Кафедра английского языка №2 Дубовская О. В., Кулемекова М. В

by Robert C. Pozen  / HBR / September 19, 2012 


Whatever you think of his politics, you have to admit that Barack Obama has a very demanding schedule. The president's typical day might include a ceremony celebrating Team USA's Olympic athletes, meetings with his cabinet and military advisors, several speeches to campaign supporters, and phone calls with foreign leaders.

In an article for October's Vanity Fair, author Michael Lewis explored some of these behind-the-scenes details of President Obama's daily life. To prepare for the article, Lewis spent six months in close company of the president — playing in his high-energy basketball games, sitting up front in Air Force One, and chatting with him whenever the president had a free moment.

There was one particular question that Lewis asked repeatedly of President Obama. Lewis presented the president with the following scenario: "Assume that in thirty minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president."

The president first touted the necessity of daily exercise — a habit that I endorse wholeheartedly. But what he said next was even more interesting: "You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I'm eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make."

I share President Obama's practice of "routinizing the routine." I eat essentially the same thing for breakfast each morning: a bowl of cold cereal and a banana. For lunch, I eat a chicken salad sandwich with a diet soda. Each morning, I dress in one of a small number of suits, each of which goes with particular shirts and ties.

Why do President Obama and I subject ourselves to such boring routines? Because both of us (especially President Obama!) make many decisions each day — decisions that are far more important to us than what we wear or what we eat for breakfast.

Making too many decisions about mundane details is a waste of a limited resource: your mental energy. In the late 1990s, Roy Baumeister (a professor at Florida State University) and colleagues performed several experiments showing that certain types of conscious mental actions appeared to draw from the same "energy source" — gradually diminishing our ability to make smart decisions throughout the day.

In one of Baumeister's experiments, subjects were forced to eat a pair of radishes instead of the freshly baked, aromatic chocolate chip cookies sitting on the same table. In another, subjects were instructed to suppress their emotional reactions to a comedic or tragic film. In both cases, those subjects were quicker (relative to control groups) to give up on a problem-solving task that followed, suggesting that their previous acts of self-control and self-regulation — eating the radishes or maintaining a stoic appearance — had depleted their mental resources.

Over the past fifteen years, many researchers have replicated these experiments with slight variations, trying to discover which types of mental actions most quickly deplete our mental resources, and what some consequences of this depleted state might be. Chapter four in Dan Ariely's new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty summarizes some fascinating experiments that show that a tired brain makes us more likely to eat junk food, lie, or otherwise exhibit poor self-control.

Of particular interest to me (and, apparently, President Obama) are a series of experiments run by Kathleen Vohs (an associate business professor at the University of Minnesota) and colleagues, including Professor Baumeister.

Vohs's experiments tested whether everyday choices — which candy bar to eat or what clothes to buy, for instance — wear down our mental energy. The results? Vohs and colleagues consistently found that making repeated choices depleted the mental energy of their subjects, even if those choices were mundane and relatively pleasant.

So, if you want to be able to have more mental resources throughout the day, you should identify the aspects of your life that you consider mundane — and then "routinize" those aspects as much as possible. In short, make fewer decisions.

To me, this means wearing dull clothing and eating the same breakfast and lunch nearly every weekday. My specific approach might not work for you — and that's fine! Maybe your job requires you to dress for success (say, if you work in the media) or vary your daily nutrition (say, if you're a pro athlete).

The point is that you should decide what you don't care about and that you should learn how to run those parts of your life "on autopilot." Instead of wasting your mental energy on things that you consider unimportant, save it for those decisions, activities, and people that matter most to you.

Bumpkin bosses

May 10th 2014 | The Economist

THE heads of multinational companies like to think of themselves as generals in the globalisation wars. They dream of conquering fresh markets in the East. They boast about the diversity of their armies. And they love to mock politicians for their parochialism: why is Ed Miliband, the leader of the British Labour Party, making such a fuss about Pfizer’s bid for AstraZeneca when the first is run by a Scotsman and the second by a Frenchman?

Which all makes a lot of sense: companies in developed countries do themselves nothing but harm if they fail to think globally. The biggest growth opportunities now are in the emerging world: McKinsey, a consultancy, calculates that people there will buy $20 trillion-worth of goods a year by 2020. So are the biggest threats: China’s Huawei has grown rapidly from an improbable idea into one of the world’s biggest telecoms companies.

But how good are these generals at applying the logic of globalisation to themselves? Pankaj Ghemawat, of Spain’s IESE and NYU’s Stern business schools, calculates that only 12% of the world’s Fortune Global 500—the largest corporations by revenue—are led by a CEO who hails from a country other than the one in which the company is headquartered. (By contrast, almost 50% of the managers of football clubs in England’s Premier League were born abroad.) The figure for firms’ senior management as a whole is 15%. These two numbers are highly correlated: in Fortune Global 500 companies with foreign CEOs, 50% of the management team is foreign as well, compared with only 10% at companies with native CEOs. The proportion of foreign CEOs rises to 30% if you look at the 100 biggest companies, but it quickly falls to single digits if you look beyond the largest 500.

European companies are the most cosmopolitan at the top: 23% of the bosses of European firms on the Fortune Global 500 list are foreigners, as are 28% of the senior managers. North America is just average, with 11% and 13% respectively. Japan comes a dismal third among rich-world countries: only 3% of CEOs and 5% of senior managers are non-Japanese. One of the leading “foreign” CEOs, Han Chang-Woo, of Maruhan, moved to Japan from South Korea in 1945 at the age of 14.

There are good reasons to think that leaders will become even more parochial in the future. Western companies are finding it harder to recruit “high potentials” in emerging markets. Two decades ago they had the field to themselves. Today they have to compete with fast-growing local companies and constantly confront the question, “Why should I work for a company that is run by people who look like you when I could work for one which is run by people who look like me?” Western firms are also cutting the number of people they send abroad: according to one study the proportion of expats in senior-management roles in multinationals in the biggest emerging markets declined from 56% to 12% between 1998 and 2008. And the Europeans and Americans are making poor use of those people: another study shows that staff who do a spell abroad take longer to move up the organisation than people who stay at headquarters. In other words, go-getting executives do better to spend their time politicking at central office than acquiring experience abroad.

Why does this matter? The obvious reason is that, in a globalising world, parochialism at the top can impose huge costs, in terms of reduced creativity, missed opportunities and cultural blundering. A growing body of research suggests that mixed teams are more likely than homogeneous ones to come up with creative solutions. Native CEOs tend to surround themselves with senior managers who resemble them. They are also more likely to fixate on a “native solution” to a strategic problem than to consider other options: Germans look to mechanical engineering for answers, Britons favour the financial sort.

Mr Ghemawat argues that C-suite parochialism helps to explain the relatively unimpressive performance of Western multinationals in emerging markets. Bain & Company, a consultancy, looked at the performance of 92 Western firms with listed subsidiaries in such markets. These companies increased their profits there by an average of 15% a year between 2005 and 2010. But comparable local companies boosted their profits by 23% a year.

McKinsey calculates that companies headquartered in emerging markets grew roughly twice as fast in those markets as those headquartered in developed economies—and two and a half times as fast when both were competing on “neutral turf” in the emerging world. Given that traditional multinationals have better-established brands and longer histories as global companies than emerging rivals, a good deal of the difference must be explained by superior local knowledge.

How can multinationals avoid the evils of bumpkinism? One way is to move managerial functions to other parts of the world. Procter & Gamble relocated its global cosmetics and personal-care unit from its Cincinnati headquarters to Singapore. General Electric’s health-care division is moving the headquarters of its X-ray business from Wisconsin to Beijing. Jean-Pascal Tricoire, the boss of France’s Schneider Electric, has posted himself to Hong Kong. A second technique is to bring the rest of the world to headquarters. Bertelsmann posts successful local managers to bucolic Gütersloh in western Germany for a couple of years. Daimler-Benz has decreed that half the participants in its programmes for young high-flyers must come from outside Germany. A third technique is to give people from the rich world more opportunities to travel: IBM and FedEx encourage their executives to provide consulting to emerging-world subsidiaries. It is always tempting to think that multinational companies are cosmopolitan by nature; in fact, they have to work hard at debumpkinising themselves.

Apr 26th 2013 / the Economist

TRADITIONALLY, business associates would get to know each other over a round of golf. But road cycling is fast catching up as the preferred way of networking for the modern professional. A growing number of corporate-sponsored charity bike rides and city cycle clubs are providing an ideal opportunity to talk shop with like-minded colleagues and clients while discussing different bike frames and tricky headwinds. Many believe cycling is better than golf for building lasting working relationships, or landing a new job, because it is less competitive.

“When you play golf with somebody you have to decide if you’re going to beat them, or let them beat you,” says Peter Murray, a former architect, journalist and chairman of the NLA centre dedicated to London’s built environment. “If they’re a client and you don’t want to beat them you have to sort of cheat in order to lose. That seems to me not a good way of doing things.”

In 2005 Mr Murray, who is a keen long-distance rider, founded the annual Cycle to Cannes bike ride. This six-day charity event brings together architects and developers who want to cycle 1,500km from London to the MIPIM property fair in southern France each March. It now attracts around 90 riders and has raised £1.5m for a range of charities in Britain and abroad. This year Mr Murray has also founded a more ambitious ride called Portland to Portland. A team will depart Portland Oregon on April 27th and they are due to arrive in Portland Place, London, 76 days and 6575km later. Along the way they will visit cities to discuss the benefits of urban cycling and raise money for several architectural charities.

Group cycling, and especially long-distance riding, is a shared experience, Mr Murray says. Riders often collaborate and help each other out, taking turns to be at the front so that the riders in their slipstream can save almost a third of the effort needed to travel at the same speed. Some riders selflessly volunteer to stay in the front earning them the awe and gratitude of the entire group.

How someone rides a bike can give you a real insight into what a person is like, says Jean-Jacques Lorraine, founding director of Morrow+Lorraine, a young architecture practice in London, and a regular participant of Cycle to Cannes. “Some riders are very single-minded, others more collaborative; some are tactical, others an open book. Some don’t mind being soloists whilst others prefer alliance and allegiance.” A day in the saddle, racing uphill and downhill, creates a bonding experience that endures. “If I walk into a meeting and somebody says ‘I’ve done Cycle to Cannes’ it’s a done deal really,” says Mr Murray.

Mr Lorraine estimates that as much as 75% of the practice’s workload (around 45 projects) has come directly or indirectly from contacts made on the road while cycling, in particular on the Cycle to Cannes ride. Why does he think cycle rides lend themselves so well to networking and making professional contacts? “Grabbing a quick lunch or drink after work, whilst great for different reasons doesn’t give you long enough to get to know someone,” he says. Mr Murray believes long rides break down conventional hierarchical barriers. “A younger rider can be cycling along with a chief executive and take their wind or help them in some way and you get a reversal of the relationship. This changes the relationship when they are off the ride too.”

Many long-distance bike riders say cycling, especially over long distances, simply makes them feel good; it lifts their mood and concentrates things down to the essentials. “The pattern of fuelling, riding, fuelling, arriving, celebrating, sleeping and fuelling again puts all the focus on riding and the company of your fellow riders,” says Simon Mottram, chief executive of Rapha, a premium cycling-clothes brand. The simple repetitiveness eases the stresses and pressures of normal life, making it a powerful counterpoint to our sedentary lives, he adds.

Mr Mottram believes it is easier to get to know people while cycling than in other situations. “There is an easy rhythm about conversations on a bike.” Mr Lorraine makes the point even more strongly: “The adrenaline rushes, the serotonin pulses and the surges of endorphin create a kind of high, a sense of euphoria. I feel open, honest and generous to others. I often find I’m saying things on a bike which I wouldn’t normally say, and equally I’ve been confided in when I wasn’t expecting it.”

Perhaps the most compelling reason why cycling is a good way to network is because, for many professionals, it’s a passion and a way of life. “Getting out on the bike is what we’re all dreaming of doing whilst we’re sitting at our computers,” says Mr Mottram. And a shared passion is a fantastic way to start any relationship.

3d

Explaining Innate Risk-Takers

How people feel about risk influences their choice of occupations. Firefighting, race car driving, oil speculation, and entrepreneurship are among the jobs thought to demand tolerance for risk. People who can handle a lot of risk are believed to be more likely than people who are uncomfortable with risk to choose these occupations.

But why do people differ in their willingness to bear risk? While many factors undoubtedly matter, the one that intrigues me most is genetics.

The results of several different academic studies show that genetic differences are part of the reason people differ in their willingness to take risks. For instance, studies that compare identical and fraternal twins have shown that as much as 55% of the difference between people in their willingness to take risks is genetic.

Moreover, these innate differences in risk-taking influence the very types of risk-taking that occur every day in the business world. Consider, for example, financial risk-taking. By studying identical and fraternal twins, Michael Zypher and his colleagues showed that genetics accounts for 63% of the difference in how people respond to a real investment management company's client questionnaire about how to allocate a hypothetical portfolio between stocks, bonds, and money market funds.

David Cesarini and his colleagues looked at the actual investment decisions made by Swedes as part of their individualized pension savings accounts and found that 25% of the difference between people in the risk they are willing bear in the allocation of their portfolios between stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments, is genetic.

Molecular genetics research has identified several genes associated with risk-taking. Three are related in one way or another to the brain's feel-good chemical, dopamine. Studies show that specific versions of the COMT gene, which is responsible for the production of an enzyme that inactivates dopamine and adrenaline, and the DRD2 gene, which is responsible for the creation of dopamine receptors in the brain, are associated with the tendency to take risks. A study by Camelia Kuhnen and Joan Chiao showed that people with a variant of a different dopamine receptor gene, DRD4, took 25% more risk than individuals with another version of the gene in an investment simulation.

We even have evidence that our genetic makeup influences our tendency to gamble pathologically, which clinicians define as wagering so much money so frequently that it interferes with a person's job or family. Kamini Shah and colleagues found that 55% of the difference between people on one aspect of pathological gambling—"gambling with larger amounts for longer periods than intended"—and 51% of the variance on another aspect of this disorder—"increasing bets to maintain interest"—are genetic.

SOME INTRIGUING PATTERNS

These innate differences in risk-taking might affect how people respond to opportunities to innovate within an existing business or to start new companies. For example, those innately predisposed to be more tolerant of risk might take different approaches to starting companies or developing new products because they are more comfortable taking chances. Alternately, people who are innately predisposed to be less comfortable with risk might see fewer opportunities because their reaction to risk creates blinders to visualizing the opportunities.

Scientists are in the early stages of learning how genes affect risk-taking, but they have found some intriguing patterns. DNA affects the way neurotransmitters function, which, in turn, affects the biochemistry of risk-taking. In addition, genes influence personality, temperament, and cognitive processes, and through these attributes affect how people approach risk. Researchers have even begun to identify specific genes associated with different aspects of the process.

While investigations of how our genes affect risk-taking are in their infancy, they present intriguing patterns worth exploring. Whatever their jobs, how people react to risk influences how they act in the workplace.

Influence is an important word here. Genes matter, but so do where people work, how they were raised, their education, and a variety of other factors. So I'm not saying we should focus solely on DNA if we want to understand how people deal with risk. Rather, I'm suggesting that to understand risk-taking, we need to examine all of the forces that shape it, genetics included.

3e

Firms tell employees: Avoid after-hours e-mail

The Washington Post / September 21, 2012

Tonight, employees at the Advisory Board have an unusual task: Stay off ­e-mail.

Stash away those smartphones and laptops, the District firm has instructed. For those who just can’t stay away, read but don’t reply. And while we’re at it, ignore your inbox throughout the weekend, too, the firm added.

The consulting firm’s push for no after-hours e-mail is part of a growing effort by some employers to rebuild the boundaries between work and home that have crumbled amid the do-more-with-less ethos of the economic downturn.

In recent years, one in four companies have created similar rules on e-mail, both formal and informal, according to a recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Firms trying out these policies include Volkswagen, some divisions of PricewaterhouseCoopers and shipping company PBD Worldwide.

For the vast majority of companies and federal offices, the muddying of work and personal time has had financial advantages. Corporations and agencies, unable to hire, are more productive than ever thanks in part to work-issued smartphones, tablets and other mobile technology, economists say.

And that presents one of the great conundrums of our recessionary era: E-mail has helped companies eke out more from each worker. But the perpetually plugged work culture is also making us feel fried.

“There is no question e-mail is an important tool, but it’s just gone overboard and encroached in our lives in a way where employees were feeling like it was harder and harder to achieve a good balance,” said Robert Musslewhite, chief executive of the Advisory Board, a health and education research and software-
services firm.

Official numbers show just one in 10 people brings work home, according to a Labor Department report in 2010. But economists say that figure is wildly conservative because it counts only those who are clocking in those hours for extra pay.

More often, employees work evenings and weekends beyond their normal hours and do not record that time with their employers, labor advocacy groups say. And that’s made work bleed into just about every vacant space of time — from checking BlackBerrys and iPhones at school drop-offs, on the way home from happy hour and just after the alarm clock rings, they say.

“Problems with work-life balance have become much worse, especially as the economy has taken a downturn,” said Catherine Ruckelshaus, the legal co­director of the National Employment Law Project. “Fewer workers doing jobs more used to do and are getting squeezed to do more work.”

In official government terms, all that extra work has contributed to what’s known as the productivity index, which rose 3.1 percent in 2010, 2.6 percent in 2011 and is set to increase again this year. Yet the number of hours recorded by employees is fairly flat during those years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In some cases, the discrepancy has created more than just workplace grumbling. Two years ago, a Chicago police officer sued the city for back overtime spent tapping away at his BlackBerry.

There will always be those who just can’t stay away. For managers facing make-or-break decisions, waiting until the next day is simply unrealistic. Some workers may think an e-mail time-stamped 2 a.m. is a way to show initiative. Others may be loathe to demand overtime pay because of hopes of advancement.

“Unpaid work at home appears to be a form of investment made in expectation” of a promotion later, said Youngwon Song, head of the economics department at Union College, who researched how technology has boosted unpaid work at home.

But at the Advisory Board, frustration over post-work ­e-mails showed up in an internal survey of its 1,750 employees. Workers said they would be happier and more likely to stick around longer if they had less to tackle after hours.

So over Labor Day weekend, the company launched an experiment: an e-mail-free holiday. Musslewhite, the board’s chief executive, said it was important to set an example from the top, so he followed the rules, too. It was his first weekend in which his only e-mails were about his children’s lacrosse games and dinner plans with friends.

“I would have stewed on those work e-mails for a while and thought about a reply, which is time away from whatever else I am doing at that moment,” Musslewhite said.

“It’s not large in minutes but frees your mind in other ways,” he said, adding, “I’m personally enjoying this myself.”

After that weekend, a group of more than 100 employees continued the policy of no e-mail. Musslewhite is back to e-mailing after-hours, but he schedules messages to be sent the next morning, not late at night. He is careful not to copy too many people on e-mails, to control inbox overload.

It’s too early to say how the policies are affecting productivity, he said. But Musslewhite said e-mail has become a burden even during business hours. So much time is spent on e-mail busywork that employees aren’t able to focus on new and creative ideas as much as they would like, he said.

“My work is very important to me, but waking up in the middle of the night to check e-mails and worrying about e-mails over the weekend is not a sustainable or enjoyable way to live life,” said Advisory Board senior manager Katey Klippel. She now checks her last e-mail for each weekend at 5:30 p.m. Friday and doesn’t look again until Monday morning. Important clients know to call her cellphone if they need her urgently.

At PBD Worldwide, an Atlanta-based shipping company, the mood among workers has been noticeably better since the company adopted a policy of nights- and weekends-free. Work e-mails “can wait,” said Lisa Williams, vice president of human relations. “The world isn’t going to end.”

The distractions of e-mail prompted French information technology services firm Atos last year to announce plans to end e-mail altogether. Managers had been wasting five to 20 hours a week just reading and responding to e-mail, the firm said. Instead, it will use instant messaging and other tools to communicate among staff.

“E-mail for a long time delivered on the notion of increased speed, reach and efficiency,” said William Powers, author of “Hamlet’s BlackBerry.” “But the more you start cc’ing 50 people, just in case, and replying all to those 50 people, the more e-mail starts to undermine itself.”

But compulsively checking ­e-mail after-hours can be a hard habit to break.

Sharon Ringley, who runs TwinLogic Strategies, a District-based lobbying shop for tech firms, is often scolded by colleagues for sending late-night e-mails. On a recent vacation, she compulsively checked e-mail while reading a digital book on her iPhone, even though there was no reason to expect work on her trip.

“I finally went to go buy a ‘real’ book so I would stop,” Ringley said.