Business Unusual – (UB Entrepreneurs)

http://www.ethisphere.org/

HARVEY SCHACHTER
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
Posted on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Flourish

By Martin Seligman

(Free Press, 349 pages, $29.99)

In the wake of the financial scandal, many suggestions for reforms have been put forth, among them a persistent call for business schools to spend more time teaching ethics. But famed psychologist Martin Seligman says that won’t work.

He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, home to the renowned Wharton School of Business. “If Wharton graduates – MBAs who care only about making a quick fortune – are given 10 ethics courses, it will have no effect. It’s a matter not of ethics, but of what they care about,” he writes in his latest book, Flourish.

He has been involved in developing resilience programs with the military, and has lectured at West Point, where the cadets care about serving their nation. The students are selected – and, indeed, before that, select themselves to apply – primarily around this notion of service. “If our business schools wish to avoid the economic consequences of greed and short-termism, they have to select their students for a broader moral circle and long-termism,” he notes.

Prof. Seligman is the founder of a new movement in his field, positive psychology. It focuses on what contributes to healthy mental functioning, and how to nurture that, rather than focusing on mental illness. In that vein, he wants to see a new course called “positive business,” aimed at broadening what MBAs care about. It would expose them to the five elements of well-being that he outlines in this book:

Positive emotion

This is what we feel, and for well-being it should be positive – pleasure, warmth, comfort, rapture, or ecstasy. You want what he calls “a pleasant life,” with happiness and satisfaction.

Engagement

This is about flow, getting wrapped up in an activity so that time seems to stop. He calls a life lived with that aim an “engaged life.” Interestingly, he notes that achieving engagement can be different, if not opposite, from positive emotions. When people are in those absorbed moments of flow they generally feel nothing. He believes the concentrated attention that flow requires uses up all the cognitive and emotional resources that comprise thought and feeling. But, of course, after these moments of flow we feel good for having gone through them. The pleasure is retrospective. “There are no shortcuts to flow,” he also advises. “On the contrary, you need to deploy your highest strengths and talents to meet the world in flow.”

Meaning

Human beings want meaning and purpose in life. Prof. Seligman plays a few hours of duplicate bridge every day, which provides flow and enjoyment, elements of well-being, but when he looks in the mirror he feels he is wasting his time. “The Meaningful Life consists in belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self,” he observes.

Accomplishment

This involves trying to accomplish goals and mastery, for the sake of accomplishment. Some of the expert bridge players he competes against simply want to win, and that is the only accomplishment that will satisfy them, even if they don’t play well, while others can lose but still feel they have been successful because they played well.

Relationships

Very little that is positive is solitary. “Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up,” he says. He tells of a friend, who when in a bad mood as a child would be told by his mother, “Why don’t you go out and help someone?”

He shares a series of exercises that you can employ for well-being, and that would likely be part of any positive business course. For example, find one wholly unexpected kind thing to do tomorrow, and just do it. Or try a gratitude visit, thinking of someone who over the years did something or said something that changed your life for the better. Then write a letter of gratitude to the person, and deliver it in person, reading it to him or her.

He says that MBA students have to be taught that if they want to flourish, they will not get it by only seeking accomplishment. “We must teach that the positive corporation and the individuals therein must cultivate meaning, engagement, positive emotion, and positive relations as well as tending to profit,” he stresses.

The book has the form of a memoir, as he guides readers through his thoughts on well-being and some of the major accomplishments in the field of positive psychology over the past 14 years. It is also written with other psychologists in mind, carefully parsing theories and providing research data. Some business readers may find it thin for their specific needs, but if you are looking for a wide-ranging discussion of this new approach to psychology, it can be engrossing.

from The Economist
Jan 6th 2011, 15:35 by George DeMartino | University of Denver

George DeMartino is a professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “The Economist’s Oath: On the Need for and Content of Professional Economic Ethics” (Oxford University Press, 2011).

IN NOVEMBER of 1929 a Chicago businessmen’s club wrote to the Secretary of the American Economic Association (AEA) to inquire about its code of ethics. Here, in full, is the AEA Secretary’s reply: “You should know that our middle name is “Ethics”, but we have no particular code, consequently, I cannot comply with your request.”

That reply, in a nutshell, captures perfectly the attitude of economists regarding professional economic ethics over the past century. With few exceptions, the profession has held the view that its members are committed to social progress; and that in their work economists face no pressing ethical quandaries of the sort that would justify an expenditure of intellectual resources on professional ethics.

This self-perception by the profession is half right and half wrong. Economists as a rule are driven by the imperative not just to understand the world, but to improve it. It is a wonderful irony, in fact, that a profession that portrays human nature as largely self-interested is populated for the most part by other-regarding actors who want to serve the public good. But the profession has made an extraordinary mistake in failing to appreciate that well-meaning economists face daunting ethical challenges in their work.

The case for professional economic ethics is simple. Economists affect the lives of others, often substantially—that is the crux of the matter. Not just one person at a time, as is the case in medical practice; and not just a few people who consent to the economists’ influence—say, those who purchase economic consulting services. No, economists affect the life chances of countless people across the globe, not least through their impact on economic policy. Perhaps it is the enormity of that impact that makes it difficult for economists to wrap their minds around their ethical obligations.

Economists’ influence comes to them by virtue of their intellectual monopoly over a subject matter that is vital to social welfare; and by virtue of their positions in the public, private and multilateral sectors that sometimes give economists institutional power. Moreover, economic interventions typically harm some while benefitting others, and the losers are rarely fully compensated. Finally, economists do their work in a context of epistemic insufficiency: they just can’t control and don’t know what will be the full impact of the interventions that they recommend. Think of economic restructuring in Russia, for instance, or financial deregulation in the U.S. This implies that economic interventions can generate all sorts of unforeseeable consequences. Some of those consequences may be terribly damaging, especially to those in the economy least able to bear them.

It’s a simple case, as I’ve said, one that stands on economists’ influence over others. Yet the profession has failed to accept the ethical responsibility that necessarily attaches to that influence. And that, I’m afraid, amounts to unethical professional conduct.

Fortunately, we may be on the brink of reform. Over the past two years prominent economists have begun to ask, in full public view, whether and to what degree the economics profession contributed to the current financial crisis. Then a few months back Charles Ferguson’s film “Inside Job” was released. It revealed stunning failures by influential economists to disclose their professional entanglements when giving testimony and writing about or advising on financial regulatory reform. Since then, the business press has begun to press the AEA leadership for action on conflicts of interest in economic practice. And just last week, a petition circulated by UMass economists Jerry Epstein and Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth and now signed by over 300 economists is calling on the AEA Executive Committee to formulate a code of conduct that addresses this issue.

All this is to the good, and long overdue. Not because economists are typically crooks or shills for outside interests, though there are some of those just as in every other profession. But because most economists are trying to do good work in a field where they enjoy extraordinary influence, their interventions generally harm some while benefitting others, and things can go very wrong in unpredictable ways. And so while it is important that the AEA and other economic associations take steps to address conflicts of interest among their members—and while publications like the Economist should as a matter of course begin to demand full disclosure from those economists who appear in its pages and on its blogs—economists and non-economists alike should press for something much more ambitious. We need a new field of inquiry into the many ethical issues that arise in the context of economic practice, including the risk of causing harm; the role conflict that arises when an economist serves an institution with an agenda that conflicts with the public good; the virtues that are required of the ethical economist; and so forth. And perhaps most difficult of all for a profession that has worked so hard to achieve influence, we need to consider our obligation to convey to our students and to the public not just the capacities but also the limitations of economics, and of economists.

31 books you should read and put to use.

1. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter Bernstein (1996)

From the ancient Greeks’ belief that the universe was divvied up in a game of craps to Keynes’s assertion that uncertainty makes us free, this lively economic history helps readers understand why we think — and bet — the way we do.

2. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything, by Guy Kawasaki (2004)

The author has aptly described this book as the start-up version of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. From his early exhortation to create a mantra (as opposed to a mission statement) through his final mandate to be a “mensch” (give something back), Kawasaki offers a broad, opinionated, often-shrewd blueprint for early stagers.

3. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson (2006)

Next time you are shipping alarm clocks to Singapore without thinking twice about freight costs, thank Malcom McLean, the trucking entrepreneur who battled labor and government to make it possible. This excellent history proves that sometimes the simplest answers are the most revolutionary.

4. Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell, by Nancy F. Koehn (2001)

The compelling stories of six admired companies (the others are H.J. Heinz, Marshall Field’s, Estée Lauder, and Starbucks) remind us that great brands aren’t clever marketing constructs. Rather, they emerge from founders’ deep understanding of the worlds they and their customers inhabit.

5. The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads, and Other Workplace Afflictions, by Scott Adams (1996)

Managers can learn more from the man with the antigravity tie than from a shelfful of books on organizational dynamics.

6. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, by Michael Gerber (1995)

“Work on your business, not in it” may be the most oft-quoted piece of wisdom in the entrepreneurial vernacular. Gerber urges readers to develop systems that allow their companies to operate even without them. This book doses starry-eyed entrepreneurs with much-need perspective.

7. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done, by Peter Drucker (1967)

Drucker’s classic prescriptions for decision making and time management are common sense, yet nonobvious. “In every area of effectiveness within an organization, one feeds the opportunities and starves the problems.” “If there is any one ‘secret’ of effectiveness, it is concentration.” Nobody does it better.

8. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, by Peter Senge (1990)

In the ’80s, everyone talked about continuous improvement. Then, MIT’s Senge showed us how to do it. Virtually every trait associated with 21st-century success (speed, flexibility, collaboration) is discussed here.

9. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman (1999)

The authors studied surveys of a gazillion people and discovered those undifferentiated masses yearn to be treated as individuals. The manifesto of one-to-one management.

10. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t, by Jim Collins (2001)

This book raised the aspirations of millions of business people and introduced at least some humility to the corner office. Collins’s message — about understanding what you can be best at, preserving the core, and sublimating personal to organizational ambition — remains an essential signpost for wanderers on Leadership Lane.

11. The Great Game of Business: The Only Sensible Way to Run a Company, by Jack Stack (1992)

The term open-book management didn’t exist when Stack, CEO of Springfield Remanufacturing, started giving employees the education and the data to track their company’s — and their own — performance. Stack is equally instructive and open in chronicling the experience.

12. Growing a Business, by Paul Hawken (1987)

More than 20 years after this book’s publication, few equal its blend of pragmatism and values. An early proponent of the role of passion in business, Hawken speaks directly to the ambitious but overwhelmed and often isolated founder.

13. Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, by Daniel Esty and Andrew Winston (2006)

Companies that fight against the green tide risk poisoning relationships with customers, investors, and governments. This manual smartly balances opportunity and risk in the quest to shrink companies’ environmental footprint.

14. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie (1936)

Of course, your salespeople and managers should read this self-improvement classic. But Friends is also about leadership. “There is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything,” writes Carnegie, “and that is by making the other person want to do it.”

15. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, by Clayton Christensen (1997)
Christensen shook up the business world with his insight that paying close attention to customers can hurt if your company is blindsided by a “disruptive technology.”

16. Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations, by Thomas A. Stewart (1997)

This book is an unanswerable argument for valuing your company’s collective knowledge as much as the contents of its warehouses and factories. Stewart explains with lucidity and wit how to create, wrangle, and exploit intangible assets.

17. The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up, by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham (2008)

Brodsky and Burlingham write Inc.’s Street Smarts column; The Knack similarly brings readers into the thick of running an entrepreneurial business.

18. Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman, by Yvon Chouinard (2005)

An eloquent manifesto for the socially and environmentally conscious business. The founder of Patagonia may be a reluctant businessman, but he is also an unusually thoughtful one.

19. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Don’t, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath (2007)

The Heath brothers identify qualities of memorable and effective ideas wherever they occur, in one of the most useful and entertaining marketing books to come along in years.

20. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, by Michael Lewis (1999)

Follow along as Jim Clark, the zillionaire founder of Silicon Graphics, chases after his next paradigm-shifting venture. A fascinating profile of the beyond-type-A entrepreneur and a wry anatomy of Silicon Valley in the boom years.

21. Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, by Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg (1996)

Corporate culture is a squishy term, until you look at Southwest Airlines — and suddenly the possibilities become clear.

22. Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy (1983)

The Web has changed how things are sold, but it hasn’t changed what sells. The founder of Ogilvy & Mather emphasizes research, brands, and big ideas. On copywriting, he’s still king. And he always makes excellent company.

23. On Competition, by Michael Porter (2008)

Before you choose a strategy — hell, before you choose an industry — consult Porter’s greatest hits. He distinguishes between operational effectiveness, which means doing things well (think Japan circa 1985), and competitive strategy, which means doing things differently or doing different things (think entrepreneurs circa forever).

24. Personal History, by Katharine Graham (1997)

We have heard several women CEOs cite this memoir by the former owner of The Washington Post as the most important tome in their leadership libraries. Coming into herself as a leader, Graham is an unexpected yet courageous exemplar of the socially seismic second half of the 20th century.

25. Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang (1997)

Schultz’s humble origins, his succumbing to a passion for a product, and his ongoing pursuit of servant leadership are genuinely inspirational.

26. Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big, by Bo Burlingham (2005)

For decades, company owners thought they had two choices: accept perpetual mom-and-pop-ism or pursue torrid growth. Small Giants posits a third option — be modest in scale but also an extraordinary employer, vendor, or community citizen.

27. Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder (1981)

This Pulitzer Prize–winning account of a team of Data General engineers rushing to complete a next-generation computer was published the year IBM introduced its PC. Back then, the technologists and work methods described must have seemed like exotic birds. Today, they are familiar, but Soul remains a bravura piece of journalism and foundational history of the tech sector.

28. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith (1776)

For anyone curious about the fundamentals of modern economic theory, Smith’s synthesis of earlier ideas laid the groundwork for laissez-faire capitalism. As we struggle with self-interest run amuck and debates over government intervention in business, Wealth deserves a revisit.

29. What Management Is: How It Works and Why It’s Everyone’s Business, by Joan Magretta and Nan Stone (2002)

We love the authors’ belief in management’s role as the guarantor of everyone’s well-being and their refusal to treat case study subjects as paragons. And we admire their humble goals: “You will…understand what management is capable of on a very good day. And on those bad days when things are going wrong, you will be far more likely to figure out what needs to be fixed.”

30. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, by James Surowiecki (2004)

Surowiecki’s exploration of the power of group intelligence grows ever more relevant. Technology makes this entertaining work of behavioral economics dangerous to ignore.

31. Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace, by Ricardo Semler (1995)

From Library Journal
First published in Brazil in 1988 as Turning the Tables , this book was the all-time best-selling nonfiction book in Brazil’s history. Semler, the 34-year-old CEO, or “counselor,” of Semco, a Brazilian manufacturing firm, describes how he turned his successful company into a “natural business” in which employees hire and evaluate their bosses, dress however they want, participate in major decisions, and share in 22 percent of the profits. Semler believes that Semco is different from most companies that have participatory management because employees are given the power to make decisions–even ones, with which the CEO wouldn’t normally agree. Semler claims, “This is not a business book. It is a book about work, and how it can be changed for the better.” Highly recommended.

From Booklist
What makes for a successful company? In a sometimes breathless, often boyish manner, Semler, a counselor of a Brazilian company (Semco), relates the transformation of a traditionally structured business into one quite literally without walls and rules. Semler details his not-so-easy steps in the metamorphosis: abolishing dress codes and regulations; decentralizing plants; getting rid of paperwork and titles (hence, his appellation as counselor, not CEO); and creating a consultative democracy in which employees set their own salaries and work hours and vote on managerial candidates, among other responsibilities. If it sounds too much like utopia, Semler admits that Brazil’s economic downturn has impacted Semco and that, yes, being born with a silver spoon certainly colors his vision. Nonetheless, his is a philosophy that merits some serious thought by managers and workers alike. Barbara Jacobs –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.