand Chinese characters and 25 pages of text, this way of thinking has held vast sway in such fields as military planning, strategic management, and negotiating. “Every battle is won or lost before it is fought.”

Something exceptional about the Art of War is the extent to which it’s devoted to methodically avoiding battle altogether. War isn’t something to be entered rashly or for petty reasons. “A sovereign should not start a war out of anger, nor should a general give battle out of rage. While anger can revert to happiness and rage to delight, a nation that has been destroyed cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life.”

'The Art of War' by Ralph D. Sawyer (ISBN 081331951X) Nor is war’s dominant purpose to cause physical destruction to an enemy. Instead, the pinnacle of military skill is to conquer one’s opponent strategically—by penetrating his alliances, rattling his plans, and coercing him diplomatically—without ever resorting to armed combat. “Why destroy,” Sun Tzu poses, “when you can win by stealth and cunning? To subdue the enemy’s forces without fighting is the summit of skill.”

Sun Tzu’s insistence that an enlightened strategist can attain victory without fighting echoes the foundational Taoist doctrine of “non-action (Wu-Wei.”) Armed conflict, therefore, is the last resort. War in itself represents a significant defeat. As a matter of course, Sun Tzu allocates a good chunk of the Art of War to the line of combat and attack. A savvy general must, however, take every accessible measure to gain victory swiftly, with minimal casualties and suffering for both sides. “The best approach is to attack the other side’s strategy; next best is to attack his alliances; next best is to attack his soldiers; the worst is to attack cities.”

Again and again, through implication, Sun-Tzu’s war document posits peace and restraint—the avoidance of battle—as the utmost victory. To fight at all, Sun-Tzu insists, is already a substantial loss, much worse than losing in war.

Idea for Impact: The Art of War is a worthy course on conflict management because avoiding confrontation requires more remarkable skill than winning on the battlefield.

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What if Something Can’t Be Measured

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During a September-2021 Airlines Confidential podcast (via Gary Leff’s View from the Wing,) former Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza told an exciting story about the airline industry’s systematic approach to reckon if potential new routes are economically feasible:

For the most part, airlines rely on data—required and reported by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics—on ticket purchases that show the number of people flying a given route and what price. For example, New Orleans, which is home to one of the largest Honduran populations in the U.S., has not had direct service to Honduras. Spirit Airlines will therefore analyze data from Sabre Market Intelligence for 2019 showing O&D (Origin and Destination) traffic between New Orleans and Honduras.

Sometimes, though, there’s no data on historical demand on a route, such as when Spirit Airlines was considering service to Armenia, Colombia. There hadn’t ever been a U.S. carrier flying into the airport, so there wasn’t available traffic data Spirit could access. Instead, Spirit looked at telephone data and migrant remittance statistics to get a sense of ties between the U.S. and the Latin American city. Spirit studied the frequency with which people were calling friends and relatives and how much money and how frequently money was being remitted as a reliable metric to determine if the new route was viable.

Spirit Airlines relies heavily on leisure bookings, especially visiting friends and relatives (VFR) traffic. In the absence of historical yield data for a route being considered, Spirit used fund transfers to Latin America as a stand-in variable.

A surrogate metric or proxy metric is exactly that—a substitute used in place of a variable of interest when that variable can’t be measured directly or is difficult to measure. For example, per-capita GDP is often a proxy for the standard of living, and the value of a house is a stand-in for the household’s wealth. Freight tonnage is often a proxy for economic activity.

Idea for Impact: Relying on intuition for sound decision-making isn’t sustainable, so folks need a systematic approach to making those decisions. Use meaningful proxy and surrogate metrics in your decisions to help overcome inherent biases with what can’t be measured.

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