Lonely Donkey

What Motivates Us?

2010-06-09T22:32:00.006+02:00

Just the other day I had posted the review of some studies done by D. Ariely on the relationship between bonuses and performance. Today I found this great animation of some of the studies carried out in the field of motivation. Very fun to watch!

Apple to Enter the Ad Business

2010-06-09T11:07:00.009+02:00

Apple recently reached the 1 billionth app sold on its App Store. The lucky guy who downloaded the billionth app won a $10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule and a MacBook Pro. That's a nice way of gaining fidelity from customers! More recently the iPad was released worldwide and in a few moths the new iPhone will hit the markets. In a few words this means that people are going to download more and more apps. That's why Steve & Co. must have thought that it was worth milking the cow in as many ways as possible: for example, by entering the ad business.

Nowadays developers already put advertisements into their applications, but that's done in a kinda goofy and frustrating way. Every time you mistakenly press with your finger on one of those stupid banners contained in the apps you are ripped out of the app and taken into the browser into a page that you could not care less about. The result, as mentioned by Jobs himself, is that people do not press on the banners.

Apple decided to develop a way in which it could be possible to see ads by remaining in the app. The ads are going to be interactive, emotionally engaging and very easy to develop. Steve jobs recently showed in a presentation how the new ad platform is going to work; strangely enough the ad used for the demo was the ad for the new upcoming Toy Story 3 produced by Disney Pixar (Jobs sits in the board of directors) which as humbly admitted by Steve is "awesome" and "really good".

Developers will get the 60% of the revenues from these ads; the rest will probably go into Apple's safe. Given the huge number of apps sold by the Cuppertino company this may be a good move. Moreover, this is going to help developers to make some money so that they will keep developing applications, maybe make some money out of it and - most of all - prices wil remain reasonably low for consumers.

If you are interested in learning more about Apple's (well, Steve's) vision of the future you can give a look at the videos of this year "All Things Digital" conference (covered by yesterday's Wall Street Journal). Here Steve talked about why he believes the iPad is the first step towards the end of traditional PCs and about Apple's idea to enter the ad business. Also present at the conference were other big fishes such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, James Cameron, Steve Ballmer, etc... . If you want to see the videos you can click here. Enjoy!

Big Bonus = Better Performance?

2010-06-07T22:00:00.007+02:00

What's the relationship between pay and performance? Is it wise to pay executives with incredible bonuses? Higher pay equals more motivation? Dan Ariely, professor at Duke University and author of "Predictably Irrational" and most recently of the new book "The Upside of Irrationality" tried to answer these questions (and many others) with one of his nice experiments.

Imagine the following experiment: you are given six tasks to perform. All the tasks require a mix "creativity, concentration, memory and problem-solving skills". Each task lasts for some minutes; all together they last for about an hour. In the first condition you are told that if you do very well in the six task you will get the equivalent of one day of compensation. In the second condition you are given two weeks of compensation. In a third condition you are given, instead, five months of compensation!

Professor Ariely and his collaborators run this experiments in rural India (where the average person monthly spending is about $11). In this way they could perfom the experiment without "raising the eyebrows and ire of the university's accounting system", but still offer very meaningful rewards to the people involved.

The results showed that money can be a "double-edged sword". In fact more money are motivating you to perform better. But, this holds true up to a certain point. After a certain amount, big bonuses have a stressing effect: you feel like you have to give more but enter into a stressed state of mind and are not able to perform well anymore. As mentioned by Ariely in a recent interview on his book: "when it comes to creativity and problem solving and thinking and memory and concentration, it turns out you can't will yourself to higher level of performance. And instead, the high bonus actually got people to be very stressed."

Therefore, according to Ariely's experiments, the incredible bonuses executives are taking would not lead them to perform better. If you want to find out more about the relationship discussed here and learn much more about the way in which irrationality governs our life give a look to Dan Ariely last book: The Upside of Irrationality: the Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home.

This Post is About...

2009-12-26T22:07:00.006+01:00

Here is a nice and funny story I've read in P. Watzlawick's book "How Real is Real". It may be useful to describe the problems of intercultural communication, the various problems of "translation" that may occur when people coming from two different cultures are interacting. When a healthy meta-communication is lacking, misunderstandings like these may touch everyone.

During the last years of World War II, a great number of American soldiers stepped on the English soil. This event granted the occasion to better study the effects of the penetration of one culture into another one. Among the various aspects investigated in this study was the one of courtship. It is funny to read the results of the study since it appears that both the American soldiers and the English girls were claiming that the other party was too explicit and wanted to get to quickly to the moment of having sex. How is that possible that both were making a similar affirmation? Here is what was found after some time.

Apparently, in both cultures the models of courtship (from the first glance to the moment of having sex) consisted in a series of about 30 steps. These 30 steps were the same in both cultures, but the problem was that they were positioned in different ways. Thus, for example, the kiss could have been the fifth step for the american guy, whereas it could have been the 25th for the English girl. Therefore, when the American guy decided to kiss the English girl (thinking that it was an extremely innocent gesture), she would think something like: "This pig is already kissing me!" Anyway, at this point she had to decide whether to run away or to get ready to have sex. If she went for the second choice the American guy would probably think: "Jesus, these English chicks are dirty!"

Therefore that's why the two parties were blaming each other for being too "dirty". Can we blame any of the two groups? Of course not; it is the nature of the interaction that makes such things happen. If we make the error of taking one's point of view as THE point of view, we fail to understand a key point in how human beings should approach one another. Misunderstandings as the one described above do not necessarily happen only to people coming from different cultures. As I have mentioned at the beginning of this post, if meta-communication of any kind is missing the risk for mistaking others' intentions is always behind the corner. I am going to say something more about that in one of the next posts...

COP15: What do People Say?

2009-12-09T18:38:00.004+01:00

COP15 has officially started. Great hope for what is being decided in Copenhagen. In the editorial office of the Lonely Donkey Blog I had a discussion with myself and decided that I had to post something about it. Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon! Actually , to be honest, I am not writing anything, only pointing at a couple of interesting links (in my opinion) discussing about the climate conference.

1. Is Copenhagen the Best Place for the UN Climate Change Conference? An article appeared on FastCompany where the author ask himself and his readers if Copenhagen is really the a good place to host the conference. Apparently Denmark is not that green; or maybe it is?

2. What is China saying in Copenhagen? A blog entry taken from Freakonomics Blog written by Stephen Dubner disussing the role of China.

3. The Copenhagen Climate Conference. Green Enough? A nice diary of what is happening at COP15 from The Economist website. Apparently the whole thing is less interesting that we would expect. (thanks to Simone Moriconi for the link)

4. Political ill wind blows a hole in the climate change debate A little piece written by Tim Harford criticizing the approach taken by the world leaders.

Enjoy Responsibly!

PS: a lot of noise is being made about this whole thing of lowering our CO2 emissions. Someone suggests that much cheaper and quick approaches are possible. I had written a post on this interesting approach. You can find it here

Identity, Discourse and Organizations: Managism

2009-12-06T13:47:00.003+01:00

In the last post I had promised to write a piece to make what I had written there a bit more concrete. Here I am! I want to discuss the implications of a certain type of discourse on managers’ identities. The managism discourse can be defined as:

An everyday discourse at the hearth of which is the belief that there is a distinctive managerial expertise based on a body of objective management knowledge which managers should apply to enable them rationally to design, maintain and drive organisational systems in the same way that expert engineers design, maintain and drive machines. (Watson, 2006)

Think about it: almost all management books, MBAs promotional material and similar stuff tend to advance a similar discourse. Let us analyze the possible implications. Watson calls managism an “operating faith”; he says that one function of it is to comfort people and basically give them the sense of security they need in order to cope with the complexities of the profession. Watson tells us how the rhetoric used by this promotional material works as many stories do: “it builds up anxieties in the reader and then implies that these anxieties will be overcome by the purchase of the product”. The product being the book or the MBA program.

Anyway there is also a potentially dangerous side in the managism Discourse: it creates the idea that managers are very rational, cool, calculating and visionary leaders (better if equipped with an MBA from a top Business School). Managers are presented as heroes. This Discourse can therefore raise the level of expectations to an unattainable level making it very difficult to keep up with them. “And, of course, it demands [managers] that they prove themselves all the time by achieving more demanding ‘results’ ” (Watson, 2006). The results of not being able to cope with these expectations can be tragic (e.g.: stress, depression, suicide).

Sveningsson and Larsson (2006) suggest and interesting and alternative way in which managers may end up coping with the Discourses (of leadership): fantasy. In their article, they describe the interesting case of a middle manager whose actual inability to lead in a transformational way is compensated with a sort of “identity immune system” which makes him think that he is actually a transformational leader, despite what others think and say. Reality is compensated with fantasy. In describing the manager way of seeing himself Sveningsson and Larsson wrote: “self-identity as a transformative and visionary leader has taken on the quality of fantasy, understood as an idea that is disconnected from current reality […]”.

We have therefore briefly discussed the implications of the managism Discourse on managers’ identities. Of course, one should also understand that, luckily, there is space left for choice. In fact, as discussed in the last post, there are many contradicting and competing discourses on which we can draw. People are still active agents and therefore are not completely constrained in their actions. As Watson (2006) writes “there is a mixture of choice and constraint”. Different people make sense differently of such texts, depending on their identities, past experiences, etc… Since there are many different Discourses, there is room for choice, but sometimes the space may not be enough we could say. In fact, I think that it may be very difficult to step away from certain Discourses when living in a certain world (e.g.: business world) where they are so dominating. The managism Discourse is probably the strongest one and, I have to admit, that I also tend to be trapped in it when I think of the implications of undertaking a career in business.

Identity, Discourse & Organizations

2009-12-01T09:16:00.008+01:00

Common sense – derived from a strictly modernist understanding of the world - describes the individual as a fixed entity with a certain given and stable personality. In fact, identity has been classically conceptualized as a well defined and stable construct: the idea being that it stabilizes itself and never changes, except in exceptional circumstances, once one reaches adulthood.

A post-modernist approach would instead suggest that the individual is rather, using George Herbert Mead words, a “parliament of selves” or, using another metaphor taken from Karl Weick, an “ongoing puzzle that is undergoing continuous redefinition”. A process of never ending negotiation, of struggle is what therefore characterizes the “identity work” we need to engage in, in order to try to reach the necessary sense of perceived stability.

In fact, we try to make sense of who we are by drawing on various cultural/linguistic resources such as narratives and discourses. The assumption here, as discussed in another post, is that language shapes the ways in which reality is constructed. This last point is easily understood if we consider how "we cannot know, think about or analyse the world without using concepts, language, [categories] and "frames of reference", which come from the social world that we are part of" (Watson, 2006).

For example discourses - understood as the historically contextualized collection of texts, logics and assumptions about something - can a have a more or less strong influence on the way we can plausibly think, or talk about a certain subject, on the way we enact reality and therefore make sense of ourselves. Various competing and contradicting discourses coexist at the same time and, almost certainly, none is going to offer a sufficiently strong grip in order to guarantee to the individual the comfort of a sense of coherence and stability. In fact, as humans we are better understood as strategic and situationally oriented: the specific context, the various ongoing projects, the competing discourses present at a given time and many other factors are going to influence the current sense of self and consequently how we make sense of reality.

From an organizational point of view this is interesting because this continuous struggle to define one’s identity is going to influence and, at the same time, to be influenced by organizational life. For example, people’s work orientation – the meaning and attitudes toward work – are going to change over time together with what an individual is going to be willing to exchange with the organization: the inputs, the physical and mental effort, the responsibilities, willingness to accept risk-taking, acceptance of managerial control and so on and so forth.

Moreover understanding people in this more process-relational way may help us understanding how there is actually a limit to the extent of control that a manager can reach over the people working in the organization: it is in fact impossible to herd the cats, or to control the uncontrollable.

To conclude, I think that the practical implications of this paradigm shift in how we conceptualize individuals are not to be underestimated. In fact, as we know, theories in social sciences tend to have the property of self-fulfilling prophecies: “If men define situations as real they are real in their consequences.”

In the next post on this theme, in order to make what I have explained here a bit more concrete, I am going to analyze the implications of a certain discursive approach to management.

PS: Most of Ideas for this post were taken from: Tony Watson (2006) Organizing and Managing Work. Financial Times/Prentice Hall

Don't Eat that Marshmallow!

2009-11-18T17:53:00.010+01:00

In Psychology related fields, some great experiments - yeah, I mean those strange tests performed by people wearing white lab coats - were carried out. Among the more interesting we can list Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), Milgram's Obedience Experiment (1963), Festinger and Carlsmith Experiment on Cognitive Dissonace (1959), Asch experiments on conformity (1950s) the more recent "jam tasting" Experiment by Lepper and Iyengar (2000), and so on and so forth... These experiments were great because they were able to tell something about human nature in a very simple way.

Today I want to briefly describe one of these very famous experiments: W. Mischel's Marshmallow experiment; here is what happened. Children were invited in the laboratory and given a Marshmallow. Then the experimenter would tell the little kid: "Now I have to go away for some time. You can decide whether you want to eat your marshmallow now or when I come back. If you can wait till I come back I'll give you another one, so you can have two". Some kids would eat it right after the guy left the room, others tried for a while but could not resits the temptation. At the end, it turned out that only one out of three kids was able to wait the twenty minutes before the researcher would come back. (if you want to give a look at how children behaved in a recent reproduction of the experiment watch the video below; it's hilarious trust me).

Now comes the interesting part. The children were tracked down years and years later and it turned out that those who were able to wait were on average more successful adults and apparently more intelligent (they scored, on average, 210 point higher on the SAT test) Incredible isn't it? From such a simple experiment it is possible to predict whether a child has more or less probabilities of being succesful. Self discipline - the ability to delay gratification in exchange for long-term goal achievement - would be therefore an important factor in determining people success (according to the experiment).

This example can be used to discuss an important aspect of our lives with which we have to deal on a daily basis: self control. Think about it, how many times every day you have to deal with it? Here are just a couple of situations we find ourselves continuosly: shall I wake up and go to class or sleep another hour? Am I having another beer? C'mon another slice of cake is not going to kill me! (this was for girls) I can't eat out every day. I am spending too much! from tomorrow I'll stop! Yeah, I'll have another cigarette; the last one for today... I have to go to the gym... and so on and so forth... I bet you can recognize yourself in at least one of the examples I provided above. If not... Congratulations! ...or better: start enjoying life a bit more!

Leadership and Orchestra Conductors

2009-11-15T18:59:00.005+01:00

Some time ago I had written a post on the paradigm shift we are assisting to in the world of leadership. It just happened to me to find this fascinating talk, performed by orchestra conductor Itay Talgam, on the lessons we can draw by simply observing the leadership style displayed by a certain conductor.

From Experience to Transformation

2009-11-12T23:23:00.008+01:00

Today we have the great honor of having the first guest post here at Lonelydonkey! The author is my (almost homonym) friend Simone Moriconi. Enjoy!

For a firm, to create an experience means to make the product alive, to make its identity visible through a sensorial and emotional involvement of customers (Pine and Gilmore, 2000). We know that some product categories are suitable in nature for experience strategies, such as sport activities, travels, cars and motorbikes and so on…Some products and services have a real experience DNA. That means that after having used it, we remind that experience positively, we tell other people with fervour what happened to us and we keep those happenings in memory for a long time. The fact is that in our everyday lives we often find ourselves facing advertisings that present something as “true experience”. It is noticeable that a lot of companies just use this approach to enrich their value proposition, as every object or action could basically be “experientiable”. But we know that, for instance, it’s impossible to have an experience in using our hair shampoo, or wearing our brand new shoes. We can feel positive sensations but it’s not something that change us.

A real experience is a big change, it’s something that transforms us, since after having tried it we don’t feel the same as before. Furthermore, an experience is something absolutely specific, which is lived by a definite person in a well definite moment (Codeluppi, 2007). So, each experience is lived differently according to the single customer, since we are diverse, we have different mentalities, background and past occurrences.

Then, we must switch the concept: what a true experience must give is not a simple feeling, but a real transformation of the individual. According to Pine and Gilmore (2000) firms should create “positive changes in the individual’s sphere” (physical, mental, aptitude) through the development of strong and long-time relationships with customers. The more is possible to generate proximity with them, the more companies have the basis for building authentic experiences.

In business we find a lot of actors which don’t present their products as an experience, but actually offer it. Facebook is the most emblematic case: people have found new ways of communicating, playing, contacting friends and organizing meetings in a very efficient way (less time and less money). They spend their time doing different activities than before. Their life is no longer the same. They have been revolutionized by it. Is it not a real transformation?

Another example is the university. Students start their studies at the early age of 19 and graduate at 24/25. University is their point of reference for at least three or four years of their lives. They enter in the process without having clear ideas on their future and they go out (luckily) with a job, or anyway with a precise idea of how their existence will go on. Academic and life experiences shape them, changing their view of the world and inserting them in a life-long network of people. Professors teach them how to analyse articles, books and speeches. They give them a method and new perspectives to evaluate happenings around them. Travels abroad and exchange projects catapult them in a completely new environment where they discover new cultures and languages. Universities transform students following them through an irreversible path of life. From this point of view, the student becomes the product to be transformed, with all its strategic implications.

However, it seems that few universities realized to have this huge potential so far. Some of them do a lot of communication activities and initiatives in order to involve students and grow them up - especially for what concerns contacts with companies and career opportunities - but none of them implement a complete and explicit strategy of experiential marketing. The guidelines of the Customer Experience Management suggested by Schmitt (2003) should be applied even by that big range of firms that provide experiences without having consciousness of that. And those that sell commodities should choose a softer line of communication in order not to create great expectations that they will never be able to fulfil.

References:

Codeluppi V. (2007), “La dimensione spaziale della marca”, in M. Ferraresi, P. Parmigiani (a cura di), L’esperienza degli spazi di consumo, Franco Angeli, Milano, pp. 11-18.

Pine B.J., Gilmore J.H. (2000), L’economia delle esperienze, Etas, Milano.

Schmitt B.H. (2003), Customer Experience Management, Hoboken John Wiley&Sons, NJ.

Stumbleupon.com: the Definitive Solution Against Boredom?

2009-11-08T23:48:00.015+01:00

I am sure this has already happened to you: you are sitting in front of your pc and want to surf the web, but you have no idea on where to go... Inspiration is lacking... You start getting bored... You probably end up wasting time in Facebook by looking at pictures of people you barely know. Does it happen to you? Well, it happens to me! The interesting thing is: I may have discovered the definitive solution against boredom. I mean, I haven't really discovered it, I just found it by chance. It is called Stumbleupon. According to Wikipedia:

"StumbleUpon is an Internet Community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles."

Apart from the definition, what you get is simply a random walk through the web with the high probability of stumbling on something interesting. You can download the toolbar or simply go to stumbleupon.com and start by clicking on the Stumble! button. Every time you click on it you are redirected almost randomly to a new website. I said almost randomly because you can set your preferences (e.g.: music, art, culture, technology, etc...). When you stumble on a page you can rate it. You don't have to subscribe, but if you think you are going to use it more than once you'd better to, in fact if you start rating pages, after a while, you get more tailored results. I think it is definitely an interesting way to navigate the web; it allows you to discover pages you would never discover otherwhise.

Here are some of the sites I have found. Incredibly useless, but worth visiting:

http://www.questfortherest.com/

A wonderful little game. You just have to click around and try to understand what you can do. The aim of the game is to get the little men to complete the mission. Nerd satisfaction guarantee!

http://www.futureme.org/

Here you can write yourself an email and decide when you want to have it delivered.

http://ml.hoogerbrugge.com/

I don't know what this site is about, but it is totally sick.

...and many other nice (actually more useful) pages! Hope you can discover something interesting yourself. Enjoy!

Marriage: a Romantic view...

2009-11-08T11:19:00.005+01:00

Betsey Stevenson, economist at Wharton, shares her view on love (click here for the full article):

[...] Economists simply can't believe in one soulmate. There are too many people in the world and the odds of finding that one person in five billion are, well, you can do the math.

So if economists don't believe in soulmates, why do we think people get married?

Searching for a spouse is very similar to searching for a job. There is not one perfect job for each of us, but there are clearly better and worse jobs. So we hunt, for a spouse and a job. When do we stop? When the offer in the hand is better than the likely offer in the bush.

At a wedding I see a relationship that is good enough to settle down and start investing in.

If you get a reasonable rate of return, investment in your relationship will make it truly better than any other relationship you could have. And that's why I listen to people's vows: to understand what they want out of their marriage or in economist-speak, what they are contracting over.

How important are fidelity, loyalty, generosity, kindness? As an economist I think that a good marriage, like a good employment relationship, has shared vision, common interests, complementary abilities, and gains from specialization. [...]

Shall we really look at it from this perspective?

If the World Were Perfect...

2009-11-06T20:21:00.008+01:00

"We should often blush at our noblest deeds if the world were to see all their underlying motives."

La Rochefoucauld

"In science, as in love, too much concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence."

Peter L. Berger

"Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms."

Fëdor M. Dostoevskij

"This is the course in advanced physics. That means the instructor finds the subject confusing. If he didn't, the course would be called elementary physics."

Luis Alvarez

"Can we actually "know" the universe? My God, it's hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown."

Woody Allen

"If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

W. I. Thomas

"I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member."

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception"

"Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms."

Groucho Marx

"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing."

Dr Samuel Johnson

"The future ain't what it used to be"

"If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be"

Yogi Berra

Applying Sensemaking: the Amadou Diallo Tragedy

2009-11-05T00:04:00.015+01:00

Yes, I know, I know: I had written that I was going to write only two posts on sensemaking. But the other day I was thinking: "Ok, I have written two very theoretical posts on sensemaking. Wouldn't it be nice to try to write a more "applied" one?" So, I started to think about possible examples of "sensemaking in action" and the famous story of the murder of Amadou Diallo came to my mind. I had previously read it in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, and I already knew Bruce Springsteen had written a song about it [American Skin (41 Shots)], but it is anyway easy to find a description of the events in the internet. So, I decided I would try to briefly apply the theoretical points we have seen in the two previous posts (first & second) to the Diallo murder case to better understand how sensemaking works. Actually, the following case is a case where sensemaking miserably failed, or, better didn't work in the right way. Here's shortly what happened (if you want a more detailed description of what happened you can follow this link).

February 1999. That night, four plainclothes officers of the NYPD were patrolling in the Bronx. Amadou Diallo, a 23 years old afroamerican guy, was outside of his building taking some fresh air. When the policemen noticed him, they thought that he was fitting the description of a suspect that had previously raped numerous women in the area. They stopped and got out of the car. Diallo, noticed these four big men coming towards him and probably got scared. They told him that they were police officers and asked to have a talk. He probably didn't believe them and started running inside, towards his appartment. Two of the four policemen started chasing him. As he was reaching for his door, he noticed the two guys approaching and pulled of his wallet out of his pocket . One of the two officers, noticing that Diallo was taking a black square object out of his pocket, started yelling: "He's got a gun, he's got a gun!". The two policemen, also scared, started fire. One of the two policemen, instintively backpedalling, fell off the stairs. The other guys, in the general mess caused by the yelling and the gunshots, thought he had been hit by a gunshot and opened fire too. After Diallo was lying death on the floor, the shooting stopped. One of the NYPD officers approached the Guinean guy to sadly discover that the thing he had taken out of his pocket was only a black wallet, not a gun. Diallo had thought that the four guys wanted to rob him or maybe wanted to show his ID card. 41 gunshots were fired, 19 hit the guy.

We can say that correct sensemaking failed in both directions. Both "parties", constructed and interpreted the situation in the wrong way. Take into consideration, that the whole event happened very very fast. For simplicity reasons I will analyze the case only from the NYPD department side (I will purposely try to avoid any judgment on the matter). So, the first important point to notice is, in my opinion, the situation (point 3: enacted environment) and how it interacted with the four policemen identities (point 1: the role of identity in "deciding" through which lenses we see the world): they were in the Bronx, notoriously one of the most dangerous zones in NY. Moreover, the four policemen were already looking for a suspect. Therefore as they noticed Diallo outside of his door, they immediately thought he was the guy they were looking for. As we have seen in the last post on the topic, sensemaking is focused on extracted cues (point 6): a black guy standing out of a bulding in the Bronx doing nothing in the middle of the night. In an immediate retrospective analysis (point 2) of the situation they thought that something was not right, so they decided to interrogate the black guy. The fact that Diallo started running as they asked him to have a talk, probably confirmed their beliefs (another extracted cue on which they focused on in making sense of the situation). The fact that they thought that the "black thing" Diallo was taking out of his pocket, and later, when the police officer fell off the stairs, that he had been shot, are two other elements going in the same direction of the previous one (extracted cues). You can also notice how all the other points that I haven't mentioned so far played a role: the social stereotypes about black people living in the Bronx surely influenced how the whole situation was enacted. Also the idea that sensemaking is driven by plausibility rather than accuracy is quite evident and doesn't need to be commented.

So, I hope that with this example I have been able to give a quick flavour of how the theory I had presented on sensemaking can be applied to reality. Of course, the analysis I just suggested is very personal and superficial, but the aim of this post was not to offer a detailed analysis of a very complex case, but rather to offer an example of how the concept of sensemaking is useful in interpreting situations. If you are interested in such themes, and would like to read more, you can read K. Weick's analysis of the Mann Gulch disaster (a big fire in which 13 smoke jumpers lost their lives). In the article he provides a thorough analysis of the case and shows why and how sensemaking failed in that occasion.

Understanding Sensemaking, part 2

2009-11-03T21:46:00.005+01:00

In this previous post, we discussed the idea of sensemaking and how this concept is different (in some aspects) from the concept of interpretation. Now, in order to really grasp the meaning of sensemaking we need to explain its seven distinctive features:

1. Grounded in Indentity Construction: when we define a situation and interpret it we do it according to who we are and how we see ourselves. Our identity (identities) influences how we interpret the world. "I make sense of whatetever happens to me by asking, what implications do these events have for who I will be? What the situation will have meant to me is dictated by the identity I adopt in dealing with it" (Weick, 1995). Therefore we "decide" which aspects of reality are relevant and then interpret it according to who we are.

2. Retrospective: time is basically a pure duration, a stream of experience, it has no end nor a beginning. It flows. When time takes the form of distinct events that have a beginning and an end it is because we are interpreting it. It is like if we step away from it and look at it from an observer position. Therefore the direct implication of this is that the creation of meaning is a process that can only be retrospective.

3. Enactive of Sensible Environments: the idea of this point is that reality is not already defined, we define it. We decide what are the aspects of it that are part of our interest. We produce the environment we face. Reality is not something that is out there, it is mainly defined by ourseleves. Again, our mental schemes, our culture, our identiy influences what are the sensible environmentsto be enacted. But, it is important to be aware that we have defined those environments and that, therefore, we have defined the limits of the situations.

4. Social: the way in which we see the world is socially defined. Basically, we can summarize this point with Donne's expression "No man is an island". In fact, there is no way in which we can think, speak or act without being influenced by culture/society.

5. Ongoing: here, again, the idea is that pure duration (time) never stops flowing. "People are always in the middle of things, which become things, only when those same people focus on the past from some point beyond it" (Weick, 1995). German philosopher M. Heidegger, created the concept of thrownness to describe the idea that we find ourselves thrown in the middle of ongoing situations. The idea is also that we are in the middle of different competing things (called projects); how we see the world in a given moment is determined by these projects. Therefore, sensemaking doesn't have a clear beginning, nor a clear end and is strongly influenced by emotions.

6. Focused on and by Extracted Cues: we extract "elements of analysis" (cues) from the experience we are leaving and then focus on these elements to "perform" our interpretative work. Weick writes, "extracted cues are simple, familiar structures that are seeds from which people develop a larger sense of what may be occurring". Context influences what is extracted as a cueand also how it will be interpreted.

7. Driven by Plausibility Rather Than Accuracy: The idea here is that, in order to make sense of reality, we do not need to have all the necessary "data". We only need enough of it in order to get to our conclusions. Therefore, the precedence is given to satisfaction and plausibility rather than perfection and accuracy. This is also because of our bounded rationality, we can't, in fact, store and later elaborate all the information available. We have to filter information and with what we got we create plausible realities.

Ok, now we have know all the elements of sensemaking (hooray!!). At this point, we can continue with the exercise that I proposed in the previous post on the topic and refine it with the newly acquired categories. Try to notice, for example, how your identity (at a given time) influences how you build and later interpret a situation (point 1); Try to appreciate how reality is a shapeless thing and how you desperately and continuosly strive to define it and extract cues on which to focus (points 3 and 6), and so on and so forth... With all the points in place, if you really exercise, your ability to understand the phenomenon will grow significantly. It is working with me so far!

A little summary: the idea is that we live in a senseless and shapeless reality. It is not exactly something that is out there ready to be objectively described. We live in a "stream of experience".Reality is enacted: it emerges from an ongoing interpreting and updating of our past experience that is inevitably influenced by our social selves (social identity) and by the context itself. This is sensmaking!

Why are We Happy?

2009-11-02T23:18:00.013+01:00

Moreese Bickham spent 37 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He later got exonerated through DNA evidence. He commented: "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." Glorious experience?! How is that possible?

Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, tries to answer this and other similar questions in order to investigate on the secret of happiness.

Corporate Lingo

2009-10-31T22:26:00.020+01:00

Managerial Pseudo-Jargon: a form of language widely used in corporate settings which is neither a jargon in the sense of the specialised language of a group of experts nor a jargon in the sense of meaningless verbal noise making but which uses metaphors and expressions which tend to make organisations sound more solid than they really are and make managerial work sound more "special" activity than it actually is. (Watson, 2006)

Ok, every profession has its specific jargon: doctors, lawyers, plumbers and sailors (probably also prostitutes have one). Therefore, also managers, and corporate people in general, deserve this right. But, I have the impression that the managerial jargon is not really necessary as others may be. Many things could be said in "normal" languague, but probably they wouldn't sound as cool. Probably, one of the main functions of this way of speaking is to discriminate between those who are "in" and those who are "out"; therefore a signalling function. Or maybe, as pointed out in the quotation at the beginning, to make things sound more solid and special than they actually are. Anyway, this time I don't want to enter into any philosophical question about the managerial jargon, I just want to make fun of it (Ok, I am probably going to use it myself in my career, but who cares for now). I surfed the web to look for lists and definitions of the most common business terms (if you are studying a business-related topic or if you're already working in any type of business environment you'll know most of them) and collected some here (there are thousands, I have taken the ones I liked the most). Enjoy!

The following are taken from http://www.buzzwhack.com/

Absolutely: Over-enthusiastic, over-affirming four-syllable response used in place of a simple "yes."

Adhocracy: An organization with little structure run by creating a series of temporary cross-functional teams to do specific tasks. Depending upon execution, the result is either efficient problem-solving or utter chaos.

B2B: Business-to-business was too traditional sounding. B-to-b was too clunky. But B2B is way-cool and much easier to work into headlines and ads.

B2C: The abbreviation insanity continues. Now we have Business to Consumer.

Best practices: A term bandied about in business management circles and describes business tactics (and strategies) used in successful companies. The term, however, can be misleading. While "best practices" seems to imply success, they may have nothing to do with the actual success of the company.

Cannibalism: When a new marketing channel steals business from existing channels without adding new growth. While this is a legitimate business concern, it's downright frightening to the executive whose bonus is tied to the "old" channels.

Empowerment: The corporate mantra of the late '90s used to deceive subordinates into believing they actually were allowed to think and make decisions on their own.

First mover: In business, it’s the company that gets its new innovative product or service (or solution) to market first. Supposedly, this gives them a "first-mover advantage" and the opportunity to dominate the market and making it difficult for others to compete against them.

Leveraging our assets: This probably meant something once, but today EVERY COMPANY seems to leverage its assets. Doesn't it make sense that a company would put its resources, whether it's money, location or talent, to best use in order to make a profit?

Out of office: The annoying subject line of auto-reply e-mail that announces everyone else is on vacation or at a cool conference while you’re still slaving away at work.

Outshore: The practice of outsourcing a company's computer programming needs and development to a country where high tech labor is cheap (China and India come to mind).

Rightsizing: A perversion of "downsizing," meant to showcase the wisdom acquired by the "sizer" since his/her last foray into the re-scaling jungle.

Win/win: A fascinating business concept that somehow eliminates the "loser" in any deal or project. Loose translation: "This really works for us and we all pray it works for you, too."

The following are taken from http://www.mainframe.org/humour/various_corp_lingo.htm

must be deadline oriented: you'll be six months behind schedule on your first day.

some public relations required: if we're in trouble, you'll go on tv and get us out of it.

self-motivated: management won't answer questions.

seeking candidates with a wide variety of experience: you'll need it to replace three people who just left.

problem-solving skills a must: you're walking into a company in perpetual chaos.

requires team leadership skills: you'll have the responsibilities of a manager, without the pay or respect.

The list could go on ad infinitum with other terms and expressions such as Brain storming, Learning curve, Big picture, Benchmark, Downsize, Synergy, Walk the talk, Strategic fit... But I guess it's enough for the moment!

Understanding Sensemaking, part 1

2009-10-29T21:57:00.015+01:00

In these days I am reading a book called Sensemaking in Organizations, written by Karl E. Weick, professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology at the University of Michigan. I am supposed to read this book for a class I am following here in Copenhagen, but I am, anyway, getting more and more interested in the phenomenon of sensemaking (apart from the necessity to read the book for the exam!). I have to admit that I am having a hard time understanding the book, because it is pretty dense and complex, so that's why I decided to write a post about it: it may be a good exercise for me (so I understand if I have understood) and a nice reading for you (hopefully). The phenomenon described in this book - sensemaking - is an activity we are continuosly engaging in (on a more than daily basis I would say); so that's another reason for the legitimacy (and usefulness) of this post. In order not to make the post boring, I will try to be very concise and therefore explain only the basics aspects of the concept. I will split the discussion in two posts: a first one where in which I will define the concept and a second one in which I will explain the seven distinctive features of this phenomenon (always according to K. weick).

So, let's start with some definitions: Sensemaking is, in plain words, the process of giving a sense to reality. The idea is that we live in a continuos "stream of experience" that has no meaning in itself. It only gets a meaning when we attach one to it. Therefore, we place the various stimuli which reality offers into a given framework of understanding. We create cognitive maps of an environment we wouldn't otherwise understand.

A useful way to better appreciate the concept of sensemaking is to differentiate it from the similar notion of interpretation. The difference between these two concepts is subtle and difficult to understand, but if you manage to get it, it probably means that you have truly understood the meaning of sensemaking. Interpretation involves the existence of an object that has to be interpreted. The object to be interpreted is, anyway, already given, it already exists. You interpret a situation, a text, an affirmation, and so on. Sensemaking, instead, also adresses how that situation, is built. Weick (1995) writes: "the concept of sensemaking is valuable because it highlights the invention that precedes interpretation." Interpretation is a component of sensemaking, but the latter is also about how the situation is built. The assumption here is that we define reality. Sensemaking is about "authoring as well as reading"; whereas, interpretation is only about "reading".

Therefore, we can summarize the forementioned ideas by understanding how "people make sense of things by seeing a world on which they already imposed what they believe." With this quote we can well understand how sensemaking implies the construction of a given reality and the subsequent interpretation of it.

In the next post, as mentioned above, we are going to dig deeper and discover the seven distinctive features of sensemaking. In the meantime, as an exercise, you can try to start to pay attention to when your are involved in making sense of situations: think about something that happened to you recently, try to understand how you made sense of it and pay particular attention to how you have defined the situation (and also try to understand if that was the only way in which you could have defined it). After some exercising (I am also doing it in these days) you will become more acute and attentive to these processes. Moreover, you will also be able to understand when other people involve in sensemaking and, last but not least, you will be able to better appreciate the next post on the topic.

Alternative Solutions to Stop Global Warming?

2009-10-24T18:36:00.020+02:00

Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner, authors of Freakonomics and now of Superfreakonomics (published a couple of days ago), are always able to spread strong controversy with their writings. In Freakonomics it was the case of Levitt's famous study claiming that the significant reduction in crime that the US witnessed in the nineties was mainly due to the Roe vs. Wade law that authorized abortion (I had written a post on this research, you can read it here). You can imagine how a similar statement was taken by certain political/religious groups. This time, with Superfreakonomics, they managed to create a new, possibly harsher, debate on the hot (allow me to use this term) theme of global warming and climate change. In this chapter, always using their economist lenses, they discuss the various implications of the phenomenon, therefore the "the risks, uncertainties, misperceptions, and proposed solutions" (Freakonomics blog) to Global warming.

In the chapter, Levitt & Dubner discuss about the various difficulties in reducing our carbon emission significantly. It would take many and many years, they say, and the costs of trying to reduce the emissions would be huge ($ 1 trillion per year they say). Moreover, "even the most sophisticated climate models are limited in their ability to predict the future, and [there is a] large measure of uncertainty in this realm, given that global climate is such a complex and dynamic system." (Freakonomics Blog). They also write that even if start reducing our carbon emissions today the Earth would continue to get warmer every day.

Therefore, given all these seemingly insurmountable difficulties, the solution of geo-engineering is proposed: basically trying to lower the temperature of the Earth by artificially decreasing it. Obviously, being economists, they did not invent this technique, but they give voice the ideas of different scientists. In their blog (where they are fighting the battle against the strong criticism following from their statements) they write:

"A much better approach, we conclude, is geoengineering. The scientific evidence suggests that either the stratoshield [a technique that "involves the controlled injection of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to cool ground temperatures"] or increased oceanic clouds [another strange technique to lower the Earth's temperature] would have a large and immediate impact on cooling the Earth, unlike carbon-emission reductions. The cost of these solutions is trivial compared to the cost of lowering carbon emissions — literally thousands of times cheaper! Perhaps best of all, if something goes wrong and we decide we don’t like the results of the stratoshield or the oceanic clouds, we can stop the programs immediately and any effects will quickly disappear. These two geo-engineering solutions are completely reversible." (Freakonimcs Blog).

Now, the solution they put forward is at least interesting (also kind of complex to understand, let's admit it). But, it definitely goes against the mainstream line of thought and, obviously, this creates a strong debate. Ok, you may argue: proposing similar controversial themes also creates a lot of advertising for their book. But, apart from this considerations, I think that, when discussing about such important themes (like global warming), it is very important to really listen to all the different voices in the debate (if we want to enrich it). Otherwise we may end up running blindly in one direction without thinking about the possible consequences of that. In fact, on a purely intuitive level, it is easy to understand that lowering significantly our carbon emissions may be very difficult: more than two billion people (China and India mainly) are starting/have already started to have higher consumption levels and therefore the overall level of pollution is rising tremendously. I don't think they would be happy if we'd ask them something like: "Could you please stop developing so fast?" Therefore alternative solutions deserve to be, at least, taken into consideration without arguing that those putting them forward are terrorists!

A Brilliant Lesson on Creating Value

2009-10-19T22:50:00.019+02:00

Advertising guru Rory Sutherland gives a brilliant and hilarious talk on creating value by changing our perception of the product, rather than the product itself. Please don't stop the video unless you have seen the Shreddies example towards the end of the lecture (from 12:00).

Leadership: Towards a Paradigm Shift

2009-10-17T21:48:00.017+02:00

According to M. Popper (2004), "The first modern attempt to formulate a theory of leadership appears to be that of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1841)". Carlyle, describes the leaders as the ones leading the masses, the ones who are responsible for cultural changes, the ones who make history. Leaders are prophets, heroes, martyrs, fighters and other similar outstanding figures. Outliers. We, mere mortals, cannot even think of being one.

The dominant (stereotypical) idea of a leader is precisely the one described above. Leaders are very rare individuals with even more rare attributes: they are able to transform and inspire people to become their followers. They have a vision and they change things dramatically. German sociologist, M. Weber called these leaders charismatic: they do not derive their power from legal sources (they are appointed as leaders because some law or regulation wants it) or customs (they are appointed as leaders because the tradition wants it), rather they are like that because of their traits, their characteristics, their charisma.

The reasons why we have this kind of implicit leadership theory (Schyns and Meindl, 2005) can be explained in various ways. The first, more evident, one is the fundamental attribution error (Ross, Amebile & Steinmatz, 1977). This bias refers to the fact that we tend to overestimate dispositional, personality-based explanations when trying to understand/explain someone actions, and therefore undervalue the influence of context. It is very difficult to understand how things really work, therefore we attribute the success of a given firm only to the CEO. Such phenomenon is called by J. Meindl the Romance of Leadership, describing the tendency to excessively attribute to a leader the success or failure of an entire organization. "In the absence of direct, unambiguous information about an organization, respondents would tend to ascribe control and responsibility to leaders with events and outcome to which they could be plausibly linked to (Meindl et al. 1985, cited by Jackson & Perry, 2008). It is a mental shortcut, in fact it would be definitely too difficult (if not impossible) to investigate and try to understand the complexity of a given chain of events. Media also play an important role in creating such figures. They need them to attract our attention and we need their narratives to better understand reality. These narratives are made of heroes crafting events. There is no space left for circumstances, structural forces and so on.

Anyway in the last years, some scholars have been trying to promote a paradigm shift in the discourse (as meant by Foucault) of leadership. A discourse defines and thus limits the ways in which a topic can be plausibly reasoned and/or talked about: hundreds of years, books and university courses describing leadership in a certain way have shaped our way of thinking about the topic. As written above, the classic, hegemonic view on leadership tended to promote the idea that leaders are people with larger-than-life personalities, capable of changing people's mind with their charisma, communication abilities, and so on and so forth.

J. Badaracco, though, challenges this view. In fact, he speaks of quiet leaders as those people who lead behind the scenes in a silent way we can say. He writes: "over the course of a career spent studying management and leadership, I have observed that the most effective leaders are rarely public heroes. [...] They move patiently, carefully and incrementally. They do what is right - for their organizations, for the people around them, and for themselves [...]" (Badaracco, 2002). So leaders, according to Harvard professor Badaracco, are not those people (e.g.: CEOs & co.) constantly standing in the spotlight making dramatic decisions for their blind followers. They are normal people. A similar concept, critical to the classic idea of leaders, was also put forward by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great (2001). In his study of various successful US organizations over several years, he concludes that: "these CEOs represented the antithesis of the charismatic and narcissistic turnaround kings who were held up as the archetypical CEOs during the financial booms of the 1980s and 1990s." (Jackson & Perry, 2008).

This new way of thinking about leaders may not take into consideration the whole truth. In fact, we definitely have and need "classic charismatic leaders", but it is useful to counterbalance the more traditional approach with a more quiet view on the phenomenon. The idea that you don't necessarily need to have an extra strong personality to be a leader is definitely intriguing. The understanding of the fact that those who are defining the game may be playing off stage is even more attracting and encouraging in today's mediatized world, where if you're not in the media you don't exist. This and other critical approaches to leadership are therefore very useful in widening and deepening our understanding of this very complex and interesting social phenomenon.

Did You Know That...

2009-10-17T16:19:00.017+02:00

More or less:

there are 31,000 McDonald's in the world,
20 hours of video are posted on YouTube every minute,
5 babies are born every second,
2 persons die every second,
Micheal Jackson's Thriller sold 110 million of copies,
32,000,000 people are infected with HIV,
over 3 billion people live on less than $ 2.50 a day,
there are 16,100 Starbucks in the world,
300 million people are on Facebook,
almost 53 millions of cars were produced in 2008,
if you google Google, you get 173,000,000 result in about 0.08 seconds,
160 million copies of the IKEA catalogue were printed in 2006,
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings sold 150 million of copies (someone says only 100...),
Almost the 25% of the world population has access to Internet,
almost 340 million of people are obese in the world,
painting No. 5 (1948) by American artist Jackson Pollock was sold for $140 million,
10.4 billion male condoms were used worldwide in 2005,
the average American spends 9 hours a day in front of some kind of screen (Tv, Pc, Mobile phone, etc...),
in 1917 Coke was already selling 3 million bottles a day,
about 1,000 movies are produced by Bollywood each year,
21.17 millon of IPhones were sold until today,
Martini was the most googled "cocktail" of 2008 (mojito following).

...Last but not least: today I was supposed to spend some time studying, but I´ve spent an awful lot of time looking for these useless stats! ...That's the way the cookie crumbles...

Obama, the Nobel Prize and the Power of Symbols

2009-10-11T17:46:00.018+02:00

Friday Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy". The general reaction was one of astonishment. Let's admit it, nobody was really expecting it! According to experts, Obama wasn't even in the list of the favorites. Lots of people are still trying to understand what was passing through the heads of the Nobel prize committee when they decided to give the prize to Mr. Obama. Among the previous winners were big names like Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Henry Kissinger. They were awarded the prize mainly for their achievements, not for their good promises/premises.

In today's Financial Times one could read that the prize was awarded "just after 263 days after taking office, triggering praise and incredulity across the world over a decision that rewards him more for promise than achievement". That's why everybody was amazed: "more for promise than achievement". Obama himself said the he was "surprised and humbled" by the decision and that he did not feel worth to be counted among the great figures that had previously won the prize.

Now, I am far away from being an expert in such matters, that's why I tried to make myself an idea on why a similar decision was taken, and on what was the message that the Nobel Prize committee was trying to convey. I have read a couple of articles on the web, some blogs and various newspapers trying to understand how people were making sense of the extraordinary event. Overall, the reactions can be divided in two groups: those who are saying "C'mon, wasn'it a bit too early?!" and those who are saying: "That's a good thing! The guy has a vision!". Here are three quotes that summarize the spirit of the interpretations that I found more interesting and more realistic (in explaining why the prize was awarded to Obama):

"Obama has been widely credited with improving America's global image after the eight-year presidency of Bush, who alienated friends and foes with policies that often aroused international ire like the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq." (Reuters)

"Mr Obama, or his administration, has set in motion a process of having a nuke-free world, arresting climate change, diplomatically engaging countries belonging to what his predecessor called "axis of evil," building a true state of Palestine and putting pressure on Israel to end the Palestinian occupation, closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, and making human rights violators of the previous administration accountable for their wrongdoing." (Business World)

"This is an interesting question for those who study signaling theory. [...] First, Obama has strongly signaled his plans for the future to many other world leaders. Second, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has signaled its belief in Obama’s follow-through skills. If he were a stock future, he would have quadrupled in price, split a few times, and quadrupled again, all overnight. If he were a horse, his odds would have been extraordinarily steep." (Freakonomics Blog)

Probably the fact that G. W. Bush was the previous president of the US helped a lot! Anyway, the main aim of the committee was probably to give a strong signal to the world. I think that is the most likely and healthy interpretation. Obama is a symbol of change, novelty, hope, dialogue and peace. These are the values the committee wanted to reward. Anyway, apart from that, this decision is going to further increase the already unrealistic expectations in Obama's presidency. He has good ideas and prospects, but there's probably a limit to his abilities. And it will take more than a few weeks to understand whether he really deserved the prestigious prize.

PS: You can obviously argue that he did not deserve it, that it is too early, that many others deserved it more, etc...

Amazon Kindle: What Would Gutenberg Say?

2009-10-09T18:16:00.014+02:00

As I had written in a previous post, Google just released a new product in its labs: Google Fast Flip. The aim of the product is to change the way in which we read news on the web. Someone else, though, is trying to make a much more agressive move in trying to change our reading habits. As you may have noticed in fact, in these days (Christmas is coming?) we are assisting to a massive marketing push by Amazon in this direction. I guess you have already understood what I'm referring to: Amazon Kindle. The product has been around for quite a while now, but in these days a newer and cheaper version is being made available to the international market (more than 100 countries). In fact, until a couple of weeks ago Amazon e-reader was only available in the States. Competitors are also jumping on the bandwagon: Sony e-reader and rumoured Barnes & Nobles Android-powered reading device are two of the main competitors for the Kindle.

Amazon's move is fairly audacious. Trying to change our reading habits is not exactly an easy move. The pleasure of reading a book is not easily replicable. The feeling of holding the book in your hands, going through the pages, smelling it, contemplating it or also the simple fact of having it in your library are all things that e-books cannot substitute for. Moreover reading from a screen is kind of frustrating and tiring after a while. Of course there are also some advantages: you can have thousands of books, newspapers, pdf or Word files following you wherever you go. Not bad. Moreover, you can almost instantly wirelessly download books directly on the device at a cheaper price.

Anyway, a recent experiment run in various US univerities revealed that e-readers are not going to have an easy life. Students and professors were given a Kindle for a certain period of time. They had to use it as a study tool and later reveal their impressions about dealing with the device. Here are some not so enthusiastic quotes:

"Much of my learning comes form a physical interaction with the text: boomarks, highlight, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages [...] All these things have been lost, and if not they're too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the 'features' have been rendered useless"

"For some people, electronic reading can never replace the functionality and 'feel' of reading off paper"

Therefore it looks like people do not like the Kindle if they need it for study-related purposes. But, Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) is writing that "kindle is the most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all the millions of items we sell on Amazon.com." It looks like people are definetely interested in the gizmo! Otherwise Amazon wouldn't have decided to go for such a bold move.

Feeling curious about the matter I decided to run a little test to see whether Amazon & co. (competitors!) efforts are being reflected in people's interests. I used Google Insights for Search: a program that gives you various statistics regarding googled words. You google the word(s) you are interested in and you can see how much it was/were searched for in Google.

Here is what I got (click on the image to enlarge it):

People are definetely getting more interested in e-reading devices. But it looks like they are googling more the Sony product than Amazon Kindle! Is it because sony's device costs $200, instead of the $259 for the Kindle? Google is not anwering that (sic). Anyway, US based Forrester research doesn't seem to agree: Forrester raised its forecasts for Kindle "e-reader sales in the United States to 3 million units from its previous prediction of 2 million sales. Forrester Research also expects Amazon’s Kindle to command about 60 percent of the e-reader market in 2009, compared with 35 percent for Sony’s Reader."

I think that the day when we'll be reading from a screen is still far to come. Anyway, there is definetely an interest in such a trend, and maybe the two things should not be thought as mutually exclusive, but rather as two complementary possibilities. Luckily, we are going to read paper books for many years to come, but this doesn't exclude that we could read some stuff from a digital device and enjoy it!

Language, Thought and Reality

2009-10-03T12:13:00.006+02:00

One of the most revolutionary discoveries/learnings of my life (a couple of years ago) is the fact that (to a certain extent) there is no one single objective reality. Actually, I had never thought about it before: reality is mostly a social construct. And as written by Watzlawick in his book How real is real?: "the most dangerous illusion of all is [thinking] that there is only one reality." In fact, common sense suggests that reality is one and that it is out there, ready to be observed and described using the various tools that we have such as language. But, think about it if you never did it before: "we cannot know, think about or analyse the world without using concepts, language, [categories] and "frames of reference", which come from the social world that we are part of" (Watson, 2006). We know the world through a series of categories that are culturally, socially built and agreed upon. Different cultures, different views. Different people, different mental programmings. Not acknowledging this thing, not being able to recognize that we all have different unconscious assumptions, different mental models of reality is probably one of the most common source of interpersonal and intercultural problems. "Social constructionism cautions us to be ever suspicious of our assumptions about how the world appears to be" (Burr, 1995). Anyway, I don't want to write a dissertation about social constructivism/constructionism here (very interesting school of thought!), I just wanted to introduce the topic of how language contributes in constructing the reality that we see. Different languages (therefore cultures) see reality in different ways. Subtle variations you may say, but interesting ones I would answer!

Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is one of the founding fathers of structuralism (in linguistic). The idea at the heart of this school of thought is that language determines how our mind is structured. Language and thought are not two separated phenomena; language provides the basis for our thought (Burr, 1995). Linguistic signs, according to Saussure, are composed by two parts: a signifier and a signified. The signifier ('Home', 'Tree', 'Cat', 'Bike', etc...) is the sound that we use to represent a signified (an object, a concept, an idea, etc...). The link between the word and the signified concept is arbitrary, only a convention. The interesting part is anyway the following: Saussure claimed that also the categories (the concepts) that we use are conventional categorizations of how we experience reality. Remember different cultures, different views. The fact that we have divided the world in dogs, pigs, houses, flowers, books, watches, etc... reflects how we see reality. A classic example (I don't know if it is true, but it is anyway useful) is the following: we have only one word to describe snow, whereas the legend wants that eskimos have various words to describe what we call snow depending on various variables. This reflects their relationship with that particular portion of the world and therefore is going to shape how they perceive it.

It is therefore interesting, when learning or approaching a new language or culture (different from ours) to try to grasp these little differences that reveals something about a culture. The other day I read an article listing some of these words. The one I liked the most was the German Shadenfreude which means "the happiness felt at another misfortune". Apparently in English (I would say neither in Italian) there is not a word to describe this concept. Another good one (always from the same article) is the Dutch Gezelling: it can "be described as a cozy, communal feeling, like the warm sensation one has [when] surrounded by good friends at a long meal, with the conversation flowing". Another very nice one I was told about once is the Spanish word Duende. It describes the state of exaltation, of visceral reaction to music. The very emotional state you feel when music (or art in general I think) is flowing through your veins. The concept expressed by the word duende is anyway so complex that books are being written about it!

Some words are probably truly understood in their completeness only by people coming from a certain culture. In fact they're the probably the only ones able to really grasp the whole complexity, the reverberation of meanings that one word is carrying with itself (that's why in Italian we say traduttore traditore). Anyway, this is definitely a nice exercise, a thing worth paying attention when approaching a new culture/language, therefore new people.

They Know Who You Are

2009-09-25T10:46:00.007+02:00

Social networks are definitely a means of telling others something about ourselves. We make a statement about ourselves, who we are, who we would like to be, or better how we want others to think about us. The pictures we post. The information we upload. We carefully choose what to say and what not, we want to paint a picture of our ideal self let's say. admit it or not! So there are guys and girls posting only pictures of their parties, so every one else is going to think: "Ohhh look at this guy, he's cool. He's always partying!". You know what I mean. We can therefore make some inferences about a person by looking at her Facebook or MySpace, or Flickr, or whatever profile. We all spend some time "voyeurizing" (allow me to use this term) others profiles! Nothing new until now...

The last news I read today is rahter more interesting. Two students at MIT started a bizarre new project (apparently nicknamed Project Gaydar): basically by analyzing one's data on Facebook, mainly one's friends, they claim to be able to understand whether someone is gay or straight! The idea behind the projects is based on the concept of homophily: we usually stick around with people similar to us. Therefore if all my friends in Facebook are over fifty years old, I am probably not a kid. If all my contacts on MySpace are musicians I'd probably be something similar. If all my friends are gay, well you see where I am heading towards.

This means that probably when the software will be finalized they are going to be able to tell whether I am likely to be a terrorist, a musician, an old jew, a painter, a young but fervent calvinist, a bus driver, a drag queen and so on. Interesting! Anyway, as I've written above it is not surprising that someone can pretend to be Sherlock Holmes and try to infer various stuff by looking at others' profiles. The issue is not that. What is more frightening is that others may analyze my friends in order to try to understand (?) who I am. Only think about future employers: one day they may tell you: "Well, Mr. X, you looked like the ideal candidate. You seem to have all the qualities we needed, but our software warned us about you dirty communist affiliations. We are sorry, but we cannot hire you." Ok, maybe you are thinking that in this case it is a positive thing for the firm since we all know communists (!), but damn it! where's privacy? What if they are wrong? What if, instead, they hire me and then discover I actually am a communist? What would George Orwell say?

As Written in one Malcolm Gladwell's article on the New Yorker (on another theme): "Apparently human beings don't need to know someone in order to believe that they know someone". I personally think that's the key.

Anyway, the article I am referring to (the one from which I learned this news) ends like this: “You can do damage to your reputation with social networking data, and other people can do damage to you. I do think that there’s been a very fast learning curve - people are quickly learning the dos and don’ts of Internet behavior,” said Jason Kaufman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University who is studying a set of Facebook data. “Potentially everything you ever do on the Internet will live forever. I like to think we’ll all learn to give each other a little more slack for our indiscretions and idiosyncrasies.”

I think this is the right way of ending my post too.

On the Social Nature of Evil

2009-09-23T13:34:00.015+02:00

Last 9^th of September I wrote a post commenting on an academic article written by S. Ghoshal. In his article, Ghoshal, criticised some of the basic assumptions of classic management theories and claimed that events such as the Enron crack & Co. were happening because of the "ideology-based, gloomy vision" of such theories. Basically, in a few words, we can say that the "wrong" mental programming managers received was creating evil actors (you can read the full post here: Questioning the Basic Assumptions of Management Theories). Therefore, according to this article, the bad acting of some managers could be brought back to some of the features of the system/context. We are not intrinsically evil or good. Obviously there are people who are more "good" than others. But we should pay attention to the (social) context in which we act. Let's understand why.

One of the first tendencies I want to talk about is the famous Fundamental Attribution Error. Frequently described as one of the funding principles of Social Psychology, it describes the tendency for human beings to overestimate dispositional, personality-based explanations when trying to understand/explain someone actions, and therefore undervalue the influence of context. Let's make a quick example to make things clearer: I meet Peter, an old friend of mine, on the street. I'd like to have a chat with him, since it's been a long time since we last speak to each other. He only stops for less than 30 seconds and then runs away. I think to myself: "what a jerk he has become!". I don't take into consideration the context: Peter had to go to a funeral and was in a hurry. Moreover he was depressed and emotional because of the funeral and wasn't feeling like speaking to anyone. This was a very silly example but you see what I mean. I bet that you can think of a lot of examples of similar attribution errors.

Therefore sometimes we tend to overestimate the probability of people being evil (or rude, or shy, or inadequate, etc...) because of this bias we have. We tend not to take into consideration the power of context.

Let's dig deeper. In 1961 a Yale Researcher, Stanley Milgram, performed an experiment in order to understand how people react to authority under certain conditions, such as obeing to orders conflicting with their personal conscience. The results of the experiment were debated for years and today the experiment is frequently cited when trying to explain certain extreme events and/or behaviours (e.g.: the holocaust).

Let's see very briefly how Milgram Experiment works (you can read a more detailed explanation of the experiment here: Milgram Experiment): Participants were recruited with ads on newspapers and later told that they were participating to an experiment on learning (and that they were going to be paid for that). The experiment needed three persons/roles called "teacher", "experimenter" and "learner". Actual participants were assigned to the "teacher" role whereas researchers were in the other two positions. Participants did not know that the "learner" or "victim" was actually an actor.

After that, "learners" had to fulfill some kind of "learning task" and were later asked to answer some questions, "teachers" were controlling them. When "learners" gave wrong answers "teachers" had to to administer an electric shock to the victim whereas when the answer given was correct "teachers" could ask the next question. Every time the shock had to be increased by 15 volts. Shocks could range from 15 volts (hardly perceptible) to 450 volts (dangerous)! Obviously "victims" weren't receiving any actual shock, they were just pretending by lamenting and screaming when administered shocks. The role of the "experimenter" was to encourage the "teacher" to administer shocks when they wanted to halt the experiment.

The results were kind of unexpected. Even though many subjects were showing signs of tension and unease, a large percentage of them (65% in the first set of experiments) were arriving up to the final, massive 450 volt shock therefore obeying the experimenters's orders!

In commenting the results of the experiment, british philosopher and sociologist Z. Bauman wrote: cruelty correlates with certain patterns of social interaction much more closely that it does with personality features or other individual idiosyncracies of the perpetrators. Cruelty is social in its origins much more than it is charactereological.

We can therefore understand how context plays a crucial role in determining who we are. Incentive systems strongly determine how we act. We cannot say that people working at Enron (I'm using Enron as an example, but you can use the example you like the most) were evil, perverted humans. On this concern, American psychologist Philip Zimbardo (author of the controversial experiment famous as The Stanford Prison Experiment) wrote the book The Lucifer Effect. The concept describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. [...] Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in “total situations,” where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play.

If you want to have an overview on the topic and/or hear more about the above-mentioned experiments check out the following video:

Workplace Humour

2009-09-17T18:55:00.017+02:00

Today I attended a class on the “human aspects” of organizational life. Aspects such as mischief, sexuality and humour in working contexts are not taught very often in “Organizational Behaviour” or “Human Resources Management” lectures. I thought it was pretty interesting and decided to post something about it in my own little blog!

Using M. Weber words we can say that modern organizations are bureaucracies. The concept of bureaucracy means, in a few words, the control of work through hierarchies, tasks, rules, offices, etc... In the ideal typical (theoretical) concept of bureaucracy there is no place for feelings and emotions. In fact, Weber wrote that in the purest form of bureaucracy there would be no place for “love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation”. Keep in mind that this is a merely pure, theoretical construct, useful to grasp some aspects of reality. An ideal type. As for every theory there may not be an exact representation of it in the real world. Therefore, even if some people seem to think the opposite, Weber was well aware of the existence of human variables in the real world and was not against it.

Luckily, we may say, the workplace is full of emotions. We all know it: organizations are made of people. Anyway, we can’t even deny the fact that too many emotions in the workplace can harm, in one way or another, the accomplishment of an organization’s goals. That’s the same for us all: when we are overwhelmed by emotions we are not able to act rationally and to get things done. Moreover, we can say that (taking the boss’s view) the organization is a place where all efforts should be concentrated in getting things done efficiently. As written in Watson’s book Organizing and Managing work “if there is to be love, it is to be love for work, [...] if there is to be desire, it is to be desire for the formal rewards of pay and security that are offered for contributing to corporate success.” Anyway, workers’ emotions are not easily manageable by managers!

The type of emotional display that I want to write about is humour. We all like it. It makes life better and it shortens the boring moments at work. Workplace humour is a classic. Who has never spent some minute (or hours...) watching stupid videos in YouTube when supposed to work? Otherwise, I guess that you all have seen some type of cartoons mocking one or another aspect of the working life. Just type workplace cartoons in Google Images and you’ll see what I mean. Such cartoons are usually hanged in some place in the office (e.g.: notice board, restrooms, informal spaces, etc...)

Anyway, the theme of my post is: What is the deeper role of humour at work? (apart from the obvious answer “well, I guess to have fun”). The things that I am writing here comes from the previously mentioned book written by Tony Watson.

You maybe have noticed that workplace humour often tends to mock unpleasant aspects of work. A classic example are meetings: hundreds of cartoons represent managers sitting around a table saying some stupid thing or commenting last year results or taking senseless decisions. Anyway, in the collective imagery, meetings are often seen as one most useless and boring things in business life. Practically a waste of time. Another classic example are cartoons representing the moment during which a manager is firing an employee. Not exactly a pleasant situation in real life.

Workplace humour helps us to deal with what we dislike or fear. It has a debunking function. Watson uses the metaphor of humour as a glimpse into the abyss. That’s why he writes, people working in emergency services or hospitals are more likely to joke about matters of life or death or to use so called black humour. People whose patience is threatened by annoying customers or managers are going to make jokes about them more often. And so on and so forth.

Therefore one of the main functions of humour at work (but let’s admit it: also in other aspects of life) would be to help us coping with the anxiety of the human condition. A cathartic function: Fears, stress, worries, inhibitions, defects, etc... are temporarily forgotten.

... And after that, as Watson writes, “Having laughed at what might otherwise frighten us into a loss of control in our lives (madness even), we return to our serious demeanour and travel onwards.”

The Dark Side of the Green Side

2009-09-16T14:53:00.016+02:00

Today, during one of my endless surfing sessions, I read a Blog entry by Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) discussing a forthcoming article (Do Green Products Make Us Better People?) on the various implications of the green effect on consumers. The findings of the article, let me warn you, are kind of unexpected. As discussed in a previous post in this blog (Are You Into Ecopornography?) we have witnessed, in the last years, an incredible increase in the amount of green products offered in the market. This probably reflects the fact that consumers not only choose what to buy on the basis of the price and/or quality, but also on the basis of social and ethical factors. Being green is seen as cool. Being green is a socially desirable attribute. It makes you fell good. No doubts.

After a series of experiments, the two researchers (Mazar & Zhong) found out that:

the mere exposure to green-related concepts and/or products through priming would lead to a subsequent activation of our social responsibility and therefore to a more likely altruistic/green behaviour.
However (and here comes the interesting one): people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products.

The findings reported in point 1 are in line with the research on the phenomenon of priming. A precedent series of stimuli can influence our subsequent behaviour. For example some studies found out that exposure to a series of exclusive restaurant pictures was positively influencing manners in a subsequent "eating situation". Otherwise as described in M.Gladwell's book Blink an exposure to a series of words recalling old age was affecting the speed at which people were walking out of the laboratory after the experiment.Therefore accordingly to previous research green priming (let me call it like that), influences subsequent behaviour in a positive way.

The findings reported in the second point are more interesting and unexpected. It looks like that, after a green purchase we would be more likely to feel like: "Ok, I've done my part. My conscience is now clean. Let's rob a bank!" (or something like that). The authors explain their findings like that: "our studies suggest that social and ethical acts may contribute to a more general sense of moral self than previously thought, licensing socially undesirable behaviors in distant domains." (i.e.: cheating or stealing money).

Doing good would make us feel OK with ourself and therefore more likely to act in a anti-social or self interested way in a latter situation. Therefore if you did something good today, pay attention to what you may find yourself doing this evening!

Google Fast Flip: Looking for Old New Ways to Read News

2009-09-15T11:48:00.010+02:00

We all read news on the Internet, don't we? Some of us have their favourite sites or portals where every morning, and then some other times during the day, we go and check what's new. Others, maybe are still more into traditional newspapers, in fact, the phisical experience of reading a newspaper, going through its pages, skipping the boring sections, reading other readers' letters, etc... is always a pleasent one we can say. Ok: of course you can do both things, read newspapers and surf the web looking for news.

Google has tried to synthetize the best side of both experiences by launching a new product in its Google Labs: Google Fast Flip. The product, we read, is conceived to mirror the way readers flick through magazines and newspapers. What we get in the homepage is in fact a series of screenshots from the various publications divided by popularity, topics and sources. Of course then a search function is always present (it's always Google we are taliking about!). If you want to dig deeper into a particular article you just have to click on the screenshot and there you are. Otherwise you can just flip through the pages as you would normally do with your favourite newspaper.

In fact that's exactly what K. Bharat (founder of Google News) sayd in an interview: "We wanted to bring the advantages of print media, the speed and hands-on control you get with a newspaper or magazine, and combine that with the technical advantages of the internet. We wanted the best of both worlds".

So will be Google defining the new paradigm of news reading or will this only be a nice attempt?

Personally, my first impression of Google Fast Flip was positive (but I am biased towards Google). The fact that also an IPod version is available made it even more interesting for me! I liked the fact that you get to read the news pretty much as you do with Google News but you have nicer layout and the actually nice feature of flipping the pages. Maybe it is only an infatuation, maybe that's how I will read the news in the future. We will see...

Anyway, if you want to have a look, here's the link: http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

Why do Crack Dealers Still Live With Their Moms?

2009-09-14T17:40:00.009+02:00

Co-author of the book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, gives a nice lecture on the topic "Why do crack dealers still live with their moms?". He explains why drug dealing is not the profitable business many would think.

Toward the end of his lecture he explains some applications of classic economics theories to actual life in drug selling. The funniest is (at around 19:50):

Economic Theory: Every two-person game has a Nash Equilibrium (Game Theory).

Real life (drug dealers): If we start shooting around there [the other gang's territory], nobody, and I mean you dig it, nobody gonna step on their turf. But we gotta be careful, 'cause they can shoot around here too, and then we all fucked (obviously it is a drug dealer speaking).

Well, if this is not a perfect application of the Prisoner's dilemma!

Here's the video:

Create Your Own Melody with a Few Clicks

2009-09-13T22:05:00.009+02:00

After a couple of kinda dense topics, it's time for a more entertaining one. Here is a site I found surfing on the web. The site offers a very simple application to create your own little piece of music. You are basically given a number of tracks with assigned sounds. You simply need to design your own melodies. Once you are happy with the result all you have to do is adjust the overall mix, set the tempo and you're done! Here is the link: http://www.inudge.net/index.en.html

And here is my first experiment:

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Interesting People & Interesting Books: Nassim Taleb & The Black Swan

2009-09-13T12:08:00.013+02:00

In his book The Black Swan, before the explosion of the subprime crisis, he wrote:

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.

Seems to reflect reality, isn’t it?

We are talking about Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Today famous for his two bestselling books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. It would be difficult to label him. He is surely a writer/essayist and a researcher, but not only. He’s also a quant, the term used to describe experts in mathematical finance, or better quantitative analysts. He in fact works in this field. But this would not anyway be enough to describe him accurately. He define himself as a sceptical empiricist. In his web site we can find this description that does a good job in giving an idea about him: My major hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know...." (You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment & make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race. This quote tells more about him than any other label.

Taleb was born in 1960 in Lebanon from a wealthy and well-educated family. He later studied in various countries and universities: MBA from Wharton School (Pennsylvania, US) and Ph.D from the University of Paris. As a result of his multi-national background he speaks English, French and Arabic. But he also has a a conversational fluency in Italian and Spanish, and reads classical texts in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and ancient Hebrew. Other things that struck me when reading one of his books are the breadth and depth of his knowledge. I mean, if it happens to you to hold in your hands The Black Swan, take a look at the bibliography. It’s incredibly huge and varied believe me. This means that, not only he has a strong financial background because of his studies, but that he also spends most of his time reading and studying all kinds of books. Among the people he talks about, names such as Mandelbrot, Popper, Plato, Yogi Berra, Sextus Empiricus, Bacon, Hume, Russel and other eminent writers, scientists and philosophers.

Taleb’s main worrying seems to be that of epistemology. He doesn’t like the fact that the way in which we know the world and therefore act accordingly is frequently so wrong. That’s why the first part of his book The Black Swan is all dedicated to dismantle some of the patterns of thinking that we adopt in our everyday life when dealing with all kinds of stuff, mainly knowledge-related. Black Swans are usually strongly-influential and unexpected events that we can only “predict” (i.e.: Damn! I knew it! syndrome) only once they have already happened (e.g.: 9/11, the rise of Google, world wars, the success of the Harry Potter saga, you name it). The metaphor of the Black Swan is a tribute to Karl Popper’s concept of falsification. In fact: until a certain point in history man believed that swans could only be white. Thousands and thousands of observations were, on a daily basis, confirming that belief. One day, though, when Australia was discovered (XVII century), also black swans were discovered. Thousands of years of observations were invalidated from a single observation!

According to Taleb we are so bad at predicting things, but we do not want to acknowledge that! In fact, many of us think we live in Mediocristan, whereas evidence shows that rather we live in Extremistan. Basically, he explains this other metaphor with the following straightforward example: Take 1000 people and gather them together in a baseball field. After that you weigh them and get the overall weight Now, try to imagine the heaviest human being you can think of (that can still be called a human being) entering the room and add him to the scale. Despite of his huge size he would still represent a small percentage of the overall weight and would only slightly affect the average. This is Mediocristan: a place where the extraordinary events have a small effect on the total. A Gaussian world let’s say. Now, imagine Bill Gates enters the baseball field. What would be the effect on the average worth? Huge. That’s Extremistan.

In his book Taleb, not only exlain the nature of black swans, but also tell us why we have such a hard time recognising them. It’s up to you to read the book and discover more about it! Now, in fact, I fear that this post is becoming dangerously too long to read without hating me. I hope I was able to stimulate your interest. Therefore let me conclude, by strongly suggesting to read this book if you are interested in knowing more about humans and the way in which the world works.

Questioning the Basic Assumptions of Management Theories

2009-09-09T14:03:00.015+02:00

After the great corporate scandals in the United States that we all know (e.g.: Enron) and after the consequent emanation of laws such as the famous Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Indian professor and management guru, S. Ghoshal (in the picture) wrote a sharp article entitled Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices. In this interesting article he criticizes the scientific pretense of some of the most famous management theories (such as Transaction Cost Economics, Agency Theory, Game Theory, etc... ) and most of their basic, underlying assumptions. According to the Indian professor, the effects of these thoeries are already clear in the title, but I'll say more about that later.

First of all he starts by asserting that the fact of studying management as if it was a "natural science" (trying to discover patterns and laws) has lead to "the exclusion of any role for human intentionality or choice". Therefore little or no space is left, for example, to ethics and morality. Furthermore, he claims, this approach ignores some of the basic differences between different academic disciplines. The main distinction here is between natural sciences and humanities. Ghoshal claims that this "pretense of knowledge" has undoubtedly led to some benefits, but also that the costs have been to high.

He argues that theories in social sciences tend to be "self fulfilling": "A theory of subatomic particles or of the universe— right or wrong—does not change the behaviors of those particles or of the universe. [...] In contrast, a management theory—if it gains sufficient currency— changes the behaviors of managers who start acting in accordance with the theory. A theory that assumes that people can behave opportunistically and draws its conclusions for managing people based on that assumption can induce managerial actions that are likely to enhance opportunistic behavior among people".

After that he later attacks the "ideology-based, gloomy vision" of these theories. Basically all these theories have their departure point in negative assumptions about human beings and institutions. Our Homo Economicus is basically a rational, opportunistic, self-interested, greedy and benefit maximizer being. As Friedmann suggests, his last and foremost important goal as a manger is to create shareholders value. Nothing else. In this regards, Ghoshal writes: "Combine agency theory with transaction costs economics, add in standard versions of game theory and negotiation analysis, and the picture of the manager that emerges is one that is now very familiar in practice: the ruthlessly hard-driving, strictly top-down, command-and-control focused, shareholder- value-obsessed, win-at-any-cost business leader [...]". These assumptions are by now part of our common sense. But, are we really all like that?

The results of teaching such theories would be dramatic. Corporate scandals would have occurred mainly because of this dangerous "mental programming" that mangagers have received during their study years in business schools and because of the world view this way of thinking promotes.

Indeed the article makes some very strong statements. When I first read it, I was like "WOW! I had never thought about that!. Could it really be like Ghoshal writes?". Surely I am not sufficiently strong in the field to claim whether Ghoshal is right or wrong. Probably he is neither right nor wrong. I also think that some of the causal links between management thoeries and managers' behaviour have to be investigated. But, overall I think that his article is really interesting and engaging because it challenges most of the "great thoeries" that we have learned at school and that today are so embedded in managerial common sense. Moreover the mushrooming of disciplines such as "Business Ethics" and "Corporate Social Responsibility" in Business programmes is undoubtedly a symptom of the shared necessity to rethink business and business-related practices from a different perspective.

If you are interestend in the article, here is the bibliographic reference:

Ghoshal, S. (2005): Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices. Academy of Management Learning & Education, vol. 4/1: 75-91.

How Many Cigarettes Are You Smoking!!??

2009-09-08T17:34:00.007+02:00

I don't know if it has ever happened to you to spend some time in a psychiatric hospital or otherwise to spend some time with someone sufferring of some psychiatric disease, like schizophrenia. Well, if the answer is yes, you would surely have noticed that psychiatric patients smoke a lot. If the answer is no, then trust me please. Anyway, when I say that they smoke a lot I truly mean it. That's one of the things that I couldn't avoid to notice when I worked there. A large percentage of them was literally smoking for the whole day and frequently having one cigarette right after the other. Moreover, you could also deduct it from the brown colour of their fingers. Obviously, also "normal" people (please, allow me to use this term even if inappropriate) can smoke a hell of a lot, but the percentage is much lower. Just to make myself clear: according to some research smoking rates are as high as 80% among schizophrenic patients, whereas in the general population the percentage is around 25%.

Now of course the question: Why do they smoke so much? I did some research on my own and "discovered" some of the main reasons. Some are more intuitive, others are not. Let me tell you a couple of the things I found out (from the more to the less obvious one)

1) Smoking relieves anxiety: I don't think this first one needs further explainations;

2) Smoking is more common in deprived groups: It looks like "less lucky" people tend to smoke more cigs. And it also looks like "less lucky" people are more prone to develop some kind of mentall illness. Smoking would be a way to cope with the anxiety caused by their condition;

3) Smoking as a pastime and as a social facilitator: Patients in psychiatric hospitals have to deal with boredom. Long days, nothing to do. Smoking can, in some way, help to beat time. Moreover smoking is also a social activity. Patients gather together and use cigarette smoking as a ritual;

4) Smoking as an "antidote" (the most interesting one!): Some research seems to prove that cigarette smoking in psychiatric patients can have some positive effects like reducing some of the symptoms of psychotic illness, reduce some of the antipsychotics side effects, improve cognition, etc...

Here are therefore some of the reasons why most psychiatric patients smoke so much. Now, other questions come naturally: should doctors help them to quit or should they consider it only as a "minor thing" considering all the problems they have? Would it be possible to help them to quit? Maybe smoking is one of the few pleasures left to them?

I really would like to answer all these questions, but, please forgive me, I really have to go and smoke a cigarette...

Predictably Irrational

2009-09-07T18:10:00.017+02:00

Duke university professor and author of the book Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely gives a brilliant and actually amusing lecture on how our brain plays tricks on us.

At the following link you can also find an article I wrote on the topic for the student magazine eCHanges:

http://www.echanges-online.ch/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=184:every-day-economics-about-rationality-in-decision-making&catid=54:thema-general

Culture Jamming

2009-09-05T10:56:00.005+02:00

According to some recent study “The average American is exposed to about 3000 advertising messages a day, and globally corporations spend over $620 billion each year to make their products seem desirable and to get us to buy them". 3000 messages seemed way too many in my view, but probably it is because I don't live in the US. Anyway, I think that nobody would deny the fact that we are exposed to a huge number of commercial messages every day. The consequences of this mediatic bombardment are mainly two (out of thousands): firms have to become more and more capable of "breaking through the clutter". This basically means that they have to use new unconventional ways of communicating with the market (e.g.: product placement, events, ads where you would not expect them, etc...). The second consequence is more on the consumer side: our culture, therefore our "mental programming", the way in which we see the world is increasingly shaped by commercial communications. Entertainment, shopping and other consumer activities are frequently cited as people's preferred ways of spending their free time.

As mentioned in an article produced by the Center for Communication and Civil Engagement "As people in global societies increasingly enjoy the freedoms of private life, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate about many broad public concerns. The personalized society enables people to choose individual lifestyles and identities that often lead to disconnection from politics. Many citizens become receptive only to consumer-oriented messages about tax cuts, retirement benefits, or other policies targeted at particular demographic social groups". We can therefore argue that, due to the information overload, we have become increasingly anesthetized or, better, like the Pink Floyd song we've become Comfortably Numb.

An interesting and creative answer to the forementioned tendencies of today's world is called culture jamming. According to Wikipedia, it can be defined as a tactic in which an activist attempts to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions or corporate advertising. Classic examples are the transifguration or transformation of famous corporate logos or national flags in order to produce a message. In this way people are forced to reconsider the branded environment in which they live and the underlying assumptions. The main goal of Culture Jamming is therefore to subvert and criticize the mainstream culture, what we take for granted and our consumeristic habits using the power of communication.

A nice and famous example is the one that jams with the US flag (in the picture): the stars representing the states in the blue part of the flag are replaced by various US corporate logos like McDonalds, Nike, MTV, etc... The message is clear without need for further comments. The examples are, anyway, pretty numerous. It is enough to google culture jamming and you'll find them by yourself. And, of course, I hope you like Jamming too!

Are You Into Ecopornography?

2009-09-04T12:05:00.001+02:00

You have probably noticed that today practically every firm out there is claiming to be, in one way or another, environmentally friendly. Words and expressions like green, biodegradable, recyclable, non-polluting, etc... have become extremely common everywhere. I am sure that if you walk around your home right now you will be able to find at least one product promoting its greenish attitude. This phenomenon is so diffused that even oil companies, which are probably among the greatest polluters in the world, are claiming to be the environment best friends. Someone would say that this thing smells fishy, isn't it? Especially when, on one hand, you see ads from oil companies on Tv promoting their efforts in protecting the planet, but, alas, on the other hand they are selling products helping to ruin it. Moreover you are also told that it was discovered that some of them are constantly lobbying with governments to relax environmental laws and regulations.

That's probably what Mr. J. Westerweld must have thought when he coined the term greenwashing. He was probably struck by this ambivalent nature of some firms and industries' behaviours. He once noticed that some hotels were placing green placards in rooms promoting various types of good behaviour like the reuse of towels, etc... Though, he later noticed that these hotels were making no effort in recycling waste. The main reason for that was that it was not worth economically.

Even if you have probably already got the point, the term greenwashing defines the practice of deceivingly promoting one's products or services as being environmentally friendly. The main purpose of these actions is obviously to gain the public approval. Classical examples are the use of less natural resources, the development of new products with lower environmental impact, energy-efficient goods, etc... To define more or less the same thing also the term that I used in the title of this post (ecopornography) was created by J. Mander.

The informed consumer has to be aware of such things. The risk is otherwise to inevitably fall into the trap without even noticing it. There are of course firms actually promoting good behaviours and acting accordingly, but how to distinguish the good apples from the bad ones? It is probably very difficult. Anyway, information asymmetries can be levelled to some extent. Internet and a critical attitude are already good wapons to defend oneself from being greenwashed.

For example, Terra choice, an environmental marketing agency, has published an interesting study called The six sins of greenwashing. In their study they found out that more of 99% of the analysed firms were guilty of greenwashing in some way. Here are the six sins:

Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off: e.g. “Energy-efficient” electronics that contain hazardous materials.
Sin of No Proof: e.g. Shampoos claiming to be “certified organic,” but with no verifiable certification.
Sin of Vagueness: e.g. Products claiming to be 100% natural when many naturally-occurring substances are hazardous, like arsenic and formaldehyde.
Sin of Irrelevance: e.g. Products claiming to be CFC-free, even though CFCs were banned 20 years ago.
Sin of Fibbing: e.g. Products falsely claiming to be certified by an internationally recognized environmental standard like EcoLogo, Energy Star or Green Seal.
Sin of Lesser of Two Evils: e.g. Organic cigarettes or “environmentally friendly” pesticides.

If you want to read the complete study and find other interesting advices on how to defend yourself from being deceived please go to the following link: http://www.terrachoice.com/files/6_sins.pdf