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  So cognitive biases are the beating heart of behavioral economics and finance. But where do they come from? Are they innate or learned? Or are they epigenetic, some complex combination of the two where environmental factors trigger a gene for one or more of them? But there’s another possibility, namely that you catch them. Yep just like a cold, measles or Ebola. But in this case the method of transmission is social rather than bacterial or viral. Kind of like spreading a yawning fit. Did you know that if you spend a lot of time with obese people, you are likely to be obese yourself? And actually, it’s not just obesity but your weight so it applies but also to slenderness. And no, it’s not just that you all eat the same stuff together because you live in the same household. It is actually stronger with friends than with your roommates or significant other. So the researchers concluded that weight is socially contagious. Nor is just weight a major impact on the other party. The same thing occurs with healthy behaviors and exercise, as you might have guessed. Recently the same effect has been found in married people. If one exercises, the other is far more likely to exercise too. So there’s every reason to believe that cognitive biases can also be spread socially. In fact recent research into how behavior spreads socially focuses on Twitter If this is true it has some epic implications for us humans far beyond what has been considered so far. We know from recent research that if you are unemployed early in life (say because you had the misfortune to finish your education just as a recession hit), your lifetime income will be lower than otherwise. You will likely never recover from this hit. Similarly the implication from cognitive biases being socially contagious is that early exposure to particular cognitive biases could also impact the rest of your life adversely (or maybe positively too). Let’s take career planning as an example. Different companies will have preferred cognitive biases. If your first job is with a company with an adverse cognitive bias, say strong loss aversion, it could permanently impair your ability to do something entrepreneurial even if you are naturally entrepreneurial yourself. So your first job is even more important than you might have thought. A wise career planner would advise you to only choose companies with good cognitive biases and to avoid those with bad ones. Some companies with great names might have bad cognitive biases so your Harvard degree might get you into great-looking companies with bad cognitive biases that will impair your career and your lifetime chances of doing well (at least by your own lights). Speaking of Harvard, do different educational institutions also have different cognitive biases? Likely I would think. So instead of slavishly following the recommendations of US News and World report in choosing a school for your kids, you might want to choose them by their cognitive biases. Oh whoops, there’s no list for that. And maybe likely never will be. Just like a company is unlikely to publish one even if they knew what it was. But that doesn’t mean their cognitive biases are any less likely to impact your future career and life. But wait; there is a kind of way to find out the cognitive biases of schools and companies. Just look at the crowdsourced sites those rate teachers, company jobs and reputations to find out that’s going on there. They can give you valuable information and if you know enough about some cognitive biases, you can probably get some hint of what they are and the relative influence of the good and the bad ones. That’s better than nothing. You can see where this is going right? How about the cognitive biases of your business partner? What about the leaders of that acquisition you are contemplating? You potential lifelong love? Come to think about it, what about your parents? Sounds to me like there’s a product here. Rank colleges by cognitive biases to assess their likely impact on your future money-making behaviors. Rank companies by cognitive bias. Tinder for people who want to make money, not just find the perfect mate. We can make money out of this social contagion thing. Where do we start?!                                                                                                                                                                            Read More

I just read an article on astrology (Does Astrology Work? I’m Gonna Go With "No." in Bad Astronomy). I’ve never believed in horoscopes and all the other astrological claptrap. How could the positions of planets possibly influence your personality and behavior? But hold on here. I pride myself on being open-minded to different ideas and thoughts, even to ones that possibly sound ridiculous. And, hmmm, in the part I have been known to be wrong on certain other matters I then thought to be equally, if not even more ridiculous. So let’s give astrology the benefit of the doubt for the moment and consider what mechanism could possibly exist that would make it a real and, gasp, useful phenomenon. I’m going to talk gravitational waves for the moment. Bear with me, there’s a reason. Einstein’s general theory of relativity posits that there must be gravitational waves. Problem is, we’ve never found them although there have been numerous false sightings. But researchers haven’t given up. There have been several approaches ranging from hanging large weights and looking for tiny displacements to the recent apparently failed experiment to look for the tell-tale ripples that gravitational waves would leave on dark matter. Yep, it’s all beyond me too. But the general idea is that you have to make a detector that has extraordinary sensitivity which could sense waves that are unfathomably weak. Then you use some of the amazing instruments that are constantly emerging from high tech labs to measure the changes in the detector. Piece of cake right? Hmmm, now let me see. What do we humans have routinely lying around that is extraordinarily, and exquisitely sensitive whose operations could somehow be harnessed to identifying gravitational waves? Why, could one such be the human brain? Could it be that the brain is capable of sensing gravitational waves? Could the movements of planets and their juxtapositions be registered in our brain by some hitherto unsuspected mechanism? After all, brains have had several billion nears of evolution to build up the capability. As the summit of the art, has the human brain got the furthest way along to achieving this feat? But what mechanism could impart the absolutely extraordinary precision entailed in such a feat? Gravitational wave detectors are designed to measure down to the sub-molecular level. How could a human brain possibly achieve that? We’ve all heard about quantum physics right? The physics of ultra-small particles that is impossible for anyone but geniuses to understand? Well, here’s a turn up for the books. Recent research (over the last few years) has demonstrated that certain biological processes leverage quantum phenomena. For example it’s looking like human (animal?) vision relies on certain quantum effects in the retina to get the job done. Other similar findings are emerging. It’s being called quantum biology. In other words, it’s starting to appear that biological systems have evolved to leverage quantum mechanisms just as they have evolved to leverage other phenomena such as photosynthesis (which incidentally might also employ quantum effects). Is it possible that your brain uses quantum effects in its everyday functioning? Of course we know so little about the brain that at this stage anything is possible. So probably not impossible. And is it possible that the brain uses quantum mechanisms to achieve the sensitivity in detecting gravitational waves needed to sense the positions of the planets (not to mention other celestial bodies)? Ok so what if this is true? How would the brain being able to achieve all this actually impact our personality and behavior? Even before we are born? Well the bit about before you were born is pretty easy. We are well aware now that evens while you are in the womb, it can have a powerful impact on a baby through the maternal environment not to mention epigenetic effects. As to the impact on personality and behavior, we know so little about the brain in this area that any number of mechanisms can be imagined. But there clearly are mechanisms that exist that drive the development of your personality and behavior, even though generally we don’t understand what they are. But presumably they rely on the unbelievably complex configuration of brain components and their interrelationships. If gravitational waves are being detected by the brain with the help of quantum effects, it’s not too difficult to imagine some sort of mechanism that would involve these personality and behavioral drivers being somehow impacted. And, in that case, why not particular conjunctions of patterns of gravitational waves being somehow transmitted to the drivers of behavior? Every day we discover incredibly complex patterns involving the human brain that might have bene considered magic only a few short years ago. So is astrology true? Search me. But I am not prepared to say it isn’t because I can envisage a plausible mechanism that could make it true. It’s all that open-minded stuff you know. I’m not to blame. The gravitational waves did it to me. Or the quantum effects.             Read More

It has now become painfully obvious that all the climate science in the world isn’t going to do anything useful to change the climate. That’s because the problem is behavioral rather than primarily physical. In fact it’s probably the case that the more gloomy reports the climate scientists produce, the more people become inured to them and screen all this bade news out. After all, everything’s hunky dory now right? There are some organizations that get it such as the denizens of the UKs somewhat famous Nudge Unit but even at that august level, the boffins don’t actually know how to change minds en masse, like what’s needed in reality. The climate change scientists and supporters are great at analysis but fall tragically short on practical solutions. Nope, carbon emissions trading is not what I’m talking about thank you. How about something that common folks understand for starters? In the fashionable trade of behavioral economics it’s common to talk about the status quo bias; to us ignorati what that means is that the vast majority of people don’t like change and will do all they can to resist it. If the commoners don’t understand the issue or the boffinesque solutions to address it that’s a great way to turn them off doing anything. That’s where they are at right now. So the real issue for climate change is our behavior, not melting glaciers. And using logic to get us to change isn’t going to cut the mustard either. So what would work? Well for starters there's gotta be shock and awe, behavioral that is. As in you’ve got to really disgust or mentally terrorize people. Remember the smoking ads that showed the insides of a smoker’s lungs years ago? Or the pictures of the hearts of unborn fetuses beating inside their mother’s body? I think they provide us a template even though I still don’t think they are shocking enough. How about a fatwa for climate change from the Pope? An ISIS for climate change? Let’s think outside the box here. Time may be running out a lot faster than anyone think. I believe that the campaigns by the climate change campaigners are way too small and small-minded by half and reflect an abysmal level of understanding of how people actually think. Without some radical thinking in this direction them we have already lost the war. So far I don’t see any evidence that they’ve woken up yet. Another way of putting it is that the climate change people are suffering from the status quo bias as much, if not more, as the great unwashed that they so much criticize as being not willing to change. For an example of this look at the plans for terraforming and geoengineering that some of the extreme climate change people are promoting. A global umbrella to stop the sun’s rays? Seeding the ocean with iron filings? These aren’t visionary; they’re crazy. Why try such things when the problem is our behavior? If you change the PH of the oceans using trillions of dollars, will this change people’s behaviors any? Fat hope. It seems to me that the climate change campaigners need some really new thinking. They need to toss out the climate scientists and get some behaviorists who have their feet firmly planted but can still think outside the box. This might be difficult. The nasty little secret of climate change is that it has got to be its own industry with hordes of academics and consultants making billions off climate change fears and who’s going to give up their grants and revenues coming in even if the solution is actually receding in the rear-view mirror? For once, let’s get some big thinking in climate change, not the small stuff we’re getting now. Bring in a few shrinks from the new behavioral sciences and tell them to think really big. That’s what we need right now                      Read More

Behavioral economics is gradually winning over more converts. It’s now - justifiably - being applied to the most unlikely facets of human existence. So the natural (to me) question arises: should it be applied to animals too. I interpret animals broadly. Not just the warm-blooded ones we know and love like dogs, kittens, dolphins, elephants and other such cuddlies. I also mean to include the cold-blooded ones like snakes, insects, spiders, weevils, alligators. After all they’re all God’s creatures right? Here’s my thinking. The study of animal behavior became politically correct many moons ago. It’s now quite fashionable to study animal intelligence. The cutting edge in that area is now the emotional intelligence of animals and their sensitivity to each other and to us humans. So why not their level of business acumen? That might seem like a step too far. But animals clearly deal with scarcity. Business acumen can be boiled down to just two components; one is your propensity to use resources - not just money but things like how frugal you are with twigs and mud in making a nest. The other component is the animal propensity to add value, or to innovate. Right now that is a very hot topic of discussion amongst the animal ethology crowd. Being frugal and wise with resources obviously has a lot of use for any animal, humans included. And now that we know that even crows and chimps use tools, a whole new vista has been opened in the fevered debate about how to spur innovation (in humans). Such a discussion opens up the possibility, if not the inevitability that animals have social cultures, as indeed they obviously do, and by extension, economies. That means they do business. We might look down our snouts at animals’ lack of MBAs (not that they necessarily give humans any business sense, as has been strongly brought home to us in the serial financial crises of the last few years). But it looks awfully like animals have their own version of business thinking and models, even though we don’t understand them just yet. This might sounds a little outré. But let’s take another tack. Do animals consider and deal with risk? Yep, patently so. Do they have mental risk models? Yep again. Do they make provision for rainy days? Yes again. Hmm, this is starting to sound an awful lot like insurance in human society. Ok so maybe if we stretch we can make a case that animals have their own kind of economies, have mental risk models that work pretty well and make business decisions, just not using prices (just like we did when we used to use shells as mediums of exchange not so long ago). Does that butter any parsnips, as the ancient Brits used to say? In other words, can we make such knowledge useful to us truly? Well for starters, how similar are our risk and business models? Are we indeed the most evolved species in these areas? Or do they know something we don’t? Have they evolved in different directions? What do they know about risk that we don’t? How do they make decisions under uncertainty? What could all this tell us about how we are going to evolve in the future? Do animals’ business and risk models show us how to reconcile business risk with sustainability in ways that we could harness so we don’t pollute or nuke our way to extinction? How do they define and achieve higher economic returns for their prodigious efforts? Think the business intelligence of swarms (bees, termites, pigeons). Senior NASA boffins just pronounced that we would probably find alien life in the next 20 years. Could the study of behavioral economics in animals shed light on how other forms of life in the universe might have evolved from a risk, business and sustainability perspective? Is the business acumen of alien animals of interest to the alien life scientists at NASA? If not should it be? There’s a school of thought that says that consciousness is an emergent property of life, any life. Could business thinking also be an emergent property too since it deals with scarcity and innovation? If so, behavioral economics could yet become an even hotter topic                           Read More

Well I’m sure that this post will get me flamed but here’s going anyhow. Emotional intelligence is hot. It’s supposed to make you a better leader. How so? By making you more sensitive to your fellow man, it’s supposed to make your followers more engaged, more loyal to you and so on. The same with customers. In this model high engagement and high loyalty follows inexorably to higher sales and profits. I’m thinking of several people. Steve Jobs, Leona Helmsley, Martha Stewart, Frank Sinatra. Common denominator is that they were all regarded as unpleasant people to deal with. But all of them were ultra-successful in business terms, as well as rich. Is this just a coincidence? Let’s look at this a bit more. Try Steve Jobs for starters. Even his biographer Walter Isaacson acknowledges freely he wasn't a nice person. Not to mention the legions of people who have written about his abusive ways at work with his employees and colleagues, his business partners and competitors. OK I guess that in one of a zillion universes you could be a tough, unfeeling abusive jerk and still have a high EQ. I don’t think we’re in that one though. So I think we could justly say that Steve Jobs wouldn’t have topped anyone’s list for high EQ. And all of the Hall of Fame people I just mentioned above were similar, or even worse. Read Kitty Kelly’s biography of Frank Sinatra if you want to get the flavor. And I’m not even close to covering this pantheon of antiheroes. Bill Gates when younger, Elon Musk now, the list goes on. Why would it be that someone who is this nasty can be so rich? Pretty obvious right? Utra-focused, drives through any obstacles including wussies amongst his own employees, visionary above all else, takes no prisoners. So that’s the flip side of these people. Each of them immensely successful and of course, rich to boot. But none of them made it by being nice, or having anything remotely close to a high EQ. Each of them would appear to be the living embodiment of a rule that says that if you want to be really rich, don’t have a high EQ. Now I’m not here to argue that if you have a low EQ you will get to be rich, or that if you have a high EQ you can’t be rich. Not that there’s not some powerful evidence of the latter. Try Ben and Jerry of their eponymous firm to look at people who were nice and messed up the business acumen part. Bill Norris of Control Data, Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment. In fact in our own research into behavioral finance we see lots of evidence that altruistic people tend not to make money. There are powerful reasons for that. And yes I know about Mitt Romney and tithing; the argument there is that once it’s institutionalized and essentially compulsory it doesn’t count, albeit it is nice and social. And no I’m not arguing that you shouldn’t try to have a high EQ or do things to improve it if you want to make money. Nor am I arguing that you should be nasty in order to get rich off others’ peoples’ backs. All I’m pointing out is that the fashionable EQ hypothesis doesn’t hold up in multiple really famous and important cases. So that one of the landmark leadership theories of our time, that having higher emotional intelligence makes you a better leader, doesn’t necessarily hold up when you examine it more closely. If that’s right, there are an awful lot of leadership books and writing that have got it wrong or at least don’t have it right. If that’s correct I’m not saying that they should suddenly recant their thesis. What I would advocate is that they still push for higher EQ but acknowledge it won’t necessarily make you a better or more successful leader at least not if you measure it by raw financial outcomes. I would think it would make more sense to acknowledge the holes in the theory and state that getting a higher EQ is good for mankind and your colleagues albeit it might have some drawbacks that you have to guard against. Wouldn’t that make the framework more honest? I suspect that deep down the debate about EQ has some ideological baggage that no-one wants to own up too. EQ is particularly something that you might want in your employees if you are a public company with plenty of moolah and a fairly relaxed lifestyle, corporately speaking. As a stakeholder you probably don’t care. In fact, as a shareholder you might be deeply worried if the employees in that company you invested in care too much about anyone except your own investment. Otherwise they might help others, including your competitors and that might not be bullish for your position. If that’s the case then, EQ is for public company officers, for employees and for the people who train them including from the HR and the EQ industries. Business acumen is for owners and stockholders, the (rapacious?) financial and business types and the wealth management industry or so it would seem. If you like EQ does that make put you on the left of the political spectrum? If you don’t, then you’re on the right? Could that be the reason for the eulogizing - or the demonizing - of EQ?                  Read More

Did you see that Microsoft has developed software and a website that can guess your age just by looking at a photo? No more lying about our age I guess. And I suppose you have seen the numerous reports about how researchers can now identify your emotions based on brainwaves seen from MRI scans? So now we’re cutting off yet another avenue for creative obfuscation. But now you don’t even need a connection to MRI to ready your thoughts. That’s because there are now brain-computer interfaces that don’t need such a connection because they can use radio communication interfaces from your brain. That has already resulted in mind-controlled prostheses such as for arms, in one case, two arms simultaneously. It’s pretty clear that within a couple of years at most, brain-computer interfaces using radio communications will be routine in many areas. See for example advertisements on the web to help you build your own brain-controlled helicopter drone using off-the-shelf components. So now we have to worry about protecting our brains from others who would like to use it for their own nefarious purposes. At first some of these uses might appear to be (relatively) harmless such as checking your emotions to see if you are a terrorist. For example a security device that checks your emotional stout as you go through security at work, or maybe when you go through TSA inspection at the airport. But once you can start checking someones brains for stuff like this, where does it end? Does my girlfriend really like me? What are my kids thinking? Is my boss going to fire me? You can see where this doesn’t end. But even that doesn’t start to highlight what could really happen. If I can do these things by radio, maybe I can hack into your brain to make it think things that will result in something bad happening. Maybe I hack you to get your brain to stop your pacemaker. Or maybe to get your prostheses to do something you wouldn’t like them to do, like striking someone, or worse? Could I get hack a pilot to crash an airport deliberately using my iPad from the plane seat in the back of a plane? Or get the US President to press the Big Red Button? Is it possible that brain hackers could get into a leader’s brain and hijack his leadership strategies so that they now meet their objectives instead of the leader’s? Could this be the ultimate way of winning a war; by taking over the brains of the leadership instead of trying to kill them all? We are moving into an era of brain phishing. So if my brain is being hacked, how do I know it? If I get a sudden urge to smack someone, it is me or a hacker? Will psychosis now be con-mingled with the claim that the sufferer has been hacked? How do we distinguish between self-will and outside influence? Between social influences that are benign from "benign" or "legitimate" brain hacking? Between benign and malignant penetration of our thoughts? And what do you do about it? Are there certain techniques to identify if your brain is being phished? Certain behaviors that can prevent or reduce it? Will meditation help? Mindfulness training? Or are these techniques still to be developed? Who is going to do that? Not the NSA we hope. What are the ethics of getting psychiatrists involved? So cybersecurity is not just how to protect a computer from viruses. Not even about shielding my iPhone from hackers trying to get my passwords. Pretty soon it’s going to be about how to protect my brain from prying eyes and how to stop bad people using my brain to do bad things that I wouldn’t want to happen. And in particular cybersecurity will have to protect the brains of leaders from being hacked. That might be even more important than protecting conventional assets such as computers, grids and networks. How would you achieve this? I can’t even think where to start. How about building a helmet to wear at all times that will repel invaders? Hmm, a permanent bad hair day. Or how about I wear permanently something on my wrist that emits a protective force field to achieve the same ends? Sort of like an iWatch on steroids. Maybe I could make one that will make an exception for me to look at what my girlfriend is thinking? And if we get to this state of mind, what happens to our behavior? As individuals and as a species? Will our behavior start to change under the constant assault of potential hackers, just like we are all learning what emails not to click in case they are phishing devices? Will we start to develop anti-phishing behaviors from birth, developed epigenetically or even genetically? In three generations time will we need to have a measure of someones AHIQ (anti-hacking IQ)? Will these developments lead to changes in our brain structure as well as behavior over a couple of generations or so since we now know that epigenetic changes can occur very rapidly? It’s becoming obvious that events on the ground are outpacing our capacity to address them. Cybersecurity will soon be only to a minor extent a matter of making computers secure. The theater of operations is rapidly moving to a new terra incognita, our own brains and particularly to the most valuable, those of our leaders. What happens to leadership strategy then I wonder?                Read More

You know the usual approach to innovation in a corporation. Hold an offsite for brainstorming and to stimulate creativity. Get a big-name consultant. Team comes up with an idea, makes a plan. Does a public relations blast announcing their breakthrough idea. Fails. Do again. Fail again. If that wasn’t the case the vast majority of organizations would have no problem innovating right? The approach du jour is to go with a check the boxes approach based on a big-brand name theory. But here’s the rub. It doesn’t matter how many approaches you follow, it’s likely that all or most will fail. That’s because there’s no innovation without innovators. Corporations resist the idea that someone is indispensable. It’s much better to think that if you get someone smart with the right education, they will be an innovator. It totally forgets that innovators are a breed apart. If you have them, they will innovate no matter what because it’s in their genes. If you get a suit, they can never innovate in a million years, no matter how much theory and support you throw at them. One of the problems with corporate innovation efforts is that they tragically confuse creativity and innovation, as I have pointed out before. Another is that they also confuse entrepreneurship and innovation. These problems arise because the vast majority of corporate types aren’t innovators. And the main difference between innovators and everyone else is not one of intelligence. It’s a cognitive difference. So it’s really difficult for a non-innovator to recognize an innovator, even if he’s hit in the proverbial face by one. So to help you recognize these rare types, here is a list of the differences between innovators and everyone else. Innovators always overestimate the ease of achieving the target: the target always looks impossibly close to an innovator. To a normal person it looks realistically far. That’s because innovators focus on the reward, not the risk, and their perceptual field sees rewards as being much larger than they are from an achievability perspective because the innovator factors in the psychic value of achieving the reward which for him is always huge, as long as the idea is big enough Innovators always radically underestimate risk: for them the risks always look very low and easily overcome, for normal people they realistically assess the risk so it looks large; an innovator is someone who has a warped view of risk, discounting it so much that a huge risk always looks very attractive Introversion; most, but not all, innovators are introverts. That is shown clearly from our psychometric research in this area; this happens because introverts prefer to spend time alone which gives them more time for the thinking involved, they don’t care what others think, so they aren’t deterred by having a bad social image from being different. One of the many reasons extroverts are usually not innovators is that they are very sensitive to the views of others about themselves and if they think that view will be bad, they won’t do it. An introvert on the other hand might even do it precisely because others will think less of him; it’s the introvert’s way of sticking it to other people and showing they don’t care about them. An innovator wants to destabilize things and make wholesale change; innovators want to break things especially the status quo; that’s because in the established world, they have no power. However if they can destabilize the status quo, the world changes so m much that they might be the only people who understand it which gives them power. In addition, they often have a high sense of insecurity which makes them want to show people that they are powerful, which they can only do if they change the world in their favor. Innovators are so motivated they are prepared to risk being fired; innovators are so highly motivated to achieve their vision that they will risk being fired for their belief and actions. If someone is not prepared to get fired for pursuing an innovative course it’s almost certain that they are not an innovator. Lone wolf; innovators like to be on their own. They hate to have a boss (OK, who doesn’t?) but an innovator differs in this area by often being prepared to go out and do it themselves in their own company because they hate so much having to do what someone else tells them. Energy, fire in the belly: OK you don’t have to be an innovator to have fire in your belly but if you don’t have that fire you certainly aren’t going to be one since otherwise you will never have the energy to go through with an innovation that everyone else thinks is stupid and is going to resist as strongly as they can. Innovators don’t necessarily have original ideas: Did you notice that I didn’t say one difference is that innovators have original ideas but normal people don’t? Yes, that’s the case. Innovators find their ideas from anywhere and often they just pick up an idea that’s "in the air" that they didn’t originate themselves but that they see represents a huge opportunity that no-one else is taking up. So one of the differences is not that innovators have original ideas and others don’t. The difference is that innovators see and leverage opportunities that others don’t or can’t. The message: find innovators, not innovations. The innovators will then find the innovations for you.    Read More

Was doing some coaching last week and met a young lady who had impressive skills in arranging events. She’s a leader but doesn’t know it yet. And her lesson is a good one for all of us. She arranges conferences for her company. But although young she has already migrated to making these conferences into experiences. People at her conferences don’t sit; they stand. That makes them mix things up and talk to people they would never talk to otherwise. They have to move, instead of sitting down and going to sleep. Movement is good; sitting is bad, just about always. There’s a broader lesson here. When we talk about leadership we tend to talk about the importance of the message, how to use talent and so on. But there’s another dimension that only the flopheads in Hollywood really understand. That is that leadership is about creating experiences for people that will motivate, excite and inspire them. The reason that people get inspired is not usually that they believe. It’s that they are inspired. And if you give them an experience that impacts them at the emotional level, no matter how cheesy, you will win a convert over to your cause that you won’t by giving them a briefing to read. I hate using Steve Jobs as an example because he’s so hackneyed as an exemplar. But you had to give it to him. Whether it was with his press conferences, his jeans and T-short, his impresario-like acts berating his employees, he always provided an experience. And he knew the value of choreography using it all the time to create effects, even though we didn’t know he was choreographing all of them. The best leaders are natural choreographers. Often they are impresarios like Richard Branson or Larry Ellison. And you don’t have to be a flaming extrovert like them to do it. Even Warren Buffett in his older age has assumed choreographer-like tendencies even though he is a deep introvert. And being a choreographer-leader doesn’t mean that you have to be into son et lumiere, although it might well help. Choreographer-leadership might also include some of the following: Bringing employees together in unexpected but choreographed ways Bringing natural innovators into bastions of stability to shake them up a little Integrating walking environments with working environments Doing planned but choreographed simulations for your employees with them, either acting out situations or otherwise I think that one of the big problems in modern leadership, especially in large organizations is that it is over-intellectualized, too structured and over-analyzed. Unless you can meet people at an emotional level and give them an experience rather than just a lesson, you probably won’t get the compelling leadership impact you actually want. So the lesson is, if you want to be a better leader, you also have to think like a choreographer.             Does choreography provide us with a new more effective leadership model?Read More

Much of the talk about leadership is about how the leader looks and how he should act to be seen as being most effective by her followers. But I think there’s another perspective; that the best leaders, to paraphrase the old saying about children in Victorian times, are best not seen, and not heard. That might seem a bit heretical. Isn’t the job of the leader to be seen and heard so that people know what she wants and can see an image of direction that they would like to follow? Well yes, but only sometimes. A good leader knows when to be seen and heard, and maybe even more importantly, when not to be seen and not to be heard, at least not through the normal senses. I call them invisible leaders. I have known many leaders who had mastered the skill of being invisible. Moreover many of these leaders had also mastered the skill of knowing when to be visible or when to be invisible. Most of them, I have to say, were invisible most of the time and only came up for air occasionally. Maybe that’s not the classic conception of leadership but I can also say that in almost all of these cases, these leaders were extraordinarily effective. So much so that one of the most frequent questions asked about them was: "How does everything work so well here even though were never see Joanna?" So here’s a partial answer to that question. It’s partially because I think invisible leaders have many skills and approaches that are not well understood, even by the leadership literati. In many cases I think that invisible leaders cultivate this lack of understanding because they don’t want their secrets of invisibility to be well understood, lest they become less effective. So here are some of the strategies followed by invisible leaders: They rarely issue edicts; instead they let their wishes be known to be merely suggestions and let people decide for themselves whether or not they want to follow them. If they don’t, the leaders let well enough alone and go on to the next idea. If enough good people don’t think it’s a good idea, either he will drop it or try another suggestion. They rarely tell people to actually do something. Instead they divine what a person really likes doing, or something he really wants to do now, and then they let it be known that she would have no objection that the person does it. Of course then the person does it very well because they own the idea, not the leader. When taking many decisions, instead of making the decision themselves, they allow the decision to bubble up from below and then they follow it. In this case it appears they have followed the team rather than led it so their people feel that their views have been respected and followed which increases the level of engagement by the followers. They frequently set up informal committees or groups to look at and suggest decisions. They are careful not to direct these groups and even to tell the groups what their own view or recommendation is, but still allow enough - but not all - of their thoughts to be known so that the group will not stray too far off the reservation. As I mentioned, these are only some of the techniques followed by invisible leaders. But these four are the basics. Even when they are visible, invisible leaders still use these techniques to a greater or lesser extent. You might think that some of these techniques are manipulative. So be it. The questions are: are they any more manipulative than conventional techniques for command and control? Are they worse than straight commands? Is understanding your people so well that they do things that you don’t tell them a do bad way of leading? I wouldn’t necessarily think so. An invisible leader might seem to have a lot in common with the Level 5 leaders talked about by Jim Collins in his famous book "Good to Great". I’m not a great fan of the science behind the book but I think that a Level 5 leader comes closest in the popular imagination to what I see as an invisible leader. But I think Jim Collin’s Level 5 leaders still had PR guys and the full panoply of the public company CEO albeit more muted than in the usual case. My invisible leaders are far more muted and far more subtle than I think Jim Collins’ Level 5 leaders ever were, especially when you consider the well-known less-than-stellar epilogs to many of them. In any case, I think the techniques of invisible leaders are well worth studying. In this leadership-obsessed age, sometimes the focus is on the overt signals of leadership rather than being simply effective. And taking on the mantle of invisible leadership is surely one guard against leaders whose power goes to their heads, or who are destructively narcissistic. Or think that being publicly decisive is the only way to be a good leader. Next time you see an organization where things seem to be going well, but you can’t see how the leader is doing it, ask whether they are one of the best types of leader, the invisible leader.                Read More

Over the last couple of weeks I have been conducting coaching for innovators identified using our psychometric assessments. This has reminded me of an important issue that usually gets overlooked in discussions on innovation. In the conventional wisdom, an innovator is someone who thinks up an idea and then (maybe) does something with it. I have blogged before on this confusion. Steve Jobs filched the Apple GUI from Xerox. Bill Gates bought DOS from tiny company Seattle software for a song. Neither created the products for which they were later, justly, seen as being the innovators. They didn’t create the products; they spotted them. Many innovators are incredible spotters of opportunities that everyone else has missed. In many cases, that’s what makes them the innovator, not that they created the idea, product or service, which as I have said, in many cases they didn’t. Last week I was coaching a young lady with an incredible idea which she is already putting into practice in a project which could become a company. In discussing it with her she told me that she had got the idea from her husband. But that doesn’t make me think any the less of her innovative capabilities. Her husband threw out an idea which she spotted as an opportunity. No doubt this isn’t the first time an idea like hers has bene mentioned somewhere. The difference is she immediately saw the opportunity and picked it up and ran with it. That’s the difference between most innovators and most of the rest of us. However I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all innovators are spotters. Some are indeed creators. Einstein clearly created his own ideas. But there many others who were quick to see their importance and who say how they could be used, for example in navigation, timekeeping and so on. Einstein was a scientific innovator. Most innovators in business are commercial innovators. Scientific innovators do something like Einstein and dream up something new. Commercial innovators usually spot something that already exists but has lain dormant since no-one saw the enormous possibilities of the idea. Discussions about innovation and innovators have tended to confuse the two types of innovation. The result is that commercial innovation, where someone spots an existing idea, is somehow looked down upon as inferior. Of course, when it’s by an icon like Steve Jobs, we overlook the fact that he got it illegally. But that’s a very narrow-minded view and overlooks the source of most commercial innovation. So in working with innovators you have to be very careful that you don’t say something like "You didn’t make up that idea; I heard it before somewhere else so the you didn’t make it up and therefore you aren’t an innovator." Because that misses the whole point and would have missed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and innumerable others. It’s another tweak on the true meaning of innovation. Those of you have kept up with this blog know that this is another of my pet peeves (right up there with thinking that anyone can be an innovator). Spotting the unspotted is just as socially valuable as creating the uncreated. If you don’t want to end up missing something really important, you need to keep that firmly in mind.                            Read More

Did you see the research that shows that the descendants of Holocaust survivors have elevated stress levels compared with others? It seems that trauma can be inherited. It's starting to look like that goes for a lot of other things. For example recent research shows that breast cancer risks acquired in pregnancy may pass to the next 3 generations. Another way of seeing this is that what happens to you in your life isn’t just a function of your own genes and those of your parents; it is a result of the combined experience of your forbears and even bloodline. We’ve known for some time that most of our DNA doesn’t seem to do anything, the so-called junk DNA. That’s mystery number 1. But now it’s clear that the unimaginably complex interplay between gene expression and environmental influences results in biological outcomes that were formerly thought to be impossible, such as evolution occurring within one generation, a theory put forward by Lamarck, formerly ridiculed for centuries. So it’s starting to look like our DNA does vastly more than we understand. In fact it has uncanny similarities to dark matter. You know, the type of matter (and dark energy) that scientists now believe makes up the vast majority of all matter. They can’t see it directly and they don’t know what it does (except hold the universe together). But they do know that the matter we see is relatively inconsequential in the overall scheme of things. Just like only a tiny fraction of our DNA does anything useful. So what does the dark DNA do? The research I quoted above shows one perspective on the role of DNA namely the collective biological experience of our forebears. The history of science does give us another. Jung and others proposed the idea of a collective unconscious. Dreams allowed us to see into this. We could be encoding this into memories stored in our DNA. So it could be our DNA is a distributed mechanism for storing the collective memories of all humans, kind of cloud-sharing for the human family history. Another possibility is that the DNA controls quantum communication processes between brains everywhere, as I have proposed previously. You would think that would use up at least some of the dark DNA, right? In this perspective the brain itself is a universe. Peer inside and you can see your own biological destiny, albeit this is only an infinitesimal sliver of the total DNA. You can see the genetic history of your own bloodline right back to the beginning. And you can see the collective history of the human experience. Now that’s really a decent-sized universe. That’s worthy of more consideration. Can we take this analogy further? You have probably heard about the theory of multiple or parallel universes, courtesy of author Brian Greene. If the theory about the collective team of our brain and our dark DNA holds any water, our brain is actually a collection of universes. Go into any one and you get a totally different view: of yourself as an individual: your relationship to the human race: an insight into human collective experience: maybe communication with brains everywhere. That’s a lot of work for a piece of jelly weighing around 4 pounds. Could it be that our brain is actually a wormhole to those multiple, parallel universes? Could it be, taking the analogy even further, that we don’t need a warp drive to get to Alpha Centauri? That the ticket to ride has actually been within us all along? That our brain is a wormhole cunningly camouflaged as a control module for a single body so we can’t see its true purpose? That we can actually use this wormhole to penetrate the mysteries of existence, not just here on Earth but elsewhere? That getting to the stars might actually be easier than getting to Mars?                                        Read More

Uh oh, I guess this is really a sacred cow. I’m a runner (road, not gym) too. But it looks to me like there’s a big problem in this area of gyms. Not only that, by using a gym, exercisers are actually denying themselves some much greater health benefits. First of all the bad news about gyms. Past research shows that they often have a serious problem with bacteria. It occurs in most areas of the gym including exercise equipment, hot tubs, swimming pools, showers, towels and so on. One analysis of a site showed that it harbored 132 million bugs in an area the size of a 2p coin, while the average count was 16 million, compared with 500 for the average toilet seat. You’ve got a lot of sweat, warm and moist conditions, maybe with a few ill people thrown into the mix. Kind of like being in heated airplane breathing recycled air. Or a hospital. Either way, not good. And there’s no state or federal health regulations for gyms. You are totally dependent on the gym itself to keep things clean. Most gyms do take considerable efforts to keep things clean. But it’s clearly an impossible environment from an antibacterial perspective. You are exercising in a bacterial soup and no amount of hand sanitizer is going to change that. It’s not just the bacteria. It’s also the air. One recent study in New York showed that "Almost all of the gyms in the study had levels of these substances (dust and formaldehyde" that significantly exceed European standards for healthy indoor air standards." You’re breathing in the exhalation products of a lot of sweaty exercisers as well as the remains of the cleaning and deodorizing products that are used to try to remove the smell of human existence. But here’s what I think is the bigger problem. That is that gym-goers are denying themselves the immense value of sunlight by exercising indoors. Most everyone is sublimely unaware of the importance of that lack. It’s well known that most of us lack vitamin D but that it’s essential to good health so many people take vitamin supplements. The major benefits of vitamin D are prevention of osteoporosis and positive impacts on our immune system and heart health. You can also get your daily shot of vitamin D by being out in the sun. But we now know that vitamin D supplements do not replace the health benefits you get from real sunlight. In other words, you really have no choice than to spend some time in the sun if you want to have the best health. But now there’s more fascinating research about the impact of sunlight on human health. It turns out that sunlight promotes the production of nitric oxide in your skin and that this in turn lowers blood pressure and has positive impacts in strengthening the immune system. But now there’s even more research that links regular exposure to sunlight to reducing obesity and diabetes through both the notice oxide effect and other linkages that we don’t understand yet. Of course, now that researchers can smell blood in the water, there’s even more good stuff coming out. One is the finding that "outdoor physical activity had a 50 percent greater positive effect on mental health than going to the gym" through its effect of reducing stress. And of course, when you are exercising outside, you are getting the benefits of breathing air that has been sterilized by the effects of the sun’s ultra-violet rays so you are breathing clean air (unless you are in a big polluted city, and especially if you are overseas such as in Beijing or New Delhi). That’s got to count for something right? The irony is that many people (me included) have tended to support our non-gym-going habits with our contention that exercise machines don’t give you the same workout as running outside where you don’t get all that help from the machine. But guess what; we’re all wrong. It turns out that it’s basically the same. So that’s one argument you can’t use for throwing brickbats at gym-going. Of course, if you are exercising, that’s a good thing. It has enormous positive health benefits. I don’t think they are being totally negated by going to a gym. Let’s say they are just being significantly reduced. In some cases that bacterial load you are receiving is going to have much more pernicious effects, so be warned. The commonsense thing would be just to exercise outside. That might not be possible for many people. So the nest best thing is if you have to go to a gym to exercise, make sure that you spend at least an hour a week in sunlight, maybe walking or cycling. There is an answer although the gyms might think it’s too radical. That is that the best antibiotics are fresh air and open roofs to let in the sunlight. This was what Florence Nightingale used to recommend and one of the ways she brought down the huge infection rates that existed in Victorian hospitals at the time. You might think that’s kind of old-fashioned. But there’s a new realization that modern hospital designs, using windows that can’t be opened, no fresh air and a lack of sunlight is actually one of the best environments for infectious bacteria including some of the baddies like staph and MRSA. We need to redesign hospitals to allow lots of fresh air and real sunlight as the best way to reduce these hospitable conditions for deadly infections. That’s how those "old-fashioned" Victorian sanitariums were built, you might remember. The problem is that modern gyms are designed like modern hospitals with sealed windows and no direct sunlight. The answer is that gyms must be totally redesigned so that they are genuinely healthy places in which to work out instead of breeding grounds for the worst bacteria. We’ve collectively forgotten that our bodies were designed specifically for a lot of sunlight and fresh air. I have little doubt that in the near future researchers will demonstrate a strong link between cognitive performance and sun exposure. In our modern age we have also collectively forgotten that fresh air and sunlight are the best antibiotics. Until gyms are extensively redesigned my advice is exercise outside as much as you can.                               Read More

Have you heard about the scandal with cheating on the SAT? It’s particularly prevalent in Asia with Chinese and Korean students being repeat offenders. The organizations behind the cheaters go to some considerable lengths to get the SAT questions. They send questions to phones by text and other means. The stakes are rising though. Some cities in China are actually using drones to intercept these signals. So there’s actually a bit of an arms race going on between the cheaters and the gamekeepers with both using more innovative means to outsmart the other side. If there wasn’t the ethical dimension here I am sure that the organizations supplying the cheating test-takers would otherwise be called innovative. Even the cheaters might be called innovative too. Of course it might offend many sensibilities to say that but nonetheless, it’s probably accurate. I often cite Steve Jobs in this regard because he’s a really good example. He purloined his Mac interface from Xerox without distribution or payment. It worked and he got away with it. It was definitely innovative but it was almost certainly wrong or at least ethically challenged. For some time all those millions of people who were using stolen downloaded music were lauded as heroes of the digital age even though what they were doing was criminal, as courts later ruled. If you called them criminals at that time you were seen as being old-fashioned or just plain stupid. But they were probably hopping on the innovation bandwagon in their own misguided way. Grooveshark was lauded as an innovator with its Napster-like downloaded music model (it was actually located in my hometown until its demise). Yet it was basically engaged in a criminal enterprise. It thrived for some years on this model, and managed to stave off the companies whose music it stole until the courts closed it down recently. But while they were alive they were the darlings of the digerati. Innovators are as innovators does. Finally of course ethics won, after a long hard fight though. Yet it was precisely this moral victory of ethics over fashion that allowed Taylor Swift to cock her snoot at Apple recently. Without this fight to defeat unethical innovators from the downloaded music area , stealing music might have become legal by default and artists like Taylor Swift would have lost their livelihood.. Frank Sinatra strikes me as being another example in this category. He was as innovative as they get in the music sphere. But he was a fellow-traveler of the Mafia and was basically a criminal himself, a story that Kitty Kelley tells in her pathbreaking biography of him "His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra." To say he was tawdry and a very nasty person is an understatement. But he was certainly innovative. The lionization of celebrities means we often turn a blind eye to their peccadilloes. If they are innovative, then we tend to remember the innovation part and forget about the rest. I suspect that the problem with the cheating Chinese students and the organizations behind them is that they are Chinese so it’s pretty easy to target them as cheats - which they are. But the innovation part is brushed under the carpet because they don’t have any redeeming celebrity status which would probably get them off the hook. If you are an innovative celebrity or you have money it’s quite easy to do unethical things but fool everyone to think otherwise. You can pay public relations people to pull the wool over the eyes of the press and the public, as Steve Jobs did for so long. Or you can pay lawyers to hold things up in the courts, like Grooveshark did (and Napster before it), and enter into a long war of attrition that you might even win, thanks to the vagaries of the US legal system. You can be innovative both inside and outside ethical constraints. It happens a lot in wars, tragically. But it’s still innovative even if it’s tragic and totally immoral. ISIS has clearly been enormously innovative even though without any doubt it is guilty of war crimes and the most terrible, inhumane and ugly acts possible. We tend to equate the term "innovative" to being morally good. That’s one of the reasons it gets so much press. It’s so good to be an innovator right? Innovativeness is next to Godliness maybe? But we forget that are brains are plastic. Our mental skills are often used as much for innovating in the darkest ways possible as well as in the greatest ways. We just have to be careful that we don’t let our flawed, unconscious decision processes take over and confuse innovation with "the good". When a celebrity or anyone else’s does something innovative that’s bad, we need to call them out. Otherwise we will end up extolling bad or even terrible acts by using a perversion of the term innovation. Unfortunately that’s what’s trending these days.                  Read More

I’m sure you have heard of the microbiome? That’s the trillions of bacteria in the human gut whose functions we still only dimly understand. But one thing has recently become very clear. That is that the microbiome has a huge impact on our feelings, moods and mental functioning generally. Here’s the interesting part. It’s also become clear that the microbiome produces many of the same chemicals that are used by the brain such as dopamine and other neurochemicals. And these chemicals can pass through the blood-brain barrier. So many of the chemicals in your gut could be used to change your moods and behavior, and even to address mental disease. The new name for these chemicals is psychobiotics. Think of them as the fancy successor to probiotics. Right now health and medical experts are licking their chops at the potential these chemicals have to do good. But there are other people who are probably licking their chops too. That’s the marketing guys and the spooks, amongst many others. The marketing guys now have a brand new way to manipulate and mislead you that’s radically more sophisticated than traditional marketing and advertising. How about psychobiotics in your cereal which make you eat more of a sister brand of cereal? What about snack bars that make you want to buy more expensive doodahs? How about a frappuccino that makes you much more likely to download a Starbucks movie? We've just discovered the next big leap in neuromarketing folks. But this is the tip of the iceberg. What if I can find details of the exact composition of your individual microbiome and link it you your personal data? Sound impossible? Just ask the Chinese and they can give you the information on at least 18 million Americans from the monumentally incompetent Federal Office of Personnel Management. What’s the odds that they have also purloined the medical records of millions of Americans too? And not just the Chinese. How about the NSA which has records of everything including no doubt your own personal medical records? Did you know that the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Board, ostensibly set up to protect the privacy of US citizens, has actually instead collected data on 600 million credit card accounts? The Government Accounting Office has just released a report saying that the CFPB doesn’t have sufficient security to protect this data either. So there’s now enough data lying around unprotected to allow US spooks, foreign governments and hackers and private companies to link your private financial and other data to your medical data, including the data on your microbiome. That’s once hospitals start to collect it, which you can guarantee they will soon, partly for some very good reasons. Just imagine how that data can be abused. For example I could now link your private financial data with your IP address and microbiome data to figure out how best to impact your mood and mental functioning using a combination of advertising and special offers (e.g. for food or medicines). Maybe I want to do this because you are the senior executive of a competitor and I want to nobble you to make you less effective. Or I am a romantic rival of your boyfriend and I access hacker data to target his financial and medical data to figure out ways to destabilize him mentally and emotionally so that you switch your attentions to moi. No-one would ever think of doing that, right? Maybe I am the commanding officer of the armed services of an unnamed Slavic country that has decided it wants to unnerve the entire population of the US so that it won’t attack it if it invades several nearby countries. The commanding officer also has deep information on the moods and emotions of our troops near his country and can gain secret access to the supply chain that provides the food supplies of the defending troops. So he can change their mood to one of defeatism and despair so that when he attacks we won’t defend. I guess no-one would ever think of something so nefarious right? Of course one can also think of some really beneficial uses of microbiome data. It could help society, government and business in innumerable ways, and it probably will. The unfortunate thing is that they guys who want to abuse this information for bad purposes are probably already way ahead of the good guys. Some of the bad guys are ours too. We tend to think of weapons of mass destruction as being physically massively destructive ones like nuclear bombs, chemical and biological weapons and poisons in the water supply. But the ultimate weapons of mass destruction are lying right inside you right now just waiting for someone to come along and activate them. We’re almost there.                  Read More