Ubiquitous Wisdom – Page 4 – It's everywhere … if you look for it.

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Seeing With Fresh Eyes

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French novelist Marcel Proust wrote that, “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” To me, this sounds like the exact opposite of déjà vu. We all know that déjà vu feeling. It’s the distinct feeling that, even though we are in a completely unfamiliar place, somehow, we’ve been here before. According to dictionary.com, the noun déjà vu (from the French: “already seen”, also called paramnesia) first appeared in 1903, and has two meanings:

the illusion of having previously experienced something being encountered for the first time
disagreeable familiarity or sameness: The new television season had a sense of déjà vu about it–the same plots and characters with new names.

The late comedian George Carlin, in one of his comedy routines, coined the phrase, vuja de to describe the feeling that “none of this has ever happened before.” Vuja de hasn’t made it’s way into the formal lexicon but the Urban dictionary provides a few attempts at a definition, all of them a variation on Carlin’s theme of coming to a familiar place and finding something new and different that you’ve never seen before. Proust might have balked at being linked with George Carlin, but I think Carlin’s phrase captures the essence of Proust’s quote, since vuja de must be akin to having a fresh set of eyes to see the same thing as everyone else, but understand it in a unique way. As an aside, Carlin’s ability to bring that sense of vuja de to his observations of everyday life were the essence of his comedic genius.

Abraham Wald’s Airplanes

An often quoted example of this “seeing with fresh eyes” is the story about Hungarian statistician, Abraham Wald, who worked during World War II with the UK Air Ministry. British bombers were being shot down over Germany, and it made sense to reinforce the planes with armor. You can’t armor plate the entire aircraft, because the plane would be too heavy to get off the ground. Wald was asked to perform a statistical study to answer the question, “Where should we place the armor?” Records of the planes returning from Germany showed where they had been hit, sometimes with very large holes in the aircraft extremities. So the Air Ministry wanted to put armor plate on all of the areas that showed heavy damage. But Wald pointed out that there was no data on bombers that didn’t return from Germany. He then carefully noted the few areas of the bombers where holes were NEVER found. These were the areas that Wald said needed heavy armor, because any bomber hit in those areas must not have been able to make it back to England. Obvious, but only after someone who looked at the data with fresh eyes pointed it out in a way that caused the Air Ministry to see that what had previously seemed “obvious” to them was obviously wrong. The folks at the UK Air Ministry were fooled, because they saw what looked like a pattern and made a wrong interpretation. They ignored the pattern that they couldn’t see; the pattern of bullet holes in all of the bombers that were shot down.

Our Pattern-Matching Minds

The human mind is an amazing pattern matching machine. Our ability to recognize and act upon patterns from a small sample of data characteristics allows us to transit the exigencies of our daily lives without having to consciously think about everything that we do. We can develop heuristics–rules of thumb–that help us make decisions almost without conscious thought. Remember what it was like as a child learning to brush your teeth, or a teenager learning to drive. Every action was strained and difficult, requiring careful thought. These are actions we perform today almost automatically. We’ve learned the physical patterns of handling the toothbrush and steering the vehicle.

We do the same kind of thing in our thinking processes. We observe patterns, and make fast decisions based on what those patterns tell us. Unfortunately, as with Wald’s Airplanes, our pattern-matching isn’t always correct. In fact, it’s often disastrously off the mark. Our minds are subject to a broad array of conceptual and perceptual errors that assail our ability to truly think straight. (If you are really interested in exploring how well, and how poorly, our thinking processes work, I highly recommend you take a look at Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s latest book, Thinking Fast and Slow. If that sounds familiar, it may be because I mentioned his book in a previous post.)

But what’s maybe even more disconcerting than what we get wrong in our thinking, is what we fail to see that is right there in front of us–the things that are so obvious once they’ve been pointed out. Studies show that airport security staff miss a huge proportion of the weapons that authorities send through x-rays as a test. Should we be horrified: how could something as unambiguous as a gun not stand out? Psychologists like Kahneman know the answer: because guns are so rare the screeners don’t see them, the bags with the weapons simply merge with the “pattern.” of bags without guns. So, beguiled by pattern, the screeners can’t see with fresh eyes, and they fail to notice the gun.

But sometimes, people find ways to look with fresh eyes. Companies were making cell phones and PDAs for years, but Apple, with the iPhone and apps, looked beyond the communications functions of the device and saw it as the smartphone, personalized and loaded with our apps and data until it has become almost indispensable, more like a part of our body than an appliance. The Amazon Kindle and its copycat eReaders are a similar phenomenon, as are wheels on suitcases, though we put a man on the moon before we figured that one out. Obvious once you’ve seen it.

A vuja de Switch

Perhaps what we need is a “vuja de switch” that we could turn on in our brains when we get too bound up in conventional thinking. That seems to a major theme of the book, Practically Radical, by Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company magazine. Perhaps, as Oliver Burkeman wrote in his review of Taylor’s, book published in The Guardian, “‘Think outside the box’ has been put back in its box. Vuja dé is in.”

Unfortunately, as Burkeman points out, recommendations for vuja de thinking are essentially replacements of old thinking routines with new and different routines. The key word here is routines. Again quoting Burkeman, “The point of vuja dé is to think outside preworn grooves, but a book telling you how to think is to some extent by definition a preworn groove.”

There are some possibilities, though. Thinking about a problem in different physical circumstances seems to help, which perhaps explains why BFOs (Blinding Flashes of the Obvious) often strike when we leave our desks and step outside for a walk in the fresh air. Selecting the reference frame of a different person–an engineer, an actor, a cook–and considering what they would do can also be a very powerful way to bring a fresh sense to our own eyes. But if the key is to randomly shift perspective to trigger new outlooks, we are in trouble without that vuja de switch. Without an outside intervention to jolt us, our pattern-seeking brains will follow the familiar and well-worn pathways, and ignore what is right in front of us, if only we would look for it.

The best advice on this subject may be found in the book, Zen Mind: Beginner’s Mind, where Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki wrote: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” If we could approach the world with the wonder of a child, unburdened by the weight of our worldly experience and the numbing patterns it triggers, what might me be able to discover?

Stomping Grapes or Making Wine?

If you’re anywhere near my age, you’ll remember a very funny episode of the “I Love Lucy” show, where, en route to Rome by train, Lucy is spotted by a famous Italian cinema director and chosen to play a part in his new movie “Bitter Grapes.” Lucy sets out to immerse herself in the role. When she nonchalantly wanders into a vineyard inhabited by a motley assortment of Italian-speaking women, she is dispatched to the wine-making area to crush grapes with her feet. [Here’s a link to the episode–Season 5, Episode 23, Lucy’s Italian Movie. The grape stomping scene starts around 19:50 into the episode.]

Grape stomping,is part of a method of maceration used in traditional winemaking, wherein the grapes and stems are mashed together, releasing not only the juice from the grapes, but also the phenols and tannins that provide color and acidity. Rather than using a wine press or other mechanized method, grapes were crushed by foot in open vats to release their juices and begin fermentation. The French word pigeage is also often seen in connection with grape stomping, but pigeage, which literally means “punching down the cap,” describes the pushing down of the grape skins that float to the surface of the fermentation vats, forming a “cap.”

Grape stomping probably goes back to the very beginnings of winemaking. Historical evidence shows that grapes were stomped at least as far back as Rome in 200 BC. One of the earliest existing visual representations of the practice appears on a Roman sarcophagus which depicts a group of demigods harvesting and stomping grapes at a rural Roman festival.

For centuries grapes were picked by hand and grape stomping was the universal method used to extract juice from the grapes to make wine. In America, most grape stomping by human feet was legislated out of existence by the end of the twentieth century, the concern for public health outweighing tradition. Most other countries eventually banned grape stomping too, but there are still places where you can stomp grapes. If you are really serious about grape stomping, you can compete in the World Championship Grape Stomp at the Sonoma, CA Harvest Fair.

But there is a lot more involved in making wine than stomping grapes. A vintner starts by deciding which type or types of grapes she wants to grow. She has to consider soil, geology, topography, and climate/microclimate. Praying for good weather–the right blend of warm sun and invigorating rain, the vintner selects the optimal time for harvest, when the sugar level in the grapes is exactly where she wants it to be. The grape crop is then harvested, usually by machine, but sometimes by hand in carefully selected bunches. Then the grapes are rushed from the vineyard to the winery.

In the winery, the grapes are crushed and the crush is placed in fermentation vats, where the vintner adds yeasts, carefully selected to deliver the desired flavors. During fermentation, which can last from a few days to a few months. the winemaker carefully monitors acidity and alcohol levels, and when she determines that the wine is ready, it is transferred to barrels for storage and aging. Even the barrels are selected with care, since the different woods–French oak, American oak, old oak or new oak–will impart different flavor elements to the final product. Finally after three months to as much as three years of barrel aging, the wine will be bottled and distributed, finding its way to store shelves and wine cellars around the world.

It’s obvious that making wine isn’t easy; making a good wine is hard work and a bit of luck; and a great wine is the result of hard work, luck, and a high degree of both skill and artistry. There’s a huge gap between a grape stomper and a wine maker.

Unfortunately, we often fail to see the difference. In almost every field of endeavor we encounter people who actually know very little about their real work, but do know how to put on a good show–filled with all the right buzzwords and catch phrases, posing as experts. But unlike true experts, they haven’t put in the time and effort practicing their craft. Unlike true experts, they haven’t learned hard lessons from failed efforts, then come back to try again with improved techniques. Unlike true experts they haven’t mastered their craft in the crucible of experience. They are grape stompers posing as winemakers.

Winemakers love their craft; most of them aren’t in the game for the money. [You’ve heard the old joke: “How do you get a million dollars making wine? Start out with five million.”] They study; they experiment; they ask lots of questions. And if they make smart choices and have a bit of luck, they sometimes produce a truly great wine.

It doesn’t “just happen” for winemakers. It won’t just happen for you. Are you willing to work for it? Do you want to be a wine maker, or will you settle for being a grape stomper?

Four Rules for Building Powerful Teams

Last week, my business partner Moss Jackson and I finished up a leadership development program that we had created for a long-time client. The program brought together senior leaders from different business units and corporate functions within the company, who worked in small teams on a variety of challenges. All but one of the challenges was short-fused, and required the team members to quickly formulate an approach to the problem, adopt appropriate roles, then execute smoothly to complete the assigned tasks. We added an immediate feedback loop, wherein the teams were scored by a set of judges on how well they completed each of the assigned challenges and presented their results. During the course of the program we mixed up the teams, so that each individual program participant worked with every other participant at least once. We also added an element of personal competition to the program, with each participant’s score being the total of the points earned on each of his or her team assignments.

During the final debrief, several participants commented on how well they had been able to work on the team challenges with individuals from other parts of the business with whom they otherwise rarely interacted. Members of the company’s Executive Committee, who served as judges for the program’s final business challenge, noted that they were both pleased and a bit surprised at the quality of the work product delivered, considering that the challenge had been assigned less than a day earlier. As the discussion continued, I was particularly encouraged that the question the group asked itself was not the negative formulation, “Why don’t we behave like this and perform like this all of the time?” but rather the learning-based inquiries: “What happened here?; How did we behave?; How can we act as role models for our own work teams so that we improve our level of team performance?

We identified four significant factors at work that led to the extremely strong performance of these ad hoc teams, which we converted into rules for quickly building high-performing teams.

Rule 1: Trust others first. The fastest way to build trust is to show that you trust the other members of the team. While it may be difficult to offer up your own vulnerability, in most situations it works a whole lot better than asking, “Trust me.” Our program participants emphasized the critical importance of trust building to their ability to work together on team projects. What really hit me was how often they said that they now felt that they had strong connections with people throughout the organization; people they could go to for help at any time, and on any issue where they needed help.

Rule 2: Defer judgment. Getting quick results required the teams to generate a large number of possibilities in a short period of time. They seemed to understand that nothing will slow down anyone’s problem-solving work in a team environment faster than getting their ideas shot down, so they withheld judgment until lots of ideas were on the table. Even after the teams had generated many ideas, their analytic approach allowed them to gravitate toward solutions with the greatest likelihood of success. Further, because they built on each other’s ideas rather than promoting a personal agenda, they all felt invested in and committed to the solution path they chose.

Rule 3. Build and share a common language. This one was the trickiest to implement, but turned out to be extremely powerful. The language was less a technical jargon than a language of purpose and vision that the company had created a year earlier during a senior leadership retreat to re-examine its mission and vision. The process used to develop the specific phrasing of the company mission, vision and values statements and roll them out to the entire organization was thoughtful and inclusive, so that language became part of the everyday work context of the organization. All of the program participants, regardless of business unit or functional affiliation, were connected by the common language of mission, vison and values, enabling them to quickly forge a team identity around each of the challenges presented to them.

Rule 4. Create a sense of urgency. Nothing creates task focus better than a hard deadline. When the clock is ticking down against a deadline, everyone’s attention is sharpened. The rush of adrenaline makes it easier to block out distractions. No one wants to stand around idly, so each team member searches for aways to use her skills and abilities to complement the skills and abilities brought to the task by other team members.

These rules may not be universal, but they certainly worked well in this lab-like environment, and are likely to prove successful when implemented more broadly throughout the organization.

What other rules would you suggest to people interested in quickly building high-performing teams?

Predicting Progress

I read something the other day that appealed to the techno-geek in me. It has to do with techniques for predicting technological progress. The go-to rule for predicting progress in the technology realm, at least what I always thought was The Rule, was attributed to Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation. The rule is commonly known as Moore’s Law. Moore’s law has been the benchmark measurement for technical progress in electronics for decades.

Moore’s Law was a prediction that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on a computer microchip would double every year. While originally intended as a rule of thumb in 1965, it has become the guiding principle for the industry to deliver ever-more-powerful semiconductor chips at proportionate decreases in cost. In 1995, Moore updated his prediction to once every two years. The doubling of transistors on a chip translates to a doubling of computing power and so–it was believed– Moore’s law “explains” why people today can carry a computer in their pocket, the ever-present smartphone, that is far more powerful than the computers used to control the Apollo moon missions.. The rub is that, since Moore’s law applies only to electronics, it can’t be used to forecast technological progress in other areas.

Researchers from the Santa Fe Institute now argue that a theory, proposed by Theodore Wright in 1936, called Wright’s law, is actually a better reflection of technological progress than is Moore’s law. In their working paper, “Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress”, the Santa Fe Institute researchers detail how they looked at technological progress rates from 62 different technologies, including chemical compound manufacture, mechanical engineering, etc., and found key similarities. In effect, they found that economies of scale trump time in the race to drive down costs.

“Moore’s law says that costs come down no matter what at an exponential rate. Wright’s law says that costs come down as a function of cumulative production. It could be production is going up because cost is going down,” said Santa Fe Institute lecturer Doyne Farmer told The Futurist magazine in a recent interview.

More importantly, Wright’s law can be applied to a much wider variety of engineering areas, not just transistors. That will give technological forecasters a new way to measure and predict progress and cost for everything from airplane manufacturing (its original use in 1936) to the costs of building better photovoltaic panels, used to provide solar energy. This is what got me excited about Wright’s Law.

“It means that if investors or the government are willing to stimulate production, then we can bring the cost down faster. In the case of global warming, for instance, I think that a massive stimulus program has the potential to really bring the arrival date for having solar energy beat coal a lot sooner,” said Farmer.

This argument mirrors my own view, which was previously unsupported by scientific evidence, that if we are serious about America developing alternative energy resources, like solar power, we need some type of significant stimulus to production. The stimulus could take a number of forms. For example, a tax on fossil fuels would make alternatives, like solar, more cost competitive; and if fossil fuel and solar options were offered at the same price, I have to believe that the demand for solar would increase exponentially. If Wright’s Law holds true, the increased production, driven by demand, would have the happy result of lowering the cost of solar, making it even more attractive when compared to fossil fuels.

Farmer and his colleagues are expanding their working paper into more expansive study that further details the relationship between costs and the rate of progress. In the interview with The Futurist, he indicated that he and his colleagues are trying to make solid, probabilistic forecasts for where costs for solar will be with and without stimulus, aas well as a probabilistic distribution of time frames for cost reductions that will occur with business-as-usual approach, compared to various stimulus scenarios.

I wish them luck.

Too Many Choices?

While my wife and I were visiting my father-in-law in Pittsburgh, we did some grocery shopping at the local Giant Eagle supermarket. I enjoy walking around the store, which is huge, checking out the almost unbelievable variety of products available in virtually every category of grocery. There is an entire aisle–50 to 60 feet of four-high shelves on both sides–devoted to nothing but cookies. Another aisle holds snack crackers and chips. You name it, they have an aisle for it; and every aisle is stocked with a dazzling array of choices for each and every product.

In the bread aisle, the rep from Thomas’ English Muffins was busy restocking the shelves with the 15 different varieties currently baked by Thomas’. Although I generally favor the Original, with all of the “Nooks and Crannies” which, when properly toasted to an almost-burnt crisp, hold delicious gobs of melted butter, this day I selected the Limited Edition Cranberry. Thomas’ also had a Limited Edition Pumpkin-Spice English Muffin available that day, but somehow, the thought of a pumpkin-flavored English Muffin didn’t work for me, though the Thomas’ rep told me that they are very popular and he has a hard time keeping the shelves stocked with Pumpkin-Spice.

The experience got me to thinking about choices, and the wide array of choices we are presented with as consumers. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the scene in the 2006 movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” where Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat character is in an American grocery store examining the–to Borat–unbelievable number of different types of cheeses and packages of cheese for sale. [Here’s a link to the entire 4-minute cheese scene, which was reduced to about one-minute in the theatrical release of the movie.]

Giant Eagle is simply following the conventional wisdom among retailers, supported by scientific research, that consumers prefer large selections and are lured by more options and greater variety. But not every store believes that variety of product offerings is the surest path to success. Unlike most retailers, Trader Joe’s drastically restricts customers’ choices. They don’t carry household-name brands, and within any particular product category—pasta, for example—there are only a few options, [mostly house brands like Trader Giuseppe Pasta], compared to the myriad choices offered at the Safeway or Albertson’s down the street. As an aside, if you are interested in the behavioral economics explanation of TJ’s success–over 300 stores and growing, with the highest sales per square foot of any grocery chain in the US–check out this story, “Trader Joe’s, Where Less is More,” by Kay-Yut Chen and Marina Krakovsky, authors of the book, Secrets of the Moneylab: How Behavioral Economics Can Improve Your Business. Clearly though, when it comes to providing consumers with a plethora of choices, Trader Joe’s is an exception to the rule.

Moving beyond the world of grocery shopping, into the larger domain of choices in general, we have to consider: why it is that sometimes, presented with a wide array of choices, rather than being exhilarated by the degree of choice-freedom provided, we can become paralyzed by the task of assessing options, and choose not to choose at all? It seems odd that choice aversion might ever happen in America, where, from the nation’s inception, autonomy, individuality, and self-determination have been foundational values; where, from the time of Washington and Jefferson to today with Bush and Obama, politicians and the voting public generally assume and act under the presumption that choice always provides social benefits. After all, don’t we strongly resist attempts to use public policy to restrict our personal choices? [Curiously, this doesn’t seem to stop interest groups of all persuasions from attempting to push their personal/ideological views as public policy that would constrain the behavioral choices of others with differing views, for example: Pro-Choice/Pro-Life, Gay Marriage/Sanctity of Marriage, ObamaCare/Free-Market Healthcare.]

There is, indeed, some evidence that a presumption that choice is always good may be incorrect, at least in the realm of public policy. “The Dark Side of Choice: When Change Impairs Social Welfare,” an article by Simona Botti and Sheena S. Iyengar published in 2006 in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, points out the sometimes detrimental effects of choice in the public policy realm. The authors ascribe three elements to the “dark side” of choice: information overload, a higher likelihood of dissatisfaction with the choice made, and a propensity to overpay for options that don’t have a commensurate increase in personal happiness.

Another recent study, conducted at Washington University in St. Louis, “Choosing Here and Now Versus There and Later,” corroborates the notion that when choosing among products, we [in our role as consumers] prefer having more options over having fewer options. But that’s not the case when we are making choices about the more distant future, such as when we are considering insurance, retirement plan options, or vacation plans six months in the future. The authors of the study, Joseph K. Goodman, PhD, and Selin A. Malkoc, PhD, both assistant professors of marketing at Olin Business School, suggest that psychological distance is what accounts for the difference in behavior. Psychological distance, both temporal and geographical, increases the similarity of the options in a category, making them appear more substitutable. When making decisions related to the future,the authors conclude that, “… consumers tend to focus on the end goal and less about how to get there and this leads to predictable changes in consumer behavior.”

I found my own favorite take on the “too many choices” problem in the book, The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less, published in 2004 by American psychologist Barry Schwartz. Schwartz ranges far and wide in his study of choice behavior, but I was drawn to his views on the ideas of psychologist Herbert A. Simon from the 1950s, and how Schwartz relates Simon’s theories to the psychological stress that consumers face today when confronting seemingly unlimited choices. He notes some important distinctions between what Simon termed maximizers and satisficers.

A maximizer is like a perfectionist when it comes to making a choice, someone who needs to be assured that their every purchase choice was the best that could be made. The only way a maximizer can know for sure that his choice is the perfect choice is to consider all the alternatives he can imagine. This can’t avoid being a psychologically difficult task, one that become even more daunting as the number of choices increases. The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. A satisficer has criteria and standards, but, rather than searching for the perfect choice, satisficers are perfectly happy with an option that is “good enough.” A satisficer doesn’t worry about the possibility that there might be something better available, somewhere. Ultimately, Schwartz agrees with Simon’s conclusion, that satisficing–looking for good enough rather than demanding perfect–is, in fact, the maximizing strategy. Interestingly, it seems that a satisficer–willing to be happy with good enough–is much less likely to second-guess her own choices than the perfectionistic maximizer.

In this regard, I think about my own recent purchase of a new mobile phone. With so many brands to choose from, and so many model choices within each brand, each with a dizzying array of features, the choice-decision further complicated by carrier incentives and complex rate plans, I opted for simplicity. No change of carrier or mobile operating system for me; simply an upgrade to the best available Android phone [Samsung’s Galaxy SIII in case you were wondering]. No doubts. No second thoughts. I ‘m convinced I made a good enough choice.

So, what do you do when you want some mustard, and the mustard shelf in your grocery store has 55 varieties of mustard? Probably best to act like a satisficer–set guidelines for price, style of mustard, type of container, acceptable brands to filter through the possibilities– and make a fairly quick and painless choice. Not so easy though, if you are looking for a movie to watch, a book to read, or a song to listen to. Millions of possibilities. Hard to even imagine what filters to apply. Personalized recommendations are particularly valuable in these situations. That’s why we love Netflix and Amazon and Pandora; they do the filtering for us and present us with a set of movies, books and songs that should satisfy our tastes.

But even if the recommendation suits our tastes, there’s no guarantee that the choice will make us happy; that we’ll be flly satisfied by the choice. Perhaps, as Kevin Kelly suggested in his blog post “The Satisfaction Paradox,” ultimate choice–in the form of virtually unlimited options–may be ultimately unsatisfying.

Fast Food is Really Fast!

Fast food. It’s fast. You order it in a hurry; it’s ready in a hurry; you usually eat it in a hurry. Other than the risk of indigestion–and, if you believe some of the medical studies, obesity– you don’t expect fast food to have any affect on you at all. But that may not be the case. In fact, eating fast food may have some interesting, and certainly unintended consequences for those speed diners who frequent McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, KFC, Taco Bell, et al.

Now, while burgers and fries are prototypical fast foods, the real essence of fast food is not what you eat but how you eat. Everything about fast food is designed with the goal of saving time. Fast food allows us to fill our stomach as quickly as possible and move on to other things–and the other things are always things that we deem to be important, even urgent. It shouldn’t surprise us that the concept of fast food is considered by many to be representative of a culture that emphasizes efficiency and immediate gratification, and places a high value on our time.

To shed some light on fast food and its effects on our behavior, we turn to the work of Sanford DeVoe, an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. DeVoe’s current research is focused on the psychological dimensions of incentives within organizations, including looking at the tradeoffs between time and money, and how each is valued.

In a 2006 paper co-authored with Jeffrey Pfeffer at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, titled “When time is money: The effect of hourly payment on the evaluation of time,” the authors discuss the effects of hourly pay on the way people value time and money.

It is a common belief that people value time differently than they value money. Lots of reasons for this are posited, but the most likely explanation is that people simply have more difficulty accounting for time than for money. This difficulty is less apparent for individuals working for hourly pay. DeVoe and Pfeffer cite earlier research by Evans, Kunda, and Barley, whose ethnographic study of technical contractors including engineers, software developers, technical writers, and information technology specialists who sold their services to firms in exchange for an hourly wage. Being paid by the hour and the corresponding requirement to bill client firms for the number of hours spent working (i.e., billable hours) led these technical contractors to develop an appreciation for the microeconomics of time. Billing for their hours provided these contractors with extensive practice in accounting for their time and its value. By being paid by the hour, unlike salaried employees, contractors could put a precise value on every hour of the day—their hourly billing rate.

DeVoe and Pfeffer’s experiments went further, examining the effects of hourly pay practices for non-contract employees on the time/money tradeoffs employees make. Unconsciously, this can have a pernicious effect on other aspects of life. Similar to working hours, leisure time gets a value put on it. It isn’t hard to imagine a lawyer asking himself, “Is it worth $450 times three hours for me to see my son’s soccer game?” Even more troubling, it can begin to reverse the delayed gratification response; as individuals make more per hour, they want to bill more hours, and unconsciously become more impatient. Perhaps that’s why more and more organizations are moving away from hourly wage pay plans–to remove the secondary negative effects.

But it is the research paper You Are How You Eat: Fast Food and Impatience, published in 2010, where DeVoe and fellow researcher Chen-Bo Zhong wrote about a series of experiments they conducted to test the theory that even incidental exposure to fast food can lead to impatient behaviors and choices outside of the eating domain that provides real cause for concern about how we are dealing with time.

Simplifying the theoretical structure, their argument worked as follows:

Social behaviors can be primed or set up by environmental cues. Much recent research in this area, known as behavioral priming, supports this concept. For example, people who cast their votes in school buildings are more likely to support school funding initiatives than people who vote in other polling places.
Because fast food embodies time-saving as a goal, behavioral priming research suggests that exposure to fast food related concepts may automatically increase speed and time preference.
The results of the fast food to speed/time preference link are not context sensitive, so the speed/time preference may not always be positive. As an example, walking faster is time efficient when you are late for an appointment; it is a sign of impatience when you are taking a stroll along the beach.
So, even though fast food has contributed to a culture of time efficiency, exposure to fast food might also promote impatience.

The first experiment examined whether a subliminal exposure to fast food logos can increase reading speed. They found that even an unconscious exposure to fast-food symbols can automatically increase participants’ reading speed when they are under no time pressure. In the experiment, participants exposed to subliminal flashes of fast food logos performed a reading task 20% faster than a control group.

In the second experiment, the researchers manipulated exposure to fast food related concepts and examined time-saving preference and impatience in consumer choices after the exposure. They found that thinking about fast food increases preferences for time-saving products, or time-saving features of products, despite the existence of potentially many other product dimensions to consider.

Finally, the third experiment examined whether priming behavior via exposure to fast food logos induces impatience in financial decisions–an activity about as far from eating a Big Mac as you can get–as reflected by people’s unwillingness to postpone immediate gains in order to receive greater future returns. This time the researchers found that the participants primed by exposure to fast food logos were much more likely to accept a smaller payment now rather than waiting for a bigger payment in a week, compared to those in the control condition. Fast food priming seems to have made people impatient in a manner that could put their economic interest at risk.

DeVoe and Zhong’s research clearly indicates that the way people eat has far-reaching (often unconscious) influences on behaviors and choices unrelated to eating. Other research experiments have shown that exposure to fast food logos caused difficulty enjoying music and photographs–they felt that the experiences lasted too long and were boring.

I’d like to say that we have easy ways to defend ourselves against these unconscious environmental influences. But it appears that the effects of hourly pay rates, fast food symbols, and who knows what other factors, are all driven below the level of conscious thought. We probably have to learn to expect continuing exposure to various stimuli that speed us up and make it harder and harder for us to simply “smell the roses.”

Why Are We in Such a Hurry to Make Up Our Minds??

Perhaps you’ve wondered: Why did banks and traders make such bad decisions leading up to and during the 2007-2008 financial crisis? Frank Portnoy [a former derivatives trader and current professor of law and finance at the University of San Diego] , was apparently wondering the same thing. In Professor Portnoy’s case, it led to the writing of his most recent book, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay

Answering the question about banks’ and traders’ bad decision-making leading up to and during the financial crisis turns out to be rather complicated. It wasn’t because the bankers were ignorant about decision-making, and decision-making flaws imbedded deeply in the human psyche. In Wait, Portnoy describes how the top executives at the now-defunct investment bank, Lehman Bros. commissioned a special training course in decision making, inviting some of the top writers and researchers on the subject, including Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, to come to their offices in New York and teach them how to make more good decisions, while avoiding the really bad decisions.

Lehman’s top two dozen execs listened to what the highly-paid speakers had to say, then they marched off–taking their copies of Blink to the trading floor–and proceeded to make a series of disastrous snap decisions that led to the firm’s downfall. Apparently, the Lehman execs only read the first two-thirds of Gladwell’s book. Blink has been interpreted as saying that making snap decisions is a good thing. The first two-thirds of Blink makes the case for that idea, but the last one-third, which people typically don’t read, is about the problematic aspects of snap decision making. Ooops!

Looking deeper, Portnoy found that little research had been done about the timing of decisions; when is the best time to actually make any decision? It seems that for every situation and every person there is an optimal amount of delay. I kid you not. The very idea of delay in the context of decision-making is, for me, rather unsettling. But the science behind the concept is compelling.

So, what is it about decision making in different time frames that is good and bad? Portnoy starts this journey of discovery in the world of high frequency trading (“HFT”). HFT is the use of sophisticated technological tools to trade securities like stocks or options. It has a number of interesting characteristics, but for our purposes, the most significant is that HFT is very sensitive to the processing speed of markets and of the HFT traders’ own access to the market. I’m personally not a big fan of HFT, for a number of reasons. Here’s a link to a recent NY Times article that might make you think twice–or three times–about HFT and its impact on financial markets. Regardless of whether you love, hate, or are indifferent about HFT, you’d think that in such an environment, faster would always be better. That proves to be a bad assumption; in HFT faster isn’t necessarily better. Getting faster can actually make you get worse.

A high frequency trader called UNX in Burbank, CA, had been at the bottom of the league tables, which rank investment firms relative performance. UNX brought in new CEO, Scott Harrison, who instituted a new HFT algorithm, flipped the switch and moved to the top decile of the league tables. Their execution model allowed for a trade execution time of 65 milliseconds (“m-sec”). Harrison then thought, if 65 m-sec is good, faster would be even better. The only way to get much faster , given that electronic trading instructions travel at the speed of light, was to move the trading computers closer to the stock exchanges in New York City [Southern California to NYC at the speed of light is about 30 m-sec]. UNX packed up and moved its computer trading operations to New York, to co-locate next to the New York Stock Exchange, flipped the switch, and, as expected, lowered execution time to 35 m-sec. What they didn’t expect is that with a 35 m-sec execution time, their rank on the league tables would drop to the bottom decile. Harrison then rigged the trading computers to slow them down to 65 m-sec; performance leaped back to the top of league tables.

Portnoy suggests that there is an optimal delay time for everything. In another example, we consider that humans don’t perceive speech delays of less than 150 m-sec. Telephone companies, at considerable expense, have the technological capability to reduce the speech transmission delay to as low as 1 m-sec. But it wouldn’t be worth it, since the optimal delay–the slowest speed at which speech delay is imperceptible–is just under 150 m-sec; getting faster isn’t necessarily better.

Now, it’s true that the optimal delay for high frequency trading may not stay at 65 m-sec. Trading systems and trading algorithms are always subject to improvement. Human aural systems may also evolve and improve, reducing the optimal delay for voice transmission systems. Optimal delay is generally going to be a moving target; it may also depend on your strategy. For example, how should you manage emails? Should you respond immediately, wait an hour, wait 3 hours, set aside a special time every day to deal with email? Your answer will depend on what you are trying to accomplish, and how you try to balance competing needs.

And no one is suggesting that you delay simply for the sake of delay. What you want to do is maximize the time you get to make a decision. For further insight into decision timing, Portnoy turns to the world of super fast sports: professional tennis players returning 120-mph serves, or Major League Baseball hitters swinging at 98-mph fastballs. In this super-fast world, the entire act is completed in less than 500 m-sec. (As a point of reference, the speed of a blink of an eye for humans averages between 300 and 400 m-sec.) The easy answer is that the best players in super-fast sports simply have faster reflexes. But the best serve returners and batters don’t necessarily have quicker reaction times. So what is it that makes them the best?

In a 500 m-sec world, if you have the ability to execute the baseball swing or tennis service return faster, say in 100m-sec instead of 200 m-sec, you wind up with much more time to gather information before you execute. You’ll be able to hit that fastball out of the park, or make a great service return. Very small delays can be hugely important. In the world of professional tennis a 50 m-sec improvement in service execution speed can mean the difference between a world class professional and a very good amateur. Of course, all of this super-fast sports activity is so fast that it is clearly sub-conscious. What about the slower world that most of us make our way in? How do we determine optimal decision delay in that world?

Well, no one studies decision making more than the military, especially tactical decision-making. John Boyd, a brilliant military strategist, developed the jet fighter tactics now taught at the Top Gun school for fighter pilots. Boyd’s tactical decision-making approach was Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, often referred to by its acronym, the OODA Loop. Boyd said that the F-15 fighter jet should be like a switchblade in a knife fight. It is very fast, but the true value of its speed is that it gives the pilot more time to observe, orient and decide, before acting. The F-15 pilot can wait until the last possible moment before committing to action, knowing that his aircraft is so much faster and more agile than his opponent’s aircraft. Action and execution speed is every bit as valuable in the 60-second world of jet fighter dogfights as it is in the 500 m-sec world of tennis and baseball.

But what about the “normal” world of personal and business decisions? What is the optimal amount of delay in the world where most of us live and make our decisions? If you don’t make a decision as quickly as possible, you’re likely to be labeled a procrastinator. And procrastination has become a very bad word. Yet sometimes procrastinating–managing delay in decision-making–is precisely the right thing to do.

It might be time to suck it up and admit that procrastination is not necessarily a bad thing. Procrastination was once actually associated with wisdom. In it’s original usage, procrastination simply meant putting off until tomorrow what belonged to tomorrow, and was considered a virtuous and wise path. That is no longer the case. Going back to the days of the Puritans, aspects of American culture have made us feel guilty about procrastinating. The dictionary definition of procrastination today clearly infers that it is a bad thing, delaying or putting off something that urgently needs to be done.

Business culture has become almost obsessively action-oriented, rather than focused on making good decisions. I remember working for an executive in the 1980’s who was proud of his Ready-Fire-Aim approach. He was a big fan of the Peters and Waterman book, In Search of Excellence, wherein the authors identified seven factors that contributed to organizational excellence, with the top factor, Bias for Action, considered more important than the other six combined.

In the end, the discussion about optimal delay times for decision making doesn’t provide any simple answers. I think it becomes, more than anything else, a question of priorities. There are always too many things to do; so what will we do now, what will we do later, and what will we never do? Then we have to strike a reasonable balance between “do it fast,” and “wait as long as possible to decide.”

The Power of the First Follower

I got a gift the other day. One of my former coaches, Martha Tilyard (I wrote about Martha last year in my post “A Belated Thanks You“), sent me a link to a video of a 3-minute talk at the February 2010 TED by Derek Sivers, titled “How to Start a Movement.” I want to share that gift with you.

Mr. Sivers makes a few crucial points in his brief talk about leadership, focused on the role of the leader in starting a movement:

A Leader needs the guts to stand up and be ridiculed.
What the Leader does, and what she wants others to do, has to be easy to follow.
The First Follower has a crucial role–showing everyone else how to follow.
The Leader has to embrace the First Follower as an equal, so that the movement is not about The Leader (singular) it is about US (plural).

What it all comes down to is that the role of First Follower is a seriously underestimated form of leadership. It takes guts to get out there and be the first to follow a leader. In fact, it is the First Follower that transforms the “lone nut” into a Leader, because you can’t be a leader without at least one follower. Moreover, the act of following has to be a public act. If no one else can see it, what’s the point?

The great thing is that once the First Follower sets things in motion, it is that much easier for the second follower to join in, and, of course, three is a crowd. The momentum can build rapidly from that point. As more people join in, it’s less risky, the danger of ridicule drops way down. At that point, all of the fence-sitters join in rapidly, hoping to become part of the in-crowd, the first movers.

All of this got me to thinking, usually a dangerous situation. I wondered about a few First Followers:

In 1906 in South Africa, a lone nut named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi urged his fellow Indians living in South Africa to defy a new law requiring them to register with the government, and to peacefully suffer the punishments for doing so. Someone, unknown to us today, stood up and joined Gandhi, adopting the still evolving methodology of non-violent protest for the first time. The community adopted his plan, and during the ensuing seven-year struggle, thousands of Indians were jailed, flogged, or shot for striking, refusing to register, for burning their registration cards or engaging in other forms of non-violent resistance. At the time, who could have anticipated that the slightly built, bespectacled barrister who would become known as Mahatma Gandhi, would someday lead India to independence and inspire movements for non-violence, civil rights and freedom across the world?

Fifty years later, in June, 1956 in Indianapolis, Indiana (sorry about all of the alliterative ins) a 25-year old former member of the Communist Party USA, decided to organize a massive religious rally, riding the coattails of Rev. William M. Branham, a healing evangelist and religious author as highly revered by some at that time as Oral Roberts and Billy Graham. Someone thought the young man was worth following, and from that gathering, the Reverend Jim Jones started the congregation eventually known as the People’s Temple Christian Church Full Gospel. Twenty-two years later, on November 18, 1978, having moved the congregation first to Northern California near Ukiah, then eventually to Jonestown, Guyana , the Reverend Jim Jones presided over the mass suicide of 909 Temple members. Someone decided to follow the wrong lone nut.

Maybe, as Mr. Sivers suggests, leadership is over-glorified. Sure, the Leader will be the one getting the bulk of the credit, but being a First Follower requires a lot of courage, maybe as much as the courage of the lone nut with a potentially world-shaking idea. The lesson for everyone who wants to be a leader is clear: nurture and support your first followers as equals.

And for those of us who choose to lead in a different way, maybe our best role is to find that lone nut with an idea that appeals to us intellectually and emotionally, and find the courage to turn that lone nut into a Leader, by becoming the First Follower. But remember, not every lone nut is created equal. Choose a Gandhi, not a Jim Jones.

Why Do We Call It Spam?

A particularly egregious piece of junk e-mail showed up in my Inbox this morning, and I remarked out loud, “How did this piece of junk get through my spam filter?” I deleted the message, but then started thinking about the word spam. Why do we call unwanted junk email “spam?” I remember the canned meat product, Spam, from childhood days. How did we get from canned meat to junk mail? My curiosity got the better of me, and I did some research.

Let’s start with the canned meat product, Spam (shortened from spiced ham), produced by the Hormel Foods Corporation. Hormel has produced Spam since 1937. The labeled ingredients in the classic variety of Spam are chopped pork shoulder meat, with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, and sodium nitrite as a preservative. Spam slips out of the standard size 12-ounce can covered with a gelatinous glaze, or aspic, formed from the cooling of meat stock. Much to Hormel’s chagrin, Spam has become part of many jokes and urban legends about mystery meat, and firmly ensconced Spam as part of pop culture and folklore.

In the 75 years since its introduction, Hormel has introduced ten additional varieties of Spam, including Hot and Spicy, Spam with Bacon, and Spam with Cheese. To celebrate Spam’s 75th anniversary, Hormel created a website totally devoted to SPAM.

Some interesting Spam facts I tripped over during my research:

Spam is sold in 41 countries, on six continents (no grocery stores in Antarctica?)
In 2007, the 4 billionth can of Spam was sold
3.8 cans of Spam are consumed every second in the US
On average, each person on Guam consumes 16 tins of Spam each year

But none of this explains the connection between the canned meat product and the totally undesirable and definitely unwanted clutter in my junk mail folder. To find that connection, we have to go back to 1970, to a sketch from the British television series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in which Spam is portrayed as ubiquitous and inescapable. Rather than describing the sketch, here is a link so you can watch it for yourself.

After the invention of the Internet (by Al Gore?) some years later, marketers began drowning out discourse by flooding Usenet newsgroups and individuals’ email with junk mail advertising messages. This phenomenon was named spamming, due to some early internet users that flooded forums with the word spam, recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of Spam in the Monty Python sketch.

Now, you might think that Hormel would have been more than a bit miffed by the take-off on one of their headline products, but you’d be wrong. Though the company was never particularly happy about the use of the word spam for junk email, Hormel has been supportive of Monty Python and their sketch. Hormel issued a special tin of Spam for the Broadway premiere of Eric Idle’s hit musical Spamalot. Also, the sketch is part of the company’s Spam museum in Austin, Minnesota.

In 2007 the Hormel company decided that the spam publicity was part of their corporate image, possibly for the better, and sponsored a game where their product is strongly associated with Monty Python, even featuring a product with “Stinky French Garlic” as part of the promotion of Spamalot. If there is a lesson in all of this, and I’m sure there is, it must be that it is often best to take advantage of whatever life throws in front of you, even if you don’t like it at first. You may be much better of simply utilizing the situation to your best advantage, rather than opting to fight what may ultimately be a losing battle.

And while you are musing on all of this, go ahead; click on the link and play the game. Allow yourself one of life’s small pleasures. I promise not to tell.

A Follow-up on Out-of-Control Controls

A few months ago I authored a screed on out-of-control controls, where I took on the FAA for its seemingly impossible to navigate process for approval of safety related controls for a new US-based airline. It struck a chord with at least some of my readers, who related their own frustration with controls and control systems that seem to do little more than add complications without improving anything at all. The rhetoric coming out of the Republican and Democratic Party conventions have brought the topic of government regulation back into the news. Based on the differing arguments we hear, it is hard to decide whether more regulation or less regulation would be better for the country.

Last month, my friend and business associate Alan Engelstad co-authored an article with Andrew Bass from the UK that appeared on Karl Moore’s Forbes.com blog. I enjoyed what Alan and Andrew had to say, and I hope you will, too. To read their article, titled “It’s Not About More or Less Regulation–A Message for Obama and Romney ,” which offers a rather refreshing approach to thinking about controls and control systems, click here.

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