513
The Portable Leader Is the New “Organization Man”
By Gianpiero Petriglieri
I met Tanya years ago, at a global corporation where she led a business unit and enjoyed a reputation as a formidable mentor. “The thing I always keep in mind,” she told me with obvious pride, explaining her approach to management as we walked through a bustling open office, “is that these people are the best talent in the business. They could be working elsewhere, if they so chose. And I am sure that many will, eventually.”
I knew that to be true. Competitors poached people in Tanya’s unit regularly. And yet there was no trace of cynicism in her tone. “Each of them is valuable and hard to replace,” she continued, “but I can’t preach them loyalty. They’d laugh at me. I can’t pay them more, either. All I can promise is that while they work here, they’ll grow more than they would anywhere else. And when they leave, they will be leaders wherever they go.”
Some version of Tanya’s promise — working here today will make you a leader elsewhere tomorrow — is at the center of many companies’ talent management strategies. Its popularity has led to the rise of corporate universities and to the corporatization of universities, all promising to turn talent into leaders. It is more than a promise of learning. It is a promise of transformation — that a stint at the organization will change your substance and value, not just your leadership style, in ways that will outlast your tenure in it.
Despite that promise’s troublesome aspects (Jennifer Petriglieri of INSEAD and I have written about those before), it holds strong appeal. Talented people flock to institutions that make it, regarding costs such as tuition fees, long hours, or foregone earnings as investments in their future. But “transformation” remains a nebulous promise at best, and corporate drivel at worst. Who gets transformed, into what, and how? What good is it for people and their organizations?
512
Proudly exclude people
By Derek Sivers
You know you can’t please everyone, right?
But notice that most businesses are trying to be everything to everybody. And they wonder why they can’t get people’s attention!
You need to confidently exclude people, and proudly say what you’re not. By doing so, you will win the hearts of the people you want.
Hotel Café, a folk- and rock-music venue in Los Angeles, is a no-talking club. Big signs say, “No talking during performances!” Performers are encouraged to stop the show if someone is talking, and let the person know that he can go to any other club in town to talk over the music. This is the one place in LA where you can sit and really listen to the music. This, of course, makes it the most popular music venue in town.
When CD Baby got popular, I’d get calls from record labels wanting to feature their newest, hottest acts on our site.
I’d say, “Nope. They’re not allowed here.”
The record label guys would say, “Huh? What do you mean not allowed? You’re a record store! We’re a record label.”
I’d say, “You can sell anywhere else. This is a place for independents only: musicians who chose not to sign their rights over to a corporation. To make sure these musicians get the maximum exposure they deserve, no major-label acts are allowed.”
It’s a big world. You can loudly leave out 99 percent of it.
Have the confidence to know that when your target 1 percent hears you excluding the other 99 percent, the people in that 1 percent will come to you because you’ve shown how much you value them.
511
San Francisco’s Civil War
YIMBYs! Socialists! The only thing the Bay Area’s tenant activists hate more than high rent is each other.
By Henry Grabar
Local politics is always, in one way or another, about housing. In San Francisco, a deep blue city whose fault lines long ago ceased to resemble America’s, that politics is a vitriolic civic scrimmage, where people who agree about almost every national issue make sworn enemies over zoning, demolition, and development. It’s like a circular firing squad at a co-op meeting.
On June 1, members of a group that advocates for housing growth to lower rents called San Francisco YIMBY (for “Yes, In My Back Yard”) helped organize a panel in downtown San Francisco: “The Political Dynamics of Housing.” Over food and drink, a group of local experts and activists tried to talk through why, despite widespread local consensus that something must change, San Francisco continues to be the country’s most expensive city for renting an apartment.
The day before the event, the San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America—an organization founded in 1982 whose membership more than tripled, in the 12 months ending in March 2017, to 19,000 dues-paying members—included a note in their regular membership letter. “The SF YIMBY Party is a pro-development, pro-gentrification, pro-landlord organization,” it read. “DSA SF is seeking folks to come up with materials and a plan for challenging this narrative and the disinformation they will undoubtedly be spreading regarding housing at this meeting.”
That call, and an ensuing shouting match at the panel, was the most overt skirmish in a feud between the DSA and the YIMBYs, two groups that have more in common than you might expect. Each has harnessed the political energy of young people in West Coast cities. Each considers entrenched wealthy homeowners an enemy. They have a good number of members in common. And the goal, of course, is the same: more affordable housing.
510
Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?
More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.
By Jean M. Twenge
One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”
Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
509
How to Help Negative People
By Steve Pavlina
Many people have asked me how they can help someone who’s stuck in negative thinking or depression. Here are some tips on how to do that.
No matter what happens, stay positive.
I once visited the house of an old acquaintance, and as soon as I saw him, I felt a wave of darkness pouring over me. I regretted stopping by almost immediately. No matter how many times I changed the subject, he proceeded to spin every topic of discussion into an excuse to complain about what he disliked about his life, other people, and the world at large. After 30 minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and had to leave. This man was a major energy vampire, trying to get me to agree with all his imaginary woes in order to validate his victimhood. His dissatisfaction was palpable as I refused to join him in his self-made prison, which only made him want to try harder. But he was getting out of life exactly what he intended. He was a victim because he thought himself a victim.
One of the most important considerations when helping someone in a negative state is that you must avoid falling into negativity yourself. Negative people are energy vampires. They have an almost endless capacity to dwell on what they don’t want, whining and complaining about their lives while denying responsibility for their results. Their fear blocks the natural flow of energy from within, so they must get it from other people instead. After spending a few hours with them, you’ll usually feel drained, tired, worried, or stressed. Positive people, on the other hand, have overcome their fears to such a degree that their energy flows outward. Consequently, they give energy instead of taking it. After spending time with very positive people, you’ll tend to feel energized, uplifted, and inspired. Most people are somewhere in the middle though, so the energy exchange tends to be close to neutral.
It makes no difference what particular circumstances negative people blame for their negative outlook. Ultimately it’s still a choice rooted in free will. No matter how unconscious the person was when making the decision to sink into negativity, in this moment that person still has the power to choose otherwise. So if you decide to help such a person, your primary role is to help guide him to make a more conscious choice, one that will likely be much more empowering.
508
To Kill a Mockingbird
By Harper Lee
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.
When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.
I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn’t run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn’t? We were far too old to settle an argument with a fist-fight, so we consulted Atticus. Our father said we were both right.
Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings. All we had was Simon Finch, a fur-trapping apothecary from Cornwall whose piety was exceeded only by his stinginess. In England, Simon was irritated by the persecution of those who called themselves Methodists at the hands of their more liberal brethren, and as Simon called himself a Methodist, he worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens. Mindful of John Wesley’s strictures on the use of many words in buying and selling, Simon made a pile practicing medicine, but in this pursuit he was unhappy lest he be tempted into doing what he knew was not for the glory of God, as the putting on of gold and costly apparel. So Simon, having forgotten his teacher’s dictum on the possession of human chattels, bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River some forty miles above Saint Stephens. He returned to Saint Stephens only once, to find a wife, and with her established a line that ran high to daughters. Simon lived to an impressive age and died rich.
509
How to Help Negative People
By Steve Pavlina
Many people have asked me how they can help someone who’s stuck in negative thinking or depression. Here are some tips on how to do that.
No matter what happens, stay positive.
I once visited the house of an old acquaintance, and as soon as I saw him, I felt a wave of darkness pouring over me. I regretted stopping by almost immediately. No matter how many times I changed the subject, he proceeded to spin every topic of discussion into an excuse to complain about what he disliked about his life, other people, and the world at large. After 30 minutes I couldn’t take it anymore and had to leave. This man was a major energy vampire, trying to get me to agree with all his imaginary woes in order to validate his victimhood. His dissatisfaction was palpable as I refused to join him in his self-made prison, which only made him want to try harder. But he was getting out of life exactly what he intended. He was a victim because he thought himself a victim.
One of the most important considerations when helping someone in a negative state is that you must avoid falling into negativity yourself. Negative people are energy vampires. They have an almost endless capacity to dwell on what they don’t want, whining and complaining about their lives while denying responsibility for their results. Their fear blocks the natural flow of energy from within, so they must get it from other people instead. After spending a few hours with them, you’ll usually feel drained, tired, worried, or stressed. Positive people, on the other hand, have overcome their fears to such a degree that their energy flows outward. Consequently, they give energy instead of taking it. After spending time with very positive people, you’ll tend to feel energized, uplifted, and inspired. Most people are somewhere in the middle though, so the energy exchange tends to be close to neutral.
It makes no difference what particular circumstances negative people blame for their negative outlook. Ultimately it’s still a choice rooted in free will. No matter how unconscious the person was when making the decision to sink into negativity, in this moment that person still has the power to choose otherwise. So if you decide to help such a person, your primary role is to help guide him to make a more conscious choice, one that will likely be much more empowering.
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