Marine Corps (ret.), recipient of the Purple Heart and two Silver Stars, and former executive with USAA
• Michael Pope, an assistant coach to the New York Giants, who has spent twenty-eight years coaching in the National Football League
• Jasper White, chef, author, and owner of several successful New England restaurants
• Nicholas Thacher, a veteran headmaster of various independent schools
• Leon de Magistris, hair stylist and owner of Leon & Company, the oldest business in the town of Belmont, Massachusetts
These people all agreed that the great trick in management today is to get the best out of people’s brains. You cannot do it with a stick, no matter how big a stick you wield. Nor can you do it with just a carrot, no matter how juicy the carrot. Rather than a simple carrot-and-stick method, bringing the best out of people today requires that you create harmony. You must match the right people with the right jobs and environments. Craft the right setting, the proper culture, and the prime conditions under which people will naturally deliver their best, as naturally as a flower turns toward the sun and grows.
The Latest Research
In transferring my plan from the world of children, families, and schools to the world of businesses and organizations, I got lucky in my timing. As I was developing my ideas, the world burst with new research in several critically relevant fields.
First, neuroscience exploded in the 1990s, the “decade of the brain.” The explosion has continued since then, with surprising discoveries that inform and bolster my plan, such as neuroplasticity (the fact that the brain can change throughout life) and the ability to promote brain growth through certain actions and activities.
Second, not only did the world of brain science change, but the world of psychology took a radical positive turn as well. Spearheaded by Martin Seligman, positive psychology emerged as the brightest, most useful new paradigm in psychology since the days of B. F. Skinner and his behaviorist theories. Instead of dissecting what’s wrong with a person, positive psychology focuses on how to help people live and achieve at their highest and happiest levels. For example, thanks to the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, another leader in the positive psychology movement, we know the conditions under which a person’s brain is most likely to “light up” and surpass its previous best.
And third, researchers started to take the oddly neglected psychological state called happiness seriously. They deepened its definition beyond mere sensate pleasure, and they learned how critical a positive state of mind—a happy state of mind, dare we say it?—truly is to achieving at your best. The old saw that excellence occurs in direct proportion to suffering is dead wrong. Excellence occurs in direct proportion to necessary suffering, but in inverse proportion to unnecessary suffering. We know this now because researchers finally looked scientifically at the roots of happiness and well-being, and how such factors contribute to performance.
These major breakout developments in three different areas provided me with a bonanza as I synthesized my theory of the Cycle of Excellence.
In addition to Seligman’s work, I drew upon the research of a wide range of other experts, including Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor whose book Stumbling on Happiness is full of counterintuitive insights; Don Clifton, Tom Rath, Marcus Buckingham, and others from the Gallup organization and the strength-based movement; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, originator of the concept of “flow”; George Vaillant, the Harvard psychiatrist who did the famous Grant study, a longitudinal study that followed one class of Harvard graduates for decades while identifying the variables that correlated most closely with success, health, happiness, and well-being; David Myers, another great researcher into the field of what makes for a satisfying life; Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who gave us the powerful concept of the “growth mind-set”; Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, whose work on social networks and connections sparkles with insights relevant to organizations; Stuart Brown, whose research into play shows how profoundly powerful play is for innovative thinking and even life itself; Marco Iacoboni, neurologist and neuroscientist whose work on “mirror neurons” gives insight at the cellular level into how and why people connect; Angela Duckworth, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist whose research into what she calls “grit” is showing that determination trumps IQ in predicting performance; my close friend, John Ratey, whose book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain shows how useful—yet undervalued—physical exercise is in promoting mental acuity; Kathy Kolbe, whose explication of “conation,” the most important word/concept you’ve never heard of, gives managers an amazing new framework for understanding how to get the best out of people; and many others in the fast-advancing interdisciplinary world of peak performance research.
While, as an MD, my own knowledge of human physiology and brain function helped me synthesize the Cycle of Excellence, all of this new research served as important guides, dispelling some of the myths that have misled people about high achievement. These myths include “IQ predicts success” (it doesn’t), “hard work conquers all” (paradoxically, hard work can sabotage success by leading you to try to overpower a problem rather than figure it out), and “the brain is hard-wired and unable to change once a person reaches adulthood” (wrong!).
Why These Ideas Matter Now
A while ago our world exploded. The environment and the world of towns and cities and families and communities blew apart, along with the world of ideas and information, of entertainment and communication, of politics and diplomacy, and of course the world of businesses and organizations. It’s hard to date when the explosion started, but it was after JFK’s assassination and before 9/11. Somewhere in there the modern big bang began. And it’s still banging.
Living well in the midst of an ongoing explosion takes work, patience, skill, and luck. Managing well in the midst of an explosion may seem to require superhuman powers. Managers today may feel like the prophets in the Old Testament who asked, “Why me, Lord?”
You have your own answers to that question, such as: the challenge, the mission, the paycheck, the adventure, the calling, the necessity, or just the feeling that if you don’t do it, nobody else will. So each day, you jump into the explosion. You do all you can to make sense out of chaos and keep your organization, your mission, and your people moving forward. You draw upon values and lessons you learned growing up, like “never say die,” “give it your all,” and “look for the best in people.” When all else fails you fall back upon your core self—who you are, what you do when no one else is looking.
You can lose your bearings easily. As a manager, you can feel like the blind leading the blind. How are you supposed to know what to do when no one has a clue what will happen tomorrow? How do you reassure and lead people when you are scared as hell, at least in those rare moments when you have time to stop and think about what’s really going on? What do you do about it? Shoot from the hip and hope for the best? Learn to love the smell of napalm in the morning?
Of course not. But the explosion that surrounds us makes managing people extremely dicey, to put it mildly. That’s why I feel an urgency in offering the plan in this book. I want to give you a mooring you can hold on to and use as the storm gets wild. I want to give you a connection you can use.
A key to working my Cycle of Excellence is making the critical step of connection. When that is threatened, all the other steps go awry. Unless managers realize how crucial it is to create an emotionally stable, connected environment in the midst of the maelstrom of modern business life, they will—and do—sacrifice performance in the name of speed, cost cutting, efficiency, and what they perceive to be necessity. In such a context, deep thought disappears, only to be replaced by decisions based on fear. Frazzled becomes the order of the day.
As global competition and economic stress create problems for businesses of all kinds everywhere, managers who don’t have a plan to stabilize operations will be compelled to revert to crisis mode, putting out fires all day, just hoping to survive. The managers who do best develop a method that enables their people to do their work without