How to fight homeostasis and initiate change

This is the sixth newsletter of Book Lovers sent on September 13, 2015, asking how to change when change is hard. And highlighting that to initiate change, you first need to be open to change and to stay flexible. This edition features the Heath brothers (Switch), JD Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) & Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Don't miss the following letters:

"Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
 -- George Bernard Shaw

Last week, we talked about the permanent war between Old and New. We were talking about resistance, the need of understanding and the unstoppable wave of change.

My key takeaway: we should try to acknowledge change and protect what is dear to our heart. And the best way to do it, might be to understand the new wave and to find a way to integrate some of the old parts in the new reality.

And this week I witness something slightly different: if the outer world is a world of chaos, your inner world always try to find equilibrium, which serious people call homeostasis, the property of a system in which variables are regulated so that internal conditions remain stable.
 

So how can we fight homeostasis? 

How can we to change things when change is hard? This is exactly what Dan & Chip Heath, two brothers, tried to figure out in their book Switch (Dan previously worked as a researcher and case writer for Harvard Business School, Chip is still working as researcher and professor at Stanford School of Business).

First of all, let’s borrow an image from the Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, psychologist at University of Virginia. Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader.

But the Heath brothers, using this image remind us that “the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. [..] The weakness of the Elephant, our emotional and instinctive side is clear: It’s lazy and skittish, often looking for the quick payoff (ice cream cone) over the long-term payoff (being thin). [...] The Rider’s strength is the opposite: its ability to think long-term, to plan, to think beyond the moment”.

Interesting image, but nothing really new, right?

But here comes the interesting part: “the Elephant also has enormous strengths and the Rider crippling weakness. Emotion is the Elephant’s turf -- love and compassion and sympathy and loyalty. That fierce instinct you have to protect your kids against harm -- that’s the Elephant. That spine-stiffening you feel when you need to stand up for yourself -- that’s the Elephant.
And even more important: the Elephant is the one who gets things done. This energy and drive is the mirror image of the Rider’s great weakness: The Rider overanalyze and overthink things (agonizing for twenty minutes about what to eat, brainstorming for hours but never making a decision or a things done).”

They say: if you want to change things you’ve got to appeal to both.

So how can we appeal to both?

In the book, they share a very interesting framework, full of studies, stories and actionable tips.
They show us that

1. what looks like resistance is often lack of clarity and show us how to direct The Rider (follow the bright spots, script the critical moves, point to destination)

2. it's exhausting trying to keep an elephant in line and show us how to motivate The Elephant (find the feeling, shrink the change, grow your people)

3. what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem and how to shape The Path (tweak the environment, build habits, rally the herd).

I cannot but invite you to buy this wonderful books that will have a meaningful impact on your life. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back (or at least a free coffee to talk about it ;)).

And before going to my curation of the weekly best articles, let me share with you something that I discovered BEYOND this wonderful book.

This week, I’ve bought a book that I wouldn’t have done without the suggestion of someone I value. I’ve bought the book The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, which is the story of Holden Caulfield, a sixteen-year-old boy just expelled from prep school.

Why wouldn’t have bought it?

1. the language is very familiar, full of slangs & spoken pauses
2. the narrator is very cynical
3. the main themes are angst, alienation and teenage rebellion

Three things I don’t enjoy that much.

But in culture you sometimes have to follow someone else advice to expand your horizon.

And I’m really glad I did it, because this is a truly wonderful book (you should buy it as well - FR version). We are following his exact thought process that sounds legit. And the character makes very witty observations such as:

• “If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?”
• “People always clap for the wrong reasons.”
• “It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”
• “I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

and asks wonderful questions such as:

• "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?"

Why do I tell you all of that? Because it made me realize that we need to be flexible enough to allow changes in our system of preferences even if we are totally satisfied with it.

André Comte Sponville, in his latest book “C’est chose tendre que la vie“ (don’t ask me to translate it, I just can’t!), shares an anecdote that I loved. As he was visiting Claude Lévi-Strauss, he asked him how he was doing. Lévi-Strauss answered “I have more and more tastes and less and less talent”.

What if we need not to have that much established tastes?

2. Weekly #MustRead articles

1. In How Making Time for Books Made Me Feel Less Busy (HBR), Hugh McGuire explains us why we don’t find time to read (hints: a. social media = new information = dopamine > food & sex! >> reading / b. jumping from one thing to the next makes us too tired to read) & gives us his tips that make him read again.

2. Chris Holmberg in The Most Dangerous Leadership Traps — and the 15-Minute Daily Practice That Will Save You (Firstround Review) invites us to spend 15 minutes a day in reflection to review candidly the events of the previous day and make plans for the one coming up. Because we can’t afford to have low learning efficiency.

3. In The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies(HBR), Sarah Green Carmichael shows with considerable evidence that overwork is not just neutral:  it hurts us and the companies we work for.
 

If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to someone you like.And start the conversation by replying to this email or by sending my a quick tweet:@willybraun

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.
Warm regards, 
Willy

How to Behave in a Changing World?

This is the fifth newsletter of Book Lovers sent on September 6, 2015, raising the not-so-easy question of how to behave in a changing world. It also reminds us not to trust blindly the great thinkers, thanks to a contribution of @mathieudaix. This edition of the newsletter features Alessandro Baricco & Friedrich Nietzsche

Don't miss the following letters:

1. Old vs new

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty."  — Maya Angelou

There is an endless war in the cultural field between the Ancients and the Moderns: the former believe they’ve reached the apex of human achievement and view any divergence as a decline, the later believe in an endless course of progress and feel an urge for a wind of change, more adapted to the “changing world“.
Eventually, after the shift of paradigm, the moderns become the ancients and the story keeps on indefinitely.

That is also our everyday life in the tech industry: the new world of startups wants to overhaul the old economic world.

But is NEW always better? I doubt it.
Is NEW something we can fight? I doubt it too.
So what should we do when we don’t believe in the virtue of one gigantic wave of new?

We can complain.
We can be resigned.
We can try to build an alternative.
Or we can try to acknowledge change and protect what is dear to our heart. And the best way to do it, might be to understand the new wave and to find a way tointegrate some of the old parts in the new reality.
 
If this topic is appealing to you, I highly recommend the book The Barbarians (Les Barbares), written by Alessandro Baricco. He tries to explain what most intellectuals consider as a “cultural apocalypse“ where our civilized culture is being sacked by “predators with no culture or history“.

He describes our today's mutation as “a sort of mental and architectural restructuring“ where there is a shift of the idea of experience.

How can we understand this restructuring? How should we act? You need to study the new animals and to understand their new social rules, he says.

If you are sometimes wondering whether we are at the top of the cultural hill or just climbing, if you don’t know what are the inner forces of the mutation, just read the books.
 
A quick teasing of the new rules revealed by the author :
1. Technological innovations that shatters the privilege of a caste, making a form of action possible for a new population.
2. Commercial bliss taking up residence in the expanded playing fields.
3. Spectacularity as the only untouchable value.
4. The adoption of a modern language as the fundamental language of all experience, as the precondition for any occurrence.
5. Simplification, superficiality, speed, middlingness.

2. The usurpation of objectivity

This second part is a contribution Mathieu Daix (@mathieudaix), one of my business partner & long time friend. He invites us to remember not to trust the Great Thinkers by default and to remind ourselves that rationality might be the worst enemy of Honesty.

Mathieu Daix: 

In front of a new dish, a painting or the last Jeff Koon’s giant marble crocodile, our teachers invite the students to say a brief and dry “I like / don’t like it“ instead of a lyrical and passionate “It’s sooooooo beautifuuuuuuul!!!!“ or “aaargh it’s disgustiiiiing!!!!!“
Why? Because it opens the necessary door to subjectivity. It forces us to explore why we like it while our mother doesn't. We all like to believe our thoughts are the Truth, but we learn to see that as an usurpation of objectivity. 
 
Well, Friedrich noticed another usurpation of objectivity. And when Friedrich says something, it’s loud and clear. M. Nietzsche writes that the wise and well-educated philosophers, the same who asked us to say  “I think“ and “I like“ instead of “it is“ are damned liars. Indeed, they spend their life building thinking systems dressed with the veil of universality, rationality and objectivity. They always say “it is“ and never “I think“. Worst, philosophers, instead of working on the issues of the world are actually working on their own issues, never admitting and writing down “I think“.
 
All thoughts are confessions. 
 
Nietzsche simply warns us about something that philosophers and of all us keep doing: we use rational thinking not to build universal models and concepts but only to justify our deep believes and feelings. Well, that’s not bad in itself, but it asks us integrity, I mean saying “I think“ instead of “it is“. Your grandma was right. 

Here is Nietzsche writing:
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself: "What morality do they (or does he) aim at?" Accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and as SUCH, attempts to philosophize. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise—"better," if you will; there there may really be such a thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind of small, independent clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, WITHOUT the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part therein. The actual "interests" of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction—in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not CHARACTERISED by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS,—that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other. 
-- Beyond good and evil, Nietzsche

3. Weekly #MustRead articles

1.  Walter Frick shows us that we humans need to trust thinking machines and gives us tips to manage it in When Your Boss Wears Metal Pants (HBR)
 
2. In Rethinking work (NYT), Barry Schwartz wonders “in the face of longstanding evidence that routinization and an overemphasis on pay lead to worse performance in the workplace, why have we continued to tolerate and even embrace that approach to work?“ 
 
3. In « Comment faire d’une théorie inefficace un phénomène de mode en entreprise » - How to make a inefficient theory a corporate phenomenon? (HBR France), Ludovic François & Romain Zerbib show us why dubious theories can be appealing:
- managers lack time -> they look for simplicity,
- managers are rational beings -> they look for data-driven frameworks,
- managers are in a quest for new -> they look for modern theories,
- managers are sheeplike -> they are likely to follow what others do
- managers are sensible to experts -> they are likely to follow what experts says.

If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to someone you like.
And start the conversation by replying to this email or by sending my a quick tweet:@willybraun

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.
Warm regards, 
Willy