Thought Process

Rules Are Made to Be Broken // Summary of Francesca Gino’s ‘Rebel Talent’

August 9, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Rebels have a bad rep. When you think of them, you imagine trouble. However, all rebels really do is take the habits that could hold the rest of us back and break them.

Instead of leaning toward the comfortable and the familiar, rebels ask questions and look at problems from unexpected perspectives. They aren’t afraid to question assumptions, stick their necks out, make themselves vulnerable in front of others, or experiment and fail.

Harvard social scientist Francesca Gino’s Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules in Work and in Life (2018) aims to explain the merits of breaking the rules and showing how to see challenges from new perspectives.

When we challenge ourselves to move beyond what we know and can do well, we rebel against the comfortable cocoon of the status quo, improving ourselves and positioning ourselves to contribute more to our partners, coworkers, and organizations.

The anecdotes and case studies that Gino pulls together to illuminate her “rebel talent” narrative are hardly convincing. In fact, they’re no more than examples of creative—perhaps unconventional—thinking. To take a prominent example Gino cites in the book, Captain Sully Sullenberger (of the US Airways Flight 1549 incident) did nothing rebellious. With 40 years of flying experience and situational awareness, he made lightning-quick decisions to land in the Hudson and not return to a nearby airport.

Recommendation: Read the introduction of Francesca Gino’s Rebel Talent, and skim the rest. The book’s introduction has a few useful concepts that merit an article, but the book lacks the rigor and utility to be expected from a Harvard Business School professor. The key takeaways (codified as the “eight principles of rebel leadership”) are relatively clear-cut: be curious and open-minded, never be satisfied, embrace discomfort, think unconventionally, and break established norms.

Don’t Ruminate Endlessly

May 6, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Say you’re in the market for a laptop but just can’t bring yourself to pick out the right model. You’ve spent countless hours comparing different models, visiting various websites, reading reviews, exploring stores, and researching all the available features, even though you’re unlikely to use most of them. Draining indeed!

Too Much Choice Can Stress You Out

Choice may be a great “problem” to have. Books such as Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice (2004) and Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing (2011) have exposed how increased choice may be bad for you.

Sometimes, the only thing worse than never having a choice is always having to choose.

Overthinking can trip you up. You can get confused when you have too much information or overthink about what you should be doing. Behavioral scientists such as Schwartz and Iyengar call this phenomenon “choice paralysis.”

Combat your indecisive nature by limiting your search, say, by establishing a cut-off time. Tell yourself that you’ll look around for two hours and then you’ll buy the best laptop you’ve come across in that time.

Use opportunity cost as a filter. Don’t poke around the internet for a better deal on an airfare or follow an eBay auction if you’re saving less than, say, $15 per hour spent deal-hunting.

Idea for Impact: Choose to Reduce Choice. Simplify and Prioritize.

Overthinking everything can make everyday life a challenge. Unnecessary analysis costs time and money and causes psychological wear.

The benefits of forgoing further rumination and acting on available information often offset the from needing to do everything perfectly.

Choosing when to choose is important. Rethink which choices in your life really matter and focus your time and effort there. Life is all about values and priorities.
In decision-making, simple beats complex. Reject complexity and accept that you’ll be sure that you’ve made the right choice. Make a decision, and then change course if it ends up being horribly wrong. As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has written in his 2016 letter to shareholders, “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think.”

Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission

April 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

A long time ago, I heard the managerial maxim, “you will move as fast as you can make decisions.” Amen to that.

That complements the mantra “’tis better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission”—that’s the oft-repeated rallying cry of entrepreneurial thinking.

You need to know when you shouldn’t—and can’t—wait for someone else’s approval to do the things you need to do to succeed. Every time you ask for buy-in, approval, or agreement, you’ll slow yourself down.

Depending on what’s at stake, you’ve got to know when moving forward does need consent. As with everything, you want to know your manager, team, partner, or spouse, how they operate, and their expectations for the group effort. If something’s an important-enough decision with high stakes, they’ll want to be in the loop.

Idea for Impact: Live speed. Where possible, don’t let dilly-dallying for permission endanger your decision-making success. It’s not about taking advantage of situations but about knowing when to push the boundaries. Where possible, aggressively move forward on your own and “get it done.”

Creativity—It Takes a Village: A Case Study of the 3M Post-it Note

April 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Creativity isn’t always about sudden insights that work perfectly. No matter how good an idea is, it’ll probably need some work before it can mature into a helpful innovation.

The invention of 3M Post-it (or the sticky note) is a particularly illuminating case in point that innovation requires actionable and differentiated insight. Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure creative involvement throughout the development process.

A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

In the winter of 1974, a 3M adhesives engineer named Spencer Silver gave an internal presentation about a pressure-sensitive adhesive compound he had invented in 1968. The glue was weak, and Silver and his colleagues could not imagine a good use for it. The glue could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Silver could stick the glue and reapply it to surfaces without leaving behind any residue.

In Silver’s audience was Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M’s paper products division. Months later, on a frigid Sunday morning, Fry called to mind Silver’s glue in an unlikely context.

Fry sang in his church’s choir and used to put little paper pieces in his hymnal to bookmark the songs he was supposed to sing. The little paper pieces of bookmark would often fall out, forcing Fry to thumb frantically through the book looking for the correct page. (This is one of those common hassles that we often assume we’re forced to live with.)

In a flash of lightning, Fry recalled the weak glue he’d heard at Silver’s presentation. Fry realized that the glue could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark. The adhesive bond was strong enough to stick to the page but weak enough to peel off without leaving a trace.

The sticky note was thus born as a bookmark called Press’n Peel. Initially, It was sold in stores in four cities in 1977 and did poorly. When 3M offered free samples to office workers in Boise, Idaho, some customers started using them as self-attaching notes. It was only then that Post-it notes started to become popular. They were first introduced across America in 1980 and Canada and Europe in 1981.

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

In all, it took twelve years after the initial discovery of the “glue that doesn’t stick” before 3M made Post-it available commercially. The Post-it continues to be one of the most widely used office products in the world.

This case study of the Post-it is a persuasive reminder that there’s a divergence between an idea and its tangible application that the creator cannot bridge by himself. The creator will have to expose the concept to diverse people who can evaluate, use, and trial the product.

In other words, the creative process does not end with an idea or a prototype. A happy accident often undergoes multiple iterations and reinterpretations that can throw light on the concept’s new applications. In the above example, Art Fry was able to see Spencer Silver’s invention from a different perspective and conceive of a novel use that its creator, Silver, could not. And all this happened in 3M’s fertile atmosphere that many companies aspire to create to help ideas intermingle and creativity flourish.

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas and concepts—and new associations that connect the ideas with existing problems.

Excellent new ideas don’t emerge from within a single person or function but at the intersection of processes or people that may have never met before.

Why Your Judgment Sucks

April 5, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) describes the finer points of decision-making. It’s an engaging showcase of the innate biases of the mind and unthinking approaches to decision-making.

Human Beings are Intuitive Thinkers

Kahneman is a behavioral economics pioneer and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His lifelong collaboration with Amos Tversky (1937—96) has molded humans’ thinking about human error, risk, judgment, decision-making, happiness, and more. Tversky died in 1996, so he did not share in the Nobel.

Thinking, Fast and Slow explores what Kahneman calls the “mind’s machinery” as two coexisting modes of thought (“fast and slow,” as the title says.) Kahneman splits the brain into two radically divergent ways, employing a two-tier model of cognition.

System One makes judgments instantly, intuitively, and automatically, as when a cricket batsman decides whether to cut or pull. A significant part of System One is “evolved heuristics” that lets us read a person’s expression in a microsecond from a block away, for example. And it can’t be switched off. System One’s thinking is fast and effortless. It often jumps to the wrong conclusions, relies on hunches and biases, and perhaps overconfident.
System Two is slower, conscious, calculated, and deliberate, like long division. Its operations require attention. System Two is what we think of as “thinking”—slow, tiring, and essential. It’s what makes us human. Even if System Two believes it is on top of things, System One makes many of our decisions.

System One Isn’t All Flawed

In a world that often necessitates swift judgment and rapid decision-making (e.g., fight or flight,) a person who solely relies on deliberative thinking (System Two) wouldn’t last long. Doctors and firefighters, for example, through training and repetition, develop what’s called “expert intuition” that helps them identify patterns and impulsively devise the right response to a complex emergency.

We as humans are not simple rational agents. Consequently, our thinking boils down to two “Systems” of thinking/processing. As we strive to make better decisions in our work and personal lives, it benefits us to slow down and use a more deliberate System 2 way of thinking. Learn to doubt your fast/quick way of thinking!

Human Intuition is Imperfect

Thinking, Fast and Slow is an eye-opener in various ways. It can be a frightening catalog of the biases, shortcuts, and cognitive illusions that come to err our judgment—the endowment effect, priming, halo effect, anchoring effect, conjugation fallacy, the narrative fallacy, and the rest. Such mental processes are not intrinsically flawed; they are heuristics—rules of thumb, stereotypes, shortcuts. They are strategies the mind embraces to find a path in a tsunami of data.

Kahneman teaches how to recognize situations that require slower, deliberative thinking. Kahneman asserts that the value of the book is to give people the vocabulary to spot biases and to criticize the decisions of others: “Ultimately, a richer language is essential to the skill of constructive criticism.”

Recommendation: Read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011.) As one of the most popular non-fiction books in the last decade, it’ll open your eyes to the quirky and error-prone ways in which you can be influenced in ways you don’t suspect.

The conceptions behind behavioral economics make Thinking, Fast and Slow a laborious read. Many chapters are bogged down by hair-splitting details of his rigorous scientific work and academic gobbledygook. It’s a commanding survey of this field, but it’s superbly written and intelligible to non-experts.

Complement with Rolf Dobelli’s accessible The Art of Thinking Clearly (2013.)

The Unthinking Habits of Your Mind // Book Summary of David McRaney’s ‘You Are Not So Smart’

April 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Psychologists have argued that many cognitive biases are rooted in mental shortcuts. They are heuristics—rules of thumb, stereotypes, instincts—that help you make sense of the world. They aren’t intrinsically flawed, but, they’re often quirky and error-prone. Your mental models can affect you in ways that you don’t suspect.

David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart (2011) suggests a brief—if hurried—tour of 48 cognitive biases that can deceive you. Based on the author’s popular blog, the book is a satisfying assessment of understanding people’s—and your own—behavior a little bit better.

There is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. … From the greatest scientist to the most humble artisan, every brain within every body is infested with preconceived notions and patterns of thought that lead it astray without the brain knowing it. So you are in good company.

Each chapter starts with a brief statement of a misconception followed by the fact. Then a synopsis of a related behavioral study shows how our brains produce the counterpart deception and the truth. Some of the less-known preconceptions discussed are,

Confabulation. You tend to create unreliable narratives to explain away your choices post hoc. These reassuring perceptions can make you think you’re more rational than you actually are.
Groupthink. People tend to fall in with the rest of the group to minimize conflict and foster group cohesiveness and social acceptance. No one wants to be the one person with a dissenting opinion.
Social Loafing. That others in a team will pick up your slack may induce you to put in less effort if you think you’ll get away with it. This can curb your own performance, even if you’re a conscientious, hardworking type. If you don’t feel your participation will be noticed, why bother putting in the effort?
Availability Heuristic. You’re likely to estimate the likelihood of an event based on your ability to recall immediate and easily accessed examples.
Fundamental Attribution Error. You tend to assign external reasons for your own behavior but internal motives to other people. For instance, if you’re late for a meeting, you’ll blame it on public transport. If someone else is running late for a meeting with you, you’ll blame it on her poor time-keeping.

Recommendation: Read David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart. It’s an engaging, easy-to-read primer to how the mind works. Read it as a lead up to Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling dissertation Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011; summary forthcoming.)

Idea for Impact: Once you learn to spot the cognitive biases we all grapple with, they’re easier to overcome.

The Data Never “Says”

March 1, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Data doesn’t say anything. Indeed, data can’t say anything for itself about an issue any more than a saw can form furniture, or a sauce can simmer a stew.

Data is inert and inanimate. Data doesn’t know why it was created. Data doesn’t have a mind of its own, and, therefore, it can’t infer anything.

Data is a necessary ingredient in judgment. It’s people who select and interpret data. People can turn it into insight or torture it to bring their agenda to bear. Data is therefore only as useful as its quality and the skills of the people wielding it.

Far more than we admit, subjectivity and intuition play a significant role in deciding how we collect, choose, process, explain, interpret, and apply the data. As entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan warns in Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (2012,) “We mostly admit the information that makes us feel great about ourselves, while conveniently filtering whatever unsettles our fragile egos and most vital beliefs.”

In the hands of careless users, data can end up having the opposite effect its creators intended. All data is good or bad depending on how it’s employed in a compelling story and what end it’s serving—neither of which the data itself can control.

Don’t let data drive your conclusions. Let data inform your conclusions.
Don’t declare, “The data says,” (as in, “the stock market thinks.”) Data by itself cannot have a particular interpretation.
When you find data that seems to support the case you wish to make, don’t swoop on it without caution and suspicion. Data can be very deceptive when used carelessly.
Be familiar with the limitations of your data. Investigate if your data informs any other equally valid hypothesis that could propose an alternative conclusion.

Idea for Impact: Beware of the risk of invoking data in ways that end up undermining your message.

How to Avoid Magical Thinking

February 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Magical thinking remains a subtle impediment to making sound decisions. The more you examine yourself, the more you can reduce your tendency to indulge in it.

Discover the truth for yourself. Beware of the tendency to let others think for you. Don’t believe what your parents, teachers, counselors, mentors, priests, and authorities of all inclinations have taught you from an early age. (The best predictor of people’s spiritual beliefs is the religiosity of their parents.) Question others’ underlying premises and discover for yourself what’s reasonable. Force yourself to test for alternatives.

Don’t believe what you want to believe is true. Many people believe in UFOs and ghosts, even when there’s no credible verification for any visitation from outer space or dead souls haunting abandoned buildings. Often, misinformation is cunningly designed to evade careful analytical reasoning—it can easily slip under the radar of even the most well-informed people. Shun blind optimism.

Consciously identify your biases and adverse instincts. Psychologists have identified more than 100 cognitive biases that can get in the way of clear and rational thinking. Explore how those biases could come into play in your thinking. Try to determine their motive. Work to extricate yourself from them to the best of your ability.

Demand proof when the facts seem demonstrable. Remain intellectually agnostic toward what hasn’t been established scientifically or isn’t provable. If you can’t determine if something is true or it isn’t, suspend judgment. Beware of anecdotes—emotionally swaying stories in particular—they are the weakest form of evidence.

Don’t believe in something that isn’t true just because there’s a practical reason to. If you feel emotionally inclined to believe in something because it gives you hope, comfort, and the illusion of control, identify your belief as just that. Faith is often no more than an inclination that’s not withstood the tests of reason. The process of faith is an absence of doubt. There’ll always be people who reject evolution for reasons that have little to do with evolution. Don’t act with more confidence in unproven theories than is justifiable.

Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

Give critical thinking and systematic evidence the central role in how you understand the world. Improving the criteria you use to judge the truth of things is difficult—but it’s of the essence. Have an unvarying, well-balanced degree of skepticism about everything, especially your own postulations.

A Real Lesson from the Downfall of Theranos: Silo Mentality

February 4, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The extraordinary rise and fall of Theranos, Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud, makes an excellent case study on what happens when teams don’t loop each other in.

Theranos’ blood-testing device never worked as glorified by its founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. She created an illusion that became one of the greatest start-up stories. She kept her contraption’s malfunctions and her company’s problems shockingly well hidden—even from her distinguished board of directors.

At the core of Holmes’s sham was how she controlled the company’s flow of information

Holmes and her associate (and then-lover) Sunny Balwani operated a culture of fear and intimidation at Theranos. They went to such lengths as hiring superstar lawyers to intimidate and silence employees and anyone else who dared to challenge their methods or expose their devices’ deficiencies.

Holmes had the charade going for so long by keeping a tight rein on who talked to whom. She controlled the flow of information within the company. Not only that, she swiftly fired people who dared to question her approach. She also forcefully imposed non-disclosure agreements even for those exiting the company.

In other words, Holmes went to incredible lengths to create and maintain a silo mentality in her startup. Her intention was to wield much power, prevent employees from talking to each other, and perpetuate her deceit.

A recipe for disaster at Theranos: Silo mentality and intimidation approach

Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018; my summary) is full of stories of how Holmes went out of her way to restrain employees from conferring about what they were working on. Even if they worked on the same project, Holmes made siloed functional teams report to her directly. She would edit progress reports before redirecting problems to other team heads.

Consider designer Ed Ku’s mechatronics team responsible for designing all the intricate mechanisms that control the measured flow of biochemical fluids. Some of his team’s widgets were overheating, impinging on one another and cross-contaminating the clinical fluids. Holmes wouldn’t allow Ku and his team to talk to the teams that improved the biochemical processes.

Silo mentality can become very problematic when communication channels become too constricted and organizational processes too bureaucratic. Creativity gets stifled, collaboration limited, mistakes—misdeeds in the case of Theranos—suppressed, and collective objectives misaligned.

Idea for Impact: Functional silos make organizations slow, bureaucratic, and complicated

Innovation hinges increasingly on interdisciplinary cooperation. Examine if your leadership attitude or culture is unintentionally contributing to insufficient accountability, inadequate information-sharing, and limited collaboration between departments—especially on enterprise-wide initiatives.

Intentions, Not Resolutions

January 4, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I think resolutions set you up for failure because they’re usually daunting, and they don’t give you a plan for how to realize what you want to achieve. More to the point, you underestimate how long it’ll take you to kick a bad habit or adopt a good one.

On the other hand, intentions propose paths forward—they can keep you accountable in the process.

Intentions dig into the WHY

Change is hard—change requires real commitment, planning, and follow-through. Intentions help by grounding you to what you can commit to today and tomorrow. Intentions will remind you of the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live.

Intentions don’t demand perfection, and intentions leave some room for error. Intentions will help you commit yourself and not fill you with guilt and shame if you fall off the wagon for a short period. With intentions, you can anticipate lapses and plan for them.

Setting intentions and then taking action becomes an exciting path of self-discovery rather than a guilt-trap set up with broken resolutions.

Idea for Impact: Set Intentions Instead of Yearly Resolutions

Put less pressure on yourself and set yourself up for success by making regular daily, weekly, and monthly intentions. Once you set the intention, focus on getting to the first step. Then, regroup and think about step two. This way, you target short-term achievable results, and the intention orients you.

Don’t make intentions for the entire year. It’s just hard to keep up with something and stay excited about it year-round.

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Thought Process

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Too Much Choice Can Stress You Out

Idea for Impact: Choose to Reduce Choice. Simplify and Prioritize.

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A Glue That Doesn’t Stick: A Solution Without a Problem

Ideas Intermingle and Evolve: Creativity Needs Collaboration

Idea for Impact: Creativity Is About Generating New Possibilities

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Human Beings are Intuitive Thinkers

System One Isn’t All Flawed

Human Intuition is Imperfect

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Idea for Impact: Be wary of the influences that can put you at risk for magical thinking.

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At the core of Holmes’s sham was how she controlled the company’s flow of information

A recipe for disaster at Theranos: Silo mentality and intimidation approach

Idea for Impact: Functional silos make organizations slow, bureaucratic, and complicated

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Intentions dig into the WHY

Idea for Impact: Set Intentions Instead of Yearly Resolutions

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