How Integrity is Like a Great Dog

I'm back from vacation, back from stewing over the events of the past year, and back in action.

Today an article caught my attention. Seems that they've finally indicted a guy suspected of stealing a wee bit of credit card information — about 130 million records, give or take. Congratulations to our government, who finally tracked the guy down in his very, very secret hiding place: prison.

But that's another matter. Here's the bit that really caught my eye:

Mr. Gonzalez once worked with federal investigators. In 2003, after being arrested in New Jersey in a computer crime, he helped the Secret Service and federal prosecutors in New Jersey identify his former conspirators in the online underworld where credit and debit card numbers are stolen, bought and sold.

Now, when the Secret Service is looking for informants, it's not like they can call on me or one of my friends. They need somebody who is currently employed as a scumbag, so he (let's face it: it's a “he”) can rat on his scumbag buddies.

But all too often, employers will take the same “it takes a thief” approach. This case is a great example of why that's a stupid idea: integrity totally eclipses skill and experience when it comes to hiring. That made me think of something I saw recently.

In this diagram, the "Big Dog" star, VY Canis Majoris — the biggest known star in the galaxy — is compared to another humungous object, our Sun. The Sun occupies a central position in our perception, giving depth and color to everything we see. And yet, way out there, in a place where we can't directly observe it, is this unimaginably huge, gigantic, enormous star. But it doesn't make itself known to us directly — we have to search it out.

In hiring decisions, the applicant's skills and experiences often color our entire vision of that person. And yet, floating out there is something much bigger, but less obvious. We have to make the extra effort to identify the underlying character of the person behind the skillset, and then determine if that individual has the qualities that we want to bring to the organization. If not, there's just no amount of technical ability that is going to make up that deficit.

On a related note: if you're wondering about this image, it is in the public domain. It just wouldn't do to write an entire column on integrity and then steal the central image, would it? :-)

Genius

Wow - I knew it had been a while since I'd posted, but I was amazed to see just how long.

So back to work. If you've been in a leadership position for any amount of time, I hope you've noticed that good ideas come from all quarters. At a given moment, anybody in the room might come up with an insight that all the really important folks (like yourself) have missed.

Still, it can't be denied: some people are just smart. Really smart. You know who you are.

So I was interested in this David Brooks piece, entitled “Genius,” in the New York Times. As the author relates, and as we all know, the path to success is the same as the route to Carnegie Hall: practice.

When I was a kid, I was a huge Lakers fan, and my particular favorite was number 44, Jerry West. As a teen, West “practiced in the rain, mud, and snow. He would forget to go home to eat dinner, and would practice shooting until his fingers bled.” Result? Well, among his many other accomplishments, West still holds the NBA record for free throws made in a season – and that was in 1966!

Sure, West was born with talent. But lots of people are, and only West has held that free throw record for nearly as long as I've been alive. What made a kid from a West Virginia backwater into a superstar were those hours and hours of relentless, painful, mind-numbing practice.

But I wondered, when I read the Brooks piece, about intellectual, rather than athletic, accomplishment. Brooks mentions Mozart, but implies that Mozart's early and regular practice with the piano is what led to his reputation as a genius. That might be true if he were best known for his playing, but of course, Mozart is actually famous for composition. The most brilliant pianists aren't necessarily great composers (Chopin being a notable exception).

So how to account for superior intellectual achievement in areas like composition, or leadership, or innovation?

Whenever I think of the term “genius”, I take a moment to lament my own lost potential, and then I get past that and I think of the physicist Richard Feynman. In part, of course, because that's the title of James Gleick's terrific biography of Feynman. But fundamentally, it's for the same reason that Gleick had when he chose the name of his book. Feynman was – second only perhaps to Einstein – the iconic genius of the 20th century.

But if repetition, more than innate gift, made Jerry West what he was, and Kobe Bryant and Tiger Woods and Yo-Yo Ma what they are, what made Feynman, Feynman?

Thanks to Feynman's habit of writing about himself, and to Gleick's account, we know the answer: Practice. Nobody worked through problems in their head more than Feynman. No matter what else was going on, Feyman's inner dialog was never silent. Feynman himself writes, “I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.” There are too many examples to relate here, but when he says “use”, he means: rehearse. Over and over again.

Don't believe in “intellectual practice”? Consider Jill Price. You may have heard of her: she's the woman who remembers virtually every minute of her life. Misleadingly labeled “the woman who can't forget,” Price can recount what she was doing at any given time, or tell you the exact time she was doing any given activity. Scientists are fascinated by her, and are seeking biochemical or anatomical clues to her incredible capabilities.

But, as Gary Marcus suggests in Wired, Price's amazing recall may be due less to biology than to (wait for it): Practice! Marcus believes that “Price remembers so much about herself because she thinks about herself—and her past—almost constantly.” He goes on to conclude:

[Michael] Jordan wasn't born the greatest basketball player of all time; he became the greatest, combining considerable but not unique innate talent with an incredible amount of hard work shooting free throws and practicing jumpers long after most of his peers were out carousing. Whether intentionally or not, Price has shown the same sort of daily dedication to chronicling her own life.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that leadership takes practice. Innovation takes practice. The fact that the practice occurs in your head, or in a meeting, or in a memo, doesn't make it any less fundamental. And surely the fact that you aren't always successful shouldn't deter you: even in his record-setting '66 season, Jerry West missed 14% of his free throws.

The lesson for me? I need to post more often. I simply need the practice.

Before You Can Be A Real Leader, You Might Have to Fake It

Two articles caught my attention. In the first, the author, Kevin Hassett, argues that smarty-pants know-it-all Ivy League MBAs are responsible for all the economic trouble we're in today. (I suppose he could be right, but in my experience, Ivy League MBAs are brilliant and creative. Then again, I only know one, and we've been friends since we were roommates in college.) Hassett uses the phrase “best and brightest,” presumably alluding to the term used by David Halberstam to describe the posse of geniuses he blamed for leading the country into the debacle of Vietnam.

I'm not sure I agree with the general thrust of the piece, but one line caught my eye. In describing how these high-powered businesspeople came to believe they were masters of the universe, the author refers to Ohio University research involving 153 MBA students. According to Hassett, the psychologists running the study “observed that the students who had the strongest narcissistic traits were most likely to emerge as leaders.”

An article in Time runs along a similar vein. The author, Jeffrey Kluger, examines a couple of other studies recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And guess what? The UC Berkeley researchers involved in that effort discovered that “dominant individuals behaved in ways that made them appear competent [...] above and beyond their actual competence.”

I posted the Time article on the door to my office. I hope my employees take two messages from the piece when they stop to read it. First, that I'm engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor – which I am. Second, that Kluger's advice to “[s]peak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say” may be worth examining.

Taken together, the articles suggest that you need to fake it before you can make it. Harvard MBAs may or may not have ruined the world, but before they were in any position to do so, they had to believe in themselves (perhaps a tad too much, but that's a discussion for another time). Bosses may be smart, or they may not be, but they only got to be bosses by being willing to put their ideas out there, and by having the confidence to assume that others will follow.

Leadership is like anything else. You're not born doing it: it takes practice, and you'll make mistakes, and if you have the slightest amount of self-awareness, you're going to ask yourself frequently whether you really belong in the position you've reached. So relax. You might have to fake it for a while. But so did your boss when she was in your job (and then she did it again when she moved up into the corner suite she occupies today). And so did that other manager down the hall whose intellect and leadership skills you admire (and maybe he still is).

You can't do the right thing for the people you are leading if you're not leading. Take a deep breath, and then, as another brilliant MBA I know likes to say, act as if you really have the confidence that you think somebody in your job should have. Before you know it, you will.