Balancing Global Vision with Local Relevance
At the moment, Andrew Deonarine is a third year medical resident at University of British Columbia (UBC) He has developed a passion for improving literacy in developing economies. A few years ago after a trip to India he was inspired by the One Laptop Per Child initiative to improve literacy around the world. And he wondered if there wasn’t an even easier and more ubiquitous platform for delivering literacy learning.
He is also a programmer and technology tinkerer. With a curious mind, he developed a big idea to use simple cellphones to be a platform for distributing literacy learning through PhoneCasting – a push technology in which anyone can author a brief engaging learning script and push-cast it out to deliver simple reading and math literacy to potentially millions of people. He calls it EduCell.
Inventive yes. But how does anyone know about it? They didn’t. Until, he learns about an InnoCentive challenge. He applies and his EduCell proposal wins. He is in talks with Nokia to develop and deliver EduCell universally. Through the innovation crowd-sourcing visibility of Innocentive, Andrew is changing the world. From Ontario.
This is a wonderful story, and indicative of how fast innovation can move in this frictionless economy. How important is speed to market? Last year Jim Barksdale, formerly of Netscape, spent 300 million to dig a gopher hole from the Chicago Mercantile exchange 825 miles to the New York Stock Exchange to lay direct-line fiber optic cable. Why? To gain 3 milliseconds in speed of trading information.
Competition is emerging from everyone, everywhere, and for everything – and one thing is clear: Our most powerful competitive advantage is in the hearts and minds of all the people throughout our global organizations, and we must unlock these capacities. Gone are the days when we could just buy diligence and expertise, and ask people to execute on the strategic bets of a very few in the corner offices. Now, only by tapping into those discretionary qualities of initiative, creativity and passion – that cannot be bought at any price – can we build the competitive value of the future.
Bruce Churchill, president for DirectTV Latin America, said the key to the 300% market growth was to remove the corporate directives from NYC and Miami that decided how and when and where their services were deployed in Latin America, and instead give autonomy and discretionary decision-making authority to the local operators. Who knows better than the people who live in Bogotá, Rio, and Caracas, the culturally relevant TV programming to provide, how to price it, the marketing that would make it stick in each locality.
Michael Byrne, president of Linfox, the biggest shipping and logistics operator in Australia said the key to their remarkable growth in India, Thailand, Vietnam, China and throughout southeast asia over the past ten years has been specifically because tap into the talents and give localized control over operations. With over 2400 employees in India, and as of my conversation with him last year, Linfox had exactly one Aussie ex-pat working there – and he’s not the boss either. By first providing a clear and singular vision of commitment to safety, excellence, product integrity and quality, Linfox provides the shared vision and values that provide the bedrock of the company, and then gives trust and operating control to the local markets for culturally nuanced execution.
Those organizations that learn to balance global unified vision with local relevance are those that will thrive in the new creative age.
Read MoreYou Make Your Own Luck
Friday afternoon I stopped by our local convenience store to gas up. When I went inside, I was surprised to find a sizeable line of people to buy megabucks lottery tickets. I knew about the lottery since it was plastered everywhere but had yet to encounter the fever pitch first hand. The drawing for 650M was in a few short hours. Showing the same wildly irrational hope, I bought a few tickets.
We don’t have much control over whether we win the lottery, but it turns out, we have control over what we perceive as “luck,” and we have a great deal of control over our own happiness by how we interpret events and situations. When events occur we choose whether we believe they happened to us, or we caused them to happen. Bronze medal winners consistently self-describe themselves as happier with the result than Silver medal winners. Because they are not celebrating the facts, but interpreting counter-facts. They are answering the what-if question, and Bronze medal winners are celebrating that they are on the podium, while Silver medal winners are disappointed they lost.
Here’s another example of how we look at the world. In Daniel Kahneman’s book, he describes a bank survey in which they asked two separate questions:
- How much would you pay for $100,000 life insurance that will pay in the event of death for any reason?
- How much would you pay for $100,000 life insurance that pays in the event of death by terrorist attack incident?
Survey respondents said they would pay much higher rates for the second type of life insurance. This is deeply irrational but speaks directly to how negative emotions and ideas have the ability to cause us to overvalue or over emphasize their likelihood because of our emotional response to the idea.
In Richard Wiseman’s book The Luck Factor, he describes luck in terms of choice. In his research working with over 400 individuals he found some key attributes of those who describe themselves as “lucky.” These are the four big points in the book:
They consistently have chance encounters that lead to interesting new possibilities and opportunities
Lucky people harness the power of curiosity well. They are creative and curious, and everyone can learn to be too. Wiseman has a fun game you can play in which you write down six activities or experiences you have not tried but would be willing. Write them down and then roll a die and go do it.
They make good decisions without consciously knowing why or how they did
Those who describe themselves as lucky make better gut decisions. Which seems impossible to control, yet Wiseman discovered this is a learned trait since he found that those lucky decision-makers actually spent more time reflecting and meditating on the decision once considered, and spent more time envisioning hypothetical circumstances they might have to decide on. So when the situation arose, those lucky were better prepared to make a decision in the moment.
Their dreams and ambitions have a knack of coming true
Lucky people expect the best outcomes, despite any negative past experiences, whereas unlucky people allowed past negative events to dictate future expectations. The lucky people also described their expectations of upcoming interactions with other people as generally positive.
They regularly turn their bad fortune into good luck or opportunity
Wiseman describes two primary ways people turn bad luck into good. Basically they interpret the bad as “could have been much worse.” And when they reflect, they spend a greater amount of time visualizing and selectively remembering the positive. Other words, the bad wasn’t all that bad, and the good was pretty great.
The #1 Motivator in the World
I know. That title is a big call. Not to worry, we have Teresa Amabile, author of The Progress Principle, to back us up. I was fascinated and enthralled by her work and book when it came out early in the fall 0f 2011, and just one week before meeting her to collaborate on an event, I made the following mistake: I was conducting a workshop with 86 senior executives and asked them Teresa’s question in a quiz-format:
Rank-order the following employee motivation factors:
Most people in the room chose Recognition, then Interpersonal Support, then Clear Goals, then Incentives and Progress last. Seven people chose Progress. Less than 10%. Perfect right? Since this is my opportunity to share Teresa’s work and illuminate the truth that the #1 motivator is a sense of progress. More specifically “progress in meaningful work.”
This was supposed to be the moment of ah-ha, the moment of illuminating insight, but instead there were a lot of frowns, and after a beat one executive raised her hand to say, “But without Clear Goals, progress is meaningless. Clear Goals must be the most important.” I couldn’t stop myself and said, “Yes, you are speaking from the perspective of the team leader. You know and understand there must be clear, actionable goals in order to make progress. But the question was ‘What is the most powerful motivator of the members of the team?”
Teresa and her colleague Steven Kramer analyzed 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees in 7 companies to come to the qualified conclusion that the most valuable work motivator is indeed, a sense of progress (in meaningful work). And even though I knew from her research that only 5% of leaders surveyed understood that, still I persisted in pressing the point.
When I met with Teresa, she said she didn’t present her findings in such a “gotcha” format because of that very reason. And her goal was to spread this important message until the needle pushed way past 50%, and then perhaps she would try it in a quiz-format.
Two take-aways:
1. The #1 motivator for contributors is progress (in meaningful work)
2. Never ever make your audience feel stupid
When sharing insight with anyone – either personally one on one or in a large group – allow people to feel like they have come to the insightful conclusion on their own, and build their own insights to apply to their work. Make people feel stronger, smarter, better-equipped to propel their team and drive innovation.
Read MorePraise Effort and Grit, Not Talent
“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”
- Stephen King, Author
Carol Dweck led a fascinating study back in 1998 in which she and her colleagues worked with four hundred 5th graders and gave them a series of tests, mostly puzzles, and then praised them in two different ways with these six little words.
With half of the group they said, “You must be smart at this.”
With the other half of the group they said, “You must have tried really hard.”
The first word set awarded intelligence, and innate talent, similar to how many parents and coaches (myself included) get trapped into talking about, and to, our kids. We say how smart they are, or how naturally gifted they are. The second word set praised effort, determination, preparation, grit. What the researchers were interested in, was how the kids would view their abilities, as fixed and unchanging or as malleable and able to grow and change with work.
In the next round of puzzles, the kids were offered a choice. They could try harder problems or easier ones. You guessed right, the kids praised for effort choose to attempt the harder problems. The kids praised for talent selected the easier problems because when you praise for innate talent, you create a form of status. If someone believes they have special talent and they are expected to perform well, then the thought of failing expectations becomes a liability. So to protect yourself as a “gifted and talented” individual we will choose easier tasks to ensure we have high performance.
In the next part of the study both sets of kids were given harder problems to solve and both sets of kids performed more poorly. But here’s the interesting thing. When the researchers asked the kids how they did on the problems, the kids praised for talent lied 40% of the time, presumably to maintain their social status as “talented.” However, when the other kids praised for effort were asked to tell their peers how they did on this set of questions, only 10% of them exaggerated their performance. They felt no loss of self-esteem from doing poorly on difficult problems.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. In the next phase of the study, both sets of kids were given problems comparable to the original set of problems. In terms of difficulty, this next set was just as challenging as the first. The group praised for talent had just had an ego setback in the earlier round, and did 20% worse than they did the first time around. They were told they were smart, then they performed poorly, and now attacking the same level of difficulty with decreased confidence they do 20% worse.
But the second group did 30% better this time around. There’s the difference – 6 words. But keep in mind there are a lot of ways to say, “You must have tried really hard.”
Carol and her colleagues use these kinds of effort or “process” praise: which is praise for engagement, perseverance, strategies, improvement, etc.
– You really studied for your English test, and your improvement shows it. You read the material over several times, outlined it, and tested yourself on it. That really worked!
– I like the way you tried all kinds of strategies on that math problem until you finally got it.
It was a long, hard assignment, but you stuck to it and got it done. You stayed at your desk, kept up your concentration, and kept working. That’s great!
– I like that you took on that challenging project for your science class. It will take a lot of work—doing the research, designing the machine, buying the parts, and building it. You’re going to learn a lot of great things
Next time you see excellent, praise the effort, the grit, the patience and hard work it must have taken to get there. You’ll not only be rewarding excellence, but also building growth and confidence.
Read MoreThe Velocity of Learning
You don’t often think of learning as having a speed, a velocity, but it does. The classic notion of practice involves putting in the hours, doing the time, right? But there is a striking difference in the quality of practice that leads to accelerated learning. And it isn’t about watching the clock, it’s more about purposeful practice. Purposeful practice is found right on the edges of your ability, at the intersection of challenge and ability when you are successful perhaps 50-75% of the time. Not so much easy success that gains overconfidence and loss of challenge, and not so much difficulty that it creates a sense of stress and anxiety.
But the only why to find that sweet spot is to try, to get in action. Particularly when trying to acquire new skills or new behaviors the aim shouldn’t necessarily be to stop a trait or practice, but instead think about starting new behaviors and habits. Dan Coyle told a marvelous story about visiting the Shyness Clinic in Palo Alto, CA where they focus on building new habits toward developing what they call “social fitness.” The folks that come to the shyness clinic often have arrived at a point where their social anxieties and shyness have become a real hindrance and barrier to connection. The clinicians and psychologists there believe that much like developing physical fitness, or leadership or creative capacities, so too can people develop social fitness.
A simple exercise might involve asking participants to approach two people per day in a public place and simply ask them the time of day. And then graduate to asking a store manager where the restroom is, for example. For a final exam a participant was asked to go to a supermarket and intentionally drop a whole watermelon on the floor and work with the market employees to deal with the mess and apologize for the accident. Such a scene would be an appalling thought to someone suffering from acute shyness. But over time, with incremental social practice and repetitive purposeful practice and interactions, the participants could build the social and emotional capacities to envision such an incident, and effectively deal with it in a public social setting.
And remember the practice needs to be in context, under real conditions, with a little stress, a little challenge such that you are on the edges of your ability. For example, instead of asking the soccer team players to shoot twenty penalty kicks at the end of practice, instead stop the scrimmage in the middle of practice and have a player shoot just two, under pressure, in the middle of the game.
Read MoreGratitude = Meaning = Performance = Happiness
The results were clear: Higher levels of optimism, increased life satisfaction, and decreased negative feelings were all associated with students’ expressions of gratitude. By the follow-up three weeks later, students who had been instructed to count their blessings showed more gratitude toward people who had helped them, which led to more gratitude in general.
– Jeffrey Froh, Professor, Hofstra University
I have three kids, currently with a combined age of twenty-one. The other day I was musing on how to teach gratitude to them and posed this question to my five year old at the kitchen table: “Annie, would you name three things you are grateful for?”
“What’s grateful?”
“Thankful. What are three things you are thankful for?”
She thought for a moment and said, “Santa Claus!” Cute. She also said painting with her grandmother and playing with our dog. A good start. Gratitude, just like creativity, can be learned. The importance and power of engaging ourselves in our work, connecting with the people and world around us, and deviating from convention to create new value, defines our potential in this creative age.
Jeffrey Froh, Hofstra University, did this cool study in which he and his colleagues, tracked 221 students and divided them into three groups, asking each group to think about 1. things they were grateful for and liked about school, 2. things they found to be a hassle and not fun, and 3. a control group they asked nothing of.
Pretty simply, they asked group one to spend just a few minutes each day identifying up to five things they were grateful for, and measured their school performance and engagement from both their perspective and the perspective of their teachers. Essentially, they found these students to be happier (by their own account), and more engaged in their work (by the teachers account), and…wait for it, they got better grades. Not only that, the effect lasted beyond the duration of the study itself. Finally consider the effect of extrinsic rewards in this study:
“Evidence from research with adolescents indicates that gratitude is incompatible with the pursuit of materialistic or extrinsic goals and that it positively predicts academic achievement, mental health and well-being—outcomes that are negatively predicted by materialism.”Read More