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Education Bias (Pt 5): Understanding vs. Appreciation
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Education BiasSomeone once asked, “Mike, do you think people understand you?” “No,” I answered. “Does that bother you?” “No.” “Why not?” “Well, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to understand yourself let alone someone else. Heck, even science doesn’t understand completely how we work. So, [… Read More]
Personality is our Politics
People often believe that political views are a battle of ideas. In reality, they are more a battle of personality types. People also believe people are important. “I am a people person,” is a common self-descriptor. Daily though, we discount people without consciously realizing we do. For instance, saying politics is a battle of ideas, [… Read More]
Anatomy of Events
When we examine events, we tend to look at them too narrowly and statically. The advantage of the schematic in this post is to remind us of two things regarding the anatomy of events: We tend to overestimate our influence and underestimate or ignore other influences especially if we are optimistic. All forces are moving [… Read More]
Clausewitz’s Friction: Difference between Plans and Reality
Carl von Clausewitz’s book, On War, greatly influenced my business ideas especially his short chapter on “Friction in War.” Essentially, there is a difference between plans and reality. That difference is “friction”: Reality – Plans = Friction While the difference is relatively simplistic and obvious on paper, in reality we often discount the amount of [… Read More]
Leadership Lesson from Wobbly Furniture
The relentless advance of technology and research methodologies is accelerating our understanding of ourselves and constricting the domain of free will (more). The article, “Tall, Dark and Stable” (The Economist, July 14,2012 edition), reports the work of David Kille, Amanda Forest and Joanne Wood (University of Waterloo) finding that “the stability of chairs and tables [… Read More]
Creative Innovation (Pt 6): People Mix
This entry is part 6 of 15 in the series Creative InnovationIn previous posts of this series, I covered accepting disruptive personalities, allowing spontaneity and creating conditions for interactions. Underlying these are people. These are processes akin to cooking; thus, people are the ingredients. What mix, what proportions, how much of each ingredient do we [… Read More]
Extremely Unified Groups: More Aggressive, More Destructive
Groups change people; a person in a group is very different alone. Subliminal influences encourage groups to accept those who adopt its ways and to excommunicate those who don’t. Since new approaches disrupt the status quo, creative people often fall in the latter. The Stanford Prison Experiment (August 1971) clearly showed what can happen to [… Read More]
Body – Emotion Connection: People Are Very Different
People are different. However, we tremendously underestimate how different we are. We often think someone is purposely trying to upset or harm us when in actuality it’s personality differences. Carrie Arnold’s article, “Inside the Wrong Body” (Scientific American Mind, May/June 2012 edition), is an example of our tremendous differences. She discusses interoception: “awareness of the [… Read More]
Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt 8): Decision Making
This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive PeopleA reader emailed me asking: What are the advantages and disadvantages of sensitivity in decision making, especially in buying and selling? All the advantages and disadvantages stem from sensitive people (SP) tending to be more in tune with the emotions of [… Read More]
Real-time Personality Assessment (Pt 2): Important Qualities
This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Real-time Personality AssessmentThe downside of many personality tests is that you need to administer them. Yes, some will teach you how to assess without doing that, but you must learn their system. In reality, we can all develop and do a real-time personality assessment. In [… Read More]