Videos: Final Exam

Video: Build a tower, Build a team; Tom Wujec

Several years ago here at TED, Peter Skillman introduced a design challenge called the marshmallow challenge. And the idea's pretty simple: Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. The marshmallow has to be on top. And, though it seems really simple, it's actually pretty hard because it forces people to collaborate very quickly. And so, I thought this was an interesting idea, and I incorporated it into a design workshop. And it was a huge success. And since then, I've conducted about 70 design workshops across the world with students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50, and there's something about this exercise that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration, and I'd like to share some of them with you. So, normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task. They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power. Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch and they lay out spaghetti. They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever-growing structures. And then finally, just as they're running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and -- ta-da! -- they admire their work. But what really happens, most of the time, is that the "ta-da" turns into an "uh-oh," because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse. So there are a number of people who have a lot more "uh-oh" moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school. (Laughter) They lie, they cheat, they get distracted and they produce really lame structures. And of course there are teams that have a lot more "ta-da" structures, and among the best are recent graduates of kindergarten. (Laughter) And it's pretty amazing. As Peter tells us, not only do they produce the tallest structures, but they're the most interesting structures of them all. So the question you want to ask is: How come? Why? What is it about them? And Peter likes to say that none of the kids spend any time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti, Inc. Right? They don't spend time jockeying for power. But there's another reason as well. And the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan, right? And then they execute on it. And then what happens is, when they put the marshmallow on the top, they run out of time and what happens? It's a crisis. Sound familiar? Right. What kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way. Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process. And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work. So the capacity to play in prototype is really essential, but let's look at how different teams perform. So the average for most people is around 20 inches; business schools students, about half of that; lawyers, a little better, but not much better than that, kindergarteners, better than most adults. Who does the very best? Architects and engineers, thankfully. (Laughter) Thirty-nine inches is the tallest structure I've seen. And why is it? Because they understand triangles and self-reinforcing geometrical patterns are the key to building stable structures. So CEOs, a little bit better than average, but here's where it gets interesting. If you put you put an executive admin. on the team, they get significantly better. (Laughter) It's incredible. You know, you look around, you go, "Oh, that team's going to win." You can just tell beforehand. And why is that? Because they have special skills of facilitation. They manage the process, they understand the process. And any team who manages and pays close attention to work will significantly improve the team's performance. Specialized skills and facilitation skills are the combination that leads to strong success. If you have 10 teams that typically perform, you'll get maybe six or so that have standing structures. And I tried something interesting. I thought, let's up the ante, once. So I offered a 10,000 dollar prize of software to the winning team. So what do you think happened to these design students? What was the result? Here's what happened: Not one team had a standing structure. If anyone had built, say, a one inch structure, they would have taken home the prize. So, isn't that interesting? That high stakes have a strong impact. We did the exercise again with the same students. What do you think happened then? So now they understand the value of prototyping. So the same team went from being the very worst to being among the very best. They produced the tallest structures in the least amount of time. So there's deep lessons for us about the nature of incentives and success. So, you might ask: Why would anyone actually spend time writing a marshmallow challenge? And the reason is, I help create digital tools and processes to help teams build cars and video games and visual effects. And what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them identify the hidden assumptions. Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, doesn't it? The challenge provides a shared experience, a common language, a common stance to build the right prototype. And so, this is the value of the experience, of this so simple exercise. And those of you who are interested may want to go to MarshmallowChallenge.com. It's a blog that you can look at how to build the marshmallows. There's step-by-step instructions on this. There are crazy examples from around the world of how people tweak and adjust the system. There's world records that are on this as well. And the fundamental lesson, I believe, is that design truly is a contact sport. It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand. And sometimes, a little prototype of this experience is all that it takes to turn us from an "uh-oh" moment to a "ta-da" moment. And that can make a big difference. Thank you very much.

How to speak so that people want to listen-- Julian Treasure

The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say "I love you." And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. And why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into. First, gossip. Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us. Second, judging. We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. Third, negativity. You can fall into this. My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, "It's October 1 today," and she said, "I know, isn't it dreadful?" (Laughter) It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative. (Laughter) And another form of negativity, complaining. Well, this is the national art of the U.K. It's our national sport. We complain about the weather, sport, about politics, about everything, but actually, complaining is viral misery. It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world. Excuses. We've all met this guy. Maybe we've all been this guy. Some people have a blamethrower. They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that. Penultimate, the sixth of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration. It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it? (Laughter) And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us. And finally, dogmatism. The confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that. So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. These are things I think we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this? Yes, there is. I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately, these things spell a word. The word is "hail," and it has a great definition as well. I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I'm talking about this definition, to greet or acclaim enthusiastically, which is how I think our words will be received if we stand on these four things. So what do they stand for? See if you can guess. The H, honesty, of course, being true in what you say, being straight and clear. The A is authenticity, just being yourself. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. And the L is love. I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, my goodness, you look ugly this morning. Perhaps that's not necessary. Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. So hail. Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking. Register, for example. Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. You can locate your voice, however. So if I talk up here in my nose, you can hear the difference. If I go down here in my throat, which is where most of us speak from most of the time. But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. You hear the difference? We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. That's register. Then we have timbre. It's the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. Go and get a voice coach. And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice. Then prosody. I love prosody. This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's root one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. That's where the word "monotonic" comes from, or monotonous, monotone. Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement? (Laughter) And if you repeat that one, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit. Pace. I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence. There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful. Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. Where did you leave my keys? (Higher pitch) Where did you leave my keys? So, slightly different meaning in those two deliveries. And finally, volume. (Loud) I can get really excited by using volume. Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. Some people broadcast the whole time. Try not to do that. That's called sodcasting, (Laughter) Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice. Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice. Actually, let me show you how to do that. Would you all like to stand up for a moment? I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. Any time you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. One more time. Ahhhh, very good. Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba. Very good. And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. Brrrr. Now your lips should be coming alive. We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Beautiful. You're getting really good at this. And then, roll an R. Rrrrrrr. That's like champagne for the tongue. Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. It's really good. It starts with "we" and goes to "aw." The "we" is high, the "aw" is low. So you go, weeeaawww, weeeaawww. Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. Take a seat, thank you. (Applause) Next time you speak, do those in advance. Now let me just put this in context to close. This is a serious point here. This is where we are now, right? We speak not very well to people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. I have talked about that on this stage in different phases. What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading. Thank you.

Why good leaders make you feel safe Simon Sinek

There's a man by the name of Captain William Swenson who recently was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on September 8, 2009. On that day, a column of American and Afghan troops were making their way through a part of Afghanistan to help protect a group of government officials, a group of Afghan government officials, who would be meeting with some local village elders. The column came under ambush, and was surrounded on three sides, and amongst many other things, Captain Swenson was recognized for running into live fire to rescue the wounded and pull out the dead. One of the people he rescued was a sergeant, and he and a comrade were making their way to a medevac helicopter. And what was remarkable about this day is, by sheer coincidence, one of the medevac medics happened to have a GoPro camera on his helmet and captured the whole scene on camera. It shows Captain Swenson and his comrade bringing this wounded soldier who had received a gunshot to the neck. They put him in the helicopter, and then you see Captain Swenson bend over and give him a kiss before he turns around to rescue more. I saw this, and I thought to myself, where do people like that come from? What is that? That is some deep, deep emotion, when you would want to do that. There's a love there, and I wanted to know why is it that I don't have people that I work with like that? You know, in the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. We have it backwards. Right? So I asked myself, where do people like this come from? And my initial conclusion was that they're just better people. That's why they're attracted to the military. These better people are attracted to this concept of service. But that's completely wrong. What I learned was that it's the environment, and if you get the environment right, every single one of us has the capacity to do these remarkable things, and more importantly, others have that capacity too. I've had the great honor of getting to meet some of these, who we would call heroes, who have put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others, and I asked them, "Why would you do it? Why did you do it?" And they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. So trust and cooperation are really important here. The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they are feelings, they are not instructions. I can't simply say to you, "Trust me," and you will. I can't simply instruct two people to cooperate, and they will. It's not how it works. It's a feeling. So where does that feeling come from? If you go back 50,000 years to the Paleolithic era, to the early days of Homo sapiens, what we find is that the world was filled with danger, all of these forces working very, very hard to kill us. Nothing personal. Whether it was the weather, lack of resources, maybe a saber-toothed tiger, all of these things working to reduce our lifespan. And so we evolved into social animals, where we lived together and worked together in what I call a circle of safety, inside the tribe, where we felt like we belonged. And when we felt safe amongst our own, the natural reaction was trust and cooperation. There are inherent benefits to this. It means I can fall asleep at night and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger. If we don't trust each other, if I don't trust you, that means you won't watch for danger. Bad system of survival. The modern day is exactly the same thing. The world is filled with danger, things that are trying to frustrate our lives or reduce our success, reduce our opportunity for success. It could be the ups and downs in the economy, the uncertainty of the stock market. It could be a new technology that renders your business model obsolete overnight. Or it could be your competition that is sometimes trying to kill you. It's sometimes trying to put you out of business, but at the very minimum is working hard to frustrate your growth and steal your business from you. We have no control over these forces. These are a constant, and they're not going away. The only variable are the conditions inside the organization, and that's where leadership matters, because it's the leader that sets the tone. When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen. I was flying on a trip, and I was witness to an incident where a passenger attempted to board before their number was called, and I watched the gate agent treat this man like he had broken the law, like a criminal. He was yelled at for attempting to board one group too soon. So I said something. I said, "Why do you have treat us like cattle? Why can't you treat us like human beings?" And this is exactly what she said to me. She said, "Sir, if I don't follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job." All she was telling me is that she doesn't feel safe. All she was telling me is that she doesn't trust her leaders. The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people. It's because they don't fear their leaders. You see, if the conditions are wrong, we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other, and that inherently weakens the organization. When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities. The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is, is like being a parent. If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want? What makes a great parent? We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. Great leaders want exactly the same thing. They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves. Charlie Kim, who's the CEO of a company called Next Jump in New York City, a tech company, he makes the point that if you had hard times in your family, would you ever consider laying off one of your children? We would never do it. Then why do we consider laying off people inside our organization? Charlie implemented a policy of lifetime employment. If you get a job at Next Jump, you cannot get fired for performance issues. In fact, if you have issues, they will coach you and they will give you support, just like we would with one of our children who happens to come home with a C from school. It's the complete opposite. This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred, anger, at some of these banking CEOs with their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures. It's not the numbers. It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership. They have violated this deep-seated social contract. We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests. This is what so offends us, not the numbers. Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? Do we have an issue with that? None at all. None at all. Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people. Bob Chapman, who runs a large manufacturing company in the Midwest called Barry-Wehmiller, in 2008 was hit very hard by the recession, and they lost 30 percent of their orders overnight. Now in a large manufacturing company, this is a big deal, and they could no longer afford their labor pool. They needed to save 10 million dollars, so, like so many companies today, the board got together and discussed layoffs. And Bob refused. You see, Bob doesn't believe in head counts. Bob believes in heart counts, and it's much more difficult to simply reduce the heart count. And so they came up with a furlough program. Every employee, from secretary to CEO, was required to take four weeks of unpaid vacation. They could take it any time they wanted, and they did not have to take it consecutively. But it was how Bob announced the program that mattered so much. He said, it's better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot, and morale went up. They saved 20 million dollars, and most importantly, as would be expected, when the people feel safe and protected by the leadership in the organization, the natural reaction is to trust and cooperate. And quite spontaneously, nobody expected, people started trading with each other. Those who could afford it more would trade with those who could afford it less. People would take five weeks so that somebody else only had to take three. Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is. I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater, and as is the Marine custom, the officer ate last, and he let his men eat first, and when they were done, there was no food left for him. And when they went back out in the field, his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat, because that's what happens. We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain, and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, "Why would you do that? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?" they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in? Thank you very much.

The puzzle of motivation—Dan Pink

What do you think is the key to achieve our goals, our success? Some people suggest things like hard work, focus, persistence. But research shows these are all by-products of something else, something much more powerful that we can all develop. It is this very special something that is really critical to success, and is what I am here to discuss with you today. Someone who has achieved great success is Josh Waitzkin, a chess international master and the subject of the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer". Nobody has won all the national chess championships that Josh has. But even more impressive, when he turned 21, he took on the challenge of mastering something completely new and very different from chess: martial arts. He realized that he had learned how to grow and succeed, and he could apply that understanding to other domains. And so, he devoted himself relentlessly to tai chi chuan. And after lots of hard work, many failures, and some broken joints, he became a great martial artist, and he won two world championships. Now he is off to jiu-jitsu. So what does Josh say is the greatest thing ever happened to him? Believe it or not, he says, "Losing my first national chess championship, because it helped me avoid many of the psychological traps." The key trap that Josh avoided was believing that he was special, that he was smarter than other people, and that he didn't have to work hard. He could have thought of himself as a prodigy, but he doesn't think that he has extraordinary intelligence. He says, "The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability, we will be brittle in the face of adversity." Josh often quotes Stanford Professor Carol Dweck who discovered that some people see intelligence or abilities as fixed what is called a fixed mindset, while other people see them as Josh does, as qualities that can be developed; a growth mindset. More important, Dr. Dweck discovered that these two different mindsets lead to very different behaviors and results. In a study she did with Dr. Lisa Blackwell, several hundreds seventh graders were surveyed to determine which mindset each student had, and then they were tracked for two years. Results showed that the students with a growth mindset, those who thought they could change their own intelligence increased their grades over time. While those with a fixed mindset did not. You can see the trend, the gap in performance just widens and widens over time. The difference between these two groups: a different perspective on intelligence. Other studies have shown similar effects for our mindset about other abilities like problem solving, playing sports, managing people, or anything else you'd like, dancing La Macarena. The key to success is not simply effort, or focus, or resilience, but it is the growth mindset that creates them, the mindset itself is critical. Research shows that when we directly try to build grit or persistence, it's not nearly as effective as addressing the mindset that underlies them. How many of us think of ourselves as not math people, or creative, or sociable, or athletic, or conversely, that we are naturals? If we are to fulfill our potential, we have to start thinking differently. We have to realize we are not chained to our current capabilities. Neuroscience shows the brain is very malleable. And we can change our own ability to think and to perform. In fact, many of the most accomplished people of our era were thought of, by experts, to have no future. People like Charles Darwin, Lucille Ball, Marcel Proust, and many others. But they, along with all great achievers from Mozart to Einstein, built their abilities. But the key insight I would like you to walk away with today is that when we realize that, when we realize we can change our own abilities, when we have a growth mindset, we bring our game to new levels. So how does a growth mindset do that? It turns out that there are physiological manifestations to mindset. Brain scans show that for people with a fixed mindset, the brain becomes most active when receiving information about how the person performed such as a grade or a score. But for people with a growth mindset, the brain becomes most active when receiving information about what they could do better next time. In other words, people with a fixed mindset worry the most about how they are judged, while those with a growth mindset focus the most on learning. There are other consequences of mindset: people with a fixed mindset see effort as a bad thing, something that only people with low capabilities need, while those with a growth mindset see effort as what makes us smart, as the way to grow. And when they hit a set back or a failure, people with a fixed mindset tend to conclude that they are incapable. So to protect their ego, they lose interest or withdraw. We observe that as lack of motivation. But behind it is a fixed mindset, whereas people with a growth mindset understand that set backs are part of growth. So when they hit one, they find a way around it. Like Josh Waitzkin did when he lost in chess or in martial arts. Research clearly shows these effects of mindset. In one study Dr. Dweck did with Dr. Claudia Mueller, they had children do a set of puzzles, and then they praised the kids. To some of the kids, they said, "Wow, that's a really good score, you must be smart at this." That's fixed mindset praise because it portrays intelligence or abilities as a fixed quality. To other kids they said, "Wow, that's a really good score, you must have tried really hard." That's growth mindset praise because it focuses on the process. Then, they asked the kids, "OK, what kind of puzzle would you like to do next? An easy one or a hard one?" The majority of the kids who received the fixed mindset praise chose to do the easy puzzle. While the great majority of those who received the growth mindset praise chose to do challenge themselves. Then the researchers gave a hard puzzle to all of the kids because they were interested in seeing what confronting difficulty would do to their performance. Look at what happened when the kids later went back to the set of easier problems that they started with. The kids who received the fixed mindset praise did significantly worse than they had originally, while those who received a growth mindset praise did better. And to top it off, at they very end, kids were asked to report their scores; and the kids who received the fixed mindset praise lied about their scores over three times more often than those who received the growth mindset praise. They did not have another way to cope with their failure. The difference between these two groups: one short little sentence. How often do we praise kids for being smart or for being great at something? We have been told that this will raise their self-esteem. But instead, it puts them in a fixed mindset. They become afraid of challenges, and they lose confidence when things hit hard. As Josh Waitzkin says, "It is incredibly important for parents to make their feedback process related as oppose to praising or criticizing talent. If we win because we are winners, then when we lose, it must make us losers." These studies show not only the mechanisms by which mindset affects performance, but they also show something else that is very important: they show that we can change mindsets, and that's important, because most of us have fixed mindsets about something. Another study that showed that we can change mindsets is one in which Dweck and Blackwell did a workshop with seventh graders to instill a growth mindset in them. As a result of the workshop, the students gained more interest in learning, and they worked harder; and as a result of that, their grades improved. Other studies have shown that when we teach a growth mindset, not only that it improves achievements for students as a whole but it also narrows the achievement gap, because the effects are most pronounced for the students who face negative stereotypes such as minority students, and girls in math. I have spoken mostly about children, but mindsets affects all of us. In our work places, managers with fixed mindsets don't welcome feedback as much, and they don't mentor employees as much. And employees with growth mindsets about specific skills like negotiations become far better at those skills than people with fixed views. Mindsets can even help us solve big social issues. A recent study showed that when we expose Israelis and Palestinians to the idea that groups can change, they increase their attitudes towards towards one another, they improve them. and they enhance their willingness to compromise and to work for peace. We also see the effects of mindsets on relationships, sports, health. How is it possible that as a society, we are not asking schools to develop a growth mindset in children? Our myopic efforts to teach them facts, concepts, and even critical critical thinking skills is likely to fail, if we don't also deliberately teach them the essential beliefs that will allow them to succeed not only in school but also beyond. There is a lot that we can do to change mindsets, but here are three things that any of us can do to instill a growth mindset in ourselves and in those around us. First, recognize that the growth mindset is not only beneficial but it is also supported by science. Neuroscience shows that the brain changes and becomes more capable when we work hard to improve ourselves. Second, learn and teach others about how to develop our abilities. Learn about deliberate practice and what makes for effective effort. When we understand how to develop our abilities, we strengthen our conviction that we are in charge of them. And third, listen for your fixed mindset voice, and when you hear it, talk back with a growth mindset voice. If you hear, "I can't do it," add, "Yet." My request to you today is that you share this knowledge about the growth mindset with your family, friends, and schools so that all of us can go and fulfill our potential. Thank you.

Inspiring: Change the World by making your bed- Admiral William McRaven

change the world start off by making your bed if you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day it will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another and by the end of the day that one task completed will have turned into mini task completed making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter if you can't do the little things right you'll never be able to do the big things right and if by chance you have a miserable day you will come home to a bed that is made that you made and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better the Bastille training are a series of long swims that must be completed one is the night swim before the swim the instructors joyfully brief the students on all the species of sharks that inhabit the waters off San Clemente they assure you however that no student has ever been eaten by a shark at least not that they can remember but you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position stand your ground do not swim away do not act afraid and if the shark hungry for a midnight snack darts for you then summons up all your strength and punch him in the snout and he will turn in swim away there are a lot of sharks in the world if you hope to complete the swim you will have to deal with them so if you want to change the world don't back down from the Sharks over a few weeks of difficult training my SEAL class was started with 150 men was down to just 42 there are now six boat crews of seven men each I was in the boat with the tall guys but the best boat crew we had was made of little guys the Munchkin crew we call him no one was over five foot five the Munchkin boat crew at one American Indian one African American one Polish American one Greek American one Italian American and two tough kids from the Midwest they out paddled out ran and out swam all the other boat crews the big men and the other boat crews will always make good-natured fun of the tiny little flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feet prior to every swim but somehow these little guys from every corner of the nation of the world always have the last laugh sewing faster than everyone and reaching the shore long before the rest of us SEAL training was a great equalizer nothing mattered but your will to succeed not your color and a terrific background that your education that's your social status if you want to change the world measure a person by the size of their heart not by the size of their flippers the ninth week training is referred to as hell weighted it is six days of no sleep constant physical and mental harassment and one special day at the blood flats the mud flats are an area between San Diego and Tijuana where the water runs off and creates the Tijuana sloughs a swampy patch of terrain where the mud will engulf you it is on Wednesday of hell week but to paddle down in the mud class and spend the next 15 hours trying to survive a suprising cold the howling wind and the incessant pressure to quit for the instructors as the Sun began to set that Wednesday evening my training class have you committed some egregious and fraction of the rules was ordered into the mud the mud consumed each man till there was nothing visible but our heads the instructors told us we could leave the money homie five men would quit only 5 min just five men and we could get out of the oppressive cold looking around the mud flat it was apparent that some students were about to give up it was still over eight hours till the Sun came up eight more hours of bone-chilling cold a chattering teeth and shivering moans of the trainees were so loud it was hard to hear anything and then one voice began to echo through the night one voice raised in song the song was terribly out of tune but some with great enthusiasm one voice became two and two became three and before long everyone in the class was singing the instructors threatened us with more time in the mud we kept up singing but the singing persisted and somehow the mud seemed a little warmer and the wind a little tamer and the dawn not so far away if I have learned anything in my time traveling the world it is the power of hope the power of one person the Washington a Lincoln King Mandela and even a young girl from Pakistan Malala one person can change the world by giving people hope so if you want to change the world start each day with a task completed find someone to help you through life respect everyone know the life is not fair that you will fail often but if you take some risks step up on the time through the toughest faced down the bullies lift up the downtrodden and never ever give up if you do these things the next iteration and the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today and what started here will indeed have changed the world for the better you

Measuring Personality: Crash Course Psychology #22

how would you describe your personality may be friendly creative quirky what about nervous or timid or outgoing but has anyone ever called you a sanguine what about a cava or full of metal ancient Greek physician Hippocrates believed personality manifested itself in four different humors and basically you are who you are because of your balance of phlegm blood and yellow and black bile according to traditional Chinese medicine our personalities depend on the balance of five elements earth wind water metal and fire those who practice traditional Hindu Ayurvedic medicine view each other as unique combinations of three different mind-body principles called doshas but Sigmund Freud thought our personalities depended in part on who's winning the battle of urges between the Ede ego and super-ego meanwhile humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow suggested that the key to self-actualization was first successfully climbing a hierarchy of more basic needs and then you got your BuzzFeed quizzes to determine what kind of pirate der font or sandwich or Harry Potter character you are but I would never take one of those seriously all this is to say the people have been characterizing one another for a long long time and whether you're into blood or bile or ego or it or blt or PB&J; there are a lot of ways to describe and measure a personality and all these theories all the years of research and cigar-smoking an inkblot gazing in the fans debating whether they're more of a Luke or Leia they're all funneling down the one big central question who or what is the self last week we talked about how psychologists often study personality by examining the differences between characteristics and by looking at how these various characteristics combine to create a whole thinking feeling person the early psychoanalytic and humanistic theorists had a lot of ideas about personality but some psychologists questioned their lack of clearly measurable standards like there was no way to really quantify someone's inkblot response or how orally fixated they might be so this drive to find a more empirical approach spawned two more popular theories in the 20th century known as the trait and social cognitive perspective instead of focusing on things like lingering unconscious influences or missed growth opportunities trait theory researchers look to define personality through stable and lasting behavior patterns and conscious motivations legend has it that it all began in 1919 when young American psychologist Gordon Allport paid a visit to none other than Freud himself Allport was telling Freud about his journey there on the train and how there was this little boy who was obsessed with staying clean and didn't want to sit next to anyone or touch anything Albert wondered if the boy's mother had a kind of dirt phobia that had rubbed off on him so yeah yeah yeah he's telling his tale and at the end of it Freud looks at him and says hmm was that little boy you all port was basically like no man that was just some kid on the train don't try to make this into some big unconscious episode from my repressed childhood Allport thought Freud was digging a little too deep and that sometimes you just need to look at motives in the present not the past to describe behavior so all-ports started his own Club describing personality in terms of fundamental traits or characteristics and conscious motives it wasn't so much interested in explaining traits as he was in describing them modern trait researchers like Robert McRae and Paul Costa have since organized our fundamental characteristics into what's casually known as the big five openness conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism which you can remember using the mnemonic ocean or canoe whichever one you prefer each of these traits exists on a spectrum so for example your level of openness can range on one end from being totally open to new things in variety or one thing strict regular routine on the other end your degree of conscientiousness can translate into being impulsive and care lists are careful and disciplined someone high on the extraversion in will be sociable while those on the low end will be shy and reserved a very agreeable person meanwhile is helpful and trusting while someone at the opposite end may be suspicious or uncooperative and finally on the neuroticism spectrum an emotionally stable person will be more calm and secure while a less stable person is often anxious insecure and self-pitying the important idea here is that these traits are hypothesized to predict behavior and attitude like an introvert might prefer communicating through email more than an extroverted and agreeable person is much more likely to help their neighbor move that couch then a suspicious one who's just glaring through the window my adulthood trait theorists will tell you these characteristics are pretty stable but isn't to say that they can't flex a little in different situations like that same shy person might end up singing Elvis karaoke in a room full of people under the right conditions so our personality traits are better predicting our average behavior than what we do in any specific situation and research indicates that some traits like neuroticism seem to be better predictors of behavior than others this flexibility that we all seem to have leads to the fourth major theory on personality the social cognitive perspective originally proposed by our Bovo beading friend alfred bandura the social cognitive school emphasizes the interaction between our traits and their social context ventura noted that we learn a lot of our behavior by watching and imitating others that's the social part of the equation but we also think a lot about how these social interactions affect our behavior which is the cognitive part so in this way people and their situations basically work together to create behavior bandura referred to this sort of interplay as reciprocal determinism meaning that for example the kind of books you read or music you listen to or friends you hang out with say something about your personality because different people choose to be in different environments and then those environments in turn continue to reinforce our personalities so if Bernice has a kind of anxious suspicious personality and she has a serious Titanic crush on Sherlock Holmes she might be extra attuned to potentially dangerous or fishy situations the more she sees the world in that way the more anxious and suspicious she gets in this way we're both the creators and the products of the situation's we surround ourselves with that's why one of the key indicators of personality in this school of thought has to do with our sense of personal control that is the extent to which you perceive that you have control over your environment someone who believes that they control their own fate or make their own luck is said to have an internal locus of control while those who feel like they're just guided by forces beyond their control are said to have an external locus now whether we're talking about control versus helplessness introversion versus extraversion calm versus anxious or whatever each of these different personality perspectives have their own methods of testing and measuring personality we talked before about how the psychoanalyst super hunk Hermann Rorschach used his ink blot test to infer information about a person's personality we know that Freud used dream analysis and both he and Young were fans of free association the broader school of theorists now known as the psychodynamic camp that descended from Freud and pals also use other projective psychological tests including the famous Thematic Apperception tests in this kind of test you'd be presented with evocative but ambiguous pictures and then asked to provide information about them you might be asked to tell a story about the scenes considering things like how are the characters feeling or what's going on or what happened before this event and what will happen after like check it out is the woman crying because her brother just died from a bee sting or is she a maid laughing because some royal just passed out drunk in his bed or perhaps the object of her long burning affection has just confessed his love and a fever hazel jane austen style and she's having a mini breakdown in the hall the idea is that your responses will reveal something about your concerns and motivations in real life or how you see the world or about your unconscious processes that drive you by contrast with that approach though modern trait personality researchers believe that you can assess personality traits by having people answer a series of test questions there are lots of so called personality trait inventories out there some provide a quick reading on a particular enduring trait like anxiety or self-esteem while others gauge a wide range of traits like our friends the Big Five these tests like the myers-briggs which you might have heard of involve long questionnaires of true false or agree/disagree questions like do you enjoy being the center of attention do you find it easy to empathize with others or do you value justice over mercy but the classic Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory is probably the most widely used personality test the most recent version asks a series of five in 67 true/false questions varying from no one seems to understand me too I like mechanics magazines too I loved my father and is often used to identify emotional disorders and there's how bandura's social cognitive camp sizes you up because this school of thought emphasizes the interaction of environment and behavior rather than just traits alone they aren't solely into questions and answers instead they might measure personality in different contexts understanding behavior in one situation is best predicted by how you acted in a similar situation like if Bernice freaked out and tried to hide under the bed during the last five thunderstorms we can predict the chip will do that again next time and if we conducted a controlled lab experiment where say we looked at the effects of thunderstorm noises on people's behavior we might get an even better sense of what baseline psychological factors could best predict storm induced freak-outs and finally there are the humanistic theorists like Maslow they often reject standardized assessments altogether instead they tend to measure your self-concept through therapy interviews and questionnaires that asked subjects to describe both how they would ideally like to be and how they actually are the idea is that the closer the actual and ideal are the more positive the subjects sense of self which brings us back to that biggest motherlode question of them all who or what is the self all the books out there about self esteem self-help self awareness self control and so on are built upon one assumption that the self is the organizer of our thoughts and feelings and actions essentially the center of a personality but of course it's a sticky issue one way to think about self is through the concept of possible selves like your ideal self perhaps devastatingly attractive and intelligent successful and well loved as well as your most feared self the one who could end up unemployed and lonely and run down this balance of potential best and worst selves motivates us through life in the end once you factor in environment and Javad experiences culture and all that mess not to mention biology which we haven't even touched on today can we really firmly define self or answer certainly that we even have one that my friend is one of life's biggest questions in so far it has yet to be universally answered but you learn a lot anyway today right as we've talked about the trait and social cognitive perspectives and also about different ways these schools and others measure and test personality we also talked about what self is and how our self-esteem works thanks for watching especially to our subbable subscribers who make crash course possible to find out how you can become a supporter just go to subbable.com/crashcourse this episode was written by Kathleen Yale edited by Blake de pastino and our consultant is dr. Ranjit Bhagwat our director and editor is Nicholas Jenkins and the script supervisor is Michael Aranda who is also our sound designer and the graphics team is thought cafe you

The puzzle of motivation—Dan Pink

need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of. Something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. (Laughter) In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. (Laughter) In America, law is a professional degree: after your university degree, you go on to law school. When I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90% possible. (Laughter) Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to. (Laughter) But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might know it. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. He created this experiment that is used in many other experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Now what would you do? Many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or ten minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here. The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem. I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US, This shows the power of incentives. He gathered his participants and said: "I'm going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem." To one group he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem." To the second group he offered rewards. He said, "If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator. Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. 3.5 min longer. This makes no sense, right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work, right? (Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored. I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. What's alarming here is that our business operating system -- think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources-- it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you. Glucksberg did another similar experiment, he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing. What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it? (Laughter) If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. So, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well. But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility. Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting, financial analysis, computer programming -- has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities. Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work! It makes me crazy. And here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy. (Laughter) This is a fact -- or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me give you an example. Let me marshal the evidence here. I'm not telling a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward, on down. What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. Then they said, "Let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Let's go to Madurai, India and test it." Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards. What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance. Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No, these are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. Do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience. Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics, LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of eleven Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. (Laughter) Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what they said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance." There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach. The good news is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, they're interesting, or part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses. I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is not a tree, it's a television set. Somebody invented it. It doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better. Some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. You don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy. Some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half. (Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, "Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want." Engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and woolly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. Being Australians, everybody has a beer. They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty; not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever. (Laughter) That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed. It's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20% time -- done, famously, at Google -- where engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20% time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News. Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), created by two American consultants, in place at a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional. What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, the building blocks of a new way of doing things. Some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." And I say, "Nope. I have proof." The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a euro or a yen. Do it because you like to do it. Just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model. This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation, right? This is the Thrilla in Manila. Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout. Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive-- the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter. And here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between science and business, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe -- we can change the world. I rest my case. (Applause)

Avoid Avoiding Conflict | David Thornsen

the main reason that couples tend to give when they come into my office for therapy is communication now over the years I have identified a common culprit that is almost always the cause of that breakdown in communication and that common culprit is conflict avoidance now I understand why people do it I think we all do it for the right reasons you know we say sure when we don't really mean it or we keep something annoying to ourselves because we don't want to ruin the evening or whatnot but there is a consistent cost to taking that approach and when I explain that to couples in my office it makes a dramatic difference in the relationship so I want to explain that to you now so let's take a hypothetical couple will call them Terry and Shawn and we'll put them into a not super horrible dilemma and we're going to see what happens so let's say that Terry is out and heading home and calls up Shawn says hey Shawn I've got a great idea let's get pizza and Shawn's thinking oh I don't really feel like pizza I it was kind of thinking about a salad today and Shawn knows it to say that would mean that conflict would be in the relationship right and I always picture it up here between the two people up here like swarming around like a swarm of bees or a thundercloud or something it's conflict so let's say instead Terry calls up and says hey Shawn I got a great idea let's get pizza tonight and Shawn doesn't want pizza really wants a salad but doesn't want to have that kind of evening so says yeah sure Pizza sounds good all right no harm done Shawn doesn't really want pizza but went along with it anyway no big deal there's no conflict up here in the relationship but does the conflict still exist right it does where does it exist inside of Shawn so Sean hasn't avoided conflict Shawn has effectively internalized now the first thing that happens there the most simple thing is that Terry's getting misinformation right so Terry's going to come home with the pizza plan on having a great night thinking that they're both in on it together and Shawn's gonna be a little off a little quiet little weird and when Terry asks why Shawn's not gonna be able to really say why and it's going to be kind of weird but that's not even the worst part the real damage to the relationship comes in here because conflict in order to be resolved or dissolved or word through or gotten rid of always requires compromise so if Terry wants pizza and calls up Shawn and Shawn doesn't really want pizza and says that there's conflict up here in the relationship then the two partners are going to have to work together and come up with a compromise maybe the order of pizza and pick up a salad maybe they wait till Saturday I don't know they'll come up with some kind of some kind of compromise together to work it out but if Terry calls up Sean says hey I got a great idea let's get pizza tonight Sean doesn't want pizza but doesn't want to have that evening so says yeah sure pizza go ahead I'll order it you pick it up and internalizes the conflict what happens then see the compromise that internalized conflict requires is that we compromise a bit of ourselves every time and it builds up over time and it has a way of chipping away at a person sense of self and they begin to feel like they don't matter they're less important in the relationship they begin to feel like they lose their voice and then resentment sets in and resentment builds now the good news is that it's really easy to undo that pattern all the couple has to do is prioritize honesty over the reaction that they're afraid that they're going to get from their partner all they have to do is make sure that their yes means yes or their no means no be honest with each other in their thoughts and their feelings now will there be more conflate now there won't be more conflict it'll just be out in the open where it belongs right we're both partners can work together to come up with a compromise so that nobody is any longer internalizing the conflict nobody's chipping away at their sense of self there's no voice being lost resentment doesn't set in and resentment doesn't build up so I'd like to see you try that being honest with one another it'll be easier than you think thank you

Video: Why TEAMWORK is important?

once upon a time a turtle and a rabbit had an argument about who was faster they decided to settle the argument with a race the turtle and the rabbit both agreed on a round and started off the race the rabbit shot ahead and ran briskly for some time then see he was far ahead of the turtle he thought he'd sit under a tree for some time and relax before continuing the race he sat under the tree and soon fell asleep the turtle plodding on overtook him and soon finished the race emerging as the undisputed champ the rabbit woke up and realized that he'd lost the race the moral of the story is that slow and steady wins the race this is the version of the story that we've all grown up with but our version of the story continues the rabbit was disappointed at losing the race and he did some thinking he realized that he'd lost the race only because he had been overconfident careless and lacks if he had not taken things for granted there's no way the turtle could have beaten him so he challenged the turtle to another race the turtle agreed this time the rabbit went all out and ran without stopping from start to finish he won by several miles the moral of the story fast and consistent will always beat the slow and steady it's good to be slow and steady but it's better to be fast and reliable the story doesn't end here the turtle did some thinking this time and realized that there's no way he can beat the rabbit in a race the way it was currently formatted he thought for a while and then challenged the rabbit to another race but on a slightly different route the rabbit agreed the turtle and rabbit started off in keeping with his self made commitment to be consistently fast the rabbit took off and ran at top speed until he came to a broad river the finishing line was a couple of kilometers on the other side of the river the rabbit sat there wondering what to do in the meantime the turtle trundled along got into the river swam to the opposite bank continued walking and finished the race the moral of the story first identify your core competency and then change the playing field to suit your core competency the story still hasn't ended the turtle and rabbit by this time and become pretty good friends and they did some thinking together both realized that the last race could have been run much better so the turtle and rabbit decided to do the last race again but to run as a team this time they started off and this time the rabbit carried the turtle till the riverbank there the turtle took over and swam across with the rabbit on his back on the opposite bank the rabbit again carried the turtle and they reached the finishing line together both the turtle and rabbit felt a greater sense of satisfaction than they'd felt earlier the moral of the story it's good to be individually brilliant and to have strong core competencies but unless you're able to work in a team and harness each other's core competencies you'll always perform below par because there will always be situations at which you'll do poorly and someone else does well teamwork is mainly about situational leadership letting the person with the relevant core competency for a situation take leadership and that is the end of the story

Best speech ever Simon Sinek on Millennials in the workplace

what's the Millenial question apparently Millennials as a generation a group of people who were born approximately 1984 and after are tough to manage and they're accused of being entitled and narcissistic self-interested unfocused lazy but entitled is the big one and and because they confound leadership so much what's happening is leaders are asking the Millennials what do you want and Millennials are saying we want to work in a place with purpose love that we want to make an impact you know whatever that means we want free food and bean bags and so somebody articulates some sort of purpose there's lots of free food and there's bean bags and yet for some reason they're still not happy and that's because you that they're missing there's a there's a missing piece what I've learned is that there I can break it down into four pieces right there are four four things four characteristics one is parenting the other one is technology third is impatience and the fourth is environment the generation that we call the Millennials too many of them grew up subject to not my words failed parenting strategies you know where for example they were told that they were special all the time they were told that they have anything they want in life just because they want it right they were told some of them got into honors classes not because they deserved it but because their parents complained and some of them got a is not because they earned them but because the teachers didn't want to deal with the parents some kids got participation medals they got a medal for coming in last right which the science we know is pretty clear which is it devalues the metal and the reward for those who actually work hard and that actually makes the person who comes in last to feel embarrassed because they know they didn't deserve it so actual makes me feel worse right so you take this group of people and they graduate school and they get a job and the thrust and turn it into the real world and in an instant they find out they're not special their moms can't get them a promotion that you get nothing for coming in last and by the way you can't just have it because you want it right and in an instant the entire self-image is shattered and so you have an entire generation that's growing up with lower self-esteem than previous generations the other problem to compound it is we're growing up in a facebook Instagram world in other words we're good at putting filters on things we're good at showing people that life is amazing even though I'm depressed right and so everybody sounds tough and everybody sounds like they got it we'll figure it out and the reality is there's very little toughness and most people don't have it figured out and so when the more senior people say what we do they sound like this is what you got at it and they have no clue so you have an entire generation growing up with lower self-esteem than previous generations right through no fault of their own through no fault of their own right they were dealt a bad hand right now let's add in technology we know that engagement with social media and our cell phones releases a chemical called dopamine that's why when you get a text feels good right so you know we've all had it or you're feeling a little bit down or feeling a bit lonely and so you send out ten texts to ten friends you know high high high high high because it feels good when you get a response right right it's why we count the likes it's why we go back ten times to see if and if it's going if our my Instagram is growing slower I would do something wrong do they not like me anymore right the trauma for young kids to be unfriended right because we know when you get it you get a hit a dopamine which feels good it's why we like it it's why we keep going back to it dopamine is the exact same chemical that makes us feel good when we smoke when we drink and when we gamble in other words it's highly highly addictive right we have age restrictions on smoking gambling and alcohol and we have no age restrictions and social media and cell phones which is the equivalent of opening up the liquor cabinet and saying to our teenagers hey by the way this adolescence thing if it gets you down but that's basically what's happening that's basically what's happening right that's basically what happened you have an entire generation that has access to an addictive numbing to chemical dopamine through social media and cell phones as they're going through the high stress of adolescents why is this important almost every alcoholic discovered alcohol when they were teenagers when we're very very young the only approval we need is the approval of our parents and as we go through adolescence we make this transition where we now need the approval of our peers very frustrating for our parents very important for us that allows us to acculturate outside of our immediate families into the broader tribe right it's a highly highly stressful and anxious period of our lives and we're supposed to learn to rely on our friends some people quite by accident discover alcohol and numbing effects of dopamine to help them cope with the stresses and anxieties of adolescence unfortunately that becomes hardwired in their brains and for the rest of their lives when they suffer significant stress they will not turn to a person they will turn to the bottle social stress financial stress career stress that's pretty much the primary reasons why an alcoholic drinks right what's happening is because we're out allowing unfettered access to these dopamine producing devices and media basically it's becoming hardwired and what we're seeing is as they grow older they to many kids don't know how to form deep meaningful relationships their words not mine they will admit that many of their friendships are superficial they will admit that their friends that they don't count on their friends they don't rely on their friends they have fun with their friends but they also know that their friends will cancel out them that something better comes along deep meaningful relationships are not there because they never practice the skillset and worse they don't have the coping mechanisms to deal with stress so when significant stress starts to show up in their lives they're not turning to a person they're turning to a device they're turning to social media they're turning to these things which offer temporary relief we know the science is clear we know that people who spend more time on Facebook so far higher rates of depression than people spend less time on Facebook write these things balanced alcohol is not bad too much alcohol is bad gambling is fun too much gambling is dangerous right there's nothing wrong with social media and cell phones it's the imbalance right if you're sitting at dinner with your friends and you're texting somebody who's not there that's a problem that's an addiction if you're sitting in a meeting with people you're supposed to be listening to and speak and you put your phone on the table face up or face down I don't care that sends a subconscious message to the room that you're not just you're just not that important to me right now right that's what happens and the fact that you cannot put it away it's because you are addicted right if you wake up and you check your phone before you say good morning to your girlfriend boyfriend or spouse you have an addiction and like all addiction in time it'll destroy relationships it'll cost time and it'll cost money and will make your life worse right so you have a generation growing up with lower self-esteem that doesn't have the coping mechanisms to do with stress stress right now you add in the sense of impatience right they've grown up in a world of instant gratification you want to buy something you go on Amazon it arrives the next day you want to watch a movie log on and watch your movie you don't check movie times you want to watch your TV show binge you don't even have to wait week to week to week right I know people who skip seasons just so they can binge at the end of the season right Instagram if occasion you want to go on a date you don't even have to learn how to be like you don't even have to learn and practice that skill you don't have to be the uncomfortable and which this is yes when you mean known says no when you mean no but yes when you you have to swipe right bang I'm a stud right you don't have to learn the social coping mechanisms right everything you want you can have instantaneously everything you want instant gratification except job satisfaction and strength of relationships there ain't no app for that they are slow meandering uncomfortable messy processes and so I keep meeting these wonderful fantastic idealistic hard-working smart kids they've just graduated school they're in their entry-level job I sit down with them when I go how's it going they go I think I'm going to quit I'm like why they're like I'm not making an impact I'm like you've been here eight months it's as if they're standing at the foot of a mountain and they have this abstract concept called impact that they want to have in the world which is the summit what they don't see is the mountain I don't care if you go up the mountain quickly or slowly but there's still a mountain and so what this young generation needs to learn is patience that some things that really really matter like love or job fulfillment joy love of life self-confidence a skill set any of these things all of these things take time sometimes you can expedite pieces of it but the overall journey is arduous and long and difficult and if you don't ask for help and learn that skill set you will fall off the mountain or you will the worst case scenario the worst case scenario and we're already seeing it the worst case scenario is we're seeing increase in suicide rates we're seeing an increase in this generation we're seeing an increase in accidental deaths due to drug overdoses we're seeing more and more kids drop out of school or take leaves of absence due to depression unheard of these are this is this is really bad the best case scenario the bet those are all bad cases right the best case scenario is you'll have an entire population growing up and going through life and just never really finding joy they'll never really find deep deep fulfillment in work or in life they'll just just walk through life and it'll G just it's fine how's your job it's fine the same is yesterday how's your relationship it's fine like that's that's the best-case scenario which leads me to the the fourth point which is environment which is we're taking this amazing group of young fantastic kids would just dealt a bad hand it's no fault of their own and we put them in corporate environments that care more about the numbers than they do about the kids they care more about the short-term gains than the long-term life of this young human being we care more about the year than the lifetime right and so we are putting them in corporate environments that aren't helping them build their confidence that aren't helping them learn the skills of cooperation that aren't helping them overcome the challenges of a digital world and finding more balance that isn't helping them overcome the need to have instant gratification and teach them the joys and impact and the fulfilment you get from working hard over on something for a long time cannot be done in a month or even in a year and so with thrusting to them them in corporate environments in the worst part about it is they think it's them they blame themselves they can't they think it's them who can't deal and so it makes it all worse it's not I'm here to tell them it's not them it's the corporations it's the corporate environment it's the total lack of good leadership in our world today that is making them feel the way they do they would dealt a bad hand in it and I hate to say it but it's the company's responsibility sucks to be you like we have no choice right this is what we got and I wish that society and their parents did a better job they didn't so we're gonna we're getting them in our companies and we now have to pick up the slack we have to work extra hard to figure out the ways that we build their confidence we have to work extra hard to find ways to teach them social the social skills that they're missing out on there should be no cell phones and conference rooms none zero and I don't mean the kind of like sitting outside waiting to text I mean like when you're sitting and waiting for a meeting to start nobody go this is what we all do we all sit here and wait for the meeting to start meaning starting ok we start the meeting no that's not how relationships are formed remember we talked about it's the little things relationships are formed this way we're waiting for a meeting to start we go how's your dad I heard he's in hospital oh he's really good thanks for asking he's actually at home now oh I'm really glad it was really amazing I know it was really scary girl that's how you form relationships hey did you ever get that report on oh my god no I didn't I'll help you out I've totally are can I help you out with that really that's how trust forms trust doesn't form at an event in a day even bad times don't form trust immediately it's the slow steady consistency and we have to create mechanisms where we allow for those little innocuous interactions to happen but when we allow cell phones and company mist okay have the meeting and then my favorite is like when there's a cell phone there and you go like this you go it rings and go I'm not gonna answer that mr. magnanimous you know when you're out for dinner with your friends like I do this with my friends when we're going out for dinner and we're leaving together we'll leave our cell phones at home who are we calling maybe one of us will bring the phone in case we need to call an uber or take a picture of our meal bang come on I'm not I'm an idealist but I'm not insane I don't even I mean it looked really good we'll take one phone and so it's like an alcoholic the reason you take the alcohol out of the house is because we cannot trust our willpower we're just not strong enough but when you remove the temptation it actually makes it a lot easier and so when you just say don't check your phone people literally will go like this and somebody would go to the bathroom and what's the first thing we do because I wouldn't want to look around the restaurant for a minute and a half you know but if you don't have the phone you just kind of enjoy the world and that's where ideas happen the constant constant constant engagement is not where you have innovation and ideas ideas happen when our minds wander we go and you see something on I bet they could do that that's called innovation right but we're taking away all those little moments right you should not end none of us none of us should charge our phones by our beds we should be charging our phones in the living rooms right remove the temptation you wake up in the middle of night cause you can't sleep you won't check your phone which makes it worse but if it's in the living room it's relaxed it's fine hiya but it's my alarm clock fine alarm clock they cost $8 I'll buy you in a while

Margaret Neale: Negotiation: getting what you want

you've got a job offer and now you have a choice negotiate or not if you decide not to and your buddy who got the same offer negotiates and gets a $7000 increase by the end of 30 years your buddy will be making $100,000 more a year than you think about that my husband's a trained chef you know the chef's don't have recipes for all those sauces they know the structure of a sauce and so regardless of the ingredients they have they can make a great sauce and that's what I want for you I'm not going to give you a recipe for a particular negotiation rather what I want to do is give you the structure of a negotiation so that you can be successful regardless of what you face I want to propose a new way of thinking about negotiation and what you're trying to achieve in that negotiation and then what I want to do is give you four steps to help you be more effective in getting what you want folks typically see negotiation is an adversarial process and are uncomfortable because they're concerned that other folks will think of them as too demanding too greedy not nice or socially awkward what I want to do today is get you to change the frame of how you think about negotiation moving it from an adversarial process to one that is problem solving and problem solving is collaborative I want to solve our problem in a way that's good for you but also gives me more of what it is I want when we negotiate most of us view the goal of a negotiation as to get an agreement this is wrong the goal of a negotiation is not to get a deal the goal of a negotiation is to get a good deal we need to be able to separate what a good deal is from what a bad deal is so that means we need at least three pieces of information the first thing we need to know is what is our alternative what happens to us at this negotiation fails what are we left with what's the status quo or what alternatives exists for us and the research is very clear he or she with the better alternative does better secondly we need to know what our reservation price is what's the point at which we are indifferent between saying yes and invoking our alternative and when you negotiate it's critical that you understand where that reservation price is because that's the point at which you are indifferent we're a know looks as good as a yes and the third point which is really important and one that people often overlook is that not only do we have to think about our alternative and our reservation price we also need to think about our aspiration what is an optimistic assessment of what it is we can achieve in this negotiation so how do you get more of what you want let me suggest that four steps will help you the first step is to assess the situation is this a situation where I can have influence on the outcome to change that outcome in a way that makes me better off and I need to weigh the potential benefits from negotiating with the potential costs for negotiating and will the benefits outweigh the costs the second step is I need to prepare and there are really two aspects of this step number one I need to understand what my interests are what I'm really trying to achieve in this negotiation and the second component is I need to understand the interests and preferences of my counterpart many of us may understand what our interests are but few of us actually understand at a deep level what the preferences and interests are of our counterparts third now comes the ask engage with your counterpart look at these disputed social situations as opportunities to negotiate you have information that your counterparts don't have and this is what you bring to the table if they knew all your information if they knew your perspective they don't need you because you have unique information and because they have unique information that's where the value is created fourth you need to package now what do I mean by that most of us when we negotiate negotiate issue-by-issue this is a really bad strategy because when you negotiate issue-by-issue every issue is adversarial you either win or lose when your packaging issues you now have the opportunity to trade among the issues so think about proposing solutions alternative solutions to your counterpart in packages and to help you out because your counterpart will probably want to negotiate issue-by-issue think about using if-then language if I give you this then I get that what you're doing is you're yoking various issues together into a package to get more of what you want there are four steps assess prepare ask package to give you an example my Dean recently sent me an email indicating that I would have to be going from five courses a year to six courses a year because he had received information from the Provost that we needed to be consistent in the amount of contact hours and course credit I was not happy about that email so my response was I think I need to talk to my Dean let's negotiate but before I started the negotiation I thought hard about why was he doing this what was in his interest his interest was probably to make sure the Provost was happy what was my interest not to move from five classes to six classes and it turns out I teach two different types of classes MBA electives and then some specialty classes there are lots of folks who teach MBA electives there very few folks who teach specialty classes so I thought I should focus on the specialty classes so then I went for the ask I set up a meeting and part of that meeting was to verify the information that I had gathered in my planning session and it did turn out to be true he was interested in making the Provost happy so then came the proposal that packaged our interests he said he wanted consistency between contact hours and credit so what he did is he changed the credit to match the contact hours I suggested why not change the contact hours to match the credit because it turns out that in my courses in my specialty courses we always went over so while they were three hours it was common that we would go for three and a half to four hours so let's make him for our courses and keep me at five whether than move me to six he said to me I never even thought of that and why didn't he it wasn't that weird because he didn't have the information that I had that my classes routinely ran over and so when I gave him that information it created a solution that made him as well off as he was and made me a whole lot better by the way I was the only faculty member to get an exception and why did I get an exception because everybody else had the same email for two reasons one I decided to negotiate and number two I provided him with a solution that made us both better off so what are the unique opportunities and challenges that women face when they negotiate let's start off with an example that's pretty far away from what most of us think about as negotiations in 2006 the US Tennis opens Grand Slam tournament got some new technology and for the first time they were able to replay the calls and so they allowed the players to challenge the calls of the referees now it turns out that over the course of the entire tournament about one-third of the challenged calls were given to the player but interestingly if you divide it up the number of challenges by gender it turns out the men challenged seventy-three calls while the women challenged twenty eight now we can come up with all sorts of stories about why men's tennis is different from women's tennis men's sentences faster maybe the judges make more mistakes maybe the judges are paying more attention to the women maybe but three times difference in the number of challenges women are simply uncomfortable with asking expectations drive behavior if we expect to do poorly we will behave in ways that ensure a poor performance this was demonstrated in a piece of research that I think is very telling when women were told that people who are like them negotiate poorly they did significantly worse in their negotiation performance than their male colleagues when they were told that people like them negotiate well they did significantly better than their male colleagues expectations drive behavior if you change your expectations you will change your outcomes as women we need to be very cognizant of three aspects of negotiation why am i asking how am i asking and for whom am I asking let's first talk about why you are asking it turns out that women are much more effective in negotiations when they pair their competence with a communal orientation women need to demonstrate their concern for the other so how will my skills help you the organization my employer my team to do better so let me give you an example a colleague of mine had gotten a wonderful job offer from an East Coast University so she came to me and said can you help me figure out how to leverage this offer I really don't want to move I said no problem we can do this so I said make an appointment with the Dean and take the offer with you be very clear Dean we have a problem I love Stanford but I just received this offer and it's an attractive offer I need some help can you help me figure out how to stay here she wasn't making a demand she wasn't giving an ultimatum she was saying can you help me communal problem solving how are you asking male evaluators penalize female negotiators in a single-issue distributive negotiation when I ask for more money in ways that they do not penalize her male counterparts female evaluators penalize both males and females for asking for more why the women were penalized was because they were perceived as being too demanding and not nice now note I said a single issue they were negotiating issue by issue so how can I help you with this pool of resources that I need to do my job more effectively to make you better off and packaging communal packaging next for whom are you asking it turns out that if we distill the research and negotiation we have two big findings number one you're better off negotiating for yourself if you're a man number two if you're negotiating for me I am much better off if you are a woman women outperform men in representational negotiations between 14 and 23 percent this is huge so I use this all the time when I negotiate I don't negotiate for myself I negotiate for my husband my four dogs my seven horses and my 14 chickens that's a lot of mouths to feed and it works a client came to me asking for one of our top consultants who was busy working on another project full-time so I wanted to staff it with a different consultant but the consultant that the client wanted really wanted that project as well so she came up with the idea what if we hired a junior consultant to work underneath her and give her the opportunity to work on both projects with that leverage it worked for the client it made the consultant really happy and it really solved my problem before coming to business school for me negotiation was about preparing to beat a price or aim for a higher number now I realized that preparation for a negotiation is much more than that it's about identifying the issues are important to me but also the issues are important to the other parties that I'm interacting with and I think that allows us to be much more creative and actually solve the problem one of the most important things you can do in preparing for your compensation negotiation is to do your research and find out your market value sometimes people will go to websites and enter in their current field and title in order to find out what their salary ranges but I find that those websites aren't all that accurate and they often compile an average salary it's safe to assume that if you've performed strongly and you're asking for a raise you're above average one of the other things you can do is to survey a membership group or an association either online or offline and ask those members what their salary ranges you can do so anonymously if that feels more comfortable to you I worked for a fortune 50 company I got the promotion of my dreams best day of my life went out to dinner with a mentor that night to celebrate learned that I was getting paid substantially less than my six male counterparts he said you've got to go back in there and renegotiate had a lot of fear that I might lose that job but I did showed up next morning and I renegotiated the concern of my boss was I was younger and had far less experience than all my counterparts yet I pointed out to him that his expectation of me was that I would make the same goals as my six counterparts for equally as large accounts we discussed it and he agreed and at the end of the day I got the raise that I really deserved when you're considering negotiating you need to be very honest with yourself how much are you willing to pay to avoid the discomfort of negotiating and if you decide that you're going to negotiate you need to be strategic in how you ask and finally negotiation is an interdependent process every bad deal you have gotten you've agreed to so you need to have the capacity to say no and sometimes when you say no the other side comes back and says don't go let's talk how about this is it good for you but you'll never know that unless you're willing to walk away recently I had a client enter negotiation where the terms really didn't work for me and so I told them it's just not economically rational for me to take the deal and it kept it objective and not personal which really worked for me and allowed me to walk away from the deal but keep the door open when I got my first job I didn't even negotiate for salary I had no idea how to set a goal I had no idea how to make the ask now it's a little bit different I understand how to set an aspirational goal and in that preparation I get to the point where I understand how it benefits all the different parties that are involved but you really do have to understand how you feel in order to understand what it is that you want because if you don't know what you want you can't negotiate for it earlier in my career I realized that the types of projects I was going to get to work on and the people I was going to get to work with would be invaluable experience for me to gain for later on so when I received a promotion I took that time not just to negotiate my cash compensation but my total package in this way I was able to ensure that I was able to focus on a particular industry and also get to work with team members who I knew would invest in my own development when I was hiring people it struck me that men negotiated quite frequently and women were not negotiating and when they did negotiate women would have a number in their mind of what they wanted but they wouldn't be able to back in to how they got that they didn't explain to me that they did a competitive assessment they didn't tie it to the results and goals that I was hiring them for and why based on their experience they were a perfect fit and they were going to meet those goals for me and therefore they wanted a package that would include X they needed to come in prepared and just persuade me that they could meet my needs I've been on both sides of the negotiation first running compensation for a large organization and now as I place people in jobs and where I've seen women be most successful is when they frame their ask in terms of how it reaches the business goals so go ask just always keep in mind how does it help the company as well what I've noticed before is candidates negotiate their compensation package is that sometimes the negotiation process can get so heated and both parties can get so focused on what they're looking to get out of it that the candidates enthusiasm and hunger for the job can get lost therefore remember when you enter this process that you want your future employer and your boss to know that you're not only excited about the opportunity but you're hungry to get in there and start the job let's start with baby steps don't start off with a negotiation where there's a big relationship risk rather start a negotiation where the relationship is possibly not even important where there's less risk to you to experiment to try let me give you an example think about going to a department store and I don't know about you but I am a shoe a holic I love shoes unfortunately with my job I spend a lot of time in boring black pumps but sometimes when I go to shoe sales there are shoes that sing to me you can't wear them you can't even walk very far and I'm but when you put them on you're like I am good so I go to this department store it's the sale they have a sale like once every six months I'm there when the store opens and I find the boring pairs of black pumps that I'm gonna have to buy and then there's a shoe that from the rack was singing to me and I found him and they were in my size it was great I was excited but down to the price SiC these were really expensive shoes and they hadn't discounted them very much for the sale and I said to the guy I said I'm gonna buy these shoes here these are beautiful I want them but they're too expensive can you help me and he said no problem ma'am here's what you do buy all four pairs but don't wear these shoes and then bring them back in a week you return them we discounted 50% and then you can come and buy them back immediately and I said it's an hour and a half each way from my home to the store it's not gonna happen have you got any other options and he said let me go talk to my manager but when he came back he said we'll take $75 off those shoes for you and I said that works thank you now here's your assignment go to your favorite department store find something you want and then negotiate for it figure out how to solve the problem here's what I want it's too expensive for me and ask for help initiate the negotiation not all of you will be successful every time but you will be surprised at how often you are when I first learned about this research it helped me understand why women sometimes don't ask there is a social risk women are judged differently and with Maggie's work it gives us tools to negotiate successfully in a way that works for everyone Malcolm Gladwell suggests that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become expert in anything negotiation is the same way you need to practice but you need to learn from what you experience you need to see social situations as an opportunity to create value so that you and your counterparts can get more of what you want