I am currently reading Daniel Kanheman’s, Thinking, fast and Slow. According to Wikipedia, “Kanheman is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate, He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology.”

His latest book is very good; I’m just about half way through. However, it doesn’t fill me with a huge amount of confidence in the human condition. We are full of biases and cognitive errors. If any of us are successful at all it is, according to Kanhemen, more about luck [internal link] than skill. (Skill and talent does count, just not as much as we think.)

I don’t know what to make of it all yet. It seems according to the Freakonomics.com guys, that we are biased by beauty too. A researcher Dan Hamermesh, explains in his book: Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. why says Good Looking people have more opportunity, and thus success than ugly people:

Here is some Q&A from the Freakonomics blog:

Q. I forgot to add I have seen studies claiming that more attractive men were more likely to be hired, but the opposite was true of women, possibly because the admin and recruitment departments of many firms have a higher proportion of female staff who may be jealous at another womans beauty. Could this also add to the disparity in the effect on income of beauty by gender? –Leon Y

A. The one study you quote was not of actual hiring, but of intentions to hire. In general, as you move up the looks scale, both among men and women, you do better.  I’ve only seen when case where that wasn’t true—on the odds of making partner in law firms if you are a truly gorgeous woman.

Like Kanheman, he says we are bad at evaluating ourselves, especially men.

Q. I would like to know how accurate are we when it comes to judging our own looks? Are we usually on par with with others think of us? Are men or women better at it? –Rever

A. One set of data had both others’ and our own ratings.  The correlation was extremely highly positive.  However, on average others tend to rate us slightly better than we rate ourselves. And women are slightly more accurate (more in accord with others’ ratings) than are men.

 

IT IS almost the end of January, by now you should be back from any vacation returned to work and hopefully have your head above water.

Now is the perfect time to revisit the goals, and perhaps wild ideas you had while on holidays. If you’re anything like me, taking time out from routine, for quiet reflection, and dream up big goals and ideas, and end up champing at the bit to get back to work.

I find that the remainder of January is an ideal time to set the preparation for achieving these goals. For example, writing them down and defining them, getting them into your system so you will see them each day and take action on them.

Given January – in Australia at least – is summer time, and therefore a very social and active period, I find it’s a great time for actions around research and general organisation and preparation.

Preparation

As the old saying goes: “prior preparation prevents poor performance.” It’s as true as they day my Dad admonished me as a kid. It’s one of those 80/20 activities, where a little time spent preparing and thinking through the goals and project you are about to embark on will vastly reduce the effort required in execution.

Steps to take to prepare

1.       Define the project and goal:

What is the objective of the goal? To answer this question I ask why am I doing this? To what end?

What are the values and guidelines or constraints I must work within? This could be budget constraints for example.

How will I measure progress toward this goal? Favourably or un-favourably. For example, when you have a fitness goal, are the scales are going down, or using new belt notches. 

2.       Start brainstorming the various actions and activities you must take to achievement:  

You might mind-map, using 6 thinking hats, whatever, the point is, you must get all of the ideas out. Don’t try to organise them yet. If I’m thinking about a large goal, and I don’t really want to share this with others yet, I might sit in this phase for a few weeks. During this time I will collect articles, and ideas relating to the project. 

Often this sort of gestating period is an amalgam of steps one and two. 

3.       Organise:

When you have the ideas of action steps down, now is the time to organise them. And get them into your system.  In my system I keep project plans with the project definitions, and the actions for the next week or two go into my various lists.

4.       Execute and review:

Do the actions. Whilst obvious this requires discipline and focus.

Hard Focus

The very good Cal Newport writes a blog, “Study Hacks” aimed at college students. I’ve been reading him for year or so, and besides being a very good writer, he is also a very good thinker. Whilst his books are aimed at students, I can highly recommend his work and productivity ideas for working professionals too.

I find my life is more or less just like studying. (I have become so enamoured with Cal’s work I have read his most recent book, How to Be a High School Superstar, while obviously targeted at High School students, it has much to offer for the ambitious professional. Check it out.)

To this end, Cal writes regularly about cultivating the ability to focus for lengthy periods of time in order to punch out higher volumes of quality work in short periods of time. He calls this Hard Focus.

His blog is aimed at college students who feel they need to study for 80 hours per week to compete and achieve the grade goals, but end up stressed as a result.

This is very much akin to the professional world where managers work similar amounts ending up burnt out before their time.

I have very close friend who echoes this exact sentiment. He is programmer who works for himself, working solo he is able to punch out mammoth amounts of work day after day. I asked him how he does it. He said that in the beginning he struggled to work just a few hours a day, and had to build it up, now he can work hours of hard disciplined focus. Punching out the work, and having a life too.

 When it comes to achieving our big goals, our ability to focus is of the upmost importance. This is my focus for this year. To further develop and enhance my ability for Hard Focus.

January is almost over

• Have you taken your preparation and organisation steps?
• Are you ready to jump into February and take action?
• How would you rate ability to focus on important tasks without distraction for lengthy periods of time?

An article on Fortune, interviews Malcolm Gladwell about his much talked about book, Outliers on the theory of how success happens.

Gladwell comments, “We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves. And we have a series of other beliefs that say that our personality, our intelligence, all of our innate characteristics are the primary driving force. It’s that cluster of things that I don’t agree with.”

He makes the point that the causes of success lie more in making the “most of a series of gifts that have been given to them by their culture or their history, by their generation.”

Practice

But it takes work, or practice, in fact it takes about 10,000 hours or about 10years to become outstanding in “any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern.”

Tony Schwartz elaborates on this concept of practice and blogs about the Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything:

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It’s also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

A certain type of practice

For further reading on practice check out Cal Newport’s Study Hacks, and his concept of Deep and Deliberate Practice. Though his books and blog is primarily focused on students, he has won many professionals like me, who do ‘knowledge work’ for living, which is not unlike studying for a living.

Cal makes the very obvious but important point, that simply practice is not enough it must be focused and concentrated to yield the real results you’re aiming for.

Passion

Interestingly while Cal would agree with Tony Schwartz with his admonishment that focused practice is the way to go, he would take issue with his first comment about ‘following your passion.’ Instead, Cal suggests that the truly successful, happy, fulfilled people built a passion as a result of deliberate practice; they focused on becoming good at something. His basic position being: “Passion Must Be Actively Pursued, Not Passively Waited On”

The flip side of success

Further, it’s not just wanna-be’s looking at the super successful and wondering how they got there, it’s also the successful people themselves, who forget the origins (that as Gladwell points out: making the most of culture and surroundings) when they receive adulations on a regular basis, and suffer the deleterious effects of hubris.

As I wrote in my September e-newsletter, about the two CEO’s Mark McInnes (ex David Jones) and Mark Hurd (ex Hewlett-Packard), this is “Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power.”

In the end, to become and continue to be succesful we must:

• focus on the conditions given to us,
• fuel the fire of emotion to be the best we can,
• resist the urge to flip and flop between disciplines in order that we can concentrate learning in one area
• get some rest for the next bout of practice
• and remember from where we came.

(Hat Tip: Robert Heller at Thinking Managers)

In a blog post at HBR.org, Robert Pozen offers a few tips to a new manager on how he keeps organised and productive.

Every night before he leaves the office he prepares for the next day, “I might have a call at 8:30 a.m., a meeting at 9 a.m., and so on. For each event on my schedule, I’ll write down a few words about what I want to get accomplished.” This also includes a checklist of other actions he wishes to accomplish the ext day.

Routines and rituals are a great way to start the day, Pozen explains his reason for having routines is to, “simplify his life.” He sets out “[t]he night before I set out what I’m going to wear.” In the morning he does everything the same way.

Interestingly – and this is one I embrace whenever I can – Pozen will “try to take a nap every day after lunch. Just close the door, put up my feet and I am out like a light for almost exactly 30 minutes. After a nap, I feel refreshed with a lot more energy for the rest of the day.”

For myself, I am a big believer in routines, and thinking ahead to make things easier. I travel a lot being a consultant, so I have a set way to pack, unpack, keep a second toiletries kit packed for example.

In addition I have a weekly routine, Mondays being for processing last week information, planning the coming week in more details and conducting my weekly review. Tuesdays through Thursday is for the heavy lifting, and Fridays is for big picture thinking, planning, organising the weekend, light conversations with colleagues.

Of course these routines extend monthly, with end of month routines. Quarterly and yearly. The point is to plan the week and month before your start it.

Everyday I aim to process my inboxes to zero to keep up to date action and project lists. This is not always possible, and as I write this I have a tonne to process in my work inbox – both physical and electronic – after being on the road all last week including the weekend, and Monday and Tuesday devoted to writing up a recommendations report.

We all get out of control, for me, the periods of chaos are much shorter, and I have a defined process and system I trust to know that I can pick up quickly from where I left off.

As always, and as anybody who I’ve coached knows, give yourself permission to set these types of systems, tools, and routines in your personal life as well as your professional life. One impacts the other.

Some people scoff at routines, suggesting that it is boring and not for creative people. Well, as any creative and innovator knows, it’s within the constraints that we innovate and come up with new solutions and ideas. All these other details of life have to be done anyway, so why not make them as painless as possible so you can focus on the important stuff.

As Ayn Rand said, “the maintenance of life and the pursuit of happiness are not two different things.”

In the 1990’s it became fashionable to talk about the ‘triple bottom line’ or corporate social responsibility (CSR). I’ve written about this before, and now Schumpeter’s printed blog post in The Economist (October 23-29^th), has also written about it.

To quote from Schumpeter’s printed blog post in The Economist (October 23-29^{th, 2010}):

“triple bottom line”: not only profits, but also environmental protection and social justice. This notion if taken seriously is, “incomprehensible”, say Ms Bernstein.

Businesses are great at one thing: making profits. Any CSR is – maybe – a necessary condition. That is to say, spoiling the environment might mean cheaper waste disposal now, but ultimately higher costs through litigation and in particular, bad publicity in the future. Executives are good at making decisions now comparing the cost in the future.

I write about this to defend business. Not necessarily to hold them up as saints – business is well known for lobbying government for favours which aren’t especially good for the economy as whole – but to illustrate the need to get your values in order.

You mustn’t go around feeling guilty for working for an organisation whose sole objective is to make money. If you want heal the world – maybe working for a non profit is the way to go. But, to paraphrase Warren Buffett, I think Costco delivers more in marginal utility to the world than most charities.

I just had a 10 minute chat with the CEO of  a major bank here in Australia – top 20 in market capitilization in the world – I asked him a few questions and I thought I would share his answers.

On reading:

He doesn’t read business books, as he finds them boring and repetitive.

What does he read?

He said he reads fiction, political history, The Economist every week, and real life analysis of major events, mentioning that he’d read Too Big to Fail recently. He’d also read March of the Patriots (an Australian political history book).

On career planning:

He said he didn’t really ‘plan’ to become CEO, he said he took interesting opportunities as they came available and always made decisions that he considered to be in the best interest of the organisation he was working for. 

He said that if people over plan they may make poor decisions, he didn’t say as much, but implied they might put their own interests ahead of the organisation.

On work-life balance:

He said he plans his diary a lot, books things in well in advance and plans around them. He said delegates everything he reasonably can.

The last major bank CEO I met, didn’t say any of these things – he just hugged me, seriously, right on the operations floor – takes all kinds. Right?

Recently I wrote about attention and focus. It sparked some further thoughts.

So much of consulting is about bringing to my clients attention what is not being focused on that should be. Then helping to designed systems and processes to help tem focus on the right things at the right time.

For example the measurements and incentives that you set your staff will directly drive their behaviour – good or bad. It will set their focus. 

Or, setting up a project correctly, will allow you to focus on the critical path & resource combination to ensure your project stays on time and is delivered in full.

Where is your focus and what is your relationship to it?

Attention is the currency of relationships.

Who should you be giving attention to?

• Your boss?
• Clients?
• Significant other?

Attention is diminished by multi-tasking. You can’t give attention and Facebook at the same time. So either Facebook, or be with whoever or whatever your with.

Therefore, attention could be defined as focus. And what you focus on is what you get.

Reading Tom Peters blog here today, he posted an interview with Edgar Schein who has written a new book about helping. I decided to post on it, as this is was the second reference to Edgar I’d seen in successive days as I had received an email yesterday from Amazon about this same book.

Edgar Schein writes about the process of consulting. Which he says is really just ‘helping.’ Recently I had read this and, naturally, being in the the consulting game found it enlightening.

It’s simply one of the best books about consulting around, but it goes further than just consulting. Which is why I suspect he‘s written the new book. I say every manager should read this book.

Managers usually start out as content experts. This is the case for a project I am working on at the moment. A highly complicated environment and the new manager is a revered expert in the company (in his niche.)

But he can’t stay a content expert forever, not as a manager.

He will inevitably lose touch with the details of the content, as he is forced to move to leadership role: making decisions, strategy and so on.

Then he will be in a helper role. That’s what bosses do. Help their people; ask questions without knowing all the content to make decisions. Sounds more and more like a process consultant.

From Edgar Schein’s book, Process Consulting Revisited, are the ten steps he outlines to engage in an effective helping relationship. Read these regularly. If you’re stuck with your team, pull them out and use them as guidelines on what to do next. If you’re planning a project of some nature, review these for approach ideas.

Process Consulting Skills:

1. Always be helpful:

As in all human relationships the intention to be helpful is the guarantee of a rewarding fruitful relationship.

2. Always stay in touch with the current reality:

Be helpful by understanding what is going on in myself, the client, and the situation.  [This is the core of all successful people, from military leaders (think Napolean), to business leaders (think Warren Buffett). Their ability to grasp current reality is the critical step to their success.]

3. Access my ignorance:

Understand my own current reality by understanding what I know and what I assume I know, from what I truly know. Work on those areas where I truly do not know. Locate what I do not know and should be asking about. Like accessing my own inner database and noticing empty compartments. If I truly do not understand I am more likely to sound congruent and sincere when I ask about it.

4. Everything I do is an intervention:

Every action has consequences for the client, and for me. I therefore have own everything I do and be sure the consequences fit the goals of a helpful relationship.

5. It is the client who owns the problem and the solution:

My job is to create an environment in which the client can get help. It is not my job to take the clients job onto my shoulders. Nor is it my job to offer advice and solutions in a situation that I do not live myself.

6. Go with the flow:

Don’t impose my own sense of timing onto an unknown situation. Once a certain level of trust has been reached and the client and helper have a shared insight about the current reality (what’s going on), flow itself becomes a shared process.

7. Timing is crucial:

Introducing anything from my own point of view must be timed to those moments when the client is open to hear them.

8. Be constructively opportunistic with confrontive inteventions:

Seize the moments when the clients attention is available. Look for moments when I can build on clients strengths and positive motivations.

9. Everything is data – errors are inevitable, learn from them.

No matter how much I try, some actions will have consequences that are undesirable. I must learn from them and at all costs avoid defensiveness, shame or guilt. I can never know the clients reality enough to avoid error, but errors provide a great deal of data from which to learn about, mine, and my clients reality.

10. When in doubt share the problem:

Inevitably a relationship will lose momentum, I don’t know what to do next and feel frustrated and sometimes become paralysed. The best way through this is to chare my ‘problem’ with the client. Why should I always assume I know what to do next?

For me, this was a profound book, because as an ‘expert consultant’ and leader I’ve often felt I need to have all the answers. I’ve learnt to say: “I don’t know,” and instead ask for help to understand the clients reality is critically important.

This way I can make sure I’m helping to solve the real problem, which prior to my probing, the client didn’t fully understand, therefore becoming infinitely more valuable. Which isn’t surprising given the complex nature of organisations.

Can Bill Gates be a billion times smarter than you? No, it is impossible. So if he isn’t smarter than you then what is it that accounts for his success and that of other successful people.

It is how we think.

And what we choose to focus our attention on.

How we think has enormous influence on our outcomes. All success is not in the outside world but in the inside. When you change your thoughts, what you focus on and where you place your attention, the external world changes to reflect those thoughts.

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts . With our thoughts, we make the world.” - BUDDHA

So focus on your attention. Where are you placing it? Are you allowing the media and mainstream news bombard you with negative economic news?

The latest stats show that top athletes are spending as much as 70% of their times on mental imagery, mental rehearsal and practice. Only 30% of their time is in the physical. The practical application for us in our daily professions is to do the same. Plan your and visualise your ideal week, month, and year, mentally rehearse the next meeting.

I spend an hour each morning reading my goals, vision, and planning he day. I spend an hour at the end of the day recapping what I did looking at the month ahead and planning the next day. I do this every day, which is 2 hours out of each work day, which may seem like a lot. But his process keeps me connected and on top of my goals and projects. I call it the daily scaffold.

This keeps me balanced, certain, and allows me to relax into the activity I am doing knowing that everything else is covered. In martial arts the ability to create power is from speed. And speed must be created from a relaxed balanced state. This is true in our thinking. We need to relax and balanced.

Action steps:

• Become aware of what has your attention.
• Write it down and journal what is happening for you and set up an action plan to deal with it.
• Journal, and plan your week, month, and year, and the ideal vision of each area of your life and work, review it daily.
• Set up a daily ‘scaffold’ or structure that is the same each day where you can affirm, visualise, journal and plan.