Mike Lehr's Blog

Wow! I’m excited about my 200^th post. More and more people have entered my life – real and virtual – for whom I am thankful. This post is longer than my norm, need to tap into the power of thank you’s.

I continue to be thankful for those I mentioned in my 100^th post, including my wife, Kathy, who even as I write this is adjusting her schedule so I can keep my deadlines.

The second hundred had a more public feel for me than the first hundred did. Yes, some is due to substantially more visitors, but that is the smallest part of this story.

I’m thankful to the #usguys (Twitter) and 12Most families. Jeannette Marshall (Blog: optioneerJM) introduced me to the first and Daniel Newman the latter. Daniel “discovered” me on Twitter and Skyped me. Consequently, I ended up with three posts on 12Most, one drawing fairly heavy traffic (and controversy on Goggle+ ).

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the international aspect of the second hundred. I’m extremely thankful for Sandra Semjonova from Latvia. Anybody who follows me on Twitter knows she is a huge supporter. This world would be better by a factor of ten if it had just a few more Sandra’s. There’s also Vanina Santana-Sweeney from Australia who tracks me on several social media sites. Finally, there are cities like Marrakech, Belgrade, Pelotas, Melbourne, Manila, Bangalore containing regular readers. It’s reassuring to know we have commonalities; maybe those world problems aren’t so daunting after all!

Still, my biggest surprise has been locally. I’m thankful to those who meet me like Eric Mann and Tammy Wilson who then follow up by visiting here and wanting to know more. Or those, like Tom Wyatt who want to just meet to see if I’m for real. Then there are some high school classmates who wonder if I’m the same person they knew.

Moreover, locally, I’m extremely thankful for ProSource Solutions, LLC. A great client who requests much of my time but encourages the flexibility I need to grow this effort. Its Managing Directors, Lowell Messner and Jeff Welch, are extremely supportive of my ideas and work.  Additionally, their many employees make it all very enjoyable and rewarding. If you have IT-related skills, you should definitely look into them.

Finally, there are many unknown and unmentionable readers for whom I am thankful. I might only know some from their obscure towns. Others, for various reasons, including censorship in their communities, need to remain unmentioned. However, even if unknown and unmentionable, they certainly aren’t unappreciated.

With that, thank you – again – and I look forward to your continued inspiration. Now, I must close the door on the second hundred and open the one in front of me for the third hundred. Fortunately, you have given me the key. I promise to use it wisely . . . and, of course, intuitively.

Have a good one!

Referenced posts from 12Most.com:

• 12 Most Important Unspoken Truths about Experts
• 12 Most Effective Morale Builders That Don’t Cost a Cent
• 12 Most Crucial Business Lessons Learned from Battle

The article, “The Modern Matchmakers,” from the February 11, 2012 edition of The Economist contained two major business lessons that I’ve discussed earlier regarding the solving of people-related problems:

1. What people think they want isn’t necessarily what they will choose
2. When faced with too much choice, people have less energy to think about them

For example, the article cites the work of Eli Finkel of Northwestern University on speed-dating in which he found that “people’s stated preference at the beginning of the process do not match the characters of the individuals they actually like.” Furthermore, “that when faced with abundant choice, people pay less attention to characteristics that require thinking and conversation to evaluate . . . and more to matters physical.” In short, just as Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University and Mark Lepper of Stanford concluded that too much choice is demotivating,” Finkel found it can dull thinking processes.

As I had also done in an earlier post on online dating, we can translate these themes to our business efforts by asking three questions:

1. How much freedom does someone want?
2. What does someone really want; what will he really do or decide?
3. How much (and what kind of) thinking will someone require from a leader?

These further translate into more tactical questions for managers and executives such as:

1. How much flexibility or process must I give someone?
2. What differences do I see between what he wants and what he actually does?
3. What kind of decisions do I give her to make and what (or when) do I decide for her?

Complicating this further is the fact that the answers will vary for each employee, requiring deeper and more interpersonal skills from managers and leaders. Are your managers up for the challenge?

Previous post on online dating:  What the Failures of Online Dating Can Teach Us

How many times have you heard, “Don’t reinvent the wheel”? Why is it then that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued over 30,000 wheel patents since 1790? Moreover, as patent attorney, Lawrence Ebert, indicates, they’re approving about three hundred new ones a year. However, even Lawrence doesn’t tell the whole story.

You see, he only quoted figures from Patent Class 295 (Railway Wheels and Axles) and Class 301 (Land Vehicles: Wheels & Axles). He didn’t include wheels from Class D21 (Games, Toys, and Sports Equipment) which includes the following:

• Subclass 375: Roulette wheels
• Subclass 175-177: Steering wheels
• Subclass 204-213: Toy wheels
• Subclass 458: Pinwheel
• Subclass 477: Toys with steering wheels
• Subclass 543: Paddle wheels
• Subclass 779: Skating wheels for roller skates and skateboards
• Subclass 667: Fly Wheels
• Subclass 763: Rollers
• Subclass 563: Wheels for toy vehicles
• Subclass 829: Ferris wheel

Furthermore, he didn’t include Class 472 which contains crank wheels such as those powering our bicycles. He also didn’t include pulleys which fall under Class 474 and various kinds of tires (Class 152) and wheels that fit around other wheels (Class D12)

Now, just imagine if no one “reinvented the wheel.” We wouldn’t have all these wonderful wheels not to mention many folks wouldn’t have jobs and businesses. In short, many people wouldn’t be making the money they’re making now. Technological advancement has come because we like to reinvent things, always making them better and more adaptable to a need.

So, when people say, “Don’t reinvent the wheel,” take them up on the challenge and show them how you can make the “wheel” better and more profitable. Don’t let their lack of creativity chain your creativity and innovativeness to the ground.

People’s names are extremely powerful. Every day, opportunities to use names present themselves, but we don’t seize them. Names in emails, even the shortest ones, allow us to personify them, giving them personality. Just as people find pictures and news articles about people more interesting, the same holds true for emails.

For example, rather than send an email like this:

Can you meet me today at noon?

We can personify it this way:

Joan,

Can you meet me today at noon?

Linda

Thus, a generic email from by anybody to anybody becomes personal. Moreover, rather than use a formal address and closing, we can alter it by writing:

• Joan, can you meet me today at noon? ~Linda
• Can you meet me today at noon, Joan? ~Linda
• Can you, Joan, meet me today at noon? ~Linda

In these examples, we used the person’s name in the beginning, end and middle of the question. We can employ the same strategy longer emails:

I’m thinking about going out for lunch today. Can you meet me today, Joan, if I do? It would be great to see you.

Linda

We can also use their names more than once by combining the techniques above:

Joan,

I’m thinking about going out for lunch today. Can you meet me today, if I do? It would be great to see you.

I want to share a project I’m working. Joan, I really feel you might be able to help. If so, I’d like to introduce you to my manager.

Please let me know,

Linda

People aren’t light switches, so we can’t expect this to work instantaneously. Nevertheless, if we employ regularly and integrate with other techniques, we will accelerate better relationships and responses to requests over the long run.

If you have a son and a daughter both under college age, odds are greater that she will become CEO of a Fortune 500 company. As I was writing my book, The Feminine Influence in Business (more), in 2003 and 2004, I made this prediction to friends:

Within the next generation or two, more women will be Fortune 500 CEO’s than men.

After eight years, I’m only concerned that I was too conservative. The recent appointment of Virginia Rometty as new CEO of IBM has prompted me to revisit this prediction. However, despite what articles such as “The End of Men” and “The Rise of Women in the Creative Class” say, I believe deeper, more fundamental forces are at work:

The nature of work that is remaining for humans to do falls more within the talents, attributes and skills of women than of men.

That is because technological advancements more easily replace the logical, rational functions of humans than the intuitive, relational ones. Since men tend to be more dominant in the former and women the latter, computers will more easily replace men than women.

In this blog, we already explored the need for more relational skills to manage a more creative, innovative and adaptive workforce. Moreover, as much as we try to systematize and quantify creativity and innovation, that only takes us so far. Many times we need intuition to fill in the gaps. There is a reason why we say, “woman’s intuition” rather than “man’s intuition.”

Yes, many other forces are at work such as more women receiving advanced degrees, more diverse family options and more women in the workforce. But, underneath it all is this current: technology is producing a workplace more favorable to women than to men.

As I had mentioned in The Rise of Intuition, the biggest advancement we’ll see in the next five to fifteen years will not be in biotechnology, cloud computing, medical treatments, alternative energy, personal computing devices or any other tangible technology. It will be in understanding ourselves as human beings.

Technology and new research methodologies are fueling this revolution. In these previous posts, I highlighted what these methodologies are showing about what influences us:

• Eloquence Trumps Honesty in Trust & Likeability Wars
• Information You Know Is Wrong Still Influences You
• Rude More Powerful than Respectful

Now, in the October 29, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Mind-goggling,” tells of four different technologies capable of reading our minds:

• Bin He of University of Minnesota (more)
• Martin Dressler of Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (more)
• Jack Gallant of University of California, Berkeley (more)
• Francisco Pereira of Princeton University (more)

While the readings are crude today, work is rapidly progressing. Remember the medical tricorder Doctor McCoy used in Star Trek to scan bodies? Even as fantastic as that was, Spock still had to read minds via a mind meld. Now, imagine if McCoy had a brain tricorder capable of reading thoughts.

These technological advances are going to revolutionize our understanding of how we work. Early returns show an increasing amount of complex brain activity occurring on a subconscious level beyond the classical reflexive functions. This will directly challenge our concept of free will (more) as I have written earlier.

Amazingly, this revolution is silently flying under our radars and continuously fails to garner the hype of the other advancements I mentioned. Of course, this may be fitting since the revolution will likely uncover many thoughts and emotions that live outside of our consciousness.

If you examine the two opposing sides in the Star Wars Epic, The Empire (Bad Guys) and The Rebels (Good Guys), there are two major contrasts:

1. There are no women on the bad side.
2. The good side has diverse characters, the bad side doesn’t

Upon contemplation, Point #1 is easy to see. Point #2 is a little harder, but essentially the Empire’s army consists of robotic droids who all look alike in white, shock-troop armor. Conversely, the Rebels are a collection of species, some humanoid, most alien and some even animalistic. Moreover, whereas the Empire’s forces are all dressed alike, the Rebels are not. Similar themes exist in Lord of the Rings.

What does this mean? Very simply, we tend to see evil as being a life of conformity without feminine qualities. In business, this movie helps us to see the emotional forces aligned against standardization and processing. It might also help us to understand why women are making such advancements: perhaps as an offset to these negative forces. Finally, it shows our inherent emotional propensity for diversity including in personality.

Women are closely associated with diversity; as they’ve been the first ingredient of diversity in many business settings. Heck, their wardrobe alone adds immense diversity to them. What would happen if two women actors arrived in the same dress for the Academy Awards: chaos, confusion, anxiety? What if two men came in the same black tuxedo, would anyone even notice?

Movies tend to tap into our deep, unseen, collective emotional currents. Consumer research shows there is often a different between “what people buy” and “what people say they will buy.” Thus, while we wring every cost saving from standardization and processing, perhaps on a deeper emotional level we feel “The Bad Guys” are winning.

In the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic, I ran across Richard Florida’s article, “Where the Skills Are” and found myself rethinking the idea of a diverse workforce. The idea has two paradoxical forces playing on it:

1. Diversity improves a company’s adaptability, creativity and innovation
2. Employers tend to hire employees who are like them

For the moment, let’s imagine that employers can hire a diverse workforce. The next challenge is managing it. It’s difficult because personality conflicts are side-effects of diversity. Since everyone’s a people person until people are the problem, managers are more apt to “get rid of the problem” rather than incorporate it. Consequently, employers will not only tend to hire those “who fit in” but also dispose of those “who don’t.” This moves them ever faster toward a homogenous workforce lacking adaptability and innovation.

Even though Richard’s article focused on talented individuals adept at connecting with diverse people, there are applications from a managerial perspective. It will take a very talented person to manage diversity. That’s because personality conflicts manifest themselves in many ways as differences in approaches, organization, ideas, behaviors and others. A manager will need to be able to see through this, account for his own biases, creatively solve it, and have the discipline to pursue the solution. We do not solve personality conflicts overnight.

Moreover, the need for such managerial talent is only going to increase as technology continues to take over the more routine and predictable tasks of various jobs and as the marketplace becomes more dynamic. The need for diversity not only in demographics but also in personality is only going to increase too.

When I’ve written about the illusion of free will, I’ve focused on the advancement of technology and research methodologies to uncover subconscious thought patterns. However, these advancements are also discovering a connection between chemical reactions and some of our emotions.

In the September 24, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Rogue Hormones,” reports on the research of John Coates, a  neuroscientist from Cambridge University. His research of derivative traders showed that when they “are on a winning streak their testosterone levels surge, sparking such euphoria that they underestimate risk.” This biochemical process produces extremely “powerful emotions” encouraging traders to “go crazy.”

This helps to explain why we often learn more from our failures than our successes and why success can deliver us to a state of hubris, an exalted arrogance that can corrupt our decision-making processes. Such biochemical processes help explain why such exuberance can infect many people to think and act similarly without communicating with each other while each is believing he is responding of his own free will. Thus, such events as financial bubbles and housing bubbles can occur on a broad scale.

A way to mitigate this effect is to diversify your workforce to include many types of personalities in decision-making positions. For instance, the article concluded that hiring women, who generally have about 10% as much testosterone as men, could help offset “irrational exuberance.” Experience can also help especially if it contains crises brought about by excessive risk taking. Moreover, even from strictly a gender perspective, not all men will experience the same increases in testosterone levels from success making them prone to erroneous risk assessments.

Of course, it’s not easy to manage a diverse workforce.

I decided to revisit the illusion of free will after running across two other articles reinforcing it. As technology and research methodologies advance, we are finding more and more that biological and psychological factors heavily influence us without our knowledge, further eroding the rational actor theory. This theory forms the basis of many decision-making models in business; however, it’s turning out we cannot expect people to behave rationally.

The article by David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” appearing in the July/August 2011 of The Atlantic, discusses recent brain and genetic research. Whether you believe nature or nurture is the more impactive force in our development, the point is this: we control neither. If free will really existed, we wouldn’t need drugs to cure depression because threats would work. As Eagleman also indicates, free will has tremendous difficulty overcoming what our subconscious has already decided to do. We cannot divorce behavior from biology or the unconscious. At minimum, free will operates in an increasingly smaller field of play.

We are also learning that genes don’t just change at an evolutionary rate but at a generational one too. In the July 23, 2011 of The Economist, the article, Baby Blues, mentions, “a mother’s stress while she is pregnant can have a long-lasting effect on her children’s genes.”
Biology and genes form an integral part of our personalities. As I mentioned in my previous post, if we look at personalities as being analogous to software in computers, we can see where knowing the personality can help us predict behaviors in much the same way as knowing the software can help us predict what a computer will do.

What this means is that our decisions need to factor in a reality where people don’t behave rationally because they aren’t free to do so.

Related link: Illusion of Free Will