Ed Batista

Academic Journals Have an Offer You Can't Refuse

(Academic journal publishers?)

The other day I referenced a post by Bob Sutton that was inspired by a recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Nathaniel Fast of USC and Lara Tiedens of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  (Full disclosure: I know Lara and support courses that she teaches at the GSB, although we haven't worked together directly.  I was also a student of hers in a previous century.)

I wanted to check out the study for myself, so I found the Journal's website and tried to locate the article.  I expected it to be locked away behind a paywall, but I assumed I'd at least find an excerpt.  But I couldn't.  I'm hardly a professional researcher, but I'm a reasonably proficient user, and I couldn't even find a link.

I often run into problems like this with academic journal sites, and even when I successfully navigate their poor design and confusing search architecture, the article I want is almost always prohibitively expensive.  But I was so irritated yesterday that I kept up the search and finally found not just a link but the entire text of the study: Blame contagion: The automatic transmission of self-serving attributions.

Success!  And yet it's merely the exception that proves the rule.  That study was published in the Journal's January 2010 issue, which happens to be the only issue of the 60 published in the last decade that is freely available online.  Why?  I don't know--and can't find out on their website.  How long will it be available?  I don't know--and can't find out on their website.

So what if I wanted to read a article from another issue?  For example, I'd love to read Fooled by first impressions? Reexamining the diagnostic value of appearance-based inferences, which was just published this month--and I can, for just $31.50.

That's pretty pricey, but it's reasonable to assume that brand-new content is going to be more expensive.  What if I wanted to read an article from, say, ten years ago?  I'm sure I'd find it rewarding to read The Consequences of Communicating Social Stereotypes, published in November 2000--and I can, for the same low price of $31.50.

Well, perhaps the article prices are so high in order to encourage subscriptions--although perhaps not, because in order to get all six issues of the Journal delivered to my (literal) mailbox, I'd have to pay $191.00.  (Good news for students--you pay just $146.00!)  And does a subscription to the print edition include online access?  I don't know--and can't find out on their website.

Good grief.

I don't mean to single out this particular journal or its publisher--these figures and policies are typical in my experience.  But with competitive pressures transforming the business models of every other publisher, how is it that academic journals are able to stay afloat with this pricing structure?  What keeps this racket going?

My best guess is that these journals have no incentive to cultivate a market of individual readers like me via lower prices because they already hold the institutional market hostage.  Academics seeking tenure must publish their research in a small number of established journals in order to gain the recognition of their peers, so the journal publishers enjoy oligopoly control over content.  And university libraries and other institutional clients must subscribe to these same journals in order to meet the needs of faculty and other researchers, so the publishers can command outrageously high prices for institutional subscriptions--over $1,000.00, in the case of the journal cited above!

And of course, journal subscriptions are just one small line item among all the other costs passed on to the biggest "consumers" of academia, who typically pay for a aggregated "bundle" of services from the institution: parents and students paying tuition; federal, state and local governments making appropriations; donors giving gifts.  (Thanks to the Delta Project for their data on post-secondary education revenue sources.)

I'm a realist, and if I'm right about the incentives described above, I don't expect this system to change anytime soon.  But it's still a shame that so much useful knowledge is so difficult to access.

Postscript: My wife Amy, a recovering corporate attorney-turned-legal reference librarian, is a professional researcher, and she writes, "But you're married to a librarian!  You could have asked for help, you know.  But I agree that the UI sucks for most online journals."  And while I'm always grateful for Amy's expert guidance (as well as help from the great reference staff at the GSB's Jackson Library), my hope is that someday it'll be easier (and cheaper!) for lay readers like me to access and make use of academic research.

Photo of The Sopranos © HBO and TimeWarner.

Blogs I Read

Here are several lists of blogs, ranging from Management to Miscellaneous, written by people whose work I admire and from which I draw inspiration on a regular basis.  (I'll keep a link to this post on my Resources page.)

Photo by Matti Mattila.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Visual Images and Effective Communication

I've always found that well-designed images enhance effective communication, and current research in neuroscience is helping us to understand why.  Information designer Tom Wujec spoke at TED in February on the relationship between visual images and meaning:

What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations that create meaning?

Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead creates a series of mental models through a collection of "a-ha" moments or moments of discovery through various processing...

The act of engaging and creating interactive imagery enriches meaning...

We make meaning by seeing, by an act of visual interrogation...

Wujec proposes three basic guidelines for anyone seeking to communicate more effectively:

1) Use images to clarify what we're trying to communicate.

2) Make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully.

3) Augment memory by creating a visual persistence.

Although my reliance on static images falls short on the interactive front, these concepts certainly underlie my recent posts on a framework for professional and personal development, the importance of time horizons, and the nature of influence.

And these same concepts explain why I'm continually drawn to the efforts of designers like Dustin Curtis and writers like Virginia Postrel, who highlight the utility of good design while also doing work that just looks great.  There's also a connection with the work of Howard Gardner on influence--he notes that "A change of mind becomes convincing to the extent that it lends itself to representation in a number of different forms, with these forms reinforcing each other," and with a particular emphasis on alternative visual forms of representation.

Finally, for some even more vivid examples of how effective communication can depend on visualization, see Nathan Yau's Flowing Data or the many projects undertaken by the breathtakingly creative people at Stamen.

Thanks to Stephanie West Allen for the reference to Tom Wujec, and thanks to David Zinger for the reference to Nathan Yau.  If the meaning of the photo above from Spinal Tap is unclear, this clip might help.  (Warning: Profanity, power chords, mullets.)

Three Things You (Probably) Won't Learn in Business School

I learned a hell of a lot in business school, but it wasn't until after I graduated that I fully realized how much I still didn't know.  I'm not blaming Stanford in the least--they did the best they could with me--but one of the reasons I find my current work with MBA students so gratifying is that I'm helping them explore topics that will allow them be better prepared after graduation than I was.

I recently had a chance to talk with Corey Ford, a former GSB student and current lecturer and Fellow at Stanford's Institute of Design (better known as the "d.school.")  We talked extensively about what he'd learned in business school, but I also asked him about what he didn't learn.

His answers resonated with me--I had the same gaps in my knowledge 10 years ago.  And despite the substantial innovations in the GSB's new curriculum, particularly its emphasis on experiential learning and leadership development, I don't know that we'll be teaching these lessons to our current students, either--perhaps because they're best learned after graduation.  With big thanks to Corey for providing this framework, here are three lessons you (probably) won't learn in b-school:

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Business school definitely helped me learn to get things done more effectively.  I tackled so many academic and extracurricular projects in such a short amount of time, working alongside classmates who were so sharp and productive, that I had to bring my "A" game every day, and my game inevitably improved.  But although the experience left me far better prepared to get things done--to get to "point Z," in Corey's phrase--it didn't necessarily help me find "point A," the right place to get started.

At a macro level, this means that business school isn't a particularly good place to "find yourself" or to reflect on your life path.  Business school is a great place to find a job in almost any field or to take your career in an entirely new direction, and I found that a wealth of resources at Stanford, from the Career Management Center to the Center for Social Innovation to an amazing network of alumni, were available to help me get from point B to point Z.  But it was still up to me to pick the point A where I wanted to get started.

I'm not suggesting that before you enter business school you need to know exactly what you're going to do after graduation, but whenever I talk to prospective MBAs, I encourage them to spend a lot of time thinking in advance about why they want the degree and what they expect to do with it.

And at a micro level, this means that the pace and intensity of b-school (and the related skills that you develop) can result in rapid venture-creation, problem-solving or project management processes that propel you quickly down a path toward point Z before you're sure that you've started in the right place.

Rather than focusing immediately on answering the question, "How can we do this more effectively?," it may be more useful to engage in a little double-loop learning and ask "Is this the right thing to do in the first place?" and "What assumptions should be challenged before we proceed?"  (A lesson I've had to re-learn on occasion.)

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After graduating from the GSB I became the first Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) a new organization dedicated to helping the nonprofit sector make more effective use of technology.  I led NTEN for four years--it was an incredible experience, and I'm really proud of what we accomplished--but at times I made things harder for myself because I didn't see how being surrounded by MBAs for two years had affected how I worked with others.

Although b-schools can be perceived as lacking in diversity, in my experience MBAs are actually an extremely diverse group, with the important caveat that only 35-40% of the students are women (in contrast to most other graduate programs, in which the majority of students are now women.)  And gender balance aside, as a student I learned a great deal about working with people from different cultures, industries and personal backgrounds.

But ultimately all these people were MBAs, and although it's difficult to generalize about that group as a whole, I found that my classmates' competitiveness and drive served to enhance those qualities in myself, and, and while that allowed me to get a lot accomplished as a leader after graduation, it also had a downside.

When I encountered difficulties or ran into conflicts--inevitable when building a new organization that served a wide range of stakeholders--I often saw issues in zero-sum, win/lose terms--and I felt that my effectiveness as a leader was contingent on my ability to push forward and surmount opposition.  I was good at driving projects toward completion, but in the process others could feel stifled or experience me as inflexible.  I don't want to overstate the case--I believe I was ultimately an effective community-builder--but it would have been an easier process if I'd been more aware of this dynamic.

Corey has observed similar processes in his work at the d.school, where students from different graduate programs work in teams.  The MBAs come in with strong group development and interpersonal skills that allow them to step into leadership roles, but they can sometimes overuse these strengths and be too influential, preventing others from feeling fully heard.

I do think that the GSB's new curriculum will help students be better prepared to cope with this dynamic, but you're still going to have to experience for yourself what it means to go from an all-MBA environment to one in which you may be the only person with that background and training.  How will you differ from your new colleagues or clients?  How will those differences help you achieve your goals?  And how might those differences get in the way?

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Getting my MBA was a valuable experience.  I learned a lot, the degree's been a helpful line on the resume, and I've benefited greatly as a member of the GSB's alumni network (a debt I gladly repay at every opportunity).  But unlike a JD or an MD, you don't need an MBA in to pursue any particular career path.  They're important assets in many cases, but rarely actual prerequisites.  (And sources from BusinessWeek to 20 CEOs and other experts believe MBAs are overrated.  Hell, even MBA drop-outs can make it big.)

So even though MBAs tend to be competitive and driven, in my experience they also tend to be risk-averse.  Going to b-school is a diversification strategy, a way to expand one's options--and a way to delay committing to any particular path.  This combination of competition and risk-aversion creates an environment in which our typical reluctance to make mistakes is heightened out of all proportion to the actual costs of those mistakes.  So MBAs tend to put a high value on "doing it right" and avoid failure like the Black Plague.  This establishes a "floor" under our losses, but it also creates a "ceiling" over our accomplishments.  Success is never certain in any meaningful endeavor, and the more risk you can tolerate, the more you can potentially accomplish.

A lot of the coaching work I do with students involves helping them increase their risk-tolerance in interpersonal situations.  We experiment with greater candor and directness, we test our intuitions and hunches, and we explore how we might accomplish our goals more effectively.  And at every stage, we fail.  But each time we fail, there's something to be learned from the experience--and the most important lesson is how often we mistakenly inflate the costs of failure. 

Corey also sees elements of this in his work at the d.school, where "Fail faster, succeed sooner"--attributed to IDEO's David Kelley--is a mantra of the rapid prototyping methodology that's integral to any contemporary design process.  As David Bradford says, "Failure is inevitable, and what's important is how you handle it, not how you avoid it."

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Thanks again to Corey Ford for his insights and his ability to distill two years of experience into a few minutes of thought-provoking conversation.

(Here's a 7-slide PowerPoint [90 KB] of the images above.)

Reading List

Updated February 2012

Below is a list of books that have had a major impact on my professional development and to which I frequently refer in my work as a coach and consultant.  Each item includes a link to the book, usually on Amazon, followed by links to any of my posts that focus on or reference the book.  This list isn't exhaustive, but it's reasonably comprehensive.  (I also tweet about blog posts, articles, papers and other resources that I find useful, so follow me @edbatista.)

I update this list occasionally, adding books as well as links to new blog posts of mine, and at some point I may sub-divide the list into categories, but at the moment I find that an alphabetized list strikes a nice balance between order and chaos:

42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role, Pam Fox Rollin (my post)

The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block

Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman (a related post, another)

Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love, Robert Karen

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell (my post, part 2, part 3)

Changing for Good, James Prohaska et al

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke et al

The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub

Coaching with the Brain in Mind, David Rock and Linda Page

Co-Active Coaching, Laura Whitworth et al (a related post)

Cognitive Therapy, Judith Beck

Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön (my post)

The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Kerry Patterson et al

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Antonio Damasio (my post)

Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time, Susan Scott (a related post)

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge et al

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Peter Block

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion, Peter Block et al

Gestalt Therapy: Perspectives and Applications, Edwin Nevis, ed.

Getting Things Done, David Allen

Harvard Business Review On Managing Yourself (a related post, another)

Harvard Business Review On Women in Business

The How of Happiness, Sonia Lyubomirsky (my post, a related post)

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini

The Inner Game of Work, Tim Gallwey (my post)

Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker (my post, another, yet another, still another, and another)

The Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, Robert Hargrove

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson, Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley

The Neurotic Behavior of Organizations, Uri Merry and George Isaac Brown (my post)

The No Asshole Rule, Bob Sutton (my post)

The Organizational Behavior Reader, Joyce Osland et al

The Power of Resilience, Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein (my post)

Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership, David Bradford and Allan Cohen (my post)

Reading Book for Human Relations Training, Alfred Cooke et al (my post referencing an article in the book)

The Resilience Factor, Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte

Start Where You Are, Pema Chödrön

Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton (my post)

The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel (my post)

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, William Bridges (my post)

Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, Grant McCracken (my post)

True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership, Bill George (my post, an earlier post, and an even earlier post)

What Should I Do with My Life?, Po Bronson (my post)

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön (my post)

Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes (free download), Andy Goodman (my post)

Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones (a related post, another related post)

The World According to Peter Drucker, Jack Beatty

Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives, Sara Friedman (my post)

Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini (a related post)

Your Brain at Work, David Rock

Photo by joguldi.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Why You Drink

From Le Grand Content, a brilliant and baffling 4-minute animated film by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit:

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable tv, emotions and hamsters.

There's an obvious association with Jessica Hagy's Indexed (she lists Le Grand Content's URL in her blog header), but I'm not sure who's the Chicken and who's the Egg.

Thanks to Paul Hebert for turning me on to Indexed in the first place.

The General Design Company

What's a blog for if you can't use it to pimp your friends and family every once in a while?  The General Design Company is a graphic design firm just launched by my sister-in-law Soung Wiser and her colleague Scott Livingston.  The two of them have been the creative team at BatesNeimand for a number of years, and although they're keeping their day jobs, they wanted to strike out on their own in order to take on new projects.

Their site's still under construction, but I expect to see something very spiffy there in the near future.  In the meantime, if you're looking for a graphic designer, give them a call.  Soung is incredibly talented and totally cool, and I am not biased at all.  Not one bit.

I Was An Anticorporate Rebel

I was a Chuck Taylor devotee for many years, from high school to college to art school back to college, before finally giving them up at some point in my mid-20s.  Today's Wall Street Journal has an article by Stephanie Kang on Nike's efforts to extend the brand beyond its traditional image to appeal to more fashionable tastes.  (Nike acquired Converse in 2003.)  Kang dutifully finds a grumpy old skooler who keeps it real by dumping on the new models: "What's happening is that Converse has now gotten greedy... That's why these are not as cool."  Whatever.  The guy probably thought Converse was selling out when they unveiled the fantastically fugly day-glo orange model that I loved so dearly back in 1987.

The upmarket, fashion-forward Chucks being rolled out now won't be a huge success, but they're not intended to be--their purpose is to generate publicity (like right now) around the fact that Chucks don't just come in the six basic flavors (black, navy, white, "optical" white, red and all-black), but in 471 varieties.  (See for yourself at Converse's Flash-infested abomination of a site.)

And despite the grumbling of Kang's man in the street, I think that's wonderful.  Let a thousand sneakers bloom.  But our old skooler seems hopelessly entangled in the faux-utilitarian iconography that Chucks used to stand for.  As Kang writes,

[E]ven as Converse lost favor with pro players, it stumbled on a new fan base to court: Rockers Joey Ramone and Kurt Cobain were among the first slacker heroes to wear Chucks, influencing the footwear of millions of anticorporate rebels for years to come.

Let's ignore Kang's slightly slippery grasp on punk and pop-culture history and stipulate to the point she's trying to make: Chucks used to be cheap gear for proles, or rich rockstars who wanted to maintain a prole image, or anyone who was keepin' it real.  So how will Nike navigate these challenging waters?

The suits are following the script--"It's such an iconic shoe that we're trying not to overextend it," coos Nike CEO Mark Parker--but that hardly seems necessary.  If you're really an anticorporate rebel today, you're not buying Chucks--you're buying fair-trade, no-marketing sneaks made from organic hemp and recycled rubber.  And if you think your Chucks are making a statement against the Man, you're delusional.  (Although perhaps the delusional market segment is a big concern for Nike, I don't know.)

There's a larger story to be told here about 1) the end of authenticity (or more accurately, the end of perceived, manufactured and marketed "authenticity"), 2) the resulting decoupling of phony and ineffectual connections between the personal and the political, and 3) the individual's liberation from the herd--not just within the mainstream, but (and especially) within smaller, often politicized sub-cultures.  Whew--but that's a whole more than I have time for today.

tags: chuck+taylor chuck+taylors converse nike stephanie+kang

Wine: French Appellations

The February 2006 Wine Spectator features some outstanding maps of Californian, French and Italian appellations by Richard Thompson.  There are any number of similar maps online, but these are strikingly beautiful--I hope the Spectator ultimately makes them available in their archives.  For now, some photos of the French maps are after the jump.

San Francisco: Hallidie Plaza

Yesterday SF Chronicle urban design writer John King proposed starting over at Hallidie Plaza, and I sent the following in response:

Dear Mr. King,

Many thanks for your thoughtful Feb. 2nd column on Hallidie Plaza.  I've lived in San Francisco for 16 years, and for most of that time I've worked within a block or two of Hallidie, including three recent years at the Flood Building.  Passing by and through the Plaza several times a day, I became familiar with its mix of tourists and locals, and the means by which human activity is shaped by our built environment--often for the worse.

Hallidie could and should be the city's crossroads, with so many physical vectors and social currents converging on one place.  Fifth and Powell and Cyril Magnin.  The cable cars and BART, the glorious F line and every sullen bus that trudges down Market.  Union Square and SF Centre and Virgin and the Apple store and the Metreon and all the crowds they attract.  Ladies who lunch and knick-knack vendors and sullen teen punks and mad chess geniuses and shivering Euros and big suburban families and bargain-hunters laden with bags and Filipino retirees and the steel drummer and and the tap dancer, always dancing, and the hostile shoe shine guy who takes your scuffs as a personal insult.

There's so much life, so much action and chaotic vitality.  It's one of my favorite places anywhere.

But that huge, dirty, wind-swept, pigeon beshitted hole runs through its middle like a scar.  It kills me.  Pushing everyone away from what should rightfully be the center of activity, forcing us onto crowded narrow sidewalks along Market and in front of Forever 21.  The only people who appreciate its empty space are the desperate and the drunk and the dealers, who have their own reasons for preferring privacy and darkness to mixing with the rest of us.

And yet despite that architectural tragedy, despite all the petty and not-so-petty crime that pervades the place, we refuse to let Hallidie die.  On a good day, we can even make it sing.

You propose filling it in, and that might be a good start.  But planners seeking to design for urban liveliness should follow Hippocrates' example: First, do no harm.

Could we guarantee that the City wouldn't make Hallidie worse if they were to undertake such a project?  Of course not.  Look at the awful screen that they installed to "beautify" the BART elevator a few years ago.  It stands there like a rusty knife plunged into Hallidie's heart.  The only useful purpose it serves is to act as a warning to anyone who'd invite the City to try to improve a social environment.

If anyone could ignite a campaign to improve Hallidie, you could.  I hope you do it, and I'd gladly volunteer to help.  But bear in mind that although Hallidie falls far short of perfect, those of us who love it have found a way to transcend its structural flaws and to breathe life into it.  If you start the Wheels of Redevelopment turning, your first responsibility will be to make damn sure that the City doesn't come up with some godawful Master Plan that will crush all the life out of Hallidie in the process.   Destroying the Plaza in order to save it, if you will.  First, do no harm.

Thanks again.

Ed Batista
San Francisco

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The pic above is from San Francisco CITYSCAPE, which in October 2004 discussed another Chronicle article on potential plans for Hallidie:

The Chron quotes unnamed designers on the need for "a pedestrian-friendly layout (like those) used by all celebrated plazas around the world" — so far, so good — "including perhaps a green space or park." Listen, folks: Cityscape worships nature as much as any Northern Californian, but the world's great urban open spaces are plazas, not parks. The new Union Square, up the street, was transformed from a homeless encampment into a space welcoming to all comers when its hedges were replaced by hard surfaces. Of course, nor is it empty like Hallidie's red-brick, modernist-makeover-of-Market Street kin, United Nations and Justin Herman plazas. Cityscape likes the idea a friend had, to just accept that Hallidie Plaza really should be the Times Square of San Francisco and to give over this one corner of the big city to bright lights, to "sheer whimsy, a gee-whiz display of light and sound and technology in a public plaza unlike anything available in any suburb. ... a very tall, very modern, very thin tower, clad with digital displays, jumbotrons, colored lights, strobes, and neon tubes — all sponsored by famous local Bay Area tech and Internet companies. A beacon of the future in a historic old place. A slice of Blade Runner in the cool gray city." Or, at least, we could bring the whole place out of hiding and up to street level.

Some great ideas there.  No half-assed "pocket parks" at the city's crossroads, please, and no empty brick plazas either.  I don't know about a tower per se, which would take the focus off the street-level action which makes Hallidie such a vital place.  But I do like the idea of "sheer whimsy," of spectacle.

But could the City pull it off?  As noted above, I'm not optimistic.  I'd love to see Hallidie achieve its full potential, but first, do no harm.