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The news is filled with examples of senior executives and politicians who want a position at the top but are too cowardly to accept the ultimate responsibility that goes with such a position. It is always someone else’s fault. They never had any idea what was going on…even if the person doing it was themself.

You know the response. They make something up in defense and expect us to believe it in spite of evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately it works all too often leading to more problems in the future and an even greater disaster than the original problem. After all, each time such a person is let off without penalty their belief in their infallability just builds and builds.

This is particularly true if they haven’t followed the advice offered in the last post: Warren Buffet’s Key To Success? Criticism. If they are insulated by sycophants telling them they can do no wrong, that each and every thing they do is the best thing ever. The ego grows while the ability to distinguish what is actually the best thing to do diminishes. It’s hard to tell which moves faster, ego growth or judgement diminishment.

Thinking about this got me pondering

the famous sign on President Truman’s desk:

What has happened since Truman’s times

that makes it so difficult for leaders to accept responsibility?

Whether accepting it or not, leaders set the culture, the tone, and the ethical basis of the entire organization they lead. If the person or people at the top won’t take accountability for what the organization does, whay should anyone else accept accountability for their mistakes? If obfuscation if not outright lies by the leader are the response to unfortunate events, is it any wonder that everyone else is comfortable misleading others about what really occurred?

If those at the top and the organization as a whole are hiding money overseas to avoid taxes and using corporate resources as if they were their own, why should an employee worry about falsifying an expense report or adding a few extra hours to their time sheets?

You really are accountable for all that happens. Like it or not, The Buck Stops At You.

Buffet is an unusual man in many ways. One of the ways is that he insists on having people who vehemently disagree with him around to push back…and he is not just fine with, but actually welcomes such disagreement in public. He turns out to be one of the few CEOs who allows absolutely anyone to ask questions at his annual meeting and who doesn’t seem to have any worries about having to answer an odd or even disparaging question in front of thousands.

No preapproved questions and pre-written answers for him. Bring on those tough questions and push him.

Many of the biggest disasters in the corporate and political world have come about when the person at the top became insulated from those in disagreement with their ideas and policies. Not that those in opposition are always or even often correct, but when you refuse to hear opposing views the more closed you mind becomes. The more you think you’re the smartest person in the room, the more closed minded you tend to become. The more closed minded you become…the higher the likelihood you’ll miss something that leads to disaster.

Merely giving lip service to hearing is not enough. You need to open your mind to opposing views, encourage opposing views, revel in opposing views. Learning comes from the give and take of ongoing discourse with people who can question you, push you, suggest other ideas.

We’re talking about civil discourse, not what passes for discussion on the internet or most of talking head television and radio. Berating, screaming at, insulting, and refusing to hear the response are not civil discourse. Joe Scarborough’s show, Morning Joe, is popular for the reason that he gathers erudite people from differing views and allows, no, encourages them to share their ideas and discuss their differences. No screaming, just intelligent conversation about the facts and their implications.

Most importantly, people are willing to be convinced if presented with irrefutable evidence that their ideas are wrong. How unusual. People are willing to be convinced if presented with irrefutable evidence that their ideas are wrong.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

*****

For more information on Warren Buffet’s love of opposing views: Jason Zweig in the Wall Street Journal, ”Lesson From Buffett: Doubt Yourself”

Have you ever been in a group and privately believed something while sure the rest of the group believed the opposite? Remember that time at the fancy restaurant you were sure the food was terrible but were unwilling to speak up because no one else did? You assumed they thought the food wonderful but others probably thought the same as you.  Often many in the group actually are in agreement with you but feel the same way you do…they alone have this belief. No one shares their thoughts because they incorrectly believe everyone else shares the opposite opinion. It happens quite often.

Recently during lunch a long time client started out by telling me “I’m probably going to offend you but I want to share my thoughts about something.” Of course I got nervous and wondered what this long time client…who had become a very good friend…was going to say. 

To my surprise, he gave a very detailed overview of his political beliefs and began talking about the state of the government. To his surprise, with minor differences, I fully agreed with everything he said.

The very next day while reading Pacific Standard Magazine, in the article Alone With Everyone Else, I learned this is a well known phenomenon. In 1931 psychologists Daniel Katz and Floyd Allport gave it a wonderful name: pluralistic ignorance.

Pluralistic Ignorance: thinking that everyone else in a group believes the opposite of you when, in fact, they don’t.

In the political world this leads to bad policy hanging on longer than it should due to the belief that everyone agrees with it…when, in fact, individually many are in opposition. In the business world it leads to an inability to correct bad practices in the belief that everyone else thinks they’re the best practices.

Pluralistic ignorance leads to groups often having group belief quite at divergence from actual beliefs of the group members. Members feel they can’t speak up and so go along with policies and actions they find uncomfortable or even abhorrent. As a group and as a society we thus do things that few agree with and many would like to see changed.

Keeping your opinions to yourself can, in fact, lead to the wrong decision, the wrong action, the wrong result. 

Fight pluralistic ignorance. Encourage all to share their ideas in an open and honest way. Gather opinions widely and discover what people really think. And as for yourself, find out if others really do agree with you or are just nodding their heads in order to keep their mouth shut.

More and more people seem to have strong opinions…and seem to be unwilling to consider modifying them under any circumstances. In the political arena this has led to gridlock in Washington combined with a splintering of any semblance of a unified country on many issues. The United States is not alone in this. Around the world it seems to be more and more difficult to get people to agree on a course of action to solve just about any mutual problem they face.

Compromise has become the strongest curse word there is, wielded to intimidate into submission rather than lead to common understanding, solution, and agreement on action. We see it every day because the political fights are so visible, and we pay attention because it has such impact on each of us.

As the discourse has become louder and more virulent in condemnation of those with differing opinions, fed by the digital 24 hour deluge of nasty comments, the situation has grown worse. And it looks like it will continue along this downward spiral.

I believe this is at least partly due to the fact that we react emotionally in defense when our opinions are attacked rather then rationally in reasoned debate about what the facts lead to. Unfortunately modern discourse all too often degenerates into attacks that unleash this emotional response rather than being civil comments that lead to rational thought.

I was pleased to read, not because it is good news but because it supports my thinking, that recent research at George Mason University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has found that those who read rude comments about themselves and their opinions became more fixed about their positions, whatever they are. Observation supported by research.

There is another less visible manifestation of this that occurs in the business world and impacts the success…or failure…of the company and so concerns us in this blog. All too often the words by senior executives to those who are lower in the company hierarchy feels to the person addressed more like an attack than a desire to communicate and discuss. And to make it worse, those who happen to witness the event feel the same. The result? A negative emotional response which often leads to a strengthening and continuation of whatever behavior was being addressed. It is the dreaded “passive aggressive” response which comes about because due to relative positions of power outright disagreement is difficult or impossible.

Where does this resistance come from? Not the one addressed but the one addressing. Executives are often their own worst enemy, completely oblivious to the response they engender by the words, attitude, and actions they display. Often the one causing the problems is someone they see every morning staring back at them in the mirror.

If only what they saw bore some resemblance to how they’re seen by others

Yangjie Gu, Simona Botti, and David Faro have been investigating how to improve satisfaction with the decisions we make. At first I passed this research by, thinking it was only about buying things. But then it occurred to me, if you think about all decisions as buying decisions, perhaps their ideas could improve satisfaction throughout an organization.

What they found is that when you make a buying decision you’re happier with it if you perform some small act of closure…some act that shows the decision is made. Note the word “small”. A minor act is all that is required for a significant increase in satisfaction with the decision.

Something as simple as closing the menu after choosing your meal at a restaurant increases satisfaction with your dinner over choosing the same mean and leaving the menu open. It seems that restaurateurs have been working a bit of subliminal taste improvement on us with the well known method of waiting until we close the menu to come and take our order. The finality of closing the door on the decision leaves us more pleased when we taste those first bites.

How to apply this in your business? I must admit I’m not sure so thought I’d offer it up as a daydreaming exercise. Next time your brain needs a break from the rigors of 24 hour access, go off on that clarity break and think about closure…and satisfaction. What can you do to ensure little acts of closure occur throughout the day as people make decisions.

Remember, we’re talking a physical action of actually lowering a lid or something similar. My guess is that the physical act of moving is as important as seeing the menu closed. You made a decision, you closed the lid, feels great.

Let me know what you come up with.

“Turning the Page: The Impact of Choice Closure on Satisfaction”, Journal of Consumer Research, August 2013 

Response to last post: Opinion?…or Fact? I received this in response to Opinion?…or Fact? “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, United States Senator.

People seem to be confusing opinion with fact much more than they used to. This is affecting both those spouting opinion as fact as well as those unable to differentiate whether what they hear is opinion or fact. It has dire implications since opinion often directly contradicts fact.

According to Merriam-Webster:

Opinion:   a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter.

Fact: the quality of being actual.

Notice the difference. Opinions are ideas formed in your mind while facts are about real things that exist. Political discourse today gives us the clearest example of the disasters that come from basing decisions on opinion versus fact. And it also shows how difficult it is to come to agreement when people harbor deep felt opinions that resist all intrusion of fact.

It leads to willful ignorance, as Stephen Schwartz calls this following of opinion over fact. And willful ignorance leads to decisions with poor results. In the political arena such decisions negatively impact whole countries and all their citizens.

In the United States the fact is that along much of our coast we have rising water that will eventually, and in some places very soon, lead to dire consequences for coastal communities. There are two responses currently taking place in North Carolina which has a huge, low lying coastal area already seeing the effects of higher water levels.

State scientists and various science panels are using the factual data on historic and recent weather and water patterns to predict how the water will rise and affect coastal communities…leading to ideas for how to respond. Unfortunately the predictions lead to consequences that many do not want to hear since they negatively affect coastal property. In response political leaders are passing laws based on their opinion that water is not rising. These laws prohibit government agencies from preparing responses based on the facts. They are trying to legislate real things…facts… to conform to opinion.

They don’t want to scare off land developers, and the money they and those who buy the houses bring, from building on what will soon be underwater.

The result? Their opinions are creating more development in areas where it is extremely likely to be destroyed in storms…with all the negative consequences this leads to.

I’ve noticed the same thing occurring in companies. Leaders and leadership teams that have opinions about what they do and how wonderful it is that are so strong they completely ignore facts showing they are wrong, the facts showing the water is rising and their business will be swept away.

Leaders who have built moats around themselves that keep unpleasant facts from getting in. Leaders who have made it clear to their people that their opinions are correct so no one need dispute them with evidence to the contrary.

Leaders who are standing on tiptoe to keep their nose above water but still are sure it’s just a temporary wave passing by.

Happy Hour Indeed

Undoubtedly most of you finished the above quote by filling in the famous misquote of Alice in her talk with Cat in Alice in Wonderland. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” But this sentence never appears in Alice in Wonderland. The actual idea appears in a much longer way during a dialogue between the two.

Then there is what Yogi Berra said, although no one seems to have any idea how many of the things Yogi Berra said, he actually said. I imagine he would enjoy this confusion immensely. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up someplace else.”

Whether pulled out of and created from the ideas in a longer dialogue or an apocryphal comment from one of the most well known American philosophers, these quotes capture the reason for so much business anguish: not having any idea what the end goal is. For without a clear, concise, measureable goal how can you plan the path to achieve it? And how can you know when you get there…or even where there is?

It gets even worse if you think about the actual final few words in the interchange between Alice and Cat, “if you only walk long enough.” Without knowing where you’re going not only will you have no idea how to get there but you’ll also not know when you get there.

I know companies traveling this random path. And the leadership team is wondering why things aren’t going as well as they’d like. Everyone else in the company knows why…they are lost in the wilderness and can’t build a map to get out without knowing where they’re going. And the leadership team isn’t up to the task, or isn’t brave enough for the task, or figures it will all work out…eventually.

Make your life easier. Do some hard work immediately. Pull the leadership team together, take a day, and gaze out into the future. What is that wonderful, big, profitable vision floating out there five or ten or twenty years in the future? Wonderful, big, profitable.

Now think about what you need to get there. The people, the processes, the customers, and whatever else you can clearly delineate and measure. Measure, for without measurement you have no way of knowing how you’re proceeding.

Notice I have not mentioned product or service. If you don’t have something people want nothing will help you so you might as well just pack up shop now and do something else.

But assuming you do have something people want, spend the rest of the day drawing the map that will get you to this future. And the day after take the second step by communicating the vision to everyone and then the third step by actually beginning to follow the path you’ve laid out.

Be strong and stay focused. Follow the map. Don’t led the random trails you cross steal your attention and lead you off in different directions. Keep that vision in sight right out there in front of you…and notice how it becomes more and more solid as you move forward. And how everything begins to improve as the business moves forward, aligned, engaged, with all running down the same path together.

Follow the right road and get where you’re going…without wearing out your feet.

Complexity is everywhere. The more complex things become, the fewer of us understand them and the harder it is to come to agreement and reach a decision…or a solution. We overload everything with unending charts and graphs and facts and details and just for good measure throw in anything that just, possibly, perhaps might someday add a teeny tiny bit of something or other.

So many try and hide the fact that they are too cowardly to just distill it all down and clearly state the basic facts. They are unwilling to come out for something that we all can understand so obfuscate everything behind piles and piles of irrelevant things to make it as hard as possible for us to understand. I suppose they think this makes them seem erudite but mostly it makes them seem incapable of clear thinking and judgement.

Most things have only a few key and critical items necessary to explain them in a way that all can understand. Most things have only a few key and critical items that lead to success or failure. Most things have only a few key and critical issues needing rapid resolution.

The most things I’m talking about include your business as well as just about everything your business does. At any point in time only a small part of what goes on is really critical for the life or death of your business…critical for successful growth and profitability.

And yet, we treat everything as equally important and overwhelm everyone with so many things to do and details about how to do them and explanations about what we want done that we lose the basic concepts of clarity, understanding, freedom to act, and thus the ideas, creativity, and innovation that come from letting the mind roam without overwhelming it with flotsam and jetsam.

We lose the wisdom that lives in the minds of our people.

Simplicity of thought is difficult to achieve. It takes effort to distill things down to their essentials and bravery to give only these essentials as guidance.

Effort and bravery that will be well rewarded as you realize that with clarity and trust in others comes simplicity and with simplicity comes more rapid decisions and quicker execution to solve those things that really are the critical factors for future success.

And everyone will understand and be included.

I’ve sent out my thoughts every Tuesday since beginning this blog. But this morning it happened. When I sat down to write today’s post I realized I had nothing to say. Much has happened since I last wrote and I’ve been thinking about quite a few things, but none of it rose to the level of something I felt would be useful to comment about. Nothing at all that would get you thinking about improving your ability to be a great manager and leader.

Perhaps that’s the idea for today. When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

We’re all obsessed with creative thinking. How can we get people to come up with new ideas, create new products, solve seemingly intractable problems, and even just be a bit better at getting basic tasks done well.

Neuroscientist David Strayer got thinking about just these issues when he realized that his brain seemed to work much better when he was hiking around the backcountry than when he was sitting for days on end in his lab. Being a scientist he did what scientists do: came up with an experiment to evaluate this situation. He used his favorite lab rats, university students. Half the group went off on a four day backcountry hike while the others just hung around and did whatever they normally did…which was not backcountry hiking.

Amazingly, when the students were then evaluated via a creative thinking and intuition test the hikers bettered the others by 50%. Merely getting out of the built environment and walking through the backcountry opened up the creative synapses tremendously.

I hestitate to suggest that you send all your employees off on four day backcountry hikes in the hopes they return with exceptionally new and creative ideas. That seems to stretch the research way too much. However, Strayer seems to have found that freeing the brain from the built world and letting it wander while getting some exercise via hiking along the wilderness trails will open up the mind to non-linear intuitive and creative ideas. So perhaps you ought to think about how to encourage such pursuits.

Personally, I have always found Strayer’s conclusion to be true and so spend quite a bit of time walking through the woods where I live. Mostly I take short walks of a hour or two. Still, these short walks always get my mind wandering to unusual places and coming up with thoughts I never had before. People laugh at me, but I always carry a little tablet that fits in my pocket so I can scatch out notes as ideas occur to me. A fair bit of my soon to be published book was thought through this way and I’ve come up with some interesting ideas for clients that have proven useful and profitable while staring at trees and pileated woodpeckers.

I’ve also noticed that although I mostly walk by myself when I’m with someone else the ideas seem to grow exponentially. The power of minds released from their strictures feeding off of and building on the ideas you can bounce around when only the trees and forest critters are witnesses.

Get some air more often. Encourage your people to get some too. That old saying you mention about needing to get some air as you bolt from the confines of the office into the outside world is the first thought on your way to a more creative day.

…which is just about everything. Stop worrying about and putting time and effort into anything that isn’t critical to the success of your business. Be tough. Take a step back and really think about what is essential for improving the business.

It’s hard to do. We are accustomed to thinking that many more things are required than actually are. We fear eliminating things just in case they might be necessary or useful some time in the future. We’re caught by the endowment effect…divestiture aversion…a tendency to over value things once we have them. We lose our ability to differentiate the necessary from the nice to have, the long term critical from the immediately in front of us. We forget that if everything is important, nothing is.

All too often the immediate grabs our attention and we drop everything else to take care of it…without any thought about it’s importance. We ignore or put off dealing with something critical because it’s just so much easier to fix some simple thing that popped up and distracted us. We let every distraction grab our attention and focus.

And yet, greater success comes from maintaining your focus on the few things that really are critical. Greater success comes not allowing yourself to be distracted by the minor but immediate, by the constant emails and texts, by the hurricane of noise that comes with volume and intensity but no depth or value.

Look out over the next 90 days. Make a list of what you need to do. No doubt it goes on and on. Step back. Be tough. Force yourself to really think about which are the 3 or 4 critical things that absolutely have to be completed over the next 90 days for business success. Pick those things that are mission critical. After all, you are only going to be able to do so much so do that which has the biggest impact. Save the rest for another day.

Now work on these 3 or 4 critical tasks and get them done. You have 90 days. The rest will still be there waiting for you although you’ll probably find some of these less important things disappear. It turns out that many are symptoms and when you solve the critical the symptoms take care of themselves.

Do things by choice, by conscious design. Not by accident or random happenstance. Eliminate the non-essential. You’ll be amazed how much more effective you are and how much more time you create. Now get everyone else in your organization to do the same thing. Focus on the important and leave the rest to fare how it will.

An amazing thing will happen as this way of working permeates your organization. Everything improves.

We all are overwhelmed by everything going on around us. With more responsibility comes more to worry about…and more piling up on your plate. Decisions about this and that interspersed with neverending calls, emails, and heads popping in needing just one minute to discuss something. And then there are the meetings and the travel and hopefully not lost in all this, family and friends.

It’s enough to exhaust you just thinking about it.

And with exhaustion comes the need to breathe.

We all know about breathing. Most of us do it every day without thinking much about it. Althletes, actors, and great speakers all know the value of controlling your breathing to achieve peak performance…and so think about it always.

But there is another thing about taking a breath…it gives you time to think before speaking or acting. It gives you the chance to hold your tongue or stop your arm from moving. It gives you the chance to think about how that email will sound to the recipient…and do you really want that to be their reaction.

It gives you a chance to overcome the braindeadening effects of overwork and exhaustion before doing irreversible harm. For some reason we often jump to the wrong conclusion and don’t think through why someone has done or said something we find incomprehensible…or worse, destructive. And without the pause to think we respond in ways that make the situation worse.

So breathe. Pause a bit and collect your thoughts. Stop your impulse to react immediately before understanding the implications. Give yourself the chance to be your best.

A few weeks ago I sent off a post: Culture…When No One Is Watching. As usual, a few people sent me notes about it, although, also as usual, no one actually posted a comment. One note in particular has stuck with me: “My minister says, ‘your children may not be speaking but they are always watching.’ ” It came from regular reader and commenter David FitzGerald. Something to remember, you are building culture not only at your business but also at your home by how you act every single minute. There is no place where no one is watching.

While thinking about this I happened to see Ed Whitacre on The Daily Show. He was made CEO of GM a few years ago with the charge to fix it. He shared a bit of his philosophy for success which builds quite nicely on the aforementioned thought. “Get up every day and find a piece of your future.”

Be aware that everything you do is closely watched so if you start out each and every day looking forward and building for the future, others will see and follow your lead. Unfortunately the reverse is also true. Wander around lost without a consistent direction and do other than what you say and others will lose faith in you and realize they can’t trust you and you have no idea what to do.

Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. Considering that he was born in a very rural part of Nigeria, it’s quite amazing that he has become a hugely prolific author of world renown writing books, plays, and poems at a furious pace. Somewhere in there he managed to get a doctorate at the University of Leeds, be a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and, spend several years in jail in Nigeria as a political prisoner. For the last few decades he has been a professor at several different universities in Nigeria.

Quite a story for someone born in 1934 in the then even more wild area of rural Nigeria.

When it was my good fortune, quite randomly, to hear him discuss his life it made quite an impression on me. The hardships he endured on his way to great success and the persistence he exhibited in pushing forward on his own path to greatness are inspirational. And then he said the thing that sums up how he has achieved his success, that which differentiates those who find success and those who don’t.

Soyinka was asked a question about what kept him going when he was younger and found rejection everywhere, what advice he could offer young authors struggling to keep going. There was a long pause, a bit of a chuckle, a humble “I really have no great advice”, and then, in his soft voice, these words of great wisdom, “have a drawer in your desk and just throw all the rejection slips in it and keep going.”

Many people have spent quite a bit of time thinking about, talking about, reading about, and worrying about culture. I am one of them.

Thinking about culture led me to look up the meaning of the word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I was amused to find the first definition is about farming: cultivation, tillage. The next few definitions are about developing excellence of taste and so forth. Finally they get to the meaning we generally think of in the business world: