I’ve written a few posts about Doctor Nicholas Christakis and Doctor James Fowlers' research. This post is about their book - Connected: the Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives . Their research uses network analysis techniques to the aid the understanding obesity, smoking, happiness, back pain, sexual practices, beliefs, and other social phenomena. Their interesting finding is that all these phenomena are contagious.

Christakis and Fowler base their findings on a careful analysis of the Framingham Heart Study, conducted from 1948 to the present in a small Massachusetts city. They have mapped more than 50,000 ties between just over 12,000 people. In essence they argue that if friend’s friend’s friend - whom you’ve never met, and lives 50 kilometres away - is unhappy, then you’re likely to be unhappy as well. In other words there are three degrees of influence. They demonstrate the same outcome for smoking behaviour and obesity, and attribute it to “norming behaviour”. In short we are part of a collective (social network) that seeks homeostasis and is bound by certain rules. According to Christakis and Fowler these are:

read more

This question came in an email yesterday from Mozilla's Asa Dotzler, who is renowned for his skill as an open-source marketer, especially in spreading the Firefox browser.  The engine that propels any open source community is having a wide range of smart and hardworking people who generate and refine solutions, and are eager to step in and fix them when things go wrong.  So maintaining norms that encourage people to participate in generating solutions and making decisions-- rather than those who don't pitch in or help make decisions but always complain bitterly about the outcome  -- is crucial to any open source community. 

I would add that the same goes for life inside organizations: Some people refuse to speak-up or pitch-in when ideas are being developed, are unable or unwilling to go to key meetings, and generally don't have the will, time, or inclination to help their colleagues, but then repeatedly shoot-down the decisions that are made, refuse to help implement them, and bad mouth their more hardworking colleagues.  They are destructive assholes in my book.  Indeed, as Jeff Pfeffer and I showed in The Knowing-Doing Gap, there are some organizations where people seem to get rewarded and promoted for shooting down other people and their ideas --- not for generating, proposing, and implementing ideas.  At one large bank we studied, we saw and were told about episode after episode where people who proposed new ideas were ripped to pieces. The people who got ahead in the organization had learned it was career suicide to actually develop and push ideas -- the rewards were all given to critics who not only took down the new ideas, but also took down people who developed and proposed them.

To return to Asa and his friends at Mozilla, they want to discourage this kind of behavior (and so do people in a lot of other workplaces), and are trying to come-up with a punchy, sticky, and fun word to describe these destructive characters.  Here is what Asa wrote me:

A few of us at the office today realized that we didn't have a good word for someone who opts out of participating in something but then complains about the outcome. The most obvious example is someone who doesn't vote and then laments the election results. Ideally this word wouldn't be specific to simply expressing a preference (as in voting) because we'd like it to also include people who, given the opportunity to participate in something much more involved (say, stopping global warming,) fail to take advantage that offer and then complain about the results.  

I can't come up with anything good.  Terms like "lazy complainers," "destructive second-guessers," and "listless lamenters" don't cut it.  In the spirit of the open source movement, I asked Asa if I could put this out here and see if the readers of Work Matters could come up with something better. We would love to see your ideas. Language is a powerful thing, and it would be great to have powerful word to describe this destructive behavior and/or the people who do it again and again.

I have argued in the past that there are a lot of evidence-based disadvantages to working in an open office, as there are many more interruptions, distractions, and other stressors --- and of course less privacy.  And there are quite a few studies that show when people move from closed to open office designs, they don't like it all and their productivity sometimes drops.  I had an experience a few weeks back, however, that has me questioning the limits of this research -- and believing that if an organization has the right norms, leadership, and especially collective trust  (and have the right people and right skills to truly do cooperative work), that open offices can be a splendid thing. 

This all struck me a few weeks back when I went to visit  David Kelley at IDEO to chat about some ideas we were hatching for the Stanford d.school (which David, a Stanford professor, co-founded along with IDEO... David was the strongest driving force behind both ventures).  I had the usual delightful conversation with IDEO's receptionist (Joanie was working that afternoon) and went upstairs to what is best described as IDEO's "management floor," where IDEO's CFO, head of marketing, Chairman (David Kelley), General Manager (Tom Kelley), and CEO (Tim Brown) all work.  As I turned the corner to the main floor, sitting right where the receptionist on the floor would sit (if they had one, they don't) was none other than CEO Tim Brown.  I frankly took a double-take, as (in many organizations) he was sitting in just the place that would be reserved for an assistant, and frankly, would be seen as one of the lowest status places to sit because of the constant interruptions and because there was no gatekeeper to keep colleagues and random visitors like me from walking-up and talking to him.  I assumed this was a mistake or something, but became more puzzled when I realized that there was some stray group (including Chris Flink, head of  IDEO's New York office) in what I thought was Tim's office.  After I met with David (who was charming and fun as always), I saw that Tim was still there, and I asked him why he wasn't in his office. He said it wasn't his office any longer and that he had moved to what I would call the "receptionist's position," which made him -- as he later explained it -- "the most public person on the floor."

I called him a week or so later to ask more about this approach. He told me that most of IDEO's senior people had moved out of their offices and now when there was a need for more private conversations, there were a lot of small conference available (i.e., their old offices) that everyone could use.  He then explained that after working for IDEO for many years -- including as head of their London and San Francisco offices -- after he became CEO five or six years ago and was given his own office (albeit a pretty small one with glass that limited his privacy) he found it "vaguely embarrassing and frustrating to be in an office." After awhile, he and others moved to a different approach, where they were out in the open and there was more casual and exchange and fewer barriers.  I also asked Tim what happens when visits IDEO's other offices -- at places like London, Chicago, New York, Shanghai, and San Francisco. He said that -- although he spends time in conference rooms in meetings with IDEO people and clients (especially when confidential matters are discussed), he takes a desk in the middle of the action because "When I am there to visit and get to know the people and how they work, I can't learn much sitting in a private office."  

We also had a conversation about what he does when he needs a quite place to work, after all, he did write a great book last year called Change By Design.  He said that he has plenty of quiet time to think, especially when he travels, and that to write a book, well that was something that he did at home on nights and weekends!

To me, the upshot of all this is NOT everyone should move to an open office and every CEO should be in the middle of the social swarm like Tim.   Rather, the lesson is that what Tim and other senior people at IDEO do works when you have the right kind of culture and leadership, when the work requires interdependence and knowledge sharing, and people have developed the right skills and routines to work effectively when they are out in the open and on display to everyone else.  I think it is especially important to develop strong norms around courtesy, about how loud to talk, when to avoid interrupting others, and so on, and to make it safe for anyone in the setting to gently remind others when they are violating such norms.  I have noticed, for example, that it took some years to develop these kinds of norms at the Stanford d.school (the one "open place" that I work at a fair amount), and we are now -- on the whole -- quite considerate and respectful. The great thing about IDEO, of course, is that they have the kind of culture and skilled people who can make openness work.

P.S. In fact, if you are interested in Tim's perspective on the kind of people they strive to hire and develop, check out this recent interview that Morten Hansen (of Collaboration fame) did with Tim Brown on "T-Shaped People."

I got a comment this morning about the outcome of the the appeal meeting at Ohio University for Bill Reader's tenure case.  You may recall that I wrote about this in detail in my post on The No Asshole Rule Versus Compassion for the Mentally Ill. The meeting appears to have been an ugly scene.  According to the report in the school paper:

"A standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty members in Baker University Center 219 heard Dean Greg Shepherd and Director Tom Hodson defend their decision to deny Reader tenure, calling him a non-collegial bully incapable of working with current tenured faculty."

Reader and his supporters offered a much different perspective:

It is impossible to know the truth based on the facts in this report.  But it is possible for all of us to take this as a cautionary tale.  When you as a boss let things fester and don't deal with "asshole problems," be it among a single colleague or many of them, you risk having things degenerate into a a total mess like this one.  When everyone starts calling everyone else an asshole, as is happening here, then it is a sign to me of an asshole infested place.  As I wrote in The No Asshole Rule, when you are embedded in such a situation, it is very difficult to avoid becoming an asshole both because emotions and norms are so contagious, and if you spend your days confronting one asshole after another, often the only way to survive is to throw the crap back at them.   Again, I don't know how much of this is true of the School of Journalism at Ohio University, but regardless of what happens after this case, it seems to that the leaders -- probably at the School level-- need to step and figure out what is going on and how to stop it.  In such situations, a change in leadership is usually necessary even if particular bosses are not to blame, they are so entwined with old destructive patterns and perceptions that replacing them is necessary for starting  anew.

Finally, to repeat my main advice about asshole infested places like this one seems to have become (I hope I am wrong, but if you read the above story, it sure seems like a reasonable inference), the best thing you can do is to figure out how to get out as fast as you can if you are trapped in such a human cesspool.

I just started blogging at Psychology Today last week. This page and blog will remain the place where I put the lion's share of my effort.  Most of my posts will appear here first, and then I will reprint some of them there to reach a different audience.  The name of my blog there is Work Matters: Straight Talk and Solid Evidence About Organizational Life.  I also will let you know when I write anything in Psychology Today that is now printed here.  For starters, I thought a good way to introduce myself to Psychology Today readers was to introduce them to a range of my old posts, so I have put-up slightly updated versions of Strong Opinions, Weakly Held, A Strange But Effective Way to Stop Employee Theft, and my post about Jim March's assertion that most claims of originality are actually reflections of ignorance, hubris, or both. 

If you have any suggestions about old posts that you would like me to reprint for Psychology Today readers, please let me know.  Thanks.

A little while ago I wrote a post titled “Visualisations Are Not Everything” . Here’s a good example, which uses data from Google Scholar to show collaboration between Iranian Nuclear Physicists. The data is visualised in UCINET/NetDraw and NetMiner III, and shows the dangers of incomplete data sets, poor interpretation, and poor understanding of how to use the tools.

Consider the network diagram below, which has been visualised in UCINET/NetDraw. The nodes are Iranian Nuclear Physicists, and the red nodes are the network cut points – that is the individuals who are holding the network together.

read more

I clearly have strong beliefs about what drives human behavior, and think there is pretty strong evidence to support many of them. At the same time, I believe equally strongly that there are no magical cures for organizational and individual problems, or any one theory that explains all human behavior. Behavioral scientists battle over these issues -- and they should, it leads to better evidence -- over things like nature versus nurture, extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards, cognition versus emotion, and on and on, and each of us -- me too -- is probably unduly biased in favor of our pet theories.  There is a lot of evidence out there to fuel different arguments and I often am bewildered about what causes human behavior (remember this research about how the sawmill stopped theft....if you read this in combination with Salt Passage Research, you can get completely confused). But, in reading so much of this stuff over the years --while it is clear that some behavioral theories and interventions work better than others -- the thing I am most sure of is that there no one golden theory that is by far the most powerful and effective, and that provides the golden path to success.

The corollary to this conclusion (which is evidence-based) is that when anyone claims they are hocking a theory that explains 75% of success in life, it is safe to assume they are selling you snake oil. To quote James March once again, as I suggested in my post on Good to Great, “Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimonial to hubris.”

I was reminded of this problem once again when I received an invitation for a workshop on emotional intelligence (called "EQ" sometimes) that an obviously well-meaning consultant was putting on at one of my kid's schools.  The advertisement for this event claimed that "EQ" was far more powerful for explaining success in life than "IQ," in fact, the advertisement claimed it explained 75% of success in life.  I am a big fan of the general idea behind emotional intelligence, and believe that more successful human-beings -- especially bosses --enjoy higher emotional intelligence, which researchers (the one's who apparently coined the concept and published the first studies) John Mayer and his colleagues define as "The ability to engage in sophisticated information processing about one's own and others' emotions, and the ability to use that information as a guide to thinking and behavior."  As I wrote to this consultant, I definitely think that the schools in my area would be better-off if everyone -- students, teachers, and administrators-- had higher EQ, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that (despite debate about exactly what it is and how it works), that more EQ leads people to more success -- and to have more civilized human exchanges too.  

Yet, much as the main popularizer of EQ apparently did, this consultant undermines her legitimate message by making excessive claims -- in March's lingo, claims that she wielding magic.  The case of EQ is interesting because, while Goelman and his colleagues were selling it as nearly a cure all (I went to one of his speeches, and he was making outrageous claims about the amount of variance in organizational performance that were explained by a leader's EQ), more careful research and more measured claims were emerging from Mayer and other researchers.  To this point, please read what Mayer and his colleagues wrote in an article published in the American Psychologist in 2008 called "Emotional Intelligence: Now Ability or Eclectic Traits."  On page 504, they argue:

A journalistic rendering of EI created and also complicated the popular understanding of it. Goleman’s (1995) bestselling book Emotional Intelligence began with the early version of our EI model but mixed in many other personality traits including persistence, zeal, self-control, character as a whole, and other positive attributes. The book received extensive coverage in the press, including a cover story in Time magazine (Gibbs, 1995). Because the book included, in part, the theory we developed, some investigators wrongly believed that we endorsed this complex and, at times, haphazard composite of attributes as an interpretation of EI.

The journalistic version became the public face of EI and attracted further attention, in part, perhaps, owing to its extraordinary claims. Goleman (1995, p. 34) wrote of EI’s importance that “what data exist, suggest it can be as powerful, and at times more powerful, than IQ.” A few years later, Goleman (1998a, p. 94) remarked that “nearly 90% of the difference” between star performers at work and average ones was due to EI. .... Our own work never made such claims, and we actively critiqued them (Mayer, 1999; Mayer & Cobb,2000; Mayer & Salovey, 1997; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso,2000). More recently, Goleman (2005, p. xiii) wrote that others who believed that EI predicts huge proportions of success had misunderstood his 1995 book.

I suspect the consultant's claims about the magical powers of EQ simply were repeating these widely accepted beliefs -- apparently first perpetuated (but now denied) by Goleman.  In addition to sending this consultant the Mayer paper, I also sent her an article (summarized here) that analyzed 85 years worth of research and showed that, for better or worse, the strongest evidence we have is that IQ is mighty powerful predictor of success.  I hope I didn't come across as arrogant or overbearing when I suggested to her: "I am not an IQ freak at all, and in fact, I believe that it has a large social and economic component – and although my ideology and values press to me believe in EQ and related indicators of the ability to read and respond to others, I try to be careful to stick to the data and avoid excessive claims.  I think what you are doing is wonderful, but please be careful not to fall into the trap of making excessive claims to attract attention."

For me, all this raises an interesting question, or I suppose challenge, that I wrestle with constantly.   I believe in evidence-based management and also have strong opinions that are grounded in evidence but are also shaped by my values (e.g., no matter how much money you make, in my book you are still a loser if you are an asshole) and by the quirks of my experience in this life.   The challenge is to walk the line between selling ideas that I firmly believe can make organizations better places, without overselling them -- it is hard to do both because of the temptations (money and attention, for starters) and because, in many cases, people yearn for simple, powerful, and complete solutions to their problems (and keep asking for them even when you are careful to say that you don't have them and neither does anyone else). 

I got an email from a colleague who I had not heard from for years, and as often happens when people contact me for the first time in a long time, her note touched to The No Asshole Rule.  She linked to an article published at Inside Higher Ed that described the strange case of Ohio University Journalism Professor Bill Reader who, "Despite glowing teaching evaluations and no documented trace of disciplinary action in his past" narrowly (7-5) was approved for tenure by the evaluation committee, which set the stage for several administrators to decide to deny him tenure.  I have never seen a vote like this... in fact, having voted on a lot of tenure cases, my guess is that a possible meaning of such a vote could be "we don't have the guts to make a real decision, so we will leave it to administrators to decide," as such votes are usually recommendations to them -- and a 7-5 vote really isn't a recommendation at all, it means "it is up to you."  In any event, it is no surprise that this vote "served as a precursor for recommendations of tenure denial from the school’s director, the college of communication's tenure review committee and the dean."  The No Asshole Rule (translated in academic language as "the norm of collegiality")  was cited as a primary reason for these denials, "Reader’s director and dean have cited a “pattern” of non-collegial and even “bullying” behavior as the reason for their concerns, and those misgivings were “heightened,” his dean said, by Reader’s admittedly angry reaction to the narrow tenure vote.

Apparently, the final decision around the case has not been made, that is coming in a few weeks. But regardless of how the decision goes, it raises a serious issue that advocates of The No Asshole Rule like me need to consider -- that people who show all the hallmarks of acting like an asshole may be doing so because they suffer from serious mental health problems.  Indeed, although claims and counter claims are flying in this case about whether Professor Reader made threats after the vote, it is clear that he was suffering mental health problems before the close vote and really freaked out after that.  As Reader himself admits in the article:

When Reader learned that Hodson planned to recommend against awarding tenure, he made the bizarre decision to expose scars on his arms where he had used a branding tool to burn the words “comfort” and “truth” into his flesh. Reader branded himself during a difficult divorce two years earlier, and he told investigators that he wanted to demonstrate to Hodson and Robert Stewart, the school’s associate director, that his commitment to work had contributed to the dissolution of his marriage.

“I just felt completely betrayed, and to be honest I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown,” Reader said. “I probably shouldn’t have shown them my arms, but I did.”

This incident and some nasty emails that Reader apparently sent do suggest that he was acting like an asshole.  Regardless of the exact facts of the story, it raises an interesting and difficult question about how to treat abusive and destructive people who are acting out because they are suffering from mental health problems -- and in this case there are hints that Reader was good at his job (and that students liked him, they don't give nasty teachers good teaching evaluations).  I am all for enforcing The No Asshole Rule in academia, and believe that consistently abusive and selfish people (who are otherwise competent) should not be rewarded and promoted -- and unfortunately I have seen too many cases were such people are promoted and then go on to leave a path of destruction for decades.

BUT if such behavior has not been a problem in the past, and is provoked by life pressures or changes in physical health, it seems to me that compassion and understanding is called for... so in a case like Reader's (I don't know the facts well enough to say what should be here done for sure), perhaps the best thing to do is to delay the tenure decision for a couple years and make it contingent on him changing his behavior -- in other words, contingent on him returning to sufficiently good mental health to keep his inner jerk in check.  I realize that circumstances vary from place to place, and that may not be right or possible in this case, but I think that showing  compassion and emotional support is necessary in such situations.  Skilled and well-meaning people are sometimes overwhelmed by what life throws at them, and discarding them despite great skill and potential troubles me -- especially if there is good reason to believe their behavior can change. 

To be clear, however, if someone has a pattern of abusive behavior and -- regardless of the cause -- it does not stop, that means to me that the person is incompetent to do the job, and should be grounds for not promoting someone or firing them.

This brings me to another lesson from this case -- if the report is accurate, the administrators who voted to deny him tenure made things much harder on themselves and ultimately on Reader because they did not have the guts or energy to call him out on his nasty behavior before the tenure decision (at least in writing).  In fact, his written evaluations suggest quite the opposite, especially from his bosses (notably school director Tom Hudson,  who voted against Reader apparently because of his hostile behavior). The story reports:

There is not a single piece of documentation from Reader’s eight years at Ohio, however, that shows he was ever disciplined for any “volatile, bullying, or other anti-social behavior,” according to a report of the university’s Office of Institutional Equity.... What is documented before the tenure vote is a pattern of congratulatory evaluations, endorsed by the very department head who is now challenging Reader’s tenure status. In 2004, Hodson called Reader “the ultimate team player.” He followed that up in 2007 by declaring “I am proud to be your colleague."

“Just because something doesn’t occur in a narrow piece of the written record doesn’t mean there were never any discussions, conversations.”

Shepard declined to elaborate. So there may have been conversations where Reader was given pointed feedback and a chance to quell his nasty behavior -- I want to be careful to make clear that I do not have all the facts on this case.  But there is a key lesson here if these bosses lacked the will or skill to do to give Reader negative written reviews and work with him to change his alleged behavior.  This not only may  weaken their legal case against him, if such a spineless pattern persisted throughout Reader's career at the school, it damaged everyone involved.  Academic administrators have tough jobs, but I don't have much sympathy for any boss who lacks the courage to take tough but necessary action -- and then votes to fire someone (despite a history of glowing written reviews) by claiming that, really, this had been a problem all along.

There is an important and broader cautionary tale for every boss here: If you don't have the guts to do the dirty work, and can't or won't find someone to do it for you, you are in the wrong job.  If you let an asshole run wild for years and years, write glowing reviews all the while, but finally get so fed-up that you vote to fire him or her -- in my book you don't deserve any sympathy when the whole situation blows up in your face.  This theme, that the best bosses have the guts to do the dirty work (and understand that there is a big difference between what you do and how you do it... the best bosses make and implement hard choices without turning into bossholes) was also a central theme in my HBR article on "How to Be a Good Boss in A Bad Economy" -- the article is here and I talk about it here).

To return to Professor Reader's case, the whole thing sounds like an unfortunate mess.  I hope that it is resolved in a manner that is best for Ohio University students in the long run -- that is the most important thing, even if the impact on students if often ignored in such decisions. 

P.S.  Everyone involved in this case would have benefited from reading and following the advice in C.K. Gunsalus' The College Administrator's Survivial Guide.

P.P.S. Check out Sherman Dorn's post on this case, he does a great job of digging into the norm of collegiality and how tough it is to enforce and figure out what it means in practice.

Fortune just released their 2010 list of the "Top 100 Companies to Work For" and I was pleased to see that SAS Institute tops the list this year.  In large, part, I was pleased because -- as I have used SAS as an extreme and successful example of putting people first -- one of the critiques I often hear form executives and students is "it works for now, but it doesn't seem sustainable."  Well, they have kept their commitment to people through the best times (when the lure of getting rich quick challenged their model during dotcom boom) and now through the meltdown.  Nothing lasts forever, but you have to give CEO Jim Goodnight a lot of credit for keeping things rolling.  And his firm also presents a compelling case that going public isn't always a great thing.

Speaking of privately held companies, I was even more delighted to see that Robert W. Baird moved-up from #14 to #11.  I have blogged about them in fairly massive detail -- see here and here. And I pleased to see that they have continued to do well financially during the downturn and still tout their no asshole rule!  As Fortune reports:

Rank: 11 (Previous rank: 14)

What makes it so great?

Congratulations to CEO Paul Purcell and his colleagues. I remember, when I interviewed him a couple years ago after the first time they appeared on the list (at #39 in 2008), I asked Paul what kinds of jerks he especially tries to screen out -- to get at how he defines a workplace asshole.  He said the most toxic people were those who consistently put their own needs and wants ahead of their colleagues and the company.  Unfortunately to many firms on Wall Street reward exactly those kinds of people  -- see how things at least used to be at Merrill Lynch in this article by the Heath Brothers. I wonder, as all those Wall Street firms insist paying big bonuses to top performers -- what kind of behavior are they rewarding?  The stars who stomp on others on the way to the top -- or the one's who help everyone around them succeed. 

I don't know about you, but I've got a feeling that a lot those firms we bailed-out are handing wads of cash and stock to their selfish superstars.

The above quote is from James March, an emeritus professor at Stanford.  I would argue that Jim is the most prestigious living organizational theorist. If I believe the rumors I hear from "well-placed sources," he came pretty close to winning the Nobel Prize in Economics last time and has a decent chance do so in the future.  I thought of Jim's quote (which is from an email he sent me about five years ago and is quoted in our book Hard Facts) when I received an invitation to a leadership conference at a prestigious university proclaiming that -- given defective but widely accepted leadership models that fueled the financial crisis -- it is time for some really smart academics and business leaders to get together and "imagine" a radically different  and better kind of leadership. 

Frankly, I felt physically ill as I read the hype around this conference because, once again, I see people arguing that reinvention and radically new ideas are needed to save the day.  Yet, in fact, there is plenty of old evidence (not to mention common sense) kicking around that shows the best leaders are competent and benevolent and that they put the interests of their followers and customers ahead of their own greedy desires. Is that a shocking new idea to you?

Yes, there are nuances and tweaks that emerge from new research and innovative leaders all the time, but just as in the rest of life, progress occurs one tiny and often painful lesson at a time -- not through some magical process where ultra-smart people (many of whom brought us the defective models that got us in this mess) imagine a brand new kind of leadership.

I bet that Kurt Vonnegut never read any management theory.  But he got it right in his  "Joe Heller"  poem that I love so much -- where he suggested that emotionality  healthy human-beings are content with having enough to live well, with the knowledge that they have enough, and they don't constantly yearn for, demand, and take more more more status, money, and power for me me me.  I don't think this mindset requires any radical new inventions or leadership models -- I bet you knew that before you ever read this post.  And I contend that anyone who claims that it does -- or worse yet, claims they have invented such a radical new model -- suffers from arrogance, ignorance, or both (to paraphrase Jim March's wise words.) 
 

I wrote a long post yesterday about the methods that we teach and apply at the Stanford d.school, and how many have their roots in what has been taught at the Stanford Engineering School (and recall the d.school is a unit of the Engineering School).  But I only talked about these methods and the associated mindset in broad brush.   Fortunately, I can point you to a wonderful handbook that was just posted a couple weeks back on d.schools news -- the d.school blog. The folks who teach the introduction to design thinking class,which we call Bootcamp, have complied what they call the Bootcamp Bootleg (get the pdf here). The Bootleg lays out and explains the general "D. Mindsets" like "create clarity from complexity,"  "show don't tell," "get experiential and experimental."  Then it moves to different "modes" including "empathize,"  "define," ideate," "prototype," and "test."   Most useful of all, the Bootleg contains detailed and road tested explanations of many design thinking (and doing) methods: Assuming a beginner's mindset, user camera study, how to "interview for empathy," "team share and capture," empathy map," "powers of ten" and on and on.  The Bootcamp Bootleg provides convenient one-stop shopping for anyone who wants to learn about the nitty-gritty of how design thinkers practices their various crafts, to find tools use throughout the design process, and for anyone who is teaching or coaching a group of design thinkers.

A big thanks to the team who put together the Bootleg -- it is as useful as a tool like this can be, and it is free for the taking!

I am preparing for my class tomorrow where my students and I discuss the what motivates human behavior -- a pretty hot topic these days given all the focus on whether it really is necessary to  pay top talent gobs of money to motivate them and keep them from running out the door (as we saw in the strong emotional responses to this recent post).  As I was digging through old articles, I ran into an old parody published in Change in 1978 by Michael Pacanowsky called "Salt Passage: The State of the Art," which does a remarkably adept job of showing that -- when you review major behavioral science theories -- ranging from work on  cognitive dissonance, to communication, to rewards, to the effects of threats -- that researchers have not yet generated clear evidence to explain why the request "Please pass the salt" is efficacious in causing salt to move from one end of a table to the source of the utterances.”

The research in the article is fake, but the theories are remarkably well-explained, and, alas, some 32 years later, I would assert that behavioral scientists are -- if anything -- even more at odds then ever about what fuels human action.  It is an easy way to learn a lot of social psychological theory in a short space, and if it was revised for modern times, another dozen reasons would need to be added to explain why people pass the salt when asked.  Here is the pdf: Download Saltpassage-2  It holds up pretty well.  And it makes me squirm because I realize I don't really know why people pass the salt when asked...

One of the most notable and intriguing recent innovations in businesses and business schools is the design thinking movement.  A couple weeks ago, the  New York Times had a big story how MBA education is being reinvented in many places because -- as former MBA and d.school star student Laura Jones explained it -- “At business school, there was a lot of focus on, ‘You’ve got a great idea; here’s how you build a business out of it.’ The d.school said, ‘Here’s how you get to that great idea.’  As the article explains, design thinking is now part of the curriculum in many business schools -- Stanford, Berkeley, Virginia, and although I am not entirely sure what is going on at Harvard Business School,  I did see that Diego Rodriguez of IDEO (and Metacool fame) led a workshop at IDEO for Harvard MBAs the other day.

I think that is wonderful that design thinking -- with its emphasis on observing and identifying human needs (and not just relying on what they say, but by watching what they do as well), on developing a point of view about what problems need to be addressed, generating ideas, prototyping like crazy, and testing ideas (and doing it all very quickly and not being overly attached to ideas) -- is being applied now to so many different kinds of problems: designing better experiences for hospital patients, building a better bicycle for "the rest of us" rather than the tiny percentage of people who are obsessed with bikes, designing and implementing better customer experiences, changing organizational structures, and on and on and on -- read IDEO CEO Tim Brown's delightful Change By Design if you want to see the astounding range of problems that are being tackled with design thinking these days.

There is, however, a part of the story that seems to be slipping away (especially in the business press and in business schools) that I think is important to tell, and that executives, students, and journalists often don't seem to realize: Engineers and engineering schools are one of the main driving forces behind this movement. You can see the impact of engineers clearly in the development of two iconic design thinking organizations that I know well and have been involved in for many years: IDEO, the magnificent innovation firm, and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, which everyone calls the Stanford d.school.  I did an 18 month ethnography of IDEO in 1990s (with Andy Hargadon, who is now a management professor but already had two degrees in engineering product design from Stanford at the time). I still am involved in the company a bit as an IDEO Fellow.  And I have been teaching at the d.school since it founding.  I guess you could say I was among the founding faculty -- but to be honest, one person deserves a lot more credit for starting the d.school than any of us, David Kelley.  He was the driving force -- in terms of ideas, building emotional involvement, and raising funds.  And, although IDEO was formed through a merger between David Kelley Design and two industrial design firms, one owned by Mike Nuttall and the other by Bill Moggridge, they will tell you that engineer David Kelley was the strongest driving force -- which was why he became CEO when the firm was founded and is currently the Chairman.

I don't want to leave you with the impression that Industrial Design played a minor role in the rise of the design thinking movement (indeed, Bill Moggridge and current IDEO CEO Tim Brown are industrial designers), but I want to focus on the role David Kelley and other engineers have played in this post.  David is an engineer by training (first at in electrical engineering at Carnegie-Mellon and then at Stanford in product design) and is a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford.  David was a central figure in teaching product design classes at the  Stanford Engineering School for decades before the d.school was born (and built IDEO at the same time). David  has used his creativity and charm to entice and educate many of us business types to embrace design thinking and there are now lots of MBAs and other business types working at IDEO and teaching at the Stanford d.school.  Yet most of the acknowledged masters of design thinking at the d.school and IDEO have engineering backgrounds (with the main exceptions being industrial designers like Tim and Bill) -- in particular, they have degrees in engineering product design.  The essence of what happens at both IDEO and the d.school can be seen in the product design process that has been taught for decades at Stanford -- which has been tweaked, refined, and expanded to address a much wider range of problems (and continues to be an ever-evolving prototype at both IDEO and the d.school).

Consider two of the most revered design thinkers and teachers I know: Diego Rodriguez at IDEO and Perry Klebahn at the d.school.  When I first met Diego, a good 15 years ago, he had just graduated from Stanford (where he earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering) and was working at IDEO.  Diego did get increasingly interested in business, got a Harvard MBA, and now -- back at IDEO as a partner and  head of the flagship Palo Alto office-- has become one of the most imaginative business thinkers I know (If you don't read Metacool, you are really missing something). Yet, when I talk to Diego, listen to his ideas, and watch his masterful teaching and coaching, I can always see how the magnificent engineering designer inside him remains the strongest guiding force.  His relentless advice to do things like get out and talk to and watch some real human beings, to develop a sharp point of view, to brainstorm, to "prototype until your puke," and to view ideas as easy to get, important to throw away, and ultimately best judged by users and the market (rather than experts) all go back to his product design roots.  This really struck me when, a few years back, Diego was designing a new organizational structure for client that, many years before, he had designed a product for when working as a young IDEO designer.  He remarked to me "The end product is a lot different, but the process I am using is remarkably similar."

I see the same thing in how Perry approaches problems.  Perry has always been a product guy, as he invented the modern show shoe as a Stanford product design student and then went on to grow a company that sold and spread the product called Atlas, then was COO of Patagonia, and most recently was CEO of Timbuk2. Perry has also taught numerous product design classes at Stanford over the past 20 years, and in the last five years, taught over a dozen classes for students and executives at the Stanford d.school.  In the process, I have watched Perry move beyond and expand his engineering design skills to an ever broader set of problems, things like helping software executives gain empathy for what Gen Y workers want, rethinking the strategy of a Fortune 500 company, and lately we have been talking about how to apply design thinking to reinvent HR.   Yet Perry's engineering roots are always evident.  I was just watching the other day in class as Perry used his product engineering background to guide a class exercise aimed at improving employee selection, recruitment, and socialization practices for our d.school fellows program.  He pressed the students to look for unmet needs, to identify the problem they were trying to solve, to brainstorm ideas for prototypes quickly, and then to test the emerging ideas with users --- even though those ideas were unfinished and crude approximations of organizational practices.  This process, although modified by Perry and many others to fit problems of all kinds, is simply a variation of the design process that Perry used as a Stanford Engineering School student years ago to invent the modern snowshoe -- and then to grow the company and customer based required to make the product succeed.  One of his primary mentors throughout the process was David Kelley, of course. It is no accident that the Stanford d.school is a unit of the Stanford School of Engineering.  It is also no accident that many of us who teach design thinking to students (many of whom are MBAs working on business problems) have been mentored by engineers who are masters of design thinking -- people like David, Perry, and Diego. 

In this vein, the sole Stanford Graduate School of Business professor who teaches regularly at the d.school is Jim Patell.  He teaches magnificent classes on Extreme Affordability, where students design products like water pumps and lights for the poorest people on the planet. Jim was introduced to design thinking by David Kelley and then mentored by him for years.  Now Jim teaches with Dave Beach, an engineering professor who (among any other things) runs the "Product Realization Lab," (the machine shop) at the Stanford Engineering School.

Certainly, depending on the problem at hand, other talents and disciplines play key roles in d.school classes and the design process.  As an organizational psychologist, I believe the behavioral sciences have a lot to add to design thinking, and certainly believe my expertise is useful classes were we coach students in ways to spread infectious action (like this project) or when veteran executive Debra Dunn and I taught a class that helped Perry and his team at Timbuk2 build a better company meeting.   

Yes, I am tenured professor in the Stanford Engineering School, but I am not an engineer. The core of what we do at the Stanford d.school and of much of what they do so well at IDEO is rooted most strongly in product design engineering, especially the flavor taught in the Stanford Engineering School.  That is why, frankly, I always feel compelled to involve "real" product designers like Diego and Perry in the d.school classes I teach -- even though I am starting to believe that I know this design thinking stuff pretty well after teaching it for four or five years.  Indeed, the masters of this craft aren't just established veterans like David Kelley and his students from long ago like Perry and Diego.  Debra Dunn and I -- and our students -- have benefited a great deal by involving Kris Woyzbun (now at IDEO) in our class on treating organizational practices as prototypes.   We like the fact that Kris took numerous classes on applying design thinking to business problems from us at the d.school and she was a star student -- but I would argue that one of the main reasons she was a star in those classes and now at IDEO is that she also has a masters in engineering product design from Stanford.

Like many other people at the d.school, I get in arguments about what design thinking is, how it ought to be applied, and the times when it isn't right to use it. But there is little disagreement at Stanford that the brand of design thinking that we teach largely reflects a mindset and set of methods that was developed and refined at the Stanford Engineering School for decades before design thinking was ever a hot business topic. 

P.S. I want to emphasize that this post reflects my biased experience at Stanford and with IDEO. No doubt, engineers in other organizations and universities have had a huge impact as well. And I said, other disciplines have been crucial as well -- at IDEO Industrial Design has been especially critical.

That is what just came in my email.  The No Asshole Rule has been published in a lot of different languages now, I should compile the list.  The last offer was for a Polish translation -- not exactly a huge market compared to other countries -- but the market for Croatian translations is a lot smaller.  They apparently will publish a first run of 1000 copies sometime in the next 18 months.  I can hardly wait to see the cover and title -- I will post it when it arrives.

P.S. A big thanks to J.S.W. for spreading the word about the book in Poland.

The notion that the process of studying something can change it is an old and useful theme in the behavioral sciences and other disciplines.  Perhaps the most famous illustration is the Hawthorne effect, which was uncovered (as the myth goes) when Harvard Business School researchers who were studying the effects of illumination and other physical changes on employee performance at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant in the 1920s.  Many reports suggest that employee productivity at Hawthorne went up mostly because the researchers and their managers were just paying more attention to the employees. As I learned it in graduate school, Harvard's Elton Mayo and his colleagues reported a pattern that looked something like this list at ACCEL when they experimented with different working arrangements with a group of six "girls" (this was the 1920s, remember):

• Output went up

• Output went up once more

• Output went up sharply.

• Output fell slightly

• Output went up

• Output went up

• Output remained the same

• Output was the highest ever recorded averaging 3000 relays a week

You can see the Hawthorne effect myth here in more detail at the ACCEL site or the more staid and cautious explanation at the Harvard Business School site here -- but regardless of what actually happened in this study (whether the simple act of paying attention to these workers increased their output --- or not), the Hawthorne effect is now used to mean "the phenomenon in which subjects in behavioral studies change their performance in response to being observed." 

I started thinking about the Hawthorne effect because of the Floon Beetle Expedition, one of the many masterpieces by the late Mad Magazine columnist Don Martin.  I used the cartoon below last week to demonstrate how the act of studying things can change them... in this case, destroy them!

I haven't been blogging much lately, but expect to get back in the swing of things this week as the worst of my writing and teaching pressures seem to be slowing down.

Meanwhile, my better half, Marina Park, put up a great post (I confess to being biased) over at SF Gate, where she blogs at the online home of the San Francisco Chronicle.  Marina has a lot of experience dealing with highly paid people who suffer from fits of greed and self delusion (she spent 8 years as managing partner of a big law firm, and I can tell you, that law firms are great settings to study self-enhancement bias -- the notion that people are prone to seeing themselves as "better than the rest" regardless of the actual evidence).  But what she saw among highly paid attorneys is nothing compared to how greedy the bankers are now acting and how blind they seem to the damage they did and that still persists.  In her view, the behavior of the Wall Street Titans clashes with the lessons that she learned as a young lawyer and now as CEO of the Northern California Girl Scouts.

As Marina argues at the outset of her post:

Always leave a place better than you found it -- that's from the Girl Scouts.

You are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of your actions -- that's from the First Year Law Students.

The bankers don't seem to quite accept these values or logic.  Check out the rest of her post.  I am all for paying talented people what they deserve.  But I am also all for requiring people to take responsibility for their actions, even if they didn't mean to hurt anyone. 

Sometime ago I posted some commentary about this study by Doctor Nicholas Christakis and Doctor James Fowler, who used network analysis to aid understanding of obesity, and some commentary on this study where they used network analysis to aid the understanding smoking behaviour.  Both studies were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I also posted some commentary about a study on happiness published in the January 2009 edition of the British Medical Journal, or BMJ for short.  Last year Doctors Christakis and Fowler published a book called Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.  I'll be doing a book review in the next few days.  In the meantime the video below features Doctor Fowler talking about their work - it's well worth viewing.

read more

I think that a missing component in the corporate literature on knowledge management, and for that matter the management literature, is discipline. It seems that as a society we are afraid of discipline because it conjures up images of corporal punishment. Yet I would say to you that ‘discipline is not a dirty word’! Indeed, in 1918 one of Australia’s most famous generals and citizens – Lieutenant General Sir John Monash - captured the meaning of discipline very well. He said:

“Discipline is, after all, only a means to an end, and that end is the power to secure coordinated action among a large number of individuals for the achievement of a definite purpose”.

A subtle tweak provides a pretty good working description of the intent of knowledge management –

“Knowledge management is, after all, only a means to an end, and that end is the means to secure coordinated action among a large number of individuals for the achievement of a definite purpose”.

read more

On the 1st of March 1971 a significant government department report, which took two years to develop, was submitted to the Minister of the day. I've just found a copy and read it from cover to cover. By today's standards it probably wouldn't pass muster - its only 74 pages and it just doesn't look pretty. It is devoid of colour, pictures, and diagrams, but it does have tables and numbers, and more importantly the principle recommendation is in the first paragraph clearly flagged in bold type. The other recommendations are easy to find and follow.

The report is remarkable for its clarity and succinctness. Its also remarkable for its predictions and its recommendations, some of which were enacted just last year, but quite independently of this report! I doubt today's policy and decision makers even know of its existence, yet it could easily have been rebadged and resubmitted. Even more astounding is the report references recommendations made and approved in 1922, but never enacted. Similar recommendations were again made in 1955 and were not enacted. And of course the 1971 report was referenced in 1997, and you guessed it the recommendations were not enacted (I've also found and read the 1997 report). A new report was commissioned in January 2008 and its recommendations approved in July 2008. The recommendations in the 2008 report could have been plagiarised from the 1971 report, and presumably the 1955 and 1922 reports, yet they were arrived at independently and in ignorance of the existence of the other reports.

read more

Yesterday I was asked – “What are the essential components of a knowledge management system?” Now this is no easy question because it is laden with assumptions, most often that we can actually build a knowledge management system from the ground up! The assumption being that a knowledge management system is a hard system, which it isn’t. Here’s my answer.

A knowledge management system is a soft system of systems with open boundaries. It is made up of components from the mnemonic PISHI (1), which stands for people, infrastructure, software, hardware, and information. This classification represents real things in the real world, and each of these things is linked together by processes so that an output is realised to meet an objective – in this case knowledge. In the modern business world, all components are essential.

read more