"Thanks a million..."

I have to be completely honest here.  I never imagined that my "Leadership Reverie" blog would ever come close to 1 million views.  Perhaps I never believed that I would continue posting for as many years (over ten years) that I have been writing for this blog.  And I certainly never thought that there would be enough interest in what I was writing about to come close to 1 million views.  Officially, as of this morning, my blog has surpassed the 1 million views threshold!

According to Wikipedia, the word million is often used as a metaphor for any very large number.  Have you ever heard or used the phrases, "Not in a million years..." or "You are one in a million..." or even "Let's ask the million dollar question"?  Here are a few fun facts that I discovered about the word million.  Apparently, one million seconds equals 11.57 days.  The total weight of one million average sized honeybees would weigh about the same as an 80 kg (180 lb) human.  And there are approximately one million characters in a typical 600 page paperback book.  In ancient Egypt, the symbol for the word million was the Egyptian god Heh, who was the personification of infinity or eternity.  Even the ancient Egyptians used the word to describe a very large - maybe even impossibly large - number.

I'm not sure that I will ever get to two million views or not, but I will keep writing as long as people are interested in reading!  I want to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers whose leadership journeys continue to inspire me to learn and grow as a leader as well!  And, as the saying goes, "Thanks a million!"

Who was Betty Crocker?

If you grew up when I did, you probably remember the iconic voice and image of the fictional character Betty Crocker, the so-called "Dear Abby" of cooking.  No, she was not a real person, but rather a fictional character created in 1921 by the Washburn-Crosby Company (later, General Mills) in 1921 to give a personalized response to consumer product questions.  The company's advertising department realized that housewives would want advice from a fellow woman, so they created a personality that the women answering the letters sent in by consumers could use in their replies.  The first name "Betty" was selected because the advertising executives considered it a cheery, all-American name.  The last name "Crocker" was selected in honor of William Crocker, a Washburn Crosby Company director.  The portrait of Betty Crocker was first commissioned in 1936 and has been updated several times since its original creation, in order to keep up with changing fashion and hairstyles.  The red spoon logon containing her signature was added in 1954.

Your probably wondering why I chose to start this post with a story about a fictional character used in an advertising campaign, albeit a highly successful one.  As it turns out, there is a leadership lesson here!  Apparently, at some point in the 1950's, General Mills launched their line of boxed cake mixes under the Betty Crocker brand.  The box of cake mix included all of the necessary ingredients for baking a cake, including both milk and eggs in powdered form.  In order to bake a cake, all someone had to do was add water to the mix, stir it up together, pour it in a pan, and bake it in the oven.  It was a huge time-saver, and the recipe was virtually error-free.  General Mills thought that they had a sure winner on their hands.

Contrary to expectations, however, the boxed cake mix failed to sell.  The team at General Mills had no idea why their product wasn't selling like wild fire.  They brought in a team of experts to help them figure out what to do next.  After conducting a number of focus group sessions, a team of psychologists suggested that the reason that no one was buying the cake mix was that General Mills had made their product too simple, effort-less, and convenient.  In other words, housewives were feeling guilty that the cake took almost no effort to bake.  As Drew Boyd writes in Psychology Today, "It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty about getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product."

So, against all conventional wisdom, General Mills made the boxed cake mix less simple and easy.  They took the powdered egg out of the mix.  Now, all someone had to do to bake a cake was add water and eggs!  General Mills relaunched the new product with the slogan "Add an Egg" and sales of their Betty Crocker instant cake mix soared.  Just the one additional step changed consumers' perceptions about the product and removing a source of guilt.

We've encountered this kind of effect before in the past (see my post from a few years ago).  A few years ago, the cognitive psychologist Dan Ariely published the results of a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology on what he called the  "IKEA effect".  Ariely and his team conducted four studies in which study subjects were asked to build IKEA boxes, fold Origami, and build Lego sets.  At the end of the study, subjects were given the option to purchase their creations, or even someone else's creation.  Subjects were consistently willing to pay significantly more money for their own creations than someone else's creation.  

Ariely's "IKEA effect" (so named to honor the Swedish company whose products require assembly) reminds me of another famous study by the cognitive psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler on something known as the "endowment effect".  In this study, subjects who had been given a coffee mug were offered a chance to trade it for some pens or sell it for a certain amount of money.  The price that subjects were willing to sell their mugs was almost twice as much as the price that they were originally willing to pay for it.  Ariely also demonstrated the endowment effect in another study, in which students were willing to sell four NCAA basketball tournament tickets for twice as much as they would have been willing to pay for them.  In other words, once we own something, we tend to want to hold on to it and are reluctant to part with it.

Whether one chooses to call it the "IKEA effect", the endowment effect, or the "Betty Crocker effect", the simple fact remains that the more involved we are in creating something (and that "something" can be tangible or intangible), the greater our sense of ownership and accomplishment.  We see evidence of this effect in leadership too.  Instead of handing down finished, top-down mandates, leaders should involve teams early in the process, encouraging them to help "build" the solution. When leaders give up some level of responsibility and agency to the other members of the team, the team feels a greater sense of pride and ownership.  In short, they feel like they are true stakeholders in a project, which, in turn, reduces or even eliminates their resistance to change. Ultimately, that sense of ownership greatly increases the chances of a successful implementation, project completion, or change initiative.

What's good for the goose...

I read an interesting blog post by Bryant University business school professor, Michael Roberto, a few days ago that asked the question, "Should we ban the use of smart phones during meetings?" (see the post, "What's good for our kids is great for us too!").  Roberto referenced a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study by David Figlio and Umut Özek ("The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida") that showed that cellphone bans in Florida schools resulted in significant improvements in test scores during the second year of the ban.  In addition, there were significant reductions in unexcused absences.  Both outcomes were more pronounced in middle and high school settings.  

Roberto also referenced an article by Chip Cutter that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last year ("CEOs are furious about employees texting in meetings").  Roberto says, "Many leaders have become incredibly frustrated by the disconnected conversations, lack of collaboration, and poor listening occurring during meetings.  Of course, many of us would say that we turn to our phones because many meetings are long, dull, and boring.  However, we have ask ourselves:  Isn't that what our kids would say about classes in which they would love to use their phone?  Are we just rationalizing our use of phones during meetings in the same way students often do?  How about the "what if there is an emergency?" excuse?  Ask yourself: Just how many true emergencies do we experience in a week?  Moreover, we can easily set our phones such that people won't disturb us unless it is truly an emergency.   Yet, we choose not to do so."

I am just as guilty when it comes to my smartphone.  I've made a conscious effort to avoid checking my phone during meetings, but I have to confess that it's not easy.  But I agree with Professor Roberto, if it's important enough to ban smartphones in schools so that students stay engaged, then it's probably just as important for all of us in organizations to avoid the use of smartphones during meetings.  As leaders, it's critically important that we model the behavior that we expect of others.  Given how hard it is to put them down and ignore them, should we just simply ban smartphones during important meetings?

Pygmalion

In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who created a sculpture of a woman that was so perfect that he fell in love with it.  He prayed to the goddess Aphrodite, who in answering his prayers, brought the sculpture, Galatea, to life.  The story has inspired countless works of art and literature based on a similar theme, including (most notably - see more below), George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion and the 1956 musical, My Fair Lady, William Shakespeare's play, The Winter's Tale, Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Birth-Mark" and novella, Rappacicini's Daughter, Henry James' novel Portrait of a Lady, Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth, and the popular movies, Weird Science, Mannequin, Pretty Woman, and She's All That.

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion in 1913 about an English gentleman and phonetics professor named Henry Higgins, who after meeting Eliza Doolittle, a poor flower seller with a strong Cockney accent in the streets of London, boasts that he can transform her into a “duchess” simply by teaching her to speak proper English.  Over the course of the next several months, Higgins trains Eliza rigorously.  While she struggles initially, she eventually masters both the arts of fine speech and etiquette to pass for a gentle lady at a high-society party.  Higgins, however, begins to treat Eliza as an object of study, rather than as a person, prompting her to eventually leave him.  

Shaw's play was turned into a Tony Award winning musical, My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle.  The musical was adapted for the big screen in 1964, again starring Harrison as Professor Higgins, but replacing Andrews with the better known (at least in film) actress Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle.  The film was a smash hit, becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 1964 (after Mary Poppins) and winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.  Notably, Julie Andrews won the Academy Award for Best Actress that year for the movie Mary Poppins!

In many ways, the overarching theme to all of these works of art and literature comes down to how you treat individuals.  Eliza Doolittle explained it best, "You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she's treated.  I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady and always will."

As it turns out, creating positive expectations - and, for that matter, negative ones - can actually turn into positive attitudes, positive behaviors, and positive performance.  Even if this concept was first described in ancient Greece, it wasn't scientifically "proven" until the early 1960's, when a group of psychology students at the University of North Dakota, of all places, were asked by the renowned social psychologist Robert Rosenthal to assist with an experiment involving laboratory rats.  Six of the students were told that their assigned rats ("maze-bright" rats) were bred to be smart enough to rapidly move through a maze, while the other six students were told that their rats ("maze-dull" rats) were genetically inferior and would likely have a lot of trouble moving through the maze.  Here's the catch - the rats were all genetically similar!  None of the rats had been trained to run through the maze, and they had in fact been assigned randomly to the two groups.  However, the so-called "maze-bright" rats performed significantly better than the "maze-dull" rats from the very beginning and until the end of the experiment!  The "maze-dull" rats wouldn't even budge from the starting position in the maze.

Rosenthal published his findings in 1963 in the journal Behavioral Science (see "The effect of experimenter bias on the performance of the albino rat").  In a subsequent article published in Scientific American, Rosenthal and co-author Lenore Jacobson discussed the findings of the original rat study which sheds further light on what they called the "Pygmalion Effect".  Rosenthal and Jacobson reported, "The students with the allegedly brighter rats ranked their subjects as brighter, more pleasant, and more likeable than did the students who had allegedly 'duller' rats...Asked about their methods of dealing with the rats, the students with the 'bright' group turned out friendlier and more enthusiastic with the animals than the students with the 'dull' group had been.  The students with the 'bright' rats also said they handled their animals as well as more gently, than the students expecting poor performance did."

All of this would be purely academic if not for Rosenthal's subsequent experiments with teachers working with students in the classroom.  Lenore Jacobson was, in fact, the principal at Spruce Elementary School in San Francisco.  She had read Rosenthal's rat study and wrote back to Rosenthal, volunteering her students to participate in further studies ("If you ever 'graduate' to classroom children, please let me know if I can be of assistance").  Teachers at Spruce Elementary were told that Rosenthal and his team would be administering "The Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition" in the spring.  However, in truth, the "test" was nothing more than a standard IQ test.  After the testing was completed, teachers were informed that there were groups of students in each class who were academically gifted and who would "blossom" during the academic year.  Again, similar to the earlier rat maze experiments above, students were randomly assigned to groups.  One year later, students were re-tested using the same "Harvard Test".  Notably, the "blossoming" students score significantly better on the second test, while the other students scores didn't change.  

Once again, teachers had treated the "blossoming" students differently, without even realizing that they were doing so.  They were more encouraging with these students, provided them with additional help, and gave them positive feedback using warmer body language.  They almost never criticized these students.  Rosenthal and Jacobson published their findings in 1968 book, entitled Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development.

The German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being."  What's true for rats and elementary school students is also true for people in general.  What's true for teachers, as it turns out, is also true for leaders.  When leaders treat their teams with positive expectations, their teams actually perform better (see the Harvard Business Review article, "Pygmalion in Management" by J. Sterling Livingston).  Treat people in the opposite manner, and they will respond in kind (which is known as the "Golem effect").

Bear's Poem

I recently finished the book The Junction Boys by Jim Dent.  Honestly, I have mixed feelings about the story.  The book tells the story of legendary college football Paul "Bear" Bryant's first season as head coach at Texas A&M University in 1954.  He had recently left a successful head coaching stint at the University of Kentucky, where he had coached for eight seasons with an overall record of 60-23-5, finishing in 1950 as the champions of the Southeastern Conference and defeating the number one ranked Oklahoma Sooners in the Sugar Bowl that year.  The team finished his last season at Kentucky with a record of 7-2-1.  

The Texas A&M head coaching position was a huge step down.  He inherited a team that finished tied for last place in the Southwestern Conference with an overall record of 4-5-1.  The book tells the story of Coach Bryant's preseason training camp that was held in the small Texas town of Junction.  He wanted to hold his camp away from the media and away from the Texas A&M alumni.  The camp started with 115 players, but only a small handful (barely enough to field a football team) lasted through the 10 grueling days of "two-a-day" practices (I use the quotes because practices would last several hours and often into the night).  Players would literally try to escape from camp in the middle of the night by sneaking away and walking to the local bus station.  Players practiced despite being severely injured.  The coaching staff wouldn't let the players drink water during practice.  One player almost died from heat stroke.

By the end, the players had earned Coach Bryant's respect.  The team would finish the 1954 season with an overall record of 1-9.  The team greatly improved in subsequent seasons, winning the Southwestern Conference championship following the 1956 season.  Bryant left Texas A&M after the 1957 season for the head coaching job at his alma mater, the University of Alabama, where he would coach for the next 25 years, becoming the all-time leader in total wins (323) and national championships (6).  And yet, when it was all said and done, Coach Bryant would say that the 1954 1-9 Texas A&M team was his favorite.

Admittedly, the ends don't always justify the means, though Coach Bryant would clearly disagree on this point.  I will also say that Coach Bryant wasn't alone in restricting access to water during football practices.  Most coaches felt that letting the players drink water would make them "soft" (and surprisingly, despite all we know about heat stroke, that sentiment didn't change until all that long ago).  

What I do admire about Coach Bryant is that he didn't just hold his players to a high standard.  He also held himself to a high standard.  The book ended with a poem that Coach Bryant apparently kept with him and read almost every day.  The poem was written by Heartsill Wilson and is called "The Beginning of a New Day."  

I think the sentiment of the poem says a lot about how Coach Bryant led his life.  Here is the poem:

This is the beginning of a new day.

God has given me this day to use as I will.

I can waste it or use it for good.

What I do today is very important

because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.

When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever,

leaving something in its place I have traded for it.

I want it to be a gain, not a loss—good, not evil.

Success, not failure, in order that I shall not regret

the price I paid for it.

Incidentally, Paul Bryant was nicknamed "Bear" because of something that happened when he was a teenager.  He went to the Lyric Theatre in his hometown of Fordyce, Arkansas where anyone who was willing to wrestle a bear and last a full minute would win a dollar (which was a lot of money back then).  Bryant wrestled the bear, but the owner and the bear escaped without paying. As the University of Alabama put it, "He didn’t get the buck but he got a nickname."

The end of bureaucracy?

I wrote a post this past November about Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (see the post, "Future Shock").  Toffler first coined the term "future shock" in an article "The future as a way of life" in Horizon magazine in 1965.  He used the term in this context "to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."  That change can be technological, cultural, or social in nature.  He wrote, "If agriculture is the first stage of economic development and industrialism the second, we can now see that still another stage - the third - has suddenly been reached."

As Toffler described it, society was (at least at that time of his book) just entering an entire new period or age, which he called the super-industrial society, which others have similarly labeled, the Information Age, post-industrial society, and post-modernism.  A post-industrial society has a number of important and defining characteristics, which include:

1. The economy undergoes a transition from the production of goods to the provision of services.

2. Knowledge becomes a valued form of capital.

3. Through technological advancements (e.g. automation) and globalization, both the value and importance of manual labor decline, while at the same time the need for professional knowledge workers (e.g. engineers, scientists, software developers, analysts) increases.

Toffler predicted that the transition to the super-industrial society would occur much quicker than similar transitions of the past.  Whereas previous generations had experienced gradual transformation over time, the newer generations growing up in modern society were facing constant, rapid shifts in everything from family life to work to values (which is why those living through this rapid period of change would be subject to "future shock").  Toffler further suggested three key features of the super-industrial society - transience, novelty, and diversity.  

Toffler used the word transience to describe the impermanence and shortened lifespan of all things in the super-industrial society.  He said, "We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs...Transience is the 'new temporariness' in everyday life...It results in a mood, a feeling of impermanence."  He used the word novelty to describe the unceasing (i.e. constant) introduction of new things - technology, lifestyles, and social arrangements.  He said, "The future will unfold as an unending succession of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas."  Finally, Toffler referred to diversity as the multiplicity of choices available in work, lifestyle, consumption, and identity.  He further wrote that when all three - transience, novelty, and diversity - converge, "we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation.  We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar, and complex as to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown.  This breakdown is future shock."

The management scholar Warren Bennis first coined the term adhocracy in his 1968 book, The Temporary Society: What is Happening to Business and Family Life in America Under the Impact of Accelerating Change.  Toffler further popularized the term in his book Future Shock, which came out just two years later.  Both Bennis and Toffler felt that the acceleration of change that we are experiencing in society, both then and certainly now, doesn't lend itself to classic bureaucracy.  Rather, adhocracy describes a more flexible, adaptable, and informal organizational structure without bureaucratic policies or procedures.  Toffler wrote, "If it was Max Weber who first defined bureaucracy and predicted its triumph, Warren Bennis may go down in sociological textbooks as the man who first convincingly predicted its demise and sketched the outlines of the organizations that are springing up to replace it."

Bureaucracies - at least according to Bennis and Toffler - are rigid, hierarchical, slow-moving, and centralized (in regards to power and authority), which means that they are best suited to stable, unchanging environments.  Adhocracies, on the other hand, are temporary, flexible, and adaptive.  They place an emphasis on creativity, innovation, and rapid decision-making through experimentation.  Whereas bureaucracies are strictly hierarchical, decision-making in an adhocracy is team-based, collaborative, and decentralized (can anyone say, "Deference to Expertise" or "Pushing Authority to Information"?).  Toffler believed that an adhocracy was essential for on an organization to succeed in a fast-moving, rapidly evolving super-industrial society.

All that being said, as Martin Reeves, Edzard Wesselink, and Kevin Whitaker at the Boston Consulting Group point out in their essay, "The end of bureaucracy, again?", the bureaucracy remains the dominant paradigm even now, almost sixty years after Warren Bennis and Alvin Toffler predicted the end of bureaucracy.  A number of management experts have proposed alternative paradigms, and in many cases, organizations have tried to re-structure around these alternative paradigms - see for example Frederic Laloux's teal organization, Brian Robertson's holacracy, or the concept of self-managed teams.  While attractive in principle, few organizations have successfully adopted these different models.  Reeves, Wesselink, and Whitaker suggest that the solution is somewhere in the middle.  The organizations that will be most successful, both now and in the future, will have elements of both the classic bureaucracy and adhocracy.  What that organizational structure will look like is not currently known.  Reeves, Wesselink, and Whitaker write, "The exact shape of these new models is still undetermined, but enterprising leaders are currently developing them."  Referring to the teal organization, holacracy, and others, they go on to admit, "We can see hints of a revolution that will likely affect all companies and sectors eventually."

So, are we about to see the end of bureaucracy as we know it?  Probably not.  But we will certainly see the continuing evolution of different organizational models and paradigms for many years to come.  Survival in this VUCA world will depend upon it.

Know so much, but control nothing...

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus said, "Of all man's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much, and to have control over nothing."  What is Herodotus saying here?  I think he is expressing the frustration that many of us feel that even if we can understand the world clearly, we just don't have the requisite power to change it.  Wisdom and power don't necessarily go hand in hand.

Today, more than at any time in history, we are starting to understand the world on a macro- and micro-level.  We know more about how the world works than any generation that came before us, and yet, we are still relatively powerless to change it.  And on the surface, that acceptance that we don't always have the authority and power to change what happens may feel like a failure.  But it's not.

The ancient Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers (Zeno of Citium, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, among others) would tell us that we should concern ourselves only with those things that we can indeed control.  Everything else?  Let it be.  

Epictetus said, "It is not in our control to have everything turn out exactly as we want, but it is in our control to control how we respond to what happens."  Or more recently, Viktor Frankl said, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing . . . to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances."  Frankl also said, "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves...Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant."

I have always enjoyed reading Stoic philosophy.  I just have to remind myself, every once in a while, what the greatest Stoic philosophers said about managing change and changing the world.  If wisdom is defined, at least according to Socrates, as knowing that you don't know everything (I think his exact quote was, "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing"), then perhaps wisdom too is accepting that you can't change everything.