The Peak Interview

Why would a consulting firm like Launchpad Partners that has nothing to do with employment, outplacement, recruitment, retention or HR consulting produce a book like The Peak Interview?

Launchpad Partners consists of a handful of highly seasoned executives who’ve been leaders of innovation throughout their careers. A principal way they help clients is to assist in synthesizing their next competitive advantage. They wanted a strong example of the results of their methodology. While they have lots of examples of this, the trouble with developing a new business model or product or service for a company, is that it usually looks ridiculously obvious in hindsight. This phenomenon of perception undermines real value of what they deliver. Therefore, they wanted something that would give people a better opportunity to evaluate what they’re capable of doing.

The Job Interview is something everyone in their target audience understands. Most executives have been on both sides of the interview. Moreover, the job interview is something millions of people go through every year and each one of them is looking for competitive advantage to win the interview and get the job offer. More than that, there are thousands of employment professionals advising clients on how to win the interview. The reason this is a good demonstration of Launchpad’s process is that you’d think with all these professionals working on this, every stone would have been overturned and nothing new could be found. Launchpad's process demonstrates that substantial new competitive advantage can be found, even in this unlikely scenario.

The book The Peak Interview describes this competitive advantage. Here is its promo:

The Peak Interview

New insights into the job interview process can give you an edge to win the interview and get the job. By the time you get to the job interview, the company has determined you are qualified for the job. But so are all the other interviewees. Your experience, skills, competencies, and abilities will not differentiate you. Your competition is just as qualified as you are. You need an edge.

Great jazz soloists know that when they are playing a solo, they have to hit one or two peaks in the body of the solo and end with a flourish. That's because people evaluate an experience based on its peaks (good or bad) and how the experience ended. The rest of the experience is remembered, but the evaluation of the experience is based on its peaks, and how it ends. This is called the ‘Peak/End rule’.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman is credited with describing this rule. His insight had such a big impact on the study of economics, that he won the 2002 Nobel Prize, despite the fact that he is a psychologist who has never taken so much as a single economics course. When people assess a past experience, they attend to two things above all: how it felt at the peak and whether it improved or worsened at the end. It is important to recognize that everything else isn’t forgotten, it just isn’t used in how we judge the quality of the experience. That means we make decisions, not on a rational basis that fairly evaluates the whole experience, but rather on the peaks and especially on the ending. On this basis we can actually make choices which, on a purely rational basis, don’t make sense.

The Peak Interview emphasizes all the best practices you need to skillfully deliver in the interview, but then shows you how to leverage the Peak/End phenomenon as you prepare for, and produce an outstanding interview. This insight can boost your chances of winning the job.

C.R.A.P.

(An excerpt from “Advantage: Business Competition in the New Normal”)

C.R.A.P.

Our brains have the automatic ability to see some solutions with a mental snap. It is the moment of insight that magically seems to pop into our brains. If you are a native English speaker, you may experience that snap with the following. (Apologies to those of you who are less familiar with English.) Compound remote associate problems, or C.R.A.P., are used for fascinating brain research by Mark Jung-Beeman at Northwestern University. He and Edward Bowden have compiled a list of these puzzles based on how quickly people get them. The puzzles involve word association. For example, what word is associated with each of these three words: man/stop/wrist? The answer is watch, as in watchman, stopwatch, and wristwatch. Try these four, each with a different answer:

cottage/swiss/cake

rocking/wheel/high

cream/skate/water

show/life/row

Chances are, with at least one of these, you experienced a brain snap, where the answer (cheese, chair, ice, boat) just popped into your head. It’s a little weird because it’s as if your brain does something that you really don’t control or understand. That is why we say our mind seems to automatically find the solution. Neuroscientists like Beeman have done very interesting work in trying to understand what is taking place in the brain when we have these brain snaps, or when we take a bit longer to solve a puzzle. You may find with the following puzzles that you feel more like you are in control of the process. Most of us don’t get these easily if at all. If you get even one, you’re doing better than I did.

reading/service/stick

shadow/chart/drop

land/hand/house

cast/side/jump

Here you may have found yourself doing a great deal more searching, going through the catalogue in you mental dictionary of all the words that are associated with each of the words in the four puzzles. You are trying to force the synthesis through this knowledge review. The answers are...(in the book, of course)

Get a copy by clicking: Advantage: Business Competition in the New Normal

(An excerpt from the new book: “Advantage: Business Competition in the New Normal”)

Mindset Revisit

Sometime the point of view is so rigid that the person will be incapable of seeing the issue from a different perspective.

Another joke:

A man showed up at a psychiatrist’s office worried.

“Doc,” he said. “I am worried about my family.”

“Why is that? asked the doctor.

“Well, it seems they are having a hard time accepting the tragedy of my death,” the man replied.

“Oh, I am sorry,” responded the doctor. “Are you terminally ill?”

The man frowned at the psychiatrist. “Why? Do I look sick? No, I’m not sick. I’m dead!”

Surprised, the psychiatrist said, “Did you say you’re dead?”

“Yes,” replied the man. “Quite and completely dead!”

Intrigued, the psychiatrist invited the man to sit on his couch.

“So, you’re dead, you say,” inquired the doctor. “How long have you been dead?”

“Well,” replied the man. “I’ve been dead most of my life, so to speak, since I am not really alive.”

“Let me ask you something,” said the psychiatrist, thinking. “Do dead people breathe?”

“No, don’t be stupid. Of course dead people don’t breathe,” replied the dead man.

“Well, I have news for you,” said the doctor triumphantly. “Clearly you’re breathing, so you cannot truly be dead!”

“Oh, No! No!” laughed the man. “I am only pretending to breathe. It’s a habit because not breathing tends to alarm people around me.”

“Ah, I see,” the doctor scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Well, do dead people’s hearts beat?”

“Come on,” answered the patient. “You know the answer to that. Of course dead people’s hearts don’t beat.”

The psychiatrist walked over to his desk and pulled a stethoscope from a drawer, put the earpieces into his ears, and listened to the man’s chest. “I hear a heartbeat,” he said, raising his eyebrows to the dead man.

“Oh, that is just a sound I make. It’s a habit like breathing,” replied the man.

The doctor retuned to his desk, put the stethoscope away, and surreptitiously picked up a pin.

“So, if your heart is not beating then you would have no blood pressure, and you would not bleed?” he asked the patient.

“No! Of course not, dead people don’t bleed,” he said emphatically.

“Are you sure?” asked the doctor.

“Absolutely.”

“If you got a cut, would you bleed?

“Look,” replied the man impatiently. “Don’t be thick about this. You know perfectly well I would not!”

Instantly, the doctor grabbed the man’s finger and pricked it with the pin. Blood oozed out of the hole.

“Ah, ha!” exclaimed the doctor. “You see, you do bleed. You’re alive!”

The man looked at his finger in bewilderment and then looked at the doctor with astonishment.

“Well, what do you know,” he said throwing his hands up. “Dead people do bleed!”

A point of view can create a powerful bias.

Purchase the book: Advantage: Business Competition in the New Normal

(An excerpt from “Advantage: Business Competition in the New Normal”)

(An excerpt from “Advantage: Business Competition in the New Normal”)

Perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of mindset is what happened before Einstein came up with his theory of relativity. Newtonian physics says that if you are standing still and throw a ball with a certain force X, it will leave your hand at fifty kilometers per hour. Likewise, if you are standing on a train going sixty kilometers per hour, and you throw the ball with the same force X, it will leave your hand at one hundred ten kilometers per hour (fifty + sixty). In 1887, E.W. Morley and A.A. Michelson decided to measure the difference between the velocity of light as it is beamed with the speed of the rotation of the earth pushing it and as it is beamed perpendicular to the rotation of the earth. The idea was that the light beam that has the speed of the earth’s rotation behind it must be going faster than the light beam that does not have that incremental speed behind it. To their surprise, no difference was detected. The scientific community knew there was something was wrong with the way they did their experiment because you cannot violate the laws of physics. It perplexed scientists for years because they couldn’t find the error.

Is this so surprising? One possible explanation is that the earth is not rotating. “WHAT?” just went through your brain didn’t it? The certainty we have about the earth rotating is the same certainty those scientists had about Newtonian physics. They could not have contemplated the alternative.

Recognizing facts is essential to getting the problem right, but point of view can color the evidence and cause us to interpret the evidence in a way that’s consistent with our worldview. It is a phenomenon that has been noticed and written about repeatedly in business and psychology texts. It is often expressed as being too close to the problem and, thus, not able to see it clearly. Einstein said, “What does a fish know about the water it swims in?”

When Albert Einstein looked at the Michelson-Morely velocity of light results, he thought to himself, ’What if the results of the experiment are correct?’ What Einstein did was step back from the problem. If the evidence proved correct, that would mean Newtonian physics was wrong. This heresy opened the universe to a new point of view and changed physics forever.

Purchase a copy: Advantage: Business Competition in the New Normal

Analysis Can Actually Hide The Problem

Analysis is the act of discovering what existing knowledge we have about a particular object or problem.

Analysis is the process we go through to define a problem. If we are going to err in coming up with the solution that gives us competitive advantage, then the obstacle hides here. Why is that?

Often, when we go through this problem definition process we start with something like “Let’s lay out what we already know.”

Unfortunately, the way the human brain works, when we are very familiar with a topic or product group, or process, or business model, our brains have already gone through a process of efficiency. Our brains determine what is relevant, and what can be ignored. It blocks out the stuff that is not relevant to the enterprise. This gives the brain the best opportunity to focus on what is relevant.

A simple example of this is when you are holding a conversation in a busy coffee shop. You can have this conversation because your brain allows you to ignore: the music playing from the sound system; the activity behind the counter as the baristas make their drinks; a staff member going around cleaning up tables and straightening newspapers; the fire burning in the fireplace; traffic zooming by outside the window, other patron’s conversations near by, and many other stimuli.

Unfortunately it is in the space that the brain is ignoring that the opportunity hides. If you are too close to a problem it is because “what you already know” will not include the subtle changes that make your product, process, business model, etc., less competitive.

It helps if you start with “Let’s lay out what we already believe, recognizing that the truths we hold dear may be missing the mark.” But really, the only way to avoid this frequent and debilitating problem is to bring in a novice brain. The best brain for this is the supersynthesizer brain. You want a supersynthesizer who is broadly knowledgeable but knows little about your problem.

The beatings will stop when productivity declines.

This from the Conference Board press release:

"Americans of all ages and income brackets continue to grow increasingly unhappy at work—a long-term trend that should be a red flag to employers, according to a report released today by The Conference Board.

The report, based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households conducted for The Conference Board by TNS, finds only 45 percent of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61.1 percent in 1987, the first year in which the survey was conducted.

“While one in 10 Americans is now unemployed, their working compatriots of all ages and incomes continue to grow increasingly unhappy,” says Lynn Franco, director of the Consumer Research Center of The Conference Board. “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.”

Fewer Americans are satisfied with all aspects of their employment, and no age or income group is immune. In fact, the youngest cohort of employees (those currently under age 25) expresses the highest level of dissatisfaction ever recorded by the survey for that age group.

“The downward trend in job satisfaction could spell trouble for the overall engagement of U.S. employees and ultimately employee productivity,” adds Franco."

I am not sure Ms Franco is right about the impact on productivity. In 2009 we saw the largest gain in USA Productivity in the past 25 years. If it's true "...job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend..." then there seems to be an inverse correlation between job satisfaction and productivity:

USA Productivity Growth Index 1987 Index=100

It seems that as American workers become unhappier, the also become more productive!

Employers: GET OUT THE WHIPS!!!

Creativity Defined

On Friday morning I attended a presentation by my friend Adam Shames who does a great job getting people to be creative.

As I understood Adam, he defines 'Creativity' as the combination of divergence (creating something new or unexpected) with convergence (something useful). The ideas created by the divergence become acceptable and adopted when they are useful.

For me this was interesting food for thought.

I thought of the creative act of writing music. A new piece of music always involves some degree of new combinations of tones, timing, pitches, instruments, etc.,. This is where the new music diverges from what already exists. Most new music is immediately accepted because composers follow certain rules. This allows the sounds to converge to become music.

Simply throwing together a bunch of notes does not create music. A child randomly banging on a piano is usually just noise. Without that convergence, it isn't creativity. It is just banging. New combinations of notes do not become music until the sounds are accepted. Our brains accept that as music when the sounds meet certain cultural expectations we have about how sounds fit together.

Something is an innovation when it is accepted, not when it is just an idea. Innovation differs from invention in that it must be implemented. It cannot be successfully implemented if it is not accepted.

This event of creativity, when divergence and convergence come together can happen right away. In the case of most music, the notes are written to be within the boundaries of what is currently accepted. A lot of innovations work the same way. The innovation solves a problem in a way that our brains can allow the idea to be accepted quickly.

But not all music is written within existing boundaries. When Stravinsky first had his Rite of Spring performed in Paris, it was not within the boundaries of music. The audience rioted in protest. But over time, we stretched our boundaries of what is music, and, today, the Rite is played as music to modern audiences (such as occurred here in Chicago late last year).

New ideas can also be slow to reach acceptance in just the same way. When Einstein first published his four revolutionary physics papers in 1905 he wasn't heralded as the great genius we all know. His crazy ideas languished and he continued to work in the patent office for four more years before anyone in the physics community could stretch their boundaries to accept his ideas. His ideas did not need to converge as much as the physics world needed to converge around the ideas.

Perhaps that is what distinguishes truly revolutionary ideas. The ideas languish for a long time before they're accepted.