A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Flattery and agreement can be a lethal combination for a CEO, according to research by Sun Hyun Park, James D. Westphal and Ithai Stern.
“Our theory suggests how high levels of flattery and opinion conformity can increase CEOs’ overconfidence in their strategic judgment and leadership capability, which results in biased strategic decision making,”
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Last Thursday we looked at the need for women employees (with clout) considering the new reality where women have become the majority of early adopters.
Let me make something crystal clear; diversity involves far more than people looking different—true diversity will occasionally make you uncomfortable.
Not the discomfort that stems from bigotry, but the kind that that rattles our assumptions and makes us think.
Rather than reinventing the wheel I am reposting (with light editing) something from several years ago that hits the true diversity nail on the head.
Another way to look at it is that if spending $100 results in a bottom line increase of $1000, did you really spend the $100, or did you gain $900? That $900 that wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t invested the initial $100.
Any increased spending on diversity development is an investment and will be more than offset by the increases in innovation, productivity and revenues.
The real question is how do you define diversity?
Old diversity focuses on diversity of race, gender, orientation, creed and national origin.
New diversity includes all of the above plus diversity of thought.
Think about it, with a little effort a manager can create a diverse group who all think the same way—George W. Bush’s initial Cabinet looked diverse, but their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) was homogeneous.
It’s far more difficult to put together a group of totally diverse thinkers. Managers tend to hire in their comfort zone and more and more that refers to how people think, rather than how they look.
So what can you do to ensure that you’re building a truly diversified team?
Here are five key points to keep in mind before and after hiring.
Avoid assumptions. People aren’t better because they graduated from your (or your people’s) alma mater, come from your hometown/state or worked for a hot company.
Know your visual prejudices. Everybody has them (one of mine is dirty-looking, stringy hair), because you can’t hear past them if you’re not aware of them.
Listen. Not to what the words mean to you, but what the words mean to the person speaking.
Be open to the radical. Don’t shut down because an idea is off the wall at even the third look and never dismiss the whole if some part can be used.
Be open to alternative paths. If your people achieve what they should it doesn’t matter that they did it in a way that never would have crossed your mind.
Most importantly, if you’re totally comfortable, with nary a twinge to ripple your mental lake, your group is probably lacking in diversity.
Today is a collection of provocative, personal opinions on a variety of subjects. I hope you’ll take time to comment if one hits hard.
Since Steve Jobs died there have been dozens of tributes and a more recent outpouring of reality checks, because Jobs was not a saint—but then who is? I found the mortal Steve touchingly described in his sister’s eulogy and the business side balanced by Jesse Larner on products and Geoffrey James on management.
The articles on Groupon’s IPO have been inundating the media since it was announced. Keith Ecker provides a look at the repercussions from a changing culture beyond the analysts’ discussions of share price and value.
I’m sure many of you are following the heated debate sparked by a screening of the November 18 episode, “The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley,” from the CNN documentary series, “Black in America.” One result was a Twitter fight over comments by Michael Arrington, claiming in one breath that he doesn’t know of an African-American CEO and in the next that Silicon Valley is a pure meritocracy (which you would only believe if you are an under-30 white male with access to a great Rolodex). Read this commentary by Hank Williams, a successful, black entrepreneur.
Speaking of entrepreneurs, check out Josh Petersel’s, Harvard Business School Class of 2013, take on entrepreneurism.
Cindy Ronzoni, a communications and social media consultant, had heard a lot about the Zappos culture. See what she thinks about it and her experience when she took the Zappos tour at its headquarters in Las Vegas.
Finally, Gene Marks, offers up his thoughts on Why Most Women Will Never Become CEO. At first reading it comes over as pretty sexist, but read it again and the reality of what he says is plain, although I don’t completely agree with his final statement.
Today’s Expand Your Mind offers links to articles that not only inform, but may shake up your views and launch you in new directions.
Learning doesn’t stop when you leave school; it is a life-long process that often requires you to study. Study habits are usually formed early and carried throughout life, but what if the way you were taught to study and that you teach your kids isn’t the best way to learn? That is the intriguing idea coming from new research.
Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. … The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget.
Discussions about corporate culture are everywhere these days. In this short interview Edgar H. Schein, Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at MIT offers a new wrinkle on what corporate culture means theses days; he says to think in terms of cultural islands and the need for disparate groups to be synergistic, rather than homogenous. To all his examples of various cultural sources I would add the culture of individual managers, from CEO to team leader.
You are never going to integrate all of these cultures but you have got to get them aligned and get them working toward the same purpose.
Important as aligning sub cultures is, it can’t happen when the culture is as badly damaged as Home Depot’s after Bob Nardelli ran amok. Surprisingly, it is Frank Blake, another GE alum, recruited by Nardelli, who is successfully changing that.
Frank Blake’s mellow, it’s-not-about-me style helped him move Home Depot past the emotionally charged reign of predecessor Bob Nardelli and recapture some of the culture fostered by its founders. It also syncs with his push to get the company back to its service-oriented roots.
Finally, an exclusive, in-depth look at Foxconn, the ultra low-profile Chinese company that manufactures iPhones, PlayStations, and Dell computers, whose profile was raised in headlines of worker suicides.
Rather, [the celebration] was a joint production of employee unions and management at Hon Hai Precision Industry, the flagship of Foxconn Technology Group, as part of an effort to mend the collective psyche of a Chinese workforce that numbers more than 920,000 across more than 20 mainland factories. The need to do so became apparent after 11 Foxconn employees committed suicide earlier this year, most of them by leaping from company-owned high-rise dormitories. The publicity-averse Taipei-based company and its 59-year-old founder and chairman, Terry Gou, were thrown into the spotlight, subjected to unfamiliar scrutiny by customers, labor activists, reporters, academics, and the Chinese government.
Each five-page summary is presented in a crisp magazine-page format. You can read it in less than 10 minutes – the perfect length to deliver the book’s key ideas. The no-fluff summaries are logically structured to get the maximum out of your reading time.
I agree that there’s too much fluff in many business books, but that fluff serves a purpose.
It’s often the fluff that helps people learn, because the differences are in the fluff and it’s the differences to which they relate. In other words, while someone may be deaf to one presentation another might resonate deeply leading to substantial change.
Think about it; how many times have the lessons you took away from a certain book been so different from a colleague as to make you wonder if you both read the same book.
So how valuable are the summaries? Probably about as valuable as online cheat sheets if that’s all that is read.
Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.
Granted, I haven’t read any of the abstracts, but my experience says that you will lose much of a books’ real value—especially the subtle ideas that play directly to your own MAP—by relying on just a five page summary.
But perhaps this is the future; a world where all ideas and learning come predigested, so they can be sucked up through a straw and thoroughly homogenize the workforce.
People want to spend their time with people like themselves, that is their comfort zone, and that is where they hire. Managers prefer to hire people
from backgrounds they understand;
working in areas in which the manager feels knowledgeable;
with experiences and education to which the manager can relate; and
with a resume that makes the manager’s decision look good even if the hire doesn’t work out.
Homophily has been increasing in most social settings, including the workplace, over the years and now young people have climbed on that bandwagon with a vengeance.
Instead of the adventurous attitudes that have always been the province of youth, they want to avoid discomfort; sidestep as many human vagaries as possible and spend as much of their time as possible with people like themselves.
Helping them avoid discomfort is a market nitch occupied by the likes of Lifetopia and RoomBug, in collusion with their universities, as well as open sources such as URoomSurf and, of course, the ubiquitous Facebook.
But some worry that it robs young adults of an increasingly rare opportunity for growth: exposure to someone with different experiences and opinions.
“Very quickly, college students are able to form self-selected cliques where their views are reinforced,” noted Dalton Conley, an N.Y.U. sociology professor…
It is not a lack in the diversity of race, nationality or even gender that is worrisome; rather it is the lack of diversity of thought.
Sometimes having the things you know instinctively, or from casual observation, confirmed by expert studies is downright depressing.
I noticed it while growing up, fought it over my 25 years headhunting, wrote and article about it in 1999 called Hiring in Your Comfort Zone, and blogged about it last March in People like me.
“It” is homophily, it’s been around forever, it’s an attitude I personally dislike and it keeps getting worse.
“Smith-Lovin’s research, for example, shows that homophily is on the rise in the United States on nearly every dimension of social identity. Ever larger numbers of people seem to be sealing themselves off in worlds where everyone thinks the way they do.”
As deplorable as this is from the social science perspective, it can be the kiss of a very slow death for companies.
Managers who, unconsciously or not, hire in their own image, no matter how they define that, do their employers harm.
A workforce that homogenizes along any lines is a workforce that will either miss, ignore, or be unable to reach a part of their market.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Flattery and agreement can be a lethal combination for a CEO, according to research by Sun Hyun Park, James D. Westphal and Ithai Stern.
Last Thursday we looked at 
Today is a collection of provocative, personal opinions on a variety of subjects. I hope you’ll take time to comment if one hits hard.
