Mike Lehr's Blog

We sometimes hear, “Nice guys finish last.” However, in genetics altruism creates a dilemma because it exists – and not just in humans. The question is why. Even Darwin considered it a challenge to his theory of natural selection. Why would any creature help another at a steep personal cost?

The article, “Kin and Kind,” written by Jonah Lehrer in the March 5, 2012 edition of The New Yorker, investigates altruism and its role in evolution. Whether its bats, bees, birds, ants or humans, the presence of altruism in these species suggests that kindness can’t be a losing strategy. In fact, insects displaying an extreme form of altruism called “eusociality” tend to dominate the insect world over their self-interested brethren.

E.O.Wilson, a main proponent of altruism as a positive contributor in evolution summarizes it this way:

Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups.

If we look at the Napoleonic era and the rise of the nation state, we find that the demise of mercenary (self-interested) armies began when citizen (altruistic) armies, cemented by patriotic and nationalistic emotions arrived on the scene. However, the reason why we don’t see more altruism in nature and our everyday lives is that a cohesive group must exist first. Again, context matters; encouraging self-interest will yield a self-interested culture, encouraging altruism will yield an altruistic one.

Of course, this prompts the question: Can a company built upon self-interested incentives triumph over a company with a cohesive, altruistic culture? Evolution suggests it won’t. Of course, that doesn’t mean a few self-interested people inside the altruistic cultures won’t try to take advantage of the others. Perhaps they are there to really test how cohesive and altruistic the company is?

Nevertheless, it seems that evolution could really be on the side of the nice guys.

Other posts in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 4): Intrinsic Rewards
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 5): Humans vs. Apes
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 6): Incentives & Rats

Previously I had indicated that placebo management could impact performance. I recently read

Michael Specter’s article, “The Power of Nothing,” in the December 12, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. He shared Ted Kaptchuk’s work on the Placebo Effect at the Harvard Medical School. I found this passage extremely apropos for placebo management:

. . . although placebos had no impact on the chemical markers that indicate whether a patient is responding to therapy, patients nonetheless reported feeling better. Kaptchuk concluded that objective data should not be the only criterion for doctors to consider.

Translated to the business world, we cannot just evaluate our effectiveness with people only on objective considerations. For instance, when a manager explains a business plan to an employee, the value isn’t just in the manager’s explanation and the employee’s understanding. There is additional intangible value in the time the manager spent with the employee. The manager could have enhanced this value by taking the employee to breakfast or lunch for the discussion.

As we saw there are two aspects to an interaction: thinking and feelings (see diagram to right). In this example, the manager’s explanation represents the thinking; the time and place represent the feeling. A different outcome would occur if the manager simply gave the plan for the employee’s reading.

In using this managerial approach, keep five things in mind:

1. Objective information and criteria don’t tell the whole story
2. People react differently
3. Expectations of you and the other person matter
4. Feelings matter more than #1
5. Different users have different results

Relationship building strategies and techniques maximize the placebo effect. It helps to have a strategy for improving your relationship with each of your employees. Implementing initiatives and effecting change will be easier and more effective.

Other links in this series: Placebo Management: Impacting Employees’ Beliefs

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the work of Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as reported by Elizabeth Kolbert in her article, “Sleeping With The Enemy,” which appeared in the August 15/22, 2011 issue of the The New Yorker. At the time, I cited Tomasello’s work to emphasize the natural orientation humans have toward cooperation. In this post, I am suggesting that cooperation is a higher form of intelligent behavior than self-interest.

Here are two quotes from the article indirectly suggesting this:

1. Apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society.
2. If you were at the zoo today, you would never have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don’t have this kind of collaborative project.

Only thinking and working towards your self-interest without consideration for others is definitely easier to accomplish than cooperation is. Additionally, when you add the importance of context, empathy and intrinsic rewards – all ingredients we’ve discussed earlier – to encourage natural cooperative tendencies, the achievement of cooperation is difficult, demanding and warrants a higher form of talent, aptitude and skill.

Furthermore, we can even take cooperation to a higher level when it comes to encouraging it within a diverse workforce. Such a workforce is more likely to be creative, innovative and adaptable. It’s much easier to gain cooperation within an homogeneous workforce than a diverse one. Moreover, creating the context, empathy and intrinsic rewards to appeal to such diversity requires special talents.

Again, all of this is to suggest that the desire and ability to cooperate belongs in the realm of a higher life form, humans rather than apes. Seen more simply, whereas self-interest puts our behavior more in line with those of apes, cooperation elevates us above them.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 4): Intrinsic Rewards

Intrinsic rewards are important aspects of creating a cooperative work culture. However, such rewards are difficult to understand and teach. Moreover, many, many people just don’t believe they are that powerful. Yochai Benkler in his article “The Unselfish Gene” of the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review endorses the importance of intrinsic rewards in cooperative cultures.

Essentially, as we saw in the second post of this series, most people enjoy being cooperative, enjoy helping others; but, this enjoyment will dissipate if we ignore, discount or unreinforce it. Using effective, intrinsic, morale building techniques and compliments while working to minimize selfish extrinsic motivations such as money will ensure this won’t happen.

Since intrinsic rewards by nature are less tangible, it’s often difficult for managers and leaders to understand and appreciate the internal motivations of others, especially if they by nature don’t receive tremendous enjoyment from helping others. Nevertheless, here are a few tips for encouraging a cooperative workforce:

• Thank employees when they help others (letting them know it’s important to you)
• Demonstrate how they have helped you or others (it’s not always apparent to them)
• Recognize that they naturally enjoy helping others (reinforcing their internal motivation for helping others)
• Show how their job helps others to do theirs when performed well (creating a personal connection between their job and others)
• Hire and promote people who enjoy helping others (the desire to help others is a function of personality)
• Believe that people enjoy helping people (we cannot promote cooperation if we don’t believe it’s a motivation)

These tips will be uncomfortable at first but regularly applied they will produce positive effects over the long run. Thus, they require relentlessness, discipline and almost a fanatical belief in the power of cooperation.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy

For many of us, we feel good when we help others. What we are even learning is that many of us, especially women, will tend to feel what others feel. Thus, we not only feel good about helping others, but we feel their happiness from our help.

In the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review Yochai Benkler’s cites in his article “The Unselfish Gene” the work of neurophysiologist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, who originally “found that our brains mirror not only pain and motor movements but pure emotions as well.”

It’s important to emphasize empathy as an emotion, not merely an understanding as I also indicated in the difference between emotional intelligence and intuition. It’s one thing to see someone smiling and know they are happy and quite another to feel they are happy because if someone can feel good about the happiness of another person, he is more likely to cooperate.

What Rizzolatti’s research, advanced by Tania Singer’s use of brain scans, indicates is that people can actually feel what others feel in the emotional areas of their brains not just the rational ones. Moreover, the intensity of empathy will vary by person with some not feeling much at all.

This has tremendous implications for leadership development because it shows the importance of sensitivity in team intelligence. Whereas Part II of this series dealt with context, this post implies a cooperative business culture is also a function of personalities: some people will just feel better about cooperating than others will. Thus, this implies that highly sensitive people, who also tend to be very empathetic, might be better leaders and employees in a cooperative environment.

Thus, cooperation is not only about creating the right environment but also about having the right personalities, personalities that are empathetic.

Other posts in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer

Classical business literature emphasizes focus: set goals, plan, and then focus on execution. However, it’s relatively void of focus’ downside: obliviousness to peripheral threats and opportunities.

In the mid-1900’s, when conditions didn’t change as dynamically as today’s, extensive research, planning and focus worked. Today, most research is outdated upon completion. Consequently, situational awareness (SA) becomes more important as part of an adaptive business strategy.

SA is the degree to which a person or company can be aware of surrounding conditions while focused on a task or plan. Ironically, SA came of age with aerial combat; you need to know where you are in the sky while focused on engaging enemy aircraft. If not, you could crash your plane from flying too low or from enemy fire simply because you were oblivious to those factors.

Context strongly influences our planning; however, if conditions forming that context are dynamically changing, that means our plan – the object of our focus – might become invalid by new threats and opportunities, and our focus and poor SA might cause us to overlook them. Psychological influences such as anchoring and optimistic planning will create additional pressures to keep us focused and ignorant.

These will also influence our assessment of talent by tending to make it too static and historical. Rather than basing it on people’s potential within new conditions, we will tend to base it on performances under old conditions. We will tend to believe that successes and failures transfer rather than assess actual skills and actual aptitudes within a new set of actual conditions. More simply, this is pigeonholing.

Technology and the internet strongly influence today’s dynamic conditions. Our focus shouldn’t blind us. SA will help us see the many threats, opportunities and talents that will influence our success.

As we saw with pigeonholing and tasting food, context influences us greatly. This extends to people’s inclinations to collaborate. In support of this, the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review has Yochai Benkler’s citing in his article “The Unselfish Gene” the work of Lee Ross from Stanford University. He found people being more inclined to collaborate if the context of the effort promotes it.

That’s why leadership that manages, operates and communicates with the implied assumption that employees are essentially motivated by “What’s in it for me” will tend to foster a less collaborative culture than leadership doing the same against a backdrop of collaboration. From an everyday perspective, this means the culture that heavily relies upon extrinsic rewards such as money, awards and perks for individual performances will tend to be less collaborative than the one relying upon intrinsic rewards such as the enjoyment of working with and helping others. Mastering morale builders that don’t cost a cent go a long way in helping here.

This doesn’t mean we eliminate monetary rewards for individuals, but it does mean we focus more on the culture we are promoting in our businesses; culture is context. However, the promotion of that culture must be real. If employees sense a divorce between words and actuality, then the context for collaboration falls, thus causing most employees to resort to self-interested behavior.

Using intrinsic rewards to buttress a collaborative context is involved. In addition to mastering morale builders, it means mastering compliments. Understanding and appreciating the different kinds will help us see how intrinsic rewards differ from extrinsic ones. It’s only by mastering these on an interpersonal level will we be able to extend it throughout our companies and organizations.

Other posts in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?

In “Before You Make That Big Decision,” which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* suggest that one way to overcome unconscious biases in decision making is that we ask the question: Is the base case [for the decision] overly optimistic? They make the point that:

• “Most recommendations contain forecasts, which are notoriously prone to excessive optimism.”
• “Groups with a successful track record are more prone to this bias than others . . . [especially if the] . . . team has been on a winning streak.”

However, in daily business life we often view those who try to rein in or express contrarian views as downers. As a result, in the desire to show who is less negative, a race to the top of optimism’s ladder begins and at some point becomes Pollyannaism.

Moreover, as we saw in the benefits of viewing a glass half-empty rather than half-full, the fear of being in an adverse situation can be a powerful motivator for taking action. Thus, a Pollyanna state could reduce a group to complacency. That means a team in the midst of success is less likely to change than one in the midst of crisis.

While clearly defining the demarcation zone between optimism and Pollyannaism is difficult, it once again highlights the failure of success and casts doubts on “nothing breeds success like success.” In fact, as the writers suggest, the best indicator that Pollyannaism might have infected a business culture is the degree of success it has been having.

After all, it’s kind of hard to reach a Pollyanna State if you’re not even in the State of Optimism.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

This post is similar to my previous post about changing the message by how people feel about the messenger. In the case of food, you can alter the taste of it by altering how people feel about the food.

One way is to alter how you describe the food. Apparently, PepsiCo is conducting extensive research here.* For instance, they are running “fMRI studies to test the hypothesis that calling a product ‘healthy’ may lower taste expectations in the brain.” They also use cameras to record these tests because “what people say about the way something tastes is a lot of times not what they really are thinking.” This latter point reinforces an earlier post that people often are not aware of what influences them.

For instance, in addition to the way we describe food, we can indirectly alter food’s taste by changing the:

• Presentation of the food: how it’s delivered and how it looks on the plate
• Ambiance of the eating environment, whether it’s clean or dirty for instance
• People with whom the eater is dining such as good friends or co-workers
• Food’s price; people will tend to feel expensive food tastes better
• Silverware, plates and other utensils with which to serve and eat the food
• Packaging of the food; beverages are a prime example of the importance of this

Even though cooking professionals and restaurateurs are emphatic about these, very few people would agree. They would refer to objective factors such as length of cooking time, seasoning, sauces, saltiness, etc. As PepsiCo discovered people don’t do a good job of attributing what really influences them.

From a problem-solving perspective, knowing these indirect ways of influencing people opens the door to a vast range of potential solutions for simple, everyday problems.

*John Seabrook, “Snacks For A Fat Planet,” The New Yorker, p. 65, May 16, 2011 [Note: Link does not provide complete access to this article because of subscription restrictions.]

The May 21, 2011 edition of The Economist had two articles casting a cloud over the skill inherent in successful stock market investing. Why is this important to intuition? It’s because we tend to have an emotional bias that overweighs outcomes in the evaluation of skill.

In fact, the article, “Poker-faced”, cites Steve Levitt and Thomas Miles of the University of Chicago as having found more skill present in poker than in stock investing. Simply stated they found that historically good poker players tend to do better than those without a history of success do. However, such a correlation didn’t exist with stock investing, and thus, they concluded there is “little evidence of skill” in stock investing. Thus, we could claim that poker is more like investing and the stock market is more like gambling.

The other article, “The Missing Link”, reinforces this unpredictability of the stock market by surveying several studies saying there is no correlation that a good economy translates into rising stock prices. Yet, in spite of these articles, we often see investment professionals tout their historical performance to attract additional clients.

Nevertheless, we know that top poker players don’t always finish on top; it’s not unusual for them to go home early. Moreover, poker is more self-contained, more controllable than the stock market. Everyone plays with the same, small, finite deck of cards and, depending upon the tournament, the same amount of money. By comparison, the stock market is anarchy.

We like to believe there is a direct link between outcomes and skills as opposed to having outcomes linked to a myriad of forces beyond our control. The belief gives us security in an uncertain world.  Yet, it will encourage us to see more skill in stock investing than in poker.