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.
What we should do is not future ourselves so much. We should now ourselves more.
Now thyself is more important than Know thyself.
Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be greener pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of the future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.
I advocate leadership that allows employees to contribute, create, and grow. I have several articles on this blog detailing the costs of micro-management and the benefits of treating employees as adults (click here to read them). I am thrilled to see the results achieved by the $2.6 billion dollar HTC under the leadership of a CEO who clearly walks this talk, Vineet Nayar. He is interviewed in the excellent–and free!–Booz & Co. periodical strategy + business.
For example, detailed financial performance data broken out by business unit is delivered regularly to employees’ desktops. This has stimulated employees to ask more questions, volunteer more ideas, and challenge their managers more often. In turn, everyone is making better decisions — the kind of decisions that directly affect the customer’s experience.
Similarly, in a bold twist on the 360-degree employee appraisal tool, all appraisals are posted on the company’s intranet, and anyone at any level can give feedback on anybody else, including the CEO. As Nayar says, “Good or bad, we all learn from the results.”
Here is my favorite quote, one that mirrors a key insight I learned the hard way some years ago: “The lesson for me was to never make assumptions about what somebody else wants or thinks. It is very important to ask people what they are thinking.”
My executive coaching clients and readers of this blog have found my quick and easy Trailing Twelve Month tool very useful. You can download the Excel spreadsheet for free here.
I also encourage my CEO clients to keep a close eye on margins. I have modified the Trailing Twelve Month tool to show monthly results and long-term trends for your business’s margin. The key difference is that since margin is a percentage it makes no sense to look at the sum of twelve months of margins. This new spreadsheet instead shows the twelve-month moving average of your gross margin. Download it by clicking here.
See also Tony’s complete goal setting kit, with audio and workbook,
free on this blog.
Do not trade sleep for exercise. You need both to be healthy.
“In a 2004 study, men limited to only four hours of sleep a night reported increased appetite and showed hormonal changes consistent with increased hunger…sleep loss can wreak havoc with a person’s endocrine system, the hormones that control appetite and metabolism.”
Cutting back on sleep, a behavior that is ubiquitous in modern society, appears to compromise efforts to lose fat through dieting.
In a new study of two groups following the same diet and exercise routines weight loss was the same but the group with adequate sleep lost fat while the sleep deprived participants lost muscle or bone.
This cutting edge technology from MIT reminds me of something I learned in business school more than thirty years ago.
Professor Ashenhurst told us the story of how an “efficiency expert” had reduced productivity. The expert did a classic time and motion study of some programmers. He noticed that the programmers not only spent a significant amount of time walking to and from the punchcard reader to submit their programs but that they “wasted” large amounts of time talking to each other along the way and around the card reader.
The efficiency expert calculated that eliminating this lost time would more than pay for purchasing a teletype for each programmer, so they could enter their code from their desks instead of wandering to the punchcard reader. The new equipment was ordered and installed.
Productivity plummeted. A brief investigation uncovered the problem. You probably have already guessed what went wrong. The engineers around the punchcard reader had not been engaged in idle banter. They were exchanging tips and techniques to get better at their jobs. The conversations, it turns out, were not a problem. What looked like mere socializing was actually problem solving.
We all see a lot of graphics pretending to portray reality but we need to be cautious consumers of these images. They can bypass some of our analytic, linguistic centers and go right to our emotional brain, often leaving incorrect or incoherent impressions. The chart to the left is an excellent example of a graphic that overstates its case and obscures data.
I am a perennial proponent of graphically presenting financial data, so it was no surprise when a client emailed this graphic to the members of one of my CEO executive coaching groups. It purports to show where in the United States people prefer the words soda, Coke, or pop as a generic term for soft drink. “Soft drink,” of course, is a phrase only a bureaucrat would use in conversation, being a term better reserved for print. I grew-up in the center of “sodaville,” so I have often wondered as I traveled what the norms and borders are.
This graphic is more useful as an example of bad information presentation than as a guide to what to say in an out-of-town restaurant.
Notice that significant portions of the country are 50% or below in usage of the depicted term. Why then are then are these counties given a color very similar to the shade indicating the dominant term? The majority might use some other term for soft drinks, but then the map wouldn’t make it so easy for the viewer to draw (possibly wrong) regional conclusions. Also, why the odd choice of intervals: 30-50 (20% range), 50-80 (30%), and 80-100 (20%)? Suggests some cherry picking of data to make the map seem even more regionally coherent. The underlying data hardly merits such a powerful representation, since it is from a self-selected group of people who visited an obscure web page and bothered to respond, that is, people with nothing better to do. It is not random, scientific, or representative. Look at some of the responses in the “Other” category, for example: “headlice,” “Fizzy Giggle,” and “Kristina is HOT!!!”
A picture is worth a 10,000 words but may convey subtly inaccurate ideas. Stop, look, and think.
Pair interaction, for example, conversation, is not a sequence of stimulus and response but a simultaneous co-creation, “both parties are processing an ongoing stream of stimuli and responding while the stimulation is still occurring.”
The Economist offers a fascinating summary of the new book by Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t. The key requirement is to get into the right department and specialty. As with starting a business, riding a rising tide by choosing a growing, lucrative sector makes everything else easier and success more likely. Once you are in the right place, three practices help you rise to power:
Manage up. Ask for help and mentoring; flatter your seniors; and make a good impression.
Be a bridge or node. Nurture relationships across departments and levels; be able to call on the right person to get key information or smooth a transaction.
Practice loyalty. Persevere with difficult postings. Don’t change companies for short term advantage.
Do not trade sleep for exercise. You need both to be healthy.
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