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Growth Mindset: Putting it to Work

Growth Mindset: Putting it to Work

Growth Mindset: Putting it to WorkFour years ago we wrote about Growth Mindset, in our Management Thinkers series. We profiled the originator of the idea, Carol Dweck, and introduced the subject.

If there was any concern then that Growth Mindset may be little more than a fad, further research has only strengthened Dweck’s early conclusions. So, it seems timely to return to the topic.

While this article stands alone, I would recommend you to review the earlier article first. It’s good context. Because, to avoid repeating it, we’re going to use this article to look at how you can put the Big Idea of Growth Mindset to work in your workplace.

Continue reading Growth Mindset: Putting it to Work

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Liz Wiseman: Multiplier Effect

Liz Wiseman is a former senior executive at the Oracle Corporation, where she ran their Oracle University. There, she became interested in leadership development and has, since leaving and setting up her own business, taken up a research-based approach. Her research into why some leaders seem to get the best from the people around them, while others equally shut down contributions, led to the powerful idea of Multipliers and Diminishers, and two best-selling books.

Liz Wiseman

Very short biography

Liz Wiseman was born and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. She attended Brigham Young University, studying Business Management and getting her bachelors degree in 1986, followed by a master’s degree in Organizational Behaviour, in 1988. From there, she joined Oracle, where she stayed for 17 years, becoming a Vice President with responsibility for leading the Oracle University.

Wiseman left Oracle in 2005, to found her own leadership consulting business. She is currently president of The Wiseman Group (formerly known as Mindshare Learning). She cites CK Prahalad as her career mentor.

She has written three books, most notably Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (2010 – with Greg McKeown), which was followed in 2013 by The Multiplier Effect: Tapping the Genius Inside Our Schools. Her most recent book, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work (2014), introduces another interesting new idea about leadership.

The Multiplier Effect

Wiseman’s big idea, which she researched with British consultant Greg McKeown, is that some leaders seem to get vastly more from the people around them than others. She calls them Multipliers. She made this observation while at Oracle and then researched just what it is that they do differently from otherwise equally intelligent leaders, who seem to suppress the contributions of others. She calls those Diminishers.

Multipliers are able to access the intelligence of the people around them and somehow grow that intellect, making them feel (and maybe become) smarter still. They ask questions and make challenges in much the same way as Bernard Bass referred to in one of his four dimensions of Transformational Leadership: Intellectual Stimulation. They seem to see more capabilities than  other leaders and therefore make bigger asks of people.

By multiplying the intelligence of your people, Multipliers have a disproportionately positive effect on your business. They can harness under-utilised capacity of busy but bored people, by expecting more and giving them the opportunity to deliver it.

Wiseman identifies five characteristics of Multipliers, and six skills that allow those characteristics to blossom.

Multipliers are Talent Magnets

This is almost the definition of a Multiplier. They seek out and attract people with ideas and talent, and draw their genius from them.

Multipliers are Liberators

They create the kinds of environments that free people up to do their best work and contribute their most innovative and critical thinking.

Multipliers are Challengers

They are able to define a challenge or opportunity and set people the responsibility to excel themselves and meet it. This way, they get the very best from their people.

Multipliers are Debate Makers

They can drive sound decision-making by creating rigorous evaluation and thorough debate. They encourage people to apply all their intellect fearlessly by caring more about the quality of discussion, than about personal gain or loss – we all win when we make a good choice together.

Multipliers are Investors

They invest in other people’s development and growth, and allow people to feel ownership for their careers and the results they achieve.

The Six Skills

The six skills that Wiseman teaches are:

  1. Asking questions that spark innovation and intelligence
  2. Creating debate that drives the best decisions
  3. Identifying and utilizing genius in others
  4. Creating space for others to think and contribute
  5. Transferring ownership and accountability for results
  6. Generating learning from mistakes

Rookie Smarts

It is worth briefly discussing Wiseman’s other big idea, captured in her 2014 book, Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work. Even more so than her Multiplier Effect, this reminds us powerfully of the work of Carol Dweck on Growth Mindset.

The idea behind Rookie Smarts is simple: new people in an organisation bring a freshness and energy with them. They question the absurd and want to change things because , as an outsider, they have no allegiance to the ways of the past.

Long-serving leaders, on the other hand, easily get trapped into a mindset of ‘that’s the way we do things around here’ , and consequently lose their passion for change and drive to innovate.

What Wiseman advocates is that we ignite our curiosity, fire-up our energy, and become Perpetual Rookies. She says that:

‘Learning beats knowing’

and in so doing, she echoes precisely the principle of the Growth Mindset.

Liz Wiseman in her own words

The 2-minute intro…

And a longer 16 minute talk…

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Edgar Schein: Organizational Culture

Edgar Schein is a social psychologist who has introduced a raft of ideas around organizational culture, and placed his thinking at the heart of the subject. He was brought to The Sloane School of Management by Douglas McGregor, where he was a contemporary of Warren Bennis. Though less widely known, he seems to me to be every bit their equal.

Edgar Schein

Short Biography

Edgar Schein was born in 1928 in Zurich and moved to the United States. There he became a citizen and studied Social Psychology, gaining a BPhil from the University of Chicago, and MA from Stanford, and his PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard, in 1952.

Following this, he spent four years in the US army, studying both leadership and, importantly for his later thinking, the rehabilitation of prisoners of war (POWs) returning from Korea under the influence of brainwashing.

In 1956, Douglas McGregor invited him to join the faculty of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he became a professor in 1964 and chaired the Organizational Studies Group from 1972 to 1982. He remains an emeritus professor there.

Edgar Schein’s Work

Edgar Schein’s work is deeply concerned with organizational culture and its relationship to behaviours, motivation, learning, management and leadership, and careers. Let’s survey six big themes in his work.

Organizational Culture

Schein sees culture as the dominant force within an organization, and he defines it as a pattern of shared assumptions, about how we relate to one another, how we perceive truth and reality, the balance of task focus with growth and fulfilment, and others. These affect how people behave and the values and social norms that evolve.

His primary thinking was captured in his best known book, Organizational Culture and Leadership, originally published in 1985, but now in its fourth edition. In a later article, ‘Organizational Socialization and the Profession of Management‘ he argued that integrating with an organizational culture requires undoing, ‘unfreezing‘ prior cultural norms, and establishing new ones. He related this to what he learned during the Korean War, about brainwashing, and suggested there are three responses to these pressures.

  1. Rejection of the organization’s imposed norms and culture: ‘rebellion
  2. Selective adoption of certain values and norms: ‘creative individualism
  3. Full acceptance of the new culture: ‘conformity

Psychological Contract

In another of Schein’s important text books, Organizational Psychology, (1980), he focused on the idea of a ‘psychological contract’ between an employer and its employees. He credits the original idea to Chris Argyris, but develops it considerably. The psychological contract is a set of undocumented expectations between the organization and its employees. Where expectations match, there will be harmony: where they mismatch, problems arise, such as disloyalty, under-performance, and industrial disputes.

Management Cultures

Within an organization, Schein identified three management cultures that co-exist and, to a degree, compete unhelpfully with one another. Organizational Learning will come as people evolve their organizational culture to properly integrate these three cultures.

  1. Operator Culture: local cultures within operating units
  2. Engineering Culture: technicians and experts seeking optimal technical solutions, mistrustful of the soft roles of people in driving the right answers
  3. Executive Culture: managers focused on financially-driven metrics

Organizational Learning

Under the pressures of constant change, organizations can only thrive when they learn quickly. The problem is that it is frustrated by employees’ and managers’ fear of change. He calls this fear ‘Anxiety 1’ and argues that for learning to occur, it must be overwhelmed by ‘Anxiety 2’ – the fear of the consequences of not learning, and therefore of not transforming to meet the new realities. He therefore advocates the need for creating a culture where people can feel safe to learn and experiment, as a way of overcoming Anxiety 1 without the need to induce greater levels of fear.

Motivational Theories

Not surprisingly for someone who came to the Sloan School at the behest of Douglas McGregor, Schein’s fertile mind also paid attention to motivation. He created two contributions. The first was to group models of workplace motivation into three categories, and the second was to add a fourth category.

  1. The Rational-Economic Model
    McGregor’s Theory X, building on Taylor’s approaches to Scientific management suggest we act out of compliance with incentives of coercion.
  2. The Social Model
    Mayo’s Hawthorne experiments suggested we respond to social cures, which was in part captured in McGregor’s Theory Y.
  3. The Self-Actualizing Model
    Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and, to some extent, McGregor’s Theory Y focused on our need for something more than social or economic benefit.
  4. Schein’s fourth category really seems obvious from any distance…
    The Complex Model
    We are all subject to a whole array of needs, expectations, desires, and motivations, and a wise manager will engage with all the subtlety and complexity of each individual. For me, Self Determination Theory is a good introduction to that necessity.

Career Anchors

We all have perceptions about ourselves. Carol Dweck has shown that we are most successful when we feel free to enlarge these as we learn, rather than see ourselves in a fixed way.

In his 1985 book, Career Anchors: The Changing Nature of Careers, (now in a new edition), Schein documented, first five, then three more, perceptions that act as anchors in the career choices we make. The original five were:

  1. Their technical-functional competence
  2. Their general managerial competence
  3. Their need for autonomy and independence
  4. Their need for security and stability
  5. Their entrepreneurial spirit and sense of creativity

The three later components are:

  1. Their desire to give service or their dedication to a cause
  2. Their need for challenge for its own sake
  3. Their desired lifestyle.

What is Culture?

Excerpts from an Interview with Edgar Schein

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Eddie Obeng: All Change!

Possibly the first business book I read as a new publication was an innovative take on project management. The book had a charismatic style, much like that of its author. Its title is emblematic of the focus of Eddie Obeng’s career.

Eddie Obeng

Short Biography

Eddie Obeng was born in Ghana in 1959, and grew up in Britain, attending a boarding school in Surrey. He  earned a BSc in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at University College London in 1980, and stayed on to take a PhD in Biochemical Engineering.

From there, he went to work as a scientist at Shell from 1983-5 and then to March as a consultant. During his time there, he took an MBA at the Cass Business School. This allowed him to move to the Ashridge Business School in 1987, first as an Assistant Director of Studies, and then, from 1990, as an Executive Director.

In 1994, he left to found Pentacle, an independent business school, which he still runs actively. He is also a visiting professor at Henley Business School and was awarded the prestigious Sir Monty Finniston Award by the Association for Project Management, in 2011, for his contributions to the study and practice of project management.

Obeng is the author of many books, most of which are self-published or out of print. However, All Change!: The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook (1995) is still available and I highly recommend it

Obeng’s Ideas

At the core of Obeng’s thinking is change. He has articulated this simply, by comparing the ‘old world’ with the ‘new world’.

Old World
We learn faster than our environment changes, so our learning equips us well, to cope. Stores of knowledge and experience are applicable and the learned thrive. We can build stores of best practice and we can afford long cycle times in developing new products and services.

New World
Our environment changes faster than we can learn, so our knowledge and experience are always out of date. Constant learning and adaptation is our only way of maintaining success. We need to find ways to develop and test new ideas rapidly and be prepared to honour ‘smart failure’.

Does this remind you of the Growth Mindset ideas of Carol Dweck? It does me.

Consequently, Obeng’s teaching is based around five disciplines we need if we are to succeed in the New World:

  1. Inventing the Future – Innovation
  2. Delivering the Future – project management
  3. Delivering Today – operational management
  4. Leading Organised Talent – leadership and team management
  5. Ensuring Results – sustaining change

All of this tracks back well to the central idea that attracted me to Obeng’s writing in the mid-1990s: that there are different sorts of change, which require different styles of leadership and different balances of capabilities and styles among team members.

These he describes as:

Going on a Quest

Goals and objectives of the change are clear, but you’ll need to figure out how to achieve them. You will need to think carefully about your resources, lead with confidence and commitment, and sell the benefits effectively. You need to stack your team with problem solvers and sleeves-rolled-up doers.

Walking in a Fog

Neither where you are likely to end up, nor the route you will take are clear. You need to move forward carefully and deliberately, one step at a time. You’ll also need to constantly reassure team members with praise for their contributions. You’ll need plenty of problem solvers and also caring people who can create strong team cohesion in the face of uncertainty.

Making a Movie

You understand the processes of change, but are open to discovering where the changes will take you. Consequently, professionalism and expertise are your your tools to ensure that the outcome will be right for your organisation. You need plenty of experts around you, who can follow processes correctly and innovate when needed.

Painting by Numbers

The clearest form of change is where the end result is evident and the means to get there are familiar. Excellence will come from precision and accuracy so it is vital to avoid the threat of complacency. As well as knowledge and skill, your team needs people who can monitor, review, and evaluate well.

This framework is now familiar to many project managers. We often learn project management as if every project is like Painting by Numbers, but it isn’t. My experience was very much with Going on a Quest projects, for example. The rise in Agile Project Management, from the mid-1990s is very much a response to this dynamic – particularly to Making a Movie and Walking in a Fog type projects.

Obeng’s charismatic style is not to everyone’s taste (see the video below), but his ideas are often stimulating and easy to grasp. At their best, they are also valuable aids to thinking about the world of work in the twenty first century.

Eddie Obeng at TED: Smart failure for a fast-changing world

[ted id=1580]

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Angela Duckworth: True Grit

What are the best predictors of success in life? Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence blew the bottom out of general intelligence for most of us, back in the mid 1990s.

One facet of emotional intelligence is motivation, and this is front and centre of the work of another psychologist. Angela Lee Duckworth’s research interest is competencies other than general intelligence that predict academic and professional achievement. And she has been putting the spotlight on two of them: self-control and perseverance.

Angela Duckworth

Very Short Biography

Angela Lee was born in 1970, and grew up in New Jersey. She was the third child of immigrants from China, who had fled the cultural revolution. The parents were exceptionally results-oriented, leading to three children who have all excelled. However, as the third child, Duckworth recalls feeling a sense of benign neglect, as her parents focused their attention on her older siblings.

She was exceptionally bright and worked hard, entering Harvard and graduating in neuro-biology in 1992. Two years later, she took up a scholarship to study neuroscience at the University of Oxford, leaving with an MSc in 1996.

From there, she joined consulting firm McKinsey and Company (where she met her husband, Jason Duckworth). Promised opportunities to do pro bono work, but being allocated work in the pharmaceuticals sector, Duckworth left and started teaching, first in New York. During this time, she started paying attention to why some children succeeded and others failed.

She joined a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Positive Psychology Center, under the leadership of Martin Seligman, who supervised her study. She was awarded her PhD in 2006 and took up an academic post there. She is now a Professor of Psychology and leads the Duckworth Lab, which focuses on two traits that predict achievement: grit and self-control.

Grit and Self-control

Duckworth’s work shows that two traits predict success in life:

  • Grit
    the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward long-term goals
  • Self-control
    the voluntary regulation of behavioural, emotional, and attentional impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions.

These two are different. Grit equips you to pursue especially challenging aims over long periods; years or even decades. Self-control operates at a short timescale in the battle against distractions and temptations – willpower, if you like.

Duckworth’s research shows that the two are related, but not totally correlated. People who are gritty tend to be more self-controlled, but the correlation is not total: some people have masses of grit but little self-control, while some exceptionally self-controlling people are not especially gritty. Her team has developed non-commercial scales that measure each.

Duckworth’s research has found that, when they strip out the effects of intelligence, grit and self-control predict objectively measured success outcomes. They have used contexts as diverse as children’s spelling competitions, military officer training, and general high school graduation results.

Because of the importance of these factors, therefore, Duckworth has introduced them into the routines for her family: husband and two daughters. Academically, her team is researching ways to instil self-control and grit into children. She has shown that children can learn and practise strategies to build grit and self-control.

In a recent Pocketblog, we looked at the work of Carol Dweck, on Growth Mindset. Duckworth sees Dweck as a role model and is collaborating with her because she has found that children who have more of a growth mindset tend to be grittier. Once again, there isn’t a perfect correlation, but enough to suggest that one of the things that makes you gritty is  a growth mindset: the attitude ‘I can get better if I try harder’. This should help you to be tenacious, determined, and hard-working: gritty.

Angela Duckworth’s work in her own words

Angela Duckworth’s 6 minute talk on Grit is one of my favourites and has over 6 million views. She is also working on a book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance due for publication in early 2016.

[ted id=1733]

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Jane ni Dhulchaointigh: Make, mend, modify… play

I have to declare an interest: I love the product that Jane ni Dhulchaointigh invented. It’s fabulous.

There are some things that most of us have around the house. We can’t imagine not having them, yet they were invented in our lifetime, or that of our parents: cellotape, duct tape, blu-tak, superglue, velcro, post its. The next generation will almost certainly include in that list one more: Sugru. That’s what Jane ni Dhulchaointigh invented.

Jane ni Dhulchaointigh

Very Short Biography

Jane ni Dhulchaointigh (pronounced Jane nee Gull-queen-tig) grew up in Eire, in Kilkenny and studied fine art. She then did a master’s degree in design at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2004. It was there that, in 2003, she first discovered the material that was, through much research and development, to become Sugru.

She presented a prototype of the material – along with sketchbooks full of uses for it – as her final year project. I don’t know how well it was marked, but she passed and, more important, visitors to the degree show wanted to know how much it cost, and where they could buy it.

ni Dhulchaointigh knew she was onto something.

Now Sugru is a rapidly growing brand that delights its customers and has a loyal following of makers, creators and hackers (in the sense of bodgers trying to make things better) around the world.

Five Lessons to Learn from Jane ni Dhulchaointigh

Sugru is a relatively new business and ni Dhulchaointigh is not a highly public figure (see the depth of the biography I have managed to assemble!) But from what I have read of her story, there are five valuable lessons for entrepreneurs, business people, and managers in general.

If you want to know more of the story of the creation and development of Sugru, the best place to look is on the company website. I have drawn these lessons from various interviews published on the web.

Lesson 1: Be Prepared to Learn

Or: ‘It’s only chemistry’. Jane ni Dhulchaointigh is a designer and sculptor by training and inclination. Creating a new silicone based product and getting it right requires a lot of chemistry. With her business partner, they hired two experienced (then recently retired) silicone chemists, but I like her attitude. Over the years of development, she was determined to learn, so she could contribute to, question, and understand the science. This puts me in mind of the Growth Mindset ideas of Carol Dweck, which this blog covered a couple of months ago.

Lesson 2: Have a Vision

Once Jane ni Dhulchaointigh had the idea for what use to put Sugru to, she was away. In guiding the chemists, she had a clear vision of what her end product needed to be like. She describes it with five words: colour, pleasure, safe, stick, magic. I’ve used Sugru and that’s five ticks. Which brings us to…

Lesson 3: Take your Time

The development process for the final product took many years. Jane ni Dhulchaointigh says she is glad it did. It meant that the product was good, and that she and her team understood it thoroughly. This was no rush job. But the question remained how to get it to market. For this, she is indebted to the advice of a friend. When she failed to secure big funding from a major corporate, she followed the advice and decided to…

Lesson 4: Start small and make it good

Her first commercial batch of Sugru got coverage in Wired, Boing Boing, and the Daily Telegraph, who all gave it rave reviews. She sold out of the 1,000 packs online in 6 hours.

Lesson 5: Be prepared to take risks

Nothing about Jane ni Dhulchaointigh strikes me as a compulsive risk taker, but she describes the whole development process as a series of risks. By taking a cautious, careful approach to risks, and holding tight to a clear vision she believes in, ni Dhulchaointigh has made those risks pay.

Jane ni Dhulchaointigh in her own words

There are a few videos of Jane ni Dhulchaointigh speaking about Sugru’s creation story. Ths is my favourite.

Fun fact for the pub quiz: Sugru is an Anglicised spelling of Irish word Sugradh, meaning ‘play’.

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Carol Dweck: Growth Mindset

What determines how good you are at what you do? Is it nature or nurture? This is an age old debate that falls into the either/or trap, but one researcher has done more than most to show that nature – your genetic make-up – is nothing more than the starting point to your success. To what extent you fulfil your potential is, says Carol Dweck, largely about your mindset.

Carol Dweck

Very Short Biography

Carol Dweck was born in 1946 and grew up in Brooklyn New York. She was an exceptionally bright student at school, but this did not hold her back. She had a love of learning that enabled her to continue to develop. Her first degree was at Barnard College in 1967, followed by a PhD from Yale in social and developmental psychology, awarded in 1972.

This was followed by a string of academic appointments at prestigious universities; the University of Illinois, Columbia and Harvard, before her current appointment, in 2004, as Professor of Psychology at Stanford.

In 2012, Dweck brought her most important work to the attention of the reading public with Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential. The ideas in this book apply in all walks of life (the cover of the UK edition lists business, parenting, school and relationships) and I think it would be a brave manager or organisational leader who wilfully ignored them. If that’s you, Dweck would describe you as having a fixed mindset, and that would not be good for your future success!

Two Mindsets

Despite the wealth of research and the long history behind the ideas, the concept at the core of Dweck’s research is simple. We do all have some form of capacity or genetic heritage that we are born with, but this is nothing more than a starting point from which we can leap toward our fullest potential or near which we can remain. The difference that makes the difference is not our innate intelligence, physical prowess, musical talent or artistic aptitude; it is the mindset we apply to these.

Fixed Mindset

At one extreme is a ‘fixed mindset’ that believes these traits are set from the start and will hardly vary: ‘some are born great’ – others are not. We are either talented or we are not. The sports star who was told from an early age that they are great, can acquire a sense of entitlement that means they believe that all their success comes from their talent. They don’t need to work hard at it; there’s no point. And if you wonder how that affects you, a manager or leader, then here it is: ‘leaders are born, not made’ is a common belief. So too is the ‘talent agenda’ in many organisations, that seeks out the talented, lauds them and then promotes them against the ‘merely hard-working’.

The problem with this ‘talent myth’ is that it breeds a need to constantly prove your worth. And from this arises the fear that, if people think you are talented, the biggest threat to that is failure. So perhaps the best thing is to avoid taking any form of risk, or stretching yourself in any new direction. From that arises stagnation and a failure to recognise that you have any need to develop. You are great as you are and you don’t need to do anything different.

For me, the Peter Principle rushes to my mind: ‘managers rise to the level of their incompetence.’  That is, they reach the point where they can no longer succeed, because they reach the limit of their talent and, without developing themselves, they start to fail. What is the solution?

Growth Mindset

At the other extreme from a fixed mindset is what Dweck calls a ‘growth mindset’. Here, your innate capabilities are nothing more than a start point and you believe that you can develop any of your fundamental abilities by hard work, dedication, practice, and learning from your experiences: success and failure. People with a growth mindset embrace challenges, are persistent even when they encounter repeated setbacks, and take failures and criticisms as valuable feedback from which they can learn. They develop a love of learning and a resilience that keeps them developing, evolving and growing as individuals throughout their lives.

Many of the great names in any field of human endeavour started life as ordinary kids with special levels of talent. Some were even written off as potential failures. But it was their growth mindsets that enabled them to build steadily on an average or below average base, day by day, month by month and year by year, to exceed their classmates and to dominate their fields.

The Growth Mindset Pocketbook

It is no surprise therefore, that it is Management Pocketbooks’ sibling imprint, Teachers’ Pocketbooks, that has produced a best-selling book on the subject of Growth Mindset: The Growth Mindset Pocketbook.

But once again, don’t for one minute think this doesn’t apply to you; a manager, professional or business-person. For me, the best chapter in Dweck’s Mindset is Business: Mindset and Leadership. Maybe it’s because my interest in education is personal rather than professional and because sport holds no interest for me. Or maybe it’s because a growth mindset is one of the most important characteristics of the best managers and leaders.

The power of believing that you can improve

Carol Dweck’s TED talk is short (10 mins) and compelling.

[ted id=2156]

 

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