How to Change Anything

I ran across VitalSmarts — a corporate training and research behemoth — when I was teaching a course on social marketing at Tufts University. Their book Influencer: The Power to Change Anything quickly made it onto my syllabus, as they detailed innovative strategies from across the globe that had successfully reduced HIV transmission in Thailand and reformed gang members in San Francisco.

Now they’ve turned their sights inward — after all, if we can reform society, shouldn’t we be able to change ourselves? In the recently-released Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success, Kerry Patterson and his compatriots have created a roadmap for individuals to gain mastery over their weight, their careers, their exercise habits, their interpersonal relationships, and more.

This is a book you can put to immediate use at work. My top five takeaways:

1. Identify Crucial Moments
Sometimes you’ll finish a day and feel completely unproductive. You know you worked 8 or 9 or 10 hours — but what did you actually accomplish? Patterson and company encourage us to identify specific “crucial moments” where we may have gotten derailed. Perhaps it’s our obsessive e-mail checking (which can quickly lead to putting out random fires) or getting too caught up chasing an article citation online (when we could have simply asked a colleague). Noticing these moments is key to controlling them in the future.

2. Find the Right Team.
Some people truly want you to succeed, giving you sage advice and encouraging your efforts. And others may be dragging you down the path of extended coffeebreaks and carping about the boss (see my recent BNET article Are Your Friends at Work Holding You Back?). It can be a challenge, but you’ve got to cut the naysayers out of your life. We respond to our environment, and you don’t want them polluting yours.

Read the rest on the Huffington Post.

4 New Year’s Resolutions to Fast Track Your Career

It’s that time of year — when family members, morning talk show hosts and co-workers grill you with impunity about how, precisely, you’re going to fix yourself. There are plenty of contenders for your New Year’s Resolution list — perhaps some you attempted last year but abandoned. How do you prioritize? And which ones will actually make you money and advance your career this year? Here are four ideas.

1. Upgrade your autonomy. Specialists in the uber-trendy field of positive psychology have identified the #1 barrier to your happiness (the cultivation of which is surely a worthy New Year’s goal). The culprit? Lack of autonomy (as anyone with a micromanaging boss can tell you). This year, find ways to flex your mojo by choosing, to the extent possible, when and how to do your work. Two good strategies are lobbying for more flexibility in your schedule (as with Best Buy’s “Results Only Work Environment“), or, at minimum, aiming to reduce the number of soul-sucking meetings you’re subjected to (check out these tips for reasons to cancel meetings and some positive alternatives you can suggest).

2. Take more lunches. Networking maven Keith Ferrazzi famously instructed us to “Never Eat Alone” (the title of his excellent 2005 book) as a way to build connections. The advice becomes even more urgent, however, when coupled with research from Stanford University business school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who investigates how executives cultivate power. As he notes in a recent Harvard Business Review blog, “If you’re in a position to bring together unrelated groups of individuals who benefit from being in contact with each other, that’s a form of power.” In short, the path to success is becoming a “broker” who fills holes, transmits information and cultivates connections.

Read the full post on the Huffington Post site.

How to Become More Powerful

Get ready: the art of acquiring and retaining power has been demystified. Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Power: Why Some People Have It–And Others Don’t (based on a class he teaches at Stanford’s business school) is one of the best business books in recent years. No padding here–Pfeffer offers insightful and informative strategies you can deploy immediately. Here are some of the best:

 

Jeffrey Pfeffer's Power: Why Some People Have It - And Others Don't is a knockout business book.

 

 

• People avoid asking for help or favors (such as dinner once a year with the CEO) because they think it’s fruitless–yet it’s one of the best ways to reinforce bonds and people are very likely to say yes. Why? Because 1) people like to think of themselves as generous; and 2) “saying yes to a request for assistance reinforces the grantor’s position of power.” Don’t be afraid to ask – it’ll set you apart.
• How to build a power base when you’re still low on the totem pole? “Build a resource base”–i.e., cultivate things other people want, which could be anything from money (if your department controls resources) to jobs, information, or just listening. Notes Pfeffer, in a nod to behavioral psychology, “Helping people out in almost any fashion engages the norm of reciprocity – the powerful, almost universal behavioral principle that favors must be repaid. But people do not precisely calculate how much value they have received from another and therefore what they owe in return. Instead, helping others generates a more generalized obligation to return the favor, and as a consequence, doing even small things can produce a comparatively large payoff.”
• Your ticket to professional success? “Occupy a brokerage position.” In others words, put yourself between groups and fill holes and help transmit information – the additional contacts and knowledge will give you more power. But note that the benefit only accrues to you if you’re in the position yourself – simply knowing someone who’s a broker won’t do you much good.
• Alpha Dog Redux. Harkening back to a previous post of mine on “How to Become an Alpha Dog” and the research of social scientist Amy Cuddy, Pfeffer sounds a similar tone: “…if you have to choose between being seen as likable and fitting in on the one hand or appearing competent albeit abrasive on the other, choose competence. Self-deprecating comments and humor work only if you have already established your competence.”
• Rebranding yourself can be tough, as I write about in my recent Harvard Business Review blog post on “How to Reinvent Your Personal Brand.” Pfeffer advises that if you’re developed a bad rap somewhere, the best move is simply to leave -  it’s just too hard to overcome it. He adds that “…because impressions are formed quickly and are based on many things, such as similarity and ‘chemistry’ over which you have far from perfect control, you should try to put yourself in as many different situations as possible – to play the law of large numbers. If you are a talented individual, over time and in many contexts, that talent will appear to those evaluating you. But in any single instance, the evaluative judgment that forms the basis for your reputation will be much more random.”
• Mild negative traits are not a deal-killer. When someone has a reputation as somewhat difficult (the key is somewhat, not pathologically), that can actually help your power base because people who are “forewarned” and hire you anyway will be more committed to the decision (Pfeffer cites Larry Summers’ well-known truculence).
• Got an enemy? Be generous and you’ll win in the end. Two good options are to “co-opt them” (create a committee, let them lead it, and they’ll be working from the inside, not the outside) or to help them get an even better job…far from where they can bother you.
• How to keep perspective when you’re already in power? The sage words of a Swiss executive: “What you have to do is every now and then expose yourself to a social circle that really doesn’t care about your position.”
• Status is “portable.” How is it that so many high-level business execs successfully run for public office, or so many actors and rappers create fashion lines? And how come Bono is now a prominent humanitarian ambassador? It’s because, as Pfeffer observes, “…people assume that if you are smart enough to succeed in one highly competitive domain, you must be competent in other, even unrelated domains as well. One implication of this phenomenon for you is that the specific organization or domain in which you rise to power may matter less than the fact that you manage to achieve high-level status someplace. The prestige and power that come from achieving a senior position will generalize to some extent to other contexts, providing you with status there as well.”

Dorie’s Book Review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

Tony Hsieh, CEO of  Zappos, has won a lot of praise for Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose. I’m also going to give it a thumbs up – though you should be forewarned it’s a pretty nontraditional business book, and that’s its great strength. Hsieh goes a little mawkish when he talks about Zappos and its famed corporate culture, though I’m not really blaming him–he built a great company that was successfully acquired by Amazon.com for a cool billion. From my perspective, however, the truly unique and outstanding parts of the book are:

• Hsieh’s discussion of his childhood entrepreneurial streak (which stayed with him all the way through hawking burgers at a markup to his Harvard classmates).
• A vivid look at late ’90s Silicon Valley culture and the mania of the time, including the $265 million the 24 year-old Hsieh and his pals got for their startup, LinkExchange.
• A personal look at how Hsieh finds meaning in business in quirky ways – including an obsession with rave culture in his youth, and his foray into positive psychology today.

His drumbeat about creating a vibrant workplace culture – and the deliberate way you need to approach it – is valuable. But even more important, this is an endearing, “unplugged” look at contemporary business culture and the people who shape it.

How to Become an “Alpha Dog”

Thanks to my stint in divinity school, I’m now the proud bimonthly recipient of Harvard Magazine, which had a great article on Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy’s research in the latest issue. Some takeaways for those of you interested in interpersonal relations, power, and managing first impressions:

• Warmth and competence are the key variables in how we perceive others, accounting for 80% of our evaluation.
• When people judge others’ character, it’s the negative that weighs more heavily with regard to warmth (one nasty act can permanently label you as a jerk), but it’s the positive that matters more with regard to competence (such as having scored well on the SATs). Says Cuddy, “You can purposely present yourself as warm…But we feel that competence can’t be faked.”
• There are four “types” that emerge in the workplace – you admire the warm and competent, pity the warm and incompetent, envy the cold and competent, and have contempt for the cold and incompetent.
• Want to become a powerful “alpha dog”? Just as self-help gurus advise you to smile into the mirror to improve your mood, it turns out that you really can improve your confidence and power levels (as measured by hormone changes) by choosing to sit, even for a few minutes, in “power” positions (open limbs, expansive posture), as opposed to submissive postures (closed limbs, crossed legs, hunkered down).

What are your personal strategies for becoming more powerful and adopting a “power mentality”?

Dorie’s Book Review: The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely, the Duke University professor who gained fame with Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, has a new-ish book out. This one, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home, unfortunately falls prey to a major peril of business books: saying in 300 pages what you could have said in 30. I adored Predictably Irrational and its insights on human motivation and behavior…but I’m beginning to wonder if behavioral psychology-inspired business books are played out at this point.

Having read Ariely, Ori and Rom Brafman’s Sway, Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, Dan and Chip Heath’s Switch, Influencer by Kerry Patterson and co., and more (and these are generally excellent books), I’m going to gag if I have to hear about the “ultimatum game” one more time (for the uninitiated, this is a favorite of psychologists, in which people generally choose to punish each other for perceived misbehavior/cheapness, rather than taking a pragmatic view and accepting a small amount of free cash). Same goes for the “story of Rokia,” an experiment that explains how people are more sympathetic and motivated when faced with one troubled person, rather than an undifferentiated mass of suffering. Is there anything new to report, guys?

 

As in the "story of Rokia," behavioral psychology shows that individuals are moved by compassion toward individuals - not groups. U.S. Library of Congress photo.

 

 

Overall, Ariely retreads old ground and goes into way too much detail, explaining every trivial nuance of complicated experiments. Here’s my takeaway of what’s relevant for business types:

• Too little of a financial incentive and no one will respond or care; too much of one (make this free throw and you’ll get a million dollars!) and they’ll choke.  So be strategic with rewards and give folks just enough to get them motivated, but not enough for it to induce crushing fear.
• Best way to demotivate employees? Destroy their work or ignore their efforts. Even if it doesn’t end up getting used, paying attention to your employees and their work can enhance feelings of motivation and fulfillment.
• People dramatically overvalue their own creations, while others are more realistic about the merits (or lack thereof).
• Hate a task? Do it all in one fell swoop, to get it over with. Love a task? Keep taking breaks, so you have the pleasure and excitement of returning to it.
• To increase your happiness, spend your money on one-time or short-term “highs” (like travel), rather than fixed expenses (a new couch), because you’ll get used to the couch, but the travel and memory of it will remain novel.
• Want to limit emotional impact? Have someone “go rational” by doing a math problem or somesuch and watch their subsequent empathy decrease.
• We often keep making decisions based on how we’ve acted in the past; basically, we get in a habit. We do so even when those decisions were made under unusual or adverse circumstances that no longer exist, so we have to be mindful of this phenomenon.

What are your favorite insights from behavioral science? Anything that impacts your business decisions?

Dorie’s Book Review: Get-It-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More

In my ongoing quest to invent more time, I recently tackled another productivity book–this one from my friend Stever Robbins, the “Get-It-Done Guy” of podcast fame. His new book is Get-It-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More, and here are my favorite tips (in case you’re even more time challenged than I am and need a summary):

Stever Robbins, author of Get-It-Done Guy's 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More

• The best way to be productive is not to do things well that you shouldn’t be doing at all. Construct a “Life Map” to determine your priorities, and stick to them.
• Divide up your time into three kinds of days–focus, admin, and spirit. On “Focus” days, you drill down on an important task–that’s where the progress happens that you feel really good about. But “Admin” days are necessary, too–writing that masterpiece on a Focus day will be cold comfort if they shut down your telephone and electricity. Pay those bills and you’ll be all set. Finally, a “Spirit” day is your recharge time, which gives everything else meaning.
• Too many choices can be stressful (a key insight of behavioral economics). Limit your own choices and increase your happiness. Determine what your Absolute No’s and Absolute Yeses are–and if the new car or new desk or whatever you need meets those criteria, just buy it. No need to waste hours of your life evaluating 30 different options when this one will be just fine.
• Eliminate “tolerations,” which is coach-speak for “minor things that annoy you but don’t seem like a big enough deal to do anything about.” You’ll feel better and less stressed on an ongoing basis if you make the time to knock them out. Over the course of the next 10 days, pick 10 minor things and get them done. In my case, that means replacing my HVAC filter and hanging up a photo that’s been languishing on my desk.

What are your favorite ways to conquer clutter (mental or physical) and become more productive?

Business Book Review: Click by Ori and Rom Brafman

How do you make instant connections with people? How can you build trust rapidly? And how do you parlay that “click” into real and lasting relationships? Brothers Ori and Rom Brafman (previous authors of  Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior) have written a great, intensely readable book that will appeal to anyone who’s ever wondered why you really like someone you’ve just met. My top take-aways from Click: The Magic of Instant Connections?

• Counterintuitive though it may be, one of the best ways to create rapid trust is to make yourself vulnerable. Your openness and disclosure will put the other person at ease and create a positive feedback loop.
• Familiarity and physical proximity have a dramatic effect on how much we like people. Even if we don’t talk to them or interact with them, seeing them frequently will make us like them better.
• Not surprisingly, similarity makes us like people more–but studies show it doesn’t matter how trivial (a shared dislike of fast food) or profound (your political affiliation) the similarities are. The moral? You can find common ground with almost anyone over something–and you can use that to kickstart a positive relationship.

When was the last time you “clicked” with someone? What do you think caused it?

The Secret to Good Marketing – Or, Going on a Bear Hunt

What is marketing, really? To me, it’s like the game we’d play in preschool–Going on a Bear Hunt (those of you who were not similarly blessed should check out the link to see what you’ve been missing). In this heroic quest, our three-foot selves encountered tall grass, rivers, mountains, you name it, and we had to surmount the obstacles in order to capture the bear. (Note that I have subsequently become an Overseer for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, but that’s another story.) The mantra-like chorus: “Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, gotta go around it.”

There’s a tendency to think of marketing as just another name for public relations–spin. You have a product and you find a clever way to sell people on it. That may be part of it, but I’d argue it should be the last and smallest part. Good marketing is the process of properly identifying your target, discerning their needs, unearthing the barriers they face, and–as in the bear hunt–finding clever ways to overcome those barriers so people will purchase your product or take up a new behavior. Gotta go around it, indeed.

A while back, I gave a guest lecture to the Eco-Ambassadors program at Tufts University. These valiant staffers and grad students are trying to get their peers to recycle more, use less paper, bike to work–all the good stuff. Sometimes the obstacle to eco-friendly living is attitudinal–folks don’t believe global warming is a threat, or don’t care. But often, it’s practical. Does the building have recycling? Is there a place to park the bike? Does the printer actually print double-sided or do you have to turn every page over yourself? Good marketing looks at structural challenges just as much as it addresses “messaging,” because you need both to be truly effective.

Marketing and Emotions

How do you get something to really sink in? Why is it so hard to shake old habits, feelings, ways of seeing the world? Why can’t you just make yourself change?

This morning, I gave a talk at the Boston Center for Community and Justice, which runs a leadership development program I participated in a couple of years ago called LeadBoston. One of the readings from the program that stays with me is from Primal Leadership, by “emotional intelligence” guru Daniel Goleman and his posse. The best insight for marketers?

Our emotions and drives are learned early in life and are governed by the brain’s limbic system. If those patterns are holding us back, we have to relearn them–but most people try to do it with books and lectures, which reach a completely different part of the brain, the neocortex. In other words, if we want to change or improve what is deep inside of ourselves, we can’t do it through “reason”–we have to make people feel, act, practice, and reach the emotional part of their brain. Giving them facts alone won’t do it.

This is a major issue in social marketing, which tackles the recalcitrants who know drunk driving is bad but do it anyway, or the folks who refuse to use condoms or bicycle helmets or quit smoking. (I teach a course on this at Tufts University.) It’s such a human quandary–what are the forces inside ourselves that sabotage our best intentions? And for social change marketers, how can we discover and defeat them?

 

Drunk driving: one of social marketing's target behaviors. Photo by usag-yongsan.

 

What do you think?