I want to aplogize

By Peter Bregman

Why Should You Apologize?
One of the clearest ways President Obama has set himself apart from his predecessor is by demonstrating his willingness to apologize. He has apologized for using inappropriate language, making jokes in poor taste and even acting arrogantly toward Europe in the past few years.
What exactly is Obama doing? He is disarming his opponents and paving the path for reconciliation. Next time you are ready to defend your actions and play your part in a knockdown fight, consider apologizing first. Demonstrate empathy, concern, and willingness to change.
Ultimately, apologizing is not an admission of defeat but a humane gesture that can keep you out of a fight.

I was backing out of a space in a mall parking lot in New Jersey when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement and instinctively slammed on my brakes. Another car sped by, missing me by inches.

I was instantly furious. I pulled out fast to chase the other car, leaning on my horn and flashing my lights. Finally, the car stopped and I pulled up right behind him, still honking. We both got out of our cars.

"What the hell were you thinking? You almost hit me!" I screamed.

"I didn't see you!" he yelled back.

"Of course you didn't. You were driving way too fast!"

We yelled at each other for a few seconds and then he opened his arms wide and shouted:

"What do you want from me?"

An awkward silence hung between us for a moment. That was actually a great question. What did I want from him?

I knew he shouldn't have been driving recklessly and I was angry enough to drive recklessly behind him to tell him. What I really wanted was impossible; I wanted him not to have done what he did. Well, too late.

So what did I want now? Why was I screaming at him? The brief pause calmed us both down a little.

"I want you to apologize," I told him.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Thanks," I said feeling strangely better, and we both got back into our cars and drove off without another word.

We have big problems in this country. Wall Street played recklessly with our money. Banks made bad loans. Insurance companies guaranteed stupid risks. People took out unrealistic mortgages and borrowed too much to buy things they couldn't afford. Companies are going out of business and laying off workers. And, the government is bailing people out and billing our kids.

It would be easy (and tempting) to go on. But we have one more, deeper problem that's making all these other problems worse.

No one is apologizing. No one is taking responsibility for what they did to contribute to our problems. They're all blaming someone or something else. We have a kindergartener's problem and it's tearing us apart.

A friend of mine, Paul Rosenfield, was skiing with his six-year-old son Yonah when Yonah fell. It was not a terrible fall, but the binding didn't release and Yonah broke his leg. After an emotionally wrenching day spent in the emergency room tending to his child, Paul went to the shop to return the skis and speak with the owner.

The owner of the shop immediately became defensive. He claimed the bindings were set within the normal acceptable range for Yonah's 40-pound weight (in fact one reading showed the binding set above 60 pounds). He claimed he used a special machine to calibrate the setting, a machine that had been used in several court cases. And he initially resisted Paul's request to see the printout from the machine's test.

Paul went into the shop to have a conversation and he left angry enough to sue.

I asked him what the shop owner could have said that would have given him a different feeling.

"If he had been more concerned with the injury than protecting himself, if he had apologized, if he hadn't tried to cover over the fact that the bindings were too tight, if he hadn't given me a hard time about asking for a copy of the measurement printout, if he hadn't mentioned how many times his machine was used in lawsuits, then I would have left feeling less angry."

We try so hard to protect ourselves from lawsuits that we bring on lawsuits. We forget that we are human beings dealing with other human beings. And what human beings want more than anything is empathy — to be cared for and treated with respect.

By avoiding responsibility, empathy, and apology, the shop owner became a target for all of Paul's anger about the accident.

In a study of medical malpractice lawsuits, the top five reasons people gave for initiating the lawsuit were:

1. So that it would not happen to anyone else
2. I wanted an explanation
3. I wanted the doctors to realize what they had done
4. To get an admission of negligence
5. So that the doctor would know how I felt

And the number one thing the doctor or hospital could have done to prevent the lawsuit? An explanation and apology.

When the University of Michigan Health System experimented with full disclosure, existing claims and lawsuits dropped from 262 in 2001 to 83 in 2007.

Apologies work. Real, heartfelt empathy between one person and another diffuses anger and builds relationships. Defensiveness and resistance to admit mistakes creates anger.

Whatever you think about President Bush, admitting mistakes was not his strong point. If you don't admit mistakes, you can't apologize for them. And if you don't apologize for them, you will generate anger and fighting.

President Obama has shown his ability to apologize for his own mistakes. One of his earliest apologies was during his campaign when he apologized to reporter Peggy Agar for calling her "Sweetie." Most recently he apologized for his joke in poor taste about the Special Olympics on the Jay Leno show.

And now he's apologizing for America's arrogance towards Europe in the past few years. He apologized for being "dismissive, even derisive" towards our allies. For failing "to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world."

And while he chastised Turkey for not coming to terms with their treatment of the Armenians, he admitted "our country still struggles with the legacy of our past treatment of Native Americans." And he reinforced our commitment to do better: "we recently ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, and prohibited — without exception or equivocation — any use of torture."

President Obama is being criticized by some for apologizing. Because, they say, apologizing will reduce America's standing in the world. I couldn't disagree more. The world needs less anger and more apologies. And President Obama is a great example, a role model, for how we can diffuse anger and repair relationships.

Apologizing is a humane gesture, a way to treat others with respect. And, not for nothing, it might just keep us out of a fight.

Source Harvard Business Blog

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3 Ways to Fail Cheap

By Scott Anthony

I had an interesting dialogue with an innovation practitioner in a large corporation the other day. We were talking about how the high rate of innovation failure can hamstring innovation.

"The failure rate is actually irrelevant," he said. "It's the risk associated with those failures that gets you into trouble."

In other words, failure would be fine, if it wasn't so darn expensive. Because failures cost money (and time), high failure rates can cause corporations to become very gun shy about innovation.

Of course, one way out of this problem is to increase the innovation success rate. A noble aspiration for sure. But be careful. Following that seemingly sensible path can lead to some perverse behavior.

For example, a company can almost always "succeed" by introducing "new and improved" products that cannibalize what they already sell. A company can confidently state that all of its revenue comes from products launched within the past two years, feel good about its innovation efforts, and actually be falling further behind competitors.

The real answer is to dramatically decrease the cost of failure. A leadership team seeking to achieve this aim has three levers at its disposal:

1. Lower the costs of experiments. Running experiments need not be expensive. There are tons of low cost ways to test critical assumptions (chapter 5 of The Innovator's Guide to Growth describes about 30 such approaches).

2. Change the order of experiments. Many companies spend a lot of money answering the wrong questions. They'll seek to perfect a technology without understanding whether there's a market need. Assess strategic risks first, because they are often what sink an idea.

3. Increase the pace of decision making. Entrepreneurs with clearly bad ideas typically don't have the luxury of spending money on those ideas for too long. Companies, however, can let bad ideas linger for inordinate amounts of time because of slow decision-making processes. Shutting down flawed projects early avoids needless spending — and focuses resources on the best ideas.

Pulling these levers requires embracing the notion of "good enough." Experiments are often expensive because companies seek perfection in their own eyes before they run any sort of test. Remember, the less you've spent, the more freedom you have to change your approach.

And finally, remember that failure is not a dirty word. The odds are pretty high that your first idea is wrong along some meaningful dimension. If you fail fast and fail cheap, you can accelerate discovering a winning idea. Successful innovation and fast-cycle iteration go hand in glove.

Of course, it's one thing for companies to say they embrace the right kind of failure. It's quite another thing to create a culture that rewards low-risk failures and savors surprises. Maybe companies could set up a failure target as part of each employee's annual review. Or create a repository of "failure case studies." Any further thoughts?

Source: Harvard Business Blog

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Time to Detox the Work Environment

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Corporate practices are having effects not just on polar bears and wetlands, but also they may be killing human beings, says Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer. The concept of "sustainability" must be expanded to include consideration of whether workplaces are good not only for the environment but also for people.

What Pfeffer calls toxic workplace environments, particularly in the United States, raise rates of disease and mortality. He urges business, government, and the media to pay attention to what has been a shockingly neglected topic. In the present distressed economy, he says, "the problem is only going to get worse."

"The lack of attention to employee needs helps explain why the United States spends more on health care than other countries but gets worse outcomes," says Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business. "We have no mandatory vacation or sick day requirements, and we do have chronic layoffs, overwork, and stress. Working in many organizations is simply hazardous to your health."

Specifically, he says, epidemiological studies show that holding a lower-level position where one does not have much control over job activities and decision making puts employees at a higher risk of having—or dying from—a heart attack. "There’s nothing more stressful than being in an environment in which you have a lot of pressure but relatively little power," Pfeffer says.

In addition, spotty or interrupted health care insurance—a typical consequence of layoffs and job changes—and the trend toward jobs that offer no health coverage at all, leads to a significant decrease in routine preventive medical screening procedures such as mammograms and cholesterol and blood pressure testing, and as a consequence, added risk to workers’ health.

Pfeffer cites research showing that overwork and job stress lead to increases in smoking, alcohol abuse, and high blood pressure, while layoffs contribute to depression, violence, and even lowered life expectancy. "There is evidence that people who experience a layoff live 1.5 years less than those who don’t," Pfeffer says.

The Stanford professor thus maintains that the concept of "sustainability" must be expanded to include not only whether corporations care for the environment and resource conservation, but also whether they are good for their employees.

As to why the serious question of worker well-being has been given scant attention by executives, regulators, and pundits, Pfeffer suggests it may have something to do with current mercenary cultural values. "There was a time when CEOs believed they had an obligation to all of their stakeholders, including employees," he says. "But over time, we've come to look at even the simplest things in financial terms. Childcare, for example, which used to be a matter between parents and children, is now a service to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This way of thinking is taking out the human factor."

The great irony, says Pfeffer, is that most workplace policies that are bad for employees are also bad for companies themselves. Organizations that are more "humane"––offering generous benefits, sick leave, vacation pay, health insurance, and so forth––are shown to be more profitable. Pfeffer points to companies such as Southwest Airlines, Kimberly-Clark in the Andean region, and kidney dialysis provider DaVita as exemplars. "I hope businesses will wake up to the fact that if they don't do well by their employees, chances are they’re not doing well, period," Pfeffer says.

In the current economic climate, he notes, more people will be laid off, work longer hours, become saddled with increasing work responsibilities, and operate without health insurance. The government, Pfeffer says, will almost certainly need to step in with regulation. If nothing else, with health care costs on the rise, government should be looking to the workplace as one culprit in the decline in the quality of workers' health.

—Marguerite Rigoglioso

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