Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Persuasion

Stop Dieting, Start Savoring

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Research suggests that excluding entire food groups, banning your favorite foods, forcing yourself to count calories, and measuring success by a number on a scale may actually make you want to eat more. Restrictive dieting can slow your metabolism down, making it even harder to lose weight over the long term.

You’re more likely to be successful at keeping weight off if you lose weight gradually and steadily. Be more mindful of what you eat and how you eat.

There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your favorite foods and indulging in your cravings for cookies, potato chips, or ice cream. All you have to do is cut back. Practice awareness by slowing down and thinking about what you’re eating and why you’re eating it.

Don’t gulp your food; you’ll overeat before you realize that you’re full. Instead, rest between bites. Take time to chew your food thoroughly. You really don’t need as much food as you think you do.

When you eat out, keep your food-mindfulness on the right track. Keep hunger under control beforehand. Don’t skip meals. Control portion size. Share your meal or take half of it home.

Idea for Impact: Eating should be a pleasurable activity. No food is inherently good or bad, and there’s no need to build an adversarial relationship with food.

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Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data

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Yesterday’s New York Times article highlights the complex tradeoff leaders must often make between indecision and acting on insufficient information:

The Omicron variant is pushing the CDC into issuing recommendations based on what once would have been considered insufficient evidence, amid growing public concern about how these guidelines affect the economy and education. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky has been commended for short-circuiting a laborious process and taking a pragmatic approach to manage a national emergency, saying she was right to move ahead even when the data was unclear and agency researchers remained unsure. The challenge now for Dr. Walensky is figuring out how to convey this message to the public: “The science is incomplete, and this is our best advice for now.”

The smartest people I know are the ones who understand that they don’t know—can’t know—everything. Yet, they’re ready to act on imperfect information, especially when being slow will be costly.

Idea for Impact: Being able to analyze information is insufficient if you can’t reach decisions.

Knowing you’ll never know everything shouldn’t prevent you from acting. The ability to reason and reconsider your position on something is an integral part of rational thought.

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Don’t Over-Measure and Under-Prioritize

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There’s a difference between what you can measure and what you must prioritize.

If you let the data drive the process, you’ll end up with an abundance of metrics that you don’t really know what to do with. Don’t build metrics based on what is easy to measure instead of measuring what matters.

While you might want to track many metrics, you need to prioritize a few of them—just the ones that matter most for your team. Start with strategic goals, and frame the data collection and analysis around those goals. Be clear about these goals in your internal communications.

Idea for Impact: The more you measure, the less prioritized you can be. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to measure everything. Focus on developing reliable metrics and models that consistently link the data to your team’s performance. Measure what matters.

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Why Amazon Banned PowerPoint

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One of the distinctive features of the Amazon management system is its use of the long-form to facilitate decision-making. Jeff Bezos has claimed that banning PowerPoint presentations—more specifically disallowing bullet points for sharing ideas—as Amazon’s “probably the smartest thing we ever did.”

Since June 2004, Bezos has forbidden bullet points and PowerPoint at a senior leadership level. Instead of presentations, teams are expected to iterate an approach to sharing information that involves writing memos of running copy, usually a “six-page, narratively-structured memo.” Meetings typically begin in silence as all participants sit and read the memo for up to half an hour before discussing the subject matter.

Ram Charan and Julia Yang’s The Amazon Management System (2019) reproduces the original email from Bezos explaining this dictum:

Well-structured, narrative text is what we’re after, rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in Word, that would be just as bad as PowerPoint.

The reason writing a good four-page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related.

PowerPoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.

Using memos may seem counterintuitive in an age when communication is increasingly visual. However, long-form has a way of forcing rigor to think through ideas properly, reconcile viewpoints pro and con, iron out logical inconsistencies, and consider second-order consequences.

Bezos’s approach is brilliant not just because sentences and paragraphs enable a certain clarity in thought and exchange of ideas. It also inhibits some of the usual shortcomings of brainstorming meetings, viz., interruptions, biases that initiate groupthink, and the tendency to reward rhetorical ability over substance. Forcing all meeting attendees to read the memo in real-time prevents them from pretending to have read it before a meeting and then bluffing their way through the meeting.

Idea for Impact: Think complex, speak simple, decide better.

Bullet points and “decks” are often the least effective way of sharing ideas. Having a narrative structure allows you to clarify your thinking and provide a logical, sequenced argument to support your ideas.

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Plan Your Week, Not Your Whole Life

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Don’t set unrealistic expectations for yourself. No matter how ambitious and eager you are, no matter how talented you are, there’s a limit to how much you can “produce” in a given time. Moreover, even if you get 24 hours to work, you’re restricted by the amount of energy you’ll have.

Much of long-term planning is guesswork or an expectation of the continuation of prevailing trends. The future can’t be predicted with absolute certainty. At the most, you can be somewhat confident about what might happen in the next few weeks or the upcoming months.

Idea for Impact: Plan Weekly, Review Daily

You can’t identify a precise point in the long-term future and then work yourself from here to there. You’ll be better off if you explore like the Italian navigator Columbus, and just head in a general westerly direction. In other words, have a long-term orientation but operate with medium-term plans. Restrict yourself to a few but significant quarterly goals.

Each week, develop weekly milestones that contribute to the quarterly goals. And each day, schedule 15 minutes to go over your progress and fractionate weekly objectives to daily working goals.

Life is unpredictable, and it is great to have some big things planned out, but not your whole life. A fine-grained approach to goals and planning can help you adapt quickly for survival and success.

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Selling is About Solving Customer Problems

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The best salespeople don’t sway customers through manipulative games and mesmerizing presentations. Instead, they figure out how they can enhance a customers’ lives.

If customers believe their problems are real and, more importantly, if they understand them personally, they’re more likely to be persuaded by an image of a satisfying solution.

No product or service is excellent in and of itself. It’s only worthy if it fulfills customers’ needs.

Invest more time in the problem representation stage. Develop a fuller appreciation of your customers’ problems. Make the idea of paying money for the solutions seem natural. Induce consumers to fit your products and services into their long-held routines.

Idea for Impact: Focus on solving customer problems. Don’t find customers for your product. Find products for your customers.

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Don’t Demonize Employees Who Raise Problems

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One of the traps of successful leadership is being surrounded with “yes men.” Your team could hesitate to challenge your decisions, no matter how bad or mistaken they may be.

Hearing what others rally think can give you a valuable perspective. Nevertheless, it’s not really in human nature to invite others to inform you how—and why—you’re wrong. Human nature is such that we all want to hear nice things about ourselves and be reassured that we’re on the right track.

“When in doubt, keep your mouth shut,” indeed

Employees are terrified to speak up owing to the need for self-preservation. The apparent risks of speaking up are very personal and immediate, especially in comparison to some potential benefits to your organization someday. Employees impulsively play it safe.

Even if your employees are more knowledgeable, they may think twice before giving you candid feedback, especially if you’ve demonstrated tendencies of being vindictive, penalizing—even reprimanding publicly or sacking—anybody with a dissenting view.

Disciplining employees who raise problems only exacerbates the problematical frame of mind around a successful leader. It promotes the toxic culture of unquestioned power. As the American general and diplomat Colin Powell reminded in a famous speech at Sears headquarters, “The day your people stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either is a failure of leadership.”

Idea for Impact: Cultivate a culture in which psychological safety thrives.

Create a work environment where your employees aren’t afraid to speak up and express their concerns. People will stick their neck out only if they sense a low psychological threat level.

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How to Mediate in a Dispute

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In mediation, the parties in disagreement work out a mutually acceptable solution with the help of a neutral, third party mediator.

If you’ve been called to serve as a go-between in a dispute, here’s what you can do to help promote mutual understanding and resolution:

  1. Set ground rules. Agree on how much time you’ll give to the mediation meeting. Keep the meeting close-ended. If there’re more than two parties, each with different views of a dispute, engage more than one mediator.
  2. Have each party prepare a brief summary of their positions before the mediation and send them to you, and, ideally, to each other. The brief can explain positions, rationale, and motivation. The brief can also contain each party’s summary understanding of the opposing party’s arguments and counterarguments.
  3. Insist that the each party have a clear understanding of their underlying intentions. What’s their best understanding of the basic objectives? What do they want to achieve? What’s rigid? What’s flexible? What are they willing to bargain?
  4. At the start of the mediation meeting, remind each party that mediation is a voluntary process. Your role is to help the parties reach an agreement, not to reach an agreement for them. Say, “Nothing lasting will happen unless each of you participates in the solution. Any agreement you’re able to reach must be your own.”
  5. Announce that your intention is to foster the interaction by helping each party understand one another’s perspectives and expectations. Encourage them to consider a wide range of solutions and to shun false dilemmas (“either-or” approach.) Push them to understand the other party’s underlying interests, not just their stated positions.
  6. Outline how they’ll work together during the process. Get them to agree that they’ll deal with matters in a non-confrontational way and be open-minded about what the other wants.
  7. Let each party make a preliminary presentation without interruption from the other parties. Then, encourage each party to respond directly to the other’s opening statements.
  8. If the communications break down completely, restart the mediation process by separating the parties and talking to each party separately. Go between the two rooms to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each position and to exchange offers. Continue the interchange until you’ve helped define an agreeable compromise.
  9. When you’re talking to each party separately during a break down in the discussions, help each party hear the views of the other and identify areas of common ground for a resolution. After independent caucuses, if possible, bring the parties back together to negotiate directly.
  10. Don’t stop each party from venting their frustrations, but try to keep them under control. If there’s rambling, gently pull the conversation back. Refocus on what needs to be achieved. Encourage them to remain open to persuasion.
  11. Even with a well thought-out approach, some disagreements turn ugly. Re-focus the dialogue on the future. Remind the parties that they can’t fight over something that’s already happened, but they can set a course for going forward.
  12. If the parties come to a resolution, draft the terms of a binding agreement and have both parties review it and sign it. Make sure the parties own the resolution, because they’re the ones who’ll live with the consequences.
  13. If the parties don’t reach an agreement, help them decide whether it’d be helpful to meet again later, use a different mediator, or try other ways to resolve the issues.

These books are most helpful in negotiations, either when you’re the mediator or one of the parties in conflict: Roger Fisher et al’s Getting to Yes (1991, 2011; my summary) and Kerry Patterson et al’s Crucial Conversations (2011.)

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Buy Yourself Time

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The secret of “thinking on the spot” is to be prepared. Occasionally, though, when you’re put on the spot, the unanticipated questions and requests for your time and money can leave you feeling tongue-tied and wanting to head for the door.

To put your best response forward and prevent getting forced into some commitment that you might regret later, see if you can buy yourself some time.

  • When someone says something that you don’t agree with, and you can’t speak up at that moment, you can declare that you need to get educated on the subject before chatting about it further. Bonus: Conversations are often easier when you think through the nuances and get prepared to assert your positions.
  • When someone asks you to do something that you aren’t sure you want to do, buy yourself time by saying you must check on something or consult somebody before making a commitment. Bonus: Taking time before you say no can soften the news of your rejection.

Buy yourself more time and speak up later on your own terms. Even if you end up disagreeing with your interlocutor or declining her request, she’ll feel appreciated knowing you’ve given her opinion or request some thought.

Idea for Impact: Buying time—and sometimes stalling—is your prerogative. It shows consideration for others—and for yourself. It’s is a way of respecting your own wants and needs.

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Employee Engagement: Show Them How They Make a Difference

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The sure-fire way to assist employees find meaning and fulfillment at work is to get them to have even a small interaction with people who directly benefit from the work they’re doing.

One research showed that radiologists developed a stronger sense of the significance of their work if a photo of the patient were attached to an X-ray. “It enhanced their effort and accuracy, yielding 12% increases in the length of their reports and 46% improvement in diagnostic findings.” Radiologists typically don’t interact with patients directly—they work in the background providing interpretation services to other doctors.

Idea for Impact: People are inspired less by what they do and more by WHY

How people see themselves and their meaning and purpose in this world may be the most significant incentive of all.

Empower your employees, especially those that aren’t on the frontlines, with direct reminders of task significance. Invite next-down-the-line customers (virtually or in-person) to share meaningful insights, give appreciation, and share feedback. Promote regular dialogue with customers to help stay relevant and become responsive to customer issues as they arise.

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