Difference between meeting 1 jerk and meeting 10 jerks

There's a saying I heard once that I keep in mind most days:
If one day you meet a jerk, then you met a jerk. If one day you meet ten jerks, then YOU'RE the jerk.
As you think on that for a moment, let's consider the exact opposite. There's no better way I know to do that than to use the poem "Purple" by Alexis Rotella, which I'll put here. Please take a minute to read it. I promise you won't regret it.

In first grade
Mrs. Lohr said
my purple teepee
wasn’t realistic enough
that purple was no color
s for a tent,
that purple was a color
for people who died,
that my drawing
wasn’t good enough to hang
with the others.
I walked back to my seat
counting the swish swish swishes
of my baggy corduroy trousers.
With a black crayon
nightfall came to my purple tent
in the middle of an afternoon.
In second grade
Mr. Barta said draw anything,
he didn’t care what.
I left my paper blank
and when he came around
to my desk
my heart beat like a tom tom.
He touched my head
with his big hand
and in a soft voice said
the snowfall
how clean
and white
and beautiful.

A poem about a child and a teacher can be particularly evocative, because of the imagery of the subject. But what about those you encounter that aren't cute little kids, such as the grumpy service staff, the judgemental coworker, or the random person on the bus who causes an unconscious shudder from you? It is said that you can tell the character of a person by how they treat those who can do nothing for them.
Each of us, no matter how isolated or public, no matter our corner of the earth leaves a trail as we move through this life. What trail will you leave?

Think beyond tools and tactics!

Most Stanford students fail this challenge. Here's what we can learn from their mistakes.

You’re a student in a Stanford class on entrepreneurship.

Your professor walks into the room, breaks the class into different teams, and gives each team five dollars in funding. Your goal is to make as much money as possible within two hours and then give a three-minute presentation to the class about what you achieved. 

If you’re a student in the class, what would you do? 

Typical answers range from using the five dollars to buy start-up materials for a makeshift car wash or lemonade stand, to buying a lottery ticket or putting the five dollars on red at the roulette table. 

But the teams that follow these typical paths tend to bring up the rear in the class. 

The teams that make the most money don’t use the five dollars at all. They realize the five dollars is a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource. 

So they ignore it. Instead, they go back to first principles and start from scratch. They reframe the problem more broadly as “What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?” One particularly successful team ended up making reservations at popular local restaurants and then selling the reservation times to those who wanted to skip the wait. These students generated an impressive few hundred dollars in just two hours. 

But the team that made the most money approached the problem differently. They realized that both the $5 funding and the 2-hour period weren’t the most valuable assets at their disposal. Rather, the most valuable resource was the three-minute presentation time they had in front of a captivated Stanford class. They sold their three-minute slot to a company interested in recruiting Stanford students and walked away with $650. 

The five-dollar challenge illustrates the difference between tactics and strategy. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to different concepts. A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you undertake to implement the strategy. 

The Stanford students who bombed the $5 challenge fixated on a tactic—how to use the five dollars—and lost sight of the strategy. If we focus too closely on the tactic, we become dependent on it. “Tactics without strategy,” as Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War, “are the noise before defeat.” 

Just because a $5 bill is sitting in front of you doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for the job. Tools, as Neil Gaiman reminds us, “can be the subtlest of traps.” When we’re blinded by tools, we stop seeing other possibilities in the peripheries. It’s only when you zoom out and determine the broader strategy that you can walk away from a flawed tactic. 

What is the $5 tactic in your own life? How can you ignore it and find the 2-hour window? Or even better, how do you find the most valuable three minutes in your arsenal? 

Once you move from the “what” to the “why”—once you frame the problem broadly in terms of what you’re trying to do instead of your favored solution—you’ll discover other possibilities lurking in plain sight.

Evolution and Revolution As Organizations Grow

Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow

Larry E. Greiner of the Harvard Business School wrote a noteworthy article with this title in the Harvard Business Review in July 1972, describing the growing pains that organizations go through.

Greiner proposed that organizations exhibit five predictable stages of growth called evolutions and five periods of crises called revolutions. His theory is readily applicable to many organizations.

The growth pattern consists of tightening and loosening of management reins in response to changes within the organization and the environment.

The evolution/revolution pattern, as shown by Apple Computer, is an excellent way to put a company’s history into MBA perspective. Apple Computer sprang forth from the creativity of Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak. Beginning in 1976, these two entrepreneurs were on a freight train of rapid growth until the company became so unwieldy that is almost jumped the tracks in 1983. Apple was faced with the leadership crisis of a growth company that didn’t have anyone who could efficiently run its day-to-day operations. Jobs was a lofty visionary making speeches, while Wozniak was the magic technician.

The company started to run out of gas as its creative fuel ran low. Apple II sales slumped and the new Lisa computer failed. John Sculley (Wharton MBA ’63) was brought in from Pepsi-Cola to give the company direction. Sculley reorganized Apple and cut costs in its bloated headquarters. Steve Jobs and his followers demanded more autonomy to develop a new breakthrough product and Sculley gave it to them. The delegation resulted in the creation of the Macintosh.

The Mac created another explosive growth period. However, Jobs could not work in a growing corporate bureaucracy, and he started a new company called NeXT. In 1989 the aging Mac faced fierce competition, and as profits declined in 1990, a new Apple crisis of control was brewing. Michael Spindler was appointed as chief operating officer to assist Sculley as chairman to take control and return the company to increasing profitability. By 1992 they had succeeded, but fell into crisis in 1995. Steve Jobs returned and led yet another recovery in 1998 with the iMac and G3 computers.

Source: Ten Day MBA (Steven Silbiger)

Three Steps To Success On The Job

“The first step to success on the job is to understand bosses and their context, including:

• Their stated and unstated goals and objectives
• The pressures on them
• Their strengths, weaknesses, blind spots
• Their preferred work styles

“The second step is to be introspective and assess yourself and your needs, including:

• Your own strengths and weaknesses
• Your personal style
• Your predisposition toward dependence on or resistance to authority figures

“The third step is to incorporate the first two steps and develop and maintain a relationship that:

• Fits both your needs and styles
• Is characterized by mutual expectations
• Keeps your boss informed—bosses hate surprises!
• Is based on dependability and honesty
• Selectively uses your boss’s time and resources”

Source: Ten Day MBA (Steven Silbiger)

Appreciate, appreciate and appreciate

I once read a poignant Reader’s Digest article about a little girl who often misbehaved. Her mother had to continually reprimand her. However, one day, the little girl had been especially good and hadn’t done a single thing that called for a reprimand. The mother said, “That night after I tucked her in bed and started downstairs, I heard a muffled noise. Running back up, I found her head buried in the pillow. She was sobbing. Between the sobs she asked, ‘Mommy, haven’t I been a pretty good girl today?’”

The question, the mother said, went through her like a knife.

“I had been quick to correct her,” she said, “when she was wrong. But when she tried to behave, I hadn’t noticed it and I put her to bed without one word of appreciation.” Adults are all grown-up little girls and little boys. We may not go to bed sobbing if the people in our lives don’t notice when we are good. Nevertheless, a trace of those tears lingers.

Source: How to talk to anyone (Leil Lowndes)

What the dog sees in you ('What the dog saw' by Malcolm Gladwell)

The anthropologist Brian Hare has done experiments with dogs, for example, where he puts a piece of food under one of two cups, placed several feet apart. The dog knows that there is food to be had, but has no idea which of the cups holds the prize. Then Hare points at the right cup, taps on it, looks directly at it. What happens? The dog goes to the right cup virtually every time. Yet when Hare did the same experiment with chimpanzees — an animal that shares 98.6 percent of our genes — the chimps couldn’t get it right. A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won’t. “Primates are very good at using the cues of the same species,” Hare explained. “So if we were able to do a similar game, and it was a chimp or another primate giving a social cue, they might do better. But they are not good at using human cues when you are trying to cooperate with them. They don’t get it: ‘Why would you ever tell me where the food is?’

The key specialization of dogs, though, is that dogs pay attention to humans, when humans are doing something very human, which is sharing information about something that someone else might actually want.” Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans,” Hare went on. “ Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.”

A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward — even a quarter of an inch — means nonthreatening. It means you’ve relinquished what ethologists call an intention movement to proceed forward. Cock your head, even slightly, to the side, and a dog is disarmed. Look at him straight on and he’ll read it like a red flag. Standing straight, with your shoulders squared, rather than slumped, can mean the difference between whether your dog obeys a command or ignores it.

Breathing even and deeply — rather than holding your breath — can mean the difference between defusing a tense situation and igniting it. “I think they are looking at our eyes and where our eyes are looking, and what our eyes look like,” the ethologist Patricia McConnell, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says. “A rounded eye with a dilated pupil is a sign of high arousal and aggression in a dog. I believe they pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that’s a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go.”

In the book The Other End of the Leash, McConnell decodes one of the most common of all human-dog interactions — the meeting between two leashed animals on a walk. To us, it’s about one dog sizing up another. To her, it’s about two dogs sizing up each other after first sizing up their respective owners. The owners “are often anxious about how well the dogs will get along,” she writes, “and if you watch them instead of the dogs, you’ll often notice that the humans will hold their breath and round their eyes and mouths in an ‘on alert’ expression. Since these behaviors are expressions of offensive aggression in canine culture, I suspect that the humans are unwittingly signaling tension. If you exaggerate this by tightening the leash, as many owners do, you can actually cause the dogs to attack each other. Think of it: the dogs are in a tense social encounter, surrounded by support from their own pack, with the humans forming a tense, staring, breathless circle around them. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen dogs shift their eyes toward their owner’s frozen faces, and then launch growling at the other dog.”