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Insecure Egomaniacs

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Stern Woman BWIn April 2007, the New Yorker published an article by John Calapinto called The Interpreter. It describes Dan Everett, a linguistic researcher who lived for many years with a remote Amazonian tribe in Brazil, the Parahã.

The Parahã consider their language to be vastly superior to all others, and show no interest in learning other languages. In fact, as far as they’re concerned, nearly anything that isn’t part of their culture is completely un-interesting – planes, movies, radio. They are entirely self-absorbed, in a very profound and fundamental way.

Meanwhile, back in the “civilized” world, the field of linguistics is dominated by the theory of Noam Chomsky, which I won’t attempt to describe except to say it posits a universal characteristic of human propensity to form language. In other words, it says all languages must have this one thing (recursion) in common.

Well, surprise, surprise. The Parahã language, according to Everett, appears to be a counter-example. All attempts at demonstrating recursion fail. Chomsky would appear to be wrong.

But the Chomsky-ites are undeterred. Something must be wrong – wrong with the data, wrong with the researchers, wrong with the methodology. Because something can’t be wrong with the theory.

And so the linguistic theorists are just like the Parahã they study: convinced of the utter un-interesting-ness of the world around them – and blissfully ignorant of the irony.

Self-Centricity

Linguistics is hardly the only example of this self-centricity. We are literally born with it; our world starts off as hardly larger than our mother’s arms. Our view of astronomy was earth-centric until very recently in terms of human development.

To this day, maps of the world tend to be centered around, surprise surprise, the country they’re sold in. China was called the Middle Kingdom. Mutual funds in the US tend to be heavily weighted toward US stocks, while those in the UK are UK-weighted – yet each describes itself as global in view.

So, we think we’re the center of the universe. Let’s call that arrogance.

But arrogance has a helpmate, who often shows up at the same time and place.

Insecurity

We all like to be liked. The need for affiliation runs deep in our species, and not just for propagation. As far back as archaeology can inform us, we have tried to present ourselves to others in the best favorable light. Women wear makeup, men strut. So it goes.

In modern society, this reaches abstract levels. Some develop neurotic obsessions about the likelihood of their newborn offspring getting into Harvard, and nearly all of us are prey to teen-age angst – they like me, they like me not, my life is over.

Truth be told, very few of us ever achieve complete escape velocity from this insecurity. We still channel our inner teen-ager with depressing regularity. The urge to measure our insides by the metric of others’ outsides is powerful.

Insecure Egomaniacs

When self-centricity meets insecurity, we get Insecure Egomaniacs. In my experience, it’s not that some people are IE’s and some not – it’s that we all are IE’s, more or less, at different times. The struggle is to be less of an IE, more often, in more situations.

When we are in our IE phase, we reciprocate like alternating current between worrying that no one notices us, and that everyone is looking at us. We think ‘dance like no one’s watching,’ but we aspire to dance so well that everyone watches. We want to be at the center of the crowd, but we sit in the back row, on the side.

It’s as hard to trust an IE as it is for an IE to trust. Both arrogance and insecurity are a form of alienation, cutting us off from another, and from others. In our IE modes, we see risk everywhere, and can’t bear the thought of intimacy or vulnerability – it would either deflate our arrogance, or frighten our insecurity.  And so we rotate, iterate, prevaricate.

We are not doomed by our IE predilections, not by any means. But that’s another story.

 

Lessons in Strategic Communications from an Admiral

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You may have missed it. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave a clinic in communications, public relations and sales. It was in late August–perhaps that’s why you didn’t hear of it.

Of course, it was also cleverly disguised as a critique of the US government’s communications policy with respect to the Muslim world. But no matter, it was a clinic nonetheless. Here is Adm. Mike Mullen:

"To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate…

…most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all," he wrote. "They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are."

What constitutes good communication? According to Adm. Mullen:

"…having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves. We shouldn’t care if people don’t like us. That isn’t the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time.

[our messages] lack credibility, because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises."

Clearly Mullen is confusing his skillset with that of a communications expert. What else does he think good communication requires?

"It’s not about telling our story," he stated. "We must also be better listeners."

You may think Mullen is out of his league. Then again, if you are reading this blog, you probably recognize his wisdom. But let’s pile on some more anyway.

Communication is a Two Way Street

The heart of influence lies not in our fancy powerpoints or elegantly crafted talking points. Ironically, paradoxically, it lies in listening before we talk.

Thomas Friedman articulated this well in his commencement address at Williams College a few years ago:

The most important part of listening is that is is a sign of respect. It’s not just what you hear by listening that is important. It is what you say by listening that is important…

Never underestimate how much people just want to feel that they have been heard, and once you have given them that chance they will hear you.

The Psychology of Communication

Communication is a dance, not a diktat. The establishment of trust requires communication, in an ascending exchange of reciprocal acts of listening.

Being right is an overrated virtue. In fact, being right too soon has the effect of pissing people off. There is a time for every season, including stating opinions. And that time is after you have listened.

Not all truisms are true, but this one is:

–People don’t care what you know, until they know that you care.

That simple little sentence, phrased in an intentionally corny manner so as to increase the odds of remembering it, is very sound psychology.

Communications, influence and trust have a few very simple rules: one is, first you listen.

  • Shrinks know this.
  • Good salespeople know this.
  • Good diplomats know this.

Apparently, so do Admirals.

Thanks for the clinic, Admiral.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Business Ethics and Self-Orientation

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The Harvard Business School Working Knowledge series has a track record of picking fascinating topics, even if I’ve occasionally accused them of over-analyzing the obvious.  Not so in a current article.

Why We Aren’t as Ethical as We Think We Are, by Tenbrunsel et al, is not only a terrific topic, but—in my humble opinion—it’s treated very provocatively. It raises big issues well.

Here’s HBSWK’s abstract:

People commonly predict that they will behave more ethically in the future than they actually do. When evaluating past (un)ethical behavior, they also believe they behaved more ethically than they actually did. These misperceptions, both of prediction and of recollection, have important ramifications for the distinction between how ethical we think we are and how ethical we really are, as well as understanding how such misperceptions are perpetuated over time…Key concepts include:
• All individuals have an innate tendency to engage in self-deception around their own ethical behavior.
• Organizations worried about ethics violations should pay attention to understanding these psychological processes at the individual level rather than focus solely on the creation of formal training programs and education around ethics codes.

That second conclusion contrasts with the usual business approach to "ethics."  Many corporate “ethics” initiatives amount either to probabilistic analyses or to brainwashing about political correctness.

Harvard Business School’s own ethics program is, if I recall, built around analyzing three constituencies: business, the law, and society (the latter including prevailing norms and mores).  The manager’s job is to intelligently balance the response.

This approach doesn’t distinguish between “ethics” and corporate strategy.  If the overriding goal is the long-term survival and success of the company—which it nearly always is (think "sustainable competitive advantage")—then "balancing" is just another exercise in corporate optimization.  The concept of a “conscience” in such models is a curiosity that seems to exist solely in others—just another data point or constraint to be optimized.

Yet how can “ethics” be discussed absent a treatment of the formation of conscience?

It can’t.  To their credit, the authors suggest conscience is individually meaningful, and affected by emotional processes. They say the psychological angle may be heretical to some ethicists—but I think the personal angle is even more heretical to most business thinkers, stuck in modes of alignment and processes, where "conscience" is an alien concept.

The article has meaning beyond ethics.  Look at this pattern.  People think they are more ethical than others; and they rewrite their past (and future) ethicality relative to current actions.

This is also a pattern not just of ethics, but of self-orientation.

A study asked faculty and students to rate how often they thought about the other group, and how often they thought the other group thought about them.  Yup—students and faculty alike thought mostly about themselves—but students assumed that faculty were also absorbed by their thoughts of students.  And faculty assumed that students were consumed by thoughts of faculty.  Everyone projects their own levels of self-absorption on to others, no one noticing the true similarity—self-absorption itself.

In its low-grade form, this is human nature.  In extremis, it is narcissism.  Another extreme form is encountered in alcoholics.  In both cases, the individual projects an over-inflated sense of one’s own importance on to others. (For narcissists, the projection is always positive—for alcoholics, it’s an oscillating  sine wave of positivity and self-revulsion).

Narcissists and alcoholics—I suspect—aren’t high on ethical behavior charts either.

Which suggests the ability to get out of oneself and to see things as they are are prerequisites both for accurate observation of the outside world, and for ethical behavior.  

Which suggests that strategy and ethics actually share something—an innate focus on the Other.  Self-centered strategies, those built around optimizing selfishness, are ultimately self-destroying; good strategies are intimately bound up with markets, customers, employees, suppliers.   Ditto for ethics; an ethics built solely on corporate success is an oxymoron.  Ethics require us to be intimately bound up with others.  

Hmmm…strategic and ethical analyses share an external view…both have a psychological component…business is about people as people, not just as objects of behavioral vectors …

This is not your normal business writing.  Kudos to HBSWK, and to the authors.