Happiness Advantage: Post #9--Social Investment

Principle #7. Social Investment: Why Social Support is Your Single Greatest Asset
a. The Harvard Men Study: Researchers followed 268 men (all Harvard graduates) since the late 1930’s for 70+ years and looked at what distinguished the happiest and most successful from the rest. The chief researcher offered one word that made the difference: Love! The findings led to the simple, powerful fact that our social relationships with other people matter more than anything else in the world! It’s that simple. In fact, happiness predicted career achievement and income. The deeper and wider our “communities” of friends, colleagues at work, relatives, and others, the more resilient, productive, and happy we are. The need for social support is as vital as water and air to our surviving and thriving in a productive, happy world. For example, heart attack victims with social support are three times more likely to survive. Talk about an insurance policy.
b. Socially bonded employees work harder, have greater focus, can endure more, and are immune to turmoil. The positively interactive social group acts like a team turbo-booster. The more employees interact socially, the more energy teams and individuals have. MIT researchers studied a large population of IBM employees and found that the more socially connected ones performed better.
c. Vertical Couple: The most important work /social connection is between boss and employee (I’m guessing also the client-consultant relationship). Daniel Goleman calls this relationship the “vertical couple.” This basic unit of the organization makes the difference in whether an employee is happy, engaged, and productive. It should be call the vital couple!
d. Investing in social capital at work—introduce people around to each other. Ask “what’s on the other side of your business card? What are you known for? Being a catalyst, the get it done guy, the inspirer, etc?” Send a “thank you” email to someone at work every day. Keep a gratitude journal. After a month it will become a positive habit…visible and infectious.

Crossing the Divide #7--Operating Across Boundaries

Operating Across Boundaries: Leading Adaptive Change by Ronald Heifetz. Intergroup relationships occur everywhere in our history from one clan marrying into another, to mergers and acquisitions, to Congress operating. The complex relationships between groups (intergroup) and among groups (intragroup) create a level of complexity and nuance that is required for adaptation/survival in a new and ever changing world. Heifetz is a world-class mind at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has studied power, adaptation and survival. He notes that, like DNA that’s evolving, social adaptability works best when occurring gradually and constantly. Nonetheless, such change can create a sense of loss—and emotions of resistance that come with those emotions associated with loss. In this piece he discusses three aspects of adaptive work. 1) The commonality of loss. People can accept change, but not loss. Loss of power, status, influence and the like create an emotional wake too big to overcome. Thus, affected people put up decoys to avoid tackling the truly tough issues. And avoiding such tough issues often results in bigger eruptions down the road. 2) The politics of inclusion. Part of adaptive work is defining the problem and the inconsistencies presented and then identifying and bringing together the right parties to solve the problem. Ignoring critical social issues led to the Civil War…where we sidestepped addressing the economic issue of slavery only to turn around and pay an enormous price. 3) Refashioning loyalties across boundaries. Adaptive work requires convincing people to refashion their in-group loyalties to work across boundaries and forge coalitions. They must then, even after reaching intergroup decisions, sell their “new” position to their own constituents—which can be both difficult and treacherous. The author’s examples of the assassinations of Rabin, Sadat and Arafat were stunning cases of just how treacherous constituencies can be. Strategies among diverse interworking groups about how to introduce change to their various subgroup constituencies are often neglected and often fail.

Harvard Business Review Post # 8: Communication

Defend Your Research… “I Can Make Your Brain Look Like Mine” (by Uri Hasson, p. 32). Hasson, a professor at Princeton, studied how brains couple—when one person speaks what happens to the listener. In highly resonant (my word) or attuned communication, the brain activity of both speaker and listener are eerily in sync. In fact, in highly resonant conversations where active listening is afoot, the listener’s brain activity actually anticipates what the speaker will say next. If you’ve ever finished a colleague’s or a mate’s sentence, you’ve experienced this.

Harvard Business Review Post # 7: Professional Boards

“The Case for Professional Boards” (by Robert Pozen, p.51). Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Business School, argues that despite having star-studded board members for oversight, many financial institutions went down the chute in 2008-9 and had to be rescued from insolvency. He advocates for professional board members who do board governance for a living. He argues for a typical board size to be 7 directors and wants members to have real-world expertise in the company’s business space. Finally, he strongly contends that all boards meet regularly in executive session without management present. In such meetings, board members tend to talk more candidly about what bothers them. This is critical for the organization whether a for-profit or non-profit.

Harvard Business Review Post #6: New Media & Best Buy CEO

How I Did It Column…”Best Buy’s CEO on Learning to Love Social Media” (by Brian Dunn, CEO of Best Buy). Tweeting regularly and vigorously, Dunn himself is an avid user of social media. And despite having had his Twitter account hacked, sending out an embarrassing tweet to many and much of the heartburn that social media can cause—Dunn is an avid, if not rabid, fan of new media. A couple of stats: Best Buy’s website influences 50% of their in-store sales, and 30% of their online customers actually come into the store to pick up purchases. I found this a great read for any CEO who’s starting to think about social media (and if you’re not…why not?). Of particular interest is an excerpt (on p. 48) from Best Buy’s social media policy. This is worth checking out if you’re considering writing your company’s policy—and I’d say that’s a smart idea.

Harvard Business Review Post #5: New Media Ringmaster

“Why You Need a New Media Ringmaster” (by Patrick Spenner, p 78). From the Corporate Executive Board, Spenner advocates a more integrated marketing communications approach to brand management. Up to now, marketing, corporate communications, and customer service all act in many companies a bit like the blind men holding different parts of the elephant—each thinking he has a different animal. Spenner advocates for a super integrator, much like a ringmaster at the circus—especially people with social media skills. The three skills he sees as necessary are integrative thinking (can combine old and new on the fly); lean collaboration skills (be able to beg, borrow across the organization); and high speed responsiveness (detect early opportunities or threats and react fast with social media).

Harvard Business Review Post #2: Digital Branding

“Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places” (by David Edleman, p. 62). Edleman, a leader in McKinsey’s Global Marketing Strategy practice, has some definite opinions that marketing directors should listen to. Specifically, today’s consumers are bypassing the typical marketing funneling process in favor of what he calls a consumer decision process: 1) Selecting brands; 2) evaluating by getting peer and reviewer opinions; 3) buying the brand; and 4) enjoying and advocating the brand. And if the consumers’ bonds get strong enough, they skip steps 1 and 2 and go straight to buying and advocating. That describes my relationship with Hondas, for sure!

Reviewing Dec. Harvard Business Review

This week I’ll be reviewing the December 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review—focused on Social Media...VERY important for any business.

First off, kudos to Adi Ignatius, the editor in chief at the Harvard Business Review (HBR). If you’ve been reading the HBR for any length of time, you’ll know the impact Ari has had since coming from TIME (as Deputy Managing Editor) to become the editor of the HBR. As a result of Ari’s hand, the HBR has a hipper feeling, is a quicker read, is better designed and is a much more digitalized (blogged, podcast, etc.) publication. In short, it’s useful, up to date, and a great value proposition for any leader. So, thanks, Adi.

Stay tuned this week for the review that I think you'll find directly applicable to your company's bottom line. .

HBR's 10 Breakthrough Ideas for 2010: Risk Management

#8, Risk Management: Spotting Bubbles on the Rise: We have the tools to sound the alarm early (by Sendhil Mullainathan). We don’t have in place reliable predictors of asset risk. If we did have such “bubble” spotting metrics for identifying a particular asset class as “at risk,” we would be able to more accurately describe the proper level of value on the balance to ID risk threat.

The Breakthrough Idea: We can’t always prevent financial setbacks, anymore than we can prevent earth quakes or hurricanes. But we can predict financial bubbles through some sort of thoughtful research-based committee. Even a "bubbles committee!" Such a committee would not be unlike w hat the National Bureau of Economic Research does. The goal: “To use the research in behavioral finance to identify bubbles before they form….”

Harvard Business Review's 10 Breakthrough Ideas for 2010: Innovation

#6 Innovation: A Faster Path from Lab to Market: Removing the technology licensing obstacle (by Litan and Mitchell). To make sure that researchers at universities got their inventions to the marketplace faster, Congress passed a bill that set up technology licensing offices on university campuses. Ironically, these intended facilitators have in some cases become obstacles and bottlenecks and have inhibited the very research-to-market goals originally intended.

The Breakthrough Idea: Simply amend the Bayh-Dole Act and allow professors to chose the technical help they need to bring their inventions to market as soon as possible.

Breakthrough Ideas for 2010: Harvard Business Review

The January-February 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review presents a list of breakthrough ideas compiled by the editors in conjunction with The World Economic Forum. These ideas range from health care to nation building, which ideas the editors believe would make the world better if people got behind them. So, over the next two weeks, I’ll discuss each one and hope that one or several will appeal to you.

NOTE: I strongly invite your candid feedback that I will send to the editors. Currently, I serve on a HBR Advisory Council for the Review to give them regular feedback on the magazine.

Also, readers should know that on my blog I review selected books for the Harvard Business Press and other publishers--only those books that I consider of high value of the varied selection sent to me to review.

From HBR-January: "The Quick Wins Paradaox"

Mark Van Buren and Todd Safferstone in their article “The Quick Wins Paradox,” discuss how many new leaders eagerly want to get early wins to boost their value and credibility to the company. However, this rush to early wins often results in failure or wins at a tremendous personal cost. The authors focus on several areas of struggling new execs: reacting negatively to criticism, intimidating others, jumping to conclusions, and micromanaging direct reports—all of which can pollute a leader’s credibility.

HBR Leadership January 2009 Issue—Must Read

If you or your company is in any sort of a transition (and who is not these days!), I highly recommend the current (January 2009) issue of the Harvard Business Review. This week, I'll highlight several of the articles...but go out an buy a fistful of copies of this issue and hand it out to your key leaders.

Article Highlight: Michael Watkins (author of The First 90 Days—search for my review of this book in this blog) in his article—“Picking the Right Strategy” instructs leaders to first understand the kind of transition they are in before acting on it. He describes his STARS model (start up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success). New executive failures in companies typically happen in the first two years and cost the company $2.7million—so pay attention.

How to Protect Your Job in a Recession

To help work through this uncertain economic time, here's what the Harvard Business review says in a nutshell (How to Protect Your Job in a Recession--Sept. 2008, p. 113-16). The following is a direct quote:
Article at a Glance:

--If you want to survive, act like a survivor. Be confident and cheerful. Stay focused on the future by concentrating on the customer, without whom nobody will have a job.

--Give your leaders hope. They agonize over layoffs, so cut them a break. Empathizing with your boss will give you an advantage.

--Be a corporate citizen. Companies like team players. Research shows that collegiality may trump competence when push comes to shove.