Tuesday, June 16, 2009
The Asian Math Gene
I have always done math in my head in Chinese (Cantonese). I emigrated to the US when I was six years old and I barely speak Cantonese anymore (except at home), but I continue to do math in Chinese. Never thought about it really - it's almost subconscious. In second grade, we used to play this game call Around the World where one of the students would stand behind the next student in a circle. The teacher held up addition or multiplication flash cards and the first student to say the answer stood behind the next student in the circle. I would usually go around the circle a couple of times before someone would beat me, usually by luck. The other students said I was Asian so I was good at math. I was born with math skills. The Asian Math Gene - it made sense. I believed it. Never really questioned it after that.
During my drive to Milwaukee, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and in one of the chapters Rice Paddies and Math Tests, he actually had a valid rational for this phenomenon. Okay, my ancestor's work ethics in the rice paddies translating into mathematical prowess seemed a bit absurd, but the neurolinguistic explanation did make a lot of sense:
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you're Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene's book "The Number Sense," and as Dehaene explains:
Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is 'si' and 7 'qi') Their English equivalents—"four," "seven"—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.
So according to Gladwell, I might not actually be good at math, just quicker based on lingustics. Interesting theory - I always thought it was because of my individual talent and initiative. Oh well, it has carried me this far...
I love this quote. It's like something I would get out of a fortune cookie: "No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich"
I digress. Outliers also had a whole chapter on KIPP - Knowledge Is Power Program, a public school program started in inner-city Houston back in 1994. Gladwell talked about the achievement gap between the performance of groups of students in different socioeconomic status and cited Karl Alexander's "summer learning loss" research as the reason for this distinct academic disadvantage. Low-income students actually gained more during schools than their high-income peers, but fell back over the summer while the rich kids moved ahead:
What Alexander's work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding--all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it...For it's poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that's the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve.
KIPP students spent more time in class. Their classes started earlier, lasted longer, and sometimes ran on Saturdays. KIPP students did better because they worked harder. Also, KIPP schools are grounded in a culture that acted on a shared, authentic belief that all students can learn, and KIPP schools are populated by teachers who are deeply committed to making a difference. KIPP supposedly founded some of its first teachers by going to school parking lots in the evening and putting flyers on the cars of teachers who were still in the schools working. Teachers who worked into the evening because of their commitment to kids were the kind of teachers wanted at KIPP schools.
I didn't know much about KIPP before, but definitely interested in learning more about the school. Check out this video:
I have always done math in my head in Chinese (Cantonese). I emigrated to the US when I was six years old and I barely speak Cantonese anymore (except at home), but I continue to do math in Chinese. Never thought about it really - it's almost subconscious. In second grade, we used to play this game call Around the World where one of the students would stand behind the next student in a circle. The teacher held up addition or multiplication flash cards and the first student to say the answer stood behind the next student in the circle. I would usually go around the circle a couple of times before someone would beat me, usually by luck. The other students said I was Asian so I was good at math. I was born with math skills. The Asian Math Gene - it made sense. I believed it. Never really questioned it after that. During my drive to Milwaukee, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and in one of the chapters Rice Paddies and Math Tests, he actually had a valid rational for this phenomenon. Okay, my ancestor's work ethics in the rice paddies translating into mathematical prowess seemed a bit absurd, but the neurolinguistic explanation did make a lot of sense:
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you're Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene's book "The Number Sense," and as Dehaene explains:
Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is 'si' and 7 'qi') Their English equivalents—"four," "seven"—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.
So according to Gladwell, I might not actually be good at math, just quicker based on lingustics. Interesting theory - I always thought it was because of my individual talent and initiative. Oh well, it has carried me this far...
I love this quote. It's like something I would get out of a fortune cookie: "No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich"
I digress. Outliers also had a whole chapter on KIPP - Knowledge Is Power Program, a public school program started in inner-city Houston back in 1994. Gladwell talked about the achievement gap between the performance of groups of students in different socioeconomic status and cited Karl Alexander's "summer learning loss" research as the reason for this distinct academic disadvantage. Low-income students actually gained more during schools than their high-income peers, but fell back over the summer while the rich kids moved ahead:
What Alexander's work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding--all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it...For it's poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that's the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve.
KIPP students spent more time in class. Their classes started earlier, lasted longer, and sometimes ran on Saturdays. KIPP students did better because they worked harder. Also, KIPP schools are grounded in a culture that acted on a shared, authentic belief that all students can learn, and KIPP schools are populated by teachers who are deeply committed to making a difference. KIPP supposedly founded some of its first teachers by going to school parking lots in the evening and putting flyers on the cars of teachers who were still in the schools working. Teachers who worked into the evening because of their commitment to kids were the kind of teachers wanted at KIPP schools.
I didn't know much about KIPP before, but definitely interested in learning more about the school. Check out this video:
Labels: Asian Math Gene, Books, Education, Outliers
Monday, December 22, 2008
Thinkers 50
If you are applying to business school or want to stay on the cutting edge of what's going on in business, you have to continue to follow the most important and influential business leaders of today. Thinkers 50 is a great website to track some of the most important management thinkers: Click here
Use this list as a reference for books to read and concepts to understand. Essential readings for future consultants include In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters, Good to Great by Jim Collins, and Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter. Future marketers should read anything by Philip Kotter and Seth Godin. Seth Godin's Unleashing the IdeaVirus is available for download here: Click here
Our very own USC Marshall Distinguished Professor on leadership, Dr. Warren Bennis, is ranked here at 24. He founded the Leadership Institute here at USC Marshall to prepare the next generation of leaders in business and the public sector for a 21st century characterized by greater diversity, technological complexity, social and organizational democracy and global interdependence.
In this business environment you have to continuously stay ahead of your competition.
"One who does not look ahead remains behind." - Proverb
Use this list as a reference for books to read and concepts to understand. Essential readings for future consultants include In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters, Good to Great by Jim Collins, and Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter. Future marketers should read anything by Philip Kotter and Seth Godin. Seth Godin's Unleashing the IdeaVirus is available for download here: Click here
Our very own USC Marshall Distinguished Professor on leadership, Dr. Warren Bennis, is ranked here at 24. He founded the Leadership Institute here at USC Marshall to prepare the next generation of leaders in business and the public sector for a 21st century characterized by greater diversity, technological complexity, social and organizational democracy and global interdependence.
In this business environment you have to continuously stay ahead of your competition.
"One who does not look ahead remains behind." - Proverb
Labels: Books, Leadership, Marketing, Thinkers 50
Friday, December 12, 2008
StarPower, Net Impact & Muhammad Yunis, and Spiderman
StarPower
Earlier this year in our Organizational Behavior class we played a game called StarPower during our session on Power and Politics to demonstrate the subtleties of power and its effects on individuals. Basically to win the game you have to be in the top 3 position in points at the end of the game. The premise is that players are assigned initial lots of colored chips. Players are told to not share information about their chips. While players are told that the group assignment is based on "achievement" or "merit", the initial distribution dominates the resulting scores.
Each round, players draw random colored chips and trade them for sets of points. At the end of each round players are assigned one of three groups and given an associated badge based on their score. The top scorers are triangles, the middle scorers are squares, and the low scorers are circles. Starting on turn two (the first turn in which players are assigned to groups), the triangle players draw from a bag with higher scoring chips, while the circles draw from a bag with lower scoring chips. As a result, movement between groups becomes uncommon. Source
For the first two rounds I was a square looking to improve my lot in life and join the triangle group. After the end of each round, each group was given a set of 6 bonus chips, worth 3 points each, to distribute among the group. After the first round, we randomly promoted 3 of our fellow squares into the triangle group and never heard from them again. In the second round, we used a random birthday generator and from some random luck of the draw, I was selected as the lucky recipient of all 6 bonus chips! With the additional 18 points, I was boosted into the triangle group and I was ready to help my fellow squares join the group.
Before starting the third round, the triangles were free to change the rules any way we liked. The dynamic in the triangle group was antagonistic and intense. My once cordial MBA colleagues were yelling and screaming determined to win at all cost. At the end of the short discussion, they decided to only allow the triangles to win the game, basically eliminating the squares and circles the opportunity to even compete. I kept thinking, "Why shouldn't everyone be given a chance to win the game?" The frustrating part was not being able to even get a word in as the newest member of the group. We started the trading session again and the squares and the circles were either 1) angry that they were forced out of the game or 2) hopeless and apathetic since they had no way of winning. Also, I felt resentment by the squares for selling out on them for agreeing to a decision which I really had no part in making.
This simple game had a profound effect on me for the next couple of days that I couldn't quite crystallize and articulate. It made me second guess my decision in coming to business school and reexamined my deepest core values and who I really was.
Net Impact & Muhammad Yunis
"Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever." - Po Bronson
I first heard this quote through my old work colleague and roommate, Shu, who's also a DJ and very entrepreneurial and passionate about his music. I was always a bit jealous of his creative drive and his vision of knowing what he cared about and stood for. Even though we didn't find much meaning in our work, he always had an outlet in music and I would find him lost for hours in his own electronic music world after work. For a while, my life was just about making a lot of money as a consultant and not much else.
My application and eventual decision regarding business school was a tough one as I pondered about the opportunities coming out of the program. I eventually chose to join USC Marshall because it was a better alternative than working for something I didn't care about. I did think about being locked into something I might not actually want, but I eventually took the dive and hid these feelings deep down inside even from myself.
"If the things we believe are different than the things we do, there can be no true happiness" - David O.McKay
StarPower opened up Pandora's box for me in its subtle ways. It made me evaluate my decision (which I should have done before joining the program) and look into who I was and what I wanted.
I got involved in Net Impact, went to the North America Net Impact Conference and met people hanging out at the same crossroads. I read books including Mark Albion's More Than Money and Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World Without Poverty, which really opened my eyes to the opportunities to use business to change the world.
Muhammad Yunus stressed in his book that "Other economic sectors - the volunteer, charity, and NGO sectors - devote a great deal of time and energy to dealing with poverty and its consequences. But business - the most financially innovative and efficient sector of all - has no direct mechanism to apply its practices to the goal of eliminating poverty."
While government and non-profits have tried to respond to the societal problems in the world, each has its shortcomings in its abilities to continually deal with social changes. Businesses basically are the only sustainable and legitimate drivers for social and societal changes in the world.
His perspective on Capitalism actually hit it home for me. "Capitalism is a half-developed structure - Captialism takes a narrow view of human nature, assuming that people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with the pursuit of maximum profit. The concept of the free market, as generally understood, is based on this one-dimensional human being. Mainstream free-market theory suffers from a 'conceptualization failure' a failure to capture the essence of what it is to be human."
My whole life I have been playing StarPower without realizing that I have been chasing an outcome (maximum profit / money) that I didn't really want. I have been hating the players and not the game without realizing that the rules were set up in such a way that caused people to act accordingly. Capitalism mandated one ultimate focus on money with no regard for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The higher you moved up in society (the triangle group) the stronger your focus on making and keeping the money you've made.
This helped me put into perspective the entry I wrote about Soren Kierkegaard & Money over a year ago. Understanding all of this allowed me to change the rules of the game for myself...
Spiderman
"Not everyone is meant to make a difference. But for me, the choice to lead an ordinary life is no longer an option."
"Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: 'With great power comes great responsibility.' This is my gift, my curse." - Spiderman
It's silly to think that I am some sort of superhero out there trying to save the world, but the fact of the matter is that I am put in a precarious position to use this MBA for good. It is my responsibility to ensure that businesses and MBAs are using their knowledge and resources to do what they can for societal causes. With this newfound sense of responsibility and focus, I started to examine the industries I cared about (healthcare and education) and discovered ways I could make potentially make an impact. I could easily spot opportunities to see how business processes can be implemented to make non-profits more efficient and mission-specific. I might never make a societal impact like Muhammad Yunus that lifted an entire country out of poverty, but I can focus on making incremental changes to provide opportunities and potentially change the lives of a small group of people. That's the outcome I want. That's the power I yield.
"Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all, heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built." - James Allen
StarPowerEarlier this year in our Organizational Behavior class we played a game called StarPower during our session on Power and Politics to demonstrate the subtleties of power and its effects on individuals. Basically to win the game you have to be in the top 3 position in points at the end of the game. The premise is that players are assigned initial lots of colored chips. Players are told to not share information about their chips. While players are told that the group assignment is based on "achievement" or "merit", the initial distribution dominates the resulting scores.
Each round, players draw random colored chips and trade them for sets of points. At the end of each round players are assigned one of three groups and given an associated badge based on their score. The top scorers are triangles, the middle scorers are squares, and the low scorers are circles. Starting on turn two (the first turn in which players are assigned to groups), the triangle players draw from a bag with higher scoring chips, while the circles draw from a bag with lower scoring chips. As a result, movement between groups becomes uncommon. Source
For the first two rounds I was a square looking to improve my lot in life and join the triangle group. After the end of each round, each group was given a set of 6 bonus chips, worth 3 points each, to distribute among the group. After the first round, we randomly promoted 3 of our fellow squares into the triangle group and never heard from them again. In the second round, we used a random birthday generator and from some random luck of the draw, I was selected as the lucky recipient of all 6 bonus chips! With the additional 18 points, I was boosted into the triangle group and I was ready to help my fellow squares join the group.
Before starting the third round, the triangles were free to change the rules any way we liked. The dynamic in the triangle group was antagonistic and intense. My once cordial MBA colleagues were yelling and screaming determined to win at all cost. At the end of the short discussion, they decided to only allow the triangles to win the game, basically eliminating the squares and circles the opportunity to even compete. I kept thinking, "Why shouldn't everyone be given a chance to win the game?" The frustrating part was not being able to even get a word in as the newest member of the group. We started the trading session again and the squares and the circles were either 1) angry that they were forced out of the game or 2) hopeless and apathetic since they had no way of winning. Also, I felt resentment by the squares for selling out on them for agreeing to a decision which I really had no part in making.
This simple game had a profound effect on me for the next couple of days that I couldn't quite crystallize and articulate. It made me second guess my decision in coming to business school and reexamined my deepest core values and who I really was.
Net Impact & Muhammad Yunis
"Failure's hard, but success is far more dangerous. If you're successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and money and opportunity can lock you in forever." - Po Bronson
I first heard this quote through my old work colleague and roommate, Shu, who's also a DJ and very entrepreneurial and passionate about his music. I was always a bit jealous of his creative drive and his vision of knowing what he cared about and stood for. Even though we didn't find much meaning in our work, he always had an outlet in music and I would find him lost for hours in his own electronic music world after work. For a while, my life was just about making a lot of money as a consultant and not much else.
My application and eventual decision regarding business school was a tough one as I pondered about the opportunities coming out of the program. I eventually chose to join USC Marshall because it was a better alternative than working for something I didn't care about. I did think about being locked into something I might not actually want, but I eventually took the dive and hid these feelings deep down inside even from myself.
"If the things we believe are different than the things we do, there can be no true happiness" - David O.McKay
StarPower opened up Pandora's box for me in its subtle ways. It made me evaluate my decision (which I should have done before joining the program) and look into who I was and what I wanted.
I got involved in Net Impact, went to the North America Net Impact Conference and met people hanging out at the same crossroads. I read books including Mark Albion's More Than Money and Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World Without Poverty, which really opened my eyes to the opportunities to use business to change the world. Muhammad Yunus stressed in his book that "Other economic sectors - the volunteer, charity, and NGO sectors - devote a great deal of time and energy to dealing with poverty and its consequences. But business - the most financially innovative and efficient sector of all - has no direct mechanism to apply its practices to the goal of eliminating poverty."
While government and non-profits have tried to respond to the societal problems in the world, each has its shortcomings in its abilities to continually deal with social changes. Businesses basically are the only sustainable and legitimate drivers for social and societal changes in the world.
His perspective on Capitalism actually hit it home for me. "Capitalism is a half-developed structure - Captialism takes a narrow view of human nature, assuming that people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with the pursuit of maximum profit. The concept of the free market, as generally understood, is based on this one-dimensional human being. Mainstream free-market theory suffers from a 'conceptualization failure' a failure to capture the essence of what it is to be human."
My whole life I have been playing StarPower without realizing that I have been chasing an outcome (maximum profit / money) that I didn't really want. I have been hating the players and not the game without realizing that the rules were set up in such a way that caused people to act accordingly. Capitalism mandated one ultimate focus on money with no regard for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The higher you moved up in society (the triangle group) the stronger your focus on making and keeping the money you've made.
This helped me put into perspective the entry I wrote about Soren Kierkegaard & Money over a year ago. Understanding all of this allowed me to change the rules of the game for myself...
Spiderman"Not everyone is meant to make a difference. But for me, the choice to lead an ordinary life is no longer an option."
"Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: 'With great power comes great responsibility.' This is my gift, my curse." - Spiderman
It's silly to think that I am some sort of superhero out there trying to save the world, but the fact of the matter is that I am put in a precarious position to use this MBA for good. It is my responsibility to ensure that businesses and MBAs are using their knowledge and resources to do what they can for societal causes. With this newfound sense of responsibility and focus, I started to examine the industries I cared about (healthcare and education) and discovered ways I could make potentially make an impact. I could easily spot opportunities to see how business processes can be implemented to make non-profits more efficient and mission-specific. I might never make a societal impact like Muhammad Yunus that lifted an entire country out of poverty, but I can focus on making incremental changes to provide opportunities and potentially change the lives of a small group of people. That's the outcome I want. That's the power I yield.
"Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all, heavenly environment; of these, if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built." - James Allen
Here are some great articles about real heroes out there:
Labels: Books, Microfinance, Money, Muhammad Yunus, Net Impact, StarPower
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Provisional Existence
Viktor Frankl was a well known psychiatrist and later developed a field in "logotherapy". He also endured and survived 3 years as a prisoner of Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz.
One of Frankl's discoveries within the concentration camps is what he calls a "provisional existence". It's where a person live an existence without a clear future and without an obvious goal.
From one of my favorite books of all time, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. This passage often lift my spirits in good times and bad. A constant reminder to keep an optimistic attitude and enjoy the limitless opportunities given to me in life.
"Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised its as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless...
...we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners." - Viktor Frankl, on one's attitude, the last of the human freedoms
One of Frankl's discoveries within the concentration camps is what he calls a "provisional existence". It's where a person live an existence without a clear future and without an obvious goal.
From one of my favorite books of all time, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. This passage often lift my spirits in good times and bad. A constant reminder to keep an optimistic attitude and enjoy the limitless opportunities given to me in life.
"Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised its as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless...
...we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners." - Viktor Frankl, on one's attitude, the last of the human freedoms
Labels: Books, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
Saturday, November 22, 2008
USC Marshall & Tribal Leadership
One of the main reasons I chose to go to Marshall was its reputation as a team-oriented, collaborative business school. This was instilled upon us from day one and companies and recruiters love coming to Marshall because Marshall MBAs understand how to build and lead effective teams. One of the concepts we learned about during orientation was called Tribal Leadership.
The basic concept is that every company has tribes, often several, consisting of 20 to 150 people who know each other and work together. But while everyone "tribes", the culture of each tribe is different, as is its effectiveness. Improving a tribe's culture—and its chances for greater success—requires a tribal leader who not only understands the tribe but can leverage its collective assets to build a greater team. Top tribal leaders also excel at getting their groups "unstuck" and moving forward by putting the tribe members (rather than themselves) first.
The book starts with an accessible framework for evaluating corporate cultures, each with instantly recognizable traits -- from the DMV to Apple to your company. Stage 1: Life sucks. Stage 2: My life sucks. Stage 3: I'm great (and you're not). Stage 4: We're great (and they're not). Stage 5: Life is great.
While the vast majority of the working world is stuck in stages 2 and 3, Tribal Leadership delivers tools to help individuals and organizations break through to the next evolutionary stage.
USC Marshall Professor Dave Logan teamed with e-tailer Zappos.com, one of the most successful online shoe store, to make a free audio version of his 2008 business book, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, available at Zappos.com. Here is an excerpt from the book:
"A Tribal Leader many of us know from history is George Washington. His single major contribution was in changing thirteen diverse colonies into one people. If we look into what Washington actually did, he built a single identity (measurable by what people said) to a series of networked tribes. One was the affluent class in Virginia society, perhaps fewer than a hundred people. Another was the Continental Congress, originally fifty- five delegates. The third was the officer class of the Continental Army. Each time, Washington led the group to unity by recognizing its “tribalness,” by getting its members to talk about what unified them: valuing freedom, hating the king’s latest tax, or wanting to win the fight. As he built the common cause in each tribe, a mission gelled and they embraced 'we’re great' language. Washington’s brilliance in each case was that the man and the cause became synonymous, with the leader shaping the tribe and the tribe calling forth the leader. This is how Tribal Leadership works: the leader upgrades the tribe as the tribe embraces the leader. Tribes and leaders create each other."
To receive the free audio book version of Tribal Leadership click here.
One of the main reasons I chose to go to Marshall was its reputation as a team-oriented, collaborative business school. This was instilled upon us from day one and companies and recruiters love coming to Marshall because Marshall MBAs understand how to build and lead effective teams. One of the concepts we learned about during orientation was called Tribal Leadership. The basic concept is that every company has tribes, often several, consisting of 20 to 150 people who know each other and work together. But while everyone "tribes", the culture of each tribe is different, as is its effectiveness. Improving a tribe's culture—and its chances for greater success—requires a tribal leader who not only understands the tribe but can leverage its collective assets to build a greater team. Top tribal leaders also excel at getting their groups "unstuck" and moving forward by putting the tribe members (rather than themselves) first.
The book starts with an accessible framework for evaluating corporate cultures, each with instantly recognizable traits -- from the DMV to Apple to your company. Stage 1: Life sucks. Stage 2: My life sucks. Stage 3: I'm great (and you're not). Stage 4: We're great (and they're not). Stage 5: Life is great.
While the vast majority of the working world is stuck in stages 2 and 3, Tribal Leadership delivers tools to help individuals and organizations break through to the next evolutionary stage.
USC Marshall Professor Dave Logan teamed with e-tailer Zappos.com, one of the most successful online shoe store, to make a free audio version of his 2008 business book, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, available at Zappos.com. Here is an excerpt from the book:
"A Tribal Leader many of us know from history is George Washington. His single major contribution was in changing thirteen diverse colonies into one people. If we look into what Washington actually did, he built a single identity (measurable by what people said) to a series of networked tribes. One was the affluent class in Virginia society, perhaps fewer than a hundred people. Another was the Continental Congress, originally fifty- five delegates. The third was the officer class of the Continental Army. Each time, Washington led the group to unity by recognizing its “tribalness,” by getting its members to talk about what unified them: valuing freedom, hating the king’s latest tax, or wanting to win the fight. As he built the common cause in each tribe, a mission gelled and they embraced 'we’re great' language. Washington’s brilliance in each case was that the man and the cause became synonymous, with the leader shaping the tribe and the tribe calling forth the leader. This is how Tribal Leadership works: the leader upgrades the tribe as the tribe embraces the leader. Tribes and leaders create each other."
To receive the free audio book version of Tribal Leadership click here.
Labels: Books, Leadership, MBA, USC Marshall, Zappos.com
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Dr. Mark Albion - More Than Money
"I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E.B. White
I am excited about the opportunity this Tuesday to go to see Mark Albion, founder of Net Impact, talk about making a life and not just a living. Part of coming back to business school for me is to find a career that is meaningful and I have been pretty disillusioned thus far. Out of the many company presentations I have attended so far, I have only found 1 or 2 that made me really excited about working. Anyway, I hope this seminar will give me some better insight and perspective.
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For years, Mark Albion ran at the head of the rat pack. Every step of the way, he built his career on a succession of triumphs. He earned three degrees at Harvard University: a bachelor's in economics, an MBA, and a PhD in business economics. In 1982, at the age of 31, he won an appointment at Harvard Business School, the West Point of capitalism, where he taught marketing. His success at Harvard attracted attention: He appeared several times on "Nightline" and was profiled on "60 Minutes" as part of a new breed of marketing wunderkind. He was called upon to help the best and the brightest: Blue-chip companies such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola flew him in for advice on how to fine-tune their brands. He had brilliant colleagues, unlimited resources, few bosses, a flexible work schedule, and personal wealth.
Oh, and one other thing: He was miserable.
Without realizing it, Albion -- a go-go guy with rapid-fire speech and the ability to function on four hours' sleep -- had allowed himself to get trapped in the rat race. He had always believed that he was on this planet not just to make a living but to find a way to enrich other people's lives. But in his quest to get ahead, he had left his core values behind. Albion was making a great living; he was failing to make a life.
If there is a promise at the heart of the new economy, it is this: We should all do work that matters. Today, we all put in too many hours, and accumulate too much stress, to work at something that isn't personally engaging and rewarding.
That said, far too many of us are willing to accept the notion that the new economy's promise simply doesn't apply to us. We still trudge off to work in the morning, tacitly accepting that we're stuck with whatever life deals us -- or, alternatively, that while our work may be unsatisfying, at least it provides the material definition of success. As a result, we feel that we're forced into making a fateful, either-or decision: Either make a living or make a life. Mark Albion has taken on an audacious challenge -- to replace the "either-or" with a "both-and." His mission is to demonstrate that you can make both a living and a life.
In 1988, Albion chucked the prepackaged definition of success that had buoyed him at Harvard. But what was he going to replace it with? He wasn't sure. But he knew one essential thing: He had to do work that mattered.
Albion never did find the right "job" -- but after much struggle, he invented one: He launched an electronic newsletter. He started a business. And he wrote a book, "Making a Life, Making a Living: Reclaiming Your Purpose and Passion in Business and in Life" ( to be published in mid-January by Warner Books ), which profiles 11 high achievers ( plus one dubious achiever, Fast Company founding editor Alan Webber ), who found their way into work that mattered to them.
Many of us built careers based on what we were good at, not what we loved -- not what made us feel ALIVE.
Source: Click here
"I arise in the morning torn between the desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E.B. WhiteI am excited about the opportunity this Tuesday to go to see Mark Albion, founder of Net Impact, talk about making a life and not just a living. Part of coming back to business school for me is to find a career that is meaningful and I have been pretty disillusioned thus far. Out of the many company presentations I have attended so far, I have only found 1 or 2 that made me really excited about working. Anyway, I hope this seminar will give me some better insight and perspective.
---
For years, Mark Albion ran at the head of the rat pack. Every step of the way, he built his career on a succession of triumphs. He earned three degrees at Harvard University: a bachelor's in economics, an MBA, and a PhD in business economics. In 1982, at the age of 31, he won an appointment at Harvard Business School, the West Point of capitalism, where he taught marketing. His success at Harvard attracted attention: He appeared several times on "Nightline" and was profiled on "60 Minutes" as part of a new breed of marketing wunderkind. He was called upon to help the best and the brightest: Blue-chip companies such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola flew him in for advice on how to fine-tune their brands. He had brilliant colleagues, unlimited resources, few bosses, a flexible work schedule, and personal wealth.
Oh, and one other thing: He was miserable.
Without realizing it, Albion -- a go-go guy with rapid-fire speech and the ability to function on four hours' sleep -- had allowed himself to get trapped in the rat race. He had always believed that he was on this planet not just to make a living but to find a way to enrich other people's lives. But in his quest to get ahead, he had left his core values behind. Albion was making a great living; he was failing to make a life.
If there is a promise at the heart of the new economy, it is this: We should all do work that matters. Today, we all put in too many hours, and accumulate too much stress, to work at something that isn't personally engaging and rewarding.
That said, far too many of us are willing to accept the notion that the new economy's promise simply doesn't apply to us. We still trudge off to work in the morning, tacitly accepting that we're stuck with whatever life deals us -- or, alternatively, that while our work may be unsatisfying, at least it provides the material definition of success. As a result, we feel that we're forced into making a fateful, either-or decision: Either make a living or make a life. Mark Albion has taken on an audacious challenge -- to replace the "either-or" with a "both-and." His mission is to demonstrate that you can make both a living and a life.
In 1988, Albion chucked the prepackaged definition of success that had buoyed him at Harvard. But what was he going to replace it with? He wasn't sure. But he knew one essential thing: He had to do work that mattered.
Albion never did find the right "job" -- but after much struggle, he invented one: He launched an electronic newsletter. He started a business. And he wrote a book, "Making a Life, Making a Living: Reclaiming Your Purpose and Passion in Business and in Life" ( to be published in mid-January by Warner Books ), which profiles 11 high achievers ( plus one dubious achiever, Fast Company founding editor Alan Webber ), who found their way into work that mattered to them.
Many of us built careers based on what we were good at, not what we loved -- not what made us feel ALIVE.
Source: Click here
Labels: Books, Business School, Making a Life, Mark Albion, Net Impact
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