Questioning

Be Open to Being Wrong

March 22, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell, one of history’s brightest minds, was once asked whether he’d be prepared to die for his beliefs. He replied, “Of course not. After all, I may be wrong.”

Feeling that you’re making more sense than others shouldn’t be the gauge for being accurate about your convictions. Especially when you’re good at arguing, you can take your ideas and judgments in various directions that will mislead you in ways that are more convincing to you than what the other side thinks. Blind spots can spawn certainty quickly.

Idea for Impact: Hold yourself to a higher standard. Turn doubt into a deliberate attitude. Allow your mind to wander in unexpected directions. Be open to other perspectives. Be open to being wrong.

And the Theranos Board Walks Away Scot-Free

November 19, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes has finally been sentenced to over 11 years in prison. Too bad our corporate law is too narrow to attribute some criminal liability to the company’s board of directors. Such luminaries as former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, Marine Corps General James Mattis, and former Secretary of Defense William Perry, once famously portrayed as “the single most accomplished board in U.S. corporate history,” should be partly culpable for Holmes’s malfeasance.

When Holmes explained away her underlying technology as “a chemistry performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel,” all the board had to do was demand, “Show me.” Determining how a device or service works—exists even—as purported, is the essential obligation of a board member. A truly engaged overseer may have preserved $945 million in investors’ capital and kept a naïve, immoral, and feckless entrepreneur from bullying the press, intimidating her employees, and gambling with the patients’ lives. (Read WSJ reporter John Carreyrou’s excellent chronicle, Bad Blood (2018; my summary.))

The board individually and collectively failed in their responsibilities as trustees of investors’ interests. Undoubtedly drafted as trophy directors to reinforce the company’s standing such as it was, not for any knowledge of blood testing, they now walk away with nothing more than a blot on their illustrated careers.

When Exaggerations Cross the Line

January 22, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Many myths and urban legends—even politicians’ infuriating rhetoric—aren’t wholly untrue. Rather, they’re exaggerations of claims rooted in a kernel of truth.

Yes, many of us don’t achieve our full intellectual potential. However, that doesn’t suggest that most people use only 10% of our brainpower.

Sure, men and women tend to differ somewhat in their communication styles. However, pop psychologists such as John Gray have taken this gender difference stereotype to an extreme, declaring “men are from Mars” and “women are from Venus.”

Idea for Impact: Exaggeration is part of human nature. Take care to not cross the line from harmless puffery to reckless overstatements.

Invite Employees to Contribute Their Wildest Ideas

December 13, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When Hewlett-Packard (HP) Norway appointed Anita Krohn Traaseth managing director in 2012, she implemented a “speed date the boss” program. She invited every employee from every organization level for an informal, five-minute conversation based on three themes. She encouraged people to bring their big ideas on innovating individually and collectively.

Who are you, and what do you do at HP?

Where do you think we should change, and what should we keep focusing on?

What do you want to contribute beyond fulfilling your job responsibilities? Or, do you have a talent or skill you don’t get to use now in your position?

Everyone’s an Innovator: Ramp up creativity with your frontline employees

Krohn Traaseth’s initiative defined the roadmap for her tenure. It pushed HP to become one of Norway’s top workplaces within three years. HP Norway improved every major organizational performance measure, such as staff turnover, customer satisfaction, top-line growth, and bottom-line performance.

Not only that, her discussions uncovered that there were 30 skilled musicians on her payroll. HP Norway formed a band, which played live to 1,800 company executives in Barcelona in 2013, gaining better visibility to her Norwegian outpost.

Following Krohn Traaseth’s success, other HP divisions and employers have now introduced the concept of ‘Speed Date the Boss’ initiatives in other countries.

Idea for Impact: Value the frontline people in your organization as talented assets, not cheap cogs.

Krohn Traaseth’s program was so successful because, as the top boss, she showed that she was willing to listen. She also openly modeled her willingness to listen to her management teams and foster their engagement.

When employees see the boss willing to receive honest feedback and no one’s head rolls, they’re more likely to speak up.
Soliciting ideas directly from employees individually, rather than holding brainstorms, takes the edge off group dynamics. Group settings aren’t where all employees feel free to share their best–and bold—ideas.
Rank-and-file employees can be a great source of innovation if only their leaders listen to them. Organizational innovation doesn’t have to trickle top-down or emanate from the R&D team. The best way to produce great ideas is to start by generating many ideas. Encourage everyone on your team to think, contribute, and participate.

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PS: Anita Krohn Traaseth is now the CEO of Innovation Norway, a state-sponsored project focused on promoting innovation and economic development. She’s the author of Good Enough for the Bastards (2014,) a Norwegian version of Sheryl Sandberg‘s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013.)

Cf: See my guide on preparing an action plan at a new job by collecting the expectations of all the people with whom your new role interacts.

Let’s Hope She Gets Thrown in the Pokey

November 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

The Elizabeth Holmes-Theranos criminal trial hasn’t been without its share of theatrics.

Yes, Holmes’s massive fraud is obvious. She entranced (read WSJ reporter John Carreyrou’s excellent chronicle, Bad Blood (2018; my summary)) journalists, investors, politicians, and business partners into believing her fantasy science. She may even be responsible for negligent homicide if people died because of her company’s fake test results.

Then again, these sorts of cases generally hang on subtle distinctions between hyperbole and outright dishonesty and whether such deceit was deliberate.

Holmes’s lawyers will argue that she was merely an ambitious entrepreneur who failed to realize her vision but wasn’t a fraudster. Her lawyers will make a case that she is not to be blamed because people took her puffery and exaggeration as factually accurate. At what point do her wishfulness and enthusiasm go from optimism to intentional fraud? That’ll be the critical question.

At any rate, the Theranos verdict is unlikely to deter others from the swagger, self-assurance, hustle, and the “fake it till you make it” ethos that is so endemic to start-up culture. Investors will never cease looking at people and ideas rather than the viability of their work.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be so swayed by story-telling that has a way of making people less objectively observant. Assemble the facts, and ask yourself what truth the facts bear out. Never let yourself be sidetracked by what you wish to believe.

You Can’t Believe Those Scientific Studies You Read About in the Papers

November 11, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Look at the filler articles in the well-being section of your preferred newspaper, and you’ll often luck into health advice with nuance-free mentions of all sorts of scientific studies.

One week, drinking coffee is good for you. Next week it’s harmful. Ditto video games. Swearing makes you look intelligent, but hold your flipping horses … the next day, swearing makes you seem verbally challenged to explain your annoyances respectfully.

Gutter press revelations isn’t only less-than-scientific, but it actually defeats the objectives of science.

In June 2014, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published an allegedly peer-reviewed paper titled “Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes.” The study deduced that hurricanes with feminine names generate more casualties supposedly because tacit sexism makes communities take the storms with a feminine name less seriously. The work was discredited as soon as its methods were dissected. Nevertheless, the dubious paper had made its way into media channels across the country because of the believability implied by the influential National Academy of Sciences.

Positive results that make a sensational headline tend to get published readily—especially if they speak to the audiences’ worldviews. In truth, many of these studies are low-quality studies where the variables are latent, and the effects aren’t directly observable and quantifiable, especially in the social sciences. Sadly, with the push to produce ever more papers in academia, peer review doesn’t necessarily corroborate the quality of research nearly so much as it enforces a discipline’s norms.

Idea for Impact: Let’s be skeptical readers. Let’s be better readers.

Let’s subject every claim to the common-sense test: is the claim possible, plausible, probable, and likely? Everything possible isn’t plausible, everything plausible isn’t probable, and everything probable isn’t likely.

Being skeptical does not mean doubting the validity of everything, nor does it mean being cynical. Instead, to be skeptical is to judge the validity of a claim based on objective evidence and understand the assertions’ nuances. Yes, even extraordinary claims can be valid, but the more extraordinary a claim, the more remarkable the evidence to be mobilized.

While we’re on the subject, have you heard about research that found that you could make unsuspecting people believe in anything by merely asserting that it’s been “shown by research?” Now then, the former’s the only research worth believing. Very much so, yes, even without evidence!

Decision-Making Isn’t Black and White

October 30, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most decisions aren’t “good” or “bad;” most fall somewhere in the middle.

Coming to terms with this reality is a big part of allowing yourself to trust your decisions, especially when dealing with uncertainty. Besides, more thinking can’t always be better thinking.

Let go of decisions you made in the past that you weren’t entirely satisfied with. Don’t let them haunt you in the present. Don’t let them second-guess yourself after a decision has been made.

Idea for Impact: When decisions don’t work out as expected, give yourself a break. Not all bad outcomes result from bad decisions. There are positive and negative implications to everything. And that’s OK.

The Solution to a Problem Often Depends on How You State It

August 25, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consider a family with four drivers and one car. Being a one-car family isn’t always convenient or even pleasant. Creative solutions can’t emerge if the family asks, “How could we make the car available to everybody who needs it when they need it?” If, instead, they ask, “How can we each meet our needs without using the car?” Mom can join a carpool to work. Dad can combine his trips when he runs errands once a week. The kids can ride their bikes whenever the weather favors. If the family needs to be in two places at the same time, somebody can Uber. Coordinating can be annoying, but with a bit of flexibility and communication, getting by with one car can easily be pulled off.

Defining a problem narrowly (“How can we create a better mousetrap?”) will only get you restricted answers. When you define the issue more broadly (“How can we get rid of mice?,”) you open up a whole range of possibilities.

Idea for Impact: Revisit and redefine the problem if you can’t get through the tensions inherent in conflicting expectations. The fresh perspective can open your mind to alternative interpretations.

A Train Journey Through Philosophy: Summary of Eric Weiner’s ‘Socrates Express’

June 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Journalist and author Eric Weiner’s The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers (2020) is a travelogue, memoir, and self-help book all rolled into one. It’s a distillation of the teachings of 14 great philosophers.

The “Express” isn’t just part of a catchy title. Each chapter starts with a wisdom-seeking train journey that Weiner took to locations where past great philosophers lived, worked, and thought (or are studied.) This introductory vignette orients Weiner’s study of these philosophers’ concepts: how to wonder like Socrates, see like Thoreau, listen like Schopenhauer, have no regrets like Nietzsche, fight like Gandhi, grow old like Beauvoir, cope with hardship like Epictetus, and so on.

The insights resonate with a fresh vibrancy for our problems today. Gandhi (on “how to fight”) believed that individuals who resorted to violence did so from a failure of imagination. Gandhi’s most significant fight was the fight to change the way we fight. He taught that a perpetrator of violence, “unwilling to do the hard work of problem-solving, he throws a punch or reaches for a gun.”

Weiner packs just enough background details on the philosophers’ life stories and how their intellectual traditions are rooted in the context of their times. Stoicism, for example, evolved when ancient Greece’s city-states were facing sociopolitical uncertainty.

The slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus distilled Stoicism to its essence with the dictum, “Some things are up to us, and some are not up to us.” Weiner writes, “Most of what happens in our life is not up to us, except our internal reactions to those events. The Stoics have a word for anything that lies beyond our control: “indifferents.” … Their presence doesn’t add one iota to our character or our happiness. They are neither good nor bad. The Stoic, therefore, is “indifferent” to them.”

Indifference, thus, is an empowering philosophy. With outward events, we are less powerful than we think, but with our reactions, we’re much more powerful.

There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, calmly extinguishes a match between his thumb and forefinger.

A fellow officer tries it himself, and squeals in pain. “Ouch, it damn well hurts,” he says.

“Certainly it hurts,” replies Lawrence.

“Well, what’s the trick, then?”

“The trick,” says Lawrence, “is not minding that it hurts.”

Lawrence’s response was Stoic. Sure, he felt the pain, yet it remained a raw sensory sensation, a reflex. It never metastasized into a full-blown emotion. Lawrence didn’t mind the pain, in the literal sense of the word: he didn’t allow his mind to experience, and amplify, what his body had felt.

Socrates Express won’t be the most exhaustive philosophy book we can access. Moreover, as we read through, it’s helpful to have some prior appreciation for what we’re reading. For philosophers we’ve studied best, Weiner’s prose will reiterate the key findings. (That was Gandhi, Epictetus, Thoreau, Confucius, and Aurelius, for me.) The other chapters will seem comparatively less insightful.

Ultimately, Weiner reminds what we should be really looking for isn’t knowledge but wisdom. The difference, he says, is that, while information is a jumble of facts and knowledge is a more organized clutter of facts, wisdom is something else altogether. Wisdom “untangles the facts, makes sense of them and crucially, suggests how best to use them.” Put succinctly, “knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.”

Weiner’s prose meanders, it ventures down sidetracks, it stops frequently, it staggers, and it distracts. And it never arrives anywhere. And that’s the whole point. “The Socrates Express” begins in wonder—as does philosophy. The journey never ends—the quest for wisdom is ongoing. By the end, if, at Weiner’s prompting, philosophic thought has done its best, the curiosity of the journey has evoked remains.

Recommendation: Read Eric Weiner’s Socrates Express. It’s an engaging reminder that many philosophical systems are not just academic abstractions whose real meaning is lost in the minutiae.

Weiner’s prose invites us to start “questioning not only what we know but who we are, in hopes of eliciting a radical shift in perspective.” Socrates Express is a reminder that philosophy ultimately isn’t a cure-all for our current or future woes. Instead, philosophy is worthwhile because it builds immunity against negligent judgments and unentitled certitude. And it’s as relevant today as it’s ever been.

The Unlikely Barrier to True Diversity

May 31, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

As much as companies like to tout diversity, the definitive rule of getting ahead at work is to be likable—to follow the unwritten set of norms and adhere to your company’s culture. That is, you must fit and mix well with the rest of the “gang.”

As I’ve written before, likeability is a significant predictor of success. Well-liked people, especially those who work well with others, will advance. Those who aren’t very likable don’t usually get as far. If your company is conservative, you should be conservative. If the leadership is aggressive, snappy, and rule-bending, be the same. It’s better to be “one of them” to progress your career and endear yourself to your colleagues and higher-ups.

Every grouping of people, whatever the institution, community, or population, has an unwritten set of norms. It’s true for nations, in social groups, sports teams, and businesses. Wherever people form a group, they organically form rules. They institutionalize ways of doing things, traditions, and unquestioned assumptions. Such norms give the group a sense of identity. It’s natural. It’s tribe mentality. We, humans, are social creatures, and this is how we foster a sense of belonging.

Affinity Bias

Per affinity bias, human nature is such that people instinctively associate other people with labels, relate, and play favorites. Groups establish the norms and embrace and propagate them. The resulting categorization not only resists differences but also initiates prejudice and favoritism.

In professional settings, most workplaces tend to hire similar people and encourage them to think and work in the same way. I’ve previously written,

Even if nearly all corporate mission statements extol the virtues of “valuing differences,” managers stifle individuality down in the trenches. They are less willing to be receptive to different viewpoints. They seek to mold their employees to conform to the existing culture of the workplace and to comply with the existing ways of doing things. Compliant, acquiescent employees who look the part are promoted in preference to exceptional, questioning employees who bring truly different perspectives to the table. The nail that sticks its head up indeed gets hammered down.

Defining, fostering, and defending a corporate culture often becomes an exercise in clarifying ‘this is who we are’ and ‘this is who we are not.’ It engenders a strong norm, which builds an even more significant incentive to get people to think alike, get on, and tolerate or repel incompatible people.

Idea for Impact: Culture is a Barrier to Diversity and Inclusion

Culture is the unlikely—if unintentional—barrier to true diversity. Culture has a pernicious effect on hiring. It gives people ample reason to favor and engage who they believe to be “the right people.”

Questioning

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Everyone’s an Innovator: Ramp up creativity with your frontline employees

Idea for Impact: Value the frontline people in your organization as talented assets, not cheap cogs.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Gutter press revelations isn’t only less-than-scientific, but it actually defeats the objectives of science.

Idea for Impact: Let’s be skeptical readers. Let’s be better readers.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Affinity Bias

Idea for Impact: Culture is a Barrier to Diversity and Inclusion

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