Ed Batista

Rudy Goes to USC

A student journalist at USC tried out for the football team earlier this month to write an article about the experience for the school paper.  To his shock, he actually made the team:

I had gone out to the tryout not to actually make the team - no, I went through the tryout to write a story and inform the readers of the Daily Trojan who don't get this opportunity. That's all. To say the least, things have changed.

I went in to talk to [head coach Pete] Carroll a little before noon, and if he was playing a joke, he sure was doing a fine job of showing a poker face.

"You could catch some balls out there," Carroll said before complimenting my speed and route running.

Wait a second, Pete Carroll is commending my football-playing abilities?

This can't be real.

"We're really low on numbers, especially wide receivers," Carroll said as he dribbled a basketball while sitting on a plush leather coach in his office. "Do you want to do it?"

"Heck yes," I responded, still in disbelief of what was happening.

"Well, let's do it," Carroll said as he tossed the basketball at me. He shook my hand, turned away and was immediately off to work.

I'm hardly an 'SC fan, but I thought this was an encouraging story about the surprising things we can achieve when we give ourselves permission to try.

Weighing In at AOL

Last week I attended an event at AOL's offices in Mountain View, and afterwards I stepped into the first-floor men's bathroom.  I was startled to see a doctor's scale, and it seemed just noteworthy enough to snap a photo.  Why is it there?  Is AOL trying to encourage their employees to lose weight?  Are they running a contest?  Is there a scale in the women's bathroom, too?

It was mystifying and compelling, in the way that slightly-out-of-context objects always are.  And the answer to the obvious question: 176 lbs., which would be fine if they weren't slowly settling around my abdomen.

At PC Forum

Just a note to let folks know that I'm blogging from PC Forum, pimping AttentionTrust among the Masters of the Universe.  It's been a fascinating day-and-a-half so far, and you can keep up with me at the AttentionTrust blog.

tag: pcforum attentiontrust

Mentoring, Training, Coaching...Whatever

Just what do we mean by executive coaching?  As a starting point, I find it helpful to think about what it's not: It's not mentoring, not therapy, not business process consulting and not career counseling--although it's clearly related to all of those practices.  If we could align them on the margins of a multi-dimensional graph, I'd put coaching right in the middle, drawing upon each discipline, but with different methodologies and goals.

Carol Hymowitz's "In The Lead" column in today's Wall Street Journal muddies the waters by using "mentoring," "coaching" and "training" almost interchangeably.  It's headlined "Today's Bosses Find Mentoring Isn't Worth The Time and Risks," and the basic premise is that some senior managers believe their time is best spent thinking of ways "to expand their businesses and improve productivity and work quality," not wasted on "coaching employees on how to do their jobs."

The contrarian view, here represented by Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford Business School, is that "lack of time for training won't affect performance today or next week...but it will further down the road, when you need a new generation of leaders."

That's a fascinating debate, but it would be easier to understand exactly what's being debated if the language in the article were more precise.  "Training" and "mentoring" and "coaching," although clearly related, are different in their aims and their practices.  To take an oversimplified view of the distinctions, I'd say that training seeks to improve an employee's job-related skills, mentoring seeks to insure that an employee is on the right path early in his or her career, and coaching seeks to maximize a high-potential employee's fulfillment and effectiveness.

If we take a look at Hymowitz's column with those definitions in mind, I'd say that senior managers...

• ...are right to resist providing training to their reports.  More likely than not, training is a time-intensive activity with a low ROI for any individual manager.  If a manager is providing hands-on training to an individual report, they're probably taking on a burden that should be shifted back onto the organization as a whole.  (Of course, that's just reality in many organizations--but that doesn't make it right.)
• ...are wrong to resist providing mentoring.  Properly guiding an early-stage employee will reap rewards not only for the organization, but also for the individual manager who has the opportunity to develop a valuable network of "mentees."  Each manager will have to gauge how much time and energy they can devote to mentorship, but it's one of those Important-But-Not-Urgent tasks that an organization neglects at its peril.
• ...should provide coaching when they perceive that a high-potential employee isn't as effective or as fulfilled as he or she could be.  If they don't have the time to do it themselves, then they should devote the resources necessary to bring in an external coach.  Coaching isn't about helping low performers reach to a minimally acceptable standard--it's about identifying and eliminating the barriers that are keeping your best and brightest from living up to their full potential.

I don't want to sound pedantic, but defining these terms more carefully will allow us to reach better conclusions about whose responsibility they are and how important they are to an individual manager and to the organization as a whole.

I'm an Attention Pimp

According to Valleywag.  I suppose it's better than being an "attention whore," but it's the same business in the end.

Authenticity is a Straitjacket

A recent post by Gerard Cosloy referred me to Sergio Ornelas' admirably profane rant against the mainstream adoption of "designer streetwear."  Serg writes:

Designer streetwear is a crock of shit created for a bunch of bitchmade idiots who are too stupid to decide what is cool for themselves. I don't give a fuck if you like shoes or cool shirts. That's beside the point. What is stupid is this idea that a whole style that was jacked from poor kids in the hood trying to rock fly shit is now some bullshit bourgeois sense of style for a bunch of rich mediocre skaters who day dream of doing graffiti in something other than their shitty notebook...

I don't give a fuck about fashion or even people paying way too much money for some bullshit designer crap just because it was on a fucking runway. What annoys me is how this shit wants to put up some front of being down with the "streets." It’s not even on a hood level, it's just straight up "hey rich kids lets earn cool kid points with overpriced limited edition footwear made by small hands in the 3rd world."

Hmmm.  To the extent that it's possible for an out-of-touch unhipster like myself to fully understand all the issues in play here, I agree with Serg's assertion that "designer streetwear is a crock," but I couldn't disagree more with the underlying rationale that it's inauthentic, and therefore fundamentally wrong, for upscale white kids to cop styles from "poor kids in the hood."

The concept of authenticity is a straitjacket meant to keep us in our culturally assigned places, and it's simply no longer relevant, if it ever was.  The mirror image of Serg's position is the century-long effort by white authority figures to "protect" mainstream culture from the "pernicious" influence of African-Americans.  And whether it's a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to stand up for "poor kids in the hood," or a blatantly racist attempt to "keep white America white," the end result is the same.  Support for "authenticity" equals opposition to "miscegenation."

But American culture has always found a way to overcome the artificial boundaries drawn by the defenders of "authenticity."  Critics of the "melting pot" metaphor for America were right to resist its implication that groups outside the traditional WASP mainstream must lose their individual identity to fit in.  But the "mosaic" metaphor that's been suggested as a substitute is just as flawed, because it fails to reflect the dynamic interplay that constantly occurs among sub-cultures and between sub-cultures and the mainstream.

And although I look at upper-class white teens in their "designer streetwear" and think they're fools, I also recognize that it's merely the latest example of cross-cultural migration, a process that is essential to the evolution and health of our culture.  And the pace of change is accelerating, driven by the our collective desire for the next new thing and by consumer capitalism's unique ability to both fulfill and stoke that desire.

If you listen carefully to Serg's message, you actually hear a very conservative message--not merely  resistance to change, but a desire to turn the clock back and return to an era when we were more "authentic" because our cultural signifiers--our clothing, our music--were inherited, not selected/bought/stolen.  But I also sense in his frustration a recognition that he's fighting for a lost cause.  The era of authenticity is over, and perhaps it never even began in this country.  The idea that you can choose your own identity was implicit in America's founding, and our history has been a slow but steady effort to fulfill that promise for all of us.

I'm not so naive as to think that the end of authenticity will usher in an era of rainbow-colored, hand-holding, multi-culti celebration.  The end of authenticity also opens the door to bullshit of the highest order, and creates endless opportunities for quacks, hucksters and phonies.  Serg may be right to suggest that "designer streetwear" is one such opportunity.

But the alternative to this postmodern blender is the enshrinement of authenticity, which ultimately results in a static, sterile, changeless society.  And I'd rather live in a society where we are free to choose our identities for ourselves, even though some people will choose identities that are so inauthentic as to be absurd, than have traditional--but authentic--identities forced upon us.  The choice is that stark.

tags: sergdun gerard cosloy designer streetwear authenticity

Golden Gate Park, Dusk

Stephen Malkmus

This isn't the way it's supposed to work. Indie band breaks up, egotistical singer follows his personal muse, everyone crashes and burns--that's the way it's supposed to work. What are we to do when the singer's work is better than the band's (revered) output?

Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons on Motivation

ESPN's Bill Simmons recently exchanged a number of emails with The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, as part of Simmons' ongoing series of interviews with public figures from beyond the world of sports.  Gladwell's insights can usually be applied to a wide range of subjects, so I was curious to see what Simmons (aka "The Sports Guy") would elicit from him.  The most interesting thread from Part One of their correspondence relates to motivation--here are a few excerpts:

Simmons: [H]ow did you learn to...write so well?

Gladwell: ...I'm not sure I can answer that...except to say that I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn't much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing... They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I've always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky...(snip)

Simmons: ...I think there's a certain amount of professionalism that needs to be there, as well, because there will always be days when you don't feel like doing your job, and those are always the true tests. Halberstam has a great quote about this: "Being a professional is doing your job on the days you don't feel like doing it." I love that quote and mutter it to myself every time I don't feel like writing because my allergies are bothering me, or my back hurts, or my head hurts, or there's some random dog barking, or any of the other excuses I use when I'm procrastinating from pumping out something. So how easy is the writing process for you?...

Gladwell: This is actually a question I'm obsessed with: Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so?

...The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection... Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare.

These two concepts seem inextricably intertwined: A) In addition to the many external obstacles we encounter that keep us from doing our best work, we may also have a tendency to sabotage ourselves by not even doing our best to begin with.  B) To insure against this tendency, we need to love what we're doing, and we need to love it so passionately that the intrinsic rewards of the experience itself are sufficient--because the extrinsic rewards (for achieving success as well as for avoiding failure) may never be enough.

This resonates deeply with me.  I'm not indifferent to extrinsic factors--I want to enjoy a high standard of living, win praise for my efforts, avoid criticism for failure--all the things we expect to come from doing good work.  But if I'm not in love with the work itself, none of that is enough to keep me going indefinitely.  As Simmons rightly notes, a sense of professionalism--which I see as a combination of duty and pride--is essential to get through the rough spots.  I've drawn from that well plenty of times--enough to know it's not bottomless.  All of these forces factor into our motivation, but at the center there has to be a passion for the work.

I've been a little harsh on Simmons over the years (and he can be bad--don't ever read him on the New England Patriots), but he deserves a lot of credit for showing us another side of Gladwell.  Well done--I'm looking forward to Part Two tomorrow.

tags: malcolm gladwell bill simmons espn blink tipping point motivation

On Failing and Trying Again

Jeffrey Zaslow's "Moving On" column in today's Wall Street Journal discusses the challenges faced by Dan Doctoroff, a former investment banker who led New York City's ultimately futile bid for the 2012 Olympics.

Doctoroff spent 11 years on the effort, as well as $4 million of his own money, and he's grappling with the question of whether to support another bid for the 2016 games after such an exhausting and high-profile failure. Zaslow wonders what insights can be gleaned from Doctoroff's example:

Researchers have advice for high-achievers who fail: Try self-deprecating humor. Do extensive postmortems. Allow yourself to dream big again. If you fear being a two-time loser, create a team strategy, so others share the risk. And ask yourself: What was your failure? Was it not reaching your goal, or not giving your all?

Zaslow also talks with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School who's done some inspiring and thought-provoking work on leadership and organizational change:

Before trying again after failing, Prof. Kanter says, people must ask: Is there still evidence that the dream makes sense? Are you gaining or losing support? Is there more or less competition now? And are you so enthralled with your own abilities that you're unrealistically optimistic?

This analytical approach to post-failure analysis seems particularly relevant in light of a recent comment by David Bradford, senior lecturer in organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business:

Bradford says he sees differences between teaching MBAs and alumni who have learned more life lessons: "If you live long enough, you realize that you can fall off the horse and get back on again," he said. "I think many of our MBAs are very much afraid of failure. But those of us who have been around awhile realize that failure is inevitable, and what’s important is how you handle it, not how you avoid it." [my emphasis]

Zaslow and Kanter's advice can help us understand why we failed and whether any given challenge is worth tackling again. But Bradford's telling us something even more important: We will fail, at some point, and it's not the end of the world. Risky ventures are often the most rewarding--psychologically as well as materially--and never failing may simply mean that you never attempted anything worthwhile.