I am also a big fan of the game of basketball, as well as a big fan of the lessons that we can learn from games like basketball, where team play can trump raw talent. Thus, I have often marveled at the strategies of basketball coaches who must live with particularly frustrating constraints: they’re not allowed to shoot the ball or actively defend the players on the other team, however much they might want to. In some sense, you might think that these constraints would help coaches do less. Instead, coaches still seem to find ways to do too much. In particular, far too many coaches pace up and down the floor during their team’s games, losing their voices by barking commands at their players even while they are trying to do their jobs and play the game.

Thus, my archetypal Do Nothing! basketball coach-slash-leader has always been Phil Jackson, who was renowned not only for being incredibly successful but also for sitting on the bench with his arms and legs crossed during his teams’ games. I have recently learned (due to a suggestion from my colleague, Adam Waytz) that there is another Do Nothing! basketball coach who is currently active, Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat. (Please note: it is particularly difficult for me to say anything positive about the Heat or about any team that hails from New York, as I am a particularly avid fan of the Chicago Bulls.)

The Heat were recently embroiled in a particularly close game against another powerhouse, the perennially effective San Antonio Spurs. The Spurs had called a timeout, with 32 seconds remaining. This is a great time for great coaches to put their imprint on a game, as people remember the end of a game much more than they remember the beginning (even though late points don’t count any more than early points do). Spoelstra used the time-out to organize his team’s defense. With two of their own possible timeouts remaining, he also could have told his team members to call their own time out when they got possession of the ball so that he could orchestrate their next, and possibly last, offensive play. This way they might be able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (as they say). This is crunch time in basketball, and for professional basketball coaches, who are often the epitome of the term, ‘control freak,’ this is their time to shine and show that they are worth the big salaries that they receive.

But Spoelstra is also a data-oriented coach, and it turns out that the data on late time-outs is very clear: teams shoot more poorly after they take a time-out – by a sizable degree. Data over a 3½ year period shows that shooting percentages in the pros fell from 40.4% to 33.5% during the last 5 minutes of a game when a team that was tied or behind by less than 5 points took a time-out. When they took a time-out within the last minute of a game, the percentage change was less severe but still notable, from 35.1% to 32.1%. (Note, too, that both percentages dropped as the clock wound down – even professional players are affected by time pressure). And when they took a timeout within the last 9 seconds of a game, the percentages dropped from a particularly poor 27.4% to a truly abysmal 20.9%. It is clear that time pressure is not a shooter’s best friend; it is also clear that a team’s chances of winning a game at the very end go down even further if their coach has called a time-out.

The irony, of course, is that most coaches don’t really believe this. Instead, they think that their players need their help even more when times get tough. (They also believe that a player who has made three or more shots in a row, i.e., someone who has a ‘hot hand,’ will be more rather than less likely to sink their next shot, even though the data doesn’t support this either. But that’s another story.)

You might argue that Spoelstra can afford to do nothing, as his team is stacked with stars: LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, Ray Allen, and their teammates. Phil Jackson was similarly blessed, and similarly scorned. But the history of basketball also shows that many teams with great players still don’t win championships. In other words, like any focal leader, coaches matter; it’s not just the skills of the players that wins games.

Calling ineffective time-outs seems to be the result of the same kind of human nature that pushes leaders in all sorts of situations to do more than they should and to interfere with their team members’ ability to display their skills naturally and without having to think too much about them. It’s just incredibly hard, for leaders and coaches, to sit on their hands and Do Nothing! But when they do, what are their teams’ likely reactions? To realize that their coach/their leader has confidence that they can do the right thing.

In basketball, taking a timeout also lets the other team organize their defense. As Shane Battier – an amazing defensive player and an incredibly important role player for the Heat – put it, “Defenses aren’t as prepared after a late bucket to tie or take the lead because emotionally teams aren’t as prepared to get that stop. If you call time-out you allow a team to set up their defense, focus in.”

In other words, leaders who do too much not only send the wrong signal to their own team members, they also don’t recognize the effects of their behavior on their competitors. In this case, by calling a time-out, a basketball coach lets his opponents organize their defense. This makes it that much harder to surprise them or get them out of position, making it much harder for their team to win a close game.

This is one more example, of so many, of a particularly ineffective intervention by leaders – and one the rest of us can keep in mind as well.

Note: Background information for this blog came from two articles at ESPN.com
1. Beckley Mason, “Evidence: Timeouts can hurt scoring.” February 21, 2012
2. Henry Abbott, “Erik Spoelstra for coach of the year,” April 2, 2013

I’ve been reading some research lately that continues to reinforce the idea that I was (and am) fairly naïve – but it also gives me hope. My colleague, Nicole Stephens, does wonderful work on the fact that people from different social classes in the US have markedly different perspectives on actions and decisions that people view as appropriate in a variety of challenging situations. One of my favorites of her studies concerns the public’s reactions to people who did not leave New Orleans in advance of Hurricane Katrina. Although we can easily argue about whether there was enough time for people to get out of town (FEMA’s responses to the crisis did not fare well in the court of public opinion, for many good reasons), people who stayed were scorned for their actions: they were accused of being lazy and irresponsible, endangering themselves and their families, and requiring more government support than they deserved.

Nicole’s research shows that this is a truly middle class view of the situation. She and her colleagues note that the primarily middle-class White people who left had more education and income, easier access to news and warnings, more reliable transportation, and more geographically extended social networks than the primarily working-class Black people who stayed. In addition, she and her colleagues surveyed and interviewed three groups of people who had opinions about these events: outside (neutral) observers, relief workers, and survivors themselves.

Their survey results reveal that outside observers were decidedly negative toward the people who stayed: they portrayed their actions as stupid and passive even though they clearly recognized the many reasons that made it difficult for them to evacuate (e.g., limited money and transportation options). Although relief workers were less negative, their reactions were also negative; they basically said that they really couldn’t understand why people stayed.

Nicole and her colleagues’ interviews were extremely revealing. One person who left town presented a simple, logical explanation: “I wanted to beat the hurricane so we decided to leave early to beat traffic.” Another described the decision process as rational and forward looking: “I started making plans. I immediately got on the phone and called hotels.” Leavers were also afraid that they would lose their sense of being independent, e.g., “Being away from home means you’ve lost your independence and feel totally dependent on others.”

In sharp contrast, people who did not leave had a broader, more interdependent focus, e.g., “We’re all in this world together and we’re stronger together.” Not surprisingly, people who stayed and survived noted that they valued strength and not giving up, e.g., “You have to be so strong-minded to survive. You do the best you can do and if you fail, you get up again. That’s all you can do.” People who stayed also focused on fate and faith: “Through much prayers and faith in God, that’s how we made it.”

Thus, even though Leavers and Stayers reported having a similar set of general emotions, feelings of well-being, and overall mental health, they viewed the challenge of Hurricane Katrina in markedly different ways. In addition, our ultra-individualistic society supported leavers over stayers, viewing them as active agents who were shaping their own destiny even though stayers were also active, forceful agents who, instead, had to cope with a resource-poor rather than a resource-rich personal environment.

Some of Nicole’s other work addresses another aspect of the way that people from working and middle class families approach challenges: she and her colleagues have focused on the gap in college achievement exhibited by students from working class versus middle class families. Leaving home and attending college is stressful for almost every new college student; it can be even more stressful for freshmen whose parents did not graduate from college. Nicole documents the performance gap that results and shows how interventions can help alleviate it. In particular, by having students read a welcome statement ostensibly from the University president espousing a team-oriented, communal atmosphere at the university or by having them hear a panel discuss how their diverse backgrounds can shape their transition and adjustment to college, Nicole’s work shows that the performance gap can not only be reduced: it can even be obliterated completely.

This is very exciting research: it is careful, thoughtful, and it packs a powerful message. As human beings, we really have a hard time when we try to appreciate and understand other people’s experiences. As just one example, I’ve always remembered a conversation that I had, years ago, with Amnon Rapoport, another accomplished academic who had served as an officer in the Israeli army. We were driving by the buffer zone along Israel’s northern border and he was describing some of his experience in the military. I offhandedly replied, “I understand.” He quickly replied, “No, you don’t.”

I have never faced military combat. Although my father and several friends have, and I have heard many stories and read many depictions and seen movies about it, Amnon was absolutely right – I really couldn’t understand it.

In the same way, most of us in the middle class can’t really, deeply understand the constraints of a less well-endowed environment, even in our own country or our own home town. It is probably even harder for us to understand the consequences of growing up in poverty in Somalia or India or other poor countries, especially countries that are half way around the world. Nicole’s research also makes it clear that, even though we can’t really understand the impact of these other kinds of existences, if we understand the fact that we can’t understand them, maybe then we can blame people less when they don’t live up to our expectations or don’t act as we would in the same situation. Thus, we may not be good at ‘putting ourselves in other people’s shoes,’ but if we understand that we can’t get their shoes to fit our feet, this could also reduce our natural tendency to find fault and blame. Maybe then, if we take things a step farther (no pun intended), my naïve hopes for reducing blame are actually possible.

References:

Stephens, N. M., Hamedani, M. G., Markus, H. R., Bergsieker, H. B., & Eloul, L. (2009). Why did they “choose” to stay? Perspectives of Hurricane Katrina observers and survivors. Psychological Science, 20, 878-886.

Stephens, N. M., Fryberg, S. A., & Markus, H. R., Johnson, C. S., & Covarrubias, R. (2012).  Unseen Disadvantage: How American Universities’ Focus on Independence Undermines the Academic Performance of First-Generation College Students. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 1178-1197.

Oscar Statue image courtesy the Academy Awards.

I think I was thirteen when I picked up my first James Bond novel. My parents didn’t know – I was too young (in their eyes) to be reading such a racy novel. Not surprisingly, I loved absolutely everything about double-O-seven. Soon after, the first Bond movie arrived on screen. Now I could devour the novels and sneak out to see it all play out on film – doubling the thrills of reading on its own.

This all helped me decide who I wanted to be when I grew up: James Bond (American version). Skills, thrills, brains, bravery, and beautiful women. Who can argue with a combination like that? Also, if that didn’t work out, maybe I could be a rock star or a baseball player (at least in my dreams).

Although James Bond is not with us much in print anymore, he continues to be with us at movie theaters. Skyfall, the newest Bond flick, has been nominated for a Bond record 5 Oscars (the previous 22 movies only received 7 combined) though it missed out as a nominee for best director or best picture. Even though it’s missing from the slate of candidates, many worthwhile films have been selected, and the Arts sections of our newspapers are abuzz with Oscar-talk and Oscar-related news. (This is a fine way to distract those of us who live in cold weather from thinking about arctic chills.)

Although the actresses and actors are the real stars, not only of the movies themselves but of the awards discussions as well, the directors are the true leaders of every successful movie. Directing a major motion picture is a huge undertaking: it takes a tremendously talented leader to succeed. Thus, a recent newspaper article that presented edited excerpts of an interview with six notable directors piqued my interest. They included Ben Affleck (Argo), Sacha Gervasi (Hitchcock), Tom Hooper (Les Miserables), David O. Russell (Silver Linings Playbook), and two others whom I don’t quote here.

A simple premise in leadership is that a leader must work with the people who will be doing the job. Ruling by fiat may be effective in crises and movie productions might feel like they are constantly facing crises, but everyday leadership requires the enlistment of motivated support. Thus, movie directors might have chairs with their names on them and bull horns that help them get everyone’s attention but they must still work with people to do their jobs well.

Thus, it was noteworthy to hear Sacha Gervasi say that, two days before they began shooting, he convened all of his key department head members and, “Rather than doing a reading with the actors, I cast my department heads in the roles … it was wonderful, because everyone connected, and it put them right into the material… their heads and their hearts… I wanted to communicate that feeling of, there’s a reason that we’re doing this, you know? Fundamentally, you can’t spend two years of your life working on something unless you have a real emotional connection with it.”

David Russell took things further, “That’s why I start every day in the van. I want the actors, I want the head of every department to come with me in the van at the very first moment I arrive to talk about what the day is, so that everyone has a very intimate feeling of what we’re doing. Because the movie is not out there on the set with all those extras trying to look at the camera. You can get out there and the energy’s very dissipated, and it’s very chaotic and the whole thing can be misdirected, the energy. And you want everyone to be feeling what you feel in your heart.”

Both directors highlighted the need to get their critical performers on the same page, in terms of the material and particularly in terms of the emotions and energy that are associated with it. They also seemed to realize that they needed to convey their vision – implicitly and personally – to make sure that their team members were thinking and feeling what they were thinking and feeling.

They also talked about the incredible risks that movie directors must take. (This is true of almost all leaders.) Tom Hooper noted that, “that sense of taking a risk was incredibly exciting, not just for me but the entire team.” David Russell, probably the least seasoned of the directors in the group, also noted that “You can be more scared than (your actors) are, but you always have to be the one who’s saying ‘This is going to be fine, we know exactly what we’re doing,’ even though inside, you might have just been saying to your producer, ‘What is going to happen in this scene? I have no idea – help me.’”

Leaders always take risks because they never know in advance what they might need to address or what they might actually say, particularly at critical moments. It also helps, enormously, to have a confidant whom you can trust with your most basic fears and feelings, because almost every leader has these kinds of thoughts, and no one has all of the answers.

I also couldn’t help noticing how these great directors also had a Do Nothing! approach to leadership, especially with their actors, who can easily succumb to the temptation to act too much. Ben Affleck, for instance, said that, “The one thing I say the most, all the time, is just stop, don’t do anything. Because the actors sometimes feel this onus to come and perform… I tell them it’s not your job to make the movie. It’s my job.” In the same way, everyday leaders must facilitate and orchestrate: if only their team members would simply perform their tasks well, it would make the leaders’ jobs much easier.

Affleck also noted how important the cast is. When he was asked, “Is there a percentage you can put to how important casting is of all the decisions you make” Answer: “a hundred percent.”

His last quote in the article was also particularly telling, as he again conveyed how important (ironically) it is for directors to not be directive. “This is a weird story, but a friend said you should come to horse therapy. And I was like, what is horse therapy? And you walk this horse around a circle with a rope, and you go up and touch them. But if you tell the horse, if you kind of pull on them, if you were sort of insistent, the horse will stand there. It won’t go with you. But if you sort of be calm, be sure of yourself … and then you start to walk, and the horse starts to walk, you know?”

When directors have great scripts and their people do their jobs well, acclaim follows. Even if they don’t win awards themselves, directors almost always get a lot of credit from actors who win Oscars. Our more run-of-the-mill organizational lives don’t typically provide these kinds of award ceremonies, and even when they do, they are rarely so well publicized. But the lessons of great directors apply extremely well: we would all do well as leaders to

1. Help people get involved and see the job the way we see it
2. Build excitement and energy in effective directions
3. Realize and embrace the fact that, as leaders, we are always taking risks
4. Also realize that even though we may not always be confident and clear, we must communicate a sense of confidence and calm
5. Encourage people to do their own jobs well but not to overdo them
6. Choose your team carefully when you have the luxury of choice
7. Be calm and depend on the fact that, even if you don’t know everything, you probably know more than other people do about your job, and they need to see your quiet resolve.

Then, a final step: reward people who do well. You may not be able to give them an Oscar, but recognition is a truly tremendous motivator: it doesn’t cost much and it can have amazingly positive effects.

Reference:

John Horn: “Six filmmakers talk shop.” Chicago Tribune, December 28, 2012, Arts & Entertainment section, page 6.

People miss work about 6 days a year because of injuries and illness – but each of them miss a median of 25 days from stress-related disorders. These are striking statistics. Also, in one major, multi-employer study, high stress led to healthcare costs that were 46% higher than they were for people who had less stress (Goetzel et al., 1996).

How much does all this stress cost? In the U. S. alone, estimates exceed $300 billion a year, from lost work, people changing jogs, reduced productivity, and healthcare-related costs.

Although all of this is extremely bad news, things may even be getting worse: the average, combined work week for dual-earner couples has risen from 81 hours in 1977 to 91 hours in 2002. How much has this figure increased in the last decade? Also, if we consider the potentially multiplicative effects of two full-time employees, neither of whom is likely to get as much at-home support from their partner as they both continue to work more, and it seems clear that work-related stress issues are likely to be increasing.

A simple antidote, especially over the holidays: Do Nothing!

CareerBuilder (2009) reports data that almost a third of the Moms who work would prefer to spend more time with their children and would be happy to take a pay cut to be able to do that, and over 30% of working Dads would quit their jobs if their partners could provide enough financial support for the family. So there is plenty of motivation out there to work less – even as it seems that people are working more and encountering more and more stress.

What do I really mean by Do Nothing? This is a question I am often asked, especially since my book has this title and many people either have a hard time doing nothing (e.g., Type As) or are simply skeptical that it’s possible.

When I write about Doing Nothing at work, I do not mean that you should sit on a couch and watch TV all day or play golf rather than going to work. Instead, it’s a message for leaders who consistently do more than they need to do, who can’t seem to resist interfering with their team members’ work, and who would do much better if they spent their time leading rather than working on a task.

Too many leaders also take too few vacations and, even when they do take a break, they can’t let go of their cell phones or their laptops to constantly check on how the work is proceeding.

The holidays are a perfect time for leaders to stay away from work altogether, to share time with their family and friends, and to let some of that work stress that can so easily accumulate slip away. When employees see their leaders taking a break with their families, it’s easier for them to take a break, too. This is good for everyone.

Also, it turns out that, for leaders, there is an extra, unexpected benefit from Doing Nothing – even for Type A leaders. When we Do Nothing, our unconscious minds keep working, even as we pay attention to other things. Our minds almost never rest, even when we sleep. By putting work and all of its demands aside for a few days, it’s amazing, but tough problems often seem more tractable, and solutions seem more obvious. Sometimes we just need to let our minds work; obsessing too much about complex problems can actually be remarkably ineffective. (These insights come from research by Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist, and my colleague at Kellogg, Loran Nordgren.)

So relax, kick back, let your brain work on its own – it won’t stop – and come back to work, after the holidays, refreshed and less stressed. It will be good for your health and for your family. It might even make you more productive.

* These data come from the Psychological Healthy Workplace Program of the American Psychological Association, at http://www.apa.org/practice/programs/workplace/phwp-fact-sheet.pdf

CareerBuilder Inc. (2009) Fewer working fathers are willing to be stay at home dads. http://www.careerbuilder.com
Dijksterhuis &. Nordgren (2006). A theory of unconscious thought. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 95-109

Goetzel, Anderson, Whitmer, Ozminkowski, Dunn, Wasermann, and the Health Enhancement Research Organization Research Committee. (1998). Journal of Occupational health and Environmental Medicine, 40, 843-854.

One of the joys of being a social scientist is having the opportunity to read and talk about research that provides new insights into how and why people behave. For example, for one of my recent classes a bunch of PhD students and I discussed the altruism question, i.e., whether people are altruistic or, instead, do good primarily to make themselves feel good. After reading a lot and then engaging in a wide-ranging, give-and-take discussion, some of us felt that people were truly altruistic but others couldn’t get past the idea that people are primarily self-interested.

Recently, however, a new paper has come out that has crystallized these issues very nicely, particularly when we combine its results with those of a previous paper.

The older paper, published in Science in 2008, was written by Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin of the Psychology Department of the University of British Columbia and Michael Norton of the Marketing Unit of the Harvard Business School. They did a series of studies on charitable giving. Their initial test was a national survey of 632 Americans who rated their general happiness, their annual income, and how much they spent in a typical month on expenses and gifts for themselves versus gifts for others and charitable donations. Not surprisingly, people spent much more, in fact over ten times more, for the first category than for the second. But the second category, prosocial spending, was positively related to general happiness and personal spending was not.

They then surveyed 16 employees one month before and 6-8 weeks after each of them had received a profit-sharing bonus. The results resonated with their first study’s: the employees’ prosocial spending in Time 1 was the only factor that was clearly related to their happiness in Time 2, even taking into account the size of their bonus and their overall income.

Like the good researchers that they are, they weren’t satisfied with these findings. Instead, they pushed things further. In a third study, they gave 46 people an envelope that contained either $5 or $20 in the morning and asked them to spend it by 5 o’clock that day, either personally (on a bill, an expense, or for themselves) or prosocially (for someone else or a charity). After 5 pm they rated how happy they were. Once again, the people who spent their money prosocially reported more happiness feelings than people who spent it personally, even controlling for their reported happiness at the start of the day. In addition, spending $5 vs. $20 had no discernible effect. These results suggest that it’s not how much money you spend but how you choose to spend it that matters.

Liz, Lara, and Mike were still not finished. They did one more study so that they could address the obvious followup question: If prosocial giving makes people feel so good, why don’t we do it more? In this, their fourth study, they asked 109 people to tell them how happy Study 3’s spending choices would make them. Their respondents indicated that they preferred to spend money on themselves rather than prosocially and they preferred spending $20 over spending $5. In other words, their predictions about how they would feel did not reflect people’s actual post-choice feelings, on both counts. (Other research reinforces this observation: people are not very perceptive about what actually makes them happy.)

Pretty fascinating, no? Results that were released just this month, by Jonathan Berman and Deborah Small of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania add to these insights in very important ways. Their new research included three studies: two experiments that included 348 undergraduates plus 252 people who completed an online survey. Everyone was told that they would receive money that they could spend on themselves (as either cash or a gift card to Au Bon Pain or Starbucks) or as a donation to a charitable organization (e.g., the Red Cross or UNICEF). The interesting twist was that some people had the opportunity to choose one of these two options while the others had no choice: they were required to take the money for themselves (in cash or via the gift card) or they were required to donate it to a charity. Then everyone indicated how satisfied they were and how much they enjoyed this experience.

Among the people who had a choice, about 60% chose to use the money for themselves rather than for charity. More importantly, the people who were forced to use the money for themselves reported being happier, on average, than everyone else. In other words, when we must spend money on ourselves and it’s not our choice, we can treat ourselves well without feeling that we look selfish or greedy. It wasn’t our fault that we had to do this – an authority figure forced us to treat ourselves well. This appears to be particularly liberating: we get to act self-interestedly without any guilt.

I love these two papers. They tell us a lot about human nature. They are perfect examples of why social science research is so important and so interesting. In addition, if we return to the subtitle of this blog, “Are We Greedy or Are We Charitable?” it is clear that the answer to this important question is “Yes!”

References

Dunn, E.W., Aknin L.B. & Norton, M.I. (2008) Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness. Science 21: Vol. 319 no. 5870, pp. 1687-1688.

Berman, J.Z. & Small, D.A. (2012) Self-Interest Without Selfishness: The Hedonic Benefit of Imposed Self-Interest. Psychological Science vol. 23 no. 10, 1193-1199.

Alvin Roth receiving a congratulatory phone call Monday morning. Image courtesy Stanford University News.

Today the Nobel committee awarded their prize in economics to my old friend and colleague, Al Roth. It’s a wonderful day. Al is not only a brilliant scholar and a truly worthy winner of this incredible award, he’s also a wonderful person – a loving husband, a dedicated Dad, an amazing adviser, and a great friend to many, many people.

Al and I first met in the fall of 1974, when we were both new assistant professors at the business school at the University of Illinois. We were both freshly minted PhDs – Al from Stanford, me from Purdue. I was a young professor at the age of 25 – Al was only 22.

Al never graduated from high school; he quit, I think, because of the boredom. Soon after a family friend told him that Columbia had a program that admitted people to the University without a high school degree. Al passed all of their requirements – no problem there – and enrolled at the age of 16. He graduated at 19, enrolled in the PhD program at Stanford at 19, and finished his dissertation in three years. Yes, he is a very smart guy.

As young as he was, he grew a beard to make himself look older when he went on the job market. He also was a bit informal. In fact, word spread that someone went to all of his interviews that year wearing a sweater rather than a suit. That was Al.

After arriving at Illinois, two of our senior colleagues threw us together, thinking that we might have a lot to talk about since both of our dissertations investigated coalition formation – Al from the theoretical side, me from the empirical. This connection was the start of a long-running collaboration that resulted in 12 joint publications. We worked on bargaining and prisoners’ dilemma games as well as coalition formation. Al got tenure at the age of 25, was promoted to Full Professor at 27, and moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1982 for a Chaired Professorship that was a direct line item on the University budget. At Pitt Al helped to build a dynamic, productive economics department. He was then lured to Harvard and has recently moved back to Stanford.

Al met his wife Emilie at Illinois. She was a PhD student in the Psychology Department. While I might have pushed Al toward experiments, Emilie gave him incredible insights from the world of psychology. She has also been an incredible partner for over 30 years. They also have two wonderful sons, Aaron and Ben.

Al is a restless, adventurous soul. Three random (and maybe tepid) examples: (1) He often knocked on my door at Illinois when he needed a break from work, tempted by the thought of ice cream rather than working right through the day. (2) After he turned 25 he also worried that, as a mathematician, he might not have any more great ideas; it’s great to see how wrong he was. And (3), his younger son Ben’s prowess in ping pong led Al to be an avid and accomplished player himself at a pretty advanced age.

I always claimed that I taught Al how to do an experiment. Truth be told, I didn’t have to tell him much. After we had worked together for a while, I often told him that someday he would do an experiment on his own; he always replied by saying that someday I would prove a theorem on my own. We both actually did that.

This is a wonderful day for Al, his family, and all of his friends, as well as for game theory and experimental economics. Kudos to Al, and to the Nobel folks for recognizing him!

Odds are, you can’t help yourself: you are thinking of a purple chicken.

Once an idea jumps into your head, it can be very difficult to get rid of it. That’s why it’s critically important for leaders to have a sounding board – someone who will willingly listen to their ideas and make sure that they are not totally cockamamie.

In this Sunday’s New York Times (August 19, 2012), Stuart Miller wrote a great article on the emergence of bench coaches in baseball. Almost every manager now has a bench coach who sits next to him during the game and provides ideas and a welcome ear.

It wasn’t always this way. As the article notes, the emergence of bench coaches as a regular part of a team’s coaching staff only began to flourish in the 1990s. Before then, a manager was pretty much on his own; statistics were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are now; and having a ‘feel’ seemed to dominate big decisions. This kind of intuitive decision making was informed by a wealth of experience but very little hard data.

Those days are gone. With the advent of sabermetrics, teams and their leaders now have enormous amounts of data to help them make better decisions. Bill James was the leader in emphasizing the value of statistics for decision making in baseball, and Michael Lewis helped make Billy Beane, the general manager of the over-achieving Oakland Athletics, famous for his use of statistics in Moneyball. Other teams soon followed suit, to varying degrees, but every team now uses reams of data to help them make key, moment-to-moment decisions.

Bench coaches are a wonderful result of this movement. First and foremost, they are important because the demands on baseball’s managers – for interviews before and after a game, for other media appearances, and because their counterparts are also so well informed – have grown. It’s tough for one person to be on top of everything.

They are also important because they can take over and coordinate the more routine tasks that don’t need a manager’s hand. Thus, many bench coaches run the fundamental drills that fill spring training as well as batting practice and exercise sessions prior to each game. Taking over these more routine responsibilities lets managers do the less routine but important things, like strategizing, motivating, and inspiring.

Most of all from a leadership standpoint, however, the beauty of having a bench coach is their ability to ‘sit on the balcony,’ i.e., to be a bit more dispassionate and look down at the events that are transpiring in real time from the vantage point of the big picture. This way bench coaches can be less deeply enmeshed in any one play or any one game. Instead, they can pay attention to the forest as well as many of the trees: rather than worrying about when to take a laboring starting pitcher out of a game or whether to call a hit-and-run, for instance, bench coaches can keep track of how many innings the bullpen pitchers have put in lately and how many left-handed hitters the opposing team has waiting on their bench to pinch-hit. They can focus on behind-the-scenes details that can rear up and bit an unsuspecting manager if he is not careful.

Presidents and other politicians are also renowned for having back-room advisers, people who will keep them focused on the big picture and help them stay in tune with their philosophies and their goals.

Why isn’t this the case for leaders and executives? Executive coaching has certainly grown in popularity, but it is far from universal. Especially when the stakes increase, leaders could benefit tremendously from having a bench coach. In the current economy, this would also provide a tremendous part-time role for sage executives who might want to step away from the everyday action, but not entirely.

I’ve actually had a long-running coaching role with an executive in Australia. We’ve only met once. Since then, whenever he has a big negotiation – either for his company or for himself – he calls me and we talk strategy. I’m not the only coach that he uses. He pays us well but he benefits even more by avoiding costly missteps. There are no purple chickens in his career. How many leaders can you think of who can make that claim?

What makes a good coach? Ideas, questions, insights, and a willingness to step away and let the real leader do their thing. In simple terms – wise ones (who, by the way, don’t always get everything right either).

Most leaders don’t use them enough. If they did, they could do less, strategize more, and achieve the nirvana-like state of doing nothing – sooner!

This exercise, however, takes real effort. Here’s why I say that. My colleague, Daniel Effron, who is currently a postdoc at Kellogg in our Dispute Resolution Research Center, has been doing some fascinating research that documents how creative people can be – and how easy it can be – when they are tempted to do something unethical and need to somehow justify their actions. He builds off a bunch of research which shows that, for everyone but psychopaths and sociopaths, being a moral person is not only desirable, but a central part of almost all of our identities.

The problem with sustaining this moral identity, however, is temptation. As noted, we all face temptation, and it’s not unusual, e.g., whether to cut a corner here or there to be able to display a better bottom line or to hire our friends even though other people are more qualified. Daniel’s research shows that people are really good at providing a platform of evidence to justify acting selfishly or engaging in other less-than-ethical acts.

Daniel got his PhD in the psych department at Stanford, where he worked with Professors Dale Miller and Benoit Monin. His research builds on their classic work on moral licensing, i.e., how people display or point to times when they were virtuous to justify being something less than virtuous now. In one of Daniel’s early papers, for instance, he showed that an opportunity to endorse Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential election made his supporters more likely to express views that favored Whites at the expense of African-Americans. Essentially, the endorsement made people feel like they had shown that they were not biased, giving them a license to express racially problematic views..

Daniel’s more recent work reveals a variety of fascinating but frightening tendencies in people who are facing temptation. First, people who have been unkind to someone else in a negotiation that could become cooperative or competitive justify their actions by suggesting that they were only pre-empting the other person’s competitive behavior. This sure seems convenient, no?

Second, people who are tempted to act badly simply need to think of a time when they were good to reinforce their positive feelings about themselves, which then gives them the opportunity to do something less-than-positive and not feel bad about it. Behaviors that seemed unremarkable at the time (“I nodded hello to a homeless person – no big deal”) allow people to feel good enough about themselves (“smiling at the homeless person shows what a kind and sensitive individual I am!”) to do something ethically questionable. In Daniel’s terms, people seem pretty darn good at making mountains of morality out of molehills of virtue.

Third, and most frightening of all, his research shows that people don’t even need to do anything at all to justify their subsequent, non-virtuous action. Instead, all they need to do is think about how they could have done something even worse! This allows them to say to themselves, “So what I’m doing here is really not so bad after all.” And when people haven’t actually had any opportunities to do anything worse, they’ll distort their memories to convince themselves that they did have these opportunities. This mental trickery is probably familiar to dieters, who might justify eating cake for dinner by patting themselves on the back for not gorging on cookies for lunch – even if no cookies were available at lunch. Thus, many people who are faced with temptation seem able to not just make moral mountains out of molehills – they also seem willing to fabricate these molehills.

Why is this so scary? Well, all of us have done good things in our lives, and it is not hard to remember them. This allows us to justify all sorts of bad behavior. But it also seems that we don’t even need to have done anything good – thus, even a sociopath with the simplest of imaginations should be able to justify bad behavior.

Ann Tenbrunsel and Max Bazerman’s recent book, Blind Spots, makes a great case for the idea that all of us can fail to see how we so easily and inappropriately find ways to justify our less than wonderful actions. Daniel’s research adds several neat and scary observations that make the case even clearer.

The moral of this moral story: look within, you knave – you could be the root of your own evil. But you can fight it if you try. I hope you do.

References

Bazerman, M. H.& Tenbrunsel, A. E. Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about It. Princeton, 2011.

Effron, D. A., Cameron, J. S., & Monin, B. (2009). Endorsing Obama licenses favoring Whites. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 590-593.

Effron, D. A., Miller, D. T., & Monin, B. (forthcoming). Inventing racist roads not taken: The licensing effect of immoral counterfactual behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychobgy.

Merritt, A. M., Effron, D. A., & Monin, B. (2010). Moral self-licensing: When being good frees us to be bad. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 344-357.

Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33-43.

Wang, L. & Murnighan, J. K. (2011). On greed. In Walsh, J. P. & Brief, A. P., (Eds.), The Academy of Management Annals, Volume 5, 279-316.

In an attempt to be clear and transparent, I must admit that I’m not unbiased when it comes to basketball. As a native Chicagoan, I hold a special place in my Leadership Hall of Fame for people like Phil Jackson, who led the Chicago Bulls to six championships in the 1990s (and five more for the Los Angeles Lakers after that).

But today’s blog is about the Boston Celtics, who just lost the seventh game of a semi-final series with the Miami Heat. They are out of the playoffs and will soon be out of people’s memories because second place doesn’t count for very much these days. In addition, it wasn’t even the finals, only the contest for the NBA’s Eastern Conference championship.

Nevertheless, I’d like to focus on the Celtics’ coach, Doc Rivers, another great leader. He was a player himself before becoming a coach, so he has a great sense of what players need to play well. He is also both perceptive and articulate. For instance, when he was asked how his older players could keep up with their younger competitors, he said, “Passes move faster than players do.”

The unique part of his strategy during this year’s playoffs was in choosing to not practice on the team’s off days. Thus, he took my the advice from my new book, Do Nothing!, to new heights. In his case, it was exactly the right strategy. Why? First, because this year’s schedule was compact: teams had to play an abbreviated schedule (due to a labor dispute) in a concentrated time frame; they had far fewer off-days than normal, and more days when they played back-to-back games. And second, because Rivers’ three big stars, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen, were all approaching the nadir of their careers. Pierce, nicknamed ‘The Truth,’ is 34 years old and has played 14 seasons in the pros; Garnett, ‘The Big Ticket,’ is 36 and has played 17 seasons; and Allen is almost 37 and has played 16 seasons.

In his attempts to preserve his players’ health and stamina, as much as he could, Rivers had Pierce and Allen playing the fewest minutes per game of their careers, and Garnett played even less than that. More pointedly, the Celtics never held a single practice session during the playoffs. Instead, they watched and analyzed film and went over their game plans the day of each game.

As Rivers put it, “We’re just too old. We’re tired and old and banged up … if I have a choice between the legs and the brains, I’m going to take the legs every single time.” He went on to say, “We have to do whatever we need to do. Every team is individual. It’s not by choice. It’s by need.”

In the end, it was pretty amazing that the Celtics did as well as they did, because only a loyal few expected them to weather the season and go so far in the playoffs.

But the Celtics not only endured, they thrived, beating the Heat in Miami in the 5th game of their series to take a 3-2 lead and bring hope to everyone who roots for aging basketball players. After this victory, they only needed one more to go to the NBA Finals.

Sadly, this was not meant to be, and even Coach Rivers thought that they simply ran out of steam.
Other leaders have also made notable, historic decisions to Do Nothing!, not always because of need. Sometimes they were appropriately cautious because they had no experience and, as a result, no clear intuition about how to proceed.

Chris Craft, who ran Missile Control for NASA during the Apollo moon program, is one of many notable examples. He set a ‘sticky trigger’ for his operational decisions. After Apollo 13 had an oxygen tank explode two days after its launch, he decided to cancel their planned lunar landing and, throughout the process of making decisions that would get the astronauts back to earth safely, he followed a simple rule: “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.” His rationale was that if you do something wrong in space, it can be catastrophic. Thus, they only did what they absolutely needed to do: they didn’t make big, risky decisions.

Sometimes leaders should Do Nothing! because of need and sometimes because of a lack of information. Ironically, more leaders would also do better by doing nothing simply because it helps their team members be more effective. Thus, when teachers do less, their students learn more, and when coaches like Phil Jackson do less during a game, e.g., by uncharacteristically sitting down and crossing their arms and legs, their team members step up and take responsibility. In other words, there are many reasons for leaders to Do Nothing! If only more of them would.

Are there ever times when it pays for a leader to literally “Do Nothing”? Obviously, leaders might find it useful to pause and consider options when they really don’t know what to do, i.e., when they are faced with a novel situation that requires insights and skills that they don’t have. These are times when it is critical to avoid doing anything until you can get relevant information.

Recent research has also identified another key time when leaders should literally “Do Nothing.” Two new research papers, one that was just published in a leading management journal and the other that will soon appear in a leading psychology journal, both suggest that leaders who face moral decisions should stop and Do Nothing!

Shaul Shalvi, Ori Eldar, and Yoella Bereby-Meyer investigated whether people would limit their dishonest behavior if they had enough time to think about their choice and if they didn’t have an easy justification for being dishonest. In their experiments, people rolled a die and reported the results of their own roll. They knew that a six would pay more than a five which would pay more than a four, etc. Because they rolled the die inside an upside-down cup, with a hole in the top, only they could see their result – and they knew that no one else could see it either. This gave them an easy opportunity to inflate their results, since no one would be the wiser.

In the first of their two studies, people were told that they would only report the results of their first roll of the die, but they should also roll the die two additional times. The instructions emphasized that their payoff would only depend on the outcome of their first roll.

The extra rolls made it easy for people to construct what psychologists call ‘counterfactuals,’ i.e., thoughts about what could have happened (even though it didn’t). People think of counterfactuals all the time, e.g., “If only I had set a second alarm clock, I wouldn’t have slept through the first one and missed my plane” or “If you had warned me, I would never have done something so foolish.”

When subsequent rolls of a die yield higher outcomes than the first roll, as they often do, it is easy for people to think “If only I could report that result rather than my first.” Thus, previous research has shown that people lie more when they roll a die several times.

In addition to rolling the die three times, half of the people in this first study were asked to report their outcome either quickly (within 20 seconds) or at their leisure, i.e., they had no time limit at all.

Odds tell us that rolling a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or a 6 is equally likely. Thus, if everyone truthfully reports the outcome of their first die roll, the average should be right around 3.5. Instead, the average for the slow reporters was 3.87, suggesting that some of them reported a better outcome than they actually received. The quick reporters, in contrast, lied even more, reporting an average of 4.56. This suggests that waiting and doing nothing before making a moral decision increased truth-telling and reduced the number of people who lied.

In their second experiment, a different group of people rolled the die only one time. Previous research has shown that this reduces lying because people don’t have an immediate counterfactual that they can use to justify lying. Again, people were required to report their outcome either right away – within eight seconds – or with no time pressure at all.

This time the data suggest that the people who had no time pressure did not lie at all: their average report, 3.42, is just less than what we would expect from a normal distribution of rolls. People who had time pressure, however, again seemed to inflate their outcomes, reporting an average of 4.38.

Many previous research studies have shown that, when people think that they are acting anonymously and lying pays, many people lie. These results suggest that people act more ethically and lie less if they take their time deciding and they don’t have easy justifications for lying.

In another, independent study, my colleagues Brian Gunia, Long Wang, Li Huang, Jiunwen Wang and I also presented people with an opportunity to lie to obtain a better payoff. Rather than rolling a die, the people in our experiment had a very clear choice: they could send a truthful message to an anonymous person in another room and receive a payoff of $4 or they could send a message that was not true to that same person and markedly increase their chances of getting $6. Thus, we tempted them to lie so that they could boost their pay by $2.

Some of the people in our study experienced what we called a “contemplation condition”: they sat in front of a computer screen for three minutes before they could send their message. The entire time, the message on the screen said “Please think very carefully about which message to send.” Once the three minutes was up, these people knew what they were going to do and they chose very quickly.

In contrast, people who were in our “immediate choice condition” were asked to send their message right way. On average, it took them about 11 seconds. Thus, their choices were not literally immediate, but they certainly didn’t contemplate very long.

The results? Almost 90 percent of the people in our contemplation condition sent truthful messages, compared to just more than half (56%) in our immediate choice condition.

People in both the contemplation and the immediate choice conditions could also embellish their message by adding “this is the truth” if they wished. (This made a lie even more unethical.) None of the contemplators told a lie and called it the truth, but 18 percent of the immediate choosers did. We might call them ‘really big liars.’

After the experiment was over, it was interesting to see what people said about their choices. Truth-tellers emphasized the fact that this was a moral situation and that social norms supported telling the truth. People who lied, in contrast, felt that this same situation focused on and supported self-interest. Unlike the truth-tellers, they also said that they viewed the situation as being more business-oriented. Thus, individuals’ explanations for their decisions were internally consistent: they were very good at justifying their actions, whether those actions were to lie or to tell the truth. (To their credit, the people who lied did express a bit of regret for their actions.)

The bottom line from these two studies is very clear: don’t rush into moral decisions. Instead, take your time and think about things for a little while. Theories of morality suggest that our immediate reactions are often rooted in our evolutionary heritage: years and years ago it was important to be self-interested as this helped people achieve self-preservation. If our ancestors passed these successful tendencies down to us, as evolution suggests that they did, then our instinctual, immediate responses to temptation may well be to act only in our own personal interests.

Over our life-times, and particularly in the currently civilized social world, we learn that lies are immoral acts that often have reverberating consequences that don’t provide a simple satisfaction of our self interest. Thus, when we take the time to do nothing but think about our moral decisions for a little while, it increases the likelihood that we will overcome our temptations and do the right thing. In the end, then, To Do Nothing may truly help us Do the Right Thing.

References:

Gunia, B. C., Wang, L., Wang, J., Huang, L., & Murnighan, J. K. (2012). Contemplation and conversation: subtle influences on moral decision making. Academy of Management Journal, 55, 13-33.

Shalvi, S., Eldar, O., & Bereby-Meyer, Y. (2012, forthcoming). Honesty requires time (and lack of justifications). Psychological Science.