Tag Archives: david brooks

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At Google, Starbucks (and Life Outside of Work), Success = Connection

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The New York Times has had a number of great articles related to connection and how it leads to success at work and in life.  In an article about what Google discovered from Project Oxygen, a rigorous study of its successful managers, Laszlo Bock, the leader of the study stated:

“In the Google context, we’d always believed that to be a manager, particularly on the engineering side, you need to be as deep or deeper a technical expert than the people who work for you…It turns out that that’s absolutely the least important thing. It’s important, but pales in comparison. Much more important is just making that connection and being accessible.” (italics mine)

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David Brooks on Connection

Some years ago I had the good fortune to meet New York Times columnist David Brooks for lunch.  This was back in the days when he was writing for The Weekly Standard and contributing articles to The  Atlantic.  I admire David and his work.  He’s frequently an island of reason and moderation amidst an ocean of extremist media pundits. And if you’re interested in connection, David Brooks is a writer you’ll want to follow. Check out David’s latest articles related to connection: The New York Times column entitled “Amy Chua is a Wimp” and  the New Yorker article entitled “Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of life.”

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How Solitude Shapes Great Leaders

Take time to read this thoughtful speech entitled Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz given to this year’s plebe class at West Point. He describes how great leaders develop the courage of their convictions, which includes moral courage. Reflection, time alone with one’s thoughts, interactions with trusted friends and reading great books, as Deresiewicz says, are part of the mix.  What he didn’t adequately include is the impact of one’s experiences in life including one’s family of origin and periods of adversity and suffering that breed humility.  Despite its shortcomings, it’s a fine speech and well worth taking time to read.

Many thanks to David Books of The New York Times for bringing this thoughtful speech to my attention.  Brook’s recognized Deresiewicz’s speech as one of the best pieces of long journalism written in 2010.

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“Interpersonal Connectedness” One Factor in Metric to Replace GDP

There is a movement to replace GDP as a statistical measure of national success and well-being.  In “The Rise and Fall of GDP,” that appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Jon Gertner describes this effort.  Gertner writes about the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) developing a “key national indicators” system that will be available online. (Last year I spoke at the GAO’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. about The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage.) The article goes on to say that “interpersonal connectedness” is one of the components being considered.

Including connection as a component in a measure of national success would be wise.  What’s measured is what gets done.  David Brooks, also of The New York Times, effectively supports my view.  He argued in “The Limits of Policy,” that it would be wise for government leaders to “try to use policy to strengthen relationships.”

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More Evidence: Trust and Connection=Life, Distrust and Isolation=Death

Trust increases when people feel a sense of connection to one another. Strength of connection and trust develop over the time.  This happens as people interact and get to know one another increasing each person’s credibility and reliability in the eyes of the other, and as intimacy develops. Several studies support that this connection that develops trust is the most or among the most significant factors affecting the performance of organizations.

Parker Palmer, the Quaker writer and educational thought leader, told me about the book entitled Trust in Schools by Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider. Bryk and Schneider found that far and away the most powerful factor affecting school improvement during the 1990’s in Chicago was “relational trust.” Money, governance, curriculum, etc. were nowhere close to affecting educational outcomes as compared to relational trust (Tony Bryk is now the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning.)

I learned about two additional studies related to connection and trust from the writings of Dov Seidman, the founder and CEO of LRN.

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Sandra Bullock: Wishing Her Well

David Brooks asks the question in his New York Times column entitled, “The Sandra Bullock Trade,” if you were in Sandra Bullock’s shoes and could somehow choose between winning an Oscar for best actress or having a strong, supportive marriage, which would you select?  He goes on to describe why you should select the strong, supportive marriage and then describes what I refer to as the force of connection, including how it affects so much in our lives from happiness to the productivity of nations.

Thanks to an introduction from David Bradley, owner of The Atlantic, David and met for lunch in Washington D.C. some years ago.   We discussed my ideas on the force of connection and my concern that the decline of connection in market democracies was having a detrimental effect on well-being and economic productivity.  A few years later I wrote about it in The Connection Culture: A New Source of Competitive Advantage that was published by changethis.com.

My heart goes out to Sandra Bullock. I’ve always liked her as an actress and she seems like a terrific person. In an earlier post , I heaped praise on Bullock’s tour-de-force performance in The Blind Side.  Watching her acceptance speech for best actress at the Academy Awards, then, I was surprised to see her remarks and demeanor seemed bittersweet.  Of course, at that time, I was not aware that her husband has been, as David says, “an adulterous jerk.”   In hindsight, it would appear that she was struggling, as any of us would, to make it through a difficult season in her life.  My hope is that Ms. Bullock has a group of close loving family members and friends who can help her through this.  That’s the most important benefit of connection in my opinion.  It helps us get through the inevitable difficult seasons in life, a topic I wrote about from personal experience in Alone No Longer.

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Culture, Not Who Pays, Is Real Problem in Healthcare

The New York Times columnist David Brooks just came out with his Sidney Awards for the best magazine essays in 2009.  I always read them because Brooks is among the very best writers/thinkers in journalism today.  One of the award winners is “The Cost Conundrum” by Atul Gwande, the surgeon, author and MacArthur genius award recipient.  Brooks describes Gwande’s essay as the most influential essay written this year.  I highly recommend that you take the time to read it.

What I found especially interesting in Gwande’s essay is that he concludes that culture — or more specifically, the values of doctors — is at the heart of America’s heathcare cost crisis rather than who pays the costs.  Gwande takes us to McAllen, Texas where in 2006, Medicare spent nearly $15,000 per enrollee, twice the national average, but achieved no better than average quality of care.  Like a good investigative reporter he roots out the truth by conducting qualitative interviews and looking into quantitative data.  He discovers that the average doctor in McAllen orders more procedures than the average doctor in America.  Upon further investigation he learns that in towns like McAllen it’s a handful of doctors who drive up the cost per patient by ordering unnecessary procedures. He explains how these doctors benefit financially from ordering unnecessary procedures. The financial benefits come in the form kickbacks to admit patients to hospitals and revenue to partnerships of physicians who own diagnostic equipment such as MRI and CT-scans.  He sums it up this way:

“When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen–and the almost threefold difference in the cost of care–you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine.  Somewhere in the United States at this moment, a patient with chest pain, or a tumor, or a cough is seeing a doctor.  And the damning question we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue.”

In some ways, this is a matter of identity.

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Obama Leads Learning Organization

In this morning’s New York Times, David Brooks in his column entitled “The Analytic Mode,” argues that President Obama leads a learning organization.  I completely agree.  In the past I’ve argued that President Obama is an intentional connector in part because he is a bridge builder who accords respect to his political opponents and because he solicits the ideas and opinions of his advisors then considers them before making decisions.  This leadership approach creates Connection Cultures that keep members of his administration feeling connected so that they give their best efforts, align their behavior with organizational goals and take the risk to communicate information, especially information the president may not want to hear but needs to hears. President Obama might also be described as an “integrative thinker” who employs a “design thinking” approach.  What do you think?

Here are links to resources that will help you consider the wisdom of President Obama’s approach in general and specifically with respect to the decision to commit additional troops to Afghanistan.

David Brook’s NY Times column entitled  “The Analtytic Mode”

Speech I recently gave at Google on Connection Cultures and the “The Force of Connection”

Dean Roger Martin of The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management on the Integrative Thinker and Design Thinking

For some perspective on a president’s decision to increase troops, listen to this Bill Moyer’s program that includes taped conversations President Johnson had with his advisors prior to committing troops to Vietnam.