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Dear Men: Wake Up and Smell the Inequality

In corporate America, 88% of men think women have at least as many opportunities to advance as men.

This is the finding of a major new study—almost 30,000 employees across 118 companies—by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company.

Just 12% of men felt that women had fewer opportunities to advance in their organizations.

Yet when you look at the actual data, women’s odds of advancement are 15% lower than men’s.

It’s not because women are less capable: the evidence is strong that although men tend to be more confident leaders, on average women are more competent leaders.

And it’s not just a glass ceiling: women face bottlenecks in the middle and sticky floors. At every level, women are less likely to advance.

Why don’t men see it?

Hypothesis 1: Men are stupid.

There are more men than women with low intelligence. And for the past 20 years, 318 Darwin Awards have recognized people who removed themselves from the gene pool through “idiotic behaviors”—like the terrorist who mailed a letter bomb without enough postage, and when it was returned to sender, opened it.

It turns out that more than 88% of the Darwin winners were male. As the researchers write, “This finding is entirely consistent with male idiot theory… and supports the hypothesis that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.”

But not all men are idiots. What accounts for the rest of the ignorance?

Hypothesis 2: Men are blind.

“Seeing is believing,” Ashleigh Brilliant once remarked: “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.”

Many intelligent men have a hard time stomaching the idea that the world of work still isn’t fair. Not long ago, I was one of them. Some men ignore gender inequality altogether. Others make excuses: “We have lots of opportunities for women. They just keep leaving to have kids.”

That’s not what the new study shows. In reality, women are less likely to leave their organizations than men—especially in leadership roles. Women in senior vice president roles are 20% less likely than men to leave, and women in the C-suite are nearly half as likely as men to leave. And women without children are less motivated to reach the top: mothers report 15% higher interest in becoming a top executive.

Progress toward gender equality in corporate America has slowed to a glacial pace. As Sheryl Sandberg wrote this week:

"At the current pace of progress, we are more than 100 years away from gender equality in the C-suite. If NASA launched a person into space today, she could soar past Mars, travel all the way to Pluto and return to Earth 10 times before women occupy half of C-suite offices. Yes, we’re that far away… We reached the moon in eight years of concerted effort—not 80. Let’s bring that same urgency to this mission.”

Five months ago Sheryl tragically lost her husband, Dave Goldberg, a strong advocate for women. He would have celebrated his 48th birthday this week, and I can think of no better way to honor his legacy than to mentor and sponsor women.

So men, repeat after me:

Women do not have the same opportunities to advance as men.

This is unacceptable.

I am going to take action to change it.

No, You Can’t Pick My Brain, But I’ll Talk to You Anyway

“Can I pick your brain?”

It’s a moment many of us dread. A stranger asks for a phone call—or worse yet, a meeting. You already have way too much on your plate. Your brain is not just sitting there passively, waiting to be picked. Plus, the mental image of a brain being picked is just gross.

Most people answer this question by asking, “What will I get?” They run a cost-benefit analysis, and base the decision on expected utility. And that’s a terrible mistake, because it’s impossible to predict the utility of a meeting.

In 1994, a professor named Bill Hamilton was asked to meet with a young entrepreneur who was starting a biotech venture, and consider joining the board. After one look at the business plan, “I quickly decided that I had no interest in a venture with no money and no management,” Bill says—there were “just too many other demands on my time.”

But then Bill took a leap of faith. Despite having no desire to get involved, “I offered to meet with him to see how I could help.”

Bill asked the entrepreneur a series of questions, and ten days later he had a set of unusually thoughtful, detailed answers in his hands. After several more meetings over the next few months, Bill was impressed enough with the entrepreneur and his ideas that he changed his mind, and joined the board as the first independent director.

Seven years later, just before an initial public offering, they sold Avid Radiopharmaceuticals to Eli Lilly for $320 million. “This was a terrific exit for everyone associated with the company, including investors, management and directors,” Bill says. “I was only trying to help, but I ended gaining a lot—both experiential and financial.”

Bill is not alone. Here’s my story (magic trick style, with a full deck of playing cards) of what happened when a financial adviser named Peter Audet went to visit a client with no assets.

Call it the Law of Unexpected Utility. By definition, you cannot know when you meet someone today where that person will land tomorrow. If you make every decision by asking “What will I get in return?” you’ll miss out on these moments of serendipity.

Of course, we all need to set boundaries. Serial entrepreneur Adam Rifkin protects his time by doing 5-minute favors: micro-loans of his knowledge, skills, and connections that cost him little but can add a lot of benefit to others. Venture capitalist Brad Feld holds Random Day: every other month, he opens up a day in his calendar to meet with anyone for 20 minutes. That allows him to take about 80 meetings a year with strangers, which only costs six days of his time.

The point is not to get something. It’s to give something. Often, giving is a better path to success than taking. But even when it doesn’t pay off directly, givers lead more meaningful lives than takers.

So next time you get a brain-picking request, you might consider taking the conversation. And if you’re the one looking for guidance, there’s a better way to show respect than asking to pick someone’s brain. “Can I seek your advice? I’d value your insight because…”

My Mentor Never Gave His Last Lecture

To millions of beloved readers, Jeff Zaslow was the advice columnist who replaced Ann Landers and the bestselling author who captured our hearts with moving books like The Last Lecture with Randy Pausch. But to me and countless other writers, Jeff was a devoted mentor who gave countless hours of his time and energy to help aspiring authors.

When I was in middle school, Jeff and his family moved in across the street from our house in Michigan. At a neighborhood barbecue, I was a shy, nerdy kid shooting baskets alone. Jeff walked over, introduced himself, and challenged me to a game of HORSE. He took a genuine interest in getting to know me, asking about my hobbies and crushes. Although we had just met, I had the uncanny sense that this new neighbor truly cared about me. Suspiciously, he lost that game of HORSE very, very badly.

Looking back, Jeff was the first adult who treated me like a peer, and it helped me come out of my shell. At the time, I had no idea that Jeff would become a mentor to me—or that I would enter the writing profession.

Two decades later, I decided to write my first book. In search of guidance on developing a proposal, I reached out to Jeff. Less than three hours later, his reply landed in my inbox. He invited me to call his cellphone any time, day or night. He asked me thoughtful questions and listened to my responses. I explained that I was interested in writing about why people help others. “You haven’t found the forest in the trees yet,” he confided, “but I think there’s potential for a book here.” He suggested trying to articulate my message in a single sentence. “What’s the big, surprising idea?”

Three days later, the answer hit me. The book was going to be about the surprising success of people like Jeff, who consistently helped others without expecting anything in return. Instead of achieving success and then giving back, is it possible that you could attain success by giving first? To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, if you use your candle to light mine, I get light without darkening you.

Months later, when I was preparing to meet with publishers, my heart was racing. Jeff kindly reviewed my pitch and boosted my confidence with a quip: “The little schnitzel across the street is going to be famous!”

Two weeks later, Jeff launched his latest book, The Magic Room. Despite being scheduled around the clock, he sent me a note to check in on how the meetings with publishers went. Just like the first time I met him, I was overwhelmed by the fact that he cared. He helped me choose the right publisher and added, “Here’s hoping you’re the next Malcolm Gladwell.”

When I started writing, I relied on Jeff’s work as a model for creating narratives that speak to readers’ hearts along with opening their minds, and his personal example as a reminder of what it meant to put other people first. There was the time in 1983 when he gave the croissant out of his mouth to a homeless person. There was the Zazz Bash, an annual singles party that he created for charity—and led to 78 marriages. In his books, he was always shining a spotlight on others. And there was the time when he ran into my dad at a local store. Jeff had just released a new book and had a stack of them sitting at home in our neighborhood. But Jeff marched up to the register and paid for a copy of his own book, autographing it so my dad didn’t have to wait for a signed edition.

Despite the fact that he gave advice for a living, Jeff never assumed that he knew the right course of action for anyone else. This humility was visible early in his career. In his late twenties, while writing a story for the Wall Street Journal about the contest to replace Ann Landers, he decided to enter it on a lark. When an interviewer told him he was underqualified, he replied: “I may be 28, but I have the wisdom of a 29-year-old.”

When students ask me how they can pay their mentors back, I challenge them to think about it differently. Mentoring is a gift, and their job is to receive it with gratitude. How can they show their mentors that they’ve made a difference?

In 2012, before I finished writing my book, Jeff lost his life in a tragic car accident. I missed the opportunity to tell him what an impact he had on me—not only as a writer, but as a role model for how to live a good life.

Jeff Zaslow never got the chance to give his own last lecture. I don’t know what he would have said, but I know how he would have made you feel. He would have dazzled you with humor, enlightened you with insight, and inspired you to pursue and savor the most meaningful moments in life.

I dedicated my book to him, but it seems that the most powerful way to honor Jeff’s memory is to share the wisdom that he imparted through his actions. He taught me four timeless lessons about mentoring:

1. Great mentors don’t give answers. They ask questions.

2. Great mentors are proactive, not reactive. They don’t just respond to outreach; they reach out to their mentees.

3. Great mentors see more potential in their mentees than their mentees see in themselves.

4. Great mentors focus on their mentees’ success, not on their own.

Since we lost Jeff, people have come out of the woodwork to share how much his generosity meant to them. Perhaps the most stirring was Brad Epstein, a healthcare executive. Seven years ago I worked on a project with Brad, not realizing that he knew Jeff. It turns out they were roommates in Orlando in their twenties.

“I miss the light he added to the world,” Brad wrote. “But I can see the glow from countless candles he lit.”

Thank your mentor before it’s too late. And then light as many candles as you can.

Remembering Dave Goldberg, the Ultimate Mensch

Most of us are lucky if we have even one great passion in our lives. Dave Goldberg had many more: his wife Sheryl Sandberg, his children, his friends and colleagues, music, poker, and the Minnesota Vikings.

On Dave’s birthday last fall, a group of friends joined him at his home to watch the Vikings play the Packers. Dave did something that caught me off guard. At the time, it seemed small. But now it speaks profoundly to one of the many ways that Dave was larger than life.

The game got off to an ugly start. In the first ten minutes, the Vikings were down 14-0. A typical fan would scream at the coach, start hurling objects at the TV, or give up on the game. But Dave stuck by his team. By halftime, the Vikings were losing 28-0. Dave didn’t budge; he kept rooting for them. In the third quarter, they were down 42-0. By this point, I wasn’t even watching the game. I was watching Dave in awe—because every time the Packers scored, he cheered louder for the Vikings. The further behind his team fell, the more he stood up for them. Even after losing 42-10, Dave still loved his team.

That’s who Dave Goldberg was. When your chips were down, he doubled down. As Sheryl expressed it Tuesday in the single most beautiful speech I’ve ever heard, “Dave was my rock.”

Dave was the CEO of SurveyMonkey, and he hosted me to speak there a year ago. When he gave the introduction, I was so embarrassed by his kind words that I could hardly speak. I knew I didn’t deserve his praise, but I wanted to earn a fraction of it.

Among the hundreds of talks I gave that year, it was the most extraordinary audience I had. Just as Dave did with everyone he met, the SurveyMonkey team instantly made me feel accepted. They listened more intently, and laughed more loudly, than any group I had addressed. I was so astonished by their generosity and curiosity that I hung around afterward, hounding various employees to find out how they had created such a positive culture. Over and over, I heard the same thing: the secret ingredient was Dave.

It was clear that Dave made a concerted effort to recruit people who cared about others, who loved to learn and have fun. But his team stressed something far more meaningful: Dave built that culture by example. His helpfulness, inquisitiveness, and joy were contagious. His employees wanted to be like him.

Great leaders build things that outlast them. Inspired by Dave’s example, SurveyMonkey will continue to thrive. This week, the teams worked late to finish projects that mattered most to Dave, and used the hashtag #makedaveproud.

When leaders are admired, it’s usually for what they do for the company. But Dave’s team admired him for what he did for them. Dave saw and brought out the best in others.

His goodness moved us even more than his greatness.

I’ve spent a dozen years studying generosity, and there is no one who embodied it like Dave. Touching tributes have extolled him as a loving father and husband, the heart and soul of Silicon Valley, a lifelong advocate for women, best friend to many, a compassionate leader, and a gracious and generous connector who was bright, kind, humble, and universally admired and liked.

Like his wife, her parents, and his own parents, Dave lived his life in service of others. He was an advocate for SurveyMonkey Contribute, which has donated over $5 million to charity in exchange for people taking surveys. He was a dedicated benefactor of a wide range of important causes, particularly in education and healthcare. But he rarely spoke about his philanthropic work.

“David Goldberg embodied the definition of a real leader—someone who was always looking for ways to empower others,” President Obama wrote. “He was generous and kind with everybody, and cared less about the limelight than making sure that the people he worked with and loved succeeded in whatever they did.”

Dave was quiet about his contributions because he was modest, but also because he genuinely took more joy in the success of others than his own. His startup was streaming music online before most people had even heard of the internet, but he didn’t talk about that. He grew SurveyMonkey from 12 employees to 500, building it into a billion-dollar company, but he didn’t talk about that. As he wisely noted last year, his best advice for leaders was to “Stop talking. Ask and listen.”

A little over a month ago, I saw Dave for the last time. As always, there was no handshake; he greeted me with a teddy bear hug. When I asked him what was new in his life, he immediately said the highlight was the Lean In Together campaign. He beamed with pride at the prospect of fathers becoming more involved with their children, husbands becoming 50-50 partners, and men becoming more supportive of women at work.

Dave was Sheryl’s biggest fan, and he cheered for her even more passionately than the Vikings. When she was writing Lean In, she didn’t want to put her picture on the cover or share her personal stories. She wanted the book to be about progress for women, not about her. Dave knew the movement needed a champion: it needed a human face and voice. He encouraged her to lean in.

Queen Elizabeth II said that grief is the price we pay for love, and for Dave, the grief is immeasurable. My heart is aching for Sheryl and their children. It is also hurting deeply for the world.

I don’t believe this happened for a reason, but it has given us all a reason to be more present parents, more loving spouses, more supportive friends, and more caring leaders. The overwhelming sentiment from everyone who knew Dave is that he inspired us to be better human beings. And he had that effect on us throughout his life, long before we lost him. “Things will never be the same,” Sheryl said, “but the world is better for the years my beloved husband lived.”

There is little that can bring solace in this time, but there is one memory of Dave that I will cherish forever. In the spirit of candor, Sheryl is not the world’s biggest football fan. But on his last birthday, when Dave walked in the door, she and the kids were decked out in Vikings jerseys.

Dave broke out in the biggest grin imaginable, and I have never seen a person happier. He loved his family with all his heart, and he knew they loved him the same way.

For those who have inquired about how to honor Dave's memory, his mother Paula has spent her life helping children with disabilities. For the past four decades, she has run the PACER Center, which exists to enhance the quality of life for children and youth with disabilities, and their families. The Goldberg family has asked that you please direct donations to the David B. Goldberg Endowment, c/o Pacer Center, 8161 Normandale Blvd., Bloomington, MN, 55437.

Three Lies about Meaningful Work

In the 1980s, when Steve Jobs was trying to lure John Sculley away from Pepsi to join Apple, he clinched the deal with a single question: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

Back then, the organization to which people belonged was the dominant driver of whether they found their work meaningful. A sense of purpose came from belonging to a company with a mission that mattered. Selling sugar water was worthless; reinventing computers was worthwhile. But now, where you work is no longer the major source of meaning. And in the next decade, employers will fade even further into the background.

Today, there are some jobs where almost everyone reports a strong sense of meaning: • Clergy and religious directors: 97% • Surgeons: 94% • Elementary and secondary education administrators: 93% • Chiropractors: 93%

These jobs have three big things in common, and they debunk three lies about what makes work meaningful.

Lie #1: Meaning comes from where we belong. You don’t need to work for a company like Apple to find meaning. All of the meaningful jobs above are completely untethered to specific organizations. Some of them work at multiple sites: surgeons often split their time between half a dozen different hospitals in a week, and clergy float between different religious institutions. The rest can do the same job anywhere: education directors and administrators can move from one school to another—and chiropractors from one office to another—while the nature of their work stays the same. They identify with occupations, not organizations. As Dan Pink wrote in Free Agent Nation: “Bye, bye, organization guy.”

Lie #2: Meaningful work is knowledge work. You don’t need to be a knowledge worker to find meaning. You might have heard that the industrialized world has shifted from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy, but this isn’t actually true. We work in a service economy, and that’s where the meaning lies.

In the U.S., nearly three of every ten employees are knowledge workers. This number pales in comparison to service workers, who represent about eight of every ten American employees. The service sector now accounts for almost two thirds of the world’s GDP—up from half in the 1980s—including about 80% of GDP in the U.S. and 73% in the EU.

The most meaningful jobs are all service jobs. Surgeons and chiropractors promote physical health. Clergy and religious directors promote spiritual health. Educators promote social and mental health. If these jobs didn’t exist, other people would be worse off. Meaningful work makes other people’s lives more meaningful.

Lie #3: Meaning depends on having a visionary boss. You don’t have to work for Steve Jobs to have a meaningful job. Purpose isn’t scripted by a boss or dreamed up by a charismatic leader. Instead, it’s shaped by the people who hold the job. Researchers Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton call this job crafting: taking the initiative to become an active architect of your own job. They worked with a surgeon who sought greater meaning by spending less time consulting with other physicians, shifting his priorities toward teaching more by giving lectures and educating residents. They also discovered a group of hospital cleaners who were able to make their work more meaningful by finding creative ways to take care of patients, even though it wasn’t in their job descriptions. One cleaner worked on a wing with patients who were in comas, and she started rearranging the artwork on their walls in the hopes of sparking their awareness.

At its heart, meaning-making is an act of self-expression, a chance for us to reveal who we are through what we do. After interviewing hundreds of people about their jobs, Studs Terkel observed that “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.” To find it, we need to realize that meaning is about what we do, not where we belong. It lives in the relationships between people, not ideas. And it’s created from the bottom-up, not the top-down.

Why I Failed to Advocate for Women: Confessions of an Ignorant Man

In Hollywood, Judd Apatow was known as the King of Bromance. He made his name producing comedies like Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But then he made a radical shift. He championed a script that was written by two women, starring six women.

Bridesmaids became his highest-grossing film at the U.S. box office. Apatow now serves as the executive producer for Lena Dunham’s smash hit Girls on HBO.

We need more men like Judd Apatow to go to bat for women. Sadly, many men don’t, because they’re blind to gender bias. I know, because I was one of them.

When I worked in advertising, a female colleague mentioned that male board members weren’t taking their ideas seriously. I was convinced she was imagining it. She was brilliant, and it was the 21st century. I wanted desperately to believe that we were living in a just world. As Margaret Heffernan puts it, I was willfully blind.

My eyes started to open when my wife and I welcomed our first child, and then our second—both daughters. All of a sudden, I found myself worrying about their future, and noticing how different the world was for them. I learned that the daughter effect isn’t unique to me. In Working Fathers, Jim Levine and Todd Pittinsky report that companies were most likely to become family-friendly and embrace flexible work schedules when a male CEO’s adult daughter was working in a less supportive environment. And two years ago, I wrote enthusiastically about evidence that having daughters motivates male CEOs to pay their employees more generously and male legislators to vote in support of women’s reproductive rights.

Back then, I was encouraged that having daughters makes men more concerned about women—it gave me hope that more men would come on board. Now, I just find it embarrassing. Why didn’t I think about these issues before I had daughters? Shouldn’t loving my wife, my mother, and my sister have influenced me?

My wife and I spent a lot of time discussing how to promote equality for our girls, but I didn’t think much about it in the workplace until I watched Sheryl Sandberg’s TED talk and then read Lean In. I was stunned by the mountain of evidence that gender stereotypes continue to hold women back.

Even then, I shied away from talking about gender in my Wharton classes, fearing that it would divide rather than unite. After all, I had read overwhelming evidence that on virtually every attribute ever studied, men and women are remarkably similar—including intelligence, math and verbal abilities. Instead of claiming that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, I thought it was high time to recognize that we’re all from Earth.

Two colleagues, Sigal Barsade and Nancy Rothbard, convinced me that I was wrong to stay silent on gender. Even though there are more similarities than differences between the sexes, that doesn’t mean the world is fair to women.

Today, U.S. corporate boards have more men named John, Robert, William, or James than women in total. Recent coverage by Claire Cain Miller has brought more chilling data to light: in math, when graded anonymously, girls outperform boys, but when teachers know their names, boys do better. And when students rate their favorite professors, they describe men as “geniuses” and women as “nice.” This is sad and unacceptable. We may be in the 21st century, but we’re still a very long way from gender parity.

Those combined events shattered my naiveté, and motivated me to start writing, teaching, and speaking about equality for women. I told audiences to take my comments with a grain of salt, since to my knowledge, I’ve never been a woman. But as an organizational psychologist, I feel a responsibility to shed light on what the data say about half of the population. And as a man, I don’t feel that this is just a woman’s issue; it’s a social issue. I wish I hadn’t waited to become an advocate for women until I became a dad to daughters and the evidence was staring me in the face. But I guess it’s better late than never.

Last year, Sheryl Sandberg asked me what my own data showed about gender. I had done more than a decade of research on success at work, but because of my resistance to acknowledging gender biases, it hadn’t occurred to me to systematically analyze differences between men and women in my studies. When I finally did, I was mortified: men got credit for speaking up and helping, but women didn’t. To bring these persistent biases to light, we decided to write a New York Times series on women at work.

Gender equality isn’t just good for women—it makes us all better off.

There are still too few men who step up as champions for women. Guys, it’s about time that we #LeanInTogether for equality. To learn more, visit www.leanintogether.org.

How Not to Ask for a Recommendation Letter

To land a job or get into a university, we usually need someone to vouch for us. It can be tough to ask—recommenders are typically more senior than us, they’re busy, and we don’t always know where we stand in their eyes. When we work up the courage to ask, sometimes the request comes out polite and charming. But more often than we realize, we end up saying or writing the wrong thing.

Here are some of the most ineffective requests that I’ve seen as a manager and a professor, along with a running commentary on what a cynical recommender might read between the lines. My hope is that we’ll all get a little bit more thoughtful about who, how, and when we ask.

1. Although we haven’t talked in seven years, I really value your opinion of me.

I’ve burned a lot of bridges, and I’m desperately hoping enough time has passed that you won’t remember what a jerk I was.

2. I’m not sure if you remember me, but it would be amazing if you could serve as a reference for my application.

Our interactions were so brief that I forgot you existed until just now. But I’m desperate.

3. I’m wondering if you might write me a recommendation letter. It’s due tomorrow.

You really shouldn’t vouch for me (I’m not conscientious, and I procrastinate a lot), and I think little enough of you to ask you to do this last minute. But I’m really desperate.

4. I know we’ve never met in person, but you have a unique perspective on my qualifications.

If you knew me better, you wouldn’t even consider advocating for me. Also, the first dozen people I asked said no.

5. It would be really great to have your name supporting my candidacy.

There are other people who know me much better, but no one respects them (including me).

6. Please write a recommendation letter for me.

I want to think I’m hot stuff, but really I’m a doofus. If I ask, you’ll probably turn me down. If I frame it as a command, maybe you’ll be intimidated into agreeing.

7. Thank you for your advice on my resume and cover letter last week. You can send your recommendation letter to this address.

I neglected to do my homework when we spoke, and didn’t realize I would need a recommendation. Maybe you won’t recall that I never asked.

8. Are you in a position to write me a glowing letter?

I trust you enough to say nice things about me, but only if they’re really nice. Before I give you the privilege of writing on my behalf, I really need to know what you think of me.

9. You can send the letter to me, and I’ll mail it in.

I’m going to read it first to see if I like it.

10. The application requires three recommendation letters, but I’ve decided to submit four.

I’m hedging my bets in case one of my references trashes me or drops the ball.

11. The application requires three letters, and I’m excited to submit five.

There’s no way three people can possibly capture the full extent of my greatness.

12. To save you some time, I’ve taken the liberty of drafting the letter for you.

I seriously doubt your ability to sing my praises—and I am seriously more awesome than you think I am.

13. It’s a highly competitive pool, and I want the hiring committee to know about my unique strengths, so here’s a list of my proudest achievements over the past decade.

I’m feeling highly insecure, and I don’t know if my dad can pull any strings this time. Please include every impressive thing I’ve ever done, including the time I dominated the Springfield-Harbortown Elementary Spelling Bee. “Intravert” is a totally acceptable spelling.

By contrast, here’s one of the best recommendation requests I’ve ever seen:

“I was hoping you would be willing to write me a letter of recommendation because I have interacted with you over the past couple of years more than with any other professor here. I have made countless mistakes as a team leader, including micromanaging in our first weeks as a club, not giving proper feedback to my teammates about their performance, and not being able to defuse tension at board meetings. But I have also grown tremendously, especially with the help of your advice on…”

The 15 New Books to Read in 2015

There are few better ways to start a new year than picking up some fresh perspectives to put into action. Here’s a sneak preview of 15 exciting books on business and behavior that will hit the shelves in the first half of the year. I’ve had the pleasure of reading eight of them so far. If the other seven are half as good, we’re in for a treat.

1. How to Fly a Horse by Kevin Ashton (January 20)

The innovator who coined the “internet of things” solves many of the mysteries of invention. He argues persuasively that creativity is more often the result of ordinary steps than extraordinary leaps.

2. Getting to Yes With Yourself by William Ury (January 20)

In life, the most difficult negotiations are the ones we have with ourselves. One of the masterminds behind the classic Getting to Yes sheds light on how we can reach more satisfying and successful agreements with the person in the mirror.

3. Bold by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler (February 3)

The bestselling authors of Abundance team up again to explore the technology, psychology, and social capital behind exponential entrepreneurship: creating wealth and improving the world. It’s based on insights from Diamandis’s experience building the XPRIZE, Singularity University, and more than a dozen tech companies—and the likes of Bezos, Branson, Musk, and Page.

4. Yes, And by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton (February 3)

The geniuses at Second City comedy show how they’ve used the principles of improvisation to help Fortune 500 companies boost innovation and collaboration, professional athletes cope with stress, and compliance trainers inflict less boredom. They offer a rich set of practical exercises for the office… and the dinner table.

5. The XYZ Factor edited by Nancy Lublin and Alyssa Ruderman (February 3)

DoSomething.org exists to “help young people make the world suck less,” and it exudes creativity and generosity. Each chapter is written by a staff member, covering different ways to invigorate Millennials and spread their energy across and beyond an organization.

6. Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader by Herminia Ibarra (February 10)

Against the current of advice to be authentic and transparent, a great scholar examines the dangers of being true to yourself. Instead of thinking first and then acting, this important book illuminates how leaders can gain “outsight” by learning through experiences and experiments.

7. Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin (March 17)

The beloved author of The Happiness Project reveals the hidden truths about how to change our habits—from resisting junk food and hitting the gym to ending procrastination and saving money. One worthwhile habit is to read a chapter every night.

8. Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock (April 7)

Google’s head of HR takes us behind the curtain to challenge our fundamental assumptions about how to interview, hire, recruit, motivate, evaluate, reward, develop, promote, and retain people. It’s a captivating, data-driven book on achieving sustainable productivity, remarkable innovation, and a genuine sense of community—and an inspiring, actionable vision for transforming the future of work.

9. Surprise by Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger (April 7)

I’ve always loved the element of surprise, but it wasn’t until reading this charming book by a pair of leading surprise experts that I fully understood why—and how to bring more of it into my life and the world.

10. No One Understands You and What to Do About It by Heidi Grant Halvorson (April 14)

This is a codebook for deciphering one of the grand riddles of life: why don’t others see us as we see ourselves? A renowned psychologist charts the path to making a better impression on others while maintaining a sense of integrity.

11. The Eureka Factor by John Kounios and Mark Beeman (April 14)

Two neuroscientists take us on a vigorous voyage inside the mind to understand those electrifying but elusive moments of discovery—and how we can have them more often.

12. The Road to Character by David Brooks (April 21)

Attention, Tiger Moms and Lombardi Dads: the thoughtful, provocative New York Times columnist tackles how we can develop our moral senses.

13. Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith (May 19)

A sought-after executive coach confronts the challenges of behavior change. Following up on the success of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There and Mojo, he looks at what causes resistance and where we can intervene.

14. The Misfit Economy by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips (June 16)

Can we learn something about innovation and entrepreneurship from pirates and gangsters? Two futurists, trained in economic history and political economics, go underground and off the books to see what we’ve missed in focusing on the usual suspects of Silicon Valley.

15. Clay Water Brick by Jessica Jackley (June 23)

The virtuoso entrepreneur and investor who cofounded Kiva, everyone’s favorite micro-lending platform, shares uplifting stories and compelling lessons from social entrepreneurs who do the most with the least.

The Biggest Reason We Steal Other People’s Ideas

Chances are that at some point in your career, you've taken an idea from someone else. I want to know why.

There's a clue in a story about one of the great bands of our time.

All good things come to an end, and by 1970, the beloved Beatles had decided to go their separate ways.

Within a year, George Harrison reached No. 1 with a solo song, “My Sweet Lord.” But his sweet time at the top was short-lived. Within a month, a lawsuit was filed. Harrison’s song had original lyrics, but shared a melody and harmony with the 1963 hit song by the Chiffons, “He’s So Fine.”

Was the Beatles’ lead guitarist guilty of plagiarism?

Judge Richard Owen, who happened to be a music aficionado, ruled that Harrison was guilty. But he said Harrison’s theft wasn’t intentional; it was accidental and subconscious.

Eventually, Harrison conceded that Owen was right. “I wasn’t consciously aware of the similarity between ‘He’s So Fine’ and ‘My Sweet Lord’,” Harrison wrote in his autobiography. “Why didn’t I realize?”

The psychologist Dan Gilbert calls this kleptomnesia: generating an idea that you believe is novel, but in fact was created by someone else. It’s accidental plagiarism, and it’s all too common in creative work.

In a classic demonstration, psychologists Alan Brown and Dana Murphy invited people to brainstorm in groups of four. They took turns generating lists of sports, musical instruments, clothes, or four-legged animals. Each participant generated four ideas from each category. Next, the participants were asked to write down the four ideas that they personally generated for each category.

Alarmingly, a full 75% of participants unintentionally plagiarized, claiming they generated an idea that was in fact offered by another member of their group. And later, the participants wrote down four new ideas for each category. The majority wrote down at least one idea that had already been generated by another group member—usually the group member who’d generated ideas immediately before them.

Were they not paying attention? If so, then surely they’d have been just as likely to plagiarize from their own ideas. But that didn’t happen. While 71% of participants took credit for an idea that a group member had generated, only 8% generated one of their own previous ideas.

Kleptomnesia happens due to a pragmatic, but peculiar, feature of how human memory is wired. When we encode information, we tend to pay more attention to the content than the source. Once we accept a piece of information as true, we no longer need to worry about where we acquired it.

It’s especially difficult to remember the source of information when we’re busy, distracted, or working on a complex task. (Sound familiar in today’s workplace?) And the more our attention is divided, the less we notice who’s responsible for the ideas that get raised. This explains why people are most likely to take credit for ideas generated immediately before their own. When it’s almost their turn, they’re maximally busy trying to come up with a good idea, so they never really pay attention to the source of the ideas that come right before their own.

To combat kleptomnesia, psychologists recommend reducing distractions and cutting down on multitasking. It can also be useful to minimize exposure to similar work. For example, comedy writer George Meyer avoided watching Seinfeld while writing for The Simpsons (16 seasons!). “I was afraid I might subconsciously borrow a joke,” Meyer told me.

Had George Harrison taken these steps, he might have avoided a serious financial loss and heartbreak. At minimum, when generating ideas, it could be wise to identify a few existing ideas that are similar, scrutinize the overlap, and give credit where it’s due. Otherwise, in Harrison’s words, “We all tend to break each other’s hearts, taking and not giving back.”

In everyday life, the most important corrective action may involve training ourselves to focus not only on what was said, but also who said it. As the psychologists Neil Macrae, Galen Bodenhausen, and Guglielmo Calvini put it, “May the source be with you.”

How to Stop Annoying Behaviors and Handle Offensive People

With Festivus coming up next month, I’m starting my list of grievances. The woman who touched my baby’s face at the grocery store. What a giver—she shared her germs without asking for anything in return. And the guy who parked in a space reserved for expecting mothers. Dude, a beer belly does not entitle you to claim that you’re pregnant.

My favorite business author, Dan Pink, is on a mission to fix these kinds of problems. He’s the host of a new show on National Geographic called Crowd Control, which uses social science to change some of the most irritating behaviors that we see in everyday life. After writing bestsellers like Drive and To Sell Is Human, giving a wildly popular TED talk, and serving as a chief speechwriter in the White House, Dan is uniquely qualified to make our days a bit less miserable.

In the first episode, he takes on speeding drivers, jaywalking pedestrians, and people who go one ugly step beyond stealing spots reserved for pregnant women: they park their cars in disabled spaces. Here’s a sneak preview of three lessons learned:

1. Fear isn’t always the best strategy. To scare jaywalkers, he puts a sign on the ground: “Be late. Not dead.” Some pedestrians stop in their tracks, but others ignore the warning: they don’t believe they’re in danger.

Instead of highlighting the risks of walking early, Dan finds a clever way to increase the benefits of waiting. He builds a game of virtual tug-of-war, where pedestrians compete against the people waiting to cross from the other side of the street. The number of jaywalkers per hour drops by 90%. Some citizens get so absorbed in the game that they forget to cross the street for multiple lights. And there’s a side benefit of the friendly competition: strangers who would normally walk right past each other now have an excuse to interact.

2. Offenders need to see their victims. A suave guy parks his sports car in a disabled spot. Dan’s team pulls up with a truck, blocking him in to watch disabled people roll out in wheelchairs. It’s enough to embarrass the guy—he even starts helping to push wheelchairs—but it’s not scalable. To fuel empathy by bringing more drivers face-to-face with their victims, Dan designs a new sign for handicapped spaces:

All of a sudden, people start doing the right thing. After a full month of surveillance, not a single violator parked in a space with one of these signs.

3. Don’t underestimate the power of intermittent rewards. Dan’s team is able to cut speeding by a third without ever issuing a ticket. How?

He posts a sign announcing that drivers who obey the speed limit will be entered in a lottery to win $100.

After filming 12 episodes, Dan has tackled a wide range of issues—getting Jersey Shore vacationers to use sunscreen, motivating New Orleans residents to clean up Bourbon Street, creating a talking elevator that shames people into taking the stairs, making sure people don’t double-dip a chip, and even adding a bit of entertainment to the wait at the Department of Motor Vehicles. To find out what else we can expect to learn, I asked Dan a few questions:

1. What was your biggest surprise?

Dan: When we were shooting the show, I spent a lot of time watching people in the wild, folks just gliding through their regular lives — on the street, in the office, in a shopping mall, wherever. What amazed me was just how much of the time we operate unconsciously — guided by default behaviors and largely oblivious to what’s happening around us. I’d previously read the research on inattentional blindness, but to see it in action day in and day out was a stunner. It presented a real challenge in changing behavior — which is why we often used novelty, surprise, and sometimes even shock.

2. How do you recommend handling repeat offenders?

Dan: You know, that’s a tough one. I wonder if some form of social pressure would work. Perhaps we could get a few confederates to approach jaywalkers and say, “Hey, you know you just jaywalked. That could be dangerous.” That might be worth trying in season 2 — though we should probably roll it out in the Midwest rather than, say, the Bronx.

3. Which takeaway have you applied most often in your life outside the show?

Dan: Explaining why. In one episode, we rewrote in-flight safety announcements so they explained, in vivid terms, why passengers needed to, say, put up their tray tables. That had a big effect (when we simulated an air crash and evacuated passengers.) Again, I’d read the evidence in the academic literature—but there’s something powerful seeing in real life. Now if I want someone — whether it’s my kids or a work colleague — to do something, I’m much more likely to explain why rather than just sternly command or gently suggest.

Why You Should Watch It

The show is really entertaining, can deepen your understanding of behavior, and will arm you with some techniques you can use in your lives. Plus, there's the sweet satisfaction of seeing a few nasty people get a taste of their own medicine.

Crowd Control debuts November 24 on National Geographic at 9pm EST and 9pm PST.

The Most Influential Books of the Past Decade

Every once in a while, we read a book that doesn’t just transform the way we see the world. It also changes how we live our lives. For the past ten years, I’ve been asking business leaders and students which book has most influenced their actions. I give them one rule: it must include rigorous evidence. Pure self-help and autobiographies are out; so are books by leaders dispensing advice. (Experience isn’t a substitute for evidence. If it were, obeying the laws of gravity would make us all physicists.)

I’ve compiled a list of the most frequently mentioned book for each year, with one additional rule: no author can appear twice. Here are the top picks, and how they’ve made a difference:

2004: The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

Yes, there’s such a thing as too much freedom. Readers have learned to limit their choice sets to minimize indecision, regret, and misery. We’ve also figured out whether we tend to be maximizers (searching for the best option) or satisficers (looking for good enough). Since maximizers tend to do better but feel worse, we’ve learned to satisfice when decisions aren’t of colossal significance. But we haven’t abandoned our love of lists that rank things.

2005: A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

We think left-brainers reign supreme with their analytical and quantitative skills, but here’s a provocative case that right-brainers will rule the future. Arguing that the MFA is the new MBA, Dan anticipated (and fueled) the growing importance of factors like design, storytelling, empathy, and meaning. When Oprah spoke at Stanford’s commencement, she gave it to every graduating student.

2006: Mindset by Carol Dweck

It’s a rare read that has as much impact on parents as it does on managers. The memorable takeaway from this gem is that we need to stop praising ability and intelligence, and start applauding effort and persistence. That way, when our children and employees fail, they won’t give up because they think talent is fixed and they lack what it takes for the task at hand. Instead, they’ll pursue growth, doubling down to develop the requisite skills to succeed.

2007: The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton

After reading this guide to building a civilized workplace, leaders around the globe have introduced policies to prevent jerks from getting hired and selfish managers from being promoted. They’ve also created better poison control practices, aiming to bring out what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. And what’s not to love about a quiz to find out if you’re a certified asshole? It’s the Asshole Rating Self-Exam (ARSE).

2008: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

It may be the ultimate feat of storytelling from our favorite storyteller, and it helped us appreciate the role of luck and opportunity in success. Leaders have worked to privilege the quality of ideas over the status of the person generating them. They’ve also become more attentive to people who haven’t benefited from cumulative advantage. Those poor hockey players who weren’t born in January…

2009: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

So an average of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice might help you become an expert. But what should you do with that time? One CEO called this book the world’s most valuable guide to developing skills and leaders. We’ve been able to grow our own capabilities and bring out the best in others through deeper practice, stronger passion, and more masterful coaching.

2010: Switch by Chip and Dan Heath

Change is probably the toughest hurdle in our work and our lives. The Heath brothers gave us the tools to overcome it. I’ve watched many executives apply their framework to shift sticky beliefs and behaviors: motivate the elephant by shrinking the change, direct the rider to follow the bright spots, and shape the path by rallying the herd.

2011: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The only psychologist to win a Nobel Prize in economics showed us why our decisions go awry and common sense isn't common practice. His insights have been directly applicable to making better choices, avoiding unnecessary risks, and understanding ourselves. As Kahneman put it, “I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”

2012: Quiet by Susan Cain

It shattered the myth of the extraverted ideal, and has chipped away at the stigma of being an introvert. We’ve seen workplaces come to value quiet leaders, schools create more supportive environments for quiet students, and parents learn to accept and nurture their reserved children. My favorite reaction was from an extravert: “I just realized why my boyfriend is so boring. He’s an introvert!” And then “He’d probably be a lot more interesting if I actually let him talk.”

2013: Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

Women read it first, but it’s been life-changing for both sexes. Women have been moved to sit at the table and stand up for leadership opportunities at work, seek out an equal partnership at home, find a mentor by not asking for one, and negotiate for themselves as they would for their close friends. Men have become aware of their gender biases; they’ve become champions of diversity in the workplace and more supportive, actively engaged partners at home. (Warning, tough guys: this book may cause an irresistible urge to start doing laundry and a persistent awareness that the world would be a better place if we had more female leaders.)

2014: A Path Appears by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

The year isn’t over yet, and this just came out in September, but in my world it’s already the runaway winner for impact on action. Starting from the premise that “talent is universal but opportunity is not,” this book offers an abundance of small actions that we can all take to make the largest difference for those in need. Readers are shifting where they give their money, volunteer their time, and dedicate their energy.

Don’t Start a Company with Your Friends

When we’re launching a new business, we naturally turn to our friends. They’re the people we trust for sharing information and covering our backs. By recent estimates, 40% of founding teams include people who were friends socially before building their startups. But according to new research, starting a company with your friends is a risky endeavor.

When Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman studied nearly 10,000 founders of technology and life sciences startups, the least stable founding teams were friends. Each friendship in a founding team increased the rate of founder turnover by 28.6%. Even teams of virtual strangers were more likely to stick together.

Of course, there are times when a founder needs to leave, but in many cases, it’s emotionally and financially devastating. Wasserman references a famous quote paraphrasing John D. Rockefeller: “A friendship built on business can be glorious, while a business built on friendship can be murder.”

But there may be a way to get the benefits of friendship without the costs. Wasserman discovered that the most stable teams were past coworkers. And other research on high-tech startups demonstrates that when founding team members have collaborated in the past, their ventures have faster growth rates.

If you work together before launching your company, you can increase your chances of success. Take it from Peter Thiel, the cofounder and former CEO of PayPal and first outside investor in Facebook, who has become a billionaire by making big bets on companies. “Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together—otherwise they’re just rolling dice,” Thiel writes in his provocative book Zero to One. “When I consider investing in a startup, I study the founding teams. Technical abilities and complementary skill sets matter, but how well the founders know each other and how well they work together matter just as much.”

You can get to know a friend well through hanging out socially. But you can only get to know a cofounder well by collaborating. By working together prior to founding a startup together, people are able to answer some fundamental questions:

Do we share a core set of values?

Are our working habits compatible?

What are our comparative strengths and weaknesses?

How will we handle conflict when it inevitably arises?

This isn’t to say that friends can’t build successful startups; it’s just higher-risk and lower-odds. If you do plan to start a company with friends, Wasserman notes in The Founder’s Dilemmas, you need to “proactively analyze the potential consequences.” Friends are less likely to acknowledge the elephant in the room, striving to preserve their personal relationship until it blows up, taking the company down with it. With that in mind, when I work with entrepreneurs who are friends, I make sure they read Difficult Conversations. They often describe it as a life-changing book that enables them to start talking about tough issues before it’s too late.

In sum, friends don’t let friends start companies together… unless they’ve tested and grown their professional relationship by collaborating first.

***

Peter Thiel recently visited Wharton to discuss these dilemmas and more on what causes entrepreneurs to fail. Here’s his speech and our conversation.

Emotional Intelligence Is Overrated

Not long ago, the CEO of a sales company mentioned that he was spending millions of dollars to train his employees in emotional intelligence. He asked if it was possible to assess emotional intelligence during the interview process, which would allow him to hire salespeople who already excelled in this area.

I said yes, it can be done—but I wouldn’t recommend doing it.

Warning: if you’re a devoted member of an emotional intelligence cult, you may have a strong negative reaction to the data in this post. In case that happens, I’ve offered some guidance at the bottom on how to respond.

To make sure we’re on the same page, let’s be clear about what emotional intelligence is. Experts agree that it has three major elements: perceiving, understanding, and regulating emotions. Perceiving emotions is your ability to recognize different feelings. When looking at someone’s face, do you know the difference between joy and contentment, anxiety and sadness, or surprise and contempt? Understanding emotions is how well you identify the causes and consequences of different feelings. For example, can you figure out what will make your colleagues frustrated versus angry? Frustration occurs when people are blocked from achieving a goal; anger is a response to being mistreated or wronged. Regulating emotions is your effectiveness in managing what you and others feel. If you have a bad day but need to give an inspiring speech, can you psych yourself up and motivate your audience anyway?

I told the CEO that although these skills could be useful in sales, he’d be better off assessing cognitive ability. That’s traditional intelligence: the capability to reason and solve verbal, logical, and mathematical problems. Salespeople with high cognitive ability would be able to analyze information about customer needs and think on their feet to keep customers coming back. The CEO was convinced that emotional intelligence would matter more.

To see who was right, we designed a study. Working with Dane Barnes of Optimize Hire, we gave hundreds of salespeople two validated tests of emotional intelligence that measured their abilities to perceive, understand, and regulate emotions. We also gave them a five-minute test of their cognitive ability, where they had to solve a few logic problems. Then, we tracked their sales revenue over several months.

Cognitive ability was more than five times more powerful than emotional intelligence. The average employee with high cognitive ability generated annual revenue of over $195,000, compared with $159,000 for those with moderate cognitive ability and $109,000 for those with low cognitive ability. Emotional intelligence added nothing after measuring cognitive ability.

The CEO wasn’t convinced: maybe they didn’t take the emotional intelligence test seriously enough. We ran the study again—this time with hundreds of job applicants, who knew that their results could affect whether they were hired. Once again, cognitive ability dramatically outperformed emotional intelligence.

I happen to find emotional intelligence fascinating; I teach the topic in the classroom and have published my own research on it. As much as I like it, though, I believe it’s a mistake to base hiring or promotion decisions on it.

A few years ago, researchers Dana Joseph and Dan Newman wanted to find out how much emotional intelligence really influenced job performance. They compiled every systematic study that has ever tested emotional intelligence and cognitive ability in the workplace—dozens of studies with thousands of employees in 191 different jobs.

When Daniel Goleman popularized emotional intelligence in 1995, he argued provocatively that “it can matter more than IQ.” But just as I found with salespeople, every study comparing the two has shown the opposite. In Joseph and Newman’s comprehensive analysis, cognitive ability accounted for more than 14% of job performance. Emotional intelligence accounted for less than 1%.

This isn’t to say that emotional intelligence is useless. It’s relevant to performance in jobs where you have to deal with emotions every day, like sales, real estate, and counseling. If you’re selling a house or helping people cope with tragedies, it’s very useful to know what they’re feeling and respond appropriately. But in jobs that lack these emotional demands—like engineering, accounting, or science—emotional intelligence predicted lower performance. If your work is primarily about dealing with data, things, and ideas rather than people and feelings, it’s not necessarily advantageous to be skilled in reading and regulating emotions. If your job is to fix a car or balance numbers in a spreadsheet, paying attention to emotions might distract you from working efficiently and effectively.

Still, even in emotionally demanding work, when it comes to job performance, cognitive ability still proves more consequential than emotional intelligence. Cognitive ability is the capacity to learn. The higher your cognitive ability, the easier it is for you to develop emotional intelligence when you need it. (This is one of the reasons that emotional intelligence and cognitive ability turn out to correlate positively, not negatively.)

As better tests of emotional intelligence are designed, our knowledge may change. But for now, the best available evidence suggests that emotional intelligence is not a panacea. Let’s recognize it for what it is: a set of skills that can be beneficial in situations where emotional information is rich or vital.

If you felt intense negative emotions while reading this post, it’s an excellent opportunity to put emotional intelligence into action.

Step 1: recognize the emotion. Is it disgust? Probably not—that’s usually reserved for gross foods, sights, and smells. Is it hostility? More likely: hostility is anger directed toward other people.

Step 2: analyze the causes of the emotion. Why are you feeling hostile? Years ago, the psychologist George Kelly argued that hostility occurs when we are attempting to “extort confirmation of personal hypotheses that have already proved themselves to be invalid.” In other words, you might be feeling hostile because the data are clear that emotional intelligence has been overrated, but you don’t want to admit it.

Step 3: regulate the emotion. Maybe this isn’t as terrible as it seems. You’ve been able to update invalidated beliefs before. Napoleon wasn’t short. Pluto isn’t technically a planet. Swimming after eating isn’t dangerous. Miley Cyrus isn’t actually a great role model. The LOST writers didn’t really have a master plan.

How I Overcame the Fear of Public Speaking

Several years ago, I was invited to give my first public speech, and I made the mistake of saying yes. I was terrified: as a student, my heart used to race at the mere thought of raising my hand in class. For weeks beforehand, I had nightmares about forgetting my lines, waking up in a cold sweat. No matter how much I practiced, for the three days leading up to the speech, I could hardly breathe.

During the speech, nothing went terribly wrong. I was relieved… until I read the feedback from the audience. Here were some highlights:

“Try not to be so nervous. You looked like a Muppet and it seemed like you memorized every single sentence for the presentation.”

“It seems like you're reading off a teleprompter. Breathe!! Too mechanical.”

“You were so tense that you were causing me to physically shake in my seat.”

In the past year and a half, I’ve given over 100 keynote speeches and hundreds of presentations, and things have changed dramatically. I still get nervous occasionally, but public speaking is now one of my favorite activities. Here are the five steps that have been most helpful in reducing my anxiety:

1. Don’t try to calm down. In clever research, Harvard professor Alison Wood Brooks asked people to give a public speech on what would make them good colleagues. Anxiety alert: they would be videotaped and evaluated by a committee. More than 90% of people said the best strategy was to calm down. But it didn’t work. When independent raters evaluated the speeches, people who tried to relax ended up giving speeches that lacked persuasiveness and confidence.

Instead of saying “I am calm,” people gave more compelling speeches when they said “I am excited.” The same was true when people were anxious before singing Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin, saying “I’m excited” led to more accurate karaoke performance on than saying “I’m calm.”

Why? Physiologically, we have two different systems: the go system and the stop system. As Susan Cain, the introverted author of Quiet who overcome her own phobia of public speaking to give a record-breaking TED talk, explains, “Your go system revs you up and makes you excited. Your stop system slows you down and makes you cautious and vigilant.” Cain suggests that it’s a mistake to work at turning off the stop system; you want to turn on your go system. Anxiety is an intense emotion, and it’s hard to make it vanish quickly in the face of uncertainty. It’s easier to convert anxiety into another strong emotion like excitement.

You won’t catch me belting out Journey any time soon. But when I feel pangs of panic about speaking, I no longer try to fight the reasons to stop. I focus on the reasons to go: I’m delivering a message that matters deeply to me. I enjoy challenging assumptions, offering actionable insights, and providing some entertainment. As my enthusiasm climbs, anxiety fades. It doesn’t vanish completely, though. As Richard Branson notes (paraphrasing a quip attributed to Mark Twain): “There are only two types of speakers in the world: 1. The nervous and 2. Liars.”

2. Practice in front of an audience. When I rehearsed my early speeches, I delivered them solo. Classic studies by the late Stanford psychologist Robert Zajonc demonstrated that the mere presence of other people raises our arousal. If you practice alone, you won’t have a chance to adjust to that arousal.

The key is to practice under conditions that resemble the performance as much as possible. With that in mind, I was surprised to discover that before a talk in front of a crowd of thousands, the best preparation was to practice in front of a small group. In a small group, you can see everyone’s facial expressions and feel their gaze burning a hole in your retina. (Want a surefire strategy for freaking out an anxious introvert? Stare at him. Being the focus of other people’s attention can be seriously overstimulating.) In a large crowd, faces blur and eye contact fades, which can actually reduce arousal. So if you want to prepare under maximal anxiety, practice in front of a small group. It’s not a coincidence that before her TED talk, Susan Cain rehearsed in a room with 20 strangers.

3. Turn off the lights. To reduce anxiety during the speech itself, I like to darken the room. As faces become less visible, my arousal drops. I recently discovered that there’s a side benefit of dim lighting: audiences laugh more. Comedians prefer “dimly lit space,” Peter McGraw and Joel Warner write in The Humor Code, which seems to “help people feel more concealed and therefore less inhibited in what they’re willing to laugh at.”

Of course, darkness also helps people feel less inhibited in falling asleep. So I only switch off the lights when I feel confident in the entertainment value of the speech.

4. Know your audience. I find that the more I learn about my audience in advance, the less nervous I become. Along with helping me tailor the material, it humanizes them and highlights common ground. Each August, I teach a weeklong course for hundreds of Wharton MBA students. It’s the first class they take in business school, and I don’t have much time to get comfortable with them. After spending a few days reading through their bios, I’m more excited than anxious. I see that one had a fascinating former life as an Olympic rower and another grew up in my hometown.

5. Lead with a puzzle, question, or story. Dylan Chalfy, a gifted speaking coach and professional actor, taught me that opening with a puzzle places the audience’s attention on the ideas, as opposed to the speaker. A question has a similar effect: it gets the audience thinking instead of judging. Malcolm Gladwell has made a similar observation about starting with a story: the audience gets absorbed in the narrative, and ends up focusing on the plot and the characters rather than the storyteller.

Earlier this week, I spoke at Google Zeitgeist. It was the most nervous I’ve been in a long time: the audience was full of extraordinary people and it was being videotaped for online posting. Although it was far from a flawless performance, I didn’t lose any sleep beforehand. My pitch was too loud at the beginning—a clear sign of anxiety—but it got better over time as I found my rhythm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxEzJFvO2oE&index=24&list=PLJhC0rY-YEDyklVz96z1SOJUnLYZfHeqR

My next step is to work on improving my breathing with my uncle, Darth Vader.

The New Books to Read This Fall

My favorite part of being an author is writing. A close second is finding new books in my mailbox. This fall, there’s an unusually exciting crop of big idea and business books about human behavior, innovation and entrepreneurship, and the fundamental questions of success, meaning, and happiness in work and life. Here are the 14 forthcoming and just-released books to check out:

1. Me, Myself, and Us by Brian Little (October 14)

I’ve never read a book that revealed so much about my own personality, let alone the peculiar habits of my friends, coworkers, and family members. With extraordinary wit and wisdom, Little— the winner of Canada’s highest award for university teaching and one of Harvard’s favorite professors—offers startling insights about our trivial pursuits and magnificent obsessions.

2. Rookie Smarts by Liz Wiseman (October 14)

If you believe in the value of experience, prepare to have your worldview turned upside-down. Wiseman masterfully shows why novices can outdo veterans, expertise blinds us to fresh ideas, and we’re all missing out on the brilliance of the newbies around us.

3. The Innovators by Walter Isaacson (October 7)

The author who brought us the epic biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin is back. It’s the saga of Silicon Valley as we’ve never seen it before: a behind-the-scenes journey with the pioneers who invented the computer, the Internet, and the digital revolution.

4. Crazy is a Compliment by Linda Rottenberg (October 7)

Rottenberg offers a treasure trove of ideas to jumpstart new entrepreneurs and accelerate the success of startups. She has guided many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, and this book is full of tips for fueling innovation in companies, nonprofits, governments, and schools.

5. The Upside of Your Dark Side by Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener (September 25)

At long last, here’s a book on why happiness can make us sad, mindfulness might be overrated, and discomfort sets the stage for comfort. This pair of psychologists offers a provocative, evidence-based case for a balanced life. If you don’t read it, you should feel guilty—and it turns out that will be good for you.

6. A Path Appears by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (September 23)

In their fourth book together, this Pulitzer Prize-winning married couple examines how regular people make a difference. From preventing disease and fixing education, to evaluating global aid and local charity, to fighting violence, the combination of inspiring examples, cutting-edge science, and practical recommendations is going to change how we think about changing the world.

7. How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg (September 23)

How did Google grow from a disruptive search engine into the world’s most valuable company? Two leaders share lessons from the inside out on strategy, decision-making, innovation, and culture.

8. Zero to One by Peter Thiel (September 16)

Thiel argues that the secret to progress is not competition, but monopoly. Drawing on his experience as cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, and an early investor in companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yelp, he offers fascinating ideas about how to shift from copying something old to creating something new.

9. Hello, My Name is Awesome by Alexandra Watkins (September 15)

How do you find the right name for your brand or your company? This is what Watkins does for a living—her company is responsible for renaming a wedding brunch service Bloody Married and a frozen yogurt franchise Spoon Me—and her clever examples and advice will spare us all from putting the wrong foot forward.

10. The Small Big by Robert Cialdini, Noah Goldstein, and Steve Martin (September 9)

If you’ve ever struggled to change the beliefs or behaviors of other people, there’s hope. The world’s leading experts on persuasion offer the best of science and practical insights about influence.

11. Smartcuts by Shane Snow (September 9)

This book solves a major mystery, illuminating how visionaries and pioneers find faster ways to achieve their goals. With spellbinding stories and relevant research, Snow has delivered one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking books of the year.

12. Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz (August 19)

According to this former Yale professor, elite colleges aren’t teaching students how to think. Deresiewiczproposes to reinvent higher education so that students develop strong values and find meaningful definitions of success.

13. Powers of Two by Joshua Wolf Shenk (August 5)

We think bold new ideas come from individuals and teams, but the heart of creativity lies in dynamic duos. Shenk examines the chemistry behind the imaginative pairs who spawned the Beatles, Apple, South Park, and the civil rights movement. Learn about the surprising benefits of conflict and power imbalances—and how to find the right partner and build trust.

14. Building a Better Teacher by Elizabeth Green (August 4)

Great education is the foundation of a flourishing society, and it depends on great teachers. Green, a leading education journalist, offers strong evidence and compelling cases to illuminate what it takes to get children to pay attention, sharpen their reasoning, and contribute to insightful discussions.

And if you’re still searching for more, here are the other new releases that I’m looking forward to reading:

Pioneering the Possible by Scilla Elworthy (October 7)

How to Kill a Unicorn by Mark Payne (October 7)

Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (October 7)

Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham (September 30)

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (September 16)

Innovating Women by Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya (September 9)

Dataclysm by Christian Rudder (September 9)

Mind Gym by Sebastian Bailey and Octavius Black (September 9)

The Impulse Society by Paul Roberts (September 2)

Legacy Wars: Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates

Not long ago, Malcolm Gladwell made a bold prediction. Fifty years from now, Apple will be around and Microsoft will be gone, but Bill Gates will be remembered—and Steve Jobs won’t.

As surprising as it seems, Gladwell might be right. To investigate what shapes a legacy, researchers Scott Allison and Dafna Eylon led a series of studies. They found that when judging leaders, we care as much about their generosity as their accomplishments.

In his time, Andrew Carnegie was best known as a steel tycoon; today, he is remembered more for building a university, a public library, and a music hall. In the same way, the Gates name won’t stand for computers; it will symbolize advancing health, fighting poverty, improving education, and creating access to information technology in the developing world—as well as motivating other billionaires to become philanthropists. Beyond what they achieve, leaders and entrepreneurs are remembered and revered for what they give.

Many great entrepreneurs don’t wait until they’ve succeeded to start giving back; they give right from the start. But for those who don’t begin their careers as givers, there’s still hope. Research shows that the motivation to help others tends to spike around midlife. By that point, we’ve accumulated the expertise, influence, and resources to feel that we can make a meaningful difference. It’s also when we become especially concerned about future generations.

Instead of paying back the people who have helped them, entrepreneurs dedicate their energy to paying it forward to those who aspire to follow in their footsteps. As network experts Wayne Baker and Nat Bulkley found in a new study, people “pay it forward by using a simple rule: ‘What has the group done for me’?” When entrepreneurs are grateful for receiving help in the past, they help younger entrepreneurs by mentoring, making introductions, sharing ideas, and investing. Along with building a legacy, this transforms the communities around them.

Consider Argentina, which is ranked 126 of the 189 countries in the World Bank’s index that measures the ease of doing business. It’s one of the hardest places on earth to start a company, deal with construction permits, register property, afford taxes, and trade across borders. Yet Buenos Aires is one of the most productive hubs of entrepreneurship on the planet, boasting a tech sector that may be the best in all of Spanish-speaking Latin America.

To find out why, Linda Rottenberg, the cofounder and CEO of Endeavor, studied more than 200 entrepreneurs in Argentina. Her team asked tech entrepreneurs who inspired them, invested in them, and mentoring them, and mapped the network. Endeavor’s director of insight, Rhett Morris, sums up the results: “One of the drivers behind the growth of the tech sector in Buenos Aires was that successful entrepreneurs were paying it forward.”

Here’s the network map. Connections are lines; companies are bubbles:

The larger the bubble, the greater the founder’s contributions to entrepreneurship. “What this graphic shows is that most of the companies trace their inspiration—and in some cases their existence—to a handful of more established companies,” explains Rottenberg (whose forthcoming book Crazy is a Compliment is a terrific read on high-impact entrepreneurship). “Fewer than ten entrepreneurs helped spawn a community more than 20 times their size.”

This is the stuff that legacies are made of. And it’s why Bill Gates will be remembered: he has opened doors for many entrepreneurs and individuals to contribute to their own communities.

If Jobs had lived longer, would he have given more? Maybe. Is it possible that he was already a philanthropist but did it anonymously? Maybe. With the limited window that he had, was inventing and perfecting new technologies a more important contribution than giving his time and money away? Maybe.

When 1,000 Argentinian entrepreneurs identified the person who inspired them most, Bill Gates came in third. Steve Jobs was first. But research demonstrates a death positivity bias: our evaluations of great leaders become more favorable when they’re no longer alive. I’m willing to bet that over time, their positions will reverse.

You're Not My Friend

Recently, someone I’ve never met introduced me in an email as “my good friend Adam.” A few days later, a virtual stranger who has emailed me a few times posted an article by “my friend Adam.” Then a student from a one-day workshop that I taught listed me as a job reference, and when asked to describe our relationship, wrote “professor and friend.” After I endorsed a book, a reporter referred to the author as “a friend of Adam’s,” when our interactions have consisted of a series of work emails and one phone call.

I like all of these people, but I wouldn’t describe any of them as my friends—I think that misrepresents how well we know each other and the kind of the bond between us. In the Facebook era, the boundaries on friendship have expanded dramatically. Someone recently called my brother-in-law a “dear friend” but didn’t bother to attend his wedding. Judging from recent friend requests, my friends apparently include a person who ignored me in grad school, a second cousin’s high school classmate, a colleague’s mentee, a peewee soccer teammate I vaguely remember, and some guy who sat at a table near me at a restaurant once.

If you want to avoid committing the faux pas of describing a colleague or an acquaintance as a friend, here are some rules for when it’s fair game to use the term:

1. You’ve actually met in person

From the caption of a famous New Yorker cartoon: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” If you’ve only connected by email or phone, even if they are a real person, there’s no substitute for the trust that can be developed from meeting face-to-face.

2. You know embarrassing things about each other that don’t show up in a Google search

Studies consistently show that self-disclosure—opening up and making yourself vulnerable—is one of the strongest drivers of close relationships. My friends know that I have questionable taste in music, and refrain from dissing Bryan Adams. They accept the fact that I read the first Twilight book, cover to cover (my wife made me do it) and the rest of them (that was my doing).

3. You can call each other without scheduling a conversation

Unless the person in question is a head of state, if you have to get an appointment on someone’s calendar to talk, you haven’t cleared the friendship bar.

4. You never discuss the weather

When you ask a friend “How are you doing?” you don’t have to follow up with “No, really, how are you doing?” Friends don’t bother with small talk. They can go months without talking, and pick up as if they’ve never skipped a beat. They dive right into deep conversations about love, life, and that exasperating conclusion of Lost where nothing was resolved.

5. You help each other without keeping score

In professional relationships, I find that most people follow the norm of reciprocity: when we do someone a favor, we expect an equal one back. In friendships, the norm shifts from reciprocity to generosity. We focus on what our friends need, not what we can get back from them. Instead of keeping tallies of credits and debts, friends give whenever they can. As Jack Handey says, “If you wear a toupee, why not let your friends try it on for a while? Come on, we’re not going to hurt it.”

6. You’ve had meaningful experiences together

Men and women alike expect friendships to involve mutual activities and shared memories. If you’ve never gone to a movie or shopping together, played a sport or game together, attended a party together, or decorated someone’s car with shaving cream together, you’re probably not friends.

7. You give the critical feedback that we don’t want to hear, but need to hear

Friendships have what the organizational scholars Jane Dutton and Emily Heaphy call tensility—the carrying capacity to withstand criticism and bounce back from strain. “We wouldn’t want to assume that compassion is always gentle,” George Saunders observes. “A harsh truth can be compassionate… if a friend is wearing something ridiculous, you can say, ‘You look like an idiot,’ and maybe that will save him.”

If you’re reading this post, you’re probably not my friend. Because if you were my friend, you would know better than to read my content.

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