Ed Batista

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.)

Some Inspiration from Corey Ford

One of the great satisfactions of being a coach is the opportunity to work with some truly extraordinary people who are seeking to experience as much as possible in life and to fulfill every ounce of their potential.  Corey Ford, who's appeared here before, is one such person, and I enjoyed another thoughtful conversation with him yesterday.

I learned that back in March he'd been invited to give the keynote address at the annual banquet of the University of North Carolina's Morehead-Cain Scholars Program.  The program--whose motto is "Create an extraordinary life"--offers high-potential students a four-year scholarship at Chapel Hill and access to a wide range of academic and professional resources.  In his inspiring talk, Corey discusses how he made the most of this opportunity, and a few of his comments in particular stood out for me:

On becoming an entrepreneur: My Morehead-Cain experiences had allowed me to grow from a boy who energetically climbed the ladder placed before him to a man who started to build his own ladder.

On his decision to leave a high-profile job: I thought I was at the top.  I thought I would be there for the rest of my career, but I faced a choice: Stay and stagnate, or make my own way.

On exploration: We all have unwritten endings.  Life is a journey, but not a linear one.  Just like design, innovation and entrepreneurship, in life there are times to focus and times to flare, times to execute and times to explore.  Congratulations—it's time for you to explore.

Kudos, Corey--I know there are a lot of people at Stanford (and I'm sure at Chapel Hill) who are looking forward to hearing about the next steps in your own non-linear journey.

Cool Tools

I've been able to spend a little time recently digging into some social media tools to understand how they work as well as their potential value for someone like me, i.e. an executive coach and change management consultant with an abiding interest in technology.  So here's a quick rundown:

Utterz is an extremely user-friendly service that allows you to capture and publish audio, video, pictures and text.  The site essentially creates a link between your phone, your camera or your webcam and the web at large.  You can call Utterz and use your phone to record an interview, snap a picture while you're at it, and publish the audio and the video not only to your Utterz page but also to just about any other site you designate on the fly--the audio's captured immediately, and you simply text the photo to Utterz.  You can do the same with video, but if you're like me, A) your phone's OK for stills but terrible for video, and B) uploading video via your carrier sucks up too much time and bandwidth.  No problem--just use your laptop's webcam and send the stream directly to Utterz, or upload a previously recorded video file.  (You can also opt to send all your Utterz videos to your YouTube account simultaneously.)  I see Utterz as a way to turn any conversation into an interview you can share with colleagues AND as a personal podcast for friends and family (depending on where I choose to send the files.) Very cool and stone cold simple.  Many thanks to my old--well, let's say former--colleague Holly Ross for the inspiration.

Tumblr is sort of like Utterz but a bit more lightweight, which makes it both easier to use and slightly less useful--or, rather, useful in a different way.  It's another service that allows you to capture and publish links, text, and photos, and although it doesn't have built-in support for audio and video, it's really easy (especially via their Firefox bookmark button) to publish to your Tumblr page and to anyplace you can insert a little code.  I see it as a great way to share and promote links to articles, posts and photos that don't merit a full-on blog post but merit something more prominent than a del.icio.us tag.  Many thanks to Mark McGuinness for the (continued) inspiration--he's THE most tech-savvy executive coach I've met since I stopped working in technology to launch my coaching practice, and I learn something every time I stop by his site.

And now for something completely different: Don't Break the Chain is a fun site supposedly inspired by the motivational wisdom of Jerry Seinfeld, according to Brad Isaac:

[Seinfeld] told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."

"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.

True?  Who cares.  It's a great story that translates brilliantly into a free web service.  Your "Chain" account serves as the online equivalent of Seinfeld's big wall calendar, and you use it to "X" out days on which you accomplish your given task.  (The image above indicates that I've gone running three straight days--no mean feat this past year.)  You can create multiple calendars to track different goals, you can customize the display a bit, and if you want the world to help hold you accountable, you can copy-and-paste a little code to publish your calendar anywhere you'd like.

Twitter is a service that's clearly useful for many people..but not me--at least not right now.  If Utterz makes it easier to blog audio and video, and if Tumblr allows you to turn your tags into a mini-blog, then Twitter is a sort of micro-blog, allowing you to send out even more ephemeral messages (up to 140 characters) via your phone or the web to your personal Twitter network.  The How? isn't an issue here--if you've used IM or sent a text message, you know how to use Twitter, but the Why? (or Why not?, in my case) is more complex.  I signed up for a Twitter account months ago, but it's never seemed useful to me.  This is primarily because my work as an executive coach involves a lot of face-to-face interactions that can't be interrupted, and my time online (or text-accessible) is limited as a result.  But I'm also aware that I need a certain amount of distance between the world and myself in order to think, to focus, to stay grounded.  I understand the appeal of feeling more connected with the people in my network via a steady stream of Twitter updates, and I could see myself using Twitter if others on my team did as well, because although most of our work with clients and students is face-to-face, we often work from separate locations--but until that happens, I'm content to opt out.  (See Common Craft's typically well-done Twitter in Plain English if you'd like to learn more.)  UPDATE: One day later, John Unger posts a Twitter manifesto, describing how he uses it--and he notes that his initial response was "Why the hell would I want to do that?"  It didn't change my mind about Twitter's utility to me at the moment, but it did open my eyes to the creative ways people are adapting the service to meet their needs.  UPDATE 2: OK, I give--with Mark McGuinness weighing in as well, I'll see if Twitter can add value despite my unusual schedule.

Finally, even though the services rendered by Creative Commons are nothing like those described above (and even though I've been a CC user for years), my work on this post led me to realize that my CC license was out-of-date, and this seems like a good opportunity to point anyone unfamiliar with them in a helpful direction.  CC provides an alternative to copyright that allows people like me to share our writing, our photos, and any other type of content with the world under the restrictions of our choice.  For example, everything I post on this site is published under CC's "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States" license, which means that you're free to copy, distribute and/or remix my work as long as you also 1) attribute it to me by linking to this site and 2) further distribute any remixed works under a similar license.  Almost all of the photos I use in my posts (including the one above) have been published under the same CC license as mine, and I'm both grateful for the right to access such highly creative work and hopeful that my contributions are as useful to someone else.

Photo by Paul Schultz.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Bill George on Teaching Leadership

Bill George is former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic, whose market cap grew an average of 35% annually under his leadership, and currently a prof at Harvard Business School.  I caught his interview with Charlie Rose and John Whitehead today, and that segment included these exchanges:

Charlie Rose: [Leadership] can be taught and learned?

Bill George: Learned. I teach now, and I don't think you can teach leadership, I think you can learn about it.  I think you can learn about yourself.  It comes from within, from who are you inside and what makes you tick, and what are those tapes playing in your head about what you want to be and what your limitations are.

(later in the interview)

Bill George: In this century, leadership has changed.  Leadership is not about getting people to follow you, the "Great Man theory," follow you over the hill General George Patton style.  That idea is out.  To me, the great leaders today are able to align people around a sense of purpose and values and get that consistency all around the globe, and then empower other people to step up and lead.  And I've found that in organizations that are really effective at generating leaders, there are thousands of leaders because people empower them to step up and lead.

(still later)

Charlie Rose: I asked [earlier] about teaching leadership--what can you teach?

Bill George: What we can do is cause people to come together and learn about themselves through dialogue... You learn about who you are, and if you go inside yourself, you find out, "What are my passions?"

(still later)

Charlie Rose: One last question: Self-analysis is crucial to leadership?

Bill George: Yes, absolutely.

Charlie Rose: If you can delude yourself, or if you are in self-denial, you will never be able to [lead]?

Bill George: Can you get... Do you seek out honest feedback from people about who you are?  The hardest thing we have to do is see ourselves as others see us.  And do you gain that self-awareness?  Some people think they have it, but they've never really tested themselves, and that is crucial.  Until you have that level of self-awareness, and you know who you really are...  As one of our leaders said, "You know, I won't trust anyone who's never failed because they don't really know who they are."

I'm struck by George's emphasis on increased self-awareness through dialogue and feedback from others.  These practices are hallmarks of the work I do with students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, not only in our more formally organized leadership development programs, but also in our "Interpersonal Dynamics" classes, both of which provide students with extensive feedback on how others see them.

These methods are a perfect complement to George's vision of 21st century leadership, in which a leader's ability to inspire others to "follow you over the hill" is of less importance than your ability "to align people around a sense of purpose and values...and then empower other people to step up and lead."

If you're inspiring followers, self-awareness is less important than the natural charisma we've traditionally associated with strong leadership.  But if you're aligning and empowering other leaders, your success will depend on your ability to connect with people not as "followers" but as independent decision-makers and to motivate and influence them by speaking to their needs and interests.  This requires a keen degree of self-awareness and the ability to see yourself clearly through the eyes of others.

(Presumably George discusses these issues further in his recently published True North, which has been well-received by my colleagues but has yet to make it to the top of my reading list.)

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.

Anita O'Day at Newport

Good Lord, I love Anita O'Day.  One of the greatest jazz artists this country has ever seen--nearly Ella's equal as a scat-singer, but with a richer emotional palette (and a helluva back story), and unique in her ability to combine technical artistry with lyric interpretation.  Two exhibits for the prosecution: Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea for Two, both from the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.  (Thanks to YouTube user jfhancock.  And if you can explain the rationale for the extensive crowd shots when Anita was onstage looking like this, I'd be grateful.)

And as long as I have the space, here are MP3s of the audio tracks: Sweet Georgia Brown and Tea for Two.

tags: anita+o'day newport+jazz+festival

Johnny Cash on Doing It Your Way

If you bought Johnny Cash's American Recordings when it was first released in 1994 a little insert came with your CD--a reproduction of six pages of Cash's handwritten memories of his mother's guitar-playing, learning to play guitar himself, and guitars he'd loved and lost to the rigors of life on the road.  As a child of 11 or 12, he was inspired by a friend named Jesse Barnhill...

...who lived three miles farther down the road.  Jesse had had polio, and his right hand and foot were withered, but with his left hand he made the chords as he beat a perfect rhythym with his tiny right hand.  It was an old Gibson flattop, and I thought, if I could play the guitar like that I'd sing on the radio one day.

The final passage has a lot of resonance for me as someone who's often easily distracted by trivial details and who can be overly concerned with doing things a certain way.  (The "right" way, of course.)  Not Cash--he's focused on what matters, and he makes his way the right way:

When performing, it doesn't matter the brand, the color or the cost.  All that matters is that the guitar and I are one.  I have to feel that the sound of [the] instrument comes out of me with the song, from inside, from the gut.  And it doesn't matter to me that I only know three or four chords.  With the left fingers on the frets, the heel of my right hand hugging the body of the guitar, letting just my right thumb lead and drive the rhythym, sometimes it's magic, and I just believe that when it all comes together it's the right way for me to do it.  Like Jesse Barnhill did it.  Like Mama did it.

Somehow I think Johnny Cash knew more than four chords, but his larger points hits home for me all the same: Don't worry about the right way to play, just play it your way.

Cash's own style is readily apparent is this performance of "Redemption", a song he wrote for "American Recordings":

tags: johnny cash american recordings redemption

Al Swearengen on Perseverence

Wisdom is where you find it, and HBO's Deadwood is a continually surprising source of inspiration.  In Episode 19 (written by Jody Worth), Al Swearengen (masterfully portrayed, as always, by Ian McShane) gives a tough-love pep talk to Merrick, the local newspaperman whose office has been vandalized and printing press destroyed.  Merrick is distraught and wants to abandon the entire enterprise, but Swearengen filters an almost Buddhist acceptance of life-as-suffering through an ornery refusal to give up:

Pain or damage don't end the world, or despair, or f------g beatings.

The world ends when you're dead.  Until then, you got more punishment in store.  Stand it like a man, and give some back.

So much of the advice we receive, both personal and professional, promises to solve our problems, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a really important problem I've faced that has been fundamentally solved, never to return.  Far more valuable than any proposed solutions are the life experiences that
have (slowly, and with great dificulty) prepared me to face an unending series of problems with equanimity, patience, compassion--and the gumption to cause a few problems of my own, when necessary.  I'm hardly at Al's level of enlightenment, but I'm working on it.

tags: perseverance deadwood al swearengen

Texas Ranch House: The Bitter End

The other day I talked about my interest in reality television as a management training tool, as well as my current fascination with the PBS reality show Texas Ranch House.  I just finished watching the last two episodes in the eight-part series, and it was a wrenching (and all too compelling) viewing experience.  In the end, despite a successful cattle drive, the entire crew of cowboys walked off the ranch two days before the conclusion of the experience, expressing their solidarity with a cowboy who had been unfairly fired.

As I expected, ranch "owner" Bill Cooke's failure to knit his family and his crew into a cohesive unit, working toward common goals, proved to be his undoing.  He compounded this failure with some tactical missteps [Oh, so when it comes time to negotiate final wages, after 2+ months of conciliatory management, now you're a hardass?], but the fact that his wife, daughters and housemaid (on the one hand) and his cowboys (on the other) viewed each other not as comrades, or even as complementary teams, but as opposing forces insured that any conflicts would be magnified and that no one was going to cut anyone else some slack if there was a problem.  And there were plenty of problems.

In fairness to Bill Cooke, I think the producers made it harder on him than they should have--by bringing in one new hand (to replace the three who had to leave prematurely) far too late in the process, by thrusting him repeatedly into negotiations where he had essentially zero leverage--but that said, there were quite a few things he could have done differently as the nominal leader of the enterprise.

OK, smart guy--what would you have done differently?  Why, I'm so glad you asked.

• Built a sense of team identity through shared experience--in this case, regular communal dinners among everyone on the ranch.  The narrator (the outstanding Randy Quaid, at times doing his level best to rein in his disbelief at various mistakes) even noted that many ranch owners and their families ate at a common table with their hands.  The Cooke's efforts to overcome the gap between them and their crew with occasional festivities were far too little, far too late.


• Spent more one-on-one time with every member of the crew.  Historically inaccurate advice perhaps, but it seemed as though every time Bill Cooke was talking with one of his crew members, he was delivering bad news (sound clip), and that's just not good.


• Used both the meals and the one-on-one talks to discuss and understand everyone's goals and responsibilities, and to get a sense of whether they felt they were succeeding (and if not, what it would take to allow them to succeed.)  Yes, I know this is an anachonistic 21st-century perspective, but despite everyone's best efforts to achieve historial accuracy, they were still 21st-century people, and a little effort--any effort--on Cooke's part to express concern about whether people's individual needs were being met would have built up a store of goodwill that he could have drawn upon when tough decisions needed to be made.


• Presented a united and consistent front to his crew.  Mr. and Mrs. Cooke utterly failed to understand how their dynamic as a couple affected the crew.  I didn't expect a 21st-century couple to fully embrace 19th-century gender roles, but the Cookes tried to have it both ways, seeking to manage the ranch's affairs together while paying lip service to Mr. Cooke's authority as ranch "owner" vis-a-vis the cowboys.  As a result, Cooke lost the respect of his crew, who came to see him as a mouthpiece for his wife's decisions.  I suspect that this led Cooke to oscillate between two vastly different management styles--usually conciliatory, but occasionally hard-nosed--and this inconsistency made Cooke seem unreliable at best, disingenuous at worst.

Damn, everyone involved seemed to have a hard time, and I doubt if anyone looks back on the experience fondly.  But this certainly proves Steven Johnson's thesis that reality television is engaging not because it's prurient, but because it's cognitively demanding, and my corollary that these shows actually provide some of the best management and leadership training materials you could possibly ask for.

tags: texas ranch house reality television steven johnson

Steven Johnson, Reality TV and Texas Ranch House

Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You (a brilliant book that I find myself referring to constantly) is subtitled "How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," and one of the examples he cites is (gasp!) reality television:

The conventional wisdom is that audiences flock to reality programming because they enjoy the prurient sight of other people being humiliated on national TV... But for the most successful reality shows--Survivor or The Apprentice--the appeal is more sophisticated...

As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that's been created for them.  The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other human beings humilated on national television; it comes from depositing other human beings in a complex, high-stakes environment where no established strategies exist, and watching them find their bearings.  That's why the water-cooler conversation about these shows invariably tracks in on the strategy displayed on the previous night's episode...

Bingo.  And today there's a flavor of reality programming to fit every cultural palate, from lowbrow, gross-out/thrill-seeking shows like Fear Factor and schadenfraude-fests like Blind Date, to the quasi-educational, historical-fish-out-of-water series like Texas Ranch House that have become a staple on public television.

I love shows like Texas Ranch House, and Johnson zeroes in on their primary appeal: second-guessing the participants' strategic choices in a complicated social environment.  I've often thought these shows could serve as management training tools by providing engaging examples of successful (and not-so-successful) interpersonal techniques.

Texas Ranch House (currently halfway through its eight-episode run on PBS) is a textbook case in this regard.  The ranch "owner," real-life San Francisco hospital administrator Bill Cooke, may yet succeed in rounding up and selling enough cattle to insure the ranch's survival, but at this point things aren't looking good, in no small part because of Cooke's missteps as a manager.

Cooke's cowboys think he's putting his family's creature comforts ahead of their professional needs and that his submissive attitude toward his wife is jeopardizing the ranch's future.  At the same time, Cooke's wife thinks the cowboys are exploiting her husband's desire to be liked and that their complaints are fueled by sexism and petty resentments.  Even Cooke's daughters are unhappy and want to go home.  The guy's in a tight spot, and I find it impossible to tear myself away--not because I'm enjoying Cooke's difficulties, but because I keep thinking to myself (or actually yelling at the screen), "Why didn't you do [this or that] instead?!?"

But I'm not just venting and feeling superior--I'm actually taking away some valuable insights.  Cooke's fundamental problem is that although his natural management style is conciliatory and team-oriented, he never invested the time and energy required to forge his family and his cowboys into a united team.  Instead, they've split into two competing tribes, with him caught in the middle.  He can't choose one group over the other, and in any event he lacks the force and authority to compel one group to submit to his will.  But neither can he effectively ask either group to make necessary compromises, because they feel little allegiance to the team as a whole or to him as their leader.  (Of course, it doesn't help that his style of delivering bad news is reminiscent of Office Space's Bill Lumberg [sound clip].)  They may be negative lessons, but there's a lot to learn in there.

Returning to "Everything Bad Is Good For You," Johnson makes the link between our interest in reality television and our professional environments even more explicit:

Reality shows...challenge our emotional intelligence... They are, in a sense, elaborately staged group psychology experiments... The shows seem so fresh to today's audience because they tap this crucial faculty of the mind in ways that ordinary dramas or comedies rarely do--borrowing the participatory format of the game show while simultaneously challenging our emotional IQ.

...[C]ountless studies have demonstrated the pivotal role that emotional intelligence plays in seemingly high-minded professions: business, law, politics.  Any profession that involves regular interaction with other people will place a high premium on mind reading and emotional IQ.  Of all the media available to us today, television is uniquely suited for conveying the fine gradients of these social skills... Reality programming has simply recognized that intrinsic strength and built a whole genre around it.

The management training field is full of stultifying, poorly produced videos and other training tools intended to represent real-life situations.  Why not substitute highly engaging reality programming instead?  PBS programs like Texas Ranch House have lesson plans for teachers that cover topics such as cattle drives and 19th century music at a middle school level.  It would be a snap to develop some materials for grown-ups that cover topics such as leadership, team-building and conflict resolution.  You know, I'm only half-joking.

tags: steven johnson texas ranch house reality television office space