Archive for December, 2009

Ever opened a tupperware in the refrigerator and wondered if something was still good. Then decide you weren’t sure you wanted to eat it now, and put it back in case you decide different later. This process gets repeated several times until nature in the form of green fuzz makes the final decision for you.

The same is true with the current state of government spending. For decades, we look at the debt and consider tackling it only to decide, we’ll figure it out later. When times are tough, our politicians want to pour money into shovel-ready projects, thereby putting money back into the economy. If on the other hand, we pay the debt down, we take money out of the economy. This effectively slows a boom period and what politician wants to mediate prosperity.

We got our answer when George W. Bush sent taxpayers cash back due to the US Treasury’s surplus of income earlier this decade. Just like the leftovers, we decided to wait for a “better time” to eat the debt. For this reason, I laugh when I hear about how we are leaving the debt to our children as though our children are suddenly going to take an action that we shied away from. It is true that we pass the burden of the clean up to them, but they likely won’t clean it up until the debt is covered in a green fuzz that jumps out and bites us.

And by then, do we think somehow our outcome will really be different than what occurred recently to the loss of confidence in large wall street banks?  Who is going to bail out the US Government?

Crea fama y eschate a dormir

Literally, “Create fame and lay down to sleep”. After about 30 minutes of Tea Bog Beet Knee explanations, I finally understood the use of this expression in Spanish and will hopefully be more successful in explaining it here (with fewer words ).

Essentially, once you have created your fame — your reputation — there is little you can do to change it.  Actions you take that attempt to change it are about as effective as laying down to sleep.

An earlier entry talked about the importance of first impressions, but your reputation is the sum of the early impressions.  The subsequent impressions have less and less effect on the total.  They refine, they don’t change.

Because we have a tendency to look for information that agrees with our assessments (we are heavily biased to believe and remember data that confirms our hypothosises rather than conflicts with them), it becomes difficult for us to chnage our impressions of people.

This can be both good and bad.  If you build a solid reputation for delivering on your commitments or for creating great results, missteps are forgiven and forgotten.  If, however, your fame is of ill repute, even little missteps are amplified when you decide to change.  It can be easier to start over with a new group of people than to continue trying to change the minds of those around you.

It also means that we need to force ourselves to reconsider previous conclusions about people and relationships. Do you have an employee that has grown a great deal in your organization?  Are you evaluating them still through the lenses of them as a beginner or are you able to see them as a new person would? When someone is not performing, and you work with them to improve their performance, are you able to set aside the opinion you had earlier and to be objective?

Both counts are hard, but you can lose loyal talented employees if you aren’t trying to force yourself to change.

Reputations have inertia and can’t change in and of themselves.  The require people who have judged the reputation to force themselves to reevaluate.

When we had a number of guests (19 people in all) over to our home during Thanksgiving this year, I observed a very interesting phenomenon:

Our house is made of concrete walls and tile floors.  The result is that sound carries quite well.  Obviously, with all of the people there were multiple conversations that were going on simultaneously.  This created an arms race of sorts.  One group would start laughing about something and the other group would raise their voices to talk over the sound.  When the first group stopped laughing, they now had to talk louder to be heard over the other group.  This would continue to the point of almost everyone speaking at very high volume.  This became most obvious when focus was shifted to making an announcement.  One person would talk and this would created a full reset and everyone started off talking in normal voices to each other (everyone could hear and no one was losing their voice).

I found this whole situation very interesting.  Every person is doing the most rational thing (speaking loud enough to be heard as opposed to telling the other people to shut up).  However, this very rational act leads to the opposite of it’s goal — no one is able to hear.  This kind of thing happens all of the time – consider a story I read where an infant was grabbing it’s own ear until it started hurting, this made the infant upset and so they started crying and grabbing harder, leading to a downward spiral.  As adults, we dismiss this as silly, yet how often do we make decisions without fully understanding how our actions end up thwarting the very goal we are trying to accomplish.  Food for thought….