by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, How to Set Goals
Making change in organizations is central to my work. The nature of organizations, however, is to resist change. That’s why we call them organize-ations, not random-izations or adapt-ations,
One common way for organizations to resist innovation and change is for people to collect evidence that any novel tool or procedure is causing problems–even if the problems predate the change.
Waterless Urinals
Craig Hansen, the Army base’s energy engineering technician, decided to retrofit all 740 of his urinals over the objection of local plumbers. “The plumbers felt that these things were a threat to their livelihood,” Hansen says. “They don’t like change.”
Hansen heard a flood of complaints early on: The urinals stank. They were dirty. Where was the flush handle?
In one building, the complaints were so vociferous that Hansen started an investigation. He found that the bathrooms did indeed stink, but the urinals appeared clean. He suspected there was something else going on and decided a little experiment might flush out the problem. He bought a smoke bomb, lit the fuse, dropped it down the main sewer line, and waited. Hansen observed that the sewer vent outside the building was placed directly in front of the structure’s air intake. Smoke flowed out of the vent and was immediately sucked back into the building. He also found a cracked toilet in the women’s rest room that spewed smoke. The urinals, however, emitted nothing. The cartridges were doing their job.
Hansen concluded that the smell had always been there, but people didn’t have anything to blame it on until the new urinals arrived.
—Pissing Match:
Is the World Ready for the Waterless Urinal?
WIRED Magazine
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Team Manager Skills
People continually and automatically evaluate situations and objects for their relevance and value …
The evidence suggests the real possibility that there are no emotion mechanisms in the brain waiting to be discovered, producing a priori packets of outcomes in the body. Emotions may not be given to humans by nature …
If the clearest evidence for the distinctiveness of anger, sadness, and fear is in perception, then perhaps these categories exist in the perceiver. Specifically, I hypothesize that the experience of feeling an emotion, or the experience of seeing emotion in another person, occurs when conceptual knowledge about emotion is used to categorize a momentary state of core affect…
Categorizing is a fundamental cognitive activity. To categorize something is to render it meaningful; it is to determine what something is, why it is, and what to do with it. Then, it becomes possible to make reasonable inferences about that thing, predict how to best to act on it, and communicate it to others. In the construction of emotion, the act of categorizing core affect performs a kind of figure-ground segregation (Barsalou, 1999, 2003), so that the experience of an emotion will stand out as a separate event from the ebb and flow of an ongoing core affect…
The conceptual act model suggests an intrinsic role for language in perceiving emotions in the behaviors of other people (see Lindquist et al., 2006). It is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), which states that language forms the basis of experience. In the case of emotion, language shapes (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches
Scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.
…
We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.
–Jonah Lehrer
The New Yorker
The Truth Wears Off
December 13, 2010, p. 52
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches
Mine was the Depression generation of journalists. Many of the best people were not educated. When I went to London as a sportswriter, I didn’t even know the difference between the Baltic states and the Balkans. But I learned the advantage of the dumb-boy technique. I found that people love to talk about themselves. You get more news by trust than by tricks.
But that is not a very popular idea with this generation. Because they went to college, they think that they know more than the guys who run the joint, and that’s a pretense that doesn’t work. Also they like big shots. I always felt that the way to gather news in Washington is at the periphery not at the center. You get it from the people who tell the big shots what to say.
— James Reston
interviewed by Alvin P. Sanoff
US News and World Report
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Leadership Development
The pace is slow for an online video but Brené Brown’s message is deep and true. Use the extra time to think about your own life, relationships, and desires.
Tony recently published a Kindle version of his talk inspired by Brené Brown’s work. See it on Amazon by clicking here.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Technology Tips
I have been very happy with an easy, free, browser-based screen sharing facility called Join.Me. That is also the web address: join dot me (not dot com).
I often “dig into the numbers” with my CEO executive coaching clients, sometimes with the help of my free Excel templates (see them here). This tool allows us to see and work on the same screen together though we are miles apart.
Join.Me is so simple, with no software to download or install and no firewall or security issues, that even top executives can use it on the fly.
–join.me – Free Screen Sharing.
by Tony Mayo | For Executive Coaches, Technology Tips
You may have heard about the cool new research tool Google has made available. You can graph the frequency of use for any word or phrase in “500 billion words from 5 million books published over the past four centuries.“
I asked it to chart “executive coaching.”
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Stress Management
Consciously increasing tension in a muscle can help people carry out unpleasant tasks and avoid unhealthful foods.
Firming one’s muscles [e.g., clench fist, contract calves, tense bicep] can help firm willpower and firmed willpower mediates people’s ability to withstand immediate pain, overcome tempting food, consume unpleasant medicines, and attend to immediately disturbing but essential information, provided doing so is seen as providing long term benefits.
From Firm Muscles to Firm Willpower:
Understanding the Role of
Embodied Cognition in Self-Regulation
Journal of Consumer Research 2010
–IRIS W. HUNG
University of Singapore
–APARNA A. LABROO
Booth School of Business University of Chicago
by Tony Mayo | For Executive Coaches
The Harvard Business Review reprinted a wonderful speech by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen titled, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” Along with plenty of great advice for new graduates he shared some keen insights on executive coaching.
If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.
That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches
One of the most popular posts on this blog is my commentary on the 2008 Conference Board survey of worldwide top executive coaching rates and budgets. The Conference Board has recently released its 2010 update and revision to that report. Unfortunately, the report no longer contains information on the amount organizations are paying for executive coaching per hour or by engagement.
The most interesting tidbit is that most organizations are compensating executive coaches for travel time.
You can visit the Conference Board site and purchase the report by clicking here.
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