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Greenspan? Rapidly approaching status of “bad joke” in my mind.

According to a New York Times article about Greenspan and his policies today, Greenspan is defending his stance on derivatives (he was pro-derivatives) by saying the whole imploding economy is because of people acting in bad faith in the markets, but the deregulated derivatives approach was somehow still “right.”

Mr. Greenspan is apparently living in a world without people. I’ve been aware of Wall Street and its tendancy to, er, stretch the boundaries of good and bad faith since Greenspan took office. In case he didn’t notice, we had a Savings and Loan Crisis, a Junk Bond collapse, Long-Term Capital Management’s collapse, the Internet bubble popping, then a wave of corporate scandals that even took down Arthur Andersen. Where was he during this 20-year march of greed that he could champion deregulation under the belief that people wouldn’t be greedy and would act in good faith without regulation to impose penalties when they didn’t?

How could he cling to a theory that depended, oh-by-the-way, on the naive belief that people would do the “right” thing even though the instruments let them become unbelievably wealthy by doing the wrong (but legal) thing?

I just don’t get it. And I find myself repeating it over and over in stunned disbelief. He actually believed that Wall Street would police itself, after having presided over several TRILLION dollars worth of corruption and greed with several successive financial instrument “advancements.”

I’m so very, very glad that the man is no longer making policy. Of course, having the head of an investment bank now in the position doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. Goldman has a good reputation, but at this point, I’m not at all sure that anyone steeped in the financial industry culture for 20+ years has the objectivity to know whether the system is fundamentally broken (they have a vested interest in believing it’s not), or whether it simply requires some trillion-dollar tweaks to put it back in order.

From sole practitioner to organization guy

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On Twitter, I’ve recently alluded to my new job. I’ve started working at Babson College helping to facilitate a community-wide re-examination of Babson’s capabilities, strategy, and future direction. I will then be helping to implement the community’s recommendations.

This job is incredibly exciting. The new Babson president, Len Schlesinger, has been a colleague, friend, mentor, and originally professor of mine since 1989. He’s one of the most visionary people I have ever met, combined with a firm grasp of data and execution. In short, he dreams big dreams and has what it takes to make them happen.

He came to Babson to build on its strength in entrepreneurship (we’ve been #1 in entrepreneurship for the last 15 years), to take Babson to its next level. What that next level is will be defined by the community in our next four months of conversation.

This should be incredibly exciting! I will continue to produce the Get-it-Done Guy podcast and, of course, will be finishing the Get-it-Done Guy book as well. I hope to continue posting to this blog, though until the book is done and I have more time on my plate, my entries will likely be relatively fewer and farther between.

To hear Len discuss the tension between business pressures and the ethical dimensions of business leadership, listen to (1 hour) Leadership and Ethics Series: “Organizational Leadership in Search of the Triple Bottom Line: The ‘Victoria’s Dirty Secret’ Campaign.

How we explain success may be different from what really causes it.

I was reading Steve Salerno’s “anti-SHAM” blog as he was commenting on Hillary’s speech at the DNC last night. He didn’t think much of her story. She told a story of her success, he said, that may have been a tad… biased.

That got me thinking about how much our own stories do and don’t have anything to do with actual events. Certainly the book “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)” by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson documents thoroughly how we distort our own memories to tell a story consistent with how we’d rather view ourselves.

This is my response to Steve:

Check out “The Halo Effect” by Phil Rosenzweig. In it, he basically discredits 99% of popular business books and research by pointing out that after-the-fact explanations where the outcome is known always come out the same, regardless of actual circumstances. The “halo” of known success (or failure) causes all the players to remember the past in a very specific way.

For example, ask people why XYZ Co. was successful and they’ll always talk about a visionary leader, good teamwork, flexibility, etc. You can predict those explanations with such certainty, apparently, that any research based on after-the-fact explanations is virtually worthless. (Because if you can predict in advance what people will say, then it obviously can’t be based on the actual situation.)

To avoid the halo effect, you would have to approach people in companies before success is known. Then ask them to describe the current environment. Then 10 years later (or whenever), see if their in-the-moment descriptions correlated with later business performance.

Though Rosenzweig limits his discussion to company success, I believe we also have a halo effect with successful people. We love the rags-to-riches, hard-work-and-skill-wins stories. No matter the truth of a situation, those are the stories we use to explain known success.

(Why is Bill Gates so extraordinarily successful? You’ll hear about strategy, ruthlessness, etc., etc. All the standard after-the-fact explanations. But that misses the point. There are lots of strategically brilliant, ruthless people who didn’t dominate the computer industry. In Bill’s case, mommy was on a board with the chairman of IBM, the head of Digital Research missed the chance to produce DOS so Bill was the 2nd choice, and IBM was stupid enough to let Gates keep all the rights to the software. Without those factors, all outside his control, he might have been just another 2-bit software developer. But that isn’t a story that we like to tell.)

When I look as objectively as I can at my successes and those of my friends (and many of my Harvard MBA friends have been very successful), I notice that hard work and skill seem far, far less important than, say, choosing the right industry, negotiating a compensation structure based on someone else’s work (e.g. paid as percentage of someone else’s transaction), and being lucky in your timing. Finance and entrepreneurship fit the bill.

But no one likes the story, “I made $100 million because I was frickin lucky.” That raises the question of whether the person deserves it, etc., etc., etc. We don’t want to challenge whether Gates deserves it because deep in our hearts, we hope we can make it big and don’t want to question whether or not we deserve it.

I’m sure Hillary frames her life as hard work, ambition, etc. And I can’t blame her. I suspect anyone in that position would frame their life that way. In part because of the halo effect, and in part because saying, “our achievements owe as much to luck as to skill” isn’t something many of us are willing to admit to ourselves.

It’s not so easy to say “subprime borrowers” should be responsible.

The New York Times had an article today on the advertising campaigns that led to the spate of subprime borrowing.

The reader comments fall into two broad categories: “Borrowers should have known what they were getting into.” and “Big, bad, evil banks.” I think both attitudes are naive.

Borrowers should have known… Really?

Borrowers should have known? How? Our high school graduation rate is only about 70% overall, and it’s hard to believe that every single high school graduate is educated in how to make good financial decisions. In fact, it’s easy to believe that many high school graduates have difficulty with so-called “word problems” in math (and taking out a mortgage, people, is the mother of giant word problems).

I have an MBA from Harvard and when considering my mortgage, found myself staring at a 90-page document full of 8-point type, written in incomprehensible legalese. I had no real choice but to go on the “plain english” explanation of my bank and mortgage broker, both of whom had likely received lots of training in how to make the sale.

Thankfully, I settled with a fixed-rate mortgage. But I found out six years later that even with my MBA, I’d misunderstood (been mis-explained to?) how the variable rate mortgage worked. It turns out the first variable reset was directly to the target interest rate of prime-plus-X%. That was news to me! I thought the first reset was capped and only slowly moved to the target.

Furthermore, people were bombarded with sound bites saying “Life richly” by companies who, frankly, they trusted. Banks have historically been trustworthy institutions. They were known as financially conservative, considered decision makers. So people may well have been inclined to trust the ads. Lacking the education to do a financial analysis, they may have thought, “if the bank says this is a safe loan, it must be. After all, they make prudent financial decisions.”

Even so, whether or not you trust the ads, whether or not you even believe the ads, advertising works! It creates behavior change. That’s why advertisers pay $1,000,000 for a 30-second spot in the Super Bowl: because a well-constructed ad can manipulate emotion and cause people to buy stuff they don’t need.

So I can’t just say “be responsible.” That’s too tall an order and obviously, it didn’t happen and isn’t likely to suddenly start happening.

(And a note to the commenter on the article who says he’s from “old money” and that the borrowers should stop waiting for “mommy and daddy” to bail them out. Are you serious? You inherited your wealth and have a problem with people being bailed out by “mommy and daddy?” Look in the mirror sometime!)

The banks shouldn’t have been so greedy. Really?

Banks shouldn’t have been so greedy. In what universe? When we deregulated them (why did we do that?), they became businesses subject to the same profit pressures as any other public businesses. Furthermore, the folks at the top had bonuses become tied to growth measures. The bonuses and stock options were relatively short-term. Bonuses were based on yearly performance, and stock options often begin vesting immediately, or at the most, have a 5-year time horizon.

This gives everyone at the bank incentive to push short-term sales and profit now. When you’re selling a 30-year loan, but your compensation structure rewards you for 5-year results, it’s makes total sense to design a product that generates a lot of sales. If it blows up in year seven, well, that’s a shame, but if we wanted accountability out seven years, we should have designed the system that way.

And before you go off saying, “well, that’s just plain WRONG,” consider that we all make this kind of decision every day. Do you eat high-fructose corn syrup? If so, you’re trading short-term sugar high for long-term health consequences. How about, say, do you drive a car? If so, you’re using a non-replaceable resource that won’t be there for your kids because you want to live in a luxurious suburb instead of an inner city where you could walk to the grocery.

The banks did exactly what they were supposed to do: produce short-term returns by persuading people to buy products that, in the short-term, were safe, affordable, and met people’s needs.

How do we avoid this again?

That’s simple: we don’t. At least, not by focusing on one half of the equation. For better or worse (I believe worse), we’ve evolved to the point where we consider business to have no binding responsibility to the community or society. Thanks to Milton Friedman, as long as business is profitable, measured solely by one-year pretax, cash income, we reward the people who run the businesses and the people who invest in the businesses.

We have an advertising industry that complements business by having a good 100+ years of learning on how to create emotional needs that don’t exist and link those to people’s purchase decisions so people actually go buy consumable stuff instead of saving their money. It works, and it isn’t going away.

We also have an educational system that apparently isn’t preparing people to make intelligent financial decisions. Given the negative savings rate and average household credit card debt, I feel pretty comfortable suggesting that even the college-educated, financially literate aren’t turning on that financial intelligence as often as they should be. Or, if I want to be extra-generous to the people, perhaps their good financial sense is still being overwhelmed by the emotion-laden ad messages.

If we want to avoid this again, we have to do something to rebalance this triumverate. We need to educate people and stop advertising so much. Or we need to link compensation and measurement to much longer-term, broader measures than short-term profit (which means you, gentle reader, will have to stop evaluating your savings and investments on one-year returns), and educate people. Or we have to tone down the emotional advertising and educate people.

Hmm. All three of my top-of-the-head solutions seem to have education as one of those components. So let’s get to it, people. The school systems aren’t doing it, so it’s up to us. If you’re financally literate, grab a friend and teach them to be, too. If you’re not, find a friend and learn something. Then practice watching commercials and rather than thinking, “Oh! I want that!” calculate exactly how many more years you’ll have to put off retirement if you decide to buy that cool, neato new widget.

Speaking of cool, neato things to buy, consider this: Your life will be much, much better if you buy my “You Are Not Your Inbox: Overcoming Email Overload” audio product. Your teeth might sparkle, you might get all the sex (men) and cuddling (women) you could ever desire. In fact, you will find that saving 30 minutes a day adds up to three weeks a year. If you make $52,000/year, that means the savings would be more than $3,000. All for the low, low price of $47. Keep me in business, people.

There, you’ve been psychologically manipulated. Go buy. And if you don’t have the cash, you can charge it on your credit card or your home equity loan. Go wild.

Does email overload help us? You need to understand the costs and benefits.

Tim Sanders wrote a blog entry that references a Business Week article on information overload I commented on last week. The writer suggests that information overload might be good. There might be some valuable information, and besides, young people can handle it just fine.

Sure. In what universe? My Get-it-Done Guy podcast email and people’s reaction to my what is email costing you assessment, suggest many people of us feel our life force being regularly sucked from our bodies by information overload. It makes us jump from topic to topic. It interrupts us when we need to concentrate. And then we feel guilty that we still can’t keep up. Gee, that sounds like a resourceful emotional state for reaching our goals.

Yes, we’re getting more info. Yes, some of it’s useful. But that’s not the point! We need to ask: is it useful enough? Are the benefits—financial, social, or emotional—worth the cost?

For Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy (mentioned in the article), the answer is Yes. In email, they say things they would never say otherwise. Like that comment about the chocolate mousse, telephone pole, and garter belt. Who would ever say that out loud?

Of course, an anonymous suggestion box would fill the same function. Even better, the tipster could actually include the original garter belt. But apparently, those emails are amazing enough that Anne devotes a lot of time to her email. Since she’s gotten great results at Xerox, for her, the benefits might be worth the cost. (Assuming, of course, that her success is because of email, rather than in spite of it. Maybe a weekly suggestion box would be just as good.)

If you’re top dog, no one pays attention to how you use your time as long as you produce business results. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. Our pointy-haired boss gives us specific goals, and email can suck up a lot of time without moving us towards our real goals. That “Top 10 Reasons Working Here Sucks” email will only help you reach your goal if that goal is a new job at your major competitor’s firm.

When you’re deciding how much time to spend with your inbox, think long and hard about the benefits you’re getting. After all, there’s lots you could be doing with that time. Ask yourself if there is any other way to get those same benefits? If you hired a $50/hour assistant to read and answer your email every day, what would you tell him/her to process versus ignore? Are you following those same guidelines?

Being perfect in every way, I follow my own advice and am ultra careful with my email habits. Even so, I often get sucked in for up to 30 extra minutes a day. Since I’m perfect, that must be the perfect amount of time to waste. But there’s still a nagging feeling: that comes out to three weeks per year. If I’m going to spend three weeks a year blathering mindlessly, I’d rather do it wearing a bathing suit on a sunny Caribbean beach than sitting hunched over my computer in my basement office, looking like one of the Mole People. At least on the beach, I might get a tan.

So don’t take my word for it. Don’t take Tim Sanders’s word for it. And don’t take Business Week’s word for it. Your email time is productive to the extent it helps you get what you want out of life. Hold it to a high standard and if it isn’t performing, drop it from your life faster than that stalker you accidentally dated in college. With email, only you can take control; there’s no way to get a restraining order.

The key to ethical, sane behavior: the *little* voice.

Have you ever wondered how certain corrupt businesspeople can keep spouting great, moral words while doing the exact opposite in their behavior? You wonder how they can wax eloquent about the need to give customers high-quality products while they happily substitute inferior quality raw materials to save costs. You wonder: are they insane? Probably not. Yes, they hear voices in their head. But we all do that. The problem is that they’re listening to the wrong ones.

In a New York Times article today, John Tierney discusses the science behind hypocrisy and how we fool ourselves. It seems when we distract our conscious mind, we listen mainly to our “gut” (or our “heart,” depending on how poetic an image you prefer), and we know when we’re doing The Wrong Thing. When our conscious minds are free, however, we use them—to self-justify. When we engage in hypocritical or anti-social behavior, our conscious mind goes to work creating justifications so we believe we’re doing the right thing, even when we aren’t.

In the past several years, I’ve become more aware of my own “heart voice.” When I have a troubling decision to make, or strong ambivalence about a situation, I sit quietly. Actually, my brain is usually shrieking gibberish about how unfair I’m being treated, or about how I don’t deserve what’s happening, or about how I’m an utter and complete failure at life because I missed “9 Down” in today’s New York Times crossword puzzle. So here’s this Shrieking Monster in my head, and I let it rant while putting attention on the middle of my chest. Then when the Shrieking Monster stops to take a breath, I quickly ask, “What should I do in this situation?”

Then I sit. After a few minutes, beneath the Monster comes a little, quiet voice. It’s barely even in words. And it has an answer.

The moment the answer comes, I know it’s the right one for me. It’s almost always the moral thing, the ethical thing, the loving thing, the passionate thing. In some weird way, it’s the answer I already knew was right, but just wouldn’t admit to myself. It took a chat with the Little Voice to bring it to the place where it could be heard over the Shrieking Monster voice.

The Shrieking Monster is the one that usually pushes me to do stupid things. It goads me to yell at people when I’m frustrated, to get petulant and childish when I could be forging alliances, and to beat myself up when I don’t do well, even if I did my best. The Little Voice, though, is my own internal Dear Abby: its advice is excellent, even if its hairstyle could stand some updating.

If you’ve never tried this, give it a shot. Ponder a decision that’s giving you angst. Maybe it’s an ethical quandry, or an issue with a co-worker, or that persistent fantasy about wrapping your boss in duct tape upside down, hanging from the ceiling. Choose something really, really important, like: is it fair that I always have to spend the 3 minutes to type up action items after a meeting?

Sit quietly with the situation. Your Shrieking Monster will helpfully point out how unfair it is that you have to type those action items, how your fingers ache, how it’s probably carpel tunnel syndrome and you’ll be crippled for life, and how you really deserve to be the boss and are just not deeply appreciated. Then sit quietly and listen to the Little Voice behind the shrieking monster. It just might have some good advice.

If it seems reasonable, give it a shot. You might find yourself acting more ethically, more morally, more professionally, and more happily. In other words, you just may find your little voice is the key to acting as—not just aspiring to be—your Very Best Self.

Find the article on hypocrisy at http://r.steverrobbins.com/hypocrisyarticle.

Groupthink, brainwashing, and politics (hopefully fixed)

This post kept appearing and reappearing in my RSS feed. I’ve deleted it and am re-creating it in the hopes that the strange behavior will stop happening. Fingers are crossed.

Maybe you’ve been successfully brainwashed and just don’t know it. How would you? … Find the transcript of this podcast at https://www.steverrobbins.com/articles/groupthink-brainwashing-politics.htm.

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Giving just may be the path to success

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In this Business Explained podcast, I talk with Bob Burg, co-author of The Go-Giver, a current best-selling business book that lays out the five principles of why Giving just may be the key to success. This is a companion interview to the Get-it-Done Guy podcast episode, Giving to Build Success.

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