Mike Lehr's Blog

How we position things greatly influences the outcome. In the April 7, 2012 edition of The Economist the article, “Dressing Up,” uncovers that women’s sizes have inflated by four sizes since the 1970’s. Unlike men’s sizing which is based on inches, women’s sizing is purely arbitrary and often varies by brand. Thus, depending on the size, a pair of women’s pants might have increased as much as four inches at the waist and three inches at the hips since then.

The generally accepted assumption for allowing this size inflation is that if consumers feel good about themselves they are likely to buy, thus why the fashion industry calls it “vanity sizing.” However, even though it seems like a topic to take lightly or with which to have fun, vanity sizing plays in all aspects of statistics. That is why it’s important to challenge definitions and assumptions in order to understand and solve problems.

For instance, the article “Botox and Beancounting” of the The Economist’s April 27, 2011 edition, discusses how official U.S. economic statistics might be overinflating its performance relative to Western European economies. Ironically, the article’s title makes an appropriate analogy to vanity sizing.

U.S. unemployment figures present another excellent example. They not only conflict with one another on occasions but they are difficult to figure. Additionally, their accounting changed in the 1980′s, making them appear lower than before.

Thus, while it’s commonly said that “numbers don’t lie,” that’s true; however, an ignoramus isn’t lying either if he believes his own ignorance. If we’re ignorant to numbers’ origination, we are more likely to accept them if they tell us our glass is half full rather than half empty, thus reinforcing our own perceptions . . . also known as “vanity believing.”

We often hear about the jealousies women have for other women who they feel are attractive. While it’s easy to discount this as pettiness, there are business implications when it comes to appraising and hiring talent.

For example, the March 31, 2012 edition of The Economist reports in its article, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful,” that it’s better for attractive men to submit photos with their resumes but not women. The reason was that “human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women,” especially when it comes to resumes’ initial screenings. Bradley Ruffle of Ben-Gurion University and Ze’ev Shtudiner of Ariel University Centre conducted the study.

As I wrote above, it’s easy to view from a petty perspective. However, let’s frame it from a perspective of power. For instance, would a man hire another man who he felt was more powerful (i.e. more talented than he was)? More specifically, would a male manager hire another man who could take his job or the promotion he was expecting to receive in the near future?

Thus, if we look at beauty as power, couldn’t the women in this study be feeling threatened from a power perspective? This is even more possible if we review how beauty’s subliminal influence deliver many advantages to attractive people in the marketplace. As a result, rather than see the rejection of attractive women by other women as something superfluous, it’s now a natural defense mechanism.

Again, the purpose of this series is to explore the tangible, pragmatic influences beauty has on us in everyday business life. It’s not just a personal sideshow in that life. Beauty, and its superficial sister, attractiveness, trigger deep, natural forces within us that influence our decisions.

Other posts in this series:

• Beauty as Power
• Beauty as Power (Part II): Attraction vs. Beauty
• Beauty as Power (Part III): Appreciation
• Beauty as Power (Pt. IV): Subliminal Influence

The research behind behavioral economics is full of emotional solutions to everyday problems. By tapping into the emotional biases behind our decisions, we can expand the range of limited solutions offered by rational thought models. The exploring of emotional solutions has gone big time as the article, “Nudge Nudge, Think Think” explains in the March 24, 2012 edition of The Economist by focusing on the amount of investments governments are making in this area.

Said simply, “How we phrase things matter.” I’ve written how this can change the taste of food and even change the reactions to a bonus plan. As the article explains, nudging “shows it is possible to steer people towards better decisions by presenting choices in different ways.”

For example:

• People were three times more likely to pay an outstanding vehicular tax when the letter was simplified and included a picture of the automobile.
• Boys did better than girls did when a technical drawing class was called “geometry,” and girls did equally well or better when it was called “drawing.”
• People were more inclined to use less energy when their consumption was compared to their neighbors.

Not only does this help us solve problems, it also helps us avoid them by being aware of what we say so we don’t sabotage our well-intentioned plans. Choosing the right words for a personality can go a long way in helping us to effect the change we desire by tapping the right emotions.

For example, my wife won a bet at a party by talking a friend’s six-year-old daughter into selecting a vegetable over chocolate to eat. Understanding and appreciating the power behind words’ connotations helps us immensely here, and Roget’s Thesaurus is invaluable in our efforts.

Remember, people eat escargot not snails.

We often view measurements as unchangeable. A meter is a meter, a pound a pound. We often forget that at some time someone somewhere declared what those were and that they would be a standard. The point is this: arbitrariness underlies almost all objective standards by which we live.

For example, in the January 29, 2011 edition of The Economist, the article, “The Constant Gardeners”, explores the kilogram. The official standard is a platinum-iridium alloy cast in 1879. However, today, its weight seems to vary from its copies by up to 69 micrograms, about half a grain of sand, an important variance when weighing small things. So, the question is this: How heavy is a kilogram . . . really?

The relevancy to problem solving is similar to that which I wrote in my post, “Arbitrariness: The Cornerstone of Conditions”:

By searching for the underlying arbitrary aspect of any apparently objective situation, we can often find the perspective – when altered – that can cause us to see that situation in a different light.

For example, when someone asks us, “What’s the best way to get from A to B?” we often give the fastest route. The assumption being that the “best way” is “fastest” when “best” could have many different attributes. Over time, the best-fastest link becomes the arbitrary point – when altered – that sheds a different light on what route might be best such as the most scenic one or the most fuel-efficient.

As a more sophisticated example, consider our reliance upon “proven outcomes.” What does that mean especially when you cannot scientifically prove that good leadership begets good results? Thus, when we look at what it took to be proven, we often find that it’s subjective based upon who is determining what “good leadership” and “good results” are.

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

Words have power, not only in their definitions but also, more importantly, in their connotations. The article, “Making Murder Respectable,” from the December 17, 2011 edition of The Economist talks about an example of this power, euphemisms: “a mixture of abstraction, metaphor, slang and understatement that offers protection against the offensive, harsh or blunt.” They’re used across cultures.

In other words, euphemisms sugar coat reality and confirm in many cases the powerful scene from the movie A Few Good Men in which Jack Nicholson, playing Colonel Nathan Jessup, tells Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise, “You can’t handle the truth.” As the article concludes, “A culture without euphemism would be more honest, but rougher.”

Often, we desire to believe our illusions because they allow us a convenient excuse to avoid action. For example, knowing a condition is undesirable forces us to address the question: Why don’t we take action to correct (cognitive dissonance)? This is a downside of believing our glass is half full.

Additionally, knowing our preference to live with our illusions, we expose ourselves to manipulation as George Orwell conveyed in his book, 1984. In it, the Ministry of Truth was responsible for fabricating history for public consumption; the Ministry of Love tortured criminals. In 1949 the United States renamed its War Department to the Defense Department. In business, we see the extension of euphemisms in the form of vanilla words, names of food, compensation plans and labels.

However, many times euphemisms permit sensitivities. For example, we say “passed” rather than “dead.” So, perhaps our illusions are reality because the reality is we cannot live without them.

Don’t believe it? See what happens when you strip people of their illusions.

In business, people often see aggressiveness as a virtue; however, it can be a defect. Exploring this will give us insights into dealing with aggressive personalities in our lives and examples of how different perspectives help in problem solving.

The Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 from the American Civil War, the turning point in that war, is a good initial example.  The Union won this battle over the Confederates but never attacked. That’s because the Confederates relentlessly attacked a different part of the Union line on each of the battle’s three days (see diagram to right) despite the Union being on higher ground and firmly entrenched. Consequently, the Confederates suffered heavy losses and retreated.

In nature, the article, “Unnatural Selection” from the May 23, 2009 issue of The Economist, reports on the work of Laszlo Garamszegi from the University of Antwerp. He found that the aggressive animals were most likely to be caught in traps. The Battle of Cannae from 216 B.C. is a human form of this. Hannibal had tapped into his Roman opponents’ aggressiveness and hubris to lure them into a trap, thus destroying an army twice his size. In American football, the screen pass takes advantage of aggressive defenses by luring them into the backfield.

Thus, aggressiveness alone is defective without intelligence, wisdom or insight. As these examples show, we can defeat aggressiveness by:

• Allowing it to tire itself on extremely difficult tasks
• Giving it “a bone” (a lesser important task) to distract it
• Tapping into its hubris and goading it into wasting time on irrelevant things

In business, we see examples when companies expand too aggressively, thinking they have the “secret,” taking shortcuts and ignoring planning. As a result, aggressiveness produces huge losses for them, just as it did for the Confederates.

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.

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.