Expert in systemic decision-making, business strategy, and leading change
Based in the Washington, DC area.
"If I were to wish for anything
I should not wish for wealth and power,
but for the passionate sense of what can be,
for the eye, which, ever young and ardent,
sees the possible.
Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.
And what wine is so sparkling,
what so fragrant,
what so intoxicating as possibility?"
[Søren Aaby Kierkegaard]
"A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
Did you say 10 cents?
More than half of a Princeton University economics class gave the same answer (as did most of my friends), and it is wrong.
The thought process that produced this wrong answer is an example of what Prof Kahneman calls 'System 1 thinking'. It is, he says, 'fast, effortless, associative.' We just impulsively pluck out the most intuitively obvious-sounding answer. We don't stop to deliberate, especially when the question seems trivial."
Click here for the correct answer and the full article in the Business Times.
From The BIGVIZ, "an exploration in visualizing the Big Ideas presented on the TED mainstage." Link
Author Sam Harris is running another research project on religious faith that should prove interesting. He needs volunteers who represent lots of different perspectives.
Research Volunteers Needed |
 We are preparing to run
another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us
refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of
religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I
have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.
You'll find links to these surveys on my home page. |
Wired reports on study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. Link
One of most frustrating issues in operations research and organization leadership is the high failure rate of large, multi-dimensional change programs. These are the types of programs that result generally from mergers and acquisitions, technology replacements, or significant policy or market shifts. They often involve hundreds of people and tens of millions of dollars. Large organizations want to be stable and profitable operations: they are distressed by anything that rocks the boat or introduces risk. Three decision points are critical to increasing the chances of successful change:
Whether to do it. This decision is usually put off until a crisis brews or a deadline looms. Many companies can mobilize only with a looming threat. (This is the famous burning platform.) The key is to mobilize before the crisis hits.
When and how to do it. This decision is usually optimized to disrupt current operations as little as possible, which, if the place is really in flames, is not a wise move. This decision requires lots of data, emotional intelligence, and the courage to tailor the plan.
Correcting the course along the way. This decision is the real opportunity for the inevitable roller coaster of change, for this one big decision should really be dozens of smaller ones.
I have a couple of 'secrets' to managing large-scale change that relate to the second point:
What to do with that extra up-front time?
Plan on it.
Corporate decision makers who seek to combine company cultures would get better results by building associations between their companies, rather than forcing their cultures to 'fit.'
Executives use mergers and acquisitions to increase shareholder value, become bigger players, or cut costs. More than half of all M&A's fail to meet key expectations, often with consequences that devastate employees, customers and stockholders. AOL Time Warner and HP/Compaq are famous examples among hundreds of lesser-known attempts.
While observers and researchers have widely studied M&A failures and published insightful lessons to learn, 1980's-style M&A practices continue to seduce time-boxed executives and the consultants and integrators they hire. Over the past twenty years or so, one factor--culture fit--has consistently made the list of top-10 issues. From a recent study by the Hewitt consulting firm:
"Cultural fit emerged as the top HR integration issue in terms of importance and complexity during an M&A deal. Despite this, 52 per cent of companies indicated that they did not believe that cultural integration would take more than six months nor had they planned for such an eventuality. However, 70 per cent had learned that cultural integration took much longer than six months in reality."
While this study would appear to advocate the need to pay greater attention to cultural integration, the most up-to-date methodologies, like this one by Booz-Allen, are weak in this area. (Click to enlarge).
Why aren't we making more progress with cultural integration? I believe decision makers are stuck repeating a pattern of incomplete assessments and naive assumptions about human nature and the predictability of combining organic systems.
Corporate decision makers--goal-oriented, like-minded, and usually merger veterans--approach each new M&A with four flawed assumptions:
Marriages between two people work better when allowed the time to adjust, assimilate, and learn. Courting corporations are much the same. They need time to collaborate, co-develop new products, form partnerships, and get to know each other.
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Researchers are using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to prove Spinoza’s speculation that we tend to believe what we know and disbelieve most new information.
This sounds reasonable on the surface, but totally crazy when you think about the path of human progress. Premature disbelief of what we do not understand gives undiscovered knowledge a serious handicap. Why should one spend the additional time and effort on discovery and learning? Curiosity is not enough. The answer is survival: our old beliefs may be fatally flawed.
The next time you have an important decision to make, challenge one key factor about the decision that you assume is fundamentally true and indisputable. You may be surprised with what you learn.
And, oh yea, as far as we know the earth is not the center of the universe, although people just like us believed it was for thousands of years.
Link to research by Harris, Sheth, and Cohen, 2007.
Sam Harris's blog
