Book Review-Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World

It was on-stage in San Diego where I first saw Steven Kotler. He was talking about the powerful impact of flow and his work on The Rise of Superman. I’ve been in love with flow for years, and so I dug into The Rise of Superman, interviewed Kotler and ultimately took his flow fundamentals course. One of the counter-intuitive challenges of reading over 50 books a year is that you want to read more than you can get to. Kotler’s previous work with Peter Diamandis, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, sat in my reading queue since I read and reviewed The Rise of Superman, but other distractions kept me from it.

Bold is a follow on to Abundance. Though I’ve not yet read Abundance, its title is largely illustrative of what it’s talking about – global abundance. Bold is an attempt to make that abundance more accessible to everyone. To reach towards it, you need to make bold moves.

Peter Diamandis

I’ve already explained how I met Kotler but the other author, Peter Diamandis, was a bit of a mystery to me. His name was oddly familiar but I couldn’t place why. The answer lies in the fact that he’s responsible for XPRIZE and the Ansari XPRIZE for private spaceflight. Like many young men, my first desired profession was astronaut. I gave up my pursuit of that goal, like most of the boys that wanted to be firemen and police officers. I gave it up, but Diamandis didn’t — it was a passion. Ultimately he wondered, if you can’t get to space through NASA, how do you get yourself into space? The answer is make it available commercially. While this isn’t the most straightforward path, it is a path that he’s demonstrating is possible.

This context is important because without it you’re left asking, who is this guy and why is he telling me that I can change the world? Even as someone who has patents filed for things that I believe will change the world, and specific targeted plans for my next big move to improve our lives on this planet, I had a bit of a challenge with accepting that we should all change the world. It’s a bold move but one that I’m willing to consider.

Super Credibility

It’s because of Diamandis’ experiences with the XPRIZE and the outrageous things that he’s been able to accomplish, and the respect I have for Kotler that pushed Bold above the line that they call “super credibility”. That is the point above which, no matter how crazy what you’re proposing appears on the outside, it will still appear credible. When Jeff Bezos says they’re talking about doing delivery of packages via drones, you believe it because you believe in Jeff. When Diamandis wants to do a commercial space telescope, or a colony on the moon, or whatever, you believe he means it. This super credibility is important as you go to seek to get others onboard with your ideas something Bold discusses at length.

Figuring out what super credibility is or who you have to get on board before you can cross that super credibility line is a bit of a mystery. It’s all about the perception in others’ minds. Which celebrities do you need to already have on board when you launch your idea? Who will be the people that will keep most people from thinking that you’re a crackpot who needs locked up? Exponential growth requires some level of genius insanity, but you don’t want to let everyone latch on to the insanity part of that statement.

Changing the World at Exponential Speed

Underlying the opportunity of abundance and the need to be bold is the exponential growth that we’re seeing in the world. As the world moves from atoms to electrons, we’re decreasing the delays in the system and increasing the opportunities. (See Thinking in Systems for the impact of removing delays in a system.) What is happening today is driving faster disruptions and more rapid transitions from winner to loser and loser to winner in the global marketplace. The ability to scale exponentially is built on the back of six things:

• Digitalization – The core conversion of atoms to electrons. Moving from a world where we must ship something to a world where we ship the information electronically. This is what Amazon Kindle is to the book industry.
• Deception – Exponential growth seems small at first, but the iterations of that exponential growth suddenly break out of the norm and create amazing results.
• Disruption – Seemingly suddenly, the old rules change. For instance, digital cameras became better than the 35mm film cameras. When the tipping point is hit, the sales of 35mm film plummet with the rise of digital cameras. Ironically, this destroyed the Eastman Kodak company that created the digital camera technology in the first place.
• Demonetization – Removing money from the equation. Make things available for free. How many Apps in the Apple App store are available for free?
• Dematerialization – The vanishing of goods and services. The luxuries of today become the expectation of tomorrow. ABS brakes used to be a luxury item, now you wouldn’t buy a car without them.
• Democratization – The hard costs drop so low that they’re available and affordable to nearly everyone. Nearly everyone has access to the Internet and the wealth of information that is freely available on it.

Ultimately, when I think of this from a systems point of view, I realize that the delays and friction in the system of human growth is being removed.

Frictionless Society

These six things speak to the friction that we have in commerce. We have friction of finding the goods and services that we want to purchase. For what we sell, we have friction in finding customers and getting the goods to them. As was explained in Demand, small barriers (friction) can dramatically reduce results. When we’re talking about exponential growth, we’re talking about removing friction to growth. If you don’t, the whole thing will blow up.

Amazon Kindle reduced the friction of acquiring a book and keeping it with you when you have available time. Now you carry your iPad, and on it is your entire library – or at least you have instant access to it. If you’re connected to the Internet, you can get books from your library digitally – and even purchase more. Within minutes you can be reading a book that you learned about or pick up something new on a topic you love.

Software delivery is mostly digital now. Rarely do people ship CDs, DVDs, or USB drives. Now, people expect that they can get whatever software they want from the comfort of their home within minutes. Gone are the days of driving to the store to buy a word processor or an anti-virus program.

This lack of friction means that we’re able to learn more and do more than we have ever been able to do. We’re not held back by the need to transport atoms from one place to another. When it comes time for atoms to actually move, we have an efficient logistics system to get you only the atoms you need when you need them – generally within a day or two.

Prototyping and Production

It’s a different world that we live in than 20 years ago. In my office I’ve got a multifunction printer/copier capable of doing any of my small-run paper production. It will staple automatically if I want it to, or I can pull out the binder and bind reports. The laminator can be used to protect any productivity aid that I’m going to leave with a client. I don’t have a CNC paper cutter/engraver yet – but the price for tools like that are less than $200. It’s absolutely a gadget that’s on my short list to fill out one of the gaps in my ability to completely prototype on paper.

I mentioned in my post Embroidery and Love that we have everything here to do short-run embroidery of clothing. I recently added the capacity to custom print the backs of post cards. We production print the fronts and now custom print the backs of the cards. Once they’re printed we add printable postage and mail them. On the postage side, we can literally ship anything we want from our printable postage account. A computer weighs the package, we select the service and provide the address. Every day the mailman picks up the packages.

We’ve got the ability to see what we’re creating quickly before sending out the larger orders. When we need bigger quantities than we can produce in-house, we submit a digital order with electronic files and we get back what we need; or, more frequently, the service provider simply does the mailing for us and sends us the bill – which we pay electronically.

Our DVD/Bluray printer/copier allows us to create short-run items for trade shows and other events – and we can buy larger production online when we need it. However, even our “small” printer/copier can do 10 per hour (or more) and 100 at a time unattended. I’ve run as many as 600 of the discs for a conference that I was speaking at. It required a bit of monitoring but it was certainly manageable.

We haven’t purchased a 3D printer yet – but that’s largely because we’re not doing many things that require the creation of 3D objects. However, if we did, we could buy an inexpensive 3D printer for small scale tests and purchase larger 3D models from online services.

By reducing the barriers to prototyping, it’s possible for inventors to iterate quickly and to see problems that just can’t be seen in the design phase. I’ve been able to test several different sizes of logos for embroidery.

Years ago I worked for a rapid prototyping company which used early technologies for 3D printing. Large customers spent big dollars to be able to do what someone can do in a few hours with a few hundred dollars.

Scalable production has always been another challenge. At that same company, we did short-run RTV parts and injection-molded parts. The Room Temperature Vulcanizing (RTV) process worked for a few dozen parts. If you needed more than that, you created an injection mold. Even with our CNC machines, building a mold was tens of thousands of dollars. Now, all of this is abstracted. When you’re ready for production you go to an online supplier that can cost-effectively create as many parts as you need.

Consider something less technologically advanced: the book. While electronic books are taking a bite out of the market, there are still many printed books sold. Historically this was done by a huge press and a few thousand to many tens of thousands of books were printed. For small publishers, this was a huge investment – especially since it’s notoriously hard to know which books are going to sell well. Many years ago there was a revolution in book publishing. Print on demand printers would print the books that people wanted when they wanted them. My SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users books have been using this strategy since the beginning. (See my post Self Publishing with Lulu.com for more on that experience.) My per-unit cost is much higher, but my capital outlay for the books has been almost zero. It’s eliminated the capital requirements, which freed the capital up to iterate on other ideas.

Internet of Things and a Trillion Sensors

When we’re talking about prototyping and production, we’re still shaping atoms in the end. We’re trying to shape our physical world. However, some of the most exponential businesses won’t be creating anything directly. Instead, they’ll be helping us optimize our worlds and give us more of what we want with less waste.

Historically, homes had relatively little automation. The 70s had home intercom systems. The 80s had home alarm systems, and as we got into the 90s, a few homes started dabbling with primitive home automation solutions that could turn on and off lights. Fast forward to today, when we’re talking about intelligent thermostats.

Today you can buy a thermostat which knows when you get home and adjusts to your preferences. Alarm systems are now integrated with your smart phone, and instead of punching in a code when you get home or receiving a call when you’re not home, everything is handled from your smart phone.

The sensors in our homes are invading everything. Locks are now Z-Wave enabled, allowing them to be automated as well. Remotely you can know where your front door is closed (through the alarm contact) and whether it’s locked (through the lock). You can, in fact, remotely lock your doors – or unlock them if you need to let in someone to work on your refrigerator or air conditioner.

Video surveillance has come down in cost to the point where more and more homes have external video surveillance. The video can be captured and reviewed days or even months later. Watches are now monitoring our heart rate and sending reports to our phone to be included in our health log.

The cost for sensors has plummeted. The availability of WiFi with internet access, back-ended by massively scalable computing centers, means that every application for a sensor can be wired. Whether it’s a truck transporting goods across the country, home automation, or monitoring of commercial systems, we’ve got more sensors capturing more data and giving us the opportunity to optimize how things run like we never have had before. However, that isn’t the most compelling change that’s coming.

Cognitive Surplus

One of the unexpected – but completely accurate – ideas expressed in Bold was the cognitive surplus in the world. As a society we’ve not yet completely eliminated scarcity. There are still parts of the world where there is a struggle to survive. The basic necessities of water, food, and shelter are still an everyday struggle. However, the majority of humans no longer struggle to find enough food to eat. For those of us in the developed world, we enjoy more leisure time than any previous generation. We’ve got more spare time than any generation before us. If we have more time, then we have more capacity for thought. That’s a very special resource. It’s what has differentiated us from our closest evolutionary cousins.

However, the surplus is more than just time. It’s more than just the capacity to concern ourselves with needs broader than our own and temporally further than the next few hours or days, but it’s also the ability to consume more information and process it in ways that our ancestors never could. We see in a single day more information than a generation would have seen in an entire year – or in some cases an entire lifetime. We not only have the capacity for thinking, we’ve got better access to information to make this thinking time more useful.

If you want to become an expert in nearly any topic, it’s possible to do today with only a high speed internet connection and a few thousand dollars. In most cases, the skills that you want to learn are available for free if you’re willing to wade through the information on the Internet to find the credible sources that are freely teaching the information.

Passion, Ideas, and Execution

It’s a truth that investors look for passion, learn about ideas, and fund execution.

Consider two different perspectives on building a business. There’s the mercenary perspective, where the goal is to make money and then get out. Here, the leader is looking for a quick payout. It’s something they’re doing not because they love it, but instead because they believe they can “turn a quick buck” and move on. Conversely, consider the missionary perspective on business leadership. They are looking for sustenance while they pursue their passion. They’re looking to change the world, not their personal world. The missionary assumes that they’ll be there until someone steps in to replace them and carry on the mission.

The difference between the two is that the mercenary won’t have passion about what they’re doing. The mercenary isn’t trying to change the world, and as a result won’t have that same “fire in their belly” or “light in their eyes.” Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that there are times when every missionary feels beaten down. Every missionary feels like they’ll never achieve their passion. At those times, it’s easy for someone to mistake a missionary for a mercenary. (If you want to see the fire in my belly look at when I talk about the Video Studio 2.1, 2.0, 1.0 or when I talk about Kin-to-Kid Connection.)

For someone else, including investors, to buy into your idea you have to be able to communicate it. You needn’t necessarily need to be the best orator or the best writer, but you have to find the way to share your passion with others. This is no different in the sales and marketing of your work than it is in looking for investors to help fund it.

Perhaps most importantly, you need to be able to execute. Here, my favorite example is Walt Disney, not because he needed investors, but because he always demonstrated in small scale what he wanted to do in the large scale. Before feature-length animated movies were the shorts. Before Disney World was Disney Land. He took small steps and demonstrated he could do something before scaling it up. While this isn’t always possible with an organization, it’s certainly preferable if you’re looking for funding.

Fine, I’ll Start a Company

When I read Elon Musk’s comment, “My initial goal wasn’t to start a company,” it resonated. His goal wasn’t that of a mercenary. He didn’t want to get rich quick. Instead, he had another mission, and building a company was simply the means to that other end. This is where most folks get confused. They believe that the company is the end. The company is always the means.

My goals in life weren’t to create a company. I didn’t want to be a consultant even. In truth, I wanted to take care of a small team of people and do amazing things. It just happened that I couldn’t do that inside of another organization, so I ended up on my own trying crazy things to make a difference in the world.

Where Musk and I differ is that Musk appears totally unfazed by scale. Recently, when pre-orders of the Tesla Model 3 significantly outpaced predictions, his response was simply that they’d have to rethink production. The professional equivalent of “oh well, we’ll figure it out.” I, however, have watched the wheels come off of businesses who were trying explosive growth – and it’s tempered my responses to scalability. Sometimes I try to look at the whole situation, including the ability for my creation to take over my life.

Wholeness

Sometimes we make some rather silly decisions. When you take a step back and look at the broader picture, it becomes clear that we make decisions based on a narrow view of the problem, and as a result the decisions aren’t the best. Consider the couple who are saving money, and at the same time are carrying a balance on their credit card. The savings may be earning 1% interest while they’re paying 10% or more interest on their credit card. For every dollar they make in interest in their savings, they’re losing nine. It doesn’t make sense. However, this is the way that we operate in our lives all the time.

There’s an old joke about a woman coming home from shopping and she says to her husband, “Honey, you wouldn’t believe how much I saved today.” The husband responds, “That’s funny I thought you went shopping and spent money.” Too frequently we miss the big picture of our world because we’re focused on just one small part.

In Theory U, we learned to look at things from the broader perspective. It’s more than just the things that we can touch and feel. To experience wholeness, we have to accept that we’re a part of the whole. We have to put away the ideas of predictable systems thinking and start thinking about probabilities.

Probability

As I mentioned in my review of The Halo Effect, our world isn’t deterministic. It’s probabilistic. It’s about the probability that something will happen, not that it will definitely happen. This means that try and try again makes sense, not just from an improvement in each try but also because the conditions around you may change to make your attempt work out.

Humans like the mathematical precision of A+B=C and hate to believe that success in life has as much to do with luck, timing, and circumstance as it does with the innate qualities of a person. (Both Peak and Mindset have something to say about the ability to change personal capacity based on experience.)

What’s Worth Doing Even If You Know You Will Fail

Brené Brown’s work Rising Strong (Part 1 and Part 2) challenges with the question, “What would you do even if you knew you would fail?” The question is framed differently here. What’s worth doing even if the probability of success is low? What should you do even if you don’t know that you can make it work?

Larry Page said, “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.” In other words, don’t let impossible stop you. Don’t let the belief that you can’t succeed stop you from trying.

Crowdsourcing

By now, most of us have heard about famous kickstarter.com campaigns that have let inventors get the capital they need to engage in the market. Crowdsourcing platforms are springing up every day, where an entrepreneur can get funding for their cause or their company. Bold lays out the four kinds of campaigns: donation, debt, equity, and reward, and it provides helpful tips for how to navigate the crowdsourcing experience successfully. While it looks great on the surface and one can think that it’s free money from folks you don’t know, Bold sets the story straight by sharing the real statistics about how the money comes in and what needs to be done to support getting it.

Crowdsourcing is described as getting better leverage on the funds you already have access to through personal contacts (friends and family). And while it seems easy, it’s a process like any other. Bold suggests that you may spend as much time fundraising as you do running a fledgling business. Interestingly enough, this isn’t much different than non-crowdsourcing approaches in the investment of time. Many entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to many, many investors before receiving investment funding – even the likes of organizations like Cisco. It’s common to struggle with finding the capital you need to start and expand your business.

Whether or not you feel like you need to inject capital in your business, go Bold and create something amazing.

Book Review-The Outward Mindset: Seeing Beyond Ourselves

My journey into the material from the Arbinger Institute started in 2012. The book Bonds that Make Us Free was recommended by a counselor. That led me to reading Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace. That was all the content of theirs that I had access to, until in June they released another book titled The Outward Mindset: Seeing Beyond Ourselves. One might think that with a reading pace of one book a week that I should not have much left to read; however, nothing could be farther from the truth. However, this jumped to the top.

Much of what I read feels tactical. It feels like it’s what you need to know to execute business, marketing, life, etc. While this may make sense and is definitely necessary, it frequently feels to me like it is hollow and misses the core of the matter. It misses the world view or centralized approach that leads to a different way of thinking that makes all the difference. That’s what we have here.

I and Thou

I mentioned in my review of The Anatomy of Peace that much of the genesis for the work seemed to come from Martin Burber’s book I and Thou. I’ve still not completed reading it. It’s difficult to process and understand – but I’ve read enough to realize that we’re all in relationship to one another. How we tend to that relationship makes the difference. If we treat other people as objects – like rocks – we deny their soul and wound our relationship with them. We must seek to recognize the essential nature of others and how we might become more connected to them.

One of the challenges in our relationships with others is the desire to put people into a category of “us” vs. “them” based on whatever criteria we can get our hands on. (See Mistakes Were Made for more.) This thought pattern separates us from others by creating psychological distance that didn’t exist before. With “them” we can ascribe all sorts of bad motives and evil intent. With the “us” group we’re unlikely to leap to such conclusions.

Facing Outward

Fundamentally, the “outward mindset” is being aware of others and their needs. It’s about being focused on how you add value to their lives, instead of gathering up the limited resources available for your consumption. It’s not an abundant mindset vs. a scarcity mindset – it’s more than that. It’s believing that if you continue to do good that it will all work out in the end. It’s not necessarily Karma, that the good (or bad) you do flows back to you. It’s not an accounting of plusses and minuses. It’s a perspective that looking out for others is the best way to be.

John Gottman mentioned his love of game theory in The Science of Trust. His passion for it sparked me to investigate Nash, who famously came up with the Nash Equilibrium as opposed to the von Neumann-Morgenstern equilibrium. Gottman points out that tit-for-tat is an effective strategy for dealing with games. In essence this is whatever you do, I’ll do back to you – or the old, “eye-for-an-eye” saying. The von Neumann-Morgenstern equilibrium is the best possible outcome when both parties are primarily interested in their own gain. The Nash equilibrium is possible when the parties trust each other and are willing to work cooperatively towards the greater good. In this case, everyone may be able to get more than if they had acted solely in their own best interests.

This is the heart of facing outward. That is, when you’re willing to work with others for the greater good, you’ll get more out of life than had you acted only for your own selfish motives.

Behavior Drives Results

I loved the show MythBusters when it was in regular production. I watch very little TV but this was a show that I watched. Admittedly, watching them create new and interesting ways to blow things up was a part of it – but also there was a certain sense of mystery about how a small kernel of truth turns into a myth. That’s the case with the statement that behavior drives results. There is truth to this statement. However, it’s also true that it’s incomplete.

First, the truth. If you refuse to change your behavior, the results won’t change. At some point you have to actually change the behaviors that lead to the results – but the question is whether changing the behaviors is the right place to start.

People believe that their attitudes are formed, then they do behaviors, and then they get results. Certainly you will only get results from your behaviors. That’s truth. However, it’s also true that it’s not a simple linear sequence. First, your results – the intrinsic results of the behavior – will drive attitude. So if we’re trying to help a depressed person choose to be not-depressed (see Choice Theory) we’ll often encourage them to go take a walk or do anything. The biochemical changes help to lift them out of depression. (Your mileage may vary.) So in this, we see that sometimes the flow of causality runs backwards. Sometimes it’s the doing that leads to the thinking.

However, it’s also possible for resentment to build instead of peace flowing over you. It’s entirely possible to play a victim tape in your mind the entire time you’re doing something only to come out angrier after the behavior than when you started. (See Boundaries, Beyond Boundaries, Daring Greatly, and Change or Die for more on victimhood.) Holding on to the resentment about being “forced” to do something can negate any benefits that might naturally flow from doing it. Neslon Mandela wrote, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” Having the behavior which is underwritten by anger and resentment does you no good.

Behavior Doesn’t Drive Results

The idea that behavior drives results misses the fact that our behaviors are only part of the equation for results. Results are in fact frequently the results of our inner condition, our behaviors, and the circumstances in the world. When I was in junior high school, we had a warehouse club membership, and I could buy candy in bulk. It’s the same place that many convenience stores were buying candy. I could buy a box of candy that worked out to seven cents apiece. I could sell it at school for 25 cents each. I recruited some other folks to sell candy for me too and made decent money (for a kid) by selling candy – until the kids got tired of the one candy I was selling. All of my behaviors stayed the same, but the results changed radically. I was sitting on inventory that I was unable to move.

I’ve watched comedians practicing their craft deliver nearly identical performances with radically different results. One night the crowd was “hot” and laughed at everything. The next night they were “cold” and they couldn’t laugh at anything. The behavior of the comedian didn’t change. His performance wasn’t substantially better or worse one night to the next but the crowd and therefore the result was different.

The problem with the statement that behavior drives results is that it presumes that behavior is the only thing that drives results. That’s sort of like saying that the flour makes the cake. While it’s an essential ingredient, it’s not the only ingredient in a cake. Though there may not be the same volume of eggs in a cake as there is flour, try baking a cake without them and see what happens.

This is the limitation to the statement that behavior drives results. Sometimes little things – little important things – make the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t. This is why researchers attempt to replicate other researcher’s results. They’re seeking to figure out if the first researcher captured all of the variables that were responsible for the change in outcome. Sometimes the second researcher is able to confirm the results and sometimes they’re not. If not, then clearly those factors described in the research study didn’t drive the behaviors.

Back to Boxes

Despite the lack of mention of boxes which dominated the conversation in Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace, The Outward Mindset retains the core awareness of our desire to blame others when we’re not right with ourselves. One of the stories was particularly compelling.

A young man had issues with his father and the way that he was treated. He internalized this and blamed his father for his challenges. He built a house in victimhood. His father was long gone but he retained his victim stance. Even in his dreams he couldn’t confront his father for the harm that his father had caused to his life. Until a woman helped him know two truths about the situation:

1. He was responsible for his current problems, not his father. His father was dead and gone.
2. Even in his dreams he refused to face his father to confront him as he said he wanted to because he didn’t want to add to his father’s pain – he was aware that his father lived a life of pain but was blocked from this awareness by his own pain.

Sometimes our ability to look beyond ourselves is the box that we’re living in. It doesn’t have to be a victim box. It can be an entitlement box that prevents us from being aware of the pain and suffering of others.

Responsibility and Responsiveness

One of the most difficult topics to explain to someone is the difference between being responsive to someone else and being responsible for them. The language here is difficult to decipher. Responsible is being the primary cause their behavior or action. Or it’s about having control or care of someone or something. Responsive is about responding to the environment and to others.

Boundaries and Beyond Boundaries talked about how to define boundaries between yourself and other people in such a way that you’re not unduly influenced by them. In other words, so that you’re not swept up into their needs and desires, and you can experience life yourself. However, there’s a reason to not define too many boundaries. Too many boundaries and you live an isolated life. Learning the right balance with boundaries is understanding yourself well enough to know which boundaries can’t be crossed. In other words, to understand who you really are.

The Outward Mindset uses the word “responsible” for the success of others – I disagree with the word choice here. I believe that we need to be responsive to others’ needs. We need to get to the Nash equilibrium, where we work in everyone’s best interests and try to create the best overall situation rather than being focused on our own myopic needs.

In my work with software development teams, we often do some form of agile development which leverages a standup meeting. A standup meeting is an intentionally short meeting where everyone traditionally stands (to prevent it from taking too long). Everyone does a check in. The check in consists of what they did last period (typically a day), what they’re doing in the next period, and what barriers are in their way.

The psychology behind this meeting is sound. It requires people to make and report on their commitments, which drives the right behaviors. However, the component of sharing barriers is substantially more interesting. It allows developers to set aside their commitments and help others. The manager isn’t responsible for fixing these problems that developers have – the developers themselves are responsible for helping their team out.

Being a responsible member of the team means being responsive to the needs – as they are expressed – of the other team members. It means being willing to set aside personal success in the pursuit of better productivity for the team.

The language is difficult because in order to define your responsibility to the team, we use the word “responsible”, which typically implies control. However, in this context it’s internally focused towards control of oneself and living out the defining boundaries that “make the man.” To be the person we want to be, we’re being responsive to the needs of others without blindly accepting them or taking ultimate responsibility for them.

The difference is subtle but appropriately self-focused. It’s not about others but how I relate to others, and the kind of person that I want to be in relationship with others.

An interesting dimension of this is that, in order for the developer to allow us to be responsive in a healthy way, they have to show vulnerability towards us, and the belief that we’ll help rather than attack them. (See Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy for more.)

Doing It for Me

Perhaps the hardest thing for developing the outward mindset is understanding the flip that happens. At some point, the actions that you do aren’t because you’re wanting the results personally, but instead because you want the results for the other person.

There’s a person in my life that I send an email to every week. She is invited into my life both through my writings and in more direct ways, and despite this she almost never responds. I want a relationship with her. It’s not because I need the relationship, or that the relationship is for me. Instead it’s my wish that she could be mentally healthier. I want her to be able to find more joy in her life.

I’ve fought hard over the past several years to bring more joy into my life. I’ve fought hard to unwind old programming about who I am and who I have to be. I enjoy hard conversations (some would call these Crucial Conversations) not because they’re hard, but because of the change they produce in me and the others with whom I’m willing to enter into them with. I’d love to give this gift to her.

If I send messages every week for the rest of her life without a response, it will still be OK. The messages are for her; I don’t need the relationship. However, they’re simultaneously for me. They’re about me being true to the person I want to be. That is, I want to be the person who desires to share joy and love to everyone. The point isn’t whether she responds or not. The point is that I’m who I want to be.

The person I want to be has The Outward Mindset – what kind of person do you want to be?

Book Review-The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers

It seems like we’re all prone to want to find amazing solutions. Whether it’s Ponce De Leon looking for the fountain of youth, searching for the lost city of Atlantis, or searching for El Dorado, we seek to find the seemingly impossible – and in at least these cases they are impossible. Business books are plentiful. Everyone seems to have an opinion about what will lead to success in business. Many managers and leaders will read these books, and few will get better.

This is at the heart of The Halo Effect: … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers. Where is the elusive recipe that I can follow that will allow my business to prosper, not just today but in the future as well? How do I build a company that will outperform the stock markets – for the long term? As it turns out, despite the well-meaning advice, no one knows.

The List

Over the years, I’ve read many books that claim to have the answer to what ails business. Many years ago I read the classic book In Search of Excellence. I’ve read Jim Collins’ work Good to Great. I’ve read Patrick Lincioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – and his book The Advantage. I’ve read Singe’s work The Fifth Discipline: The Art of the Learning Organization. I’ve read Covey’s work The Four Disciplines of Execution. And the list continues:

• 365 Ways to Reward Employees with Little or No Money
  
• 42 Rules of Employee Engagement
  
• Creativity, Inc.
  
• Groundswell
  
• Heroic Leadership
  
• Influencer: The Science of Leading Change
  
• Joy, Inc.
  
• Launch!: The Critical 90 Days from Idea to Market
  
• Leading Change
  
• Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence
  
• The E-Myth Revisited
  
• The ONE Thing
  
• The Titleless Leader: How to Get Things Done When You’re Not in Charge
  
• Theory U: Learning from the Future as It Emerges
  

And this is just the list that claims to have the answers about business. It doesn’t include the books that claim to understand only an aspect of the problem, like marketing. Despite all of this reading and research, I still don’t know what works and what doesn’t work. I don’t have one definitive approach to business that I could replicate and make repeatable. So what’s going on? Am I not focusing enough or is there something else?

Foxes and Hedgehogs

One of the Jim Collins’ more famous recommendations from Good to Great is the fox and the hedgehog. It sounds a lot like the urging in The ONE Thing. The idea comes from Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox“. The basic premise is that hedgehogs know one thing really, really well and that foxes know many things well. Collins (as does Keller) believes that those who are successful are good at one thing. They stay focused. There are two issues with this that I’ve discussed before.

First, this focus on one thing contradicts the awareness that most of the innovations today are coming from the intersection of studies – not from absolute expertise in one thing. (For more see The Medici Effect.) If innovations are disruptive to existing business models, but critical for long term success and even business survival, how then can you focus on one thing? The foxes of the world are better at predicting the future. They’re better at finding innovation. They’re better at considering multiple points of view. So how is it that having one focus can possibly be the right answer?

Second, what if you pick the wrong thing to be really, really good at? For instance, the market viability of someone who is an absolute expert at canal shipping is essentially nil. For the most part, we don’t ship things via canals. The Suez and Panama canals are the two quite notable exceptions. So if I’m the world’s foremost expect on canal shipping, my ability to make a living is very narrow. Effectively, you can become the world’s best at something and have it not matter. You can become an expert at something that no one cares about – or at least that no one cares enough about. So the question is, how do you choose what to be focused on?

In a funny twist of fate, it’s the foxes that become hedgehogs – or at least they develop hedgehog-like expertise. Foxes become polymaths. (See Beyond Genius more on polymaths.) They become the Da Vinci’s of the world. They’re most interested in participating in The Medici Effect. They’re the ones that can find their way into solutions that the hedgehogs would never consider.

Of course, if you’re looking at the numbers, it looks like the hedgehogs will be the winners. They make one large bet and get large rewards from it. However, this ignores all of the hedgehogs who made the bet and lost. If you don’t count them – since they don’t make it to the end of the study – you can incorrectly conclude that the hedgehogs are the winners. However, on balance foxes seem to do better. They aren’t outliers on a standard bell curve. They’re the happy middle. They neither fail spectacularly nor do they succeed spectacularly.

The Delusion of Absolute Performance

One of the most persevering fears I have is being outperformed. As a software developer, I was told that the “offshore” developers worked 18 hour days, and that they would stop at nothing to create software solutions. Much like the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot, I’ve found the claims to be greatly exaggerated – but still fear-inducing nonetheless. I wondered how long it would be until I was replaced by an “offshore” worker, or – even more difficult to fight – when computers would start programming themselves as the users spoke what they wanted.

I was learning to be a better developer. With each line of code that I’d write, I’d get better in some small, perhaps imperceptible way. However, I had no way of knowing how fast the developers on the other side of the world were improving. Their cost was one fifth of what mine was. The economics of living in the United States are simply different than those living in India or South America. How could I compete?

This is the fear that is often overlooked. It’s not so much our performance improvement that matters. What matter is the relative improvement we have when compared with the rest of our industry and our peers. Kmart in absolute terms made great improvements in nearly every area of their business – but Walmart in particular made substantially bigger improvements. The result was that Kmart filed for bankruptcy protection, and Walmart continued to soar.

The Results Are In

So what about the results of the businesses profiled in these business books? What about the organizations that have made the leap from Good to Great? How about those that were Built to Last? What about those that were the “found” In Search of Excellence? As it turns out, the results of these organizations after their profile hasn’t been so great.

When looking retrospectively at the performance of the organizations, it was possible to pick out the organizations that excelled – but, as investment advisors are fond of saying, “past performance doesn’t indicate future results.” While it was possible to retrospectively find organizations that were effective for a period of time, that analysis didn’t demonstrate anything that would work forever.

In truth, the best business books aren’t the business books that demonstrate lasting value, advantage, or excellence. The best business books are those that tell compelling stories. We all want stories. The most successful business books of all time have been non-fiction in the sense that they’re about business. However, at the same time, they’re fiction because they are telling believable stories about impossible things – things that are not possible for everyone to do.

The Delusion of Rigorous Research

I vividly remember the title of a book I read many years ago: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Why do I remember it? I remember it because it represented what I already suspected. Incorrect application of statistics can lead to conclusions that are wildly incorrect. Business books – in my opinion – fall into two categories. There are the books which say, “I’m successful so my thinking works, do what I say.” And there are the other kind of books that say, “We’ve comprehensively analyzed the data, and here’s how to be great at business.”

The first approach works only if you’re already a successful author and business person. It’s a great place to be if you’re already there. However, most people aren’t there, and so they either need to hope people believe they’re credible, or go the exhaustive research route. The problem is that exhaustive research is expensive, difficult to get right, and often inconclusive in its findings. Too frequently, the results of painstaking research simply don’t provide any valuable results.

There are books that claim that they’ve done extensive research, and from this research they’ve identified the five or eight things that every business needs to do to be successful. However, this fails to recognize that sometimes in our world random relationships of variables occur for a temporary period or because the true underlying cause isn’t known.

Consider the high correlation between the number of arrests for public drunkenness and Baptist preachers in the 19^th century. One could easily walk up Chris Argyris’ ladder of inference and conclude that Baptist preachers were driving people to drink, or that more public drunkenness spurred more individuals to become Baptist preachers – though neither is likely correct. (I’ve talked about the ladder of inference a few times. You may find the coverage in my review of Choice Theory easiest to read.) It’s likely that both are related to the rise in population rather than one thing causing another.

Correlation and Causation

As was pointed out in The Black Swan – correlation is one thing, causation is something completely different. Knowing that one thing is related to another is interesting but knowing which thing causes the other – if either do – is more important if you want to change the results. Consider for a moment the housing and financial meltdown that happened in 2007. It all started innocently enough in the 1970s.

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was designed to encourage banks to loan money to all segments of the market, including low and moderate income families. The problem at the time was banks were reticent to loan to folks who earned low wages. This makes sense from a banking perspective, but is also not helpful for the nation at large. (Another case of bounded reality ¡thinking that leads to The Tragedy of Commons – See The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices for more about boundedly rational.) So the government would monitor practices of banks to ensure that everyone had access to financial instruments. So far so good.

However, somewhere along the line, statisticians entered with the message that home ownership was correlated with economic stability. This is true. Home owners demonstrate a number of economic attributes of stability. However, a leap was made (by whom exactly, it is not clear) that home ownership caused economic stability. As a result, Andrew Cuomo, as the secretary of housing and urban development during the Clinton administration, “encouraged” home mortgage lending to lower and moderate income families, leveraging the threat of aggressive enforcement of the CRA.

And so we all unwittily started a grand experiment about whether home ownership caused economic stability, or whether economic stability caused home ownership . As more and more people got loans for homes everything seemed fine. The loans were being offered right up to the point they were able to repay. It seemed as if things were working well in the subprime lending market.

Home prices rose in response to the increased demand. Interest rates stayed relatively constant. However, it all broke down when home prices started to level off and finally slump. The home owners couldn’t make their payments. They defaulted on their loans. The homes came back to the bank. The bank tried getting rid of the homes and home prices dropped more dramatically.

In fairness to the complete story, the housing bubble shouldn’t have caused a complete meltdown of our financial institutions. That was the greed of the financers that created financial derivatives designed to create more wealth for themselves (and I suppose everyone else). The derivatives hid the real risk behind investments, and as the home loans under the derivatives fell apart, so did they – and fortunes were lost in the balance.

So in this simple example, where we lost sight of the difference between causation and correlation, we melted down the housing market – causing large job losses in the new home construction market. We lost several financial institutions and had a government bailout of several others. We were unwitting researchers in socioeconomics, and our experiment failed. We now know that it’s economically stable thinking that leads to home ownership not the other way around – or rather, we know home ownership doesn’t cause stability. we don’t know with certainty that the opposite is true, or whether they are coincident – neither causing the other.

As an interesting sidebar, home ownership wasn’t expected until the 1950s or 1960s (See America’s Generations for more on the changing expectations of various generations); so the idea that we were experimenting with the impact of home ownership in the 1990s and 2000s seems less odd.

A World of Probabilities

Our minds love order. We love that A+B=C. As a species, we hate the idea that sometimes A+B=C and sometimes A+B=D, and other times – well other times, we have no idea what A+B is equal to. Unless you make your living grinding out money from casinos in Las Vegas, you probably don’t find the idea that outcomes are probable comforting at all. Most of us want to know that our hard work will lead to success. We don’t want to believe that three out of five times we’ll be successful if we just work hard enough for long enough.

That’s simply not satisfying. Why would I work so hard to only have a three in five chance? Even if it’s a four in five chance we don’t like it. Our brain factors out the randomness because it can’t deal with it. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow for more on cognitive biases and the simplifications we do to cope.)

I’ve become painfully aware that sometimes the same set of actions leads to different results. Rogers, in Diffusion of Innovations, spoke of how we can understand the innovation but not understand the impact of it. There are discontinuities that happen which radically change behavior. (Demand speaks to a few of these discontinuities.) The Palm Pilot didn’t dramatically change the way that people managed their lives. Personal Digital Assistants made an impact, but not a real one. By the time we get to the iPhone, we’ve suddenly got the programs, network, and portability together in a way that has all but eliminated the paper-based planners that used to be carried.

Back in 2002, I wrote Mobilize Yourself!: The Microsoft Guide to Mobile Technology. I thought that the explosion of smart phones was right on the cusp. The devices were getting smaller. The batteries were lasting longer. The storage was growing exponentially. However, I missed it. It would be another five to six years before Apple would introduce the iPhone, and in doing so would galvanize a market into action. While all the conditions were right in 2002 for the mobile market to explode, the spark didn’t come until the iPhone. I would have bet on the Microsoft Pocket PC set of devices (as the title and publisher hint at). However, while this was the probable outcome, it wasn’t the actual outcome.

Outside Our Control

It’s uncomfortable. Our egos want to believe that we are in control. (See Change or Die for more on the ego and its defenses.) We want to believe that our rational rider holds the reigns of the only elephant that matters. If we just buckle down and do the work, if we create the right strategy and implement it, then the world be damned, we’ll be successful. However, the more I read (like The Black Swan), the more convinced I become that there’s more than a small amount of business success that comes from external factors. I agree with Pasteur that “luck favors the prepared,” while simultaneously believing that chance – or luck – is far more important a factor in business than anyone wants to admit.

One can attribute the great strategies of Google and Facebook or Cisco and HP to great foresight on the part of the founders. However, when you look deeply into the stories, you find that they were exceedingly lucky in finding the right spot at the right time with the right resources. They didn’t have sophisticated methodology to find the right answers. They just happened upon them.

It’s great to have a recipe that we can follow to get the same results every time. However, the reality of business (and life) is that the circumstances and raw materials change every time. There is so much complexity that there’s no one recipe that will always work. Creating a business that works is a wicked problem. (See Dialogue Mapping for more on wicked problems.) There’s no one path. There’s no set of steps that you can follow.

If you’re willing to be uncomfortable and if you’re willing to put aside certainty, then you may be ready to read The Halo Effect.

Book Review-America’s Generations: In the Workplace, Marketplace and Living Room

It’s January 28^th 1986 and I’ve stayed home from school. I’m sitting in the basement of the tri-level home that my parents owned, when my mom called and told me that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded. I turned the TV channel I was watching to a major network and saw a replay of what had happened. I was dumbstruck. I didn’t understand how it could happen. I didn’t understand what to think. Later that evening, Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most historic speeches of our time. (One I studied while reading Great Speeches for Better Speaking.)

That was one of many defining moments in my childhood. The fact that I had stayed home from school by myself was another. As a member of Generation X, I got healthy doses of latchkey kid and divorced parents. I was shaped by these experiences in ways that I am sure I still don’t recognize. So were my friends. We were learning our values and listening to our environment to discover what we believed was true and correct.

This is the heart of generational work – the awareness that children are formed by their upbringing – for better and for worse. They take the values they’ve developed and carry them into the world as they leave high school. That’s where the story starts for America’s Generations: In the Workplace, Marketplace and Living Room.

The Five Generations

America is blessed with five generations who all share this country. Each generation passes the torch to the next. Each generation’s unique core values, which were developed as they grew up, lead to a unique perspective. Take a look at the statistics for our five generations:

These are the raw numbers that make up America’s generations. But what makes the people that make up the generation? Values do.

Values

Throughout America’s Generations, Chuck Underwood describes the different values that each generation has. However, upon reflection I believe that there are three distinct things that Underwood is bucketing into the larger container called “values”.

1. Desires – I believe that Steven Reiss’ work on the 16 basic desires explained in his book Who Am I? are a reasonable proxy for the things that drive people. I believe they’re a way to understand how people will behave in normal circumstances and that they’re what most folks would call values. I believe that each generation has a different average profile for these desires than the preceding generation and therefore taken in aggregate generations have different “values.”
2. Defining Boundaries – Cloud and Townsend helped the world understand boundaries in their book Boundaries. Townsend continued with Beyond Boundaries which defined boundaries as either protective and temporary or permanent and defining. Underwood explains that some generations develop defining boundaries, like the Gen X boundary of being a great parent, because this was something they lacked in their lives. This is the inner view that children form and that they carry into their adult lives.
3. Schemata – Our schemata – or our world view – defines how we relate to the world. Klein in Sources of Power explains the power of our mental models and our ability to simulate the world. The GI Generation and the Silent Generation grew up in a world where work was permanent. They were loyal to the corporation and the corporation was loyal to them. The generations that followed saw careers as permanent, not employers. Jobs would come and go. This developed in Gen X as a sense that you can’t trust organizations (or others). These schemata shape the way that Gen X interacts with employers and work in general.

Perspectives

Underwood seeks to distill an understanding of each generation into a series of pictures. The goal is to create understanding quickly. However, I struggled to put the pictures into frames that I could use to compare one generation to another. I wanted to see how career expectations shifted over the generations, but that wasn’t always the easiest to do based on the structure of the book. As a result, I created the following grid that largely – but not completely – follows Underwood’s observations in the book. So some of these are Underwood’s research and observation, and some of it is my extrapolation.

	GI	Silent	Baby Boomer	Gen X	Millennials
Career	I know and respect who I work for	Be loyal to the company and they’ll be loyal to you	Live to work	Trust that you’ll have work – only if you make sure you do.	Work to live
Sex	Don’t even talk about it.	It’s dirty but I do it	Free love	Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll	Sex is a recreational past time
Automobiles	Horseless carriage	One car per family	Cars are status	Cars are freedom	Cars are useful transportation when someone else isn’t willing to drive me
Music	Big bands and dancing; live	It’s on the radio	It’s my emotional release	Pop music is too corporate. I want alternatives. Choice allows me to find music that speaks to me.	It’s the soundtrack of my life
War	We won the war	We didn’t get a chance to win a war	Make love not war	It happens “over there”, not to me.	I’ll fly a drone.
Self-Confidence	We can do such amazing things.	Just do what you’re told and it will work out OK.	If I work hard enough, long enough, I’ll be successful	Life is a constant struggle	I got my participation award, did you?
Community Service	We all get better together	Community service is my social	I don’t have time for community service	Why would I want to join one of those old timers’ clubs?	I want to make a difference with my work, not a side project.
Family	Multigenerational	Nuclear	The nuclear family is a luxury not a necessity.	I’ll be a better parent than my parents	My parents are my family.
Parenting	Spare the rod and spoil the child	Discipline is essential	“We need idealistic children.” – Dr. Spock	Involved / Overinvolved
Kids Activities	Go out and don’t come back until sundown	Go out and don’t come back until the street lights turn on	Stay inside where you’re safe.	Make sure your kids are involved in as many extracurricular activities as possible.	Use your device to access the world
Money	Work hard and hope you have a little extra	Save what you get because you don’t know when you won’t have anything.	I should enjoy what I make when I make it.	I should enjoy life whether I’m making enough money or not	Money is necessary to live
Debt	Not a good idea	Required for a home	A way to finance my life	Credit cards are convenient	Too burdensome
Home Ownership		Build by my hands and those of my family – or not at all.	A source of pride	A rite of passage	Too burdensome, I’ll live with my parents
Retirement	What retirement? I’ll work till I die	Secured by social security	I’ll do it when I get there. Social Security isn’t enough – and I don’t have enough	I’ll have to provide for it.	I’ll worry about it later (may be age based because Mils aren’t old enough to be concerned – yet)
Honor	I will not leave a man down	As long as someone is watching	If it feels good it must be good	No one can be trusted, not even me.	Why should I be better than others?
Food	Eat to live	A nice meal is more than at home	I should be able to have a good surf and turf dinner.	Why spend time on it? I can grab fast food on the way through	I want to experience the abundance that life has to offer.
Marriage (Ladies)	When I find a provider	When I find a provider I like	While I’m in love	If I find the right man, I’ll get around to it	Maybe
Marriage (Men)	So I can have sex	So I can have kids	I’ve been thinking about a family	That didn’t work so well for my dad, let’s just play house	I’ll get to it – maybe
Child Bearing	A woman’s duty	A woman’s duty	An honor	A burden	A burden
Religion	Part of the fabric of life			I don’t believe but I want my children to make up their own mind.	I don’t believe.
Diversity					The differences between people don’t define them.
Learning Style		How things work, mental models, and understanding		Insatiable	Superficial, question and answer

Not every cell is filled out in the preceding because I didn’t quite know how to express the views. This, for me, is a work in progress. I’ll update it as I learn more. As we look at this grid, how did our values, self-image, and world view change so dramatically from one generation to another? The answer is in a set of defining moments – some personal and some shared.

Defining Moments

Each generation is shaped by the environment as the children grow up. Those who grow up in the golden age of automobiles and the development of the Interstate system love cars and travel by car. Those who grow up during the explosion of appliances and convenience devices still look for these devices today. The environment changed from the prominent themes of life of the latchkey kids that make up Generation X to the rise of rock and roll that fueled the hearts and minds of the boomers.

Here’s a collection of potential defining moments for you to consider how they shaped you and the people that you work with:

• Sputnik 1 (1957)

• Birth Control Pill (1960s)
• Assassination of President John F Kennedy (1963)
• Thurgood Marshal is appointed as the first African-American Supreme Court Justice (1967)
• Microwaves generally available for home use (1967)
• Landing on the moon (1969)
• Skylab operation (1973)
• Roe v Wade legalizes abortion (1973)
• Elvis Death (1977)
• Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-1981)
• Music Television [MTV] (1981)
• Marriage of Charles and Diana [Prince and Princess of Wales] (1981)
• The first Apple Macintosh (1984)
• Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster (1986)
• Libya “Line of Death” (1986)
• Dismantling of the berlin wall (1989)
• Death of Kurt Cobain (1994)
• Death of Princess Diana (1997)
• Columbine High School massacre (1999)
• September 11 terrorist attacks (2001)
• iPhone (2007)

I certainly could have listed more. And there’s plenty of opportunity to reflect on how things changed as a result of the event. The death of Princess Diana may not have impacted you personally or it might have given you reason to be frustrated with the press and the paparazzi they employ. Perhaps you decided to not purchase tabloid magazines.

Chernobyl might have changed your views on the safety of nuclear power or made you ever more vigilant. It could have made you aware of the larger forces of which you are not in control, or softened your heart for the plight of those in eastern Europe. Whatever the personal shift, it’s a shared and defining moment with millions of others on the planet and in the United States.

Things are different today in ways that previous generations could have never predicted. I realize that millennials view media differently. They didn’t know a world without the Internet. They don’t think about staying home to watch “Must-See TV.” Everything can be DVRed. Movies are available on-demand without the need to even get up off the couch. They barely remember dial tone, and a clutch and manual transmission in a car are anomalies. Their view of the world has to be different than mine because I remember these things, and my ideas of normal were formed with them in them.

One of the most pervasive changes across the generations – in my opinion – is the perspective on sex.

Sex Through the Generations

Sex has been with humans since the beginning of humanity and so has the result — pregnancy. Throughout history, humans have expected that pregnancies follow sex like harvests follow plantings. The introduction of the condom in an attempt to deter the natural consequences of sex is very old. By the 1920s, a relatively effective condom – the latex condom — was developed, improving safety from pregnancies. By the mid-to-late 1960s, the birth control pill began to come into regular use. With two layers of protection against pregnancies, the potentially life-changing consequences of sex could be reasonably avoided. Further accelerating this change was the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in 1973. Even if contraceptives failed or an accidental pregnancy occurred, the consequences of sex could be legally avoided now – regardless of ethical, moral, or religious views. E (Please don’t attempt to ascertain my view on the complicated topic of abortion from my few words here – my perspective is substantially more nuanced than I have time to go into.)

As Diffusion of Innovations illuminated, you can explain the diffusion of the innovation but not its impact on society. The impact of these innovations on society was to reduce the stigma associated with premarital sex. Instead of it being a risky behavior it became a recreational pastime. The Boomers wanted “free love” and many of them got it for the price of a condom at the local drug store. (And sometimes without that protection.)

Still, societal stereotypes change slowly. Sex may have been happening in the bedroom but it wasn’t being talked about. TV shows still showed married couples sleeping in separate twin beds. Censors were concerned about the changing attitudes in society. Mork and Mindy couldn’t say that Mindy was pregnant because that presumably meant that Mork and Mindy had had sex. However, it’s perfectly OK to say “I’m having a baby”, so that’s what the show used. (Don’t ask me why this was better, because I don’t really know.)

However, with years of erosion of the traditional values that protected society from unwanted pregnancies, is it any wonder that Millennials are “hooking up” and having casual sex in numbers that would concern even their free-wheeling Boomer parents? Sex, for many but not all Millennials, is something that is a recreational activity – not an act of bonding or something shared only in a committed relationship.

My point in highlighting this isn’t to justify the changes or even voice approval for them. My point to raise is that the world is different now. Our generational world view has been shaped by our different environment and experiences, and the result is a different view on many things, including sex.

Applicability

So how does this help us? Who cares if we know that the views of millennials are different than the views of the Boomers? The answer is because it can change how we market to them, how we lead them, and how we relate to them.

I have a component of my world which is marketing The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide. Some of my most effective marketing messages have been “retro”. When I ask about “Must See TV” or “Where’s the Beef?” my response rates go up. By recognizing the key perspectives and the key messages, I connect better with the audience and get better responses.

In another corner of my world, I create educational content, and the content providers – the libraries – that I work with are absolutely concerned with the feedback they’re getting about how Millennials are resisting traditional learning management systems. Their organizations are presenting them with the traditional video lecture educational content and they’re not taking it. (The dirty little secret in video training is the engagement rates are very low – few people actually take the courses – but the rates for Millennials are much lower than the norm.) I talk to them about ways to improve this engagement by psychological framing but also how their thinking and information processing styles are different.

I also hear of employers struggling to build generational gearboxes – a set of tools allowing employees of different generations to effectively relate and work together. These employers need the wisdom, knowledge, and know-how of the Silents and boomers and the completely free-wheeling, out-of-the-box, crowd-sourced vitality of the Millennials. And somehow they’ve got to synchronize those employees in ways that allow them to work together.

I don’t know whether by simply reading America’s Generations that you’ll discover answers to marketing, employing, educating, and relating to all five generations – but I’m sure you’ll discover interesting things to ask others about.

Book Review-Mastering Logical Fallacies: The Definitive Guide to Flawless Rhetoric and Bulletproof Logic

Have you ever felt like you’re in a discussion where the other person isn’t following the rules of logic? Have you ever felt like you knew things were off but you weren’t sure exactly why? I’ve felt that way, and that’s why when the book Mastering Logical Fallacies: The Definitive Guide to Flawless Rhetoric and Bulletproof Logic came across my email, I knew I wanted to read it.

Discussions and Arguments

Before I dive into the logical fallacies and how they are categorized, it’s necessary to stop and understand the context under which these rules apply. These rules apply to a structured disagreement. It’s about how people who are interested in improving understanding and coming to a common understanding.

Consider the story of Bill, an expert kickboxer, who frequently wins regional championships. In a dark alley he’s confronted with someone who demands his money. Knowing his prowess in the ring, he starts to defend himself. The criminal who demanded his money pulls out his gun and shoots him. The rules of logical arguments are applicable to places where the rules of discussion are well-defined. However, these aren’t necessarily the skills to bring out when having a disagreement with your spouse. (If you decide that this is the right answer you might consult The Science of Trust.)

While the rules of logic may rule a court of law, they’re very little good in the court of public opinion. While they’re powerful tools for agreement, they may be rendered powerless in an argument with flared tempers. The rules presented in Mastering Logical Fallacies are the rules of ordered debate, not the rules for arguing with a sibling or for dealing with Internet trolls.

Discussions often hold to rules of decorum, even if they’re not explicitly defined. While they rarely elevate to the level of a dialogue (see Dialogue for more) they can sometimes descend past disagreement and fall into the pit of an argument. These rules are effective in a discussion and in a disagreement, but sometimes understanding only gets you so far when it comes to arguments.

Logical-Emotional

I mentioned in my review of Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis – and several times since – that I love the model of the rider-elephant-path for describing the relationship between our rational self, our emotional self, and our environment. Kurt Lewin said that behavior is a function of both person and environment. In the rider-elephant-path model, the environment is the path. And what Lewin simplifies to the variable person are two related factors of the rider and the elephant.

While Mastering Logical Fallacies focuses in on the rider and how to make rational, logical arguments, there are many admissions that we’re not just rational creatures. There’s an acknowledgement that even though some emotional arguments aren’t rational they’re often quite effective. I find that arguments tend to be more emotional than rational. By knowing the rules of logical arguments you can – perhaps – avoid the degeneration into an emotional argument.

Rhetorical Techniques

Like a magician performing sleight of hand, sometimes the argument is less about the argument and more about what the opposing party can pull off while you’re not paying attention. Plays on emotion, instead of logic and reason, are popular ways to derail and discussion – particularly in politics or the court of public opinion.

A regular argument or debate, however, should be ruled by logic and not by emotion. Mastering Logical Fallacies is a toolbox to ensure that your arguments and responses follow the rules of logic.

Formal and Informal

The first distinction in the book is the difference between formal and informal fallacies. This major dividing line is between the arguments that are invalid by their structure, and those whose lack of validity is based on their content. Of the 61 fallacies covered in the book, only four of them are formal – and therefore invalid on their face. Two more can either be formal or informal – and the remainder are based on the content of the argument.

Consider the unfalsifiability fallacy. That is, someone makes an argument where it’s impossible to disprove the claim. This is what Sir Karl Popper used to identify the difference between science and pseudoscience. Science expresses its claims in a way that allow for them to be proven to be false, where pseudoscience appears beyond reproach.

This is a formal fallacy. You can’t make an logically sound argument that can’t be tested and proven incorrect. It’s not about the content of the argument, but is instead about its structure. Understanding how fallacies differ can help you spot them more easily. Of course, that assumes that you have a list of the fallacies you’re looking for.

The Listing

A friend of mine once spoke of spending hours outside looking into the sky looking for enemy aircraft flying overhead. In the middle of Michigan, this was a rather far-fetched idea; however, he was ready. He had his plane spotter cards and could identify the silhouettes of both American and enemy planes. He was prepared to identify the enemy and give report of their numbers. As amusing as this may seem, he was primed with what to look for so he could be ready. Here are the logical fallacies as laid out in the book, so you can be ready to identify them:

Relationships

The astute observer may note that there are many of these fallacies which are related – something that the book is quick to acknowledge. However, each fallacy has a slightly different structure. As that structure changes so do the responses to them. Being able to identify variations on a theme makes you more able to see the subtleties and to see what you need to do to Master(ing) Logical Fallacies.

Book Review-TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

One of the things that I realized is that all humans have the innate ability to speak – save those unfortunate souls who are mute. Sometime shortly after our first birthday our vocabulary bursts forth and we begin our lifelong dance with speaking. Later we learn how to write and read, and we have the capacity to understand not just the spoken word but the written word as well. However, all of this is “old hat” – everyone I’m speaking to has done these things for decades. Why should someone study something that we all do naturally?

The answer comes in a desire to get better. Ericsson in Peak describes purposeful practice, and how only through purposeful practice can someone reach the pinnacle of the skill and the industry. I want to be able to deliver knowledge and perspective that will reach to the greatest possible audience. I want to ignite the world on fire with ideas and possibility and tools to make the ideas a reality.

That’s why I continue the struggle to get better at public speaking, and why I look for luminaries to share their wisdom of how to do it. That’s exactly what I found in TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking.

Types of Talking

It’s been years ago now when I was first invited to do a keynote speech for a conference. I really knew almost nothing about them other than it was an opportunity to speak with everyone at the conference all at one time. I had been doing educational sessions for years with this conference organizer, and he trusted my stage presence enough to give me a shot at the keynote. My initial preparations, however, fell way short of the bar.

I was approaching my keynote preparation like I would my educational session preparation. I was trying to help educate my audience. I wanted them to know more about how to turn the right wrenches in the right order to get the right result. The organizer, who I count as a friend now, told me that the whole point of a keynote speech is different. I’m not there to educate. I’m there to inspire and enlighten.

If you’re a technical-minded person like me, the difference between education and inspiration seems to be very short – but as I found out they’re worlds apart. In traditional education it’s “Just the facts, ma’am”, but in inspiration it’s substantially more about engaging the entire being, including those stubborn emotions. (See the Rider-Elephant-Path in The Happiness Hypothesis for more.)

As I’ve put more focus on learning this craft more deeply, I’ve come to realize there’s a third variation of public speaking in addition to education and inspiration that’s equally different, challenging, and fun. That third form is facilitation. Facilitating a group is sort of like dancing when you don’t control your body. You can encourage a place to be but your muscles can (and do) have their own ideas. While facilitation done well is amazing, done poorly it’s a train wreck.

TED Talks focuses only on inspiration, and how to infect folks with ideas that make them change the way they see the world and how they contribute to it.

Public Speaking is Persuasion

At the core of all public speaking is the idea of persuasion. The idea is that if I can persuade someone else, if I can infect them with my view of paradise, I’ve succeeded. This is true no matter what the form. Education seeks to invade the mind of the listener with new knowledge that will be integrated into their own existence. Facilitation seeks to guide them into the group state of dialogue, potentially forever altering their world views and approaches. (See Dialogue for more on this.) Finally, inspiration seeks to change you. It seeks to directly change your way of seeing the world and to incite action.

All of this is persuasion. It’s attempting to convince another person to let you into their world. This is what Dr. Glasser calls their “quality” world in Choice Theory. We’re trying to convince them to drop the barriers that separate us and them and to allow, for a moment, ideas to cross a permeable boundary.

As a child I disliked persuasion. I thought that, somehow, people could literally put thoughts in my head. I didn’t like the idea that I wasn’t in control of myself and my thinking. I saw the evil witch from The Wizard of Oz standing over a large crystal ball pushing those thoughts into a helpless victim.

As I’ve grown older (and I hope wiser), I realize that people can’t force their thoughts on us, we have to let them in. We have to trust the other person enough to consider what they’re saying might be true. (See Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy for more on trust and its impacts.) This is where persuasion comes in: it’s convincing people to consider our perspective – not that it’s right but that it might be more right than what they know today, or that it might offer them a different piece to the jigsaw puzzle we call life.

The Significance of Speaking

Have you ever seen something happening and it appears that it’s all happening in slow motion? It’s like the effect in movies when you see a crash slowed down to watch the fireball erupt or the car flip in more detail? That’s what it looks like to me as I see the increasing importance of speaking and persuading people.

YouTube is a phenomenon. There is so much more video being created and captured for posterity than has ever been created. Video content is now a regular part of our world, and most folks admit it’s here to stay. It’s transforming education from instructor-led to on-demand. Instead of video being the league of the TV elite, it’s now created in the living room of the lonely teen.

Today, there are still more tweets than videos on YouTube. There are still more texts than video chats. There are still more emails than all of these put together. However, the question is, for how long? How long will it be that we prefer the cold precision of a typed – or “thumbed” – word to the warmth of a human connection? (See Alone Together for more on the backlash about us living technologically connected but alone.)

In the movie Back to the Future, the character Dr. Emmett Brown (Christopher Lloyd) responds incredulously when Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) says that the famous movie actor Ronald Regan is the president – until he discovers the video camera that Marty brought with him. All of the sudden he believes he understands why you need an actor as a president – because everything is on TV. Certainly, there’s a greater importance to video today than years ago and it’s growing. Though you don’t have to be a movie star to be president, you clearly must be a performer.

In a world where anyone can write a blog (like this one), anyone can write a book (through a vanity publisher), and nearly every book known to man is available at the speed of light (Amazon Kindle), how powerful is the written word? No longer are the titles of the newspaper all there is, and somehow the prestige and weight of the written word is eroding slowly. People regularly doubt the validity of the written word, because there’s no personal connection to the person behind them. Every view – correct and incorrect – is on the internet. Some of those views have a picture of Abraham Lincoln beside them with a quote from “Honest Abe” saying that he believes everything he reads on the Internet. (Ponder that for a moment.)

Speaking of Savers

If you speak very often, something is bound to go wrong. It might be the A/V or you’ll flub a line – but something will undoubtedly go wrong. My first night on a comedy stage during an open mic night, I was holding the microphone as I saw the cord drop out of it in slow motion. I didn’t know what to do. I was already nervous enough for any three people you might meet on the street, and an honest-to-goodness problem had just occurred. The good news is that by the time I got to this spot I’d given hundreds of presentations, so I silently picked up the cord and plugged it back in. It would have been funnier if I had just started to mouth the words pretending to not realize that the cord had come out. I’ve put that in my file for the next time it happens because it will.

When I’m speaking I want an expressive audience. I want to see what they’re thinking and how they’re reacting to the material. However, there are times where every funny joke falls on deaf ears – or maybe they’re not that funny. There are times when you feel as if you’re at a mortician’s convention and someone switched up the bodies with their clients. (See Inside Jokes for more on why jokes work – or don’t.) It’s for that reason that I borrow my friend Michael Malone’s saver. “You know I can see you right? This isn’t television.” It seems to always work to get a chuckle out of the audience. I can follow that up with the need for interaction, and generally the crowd is a bit looser.

I believe that humor and comedy are important components that go into the mix of public speaking. That’s one of the reasons I spent so much time learning about it (See I Am a Comedian and Inside Jokes). I believe that learning how to let the laugh ring out – and not mow over it with your next comment – is an essential bonding moment with the audience. I also believe that with good preparation, good timing, and a sufficiently large audience, you can make the speech truly memorable. Despite that, the concept of “savers” – little bits that you can use – isn’t primarily about the humor. Savers are a way to get back on track after the train is on its side. The vehicle that they use to lift us up and get things on the right track is humor, but their impact is to get things rolling again.

Privilege of the Platform

It’s been a few years now since I attended the NSA conference when it was in Indianapolis. (See My Experience with the National Speakers Association – thus far.) Perhaps the most striking thing that I heard during the event was the phrase, “The privilege of the platform.” That is, it’s a privilege to speak to others from the speaking platform. They don’t owe us anything more. Not more book sales. Not more consulting engagements. The folks in the audience owe us nothing. We as the speakers owe them something. We owe them a good return for their investment in time. We owe them to pour our hearts and souls into our presentation, and to deliver it in a way that creates the greatest likelihood that it will be valuable to them.

Sometimes speakers, myself included at times, get this backwards. They’re trying to take from the audience. They’re trying to extract their names to grow their mailing list. They’re trying to get that next DVD purchase. They’re trying to make the next sale or get the right introduction.

Certainly there is a need to ask for what you need. Someone having read Selling to VITO wouldn’t be shy about asking to speak with the CEO. However, at the same time, there’s a need to deliver value before you ask for something in return.

The Gift of Understanding

As a speaker – no matter what the type of speaking – the key gift that you can leave the audience with is understanding. It can be the understanding that the way they see the world isn’t the only way to see it through inspiration. It can be that they understand how to do something differently – they’ve developed a new skill – through education. It can be that they understand an issue better because it was possible for everyone’s voice to be heard through facilitation. Whatever the method, the goal is still the same: to increase the level of understanding.

There’s an art form in creating the conditions that allow others to build understanding. There’s the Art of Explanation
and knowing how to structure things in a way that will make sense. There’s a totally different way of approaching The Adult Learner. There’s a set of research that exposes Efficiency in Learning. Facilitation has the understanding of the need for Dialogue.

The desire to help people build understanding crosses boundaries. One frontier is obviously education, and what we know about how people learn. However, learning in Choice Theory points us to learning more about psychology. Psychology teaches us about the barriers to learning, like a fixed Mindset and a resistance to change even in cases where it’s Change or Die. Sometimes these books are really neurology books Incognito – just waiting for us to discover that, in addition to psychology, neurology offers insights into how people learn – and the barriers to learning.

To offer the gift of understanding (because you can’t truly give it), you have to invest yourself in the pursuit of creating the right conditions for success, and that is, of course, the subject of leadership. It’s about Thinking in Systems and how they help or harm people. It’s learning the secrets of Multipliers – those people who are able to create understanding and engagement in their employees.

Offering the gift of understanding is the most precious thing that a speaker offers, and the one that takes the most effort to offer.

Increasing Interest

In most audiences, you start out with a baseline level of interest – not enough to study the topic and become an expert like you are, but an interest none-the-less. The speaker’s job is to increase that interest to the point that it will drive desire to learn more. Learning creates the opportunity for understanding.

Increasing interest is done through a variety of approaches and techniques. Sally Hogshead in her book Fascinate speaks of seven triggers: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice, and trust. These are the levers that drive interest. You can use intrigue (as in mystique) to increase interest. You can feign a threat to increase alarm. You can laud someone with power. You can offer them additional prestige and so on.

Memorizing and Improvising

There are speakers who believe in memorizing every word of their speech. They believe that their best way of delivering is one where they’ve memorized everything. There are other speakers, like myself, that find this approach too rigid and lacking in the ability for me to read the mood of the crowd and adapt to the situation. However, both are valid ways of presenting. Each has its value.

The folks that memorize their talks have the value of continued refinement. Todd McComas once told me that he had to deliver one of his favorite jokes with a belly rub. If he didn’t deliver it with the belly rub the joke didn’t do well. If he delivered the lines with a belly rub the crowd would roar. (I’ve been at clubs where this happened.)

This taught me that comedians – good comedians – don’t just have a general concept of something funny. They’ve got a bit that they’ve refined into a pattern that they can replay at will. This allows them to have optimized the experience for that joke or that bit to perfection. The good news is that perfection means more laughs. The bad news is that it takes a long time to get there.

Having a looser style, where you know the topic you want to discuss but don’t necessarily memorize the words, can be powerful too. As I mentioned, it tends to make the style more improvisational and allows you to adapt more easily to the audience. This can be important when your environment changes frequently.

Landing Pads

If you’re in an airplane flying around, you want to know there’s a runway somewhere that you can land on. In fact, pilots are supposed to remain aware of potential places to land in the case of an emergency. If you’re in a helicopter you want to know that there’s a landing pad where you can set down at some point. It’s important to know where you’re landing, whether you’re flying or you’re speaking. For me, I’ve got a set of fixed points in my presentations. I know what I’ll find when I get there, and I can for a moment or two go into automatic pilot with my speaking. What that means is that I can focus my mental energies on assessing what I might have missed, the current audience engagement, and where I’m at on my timing.

These landing pads aren’t memorized bits of content, but are instead content that I know so well that I can flow words out of my mouth without my full attention. They’re my way of getting a moment or two to make sure I’m “on my marks.” I know for each major point in my presentation where I need to be on time and how much energy I should be putting out. Having a place to stop for a moment and reflect – while continuing to engage with the audience – is an important way for me to speak.

TED Talks makes a point of stating that you can pause and gather where you are. While it’s uncomfortable for the speaker at times, the audience doesn’t generally mind. They recognize it as something that you’re doing to make sure that you’re giving them the best experience.

One Way Through

One of the key learnings for me was the need for a through line. That is, I need to be able to map the story arc so that anyone can see it if they try. Since much of my work is education, I tend to think about educational objectives and sequencing of content. While this is still important (if not critical) for educational talks, for inspirational talks it takes something different. It takes a story arc or a through line. It’s the string on which the pearls hang.

Educationally I think in terms of the main point before which I put context of the idea. After the context comes the necessary components – like doing the sub-assemblies in manufacturing or putting together the components of a larger recipe. Once the components are in place I can make the main point – and then explain why it’s important or relevant. While this is held up to be an example of a structure, I think for me it is too educational to be inspirational.

Should I Speak?

One of the interesting questions is whether we should speak about the topic at all. Sometimes you shouldn’t speak about something because you don’t know enough, and other times it’s because you’re not passionate about it enough. Ted Talks provides a set of questions to evaluate whether you should speak about a topic or not:

• Is this a topic I’m passionate about?
• Does it inspire curiosity?
• Will it make a difference to the audience to have this knowledge?
• Is my talk a gift or an ask?
• Is the information fresh, or is it already out there?
• Can I truly explain the topic in the time slot allocated, complete with necessary examples?
• Do I know enough about this to make a talk worth the audience’s time?
• Do I have the credibility to take on this topic?
• What are the fifteen words that encapsulate my talk?
• Would those fifteen words persuade someone they’d be interested in hearing my talk?

So maybe you have a burning desire to become a speaker – but you’ve not yet found your topic.

Fear Jujitsu

Sometimes I don’t prepare properly for my speeches. Mostly when I’ve done an educational speech, too frequently I get bored and I struggle to stay focused on it. As a result, I’ll sometimes not refresh my memory of the material. The result is a bit of fear for me. The strange part is that I’m sometimes doing this process on purpose. It’s a delicate balance between being too prepared and not having the energy for the topic I need, or being slightly underprepared to give myself a jolt of adrenaline.

I’ve learned that fear can be an energy source. If I’m willing to acknowledge my uneasiness and fear, I can convert it into motivation and energy to reveal my passion for a topic. If I enter a topic I know too well, the result is the audience typically notices a lack of passion from me.

I call transforming fear into energy my “fear jujitsu”. Jujitsu is a martial art which uses the enemy’s power against them. It’s not meeting force with force, but is instead meeting force with deflection. For me that’s what I do with fear: I redirect it. I convert the adrenaline it releases into a useful tool so that I can deliver a talk worthy of being a TED talk. Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to say that I’ve given TED Talks
– maybe you can too.