Risk

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

August 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

Sometimes a Conflict is All About the Process

July 27, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

There’s a considerable difference between a “decision conflict” and a “process conflict,” and it’s necessary to disentangle the two.

A decision conflict is about a choice or another to be made. But a process conflict is about the approach, e.g., where making a choice has lacked rigorous deliberation (haste, a lack of participation from essential stakeholders, contempt for shared priorities, lack of attention to the tradeoffs, and so forth.) A sound decision has ensued from a meticulous-enough thought process, even if the decision emerges to be defective in the fullness of time.

Idea for Impact: Worry about bad decision processes. Make the “how” the anchor for your decision-making process. Improving the quality of decisions is developing better frameworks for making those decisions.

A Quick Way to Build Your Confidence Right Now

June 20, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Guilt, anxiety, and fear usually manifest as a creeping mindset of what’s lacking. You feel you’re not enough, and you don’t have the resources you need to achieve your goals.

Lack of confidence will probably hold you back more than you may acknowledge. Be mindful of your thoughts and address these negative thinking patterns. Notice how you speak to yourself—harping only on what isn’t enough of or what isn’t working doesn’t instill your self-assuredness.

When you spiral about what is lacking, try the Abundance Mentality—it empowers you to believe in your extant ability. You can make do with what you have and overcome any difficulties. This isn’t some naïve “can do” temperament, but it’s an earnest endeavor to muster hope and agency instead of doubt and helplessness.

Idea for Impact: The less you do, the less confident you’ll feel.

Don’t wait until you feel more confident—often, more ruminating leads to analysis paralysis. Self-confidence comes from successful experiences, and to create these successful experiences, take action.

Take a low-risk action to increase your confidence. Assume you’re the most confident self you’ve ever been and do what that self would do. Prioritize your choices and direct your resources to pressing needs, ignoring other goals.

Making Tough Decisions with Scant Data

January 18, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

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.

Our 10 Most Popular Articles of 2021

December 31, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Here are our most popular exclusive features of 2021. Pass this on to your friends; if they like these, they can sign up to receive our RSS feeds or email updates.

If You’re Looking for Bad Luck, You’ll Soon Find It. Luck is sometimes the result of taking appropriate action. And, bad luck is sometimes the result of tempting fate.
Be Ready to Discover What You’re Not Looking For. Creativity is a disorderly journey. Much of the time, you may never get where you’re going. You may never find what you hope to find. Stay open to the new and the unexpected.
‘Follow Your Passion’ is Bad Career Advice. It’s easier to pursue your passion if you can afford to work for free. Until then, seek the peace of mind that comes from being able to pay your bills and attaining financial stability.
Even the Best Need a Coach. Sometimes you can be too close to things to see the truth. Blind spots are less obvious when things are going well. Coaches can help you “break your actions down and then help you build them back up again.”
The Solution to a Problem Often Depends on How You State It. 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.
Consensus is Dangerous. Getting everyone on the same page can produce harmony—of the cult-like variety. Encourage dissent and counterevidence in decision-making.
Watch Out for the Availability Bias. Don’t be disproportionately swayed by what you remember. Don’t overreact to the recent facts.
Leadership is Being Visible at Times of Crises. Leadership means serving as an anchor during crisis times and being available, connected, and accessible during a crisis.
How to Think Your Way Out of a Negative Thought. A thought-out, levelheaded analysis of the situation can unshackle the mind’s echo chamber and nudge you to think your way out of a problem and look beyond it.
Witty Comebacks and Smart Responses for Nosy People. Don’t feel rude about quelling impolite boundary-violators. Responding snappishly but firmly will imply that that the issue is not open for further conversation.

And here are some articles of yesteryear that continue to be popular:

We wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2022!

How to See Opportunities Your Competition Doesn’t

November 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Harvard strategy professor Youngme Moon’s Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (2010) describes how many companies pursue the same opportunities that every other company is chasing and thus miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing.

In category after category, companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate—which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become … Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them.

Moon argues that the companies and brands that see a different game win big. Such innovators don’t just try to outcompete their rivals at the margin. Instead, they redefine the competitive landscape by embracing unique ideas in a world crammed with me-too thinking.

European airline Ryanair unleashed a new wave of relentless cost- and price-leadership by charging customers extra for everything beyond a seat itself. If you want to check a bag, you pay extra. If you want an airport agent to check you in and print your boarding pass, you pay extra. If you want food and drink, you pay extra. Later on, Spirit Airlines took the price-obsession further by charging for carry-on bags too. After a rough rollout and customer defiance, paying for carry-on bags has become the new normal.

Idea for Impact: Being different is what makes all the difference. If you do things the same way everyone else in your field does things, why would you expect to do any better? What are you doing to raise your game—not just to stay in place, but to get ahead?

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.

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.

Many Hard Leadership Lessons in the Boeing 737 MAX Debacle

August 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The U.S. House committee’s report on Boeing’s 737 MAX disaster makes interesting reading on contemporary leadership, particularly the pressures of rapid product development.

The rush to market and a culture of contributory negligence and concealment conspired to ensure that a not-yet-airworthy plane carried passengers into service, resulting in two fatal accidents and a long grounding.

Boeing’s design and development of the 737 MAX was marred by technical design failures, a lack of transparency with both regulators and customers, and efforts to downplay or disregard concerns about the operation of the aircraft.

Of particular importance are the “management failures,” “inherent conflicts of interest,” and “grossly insufficient oversight” at both Boeing and its regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA.) Boeing failed to offset the design limitations and cost- and schedule-pressures in favor of attention to customer safety. Leadership was fixated on fending off the runaway success of the Airbus A320neo program.

The company relied on too many technical assumptions—and they couldn’t make themselves the space and time to be reasonable about any of this. Boeing’s “culture of concealment” and an “unwillingness to share technical details” are the report’s most damning indictment. Employees spoke but went unheard; indeed, their voices were suppressed.

If You’re Looking for Bad Luck, You’ll Soon Find It

August 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consider a woman who complained that her neighborhood dry cleaner ruined her expensive slacks. “Last month, he spoiled my wool blazer. Last Christmas, he … . It always happens,” she grumbled.

This woman knew she was taking chances with this dry cleaner. She allowed it to happen.

Luck is sometimes the result of taking appropriate action. And, bad luck is sometimes the result of tempting fate.

Say, you’ve been planning for weeks for your next big trip. You got an incredible deal on the day’s very last flight to your destination. On the day of departure, your late-night flight gets canceled. Sure, you’re a victim of back luck—but you invited it. Think about it. Odds are, you’re more likely to have a flight delay or cancellation later in the day because airlines schedule their rosters tightly to maximize aircraft and flight crew utilization. Delays and disruptions from earlier in the day propagate onward to the late flights.

Often, luck has nothing to do with bad luck. “The fault,” as Shakespeare wrote, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. Don’t self-sabotage yourself by tempting fate.

Idea for Impact: Bad choices beget bad luck

You have to be lucky to get lucky. You have no control over many outcomes in life, but you can always increase the odds of getting lucky by taking appropriate action. More importantly, you can minimize the chance of bad luck by decreasing its odds.

Remember, a good mathematics student never buys a lottery ticket, and if he does, he never grumbles about not winning the jackpot!

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Risk

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Idea for Impact: The less you do, the less confident you’ll feel.

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

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Idea for Impact: Bad choices beget bad luck

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