Bob Sutton

I’m reminded of “Strong Opinons, Weakly Held”:

I’ve been pretty obsessed about the difference between smart people and wise people for years. I tried to write a book called “The Attitude of Wisdom” a couple times. And the virtues of wise people – those who have the courage to act on their knowledge, but the humility to doubt what they know – is one of the main themes in Hard Facts. We show how leaders including Xerox’s Ann Mulcahy, Intel’s Any Grove, Harrah’s Gary Loveman, and IDEO’s David Kelley turn this attitude into organizational action. Perhaps the best description I’ve ever seen of how wise people act comes from the amazing folks at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future. A couple years ago, I was talking the Institute’s Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.” They've been giving this advice for years, and I understand that it was first developed by Instituite Director Paul Saffo. Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions. This is what psychologists sometimes call the problem of “confirmation…

From "Selecting Talent: The Upshot from 85 Years of Research"[1]:

> The upshot of this research is that work sample tests (e.g., seeing if people can actually do key elements of a job -- if a secretary can type or a programmer can write code ), general mental ability (IQ and related tests), and structured interviews had the highest validity of all methods examined (Arun, thanks for the corrections). As Arun also suggests, Schmidt and Hunter point out that three combinations of methods that were the most powerful predictors of job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (in other words, hiring someone smart and seeing if they could do the work), GMA plus an integrity test, and GMA plus a structured interview (but note that unstructured interviews, the way they are usually done, are weaker).

> Note that this information about combinations is probably more important than the pure rank ordering, as it shows what blend of methods works best, but here is also the rank order of the 19 predictors examined, rank ordered by the validity coefficient, an indicator of how strongly the individual method is linked to performance:

> 1. Work sample tests (.54)

> 2. GMA tests ..."General mental ability" (.51)

> 3. Employment interviews -- structured (.51)

> ...

This is a summary of the peer reviewed article "The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings."[2]

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[1]…

I don't believe the two approaches conflict.

We're all familiar with the possibly apocryphal experiment of five monkeys, a ladder, and an electric shock - with the end of the experiment being five monkeys that have never been shocked, but their behaviour is changed. I think we all like to think we've evolved above this kind of manipulation, though I also suspect we each have stories of having worked in professional environments, staffed by evidently smart people, where we observe this same phenomenon.

(Aside -- it's sobering to consider that the people we've worked with may have stories about such effects operating upon us.)

Anyway, point being that while you may be correct in the assertion:

> It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending
> you've already achieved it.

What if the goal is to have the next generation(s) achieve a way of thinking by pretending (I'm not ecstatic about that word, but it'll have to do) we think that way now.

Do you think that may have a positive effect?

I'm reminded of the Garbage Dump Troop - a fascinating story, told in many places, but here's a succinct explanation of the effect:

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-troop-that-mellowed-out-after-the-alpha-males-died-the-sapolsky-and-share-study.html

Unsurprisingly, alpha males usually don't find the story charming. ; )

Some random thoughts, starting with personal experience:

* When my team gives me ownership over a project, I take pride in that project and produce higher-quality work. This is loosely related to "people act more responsibly when you give them more responsibility" in the sense that direct democracy will make people feel like they have more ownership over issues.

* Homeowners tend to take better care of their place of living than renters.

* When people have kids, most tend to mature and act more responsibly in general. Not all, but most. In this case "having a child" is a proxy for "having more responsibility" in general.

In terms of studies, I'm intrigued by experiments [1] where people are assigned leadership roles randomly. They seem to suggest that people tend to make better decisions when given more responsibility. An even more radical idea that is more closely related to this study would be to assign random citizens to be in charge of a certain political issue, say for 6 to 12 months.

[1] http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/10/is-it-sometimes-rational-to-select-leaders-randomly-a-cool-old-study.html

There are great insights that can be learned through these kinds of analyses, but they can also be problematical, suffering from a severe selection (“survivorship”) bias and confusing correlation with causality. To do a scientific study would require picking some attributes thought to lead to “greatness”, rating a random selection of companies along those attributes, and then tracking their outcomes going forward. Feynman had a great essay about these kinds of problems, “Cargo Cult Science”, which you should go read right now if you never have http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

For example, the companies featured in Jim Collins’s books haven’t fared especially well in the years after those books were written. Cf. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/04/12/luck_inc/?page=full http://thehaloeffect.typepad.com/authors_blog/2007/02/jim_collinss_fr.html http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/a-wellcrafted-critique-of-business-success-books-and-my-ambivalence-about-good-to-great-.html http://hbr.org/2009/04/are-great-companies-just-lucky/ar/1

Thanks for the reference to Bob Sutton. I hadn't heard of his book before, and after some research I dug up some great info and articles.

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/the_no_asshole_rule/
http://blogs.hbr.org/sutton/2007/03/why_i_wrote_the_no_asshole_rule.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-sutton/the-no-asshole-rule-part-_b_49678.html

The Kixeye CEO may have not intended to let things go this far, but from his remarks ( part 1: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/jgntgj, part 2: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/jh72ja ) he shows a stunning lack of empathy. One big red flag for me was how he doesn't say how he is planning to make amends with the black contractor and the black community. So it's pretty clear to me that Will Harbin is part of the problem here, and likely is an asshole himself. The company's investors and leaders should take this as a wake-up call and either demote or fire him. They won't reach their potential with 'asshole leadership' in place.

A fish rots from the head down.