Book Short – Blink part III – Undo?

I just finished reading Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, and honestly, I wish I could hit Life’s Undo button and reclaim those hours.  I love Michael Lewis, and he’s one of those authors where if he writes it, I will read it.  But this one wasn’t really worth it for me.

Having said that, I think if you haven’t already read both Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (review, buy) and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (review, buy), then it might be worth it.  But having read those two books, The Undoing Project had too much overlap and not enough “underlap” (to quote my friend Tom Bartel) – that is, not enough new stuff of substance for me.  The book mostly went into the personal relationship between two academic thinkers, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.  It also touched on some of the highlights of their work, which, while coming out of the field of psychology, won them a Nobel prize in Economics for illuminating some of the underlying mechanics of how we make decisions.

The two most interesting pieces of their work to me, which are related in the book, are:

First, that human decision-making is incredibly nuanced and complex, and that at least 25% of the time, the transitive property doesn’t apply.  For example, I may prefer coffee to tea, and I may prefer tea to hot chocolate, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I prefer coffee to hot chocolate.

From the book, “When faced with complex multidimensional alternatives, such as job offers, gambles or [political] candidates, it is extremely difficult to utilize properly all the available information.” It wasn’t that people actually preferred A to B and B to C and then turned around and preferred C to A. It was that it was sometimes very hard to understand the differences. Amos didn’t think that the real world was as likely to fool people into contradicting themselves as were the experiments he had designed.  And the choice created its own context: Different features might assume greater prominence in the mind when the coffee was being compared to tea (caffeine) than when it was being compared to hot chocolate (sugar). And what was true of drinks might also be true of people, and ideas, and emotions. The idea was interesting: When people make decisions, they are also making judgments about similarity, between some object in the real world and what they ideally want. They make these judgments by, in effect, counting up the features they notice. And as the noticeability of features can be manipulated by the way they are highlighted, the sense of how similar two things are might also be manipulated.”

Second, what Kahneman and Tversky called Prospect Theory, which is basically that humans are more motivated by the fear of loss as opposed to the greed of gain.  I’ve written about the “Fear/Greed Continuum” of my former boss from many years ago before.  I’m not sure he knew about Kahneman and Tversky’s work when he came up with that construct, and I certainly didn’t know about it when I first blogged about it years ago.  Do this experiment – ask someone both of these questions:  Would you rather be handed $500 or have a 50% chance of winning $1,000 and a 50% of getting nothing?  Then, Would you rather hand me $500 or have a 50% chance of owing me $1,000 and a 50% chance of owing me nothing?  Most of the time, the answers are not the same.

For fun, I tried this out on my kids and re-proved Prospect Theory, just in case anyone was worried about it.

Anyway, bottom line on this book – read it if you haven’t ready those other two books, skip it if you have, maybe skim it if you’ve read one of them!

Does size matter?

It is the age-old question — are you a more important person at your company if you have more people reporting into you?  Most people, unfortunately, say yes.

I’m going to assume the origins of this are political and military. The kingdom with more subjects takes over the smaller kingdom. The general has more stars on his lapel than the colonel. And it may be true for some of those same reasons in more traditional companies. If you have a large team or department, you have control over more of the business and potentially more of the opportunities. The CEO will want to hear from you, maybe even the Board.

In smaller organizations, and in more contemporary organization structures that are flatter (either structurally or culturally) or more dynamic/fluid, I’m not sure this rule holds any more. Yes, sure, a 50-person team is going to get some attention, and the ability to lead that team effectively is incredibly important and not easy to come by. But that doesn’t mean that in order to be important, or get recognized, or be well-compensated, you must lead that large team.

Consider the superstar enterprise sales rep or BD person. This person is likely an individual contributor. But this person might well be the most highly paid person in the company. And becoming a sales manager might be a mistake — the qualities that make for a great rep are quite different from those that make a great sales manager. We have lost a few great sales reps over the years for this very reason. They begged for the promotion to manager, we couldn’t say no (or we would lose them), then they bombed as sales managers and refused as a matter of pride to go back to being a sales rep.

Or consider a superstar engineer, also often an individual contributor. This person may be able to write code at 10x the rate and quality of the rest of the engineering organization and can create a massive amount of value that way. But everything I wrote above about sales reps moving into management holds for engineers as well.  The main difference we’ve seen over the years is that on average, successful engineers don’t want to move into management roles at the same rate as successful sales reps.

It’s certainly true that you can’t build a company consisting of only individual contributors. But that isn’t my point. My point is that you can add as much value to your organization, and have as much financial or psychic reward, by being a rock star individual contributor as you can by being the leader of a large team.

Post Traumatic Job Disorder.

As we have been scaling up Return Path, we have been increasingly hiring senior people in from the outside. We believe in promoting from within and do it all the time, but sometimes you need an experienced leader who has operated at or ahead of the scale you’re at.  Someone with deep functional expertise and a “been there, done that” playbook. When you get a hire like this right, it’s amazing how much that kind of person gets done, how quickly.

One of the pitfalls of those hires, though, is cultural fit. Many of the larger organizations in the world don’t have the kind of supportive, employee-centric cultures that we have here, or that startups tend to have in general. They tend to be much more hierarchical, political, command-and-control. There is a real risk that hiring a senior person who has been trained in environments like that will blow up on you — that, as I’ve written before, the body will reject the organ transplant.

I’ve taken to calling the problem PTJD, or Post-Traumatic Job Disorder. Some of the stories I’ve heard from senior people about their experiences with their bosses or even CEOs at prior companies include such things as:  being screamed at regularly, having had a gun pulled on you, having had a knife pulled on you, having been ignored and only spoken to once or twice a year, being the victim of sexual harassment. Nice.

Just like PTSD, many people can recover from PTJD by being placed in a different environment with some up-front reprogramming and ongoing coaching. But also like PTSD, there are times where people can’t recover from PTJD. The bad habits are too engrained. They are (virtually) shell shocked.

Assuming you do the same reprogramming and coaching work on any PTJD employee, the difference between an employee who recovers and one who does not recover is really hard to smoke out in an interview process. Almost all candidates like this (a) are very polished and now how to interview well, and (b) genuinely think they want to work in a more relaxed, contemporary environment.

Here are five things I’ve learned over the years that can help identify a PTJD candidate who is unlikely to recover, before you make the hire:

1. Look for candidates who have bigger company experience, but who also have startup and growth/scaling experience.  As I’ve written before, stage experience is important because the person is more likely to really understand what he or she is getting into — and what their playbook of action is.
2. Try to understand, if a candidate has been in a workplace that breeds PTJD, whether that person was just in the machine, or if the person actually ran the machine. In other words, a senior manager might be a better fit to recover from PTJD than a senior executive.
3. Note that not all big companies are dysfunctional or lead to PTJD, so try to understand the reputation of the person’s employer. For example, in New York, it’s a pretty safe bet that someone coming from American Express has not only been well trained, but well cared for.
4. Do reference checks differently. Do them yourself. Do them as if you were doing a 360 on the person (manager, peer, subordinate, even a junior person from another department). Do reference checks on the references (seriously – ask the references about each other) so you understand the biases each of them brings to the conversation with you.
5. Focus on the first 90 days. Be relentless about how you onboard a potential PTJD victim. Give them more care, structure, praise, guidance, and criticism than you might otherwise give. Use an outside coach to augment your work, and assign a good executive buddy internally. And listen carefully to the feedback from the organization about the person, doing a deep 360 after a few months to see if the person is recovering, can recover, or can’t recover. If the latter, time to cut your losses early.

Thanks to some of my new executive colleagues here for inspiring this post, and I hope none of my friends who have served in the military take offense at this post. I am drawing an analogy, but I’m not truly suggesting that PTJD compares in any way, shape, or form to the horrors of war.

Symbolism in Action

A couple months ago, I wrote about how the idiots who run the Big 3 US automakers in Detroit don’t have a clue about symbolism — the art or the science of it.  Yesterday, I wrote about how I think the non-headcount cuts to G&A that we’re making at Return Path during these challenging economic times will be positive for the company in the long run.  The two topics are closely related.

Obama announces on Day 1 that White House staffers who make more than $100k won’t be getting a pay raise this year.  Presumably all of those people just started their jobs on January 20 and wouldn’t be eligible for a raise until 2010.  Return Path cuts pilates classes in its Colorado office — an expense that must cost around $3,000/year.  Practically speaking, it won’t make a difference to our budget one way or another.  Microsoft lays off 1,400 people — a real number, certainly for those families — but that’s the equivalent of Return Path laying off 2 people. 

Sometimes the symbolic is just that.  It is something designed to send a signal to others, and not much more.  You could argue that all three examples above mean nothing in reality, so they were just symbolic.  A waste of time.

You can also make the argument that sometimes, when done right, symbolism turns into action as it motivates or serves as a catalyst for other changes.  Obama’s cuts may be fictitious, but they set the tone for broader action across a 2mm person bureaucracy.  Pilates in the office?  Feels too excessive these days, even for a company obsessed with its employees and their well being, in an era where we’re cutting back other things that are more serious.  Microsoft has gobs of cash and doesn’t need to worry about its future, but it wants to tell the other 99% of its employee population that it’s time to buckle down and fly straight.  And they will.

Anyone who thinks the synbolic doesn’t influence the practical should think again.  Or just talk to Caroline Kennedy about the impact of her admission that she hadn’t voted in years on her political ambitions.