Robert I. Sutton's Blog, page 16

I have been getting emails now and then from the folks at CNN.com asking if I would like to do a guest column.  I have not been blogging anywhere much because I've been traveling a lot (I did a workshop on design thinking in Singapore a couple weeks back and just got from giving speeches in Brazil on The Knowing-Doing Gap and Good Boss, Bad Boss)  and using my available time to focus on the scaling project with Huggy Rao. 

As often happens to me, however, I ended-up writing something fun when I was "supposed to" be doing something else.  I was thinking about drinking in the workplace because I had been interviewed for Bloomberg about the subject where, although I was quoted as talking about all the evils (and there are nasty evils), I had actually spent much of the conversation with the reporter talking about how sharing a drink with colleagues can sometimes strengthen the social glue in a workplace.  This is an experience that many of us have enjoyed. And. more broadly, there is some interesting academic research here as well, notably a charming book called Drunken Comportment by Craig McAndrew and Robert Edgerton, which uses anthropological and other evidence to challenge to notion that drinking always changes things for the worse.

The final motivation to write the column came after I had a lovely time sharing a drink with some colleagues one Friday afternoon a few weeks back.   So I wrote this little piece from CNN called "Drinking at Work: Its Not All Bad," which just came out today.

Here is how it opens:

At about 5:30 on a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was running out the door to get home when I ran into several colleagues sitting in a circle and drinking some Scotch. They invited me to celebrate the end of the week with them, and after hesitating a bit, I joined the little group. Yes, I enjoyed the single malt they gave me, but I enjoyed the conversation much more. These are people I see all the time, but nearly all of our interactions are rushed and task-oriented.

We talked about an array of topics -- a sick friend, kids, a cool wireless speaker the IT guy had set up and our preferences for different brands of Scotch. Then we went our separate ways. I was struck by how much the brief interaction affected me. I felt closer to my colleagues, more relaxed from the great conversation and the Scotch, and I felt good about working at a place that allows employees to take a prudent drink now and then.

That little episode illustrates the role that alcohol plays at its best. In addition to its objective physiological effects, anthropologists have long noted that its presence serves as a signal in many societies that a "time-out" has begun, that people are released, at least to a degree, from their usual responsibilities and roles. Its mere presence in our cups signals we have permission to be our "authentic selves" and we are allowed -- at least to a degree -- to reveal personal information about ourselves and gossip about others -- because, after all, the booze loosened our tongues. When used in moderate doses and with proper precautions, participating in a collective round of drinking or two has a professional upside that ought to be acknowledged.

You can read the rest here.

I am curious to hear your reactions to this idea.  What are some of the other advantages of drinking at work? What can a company or boss to do maximize the virtues and minimize the dangers?   It is one of those complex subjects that, while there are times when it is clearly dead wrong (like when airline pilots drink on the job), there are many other times when complaints about imbibing some more like misguided morality plays than constructive objections. 

I just got this request from Chris Taylor, who is writing a story for Reuters on "workplace April Fool's pranks gone awry."  He figured I had ran into some when researching Good Boss, Bad Boss. I didn't that I can recall, but the most amazing story I ran into was about the boss who allegedly waterboarded an employee at the company picnic to motivate his sales team.  I am not making this up, here is the story.

Please send in your stories as comments here, that would be most fun for all of us.  But if you want to maintain some privacy, please email them to me and I will forward them to Chris. Note his deadline is tomorrow, so please send yours in today if you can!

Julia Kirby, the amazing editor from HBR, who among many other things, made The No Asshole Rule possible, just sent me this great note about a Forbes story on Groupon CEO Andrew Mason:

The money quote from Groupon's CEO: "Most CEOs will make stuff up about themselves to sound way smarter and cooler and people are disappointed to find out otherwise. I decided to set the bar very low and make up lies about myself that make me sound lame."

Very refreshing! Not a bad life strategy -- there is an argument for delivering more than you promise, and this is a rather intriguing strategy for making that happen!

  


The new Stanford Magazine just arrived and it has a fantastic story about the d.school called "Sparks Fly" and a nice sidebar on the efforts by Rich Crandall and others to teach design thinking in schools via their K-12 initiative. I am biased as I have been involved with IDEO (which David also founded) for over 15 years and with the d.school from the start.  As I wrote in a recent post about David's 60th birthday, he has had a huge effect on many people's lives and, I would argue, on bringing an engineering inspired (but appropriately flexible) perspective to problems as diverse as designing better radio shows, to improving company meetings, to launching new companies, to developing a cheap and portable alternative to incubators for premature babies in third world countries. 

I especially liked how the magazine called David a "Jedi Master" as he has a rather magical and weird ability to mentor people, to give them strange and useful advice (like his reaction to my complaint that the d.school was out of control, when he advised that creativity was a messy process and would never be clean and pretty), to take time to give personal advice and help friends (David and his brother Tom Kelley played a big role in helping me make my decision last year to have surgery at the Cleveland Clinic rather than Stanford), to providing a perspective on leadership as striking a balance between love and money (perspective consistent with a lot of research, but stated oh so much better), to doing things that are just plain fun from giving me a singing fish to telling absurd and usually self-deprecating stories.  David is the rare leader who doesn't just talk about empathy, he has it in spades.

Although Good Boss, Bad Boss focuses more squarely on the relationship between bosses and their immediate charges, one of the main themes of the book -- following a design-thinking view of the world -- is that the best bosses go to great lengths to develop empathy for both the people they lead and the customers served by their teams and organizations.  Managers and executives sometimes tell me that just looking at sales statistics, aggregated demographics stats, and -- now and then -- reading compilations of customer complaints and compliments is all they need to do to understand their customer's needs.  There is no need to go out and waste their time watching and talking to customers or potential customers first hand.  

I am all for quantitative data, but there is a story in Chapter 5 of  Good Boss, Bad Boss that I believe shows there is no substitute for the power of first hand observation:

When bosses make concerted efforts to understand what it feels like to be a customer, it is remarkably useful for making gaps between knowledge and action vivid and identifying possible repairs.  To illustrate, SYPartners (SYP), an innovation firm based in San Francisco and New York, worked with up-and-coming executives from a big company to develop new financial services for immigrants. The executives arrived with armloads of binders packed with data-rich PowerPoint decks –and were excited about how well they had mastered the charts and statistics.  They got nervous when SYP told them they weren't going to use that stuff, and instead, would be shadowing customers.   

SYP broke the team into trios, assigned each a Spanish-speaking translator and Spanish-speaking undocumented worker, and sent them out into the Mission District in San Francisco.  Each team was asked to cash a check in a bank, wire money to a Central American country at Western Union, and observe the undocumented worker do the same things.  Before the observations, these executives knew from their quantitative data that these untapped customers represented a huge opportunity.  But their impressions of what these customers wanted – and would happily pay for – were far off the mark. The shadowing, hands-on efforts, and discussions with undocumented workers provoked them to transform and broaden the offerings they suggested to their firm.  One executive called it "life-changing" and said he would never look at a marketing opportunity the same again.  The executive who initially felt most uncomfortable about following around an illegal immigrant came away most transformed  – arguing adamantly that reams of data aren't enough, that you need to understand what your customers do and how it feels to do be them.

In other words, the best bosses know what it feels like to work for them and what it feels like to be one of their customers too!  The closer you can get to an unvarnished and uncensored perspective of the humans that you lead an serve, the better you can understand their needs and what you can do to feel those needs.

P.S.  Toward that end, a couple years back I was talking to an executive from a major airline about how crummy the experience was of flying coach -- how everything from the legroom to the rude staff made it an awful experience. He dismissed my complaint, but eventually admitted that it had been years since he flew coach on any airline.   Perhaps that is one reason that Southwest has stayed so successful for so long -- there are no first class seats for their executives hide in!

The histories of the Stanford School of Engineering (where I work) and HP are closely intertwined.  Most famously, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard were young guys, they borrowed $500 from Fred Terman, then Dean of the school, to start the company.   There are at least three buildings in the Engineering School donated by Bill and Dave.  Appropriately,  they are the Terman building, the Hewlett building, and the Packard building. 

The events over the past decade or so have led this once beautiful relationship to dim -- nothing nasty has happened, it has just sort of faded along with the decline of HP's once vibrant innovative and humane spirit.   Carly Fiorina got so mad at the Hewlett & Packard foundations that she changed the name of the company from Hewlett-Packard to HP -- because these foundations opposed the merger she led between Compaq and HP.  This dimmed the company's links to its founders, and indirectly, to Stanford.  Moreover, the Compaq merger brought in many executives with no geographical or emotional ties to Stanford.  The ties really faded under the Mark Hurd era as he had little emotional connection to Stanford, did major acquisitions like EDS in Texas that further scattered HP's geographical identity, and during his era of cost cutting, nastiness, and lack of emphasis on innovation, HP further lost its soul. 

I know many former HP executives, managers, and engineers and this is the exact phrase the all seem to use to describe what happened. They talk about it almost as if it is a human death, uniformly emphasizing that the HP that exists today is not the company the worked for -- many say they worked for Hewlett-Packard, not HP.  Moreover, when I came to Stanford, HP was THE employer of choice in Silicon Valley for Stanford Engineering students-- it is now viewed as an employer of last resort by most students. 

As such, I was delighted to see the honesty and ambition expressed by HP's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, in this report:

"HP has lost its soul," he said in an interview at Hewlett-Packard's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, offering a glimpse of the vision he will outline in greater detail at an event on March 14 in San Francisco. "The first thing I wanted to do when I joined HP was listen to the people. The rank and file usually know about all the shortcomings."

This is a dramatic change in behavior. I love that he is telling the turth and using the same term that everyone else does to describe HP.   I wish Mr. Apotheker well and look forward to a day when, once again, the best and the brightest Stanford engineers are clamoring to work at HP.  Perhaps Mr. Apotheker should change the name of the company back to Hewlett-Packard.  Short of that, I suggest they remove the word  "Invent" from the company signage -- see the above sign at company headquarters in Palo Alto. They use this logo and slogan on all their buildings.  As one former HP executive explained, once they put that word on the signs, she knew that HP's brilliant culture of innovation was fading fast. You don't see the word invent at Pixar, Apple, IDEO, or Facebook.   They don't need to talk about it because they do it and it runs deep in their souls.

Yesterday, I was talking to a pair of very smart and very ambitious friends.  As I told them, I am all for high performing teams, excellence in performance, and I love the restlessness that drives creative people at places like Apple, Pixar, and Facebook.  But there is a negative underbelly to this human drive toward achievement.  It can become a disease where, no matter how much some people get, they keep wanting more, and the result is not only chronic unhappiness for themselves and those around them, it is also often propels unethical and otherwise inhuman behavior. 

The worst examples are seen in the power poisoning and associated delusions among the worst of political leaders, with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his sons disgusting antics currently playing starring roles on the international stage.  But my focus has been on more mundane crimes against humanity.  In particular, if the charges are true, the insider trading and other unlawful actions taken by Galleon Group's  Raj Rajaratnam, whose trial just started, reflect a similar human flaw. Even more shocking to me is the news this week that Rajat Gupta -- former board member at Procter & Gamble and at Goldman Sachs, and former Managing Director of McKinsey -- was charged with insider trading.  Procter & Gamble and McKinsey are two firms I know pretty well, and while there is a strong focus on excellence in both places, I was troubled because -- each in their own way -- they are among the most ethical and non-greedy cultures I have ever encountered. 

The fact that such a central player in both places fell victim to such apparent bad judgment and greed means, to me, that no matter how wonderful you may think you are as a human-bring,and no matter how good the people around you might be,  we are all at risk of falling prey to own greed, status insecurities, and that feeling that comes with power that "the rules are for the little people."   Apparently, part of Gupta's defense will be that, if he did leak inside information to Raj Rajaratnam, he personally did not benefit financially (See this New York Times column).  To me, this defense is meaningless -- at least from a moral perspective --  because it simply suggests that Gupta was trying to get more status from Raj Rajaratnam, pay back some old favor, or set the stage for a future one -- all signs of greed (and perhaps some insecurity too -- often a hallmark of very successful people).

The lesson for all of us, as I emphasized in The No Asshole Rule, is that sometimes it can be remarkably useful to tell yourself "I have enough."  Here is an excerpt from a longer post I put-up in early 2007 on the official publication day of The No Asshole.  Current events suggest that this lesson from the late Kurt Vonnegut  is worth bringing it out again (I edited it lightly for clarity):

The process of writing The No Asshole Rule entailed many fun twists and turns.  But the very best thing happened when I wrote for permission to reprint a Kurt Vonnegut poem called "Joe Heller," which was published in The New Yorker.  I was hoping that Vonnegut would give me permission to print it in the book, both because I love the poem (more on that later), and Vonnegut is one my heroes.  His books including Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions had a huge effect on me when I was a teenager-- both the ideas and the writing style.

I wrote some anonymous New Yorker address to ask permission to reprint the poem, and to my amazement, I received a personal reply from Vonnegut about two weeks later (see it here).  The postcard he sent me was not only in his handwriting. He gave me permission to use the poem "however you please without compensation or further notice to me."  It remains one of my favorite things.

The poem fits well in my chapter on how to avoid catching asshole poisoning.  Here is how I set it up in the book:

'If you read or watch TV programs about business or sports, you often see the world framed as place where everyone wants "more more more" for "me me me," every minute in every way. The old bumper sticker sums it up: "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." The potent but usually unstated message is that we are all trapped in a life-long contest where people can never get enough money, prestige, victories, cool stuff, beauty, or sex – and that we do want and should want more goodies than everyone else.

This attitude fuels a quest for constant improvement that has a big upside, leading to everything from more beautiful athletic and artistic performances, to more elegant and functional products, to better surgical procedures and medicines, to more effective and humane organizations. Yet when taken too far, this blend of constant dissatisfaction, unquenchable desires, and overbearing competitiveness can damage your mental health. It can lead you to treat those "below" you as inferior creatures who are worthy of your disdain and people "above" you who have more stuff and status as objects of envy and jealousy.

Again, a bit of framing can help. Tell yourself, "I have enough." Certainly, some people need more than they have, as many people on earth still need a safe place to live, enough good food to eat, and other necessities. But too many of us are never satisfied and feel constantly slighted, even though – by objective standards – we have all we need to live a good life. I got this idea from a lovely little poem that Kurt Vonnegut published in The New Yorker called "Joe Heller," which was about the author of the renowned World War II novel Catch 22. As you can see, the poem describes a party that Heller and Vonnegut attended at a billionaire's house. Heller remarks to Vonnegut that he has something that the billionaire can never have, "The knowledge that I've got enough." These wise words provide a frame that can help you be at peace with yourself and to treat those around you with affection and respect:

Joe Heller  

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!"

--Kurt Vonnegut

The New Yorker, May 16th, 2005

(Reprinted with Kurt Vonnegut's permission)

To return to Rajat Gupta, if the charges against him are true, it might have spared him and his former colleagues much pain if he had repeated  "I have enough"  to himself over and and over again at key moments.  While this lesson may come too late for him, it isn't for many of us.

Ever since the days when I was writing Weird Ideas That Work, I have been careful to point out various ways that creative people suffer in comparison to their less imaginative counterparts.  My focus has been largely on the differences between doing creative and routine work (see this post on why creativity and innovation suck).  Much theory and research suggests a long list, including:

    1. Creativity requires failing most of the time; routine work entails succeeding most of the time. So doing creative means screwing up constantly, while doing routine work means you are usually doing things right and well. As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.

     2. Creativity involves constant conflict over ideas, although that can be fun when it is done right, even the most healthy groups struggle to avoid having conflict over the best ideas turn very personal and very nasty.

    3. Creativity is messy,scary, and inefficient. Routine work is clean, comforting and efficient.

    4. Doing creative work right means generating a lot of bad ideas, it also means that most of your good ideas will get killed-off too.

I could go on and on. But the best quote I have ever seen on the probabilities and emotions associated with doing creaitive work is from James March (I quote this in Weird Ideas That Work), quite possibly the most prestigious living organizational theorist. Rumor has it that he has come fairly close to winning the Nobel Prize in Economics once or twice:

"Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as heroes of organizational transformation. . . . There is, as a result, much that can be viewed as unjust in a system that induces imagination among individuals and individual organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among alternative experiments. By glorifying imagination, we entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer, altruism)."

I don't mean to bring you down even further, but a study with more bad news for creativity -- actually an academic paper containing three intertwined studies -- just came out by Assistant Professor Jennifer Mueller at the University of Pennsylvania. It is called "Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?"  The upshot is that people who are seen as more creative are judged by others as having LESS leadership potential than their unimaginative peers UNLESS they are also seen as charismatic. 

This bias against creative people is first demonstrated in their study of employees of a company in India who were in jobs where they were expected to do creative work.  It was then replicated in a controlled experiment, with about 200 students, half of whom were assigned to be idea generators or "pitchers" and half to be "evaluators." The pitchers were then divided into two groups.  As the researchers, they were asked to either '1) prepare a creative (novel and useful) or 2) a useful (but not novel) solution to the following question: "What could an airlines do to obtain more revenue from passengers?"' 

The results are pretty troubling. In short, although the judges saw no significant differences in the usefulness of the ideas generated, and did construe that subjects who were instructed to generate creative ideas did, in fact, come up with more creative ideas than those instructed to come-up with ideas that were not novel, the judges also consistently construed the more creative subjects as having less leadership potential, measured with this 3-item scale: "How much leadership would this applicant exhibit?", "How much control over the team's activities would this member exhibit?", "I think the applicant is an effective leader." (α = .86).

The bright spot, or perhaps the warning, is that, int he third study, where the "charismatic leader prototype was activated" (this was done by asking judges to list five five characteristics of a charismatic leader), things changed.  Here is how the researchers described their findings from this third study: "when the charismatic prototype was activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative idea condition (M = 4.08) as having significantly higher leadership potential than the candidate in the useful idea condition (M = 3.41; t = -3.68, p < .01). Conversely, when the charismatic prototype was not activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative condition (M = 3.08) as having significantly lower leadership potential than the candidate in the useful condition (M = 3.60; t = -2.03, p < .05)."

BNET asked first author Mueller to explain these findings, and I thought she came-up with a pretty good answer: 

'Muller notes that leaders must create common goals so their groups can get things done. And the clearer goals are, the better they tend to work, which means leaders need to root out uncertainty. One way leaders can do this is to set standards and enforce conformity.  But when asked to describe a creative person, words like "quirky," "nonconformist" and "unfocused" often take their place right alongside "visionary" and "charismatic." Says Mueller: "The fact is, people don't just feel positively about creative individuals-they feel ambivalent around them."'

Yes, this is one just paper. But it is done carefully and uses multiple methods. And it is instructive as I do think -- and there is evidence to show -- that our stereotypes of the hallmarks of creative people do often see at odds with our beliefs of great leaders.  In particular, to add to Mueller's list, creative people are also often seen as inner focused (not just unfocused), inconsistent, and flaky.  That is not the boss that most of us want.  It is also interesting that charisma seems to be the path to being seen as both creative and having leadership potential.  It certainly has worked for the likes of Steve Jobs, Francis Ford Coppola, IDEO's David Kelley, and Oprah Winfrey. 

 This research suggests that if you are a creative type, and want to lead, do everything you can to get your boss and other evaluators thinking about charisma -- "activate" the charismatic leader prototype by talking about well-known charismatics, and perhaps engaging in actions congruent with the "prototype" of a charismatic person -- articulate, inspiring, setting forth an emotionally compelling vision, and touching on themes and stories that provoke energy and passion in others. 

On the other hand, there are plenty of successful creatives who have achieved leadership positions who seem to lack at leasst some of these qualities -- Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, David Packard, and Bill Hewlett come to mind.   And there are still other successful creatives who led wonderful and important lives despite having little if any interest in leading others -- Steve Wozniak and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman appear to qualify. Indeed, although we need great leaders, it seems to me that -- especially at this moment in history -- we need creative people even more.

To me, the upshot is that these findings are intriguing and some people may find them useful -- especially creatives who are trying to get leadership jobs. But it also strikes me that presenting a false front usually backfires in the end, and perhaps the most important implication is that, if you are in a position to judge and select leaders, keep reminding  yourself that you will probably be unfairly biased against creative people -- unless you think they are charismatic (or you are just thinking about charisma), in which case you may be giving those creatives too much credit for their leadership potential!

I love a careful and creative study like this one.   No it is not perfect or the final word, no study is or can be, but it is pretty damn good.  If you want to read the whole thing, here is complete reference, including a link to the PDF:

Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, Dishan Kamdar (2011), Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

I recently wrote a post on Guy Kawasaki's new book: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Minds, Hearts, and Actions. I focused on the cover, which is probably the most beautiful I have ever seen for any business book -- look at that thing, it is so damn pretty! If you know one that is more lovely, I want to see it.  And it resulted from an amazing story that Guy tells in the book, starting with design contest that Guy ran... and then much more happened. 

I was planning on writing a review today, as the book comes out Tuesday, March 7th.  I was going to do it in the morning, as I just finished reading the book yesterday. But I learned some amazing news that convinced me I best write a short review before I go to sleep (it is after midnight in California).  The upshot is that this is Guy's best book -- he was born to write on the topic of persuasion.  Buy this book and Robert Cialdini's classic Influence, and you've got the best two book on the subject.  I am not alone in this opinion, as Enchantment just got a glowing review from Kirkus, a group that is very tough on authors. They offered praise including:

"Kawasaki transforms the otherwise exhausted and overwrought tropes of how to win friends and influence people with a complete makeover here, whether he's talking about wardrobe choice or tips for effective swearing. The author, a modern-day Dale Carnegie, offers explanations on how to wield the most influence in the digital age: Push Technologies like presentations, e-mails and Twitter are discussed as active means of enchanting others, while Pull Technologies like Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn passively draw them in. The author's suggestions for achieving likeability and trustworthiness, as well as overcoming resistance, are thoroughly explained and can easily translate from the workplace to the real world..... Informative, concise guide from one of America's most influential and, yes, enchanting entrepreneurs."

You were probably going to buy it anyway, but as Guy is the master of influence,  he -- or someone, I am not quite sure how this is happening -- is offering a deal that expires midnight on March 7th, so roughly 48 hours from now.  If you buy  a copy of Enchantment (at a bookstore or online), and fill out this form, yes this form, you will get copy of Guy's last book, Reality Check, sent to you for free as a bonus.  Reality Check is a also a great book (although I confess to being even more taken with Enchantment). As I wrote when it came out:

"If you love Guy's smarts and irreverent charm, you've got to read this book.  If you have never read his blog or books -- or seen him speak -- this is the place to start if you want to understand why Guy has such a huge and loyal army of fans.   Guy has had a lot of different careers, including at Apple as an evangelist, a venture capitalist, the master of ceremonies at wildly popular entrepreneurship Boot Camps during the boom."

The form is really easy to fill out, all you need is a pdf of the purchase (which is simple to produce, for example, from the email that Amazon sends you when you order it).  Be warned there are limited quantities of Reality Check and this offer only holds for U.S. addresses.  Enchantment will be the best-seller that everyone will be talking about in the coming months, and if you don't own Reality Check, here is a chance to get it for free.  I just did it myself, and I am getting copy of both books (I bought Enchantment at Amazon) for $13.74. I timed myself and it took me just under 160 seconds to order the book, make the pdf, and fill out the form.  Such a deal!

There is an interesting set of findings from psychological experiments that suggest we see others' flaws and strengths more clearly than our own (I wrote about this in Good Boss, Bad Boss) and that, on average, human-beings make more rational decisions when make them for others rather than themselves.  As Jeff Pfeffer and I advised in Hard Facts:

See Yourself and Your Organization as Outsiders Do

A big impediment to evidence-based management is that human beings, especially those with good mental health, often have inflated views of their own talents and prospects for success. This rampant optimism is a double-edged sword. The upside is that it creates positive self-fulfilling prophecies, which increase the odds of success. The downside is that excessive optimism causes people to downplay or not see risks, and to persist despite clear evidence they are traveling down the wrong path. One study found, for example, that over 80 percent of entrepreneurs surveyed estimated that chances were over 70 percent that their venture would succeed, and over 30 percent believed that their firm was certain to succeed—even though only about 35 percent of new businesses survive their first five years.  Max Bazerman's book on managerial decision making shows that outsiders often make more objective judgments than insiders do—so having a blunt friend, mentor, or counselor can help you see and act on better evidence.  This is one reason why Kathleen Eisenhardt's study of successful versus unsuccessful Silicon Valley start-ups found that in companies that survived and thrived, the CEO usually had a trusted counselor on the team—while CEOs of unsuccessful firms usually did not. These counselors were typically ten to twenty years older than the CEO, with broad industry experience, and were most valuable for helping CEOs recognize when they were traveling down the wrong path and a shift in strategic direction was needed.

This finding that it is better to rely on others than ourselves is also seen in a new study described at one of my favorite blogs, BPS research.   Here is the summary at BPS:

Across four studies involving hundreds of undergrads, Polman and Emich found that participants drew more original aliens for a story to be written by someone else than for a story they were to write themselves; that participants thought of more original gift ideas for an unknown student completely unrelated to themselves, as opposed to one who they were told shared their same birth month; and that participants were more likely to solve an escape-from-tower problem if they imagined someone else trapped in the tower, rather than themselves (a 66 vs. 48 per cent success rate). Briefly, the tower problem requires you to explain how a prisoner escaped the tower by cutting a rope that was only half as long as the tower was high. The solution is that he divided the rope lengthwise into two thinner strips and then tied them together.

For the complete description, go here.  The implication of these diverse studies are quite instructive.  If we want to make better decisions, make faster decisions, have a more realistic picture of our strengths and weaknesses, and now, apparently, be more creative, we need to ask others for their opinions and assistance.   There is even a kind of weird implication that rather than working on our own problems, we should always be working on others.  So, despite the cynicism about consultants, they actually do serve a moreimportant  role than many of us have recognized. Certainly, this research suggests the importance of having mentors and colleagues who will give you help, advise you on decisions, and point out the flaws in your beliefs and actions-- and that the world would be a better place if we did so in turn for others.  Another cool implication is that consultants need outside advisors when it comes to tackling their own challenges and problems.  In any event, these studies certainly provide interesting evidence of how much humans we need one another.

The citation for the creativity research is:

Polman E, and Emich KJ (2011). Decisions for Others Are More Creative Than Decisions for the Self. Personality and social psychology bulletin