Category Archives: Trends

Survival Instinct Gone Wrong

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Survival instinct – it can save our lives, but it can also make us sick.

That is the conclusion of Dr. Marc Schoen in his book Your Survival Instinct is Killing You. Dr. Schoen explains how the Survival Instinct is the culprit that triggers a person to overeat, prevents the insomniac from sleeping, causes the executive to unravel under pressure, leads travelers to avoid planes or freeways, inflames pain, and closes down an individual to love. 
  
Provocative, eye-opening, and surprisingly practical with his strategies and ideas, Dr. Schoen shows how to build up your “instinctual muscles” for successfully managing discomfort while taming your overly reactive Survival Instinct.

Are you experiencing symptoms of an overactive survival instinct? Then please join us on June 12th to hear Dr. Schoen discuss his discoveries over the past 30 years and how they can impact your ability to function in this complex world. You will learn that the management of discomfort is the single most important skill for the twenty-first century.

Our Soundview Live webinar, How to Retrain the Brain may provide answers to some of the maladies that have been wearing you down.  Is it worth an hour of your time to find out?

Balance and Innovation

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We have another two-webinar week coming to Soundview. Next week we will be hosting James Cusumano, author of Balance, and Stephen Shapiro, author of Best Practices Are Stupid. While these two topics are not related to one another, they are both important to every executive.

Balance: The Business-Life Connection by James Cusumano

In this Soundview Live webinar, Balance: Eight Steps for Success in Any Business, James Cusumano will provide a proven template for creating a successful business, and simultaneously, long-term balance and fulfillment in your personal life. Drawing from his just-released book Balance: The Business-Life Connection, the author brings three decades of diverse experience in technology and entertainment, which include Rock Star, Corporate Executive, Entrepreneur, Filmmaker, and Holistic Hotelier. He will show how to identify and unleash the power of life purpose and passion leading to long-term personal and professional fulfillment.

Best Practices Are Stupid by Stephen Shapiro

In This Soundview Live webinar, Why Best Practices Are Stupid, Stephen Shapiro will offer forty counterintuitive yet proven strategies for boosting innovation and making it a repeatable, sustainable, and profitable process at the heart of your company’s culture. Shapiro will show that nonstop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack.

You’re invited to attend one or both of these important events. Each webinar will be entertaining in its own way, as Cusumano explains his unusual career path and Shapiro debunks business’s sacred best practices.

If you’re not a current Soundview subscriber, now is the time to join. Both events are free for subscribers, and it only takes three events to cover the full cost of a subscription. Check out the options and join us.

If You’re Looking for an Edge in Business, Try Trust

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In this blog, we regularly look at the trends as they are being covered in business books. One topic that has gained momentum in recent years is Trust. Among the authors that have tackled this subject are Stephen M.R. Covey with The Speed of Trust and Smart Trust, Jordan Lewis with Trusted Partners, Rohit Barghava with Likeonomics, Robert Hurley with The Decision to Trust, and the list goes on.

David Horsager is another author to tackle this topic with his book The Trust Edge. He makes the statement “The single uniqueness of the greatest leaders and organizations of all time is Trust.” And, “Trust has the ability to accelerate or destroy any business, organization, or relationship. With greater trust comes greater innovation, stronger brands, increased retention of good people, higher morale, multiplied productivity, better results, and a bigger bottom line.”

What all these authors agree on is that trust is very important in business … in fact it may the single most important characteristic of a strong business or leader.

Horsager provides what he calls the 8 pillars of trust, to help organizations and their leaders build trust:

1. Clarity: People trust the clear and mistrust the ambiguous.

2. Compassion: People put faith in those who care beyond themselves.

3. Character: People notice those who do what is right over what is easy.

4. Competency: People have confidence in those who stay fresh, relevant, and capable.

5. Commitment: People believe in those who stand through adversity.

6. Connection: People want to follow, buy from, and be around friends.

7. Contribution: People immediately respond to results.

8. Consistency: People love to see the little things done consistently.

To help you build trust in your organization and career, we’ve invited David Horsager to join us for our Soundview Live webinar How to Build Trust in Your Organization, coming up on February 13th. Horsager will shed further light on the 8 pillars, and provide examples of real-world companies that have made trust the center of their organizations.

Soundview subscribers attend all Soundview Live webinars for free, and others pay just $59 and can fill a conference room with colleagues and ask questions of Horsager during the event.

Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t

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THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE

NO NOISE WITH THIS BUZZWORTHY BOOK

Nate Silver, the creator of the New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight.com, is probably America’s most well-known statistician, especially after his assertion that a 300-plus electoral college vote victory for Barack Obama was highly probable proved correct. In The Signal and the Noise, Silver explores a wide variety of areas — including electoral politics, sports, weather, terrorism, war and gambling — in which prediction plays a major role. He examines some of the major failures, from Pearl Harbor, 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis to a whole series of failed earthquake forecasts, to try to understand what went wrong and what can be learned for the future. The problem is not the lack of data — today there is an almost endless supply of information on any topic or question. Instead, the problem is learning how to interpret the information, paying attention to the right information and recognizing the rest as just distraction — in other words, recognizing the difference between a predictive signal and the distracting noise.

Colossal Misinterpretation

Silver begins by examining one of the most colossal errors in prediction in recent times: the world financial crisis that no one predicted. As Silver explains, the signals were present, but were dismissed. As analysts and decision-makers watched continuously rising house prices, they failed to see the potential for a bubble; as they watched the explosion of mortgage-backed securities, they failed to understand the risk of those securities; as they started to consider the potential of a housing crisis, they failed to see that such a crisis could trigger a global financial crisis; and as they dealt with the financial crisis, they failed to predict the long-term impact.

Be Foxy

For Silver, the best forecasters are going to be “foxes,” rather than “hedgehogs.” The metaphor comes from Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Hedgehogs believe in big governing ideas from which everything flows, Silver writes. Foxes, on the other hand, believe in little ideas and multiple approaches. Hedgehogs are specialized, stubborn and confident. Foxes are multidisciplinary, self-critical and cautious. The principles of Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog reflect his “foxy” approach to forecasting. Instead of confidently making one specific forecast and sticking to it, especially if it’s different from what everyone else is saying, Silver offers a range of probable outcomes and is willing to change the predictions in light of new information.

The Human Factor

Despite his mastery of data, Silver notes that the human factor is equally important in making the right predictions. “What is it, exactly, that humans can do better than computers that can crunch numbers at 77 teraFLOPS?” Silver asks, as he considers two meteorologists staring at every screen on the forecasting floor of the National Weather Service headquarters. The answer: “They can see.”

Of course, they can also misinterpret what they see. But Silver is hopeful for the potential of predictions as long as those making the predictions, he writes, adhere to the principles of an 18th century English minister called Thomas Bayes. In a chapter titled “Less and Less and Less Wrong,” Silver describes the probabilistic theory of Bayes, in which someone makes a prediction, looks at the new evidence, confirms or changes the prediction, looks at the new evidence, confirms or changes the prediction, each time getting closer to making the correct prediction. As Silver explains, Bayes taught us that we learn about the universe “through approximation, getting closer and closer to the truth as we gather more evidence.” Bayes theorem implies that “we must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty,” he writes. “We must think more carefully to the assumptions and beliefs that we bring to a problem.” As Silver demonstrates in detail in such diverse areas as sports, global warming, and terrorism, the more predictions are based on a Bayesian approach, the more likely they are to come true.

The Signal and the Noise is a sprawling, dense book that is as filled with stories and personalities as it is with data. This book will fascinate those who care about what is happening in the world — or what may happen.

Sign up for Executive Book Alert today and receive a review of a top business book every week.

Do You Have Global Leaders?

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A company can become global overnight, like when MetLife purchased Alico from AIG, or when Hewlett-Packard merged with Compaq. All of a sudden a company has people in multiple countries with various cultures, languages and ways of doing business.

Are your leaders ready for transglobal leadership? Or do you need to develop leaders that can handle this challenge in order to succeed globally? In their book Winning with Transglobal Leadership, authors Starkey, Ravi, Cooke and Barge provide a process for accessing your organization’s global capability and developing the leaders who will drive success.

They begin by listing the four classic syndromes of leaders who are not ready for transglobal leadership:

  •  The egocentric syndrome – things can be done only the way the home country does them.
  • The language syndrome – the best leaders speak my language.
  • The Western syndrome – we’re from the West and have been building business longer than you, so we know best.
  • The cultural assumption syndrome – we assume we know about the other party’s culture and what is relevant in our culture is relevant elsewhere.

If any of these ways of thinking ring true in your company, then perhaps you could use some help with assessing your transglobal leadership capabilities. To learn more about transglobal leadership, join us for our Soundview Live webinar on January 22nd. We are fortunate to have Linda Starkey, Nazneen Razi and Robert Cooke with us to explain their strategy and answer your questions.