INTRODUCTION
1. “23 Economic Experts Weigh In: Why Is Productivity Growth So Low?” Focus Economics, accessed November 10, 2018, https://www.focus-economics.com/blog/why-is-productivity-growth-so-low-23-economic-experts-weigh-in.
LIE #1
1. To offer just one example, a recent article in Harvard Business Review suggests that culture comes in eight flavors (Learning, Purpose, Caring, Order, Safety, Authority, Results, and Enjoyment); that each of these is measurable across a company as a whole; that companies can combine several of these into their overall culture; and that an important part of selecting senior leaders is to assess the degree of correspondence between their intrinsic characteristics and the desired corporate culture. Boris Groysberg et al., “The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2018.
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: James Dodsley, 1790).
3. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Harvill Secker, 2014).
4. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Harvill Secker, 2016).
LIE #2
1. Stanley McChrystal et al., Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (New York: Penguin, 2015).
2. The Battle of Britain, August–October 1940: An Air Ministry Record of the Great Days from 8th August–31st October, 1940 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1941).
3. McChrystal, Team of Teams, 216.
4. Ibid., 217.
5. Cisco data, as presented at the annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), 2017.
1. Lisa D. Ordoñez et al., “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting,” Academy of Management Perspectives 23, no. 1 (2009): 6.
2. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).
3. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, January 11, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571.
4. Cammie McGovern, “Looking into the Future for a Child with Autism,” New York Times, August 31, 2017.
LIE #4
1. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch-vWyK2yJs.
2. Stephen Pile, The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 115.
3. Stated during an appearance in the 2017 documentary George Michael: Freedom, directed by David Austin.
4. “IBM Kenexa Core (Foundational) Skills and Competencies: A Framework with Core Skills Required for General Job Roles,” IBM Corporation, 2015.
5. See https://performancemanager4.successfactors.com/doc/roboHelp/12-Getting_Familiar_With_PA_Forms/ph_wa_use.htm (retrieved 8/25/18).
6. See, for example, Dr. Robert Kegan’s talk at the 2016 NeuroLeadership Summit, available here: https://neuroleadership.com/bob-kegan-feedback/.
7. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 42.
8. This story is told in more detail by Todd Rose in his wonderful book The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness (New York: HarperCollins, 2016). We’re grateful to him for his permission to summarize it here.
9. Stated precisely, there was no evidence that the average characteristics of a group applied to any individual in that group.
LIE #5
1. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqVyHMtSvFE.
2. Ray Dalio, Principles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).
3. Adam Grant, “Billionaire Ray Dalio Had an Amazing Reaction to an Employee Calling Him Out on a Mistake,” Business Insider, February 2, 2016.
4. Brian Brim and Jim Asplund, “Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths,” Gallup Business Journal, November 12, 2009.
5. Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Viking Adult, 2002).
6. Richard Boyatzis, “Neuroscience and Leadership: The Promise of Insights,” Ivey Business Journal, January/February 2011.
7. Ibid.
8. Rick Hanson, “Take in the Good,” https://www.rickhanson.net/take-in-the-good/.
9. Including, according to one recent piece of research, by looking for a less critical social network so as to avoid hearing the negative feedback in the first place. See Scott Berinato, “Negative Feedback Rarely Leads to Improvement,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2018.
10. David Cooperrider and Associates, “What Is Appreciative Inquiry?” http://www.davidcooperrider.com/ai-process/.
11. John M. Gottman and Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert (New York: Crown Publishers, 1999); and Barbara L. Fredrickson, “The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 359, no. 1449 (2004): 1367.
12. See https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/the-magic-ratio-that-wasnt/33279.
13. Barbara L. Fredrickson, “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions,” The American Psychologist 56, no. 3 (2001): 218.
LIE #6
1. Robert J. Wherry Sr. and C. J. Bartlett, “The Control of Bias in Ratings: A Theory of Rating,” Personnel Psychology 35, no. 3 (1982): 521; Michael K. Mount et al., “Trait, Rater and Level Effects in 360-Degree Performance Ratings,” Personnel Psychology 51, no. 3 (2006): 557; and Brian Hoffman et al., “Rater Source Effects Are Alive and Well after All,” Personnel Psychology 63, no. 1 (2010): 119.
2. Steven E. Scullen, Michael K. Mount, and Maynard Goff, “Understanding the Latent Structure of Job Performance Ratings,” Journal of Applied Psychology 85, no. 6 (2000): 956.
3. More precisely, according to the researchers’ determination of how much of the ratings variance could be tied directly to someone’s individual performance, the person being rated is 16 percent there and 84 percent not there.
4. Hoffman et al., “Rater Source Effects Are Alive and Well after All.”
5. This definition is from the Financial Times, and can be found at http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=business-acumen (retrieved 2/17/18).
6. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2005).
7. See Galton’s original letter sharing his findings at “Vox Populi—Sir Francis Galton,” The Wisdom of Crowds blog, http://wisdomofcrowds.blogspot.com/2009/12/vox-populi-sir-francis-galton.html.
8. This might be a little inside baseball for you, but please watch out for anything calling itself “driver analysis.” This describes an approach in which the creator of a survey includes many questions about a subject, such as employee engagement, and then at the end of the survey adds a short list of summary questions, such as, “I am proud to work for my company,” or, “I plan to work for my company a year from now.” The survey creator then runs a driver analysis to examine which of the questions in the body of the survey “drive” the summary items, and winds up pronouncing that certain items are the drivers of employee engagement because people who scored higher on them also scored higher on the summary items. Superficially this appears to be a conclusion based on valid data, but it isn’t terribly helpful. One-off driver analysis doesn’t tell you what drives behavior in the real world: it simply reveals that people who rated certain items more highly earlier in the survey also rated other items highly later in the survey; that people who were happy early in the survey were still happy later. Technically, this conclusion is valid. It just doesn’t matter very much.
9. Lord Kelvin (né William Thomson)—the British scientist who, among other things, determined the value of absolute zero and who therefore knew a thing or two about measurement (and thermometers)—once said, “In physical science a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and methods for practicably measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.” Sir William Thomson, “Electrical Units of Measurement,” a lecture delivered at the Institution of Civil Engineers on May 3, 1883, published in Popular Lectures and Addresses, vol. 1, Constitution of Matter (London: Macmillan and Co., 1889), 73.
10. We could also, by the way, use this type of approach to design a better 360-degree-feedback tool—if we wanted to understand what someone’s peers felt about his or her performance. In doing do, we’d have to be sure the questions asked each peer to rate him- or herself, as we’ve seen. But we’d also need to solve for two data-sufficiency issues: First, who makes up the right set of people to rate you, and how many of them do we need to respond to our survey? Second, how do we know that they know your work well enough to provide good data? These are tricky questions to solve.
LIE #7
1. Douglas A. Ready, Jay A. Conger, and Linda A. Hill, “Are You a High Potential?” Harvard Business Review, June 2010.
2. For a good discussion of this, see Ken Richardson and Sarah H. Norgate, “Does IQ Really Predict Job Performance?” Applied Developmental Science 19, no. 3 (2015): 153.
3. See https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elon-Musk.
4. John Paul MacDuffie, “The Future of Electric Cars Is Brighter with Elon Musk in It,” New York Times, October 1, 2018.
1. Kristine D. Olson, “Physician Burnout—A Leading Indicator of Health System Performance?” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 92, no. 11 (2017): 1608.
LIE #9
1. We are not the first to make this point. But those who have arrived at it before us then continue by trying to identify the set of traits that all leaders should acquire in order to attract followers—bringing us right back to the idea that leadership is a thing. Our line of inquiry has taken us in a different direction.
2. Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw Hill, 1991).
3. Pierre Gurdjian, Thomas Halbeisen, and Kevin Lane, “Why Leadership-Development Programs Fail,” McKinsey Quarterly, January 2014.
4. This list is taken from Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Andrew Roscoe, and Kentaro Aramaki, “Turning Potential into Success: The Missing Link in Leadership Development,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2017, 88.
5. Joseph Rosenbloom, “Martin Luther King’s Last 31 Hours: The Story of His Final Prophetic Speech,” The Guardian, April 4, 2018.