Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World

Hospitals like Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingson, New Jersey and New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City have added the study of literature into residency programs. This broader approach to medicine has made residents into better doctors by encouraging fresh thinking, fostering greater empathy, and lowering of barriers between doctors and patients.

According to this New York Times article, more and more schools over the last fifteen years have included the reading of Virginia Woolf and Leo Tolstoy in medical school. They call it “narrative medicine.” But this is the first time hospitals are trying this approach in residency programs.

For example, for over a year at Saint Barnabus Medical Center, a doctor named Richard S. Panush has been incorporating literary discussions into his internal medicine residents’ daily rounds. This includes a daily routine in which he and his colleagues discuss poetry, short stories, and essays with their residents in the context of their patients. As a result, they
found significantly better scores on patient evaluations of residents and of quality of life.

Another example: Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons found that doctors interacting with literature were more willing to adopt another person’s perspective, sometimes after just four one-hour workshops.

A second-year resident at Saint Barnabas, Dr. Benjamin Kaplan, had this to say about the effects of the program on his fellow residents, “Their management of patients changed. They remembered to do things that I don’t think they would have otherwise done, like always talking to the family, gently touching patients, and continually explaining the course of treatment and what the doctors are thinking so patients know.”

If “narrative medicine” can make better doctors, perhaps “narrative management” can make you and your staff better business people too. The first book that I’d recommend is If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit by Brenda Ueland. If you substitute the verb for whatever you do (for example, “program”) for the word “write,” you’ll see how it can apply. I am willing to bet that it will help you build a better business, so check it out.

Rap Reiplinger, a famous comedian from Hawaii, created a popular radio sketch involving a room service attendant who repeatedly confirms a hotel guest’s dinner order: “You sure? Positive? You sure you sure?” It turns out, we’re not sure we’re sure according to the classic 1973 study by Goethals and Reckman.In the study, researchers invited high schoolers to discuss their opinions on an issue—in this case, school segregation and whether bussing would help racial integration. Some time later, study participants returned for another discussion. This time, however, they were divided into pro and con groups. Inside each separated groups, Goethals and Reckman placed a “confederate,” a person armed with arguments for the opposing viewpoint. The goal was to reverse the groups’ outlook.In the end, both confederates successfully reversed the groups’ opinions. What’s more, the people in the groups couldn’t accurately recall their original position. Many claimed their previous beliefs were less definite than researchers originally observed. Bussing supporters even thought they were against the issue from the beginning—this was not true at all.An article called “Our Secret Attitude Changes” provides several explanations if this phenomenon.

 
1. Participants didn’t anticipate being persuaded, thus they weren’t aware that they were changing their own positions. When asked about their old beliefs, they simply thought of their current ones.

  

2. In order to ease the conflict between their old and new perspectives, study subjects unconsciously integrated the two, so that it made sense.

  

3. The high school participants may not have been emotionally invested in the bussing issue.
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As a small business owner, you need to understand how technology is changing the customer experience. The folks at Razorfish wrote a report called “FEED: The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report” to help people understand these change and to explore the coming trends.

According to Razorfish, “…today’s consumer is more technically adept, open for experimentation and—most importantly—active than ever before.” Its recommendations include:

1. “Act more like publishers, entertainment companies, or even party planners, than advertisers.”
2. “Create content that engages and ‘reaches’ consumers across channels, provide valuable services over mere advertising, and master an increasingly complicated and expansive content distribution model.”
3. “Rethink the way they create relationships (or conversations) with consumers before it’s too late.”

The report also examines the impact of widgets, RSS feeds, “advertising as a service,” Twitter, online video, iPhones, and new design standards. In short, this is something you should read to stay on top of Web technology and digital content. You can get it before your competitor by clicking here.

One of the Psychology Today blogs provided three great tips to combating procrastination in a posting called “3 Tips to Reduce Procrastination.” Here’s my interpretation of the posting.

1. Just get started. Research shows that starting a task changes our perceptions of that task. If you wait for the perfect time, you might never get started–indeed, waiting for the perfect time might be the start of procrastination.
2. Suck it up. Don’t chase after good feelings. Every task has its unpleasant characteristics. You just have to gut through them. I’ve found that when I just get started and suck it up the task usually becomes satisfying and procrastination goes away.
3. Be honest with yourself. Don’t trick yourself into thinking that you work better under better conditions and put off the task until those condition exist. When you recognize this self-deception, remind yourself of steps 1 and 2.

These tips are great for everyday productivity if you have a tendency to procrastinate, but there are also some useful lessons for small businesses–especially in these economic times. If you have a great product, don’t procrastinate by obsessing about every imperfection and try to make the perfect product.

Instead, get your company going, don’t be afraid to meet the challenges when they arise, and get into the market. You can improve upon the specifics as you go. If we had waited for the perfect Macintosh, we would have never shipped. To paraphrase Bobby McFerrin, “Don’t worry, be crappy.”

One of my recent blog posts, “Is Face-to-Face Communications Always the Way to Go?,” debated the use of email communication versus face-to-face interaction. Here’s something else to think about: People tell more lies when using email than pen and paper. The Well blog of the New York Times contained a post called “E-Mails and Lies” that examines this phenomenon.In this article, blog author Tara Parker-Pope highlighted research from Rutgers and DePaul Universities, which found that e-mail is a more likely conduit for deception than pen-and-paper communication. The study took forty-eight graduate students. Each was told they had $89 to divide between themselves and another fictional person who believed the money was between $5 and $100. Using either e-mail or pen and paper, the students shared how much money they had and how much the other party would receive.The results:

• Subjects using email lied more than 92 percent of the time. Subjects using pen and paper lied less than 64 percent.
• E-mailers gave an average of $29 to the other party compared to the writers’ average of $34.
• On average, e-mailers claimed to have a total of $56. The writers averaged $67. read more

Scott Kirsner spent the last three years immersed in the movie industry in order to write a book called Inventing the Movies: Hollywood’s Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. He talked with directors like Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron, editors, cinematographers, studio chiefs, producers, tech companies that sell technology into Hollywood, and even actors with an interest in new technology like Morgan Freeman. He discovered that Hollywood serves as a great case study for how any long-established, successful, and self-satisfied industry responds to new technologies and new ideas.

Even when a new idea seems to have obvious merit, and even when its inventor can make a strong case for it, 95 percent of the people involved in the industry fight the new idea with all their energy for as long as they possibly can until they realize it has the potential to grow their business in surprising ways. Case in point: within a decade of Hollywood’s fight against the Betamax video recorder, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, the studios were earning more from home video business than they were from ticket sales.

Here are five movies–all of which you’ve likely seen–that has an important back-story that innovators can learn from.

• Sometime technology needs to be just-good-enough, not perfect. The Jazz Singer will forever be remembered as Hollywood’s first talkie – even though it wasn’t among the first dozen to try to sync up the pictures on the screen with a soundtrack. But the technology that Warner Brothers banked on, developed at AT&T’s Bell Labs, was better than what came before it. It was just good enough to turn The Jazz Singer into a hit–especially combined with a performance from Al Jolson that practically leapt off the screen. The system still relied on phonograph records that could scratch. If the film broke and needed to be spliced back together, the entire movie would veer out of sync. The Warner Bros/AT&T technology was just good enough to start the sound revolution in Hollywood, though it didn’t endure for very long as a standard. Five years after The Jazz Singer, even Warner Bros. had switched over to a technology that more reliably linked the audio with the visuals.

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As a small business owner, you’re probably concerned about what your customers think of you, and many of you have done, or would like to do, customer surveys. A buddy of mine, Dave Wanetick, shared some interesting thoughts about customer surveys. He is the managing director of IncreMental Advantage.

• Accurate reads on customer thoughts are nearly impossible. Responses can be swayed by just one word or even the order in which the questions are asked. Some have compared trying to read customer sentiments to the soothsayers of yesteryear who tried to divine meaning from chicken entrails. Consider how one word conjures up drastically different recollections in this real-world exchange:

  Lawyer to Witness: How fast was the car traveling before it ran into a telephone pole?

  Witness: Forty-five miles per hour.

  Lawyer to Witness: How fast was the car traveling before it smashed into the telephone pole?

  Witness: Sixty-five miles per hour.

• Depending on who is responding to the survey and in what setting, the results can change. Many survey respondents, for example, are self-selecting, which skews the results. Sometimes asking the same people the same question at different times of the day—for example, before or after a meal—will yield different responses.

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An age-old question that small business owners face all the time is, “Why do intelligent people make stupid choices?” Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior examines the reasons for such behavior and provides the ways people can avoid dumb decisions. This an interview with one of the book’s authors, Ori Brafman.

• Question: Cutting to the chase, why do smart people do dumb things?

  Answer: We are all affected by psychological forces that trigger irrational behavior. The interesting thing is that we make irrational decisions without ever realizing it. One of the stories we look at is the case of Captain Jacob Van Zanten, a brilliant pilot who was the head of safety at KLM airlines. He was so highly regarded by his colleagues that few felt comfortable criticizing him. But being smart and talented doesn’t preclude us from making bad decisions.

  When Van Zanten’s flight was redirected, he had to land his plane in a small island. Van Zanten was falling behind schedule, and he began feeling antsy about getting back in the air. His fear of losing time got the best of him. He hurried his plane down the runway, never validating whether he was clear to go.

  Unfortunately, Van Zanten’s plane collided with another aircraft that was parked on the runway, leading to the largest airplane collision disaster in aviation history. Part of the problem is that Van Zanten was smart—he trusted in himself too much and neglected to question himself or take others’ criticism to heart.

• Question: Knowing what you know about first impressions, how should companies conduct job interviews?

  Answer: Job interviews are really tricky. The most surprising element of researching Sway was finding out just how tricky interviews are. It turns out that most job interviews are terrible predictors of actual performance. The reason is that we form an opinion of a candidate and then ignore evidence that contradicts that initial impression.

  Because we’re so likely to misdiagnose, a much better alternative to the normal job interview is to prepare pre-scripted questions that focus on a candidate’s actual experience. Questions like “Where do you see yourself five years from now?” and “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” aren’t very useful. Instead, focus on specifics. Say you’re hiring a web designer. Does her portfolio match the style you’re looking for? Is she up to date with her knowledge of web standards? What’s her Dreamweaver skills? It’s assessing those on-the-job skills that helps hiring managers stay on focus and not make irrational decisions based on initial gut reactions.

• Question: How should coaches select teams?

  Answer: They should focus on similar types of questions as in a job interview. It’s all about distinguishing between the relevant and irrelevant data. NBA coaches, for example, give more playing time to players who were high draft picks, instead of paying attention to how they actually perform on the court.

  We all have a very strange relationship with data: We ignore it when it doesn’t match up with our perception.

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