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Optimistic or Pessimistic – which is better?

Updated Sep 1, 2007: Ramesh Ramaswamy points to a pertinent article. Please see below.

As an eternal optimist, i have always felt that it is better to have an optimistic outlook. But i always have problems with either/or strategies because i have found through experience that either/or confines your thinking to those 2 strategies and makes you not think of a third or a fourth strategy even if those were available.

I felt that Optimism Vs. Pessimism is a similar either/or trap and possibly there is a third answer. And finally, I found the answer in Jim Collins’s brilliant book Good to Great.

He talks about a concept called as the Stockdale Paradox which is based on Vice Admiral James Stockdale’s experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Collins describes the concept in the book as follows:

“I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

When Collins asked who didn’t make it out, Stockdale replied:

“Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”

This is the third strategy i was looking for. Optimism doesn’t completely convey this idea fully because it doesn’t allow for the kind of beatings/torture endured by Stockdale. A pure optimist would have long given up and Stockdale confirms that with the examples of optimistic people thinking about Christmas and Easter.

Archana Raghuram’s excellent post on Man’s search for Meaning and her follow up post on the Stockdale Paradox gave me the impetus to write this post.

Yes, you may say, that we all are not likely to be held as a prisoner of war or in a concentration camp. That is true.

But life throws a lots of hurdles, trials, pains, sorrows at you and this is especially true when you are working on tough assignments or projects. Under those circumstances, a regular optimistic approach may not be helpful. You need the Stockdale or Frankl kind of “we shall prevail eventually” approach.

What do you all think?

[Statements below added Sep 1, 2007]:

Ramesh Ramaswamy posted a comment pointing an excellent article by Price Pritchett. He finishes the article with these telling conclusions:

It’s true that pessimism, at times, can be turned to our advantage. But usually pessimism just carriers too big of a price tag.

Unflinching realism, with its bland and uninspired objectivity, will occasionally serve us best. But realism focuses too much on ‘what is’ at the expense of considering ‘what could be.’ It respects the head while ignoring the heart.

Let’s be honest about this — a fundamental but overlooked aspect of ‘reality’ is, in fact, what we think and feel and hope inside. That is a power born of ourselves, and it’s very real in its influence on our lives.

Most of the time, and in most aspects of our being, optimism has by far the most to offer.

Play the odds — think optimistically.

This article contains a lot of ideas from Pritchett’s book Hard Optimism which i have not read. I think Optimism may not work in difficult situations as Stockdale and Frankl have shown. But if you think Stockdale’s attitude is too difficult to attain, Optimism is clearly better as Pritchett says.

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Great teachers don’t teach

Please don’t think that I wanted a title with an oxymoron effect! I actually mean it and let me explain. To be sure, I’m not talking about teachers whose job it is to teach, but about managers and leaders.

An event happened in my life more than 17 years ago that has had a profound impact on me. I didn’t understand the full impact of what happened then but life’s experiences keep bringing me back to that event. Okay, enough of the build up, and onto the details.

It was my first trip to the USA and I was on an yearlong assignment at a NJ-based insurance company. As many of you know, you cannot really survive in the USA without driving a car. I was a bit afraid because all I had ridden till then were bicycles and mopeds and the high speed traffic was a bit much.

Unfortunately, my finances didn’t allow me to goto a proper driving school and chose to learn driving with the help of a few colleagues. Interestingly, all my teachers, except one, adopted this strategy – they would sit in the passenger seat, yell and scream and literally do side seat driving. At the end of the session I would be a nervous wreck.

Through my long experience with bicycles I already did have a strong sense of traffic but this side seat driving style was driving me crazy. Obviously they were all doing me a favor and I couldn’t be complaining about their teaching methods. Fortunately there was one colleague who adopted a totally different strategy.

He would explain the general principles and then let me drive. He would sit in the passenger seat and be generally quiet. He would let me make some minor mistakes and gently point out to me the mistakes I was making and allow me to correct them. From time to time, he would also gently appreciate me if I was driving steadily.

I found that my confidence was building up and within a few hours of driving with him I became a pretty good driver. He even taught me parallel parking which is a tricky manouver to learn using the same approach. During my first year of driving I made a couple of errors – nothing serious but I did damage the car.

Next time when I returned to the USA 6 years later, I quickly obtained my license and in the next 10 years I didn’t have a single accident. Of course, I had a few fender benders but nothing major. I owe my accident-free record to this great teacher that didn’t teach. As I gained experience in my life, I have realized that you can learn so much from making your own mistakes. [ Yes you must learn from other people’s mistakes as well. ]

Generally, we tend to manage people by telling them what to do to a degree of detail that makes the task mistake proof. But by doing that we eliminate the opportunity for them to figure out things for themselves, the learnings from mistakes and the coaching opportunities. Another big lost opportunity is the creativity the team may employ to do the task which we may not have envisaged when we handed them the task. I have applied this lesson many times within my teams and I find that it is very empowering and helps grow the team’s capabilities. I believe this is one of the biggest practical lessons I have learnt.

Please tell me, do you agree with this lesson? What lessons have you learnt from your best teachers?

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Will Bollywood get its comeuppance for plagiarism?

It is a well known fact that Bollywood as well the regional variants Kollywood, Tollywood etc repeatedly plagiarize Hollywood sometimes verbatim. Yesterday Economic Times reported that the makers of Hitch (Will Smith starrer) are suing the Bollywood makers of Partner (Salman Khan, Govinda starrer) for $30 MM on a plagiarism charge. Ah! Finally someone is taking action. Hopefully Bollywood will wake up and stop copying. Article link:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Partner_may_face_30_mn_Hitch/articleshow/2264000.cms Additional reading:
Wikipedia’s page on Bollywood Plagiarism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood_and_plagiarism

Made to Stick – Brilliant

Updated July 23, 2007 with some additional links.

Thanks to a strong recommendation in Bob Sutton’s blog, I picked up the book Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath recently. I have already read it twice. The authors introduce this book as the companion book to the Malcolm Gladwell bestseller – The Tipping Point. While Gladwell covered how ideas spread, the Heath brothers cover how to make ideas sticky enough that they spread. They have analyzed sticky ideas and propound a framework which they call by the acronym SUCCESS – where each letter stands for a characteristic of sticky ideas: 1. Simple – the idea has to be simple at its core. 2. Unexpected – it should have a surprise twist. 3. Concrete – it needs to help people understand it easily and remember it. 4. Credible. – it is believable. 5. Emotional – it makes people care. 6. Stories – it makes people act. It may seem like these characteristics are quite obvious. But I think they have chosen such simple terms to keep the book delightfully simple, and lucid. Each of these concepts are presented using a lot of excellent examples. I liked all of the examples. I particularly liked the simulation that Jane Elliott, a primary school teacher used in her class to teach the concept of prejudice to her students. You can see this in video form at the PBS website. This book raised a few questions in my mind that the framework probably doesn’t answer: 1. How did Harry Potter, to quote a recent example, a series with a complex storyline and lots of intricate details, capture the imagination of the world? 2. In the same vein, how do we explain the stickiness of Star Wars, Star Trek etc. One can argue that a lot of dialogues from Star Trek is incomprehensible mumbo jumbo. Overall it is a brilliant book and the framework should be an essential guide for anyone in management. Like any modern book, the authors maintain a website and a blog called madetostick.

What is common between Cabbage, Broccoli, Brussels Sprouts and Kohlrabi?

Of course, all of them are common vegetables that are a part of our diet the world over. What else is common? Would you believe if i told you that all of them are the same species! Priya Raju told me this bit of amazing information. Wikipedia’s page on Cabbage confirms this. All of them are different cultivars of the same species. But then why do they all taste so different from each other? I am currently reading Jared Diamond’s brilliant book Guns, Germs and Steel and came across the answer on page 122:

Ancestral cabbage plants, possibly grown originally for their oil seeds, underwent even greater diversification as they became variously selected for leaves (modern cabbage and kale), stems (kohlrabi), buds (brussel sprouts), or flower shoots (cauliflower and broccoli) .

In other words, all of these are different parts of the same plant known to us as different vegetables through millenia of cultivation and artificial selection.