The last time I talked about two articles in a Sunday New York Times, it included a picture of a woman in a bikini.  Not this time.  This subject has to do with parenting and what style makes the most sense.  Mostly.

The article Let the Kid Be was especially interesting to me because I am the parent of an eight year-old and I find myself asking a lot of the same questions posed in the article – should I be a “helicoptering” parent who oversees every instant of their development with a “get-them-into-Harvard-or-bust” approach, or a let them figure it out, leave ’em be, the more decisions they have to make, the sooner they will be able to make smart decisions for themselves, type of parent.

So this boils down to “how” we should parent our children, and since everything I focus on is outcomes (in this case it would be what kind of grownups and parents do we want our children to be), I was a little disappointed that topic wasn’t addressed more in this piece.  I think my parents were raised to do what they were told and never question authority.  That’s fine for a lot of roles and careers, but that’s not a great way to raise out-of-the-box thinkers who still stick to the important rules, but look at things with a much more creative perspective.

Which is why I was so pleased to then see an interview in the business section with Dany Levy In Praise of All That Grunt Work which I thought was really smart. In one section, the interviewer asks what Dany looks for when hiring a person and her answer was “What I call the figure-it-the-hell-out gene.You know, it’s like Occam’s Razor – the simplest answer is usually the best, and don’t overcomplicate things. It’s that kind of mentality that I look for.  . . I also like people who have a little bit of an off-sense; they are often more creative and can come up with the unexpected.”

When I think about the kind of person I want my son George to grow up to be.  I think the “helicoptering” style of parenting kills that “figure-it-the-hell-out” ability that we need so desperately right now in so many areas.  I also think we need to be clearer about the outcomes we are hoping to get to in these messes, and when we combine clear goals with “figure-it-the-hell-out” well then I think we are on to something.

-Ric

I wrote about this article about the infield fly rule in a blog while back, which points out  that laws have to keep evolving to maintain the civility of the masses.  There is a rule and the perceived threat of enforcement that causes people to stay within the bounds of acceptable behavior.  I talked about this Monday with Ondi Timoner, the woman who made the incredible new movie We Live in Public that deservedly won the grand prize at Sundance.

There used to be a notion of community,  and people would stop at stop signs partly because they knew it was against the law and they might get a ticket, but also partly because they didn’t want to be seen by someone they know because word might get back to the community that so-and-so runs stop signs.  It takes community and rules to enforce civilized behavior.  In my neighborhood lots of people don’t stop at stop signs now, but I know they know they are breaking the law – I think it’s because they know they won’t get caught and they don’t care who sees them.  This is the same neighborhood I grew up in, and people used to stop at stop signs here.  I still do.

The outcome, the “what” we need to get to is good old fashioned capitalism and competition, and accountability when it comes to cheating, stealing, and making spectacularly bad decisions in business.

That’s why I was scratching my head a little bit when I read this article in the paper today about a project at the Harvard Business School about a de facto Hippocratic Oath for business people.  The title of the article refers to “an Era of Temptation” and I think that’s the wrong way to look at this problem.  Temptation has been with us since someone bit into an apple a while back.  Organized religion creates a fear of accountability and couples it with a community of whoever attends that group.  For all of the things organized religion has going against it, I have to say they still seem to have community and the fear of accountability, some call the fear of god.  Temptation has always been there, it’s not a new “era” of it, people have simply figured out that we are in an era of no accountability – and that is what needs to change.    So some of the people in financial services and automotive need to be held accountable, and I am not seeing any of that.  Community will also need to be there and my guess is that this Harvard effort is a step in the right direction, but something more programmatic is needed to really get the outcome we need.

These people aren’t doing things in secret or in private, they are doing them right out in broad daylight like running a stop sign. In an era of We Live in Public, if we don’t get more aggressive about accountability coming up with an equivalent to a “fear of God”, chaos is the next stop sign where we have to make a decision to stop or go.

-Ric

In this article in The New York Times today, Denise Grady explains that for the first time in our history, the US military has been performing CT scans and X-rays of our war dead since 2004, and the lessons learned have caused changes in many areas.  I spend most of my days encouraging people to start their discussions around the specific outcomes they are achieving, the “what” they are doing before asking how to get there.  Getting statistics on how people are dying in wars, and in fact how to better treat the injured is enabling the military to improve many outcomes, not the least of which is bringing soldiers home breathing.

The article talks about how the x-rays show not only the specifics of the shrapnel that kills the soldiers, but also where the shrapnel hits, so they are able to improve the designs of protective gear.  If you are smarter about what’s coming at you, you can be better at preparing for it in the future, a simple lesson in competition for people in the business world.

But the part I liked best about this story involved improving a technique to help injured soldiers.  It had to do with a Colonel Howard T. Harcke who was doing an autopsy on a soldier who had a collapsed ling.  As you can read in the article, Colonel Harcke figured out that the tubes they were using to re-inflate lungs were almost a third too short.  He could see from the CT scan that the tube was too short to be effective in this one case, but because this case had so many other severe injuries, he couldn’t confirm that was the cause of death, but by being able to look at 100 other similar cases in the data base, he found that the tube was too short for 50% of the group he looked at, and came to the conclusion that “solders are bigger and stronger now” and it’s no secret that our population has gotten bigger.  Going from the current five centimeter length to eight centimeters increased the effectiveness to 99% (so going from a 50% effectiveness rate, that doubles the effectiveness of a common procedure, doubling anything in medicine in this century  is nothing short of kooky),    What a great example of using a set of data to help answer a question about a single instance.

There is so much information about what has happened in the past that can inform how we move forward and post mortems in the workplace can make a huge impact.  Just be thankful you are not in a life and death battle every day like the people Colonel Harcke has to work on.

-Ric

The other day someone was asking for some outside of work “how” traps that might get people to rethink “how” they go about their day-to-day activities, and boy did I find one.  I was up late the other night watching some movie and an infomercial came on that smacked of an at home “how” trap.

Someone has figured out that tomatoes and some other plants grow very successfully upside down.  Instead of getting dirty on your hands and knees and dealing with sprinklers, you start the plant inside and then at a certain size you put it in this thing that looks to be about the size of a waste paper basket filled with enough dirt and then you hang that on just about anything and the plant grows very fast and down.

Not that I have a very green thumb, but this busts up so many false assumptions I had about “how” to grow plants, literally turning them upside down is the gardening equivalent of the Fosbury Flop that I talk about in the Rethink book where before everyone did the high jump running and jumping face-forward, he turned around 180 degrees and jumped over the bar backwards on his way to an Olympic gold medal.

The web site for this company is hangingtomato.com and while it looks very infomercial-y, I think this is just such a great example of rethinking I had to say a few words about it.

I am going to do some more poking around about why it only works with some plants, where in some cases the “how” matters more than others.  Well done.

I confess.  I enjoy reading People at the dentist.

But this morning I debated, briefly, whether to write about how hard it is for me to believe that in 2009 there are online advertisements for mail order Russian brides, or a common topic in several articles the Sunday New York Times, I went with the latter.

Often when I read the Sunday paper, there seems to be an improbably common thread throughout several sections of the paper.  This morning was no exception, and as I read the interview with Frank Luntz “The Wordsmith” he talked about the subtitle of his book Words That Word “It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.” I thought that was a great expression that a lot of people miss.  Then as I got to the Sunday Styles section, there was an article about how successful People magazine remains as so many publishers struggle, and the article went on about how critical the cover is in selling magazines and how hard they work to find covers that appeal to the baby boomer generation as well as teenagers (specifically discussing a hugely successful picture of a 48 year-old former teenage star in a bikini).  As fluffy as the magazine is – appealing to such different demographics every week with one picture is hard work.

Then as I read the article in the magazine about Conan O’Brien replacing Jay Leno on The Tonight Show starting next Monday (set your Tivo), it talked about how Leno still does 160 stand up shows a year all over the country adding “it’s the best way to take the temperature of the country” and later talked about how one of the reasons Leno got that job over David Letterman was because he went out and met with many NBC affiliates in the “interview” process and Letterman did not (adding that the affiliates have a loud voice in decisions like that).   It was a pretty interesting article that talked about how different Leno and O’Brien are.

When I talk to organizations about what’s most valuable to them, one of the three pillars of my definition of value is brand or identity, why customers, partners, and employees choose them over another (the other two being linkage to key performance indicators, and whether there’s value in improving the performance of whatever is being discussed).  These three very different articles bring out three keys that I think a lot of organizations need to look at right now as this recession persists:

1) Like People magazine, be really specific about who you are selling to, and be sure that how you connect with them will resonate

2) To put a Luntzian spin on it – be very aware of what your customers are hearing you say, not just what you are saying

3) And in the case of Leno, stay in touch with your audience.  Don’t lock yourself in a room, or on a campus as the case may be for some companies, and think you know the “temperature” of your customer.

So get on with rethinking who you are talking to, what your message is, and what’s being heard.  And look at the calendar, I am due for a cleaning at the dentist.

-Ric