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Self-Help: Therapy for the DIY Age

Self-Help

Self-HelpSelf-help wasn’t always a multi-million dollar industry. Its origins go way back to when the first caveman or cavewoman got up off the floor, brushed themselves down, and got back on with it.

So what is there to say about a Big Idea that’s been around forever and is almost certainly wired into our genes?

For me, it is the self-help industry that is the story. It’s a story of:

  • academic rigour and genuine solutions, alongside
  • mindless credulity and outright charlatanry

Continue reading Self-Help: Therapy for the DIY Age

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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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Authenticity – Congruence for the 21st Century

Authenticity

AuthenticityNobody likes a fraud… yet we tolerate them. Nobody wants to be a phoney… but we all let ourselves down on occasion. But regardless of our actions, we all value authenticity.

The challenge of course is not just to recognise it, and distinguish the authentic from the ersatz.

It’s to form a clear idea of what you mean by authenticity. Because in modern business and professional parlance, it’s become a bit of a chameleon.

Continue reading Authenticity – Congruence for the 21st Century

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Chip Heath & Dan Heath: Made to Stick

Chip and Dan Heath have a writing style that turns important ideas into simple formulations, and illustrates them with compelling case studies. Their three books (to date) are all best-sellers and each is well-worth reading for any manager, professional, or entrepreneur.

Of the three, the first is not only the one that made their name, but the one that, for me, has the stickiest ideas: Made to Stick.

Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Chip Heath

Chip Heath is a graduate of Texas A&M University where he studied Industrial Engineering. He went on to do a PhD in psychology at Stanford University. He is there today, as Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Graduate School of Business, having also held academic posts at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (1991 to 97) and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University (1997-2000).

Dan Heath

Dan Heath has a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He has been a researcher for the Harvard Business School and also co-founded an innovative academic publisher, Thinkwell, whch provides school level textbooks. He now works at Duke University, as a Senior Fellow at The Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE), where he also founded the Change Academy.

The Heath Brothers’ Books

Chip and Dan Heath have written three books together:

Each of them describes a series of steps for being effective in doing something – communicating ideas, making change, and taking decisions. I strongly recommend you to read these books – I have gained a lot from each of them. Here, all I’ll do is summarise the main content.

Made to Stick

Why is it that some ideas circulate easily? People like to share them and, when they do, the ideas are memorable, compelling and soon become pervasive. They seem to be almost made to stick.

If we can understand the answer, perhaps we can also make our own ideas sticky. This is the substance of the Heath’s ideas, which they present in a handy acronym: SUCCESs.

Simple: We need to simplify our ideas by whittling away every superfluous detail to find their core, which we can then communicate to others.

Unexpected: One way to get attention is with surprise, and then we can hold that attention by stimulating curiosity.

Concrete: Real stories and examples make our ideas solid. Abstract theory is the enemy of engagement with your ideas.

Credible: People need to believe your idea for it to stick, which means giving them examples they can relate to, demonstrating your authority, and providing ways they can access proof for themselves.

Emotional: We make choices and remember ideas, when they trigger powerful emotions, so you need to demonstrate what’s in it for your audience, in terms of self-interest and emotional payback.

Stories: We are story-telling creatures, and we use stories to guide us in how to respond to situations. They make things real and inspire us.

Switch

One of the key roles for managers is to make changes in our organisations. But it is fiendishly difficult. The Heaths argue that the reason is a conflict that’s built into our brains, between our rational mind and our emotional mind. This idea will be familiar to readers of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking: Fast and Slow.

The Heaths use the metaphor of an elephant and its rider. The elephant is the powerful emotional aspect of our brain, which can easily take us where it’s going anyway, while the rider is our rational side that needs to motivate the elephant to go in the right direction. They offer a three way prescription to:

  1. Direct the rider
  2. Motivate the elephant
  3. Shape the path

Direct the Rider
Here, we have to find out what works and repeat it, discover specific steps that will get people where you need them to go, and create a direction to go and a reason to go there.

Motivate the Elephant
We don’t do things because we know they are right, we do them because they feel right. So we need to appeal to people’s emotions as well as their reason. We also need to make change easy, by presenting small, simple steps. Finally, they advocate instilling a growth mindset.

Shape the Path
Change people’s environment to shift behaviours and make the changes feel easier. Then turn the new behaviours into habits, by making repetition easy. Finally, use successes to spread the ideas and engage others.

Decisive

Back to Kahneman! Our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities. We jump to conclusions and then become overconfident that we’re right. We look for confirming evidence and disregard other information that conflicts with our prejudices. We’re distracted by  emotions – which make emotionally resonant ideas sticky.

In short, we’re rubbish at making good decisions!

And knowing it doesn’t help, ‘any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see’, say the Heaths. But luckily they also give us a four-step framework to help us make better decisions: WRAP.

Widen Your Options
Yes or no, this or that, big or small. Narrow choices make bad decisions, so the first step is to explore a wider space of options. And the book shows you how.

Reality-test Your Assumptions
Stop trying to show you’re right and start trying to prove you’re wrong. Only if you fail, then you can start to be confident in your assumptions.

Attain Distance Before Deciding
Shift your perspective in time, place or emotion. How will this decision look in five years, what do people do somewhere different, what would you tell your friend to do?

Prepare to be Wrong
Overconfidence hides the flaws in your thinking, so look for the things that can go wrong and find ways to alert yourself when events mean you need to shift decision.

Summary

What? You want more of a summary than summarising three chunky books in a thousand words. Just go out and read them!

By the way, there are lots of great resources linked to their books, on the Heath Brothers website.

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Philip Tetlock: Expert Judgment

Philip Tetlock has done more than any other academic to help us understand the process of forecasting and making predictions. He has shown us why experts don’t do well, and, with his latest work, has found the secret sauce of ‘Superforecasting‘.

Philip Tetlock
Philip Tetlock

Short Biography

Philip Tetlock was born in 1954 and grew up in Toronto. He studied psychology, gaining his BA and MA at University of British Columbia, before moving to the US, to research decision-making for his PhD at Yale.

His career has been entirely academic, with posts at University of California, Berkley (Assistant Professor, 1979-1995), Ohio State University (Chair of Psychology and Political Science, 1996-2001), a return to UC Berkley (Chair at the Haas Business School, 2002-2011), and currently, he is Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is jointly appointed between the School of Psychology, Political Science, and the Wharton Business School.

Tetlock’s early books are highly academic, but he started to come to prominence with the publication, in 2005, of ‘Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?‘ This book has become highly influential, by documenting the results of Tetlock’s research into the forecasting and decision making of experts. The bottom line is that the more prominent the expert: the poorer their ability to forecast accurately.

Tetlock’s most recent book, 2015’s ‘Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction‘ is one of those few magic books that can change your view of the world, make you smarter, make you feel wiser, and inspire you at the same time. It is co-written with journalist Dan Gardner (whose earlier books cover Tetlock’s work [Future Babble], and that of Daniel Kahneman [Risk]) and so is also highly readable.

The Tetlock Two-step

In ‘Expert Political Judgment‘, Tetlock is a pessimist. He finds substantial evidence to warn us not to accept the predictions of pundits and experts. They are rarely more accurate than a chimp with a dartboard (okay, he actually compares them to random guessing).

Ten years later, in ‘Superforecasting’, Tetlock is an optimist. He still rejects the predictions of experts, but he has found light at the end of the predictions tunnel. The people he calls ‘Superforecasters’ are good at prediction; far better than experts, far better than chance, and highly consistent too.

If you want to understand how to make accurate predictions and reliable decisions; you need to understand Tetlock’s work.

Hedgehogs and Foxes: The Failure of Experts

In a long series of thorough tests of forecasting ability, Tetlock discovered a startling truth. Experts rarely perform better than chance. Simple computer algorithms that extrapolate the status quo often outperformed them. The best human predictors were those with lesser narrow expertise and a broader base of knowledge. In particular, the higher the public profile of the expert, the poorer their performance as a forecaster.

This led Tetlock to borrow a metaphor from philosopher Isiah Berlin: The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. The experts are hedgehogs: they know one thing very well, but are often outsmarted by the generalists who recognise the limitations of their knowledge and therefore take a more nuanced view. This is often because experts create for themselves a big theory that they are then seduced into thinking will explain everything. Foxes don’t have a grand theory. So they synthesise many different points of view, and therefore see the strengths and weaknesses of each one, better than the hedgehogs.

One result of Tetlock’s work was that the US Government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) set up a forecasting tournament. This is an ‘Intelligence Community’ think tank. Eventually, Tetlock moved from helping design and manage the tournament, to participating.

Superforecasting: The Triumph of Collective Reflection

Tetlock, along with his wife (University of Pennsylvania Psychology and Marketing Professor, Barbara Mellers) created and co-led the Good Judgment Project. This was a collaborative team that was able to win the IARPA tournament consistently.

The book, Superforecasting, documents what Tetlock learned about how to forecast well. He identified ‘Superforecasters’ as people who can consistently make better predictions than other pundits. Superforecasters think in a different way. They are more thoughtful, reflective, open-minded and intellectually humble. But despite their humility, they tend to be widely read, hard-working, and highly numerate.

In a recent (at time of writing – https://twitter.com/PTetlock/status/738667852568350720 – 3 jJune 2016) Tweet, Tetlock said of  Trump University’s ‘Talk Like a winner’ guidelines :

Guidelines for “talking like a winner” are roughly the direct opposite of those for thinking like a superforecaster

The other characteristics that enable superforecasting, which you can implement in your own organisation’s decision-making, are:

  1. Screen forecasters for high levels of open-mindedness, rationality and fluid intelligence (reasoning skills), and low levels of superstitious thinking (Tetlock has developed a ‘Rationality Quotient’ or RQ). Also choose people with a ‘Growth Mindset’ andGrit.
  2. Collect forecasters together to work as a team
  3. Aim to maximise diversity of experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives
  4. Train them in how to work as a team effectively
  5. Good questions get good answers, so focus early effort on framing the question well to reduce bias and increase precision
  6. Understand biases and how to counter them
  7. Embrace and acknowledge uncertainty
  8. Take a subtle approach and use high levels of precision in estimating probabilities of events
  9. Adopt multiple models, and compare the predictions each one offers to gain deeper insights
  10. Start to identify the best performers, and allocate higher weight to their estimates
  11. Reflect on outcomes and draw lessons to help revise your processes and update your forecasts

 

Tetlock Explaining Fox and Hedgehog Theory

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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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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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