EXERCISE 1: Go to an Art Museum or Gallery

NOTHING QUITE EXCITES THE SENSES or polarizes a crowd like a piece of art. Visit an art museum or gallery and roam around until you spot a piece of work that you find either really pleasing or really repulsive. Mild reactions won’t do; it’s got to be something you feel deeply, even physically. (Don’t worry if you start with something that disgusts you; you’ll repeat the exercise with something you love.) Stand in front of the work and take it in. If it’s repulsive, don’t back away or rush off after a cursory look. The point of this exercise is not for you to try to figure out what the artist is “saying” with the piece; that’s immaterial.

What is material is what you are seeing or hearing from the piece. As you scrutinize it, take note of the impressions you’re experiencing: does it make you feel happy or sad or calm or jittery or hungry? Once you’ve begun to center in on a central or dominant impression, ask yourself, Why is that impression so strong? What is it about the image you’re taking in that ignites those impressions?

Don’t stop there. Press deeper: Why do I find that attractive or repulsive? Where or when have I felt a similar feeling? What set of images or events makes me feel this way? When was the last time I felt this way?

Repeat the exercise with a piece of art that creates the opposite impression.

This exercise may confound you a bit initially because it’s easy to look at something and proclaim that “it is what it is.” But once you open yourself to associations—neuroscientists theorize that memory is a network of associations—you’ll find yourself flooded with feelings and images. The point is not to suggest that you should block associations in order to improve your observational powers but, instead, to alert you to the way in which images often carry with them feelings—some attractive and pleasant, others repulsive and discomforting—and to get you to notice that you may linger with some images and rush away from others. What you see, in other words, may be determined by what you feel about what you see.

My interviews with accomplished leaders alerted me to the way that acuity in observation was often linked to the ability to sense a crucible occurring. Occasionally, as noted in chapter 2, someone would refer to a sensation bordering on a premonition that preceded an important event. What was being described was not a premonition; instead, it was much more likely to have been an association with a situation or an event that had already occurred but that had not been consciously surfaced—yet.

For practical purposes, one way to increase your skill at seeing is to give yourself time to do a mini after-action review at the end of each day. Build a ritual around a full sensory review of events of the day: what really pleased you, what really troubled you, what felt incomplete, as well as what associations preceded, accompanied, and followed particularly memorable events. Doing this kind of review not only will get you accustomed to parsing the difference between what you saw and what you may have missed, but it will also more deeply embed in your consciousness the ability to calibrate your observations in real time (when it often matters the most).

EXERCISE 2: Shopping Cart

IMAGINE YOU ARE IN THE SUPERMARKET you usually frequent, and you’ve wheeled your cart into the express lane (ten items or less). As luck would have it, someone has left their cart in the lane unattended. Feeling generous, you decide to leave it where it is. While you wait your turn, you take a look into the unattended cart and this is what you see: a quart of skim milk, a head of broccoli, a flashlight in a package, a quart of motor oil, a large package of disposable baby diapers, a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and three dozen eggs.

To pass the time, you decide to imagine who this cart belongs to. Who is this person?

Don’t take more than a few seconds to arrive at an image. On a piece of paper jot down in rapid succession your answers to these questions: Is this person male or female? Does this person have children at home and, if so, how many? Does this person work outside the home and, if so, what does he or she do? What sort of education does this person have? Is he or she married and, if so, for how long? What does the spouse do for a living? Where does this person live—for example, in a house, a condo, a rental apartment? Does this person drive a car and, if so, what kind? What year? What color? Finally, what color shoes will this person be wearing when he or she shows up to claim the cart?

Having completed your list, notice two things. First, note how much detail you are able to drag out of so little information. Even though the exercise asked you to engage your imagination, it probably was not difficult to fill in the blanks.

Second, if you compare notes with other people on the same assignment, you will quickly notice just how different your associations are from theirs. In the dozens of times I’ve asked groups to complete the assignment, I have found that women routinely associate a woman with the cart; men most frequently see a man with the cart, but they often complain that the mixed “gender identity” of the objects (diapers and a quart of motor oil in the same basket?) complicates the task. The point here is that stereotypes run deep. Not that stereotypes are necessarily bad; indeed, they are, as decision theorists remind us, powerful shorthand devices for assimilating and making sense of information under the pressure of time or other constraints.^a The key is that you are more likely to see things you have already seen.

For practical purposes, you might want to start asking questions before you attribute meaning to events or comments. Chris Argyris and Donald Schon pioneered a distinction worth considering in this regard. They distinguished between conversations—internal dialogues as well as interchanges between people—that revolved around assertions and conversations that revolved around hypotheses.^b The former are studded with beliefs parading as facts—for example, “Everyone knows that men are more aggressive than women.” The latter are composed of hypotheses in search of facts—for example, “I have seen many more situations in which men dominate business meetings than women have.”

Another illustration, drawn from my own observation, shows how it is possible to alert yourself to situations in which your attributions may derail the performance of others. Frank was a highly successful government official who had engineered the turnaround of a troubled agency but who was, by his own admission, feared by many of the people who worked for him. He knew that because it came across with trumpets blaring in the 360-degree performance review he had initiated after his first year in office. Though not unaware of his reputation for such things as “crucifying and publicly humiliating people whom he deemed unprepared” in formal presentations (a quote from his performance review), Frank was nonetheless stumped as to how he could prevent himself from being demonized for his comments in the conference room.

With Frank’s permission, I set up a video camera in the corner of his conference room and taped several staff meetings. In the course of those tapings, there were three separate occasions on which Frank made comments that signaled annoyance, impatience, or both. I watched the presenters cringe in each instance. But I also noticed in each instance preceding his comments that Frank appeared to be contorting his mouth and fingering the gap between two of his top teeth as if trying to dislodge a piece of food. Abruptly, he’d stop and then fire off an acerbic comment.

Later on, I showed Frank the videotape and asked him what was going on. Scratching his head, he started to speak and then paused. “You know what,” he said, “I think I see what you’re saying. There’s no food there, but it’s a funny place that starts to itch when I start getting upset. I know what’s coming just by feeling it. I just don’t stop myself.” Seizing the opportunity, I asked Frank whether he would mind if I intervened the next time I saw him start picking his teeth like that. He agreed. Several meetings later (all of which went smoothly, without an outburst from Frank), I noticed Frank starting to squirm in his seat and go for his incisor during a presentation from one of his employees named Sarah. Quietly, from across the table, I asked Frank whether he was going to say something. He looked at me as if I’d caught his hand in the cookie jar, and smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “I was just going to ask if maybe Sarah wouldn’t mind it if we picked up the pace in her presentation a little. We’re covering ground that most everyone is familiar with.” He held his tongue, and the meeting went on without incident. Over time, Frank’s meetings came to be regarded as helpful and productive, no longer nicknamed the “star chamber.”

The key here is that the more alert you are to these kinds of triggers, the more likely it is you can intercept them before they have negative consequences, or at least consequences you’d prefer not to experience.

a. See Max Bazerman, Judgment in Managerial Decision Making (New York: Wiley, 1986); and Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown, 2005).

b. Argyris and Schon referred to these as Model 1 and Model 2 conversations. See Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schon, Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974).

EXERCISE 3: Record a Meeting

GO TO A MEETING (best if it’s not one you’re chairing) and try to record as much as you can about what you observe. Take notes if you like, but once you’re away from the meeting, write down all you can remember. Don’t limit yourself to the traditional minutes of the meeting; try to re-create the words, gestures, ambiance, intimations, body language, and history that enable you to understand what was going on. (It might be easier to write out your notes in the manner of a movie script.)

Ask yourself, If the meeting were a multilateral tennis match, who did most of the serving? Who was most likely to return a serve? How long or sustained were the volleys or interchanges among participants? Did you notice any patterns in the interactions you observed?

The goal here is not to get you to remember everything, but to gain insight into what you remember and why. For example, you might want to notice how you recorded your observations. Quite often, people come equipped with pad and pen but limit note taking to what they decide are the “important” things that get said or concluded. But how do you know what’s important ahead of time? What if you mistakenly classified something as unimportant but it turned out to be important later on? How would you know? Equally important, people often don’t notice that their physical location influences what they can see. If you elect to sit in a corner, in order, for example, to be less conspicuous in your observation and note taking, does that prevent you from seeing the faces of people with their backs to you? Are you inclined to infer whether they are smiling (e.g., making a signal of encouragement to a speaker facing you) or frowning (and signaling disagreement or displeasure)? Or do you ignore them altogether?

Don’t despair if you find this exercise difficult to carry through to completion. The key here is to recognize how everyday events in organizations quite often carry with them a great deal of information that we routinely miss, overlook, or ignore. Many times, we engage in censoring activities without even being aware of it. For example, did you find this task stressful or irritating? Most people do, and only a few can sustain the intensity of attention required to document their observations for more than a few minutes. They “tune out,” even when they deem the task relevant and important, because it is just plain hard to attend to all the information that’s available.

Or they begin almost immediately to categorize and prioritize information as if they knew with confidence in advance that they could capture “the important things.” The problem is that although those schemes—like stereotypes—may make it easier to condense and process information, they also prevent you from seeing and hearing things you don’t anticipate. They make it hard to learn.

By this point, you may be wondering whether it is physically or mentally possible to take everything in, much less to maintain an inner dialogue prompted by questions like “What am I really seeing?” Two things matter here. First, you are improving the quality and the quantity of the information you have at your disposal. Repeating this exercise (or variations of it) will pay off in better decision making and a greater likelihood that your decisions will get implemented.^a Second, the more you practice, the better you’ll get at reading situations and people. This will increase the speed and the accuracy of your assessments.

“Noticers” are trend spotters and pattern recognizers. They tend to see or sense an emergent phenomenon before others do. Trends can reside in markets, in large group behavior, in meetings, and even in conversations.^b Noticers are not only more likely to spot a trend in its infancy, but they are also more likely to recall from past observation other events that belong in a similar class. In other words, by not categorically dismissing observations as unimportant, they keep them available for use later on.

a. Decision theorists like Vroom and Yetton have long argued that decision quality—a product of information quality and the implementability of a decision—is strongly influenced by a manager’s skill in selecting whom to include in decision making and how to listen to them. See Victor H. Vroom and P. W. Yetton, Leadership and Decision Making (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973).

b. Steve Ober and David Kantor theorize that when a group’s members become better observers of their behaviors (e.g., in meetings), they can operate more effectively, prevent delays, and keep moving in a common direction. They break organized interactions into four underlying actions: a move, which is a statement that initiates action (“Let’s buy that company”); a follow, which supports or confirms a move (“I agree, let’s make an offer”); an oppose, which either contradicts a move or calls for a redirection (“That undermines our strategy”); and a bystand, which most often comments on the group’s process (“I thought we said we weren’t going to make a decision today”). These actions cluster into interaction patterns that are either productive or unproductive (the latter they refer to as “structural traps”). The key, according to Ober and Kantor, is that by recognizing patterns, groups can pull themselves out of traps. See Steven P. Ober and David Kantor, “Achieving Breakthroughs in Executive Team Performance,” Prism, Summer 1996, 84–95.

EXERCISE 4: Videotape Yourself at Work

VIRTUALLY ANYONE WHO PURSUES serious instruction in golf will find themselves being videotaped by an instructor. There’s no way to hide the flaws in your swing or the overall body image that somehow doesn’t quite jibe with the way you see yourself in the mirror. Yet golf instructors use video not to embarrass, but to instruct.

In this exercise, ask someone you know reasonably well to videotape you as you make a presentation or speech. Firmly instruct them that you want them to shoot you as they normally see you. No staging or props. Resist the temptation to stop and restart in order to get the best take. Keep the camera going for twenty minutes or so. Ask your videographer to capture other people’s reactions to you, as well.

Now for the tough part: rewind the tape and watch yourself in action. What do you see that surprises or distresses you? What do you like or dislike about your performance, and why? As you watch the tape, note on paper some of the impressions that strike you. Recognizing that we are usually our own worst critics, it’s important to also note the positive as well as the negative or unpleasant impressions. Notice how people react when you speak. Are they engaged? What does their body language tell you? How much of that information did you get while you were “performing”? Again, along the lines of the earlier visit to the art museum, take a few minutes to explore why you feel the way you do about specific moments in the tape.

The greatest benefit of this exercise derives from the fact that it gives you the opportunity to literally get out of your skin and use what you see as the raw data for your own analysis. Practicing this makes it easier to follow Heifetz and Linsky’s advice: go up to an imaginary “balcony” in your mind, and watch yourself in action.^a It also serves as valuable preparation for real-time self-observation—that is, practicing while you perform.

Outstanding leaders demonstrate remarkable adaptive capacity in large measure because they leave themselves open to experience, open to surprise, and open to learning. They do that not by making themselves an open book or starting always with a clean slate, but rather by being attentive to themselves as observational instruments.

They may or may not be happy with the stereotypes, predispositions, or associations that they carry around, but they are mindful of them and make a point of registering how they are coloring what they see and hear and, on occasion, subjecting what may seem to be the most mundane and obvious observations to close questioning.^b

It is important to recognize that adaptive capacity is not only about looking inward. Inward-looking exercises are intended to aid you in a process of self-calibration: to wit, how good an observational instrument am I? Astronomers routinely factor in imperfections in the curvature of the reflecting mirror—and so should leaders.

That said, the strength of a leader’s adaptive capacity also depends on her ability to discern patterns before they become obvious to everyone else. Pattern recognition—the ability to extract meaning from a mass of data (observations, interactions)—takes a variety of forms. Bird-watchers like globe-trotting McCormick & Company director Hank Kaestner excel at distinguishing a bird from a thicket of multicolored leaves. Kaestner is also extremely good at picking out a good crop in a warehouse of seemingly identical bundles of spice. Sailors like Bob Crandall, former CEO of American Airlines, read the contours of a body of water in search of shifting winds. Often, the distinction between adept and novice resides in the ability not only to sort out the information quickly but also to then infer what to do next on the basis of partial information. For example, chess players look for patterns and signature moves: one look at a board and they have a pretty good sense of what has happened and what could happen.

Another form of pattern recognition involves finding similarities among otherwise incomparable examples. For example, I had the opportunity to observe this at work with the senior vice president of R&D for a major consumer products manufacturer who was struggling with how to consolidate three labs without weakening the company’s legendary record as an innovator. One day he stopped in midsentence while we were discussing his dilemma and started waving his arms as if he were conducting an orchestra. Laughing at my befuddlement, he told me of a newspaper article he’d recently read about the business director of a major European opera company who’d been tasked to collapse five state-sponsored orchestras into two—also without weakening their musical performance. A few days later, out of a meeting with the opera director came a powerful insight into the role of the “first chairs,” the pivotal players who could make or break the orchestra and who, it turned out, had been instrumental in making the consolidation work. Therein lay what turned out to be a successful strategy for the R&D leader.

The key in both examples of pattern recognition is the ability to leverage observations—yours and others’—to extend your eyesight. In the case of bird-watching and sailing, it takes the form of indirect information that tells you where something you want is. In the case of the R&D director, it takes the form of finding a class of events or phenomena that your problem (and, therefore, your solution) belongs to. Not unlike Jack Welch’s injunction to “manage the white spaces”—that is, the places not touched by the formal rules of the organization—adaptive capacity relies on pattern recognition to identify opportunities in what might otherwise appear to be a very crowded space.

a. Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

b. Readers interested in further exercises to sharpen their observational skills, as well as fascinating research-based insights on the challenges of perception, will find it useful to consult one or more of the following sources: John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972); Ian I. Mitroff and Harold A. Linstone, The Unbounded Mind: Breaking the Chains of Traditional Business Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Todd Siler, Think Like a Genius: Use Your Creativity in Ways That Will Enrich Your Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1996).

EXERCISE 5: Kill Your Company

SENIOR EXECUTIVES FROM A WELL-KNOWN CANDY and confectionary company were assembled in the conference room of a research group with whom I am affiliated, and their objective was to scan the environment for threats to their market position. The team came armed to the teeth with the latest business intelligence, analyst reports, company profiles, and the like. But less than an hour into the exercise, one member leaned back and took a deep breath; to no one in particular, he said, “I don’t think there’s anything in these reports we don’t already know. And there’s stuff here that we know we don’t know enough about. But I bet what’s going to kill us is what we don’t know that we don’t know.” He was referring to what in the aerospace and defense community has traditionally been called the “unk-unk”: the unknown unknown.

With his declaration still hanging in the air, this executive offered a different assignment to the group: “Let’s figure out how to kill our company. We know what our weaknesses are better than anyone else. What’s the product or the process or the whatever that could do us in? Not a catastrophe or a stupid mistake or a moral lapse. Let’s figure out how to kill our company and then,” he added with eyes afire, “let’s figure out what it will take to become the thing that could put us out of business before it does!”

Your challenge, in this exercise, is to do the same. Even if you lead a small department or a not-for-profit organization, the exercise remains the same. For example, many not-for-profits found themselves starving for financial support and teetering on the brink of collapse in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in the autumn of 2005. They had weathered the cycles of fund-raising but were completely unprepared for a catastrophic event that might result in funds being diverted for an extended period of time to other causes.

You can complete this exercise by yourself, but it will be much more valuable if you undertake it as a collaborative effort. That way, you can practice listening to others, getting their input rather than telling them the answers, and identifying who among your team has the most to contribute to solving unconventional problems.

EXERCISE 6: Telling Your Story

THINK ABOUT YOUR CRUCIBLE STORY, and reframe it in your mind or on paper as an incident that threw your life out of balance, setting the stage with a brief introduction that describes life in balance. Describe how your crucible experience put you at odds with your expectations, and do so in a way that lets the listener in on the feelings associated with being caught in the middle of opposing forces. Recognizing that a good story resolves the tension, but does so in a realistic way, explain how you survived and what you learned in the process. (See “Almost Climbing to the Top of Mt. Kilimanjaro” for a short example of a well-told crucible story.^a)

To a Child

Tell your crucible story to a child. As a parent or grandparent, you would have a wonderful opportunity to share an important incident from your life that those children may not have heard or may not have heard framed this way.

To Coworkers

It’s not easy to manufacture the perfect venue or time to tell a crucible story to coworkers, certainly if you’re nervous about drawing attention to yourself. But as a leader, you have many opportunities to invite people to talk about difficult times—whether on the job or off it—especially when there’s a positive ending to celebrate.

Presentations I’ve made about the findings from the research on which this book is built have almost invariably resulted in discussions of individual crucible experiences. Indeed, the most frequent response I’ve received has been the unsolicited crucible story. People want to have their stories heard. So if you’re concerned about drawing attention to yourself, it may make the most sense for you to invite others to tell their crucible stories before you share yours. But share your story you must.

In the telling, pay close attention to whether or not your listeners show signs of engagement. Are they searching out your eyes? Are you looking to make contact with theirs? Can you draw people closer by lowering your voice? Have you spotted the person in the audience whose head bobs in accord with key points you make? Are you acknowledging their attentiveness, without focusing overly much on them? In other words, are you addressing everyone or just the people who appear to you in the moment as if they are engaged? Having told your story, test for meaning—that is, ask someone then (or afterward) what the moral or punch line of your story was. Did you get your point across?

a. Jan Houbolt graciously allowed me to reprint this version of an e-mail he sent out to friends and supporters who wanted to learn more about his first mountainclimbing experience (at the age of fifty-plus).

EXERCISE 7: Find Someone’s Passion

STRIKE UP A CONVERSATION with a coworker about passion. Inquire about something they do at work or through work that they care deeply about.^a Passion at work or for work is generally less obvious; it requires digging and careful thought about how to frame questions that will get a conversation—or a monologue—started.^b

The result, for a leader especially, will be greater insight into the emotional attachments that people have made to their work, often to the moral overtones of excellence at work, and therefore to motives and aspirations that leaders need to discern. Listen to what they say, and, more importantly, listen to how they say it. What happens when someone talks about something they feel passionate about? What happens to you, the listener? What’s different about the interchange that takes place between two people when one is describing his or her passion?

Here’s an illustration of my point; I call this “the mysterious case of the cookie jar collector.” While studying technological change in unionized workplaces, I entered the lunchroom of a weathered old sheet metal–stamping plant and sat down next to a veteran operator named Rusty.^c We struck up a conversation after I noticed that he was reading a newsletter on whose cover was a cookie jar in the shape of a popular cartoon character. I asked what that was about, and Rusty cracked a crooked smile through the stubble of a three-day beard. “Oh, that,” he said. “That’s a little hobby of mine. I collect cookie jars.” Intrigued, I asked whether there were a lot of people who collected cookie jars. Rusty lit up as he told me, by degrees, that not only was there a big network of collectors, but he was the president of an association. He maintained a database of recent sales and prices. He wrote and distributed the newsletter. And with eyes twinkling, he told me he just received a “five-figure check” from a major auction house for having appraised the value of Andy Warhol’s collection of cookie jars.

The story gets even more interesting. After mentioning to the plant manager that I’d met “the cookie jar collector,” I was told that Rusty was something of a legend in the plant—not for his cookie jars, but for his outright refusal to cooperate with management in bringing on board a new generation of computer-controlled presses. Rusty, it seemed, had rebuffed every entreaty by management to aid the production engineers responsible for implementing the new technology. His direct supervisor had concluded that Rusty was either a modern-day Luddite—someone who resisted new technology on principal—or he was too old to learn something new.

Yet, as it turned out when I tracked Rusty down for another conversation, his reluctance derived from the experience of having been “consulted” about past equipment and process changes, with no apparent effect. His memory, longer than any manager’s, trumped his fascination with technology. But no one knew.

a. People are often eager to talk about their children or a hobby, but this task is intended to be harder than that.

b. You might consider asking a leading question, such as “Have you ever lost track of time doing something you really enjoy at work? What were you doing?”

c. Robert J. Thomas, What Machines Can’t Do: Politics and Technological Change in the Industrial Enterprise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

EXERCISE 8: Build a Community

IN AN AVERAGE WEEK, working adults spend the largest fraction of their waking time at work, usually confined to eight hundred square feet of office or factory space. In the 1800s, if you spent that much time in one place, you called it home, or at least community. How much of a community is the place you work? Or, better yet, how could you make your workplace more of a community? That’s the challenge.

Students of architecture and urban planning have long been fascinated by what makes for a community, as have sociologists and anthropologists. In a pathbreaking work, A Pattern Language, architects Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein (and their collaborators) identified five features shared in common by successful communities across the sweep of time: a crossroads, or a place where people might meet in the normal course of life; a heart, or a central space where people congregated to meet others or to be seen; a founder’s tale, or something that gave an account of the community’s origin; a conversation piece—for example, a bell tower or a signature building; and finally, a mystery, or some part of the community’s history that was the subject of dispute and intrigue.

Suppose you had the opportunity to build a community at work—out of your existing office space or in a new building. What could you do to create a crossroads, a heart, a founder’s tale, a conversation piece, and a mystery? The exercise may not be so theoretical. Consider how often companies reorganize, change dwellings, or build new spaces. Each represents an opportunity to build community.

EXERCISE 9: Summing Up Your Commitments

AT THE END OF AN ESPECIALLY BUSY WEEK, stop for a moment and think about all the agreements, commitments, obligations, and promises you made. List them on a piece of paper. The list should include not only the items that might be on your to-do list, but also the more subtle agreements that you enter into. For example, when someone buys you lunch or just a cup of coffee, is an implicit obligation incurred? How many commitments did you make? How many of them do you plan to keep? What is the cost of not fulfilling them or of having them made to you but left unfulfilled?

This exercise is more difficult than it might seem at first. As we noted earlier, recall is a tricky thing, especially when we’re not aware of the blinders and filters we impose. For example, we might make offers to do things completely out of courtesy or habit, with no clear expectation (on either side) that the offer or commitment will be fulfilled. It’s just the polite thing to do. But suppose the other person took you at your word—for example, that you would read his report and respond in a timely way? Suppose further that he teed up a set of commitments of his own based on the expectation that you would fulfill yours? What would be the consequence of your failure to perform?

Convinced that accountability for commitments was a logical companion to his company’s efforts at Total Quality Management (TQM), Ray Stata, founder of Analog Devices, challenged his management team a few years back to achieve 100 percent compliance with all their commitments. The team discovered two important things: (1) roughly half the commitments managers made were left unfulfilled; and (2) managers started being far more selective about the commitments they made.^a

a. This simple example underscores something that advocates of TQM and Six Sigma approaches to quality have been arguing for years: quality is personal. See, for example, Harry V. Roberts and Bernard F. Sergesketter, Quality Is Personal: A Foundation for Total Quality Management (New York: Free Press, 1993); Shoji Shiba, Alan Graham, and David Walden, A New American TQM: Four Practical Revolutions in Management (University Park, IL: Productivity Press, 1993); and Steven J. Spear, “Learning to Lead at Toyota,” Harvard Business Review, May 2004.

EXERCISE 10: A Value Statement from the Outside In

ACOLLEAGUE WHO HAD BEEN INTIMATELY INVOLVED in the start-up of a new division of an established automobile company told me a story about how the divisional president asked him to draft and circulate a values statement for the new entity. On reflection, my colleague demurred and suggested instead that the president and his leadership team ought to conclude among themselves what values they wanted to communicate and then to let their actions, not words on paper, do the talking.

Inspired by that example, this exercise asks you to do two things. First, on a sheet of paper, write down the values—in statements rather than one-word bullets—that you believe you enact on a daily basis. Then, enlist a friend or family member to put down on paper what they believe are your core values according to what they’ve observed of your behavior. Recognize that there is risk involved for both of you; and if this exercise is to have a benefit, you need to be prepared to hear things you may not agree with, and you need to ensure that the person you enlist is not going to regret volunteering. Much as is the case with “active listening,” what’s often forgotten is that you may not hear what you want to hear; listening without defensiveness is essential.

With your value statement in front of you, gently and politely inquire about the specific behaviors and instances that led your friend or family member to conclude that those are your values. Then have a conversation in which you share with your partner the value statements you wrote about yourself, and see whether the two of you can find the points of greatest overlap and separation in the respective lists.

EXERCISE 11: Forming a Personal Board of Directors

“FORUM” IS A VERY IMPORTANT FACET of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), a global organization dedicated to mutual support for young entrepreneurs facing the challenges of starting and sustaining businesses in their most fragile stages. Forum is both a place and a process. In Forum, members can talk about anything they need to in privacy and confidence, whether it’s about business, partnership, or family life. Besides confidentiality, what makes Forum so powerful is that it provides participants with resources, most important among them being information, in moments when people are under greatest stress and in danger of doing things they might later regret. The formation of a peer cohort makes it possible for people to find others not only whom they can trust to respect their confidence but to whom they can turn for honest, constructive advice.^a

So the assignment here is to create your own personal board of directors. Like a corporate board, directors are selected for their experience, their knowledge in areas in which you may not feel qualified, and their integrity. In particular, these should be people who care enough about you to tell you the truth. Your challenge, besides identifying them, is to devise a workable model for how you will interact with your board (e.g., singly or all at once), a schedule for interacting (e.g., if it’s periodic and/or unscheduled, how will you ensure their availability?), (continued) and a value proposition (i.e., why they should agree to serve—for example, offer them a pledge to serve in a similar role for someone they nominate).

a. Indeed, an important but as-yet-unverified advantage of groups like Forum is the insurance they may provide against moral or ethical lapses. An admittedly unsystematic review of both corporate scandals and whistle-blower cases suggests that people are more likely to make decisions they later regret (or go to jail for) when they are under great time pressure and political pressure (often by bosses or peers) to do something iffy, when they are feeling particularly vulnerable (e.g., before a promotion opportunity or during economic recession), and when they do not have a rich network of friends or colleagues to whom they can turn for advice.

EXERCISE 12: Values in a Crisis

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of a product recall (occasioned by the detection of E. coli bacteria in a shipment of produce), a former student called me to describe to me proudly his company’s “Tylenol moment.”^a When routine tests of its irrigation water revealed the presence of the deadly bacteria, his company had immediately contacted the FDA and the Department of Agriculture and initiated a recall of potentially contaminated produce. Remembering what Johnson & Johnson had done in 1982, he’d assembled the management team, and, within minutes, they concluded that the company’s value statement would demand nothing less than immediate action—no matter the cost.

Imagine that you received a call from a credible source that a product or service that your organization, business unit, or department produced was believed to have been responsible for harm to one or more of your clients. Would you be prepared for your Tylenol moment? What would you do to hold your group accountable to your values?

a. In 1982, Johnson & Johnson experienced a major crisis when it was discovered that numerous bottles of its Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules had been laced with cyanide. By the end of the crisis, seven people had died. How Johnson & Johnson dealt with this situation set a new precedent for crisis management. The company was lauded for its quick decisions and sincere concern for its consumers.