Jerald Greenberg, Robert A. Baron, Behavior in Organizations. Chapter 13: Leadership in Organizations

The leader is the person with the most power in a group. A leader is non-coercive, goal-directed (Joel's note: I think this one is debatable; if someone can effectively veto any other goals, but puts forth no goals of their own, perhaps they are a leader that breaks this definition or an anti-leader; either way, their role clearly has something to do with leadership), and has followers.

A leader, who determines the group mission, is different from a manager, who implements that mission. But this distinction can be blurry, and one person can have both roles.

Great person theory says that all leaders tend to share special traits, such as drive, honesty, motivation, self-confidence, intelligence, domain knowledge, creativity, and flexibility.

Behavioral analysis of leadership suggests several dimensions. One grid is Autocratic to democratic and permissive to directive. Another is high to low person orientation and high to low production oriented; these are two different axes, and grid training is a technique to move people who are low on one or both to high on both, "9,9".

Analysis in terms of followers: the leader-member exchange (LMX) model, which defines "in-groups" and "out-groups"; leaders treat in-group members better. In self-managed teams, a team leader builds trust and teamwork, expands the team's capacity, attempts to create a team identity, exploits (in a positive way) differences between group members, and tries to foresee and influence change. Grassroots leadership empowers people to make decisions.

The attributional approach is a theory in which leaders try to understand and change the causes of followers' behavior. It also describes how followers think about leaders' motivations, e.g., the "rally 'round the flag effect" when followers extend additional trust to leaders when the group is in crisis.

Charismatic leaders exert special power due to personal charisma. Transformational leaders revitalize and transform their organizations.

Contingency theories focus on the relationship between leaders' characteristics and the context in which they lead. Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) contingency theory says that leaders can be evaluated by how they treat the follower they like least (like judging someone by how they treat waiters and servers). A low LPC leader is likely to succeed in environments of low situational control, when impersonal direction is usually appropriate, and high situational control, when the leader has unchallenged power. In context of moderate situational control, a high LPC leader will be more effective. The notion of putting leaders in situations appropriate for their personal capabilities is leader match.

Situational leadership theory defines two axes: task behavior (higher means more direction required) and relationship behavior (higher means more support required). In low task, low relationship, delegation is the best strategy. In low task, high relationship, participation. In high task, high relationship, selling. In High task, low relationship, telling.

Path-goal theory says that followers like leaders who help them on their path to their goal. Leaders can adopt four styles: instrumental, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented.

Normative decision theory says that seven criteria (leader information rule, goal congruence rule, unstructured problem rule, acceptance rule, conflict rule, fairness rule, acceptance priority rule) together suggest which of five basic strategies (autocratic, autocratic with input, consultative with individuals, consultative in group, group decision) is best for a specific context.

The substitutes for leadership framework describes conditions where leaders are not necessary, such as when individual characteristics of workers make leadership unnecessary, or when the jobs or organization are structured to not require leadership.

Leaders can develop via 360-degree feedback, networking, coaching, mentoring, and on-the-job experience.

---

Okay, that was the study guide. Now I will stop biting my tongue on my personal interpretations:

• p 504. "In view of all the attention that has been paid to the dishonest dealings of many top business leaders in recent years (e.g., most notably the late Ken Lay and his associates at Enron), it's important to note that successful leaders do, in fact, place a considerable emphasis on ethics and morality." This is the purest bullshit, special pleading of the rankest species. "oh, those guys don't count, because they were caught. real leaders are good people. How do we know that? Because leaders are good." This line of logic comes from the same batch of mental vomit as Bush's assertions that the US doesn't torture, or the idea that, "When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."
• p 517. Rupert Murdoch's vision is cited as "To provide accurate access to news for people throughout the world." He may have said that, but nothing in his record suggests he's ever believed that for as long as one second.
• p 522. "An airline pilot leading a cockpit crew is expected to take charge and not to seek the consensus of others as she guides the plane onto the runway for a landing." In fact, the most horrible air disaster of all time happened because a pilot, impatient to take off on a foggy runway after many delays, ignored his flight engineer's concerns about another plane possibly being on a runway. 583 people died. It's certainly true that, "when the demands of the task make it clear what a leader should be doing, it is perfectly acceptable for them to focus on the task at hand." But the example cited better illustrates the risk of a leader refusing to listen to subordinates.
• p 529. So, can we run nations through the checklist and see if democracy ever comes out as the appropriate leadership style?
• p 540. Question for discussion: "What special qualities make Chan Suh [founder of Agency,com, an online advertising company] so effective as a leader?" Oh, I know. The quality of being lucky. Lots of people are bold visionaries who create companies in sectors that conventional wisdom says there is no market. It takes leadership to do that. But most of those companies fail; it takes luck to land in a sector that really does explode. Bad leadership will help you destroy a success, but good leadership is not a sufficient condition for success. Again, the premise of the question is that, because person X has success, they must be an effective leader, and to me this is a circular premise.

The instructor apologizes for putting Mao in a list with Stalin and Hitler in a previous lecture. I certainly think, based on my understanding of history, that by many plausible definitions of the set of "most prolifically evil dictators of the 20th century", Mao is a solid member (scholars actually put him at the top of the democide league table). Where's my apology for taking him out of the list? The instructor further notes that anyone who thinks that Hitler, Mao, et al were "born evil" is missing the point of the class. Judging from remarks in this and previous classes, those of us who are not in the habit of writing and forwarding angry emails are missing out on a substantial portion of discourse for this class.

Perspective: when I get somewhat frustrated with the challenges of this course and fantasize about nasty feedback (example: instructor: "students who are not faring well in terms of points right now should ..." me: "is there a way for us to know how we are faring in terms of points right now?" instructor: "no, but there will be soon" Oh good, it's the final session of class for the semester and the only information about our performance is a single paper that has been returned.) I find it helpful to read things like this, which illustrate how you can easily out yourself as an asshole to be ignored. Then I take a deep breath and pet my dog.

Each time I try to do the readings for this class, I bounce off. There's more than a few Harvard Business Review articles, and they all tend to blend into one ur-article, which goes something like this:

Does A Successful Dynamic Leadership Framework Need Great Followers?¹

I've dedicated my entire life to following the greatest men in the world. I know that they are great because they are the CEOs of big corporations that make lots of money. And they have security guards, so I can't follow them too closely. But I am compelled to understand why they are so, so great. When I first started in the 70s, everyone said I was daft to research greatness, but I did all the same, just to show them. I conducted research so intense that they had to invent a new kind of supercomputer to crunch my data. It melted. So I recruited a team of highly trained interns and conducted more research, on a more powerful supercomputer. That one melted. So I built a third. That one caught fire, set off the halon system, killed three of my interns, then melted. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, reader, the strongest leadership research on the strongest leaders in the world.

And what I discovered is that one single factor explains why some men are great and others are not. That factor is awesomeness. The greatest men are awesome. In the chart, you can see a list of awesome men and details of how awesome they are. If you train yourself to be awesome, you too can be a great man. But you have to be awesome.

By the way, I have a consulting business where I teach people how to be awesome. Call me.

Yes, these articles really annoy me. If you want straight-up notes for the exam, go read my notes for Policy Analysis, the other core module this semester. I promise those are straight up. Anyway, here is the reading for the class.

Peter Drucker, Managing Oneself. Best of Harvard Business Review 1999.

Know yourself, including what kind of learner you are (visual, auditory, etc) and if you are more of a leader, follower, or adviser. Do this by feedback analysis. "Whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations." Once you know yourself, do what you are good at.

W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne, Tipping Point Leadership. Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.

Bill Bratton is great. Do what Bill Bratton did. Which is Tipping Point Leadership. So you should do Tipping Point leadership. There are four hurdles, Cognitive, Resource, Motivational, and Political. You should, respectively, Break Through, Sidestep, Jump, and Knock Over these four hurdles. (Yes, the palimpsest on this one is pretty easy to see through. They had an article about hurdles, a book called "Tipping Point" was a big best-seller, so they put the words "Tipping Point" on their hurdle article. What it really is is a missed opportunity to talk about the tipping point of the hurdles. But you only actually tip the Political Hurdle, so I guess that wouldn't work.)

Here's a reality check, courtesy the Washington Post. It shows crime over Rudy Giuliani's whole tenure as mayor; remember that Bratton was only commissioner from '94 to '96. And don't forget to look for the tipping point:

As a further aside, as long as Rudy continues bragging about his 9/11 leadership, perhaps those deaths should be included in the graph in 2001, which would obliterate the notion that violent crime decreased in New York over his tenure. But happily we haven't heard much of him lately; presumably running one of the worst presidential campaigns in American history has shown that platform consisting of three digits and a punctuation character isn't a winner.

In fairness to Malcolm Gladwell, the graph shows an inflection point, not a tipping point, which is "the level at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable", something more relevant to network theory and propagation models. Whether or not there's anything to "tipping point" beyond glib pseudo-science is a discussion for another day; suffice it to say there's little of Gladwell in Tipping Point Leadership.

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee. Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance. Harvard Business Review: Breakthrough Leadership, December 2001.

Summary: emotions matter. Great leaders cited: Jack Welch, in a sidebar.

Maria T. Farkas, Linda A. Hill, A Note on Team Process.

This is actually quite useful. It is from Harvard, but not from the Harvard Business Review. It's a note prepared "for class dicussion". It's too good and thoughtful to glibly condense to one sentence. And it mentions women and other groups that may be excluded from team discussion.

Jim Collins, Level 5 Leadership, The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve

Out of 1435 Fortune 500 companies, only 11 sustained greatness for 15 years after a major transition. All 11 had a "level 5 leader." Therefore, you should become a level 5 leader. A level 5 leader is deeply humble and intensely willful.

From page 6: "If Moclker had given up the fight, it's likely that none of us would be shaving with Sensor, Lady Sensor, or the Mach III—and hundreds of millions of people would have a more painful battle with daily stubble." All I can do in response is point to this article by Moclker's successor, James Kilts: Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades. (Here's some more serious criticism, noting among other things that "Kilts was personally never part of our community anyway. He never moved here, commuting from Rye, N.Y., and even holding his ''worldwide annual meetings" within a few miles of his home."

If you google for Level 5 Leadership, Jim Collins' home page cites David Maxwell of Fannie May. When "Maxwell’s retirement package, which had grown to be worth $20 million based on Fannie Mae’s spectacular performance... became a point of controversy in Congress", Maxwell voluntarily gave up the last $5.5 million of it. Wow! Amazing. What humility! Meanwhile, Fannie Mae engaged in "extensive financial fraud" over six years by doctoring earnings so executives could collect hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses. Of course, Maxwell retired in 1991 and fraud was only uncovered going back to the late 1990s. I'm sure Maxwell was completely clean..

Louis B. Barnes, Managing Interpersonal Feedback

Jerald Greenberg, Robert A. Baron, Behavior in Organizations. Chapter 13: Leadership in Organizations

Nothing to do with Harvard.

Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, A Survival Guide for Leaders. Harvard Business Review.

When people are forced to change, they often attack the person responsible. Be prepared for this.

This is actually a perfectly reasonable point, and there's some good advice: recruit the uncommitted; "resist resolving conflicts yourself—people will blame you for whatever turmoil results"; "restrain your desire for control and need for importance", "read attacks as reactions to your professional role, not to you personally". I have only two objections to the article. First, it very strongly encourages you to assume that the change you are promoting is the right change, and dismisses the idea that people are resisting the change because it's a bad idea. It's quite true that people resist good changes, but people also resist bad changes and the people directly affected by a change do have special insight into its impact. That shouldn't amount to an automatic veto, but it shouldn't be treated primarily as resistance to overcome or subvert, either.

Second, Heifetz and Linsky are the perpetrators of "Adaptive Leadership", the basis for books and articles and who knows what else. It just reeks of bullshit, in this case the bullshit of perfectly good but un-novel ideas repackaged under a new name to start the next fad. "Who Moved my Tipping Cheese Fish: Adaptive Leadership Lessons from the Great Lieutenant Bligh".

I think what really gets my goat on these things is that I don't buy the premise. The premise of almost all of these articles is, X is objectively great, as proven by outcome Y. X's secret is Z, and therefore you should do Z. But outcome Y is often quite flimsy. Bratton wasn't responsible for decreasing crime in New York. Jack Welch's financial success with GE may have been partially built on sand. Maxwell shows humility for giving back a fraction of a monstrous cashout. I think the real lesson is that, at a minimum, we know much less than we think we know, and we should be really cautious about people drawing bold conclusions, especially when they are trying to sell us something. I hope that's not news to anybody.

What about Enron?

I found two HBR articles about Enron prior to 2001 (plenty more afterwards). Both were positive:

Enron, with its "loose-tight" management policy, is an example of an organization that has figured out how to effect change without the usual pitfalls, says Mintzberg. [It] manages only two corporate processes very tightly: performance evaluation and risk management. Everything else is managed loosely, and local leaders get an enormous amount of discretion in figuring out how to get things done.

—Burning Questions 2001: How to overcome Change Fatigue". Harvard Management Update

[Enron] has invested millions of dollars ... to ... ensure that fluctuations in gas prices do not jeopardize the company's existence. ... [Enron]'s success - measured by both market share and profits - illustrates how financial engineers, working with marketers and strategists, can differentiate a commodity product without taking undue risk.

—"How Financial Engineering Can Advance Corporate Strategy", Harvard Business Review Jan-Feb 1996

---

1 This title is derived from the most commonly used words in the 90 Harvard Business Review articles with Leader in the title.

Context analysis of Queen Elizabeth I at her ascension to power.

Scope	Boundary	Opportunity
Global	Catholic Church, Spain, France	Colonies
National	decentralized power system sectarian civil war threats from abroad	public desire for peace Crisis=opportunity
Organizational	No money no standing army parliamentary limits on monarch	offer of marriage Institutional power of monarchy
Personal	gender limitations questions of legitimacy	daughter of a king

Seven sources of power: positional, coercive, reward, expert, referent, network, and associative.

Reading

The readings come from a book in pre-publication.

• p 40: "power without legitimacy is always transient." Oh really? An awful lot of dictators-for-life (or their subjects) would disagree, surely. You could argue that the ability to maintain power through violence is a form of legitimacy, but then you get fairly tautological: power without the ability to maintain power is transient.
• p 49: Wikipedia says Bill Gates topped out at just over $100 billion, not $160B.

Guest lecturer.

Context matters. Um, was somebody saying it didn't? The context paradox: it both enables and constrains. Four levels of context: personal/team, institution/organization, the nation, global.

Does a good leader adapt to the environment or pursue a consistent vision and, perhaps, choose the moment where the variable environment suits that vision?

The most critical part of leadership is knowing when to step aside, and a system which enforces that is a good idea.

Reading

The readings come from a book in draft form.

• p 8: To quote Samuel Huntington, "a framework is a simplified way of viewing reality." I don't care for that definition at all. I think "modeling" is a much better term for simplifying reality. OED's first definition is "A structure composed of parts framed together." A conceptual framework may set some things as more or less important, but that's not essential to its function.
• p 13: "According to ... the US State Department ... between 1985 and 2004, 13,096 people around the world were either injured or killed as a result of terrorist attacks." This is then compared to deaths from a few genocides and wars. Setting aside the incorrect conflation of casualties with fatalities, if this chapter is about context, then how about seeing death tolls from diseases, malnutrition, natural disasters, and so forth. (An interesting side-note would be to look into somehow better identifying "inevitable" versus "evitable" consequences of natural disasters, where evitable consequences come from population patterns, building codes, etc. Then we would get into which population shifts are themselves evitable and inevitable and ... maybe that thread is better left unpulled.)
• p 14. You can compare GDP with sales revenue? We've been discussing that here (1, 2). As a rule of thumb, profits plus one half of revenue (approximating labor costs) may be a better equivalent to GDP. Although this quibble does just bolster the point of the book, that the biggest companies are still smaller than "minor regional powers". Although I wouldn't call Taiwan minor. What's halfway between minor and major?
• p 14.

  ... what then defines the national context? We offer a simple list of three defining elements:

  1. Geography
  2. History and Culture
  3. Economy

  That's four elements.
• p 16: "Huntington identified a number of conflicts which were occurring at what he termed the fault lines between Civilizations. His choice of a geographic expression to describe this phenomenon was not accidental because most of the conflicts he identified occurred in places where two civilizations came into proximate contact and hence conflict." But the majority of conflicts since World War II have been civil wars. So I'm not clear on what point Huntington (or his paraphrase) might score by showing that most conflicts between civilizations happen where two civilizations come into contact. It seems like the (wrong) point lurking in the shadows is that most conflicts are are between civilizations, which they aren't.
• p 17. Now we're citing Bernard Lewis, having heard from Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. It would be nice if every public intellectual who was utterly wrong about the Iraq War was then treated more critically for the rest of their career.

The point of the chapter seems to be that context matters. I agree, but don't see anything novel or outstanding about how the chapter develops that fairly obvious point that justifies the existence of the chapter. It felt like a series of, "yeah, and?" moments.

The class to date in context. First, we did a two-day module on leadership and communication, unfortunately scheduled in the middle of the busiest stretch of the previous semester, and discussed "inner compass" issues (classes -1 and 0). Then we did reviewed our Myers-Briggs results (class 6), which are a bridge from the self to the group and FIRO-B (class 5, I think). The 360 reviews (class 6) are very much, how does the group see me. Presentation skills (class 7). Today is the penultimate lecture by the professor; then a guest lecturer gives two lectures on context, then the final lecture is on theory. The self-oriented material is more psychological than other things, and that can chafe. At the outer areas, context and organizations, studying these issues hasn't been proven to change behavior.

Class exercise to identify and deconstruct the behavior that we want to change.

Framework for feedback observations:

Situation

Behavior

Impact

Student presentations

The groups that volunteered to present today on Adaptive Leadership had a very vague brief. Our group decided after some discussion to present by play-acting our discussion about how to present, simultaneously a bold move and a kind of cop-out. (Amusingly, the way we played with the fourth wall was by raising it, since we interacted as if the audience didn't exist, instead of by speaking to them.)

We were lucky to have an expert presentation coach present for class, albeit a grumpy one since she had come directly from the airport without a stop home. It was tough for me to listen positively to the feedback, because I was proud of our work and wanted more strokes before the criticism, which the coach was simply not in the mood to provide. So it might have been an artifact of my imagination that her final words, congratulating us for making a presentation tailored to the group that communicated our message, came across in a tone of damning with faint praise.

Our most essential feedback, I felt, was when the class was asked for a show of hands: who thought we achieved our objective. The majority raised their hands. Other feedback: our method of writing out dummy text for our points as we went, and then revealing well-formed writing on another whiteboard as we left, was a bad idea. We should have just planned our stagecraft better to write out legible points as we went.

The presentation following us used the overhead for powerpoint, a minus in my book, but they more than made up for it by showing clear signs of practice: they all spoke freely and naturally without notes (except for the over-long Churchill quote). So the fluency was a big plus (update: well, two and a half well-performed segments out of five was still a huge step up from most presentations last semester). Content-wise, it didn't seem especially penetrative; something about politics as an integral part of leadership; a profile of Jesus as a leader, another of Churchill, and a shout-out to Jack Welch. At the very best, they didn't get any closer to defining "adaptive" leadership than our group did. (The message of our group was that adaptive leadership was an ill-defined buzzword, even to the point that we weren't sure whether it was intended to mean leaders who adapt, or leaders who lead people to adapt. While there might be useful ideas related to adaptive leadership, we weren't convinced they were new ideas.) Overall, the second group seemed like five independent presentations on peoples' personal interests, coordinated neither with each other nor with those before or after.

Side note: Jack Welch's leadership skills should be continually re-assessed for the next twenty to fifty years as the long-term damage he did to GE in search of consistent, indefinite short-term results emerges.

Second side note: I don't think Jesus is a good example to use for illuminating adaptive leadership. Religious figures aren't very suitable as case studies or anecdotes, because they're mythological. I don't mean that they're false (though as an atheist I happen to think that as well), I mean that they are loaded with content and meaning that is distracting from the point. Believers may overly credit, or perhaps not bother no notice, the actual context; disbelievers may wonder how the speaker's belief colors or undermines the suitability of the case study to the point at hand.

Watching the coach criticize the second group is illuminating, though again I'm not a neutral observer. She came to the front smiling, whereas she did not with ours. She asked for a show of hands between liking slides with pictures versus slides with only text, but her body language seemed to dictate the result (half the class raised their hands for the first, but only about 1/6th for the second choice). I have the impression that she has a number of pre-scripted points to make and is looking at the presentations largely for cues to spool out her points. I agree with many of the points, but don't care for the style of presentation (I'm complaining about the style of presentation used to critique the presentation - I'm so meta(l)).

Third group: finally, somebody seems to have found what the prof told us is the one paragraph buried in the entire book about Adaptive Leadership that actually defines it. (My paraphrase) Adaptive leadership is when a leader changes group behavior to better solve problems. Both the leaders and the followers are adaptive. More specifically, the problems and solution may be ill-defined, and the methods of changing behavior include cooperation and personal communication.

Sadly, it doesn't look like groups 2 or 3 haven't adapted anything in their presentations to address how the first two presentations went. We deliberately dodged this by going first. Although, we did consider making a change in our last rehearsal just before class and were unable to work it out, and so stuck with our original plan, so we wouldn't necessarily have adapted any more effectively.

Review of our 360 Reviews

A mention of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, etc). I had read that this wasn't actually grounded in clinical evidence. Here's a 2007 study:

Results: Counter to stage theory, disbelief was not the initial, dominant grief indicator. Acceptance was the most frequently endorsed item and yearning was the dominant negative grief indicator from 1 to 24 months postloss. In models that take into account the rise and fall of psychological responses, once rescaled, disbelief decreased from an initial high at 1 month postloss, yearning peaked at 4 months postloss, anger peaked at 5 months postloss, and depression peaked at 6 months postloss. Acceptance increased throughout the study observation period. The 5 grief indicators achieved their respective maximum values in the sequence (disbelief, yearning, anger, depression, and acceptance) predicted by the stage theory of grief.

I've read that three times and I'm still not sure what they are saying. I guess they sort-of validated Kübler-Ross?

Today we are reviewing our Myers Briggs test results. This is also the deadline to complete our 360 Reviews. This is a third-party program to whom the school is paying lots of money to operate an independent website where we can type in our co-workers' emails and names to harass them to fill out a questionnaire about us. I think we're supposed to get seven people to respond. I sent invitations to thirteen people, of which three completed the survey and two started and abandoned it. I don't blame them for abandoning it; it's seventy questions and a lot of them read like this:

AHMED reduces complexity to a few core priorities in pursuit of 
the major strategic objectives
 	1. Substantial improvement needed
	2. Slight improvement needed
	3. Effective
	4. Very effective
	5. Role model
 
	0. Not observed

Here's a few more actual questions:

• ...develops strategies in accordance with the business vision
• ...monitors the effects of change initiatives and reviews their value

Please excuse me while I go monitor the effects of my change initiatives.

Class Session

We got our Myers-Briggs results back, and spent 90 minutes arranging ourselves around the classroom in order of score. Then we got and discussed our FIRO-B scores. Some of this seems helpful but it takes me a conscious effort of will to ignore the similarities with horoscopes and cold reading techniques.

Leadership Direction

If a person has a sense of purpose, they seem to go much further, including perhaps going further biologically.

Happy life: research points to three factors: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

Randy Pausch Lecture

Three causes of mass death: disease, famine, and deliberate killing. The last is the domain of the leader. (I guess the traditional inclusion of Death in this list violates fourth rule of good categorization systems.)

Speaking of Jim Jones, here's a transcript of part of his final speech:

Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple. There’s no convulsions with it. . . . Don’t be afraid to die. You’ll see, there’ll be a few people land[ing] out here. They’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this. . . . Please, can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medication? . . . We’ve lived — we’ve lived as no other people lived and loved. We’ve had as much of this world as you’re gonna get. Let’s just be done with it. (Applause.). . . . Who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it’s humane. . . . Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t lay down with tears and agony. There’s nothing to death. . . . It’s just stepping over to another plane. Don’t bethis way. Stop this hysterics. . . . Look, children, it’s just something to put you to rest. Oh, God. (Children crying.). . . . Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please, please, please. Don’t — don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child.

The key to getting people to do awful things is to diffuse responsibility.

Extended discussion of the Milgram experiment. The Wikipedia entry raises the point that the phenomenon in those experiments is more probably learned helplessness than obedience to authority.

Positive psychology: instead of how to get from negative to normal, how to get from normal to positive.

This Monday morning class marks the beginning of our third semester: two core classes, each at twice per week, to wrap up two complete classes in six weeks plus finals.

This class has a lot of personality test sorts of things, including (of course) the MBTI. There's also some sort of online assessment thing where you ask one boss, four peers, and four "reports" ("report" being the very unpleasant word for people who report to you, e.g., subordinates (not a better word)). Which confused me because we don't have an "reports" here at school, but now I'm realizing that we were supposed to pick people from the real world, not from school. D'oh. That makes more sense then my addled thinking. I guess I'll go and invite some more reviewers. Some discussion; a student comments that back home, nobody who reported to him has internet access. Apparently, if you are Japanese it's unlikely you will get high ratings from your peers, no matter what. Questions about the wording of the invitation that "reports" get; what if many of my "reports" were more politically powerful than me, even if I technically wrote up their reports? What if my boss was my father? What if I've never had a boss?

FYI: American Dental Association's notes on brushing and flossing. (Yes, it's relevant to class.)

Group discussion on whether phones, SMS, and laptops. Consensus: phones bad, SMS fine. Some mild mockery of the student in the back who has been emailing and SMSing for the whole first hour of class and is oblivious every time class attention is directed towards her. No problem with laptops (or phones, for that matter) perceived by students. Faculty have discussed banning laptops. Suggestion (from students) that there should be no laptops in class except for taking notes. Joel's note: My own behavior fits the "infovore" or "internet addict" profile. I want to pay attention to class, but I struggle. Blogging helps by keeping me focused, but it leads to a bigger problem, which is that I follow up interesting things and tune out of class. I have actually tried playing solitaire simply as a way to occupy a bit of the more spastic part of my brain so the bulk of it can pay attention, and that does actually seem to work, but of course it looks terrible to anybody sitting behind me. I think knitting would accomplish the same thing and be more socially acceptable, but I don't especially want to have a bunch of knit things. And I'm not the sort of person who dresses my dog. From the prof: "When somebody's taking notes, you get a sense of participation and eye contact. When they are day trading, it's simply a void and you ignore them and the students near them."

People who get silver (where silver means something pretty special) and want gold instead. The psychology of peak performance. Joel's note: but peak performance and peak achievement are only loosely related. Most peak achievements can only be reached by via extreme performance, but peak performance doesn't guarantee peak achievement.

The value of IQ and EQ as performance predictors. Applied EQ is called, of course, Primal Leadership.

As an aside, (almost) everything that's wrong with the Business self-help industry can be found in this quote adorning the Amazon page for that book: "Harvard Business Press is discovering innovative ways to conquer the changing business universe while keeping its focus on the basics." As Orson Welles would say, "This is a lot of shit, you know that?"