With a gut full of yesterday’s turkey, it just didn’t seem right to talk business. So today, I’m sharing some life wisdom that came from a book I read last year titled Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart. With the official kick-off of the holiday season and the retail stores poised to take every last penny you have in your pocket, in the mad rush of shopping it’s easy to lose track of what’s really important. Hopefully, the notes I took from this book will help keep you grounded and inspire a little piece of mind.

As you read through my notes, I think you’ll see that the personal lessons have meaning at the community level as well.

Enjoy!

Too soon old. Too late smart. By Gordon Livingston

Life is not an easy chair.

1. If a map doesn’t agree with the ground, the map is wrong
   
2. We are what we do
   
3. It is difficult to remove by logic an idea not placed by logic in the first place
   
4. The statute of limitations on most of our past trauma has expired
   
5. Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least, it takes two people to create and sustain a relationship but just one to end it
   
6. Feelings follow behavior
   
7. Be bold and forces will come to your aid
   
8. Perfect is the enemy of good
   
9. Life’s 2 most important questions are why and why not, the trick is knowing which one to ask
   
10. The most secure prisons are those we impose on ourselves
    
11. Happiness is the ultimate risk
    
12. Only bad things happen quickly
    
13. Not all who wander are lost
    
14. For money is sullen and wisdom is sly but youth is the pollen that blows
    through the sky and doesn’t ask why, Stephen Vincent Benet
    
15. There is noting more pointless than doing the same thing and expecting different results
    
16. The process of learning is not about accumulating answers, it’s about figuring out the right questions to ask
    
17. Progress is an exercise in shared hope
    
18. Romanticized versions of the past are a way of sabotaging the present, idealized nostalgia sends a message of pessimism and lack of hope, “calcified prejudice”

Psychiatrist’s `Self-Help’ Book Resonates With Readers

Kate Mulligan

A Maryland psychiatrist and author is scoring an unexpected hit with readers by avoiding sound-bite solutions to life’s eternal problems. When Gordon Livingston, M.D., put down some thoughts about what he had learned during his 33 years practicing psychotherapy, he had no expectations of appearing on “Good Morning America” or the “Diane Rehm Show” on National Public Radio.

^{But the resulting book, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now (Marlow & Company, 2004), struck a chord with readers and commentators.}

^{The book sold out at local bookstores after a laudatory review in the Washington Post. Charlie Rose touted it on his television show. The TV and radio appearances followed, and the small volume is in its fourth printing.}

^{Livingston, a life member of APA, told Psychiatric News, “Honestly, I’m a little surprised at the reaction the book has generated. Apparently people I don’t know personally are buying it.”}

^{The book takes the form of a conventional “self-help” treatise, but Livingston’s messages are much tougher than those of more famous fix-it-quick authors.}

^{Roxanne Roberts, in the November 30, 2004, Washington Post, wrote, “He is more Job than Dr. Phil, painfully aware of life’s limitations, trying to spare you a little hurt. He thinks in paragraphs, not sound bites.”}

^{The comparison with Job is apt.}

^{In 1991 Livingston’s 22-year-old son Andrew committed suicide after a long struggle with bipolar disorder. Lucas, his youngest son, was diagnosed with leukemia six months later. That child died at age 6 after an unsuccessful bone-marrow transplant from his father.}

^{How does one deal with such losses? Not with the aim of reaching closure about the experience, said Livingston.}

^{In fact, he wrote, “Like all who mourn, I learned an abiding hatred for the word `closure’ with its comforting implications that grief is a time-limited process from which we all recover.”}

^{Instead, Livingston wrote of the possibility of honoring the memory of his children by expressing the love he feels for them to those who still need him.}

^{He and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, became acquainted on an Internet site for bereaved parents.}

^{Edwards, whose son died in an automobile accident, said in the foreword to Too Soon Old: Too Late Smart that she keeps a folder on her desk marked “Gordon” containing a collection of his e-mails and posts for occasions when she needs a “voice that is at once stern and reassuring, hopeful but unwilling to proffer any guarantees.”}

^{“At the same time that he warns us how little we control, he reminds us that we are never stripped of all our choices,” Edwards wrote.}

^{The 30 “true things” that Livingston offers to his readers appear simple, but they are hardly simplistic. They all nudge readers toward a greater acceptance of responsibility for their actions and lives.}

^{These are among his lessons: The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas… .Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least… .Feelings follow behavior… .Only bad things happen quickly… .There is nothing more pointless, or common, than doing the same things and expecting different results.}

^{“If there is an overall theme to the book,” he said to a caller to the “Diane Rehm Show,” “it is that we are what we do.”}

^{“We’re too wordy. We keep telling ourselves and each other what we wish or intend. We need to do just do it.”}

^{He warns his readers, “In judging other people, we need to pay attention not to what they promise, but how they behave. This simple rule could prevent much of the pain and misunderstanding that infect human relationships.”}

^{Livingston, who is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, became a psychiatrist after serving in Vietnam as an Army doctor.}

^{In 1969, after he had come to see the futility of the war, the newly promoted major handed out copies of a satiric prayer about the conflict that nearly got him court-martialed. Instead, Livingston was sent home as “an embarrassment to the command.”}

^{He went back to John Hopkins University, where he had attended medical school, and was befriended by Jerome Frank, M.D., a professor of psychiatry who wrote extensively about psychotherapy and international disarmament.}

^{Frank arranged for Livingston to begin his residency in psychiatry at Hopkins.}

^{Livingston maintained a psychotherapy and psychopharmacy practice in Maryland for more than 30 years as director of the psychiatry department of a large, multispecialty group.}

^{Not surprisingly, he has tough words about what has happened to his profession.}

^{“This is the profession of Freud, Jung, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Irvin Yalom,” he said. “Managed care and insurance company reimbursement schedules have turned many of us into pill pushers.”}

^{He laments the diminishing role of the psychiatrist as a “source of wisdom and guidance for people seeking help with the eternal questions of how to live meaningful lives.”}

^{His book’s unexpected popularity might result, he thinks, from the fact that it deals with basic issues—such as trust, love, and loss—that are central to the “human desire to find meaning and happiness.”}

^{He said he fears that those topics have become the “province of nonmedical practitioners who engage in the messy, uncertain, and prolonged process of psychotherapy.”}

^{Livingston recognizes that medication can be a “wonderful aid” in the treatment of emotional disorders. He added, however, that prescribing medication “should not be the entirety of our professional contribution,” and he worries that diagnostic labels can have the effect of relieving the patient of responsibility for making changes.}

^{And change, Livingston wrote in his book, is the goal of all therapeutic conversation}

Change or Die was the title of an article that I read in a business magazine recently that struck me for it’s insights into what it takes to keep companies prosperous.  Another reason that phrase caught my eye was because it was very similar to the quote offered by one of our City Blue Ribbon Panel members who when commenting on our budget situation said “I’m an anti-tax guy but after studying our city’s financial predicament for 10 months I believe that we have to raise taxes or else Kent will end up on death spiral.”  Whether it’s changing the course of a company or a community, it all comes down to our ability to lead and embrace change.

Here’s how I see it:  change is like anything else in life — the more you practice it the better you get at it — so every day I try to ask myself what did I do different today — or better yet, what’s different today because of something I did?  I’m not promoting change for sake of change on the really big important stuff but I do believe it’s important to practice changing the little things more often so we’ll be ready to handle the big things when they came along unexpectedly as they always seem to do.

I don’t believe that in something as complex as a city you will ever find a complaint-proof idea to change things.  The customer base is too broad to expect unanimous support.  Most of us understand that intuitively but as soon as an idea is proposed to change something out come the old perfecto-meter as our measure for support – and inevitably failing that standard too often we end up supporting doing nothing.

I have as high standards as the next guy — but it’s a standard that seeks excellence rather than perfection.  Excellence by definition means it’s a work in progress so rather than beating ourselves up trying to find that one elusive “perfect” fix, I’m a proponent for taking a good idea and making it great through exceptional execution — plan the work and work the plan.  That means you take your punches but that’s short term pain taken in the name of progress.

I’d argue that communities can suffer perfecto-phobia too and that’s partly why I thought I’d share this article on change.  The article suggests that 9 times out of 10 we’ll fail to do the things that we should do because of our inability to accept change.   I admit the title is a bit alarming but with our future at stake, maybe we need to be alarmed to improve our odds.

Change or Die

All leadership comes down to this: changing people’s behavior. Why is that so damn hard? Science offers some surprising new answers — and ways to do better.

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We’re talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You’re probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn’t change.

Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

This revelation unnerved many people in the audience last November at IBM’s “Global Innovation Outlook” conference. The company’s top executives had invited the most farsighted thinkers they knew from around the world to come together in New York and propose solutions to some really big problems. They started with the crisis in health care, an industry that consumes an astonishing $1.8 trillion a year in the United States alone, or 15% of gross domestic product. A dream team of experts took the stage, and you might have expected them to proclaim that breathtaking advances in science and technology — mapping the human genome and all that — held the long-awaited answers. That’s not what they said. They said that the root cause of the health crisis hasn’t changed for decades, and the medical establishment still couldn’t figure out what to do about it.

Dr. Raphael “Ray” Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, an annual summit meeting of leaders from every constituency in the health system, told the audience, “A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral.” That is, they’re sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control. Continued Levey: “Even as far back as when I was in medical school” — he enrolled at Harvard in 1955 — “many articles demonstrated that 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues.” Levey didn’t bother to name them, but you don’t need an MD to guess what he was talking about: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise.

Then the knockout blow was delivered by Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University. He turned the discussion to patients whose heart disease is so severe that they undergo bypass surgery, a traumatic and expensive procedure that can cost more than $100,000 if complications arise. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties — all at a total cost of around $30 billion. The procedures temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives. Around half of the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this so-called restenosis are complex. It’s sometimes a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself. But many patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery — not to mention arrest the course of their disease before it kills them — by switching to healthier lifestyles. Yet very few do. “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle,” Miller said. “And that’s been studied over and over and over again. And so we’re missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can’t.”

Changing the behavior of people isn’t just the biggest challenge in health care. It’s the most important challenge for businesses trying to compete in a turbulent world, says John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied dozens of organizations in the midst of upheaval: “The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.” Those people may be called upon to respond to profound upheavals in marketplace dynamics — the rise of a new global competitor, say, or a shift from a regulated to a deregulated environment — or to a corporate reorganization, merger, or entry into a new business. And as individuals, we may want to change our own styles of work — how we mentor subordinates, for example, or how we react to criticism. Yet more often than not, we can’t.

CEOs are supposedly the prime change agents for their companies, but they’re often as resistant to change as anyone — and as prone to backsliding. The most notorious recent example is Michael Eisner. After he nearly died from heart problems, Eisner finally heeded his wife’s plea and brought in a high-profile number-two exec, Michael Ovitz, to alleviate the stress of running Disney. But Eisner proved incapable of seeing through the idea, essentially refusing to share any real power with Ovitz from the start.

The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn’t motivate — at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?

Kotter has hit on a crucial insight. “Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people’s feelings,” he says. “This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought.”

Unfortunately, that kind of emotional persuasion isn’t taught in business schools, and it doesn’t come naturally to the technocrats who run things — the engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors, accountants, and managers who pride themselves on disciplined, analytical thinking. There’s compelling science behind the psychology of change — it draws on discoveries from emerging fields such as cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience — but its insights and techniques often seem paradoxical or irrational.

Look again at the case of heart patients. The best minds at Johns Hopkins and the Global Medical Forum might not know how to get them to change, but someone does: Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, in Sausalito, California. Ornish, like Kotter, realizes the importance of going beyond the facts. “Providing health information is important but not always sufficient,” he says. “We also need to bring in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that are so often ignored.” Ornish published studies in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, showing that his holistic program, focused around a vegetarian diet with less than 10% of the calories from fat, can actually reverse heart disease without surgery or drugs. Still, the medical establishment remained skeptical that people could sustain the lifestyle changes. In 1993, Ornish persuaded Mutual of Omaha to pay for a trial. Researchers took 333 patients with severely clogged arteries. They helped them quit smoking and go on Ornish’s diet. The patients attended twice-weekly group support sessions led by a psychologist and took instruction in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise. The program lasted for only a year. But after three years, the study found, 77% of the patients had stuck with their lifestyle changes — and safely avoided the bypass or angioplasty surgeries that they were eligible for under their insurance coverage. And Mutual of Omaha saved around $30,000 per patient.

Framing Change

Why does the Ornish program succeed while the conventional approach has failed? For starters, Ornish recasts the reasons for change. Doctors had been trying to motivate patients mainly with the fear of death, he says, and that simply wasn’t working. For a few weeks after a heart attack, patients were scared enough to do whatever their doctors said. But death was just too frightening to think about, so their denial would return, and they’d go back to their old ways.

The patients lived the way they did as a day-to-day strategy for coping with their emotional troubles. “Telling people who are lonely and depressed that they’re going to live longer if they quit smoking or change their diet and lifestyle is not that motivating,” Ornish says. “Who wants to live longer when you’re in chronic emotional pain?”

So instead of trying to motivate them with the “fear of dying,” Ornish reframes the issue. He inspires a new vision of the “joy of living” — convincing them they can feel better, not just live longer. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. “Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear,” he says.

Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” Lakoff says that frames are part of the “cognitive unconscious,” but the way we know what our frames are, or evoke new ones, springs from language. For example, we typically think of a company as being like an army — everyone has a rank and a codified role in a hierarchical chain of command with orders coming down from high to low. Of course, that’s only one way of organizing a group effort. If we had the frame of the company as a family or a commune, people would know very different ways of working together.

The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts. “Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have — the long-term concepts that structure how we think — is instantiated in the synapses of the brain,” Lakoff says. “Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid.” Lakoff says that’s one reason why political conservatives and liberals each think that the other side is nuts. They don’t understand each other because their brains are working within different frames.

The frame that dominates our thinking about how work should be organized — the military chain-of-command model — is extremely hard to break. When new employees start at W.L. Gore & Associates, the maker of Gore-Tex fabrics, they often refuse to believe that the company doesn’t have a hierarchy with job titles and bosses. It just doesn’t fit their frame. They can’t accept it. It usually takes at least several months for new hires to begin to understand Gore’s reframed notion of the workplace, which relies on self-directed employees making their own choices about joining one another in egalitarian small teams.

Getting people to exchange one frame for another is tough even when you’re working one-on-one, but it’s especially hard to do for large groups of people. Howard Gardner, a cognitive scientist, MacArthur Fellow “genius” award winner, and professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, has looked at what works most effectively for heads of state and corporate CEOs. “When one is addressing a diverse or heterogeneous audience,” he says, “the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences.”

In Louis V. Gerstner Jr.’s successful turnaround of IBM in the 1990s, he learned the surprising importance of this kind of emotional persuasion. When he took over as CEO, Gerstner was fixated on what had worked for him throughout his career as a McKinsey & Co. consultant: coolheaded analysis and strategy. He thought he could revive the company through maneuvers such as selling assets and cutting costs. He quickly found that those tools weren’t nearly enough. He needed to transform the entrenched corporate culture, which had become hidebound and overly bureaucratic. That meant changing the attitudes and behaviors of hundreds of thousands of employees. In his memoir, Gerstner writes that he realized he needed to make a powerful emotional appeal to them, to “shake them out of their depressed stupor, remind them of who they were — you’re IBM, damn it!” Rather than sitting in a corner office negotiating deals and analyzing spreadsheets, he needed to convey passion through thousands of hours of personal appearances. Gerstner, who’s often brittle and imperious in private, nonetheless responded admirably to the challenge. He proved to be an engaging and emotional public speaker when he took his campaign to his huge workforce.

Steve Jobs’s turnaround at Apple shows the impact of reframing and telling a new narrative that’s simple, positive, and emotional. When he returned to the company after a long exile, he recast its image among employees and customers alike from a marginalized player vanquished in the battle for market share to the home of a small but enviable elite: the creative innovators who dared to “Think different.”

When leaders are addressing a small group of people who have a similar mind-set and shared values, the reframed message can be more nuanced and complex, Harvard’s Gardner says. But it still needs to be positive, inspiring, and emotionally resonant. A good example is how chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. rescued The New York Times from crisis. Former editor Howell Raines had alienated much of the newsroom’s staff, undermining its communal spirit with a new culture of favoritism. Raines fell when a star reporter he had shielded from criticism was exposed for fabricating news stories. The scandal threatened the famed paper’s credibility. Gardner says that Sulzberger successfully reframed the narrative this way: We are a great newspaper. We temporarily went astray and risked sacrificing the community spirit that made this an outstanding place to work. We can retain our excellence and regain our sense of community by admitting our errors, making sure that they don’t happen again, and being a more transparent and self-reflecting organization. To achieve these goals, Sulzberger replaced Raines with a new top editor, Bill Keller — a respected veteran who reflected the lost communal culture — and he appointed a “public editor” to critique the paper in an unedited column. Now, Gardner says, “the Times is a much happier place and the news coverage and journalistic empire are in reasonable shape.”

Radical Change

Reframing alone isn’t enough, of course. That’s where Dr. Ornish’s other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish’s tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. “These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator,” he says. “When people who have had so much chest pain that they can’t work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, ‘These are choices worth making.’ ”

While it’s astonishing that most patients in Ornish’s demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop taking the drug because it doesn’t actually make them feel any better. It doesn’t deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that big changes are easier than small ones.

Research shows that this idea applies to the business realm as well. Bain & Co., the management consulting firm, studied 21 recent corporate transformations and found that most were “substantially completed” in only two years or less while none took more than three years. The means were drastic: In almost every case, the CEOs fired most of the top management. Almost always, the companies enjoyed quick, tangible results, and their stock prices rose 250% a year on average as they revived.

IBM’s turnaround hinged on a radical shift in focus from selling computer hardware to providing “services,” which meant helping customers build and run their information-technology operations. This required a momentous cultural switch — IBMers would have to recommend that a client buy from competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft when it was in the client’s interest. But the radical shift worked: Services have grown into IBM’s core business and the key to its success.

Of course, radical change often isn’t possible in business situations. Still, it’s always important to identify, achieve, and celebrate some quick, positive results for the vital emotional lifts that they provide. Harvard’s Kotter believes in the importance of “short-term wins” for companies, meaning “victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without sufficient wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably run into serious problems.”

Supporting Change

Even when leaders have reframed the issues brilliantly, it’s still vital to give people the multifaceted support they need. That’s a big reason why 90% of heart patients can’t change their lifestyles but 77% of Ornish’s patients could — because he buttressed them with weekly support groups with other patients, as well as attention from dieticians, psychologists, nurses, and yoga and meditation instructors.

Xerox’s executives learned this lesson well. Four years ago, when the company was in crisis, they came up with a new vision that required salespeople to change the way they had always worked. “Their whole careers, salespeople had done one thing,” says James Firestone, president of Xerox North America, who leads a sales force of 5,400. “They would knock on doors, look for copiers, see how old they were, and sell a refresh. They knew how to do that.” The salespeople had such predictable routines that they could plan their days, weeks, even years. It was comforting. But it just wasn’t succeeding any longer.

Under the new strategy, the salespeople were supposed to really engage with customers so they could understand the complexities of how their offices operated and find opportunities to sell other products, such as scanners and printers. Maybe they would find that the customer actually needed fewer machines that could do more than the old ones had. Learning about the client’s needs meant that the sales reps had to take a lot more time and talk to more people about broader issues. It undermined the cozy predictability of their routines. The reps became anxious, Firestone recalls. “They’d say, ‘I know how to sell and make a living the old way, but not the new way.’ ”

Their anxiety was compounded by the fact that Xerox lagged in giving them the support they needed. It often took a couple of months before the salespeople received their scheduled training in the new approach. And it took two years before the company changed its incentive pay system to fit better with the new model, in which the reps had to invest a lot more time and effort before they signed deals. Eventually, though, the change effort, by expanding the sales focus to a larger range of products, helped Xerox avoid bankruptcy and return to profitability. “People need a sense of confidence that the processes will be aligned internally,” Firestone says. “For large companies, this is where change usually fails.” Even if change starts at the top, it can easily die somewhere in the middle. That’s why Xerox now holds “alignment workshops” that ask middle managers — the people who make processes work — to outline the ways its systems could inhibit its agendas for change.

This Is Your Brain on Change

Are most of us like the fearful copier salespeople who dread disruption to their routines? Neuroscience, a field that has exploded with insight, has a lot more to say about changing people’s behavior — and its findings are guardedly optimistic. Scientists used to believe that the brain became “hardwired” early in life and couldn’t change later on. Now researchers such as Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, say that the brain’s ability to change — its “plasticity” — is lifelong. If we can change, then why don’t we? Merzenich has perspective on the issue since he’s not only a leading neuroscientist but also an entrepreneur, the founder of two Bay Area startups. Both use PC software to train people to overcome mental disabilities or diseases: Scientific Learning Corp. focuses on children who have trouble learning to read, and Posit Science Corp. is working on ways to prevent, stop, or reverse cognitive decline in older adults.

Merzenich starts by talking about rats. You can train a rat to have a new skill. The rat solves a puzzle, and you give it a food reward. After 100 times, the rat can solve the puzzle flawlessly. After 200 times, it can remember how to solve it for nearly its lifetime. The rat has developed a habit. It can perform the task automatically because its brain has changed. Similarly, a person has thousands of habits — such as how to use a pen — that drive lasting changes in the brain. For highly trained specialists, such as professional musicians, the changes actually show up on MRI scans. Flute players, for instance, have especially large representations in their brains in the areas that control the fingers, tongue, and lips, Merzenich says. “They’ve distorted their brains.”

Businesspeople, like flutists, are highly trained specialists, and they’ve distorted their brains, too. An older executive “has powers that a young person walking in the door doesn’t have,” says Merzenich. He has lots of specialized skills and abilities. A specialist is a hard thing to create, and is valuable for a corporation, obviously, but specialization also instills an inherent “rigidity.” The cumulative weight of experience makes it harder to change.

How, then, to overcome these factors? Merzenich says the key is keeping up the brain’s machinery for learning. “When you’re young, almost everything you do is behavior-based learning — it’s an incredibly powerful, plastic period,” he says. “What happens that becomes stultifying is you stop learning and you stop the machinery, so it starts dying.” Unless you work on it, brain fitness often begins declining at around age 30 for men, a bit later for women. “People mistake being active for continuous learning,” Merzenich says. “The machinery is only activated by learning. People think they’re leading an interesting life when they haven’t learned anything in 20 or 30 years. My suggestion is learn Spanish or the oboe.”

Meanwhile, the leaders of a company need “a business strategy for continuous mental rejuvenation and new learning,” he says. Posit Science has a “fifth-day strategy,” meaning that everyone spends one day a week working in a different discipline. Software engineers try their hand at marketing. Designers get involved in business functions. “Everyone needs a new project instead of always being in a bin,” Merzenich says. “A fifth-day strategy doesn’t sacrifice your core ability but keeps you rejuvenated. In a company, you have to worry about rejuvenation at every level. So ideally you deliberately construct new challenges. For every individual, you need complex new learning. Innovation comes about when people are enabled to use their full brains and intelligence instead of being put in boxes and controlled.”

What happens if you don’t work at mental rejuvenation? Merzenich says that people who live to 85 have a 50-50 chance of being senile. While the issue for heart patients is “change or die,” the issue for everyone is “change or lose your mind.” Mastering the ability to change isn’t just a crucial strategy for business. It’s a necessity for health. And it’s possibly the one thing that’s most worth learning.

Alan Deutschman is a Fast Company senior writer based in San Francisco.

Maybe it is this leaf induced reverence for nature that happens at this time of year or maybe it is memories of a youth spent playing Indian war games in Fall woods – either way Fall has always been a time deep with Indian meaning for me. Where I grew up in Upstate NY was deep in the heart of Indian Country. I grew up on Iroquois land – the land of Five Nations, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas. Nearly every town was named after one Iroquois father or another and we were taught at an early age in school of the bravery of the people of the longhouses that cultivated the rich soils of upstate NY and fished the finger lakes and cast fear in the hearts of white settlers.

I always took great pride in the family story of the great-great aunt that was actual Indian blood. Despite the realities of my family tree in my mind at least that bloodline ran true in my veins. Every summer I was sent to camp Arrowhead where we taught the typical summer camp boondoggling and fire starting but it was always cast against the shadow of the Iroquois and all of our games were Indian games – usually some variation of lacrosse or Indian tag. The highlight each year was the season ending sleep over with the annual bon-fire and story telling. In the dark night around the blazing fire the Indian stories took on a deeper meaning that remains with me still – especially the story of the torture where Iroquois enemies were tied to a stake and had the great misfortune of having their heart cut out so quickly that they would see it beating in the Iroquois brave’s hand before they died. Tell that story to 10 year old boys in the woods at night and see how good any of them sleep that night.

For vacation in the summer my parents would take us back to foothills of the Adirondack mountains where they grew up. This was the Mohawk Valley — appropriately named after the ancient tribes that first settled the region. I wandered many a hillside and lakeside in those summers certain that I would catch a glimpse of a feather peaking around the Oak tree. My dad would take me to all the area forts, Fort William Henry and of course Fort Ticonderoga and I always found myself more fascinated with the stories of the courage of the “savages” that left scars on the wooden forts with their tomahawks and arrowheads. At Fort Ticonderoga I walked with my dad through the woods on the trail that was used by the Mohigans to sneak in and out of the fort. I was fascinated by the Mohigan story long before the movie made it so famous.

I still find the Indian mythology very meaningful and at this time of year I love to re-read my favorite Indian books, especially Black Elk Speaks which tells the story of this Oglala Sioux vision man who foretold the demise of his tribe to the white man. Late in his life on a reservation he told his story to John Neihardt from the University of Nebraska and it offers great insight into the Indian perspective of the “civilization of the West.”

Seeing through a different perspective seems an appropriate message for all of us who are working hard to build a community that is full of different perspectives.  The story of the Oglala Sioux reminds me that there is always another side of the story and perhaps that reminder will help us work through whatever challenging community issues may come our way.

Music — the stuff memories and dreams are made of

Music has a knack for taking us back to a point in time that can call up places, people and emotions as if they just happened. Just this morning I heard a fairly recent release titled – AM Radio – that did that for me and I was immediately transported back to my childhood and memories of my first AM Radio.

I can still feel the nervous excitement that came from what were some of my first demonstrations of independence from my parents (albeit behind closed doors with low volumes) that came from knowing that I was deliberately choosing to deny my parents the pleasure of making me go to bed by secretly playing my AM Radio. They could make me go to bed but they couldn’t make me sleep! And to that end, my AM Radio was my co-conspirator and best friend that talked to me late into the night until I decided it was time to sleep.

Dreamweaver was one of my favorite songs from my childhood era but what I have found so interesting is to see how the meaning of song for me has changed through time. I still love the music and the mood it creates but whereas the song once spoke to a starry-eyed 8 year old about the promise of seemingly infinite number of tomorrows, three decades later it provides an escape from the hard times that those tomorrows sometimes brought.

If you forget all my personal philosophical psychobabble, I think the song also speaks to us on another level. It speaks to what we do everyday. Together, we use our talents and professional expertise to weave the fabric of life in Kent. With all the work we’ve been doing from the Bicentennial Plan to trying to solve our struggling finances, I can’t help but think that we are all Dreamweavers for those 8 year olds sitting up late in bed wondering about what tomorrow holds in store for Kent.

Dreamweaver

I just closed my eyes again, climbed aboard the dreamweaver train.

Try to take away my worries of today and leave tomorrow behind.

Dreamweaver, I believe you can get me through the night.

Dreamweaver, I believe we can reach the morning light.

Climbing high through the starry skies, maybe to an astro plane.

Cross the highways of fantasy, help me forget today’s pain.

Dreamweaver, I believe you can get me through the night.

Dreamweaver, I believe we can reach the morning light.

Though the dawn maybe coming soon, there still may be some time.

Fly me away to the bright side of the moon, meet me on the other side.

Dreamweaver, I believe you can get me through the night.

Dreamweaver, I believe we can reach the morning light.

Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver.

Behind the Numbers

Northeast Ohio has certainly had its share of job loss. And even in the Kent city government we’re operating with a workforce that is 10% smaller than it was years ago. This is hard on business and hard on people.

When businesses announce that they are reducing their workforces by hundreds of people, it can seem as though they are sweeping the equivalent of a group of marathoners – individuals notable only as part of a mass, with numbers instead of names on their chests – off a bridge.

That is a disturbing image, but one that has some truth behind it. In many ways the twentieth century was the Organization Century, an age in which much of a worker’s identity came from the company he or she worked for. Individuals in those organizations were plugged into predetermined slots or roles. The individual was the human resource that made the role operational – and in many cases, he or she was an easily replaceable resource. It was not an attractive image of business. People don’t relish being mere tools of management, known more by their job titles than their names.

I think our new century will be different. Organizations are already shorter and flatter. IBM once had 27 layers from top to bottom; at last count it had a maximum of 7. Such restructuring can save a lot of time and money, but it requires more discretion be given to each employee. In the future, individuals will matter more than roles.

The photo of the marathon reflects this change. Those 30,000 runners are all there by choice; no one ordered their participation. They are competitors but also associates in a communal endeavor. Yes, a few of them are striving to reach the top, to win their division. Most however are competing only against themselves. This is not a horse race in which only the first three across the line count and the rest are also-rans. In a marathon, everyone who finishes wins. And since one is competing with and not against the others, there is a camaraderie and an atmosphere of shared pursuit that is obvious to anyone watching. Some of the runners are also using the race to make a contribution to a charity or a cause. So participating in the marathon is not a purely selfish activity for them but one that in some way benefits society.

The best organizations are marathons in that sense. Their workers are there more by choice than necessity. The employees enjoy being part of something significant and value the opportunity to improve their performance and develop their skills. They are not expecting, most of them, to reach the top but rather to finish the project and beat the target. They appreciate the opportunity that a good business gives them to contribute in some way to society and they gain from a camaraderie with fellow workers.

There is for each individual, pride and joy in having been a part of something bigger than themselves, something worthwhile, something worth a celebration.

Freedom of Music

Music has always been a sanctuary for me; it keeps me sane in a distinctly irrational sort of way. Music grants me shelter from my logically addicted mind. It’s pure right brain delight and it remains one of the few pristine areas that analysis has not yet polluted – and I hope to keep it that way. I intentionally never learned to read music or studied an instrument for fear that it would subject music to the tyranny of left brain dominance that has spoiled just about everything else in our ‘rationally’ exuberant world.

I read that leading psychologists have concluded that mankind has a “story telling” problem – which basically means we are so intellectually nimble that whether we know something or not we are very capable of rationalizing a theory about it regardless of reality. Once again we have our left brain and its exaggerated sense of self-importance to credit for this “problem” of which Mark Twain observed many years ago serves salesman, attorneys and politicians very well. This point is raised only to begin to dent the armor of reason and suggest that when reason falls into the wrong hands it can be a dangerous thing.

In that spirit, I found a way to validate my musical self-indulgence when I learned that humans have evolved a unique audio-visual sensory bias. Apparently, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, sight and sound tag-teamed their way to the top of our sensory heap, out-wrestling smell, taste and touch in man’s natural selection grudge match. The theory hypothesizes that sound is a significant contributor to our reproductive success, adaptation and survival as a species – the body of evidence for which can be found every night in Honky Tonks all across this country. Certainly the way in which we use sound differs greatly from our cave dwelling ancestors, yet perhaps it is no less important to our survival today.

Music is processed through the temporal lobe of the brain which explains why it remains just out of the reach of the big Gorilla of cognition that lives in the adjoining cerebral cortex. So biologically and figuratively, music exists outside of rational judgment – it ‘is what it is’ irrespective of what the brain ‘thinks’ about it. It’s a right-now foot-tapping hand-clapping body sort of thing, not a data-driven analyze-this and study it some more tomorrow kind of thing. It’s the great equalizer that soothes the beast and quiets the “ghost in the machine” long enough to allow instinct and intuition a chance to breathe some fresh air.

TS Eliott referred to “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while it lasts.” And maybe that is the source of the power of music: its ability to transform us; to move our minds as well as our feet, thumping and bumping us out of our intellectual ruts. In demonstration of the complexity of our physiology and its creative cross-wiring, music helps us see through our ears. Where intellect would accuse music of being an accessory to the conspiracy of the senses to bypass reason, my heart defends music as an affirmation of humanity that is as much art as it is science.

Music is the sage that speaks an ancient tongue with primal roots. It’s reminiscent of Zen and its Koan riddles that were intentionally inaccessible to the intellect. Zen Masters offered these nonsensical riddles to push students to drop their intellectual attachments and find peace in a stream of consciousness. Yet thousands of years later and half a globe away, we still bang our heads against the walls of logic trying to make sense of a room full of irrationality.

In the absence of a personal Zen Master on our HR staff, maybe we just need to turn up the music and rock-out a little more often. Music might not solve the problem but it might just make solving the problem possible – or at least tolerable. Perhaps the Sufi whirling dervishes were on to something when they would grip a floor nail between their toes and spin around in order to empty their minds of their troubles. Of course its escapism – but as the song says: “you don’t know what you got till it’s gone” – and sometimes getting away from yourself is the best medicine for finally understanding what ails you in the first place.

Yet in our dog-eat-dog, fasterbettercheaper, needed-it-yesterday culture we are afflicted with a terminal case of seriousness that snubs its nose at time-outs for anything other than molding progeny into smarter-brighter higher-achievers of behaviorally obsessed parents. This is a generation raised on a diet of no-pain, no-gain – and the exercise mantra has become so ubiquitous in our cultural ethos that we rationalize sacrificing parts of ourselves every day in the spirit of building a better mousetrap. Yet in the end we’re the rat caged by the very traps we built; offering prima facie evidence that even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.

With deadlines looming, emails flying and cell phones ringing we’ve become catecholamine-aholics. In our perpetual, self-induced state of fight or flight we get our daily fix of these primal chemicals as they fill our bloodstream with enough adrenaline to keep us operating at “defcon-5” for hours – triggering basal metabolic rate increases to break down glycogen in the liver and glucose in skeletal muscles for a quick energy feed. And with our heart racing, bronchioles in the lungs dilate to admit more air while digestion slows and the bladder and colon prepare to unencumber us for action. This is prime time baby go, go, go.

So away we go, rushing from stop to stop, plodding our way through problems the best we can. The trouble is when you’re clawing, scratching and digging for every inch, it doesn’t take long before you’ve dug yourself into a serious rut. And despite Einstein’s warning that we can’t solve our problems in the same manner that we created them, we usually go right back to digging and clawing in a state of panic trying to get out of our hole anyways. With nubs for fingernails it’s easy to lose hope.

But be still grasshopper, there is another way. Be one with the Lotus flower that thrives in polluted waters, for so too can be your destiny. When faced with fight or flight choose to float instead. Pop in a cd, go for a run, sit by the river or practice what the Chinese call (in true onomatopoetic form) Wu-Wei – “doing by not doing.” Don’t always be so busy, sometimes just be. Recharge yourself – if not for yourself then for the greater purpose you serve.

What is true for the people within the organization seems to hold true for the organization itself. The organization needs time to not be so busy, but to just be, to catch its breath and unplug. By dedicating this time the organization can recharge and return to the real world with fresh eyes, a rested mind and eager hands.

But there’s even more to it than regeneration. I believe it’s actually how the work of leadership gets done. Leadership function takes us above the tree line into the realm of values, strategies, and organizational culture where our sharp tools of reason, analysis and logic have limited value – and often do more harm than good. At these higher altitudes trying to force the round peg of reason through the square hole of leadership exhausts resources with little gain.

In the eyes of the analytic hammer everything looks like a nail. But in reality not everything is solved by pounding; some things must be lifted-up and that takes an entirely different set of tools and a whole new approach to the work. That’s the paradigm gap that separates the twin peaks of management and leadership. Yet in the densely wooded forests of organizations the topography can be deceiving and depending on where you are standing it’s not always easy to see this gap and discern where the leadership trail begins and where the management trail ends.

As a result, we slip down the slope assuming that the same set of hiking skills and tools that carried us through the lower elevations will be equally effective at the top. Hanging by an ice pick and toe crampons the seasoned mountain climber knows better but from the comfort of our offices we don’t seem to share the same sense of urgency that should motivate us to pay attention to the change in terrain and change the way we climb.

Instead we pick away at the hard ice on the leadership slope like it’s the soft dirt of the management base camp, ignoring the consequences of our misjudgment. Analysis and insight may ride in the same tracks but they take us to two very different places and relying on analysis to resolve leadership issues is like using an X-Ray machine to read blood pressure. X-Ray’s do a wonderful job at figuring out what bones are broken but they’re not built to gauge arterial squeeze. It seems obvious in the medical example yet that’s essentially the context error we repeat time and time again when we allow the shadow of analysis to keep us from seeing insights that are standing right beside us. It’s like being snow blind but still trying to ascend the summit.

The symptoms of this chronic “analytic-itus” are all too common: frustrated with the elusiveness of logical answers amidst reams of research and analysis, we pile on more data and dig ever deeper through it, convinced that if we just drill down the logic a little more, study a little harder and debate longer we can take the analysis to a depth it’s never been – and we will emerge victorious from the rubble with a solution in hand. We circle the wagons and let no detail escape our study. Yet in reality the further we go down this path, the further we travel away from our destination. With standing room only our analytic left brain crowds out all possible creative, instinctive and insightful right brain contributions. That’s a great way to solve fine-grain management problems but it prevents us from doing the course-grain work of leadership.

In this respect the peaks of leadership and management may look the same but they are in fact more like mirrored images of each other. Where management honors science, leadership aspires to the humanities. Management reduces work into its components in the name of economy, control and efficiency while leadership seeks to understand holistically and synthesize elements to inspire, liberate and magnify. Management depends on linear logic and abundant data while leadership eludes mathematical calculation and solves problems sideways favoring frugality of data to maintain a focus on fundamentals. Leadership avoids the trap of wanting to know everything and seeks to distill patterns from events, parse information, and infer direction that is more visceral than cerebral.

Malcolm Gladwell in his latest best-selling book Blink notes that the human capacity for insight is physiologically rooted in our limbic system. It’s the vestiges of primal instinct and intuition. It’s the hair on your neck rising as predators approach before you even realize it. It’s knowing something without knowing why you know it – you just know. It’s the power of a glance that extracts clues from the world around us in less time than it takes to blink – and speed dials that information directly to the hidden control towers of our brain that are hot-linked into our physical and emotional architecture and power our choices and behavior without our conscious consent.

The author describes what he calls the selective bias of our culture for applying the tool of methodical deliberation – or thick description – to every type of problem whether it’s appropriate or not. Instead he argues that we need to take our capacity for “thin slicing” meaning from our world and use that ancient skill to solve problems that have no inherent right or wrong – value choices, strategies, preferences – which I would argue is exactly what leadership in building community is all about.

Building community is more art than science and if we accept the value of both reason and intuition in performing their respective roles, a significant part of what we do as a leadership team should be figuring out how to be less deliberate and more insightful. We have not yet evolved an intuition/logic switch so until we do it is imperative for us to cultivate space that quiets the incessant whine of reason and invites insight to join us at our leadership table. Tap into the reservoir of Bays Mountain and morning music to unlock the door to our intuitive selves.

Better yet, in the spirit of wellness, go exercise – and believe it or not, as you push your heart rate above 145 bpm, you’ll be activating your biological sensors to signal the brain to shift gears from logic dominated thought to those instinctual patterns that are hard-wired into our neurology and seek to protect core functions under conditions of duress. Run even faster and as your heart rate reaches 175 bpm your cognitive function is nearly disabled and with no cognition left in the tank, you’re running on pure instinct. Right about then – BAM – out of nowhere, comes one of those sudden revelations, an insight into a problem that you’ve been chewing on for days. When you calm the surface noise of reason, insights have room to bubble up.