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LEADERSHIP TIPS “The crux of leadership development that works is self-directed learning: intentionally developing or strengthening an aspect of who you are or who you want to be, or both.” Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee (Harvard Business School Press)
In college football, where fans of opposing teams can’t agree on much of anything, they do share one opinion: There is no such thing as a boring rivalry.
Rivalry games make or break seasons even when the matchups appear lopsided. This season’s rivalry weekend, for instance, has a number of them: Florida State, Ohio State and Oregon are all in the College Football Playoff race, while rivals Florida, Michigan and Oregon State are all having excruciating seasons. But if any of them pull off an upset Saturday, it would make their year—and ruin their rival’s.
The oomph in every rivalry comes from similarity, proximity and history.
Auburn versus Alabama—an intrastate matchup of public universities that dates to 1893—could be a case study. Research also shows that sports rivalries are stronger when their historical records against each other are closer.
As it happens, heading into Saturday’s games, Auburn-Alabama and Ole Miss-Mississippi State both are 18-16 since 1980 in favor of the former, while Ohio State leads Michigan, 17-16, with one tie.
There is enough scholarly literature about choking under pressure to fill Michigan Stadium, while academics caution that they are just beginning to learn how rivalries shape our lives.
A great negotiator, seen time and time again, does these five things well:
1. Sets the Stage
2. Finds Common Ground
3. Asks with Confidence
4. Embraces the Pause
5. Knows When to Leave
As with a top baseball player, a negotiator's tools must become reflexive and instinctive. They have to be because in both worlds the window for action and success is narrow. Winning doesn't wait. Opportunity doesn't come around every day. To leverage and maximize these chances, you've got to be ready with multiple tools and the confidence to use them well.
But here's the thing about negotiation: those steps are like waves on the beach. They repeat themselves over and over, especially in a big deal. They repeat between people who are negotiating and within negotiators themselves. The conversation is always going on.
Each stage of every negotiation is a test of a relationship--and a chance to demonstrate your passion and character. Trust is at the heart of negotiationand long-term success as a negotiator. The five tools are nothing without trust.
Trust is easily broken, and building trust requires a lot of intentionality.
You never know what you don't know, and assumptions kill a negotiation faster than anyting else. In a space where trust is generally missing, there is a huge upside for the person who can stand in that gap and "Find Common Ground."
Negotiation is more of an art than a science. Although "Setting the Stage" and "Finding Common Ground" can be quantified by numbers and statistics, the truly gifted negotiators display great intuition and instinct. Data is about the who, when, where and what; intuition and art are about grasping the how and why. It's about the story and conversation, the power of intangibles in "Asking with Confidence", "Embracing the Pause", and "Knowing When to Leave."
Negotiation is most successful when the terms are clear and specific to everyone involved. Whether you are haggling over a grocery coupon or a multi-million-dollar contract, you're engaged in a critical conversation. The more comfortable you are with that conversation, the better your results will be. The five tools will build that comfort for success, building trust in yourself and trust from others. They will give you the guts to negotiate.
"A Winner's Guide to Negotiating" by Molly Fletcher shares with you secrets from a top sports agent. "If you learn nothing else from me," writes Fletcher, "know this: effective negotiation is a conversation, a relationship, a rhythm built over time. At the heart of my success is managing relationships well so that conversations keep going, stay open, and spark more conversations because the seeds of your next generation are planted in the one you are doing right now. A negotiation is a story, and a good negotiator is like a bestselling novelist who knows the characters so well that nothing they do is surprising."
125 years ago today, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published its first edition on July 8, 1889.
Yes, sports were covered in the first Journal. Then champion John L. Sullivan took on Jake Kilrain in what would be the last world heavyweight championship bare-knuckled prize fight.
The Journal predicted a Sullivan win. However, in this first WSJ edition, the Baltimore American put up a bulletin that there was a rumor to effect that Kilrain had won and Sullivan's backer's were holding the wire to hedge on bets.
The Journal's own report proved correct when Kilrain's corner surrendered after the 75th round.
Before making an important decision, prudent managers evaluate the situations confronting them — and often fall into traps of faulty thinking.
Researchers have identified a series of flaws in the way we think when making decisions. They are hardwired into our thinking process, so we often fail to recognize them.
While we cannot entirely rid ourselves of them, we can learn to understand the traps and compensate for them.
You have an edge if you can establish a personal connection with those you are negotiating with. Connect emotionally and intellectually so the other person will like and trust you.
Do something positive for someone and that person will want to reciprocate some time, some how.
Reciprocation flows from Divine Law that can neither be ignored or put aside. Perhaps, the most important of these laws is the 'law of love.' Put simply, "Love is Law, Law is Love. God is Love, Love is God." This amounts to the same thing as "the gift of giving" without the "hope of reward or pay," or serving others. This 'law of love' is identified in many different ways--for example, in Wayne Baker's bestseller,"Achieving Success Through Social Capital"(Jossey-Bass), this law of love in the workplace is described as the "law of reciprocity."
The law of reciprocity is not what can best be described as "transactional reciprocity." Baker says that, "Many people conceive of their business dealings as spot market exchanges--value given for value received, period. Nothing more, nothing less. This tit-for-tat mode of operation can produce success, but it doesn't invoke the power of reciprocity and so fails to yield extraordinary success."
Baker explains, "The lesson is that we cannot pursue the power of reciprocity. When we try to invoke reciprocity directly, we lose sight of the reason for it: helping others. Paradoxically, it is in helping others without expecting reciprocity in return that we invoke the power of reciprocity. The path to reciprocity is indirect: reciprocity ensues from the social capital built by making contributions to others.
The deliberate pursuit of reciprocity fails, just like the pursuit of happiness. Acts of contribution, big and small, build your fund of social capital, creating a vast network of reciprocity. And so those who help you may not be those you help. The help you receive may come from distant corners of your network."
"One of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us is the rule for reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us." Robert B. Cialdini, author of "The Psychology of Persuasion" (William Morrow, 1993)
Example: A request for a charitable donation that is accompanied by a gift.
Anchoring
From sexuality to religion, we seek balance between the unchosen realities that anchor us (race, geography, history) and choices that liberate us.
Making important choices is never simple, but it can be a lot easier and more fulfilling when we pay attention to where the choice is coming from. From business to personal choices, we don't have to make choices from circumstances---like the selection process of choosing from a smorgasbord. Our life choices are best when they come from a deep understanding of who we are and what our life's work is.
Becoming aware of how we perceive others and our unique identity (our intangibles of assumptions/beliefs, values, vision and guiding principles along with our signature talents) help us to make conscious choices.
When considering a decision, the mind gives disproportionate weight to the first information it receives. Initial impressions, estimates or data anchor subsequent thoughts and judgments.
In business, a common anchor is a past event or trend. While relying on such may lead to a reasonably accurate estimate of future numbers, it also tends to give too much weight to past events and not enough to other factors.
“People estimate the values of unknown or uncertain objects or events by starting from an initial anchor value and adjusting from there. These anchors are typically based upon whatever information, relevant or irrelevant, is handy or strategic. Frequently, an anchor will inhibit individuals from negotiating rationally.” Barzerman & Neale
The Antidote
Anchors affect how virtually all professionals make decisions. No one can avoid their influence. But becoming aware of their dangers can reduce their impact:
Always view a problem from different perspectives. Try using alternative starting points and approaches rather than sticking with your first line of thought.
Think about the problem on your own before consulting others.
Be open-minded. Seek opinions from a variety of people to widen your frame of reference.
Avoid anchoring your advisers, consultants and others from whom you solicit information. Tell them as little as possible about your ideas and estimates. If you reveal too much, your preconceptions may simply come back to you.
Status-Quo
We are predisposed to perpetuating the status quo. Deep within our psyches, we are self-protective and risk-aversive.
Remind yourself of your objectives. Examine how they would be served by the status quo.
Never think of the status quo as your only alternative. Identify other options.
Ask yourself: Would I choose the status quo if it weren’t so?
Sunk-Cost
We tend to make choices in ways that justify past decisions, even when the latter no longer seems valid. We know rationally that sunk costs are irrelevant to present decisions, but they nevertheless lead to inappropriate choices. This frequently occurs when we’re unwilling, consciously or not, to admit a mistake.
The Antidote
Seek feedback from those who were uninvolved in the earlier decision.
Be on the lookout for the influence of sunk-cost biases in subordinates’ decisions and recommendations.
Don’t cultivate a failure-fearing culture that leads employees to perpetuate and cover up mistakes.
Confirming Evidence
Leaders sometimes seek out information that supports their existing instinct or point of view, while avoiding information that contradicts it. This trap affects where we go to collect evidence, as well as how we interpret it.
The Antidote
Don’t necessarily disregard the choice to which you’re subconsciously drawn, but make sure it’s the smart one.
Check whether you’re examining all evidence with equal rigor.
Ask someone you respect to play devil’s advocate.
Be honest with yourself about your motives. Are you really gathering information to help you make a smart choice—or are you looking for evidence that confirms what you already think and want to do?
When seeking others’ advice, don’t ask leading questions that invite confirming evidence.
Framing
The first step in making a decision is to frame the question. It’s also one of the most dangerous; how you frame a problem can profoundly influence your choices.
Individuals tend to be risk averse to positively framed choices and risk seeking to negatively framed choices. Example: Framing a choice between two plants as “plants saved” vs. “plants lost.”
The Antidote
Limit adverse effects by employing the following:
Don’t automatically accept the initial frame, whether it was formulated by you or someone else. Always try to reframe the problem in various ways.
When others recommend decisions, examine the way they framed the problem. Challenge them with different frames.
Three Forecasting Traps
Meteorologists and bookies have opportunities and incentives to maintain records of their forecasting abilities. The rest of us seldom have enough carefully tracked data to adequately calibrate our minds to make reasonable estimates in the face of uncertainty. This sets us up for three estimating and forecasting traps.
We have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world--these instances are always easy to find. You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence.
"But in my experience, I have never been in any accident...of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort." E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic
Captain Smith's ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked about shipwreck in history.
The Overconfidence Trap
Most of us are overconfident about our judgment abilities and prediction accuracy, as we remember our successes and quickly forget our errors. Our hubris tricks us into considering only a narrow range of possibilities.
Major initiatives and investments often hinge on estimate ranges. Managers who underestimate the high end (or overestimate the low end) of a crucial variable may miss attractive opportunities or expose themselves to far greater risk than ever imagined.
Example: Estimating a narrow range between the seller’s and buyer’s reservation price in a real estate negotiation.
The Prudence Trap
When faced with high stakes, we tend to adjust our estimates or forecasts with prudence, “just to be on the safe side.” Too much prudence can be as dangerous as too little.
The “Recall Ability” Trap
Memories of dramatic events leave strong impressions on our minds and can skew future decision-making efforts.
The Antidote
Take a disciplined approach to forecasting.
Start by considering the extremes: the low and high ends of possible value ranges. Then, challenge your estimates, as well as those of your subordinates and advisers.
Always state your estimates honestly, and explain to anyone who will be using them that they have not been adjusted. Emphasize the need for frank input to anyone who will be supplying you with estimates. Test estimates over a reasonable range to assess their impact.
Carefully examine all of your assumptions to ensure they’re not unduly influenced by your memory. Get actual statistics whenever possible, and avoid being guided by impressions.
Recommended Reading on Behavioral Decision Making
“Judgment in Managerial Decision Making” by Max Bazerman
“Decision Traps” by J. Edward Russo and Paul J. H. Schoemaker
“Negotiating Rationally” by Max Bazerman and Margaret A. Neale
“Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini
Hedge-fund group SAC Capital Advisors LP and federal prosecutors have agreed in principle on a penalty exceeding $1 billion in a potential criminal settlement that would be the largest ever for an insider-trading case, according to people familiar with the matter.
SAC CEO Steven A. Cohen. Bloomberg
The payment by SAC, run by star manager Steven A. Cohen, is expected to be roughly $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion, according to these people.
The penalty means SAC would pay the U.S. government a total of nearly $2 billion, including a $616 million penalty the firm agreed to in a civil insider-trading settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March.
The firm didn't admit or deny wrongdoing in the civil settlement, which is awaiting approval by a federal judge. The firm says Mr. Cohen, who hasn't been accused of criminal wrongdoing, has done nothing wrong. Any settlement wouldn't affect a continuing criminal investigation into Mr. Cohen's trading activities, the people said.
Spokespeople for the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the SEC and SAC declined to comment on the negotiations.
Bottom Line for SEC and SAC: $1-to-2 billion penalty payment with no wrongdoing. After all, it's only money and comes with a "get out-of-jail card," too.
In "The Sports Gene" by author David Epstein, there are countless examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us.
They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.
For example, Donald Thomas, who on the seventh high jump of his life cleared 7' 3.25"--practically a world-class height. The next year, after a grand total of eight months of training, Thomas won the world championships. How did he do it? He was blessed, among other things, with unusually long legs and a strikingly long Achilles tendon--ten and a quarter inches in length--which acted as a kind of spring, catapulting him high into the air when he planted his foot for a jump.
What we are watching when we watch elite sports, then, is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages.
Epstein tells us that baseball players have, as a group, remarkable eyesight. The ophthalmologist Louis Rosenbaum test close to four hundred major and minor league baseball players over four years and found an average visual acuity of about 20/13; that is, the typical professional baseball player can see at twenty feet what the rest of us can see at thirteen feet.
The ability to consistently hit a baseball thrown at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour, with a baffling array of spins and curves, requires the kind of eyesight commonly found in only a tiny fraction of the general population.
Eyesight can be improved--in some cases dramatically--through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. But when it comes to drugs, Major League Baseball--like most sports--draws the line.
Source: Man and Superman article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker magazine, September 9, 2013
There is a difference between information and insights. Accessing good data is becoming easier, but reaching insights requires a genuine curiosity--a team must be interested and willing to tinker. Insight is what moves a team to action.
A team's goal is to figure out why data is behaving in a certain way. Good analytics bring data to life. The data needs to be pushed and pulled by different forces. The team's job is to understand the forces pushing the data so that insights can be gleaned and plans built.
Data has movement. It tells a story. A team has to figure out what the story is and why the story is being told.
Gut instinct is rarely arbitrary. Gut instinct is built on truth, experience, history and perspective--a composite of the person. The right composite leads to insight. Even intuition is based upon understanding how things should work or taking into account more than the traditional data set.
"TEAM Renaissance" is a simple model of a highly effective team. The book, "TEAM Renaissance: The Art, Science & Politics of Great Teams," is a collection of stories, specifics and immediate takeaways built around the Team Arch. Complementing the text, the Team Renaissance Survey is an interactive tool that assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a team.
Simply put, the biggest challenge most teams have in forming sharp insights is that they become complacent and stop looking beyond their own four walls. In essence, they lose perspective because they hear opinions from the outside less and less and are told what they want to hear more and more.
Instead, get comfortable with inviting fresh thoughts in. Listening for fresh thoughts is akin to reading a book, watching a play, or listening to music. Odds are that one of these fresh thoughts will be an insight. The better you get a pointing your awareness in the direction of freshness and the unknown, the more likely you will hear the insight when it arrives.
A deep and sharp insight into a problem permanently changes the way we look at it, and when we have a new perspective, a clear solution will present itself, often in days or even hours. Listening for insight is simply about being present and reflective. It's a very natural, maybe even our most natural, way of listening, but it can be awkward for many of us to empty the chatter in our heads and look instead for fresh thoughts.
Coach Bobby Knight won 902 college basketball games while Indiana University had the highest rate of graduation of any NCAA team.
Coach Knight accomplished that by measuring the performance of his players on and off the court and using the power of emotion intelligence to energize his teams to victory. When Knight started coaching, one of the worst things that he heard was "It will be O.K." He wondered how the hell is it going to be O.K.? He concluded that the worst word in the English language is "hope."
All the years he coached, he sent a card to every professor for each kid he had on the team and was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average. What he did for the player that was missing class (or beginning to slide down in the class) would be to bring the kid in at 5AM and have him run the stairs from the bottom to the top until the coach told him to quit. He did that with a lot of kids, but never twice.
Coach Knight was always focused on team performance and when he said something, the players understood exactly what he meant and what he wanted. Knight believes that a big part of teaching is being emphatic.
Source: The New York Times Magazine, March 3, 2013
In the May 3, 2012 "Football A Game at Risk" at http://www.bighouseblog.com/the posting began, "We all love football, you wouldn't be on this site right now if you didn't. We love the athleticism of the players, game strategy and to be fair the contact. It's a great watch. I'm sure you feel similar to myself when I say there isn't too many better things in life then walking to the big house on a 72 degree day to watch the Wolverines play a rival. The air is electric and there is a smell of grills working overtime at each tailgate. Your walk is a little faster and your heart is beating a bit quicker. The faster you get to your seat, the faster you get to be apart of 110,000 strong cheering for the same team. It's like walking into Disney World for the first time as a child. It's a magical feeling.
If you have been reading this site for years, you know one of the things that concerns me in this sport is concussion and overall brain trauma players can receive from playing this game. It scares me for many reasons, including the future of football at all levels. We got another slap in the face on what this game can do to you long term when "allegedly" Junior Seau took a gun and put it to his chest yesterday. It's another chilling reminder of something all football fans try to forget, the effects this game has on it's players long term health."
In the Wall Street Journalof May 5, 2012, Buzz Bissinger, author of "Friday Night Lights," in his article "Why College Football Should Be Banned" reports that college football has no academic purpose. Which is why it needs to be banned. A radical solution, yes. But necessary in today's times.
Bissinger writes, "I actually like football a great deal. I am not some anti-sports prude. It has a place in our society, but not on college campuses. If you want to establish a minor league system that the National Football League pays for—which they should, given that they are the greatest beneficiaries of college football—that is fine."
So, who truly benefits from college football?
Alumni who absurdly judge the quality of their alma mater based on the quality of the football team. The coaches and their athletic departments that make obscene millions.
Who doesn't benefit?
The players themselves who don't receive a dime of compensation. The 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision that lost money on their programs according to the NCAA. The players who are at risk to the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits. Academically, the student athletes' year-round commitment and the demands of the game makes the "student" half of the equation secondary and superfluous. And, of course, the scandals that have downgraded the reputations of those universities whose football programs were desperately engaged in the pursuit of winning at all costs.
The NCAA's core purpose is to: govern competition in a fair, safe, equitable and sportsmanlike manner, and to integrate intercollegiate athletics into higher education so that the educational experience of the student-athlete is paramount. Yet, the commercial success of college football and basketball is more than the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) can effectively govern.
This is not news to the university football and basketball programs that fund most of the other university-sponsored sports programs while favorably encouraging alumni to generously contribute to the general fund of each university.
Critical Discussions on the Future of College Football
Mr. Bissinger and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell will argue that college football should be banned in a debate on Tuesday evening, May 8, 2012, at New York University, sponsored by Intelligence Squared.
It's unclear if Dan McLaughlin will ever be a great golfer, but he is very good at self-promotion. He got Nike to sponsor him as a golfer even though he had never hit a golf ball or watched a golf tournament on television.
McLaughlin decided to become a professional after reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," which examines K. Anders Ericsson's study that says it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master any skill. So, right after turning 30 last year, he quit his job, built a website, hired a coach, and decided to live off the $100,000 he had saved. He is now on the "Dan Plan" which involves golfing for 10,000 hours--which will take six and a half years of full-time commitment--with the goal of becoming one of the roughly 250 men on the PGA tour.
When McLaughlin called Ericsson at Florida State University, where he teaches psychology, the creator of the 10,000 hours rule figured McLaughlin would quit soon after starting. Ericsson believes that only deliberate practice--intensely focused time spent trying to improve--causes progress. "Most people on a job spend 10,000 hours and they are at the level they started out," he says. "You can count the hours people drive and you're not going to see a high correlation to skill. You have to try to stretch yourself and attain higher levels of control."
McLaughlin is focused on golf--and now the experiment has taken its own momentum. He counts only about six hours a day, six days a week as official hours, but he probably spends 50 hours a week on the Dan Plan if you include workouts with his official trainer, reading about golf, and entering his meticulous stats from his notebook into his spreadsheets. He already is an inspirational story for a lot of fans who find his website.
McLaughlin played his first round in August, but it wasn't until November that he got his final club--the driver--to begin using. He remains upbeat. He's added, on Ericsson's recommendation, a mental coach, to make sure he's doing the kind of deliberate practice Ericsson suggests.
