Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Persuasion

Don’t Manage with Fear

By Leave a Comment

Stop Leading Through Fear---Gain Commitment, Not Compliance The ability to rouse fear has forever been an essential tool of management. Fear can be an effective mobilization tool in the short term. But fear breeds complicity, not commitment.

Instead of fear-based tactics, try soft power. Build trust and gain influence using these methods.

  1. Develop an inspiring vision. Work hard to follow through on implementing that vision and celebrate even little accomplishments along the way.
  2. Communicate expectations. Ask, “How can I help you do your job better?” Follow up. No need to keep everything too close to the vest. You needn’t tell everything you know, but what you say and do has to be true.
  3. Solve problems quickly. Push for results. Set aside some time for review and create options or actions that are apt for your team’s situation. Be tough where you must be, kind where you can be.

Idea for Impact: Don’t take the fear approach with employees. With motivation, fear works—up to a point. Understand how your people view your leadership style and ensure your behavior doesn’t cross the line between pushing them hard and pushing them away.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Difference between Directive and Non-Directive Coaching
  2. Why Your Employees Don’t Trust You—and What to Do About it
  3. Listen and Involve
  4. To Micromanage or Not?
  5. Avoid Control Talk

Nuts! The Story of Southwest Airlines’ Maverick Culture // Book Summary

By Leave a Comment

Kevin & Jackie Freiberg’s Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success (1996) is a popular tome about the history and culture of Southwest Airlines and the fun-loving antics of its colorful co-founder and CEO Herb Kelleher (see my tribute.)

'Nuts- Southwest Airlines' by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg (ISBN 0767901843) Despite its Pollyannaish tone and repetitive narratives, Nuts| is a very enjoyable cheerleaders’ account of how an underdog overcame roadblocks and thrived in a competitive industry.

Nuts| focuses on the people-oriented culture that Herb and his secretary Colleen Barrett established based on Herb’s well-known dictum, “The business of business is not business. The business of business is people.” To Herb, Southwest was a cause—never just a company. The Freibergs write,

If there is an overarching reason for Southwest Airlines’ success, it is that the company has spent far more time since 1971 focused on loving people than on the development of new management techniques. The tragedy of our time is that we’ve got it backwards. We’ve learned to love techniques and use people. This is one of the reasons more and more people feel alienated, empty, and dehumanized at work. Many organizations today would be surprised at how much more people would be willing to give of themselves if only they felt loved.

Southwest Airlines---Employee Culture

Nuts| is dreadfully out-of-date. Southwest and the airline industry have changed a lot since the mid-90s. Southwest even stopped handing out peanuts to protect passengers from peanut-related allergies.

The miracle at Southwest Airlines could keep on only so long. As long as Herb was the CEO, employees would go the extra mile for the sake of Herb. Until his retirement in 2001, Herb preserved Southwest’s unique cost structure and work rules. Kelleher’s successor, Jim Parker, presided over mounting labor tensions and quit after just three years. CFO Gary Kelly replaced Parker in 2004. Bob Jordan became CEO in 2022.

The going has not been smooth for Kelly. Southwest has become more like the other carriers regarding employee relationships and cost structure. The rehabilitated legacy airlines and a new breed of ultralow cost carriers have chipped away gradually at many of Southwest’s apparent competitive advantages. Yes, customers still rave about Southwest’s friendly staff, unpretentious service, and flexibility in travel planning. However, Southwest hardly ever has the lowest fares on most routes. In fact, Southwest’s average fares have outpaced the industry by 12% since 2009.

Miracle of Southwest Airlines: Employee Culture

Recommendation: Speed-read Nuts! … it’s full of original insights, upbeat stories, and concrete suggestions for principle-centered leadership and how to inspire people to achieve incredible results. Here are the key takeaway lessons:

  • Even a little respect goes a long way. Give employees responsibility and entrust them to take that responsibility.
  • Herb Kelleher on Southwest Airlines Tail---Employee Culture Set the ground rules—and let employees be creative. “Culture is one of the most precious things a company has, so you must work harder at it than at anything else.”
  • Give your employees some skin in the game, and they’ll go the distance. Southwest claims, “We have credibility because we tell people what we’re going to do and then we do it.”
  • Empower workers to make decisions at the customer level. Employees who feel they have leeway in their jobs to make the “right decision” depending on circumstances are happier, more confident, and more productive. They’ll even give extra—because they believe their work has special meaning and is not just a job.
  • Make sure people feel they can be themselves and have opportunities to express individuality.
  • See yourself as a motivator and a positive force. When things go wrong, accentuate the positive and focus on a path to a solution. It’s an approach that employees will admire and want to emulate.
  • Build a sense of community. Foster the feeling of a “family” in which employees can count on each other professionally and personally.
  • Recognize that employees have lives outside of work. Celebrate every milestone to establish and strengthen relationships. The walls of Southwest’s headquarters are covered with pictures and commemorative plaques of picnics, community service awards, customers’ commendation letters, service employee milestones, and tributes to important cultural events.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  2. Why Amazon Banned PowerPoint
  3. Your Product May Be Excellent, But Is There A Market For It?
  4. How Starbucks Brewed Success // Book Summary of Howard Schultz’s ‘Pour Your Heart Into It’
  5. The Business of Business is People and Other Leadership Lessons from Southwest Airlines’s Herb Kelleher

Deliver The Punchline First

By Leave a Comment

Deliver The Punchline First = Get to the Point

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page set about to secure early funding for Google, they initiated a presentation at Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s premier venture capital firms, with the logline “Google organizes the world’s information and makes it universally accessible.”

Most busy executives don’t want to sit through a 50-slide presentation. They don’t have the patience to wait for the punchline.

Begin with the conclusion and then go through the rest of your slide deck: your proposals, theses, assumptions, your line of thinking, and the arguments, pro and con.

Meaning, Then Details

Cognitive psychologists have argued that the brain pays more attention to the core of an idea than to its details.

According to the University of Washington molecular biologist John Medina, the human brain craves meaning before details. In Brain Rules (2014,) Medina notes, “Normally, if we don’t know the gist–the meaning–of information, we are unlikely to pay attention to its details. The brain selects meaning-laden information for further processing and leaves the rest alone.”

When listeners comprehend the overarching idea of a pitch, they’ll find it easier to synthesize and digest the information.

Begin Your Next Executive Presentation with the Final Summary Slide First

Most executives have limited willpower and suffer “decision fatigue.” Don’t overload them with less-important details before asking them to decide in your favor. Your “executive summary” slide may be the only one that will get full attention. So make it perfect!

  • Practice, practice, practice. Few people, if any, have the rhetorical ability to make a persuasive 15-second speech about their significant ideas. The best speakers are the best because they rehearse and get feedback.
  • Less is more. After getting prized facetime with executives, many talented young professionals produce large slide decks to dazzle the executives with their intelligence and ingenuity. Don’t.
  • Simplify your “executive summary” message. Perceptive executives tend to be somewhat skeptical of things that ought to be simple but have become too complicated.
  • Meaning, then detail. The brain processes meaning before detail, and the brain likes hierarchy. Start with the general idea and then present information in a structured, hierarchical approach. Make sure that each detail you communicate traces back to the core concept of your presentation.

Idea for Impact: Get to the Point

Tell busy people what they need to know upfront. Communicate like a newsperson: What’s the number one thing your audience needs to know? Say that first. Then build out from there, keeping the most essential particulars up top.

There’s another smart—if devious—benefit of putting the cart before the horse: delivering your “punchline” first can hook your audience with a compelling proposal first, and then cash in on the confirmation bias to sway them to your case.

Spy thriller novelist Graeme Shimmin offers this excellent guide to writing a killer punchline, logline, or elevator speech.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How You Make a Memorable Elevator Speech
  2. Serve the ‘Lazy Grapefruit’
  3. Persuade Others to See Things Your Way: Use Aristotle’s Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Timing
  4. Facts Alone Can’t Sell: Lessons from the Intel Pentium Integer Bug Disaster
  5. What Happens When You Talk About Too Many Goals

What Most People Get Wrong About Focus

By Leave a Comment

'Choose Wonder Over Worry' by Amber Rae (ISBN 0385491743) In Choose Wonder Over Worry (2018) self-help author Amber Rae recalls novelist Elizabeth Gilbert’s interaction with a wise older lady who was helping Gilbert with her struggles as a writer:

Lady: “What are you willing to give up in order to have the life you keep saying you want?”

Gilbert: “You’re right—I need to start saying no to things I don’t want to do.”

Lady: “No, it’s much harder than that. You need to learn to start saying no to things you _do_ want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life, and you don’t have time and energy for everything.”

This anecdote is such a powerful illustration of how saying ‘no’ is so much easier when you’re clear about your priorities.

Saying 'no' is so much easier when you're clear about your priorities That’s what focus really is—saying ‘no’ to things you’d like to do so that you can free up your time to focus on the pursuits that truly matter—even tasks you have to do, even if they don’t energize and excite you.

Idea for Impact: Setting boundaries isn’t always easy, but it’s essential to establish an overall sense of well-being. Every ‘no’ is a ‘yes’ to something else.

  • Don’t find any excuse to say ‘yes’ to what shouldn’t be done.
  • Don’t find any reason to say ‘no’ to what should be done.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Say “Yes” When You Really Want to Say “No”
  2. Here’s a Tactic to Sell Change: As a Natural Progression
  3. This Manager’s Change Initiatives Lacked Ethos, Pathos, Logos: Case Study on Aristotle’s Persuasion Framework
  4. Everything in Life Has an Opportunity Cost
  5. How to Make Others Feel They Owe You One: Reciprocity and Social Influence

Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution

By Leave a Comment

Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution Entrepreneurs, don’t get so excited talking about your solution that you forget to emphasize how it solves a problem at all.

Which problem are you solving for the user? What pain-point are you alleviating? Why is your solution relevant to your customers? How will it make their life easier, faster, and cheaper?

After all, every great company starts by solving a painful problem. Focus more on that problem when you’re selling. Not only will this persuade your investors and customers, but it also rallies your team around a shared understanding of the problem and prepares you to ask for the level of resources it should receive.

Idea for Impact: Sell the problem first, not your idea. Often, jumping too quickly to a solution makes you lose sight of the nuances of the problem.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The #1 Clue to Disruptive Business Opportunity
  2. Innovation’s Valley of Death
  3. Make ‘Em Thirsty; or, Master of the Art of the Pitch
  4. Constraints Inspire Creativity: How IKEA Started the “Flatpack Revolution”
  5. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points

A Hack to Resist Temptation: The 15-Minute Rule

By Leave a Comment

A Hack to Resist Temptation: Self-Control is Challenging When you’re faced with a temptation, e.g., when you have a sugar craving, try this 15-Minute Rule: Commit to not giving in for 15 minutes. Take yourself away from the stimulus that led to the temptation.

With any luck, the enticement will wear off. At least it’ll become more manageable to control. If at all possible, wait another 15 minutes.

Increasing your awareness of your temptations and refusing to submit to them impulsively is the key to changing behavior.

Idea for Impact: Self-control in the face of urges and cravings is tricky. Even a simple distraction can break the trance.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Are You So Afraid Of? // Summary of Susan Jeffers’s ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’
  2. How to Turn Your Procrastination Time into Productive Time
  3. Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating
  4. The Reason Why Weight Watchers Works whereas ‘DIY Dieting’ Fails
  5. Seek Discipline, Not Motivation: Focus on the WHY

Cancel Culture has a Condescension Problem

By 1 Comment

Cancel Culture has a Condescension Problem Cancel culture and wokism have allowed for overly politicized worldviews where people both on the left and on the right are quick to take offence. There is, at present, a strong instinct to censure, anathematize, ostracize, and insist upon punishment for people or perspectives that are deemed unacceptable. Acceptable expression is being forced into ever-smaller confines.

It’s not enough for each faction to point to the hypocrisy of the other. It’s also crucial for each to defend theirs—and the others’—right to say disagreeable and objectionable statements and subject them to empirical and logical assessment.

While we shouldn’t organize our worlds around the sensibilities of those who’re easily distressed, every person should have the right to decide his beliefs for himself, speak freely, and defend his views during civilized discourse. Intellectual inquiry can’t thrive if people can’t express themselves in good faith.

Idea for Impact: Cancel culture is to be kept within bounds if we are to preserve a free society. If we fail to stand up for the right to speech that we dislike, why retain the right for the speech we do like?

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Have a Decent Discussion with Those You Love but Disagree With
  2. Stop Stigmatizing All Cultural ‘Appropriation’
  3. Couldn’t We Use a Little More Civility and Respect in Our Conversations?
  4. The Problem of Living Inside Echo Chambers
  5. Charlie Munger’s Iron Prescription

How to Reliably Tell If Someone is Lying

By Leave a Comment

How to Reliably Tell If Someone is Lying There isn’t one reliable behavioral cue that consistently reveals that a person isn’t telling you the truth, but the most expected sign of dishonesty is evasiveness.

Does the other person evade answering direct questions or declare, “I don’t know,” “that’s about it,” or “I don’t remember doing that?”

Instead of making direct denials, do they seem to have been caught off guard and take more time to think up a believable response?

Idea for Impact: To detect a lie, listen and pay attention. If lying is nothing more than communicating false information, dwell on what’s being said. Does it make sense? Does it align with other facts you’ve mustered or anecdotes you’ve heard? Do the answers to your probing questions stand up to scrutiny? Does the story begin to shift?

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Avoid Control Talk
  2. Think of a Customer’s Complaint as a Gift
  3. Flattery Will Get You Nowhere
  4. Stop Trying to Fix Things, Just Listen!
  5. How to Deal with Upset Customers

The Rule of Three

By Leave a Comment

Rule of Three---Persuasive Technique A familiar technique in rhetoric is to group in threes because people can hold only a few items in short-term “working” memory.

  • The Olympic motto: Faster, Higher, Stronger
  • Rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness
  • Fire safety technique taught to children: Stop, Drop and Roll (should their clothes catch fire)

Three-part lists are particularly appealing because they suggest unity and wholeness. Lists comprising only two items seem inadequate. Lists of four or more are unlikely to be recalled entirely.

Idea for Impact: Follow the rule of three to create simple, concrete, and memorable messaging in persuasion—be it in arguing, storytelling, or advertising.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. What Happens When You Talk About Too Many Goals
  2. Serve the ‘Lazy Grapefruit’
  3. How to … Prepare to Be Interviewed by The Media
  4. This Manager’s Change Initiatives Lacked Ethos, Pathos, Logos: Case Study on Aristotle’s Persuasion Framework
  5. Here’s a Tactic to Sell Change: As a Natural Progression

No, Reason Doesn’t Guide Your Politics

By Leave a Comment

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor,” observes the American political scientist Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012,) a captivating voyage of discovery of the social psychology of politics and ethics. Haidt makes a compelling case for why reason and logic aren’t what people use to contend with problems and steer through to the right answers.

Most people’s politics tend to be ill-informed. People don’t engage in deep causal thinking about the consequences of their favored political positions. Information and analyses tend to provoke—not calm—their preconceived judgments.

No, Reason Doesn't Guide Your Politics

Reason is Motivationally Inert

As the Scottish philosopher David Hume noted in his masterful Treatise on Human Nature (1739,) “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

Reason becomes subordinate to the passions that have come to life in people’s tribal allegiances and their confirmation bias. People are prone to making decisions derived from instinctive, emotional, and fast thinking of psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1,” not the slow, logical deliberations of “System 2.”

Most people feel good about sticking to their guns, even if they are wrong. They tend to read newspapers, periodicals, blogs, and social media feeds to settle ever more comfortably into their preexisting beliefs. They use their tribes’ “notice boards” not to reassess their established opinions but to have them validated, comforted, legitimized, and intensified.

On the rare occasion that they do converse with someone or read something they may disagree with, they don’t revaluate their judgments, let alone change their minds. They merely use reason as a weapon to discredit contrasting evidence, spot others’ flaws, and convince them that they are wrong. Consequently, reason doesn’t bind but drives differing people apart.

Idea for Impact: The Opinions You are Blind to Could Be Your Own

Be conscious of the internal conflicts brought on by your passions. Seek and assess the counterevidence. Incorporate these counterarguments and strengthen your positions.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. The Data Never “Says”
  2. The Problem of Living Inside Echo Chambers
  3. Presenting Facts Can Sometimes Backfire
  4. Moderate Politics is the Most Sensible Way Forward
  5. Rapoport’s Rules to Criticize Someone Constructively