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When I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90% possible.
I think there are moral obligations, and I think there are economic transactions. So I think that chores are good; I think that allowances are good. I think combining them is bad.
Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.
When we make progress and get better at something, it is inherently motivating. In order for people to make progress, they have to get feedback and information on how they're doing.
One of the best predictors of ultimate success in either sales or non-sales selling isn't natural talent or even industry expertise, but how you explain your failures and rejections.
The science shows that the best way to use money is to take the issue of money off the people. Pay people enough so that money isn't an issue, and they can focus on doing great work.
One of the best predictors of ultimate success in either sales or non - sales selling isn't natural talent or even industry expertise, but how you explain your failures and rejections.
Create some psychological space between you and your project by imagining you're doing it for someone else or contemplating what advice you'd give to another person in your predicament.
I'm not a Trump fan, to put it mildly, but I think there's a power to simplicity. When Trump was running, people knew exactly what he stood for and what he was going to do as President.
Clinton was super attuned to other people to the point where he talks about feeling other people's pain. Clinton is probably the most buoyant, resilient person in American political history.
In economic terms, we've always thought of work as a disutility - as something you do to get something else. Now it's increasingly a utility - something that's valuable and worthy in its own right.
What do artists do? Artists give people something they didn't know they were missing: a dance, a piece of music, a painting, a piece of sculpture. Catering to that need is the best business strategy.
In many professions, what used to matter most were abilities associated with the left side of the brain: linear, sequential, spreadsheet kind of faculties. Those still matter, but they're not enough.
Empathy is about standing in someone else's shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.
The ability to take another perspective has become one of the keys to both sales and non-sales selling. And the social science research on perspective-taking yields some important lessons for all of us.
Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme.
If I really believe that visual representation and narrative are ways to convey important, complex ideas, and if the world is gravitating toward this form, then geez, I better do it myself. I want to do it myself.
What's important now are the characteristics of the brain's right hemisphere: artistry, empathy, inventiveness, big-picture thinking. These skills have become first among equals in a whole range of business fields.
For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation-the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing-is essential for high levels of creativity.
Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.
There is a huge body of evidence showing that people do better in their work when they know why they're doing it in the first place. They do better when they see what they're doing contributes to something in the world.
Human beings are natural mimickers. The more youre conscious of the other sides posture, mannerisms, and word choices - and the more you subtly reflect those back - the more accurate youll be at taking their perspective.
Traditional performance reviews have passed their sell-by date. Big time. There's research showing that roughly two-thirds of performance appraisals have either no effect - or a negative effect! - on employee performance.
Large companies are not going to disappear. Multinational companies with tens of thousands of employees are not going to disappear. In fact, many of them are getting larger because they can benefit from economies of scale.
Human beings are natural mimickers. The more you're conscious of the other side's posture, mannerisms, and word choices - and the more you subtly reflect those back - the more accurate you'll be at taking their perspective.
We live in a world of breathtaking material plenty. That has freed hundreds of millions of people from day-to-day struggles and liberated us to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.
One aspect of play is the importance of laughter, which has physiological and psychological benefits. Did you know that there are thousands of laughter clubs around the world? People get together and laugh for no reason at all!
Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.
For many of us, the opposite of talking isn't listening. It's waiting. When others speak, we typically divide our attention between what they're saying now and what we're going to say next - and end up doing a mediocre job at both.
We have in our head something called story grammar. We see the world as a series of episodes rather than logical propositions... In our serious society, storytelling is seen as being soft. But people process the world through story.
The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic 'right-brain' thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.
I think that designers and architects need to educate the people who don't quite know what they do and make a strong case for why it's valuable and why it changes the game. I think waiting for people to come around to it just won't do.
To some extent, the act of creation and the act of selling are hard to disentangle. If you create something, whether it's a painting or a company, I think if you care about it, you have some obligation to go out and tell people about it.
Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. Visual artists in particular are good at seeing how the pieces come together. I experienced this myself by trying to learn to draw.
Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there--in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat--things gent freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll.
I'm not a huge fan of the concept of 'passion' when it comes to careers. Instead of trying to answer the daunting question of, 'What's your passion?' it's better simply to watch what you do when you've got time of your own and nobody's looking.
In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn't work in unstable conditions.
Financial firms are sending their back-office jobs overseas. But what do fine artists do? They create something new, unexpected, and delightful that changes the world. MFA abilities are harder to outsource and more important in an abundant world.
A lot of white-collar work requires less of the routine, rule-based, what we might call algorithmic set of capabilities, and more of the harder-to-outsource, harder-to-automate, non-routine, creative, juristic - as the scholars call it - abilities.
You know, I'm not a huge fan of the concept of 'passion' when it comes to careers. Instead of trying to answer the daunting question of 'What's your passion?' it's better simply to watch what you do when you've got time of your own and nobody's looking.
It's concerning to me when people look at the course of education as just a means for getting a job four years later. If you're just doing this because it is going to lead to a 'good job,' you're better off doing something you're genuinely interested in.
What is interesting is that John Lewis actually got interested initially in the civil rights movement because of a comic book. So part of it, he's paying homage to this tradition that you can tell serious stories and talk about serious issues in graphic form.
Most of what we know about sales comes from a world of information asymmetry, where for a very long time sellers had more information than buyers. That meant sellers could hoodwink buyers, especially if buyers did not have a lot of choices or a way to talk back.
The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.” TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO
A lot of times when you have very short-term goals with a high payoff, nasty things can happen. In particular, a lot of people will take the low road there. They'll become myopic. They'll crowd out the longer-term interests of the organization or even of themselves.
If you look at the very best presidents, the most effective presidents, they were always decent salespeople. Ronald Reagan was an extremely effective salesman, very tuned to the people he was selling to, very clear in what he was selling, very resilient and buoyant.
Studying design has made me a much, much more astute observer of this aspect of business. And I'm working mightily to improve my empathic skills. I've dramatically improved my ability to read facial expressions - and I'm trying to be a better, more attentive listener.
Questions are often more effective than statements in moving others. Or to put it more appropriately, since the research shows that when the facts are on your side, questions are more persuasive than statements, don't you think you should be pitching more with questions?
One of the things is, in the writing process, if you do it enough, you have a sense of where you are. I didn't have that with the first book as I was writing it. Now, as I write books, I have a sense of where I am. Unfortunately, the sense of where I am is usually behind.
Health care is a design problem. Dependence on foreign oil is a design problem. To some extent, poverty is a design problem. We need design thinkers to solve those problems, and most people who are in positions of political power are not design thinkers, to put it mildly.