March 2024 - a corporate tragedy, business and dopamine, people-centric, and be the only
the 62nd issue
Welcome to the beginning of days getting longer!
This month offers a mix of items in terms of content and format. The longer piece lends itself to disagreements or, at the very least, differences of opinions. I look forward to your comments.
Colin Newlyn suggests, as I do, that in matters of corporate culture one should avoid reading grandiose statements and look at what companies do. To wit,
If they get rid of people to boost short-term profits;
If they re-organise without any consultation;
If they have lots of procedures in place to police behaviour;
If they impose cultural norms;
If they recruit to for ‘culture fit’;
If they don’t support flexible working;
If they unilaterally impose changes in terms and conditions;
If they cut the training budget to save costs;
If they tolerate high-performing arseholes;
If there are topics that are ‘out of bounds’;
If they continually ask for more to be done with less;
If they focus on profits;
If they make you fit the process;
If they allow workloads and stress to increase;
then they are not people-centric.
Because if they were, they wouldn’t do those things.
And speaking of people-centric, Bob Marshall reminds us that
Psychology alone does not automatically confer excellence in management. It requires a coherent philosophy, sustained practice, and an unwavering commitment to continual learning, all of which many businesses still lack. But grasping human behaviour remains a crucial foundational layer.
For companies to truly embrace people-centric management as [W. Edwards] Deming advocated, they might choose to move beyond gimmicky pop psych trends and selective, self-serving interpretations of research. They may, instead, choose to dive deep into the expansive knowledge base of rigorous behavioural science – including the inconvenient truths it reveals – and apply those insights in thoughtful, judicious ways. Only then can businesses hope to make substantive and lasting improvements.1
Career advice from Kevin Kelly: “Don’t be the best. Be the only.”
Best is in comparison to others. Only is about being unique. That’s not easy to achieve. And that includes identifying what makes you unique. Says Kelly, we
need family, friends, colleagues, customers, clients, everyone around us to help us understand what it is that we do better than anybody else because we can’t really get there by yourself. You can’t do thinkism, you can’t figure your way there, you have to try and live it out.
And that’s why most people’s remarkable lives are full of detours and dead ends and right turns because it’s a very high bar.
But if you can get there — you don’t need a resume, there’s no competition. And it’s easy for you because you’re doing it. You’re not looking over your shoulder, you’re just right there. So don’t aim to be the best. Be the only.
h/t kottke.org
Daniel Kahneman dies at 90
Kahneman, who wrote bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, argued against the notion that people’s behaviour is rooted in a rational decision-making process – rather that it is often based on instinct. (…)
In 2002, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences in recognition for his research in the fields of psychology and economics.
Kahneman, and his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky, reshaped the field of economics, which prior to their work mostly assumed that people were “rational actors” capable of clearly evaluating choices, such as which car to buy or which job to take.
The pair’s research focused on how much decision-making is shaped by subterranean quirks and mental shortcuts that can distort our thoughts in irrational yet predictable ways.
Not an economist. Never called himself an economist. He did not quite “reshape the field of economics” but rather he viewed the field as one aspect of social psychology.
In last month’s issue I suggested an article from Ted Gioia. In it it proposes that the fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction engineered by means of dopamine hits which then generates an appetite for more stimulus which then leads to addiction. A chart illustrates his thesis about “the dopamine culture”:
L. M. Sacasas, another thoughtful writer I have been following assiduously for years, has a few interesting considerations to make on this and the whole article is well worth reading.
He makes the point with Blaise Pascal that
human beings will naturally seek distractions rather than confront their own thoughts in moments of solitude and quiet because those thoughts will eventually lead them to consider unpleasant matters such as their own mortality, the vanity of their endeavors, and the general frailty of the human condition.2
He then turns to Alan Jacobs, another favorite of mine, who pondering in 2016 on the claims of our being addicted to the devices in our lives wrote:
All of these answers are both right and wrong. They’re right in one really important way: they link distraction with addiction. But they’re wrong in an even more important way: we are not addicted to any of our machines. Those are just contraptions made up of silicon chips, plastic, metal, glass. None of those, even when combined into complex and sometimes beautiful devices, are things that human beings can become addicted to.
Ultimately “we are addicted to one another, to the affirmation of our value—our very being—that comes from other human beings. We are addicted to being validated by our peers.”
I’m not sure I completely agree with this last statement but it takes us closer to something that I have observed in my own life, across cultures, and about which there is plenty of both pop and academic literature: the need to belong. Sacasas takes this a step further: “we desire to know and to be known”.
In his last point, the author says the elements that are part of Gioia’s graph are in fact the artifacts of culture, and not culture itself. In short form, there was a break between a worldview by which we saw ourselves as belonging to an order manifested in institutions and a worldview “after the [post-Freudian] therapeutic turn” that seeks to free itself from controls of any sort and that rests largely on giving oneself permission to experiment.
He brings it all together with this:
We need a fuller account of our relationship with digital media as well as a richer story of human desire in order to see our way through the challenges we face. Interestingly, the dopamine framing is also an artifact of the condition it tries to explain [my emphasis]: it is a powerful and catchy meme, although one that is offered in the best spirit. For these reasons, I fear that it may trap us in the very patterns that it seeks to overcome.
Again, I think Sacasas’ article is worth reading in its entirety. As is Gioia’s. They discuss important aspects of the current culture as well as the way we analyze and discuss culture.
If all this sounds “too philosophical”, I will say this: a very common complaint I hear from managers and business owners I work with and who are trying to be thoughtful and discerning in their work is that they don’t have or make enough time to think.
The fact is you can’t be thoughtful if you don’t make time for quiet and solitude which is what you need to think. And you can’t be discerning if you don’t think about your thinking: how you go about it, what informs it, the assumptions and premises upon which it rests, etc..
Failing to think and to think about our thinking we rely on recipes, quick fixes, the latest blog (or newsletter!). We remain within the realm of the How, leaving for later and/or to others the What and the What-for.
A corporate tragedy in 2 acts
When he got the job in 2020 he promised he would turn the company around and make its products safer. He failed miserably… putting the lives of thousands in danger.
When he steps down at the end of this year he will receive USD 24 million. He stands to make an additional USD 45.5 million if his successor manages to boost the stock price (which went down 43% during his tenure) by 37%.
Miscellanea:
A suggestion to use meetings as a point of escalation, not the starting point of a conversation;
A quick technique to help set clear expectations: are you giving your team a compass or a map?
Stripe’s Annual Letter is well-written and understated. Refreshingly unusual;
When a high performer leaves for other job opportunities, other high performers might reasonably speculate, “Maybe there’s another option out there for me.” When a high performer leaves because of dismissal or layoff, remaining high performers might reasonably ask, “Could I be next?” Some research.
W. Edwards Deming was a polymath. Among others, an engineer, a management theorist, and a pioneer in what later became Total Quality Management. Emphasis in the quote is mine.
I am curious about how reading this sentence made you feel and whether that feeling actually supports what it says.