Business Quests in the Information Age

Matthieu Ricard at Google

Interesting insights with a strong scientific and philosophical basis. Also interesting is the fact that Ricard was invited to speak at Google. What would happen in the economy if we had truly happy people at work? What would the impact be on our societies and on global issues facing mankind?

Confidence can be a double edged sword

In my projects I often work with entrepreneurs who seem to consider it vital to show absolute confidence in their business idea. They should listen to this testimony.

Who speaks when a founder is talking?

Working in close cooperation with and coaching the founders and leaders of a business is the type of work I most enjoy because it is about helping them achieving their potential. Facilitating the achievement of human potential to the fullest possible extent in a business is in my opinion one of the most exciting missions.

To be able to serve such a mission in business one needs structured thinking and true compassion, the first making it possible to approach often complex situations sometimes from unusual angles and the latter being the condition sine qua non for sharing the feelings and passions of people, without which even the best plans and decisions fail to generate business value.
Just a couple of days ago I had the opportunity to take the founders of a fast growing business to an off-site workshop aimed at helping them define key directions regarding both their business strategy and their personal goals and expectations as founders. The decision to prepare such a workshop came when I realized that the founders of the business had highly fluctuating positions when considering potential investors for their business. It was almost as though different people where speaking to me at different times about the same topic, and in fact that may have been exactly what was going on.
From my training as a master practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) - a discipline that sometimes causes heated debate despite the indisputable added value it can bring - I know that human beings have several facets that seem to have their own agenda in the human psyche. Each facet generates thoughts, feelings and actions that serve one or more specific goals, which that part of the person feels are its best possible contributions to the person. When someone is not confused or troubled in any way, when someone is "aligned" in the sense that all of the facets of her psyche contribute their part to an overarching goal, then things flow pretty smoothly: thoughts, speech and actions are quite coherent and the commitment to a course of action is quite unwavering unless new data come in that justify a change of position. Of course, the opposite happens when "parts" of a person seem to pull in different directions because the agendas they serve seem incompatible at first glance. I thought that was probably what was going on with the business founders who were ambivalent about a number of issues regarding the development of their business. So I used my NLP skills to develop a tool that can be used in workshops as well as in one-to-one sessions with people pursuing business quests and which I am publishing here under Creative Commons license (NC-BY-SA).

The founder of a business has several facets or roles, four of which are dominant in my opinion. Although from person to person there may be variations of these four dominant parts or even additional part, my method focuses on these common elements of a founder's personality. Let me quickly present them (and I apologize for the very general statements whose sole purpose is to sketch quick profiles here) and then show how to use the method. Having a rough understanding of these different roles is quite important to be able to identify who speaks when a founder is talking. The diagram (click on it to get a larger version) shows the four roles and the intensity of ties between them.

The Entrepreneur is the most obvious and most public facet of the founder. The Entrepreneur is the most active part in pursuing the creation of a new business, the mastermind behind the business concept, the inspirer and "strange attractor" for talented early joiners and crucially, the top salesman for the services of the newly created business. His strongest skills are selling, building partnerships, generating a vision and communicating with enthusiasm and authenticity. Typically, the Entrepreneur's values are creativity, discovery, creation, growth, innovation, merit... although there may be other values as well and these may be expressed differently. Although he knows that risk is inevitable, the Entrepreneur will seek all possible ways to keep risks under control. His outlook on life and the world is usually positive (typically he believes success is possible provided he works hard to pursue a vision).

The Professional is the second best known part of the founder's personality. He is the expert in a specific field, the part that provides "technical" content and so-called hard skills. Depending on the field of expertise, the Professional will pursue a number of key values that are typical in that field (e.g. creativity for ad execs, precision for software engineers...) and the role of that part in the founder is to provide assurance to the world that the founder is competent to act as a provider in his chosen field of business. The Professional bears a heavy load whenever the founder needs to assert his rights as a legitimate participant in an industry or profession.

The Private part is the founder's non-business life, which is sometimes neglected or forgotten, but acts as a strong driver of many decisions. Ask successful founders and they will all tell you how important the private facet is and how essential it is to find the right tension between business and private spheres. That part's mission is to contribute to the founder's inner balance and to create places and times where the founder can rest and take a few steps back to consider things without day-to-day business pressure. Needless to say how fundamental that part is and I can speak from personal experience both because at times in the past I minimized the energy alloted to that part and because I was lucky to get a lot of strength from that part of my self while going through some very tough challenges a few years ago.

The Shareholder / Investor is the least acknowledged facet of the founder. Many founders forget that when they work without pay, do extra-time, put their money in a business or generally speaking allocate existing resources in a way that can only be justified by the expectation to get more resources out of the business in the future, they do act as investors. Investors of a very peculiar type perhaps because most of their resources are generally speaking non-cash, but investors still. So in a way, it is quite paradoxical that so many founders have such hard time accepting the logic that drives professional investors, although the scant respect of the latter for so-called sweat equity may be an explanation. The Shareholder is the part of the founder that seeks a fair return on the investment and wants to secure the founders' assets. The values he will typically adhere to are efficiency, profitability, productivity, fairness, security, power-influence and control. His beliefs about the world are not necessarily positive and may sometimes be quite paranoid, especially when prospective investors require terms that may be detrimental to the founder's position.

The method is based on the principle of inviting each of the four parts to express its position relative to a given issue that the founder is facing. Relevant issues may be both business decisions from strategy to day-to-day situations, and more personal decisions ranging from the longer term commitment of a founder to her business to deciding about which kinds of investors to accept as partners.

Each of the roles is assigned a physical location in the room where the exercise is taking place (see diagram - click to enlarge). When the founder is physically located at that spot he is only allowed to speak in the name of the role of that location.

Step 1: The facilitator invites the founder into the space of the exercise and asks him to quickly explain the issue that he wants to solve.
Step 2: The founder is asked to choose the first role for which to express an opinion or decision on the issue. The facilitator helps the "part" of the founder express clearly its opinion, position or decision and notes down a couple of sentences that express that part's input. Then the founder is asked to choose the next role to be involved in the process and the step is repeated.
Step 3: Once all parts have made a statement that reflects their position, the founder and the facilitator move to the neutral spot to act as non-judgmental observers or coaches. The facilitator invites comments from the founder about the interactions between the roles, the situation, any potential conflicts or issues of compatibility between the roles' positions. The facilitator helps the founder express his analysis from the neutral position (i.e. without being identified to any of the roles, without expressing judgments about the roles or their positions...).
Step 4: Once the analysis of the situation is done, the facilitator will invite the founder to imagine possible changes to the positions of the roles that would help them cooperate better in the resolution of the issue being discussed. For each change suggested from the "coach" position, the founder is invited to go back to the positions involved in the change to check how that specific change would affect their opinion, position, decision or general contribution to the solution of the issue being discussed. If additional issues arise, the facilitator may decide either to interrupt the exercise and discuss those issues first (potentially using this same method) or to note the issue for later. Once a role's position is modified or reviewed, the founder goes back to step 3 to review the situation and to step 4 to identify additional improvements.

Several iterations of steps 3 and 4 may be necessary to achieve a fluid set of positions that is defined as a set of positions such that all roles contribute to a commonly acceptable solution in the issue raised by the founder.

Step 5: The facilitator asks the founder to build a short sentence that integrates the four perspectives and expresses the founder's attitude, opinion, decision or plan for the issue at stake. The founder is then asked to detail how that sentence will translate in his actions in the near and longer term future (in NLP this is to create a bridge to future real-life situations and hence some sort of foundation to actual implementation of the integrated position of the founder).

I have had a couple of opportunities to try this method and it does bring some pretty good results both in terms of how founders feel about the issues tackled and in terms of their actual actions relative to these issues. For those of you who use the method or a variation of it, I would be very very interested indeed by your feedback. Suggestions and ideas to improve this are very welcome.

(Re)thinking your business: where psychology meets business

Over the past couple of weeks I have been involved in work to help customers approach their business from a fresh perspective and in discussions with a friend who sees innovation opportunities in the way a traditional business is operated right now in Europe. There are challenges and perils in (re)thinking a business both for insiders and for outsiders, and these are not the "usual suspects" (strategy, marketing, sales, finance...) as the next frontier of business performance seems to be what is going on inside our psyche.

In a recent project, I noticed how difficult it is for people who have been running a business for a long time to step back and reconsider their fundamental assumptions about the business; for me as a facilitator it takes a lot of focus just to create an environment in which it is safe to question some of the fundamentals of a business, i.e. precisely what makes a business owner feel secure in a company that may not be an explosive success but that does manage to generate fairly decent profits. Helping someone approach their business from a fresh perspective is much more a psychological than a business endeavor: it's about guiding an entrepreneur with all his hopes, his dreams, his fears, his  ego, his desire to be loved / admired / accepted and his representations of complex equivalents of specific values... That's quite a fascinating job to perform and definitely one that completely confirms my strong belief that the next frontier of business performance lies in the proper management of people and of their potential.
At the same time, in very stark contrast, outsiders who see an opportunity to do things differently in established industries seem to be able to access relevant statistical data supporting their views very rapidly indeed. Thus, asymmetry of  information, one of the most important historical barriers to new entrants, seems to be rapidly collapsing as content of good-enough quality is made accessible in the open environment of the Internet. This has profound implications on the impact of the free flow of knowledge on the intensity of competition and on business strategy. People who run their businesses according to the good old methods of scientific labor organization and fail to go one step beyond to take the information age into account, will slowly but very surely become extinct. I think this is also supported by Mavericks at Work, a book I am currently listening when I'm in my car. Again, the disruptive potential is no longer prevented from expressing itself simply because mere access to information is impossible. And that disruptive potential becomes effective disruption when actual people manage to overcome their internal barriers and limitations to make a credible commitment to a fresh vision of an entire industry and lead the way. Again, the endeavor is largely a matter of psychology.
In a way, the Information Age may be characterized by the disappearance of "impossibilities" and objective barriers to entry (at least those based on mere access to information) that could be analyzed and almost quantified. And perhaps that is precisely what reveals the next frontier of business performance: man's internal barriers and limitations, which require a peculiar mix of skills to be removed or transformed into creative energy. A mix of skills applied to help individuals evolve, express and achieve goals and find meaning in a holistic approach to the individual person whose life requires her to play many different and increasingly interrelated social roles.

On attention and my next frontier

It's been a while since I last wrote a post on this blog. That's because I was away on training and I make it a priority to devote adequate attention to trainings I attend. Actually I think devoting adequate attention and being conscious of what is happening is a good way of doing things in general... Not always easy, but most of the time extremely beneficial especially if one is prepared to take the feedback any experience represents. I think that's a good path to achieving more of the human potential we all have.

Anyhow, I am extremely pleased and proud because a fantastic trip came to an equally pleasant close with my certification as master practitioner in neurolinguistic programming. Over the past two years I spent over 60 days of work learning and experimenting with the approach and that's only part of my investment in training every year. Every single second has been extremely beneficial because I learned a lot about myself and about my limitations of today that are my opportunities for tomorrow. Crucially, I understood that tools are worthless if used without an involvement of our souls as much as of our minds and I think that's exactly true for most disciplines. For all the skills I learned, for a profound change in key attitudes, for helping me evolve my vision, for showing me my limitations, for being tough on issues and kind to myself and for teaching with heart and mind, I thank wholeheartedly the beautiful team of Institut Ressources as well as all of my classmates who dared to share a path that is not always comfortable.

To a certain extent robotized management is one of the issues we have in the business world, where there's been a lot of work done to automate processes, more or less rigidly define methodologies and structure organisational pyramids that are characterized as "flat" these days (at least in corporate communications)... There is one facet of business that is probably the next frontier: people. What would the net present value of an investment in truly happy employees be? I think innovative companies like Google or companie that heavily depend on people like Ideo must have some sort of positive assessment of the investment's return...

Those of us who make a commitment to work on putting people at the heart of business may have to reinvent methods and processes. That's probably one of the biggest challenges of the decades to come and my intention is to contribute to that. Actually, the end of this cycle of training is also giving me an opportunity to reshape my personal R&D, and that is very exciting.

PGAS and Compassion

Perfect Green Apples (PGA) without aroma nor taste are popular these days. We like what seems flawless. Nations fall for politicians whose image is carefully crafted by spin doctors. Our society is one of cruel judgement without heart and sensitivity. That's what I call the "Perfect Green Apple Syndrome" or PGAS in short. PGAS is pollution of the mind..

We have developed talent in executing the usual suspect; talent in destroying our fallen heroes (Zidane being only the last and today more than ever, I just love Zidane). How much energy will we accept to wastebefore we realize? Have we lost the Way of the Heart? Are we negating the legitimacy of a green apple that does not hide its imperfections? Can mandkind be standardized to fit one mold? Can the mold be forced into producing only "standard Agent Smith-like products"?

I just spent a few days of NLP training exploring the path of compassion. The path of "feeling alike without fear nor judgement". Compassion is not commiseration. Where compassion is, fearful finger-pointing and judgemental fear cannot be. Only then can we trully feel and understand any human experience. Only then can each cell of our beings feel the spark of humanity in each monster and the monster's share in ourselves. Only then can we trully accept each shade of humanity, with its visible and its hidden aspects. Only when we realize that for light to exist there must be a shadow which is well worth celebrating. Only then is there true light: light that comes from within. And that is actually the essence of true team-spirit. Is that path easy to walk? It is all a matter of attitude even though the first steps may feel uncomfortable. Would that help a business? You can bet on it!

Walt Disney in the French West Indies

I am currently on holiday in the French Wrest Indies (Martinique). Lovely place and a great break as the European winter draws to a very cold close. When I left home last Monday there was snow on the cars and a few hours later I was enjoying 28°C. But it seems that interesting things to report never cease. The place where I am staying (Domaine de Robinson at Anse Noire) is a little corner of paradise managed by a couple that has a fun way of creating stuff together. Last September they stopped operating the restaurant they had and focused only on renting bungalows and rooms. So they transformed the kitchen into rooms and they did that in quite a fun way since the concept was to have the rooms be like a continuation of the beach (the sea is literally 50 m from my doorstep and that's super cool for a morning swim). I will post a few pictures on Flickr when I get back home, but the floor of thr rooms is made of glass tiles containing sand and the shower is made in wood... The concept was his and he also actually built the rooms. But the evaluation of the concept and the critical assessment of feasibility was hers. Now, the fun part is that in the way they worked (and I was lucky enough or curious enough to be told), they seem to have applied a model that is very close to the model of Walt Disney created by Robert Dilts:

1. Walt the dreaming visionary would come up with the idea of what to develop, the grand concept of the story that could be the next success
2. then, Walt the realist would assess the ideas for feasibility, questioning how something would actually be built and realize a sample of it
3. finally, Walt the critic would review the creation of the realist to assess it for commercial viability and to identify areas of improvement

It's a powerful model presented very summarily here. How does it apply at Domaine Robinson? Well, Claude came up with the concept of rooms-as-a-continuation-of-the-beach and Vivianne identified limitations for realizing the concept. In that design cycle, Claude was the dreamer when presenting the concept to Vivianne and also the realist when discussing with Vivianne how the concept could be realized. Then Vivianne would prompt Claude to go further in the realist mode and say how he would make the whole thing come true. She would then switch to the critic mode to identify what was missing from Claude's answer, which would drive them both into another design round, until they were reasonably certain of feasibility and he would get down to do the work. The result is superb.

It may just be my frame of mind, but I found it quite fun that they would reproduce a method that led to the rise of a mega empire of entertainment to create their little corner of paradise that is definitely worth visiting.

Transcend and include!

I am deeply convinced that open business and the economics of the information age are very much influenced by the psychology of participating individuals as individuals gain access to functions previously regarded as not within their sphere of influence. The debate about the European Constitution in France has been a manifestation of the impact of individuals on larger groups (tremendous participation of simple citizens to the process in my view regardless of the result for which I felt sorry), pretty much like social bookmarking or the current debate about peer-to-peer aand copyright. Another example would be the contribution of the EFF (which I support) to the hearings of the US Congress after the decision of the Supreme Court in the MGM vs Grokster case. Are we moving towards more participation of citizens instead of less participation as some analysts claim when looking at the figures of polls on the image of traditional politicians? Interesting question. Perhaps the dynamics of politics are changing and the whole system becomes more chaotic in nature...

Perhaps the importance of psychology in economic evolution is massively underestimated as we all tend to focus so much on technology. Open business is first and foremost about people and talent. In fact, traditional ways of doing business are also increasingly dependent on people (which is perhaps why there is such a massive endeavour of big corporations to built information systems that can fully take over from people). Human psychology is a key, yet often neglected,  parameter to consider in business and economics: for example, I do not believe that financial markets are purely rational like famous professors fo finance claim. Perfection of financial markets is, to a certain extent, a fiction that is very dear to the western civilisation (the myth that rationality should and indeed does govern every aspect of our lives). The is more than rationality in the way participants behave...

Actually Carl Gustav Jung has some extremely interesting insights on the eternal conflict between rationality and intuition, between functionality and aesthetics, between thinking and feeling. I recently read his analysis of the The Secret of the Golden Flower ; I have tried to show his analysis graphically (please click on the picture to sse it in full size). In his comment Jung shares his understanding of this old Chinese book of life. He shows how the western civilization has developed a cult of rationality based on the principle of causality, i.e. that a phenomenon can (always) results from one or more other phenomena, whereas eastern civilization's development has its roots in a more intuitive understanding of the world based on the principle of synchronicity, i.e. that a set of phenomena occurring in parallel without any apparent ties of causality are nevertheless connected and happen simultaneously. In his analysis, Jung shows how these two patterns of thinking although apparently contradictory  necessarily coexist in our psyche as individuals and in humanity as a whole, which is of course linked to his concept of collective unconscious. Jung also asserts (and I subscribe to this view) that we westerners, sometimes disgusted with the extremism of the most rationalists in our midst, can be tempted to embrace the eastern philosophies and to reject our western tradition; in fact, such a behaviour would be quite improductive and even destructive because our patterns of thinking are indeed those of the West and repressing such an important dimension of the Self would lead to crippling inner conflict. true to his inclusive philosophy Jung shows the benefits of building an understanding of the East without shedding the strengths inherited from Ancient Greece, the Persian world and the Arab civilization. So much for the infamous "clash of civilizations"...

Transcend and include is the message and I think it makes a hell of a lot of sense as we see the effects of rejection, repression and violent submission of foreign lands to the rule of today's great and mighty. Now of course, if we are to follow Jung (which I am quite happy to do), then the way people like Dr Edward De Bono position their findings limits the value of these new tools: for example the "Six Thinking Hats" method (which I have been trained to use and find great in many respects) does not need to be positioned as an outright rejection of the achievements of Ancient Greek thinkers Aristotle, Socrates and Plato...

From the standpoint of economics "transcend and include" means that microeconomics becomes more relevant than ever. Indeed, thanks to new information technologies the dynamics of economic phenomena are increasingly emergent in nature: it is more and more bottom-up rather than top-down (a typical mecanism of the industrial era). Hence microeconomics, chaos theory, complex adaptive systems seem to be excellent tools to understand what is going on as it becomes more and more difficult to capture behaviour and added value as aggregate dimensions usually present in macroeconomic analyses. In short we are indeed and at long last moving towards an economy in which individuals can make a heck of a difference and away from the logic of masses that prevailed during the industrial age (although to a certain extent industrial age standardization and logic of mass still applies and should therefore not be rejected out of hand). As a consequence, there are currently important tensions and even wars between the methods of the industrial age and the approaches of the information age. From the way individuals contribute to projects and businesses, to the advent of eco-entrepreneurship (socially and ecologically responsible business initiatives), to the emergence of new consumer behaviours, to the challenges the traditional media and entertainment channels face, to new ways of engaging into political action, to innovative ways of handling intellectual property like Creative Commons (which I support)... Examples are countless in almost every field of human activity. Again, after careful consideration and having myself fallen several times into the trap of blaming, repression and rejection, it seems to me that transcendence and inclusion is a good way to go, even though it requires some reform of the individual items that are to be transcended and included into a higher level of evolution as Ken Wilber argues.

These are exciting times and what is going on is absolutely fascinating!

A psychological viewpoint on debates about Web 2.0

While researching the dynamics of what is now conventionally called Web 2.0, thinking about the impacts of these new ways of using infotech to deliver valuable services to the users of the web, I examined some of the interactions between the various stakeholders from a psychological perspective. In particular I focused on the debate going on in France these days about copyright, music sharing schemes and peer-to-peer.

What I see is a conflict between very different sets of people that can be see in different ways: established players vs challengers, conservatives vs progressives, pro-regulation vs anti-regulation, capitalists vs alter-capitalists and anti-capitalists, worshipers of rules and rationality vs adepts of artistic intuition... Of course I am biased in the way I analyze the situation, but at the end of the day that is not so relevant. The question is rather to see whether  we are capable to move beyond conflict; not to deny the confrontation of ideas, values and ideals, but rather to extract from it something larger that "transcends and includes" as C.G. Jung or K. Wilber would suggest. Do we have to be in an "EITHER-OR" frame of mind? How can we move towards an inclusive way? For example, what means could allow long-tail players like jamendo to harmoniously coexist on the market with more traditional players (even though some of the traditional practices will have to evolve to allow transcendence and inclusion to occur)? And figuring out whether the "quiet revolution of the tail" can be durably repressed by the establishment is another interesting question. Again, using history and psychology of the unconscious mind, I would bet that what is repressed eventually comes to center stage, if need be violently (which is perhaps why some philosophers like Jiddu Krishnamurti claim that extreme differentiation is the root of violence, but that is another topic).

For those interested in the debate currently taking place in France regarding copyright, peer-to-peer and music downloads, here is a link to an interesting proposal I got from the CEO of jamendo. The approach is very much in the spirit of "transcend and include". France is in fact facing something much more important than the mere choice between allowing legal downloads and banning every piece of technology the legislative body does not understand: France faces a choice of civilization, the choice between a rigid decaying society and an open innovative society in which established positions will be challenged. Historically the country mostly chose progress and they cannot afford to sleep on their laurels because there might not be a second Général De Gaulle to save the country from decadence...

Testing, the V-model and NLP

In one of my assignments of 2005 I worked on a company's test plan and on that occasion I realized how tightly coupled the formulation of requirements and the testing of the software can be. Of course, this is nothing new, except this is not so common in practice, like many other things "that everybody knows"... but nobody really applies.

What I find striking is the parallel between some of the methods developed by the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) community and the principles behind software development methodologies of recent years. More specifically I refer to the V-model and to agile methods. The first creates an explicit link between the various stages of a development project and the creation of the test plan; in NLP "testability" (i.e. how does one know from visual, auditory or kinesthetic input that something is "real") one of the criteria of proper formulation of objectives. The latter are based on a set of assumptions amongst which is the fact that iterations help better capture requirements. When working with someone using NLP "techniques", I always run through several iterations of the way that person "creates" the problem especially by reformulating what my counterpart is saying or expressing in a non-verbal manner.

I find this parallelism quite interesting because I often come across a generally accepted idea that people are easier to understand and manage than machines (coming especially from people who have had consistently bad experience with IT projects and software tools) and also because NLP was heavily influenced by computer science when the approach was created. At the end of the day the success of a software project is very much influenced by the quality of human communication and by the commitment of the various teams involved in the process. So I guess that the combination of modern methodologies and human communication skills is an important asset to keep out of harm's way and to consistently move towards project success.