Nick Tasler

What Makes Life Meaningful?

Nick Tasler — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:30:09 +0000

John Cusack, Sage At Large

How do you like that question for a conversation starter??? Of course, everyone knows that the answer to “What makes life meaningful?” is the number 7. (Don’t overthink it…)

But if you want a more substantive answer, I highly recommend you watch this TEDx speech from Colorado State researcher, Michael Steger. Michael is one of the world’s leading experts on the scientific study of meaning in life and work, and as an added bonus, he ties in references to John Cusack movies. In his talk, he illuminates why meaning in life boils down to 2 things:

1. Purpose: The need to DO something.

This is really about defining and striving to reach a future aspiration that somehow leaves your fingerprint on the cosmos. But there is also a more basic, earthly component to meaning.

2. Significance: The need to MAKE SENSE.

This is about the biological human drive to identify patterns in our world. As Steger puts it: “the question is not can we find meaning in life? We cannot not find meaning.” Everything we do, and everything that happens, our brains are constantly looking for patterns to make sense of what just went down.

Lastly, Steger closes with an intriguing challenge to his audience and to the rest of us: Research shows that the most effective way to live a meaningful life is actually to give a meaningful life.

3 Great New Books

Nick Tasler — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:53:47 +0000

Recently read 3 new books that I think could add quite a bit to both your work and your life in the coming months, so I wanted to share them here….

1. Give And Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant. I always fancied myself as a “giver” but after reading an advance copy of this book, I have to admit I’ve been more of a “matcher”—a reciprocal back-scratcher. Grant, the youngest professor tenured at Wharton (or any other ivy league business school) shares a staggering amount of hard evidence showing that my matching instincts are not only inconsistent with my goals of making a huge positive impact on the world, but likely also holding me back from reaching my full professional potential. This book is empirical inspiration for anyone looking to make a bigger impact on…well, everything. .

Full disclosure: Adam Grant is a friend and colleague. So don’t take my word for it. Skim the glowing endorsements online from 700 or so of the heavies-hitters in books and business.

2. Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed by Francesca Gino. If you’ve heard me speak, you know that step 2 in the decision process is “Consult the anti-you.” Harvard Business School prof, Gino shares her cutting-edge research showing how power, pride, and anger botch up our best efforts to make good choices. Among other great insights, Gino shares how a conscious effort to consult an anti-you can almost idiot-proof your decisions.

3. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin. Former P&G chief Lafley cautions strategic planners to not just dive into a pile of data completely cold and then call it “scientific” simply because there were numbers involved. Data by itself is not scientific. Instead, create hypotheses that can be tested, first. In other words, strategy is about using your head not just your computer.

70% of Employees Can’t Identify Company Strategy

Nick Tasler — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:28:35 +0000

Tasler Brothers Consulting: “We can now spell our name, so you don’t have to”

I’m offering a new service I’m really excited about. My six-year old son and his business partner, my four-year old son are now available to hire for your next strategic planning session. With combined experience totaling one partial year of kindergarten they are ready to take your business to new heights! Child labor laws be damned!

A few weeks ago I made a case for why team leaders should pay rapt attention to Einstein’s quip that “if you can’t explain it to a 6-year old you don’t understand it.” If you can’t describe your strategy to a six-year old, not only does it mean that you the leader probably don’t understand it very well, your team members don’t get it either.

New research by Timothy Devinney at the University of Technology in Sydney, AU found that only 29.3% of employees could even identify their own company’s strategy from a field of six others…let alone use that strategy to guide their daily decisions. If we want our team members to make good decisions every day based on the strategy we’ve painstakingly put in place, shouldn’t we start by making sure they can at least pick it out of a crowd? (Hint: If your team has to pull out a document to describe your strategic direction, they aren’t using your strategy to make decisions.) So, in one sentence or less, what is your strategy?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for an offsite strategic planning retreat with my new gurus…

3 Myths About Successful Selling

Nick Tasler — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:40:08 +0000

I caught up with Dan Pink a few weeks ago to discuss some of the points in his book To Sell is Human. Like all of Pink’s books, it has a great blend of solid social science research and interesting stories. It’s chock full of great information, and three things really stood out for me as the newest and most counterintuitive findings that challenge the common wisdom.

Myth 1 — “Saying more sells more.”

Myth 2 — “Empathy is the secret weapon.”

Myth 3 — “Tony Robbins beats Bob the Builder.”

For a more detailed description of each of these myths, check out my post in Psychology Today called How To Get Your Way.

Can Idealism Make You a Better Leader?

Nick Tasler — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:04:16 +0000

“I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding — I was fired today.” That’s how the ever irreverent Andrew Mason announced his firing as CEO of Groupon. A recent Fast Company interview with Mason got me wondering: Is idealism incompatible with real world leadership? Or does it just mean that Wall Street’s myopic focus on short-term earnings causes it to undervalue idealism? I think the truth is somewhere in between. Idealism is necessary, but not sufficient for great leadership.

The Case for Idealism

On the one hand, vision matters for successful leadership. All of a leader’s potential followers–employees, customers, advisors, investors–have an innate desire to be a part of something bigger than themselves. As much as I like to fancy myself an individualist who transcends conformist impulses, I have to admit that I take pleasure in being part of groups and movements that seem to be going somewhere exciting. People only follow leaders who seem to be going somewhere. One of the best early indicators that you are “going somewhere” is a compelling, often prophetic, and yes, idealistic vision of where you’re headed.

This is precisely why leadership development advice so often boils down to “casting a vision.” It’s why we celebrate visionary leaders. It’s also only half the story.

The Case for Strategic Idealism

Every good fisherman knows that casting your line is not the point of fishing. Eventually you gotta reel in the big one. An idealist’s ability to cast an awe-inspiring vision is not the point of leadership. Eventually you also have to execute a coherent strategy for getting there.

When Lou Gerstner took over a struggling IBM in the early 90′s he was asked by reporters when he was going to unveil his vision for IBM. To which he notoriously responded. “The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision. What it needs is a series of “tough-minded, market-driven strategies for each of its businesses.” Gerstner might have undervalued vision a tad bit, but he had a point.

Idealistic Vision – Coherent Strategy = Naivete.

Naivete is what many contend was Andrew Mason’s biggest obstacle. In Mason’s defense, the same thing was said about nearly every iconic, visionary entrepreneur at some point (Ford, Jobs, Zuckerberg, BrinPaige, Bezos, Hastings, etc). Idealism often looks like naivete.

Personally, I like Andrew Mason’s style. I don’t think he’s an inherently inept leader. I think the timing might just not be right for him and for Groupon. I predict that the Andrew Mason who eventually reemerges will be an idealist with a sharpened ability to think strategically.

Can You Explain Your Strategy To A 6-Year Old?

Nick Tasler — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:38:00 +0000

Einstein: The Next Strategy Guru?

Just came across a quote from Albert Einstein (courtesy of Dan Pink’s newsletter) that says “if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” I wonder, how many of us could explain our team’s strategy to a six-year old?

What if we tried that? Seriously. I can’t guarantee you’ll actually be able to engage a room full of kindergarteners. By merely trying to, I am 99% sure that your objectives will be stated more simply. You won’t use ambiguous buzz words like “innovative” and “industry leader” and “customer-centric” that mean nothing to a 6-year old, and not much more to working adults that have heard those words so many times that they’ve been rendered practically meaningless. Lastly, I can almost guarantee you will feel the enormous sense of relief that comes only from finally being clear about where you’re going.

If you’re up to it, give it a try. Let me know how it turns out.

Rise of Strategic Behavior

Nick Tasler — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:41:02 +0000

A few years ago, researchers led by Julie Wulf at the Harvard Business School, confirmed a long held suspicion of many: Corporate hierarchies are becoming flatter. Depending on how you slice the numbers, the flattening movement granted mid-level leaders and their teams anywhere from 27% to 64% more power to make decisions in 2008 than their counterparts had in 1986.

The question I set out to answer is: What impact has this Great Flattening had on the performance of teams and their leaders? What I discovered is a tale of two data trails.

Best of Times: Dawn of the Age of Autonomy

From 1986 to 2008, most top management teams swelled to nearly twice their original size. At the same time, the layers of management separating division managers from CEOs decreased by 27%. In other words, the last two decades have seen the typical corporate hierarchy get both wider and shorter.

These changes aren’t happening only at the very top. Other researchers have found that the number of companies using employee empowerment programs in the trenches such as job rotation, problem-solving teams, and Total Quality Management initiatives doubled from the beginning to the end of the 1990’s. Nor is this a uniquely American phenomenon. By 1999, researchers in the UK found that between 60% and 84% of manufacturing companies were actively using some form of an employee empowerment program to prevent old school bureaucracy from stifling the decision making abilities of lower level employees.

The logic behind this trend is simple. Changes in the landscape are almost always spotted and reacted to first by people closer to the front lines who don’t hold a C-level position. Today, strategy is not only executed outside of the C-suites, it is also shaped outside the C-suites. In part, the flatter structure is designed to bring more minds to the table to weigh in on the organization’s key strategic issues.

When you look at this data, it’s hard for people like me who are super-fans of autonomy and empowerment not to be inspired. But is that newfound freedom actually helping?

Worst of Times: Dude, Where’s My Direction?

On the face of it, more front line people with more decision authority should help teams and companies to be more strategically agile. They should be able to react to opportunities quicker with less red tape and fewer bureaucrats standing in the way of both the team’s and the organization’s strategic momentum. That is the theory, anyway.

Reality paints a grimmer picture.

Empowerment can indeed build and sustain strategic momentum for the organization if—and only if—the empowered teams truly understand the organization and its direction well enough to make good strategic decisions on a daily basis. A recent study by CareerBuilder.com shows that 68% of employees can’t even offer a ballpark estimate of their company’s annual revenue. Forty-four percent literally can’t pick their company’s CEO out of a lineup or name a single member of the executive team. Furthermore, a recent McKinsey & Company study found that in many companies nearly 2/3 of team leaders don’t know their company’s strategic direction.

And yet these are the same people increasingly expected to make informed strategic decisions for their teams and their organizations. When the Great Flattening first hit its high-water mark in the late 1990’s, Paul Nutt at Ohio State University (sorry, sports fans: The Ohio State University) found that half of all strategic decisions fail, and not because of flawed strategy formulation, but because of flawed strategy implementation. In other words, the initial strategic decisions were not wrong per se. They simply failed to connect with the critical implementation decisions that needed to be made by teams and leaders throughout the organization. The strategic direction was too fuzzy or complicated to act on in the trenches.

Next Chapter: The Reign of Strategic Behavior

Before we pull the shades down on the Age of Empowerment and throw ourselves back into the corporate Dark Ages where stop watches, time clocks, and micro-managers ruled with an iron fist, we should remember that this modus operandi no longer works for organizations or their people. The pressures that spawned the Great Flattening—globalization, hyper-competition for both customers and talent, and the speed of change—are not going away. Neither is the Great Flattening.

What we will likely see instead is the continued rise of Strategic Behavior—a habitual pattern of strategic thinking and decisive action—in mid- to lower-level leaders and teams. Recent research is already confirming the validity of that approach. In a study of over 20,000 managers, Kevin Wilde, Chief Learning Officer at General Mills, found that 88% of managers who share this one skill set of strategic behavior are in the top 10% of highest performing leaders overall.

In the end, the Great Flattening has created tremendous opportunities for both teams and individuals alike. It remains to be seen exactly which leaders will behave strategically enough to run with those opportunities.

Scoring Key for the Rate Your Boss Quiz @ Psychology Today

Nick Tasler — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 14:50:01 +0000

(To read the article or take the quiz, go here)

27-32 – Your boss is a keeper.

You may not always agree with your boss on everything, and sometimes his/her boldness might come across kind of tough or callous, but s/he demonstrates that decisiveness for sound strategic reasons that aren’t political or mean-spirited. In the end, your team gets results and that will be a huge asset for your career.

22-26 – Your boss is solid.

Overall, your boss has a good understanding of what needs to get done to build momentum for your team. S/he sets priorities and holds everyone—including his/herself accountable—for making the decisions that will make you all successful. Your boss probably has some room to grow, but in general s/he is doing pretty well for your team.

16-21 – Your boss could be more effective.

Your boss doesn’t usually set clear priorities for your team, and may struggle to make timely decisions. It could be that s/he has a such a strong need for social acceptance that s/he has a hard time telling anyone “no” which is critical to both strategic prioritizing and decision-making. Or it could simply be that your boss has never received proper training on these skills. Whatever the case, your best bet is to stay focused on your most important projects and tactfully help drive team decisions.

15 or below – Your boss is holding you back.

His/her shortcomings could have many causes. Your boss could be far too political in which case s/he is always trying to fly under the radar and cover his/her you-know-what. Or the most challenging scenario is that your boss is just really, really nice. In an effort to try to please everyone all the time, s/he won’t kill anyone’s distracting pet projects and won’t make a decision until the team reaches total agreement…which may never happen. If you really like your boss, you might want to talk with him/her about this and offer to help put together a gameplan. If your relationship is not so solid, you might just need to grin and bear it until you can find a different position.

Secret Recipe For Focus

Nick Tasler — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 13:26:21 +0000

Warren Buffet & Bill Gates Both Attribute Success to Focus

“What factor do you feel was most important to getting where you’ve gotten in life?”

William Gates II (the father of MicroSoft founder William Gates III) posed that question to his distinguished dinner guests at a garden party in 1994. He could hardly have picked a better audience for his question since both the first and second richest men in America were at the table.

Warren Buffett was first to respond. “Focus,” he said. Bill Gates the younger followed in kind, and also said “focus.”

Everyone knows focus is vital for achieving success. But how do you get focus? And once you have it, how do you keep it?

The recipe for focus has two ingredients.

The first ingredient is clarity about what you want to do. No surprises here. When people talk about defining specific goals; casting a clear vision; describing what success looks like; or finding your Decision Pulse, they are talking about variations on this one critical point.

But clarity about what you want to do is only half the battle.

The second ingredient is killing the other things you also want to do. This second ingredient is far less obvious, and far more forgotten. Our natural tendency is to assume that if we just get really clear about what we want to achieve that the seas will part and distractions will magically evaporate. That’s the positivist approach. Reality calls for a reductionist approach.

In an interesting study, the NYU psychologist Peter Gollwitzer found that writing action plans in a “distraction-inhibiting” way is more effective at keeping us focused than writing the plans in a “task-facilitating” way. For example, let’s say your goal is to reach a certain sales target for the week. To achieve that goal, you know you that you need to start your day by making sales calls right off the bat. So, you might set a calendar reminder for yourself that says “the first thing I will do is make 3 sales calls to customers A, B, and C!”

The problem is that this crystal clear “go get em’!” plan doesn’t say anything about the emailing, water cooler chats, and Facebook status updates that will compete for your attention first thing in the morning. Gollwitzer’s research suggests that the best approach to distraction is not doubling your efforts toward the goal, but preemptively naming and avoiding the likely distractions. I’ve applied this to my own daily habits and it’s done wonders. For example, when I need to focus first thing in the morning my calendar reminder now reads like this “NO EMAIL!! Write 500 words for the new chapter.”

That’s also why when I work with client teams I don’t just ask them to create an Action Plan for the next quarter or year. I also ask them to create a Non-Action Plan. Let’s say your team has four strategic objectives for the year. Instead of just writing those down, crafting action plans and assigning responsibilities for each, try creating a Non-Action Plan.

Start by ranking your objectives in order of importance. Then focus 100% of your team’s discretionary effort in the first quarter on tackling objective #1 by putting objectives 2-4 on your Non-Action Plan until 2nd quarter. Then get a verbal commitment from every single team member that they will focus on this ONE thing, and actively ignore the other objectives for only the next 3 months. If there was something else that was a priority last year, but a change in strategy or new shifts in the marketplace have now made that thing less of a priority, then also be sure to call that out on your Non-Action Plan.

Try it for just one quarter and see what happens. You might just feel…well, focused.

Steve Jobs on the Virtues of Quitting

Nick Tasler — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 13:53:31 +0000

The Master of Quitting as a Success Strategy

“Stop!” Steve Jobs shouted. “This is crazy!” The scene was a products strategy meeting at the Palo Alto headquarters of Apple Computer in autumn of 1997. More than a decade after his ouster as CEO of Apple in 1985, the board of Apple asked Steve Jobs to reclaim his throne as its Chief Executive. When he returned, reviewing the company’s product line was a top priority. One by one Jobs invited every product team to a 90-minute meeting in which they were asked to justify why their product mattered.

After sitting in on the flailing computer giant’s meetings for three weeks, Jobs grew more and more frustrated with the company’s complete and utter lack of focus. Finally, Jobs decided that Apple need to quit asap. As Walter Isaacson describes in his engaging biography, Jobs “grabbed a magic marker and padded to a whiteboard and drew a horizontal line and a vertical line to make a four-squared chart. ‘Here’s what we need’ he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote ‘consumer’ and ‘pro.’ He labeled the two rows ‘desktop’ and ‘portable.’ Their job was to make four great products, one for each quadrant.” Everything else followed a direct path to the recycling bin. Just like that, Steve Jobs quit on 70% of Apple Computer’s product line, as well as many of the corresponding people.

It’s true that any Wall Street raider could have also come in and immediately beefed up the balance sheet by indiscriminately slashing and burning costs and people. What made Jobs’ behavior different is that he decided Apple would be the purveyors of “insanely great” user-friendly electronic devices. To do that, the company’s engineers and marketers needed laser focus and could no longer be distracted by good, but not great product pursuits. That focus would eventually give birth to the Power Mac, the Power Book, the iMac, and the iBook, while also setting the stage for the most impressive run of consumer product creation since the age of Edison. Just one quarter after the slash and burn session, Apple recorded its first profit in two years, and is currently the most valuable company in the world.

In regard to his four quadrant product strategy, Steve Jobs explained that “deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies and it’s true for products.” It is equally as true for teams, careers, and lives. Chances are that strategic quitting will get you to the next level much faster than adding yet another “good” pursuit to your task list.