Excerpts from "Tipping Sacred Cows: Kick the Bad Work Habits that Masquerade as Virtues"

by Jake Breeden 

Chapter 2 – Bland Bold Balance

Avoid the Allure of Unhealthy Balance

The tug of balance comes not just from an aversion to choice, but from an attraction to bounty. Alexander Chernev, a Northwestern professor, conducted an experiment that revealed how easily we can trick ourselves into thinking more is better than less, even when it's clearly not. Picture two trays of food. The first has a full bowl of chili coated with cheese, and the second has that same bowl of chili but also a small green side salad. In Chernev's study, people who were shown only the chili guessed that it contained 699 calories, but the people who saw both the chili and the salad guessed the combined meal to contain 656 calories. And what's worse, people who identified themselves as dieters thought the salad had even bigger powers of deduction. Chernev describes his finding as “The Dieter's Paradox.” On the simple objective measure of calorie estimation, the dieters consistently guessed that more food equaled less calories, so long as the extra food added balance. And so obesity rates go up, even as the number of ads touting low-calorie foods explodes. It's as if dieters think adding a few more healthy foods will reduce their total consumption.²

We make similar miscalculations at work, piling tasks onto our to-do list. When we work on an extra task, we might imagine we're being more productive. After all, it's more impressive to see a juggler successfully juggle four flaming torches than two. But too often our heroic attempts simply slow our progress. Research on the work output of Italian judges showed that those who work on many cases at the same time get less done than those who work on one case at a time. In their paper called “Don't Spread Yourself Too Thin: The Impact of Task Juggling on Workers' Speed of Completion,” Coviello, Ichino, and Persico show that “judges who keep fewer trials active and wait to close the open ones before starting new ones dispose more rapidly of a larger number of cases per unit of time.”³ Like the judges, leaders are too often bogged down by a heavy caseload. In the name of balance or efficiency we load up our plates with too many commitments and risk overreaching to the point of dilution and inefficiency.

Chapter 3

Automatic Accountable Collaboration

The Rare, Productive Joy of Working Alone

Meetings are ritualized collaboration, with more talking about the work than doing the work. A calendar full of meetings indicates a collaboration binge. U.C. Berkeley Professor Morten Hansen wrote Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results, which contains the most complete and compelling research on the subject of collaboration at work. Based on rigorous research into efforts to work together, he points to times and places when collaboration produces values and also to instances when it creates waste. One stunning example of waste that Hansen shares, based on academic research he did with his colleague Martine Haas, shows how collaboration can hurt sales efforts. Based on an examination of 182 teams trying to win a contract for a professional services firm, Hansen and Haas showed that the more time a team spent getting help from others, the less likely the team was to win a deal. The teams “assumed that collaborating with other … experts … would bring even more benefits,” Hansen wrote. “It didn't. In fact, it brought only pain—time and effort involved in collaborating, which was time and effort the sales team did not spend making an even better bid.”⁵

Hansen says that collaboration only makes sense when there is a payoff greater than the pain from collaboration. He calls this payoff the “collaboration premium.” Communicating and keeping people on the same page is time-consuming and imperfect. Collaborate advisedly, only when the value of the diversity of perspectives is truly needed, not because a variety of perspectives is interesting or safe. And when people do need to work together, save the time and money spent on team-building events. Another researcher has shown that teams that get along don't necessarily get better results.

Cambridge Professor Mark de Rond has studied teams to unlock what leads to great results. “A focus on interpersonal harmony can actually hurt team performance,” he says in his aptly named book There Is an I in Team: What Elite Athletes and Coaches Really Know About High Performance.⁶ De Rond is a sacred cow tipper of the first order, taking on Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence. Where Goleman celebrates the importance of team harmony, de Rond lauds internal competition as an important but underappreciated ingredient in team success. Too often, complains de Rond, experts point to the virtues they hope to be important, such as collaborating nicely with your team members, instead of simply reporting the facts of the case, as discomfiting as they may be. From a retail store chain in the United Kingdom to surgeons in Afghanistan to improv comedians, de Rond documents how helpful internal competition can be to long-term positive outcomes.

The biggest benefit to a culture that focuses on the “work” half of teamwork is that as collaboration goes down, accountability goes up. Rather than diffusing accountability across the group, individuals are accountable for outcomes. Groups within organizations can still be collectively accountable for results, but when goals are set for individuals it's easier to spot the weak link in the system.

The point is not to highlight the struggles of underperformers, merely to shame them. The point is to break team members out of the habits of learned helplessness and create patterns that flex the right muscles at the right time. Leaders must face their own fears and trust their own and others' ability to do the work. Stepping back and allowing others to struggle is one of the hardest tenets of leadership, but it's necessary for growth. Allowing for growth doesn't preclude training, coaching, and support—it just means that in the end, everyone must be responsible for their own piece of the puzzle.

Being alone by default also values and savors collaboration when the time is right. If everyone is working independently toward specific outcomes, the areas where collaboration is necessary become inescapably clear. Putting everyone together all the time means that the instinct to collaborate trumps the need to collaborate, and it becomes unclear who or what can really contribute to results.

Chapter 4

Narcissistic Useful Creativity

Tokyo-based New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi highlights Sony's place among Japan's faltering tech sector, saying in an April 2012 article that Sony must “fight for its life” despite an “astonishing lack of ideas.”² Tabuchi charts Sony's decline from a position of leadership in consumer electronics to barely hanging on. Tabuchi isn't alone. Newspapers, magazines, and business books have also highlighted the shame of Sony's inability to generate anything standard-worthy since the Trinitron TV and the Walkman, both of which are relics of the last century. So Sony failed because of a lack of creativity. Right?

Wrong. In fact, Sony's failures stem from too much creativity. Instead of listening to the market with humility, Sony's engineers crammed their best technology into an MP3 player that was too cumbersome to use. Instead of taking care of their customer's needs for simplicity, they took care of their own engineer's need for complexity. Engineers inside Sony viewed the storage technology used by Apple's iPod as boring and beneath them, and so they went their own way. These innovators had brains full of ideas. Their problem wasn't too few ideas: their problem was too much narcissism. Proud Sony engineers joined the company to invent industries in Japan that would lead the world, not imitate innovations coming from Korea, China, or America. They wanted to invent something new as part of their legacy.

With the advent of the individual electronic music track in the late 1990s, Sony had everything it needed to create a transformational entertainment product. But rather than adapting to what the market wanted, Sony created something new. Instead of learning from the market, they tried to teach it. This is not evidence of a shortage of ideas. It's a failure of leadership.

Sony's issue is just an outsized version of what leaders face every day. When leaders are creative just for the sake of innovation, for an ego boost or a moment of self-congratulation, creativity backfires.

Scratching the Itch of New

Teresa Amabile is, among other things, a guru of creativity. Since her seminal work in the early 1980s she's helped the world think critically about how creativity works. She's on the faculty of Harvard Business School and continues to think about, study, and share her findings on creativity. Amabile defines creativity as the “production of novel and useful ideas in any domain.”³ So if it's not useful, it's not creative. But leaders too often celebrate an idea for its novelty alone, without regard to its usefulness. What passes for creativity in the workplace is often merely a new idea. Engineers don't get patents for using someone else's idea, and CEOs don't get on the cover of magazines for pragmatically adopting another leader's approach. Novelty generates more social rewards than usefulness, so leaders tend to discount the usefulness of old options and overvalue new ones.

Scott Barry Kaufman, a New York University cognitive scientist who studies creativity, says our search for the unexpected is both deep-seated and endless. “If you present an idea as new,” he says, “people will get a dopamine hit, regardless of whether or not the idea is true or good. This is why it's important to use conscious thought to contemplate the automatic emotional consequences of the dopamine rush and decide whether or not the idea really is effective or whether it's just designed to scintillate.”

This tendency to overestimate how much variety will satisfy us is called “diversification bias” and was first studied by Daniel Read and George Loewenstein while at Carnegie Mellon.⁵Read and Lowenstein's experiments show how we think we want more variety than we end up wanting. They did many studies on a wide range of subjects, but my favorite was their Halloween experiment. The candy that a trick-or-treating kid chooses is a very serious decision, and one that yields important insights into our natural human preference for novelty.

In the experiment, two neighbors conspired to systematically vary the choices kids could make. Some randomly selected kids got to pick two candy bars at one house, but none at the next-door neighbor's house. Another group of kids, meanwhile, got one candy bar at each house. At both houses the kids were picking from a bunch of Three Musketeers™ and Milky Way™ candy bars. Every one of the kids who picked two candy bars at the same time picked one of each. But less than half of the kids who got one candy bar at each house got one of each. Considered separately, the kids picked their favorite candy bar twice. But the kids who had the chance to pick two bars at the same time opted for diversity. There was no payoff to their diversity, though. They merely ended up with less of their favorite. Back at home, enjoying their Halloween bounty, kids eat their favorite candies first, of course. As the authors report about anyone who predicted they'd appreciate more variety than they usually do: “They first consume the goods they prefer the most and then turn to the less desirable items.”⁶

We grown-ups look for new candy bars at work. Our natural tendency to overestimate how much we'll prefer variety has been shown in several other experiments across adults. Because of the diversification bias, we seek out something new to add to our portfolio of projects. New must be better than old, right? Think of Sony and their thousands of new products from video game players to TVs to music. Meanwhile Apple's entire product line can fit on a kitchen table. One of those, the iPhone, accounts for more revenue than Sony's entire annual sales. Both companies are creative, but Apple seems to have more of a maniacal focus on useful creativity.

Creativity should be pragmatic, not prideful. When it's pragmatic, creativity exists to solve an important, unsolved problem. When it's prideful, it exists to boost the ego of the creator. Narcissistic creativity doesn't just waste the narcissists' time. Think of the leader who puts on a dazzling magic show of idea generation. It's impressive to witness these acts of genius. The problem is, when a magician is in the room, everyone else becomes part of the audience. Creative people leave us impressed with them, eager to watch the next magic show.

Don Draper, the charismatic ad agency creative director on AMC's Mad Men, works his magic in a 1960s workplace. When he bids to introduce Kodak's slide projector wheel, the Carousel, he tells the prospective clients, “The most important idea in advertising is new. It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of Calamine lotion.” But Draper goes on to suggest that Kodak should position its product as nostalgic, because creating nostalgia creates a sharp pain that the product can relieve. As he goes on, Don uses the carousel to show charming pictures of his own family as they grew up, including his own wedding pictures. But we know those family pictures betray Don's constant womanizing. It's part of the genius of Matt Weiner—Mad Men's creator—to use the charismatic power of creativity to force the audience to reconsider notions of virtue and vice. How can someone who behaves so badly be so likable? Part of the mix of Don's richly irreconcilable character is his irresistible creativity.

Watch out for the narcissists at work—research shows them to be clinically charming. As researchers from Stanford and Cornell showed in a 2010 study, it's easy to be tricked into thinking you've seen creativity when you've just seen charm. Students who rated highly on tests of narcissism had their pitch for a new movie idea rated more highly than their more humble counterparts. But when independent assessors rated the written version of the ideas, the narcissists' ideas were rated to be no better than the rest. As the authors of the study put it, “Although narcissists do not necessarily generate more creative ideas, they are able to convince others that [their] ideas are more creative because their high levels of confidence, enthusiasm, and charisma correspond to commonly held prototypes of the creative personality.”⁷ So what looks and feels like creativity may simply be narcissism.

Creativity, and its corporate cousin, innovation, propel leaders to success in business and life. Without them, nothing would change, and our lives would be an endless series of frustration and a lack of learning. With narcissistic creativity, however, leaders can harm their business just for the short-term payoff of good feelings and congratulations.

In his book The Upside of Irrationality, Duke economics professor Dan Ariely describes how Thomas Edison was fueled by his own narcissistic creativity, denying that Nikola Tesla's alternating current (AC) was a better global energy solution than his own direct current (DC). Despite the opportunity to profit greatly from Tesla's work (Tesla worked under Edison when he invented AC), he couldn't admit that his protégé's idea was superior to his own. If you've ever plugged anything into a wall in your home, then you know how doomed Edison's narcissistic creativity turned out to be: AC was the scalable power solution that the world needed.⁸ As Edison's eventual commercial success demonstrates, narcissistic creativity can be overcome, through persistence and, as Edison put it, perspiration. But I think that in the past hundred years or so, we've learned a few things that can help narcissists recover without so much sweat.

Chapter 5

Process Outcome Excellence

Seven Steps to Make Your Excellence Meaningful

1. Lower the Stakes

The dumb jock is an old stereotype that persists. And in many cases, there is data to support the stereotype. Dropout rates are higher and grade point averages lower than the population-at-large for athletes recruited to colleges to play football and basketball. Thomas Dee, an economics professor at Swarthmore, wanted to understand more about the reason for the lower performance. More than eighty students at Swarthmore agreed to participate in the study. About half of them were on one of Swarthmore's NCAA sports teams. When the students signed up they were simply told they were taking part in an experiment to understand cognition. During the experiment the students were paid $15 to take a test. The questions were pulled from the GRE, the standardized test given to applicants to grad school.

Before they took the test, Dee primed some of the student athletes to get them thinking about themselves as an athlete. The primed student athletes were asked how much time they spent playing and practicing. The other student athletes were asked some dummy questions about how they got around campus. Priming is used to test the phenomenon of “stereotype threat.” Claude Steele, the pioneer of this research, has shown that “where bad stereotypes about groups apply, members of these groups can fear being reduced to that stereotype.”⁹Researchers have shown over and over that reminding people that they belong to a negatively stereotyped group can create anxiety that lowers performance.

And that's exactly what happened in Dee's experiment at Swarthmore. The athletes who were primed to think of themselves as athletes did fourteen percent worse on the test than the athletes who had been asked how to get around campus. Fourteen percent is a significant drop—the difference between a letter grade. That's a full point drop in GPA.¹⁰

When Emerald Archer was doing her PhD research at U.C. Santa Barbara she wanted to understand stereotype threat outside of a campus environment. She examined the stereotype that women perform worse than men in marksmanship exercises in the U.S. Marine Corps. She presented her findings in a paper called “You Shoot Like a Girl: Stereotype Threat and Marksmanship Performance in the U.S. Marine Corps.”¹¹

Shooting is core to the identity of a marine, and every marine must qualify on an M-16. Once again, the data supports the stereotype. On average, 68 percent of women qualify on their first attempt compared to 88 percent of men. And 23 percent of men are classified as experts, the highest level, while only 15 percent of female Marines attain that level. Archer wanted to know why.

She designed an experiment much more dramatic than the GRE test. Marines, both male and female, were invited to the rifle range to shoot a few rounds. They were told this was an experiment to test performance under a variety of conditions. All of the marines were given a page of written instructions before they started firing at targets at a distance of 300, 400, and 500 meters (more than a quarter of a mile!). On their instruction sheet, some of the marines were primed to think of the experiment as a test of the stereotype that women perform worse than men, while others weren't.

The stereotype threat effect held up on the rifle range as it had in the classroom. The female Marines primed to think that their gender was the subject of the test generally shot worse than the women who weren't primed to think that way. According to Archer, a female major said she felt added pressure on the rifle range because “she didn't want to be responsible for giving other female Marines a bad name.”

But there was a surprise twist to the experiment that Archer didn't see coming. Half of the male Marines had also been primed to think of the experiment as a test of gender. So do you think the men primed to think of the experiment as a test of their dominance would perform better or worse than the men who weren't primed?

It turns out they performed worse. The prime had exactly the same effect on the men as the women. When women are told that men do better than women, anxiety lowers performance. Tell men the same thing and they seem to face the same anxiety, even though they're being reminded of their group's superiority. As Archer points out, “it is possible that the additional anxiety felt by male marines to confirm that they are indeed better than female marines led to their underperformance.”

Leaders who are out to prove something on behalf of a larger cause create unneeded anxiety that lowers performance. When a young leader needs to prove to the world that he can present with as much confidence as his older counterpart, he creates anxiety that lowers performance. When an older executive feels the need to prove she can be just as innovative as her younger counterparts, she risks foolishly overreaching. The man who needs to show how male leaders can be compassionate or the female salesperson who needs to prove she can be as strong as any man creates unhealthy brain clutter that clogs up performance.

The first step for you to achieve excellence as a leader is to lower the stakes. Don't make everything you do a campaign for some larger group. If you want to hit the target, forget about the group you're a part of. Excellence is a tough aim to achieve without trying to change a stereotype along the way. Remove any priming that reminds you of your membership in some negatively stereotyped group and narrow your focus to the task at hand.

5. Start a Meaningful Journey with a Meaningless Map

In the harsh winter of the Swiss Alps, a Hungarian army troop on a training mission was stuck. The lieutenant in charge sent a small group of soldiers to scout the best way forward and return to the troop by nightfall with a recommendation on the best way back to the base. A snowstorm started soon after the scout team left, and the lieutenant wondered if he'd sent the scout team out on a suicide mission. By the second day when the scouts hadn't returned, the rest of the troop feared the worst. But on the third day the scouts made it back to join the troop and brought with them an incredible story of good fortune.

By the end of the second day, the scouts had become completely disoriented, with no agreement on which way to go to return to the troops. Then one of them found a map beneath their food supplies. The next morning they followed the map around mountains to make their way back to the troop. The lieutenant asked to see the map. “This isn't a map of the Alps. This is a map of the Pyrenees mountains 1,000 kilometers away!”

This story was first told by Hungarian Nobel Prize–winner Albert Szent-Gyorgi and was used by business professor and organizational psychologist Karl Weick to make the point that “if you're lost, any old map will do.” As he says, “A map provides a place to start from, which often becomes secondary once an activity gets under way. Just as a map of the Pyrenees gets people moving so they can find their way out of the Alps, a map of the wrong competitor can get people talking so they find their way into the right niche.”

Chapter 6

Outcome Process Fairness

6. Check Up on Others

But sometimes, some of us worry about others for a very different reason: because we want them to suffer. As Abbink and Sadrieh say, “There is a danger of overstating the kindness of human nature.” I had hoped to reveal in this chapter that all the emerging science on the nature of fairness proves we're more interested in being more altruistic than one might assume. I hadn't planned on showing that sometimes some people are, in fact, out to get us. Thanks for raining on my parade, Abbink and Sadrieh.

Think of their research as a third step in the evolution of economic research on human interaction. First, economists believed that we are all rational actors, looking to improve our own situation. Second, a new set of researchers (Fehr and Rabin) argue that we aren't so selfish after all. Good news: we care about our fellow man. We engage in prosocial behavior. Then Abbink and Sadrieh come along and say, in essence: Yes, we agree that the old guys got it wrong—we're not simply rational actors trying to make ourselves better. But the new guys—the behavioral economists—get it only half right. We're not only interested in helping our fellow man. Sometimes we want to hurt him, just for the fun of it.

To test the degree of antisocial behavior, Abbink and Sadrieh invented a game called “The Joy of Destruction.” In the game, played at the University of Amsterdam, participants are paid to give their opinions on a series of Dutch advertisements. Two participants who don't know each other work side by side, earning €1.20 for each ad they review. The participants—let's call them Hansel and Gretel—are led to believe they're serving as test customers for ads. Then, after they've given their opinions, but before they are paid the fee, there's an unexpected twist.

Abbink takes one of the participants aside—let's say Hansel—for a private conversation and offers him a surprise opportunity. Hansel can cut Gretel's pay. Gretel will never know it was Hansel who cut the reward; Gretel will be given a bogus explanation related to departmental budget. Hansel won't get any additional pay no matter what he chooses to do. Abbink and Sadrieh designed the game so that the reduction in pay would be completely anonymous and completely without benefit to the punisher. In other words: half of the research subjects in the game have a chance to reduce someone else's pay for no good reason.

The results stun me. Many of the players—up to 40 percent of them—exercised their power to reduce the pay of their new colleague, just for the fun of it, with no benefit to themselves. This is different from the spite in the Clara story. Clara wanted to even things out by punishing her sister. But in this test, some research subjects wanted to hurt others, no matter what the score. Your belief in fairness may lead you to wrongly assume that if you have someone else's best interests at heart, then they also have your best interests at heart.

Chapter 8

Backstage Onstage Preparation

With constant testing we become conditioned to equating responsible preparation with exhaustive memorization and independent analysis—the more the better. We cram information into our brains and spew it back out onto a multiple-choice test. It's natural to hold on to the mental model of preparation that made us successful as students. But the game has changed. We have to stop overpreparing and mispreparing for a test that will never come.

Other remnants of our schooling do harm as well. For example, the concept of academic specialization hurts us if we narrowly define our expertise as limited to our one field of study at the cost of cultivating complementary skills. A+ obsession, another trap, tricks leaders into preparing for the satisfaction of a mental A+. If you've ever graded yourself or others on their preparation, you may be a victim of this pernicious mania. Even diplomas can seductively whisper in our ear, “You've arrived. You're done learning.” This is not to suggest diplomas aren't valuable or shouldn't be a source of deep pride. However, although diplomas help frame our future success, leaders must match knowledge with growth-oriented qualities like an appetite for constant learning, ability to take and learn from feedback, and a willingness to change one's mind.

In our youth, many of us participated in the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts and can instantly recall the motto, “Be Prepared.” We likely heard this adage as a voice egging us on to prepare more backstage. But Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement, described the motto as not just an activity of the mind, but of the body as well. In order to be prepared, one must approach a task holistically, thinking through possible scenarios and training the body so that when the moment comes to do your duty, you're conditioned to act. Baden-Powell built scouting around performance-based badges that pull students out of classrooms, books, and solitary learning and into the world to perform over a hundred different hands-on activities. The scouting model achieves true readiness not through disembodied study, but through integrated preparation that couples mind and body training with performance.

Before the Internet made shipping products and services an instant act, product development life cycles took years. In the old model, anything that hit the stores had to be polished. Now, crowds fund half-baked ideas through supportive communities, and Fortune 500 companies test product assumptions under the safe haven of “beta” status. As I pointed out in Chapter Five on excellence, in the recent Facebook IPO filing, founder Mark Zuckerberg included a section on “The Hacker Way” to reclaim the positive merits of the word “hacker.” Zuckerberg describes it as “an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration.” But although norms are changing, many of us find it hard to let go of our impulse to fully bake everything.

A friend of mine landed a job at Google right out of college. An alien to Silicon Valley culture, she found herself in a strange world that challenged her notions of preparation. Before Google, she interned at a law firm for a boss who praised her exacting eye for detail and reverent regard for being right before speaking up. Google released incomplete work as beta products and generally regarded everything as an experiment to learn from. The philosophy was: why waste time getting it right instead of simply shipping it and getting it right in real time? At first, she watched, bewildered, convinced that the company was letting products and features ship before they were ready. Finally, she let go of her preconceptions, embraced quick execution, and joined the high-speed, just-ship-it attitude that has led to Google's impressive track record of rapid product introductions.

Our brains shape our preparation habits too. Roughly one in five Americans suffers from anxiety disorders, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. A 2001 Gallup poll found two in five Americans are afraid to speak in front of an audience.² Fear and anxiety originate from a place deep in our brains and many of us find that compulsive overpreparing quiets our protesting brains like Xanax. Overpreparation may be comforting, but it has unintended consequences. When we prepare to calm our nerves, we're slowly falling in love with our work in a way that makes us less open to feedback. Not to mention we waste time that could have been spent more productively.

A clue from a study on jazz and the brain hints at the neurological roots disconnecting preparation and performance. A pair of Johns Hopkins and government scientists examined the brains of six jazz pianists performing well-memorized C-scales and improvised tunes. They used MRIs to isolate blood flow patterns for each activity. In both scenarios, improvising (that is, going off script) resulted in reduced blood flow to the part of the brain linked to planned actions like self-censoring. At the same time, improvising increased blood flow to the part of the brain linked with self-expression and individuality. In other words, switching from prepared to improvised activity changed brain states.³ The findings present an interesting trend and suggest that the brain actually does have to switch gears as it goes from prepared to improvised activity, at least in music.

Unless you take tests for a living, the predominant form of preparation in our culture does you no favors. Leaders must scrutinize and shift their mental model of preparation to maximize performance at work. Don't use preparation as a drug or a crutch.

Seven Ideas to Take Your Preparation to Center Stage

4. Pretotype

The year is 1970 and you're in a conference room in upstate New York. Ashtrays pepper the table and smoke rings emanate from serious expressions. A debate rages. IBM, in the business of typewriters and computers, has a decision to make. Personal computers haven't taken off in the mass market and keyboards are a major culprit. Thirty years ago, most managers didn't type. Typing proficiency, or lack thereof, blocked the way to mass market adoption.

Abuzz about a new technology concept, the room fractures around opinion. The technology that could change the game? Voice recognition. If IBM developed speech-to-text technology, typewriters would no longer be needed. Early focus groups loved the idea. What could be easier than speaking? Development will be challenging and costly. Investing the amount of money needed into research and development would effectively be betting the company on the success of voice recognition technology. Should they do it? What would you do? Will people behave like they say they will and buy the technology?

Legend has it that because they couldn't afford to make it, IBM came up with a most clever solution to test out the concept. They invited a focus group to come in and had them dictate to a computer. In an adjoining room, a super-typist instantaneously typed the testers' words. The group of testers, previously enthusiastic about the idea, found that in reality, dictating to a computer made their throats sore, was noisy, and was inappropriate for confidential or sensitive messages. Through early testing, IBM made the wise decision not to move forward with the technology.

Alberto Savoia, serial entrepreneur, retells this story to describe an idea he calls “pretotyping,” a more memorable variant of “pretend-o-typing.” Before spending the money to develop a prototype, IBM found a tremendously low-cost way to test user interest and saved time and money. “Make sure you're building the right ‘it’ before you build ‘it’ right,” Savoia advises. Translating IBM's pretotyping wisdom to preparation for leaders, leaders know the value of getting feedback early when preparing. Next time you have a big work task to do, find a quick and dirty way to figure out what would actually be valuable work and save doing it well for when you have the “right ‘it.’”

Chapter 9

Extinguish Your Backfires

It's not easy to spot sacred cows, even for experts in leadership. Byron Hanson, one of my friends and colleagues from Duke CE, is a Canadian scholar of leadership who has lived on and off in Australia, his wife's native country. In 2004, Byron and three friends of his, each of whom was also recognized as an expert in leadership, set out on a five-day walk through the Fitzgerald River National Park, which cuts through the rugged bush country of Western Australia. It was an adventure they'd been planning for over a year, and the four fit guys in their thirties were eager to tackle the challenge. They geared up with forty-pound packs of food, camping equipment, water, and water storage (as there would be no sources of water on the trek). They also carried a satellite phone as there is no mobile coverage in the Fitzgerald. They pushed their way through with optimism. They had planned well, including water drops that had been strategically left at certain spots along the trek by a support person a few days earlier. There was no path, and each step was a plodding exercise in fighting through prickly bushes, stepping on and over loose rocks the size of soccer balls, all while staying alert for signs of dehydration and snakes. They kept trudging along, but at a slower pace than they'd planned when they scheduled their water drops.

On day two as the sun set, they flipped on their headlamps to see their way along the vast sand dunes that hug the isolated coastline of the park. They should have reached their first water drop four hours earlier. One of Byron's friends, Troy Hendrickson, who now teaches with Byron at Curtin Graduate School of Business in Perth, Australia, noted that they'd only been able to cover 1 km/hour for the previous eight consecutive hours due to the harshness of the terrain—much slower than their plan.

“What was unsaid was unbelievable,” said Byron. After the four proud men finished the last of their water and the temperature began to plummet, the anxiety rose, but no one spoke. Finally, after a few frantic calls on the satphone with the park ranger to get some bearings, just before midnight they stumbled onto their water source and pitched a hurried camp for the night. Exhausted, they studied their map and determined an early start would be required if they were to make the next water drop the following day. “It was all about the plan,” Byron recalled. “Even though we were exhausted and behind our schedule, we just stuck to the plan.” The next day, about five hours in, it was becoming clear that the hikers were not going to make the next water drop and again no one was saying anything. They just continued to labor through the thick bush. And then Gavin Rainbow, the most inexperienced hiker in the group, said something that proved to be the turning point. As the group was looking at the map and trying to find a way to the next water source, he said: “You know, we could just go back.”

“That simple comment made us all pause,” remembers Byron. “We never even thought about going back or about even thinking of an alternative way out until that moment. We had our heads down driving to a destination and were not willing to see other options.” So in that moment the group finally opened up to their reality, changed course, and found their way out safely.

“Our journey ended up being more about exploring our egos than Australian bush,” said Byron. “And the irony was, these topics were what I was right in the middle of studying for my Ph.D.” Byron and the boys couldn't see the nature of their challenges because they were blinded by their sacred cows. They needed a new way of seeing the world.

For them, their sacred cows were completion, follow-through, and masculine adventure. Inside the workplace, we don't have freezing temperatures and parched mouths to lets us know we're in danger. The sacred cows at the workplace do their damage in a more subtle way.

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