Mike Lehr's Blog

There is no place that the revisiting of our unconscious urges are taken more seriously than in retailing. The Economist article “Retail Therapy” appearing in the December 17, 2011 edition gives a great historical accounting of the rise and fall . . . and rise again of the application of Freud in business which Ernest Dichter is noted for introducing. As the article asserts:

Every week seems to yield a new discovery about how bad people are at making decisions. Humans, it turns out, are impressionable, emotional and irrational.

Increasingly, researchers are finding Dichter’s assessment that “most people have no idea why they buy things” to be correct.

Of course, “Sigmund Freud argued that people are governed by irrational, unconscious urges over a century ago.” However, as we saw earlier, it took science almost a hundred years to acknowledge that the subconscious existed. Meanwhile, “businesses were recognizing the limits of quantitative studies . . . which offered little genuine insight into how customers behaved.” Said more directly, you can’t rely on customers to tell you what they might buy.

The failures of online dating showed this truth as well as research into people’s internet surfing habits. The Atlantic’s article, “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” which appeared in its April 2011 demonstrated that it’s “not what [people] say they want, nor what they ‘should’ want, but what they choose when they have a chance.”

If this applies to purchases, it also applies to all decisions. Names can affect decisions about scientific grants, and information that judges know is wrong can affect their decisions. So, if people don’t behave and choose as they said they would, we have no one to blame but ourselves for not looking deeper into the real emotions powering us.

My October 13, 2011 post, “Eloquence Trumps Honesty in Trust & Likeability Wars,” discussed how style affects our assessment of talent. Now, in the November 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review, the article, “It’s Not What You Say but How You Say It,” cites the research of

Timothy DeGroot’s team from Midwestern State University indicating the attractiveness of leaders’ voices influence our perceptions of their effectiveness.

Again, the challenge is that we often don’t realize this influence is occurring. Moreover, we tend to believe other people are influenced but we aren’t. Combining this with the way labels influence our perceptions of content and how beauty and attractiveness influences us, we begin to see easily how incompetent people can receive promotions especially if they are confident.

In combating this influence, it’s important to begin with two perspectives:

1. Acknowledge that style influences us (“That includes me!”)
2. Remain focused on more intrinsic indicators of talents such as process (how a person works, thinks and interacts)

Often, we erroneously focus on results when we don’t factor in extraneously factors such as the team, timing and situation of the person’s experience. Perhaps the person was just along for the ride. Culture, processes and tools can also affect outcomes. When we fail to account for these, we tend fall into the trap of believing people are “winners” if they come from “winning organizations.”

In the final analysis, what makes assessing talent difficult is not the intrinsic analysis of it but rather being able to do so while trying to navigate the murky cloud of our own perceptions and biases. Many forces intuitively influence us on a subconscious level to stir up this mud.

Many companies are finalizing their 2012 strategies by planning their roll out to their employees. To this effort, Nilofer Merchant’s March 22, 2011 post on the HBR Blog Network, “Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time,” is very apropos and relates to my “Best Decision as Myth” post: we often spend more time trying to make the best decision than we do trying to ensure we can implement it. A vital aspect of that implementation is a healthy company culture.

Taking Merchant’s themes further, an important part of a healthy company culture is the relationship between management and employees. That is more than just having a great vision, definable roles and enforcing accountability. It’s about doing the sublime relational techniques that mean so much even though they don’t seem to serve a direct business purpose. For instance, it’s important for managers to spell their people’s names correctly. Yes, unfortunately, this isn’t an automatic.

I’ve called this placebo management. If there is scientific evidence supporting the positive effect of placebos in medicine, they can work in business too. While managers are taught around the world in business schools about the more concrete aspects of visions, goals, compensation, information and credentials in developing relationships, they rarely learn the more intuitive aspects of relationships. Consequently, they never learn how to change the message without changing anything about it. Conversely, they don’t learn that even the best message can be ruined by a lousy messenger.

The holiday season is approaching and many companies and teams get together in celebration and camaraderie. It’s often a time to develop business relationships on a more human level. Good interpersonal relationships we develop with employees ensure a company culture that can implement strategy. Let’s make every month the holiday season in this regard.

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’s.

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.

Part of what makes intuition so powerful is the assumption that we are born with personalities, talents and knowledge. Life then becomes the challenge to express them.

For example, we are born knowing about the “opposite sex.” It’s only later in life we arrive at an understanding of it and the ability to verbalize it. However, this contradicts the more popularized view of humans being born a “blank slate.” The article, “Transporter of Delight”, in the October 15, 2011 edition of The Economist, severely undercuts this notion by beginning:

“The idea that the human personality is a blank slate, to be written upon only by experience, prevailed for most of the second half of the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, that notion has been undermined.”

The article cites research concluding, “personality is the single biggest determinant” of happiness with “a third of the variation in people’s happiness [being] heritable.” For example, extroverts tend to feel happier than introverts do. Thus, what I wrote regarding free will (more) and “who we are” being quite different from “who we think we are” is really about us being substantially more than “the sum of our experiences” and more than “a product of our environment.” There are opportunities for us when we realize we weren’t born slaves to our conditions, environments, societies and cultures.

Yet, this poses some thought provoking questions such as, “What happens to us when our nature is in conflict with our culture, our society or our upbringing?” Also, “What happens when we try to express ourselves in the midst of such conflict?” In such situations, we can easily see how God or Nature created us to alter the status quo, to change things . . . to encourage growth where stagnation exists. Growth cannot occur without change.

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.

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

Our names unconsciously influence people. We humorously smile at actors who change their names making them more appealing. Yet, some people relate because they wish their parents had given them better names.

Even in a field striving for objectivity such as science, your name can influence the peer review process. In the August 20, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article “A Black and White Answer” reports racial name research by Donna Ginther of The University of Kansas indicating it does. The article also references the 2003 racial name study, Racial Bias in Hiring, by Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan at the time of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which names influenced who received job interviews.

While the article focused on the racial connotation of names, an October 23, 2008 article of The New York Times mentions research about non-racial correlations focused on similar names, initials, sounds and letters. Of course, if we overlay the concept of branding from advertising on these two areas of research and the territory between them, we come back to “what’s in a name?”

From an intuitive perspective, what connotation does each of our names have? What feelings do people get when they hear it? How do we feel when we run across names far different from ours, ones we can’t pronounce? Subconsciously, do they trigger our defense mechanisms? All you need to do is look at popular baby names to know we do not distribute names randomly even if we account for ethnicity.

What we can learn from science in this research is that no matter how objective we think we are it is no match for the unconscious emotions truly driving our decisions.

When we approach problems too logically and reasonably, we tend to place too much faith in the dominance of consciousness and to discount subjective influences that vary by person. For example, the Innocence Project, by using DNA evidence, has helped to exonerate 271 people wrongly convicted of crimes, but almost a quarter of these people had confessed or pleaded guilty. Why would people give false confessions?

What research shows is that we can easily extract false confessions from others especially when using certain interrogation techniques. The article, “Silence is Golden”, in the August 13, 2011 issue of The Economist mentions two such research projects. The journal, Law and Human Behavior, published one by Saul Kassin and Jennifer Perillo of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York while the other is the work of Robert Horselenberg and colleagues at Maastricht University.

Since we tend to believe in free will and the dominance of consciousness, we consider confessions fairly damning because no one in her “right mind” would give false ones. Therefore, interrogations assume false confessions aren’t possible. Yet, people give them for many reasons including:

• Avoiding unpleasant interrogations
• Accepting that they might have accidentally committed a wrong
• Believing that
  -   Investigative process will show innocence
  -   Authorities and experts know better
  -   Objective truth and justice exist and will surface
  -   Technologically collected evidence is faultless

Many times our business processes assume people behave with a “right mind.” Yet, as this example shows, by questioning this assumption in our processes, interrogations in this case, we automatically call into question the outcomes derived from those processes, here confessions.

Thus, our processes need to account for more subjective, subconscious and intuitive factors or risk disconnection from reality and erroneous analyses.

Intuitive approaches often work because we don’t believe they do. Advertising is an excellent example: it influences us because we often believe it doesn’t.

This extends to our complaints about politicians not answering the question. Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton researched this and were asked to “Defend Your Research” in “People Often Trust Eloquence More Than Honesty” appearing in the November 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review. They found:

People who dodge questions artfully are liked and trusted more than people who respond to questions truthfully but with less polish.

In fact, when answerers perform the dodge effectively, less than half of the people could remember the question accurately. The key rests in the answer’s first ten words by disrupting the cognitive link we have for the question and expected answer. In everyday life, we like to complain about the fast-talking salesperson; however, on a higher level, fast-talking becomes eloquence. It’s here that we increasingly trust and like eloquence more than honesty.

Even though I promote the practical understanding and application of intuition in business on this blog, people can use intuitive approaches for ill or good. For instance, my guest 12 Most post, lists ways to influence people intuitively to build morale; however, people can use these techniques for questionable purposes too.

How do we defend ourselves? There are two broad introductory ways:

1. Realize people can influence us intuitively and subconsciously even if we believe they can’t
2. Raise our awareness regarding intuitive approaches

In this way, we can begin accounting for these natural biases in our decision-making and actions. However, believing others can influence us without our knowledge is scary for many of us, especially if we believe in the supremacy of the conscious mind and free will.