Tag: Business

Mental Models for Career Changes

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Career changes are some of the biggest moves we will ever make, but they don’t have to be daunting. Using mental models to make decisions we determine where we want to go and how to get there. The result is a change that aligns with the person we are, as well as the person we want to be.

We’ve all been there: you’re at a job, and you know it’s not for you anymore. You come in drained, you’re not excited on a Monday morning, and you feel like you could be using your time so much better. It’s not the people, and it’s not the organization. It’s the work. It’s become boring, unfulfilling, or redundant, and you know you want to do something different. But what?

Just deciding to change careers doesn’t get you very far because there are more areas to work in than you know about. A big change often involves some retraining. A career shift will impact your personal life. At the end of it all, you want to be happier but know there are no guarantees. How do you find a clear path forward?

No matter how ready you think you are to make a move, career changes are daunting. The stress of leaving what you’re comfortable with to venture into foreign territory stops many people from taking the first step toward something new.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Using mental models can help you clarify the direction you want to go and plan for how to get there. They are tools that will give you more control over your career and more confidence in your decisions. When you do the work up front by examining your situation through the lens of a few mental models, you set yourself up for fewer regrets and more satisfaction down the road.

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Get in touch with yourself

Before you can decide which change to make, you need to get in touch with yourself. No change will be the right one if it doesn’t align with what you want to get out of life.

First, do you know where you want to go? Are you moving with direction or just moving? As a mental model, velocity reminds us there is a difference between speed and direction. It’s easy to move fast without getting anywhere. We can stay busy all day without achieving our goals. Without considering our velocity, we run a huge risk of getting sidetracked by things that make us move faster (more money, a title on a business card) without that movement actually leading us where we want to end up.

As the old saying goes, we want to run to something, not from something. When you start articulating your desired direction, you give yourself clear purpose in your career. It will be easier to play the long game because you know that everything you are doing is leading somewhere you want to be.

When it comes to changing careers, there are a lot of options. Using the mental model of velocity will help you focus on and identify the best opportunities.

Once you know where you want to end up, it’s often useful to work backward to where you are now. This is known as inversion. Start at the end and carefully consider the events that get you there in reverse order.

For example, it could be something as simple as waking up happy and excited to work every day. What needs to be true in order for that to be a reality? Are you working from home, having a quiet cup of coffee as you prepare to do some creative work? Are you working on projects aligned with your values? Are you contributing to making the world a better place? Are you in an intense, collaborative team environment?

Doing an inversion exercise helps you identify the elements needed for you to achieve success. Once you identify your requirements, you can use that list to evaluate opportunities that come up.

Inversion will help you recognize critical factors, like finances or the support of your family, that will be necessary to get to where you want to go. If your dream direction requires you to learn a new skill or work at a junior level while you ramp up on the knowledge you’ll need, you might need to live off some savings in the short term. Inversion, combined with velocity, will help you create the foundation you need now to take action when the right time comes.

Finally, the last step before you start evaluating the career environment is taking stock of the skills you already have. Why do you need to do this? So you know what you can repurpose. Here, you’re using the concept of exaptation, which is part of the broader adaptation model in biology. Exaptation refers to traits that evolved for one purpose and then, through natural selection, were used for completely unrelated capabilities. For instance, feathers probably evolved for insulation. It was only much later that they turned out to be useful for flying.

History is littered with examples of technologies or tools invented for one purpose that later became the foundation for something completely different. Did you know that Play-Doh was originally created to clean coal soot off walls? And bubble wrap was originally envisioned as material for shower curtains.

Using this model is partly about getting out of the “functional fixedness” mindset. You want to look at your skills, talents, and knowledge and ask of each one: what else could this be used for?

Too often we fail to realize just how versatile the experience we’ve built up over the years is. We’re great at using forks to eat, but they can also be used to brush hair, dig in a garden, and pin things to walls. Being great at presenting the monthly status update doesn’t mean you’re good at presenting monthly status updates. Rather, it means you can articulate yourself well, parse information for a diverse audience, and build networks to get the right information. Now, what else can those skills be used for?

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Evaluate the environment

Looking at different careers, we’re usually in a situation where the “map is not the territory.” It’s hard to know how great (or terrible) a job is until you actually do it. We often have two types of maps for the careers we wish we had: maps of the highlights, success stories, and opinions of people who love the work and maps based on how much we love the field or discipline ourselves.

The territory of the day-to-day work of these careers, however, is very different from what those two maps tell us.

In order to determine if a particular career will work for us, we need better maps. For example, the reality of being an actor isn’t just the movies and programs you see them in. It’s audition after audition, with more rejections than roles. It’s intense competition and job insecurity. Being a research scientist at a university isn’t just immersing yourself in a subject you love. It’s grant applications and teaching and navigating the bureaucracy of academia.

In order to build a more comprehensive map of your dream job, do your research on as large a sample size as possible. Talk to people doing the job you want. Talk to people who work in the organization. Talk to the ones that enjoy it. Talk to the ones who quit. Try to get an accurate picture of what the day-to-day is like.

Very few jobs are one-dimensional. They involve things like administrative tasks, networking, project management, and accountability. How much of your day will be spent doing paperwork or updating your coworkers? How much of a connection do you need to maintain with people outside the organization? How many people will you be dependent on? What are they like? And who will you be working for?

It’s not a good idea to become a writer just because you want to tell stories, open a restaurant just because you like to cook, or become a landscape designer just because you enjoy being outside. Those motivations are good places to start—because it’s equally terrible to become a lawyer just because your parents wanted you to. But you can’t stop with what you like. There isn’t a job in the world that’s pleasurable and fulfilling 100% of the time.

You give yourself a much higher chance of being satisfied with your career change if you take the time to learn as much as you can about the territory beforehand.

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Elements of planning

You know which direction you’re heading in, and you’ve identified a great new career possibility. Now what?

Planning for change is a crucial component of switching careers. Two models, global and local maxima and activation energy, can help us identify what we need to plan.

Global and local maxima refers to the high values in a mathematical function. On a graph, it’s a wavy curve with peaks and valleys. The highest peak in a section is a local maximum. The highest peak across the entire graph is the global maximum. Activation energy comes from chemistry, and is the amount of energy needed to see a reaction through to its conclusion.

One of the things global and local maxima teaches us is that sometimes you have to go down a hill in order to climb up a new one. To move from a local maximum to a higher peak you have to go through a local minimum, a valley. Too often we just want to go higher right away, or at the very least we want to make a lateral move. We perceive going down as taking a step backward.

A common problem is when we tie our self-worth to our salary and therefore reject any opportunities that won’t pay us as much as we’re currently making. The same goes for job titles; no one wants to be a junior anything in their mid-forties. But it’s impossible to get to the next peak if we won’t walk through the valley.

If you look at your career change through the lens of global and local maxima, you will see that steps down can also be steps forward.

Activation energy is another great model to use in the planning phase because it requires you to think about the real effort required for sustained change. You need to plan not just for making a change but also for seeing it through until the new thing has time to take hold.

Do you have enough in the bank to support yourself if you need to retrain or take a pay cut? Do you have the emotional support to help you through the challenges of taking on a brand-new career?

Just like fires don’t start with one match and a giant log, you have to plan for what you need between now and your desired result. What do you need to keep that reaction going so the flame from the match leads to the log catching fire? The same kind of thinking needs to inform your planning. After you’ve taken the first step, what will you need to keep you moving in the direction you want to go?

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After you’ve done all the work

After getting in touch with yourself, doing all your research, identifying possible paths, and planning for what you need to do to walk them to the end, it can still be hard to make a decision. You’ve uncovered so many nuances and encountered so many ideas that you feel overwhelmed. The reality is, when it comes to career change, there often is no perfect decision. You likely have more than one option, and whatever you choose, there’s going to be a lot of work involved.

One final model you can use is probabilistic thinking. In this particular situation, it can be helpful to use a Bayesian casino.

A Bayesian casino is a thought experiment where you imagine walking up to a casino game, like roulette, and quantifying how much you would bet on any particular outcome.

Let’s say when investigating your career change, you’ve narrowed it down to two options. Which one would you bet on for being the better choice one year later? And how much would you part with? If you’d bet ten dollars on black, then you probably need to take a fresh look at the research you’ve done. Maybe go talk to more people, or broaden your thinking. If you’re willing to put down thousands of dollars on red, that’s very likely the right decision for you.

It’s important in this thought experiment to fully imagine yourself making the bet. Imagine the money in your bank account. Imagine withdrawing it and physically putting it down on the table. How much you’re willing to part with regarding a particular career choice says a lot about how good that choice is likely to be for you.

Probabilistic thinking isn’t a predictor of the future. With any big career move, there are inevitably a lot of unknowns. There are no guarantees that any choice is going to be the right one. The Bayesian casino just helps you quantify your thinking based on the knowledge you have at this moment in time.

As new information comes in, return to the casino and see if your bets change.

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Conclusion

Career changes are some of the biggest moves we will ever make, but they don’t have to be daunting. Using mental models helps us find both the direction we want to go and a path we can take to get there. The result is a change that aligns with the person we are, as well as the person we want to be.

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How Performance Reviews Can Kill Your Culture

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Performance reviews are designed to motivate and bring the best out of our teams, but they often do the opposite. Here’s how to bring out the best in your people.

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If you ask people what’s wrong with corporate workplaces, it won’t take long before you hear someone mention something about being put into a performance bucket. The A bucket is for the best, and the C bucket is for the underperformers. The middle and most common bucket is B, as it spares the supervisor from having to justify why an individual is exceptional or on the verge of getting fired. The problem is that ranking someone against their peers is not the ranking that matters and is counterproductive in terms of building an exceptional corporate culture.

People hate performance reviews. And why wouldn’t they? You either come up short against the superstars, walk away being told to keep doing what you’re doing, or leave feeling like your days are numbered. In this common construct, no one is getting the information they need to properly grow, and a toxic competitive situation is created within the organization. Forced comparisons against others don’t accomplish what we want from them. We think it inspires people. It often makes them dislike each other.

The problem is the system.

The goal of performance reviews is ostensibly to help people become better, but forced ranking has two serious flaws. First, it doesn’t take account of individual rates of improvement. We’re all starting from different places, and we’re also all improving at different rates. If you always come up short, no matter how hard you try, eventually you can’t be bothered putting in the effort to get better.

The second, more important, argument is that forced rankings create a toxic environment that rewards poor behavior. When you’re pitted against your coworkers, you start to game the system. You don’t need to improve at all to get into the A bucket, you just need to make the others look bad. The success of one person means the failure of another. How likeable are you? How good are you at whispering and gossip? How big is your Christmas present to your boss? You can end up cutting others down to stand out as a star performer. But undermining the success of your coworkers ultimately means undermining the success of the entire organization.

Margaret Heffernan, author and former CEO, explained on The Knowledge Project how the relationship between coworkers is fundamental to the function of an organization:

“…the whole premise of organizational life is that together you can do more than you can do in isolation, but that only works if people are connected to each other. It only really works if they trust each other and help each other. That isn’t automatic. … You’re only really going to get the value out of organizational life to the degree that people begin to feel safe with each other, to trust each other, to want to help each other…What impedes the flow is distrust, rivalry, or not knowing what other people need.”

Most of us inevitably compare ourselves to others at some point. Chronic comparing though leads to misery. What matters is not what we do compared to what someone else does, it’s what we do compared to what we’re capable of doing. Both as individuals and in organizations, we need to pay attention to this gap—the gap between where we are right now and what we’re capable of.

Internal motivation is easier to sustain. We produce and push ourselves because we get this immense satisfaction from what we are doing, which motivates us to keep doing it. It doesn’t work the same way when your motivation comes in the form of external comparisons.

So what do we do instead?

If you must grade performances, do it against the past. Is she learning? Is he improving? How can we increase the rate of progress and development? Empower people to help and learn from each other. The range of skills in an organization is often an untapped resource.

Organizations today are often grappling with significant corporate culture issues. It can be the one thing that differentiates you from your competitors. Comparing people against their past selves instead of each other is one of the most effective ways to build a culture in which everyone wants to give their best.

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Jeff Bezos: Big Things Start Small

Reading Time: 3 minutes

An interview with Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos touches on the timeless lessons he’s learned for business success. The three big ideas are (1) thinking on a different timescale, (2) putting the customer first, and (3) inventing.

What we’re really focused on is thinking long-term, putting the customer at the center of our universe and inventing. Those are the three big ideas to think long-term because a lot of invention doesn’t work. If you’re going to invent, it means you’re going to experiment, you have to think long-term. These three ideas, customer-centricity, long-term thinking and a passion for invention, those go together. That’s how we do it and by the way, we have a lot of fun doing it that way.

Ballet or Rock Concert?

When asked about the pressures of running a public company and meeting quarterly earnings expectations he said:

Well, I think that if you’re straight forward and clear about the way that you’re going to operate, then you can operate in whatever way you choose. We don’t even take a position on whether our way is the right way, we just claim it’s our way, but Warren Buffet has a great saying along these lines. He says, “You can hold a ballet and that can be successful and you can hold a rock concert and that can be successful. Just don’t hold a ballet and advertise it as a rock concert. You need to be clear with all of your stakeholders, with are you holding a ballet or are you holding a rock concert and then people get to self-select in.”

Big Things Start Small

While there is no one recipe that fits all, there are elements of what Amazon does that help.

[I]nside our culture, we understand that even though we have some big businesses, new businesses start out small. It would be very easy for say the person who runs a US books category to say, “Why are we doing these experiments with things? I mean that generated a tiny bit of revenue last year. Why don’t we instead, focus those resources and all that brain power on the books category, which is a big business for us?” Instead, that would be a natural thing to have happen, but instead inside Amazon, when a new business reaches some small milestone of sales, email messages go around and everybody’s giving virtual high fives for reaching that milestone. I think it’s because we know from our past experiences that big things start small. The biggest oak starts from an acorn and if you want to do anything new, you’ve got to be willing to let that acorn grow into a little sapling and then finally into a small tree and maybe one day it will be a big business on its own.

Step By Step Ferociously

The Latin phrase gradatim ferociter Is a Bezos favorite. What does it mean?

Well it means step by step ferociously and it’s the motto for Blue Origin. Basically you can’t skip steps, you have to put one foot in front of the other, things take time, there are no shortcuts but you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity.

Loving What You Do

Not every day is going to be fun and easy. That’s why they call it work.

I have a lot of passions and interests but one of them is at Amazon, the rate of change is so high and I love that. I love the pace of change. I love the fact that I get to work with these big, smart teams. The people I work with are so smart and they’re self-selected for loving to invent on behalf of customers.

It’s not, do I love every moment of every day? No, that’s why they call it work. There are things that I don’t enjoy, but if I’m really objective about it and I look at it, I’m so lucky to be working alongside all these passionate people and I love it. Why would I go sit on a beach?

 

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Footnotes
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    Source of interview: https://twitter.com/producthunt/status/1125038440372932608?s=11

The Importance of Working With “A” Players

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Stop me if this sounds familiar. There is a person who toils alone for years in relative obscurity before finally cracking the code to become a hero. The myth of the lone genius. It’s the stuff of Disney movies.

Of course, we all have moments when we’re alone and something suddenly clicks. We’d do well to remember, though, that in those moments, we are not as independent as we like to think. The people we surround ourselves with matter.

In part, because we tell ourselves the story of the lone genius, we under-appreciate the role of a team. Sure, the individual matters, no doubt. However, the individual contributions are supercharged by the team around them.

We operate in a world where it’s nearly impossible to accomplish anything great as an individual.  When you think about it, you’re the product of an education system, a healthcare system, luck, roads, the internet and so much more. You may be smart but you’re not self-made. And at work, most important achievements require a team of people working together.

The leader’s job is to get the team right. Getting the team right means that people are better as a group than as individuals. Now this is important.  Step back and think about that for a second — the right teams make every individual better than they would be on their own.

Another way to think about this is in terms of energy. If you have 12 people on a team and they each have 10 units of energy, you would expect to get 120 units of output. That’s what an average team will do. Worse teams will do worse. A great team will take the same inputs and get a non-linear outcome. The result won’t be 120; it’ll be 360.No matter where you’re going, great teams will get you there multiples faster than average teams.

Here is a quote by Steve Jobs on the importance of assembling “A” players.

I observed something fairly early on at Apple, which I didn’t know how to explain then, but I’ve thought a lot about it since. Most things in life have a dynamic range in which [the ratio of] “average” to “best” is at most 2:1. For example, if you go to New York City and get an average taxi cab driver, versus the best taxi cab driver, you’ll probably get to your destination with the best taxi driver 30% faster. And an automobile; what’s the difference between the average car and the best? Maybe 20%? The best CD player versus the average CD player? Maybe 20%? So 2:1 is a big dynamic range for most things in life. Now, in software, and it used to be the case in hardware, the difference between the average software developer and the best is 50:1; maybe even 100:1. Very few things in life are like this, but what I was lucky enough to spend my life doing, which is software, is like this. So I’ve built a lot of my success on finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for “B” and “C” players, but really going for the “A” players. And I found something… I found that when you get enough “A” players together, when you go through the incredible work to find these “A” players, they really like working with each other. Because most have never had the chance to do that before. And they don’t work with “B” and “C” players, so it’s self-policing. They only want to hire “A” players. So you build these pockets of “A” players and it just propagates.

Building a team is more complicated than collecting talent1. I once tried to solve a problem by putting a bunch of PhDs’ in a room. While comments like that sounded good and got me a lot of projects above my level, they were rarely effective at delivering actual results.

Statements like “let’s assemble a multidisciplinary team of incredible people” are gold in meetings if you work for an organization. These statements sound intelligent. They are hard to argue with. And, most importantly, they also have no accountability built in, and they are easy to wiggle out of. If things don’t work out, who can fault a plan that meant putting smart people in a room.

Well … I can. It’s a stupid plan.

The combination of individual intelligence does not make for group intelligence. Thinking about this in the context of the Jobs quote above, “A” players provide a lot more than raw intellectual horsepower. Among other things, they also bring drive, integrity, and an ability to make others better.  “A” players want to work with other “A” players. Accepting that statement doesn’t mean they’re all “the best”.

In my experience solving difficult problems, the best talent available rarely led to the best solutions. You needed the best team. And the best team meant you had to exercise judgment and think about the problem. While there was often one individual with the idea that ultimately solved the problem, it wouldn’t have happened without the team.  The ideas others spark in us are more than we can spark in ourselves.

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Footnotes
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    A play on a quote by Bill Belichick

Batesian Mimicry: Why Copycats Are Successful

Reading Time: 5 minutes

One of our first interview guests for The Knowledge Project was the former NFL executive Michael Lombardi. In our interview, we discussed topics ranging from the nature of leadership to decision making in a football context. Mike is one of the wisest thinkers associated with the game.

We heard Mike on an NFL podcast recently, and in a brief clip you can listen to here, Mike makes a fascinating comment on differentiating between a Mimic and the Real Thing:

“There’s two kinds of snakes you come across. There’s the Texas Coral Snake, and the Mexican Milk Snake, and they both look exactly alike. The Texas Coral Snake is dangerous, it’s venomous, it can kill you in a minute. The Mexican Milk Snake can’t do anything to you; it’s an impostor.”

Mike got the idea from my friend and CEO of Glenair, Peter Kaufman. Following Mike’s lead, we chose to dig in a little further.

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Turns out there are a host of Coral Snake Mimics, all designed to look exactly as fierce as the true bad guys. Besides the Mexican Milk Snake, there is the Scarlet King Snake, the Florida Scarlet Snake, and the California Mountain Kingsnake. (At least.)

For an example, here are the Texas Coral Snake on the left and the Mexican Milk Snake on the right. Pretty damn close!

220px-lampropeltis_triangulum_annulata

According to Wikipedia, the Texas Coral Snake’s venom is a “powerful neurotoxin, causing neuromuscular dysfunction”, and terrifyingly describes its bite as coming from “a pair of hollow, small, fixed fangs in the front of its upper jaw, through which the venom is injected and encouraged via a chewing motion. Due to this method of venom delivery, a coral snake must bite and hold on for a brief time to deliver a significant amount of venom…”

The Milk Snake, on the other hand, is described as a pretty ideal pet: “The Mexican Milk Snake adapts well to captive care, and its smaller size and striking colorations can make it an attractive choice for a pet snake. They are normally docile, and not typically apt to bite or expel musk.”

So, how is it that these two look alike? It’s due to a phenomenon called Batesian Mimicry.

In the 1850s, the naturalist Henry Walter Bates found a certain set of butterflies who were clearly not of the same species but whose wings looked almost the same to the naked eye. After thinking it over, Bates eventually figured out what was going on: While the butterflies which were toxic to potential predators (the “models”) were able to operate freely and relatively unmolested, there had also developed a “mimic” population of butterflies which wasn’t toxic at all, yet still went untouched!

In fact, biologists eventually figured out that the more toxic and dangerous the “model” was and the more frequently they appeared in the local population, the easier it was for its “mimics” to get by! Predators simply wouldn’t take the risk of mixing up the two. If there aren’t as many “models” around or they aren’t that dangerous, the mimics have a harder time.

This is a wonderful model, and in the practical world we live in, a similar phenomenon abounds: Copycats or “pretenders to the throne” are often very effective, very convincing “mimics” of the true champions. They dress the part, they talk the talk, and they know what buttons to push. But in the end, they are merely chauffeurs.

We see a very Batesian effect at work: The more impressive the “model,” the more effective its mimics can be in convincing people they too are impressive, and in all the same ways. But for every Warren Buffett (just one by our count), there has been many “future” Warren Buffett’s. For every Steve Jobs, there have been many “next” Steve Jobs’.

In fact, sometimes even just appearances can be quite convincing: now-disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was very fond of wearing a very Steve Jobsian black turtleneck outfit.

It seems almost a law of nature that success will be copied, sometimes in a very disgraceful way. (Charlie Munger thinks that the fundamental algorithm of life is “Repeat what works.”)

Because they can be very convincing,  we must be wise enough to watch out for Batesian mimicry — even in ourselves.

This brings up an interesting, at times paradoxical, question: Who can best tell the difference between a Coral Snake and its Mimics? The Coral Snake itself.

The real thing knows a fake. Charlie Munger once commented on this in relation to the field of money management:

“It’s very hard to tell the difference between a good money manager and someone who just has the patter down. If you aren’t a good money manager yourself, rather than trying to pick one, you’re probably better off with a low cost index fund. ‘It takes one to know one’.”

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An insight this good is only possible through continued study across the largest and most relevant fields of study. Peter got this idea by studying biology, a field full of incredible insight but, strangely underappreciated by most “non-biologists”. It’s not just ideas about predators and prey, but niches, competition, co-evolutionary arms races and a whole host of others which give us massive insight into the human world.

Peter realized that studying across fields like biology and physics is something like buying an index fund: It works because you capture all the important companies traded on the public exchange, not just a select few. That means you capture the massive winners, which tend to greatly outweigh the failures.

Studying across all of the important fields gives you the same advantage, except it’s even better: If an index fund buys a new position, it must sell something to do so; consequently, the “big winners” can only impact your portfolio in a limited way. But if you come to understand a new Great Idea, you don’t have to give up the ones you already know! This is a great advantage.

And so it’s worth taking the time to work on learning all the big ideas you can find, not just the ones you want to learn. In that search, you’ll find a host of big winners you didn’t even know existed.

If you liked this post, you’ll probably also love:

The Need for Biological Thinking to Solve Complex Problems — How should we think about complexity? Should we use a biological or physics system? The answer, of course, is that it depends. It’s important to have both tools available at your disposal.

The Founder Principle: A Wonderful Idea from Biology — In his brilliant The Song of the Dodo, David Quammen gives us not only the stories of many brilliant biological naturalists including Mayr, but we also get a deep dive into the core concepts of evolution and extinction, including the Founder Effect.

Biology Enables. Culture Forbids. — From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.

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Creating a Growth Mindset in the Workplace

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Carol Dweck‘s concept of Mindset permeates through every aspect of our lives.

One area particularity affected is in the workplace. We spend half of our day at work (some of you likely spend more than half) and both your mindset and the mindset of those around you will have a significant impact on your life, especially the mindset of your boss. Dweck comments:

Fixed-mindset leaders, like fixed-mindset people in general, live in a world where some people are superior and some are inferior. They must repeatedly affirm that they are superior, and the company is simply a platform for this.

These leaders tend to have a strong focus on personal reputation, generally at the expense of the company. Lee Iacocca, during his time at Chrysler, is a good example of this. Iacocca had his ego severely bruised when he was forced out of Ford. Fixed-mindset leaders tend to respond to failure with anger instead of viewing it as an opportunity to learn or get better.

So the king who had defined him as competent and worthy now rejected him as flawed. With ferocious energy, Iacocca applied himself to the monumental task of saving face and, in the process, Chrysler Motors. Chrysler, the once thriving Ford rival, was on the brink of death, but Iacocca as its new CEO acted quickly to hire the right people, bring out new models, and lobby the government for bailout loans. Just a few years after his humiliating exit from Ford, he was able to write a triumphant autobiography and in it declare, ‘Today, I’m a hero.’

He showed Ford that they made a mistake when they let him go, and he reveled in his triumph. But in his glory-basking, Iacocca forgot that the race wasn’t over yet.

This was a hard time for the American automotive industry, the Japanese were challenging the market like no one ever had before. Chrysler needed to respond to the competition or they would be in trouble again. Meanwhile, Iacocca was still focused on his reputation and legacy.

He also looked to history, to how he would be judged and remembered. But he did not address this concern by building the company. Quite the contrary. According to one of his biographers, he worried that his underlings might get credit for successful new designs, so he balked at approving them. He worried, as Chrysler faltered, that his underlings might be seen as the new saviors, so he tried to get rid of them.

Instead of listening to the advice of his designers and engineers, Iacocca dug his feet into the ground.

See, a fixed-mindset doesn’t easily allow you to change course. You believe that someone either has ‘it’ or they don’t: it’s a very binary frame of mind. You don’t believe in growth, you believe in right and wrong and any suggestion of change or adaptation is considered a criticism. You don’t know how to adopt grey thinking. Challenges or obstacles tend to make you angry and defensive. 

Iacocca was no different.

But rather than taking up the challenge and delivering better cars, Iacocca, mired in his fixed mindset, delivered blame and excuses. He went on the rampage, spewing angry diatribes against the Japanese and demanding that the American government impose tariffs and quotas that would stop them.

Blame is a big part of the fixed-mindset; when something goes wrong you don’t want to take responsibility because that would be akin to accepting inferiority. This can push some bosses to become abusive and controlling. They feel superior by making others feel inferior. Colleagues may feel this way too, but management has power. This is when you will notice the effect of mindset on your corporate culture. Everything starts to revolve around pleasing upper management. 

When bosses become controlling and abusive, they put everyone into a fixed mindset. This means that instead of learning, growing, and moving the company forward, everyone starts worrying about being judged. It starts with the bosses’ worry about being judged, but it winds up being everybody’s fear about being judged. It’s hard for courage and innovation to survive a companywide fixed mindset.

In these circumstances, the fear of punishment leads to groupthink. No one wants to dissent or put their hand up because it’s likely to get slapped. 

So what can you do if you’re new to a company and working against a fixed-mindset? This will be a difficult road but there are definitely ways of nudging your company towards a growth mindset.

Dweck outlines the main attributes that create a growth-mindset environment:

  • Presenting skills as learnable
  • Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready-made genius or talent
  • Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success
  • Presenting managers as resources for learning.

At the end of each chapter of Dweck’s book, she has a brilliant section entitled ‘Grow Your Mindset.’ She reviews the chapter’s contents and asks the reader probing questions to help them evaluate their situation and suggests concrete ways to move forward. Here are a few pertinent examples to explore:

What kind of workplace are you in?

Are you in a fixed-mindset or growth-mindset workplace? Do you feel people are just judging you or are they helping you develop? Maybe you could try making it a more growth-mindset place, starting with yourself. 

Is it possible that you’re the problem?

Are there ways you could be less defensive about your mistakes? Could you profit more from the feedback you get? Are there ways you can create more learning experiences for yourself? How do you act toward others in your workplace? Are you a fixed-mindset boss, focused on your power more than on your employees’ well-being? Do you ever reaffirm your status by demeaning others? Do you ever try to hold back high-performing employees because they threaten you?

Can you foster a better environment?

Consider ways to help your employees develop on the job: Apprenticeships? Workshops? Coaching sessions? Think about how you can start seeing and treating your employees as your collaborators, as a team. Make a list of strategies and try them out. Do this even if you already think of yourself as a growth-mindset boss. Well-placed support and growth-promoting feedback never hurt.

Do you have procedures to overcome groupthink?

Is your workplace set up to promote groupthink? If so, the whole decision-making process is in trouble. Create ways to foster alternative views and constructive criticism. Assign people to play the devil’s advocate, taking opposing viewpoints so you can see the holes in your position. Get people to wage debates that argue different sides of the issue. Have an anonymous suggestion box that employees must contribute to as part of the decision-making process. Remember, people can be independent thinkers and team players at the same time. Help them fill both roles.

Mindset is filled with practical advice that will change the way in which you think and interact with the world. Through examples from her rigorous research Dweck eloquently explains the nature of the two mindsets and their influence on sports, business and relationships. Since culture eats strategy, it’s important to understand her main points. Understanding her core concepts will also add depth to your comprehension of metal models like confirmation bias and bias from overconfidence.

If you’d like a bit more on Mindset we suggest taking a look at Dweck’s Google talk or perhaps revisit a more detailed explanation of the two mindsets.

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