Doug Sundheim's Blog, page 3

New Book Worth a Read

Doug Rushkoff has written a slap in the face. It’s a loving slap, but a slap nonetheless. And it’s a slap we could all use right now. The essence is this: we humans have created a host of wonderfully freeing advances, but over time they’ve come to enslave and control us–and we need to wake up. We need to question what we call “facts” and remember the potential of our collective humanity. The book is arranged into 100 brief essays under 14 topic headings. From beginning to end you will find yourself saying “yes!” to much of it. And even if you don’t agree with everything he says, you will find his writing helpful in clarifying your thinking. You can find the book here.

Below are a few passages that stuck with me:

On Social Media…

What people couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for with money, we would now paid for with personal data. But something larger had also changed. The platforms themselves were no longer in the business of delivering people to one another; they were in the business of delivering people to marketers. Humans were no longer the customers of social media. We were the product.

On losing track of figure and ground (a section I found particularly eye opening)…

When we lose track of figure and ground, we forget who is doing what for whom and why. We risk treating other people as objects. Worse, we embed these values in our organizations or encode them into our technologies. By learning to recognize reversals of figure and ground, we can liberate ourselves from the systems to which we have become enslaved… Take money: it was originally invented to store and enable transactions. Money was the medium for the marketplace’s primary function of value exchange. Money was the ground, and the marketplace was the figure. Today, the dynamic is reversed: the acquisition of money itself has become the central goal, and the marketplace is just a means of realizing that goal. Money has become the figure, and the marketplace full of people has become the ground.

On losing track of figure and ground with regards to schools…

Once we see competitive advantage and employment opportunity as the primary purposes of education rather than its ancillary benefits, something strange begins to happen. Entire curriculums are rewritten to teach the skills that students will need in the workplace. Schools consult corporations to find out what will make students more valuable to them. For their part, the corporations get to externalize the costs of employee training to the public school system, while the schools, in turn, surrender their mission of expanding the horizons of the working class for the more immediate purpose of job readiness.

On the digital media environment…

A search engine designed to promote academic thought became the world’s biggest advertising agency, and a social media platform designed to help people connect became the world’s biggest data collector…

Living in a digitally enforced attention economy means being subjected to a constant assault of automated manipulation. Persuasive technology, as it is now called, is a design philosophy taught and developed at some of America’s leading universities and then implemented on platforms from e-commerce sites and social networks to smartphones and fitness wristbands. The goal is to generate “behavioral change“ and “habit formation,“ most often without the user’s knowledge or consent.

Those of us who want to preserve the prosocial, one-world vision of the TV media environment, or the reflective intellectualism of the print era, are the ones who must stop looking back. If we are going to promote connection and tolerance, we’ll have to do it in a way that recognizes the biases of the digital media environment in which we are actually living, and then encourages human intervention in these otherwise automated processes…

On mechanomorphism (machines becoming more like us and vice versa)…

It’s not that wanting to improve ourselves, even with seemingly invasive technology, is so wrong. It’s that we humans should be making active choices about what it is we want to do to ourselves, rather than letting the machines, or the markets propelling them, decide for us.

On economics…

The economy needn’t be a war; it can be a commons. To get there, we must retrieve our innate goodwill.… The commons is not a winner-take-all economy, but an all-take-the-winnings economy. Shared ownership encourages shared responsibility, which in turn engenders a long-term perspective on business practices. Nothing can be externalized to some “other“ player, because everyone is part of the same trust, drinking from the same well.

Capitalism as it’s currently being executed is the enemy of commerce, extracting value from marketplace is in delivering it to remote shareholders. The very purpose of the capitalist operating system is to prevent widespread prosperity…Corporations are still great at sucking all of the money out of the system but they’re awful at deploying those assets once they have them.

That growth mandate remains with us today. Corporations must grow in order to pay back their investors.… With each new round of growth more money in value was delivered up from the real world of people and resources to those who have the monopoly on capital. That’s why it’s called capitalism.

In perhaps the most spectacular reversal of figure and ground we’ve yet witnessed corporations have been winning court cases that give them the rights of human beings.

The human beings running those enterprises are no less the psychic victims of their companies practices then the rest of us, which is why it’s so hard for them to envision a way out.

On artificial intelligence…

We’ve got a greater part of humanity working on making our social media feeds more persuasive than we have on making clean water more accessible.

We must not accept any technology as the default solution for our problems. When we do, we end up trying to optimize ourselves for our machines, instead of optimizing our machines for us.

On solving complex problems…

We have been trained to expect an answer to every question, and an ending to every beginning. We seek closure and resolution, growing impatient or even despondent when no easy answer is in sight. This fuels capitalism and consumerism, which depend on people believing that they are just one stock market win or product purchase away from fulfillment. It’s great for motivating a nation to, say, put a man on the moon before the end of the decade, or go to war against some other nation.

But it doesn’t serve us as we attempt to contend with long- term, chronic problems. There’s no easy fix for climate change, the refugee crisis, or terrorism. How do we even know when we’re done? There’s no flag to plant, no terms of surrender. Motivating a society to address open-ended challenges requires a more open-ended approach—one that depends less on our drive toward climax than on our capacity for unresolved situations. Like life.

The planet’s complex biosphere will survive us, one way or the other. Our own continuing participation, however, is in some doubt.

On expanding our view of what we can change…

We must learn to distinguish between the natural world and the many constructions we now mistake for preexisting conditions of the universe. Money, debt, jobs, slavery, countries, race, corporatism, stock markets, brands, religions, government, and taxes are all human inventions. We made them up, but we now act as if they’re unchangeable laws. Playing for Team Human means being capable of distinguishing between what we can’t change and what we can

You are not alone…

As much as we think we’re separate individuals, we’re wired from birth and before to share, bond, learn from, and even heal one another. We humans are all part of the same collective nervous system. This is not a religious conviction but an increasingly accepted biological fact.

We can’t go it alone, even if we wanted to. The only way to heal is by connecting to someone else.

But it also means that when one of us is disturbed, confused, violent, or oppressed, the rest of us are, too. We can’t leave anyone behind or none of us really makes it to wherever we think we’re going. And we can’t just stay confused and depressed ourselves without confusing and depressing everyone who is connected to us.

This is a team sport.

The post New Book Worth a Read appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

A Brief Visit With Einstein

I’ve always liked Albert Einstein’s quote, “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” I believe it captures the essence of a well-lived life. Wanting to understand the backstory behind the quote I set out to uncover where and to whom Einstein had said this. It led me to a short and inspiring piece, Death of a Genius, in the May 2, 1955 issue of LIFE Magazine.

A few months before publication (and just before Einstein’s death on April 18, 1955) LIFE editor William Miller, had traveled unannounced to Einstein’s home in Princeton, NJ with his son Pat, a Harvard freshman, and William Hermanns, a poet, scholar and long-time friend of Einstein’s. Miller’s son, a science student, was struggling with the meaning of life. Knowing that Einstein was one of Pat’s lifelong heroes, Miller hoped Einstein might be able to impart some wisdom to Pat. (The idea of popping into Einstein’s house unannounced to discuss the meaning of life is surreal to think about.) As an old friend, Hermanns was there to help them gain admittance. Plus Hermanns had a few philosophical questions of his own for Einstein.

Long story short, they get in and have a fascinating back-and-forth about the nature of knowledge, religion, and the soul. The conversation turns to the idea of finding truth and Einstein shares his philosophy, “There comes a point in everyone’s life where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without knowing precisely how.” Great thought.

Then Miller shares his son’s creeping nihilism, “…he can find no reason why he should strive to achieve.” This prompts the following exchange between Einstein and Pat from which the opening quote comes:

Einstein looked at Pat and simply asked, “Does not the question of the undulation of light arouse your curiosity?” (The nicest thing about the question was his simple assumption that the boy would understand it.) “Yes, very much,” said the boy, his interest brightening.

“Is not this enough to occupy your whole curiosity for a lifetime?”

“Why, yes,” said Pat, smiling rather sheepishly. “I guess it is.”

“Then do not stop to think,” said Einstein, “about the reasons for what you are doing, about why you are questioning. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity. Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives.”

A brilliant and refreshing impromptu conversation. In our increasingly style-over-substance, me-first, find-the-shortest-path-to-success, self-promote-at-all-costs world, I think Einstein’s perspective is more important now than ever.

The post A Brief Visit With Einstein appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

Fly High, Dive Deep

I’m currently helping a client think about mentoring in their organization. In the process I’m reviewing Chip Bell and Marshall Goldsmith’s good book Managers as Mentors. In it I came across a piece of advice that Fred Hassan, former Chairman of Shering-Plough and Bausch & Lomb and current Managing Director of Warburg Pincus, received from an early mentor in the 1970’s, which has stuck with him for over forty years now—Fly High, Dive Deep.

Hassan recollects the conversation:

He said that in business and life we should be like a seagull, which means you fly high so you can see the environment and the fish, and you also have to be able to dive and get in deep to catch the fish. He emphasized the importance of having the ability to see the big picture, and also get very detail oriented and execution oriented. It was a tremendous comment, which I remind myself of again and again, that I need to be hands on at times and I need to be conceptual at times. Some people are very good at seeing things, but they don’t get the job done. Others are very focused on getting it done, but they don’t see the right things to do. My mentor taught me that the seagull sees the opportunity and then dives in to capture the opportunity.

It’s great advice and I love the simple analogy. I’ve found that transitioning between the two modes is one of the toughest things a senior leader has to do. In my experience, each of us is predisposed to one mode and have to train ourselves for the other. There are a lot of strategies for doing that. Here are two of simplest:

If you’re predisposed to “flying high” and seeing the big picture, keep asking yourself HOW in order to dive deeper. How will we pursue that idea? How will each piece play out? How will we get tripped up/blocked/stopped? How will we win? Don’t stop until you get compelling clarity.
If you’re predisposed to “diving deep” and getting things done, keep asking yourself WHY in order to fly higher. Why take this action in the first place? Why is this a good idea? Why spend our precious resources here? Why do we care about this so much? Again, don’t stop until you get compelling clarity.

It’s tiring, but it’s essential. Think of the best leaders you know. I bet they’re good at moving between the two.

The post Fly High, Dive Deep appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

How Effective Is Your Senior Team?

For years I’ve used the below 9 items to gauge a team’s effectiveness. I’ve now turned it into a self-assessment so any team can get a high-level idea of their effectiveness. Do you and your team members agree on where you’re strong and weak? Take under a minute to find out. You’ll get a report immediately on screen. Have your colleagues do the same and you can compare notes. It becomes useful fodder for team development.

Start assessment

Items in the assessment

Trust among the senior team is strong
The senior team manages conflict / tough conversations productively
The senior team’s decision-making processes are clear and effective
Our values are clear and we live them
Our vision inspires and motivates employees
Our strategy is well-defined and widely-understood
We have a culture of strong communication and dialogue
Our organization encourages and supports smart risk taking
Our organization is both disciplined and nimble at execution

The post How Effective Is Your Senior Team? appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

Are You Daydreaming Enough?

Einstein’s theory of relativity started as a daydream about running beside a sunbeam.

Newton’s theory of gravity was sparked during a daydream as he saw an apple fall from a tree.

JK Rowling was daydreaming on a train when she came up with the idea of Harry Potter.

Research and anecdotal evidence are clear; our biggest and best ideas come from letting our minds wander. We connect things that aren’t yet connected. We imagine things that don’t yet exist. And we see possibilities that we otherwise miss.

Put simply, daydreaming has mental, emotional, physical, psychic, creative, and economic value.

And yet, despite the unmistakable value, we’re all getting worse at it.

Even if we know better, our smartphones highjack our attention and lead it down ridiculous ratholes. Or we’re convinced if we’re not “doing something” we’re unproductive, so we feel guilty, thus killing the value of daydreaming.

And we’re infecting our kids. They’re scheduled to the hilt. And also getting addicted to devices.

So what do we do?

I don’t have any easy answers. I think the best answer is to start small. Here are a few ideas I’ve been experimenting with…

Leave the radio off while you’re driving
Have device-free evenings in your house
Go for long bike rides or runs without a device
Get out of your office and wander for 30 minutes at lunch
Regularly schedule 60 minutes for “thinking or planning” on your calendar and consider it as critical as (if not more critical than) a meeting. Let your mind wander during that time.

How do you take back your daydreaming time?

The post Are You Daydreaming Enough? appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

Taking Smart Risks

Life is uncertain. Whether in the business world or at home, we feel an increasing loss of control over our future, and find ourselves paralyzed by indecision. Fear prevents people from taking chances and making game-changing moves. Anything other than the status quo appears inherently risky and reckless.

About the book

In his groundbreaking book, TAKING SMART RISKS: How Sharp Leaders Win When Stakes Are High (McGraw Hill, 2013), Fortune 500 leadership expert, Doug Sundheim challenges and redefines what it means to take a risk.

Smart risk-taking involves passion, planning, active learning, communication, and the ability to embrace and reward the inevitable small failures along the way. The application of Sundheim’s smart risk paradigm can transform businesses and personal lives. Counter-intuitively, we can gain more control by taking smart risks.

Smart risks empower you and spur innovation. Smart risks ultimately give meaning to what you do.

Most business leaders already know what needs to happen to drive innovation and entrepreneurship. People need to take chances and test new ideas. However, the frustration has always been how do you encourage people to take smart chances, and teach them to be smart risk-takers?

TAKING SMART RISKS addresses this perennial challenge, and helps readers get clear on the long-term costs of NOT taking a risk. Although not immediately felt, sometimes the consequences of playing it safe end up being much greater than the dangers of the perceived risk. In fact, behavioral psychologists have proven that understanding how much you might potentially lose by NOT acting is the most important driver of action.

Sundheim, a respected consultant to many Fortune 500 companies, will share with you behind-the-scenes stories of smart risk successes, and a step-by-step, proven methodology for how you can make small, meaningful changes to promote smart risk- taking that will empower you and result in more control and satisfaction in your life.

A must-read book for the serious executive, entrepreneur, and frankly everyone, TAKING SMART RISKS offers specific examples of smart risks and easy-to-implement strategies to transform your thinking about the nature of risk. Engaging, informative, filled with real-life Fortune 500 and entrepreneurial anecdotes, detailed exercises, and illustrative graphs, the book features in-depth analysis of Sundheim’s five essential elements of the smart risk.

Readers will learn to
See the Future Now

Ask questions, understand concerns, test the concept behind your ideas, and predict as many fail points in advance that you can
Have an open, honest conversation with trusted people around you to determine what is the worst that could really happen

Act Fast Learn Fast

Start before you know where to start, fail early, often, and smart—build learning into everything, and stay humble
Accept that you have to live with failure—since it is an inevitable by-product of taking risks, even smart risks. Failing smart is the best way to learn

Communicate Powerfully

Expect communication to break down and plan accordingly
Share thought processes, meet regularly, and don’t avoid difficult conversations

Create a Smart Risk Culture

Define a smart failure—the acceptable boundaries within which it is okay to fail
Reward both the successes and these smart failures

Get the book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-A-Million | Audible

The post Taking Smart Risks appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

Don’t Mistake Your Vision Statement for a Vision

Vision statements are words that have been coiffed and manicured to perfection. They’re usually uninspiring and dead on a wall.

By contrast, great visions are big ideas that are alive and messy. They’re engaging and visceral.

The acid test of a great vision – it pulls you.

When you get lazy, it pulls you off the couch. When you can’t see the road ahead, it pulls you through the fog. When things feel too tough, it pulls you over the hurdle. When people think you’re crazy, it pulls you past the crowd. And when you fall down, it pulls you back up.

A great visions pulls you because it hits something raw and real and makes it feel possible, even if difficult.

To motivate action don’t focus on developing a vision statement (that’s a silly by-product.) Focus on developing an honest-to-goodness vision instead. Really see that place you want to get to in all it’s glorious detail. The path will unfold.

The post Don’t Mistake Your Vision Statement for a Vision appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

Vision Statements vs. Visions

Vision statements are words that have been coiffed and manicured to perfection. They’re usually uninspiring and dead on a wall. They put you to sleep.

By contrast, great visions are big ideas that are alive and messy. They’re engaging and visceral. They pull you forward.

When you get lazy, they pull you off the couch.

When you can’t see the road ahead, they pull you through the fog.

When things feel too tough, they pull you over the hurdle.

When people think you’re crazy, they pull you past the crowd.

And when you fall down, they pull you back up.

Don’t spend time developing vision statements.

Develop a vision instead.

 

The post Vision Statements vs. Visions appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

Leadership Without Easy Answers

President Obama walked out of his final press conference yesterday and into the Roosevelt Room to do his final media interview as President. He sat down with Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor, four of his former advisors and speechwriters who now run Pod Save America, currently one of the top podcasts across a variety of platforms.

What struck me most about the interview was his authenticity. Something he’s always been good at, maybe to a fault. Below I’ve transcribed his answers to 2 questions that I found particularly powerful. I like them because they’re reflective and not fishing for easy answers—qualities I find indispensable to long-term effective leadership. A few lines I liked are highlighted.

PSA: If you could go back in time and talk to 2009 Obama on his first day in office what piece of advice would you give them right before he walks into the Oval Office?

Obama: I would tell him that you have to spend more time thinking about new ways of communicating with the American people. You can’t be so intimidated by the way things have been done in the White House because the communications landscape is shifting. And when you think about the dilemmas that we were confronting—the economy was collapsing, we were still in two wars—I’m always surprised and gratified about how we got, I think, basic policy right. And that was mainly because we just had a lot of really smart people working really hard. Had a good process. But, you know, as Lincoln said, with public opinion there’s nothing you can’t do and without it there’s not much you can do. And we were going to get clobbered in 2010 probably no matter what we did just because on my watch people were really hurting. But I think what I might’ve said to 2009 Obama is think about how you got here and spend that same amount of effort and energy touching people directly as opposed to standing behind a podium and giving a bunch of grim lectures. I think that’s where the impression arose that Obama is really Spock-like because I was talking about [things like] well today we lost 800,000 jobs but here’s what we’re going to do. It was hard to seem cheerful and liked. The other thing I probably would have told myself is to make sure that the team is supported and encouraged and you’re really paying attention to process. I think we wound up being good later. I got better and at the whole team got better. But you know in those early days I think you don’t appreciate how much just making sure that everybody is communicating well together internally, looking out for each other [is important.]

PSA: You’ve talked a lot, particularly in your [farewell] speech in Chicago, about the impact of people living in bubbles. How do you think, in this polarized media environment, people can get out of these bubbles?

Obama: I’ve been thinking a lot about that. I don’t have clean answers. Some of it is just technology driven—if you have a phone and you are able to visit everything on the web with the touch of a button you are going to get into certain habits. You can lecture people about [the importance of] going to the site that makes your blood boil, with which you completely disagree, but it’s hard to do and I don’t think you’re going to get a huge amount of take-up. I think that it’s unrealistic to expect that people are just going to put their phones away and spend all their time listening to NPR or your other media that I might think is more balanced and more accurate. On the other hand I my instinct is everybody hates media right now. Everybody knows that the political culture doesn’t work, so that has to be an opportunity. There’s got to be a way in which we can create some sort of virtual public square that feels better for people. My suspicion is that, particularly after the last election, there is a sizable, maybe-still-silent majority that is just tired of being mad all the time and would appreciate people just listening to each other. So, one of things I’m going to be thinking about is how do we build that civic culture, both in the real world and in the virtual world. Because if we don’t, I don’t know how we solve problems. Each side can win elections. Each side can, in that tug-of-war, move 5 yards this way or that way. But tackling big challenges of the sort that I talked about in that speech: tackling inequality, thinking about what are the new economic models that we’re going to have to come up with. That’s going to require building consensus and we are very far away from doing the right now.

Photo credit: Pod Save America

The post Leadership Without Easy Answers appeared first on The Sundheim Group.

The 25 Best Time Management Tools

by Pamela Dodd & Doug Sundheim

Get the book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-A-Million

A no-fluff, easy-to-read compilation of the best advice from the top 20 time management books. Recommendations cover five areas: Focus, Plan, Organize, Take Action, and Learn. Short chapters cover the A to Z of time management from finding out what time means to you to prioritizing, overcoming procrastination, and managing stress and well being. Read the book from start to finish or zero in on specific areas for improvement. The book includes a useful annotated bibliography and bonus sections on recommended books on being successful and how to buy books for much less.

The post The 25 Best Time Management Tools appeared first on The Sundheim Group.