Creatively, Is How I Live My Life and Experience Nirvana

Of all human activities, creativety comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. What makes us different from apes—our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology—is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.

When we’re creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a “multitude.”

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

1.      Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.

This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always “on.” In fact, they rest often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy; it’s not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. This is not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error as a strategy for achieving their goals.

One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality. At the same time, a certain spartan celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.

2.      Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the “g factor,” meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who make important creative contributions.

The earliest longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real life. Later studies suggest that the cutoff point is around 120; it might be difficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but an IQ beyond 120 does not necessarily imply higher creativity.

Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.

Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.

Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue. People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.

Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one, and this selectivity involves convergent thinking.

3.      Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.

Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”

Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: “When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, ‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.”

Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: “What a beautiful thing is this perspective!” while his wife called him back to bed with no success.

4.      Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

Most of us assume that artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

5.      Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted. We’re usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. In fact, in psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

6.      Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they’re usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them. At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

7.      Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.

This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person’s ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

8.      Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it’s difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic. Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is “her home,” nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:

“This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.”

But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: “I’d say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They’ll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it’s going to be interesting. It’s not predictable that it’ll go well.”

9.      Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:

“I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can’t be so identified with your work that you can’t accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help.”

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow’s words: “Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them.” A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.

Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.

Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.

Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

©HarperCollins

A Tribute to Maurice Hilleman

Few youngsters might recognize Maurice Hilleman as the man behind their childhood immunizations. But with more than 40 vaccines to his credit, it’s no exaggeration to say Hilleman saves millions of lives each year.

On 26 January, 2005, some of the world’s most famous and accomplished biomedical researchers gathered in Philadelphia to honor Maurice Hilleman. That evening, Hilleman thanked the group, saying, “there’s no greater tribute that anyone can pay to a scientist than to give approval to a peer. All of you I think of as peers in the world of science.”

Addressed to a group of more than a hundred people, the statement was clearly absurd. By any objective measure, a gathering of Maurice Hilleman’s scientific peers would not fill a telephone booth.

Hilleman has produced a mind-boggling number of fundamental breakthroughs. He is the inventor of more than 40 vaccines, including those that prevent measles, mumps, rubella, Haemophilus influenzae type b, hepatitis A, hepatitis B and chickenpox. Epidemiologists often refer to the first few decades after World War II as the golden age of vaccinology. It might be more accurate to call it the Hilleman period. According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly 8 million lives a year.

Hilleman also discovered SV40 and the adenoviruses, was the first to purify interferon, and the first to demonstrate that its expression is induced by double-stranded RNA—discoveries that launched several branches of molecular biology and immunology and jump-started the quest for antiviral medications.

Astonishingly, despite transforming the nature of public health, he seems to be fading into obscurity.

“Very few people, even in the scientific community, are even remotely aware of the scope of what Maurice has contributed,” Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted at the symposium. “I recently asked my post-docs whether they knew who had developed the measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B and chickenpox vaccines. They had no idea,” Fauci said. “When I told them that it was Maurice Hilleman, they said, ‘Oh, you mean that grumpy guy who comes to all of the AIDS meetings?’”

Indeed, Hilleman’s reputation as a prickly character often overshadows his accomplishments. Even at 86, he is a tall, confident man with a firm handshake who speaks softly but bluntly—and often profanely. Relating the story of how he met his wife, Lorraine, for example, he described his dating experiences in 1962: “I had a couple of dates. Christ. Finding women is sort of like by Brownian action. You don’t know whether they’re drunkards, or they’ll spend all your money, or whether they have venereal diseases.”

Giving up on the dating scene, he instead decided to hunt for a wife among the job applicant pool at Merck and Company in West Point, Pennsylvania, where he worked. He enlisted the aid of his administrative assistant. “I said, ‘Look, Ken, I want you to go through all these [job] applications and pick out what looks good to you, then send them up to me, and we’ll do that once a week until we find one,’” Hilleman recalls. On hearing this, a young woman in the audience at the symposium remarked to her companion, “You couldn’t get away with that today.”

The same could be said about much of Hilleman’s career. “Unlike other people in research, Maurice did every aspect of research and development,” notes P. Roy Vagelos, former chairman and chief executive officer of Merck. Hilleman characterized antigens and isolated them, then did the basic research, the process research and the clinical research, Vagelos says. Following clinical trials, Hilleman would also haunt the manufacturing facility to ensure that the vaccine was being produced correctly. “The manufacturing people were not quite used to that, so there was a constant grumble at that end of the campus,” says Vagelos.

“I ran into conflict with just about everybody,” Hilleman concedes. “I was told I had a very unusual management style. In spite of all this, I survived at Merck.” Asked if his one-man pipeline approach could work today, “it takes somebody who’s a bastard,” Hilleman says. “I don’t think there are basically any people at all left who would have the dedication.”

A strong proponent of a seven-day work week for scientists, Hilleman cites his upbringing on a farm in rural Montana as the inspiration for both his work ethic and his coarse language. Though he officially retired on his 65th birthday in accordance with Merck’s mandatory retirement policy, the company immediately re-hired him as a consultant, and he still goes to his office every day. During the course of a long interview one morning in February, he discussed everything from Sinclair Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith to the latest research on HIV and tuberculosis, revealing himself to be a sharp and voracious reader.

His dedication to his work is superseded only by his devotion to his family. Asked about his pastimes, Hilleman says, “my hobby is working.” There are dozens of stories about this workaholic virologist, but one of the most famous highlights his intense focus on public health. In 1963, when his oldest daughter, Jeryl Lynn, developed the characteristic fever and swollen glands of mumps, he made a late-night trip to the laboratory to retrieve some equipment, then returned home to culture her virus.

Jeryl recovered from the mumps virus, but the mumps virus never recovered from infecting Jeryl. Using the isolate from his daughter, Hilleman attenuated the virus and shepherded it through testing and production in his typical fashion. His younger daughter, Kirsten, participated in the early clinical trials. This now-standard mumps vaccine has since brought a classic childhood disease to the brink of extinction.

 

Looking at the current landscape of vaccinology, Hilleman advocates more collaboration between industry, academic and government researchers to develop the next generation of vaccines, a view that he says only recently became acceptable. “If you go back in history, industry was a leper,” he says. When he finished his doctoral work at the University of Chicago, he adds, “I was told … ‘we do not train people for industry,’ so I said what the hell, that’s exactly where I’m going.”

From Chicago, Hilleman went to E.R. Squibb and Sons in New Jersey in 1944, then to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington in 1948, finally joining Merck in 1957. According to Adel Mahmoud, president of the Merck Vaccine Division, the company currently produces seven vaccines, all invented by Maurice Hilleman. “This guy, whatever he touched, he developed a vaccine out of it,” says Mahmoud. “We owe him an incredible, incredible debt.”

Source: Nature Medicine  

The World Number One Auto Maker is Toyota

 

TOKYO — For the first time ever, Toyota sold more vehicles globally in a quarter than General Motors, preliminary January-March figures show, the clearest sign yet that the Japanese company is on track to overtake its U.S. rival as the world’s top automaker.

Toyota Motor Corp.’s success is fueled by robust demand for its reliable, fuel-efficient models, including the Camry, Corolla, Yaris and gas-electric hybrid Prius.

It also comes at a time when General Motors Corp., which lost $2 billion last year, has been forced to scale back production and cut costs in a bid to revive its sliding fortunes, even as it leads in China’s booming market.

Final bragging rights as the world’s top automaker _ a title GM has held for 76 years _ won’t be decided until global vehicle production numbers get tallied for the full year.

But Tuesday’s data show that Toyota is getting closer. TheJapanese company sold 2.35 million vehicles worldwide in the first quarter, Toyota said, surpassing the 2.26 million vehicles GM said it sold in the period, according to preliminary figures.

In 2006, Toyota’s global output rose 10 percent to 9.018 million vehicles, while GM and its affiliates produced 9.18 million vehicles worldwide _ a gap of about 162,000. In the first quarter, Toyota made 2.37 million units while GM had expected to produce 2.34 million during the same period, and has not given a final number.

Analysts say Toyota is building on its lead by investing in ecological technology, opening plants around the world, developing new models and wooing drivers with solid marketing that drives home its brand power.

Those are precisely areas in which GM has fallen behind Toyota, analysts say. GM will be hard pressed to play catch-up, making it more likely that Toyota will outstrip GM for the full year, they say.

“Toyota sales are booming because of its good image around the world about reliability and ecological technology,” said Koji Endo, auto analyst with Credit Suisse in Tokyo. “It’s just the opposite for GM, and its image is deteriorating.”

GM said although Toyota won the first quarter, the fight for global leadership is not over for the year. A company spokesman said it would not chase market share solely to recapture the lead from Toyota, and it has no special plan to retake the lead.

“We also had a record first quarter globally. We set sales records in three out of our four regions,” said spokesman John McDonald. “We’ve got our first quarter underneath our belt. Let’s see what the rest of the year holds for us. We’re going to fight for every sale,” he said.

The cycle of good news keeps getting better for Toyota, however, as it can use its profits to keep growing. With the company doing so well, morale is high at Toyota, keeping the positive cycle going, while GM tends to be dragged down by battles with its union, Endo said.

But Endo also warned that increased size also brings other problems like trying to ensure quality and manage a sprawling network of manufacturing and sales.

“As your volume gets bigger and bigger, in many cases efficiency tends to drop,” he said. “There might be a risk of being over-stretched.”

Toyota was founded in 1937 by the Toyoda family, whose members continue to play key roles and are a symbol of emotional unity for the company and its employees.

Perhaps more famous than the Toyoda family are the company’s innovators, such as Taiichi Ohno, credited with inventing just-in-time production to reduce inventory, and the philosophy of worker-empowerment called “kaizen,” allowing workers to keep improving production methods and hold the critical power of shutting down the assembly line at any time.

Companies around the world, including those outside the auto industry, have adopted Toyota’s methods. Universities, both in and outside Japan, study the Toyota method.

Toyota is also well-known for nurturing worker loyalty by offering lifetime employment. The last time Toyota resorted to massive job cuts was during hard times in 1950.

Toyota has beaten GM in profitability for the past four years, with 1.4 trillion yen ($11.8 billion) profit for the fiscal year through March 2006.

GM, meanwhile, has been negotiating severance packages with thousands of workers in an effort to turn around its North American operations. In the fourth quarter of 2006, it reported a profit of $950 million, a big turnaround from a loss of $6.6 billion a year ago.

Modesty is also a Toyota trademark, and executives have repeatedly played down the prospects of overtaking GM.

Asked that question last week in Detroit, Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe emphasized that Toyota must continue to improve its quality from the top down to remain a leader in the auto industry.

“We’re still developing in many regions of the world. I don’t regard that as a success yet,” he said.

GM doesn’t give yearly forecasts, but Toyota is shooting for global output of 9.42 million vehicles and sales of 9.34 million units.

While Toyota appears on course to supplant General Motors this year, GM’s moves to boost overseas production could keep it in the running. The company’s sales in China jumped 32 percent last year to 876,747 units, making it the No. 1 seller there. It is also building a new factory in India, another market with tremendous potential.

But analysts note that Toyota’s success required long-term planning and years of hard work.

“Winning didn’t happen overnight,” said Koichi Shimokawa, business administration professor at Tokai Gakuen University. “Japanese makers built their business, slowly but surely, accumulating technology and developing good cars.”

Endo believes the trend of Toyota outdoing GM is very difficult to reverse: “Everybody on the road expects Toyota to overtake GM in 2007.”

Associated Press

Watch Toyota human touch commercial

 

Managing Corporate Social Responsibility

 

The idea of corporate social responsibility has become a growing topic in boardrooms in the last few years, with the debate centering on what obligations companies have to be socially responsible, and what impact it can have on the bottom line.
For public companies, the issue can be particularly daunting as they seek to please shareholders, lure investors, build a brand, and all the while preserve a pristine reputation in the public eye. The common refrain among managers is that a corporation’s primary responsibility is to act on the behalf of shareholders who own the company, who want the best possible return on their investment.

At the same time, managers increasingly face pressures from government, nongovernmental organizations, media and the public to take action that demonstrates a social conscience. But there is evidence many companies cannot live up to their commitments, and that is likely to present a continuing challenge for anyone managing corporate reputation
David J. Vogel, Solomon P. Lee Distinguished Professor in Business Ethics at Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley and editor of the California Management Review, says it is nearly impossible to make an overall judgment about a company’s commitment to socially responsible behavior or to sort the good companies from the bad.

The author of six books on business political influence and the politics of environmental regulation argues that there is a place in the corporate world for responsible firms, but that the “market for virtue” is not sufficiently important to make it in the interest of all firms to behave more responsibly
Recently he spoke with The Wall Street Journal Online about how managers are adjusting their strategies to the call for increased voluntary action that is good for society. Here is an edited excerpt of that conversation.

Q: Who determines what is “Socially Responsible”?
It is impossible to clearly define what is socially responsible. When it comes to how to distinguish between what is a normal business opportunity and what is socially responsible, the boundaries are flexible, and it varies over time. There are, however, three key components to what is normally considered corporate social responsibility (CSR). They are environmental, labor issues and human rights. When corporate policies or activities go beyond what is mandated by law, then that is commonly thought of as socially responsible.

Q: What’s the difference between business ethics and corporate social responsibility?
Business ethics connotes lawfulness, that a company is obeying certain standards or regulations, whereas CSR is voluntary behavior that serves and outside purpose.

Q: Which industries have more success or difficulty in implementing these policies?
It isn’t necessarily correct to think of corporate responsibility in terms of success. It’s more correctly analyzed in terms of the efforts that companies are making. At the moment, branded firms that rely on consumers are exerting the most efforts.

Q: Is social responsibility a fad?
No, I strongly believe that CSR is pretty resilient and enduring. It is more institutionalized among certain firms or industries. Some firms such as Whole Foods or Patagonia, for instance, have made CSR part of their business profile. And there is a huge consulting business that is growing to accommodate growing interest.

Q: Some companies have received unfavorable media attention for touting responsible policies and practices here in the U.S., but then having abusive labor practices or abuse the environment, for example, overseas. Are there indications that management strategies are beginning to expand the idea of social responsibility beyond U.S. shores?
Most definitely. I think there is a greater awareness that companies need to monitor practices within the corporation and also those of suppliers wherever they may be. I think companies are definitely trying to be more consistent across the board.

Q: Can there be any incentives that reward socially responsible corporate practices?
Regulatory benefits are one way to encourage CSR. And when a company abides by socially responsible practices, government is less likely to interfere and more likely to listen to their side of things. There are also the added benefits of CSR, such as greater employee morale or carving out new markets, for example, that are branded as CSR, but they can also be part of a viable branding strategy.

Q: What do you think about some of the arguments against CSR, that it costs shareholders in terms of stock performance?
I’m not persuaded by that argument. In most cases, companies don’t commit huge resources to CSR. And it’s too complicated an issue for most companies to try to promote in their messages to consumers. Most consumers buy products based on the simple equation of cost vs. quality. The notion of a company’s socially responsible practices involves cost with little potential reward, so many managers don’t bother to try to get that message across. Most realize there are limits to consumers’ response to that unless they are niche products designed to appeal to a particular market.

Q: There has been some research on the correlation between perceptions of corporate social responsibility and a company’s stock performance. Do you think there’s a link?
There’s a weak correlation. There are reputation effects and an impact in terms of employees, energy conservation or resource efficiency, for example. And there are certainly business risks of not doing it. But I don’t think the link has been proven one way or another. It’s not critical to company performance. And if you talk to fund managers, you will find few investors ask about it.

Source:WSJ

Leading From Below

CEOs can’t change companies on their own. The secret is to foster a leadership mentality throughout the ranks.

 

 

The importance of leadership from the top is firmly embedded in corporate culture. An image survives of the all-powerful CEO, able to change the way a company operates at will.

But the truth is that at most companies, senior managers are increasingly hamstrung by the demand from investors and analysts for immediate results. If change is going to come about at these companies, it will be because managers below the CEO (and below the whole “C suite” of CEO, COO, CFO) take the initiative and risks to drive the company in a different direction. Change will have to come from those leading from below, rather than relying on leadership from the top.

These potential leaders face their own constraints. Their day-to-day responsibilities can be all-consuming, leaving no time or energy for the effort to expand their influence. And for many below the C suite, the risks of sticking your head up to suggest change seem too great, and the odds of success seem too low.

But those constraints can be overcome.

In seven years of studying the process of leading from below in hundreds of companies around the world, we have identified clear patterns in how managers succeed — and fail — in this effort. These patterns suggest two broad lessons: For the vast majority of business managers who are not CEOs, there are practical ways to play a leadership role that helps their companies, helps improve the impact their companies have on the world, and helps improve their career prospects at the same time. And for that small number of individuals who inhabit the C suite, there are practical ways to encourage the kind of leadership from below that can provide energy, innovation and advantage to the company well beyond what they can deliver alone from the top.

BECOMING A LEADER

We focused our studies on managers in two overlapping fields that usually aren’t high on the agendas of top management and therefore serve as a laboratory for leadership from below: environment, health and safety; and corporate social responsibility. The clear majority of the managers we studied found themselves stuck in predominantly service and/or governance roles — performing tasks like setting and enforcing company standards, and providing the resources for people in the company to meet those standards. Many expressed a desire to take on more of a leadership role, but didn’t see a clear way to do so.

So, how do managers make the shift from service and governance to a leadership role? How do they lead from below successfully? While each situation differs, there are several common threads that run through each of the successful examples we have studied.

• Make the decision to be a leader.
 

There are three painful realities about moving from service and governance roles to a leadership role: No one will tell you to do it; there will always be people who tell you to stick to the other two roles; and you have to earn the right to play a leadership role, often by succeeding in a service or governance role first — which in turn only increases the expectation that you will keep playing those roles.

In every case of successful leadership from below that we have studied, the manager made a conscious decision to move beyond the service and governance roles, without waiting to be told to do so.

In deciding to take on the risks involved in a leadership role, it helps to understand that failure to lead is also dangerous. In an age when job cuts are common at even the most successful companies, being a good manager who doesn’t make waves is increasingly risky. Those who take risks are more likely to keep their jobs and to be promoted.

The managers we studied usually found two ways to spur the transition from service and governance to leadership roles.

First, they reorganized their group to make themselves less essential to the provision of services or the exercise of governance. This began to free up time and energy for leadership. It also unlocked their staff’s potential, as roles they formerly dominated became opportunities for their subordinates’ growth.

An executive director of environment, health and safety at one manufacturing company had five managers reporting to him who were each responsible for a different unit of the business. The executive director designated one of the five as the coordinator of that group, freeing himself up to take the lead in some critical areas of corporate social responsibility that hadn’t been addressed in any comprehensive way. Over time, the designated coordinator’s role evolved into a promotion and the other four reported to him directly. The executive director ultimately made progress on the corporate social responsibility issues he tackled and also was promoted.

Second, the managers we studied opened themselves up to influences from outside the company. In many companies, middle managers have been trained to focus on internal rather than external signals. (We have found environmental, health and safety directors unable to name their companies’ five biggest customers, five biggest competitors, and five top products or services in revenue.) To take on a leadership role, managers needed to listen to the signals coming from outside — customers, competitors, suppliers, neighbors, the media. Then they could begin thinking about what those signals meant for action inside the company.

• Focus on influence, not control.
 

Every successful case we have found of leadership from below involved a basic shift in thinking: The managers did their job with their colleagues — not to them or for them. People simply react more enthusiastically to being enlisted in a common cause than they do to being ordered around. And getting people to act on their own to achieve the goals you have in mind is far more effective than having them only react to your direction. There are several ways to accomplish this:

Adopt the perspective of the people you’re trying to influence; don’t make them adopt yours. If your goal is to drive down greenhouse-gas emissions, it will probably be an easier sell if you frame it in terms of driving down the company’s energy costs.

Expose others to your information; don’t hoard it. If your customers are the source of insight into market pressures, don’t keep that private as a secret source of insight and power. Instead, create situations where your internal partners can hear from the customers directly. Your customers will be far more credible with your internal partners than you can possibly be.

Aim to influence existing work processes; don’t build new ones. Most of your colleagues have their own processes that they have adapted to meet their needs. Beyond those, they want to shed processes, not add new ones. Don’t create a new capital-review process; get your concerns into the capital-decision process to begin with. Don’t add a new supplier-approval process; get your concerns into the supplier evaluation and selection processes.

Don’t worry about being proved right. Exercising influence isn’t like winning a court case, where some third party can sit as a judge, decide you are right and order your adversary to comply with your wishes. When you are leading from below, the people you have to convince may be exactly the people who disagree with you the most. Winning their support is a human process of getting to a tipping point, not a logical task of proving the right outcome.

Keep things clear and simple. You know you can make any issue so complex that only experts can manage it. The challenge is to make the same issue simple enough for any smart, overworked line manager. A manager at one consumer-brands holding company we studied developed an environmental, health and safety program composed of 12 elements that fit on two sides of a piece of paper. By contrast, one oil company’s comparable program involved more than 70 elements, with over 270 sub-elements.

Keep a sharp focus. At one company we studied, initial resistance to tackling corporate social-responsibility issues included the fear that “we’re trying to drink the ocean with a teaspoon.” The vice president driving this effort insisted on picking the three most important issues and working on just those three for the entire first year.

• Make your mental organizational chart horizontal rather than vertical.
 

The traditional organizational chart resembles a military chain of command, in which direction flows downward. There are no links between peers across reporting lines. If you and I report up through different chains, the traditional organizational chart shows no connection between us.

Throw away the traditional vertical organizational chart. Imagine the effective organizational chart as horizontal. Think about how to connect with peers, and how they in turn can connect you to other peers. View your colleagues as a focus group, not a barrier. In a horizontal world, your peers’ concerns are no longer objections to overcome. Instead, they are important feedback to hear and heed.

The horizontal organizational chart can extend beyond your organization. As you build connections to peers and look at their connections in turn, you quickly find connections that lead to customers, suppliers and others outside the company.

One manager in the operating department of a railroad addressed his concerns about the company’s ability to avoid and respond to hazardous-materials releases by first reaching out to the railroad’s chemical marketing group. Together they then reached out to the railroad’s customers who shipped hazardous materials, to share their concerns. Success in this effort led to promotion for the manager and expanded responsibility for the railroad’s environmental affairs. In his new position he continued to reach out to others in the company by building alliances with the company’s lawyers and its leaders in communications and public affairs.

• Work on your “trusted adviser” skills.
 

You have to earn the right to influence people. People have to want to talk with you, and value what they hear from you. This requires more than being seen as a technical expert. It requires being seen as a trusted adviser.

The trusted adviser has skills that turn conversations into meaningful discussions that make people want to seek you out. Listen more than you talk; ask questions that broaden people’s perspective, instead of telling them how to think or what to do. Without violating confidences, share what others have seen and done in similar circumstances.

• Don’t wait for the perfect time, just find a good time.
 

There is never a perfect time to take the risks of leading from below. When times are good, everyone is too busy and no one seems bothered by the need to do things differently. When times are bad, everyone is too busy (or too scared) and there are too many other demands.

There are two keys to avoiding the timing trap. First, don’t wait for an invitation. A constant refrain from senior management is that they don’t know what needs to be done in many areas, especially those areas outside their personal experience. One newly minted vice president was stunned to be berated by his C-suite boss for his timidity. The new VP was told bluntly that at his level, the top managers should be looking to him for guidance, not the other way around.

Second, look for situations where the complacency that pervades most companies has been disturbed. In those situations, there will be less resistance to change. There may even be an active desire for new approaches. Mergers, acquisitions and divestitures all break the existing patterns in the way a company operates.

Companies also periodically undergo major organizational redesign. Regulatory or legal violations, accidents or bad press all create a need to react, often to remedy the situation at the root of the problem. But less dramatic situations also present opportunities to promote change. People who have taken on new roles in the company or who are working for new bosses may be looking for new ideas.

FOSTERING LEADERSHIP

Certainly, many of the cases we’ve studied demonstrate leadership from below without support from senior executives. However, we also were able to identify specific actions from the C suite that can lower the barriers to leadership from below.

• Integrate a broader range of risks and potential impacts into your business decisions.
 

As a senior manager, you can encourage greater leadership from your subordinates by making it clear that you want them to broaden their perspective.

When making business decisions, ask about the longer-term impacts of the actions you’re considering. Ask about a broad range of impacts, not just the effect on sales or profit — on the environment, on local communities, on both suppliers and customers.

Think about the expectations you create in your evaluations of your subordinates. Are those evaluations truly balanced, or do they focus solely on short-term actions and consequences?

• Expose yourself to a broader range of perspectives.
 

Do you have conversations with people inside and outside the company where you are open to new ideas and suggestions? What would your own horizontal organization chart look like? Do you send signals to those below you that you would value opportunities for conversations that add new perspective?

• Create vacuums rather than imposing solutions.
 

Some of the most effective leadership from below that we have seen came in companies where senior management intentionally created vacuums.

In these cases, senior management points to an issue that may need more attention, but ostentatiously avoids dictating the source or nature of answers. This breaks the organization’s complacency. Aspiring leaders can move more easily into such a vacuum: They still have to provide answers, but they don’t have to sell or legitimize the question by themselves first.

The chief counsel at one company set the stage for leadership from below with a simple statement that began: “What keeps me up at night is…” and mentioned a broad area of concerns. The vacuum was created.

• Encourage questions without answers.
 

The flip side of creating a vacuum is to encourage potential leaders to raise questions without having developed the answers first.

This reverses years of mentoring, in which managers are taught never to raise a question with senior management unless they have the answers. While prudent politically, this stifles the discussion of the most important questions. Clearly, people should be encouraged to have ideas on how to resolve the questions, but that is a long way from discouraging questions unless the answers are already known.

• Ask “what if” questions.
 

Recently opened archives from the Cuban missile crisis included a fascinating tape of an Oval Office conversation between President Kennedy and his advisers. The advisers proposed a particular military course of action. Step by step, the president forced the advisers to think through to the likely consequence of their proposal simply by asking: “What happens then?” The advisers’ final answer to the question was “general war…a nuclear exchange.” They decided to explore other options.

• Openly discuss values as well as value.
 

Business managers are comfortable talking about value, as in “we need to get more value from our assets and brands” or “we can add more value for our shareholders.” Most managers are much less comfortable talking about values: right and wrong, what we believe, what we should do. Indeed, talking about values often brands a manager as a peripheral thinker — a dangerous career move at best.

But discussions that consider only value tend to focus too narrowly on the quantifiable, predictable aspects of a business. Signals pointing to emerging pressures from the market, the community or regulators can be completely missed. A discussion that includes values as well as value creates a broader, longer-term perspective that can raise critical issues of how the company is operating and whom its actions might help or hurt long before any financial impact is knowable, let alone quantifiable.

Senior management is uniquely able to make it safe to discuss values. Once the top executives begin asking questions about values, in fact, it becomes unsafe for the managers below them to ignore those questions. Senior management can change the discussion dramatically by asking questions about value and values together, probing whether there are trade-offs between them or whether they can be complementary.

• Refresh your radar screen periodically.
 

Periodically review the range of risks and impacts that your company should consider, always looking outward and forward. What are the future requirements, expectations and demands coming at you from a wide range of stakeholders?

* * *

These methods for encouraging leadership from below are applicable at any level of the organization. Indeed, some of the most effective leaders from below have applied these same techniques to encourage ideas bubbling up within their own domains.

The payoff can be enormous. If viewed as a resource rather than a threat, leadership from below can be a powerful force for creating change, developing organizational flexibility and helping companies flourish in a dynamic world.

Source: WSJ

Decisions Are in the Details

The details that go into a flawless Orpheus performance.

 

by Ron Lieber

Orpheus played four pieces of music during its late-January concert series. Each piece included thousands of details that required hundreds of adjustments. Most of those tasks happened on the fly, often wordlessly, while others that appeared simple often took days to accomplish. A case in point: One measure of music that seemed to take forever to figure out actually involved only ringing a few bells. The bells in question rang out at the end of “Within Darkness,” a piece by Susan Botti.

Orpheus was performing the piece’s world premiere; no one had ever heard or played it before. Botti had her own idea: She wanted the bells, which came at the end of the piece, to evoke a shaft of light. But she didn’t want to force her view. After all, she was working with a group committed to self-governance. “When we started working on the piece, we were kind of fishing,” says violinist Ronnie Bauch. “We had to focus on all of the small areas.” The first run-through of the 17-minute piece took more than 90 minutes.

The musicians decided to spare Botti the pain of listening to them plow through it, figuring that it would be easier for her to help them once they could actually play the piece all the way through without stopping. Unlike other pieces that Orpheus has premiered, “Within Darkness” came together rather quickly. “The sound is atmospheric and enjoyable,” says flutist Susan Palma-Nidel. “Botti didn’t write things that were physically impossible to play, the way some composers do.

It’s easy to dislike an impossibly difficult new piece, but nobody felt that way about this one.” That is, not until the group began rehearsing with the bells. Once the bells were in the picture, a number of questions came up: How many beats should be counted between the last note of the violin and the first sound of the bells? How long should the tones last? How loud should they be? Where should the bells be kept during the performance so that they won’t make noise when they’re not supposed to? What if the applause begins before the bells have sounded? Who should cue the bells? “Maybe we should have auditions!” suggested one smart aleck. Everyone agreed that only a few beats should elapse between the violin’s last note and the bells’ first chime, lest people think that the piece were over before it really was. “Great,” Botti said. “Let’s try it.” “When we’re doing a piece for the first time, we really rise to the occasion,” says cellist Melissa Meell. “I think that the process we go through can be liberating for the composers we work with, because we’re willing to try so many different things.

We don’t pick just one interpretation and stick with it.” Botti was something of a special case, since the idea to commission her work came from the orchestra, specifically Martha Caplin, whose father was Botti’s childhood voice teacher in Cleveland. “I wrote a solo especially for Martha,” Botti says. “But the orchestra parts were written for all of Orpheus. I made sure to consider who would have to communicate with whom where, and I included a ton of places for cues to be given easily.” But the bells remained elusive. After hearing the piece performed in Easton, Pennsylvania, Botti decided to make a small refinement. During the dress rehearsal for the next performance, at Carnegie Hall, she told Orpheus of her idea: three seconds of silence, during which Caplin would keep her bow on her violin so that the audience would know that the piece was not yet over.

The bells would then sound loudly and slowly fade away to conclude the piece. At the performance, all of those thousands of details came together. The result was a perfect performance: The silence was electric, the bells rang out brightly, and the applause was generous.

The 9 Faces of Leadership

 

FedEx uses these criteria to identify potential leaders.

by Heath Row

According to FedEx, its best leaders share nine personal attributes – which the company defines with remarkable specificity. FedEx also has a system for rating aspiring leaders on whether they possess these attributes. How do you rate? Judge yourself against these edited descriptions of the nine faces of leadership at FedEx.

Charisma Instills faith, respect, and trust. Has a special gift of seeing what others need to consider. Conveys a strong sense of mission.

Individual consideration Coaches, advises, and teaches people who need it. Actively listens and gives indications of listening. Gives newcomers a lot of help.

Intellectual stimulation Gets others to use reasoning and evidence, rather than unsupported opinion. Enables others to think about old problems in new ways. Communicates in a way that forces others to rethink ideas that they had never questioned before.

Courage Willing to stand up for ideas even if they are unpopular. Does not give in to pressure or to others’ opinions in order to avoid confrontation. Will do what’s right for the company and for employees even if it causes personal hardship.

Dependability Follows through and keeps commitments. Takes responsibility for actions and accepts responsibility for mistakes. Works well independently of the boss.

Flexibility Functions effectively in changing environments. When a lot of issues hit at once, handles more than one problem at a time. Changes course when the situation warrants it.

Integrity Does what is morally and ethically right. Does not abuse management privileges. Is a consistent role model.

Judgment Reaches sound and objective evaluations of alternative courses of action through logic, analysis, and comparison. Puts facts together rationally and realistically. Uses past experience and information to bring perspective to present decisions.

Respect for others Honors and does not belittle the opinions or work of other people, regardless of their status or position