Back to Booth

Nicholas Epley: Thanks all of you for coming to my session today. I really appreciate it. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna describe to you just a little bit of a class that I teach to my MBA students. Some of you have been in it. Most of you have not. The class is called Designing a Good Life, and it does what I think any good class at least is intended to do, or at least that’s my intent of the class. And that is it encourages students to stop and pause a minute and reflect on what it is that they’re here getting their MBA for. Why is it that you’re here? Why are you taking all of these classes? Why are you investing all of this time and effort into achieving a degree from us?

Ultimately it’s, of course, to achieve some goal later in life. You take classes, you come here, you spend all this money, you put all this effort into it because you wanna achieve some goal, because you’re trying to achieve some desirable life down the road, otherwise this would be a meaningless waste of time. And so it naturally then raises the question of what is education for? Why are you here? Why are you in my class? Why are you getting an MBA? What are you trying to do in your own job? What do you want out of your life when you actually grow up? As I get older, I have learned that you never really feel like you’ve grown up. What do you want out of your life?

Well, my class is based on the assumption that all of us want basically the same kind of things out of our life. That is that we want to live a good life. A good life not in a simple sense of that term, but in a sophisticated, nuanced sense of that term. In particular, what I assume is that you and me, and all of my students as well, you wanna live a good life. A good life in three senses of the term. First, you’d like to do well in life. Good in the sense of succeeding. You’d like to be successful. You’re all working in business, I’m teaching students who get MBAs.

And so what does success look like in the business world? Well, Milton Friedman knew what success looked like in the business world; it meant money. He once wrote, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business, to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” That is, all of you wanna succeed. You’d like to make some money. Nobody signs up to work in order to be in the poorhouse.

But, of course, that’s not the only thing that we mean by doing well in life. It’s not the only goal that we have. How do we know? Well, every year I ask my students this. Essentially, I ask them this question up here, which is actually a measure that’s taken from a psychopathy scale, and the question is this one: making a lot of money is my most important goal. Is that what students think of by success? Is that your most important goal?

What do my students say? Mostly they say no, that’s not my most important goal. So this was from one particular year. We’ve got about 80 percent of students disagreeing with this in one way or another, 16.5 percent agreeing with this slightly, not a single person out of about 200 students agreed with this strongly. That is, we all know this as well. We all understand that the things we want out of our lives are so multifaceted, and money’s one thing, but it’s not the only thing.

Friedman knew this as well. Friedman knew that we want more than just money out of our lives, or even out of our business, because the famous second half of his quote suggests another motivation, that we have another sense of what it means to live a good life, and that is that we want to be good. And I assume that in your life, you not just wanna do well, but you also wanna do it in a way that you can be proud of, that is: you wanna be ethical. You wanna do things that leave a positive impact on the world that’s arguably bigger than you in some way.

What do we mean by being good? What do we mean by being ethical? If you take a philosophy class, you’ll spend a whole semester mired in this question. Psychologically, it’s actually not that hard. What do most of us mean when we talk about ethics or being good? We mean being prosocial. All ethics really involves sociality in one way or another. They deal with how we treat other people. Are we treating other people fairly, kindly? Are we being honest or dishonest? Are we helping other people or are we harming other people? All of the behaviors that have some ethical component to them have a social component to them.

And so when we talk about ethics, we mean being social. The Dalai Lama suggested that this in fact is sort of the core of our being. This is what we’re designed to do. “Our prime purpose in this life,” he argued, “is to help others, and if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” Friedman seemed to agree with this as well because the famous, often overlooked . . . the second part of his famous quote that’s often overlooked also suggests this as well. “So long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” That is, Milton Friedman assumed that you are running a business that was already good, and once you are already ethical, once that was your foundation, then beyond that, your primary goal was to be profitable.
But he did that only because he had already assumed another motive, and that was to be good. And it turns out there’s nothing unusual about the Dalai Lama or Milton Friedman. We seem to come into the world somewhat programmed to be good, to be someone ethical, to help others. You can see this even when you look at our little guys, our little toddlers. Here’s a video from a former colleague of mine at Harvard, Felix Warneken, who studies spontaneous helping in infants. He puts little kids, in this case, a little toddler, just a touch under two, in a situation where they’re given a chance to help. So what you’re gonna see on this video is you’re gonna see this little boy playing here in the middle of the room. The experimenter is off to the right of this video, and she is gonna accidentally drop a can that’s gonna roll over and fall on to the floor. Watch what the child does.

Woman: In there. Put that one here.

(child mumbles)

And then that’s for me.

(crowd laughs)

Put that here.

(mumbles) We’re put that here.

(child mumbles)

Put that right there, and then here’s another one, see, these are the same size. You can put that here, and—

Nicholas Epley: And every time I watch this video I think I gotta do more experiments with little kids.

(students laugh)

And so we all come into the world, it seems, wired, a little bit with self-interest, of course, but also with an interest in others, and you can see this surprising degree to which we are social, to which we care about others, showing up in rather unusual and unexpected places, such as in times of war. So these data here are some of the most amazing that I’ve come across in my two decades as a behavioral scientist. These data come from a book written by Lieutenant Dave Grossman, which I recommend to you, despite the title, which sounds a little grizzling. What Grossman studies is how soldiers kill in battle, and what he finds time and time again when you look at the data is that they have a shockingly hard time killing, even when their lives are on the line.

At times of war, when you dehumanize the opposition, people still have a shockingly hard time killing other people. He estimates, if you look at actually the firing rates in war, he estimates there were only 15 to 20 percent of soldiers in World War II were even able to discharge their weapon. You would go to foxholes in Europe and find gun after gun after gun that had never been fired, held by a soldier who just couldn’t pull the trigger. When left at their own, the great majority of individual combatants appeared to have been unable or unwilling to kill, Grossman finds. They estimate about 5 percent of soldiers in World War I were responsible for about 95 percent of the killing. Once they were actually shooting, they had a hard time killing, so you know, given the quality of a gun, and how far you are away of the enemy, how far you are away from the enemy, you know what the kill rate ought to be, how many people ought to die in a given minute in battle, and what you find is that in actual battles, people die at much slower rates than you would expect. Largely because people tend to shoot over the opposition’s head.

So in the Civil War, for instance, the soldiers would stand about 30 to 40 yards apart from each other, using a musket that could hit a pie plate at 75 yards, and they would spend hours firing over each other’s heads. That’s essentially what would happen. You see shockingly low kill rates given the quality of the guns that people were using. Soldiers are now trained to kill. That is, the ethical principle that we all have hardwired in us not to harm somebody else is something that actually has to be taught out of a soldier, and now our armed forces know how to do this.

Indeed, Grossman wrote, “From a psychological perspective, the history of warfare can be viewed as a series of successively more effective tactical “and mechanical mechanisms to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing other human beings, even when defined as the enemy.” Our natural inclination often toward others, despite what you might have been told in economics, when you look at actual human behavior, is to be much nicer to other people than you might imagine. We care about others, and our automatic inclination often is to help others.
And finally, I assume that you wanna live a good life in this third sense of the term as well, that is, you wanna feel good. You wanna be happy. You wanna feel good about what you’re doing. You wanna be happy in general. This is not a new notion. Again, Aristotle, centuries ago, wrote that “happiness is at once the best and noblest and the pleasantest of things.” Our Founding Fathers might have quibbled with his grammar, but they didn’t quibble with Aristotle’s sentiments when they wrote “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” into our Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right.
Alexander Pope suggested that this is really the only thing that we’re striving for, that happiness is our being’s end and aim. Indeed, you can think of almost any choice that you make as an implicit prediction, at least, of what will make me happy down the road. I’m doing this because I presume the outcome will be more positive than if I do something else. And Blaise Pascal suggested that there aren’t any exceptions to this. “All men seek happiness,” he wrote, “there are no exceptions.” Presumably, if he was writing today, he would include women in this mix as well. We don’t think there are any gender differences on this. Both men and women want to be happy.

And so this naturally raises the question, and if these are the three things we want out of our lives: we wanna succeed in a way that we can be proud of, doing things ethically, in a way that makes us feel happy. Can we get all this stuff? It’s a pretty lofty wish list. Mick Jagger once sang that “you can’t always get what you want, but you get what you need.” Can we, in this case, get everything we want? Are these goals aligned with each other, or do they compete in some powerful way? Well, this is ultimately just an empirical question. We need to look at the data. But it raises a couple of questions.

First, are the first two goals aligned with each other? That is, does doing good, does being good in business generally lead to doing well, to success? Does ethics pay? So in my class I actually spend a lot of time on this. You might think that there’s not an argument you need to make; nevertheless, it is one I think you need to make, and I think it’s one where you need to look at the data, and the data on this actually are super clear. That, over time, ethics certainly does pay in business. The key reason is because treating other people well is what you need in order to create a sustainable business over the long haul. It doesn’t necessarily predict short-run profits, but it predicts sustainability, and for obvious reasons. Remember, all ethics are social. They deal with how we treat other people. Here’s a summary of, basically, three hours of data that I show to the class, summarizes this well. Gill writes, “Well-treated employees show up happier and more dedicated to company success. They steal less and work harder. Customers who receive what was promised to them and who treated with respect will return more frequently for more business and recommend more friends to patronize the business. Anyone who needs a study to prove these common sense observations about the impact of good ethics on good business is beyond help.”

(students laugh)

We do spend some time helping our students by showing them data that actually tests whether this is true or not, and how it is. The one thing that I will show you—I won’t go through all that data—I will show you that these effects are big enough that you can actually make money on it. That is, you can trade on good ethics and business. I’m not doing this work, but certainly lots of other people are.
OK, I don’t wanna spend more time talking about this. Now what I wanna spend the rest of the time talking about is actually the link between these last two things. Most of the time I spend in my class is actually focused on this second thing. What would you do to create an organization that helps people like all of us actually be good? How would you design or construct a business that helps people who are prone to unethical lapses but who generally would like to be good? How do you design an organization that helps us be good?

I’ll talk about that just very briefly at the end, but I don’t wanna spend more time on it at the moment. Instead what I wanna talk about is the link between the second and third goal. Does doing good feel good? Now, some have suggested that, yes, this is obvious. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.” This is essentially a hypothesis, right, we can treat this as an empirical question. But I think all of us also resonate a little bit with this side as well. That yeah, yeah, yeah, it feels good to be good. That’s all nice and great, but it feels good to be naughty sometimes too, doesn’t it? Just a little bit.

So which is it, does doing good actually lead to feeling good, or not? And perhaps, when does it? Well, we can consult a handful of different data points to look at this. This is really a question about what is it that leads to happiness. And we can go back to Milton Friedman here, who suggested that, really, businesses are existent in order to make people money. People in business are pursuing money, and so we can ask a very simple question about whether this thing that we all spend lots of time pursuing actually is one of the things that brings us happiness. Does money in fact bring us happiness? And if not, if it doesn’t or if it does, then how does it do compared to other things that we might pursue?

I’ll show you a little bit of data on this. These results I’m gonna show you in just a moment come from a massive survey that Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton—both Nobel Prize winners in economics, Danny Kahneman, a psychologist, Angus Deaton, a sociologist—data that they report from a Gallup poll of about half a million Americans, where they looked at the relationship between lots of different variables, including how much money you make, and a number of different measures of well-being, OK. So here are the measures of well-being on the right. They asked people to report how happy they were, how frequently they smiled on a given day, how much enjoyment they felt in life. Also, the inverse of this, essentially sadness. I’m gonna show you the inverse of this, so the percentage of people who report not feeling sad, so it’s at least on the same scale. The percent who report not feeling worry or sadness. The amount of stress you report feeling in your life. How stressful is your life? And, finally is this latter measure, which isn’t really a measure of mood. It’s a measure of social comparison. How well am I doing compared to others? That’s what that is. And what Kahneman and Deaton report in the graph that got lots of attention from this paper is the relationship between the amount of money that you make and these different variables. It’s a very simple question to look at in the data. Do people who make more money, are they happier?

Well, here’s what the data show. So down here on the bottom is how much money you make, annually, $10,000, 20, 40, 80, 160. And this is essentially how happy you report feeling, how positive you report feeling. Positivity and how little stress you report feeling. So higher numbers here just essentially indicate feeling more positive, OK. And so we can look at this one here, positive affect. This is how happy you report being, how frequently you enjoy smiling, and much enjoyment you report in your life. Does making more money increase positive affect? Numbers are right . . . yeah, hell yes, it does, of course! Jeez, it’s like a one-item IQ question. Of course making more money makes you happier! Anybody who says that money doesn’t buy some degree of happiness has never been poor before, has never stood in a breadline before. Yes, of course, making money makes you a little happier. That’s a no-brainer.

But notice, there’s an interesting feature to this line that’s been widely reported as well. It actually slopes off. It sort of stops rising at a fairly low amount, right at about the median of income level, actually, in the US at this time. Beyond $75,000, they found that they couldn’t actually detect increases in happiness that come from increasing amounts of money. So, yes, money buys happiness, but there are severe diminishing returns on it, and really the effect is that poverty is miserable. That’s the effect. Poverty is miserable, OK?

But notice that what we can do here is we can say, OK, this is what money does with happiness. We can also think about how much happiness money brings compared to other things that we could be spending our time doing, other things we could be doing in our lives. And Kahneman and Deaton surveyed people about lots of different things, and you can relate lots of these different attributes as well to happiness or to well-being and see what really is accounting for most variants in happiness.

So this is a less-well-known table from their paper, less widely discussed. What they did was they just created an index variable to index how much happiness comes from an increase in wealth, going from the bottom quartile of their data to the top quartile of their data. So this is an average increase of $58,000 in your income on year, which is a lot for the average American. And so this is just the regression coefficient, just the beta weight on this index variable of high versus low income. It’s 0.03, you see. It’s positive. It’s not huge, but it’s there for sure.

But now what you can do is you can take this index variable, going from the bottom quartile on this measure to the top quartile, you get an effect size out of that, and you can look at, well, what happens when you go to the bottom quartile to the top quartile on other variables that we might measure? And this allows you then to scale how much a fourfold increase in your wealth, the return you get on this on your happiness compared to other variables. So what they do then is they looked at a bunch of other variables too. You just create now a ratio of high income compared to these other variables. So when you create a ratio, obviously, the ratio here is one, and what you see here is, essentially, the percentage of the effect of going from the bottom quartile to the top quartile in wealth, that you get from going to the bottom to the top on these other measures as well.

So here, for instance, is age, OK. Age is a good one. Right, ’cause you can be young or you can be old. Bottom quartile on this versus top quartile. And you can see that getting older, age gives you about 80 percent of the value that a fourfold increase in your income does. You’ll be happy to know, everybody in this room who is, I believe, getting older—it’s a sad fact of life—that people tend to get happier and happier in life as they get older, not sadder. So that’s a nice thing. It gives you about 80 percent of a fourfold increase in your income. Whether you’re religious or not. The degree to which you’re religious actually is a bigger effect than a fourfold increase in your wealth. Oh, this is a good one, whether you’re getting surveyed on the weekend versus a weekday. Sad testament to the state of work these days, a slightly bigger effect than a fourfold increase in your happiness.

But notice, out of all these different attributes, what’s the really big effect? It’s being alone, feeling alone. Seven times bigger effect on your happiness, on positive affect, than the amount of money that you’re making. That is a crushing effect. Remember, ethics are all about sociality. How you’re connecting to others, whether you have meaningful, positive connections to others. If you wanna know how happy people are, it turns out asking about the quality of their social relations is a huge determinant of that. And we find this over and over and again in experiments. So here’s another way to look at this. You can ask, what makes the happiest people out there? What differentiates people in surveys who say they’re very happy from people who say they’re very unhappy? One way you can do this. Ed Diener and Marty Seligman did this some years ago, and what they found was that sociality was the key determinant, the quality of your social relations. So people who reported being very happy over here in the right column, report on the top line here having better relationships with close friends than those who are very unhappy here. They report having better family relationships, and also better romantic relationships over here than people who are very unhappy. Your peers, your friends, these people’s friends, also report that very unhappy people have poorer social relations than very happy people. And you can also see it in the time that they spend alone or with others. Very happy people tend to report spending less time alone than very unhappy people, and more time spent with family, friends, and romantic partners than time spent alone. As Diener and Seligman write, “No variable was sufficient for happiness, but good social relations were necessary.”

If you wanna know how happy people are, turns out two questions seem to account for the most variants on happiness measures. One is: How meaningful do you find your work to be? And second, asking questions about the quality of your social relations. Everybody in this room, I suspect, has a sense that when things are going badly in a close relationship with family, or friends, or romantic partners, when you’re in the midst of social conflict, those are tough times. Those are the hard times, the miserable times. And so we can then ask, go back to this question: Does doing good, does being ethical, does treating other people well lead people to feel good? And these data would suggest they ought to be positively related. Well, are they? Remember, all ethics are social, and so we can see, well, what happens when you spend money in different sorts of ways? Does spending money, say, on other people in a way that you might consider to be ethical, does that make people feel happier?

So this is . . . Liz Dunn has done a bunch of work—she’s a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, really brilliant social psychologist. I’m gonna show you just two studies from her. This is a simple survey where they ask people, this is a Gallup survey, they ask Americans: Do you feel happy in general? This is just a simple happiness measure. And they also asked them how they spend their money, how much money they spend on a given week on personal spending versus prosocial spending. That is, spending on themselves—bills, expenses, gifts for yourselves, things for you—versus money spent on others. Of course, you can see there’s a huge discrepancy in the average amount. People spend a lot more money on themselves than they do on others. We wanna know, how are these things, these two variables, related to happiness? They also ask about income, what their total level of income is.

OK, what do we see in the results. Well, here’s what we see. First off, you see that the amount of money people spend on themselves is actually not positively related to their happiness here. But the amount that they report spending on others is positively related to happiness. That’s on the order of magnitude that is essentially identical to the effect of income on your happiness. How you choose to spend your money, Liz argues over and over again from her data, seems to predict your happiness as much as how much you’re actually making. How you choose to spend your money turns out to be important.

But, of course, these data here don’t actually tell us that spending more on others, or being more ethical in some way with your money would make you happier. Right, everybody in this room knows that you can’t infer causality from a correlation. We just have a correlation here. Factors could be running in the other direction. And so what we need in order to figure out does being more ethical, does behaving more positively toward others, does that buy you happiness? Does that bring happiness? Is we have to actually run an experiment where we give you money and ask you to go out and spend it in different ways, and that’s exactly what Liz did in a follow-up study. Brought people into the lab and gave them some money, either $5 or $20, and asked them then to go out and spend it either on themselves or on somebody else. So you get a windfall, you either go out and spend it on yourself, buy something nice for yourself, or go out and buy something for others, OK.

Now, as important here, I think, as the actual effects of this on happiness are, it’s also important, I think here, to get people’s expectations. Everybody in this room was schooled in the theory of rational choice, that people tend to behave in ways that maximize their well-being as they perceive it, as they conceive it as Gary Becker wrote. And so what we also wanna know is what do people think will happen to their happiness when they spend in these different ways because that’s ultimately what’s gonna guide their behavior. And so they asked people, one group of people was asked not to go out and actually do this, but to report their expectations about what would happen if they actually did this. Just to report their beliefs about how they would feel if they went out and spent in these two ways.
So first they were asked, which condition would make you the happiest, spending $5 or $20 on yourself or others? So, first, which would make you happiest, spending on yourself or spending on others? Two-thirds of people said spending on myself would make me happier than spending on others. Seemed to be self-interested agents here. Spending $20 or spending $5, which would make you happier? No duh, more is better, yes. Most people passed that one-item IQ test, say that spending more money would make you happier than spending less.

It turns out, though, that both of these expectations are wrong when you actually give people $5 or $20 and ask them to go out and spend it on themselves or others, and here are the data on that. So they then gave people this money, asked them to go out and spend it on themselves or others, had them come back, had them, before they go out, report how happy they were, and when they came back, report how happy they were, and what we wanna know is what’s the change in those two things?

And this is the change in those two things. Those who spent on others in the prosocial condition reported feeling happier after they had done it than before, regardless of whether they spent $5 or $20. And those who spent on themselves reported feeling a little less happy. Again, regardless of whether it was $5 or $20. If anything, $20 made you feel a little worse, but that wasn’t a statistically significant effect. Spending on others in this case made you feel happier than spending on yourself.

And yet all of us also have this intuition, too, that maybe there are times when just being a little bit naughty feels kind of nice, feels pretty good. Are there cases when treating other people poorly or aggressively makes people feel better? What about revenge? Revenge is sweet, isn’t it? Lord Byron thought so, “Sweet is revenge,” he wrote, “especially to women.” We don’t actually quite know why he thought there was this gender difference. As far as we know there isn’t one, but there certainly is this intuition that exacting revenge on people who have wronged you is what’s gonna make you feel really good. That maybe in this case, harming somebody else, that bit of unethical behavior makes you feel good. There certainly are strong intuitions that revenge is sweet. Here’s a quote from the internet, on a post following one of the mass shooting incidents of which there are now way too many here in the US. This was in Virginia Tech. One of the women who was writing about this wrote on the message board, “I don’t think there would be anything temporary about the satisfaction I would feel in being permitted to execute the person who killed my child.” Some sense that exacting revenge might do two things: one, it will make me feel better. It will help resolve this pain that I’m feeling. And second, it might help me get some closure, so to get on with my life.

Well, notice, these are hypotheses. These are expectations. Are they right, are they meted out in actual behavior? Does getting a chance to exact revenge on somebody else, does that actually make you feel better? We don’t have a lot of research on this in psychology, but we have some. We know a few things. First, there’s a strong belief in the positive effects of revenge, a kind of catharsis moment. This goes back to Freudian sorts of ideas. Catharsis is defined as the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from strong or oppressed emotions. There’s a strong sense that revenge allows you to experience this kind of catharsis. But, again, this is an empirical question. We don’t wanna know what people think. We wanna know what actually happens. What actually happens when you put people in experiments, you give them an opportunity to exact revenge on somebody who has harmed them. How do they feel about it afterward compared to people who didn’t get a chance to exact revenge?

Well, I don’t have to share you my intuition. I’m gonna show you an experiment, one of many that had been conducted by Kevin Carlsmith and his colleagues. This is one of a handful that were published in this particular paper. They put people in a situation where somebody—so you can imagine that you’re in this situation—put in an experiment where somebody harmed you in some way, really put you at a disadvantage for their own personal gain. Then gave you an opportunity to exact revenge on them or not, measured how you felt about it, and also how much you were thinking about the person after you exacted revenge. And this is how it went. You’re in an economic game, essentially, with a group of people. On each round, you’re given a dollar. Everybody in the group is given a dollar. This is a commons-dilemma game, OK, public-goods game. And you can contribute some amount of your money to the common pool, 40 percent is added to the amount that everybody pitches in to the common pool, and then the total proceeds are then divided equally among everybody who paid in. You learn of each player’s investment on each round, their winnings at the end, and the total on each round of the game.

And here’s the interesting part. So on the very first round, one of the other people in your group—you are sending instant messages back and forth to each other, communicating what you’re doing—one of the players in your group contributes half of their earnings, so contributes 50 cents on the first round to the public pool, and then sends an instant message suggesting that everybody cooperates. But then on all the subsequent rounds, never gives anything again. Is a total free rider! So she encourages you to contribute and then gives bubkes for the whole rest of the experiment.

(groans loudly)

You can feel it, can’t you? That’s just the kind of thing that chaps your hide, that makes you angry. They said help us and then they don’t help anymore down the road. Three conditions here in this experiment: One is you’re not given any chance to punish the free rider at all. Second condition, you’re given a chance to punish the free rider. You can, at the end of the experiment, pay however much you want to remove three times the amount that you are willing to pay from the other person. So this is punishment, costly punishment. So if you put in a dollar, you can take $3 from the other person. You can pay to punish the person. And there’s a third group that doesn’t actually get a chance to do this. They just predict how they would feel if they were given a chance to do this. So this, again, is measuring people’s expectations, not their actual experience, their expectations. What do people think would happen?

Two measures that we care about, first are their feelings, positive or negative mood, 10 minutes after they’re given a chance to exact revenge or not on this person. And also rumination. How much do they report thinking about the free rider after they’ve gotten a chance to exact revenge versus not? There’s some notion that this catharsis, that if I can exact revenge for somebody who’s harmed me, I’ll be able to get on with my life. OK, is that true?

Here are the results. First off, in the punishment condition, almost everybody chooses to punish. People are happy to punish when they’re given a chance. The question is how does this make them feel. Does it make them feel good? Here’s the mood rating. So this is an average of positive and negative mood. Here’s the no-punishment condition. This is their average here. It’s about five. That’s just on a 1–7 scale. It’s not very meaningful. What we wanna know is what happens to this bar in these other conditions? If punishing makes you feel good, then this bar here in the punishment condition, these people ought to report feeling better, right? Do they feel better? Uh, the answer’s no. They actually report feeling significantly worse after they’ve punished than those people who had no chance to punish. Those who predict how they would feel if they had a chance to punish predict feeling happier than those who actually punish. Not happier than those in the no punishment, but these folks think that they would feel better if they punished than people in the punishment condition actually did.

We can also see people’s theories compared to reality, their expectations compared to the reality of punishment. If you look at the correlation between how much people punished and how they actually felt. If punishing feels good, then the more you punish, the better you ought to feel. There ought to be a positive correlation between the amount you punish and how you actually feel. Is that correlation positive? No, it’s negative. Goes the other direction. The more you punish, the worse you actually report feeling. You feel guilty is what it is.

We’ve all been in the situation. You lash out at a colleague who pissed you off in some way. How do you feel after that? Maybe at the time you feel sort of OK. Moments afterward you kind of feel like crap. That’s what we get here.

But notice, look at the expectations. These are in the predictions, so these people predict how much they would punish and also how much they would feel. Expectations, the correlation is positive here. That is, people think the more they punish, the better they’ll feel. They’re precisely wrong about that. That goes in backwards. No, it actually makes people feel surprisingly bad. Does punishing decrease rumination? Does it make you think less? Actually no, it actually made them think more not less. So here’s the amount they report thinking about the free rider 10 minutes after it’s over. Those in the punishment condition actually report thinking more about the person they exacted revenge on than those in the no-punishment condition. Our beliefs about catharsis and revenge just seem to be wrong. It’s another piece of data that suggests that doing good actually feels surprisingly good.

And an interesting thing for me as a behavioral scientist, as psychologist, interesting thing about these last two results in the studies I showed you, is that people’s expectations here were both wrong in both of these last experiments. That is, they expected to feel better when they were doing the antisocial or the proself thing, and it raises this possibility that we might, just in general, undervalue the power of this link between doing good and feeling good in a way that might keep us from being more social in our own lives that would actually make us feel a little bit better.

I, after all, see people, highly social agents, who feel better connecting to others, interacting out in the world in a way that suggests they don’t really believe that to be true, that they would be better off if they were more social, if they connected more with others, if they were more positive toward others in their daily lives. Every day on my commute into Hyde Park, into this building here where my office is—we live on the South Side of Chicago. I come in on the Metra Electric line. Every day on my commute in, I see people get on the train, highly social agents, made happier by connecting with others, spend 50 minutes on the train essentially ignoring another person sitting right next to them. The drill is the same every day. People get on the train. They line up here along the outside. God forbid, you’d ever sit next to another person, you creep. That’d be totally weird. No, you wouldn’t do that. We then go down to the next stop. These people, by the way, are married to each other, so that’s OK.

(students laugh)

They’re not actually talking to each other, but they are at least sitting next to each other. Some of these seats, of course, are set up to enable conversation. It typically doesn’t work that way. I see these two women here who are sitting sort of across from each other. Of course, they’re not talking to each other. People then get on at the next stop, what do they do? They line up on the outside seat here, cheek to jowl next to another person, and for the next 50 minutes, on their way into Chicago, what do they do with this person sitting right there? Absolutely nothing. They just ignore the person, essentially, for 50 minutes.

Now, if connecting with others is a thing that makes us happy, this doesn’t make any sense. People seem to be choosing to make themselves miserable. And I don’t think there’s anything unique about my train coming into Chicago, I think this is a general phenomenon. This shows up in lots of different places around the world. Mostly you see people when they’re out in the world, around other people, they choose to ignore each other. I don’t think this is necessarily a feature of modern life as well.

So Stanley Milgram, a famous social psychologist, some years ago got very interested in sort of some paradoxes of urban life. One is that people tend, who live in big cities, so around lots of other
people, also tend to report feeling lonelier than people who live out in rural parts of the world without anybody else around them. And he noticed the same thing on the trains in New York that I noticed in Chicago. “The requirements of appropriate social behavior,” he wrote, this is in the 1970s, “on the face of it are simple. One rule is that seats are filled on a first-come, first-serve basis.” But here’s the interesting one, “Another implicit rule is one that discourages passengers from talking to one another. Even though riders are often squeezed into very close proximity, they’re rarely observed to converse.”

And so this raises an interesting question, one is: Why are people doing this? One possibility is that connecting with others is not always a pleasant experience. It depends a little on the context, right? And so, some cases it’s really nice to connect with somebody else. Other places, it’s not so nice. This is the hallway by the bathroom, the men’s bathroom, by the way, right down the hall here in the Harper Center. I love my colleagues and my students. This is not a place where I wanna connect with them. That little partition just isn’t quite enough, frankly. There is a place where we want a little more social distance. Maybe the trains are like the bathrooms, where we just need to keep to ourselves. Maybe not engaging in conversation with strangers out in public actually makes people happier, and so there’s an important boundary condition on the benefit of social connection for happiness. That’s one possibility.

And of course, the trains might be just the kind of place where you definitely do not want to start up a conversation with some randomly selected person because these people are weird. But the other possibility is that our expectations about the consequences of social interaction are just miscalibrated. Just like people in the experiment I showed you thought that spending on themselves, on average, would make them feel better than spending on others, and they were wrong about that. Or that exacting revenge would make them feel better instead of worse, they were wrong about that. Maybe this represents a general tendency to undervalue how good you’d feel if you were actually just a little more social, a little more prosocial in your life, treated other people with a little more civility and kindness, or just ethics. Maybe we’re just wrong about that. Maybe we seek solitude in places where it doesn’t make any sense.

So this, for instance, is the bike rack right over here, right outside of the building in the back. One day when I came in, here’s a case where our MBA students are trying to get into the building to the same door, and yet they want a little space for themselves from their bike. They hook their bike up to its own separate rack, not wanting to get too close to each other. Now, this doesn’t seem to make any sense to me here. I think expectations are leading to suboptimal behavior.

So what do we have going on in the train? Well, to find out we have to conduct some experiments, and so that’s what we did. We ran some experiments on the Metra Electric line here that I take every day on the way into Chicago, and we ran the experiment in the Homewood Station for a variety of different reasons. What we did is we set our lab managers up in the basement, the entryway to the platforms, and recruited them for a commuter study. This is Jasmine Kwong, one of our MBA alums who was my lab manager for about a decade. Recruited them for a commuter study, and if they were interested in participating in the commuter study, they came up to us. We gave them an envelope. Inside that envelope was a Starbucks gift card, a $5 Starbucks gift card, which turns out to be the most valuable incentive we can provide to anybody on the planet. People will do anything for a $5 Starbucks gift card.

We then, once they expressed interest in participating in the experiment, we then randomly assigned them to one of three conditions. That’s important—after they indicated being interested in the experiment, we then randomly assigned them to one of three conditions. In one condition, we told them to enjoy their solitude on the train today, just to keep to themselves, not talk to others, just keep to yourself on the way, think about your day ahead. Second condition, we told them to just do whatever you normally do. Whatever they normally do is sit there and keep to themselves. That’s our control condition. Third condition, we told them to do something radical. We told them that when somebody comes and sits down next to you, what we’d like you to do is just to try to make a connection with this person. Try to learn something about him or her, try to form a connection, that is, to have a conversation with this person.

When they were done with their commute, we told them to take the envelope out that we gave them, pull out the survey, take out your $5 Starbucks gift card, and fill out the survey for us. There were a bunch of measures on it. The first four were the ones we cared about. The others were personality measures, which I can talk to you about later if you’d like. We report them in the paper, of course. The first four items were the ones we cared about. How pleasant was your commute today compared to normal? How happy are you right now after your commute? How sad are you right now after your commute? We averaged those three items together, reverse scored the negative item to create, essentially, an index of how pleasant, how positive was your commute? Fourth item was how productive was your commute?

Turns out we don’t get any differences in reported productivity across these three conditions, which either means people don’t get squat done on the train, which it could be, or they redefine what productivity means once you give them a different sort of goal. We don’t know which it is, but we don’t see differences across those three conditions. What we really care about is the positivity measure. Did talking to a stranger, did connecting with somebody else stink? Was it unpleasant, was it miserable? The answer is no, in fact, not. Those in the connection condition actually reported having the most positive commute, and those in the solitude condition reported having the least positive commute.

And so this raises the question: If connecting with others makes you happy, and commuting tends to be one of those miserable things that people do, why aren’t you talking to other people more often? Why aren’t you doing this more often? Well, it could be that people expect that connecting with somebody else will actually make them feel worse. That is, it could be our expectations about the consequences of sociality undervalue the positive impact of connecting with somebody else. To figure out whether that’s going on we have to run another experiment where we don’t measure how people actually feel, rather we measure their expectations. So here what we do is we have them, on the train ride in, predict how they would feel if we randomly assigned them to each of these conditions. This measures their expectations. How do they think they would feel if they were in each of these conditions? Exactly the opposite of what our data suggests they would actually feel. That is, they predict feeling the worst in the connection condition.

And so people, I think, are behaving totally rationally, that is, behaving in a way that maximizes their well-being as they conceive it, they’re just profoundly wrong. Their expectations are mistaken in this case. We don’t just see this on the trains. We also this same pattern everywhere we look. This is a study that we did on the buses in downtown Chicago, ran the same experiments with cabs leaving Midway Airport. We created a waiting room downtown where we find that the positivity that you get from connecting with somebody else actually spreads to the other person. The other person is happier when you talk to them than when you ignore them, which is sort of a no-brainer, but that’s not what people seem to think. And now, it’s important to know that these expectations can, nevertheless, be powerful determinants of behavior, and so when I was doing this study with Metra, I learned this very quickly, very well.

After we ran our first experiment on the trains, I called up Virginia Chandler, who was the head of marketing at the time, who I was working with, a wonderful human being, so much fun to talk to her, and I told her about the results of our train studies, and she said, “Nick, I totally believe that. That is totally consistent with my experience. I would have predicted that without question.”

She said, “But you’re not gonna believe what we’re about to do.”

“OK, interesting, what are you about to do?”

She said, “Well we’re about to roll out a new policy on all of our train lines.”

“OK, what’s that policy?”

And she said, “We’re about to roll out the quiet car, which actually forbids people from talking on that particular car.”

I said, “Virginia, why is it that you guys are doing that?”

And she said, “Well, we asked people on a survey what they wanted, and this is what they said they wanted.”

(students laugh)

That’s what our participants said they wanted too. I asked her, “Well, have you ever experimented with the opposite, have you ever had a chatty car where you just get together and just hang with your friends and meet somebody new, right, talk to a neighbor, your chatty car.”

She said, “No, we’ve never had a chatty car, but we did have something for a while that sort of functioned in the same way, she said. “We used to have the bar cars on the trains.” Bar cars would run way out to the northwest suburbs and stuff. She said, “But we don’t have those anymore.”

And I asked her, “Why don’t you have those anymore?”

I was expecting people stumbling off the train drunk or something, and she said, “Because they turned out to be a hazard.”

“Well, why were they a hazard?”

She said, “Because they were too crowded.”

(students laugh)

(Nick sighs)

You can lead horses to water, but you can’t make them drink.

We find that this effect of undervaluing the positive consequences of prosociality is not just a function, not something that people just experience predicting their own well-being. We also find in more recent research that they underestimate the value of being good for how good others will feel as well. That is, they underestimate the value of prosociality, their own prosocial actions. They underestimate how good it will make other people feel.

So this is now a class demonstration that I do every year when I teach my Good Life class. I have students in my class write a gratitude letter to somebody else. If you wanted to feel better today, very simple thing to do, think about somebody in your life who’s done something really positive for you, who you feel like you haven’t really expressed gratitude sufficiently for, write that person a letter. Time and again, psychologists find this to be a big effect. We have my students do this. This was a study. This was the first time I ran it in class. I had 120 MBA students in this, actually I had 130 MBA students; 120 of them completed the survey in time to get their data. We asked them to write the letter and to send it to somebody else. We also asked them to give us the email of the recipient so that we could contact the recipient and see how they felt about it. We had the letter writers predict how their recipient would feel, and then we just compare expectations against reality, OK.
So 101 of my students allowed us to email the recipients; 80 recipients responded. We do a lot with the nonresponse rate, which I can talk to you about later, but I’m not gonna talk about it at the moment. What did they write about? They wrote about lots of things. Don’t be so nosy. It’s very personal. I can’t tell you exactly what they wrote about, but they wrote about serious stuff. They pasted the letter that they wrote into the survey if they wanted to. Really powerful stuff. It’s the neatest thing I do in class without question.

How did they feel about it afterward? Well, consistent with one experiment after another, after another, people tended to feel really, really good. They felt much better than they did before writing this. Here’s what the data looked like here. This is a baseline measure of mood across my class. At the beginning of one of my lectures, I’m sad to say that people at the start of one of my lectures weren’t totally thrilled. This scale goes from -5 : “I feel much more negative than normal” to +5: “I feel much more positive than normal,” with 0 being “I feel like I always feel.”

Most people at the start of my class don’t seem to be all that excited to be there. They’re feeling about how they normally do. Word to the wise if you have a chance to take a class for me. This is how they report feeling after they write the gratitude letter. They feel much better than they did before, and the statistic comparing after to before is so big that it’s of the embarrassing variety. It’s a massive effect, but this is what we cared about: Did they know how the recipient would feel? In some ways they did, but there were also some interesting and meaningful gaps. So we asked my letter writers, my students, to predict how surprised the recipient would be to receive the letter, how surprised they would be about its content, to predict the participant’s mood, on the same scale that I showed you right here that goes from -5 to +5. I’m gonna add a 5 to it so it’s on the same 0 to 10 scale as all these others, but more positive numbers indicate more positive feelings. And also predict how awkward the recipient would feel getting the letter, OK, as a measure of sort of a cost to this prosocial behavior. Here’s how they thought their recipients would feel. Sort of moderately surprised, little less surprised about the content. Notice, they predicted the recipient would feel really great. No, duh, this is obvious, this is actually a three on this -5 to +5 scale, added 5 here so it’s on the same scale. It’s basically at the ceiling of the measure. If you’re a behavioral scientist and you see a survey result like this, you assume that your measure’s not gonna be sensitive enough to predict any differences. How awkward they predicted, it would be moderately awkward. Turns out every one of these predictions was significantly miscalibrated in a way suggesting that they underestimated its value. The recipient was significantly more surprised to receive it and more surprised about the content. Felt even better than you thought they would. You predicted they would feel great, basically the negative side of the scale is irrelevant here. You predicted they would feel great. They felt even better than that, and you also overestimated how awkward the recipient would feel, turned out not to be very awkward at all.

You miscalibrated in the value of it. This is how the recipients actually felt. This is what a ceiling effect on a measure looks like. People were thrilled to receive this letter.

People also didn’t have a whole lot of clue about how recipients would actually feel. There are very weak correlations here between people’s predictions of their own recipient and how their recipient actually felt, but notice the interesting thing is that the black bars all suggest that I’m underestimating the positive value of this prosocial act. I know it’s gonna be good. It’s even better than you think it will be for the recipient. We see this in other places as well. So I also have my students do random acts of kindness for somebody else, for a stranger. Do a random act of kindness. We get exactly the same effects. We ask them to predict how their recipient’s gonna feel. We also measure how the recipient actually feels.

Recipients think that your act was bigger, was more positive than my students predict. The recipients think that you invested more time, spent more money, and put more energy into it than you think the recipient will. Again, they predict that the recipient of their random act of kindness is gonna feel really good. They feel even better than that. And they also, to a smaller degree here, overestimate how awkward the recipient would feel. All of these differences are statistically significant. Again, suggesting undervaluing how positive a prosocial act is.

We find this in other experiments as well. This was an experiment that we did at the Maggie Daley skating rink downtown. We went out and had people do some random acts of kindness, in the winter in particular. We gave them a coupon and asked them to give a cup of hot chocolate away to somebody else down here in the Maggie Daley Park today. We didn’t have them actually deliver it. What they did was they pointed out who they wanted us to deliver their cup of hot chocolate to. We then went over and gave them the cup of hot chocolate. The people who gave the chocolate away, hot chocolate away, predicted how the recipient would feel. The recipients reported how they actually felt.

How big was the act? That is, how valuable did this seem? You predicted how your recipient would rate how big this act seemed. The recipients reported it as well. They underestimated, our givers underestimated how big an act the recipients would perceive this to be. This was kind of a big deal. This small, little cup of hot chocolate, nevertheless, felt kind of big, felt really good. This, by the way, experiment, is the only time in my life I’ve ever had one of our participants take out a checkbook and ask to fund our research ’cause they enjoyed participating in it so much.

Also predicted positive mood, and again, they predicted recipients would feel positive; they felt even better than that. Again, underestimating the positive value here. Lady Montagu, a 17th-century aristocrat, once wrote that “civility costs nothing and it buys everything.” Our data suggests that the average person doesn’t calculate the benefits of prosociality quite the way that Lady Montagu did.
Alright, so I started this session by pointing out that I assume in my students, in all of you, in me as well, that we want to live a good life in three senses of the term. We wanna do well out there in the world. We wanna do it in a way that we’d be proud of. We wanna do it ethically. And third, we’d like to feel good. We’d like to be happy about what it is that we’re doing. Raised the question to whether you can get all three of these things. In fact, I think these things are . . . all of these goals are in fact aligned, particularly in the long run. These things are aligned with each other in ways that people, I think, tend to undervalue or underestimate how aligned these goals actually are.

And so it ultimately then raises the question: What do we do to change our lives, or to change the context we’re in, or the organizations that we run? What do we do to help people achieve all three of these goals? Well, first, let’s talk about how do we be better in our lives. How do we create organizations that help people achieve this core goal of being good or being ethical? What do we do? I didn’t spend much time talking about this, we’ve spent a lot on this in my class. The most important thing you need to do is to make it easier for people to be good, make sure you have incentives that are aligned with ethical behavior, make sure that you have opportunities for people to be good. Often it’s easier in organizations to be bad than it is to be good. You need to set up policies and procedures and protocols that make it easy for you, for instance, to call out unethical behavior when you see it, make it easy for you to make the hard but ethical choice.

And avoid temptations, it turns out the best way not to fall prey to a self-control problem is not to put yourself in an ethically tempting situation. People tend to overestimate how strong their moral or ethical compass is. They tend to overestimate how ethically they’ll behave when they’re tempted. You need to structure ethics in ways that keep these goals top of mind. All of you wanna live a good life in this way, but how many of you in your day-to-day life are thinking about: Is what I’m doing right now really the thing that’s making me happy? Is the thing that I’m doing right now really the right thing to be doing? If you want people to be good, you need to make sure that ethics are top of mind. One thing you can do is just make sure that you know what your own ethics are.

In my class, I have my students write a personal responsibility statement, and we frame it so that they can post it somewhere easy. If you have this on top of your mind when you’re out there engaging in behavior, you’re more likely to follow this goal. Here, for instance, is my personal responsibility statement. And this is where it sits in my office, right next to my computer right there. Keep ethics top of mind.

And finally, most behavior is contagious. We tend to do what others around us are doing, And so you wanna make sure that you’re around other people who are good. Social norms are not just powerful, they’re surprisingly powerful. Second, we need to design organizations and our own lives as well with a little bit of prosociality in mind. That is, with a little positive, ethical interpersonal behavior in mind. And in this way, we need to treat happiness like exercise. That is, happiness is something we often treat as if it’s stable over time. It’s not. Happiness is a mood. It rises and falls from one moment to another. It’s a little like having a leaky tire on a car: you have to keep putting air into that tire in order for it to stay up, otherwise it’s gonna go flat. Happiness is the same way. You need to keep doing it and doing it and doing it. The problem with lots of these goals, just like with exercise, we might know what’s good for us, but we don’t necessarily get around to it. Nobody thinks that exercising once is gonna make them healthy for the rest of their lives, but we sort of treat happiness that way. If I can get that job, I can marry that person, and I can have these kids, whatever, that’ll keep me up here, happy, that’s not what happiness is like. Happiness is a moment-to-moment sort of phenomena, and so you need to practice prosociality to make it a habit, to make it easy for you to do, just like you would do with exercise. Do it over and over and over again. There are a number of ways, you can do this: keep a gratitude journal, do a daily random act of kindness, buy a plus one when you’re out buying coffee for yourself, chat with a stranger. Just walking around smiling more turns out to make people lots happier. The reason is, is because when you smile at somebody else, what do they do back to you?

Students: Smile.

Nicholas Epley: Yeah, no doubt, they smile back to you and that feels pretty good, we find in our research. Finally, when it comes to thinking about happiness and living a good life, we often think about lots of the big stuff, but the small stuff also really matters a lot. What we find as psychologists is there are lots of little things that you can do in your life to help keep you on the ethical road that will also help make you happier. Happiness is a fleeting mood that responds disproportionately to little things. Happiness is better predicted by the frequency of positive experiences you have, not by the magnitude of those positive experiences. So lots of little things can actually add up. These things that seem like such small events—doing a random act of kindness, writing a gratitude letter—have meaningful effects on people’s happiness and well-being. On the order of psychotherapeutic medication, psychologists find. They can be big. A happy life then is a steady stream of positive experiences, both big and small.

This, of course, treating the good life as a scientific sort of problem won’t make it certain that you’re going to achieve it, of course. The hope is, though, that putting some data and putting some rigor on this kind of pursuit, this thing that we all want, will help give us some guideposts to know where we ought to be looking in order to live a meaningful, a good life. And also give us some advice about how we might design organizations that help all of us who are in it do this a little more easily. Thank you all so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

(students applauding)

Linda E. Ginzel: So I’m Linda Ginzel and I said hello to some of you. Some of you I know. Many of you I do not. But I’m really thrilled to have you in my classroom today. And welcome. And thank you for being here.

So I have been here 28 years. And I know I look young. It’s the Asian genes. And I’m really thrilled to do this session because you get two gifts from me, the book and the green pen. And I will explain those in one moment. And let’s see. Here we go. I use a document camera, and this allows me to kind of . . . I have a plan, and I can do PowerPoint. So a lot of people tell me that they think I don’t know how to do PowerPoint. Problem is that when I make a PowerPoint, it’s gonna be beautiful. It’s gonna be perfect. And so you’re gonna sit there and you’re gonna see every single slide in the order that I prepared and I determined would be best ’cause like sunk cost, I will be so committed to it.

So what I do instead is I prepare, but I print out my slides, and I use the document camera so that I can change the order or go with you or decide that something else is actually better in the moment. So this is one of the ways that I try to manage my own kind of command of the classroom, the environment.

So I’m a social psychologist. And what that means is that what I try to do is teach my students to think more like a social psychologist, which is about the power of strong situations. So I try to create the strongest situation I can in my classroom to accomplish my goals, which today have to do with helping you to be wiser, younger, and trying to get you perhaps to buy into my mission, which is to seed a grassroots leadership-development movement.

So that’s the story. You have informed consent. I just told you that I have a mission to accomplish with you. Welcome to my classroom.

Hi. Hello. Welcome back.

So I . . . someday I’m only gonna teach with illustrations. Someday. And I have a few illustrations for you today. I was sort of dragged into the teaching of leadership kicking and screaming. Leadership is really hard. What is it? There’s no consensual definition. No one has the answer. This is leadership. OK! Also, I’m an experimental social psychologist. There’s a discipline, right? What does discipline mean? You put on blinders and you go deep and narrow. You discipline your mind. Like economists. They have a disciplined way of thinking.
There’s no discipline of leadership. Leadership is multidisciplinary. It’s philosophy. It’s religion. It’s economics. It’s psychology. It’s political science. It’s everything. So it’s really hard. And I’m sure like you, I have personally been through many, you know, we have many things that we deal with in life. A few things have kept me up at night. Trying to teach leadership with integrity is something that has kept me up at night. People will sell you anything you are willing to buy. And at first, I thought: I need to help my students become a better consumer of leadership literature. And then I just gave up and wrote my own.

So here’s the story. This is the, the beginning. I wanna tell you that my goal in the classroom is for you to come up with your own perspective, your own point of view for you. Every one of you has a definition that you are using to operate about what you think leadership is. And that definition is either enabling choices or it’s inhibiting choices for yourself and for others. And I think that to the extent that we actually understand what is the definition we are using moving forward, we can create a better future. We can make better decisions.

So what I’m here to do today is to help you to develop your point of view. This is one of my favorite quotes by Marvin Minsky. He is the father of artificial intelligence. And I just read in the Booth alumni magazine, with the hiring of Sendhil [Mullainathan] into my group, the Center for Decision Research in the behavioral science group, that we are going to become the Chicago School on data analytics, right? On A.I., on artificial intelligence. So this is the father of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, and I love this quote. He says that, “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” So just by developing your point of view on leadership, I can raise your IQ. I believe that. I really believe that. You have to have your own perspective. So that you can be smarter. So that you can do a better job. So you can do whatever your heart desires. So you have to know what your heart desires. That’s one thing.

So that’s what I wanna do today. We have one hour, and I’m going to try to help you. I’m gonna raise your IQ and help you to make better choices.

Here’s how it begins. Each of you has a book in front of you, and I’d like you to open the book and write your name here. Just like that. Because this is the first step in learning. Oh, the pen has a little plastic nib. Yeah, I know people are like, these are defective. No. Plastic nib, you can just kinda flick it off. And you put your name here. So this is the first act in learning, because if you don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist. If you don’t write things down, it is a figment of your imagination. This way, you know, it’s your book. This is a workbook. I created this book so you have two gifts in front of you. One is the workbook, and one is the green pen.

And I’ll say something about the workbook first. I told you I was dragged into the teaching of leadership kicking and screaming. And I started teaching leadership in the Executive MBA Program some years ago. And the first time I taught it, I was like, eh. I put everything I had into it. I worked really hard at it. And the next year, I decided that I needed to put together exercises activities.
Some of the essence of what I was teaching in the class took off, and students would say to me, “Can I get an extra copy of this for my boss? My boss could really use this book.”
And other people would say, “Oh, my, my wife, my wife would love this book.”

I’d say, “Nope! Just one copy per student. These are handouts in my class.”

But it worked really, really well. So the next year, I actually had the handouts proofread. I had an index made. We made a table of contents, but it was all my class. Class one, class two, class three. And people were asking questions about it. And one of the students said to me, “Can I get two copies of this from my high-school children?” And I found my mouth say “yes.”

(students laugh)

And I realized, what am I an idiot? Now, what am I an idiot? Of course! If this can be useful, then it should have a broader base. So I already have the book. I mean, I had already written it for my students. And we just turned it into a workbook for the general public. So my idea is this book, this workbook is going to make me obsolete. Really, I don’t wanna go around the world teaching and talking. And this book teaches itself.

So today we’re going to do an activity or two from the book. And I’m hoping that you will see that this is cost-effective professional development, right? All you need for professional development is a little structure and a little time. So my idea is that groups of people get these books. They do x activities individually, and then they get together and teach and learn together. So what professional develop— You’re here today. This is a leadership-development workshop. I’m going to teach you. We’ll learn together a little bit about Choosing Leadership.

And there are two things that always happen with professional development if you’re . . . if you do it well. One is that you create collective wisdom. So you go in and say you do an activity, and then you meet together with your family, with your team, with your friends, and you share knowledge. So there’s an activity there, for example. It’s: What’s the best advice you ever received? So you write down your best advice, and then you get together with a group of people and you learn what was the best advice you ever received.

“Oh, wow.”

“You know, well, mine came from a parent. Yours came from a teacher.”

“Ah! Mine was from an early, early boss, an early . . . someone who I learned quite a bit from.”

And then we can talk about, well, what advice do we give? What do we think? What do we think is important? So what I used to do in my MBA classes, I would have like 100 students, and we would have them submit their best advice and then collect it and give it back to the students as collective wisdom. So that’s a formal way to create collective wisdom.

But even just getting four people together and sharing and teaching and learning together, I don’t think it’s only motivating. I think it’s inspiring to teach and learn from each other. And the book has all these prompts and all these activities that will help you to have conversations that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

So collective wisdom is really important. And you have a ton of earned wisdom already. And so how do we kind of help everyone to be wiser, younger with that collective wisdom?
The other thing that happens with professional development of this type is community building. Like, you’re back at Booth. You’re building community, from five years—or is five years the first one that we have out? Five-year reunion?

Student: One.

Linda E. Ginzel:
One! From . . . oh, are you one? We have some . . . we have. We have a . . . She was just in my leadership class using . . . You were the first class that used this book, right?

Student: No, we were the last class to use—

Linda E. Ginzel: To use, to use the handbook. It was one of your classmates who I gave to his two daughters and his son the book, and that’s why it became a book. So and then we have how many years?

Student: Forty-five.

Linda E. Ginzel: Oh, what a range! From one year to 45 years. And what are we doing? We’re here teaching and learning together. We’re building community.

Alright, so that’s one gift. And we’re actually gonna do an exercise, maybe two in the book. We only have a small amount of time, so we will do the best we can with what we’ve got.

The other gift is a green pen. And the explanation of the green pen is on page 111. But I’ll give you a quick tour. The idea is that I was taught in early on, when I was an assistant professor at Stanford, that what executives do is you manage meaning. You manage meaning every day. And you do that in all different ways. You do that in the words that you use, in the behaviors you exhibit, in the . . . what you make salient, awards that you give, what you draw people’s attention to, and with symbols.

So this green pen pretty much captures my essence. In my, what I’m trying to accomplish in the classroom. It’s practical. I’m a very practical girl. It’s relatively inexpensive. I do not have a big budget. So it comes from my budget. Usually. I mean, the reunion people paid for yours today. But if you were my student, in my classroom, it would come from my budget. So I can’t be . . . I can’t have to think, oh, can I afford to give these pens? No, everybody gets a pen. If you’re my student, you get a green pen. They are . . . it’s about writing and learning. And I believe I just told you already, if you don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist. It will remind you to collect the data of your experience. One of the things that I try to teach my students is that the data of your experience is and can be as valuable as the data that professors bring to you from their disciplines from psychology, from economics, from sociology. But we don’t tend to value the data of our experience. And you can’t write everything down, so you have to be selective about what you want to capture. And the book will help you guide you through this.

Alright, so it’s tangible. It’s inexpensive, but it’s good quality. Japanese. You can tell: good quality but not cheap, but inexpensive. And it completely captures a lot of my teaching. I want you to become your own coach. It’s great if you have a boss or a spouse or I always tell people, a teenage son, who tells me everything I do wrong on a moment-by-moment basis. But just think how much wiser you can be at a younger age if you create feedback for yourself, if you become your own coach, in addition to mediated sort of third-party feedback. So the pen reminds you to be your own coach.
And the way that, and the way that you use it is this. I’ll show you an example. Some of you were in my Negotiations class, we were just chatting about that. On page 112, I believe is, yes, this is a framework. So one of the things the book teaches you, and what I hope to teach people in life, is that we have to . . . In order to manage ambiguity, we have to have structure. We can’t just deal with the lack of any kind of structure. So when people hand us a rubric or a framework or say, “This is what you need to do.” There’s no ambiguity. You’re smart. You can fill it out. You can do that. The ambiguity comes when you have to figure something out and you don’t have the framework. So you create your own structure.

So the book helps you walk through how do you create your own structure? How do you create your own frameworks for collecting data, for organizing it and then accessing it more effectively outside the situation in which it was created? I created this framework for my negotiation students, and it’s for preparation. But you can use this in your . . . You don’t have to be in a negotiations class. Any time you prepare for an activity, I mean a meeting, you have to do problem-solving. You’re trying to convince someone of something else. You can go through and you can figure out: What are your goals? What are you going to try to accomplish? What are your alternatives? What’s the most you’re willing to give up? What’s the least that you hope to gain?

These are all very basic notions. They’re not just about negotiations, negotiation any time, two or more people divvy up a resource or solve a problem. So the other side is taking the perspective of trying to understand what’s the other side. What do they want? What’s there? And you don’t know, but you can create hypotheses.

Please come in and have a seat.

You can create hypotheses. You can generate speculations to then test at the table. So the reason I’m pointing this out is that next time you go into a meeting where you have to divvy up a resource or, or be persuasive, or learn, or exchange information, prepare in writing in advance. Prepare in writing and then take your green pen with you to that meeting. In green ink, you cross out things that you got wrong. You underline things you got correct. You make notes to yourself in the margin. And if you do this across time, then you will see trends and patterns in green ink. You will. You’ll see trends and patterns. You’ll be able to say, “Wow, I tend to do that a lot. Next time, I should try this.” So you’ll be your own coach. So the green pen will remind you to be your own coach.
Why green? Everything’s symbolic, right? Managing meaning. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, he said, he himself said that he wrote his poetry in green ink because green is the color of esperanza. Anyone speak Spanish? What is esperanza?

Student: Hope.

Linda E. Ginzel: Hope. Green is the color of hope. So it’s with hope that I give you a green pen. With hope that you will use it to collect the data of your experience to be wiser, younger. If you were in my classroom, we give feedback in green with hope that our feedback is useful as well for your growth, right? And so that’s a gift for you. And I always tell my students, the more green, the better. So repeat after me. Green is good.

Students: Green is good.

Alright, I told you that with professional development, we’re doing community building. This is John Gardner, one of my favorite quotes. “The building of community is one of the highest and most essential skills a leader can command.” I was fortunate enough when I was an assistant professor at Stanford . . . John Gardner spent his career in government. He was President Johnson’s Health and Human Services secretary. He started the Common Cause, the citizens’ lobby. He also started the White House Fellows Program. And he left his position in protest over the escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Some years later, he came to Stanford and was a faculty member. He was a teaching faculty. And he taught me many things. I was fortunate enough to be mentored by him. And this is something that I . . . it’s a skill. Building community is a skill. And skills benefit from practice. And I have always tried to build community here at Booth. It’s not a skill that is often valued very highly, because you know, we are your, you know, we kind of do our thing and we value individual accomplishment and such. But community building is a really essential skill, and you’re all here today building community. And so I encourage you to think about a lot of outcomes and things that people think are traits more as behaviors. Like courage. You wanna be more courageous? Start by small act of courage. Courage benefits from practice. And because our identity and even our reputation follows our acts, if you wanna be more courageous, start by being courageous.

Skills benefit from practice, and here we are building community together. Collective wisdom and the building of community. So I learned a lot of things in writing this book. One thing I learned is what’s called an epigraph. Do you know what an epigraph is? Do you? I didn’t. An epigraph is the quote that appears that foreshadows what’s to come in the book. And this is my quote, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” Have you ever heard that quote? Yeah, many people have not heard this quote. I mean, it is the quote that I think the Kennedy School of Government uses as their sort of moniker. But a lot of people haven’t heard this quote.

The reason I chose it, two reasons. But what I wanna say now is that this book is actually more about learning than it is about leadership. This book is about being wiser, younger. If it were true that everyone would . . . became . . . learn from their experiences, then everyone who is old would be wise. And that is not the case. You will never be younger than you are today, but you can be wiser tomorrow. And that is also your choice.

So we’re gonna say a lot about choice today. I wanted to point out that every chapter, every chapter starts with a verb, right? And the verb that we have here is choosing leadership. I believe that leadership is a choice. It is a behavior. It is not a person, a title, a credential. It is not, right? It is a behavior. So that’s the premise that we will work from.

If you go to page 132 of your book, you will see the index. I’m sorry, this is the, the Activities index. There are more than 20 activities, but these are the 20 that were indexed. And we’re going to do, we’re going to start in a moment with “Zero-draft leadership definition.” And I’ll say a few words about, maybe we’ll try a little bit of juxtaposing leadership and management. But these are the activities that you can do individually and then get together with your team or your group. I will tell you that I have mothers and daughters doing this book together. At Booth, the staff has formed Choosing Leadership groups. They do a chapter or an activity at a certain period and then they come together and teach and learn together. The Booth alumni, the Women’s Network in London pilot tested this and they’re rolling it out across the country of having women, Booth alums get together and teach and learn. My MBA TA is using it with her husband to do, her fiancé to do premarital work, to have discussions and conversations that they might not otherwise have about what’s important to them, about who has inspired them, about what they want to accomplish.

So there are lots of different ways that you can use this book to build community and create collective wisdom. Just as, while we have this open. This is my first class assignment. This is an amazing assignment. It’s from the NPR series This I Believe. And what I, what I do—and Vanessa knows—is that we have all the students bring together their essays, and then I compile them and create a booklet and give them back. And it is amazing how much humanity, you know, people, the MBAs aren’t usually, you know. You can’t really show your humanity when you’re calculating the cost of capital. But a collection of This I Believe essays is astonishing and amazing. So this is the first class assignment, “Vicarious learning framework.” That’s another assignment: create your own framework for learning by observation. What do you wanna learn from others? How do you create a structure to capture that data and move forward with that? This is Harry Davis’s final paper. Harry Davis, who’s taught here for more than 50 years. He hired me. Very smart man.

(students laugh)

When I went to teach this class, I asked him if I could put his final paper into the class because when I first started teaching, he was teaching in the Executive MBA Program. And people came up to me said, “You know that paper I wrote for Harry, it changed my life.” I thought, “Wow! I’d like to have people say that about me someday.” So I have this paper here. So now it can change your life. You can write the paper. So the idea—and this is the best advice—so the idea is there are lots of ways that you can use this workbook. It’s not a thought-leadership book. We have enough thought leadership, and there’s not much changing. This is a book you do. This is a book that you process. It is the size, the dimensions of a composition notebook. It’s about the size of a composition notebook. It’s light. It’s paperback. It’s inexpensive. It’s meant to be your companion. When you’re ready to do the activities and exercises, it will be there for you. And you can do the whole book, and then some years later, go back. It’s kind of a container for your future self. And that’s my hope. So that’s the gift to you.

We will do a couple. We’ll move to it now. But that’s what I wanted to introduce to you. Oh yeah, by the way, while I’m thinking about . . . I always forget this. There is a website with videos. The website is called choosingleadershipbook.com. And on the homepage is a great two-minute video that is basically an advertisement for the University of Chicago, because it was filmed on a beautiful fall day walking through campus. So on the homepage, there’s a video that basically tells you what I just said about how I’m trying to see the movement and get people to teach and learn together. And then under Resources, there are seven videos produced here at Booth that were these pictures that I use, are used in the videos and then I’m talking about concepts from the book. So those are on YouTube as well.

But this will remind you and have you kind of go back to what is in the book, and if you wanna use it with other people, that’s gonna be useful to you. Alright, we’re not gonna do this activity. A lot of times when I do this session, I start with this activity. But today I thought I would just give it to you as a homework assignment and use it as a story to tell you why this is important to me.
So before I started teaching leadership, officially like as a class, I did a lunch talk for the MBA Full-Time students. And I thought this would be a great icebreaker. I thought it would be really easy. And we would just start with: What was your earliest time you recall engaging in leadership behavior? And I thought it would be like an icebreaker. And it wasn’t. It was really hard. I got answers like,
“You know, I haven’t really been in a leadership position yet.”

“I was just a manager.”

“I mean, someday. I’ll be a leader someday. And but I really, I really don’t have a leadership experience.”

And I realized that it’s because of the stereotypes that we have about what a leader is. That we constrain our own understanding our own ideas about what it means to lead because we buy into sort of myths and popular knowledge, popular wisdom about what it means to lead. So I would give you this. So what I did in the book is, I solicited early leadership stories from my students, and some of them appear in the book. And I will tell you that I’ve had, I have stories from kindergarten. One person said that he was in kindergarten, and a new student came, and the student was a little different, I don’t know why, but people weren’t befriending her. And so this person went to her and included her on the playground, and that for him, that was his first act of leadership. And so, and to this day, his notion of leadership is more one on one. And it’s peer to peer. Now that’s partly a function of his choices, his job and everything, but there’s something about your earliest, whatever you think of as your earliest leadership experience, there’s something there. There’s something there about what you think leadership means. So I encourage you to do this activity as homework assignment. It is on page nine of the book. So that’s homework, optional homework.

(students laugh)

Obviously, but that’s there for you on page nine. We have, so but the story, the reason I tell you the story is because it brought up this idea about myths. So let’s turn to page 119 together. So this section is called “Busting leadership myths.” And here’s some of the myths that I start with. “Leaders are born. Leaders have charisma.”

You know what’s interesting about charisma? I think it is a really unhelpful construct, right? It’s a very not useful construct. If you think of who had, think of your charismatic ideal, whoever that is. Now, are you ever going to meet that ideal? Probably not. What is charisma anyway? Charisma in social psychology, charisma is called referent power, right? You have referent power to the extent that people want to be like you. It means to refer to. When you are a role model for someone, when people look up to you and say, “I wanna be like him or her,” you have charisma. That’s what charisma is. It’s your ability to move people in your direction, because you serve as a role model for them.

So don’t buy into this notion that you should be a certain kind of leader. Of course you can emulate a certain leader or you can admire leaders, and people always tell me, “Well, we have to fake it ’til we make it,” whatever. But you should figure out younger, sooner who you are and what it is about you, each of you that makes people want to follow you.

And there are as many different ways to be leader as there are people in this room. So don’t buy into this kind of notion about charisma being something out there that belongs to other people. That’s the myth that I think makes us think that we aren’t leaders yet.

“Leaders are extroverts. They know everything. They don’t make mistakes.” I don’t know what it means you can’t lead if you aren’t the leader. I don’t really know what that means. Oh, I guess that means if you don’t have the title or the label. “Leadership is based on seniority.”

So here’s what I’m gonna ask you to do. Talk to one or two people around you. And talk and write down another myth or two. I’m gonna give you two minutes. And I will time it on my . . . this is a participation. And think about other leadership myths that are not here. Or you can choose one that you think is interesting, and talk to each other about what you think leadership myths are. I’m gonna give you two minutes. This is a way to . . . this is a trick that teachers use to increase the energy in the classroom, right? So in case you didn’t know, so two minutes. Talk to the person next to you about leadership myths. My idea is that you’ll write another one or two down. But if that isn’t interesting to you, then just talk to the person next to you about leadership, and I’ll come back and ask you if there’s something interesting you’d like to share about what you just thought with regards to leadership myths, and then we’ll continue. So two minutes with one or two people around you, OK? And I’ll put the timer up so you can see. You’re on.

OK, so why don’t we come back together? That was two minutes. It goes quickly, right? So I would like to just ask, does anyone have one that they think we should add? Did anyone hear one or say one? Yes sir.

Student: Yes, I’ve actually got three of them.

Linda E. Ginzel:
OK, let’s start.

Student: The first one is: “Leaders are necessarily enthusiastic.”

Linda E. Ginzel: Is that different from, OK, “leaders are extroverts”? Or I’m just gonna put that here, “enthusiastic,” OK.

Student: “Leaders only associate with other leaders.”

Linda E. Ginzel: OK.

Student: And, “Leaders do not portray weakness.”

Linda E. Ginzel: Ooh, “leaders have all the answers. No portrayal of weakness.” That’s interesting. “Leaders associate with other leaders.” Yes. Oh I’m sorry, both, we have our elder statesman.
Student: “Leaders are good speakers or communicators.”

Linda E. Ginzel: Ah, “leaders are good communicators,” so we . . . communication is one thing. Speaking? Is speaking? Speaking, OK. So OK, I’m gonna put here, I’m just kinda trying to chunk these. “Leaders are good speakers.” Sir?

Student: “Leaders are tall.”

Linda E. Ginzel: Oh, that’s a great one.

(audience laughs)

OK, so let’s add to that. Let’s add to that. “Leaders are tall, attractive, male.” Oh, here we go. What else? “Blonde”? No. What are leaders, tall attractive?

Student: Deep voices.

Linda E. Ginzel: Huh? Deep voices. That’s interesting, yeah. Tall is also empirical. “Have deep voices.”

(audience laughs)

Student: Good Hair.

Linda E. Ginzel: Hair? No bald leaders?!

(audience laugh)

Linda E. Ginzel: “They have great hair.”

Student: Educated.

Linda E. Ginzel: Yes, that’s interesting. They, “leaders are educated. They have the credentials.” They’re credentialed. They’re of a certain age, aren’t they? “They’re of a certain age, credentials.”
Alright, well you get the idea. So this is exactly the idea. So to the extent that we buy into and really believe some of these what I call myths, then we are waiting to become a leader or we may never actually be able to accomplish that, right? Now you notice the problem here is that we’re talking about leaders as people. This is the only thing that ,the only time we have here where we don’t actually have leaders, but every other time here, we’re talking about leaders as people, as individuals. And I think this is part of the mistake. So I have been on a mission to get people to stop using the label leader and manager and start using the verb to lead and to manage.

But we still need a noun. We need a label. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to solve this problem. And I came up with this idea. So just like we manage meaning with symbols like the green pen, we also manage meaning with the words we use and words we choose. So the words you use are really, really important. What you call yourself and what you call others matters a lot. Are any of you here middle children? Middle? Middle children? Anyone else a middle child? No. But you know what if I say middle children right, maybe you don’t. But what association do we have with middle children? Don’t they have a stereotype associated with them?

Student: Black sheep.

Linda E. Ginzel: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. What else about middle kids?

Student: They don’t get any (inaudible).

Linda E. Ginzel: They don’t get any (inaudible).

(Ginzel heartily laughs)

Well, we just proved them wrong.

Right, so there are stereotypes, right? They’re not the oldest. Firstborns always have all these privileges. They’re not the youngest. They have all these privileges. There’s . . . yeah, they’re like, you know, they’re in the middle. That’s why they’re called middle children. So let me tell you something. You don’t have to accept labels that are put on you or use these labels.
My son, Tomer, asked me one day why someone called him the sandwich kid. And I said, well, it’s because you’re the only one in the family who has an older brother and a younger brother. They’re the bread. You’re the center of the sandwich. And that boy who’s probably, I don’t know, four or five years old, to this day, if you call him, if you say, “Oh, you’re the middle kid,” he’ll be like, “Oh, no, I’m the center of my family.”

(students laugh)

And his email address is the center . . .

(students laugh)

So what we call, what we call ourselves is really important. So think about calling yourself leader versus manager. I’ve been trying to change the label, and the label that I have been using in my classroom is executive. You are an executive. Most of the time you’re managing. Sometimes you make a choice to lead. This is what I’ve been using. And how did I get this? I got this from Peter Drucker. I’m using his definition of executive: “anyone who is responsible for the actions and decisions that contribute to the performance capacity of his or her organization.”

I am an executive. I am. I have no power. I have no title. I mean, like, I’m not an administrator. I’m not a dean. I have no budget, as you know, ’cause I use inexpensive pens. I don’t have people who work for me, but I’m an executive, according to this definition because every day I engage in behaviors and actions that contribute to the performance capacity of Booth.

So I was using this, and in the book I had executive, executive, executive, executive. And, Dick Thaler, was, is amazingly generous and smart and kind, and I asked him for a favor and he read . . . I didn’t ask him to do this, but he read the first four chapters of the book and gave me line-by-line edits. It was an incredibly generous act. He said to me, Linda, you’ve got to lose executive. You’ve gotta to lose executive. He said, if you’re trying to reach the general public, from high-school students through . . . you got to lose executive. And I said, No, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand. I’m using it the way Drucker’s using it. That’s what I mean. Right, I’m an executive. Let me . . . I’m an executive. According to this. He said, “Linda, people at Booth would call you a leader. No one’s going to call you an executive. You’ve got to lose executive. And I said, “Look, if there were a better label, I would have found it. ’Cause I’ve been working on this problem for about 15 years. I would have found the label. Honestly, believe me.” He said, “Linda, this is not world hunger. You can solve this problem. By tomorrow morning, give me 20 words that substitute for executive.”

He gives me this assignment. What am I supposed to do? So I have a baseball game. My kids play baseball. I’m asking all the baseball moms, you know, “Here’s how I use it. Here’s what it means.” Here’s . . . What’s a better word?

“Advocate, steward, actor, agent,” arrgh.

(students laugh)

Horrible, horrible, horrible! I go home. I’m googling. I’m synonyming, antonyming, trying to find, you know. I have 15 words. Ten of them are so bad I can’t even type them out into the email. And I give him five words. That next morning, he writes back and he says, “Champion. Champion is your word.” So I did a global search and replaced 42 instances of executive for champ . . . champion for executive in the book, and I wasn’t completely bought in. I wasn’t completely bought in, but you know, you got to trust a Nobel laureate when he gives you advice.

(students laugh)

And so I did. I trusted, and lately I have been on my hands and knees thanking him because yesterday I did a talk for graduate deans, trying to explain to them how they can use this book with PhD students who definitely do not consider themselves executives. We are using this book with high-school students who come to the University of Chicago to do summer programs. They definitely don’t think of themselves as executives.

But champion? Here’s how champion works. OK, so here’s the story. This is the gist of Choosing Leadership.

(sighs)

Susan, you are a champion. OK, you’re a champion. You’re a champion. Every one of you, you’re champions. Most of the time, you are in the present. Your are managing, in the present, in the here and now. When you manage, you usually use things like legitimate power, the power that comes with your title. You know, you’re a parent. You’re a boss. You’re a teacher, whatever your title gives you legitimate power, that’s what we usually use when we manage. We also, in those roles, with those types of power, have the power to reward and punish. So we can give people positive things. We can take away positive things. We can give people negative things. We can take away negative things. All of those affect people’s behavior. When we are in the present, that is when we develop trust. Trust is the contingency between what you say and what you do, in how you behave, how the reciprocation and how you behave. So that all happens in the present.

Most of the time you are managing. And don’t let anyone ever tell you that that is less important than leading. Because management is noble. When we manage, we allow . . . we help people to pay their mortgage, to send their children to school. To live their dreams. Managing is noble. And most of the time, you as a champion, you are managing. Whether it’s in your home, at work, in your community, in your classroom, you’re getting things done. You’re making the budget. You’re meeting the (inaudible) expectations, making sure you have diapers at home. When we are managing, we can use a map because the terrain is charted. We know, we know. It’s here. We can see it. We are in the here and now.

Most of the time champions manage. Once in a while, you make a choice, a decision. And it’s actually a risky decision. You make a decision to champion a view of, a different view for tomorrow. Now, the reason it’s risky is ’cause you don’t know if you’re right, because you have never been to the future. The future does not exist. You make this risky choice to leave the stability of the present that you can see and that you know to go to a place that doesn’t exist yet. This is when you make the choice to lead.

And you can’t make that choice too often. Because you would wear yourself and other people out. You have to believe so much in your vision of that better tomorrow that you are willing to go to this place that doesn’t exist. And when you’re managing, you really need people’s heads. They just need to know what to do. When you are leading, you need their heart ’cause they have to believe in your vision of tomorrow and they have to believe so much that they’re willing to follow you over that cliff. That you could be taking them over a cliff. So you need their head and their heart. You need their commitment. You need to believe in that vision of a better tomorrow. Because you’ve never been there. There’s no map. The terrain is uncharted. The best you can do is have a sense of direction.
So my symbol for leading is a compass. Just a sense of direction ’cause you don’t know exactly how to get there, where to go. So that’s when you . . . you are not a leader now and you were a manager then. It’s not that some people are leaders and other people are managers. You’re a champion. You’re either leading or you’re managing. Now what happens, you create this future and now that’s your present, right? So however long or back and forth. So this is a process that champions engage in. And this is how I see leadership.

I actually have read so much horrible stuff on leadership that I . . . this is why I couldn’t sleep at night. “How am I gonna teach my students this? How am I gonna do this?” I have come to understand that you have to develop your own point of view. You don’t have to buy my point of view. This is my point of view. This is my best shot at it at this current time. What do you think leadership is? What is your definition of leadership?

I put Followership here ’cause I have no idea what to do with followership. I really, I really don’t know. There are sections, pages in the book where I give you . . . this is Kelly’s model of followership. He says— and there are only like, there are like thousands of theories on leadership. You can count theories on followership on one hand. They all have something to do with behavior and thought, right? This one is active engagement and critical thinking. And he says that you want followers who are high on both: actively engaged and thinking critically. I think that can be useful. You can think about when is it when you . . . what situations make you more engaged and thinking critically and how can you create stronger environments that help move everyone in a more productive direction. So I still don’t know what exactly to do with followership. But I tried to kind of put it all on one image here.

So this is kind of the central image of how I think about leadership. And I wanted to tell you that in order to have you think about your definition of leadership, I’m gonna have you spend two minutes writing down your zero drafts. So start thinking about it. I believe that we have much more choice than we tend to recognize. So this is called a reversible figure, and the reason it’s reversible is because usually we see black words on a white page. So black is figure. White is background. They’ve reversed that in this image. The white is figure: the vase; the black is background: the two faces in profile. Which is why this image is unstable. It shifts back and forth. You can see both, right? Everyone see the vase in the middle? Everyone see the two faces? Now switch? You got it. You’re making a choice of what you see. And this is black and white on paper.

What if now you started talking about choices when it comes to self and others, motives, intentions, everything that’s hidden from view. You have many more choices than you think. The question is: When do you choose to lead? How do you make the choice to lead? What is it about your earliest leadership experience that tells you something about what your definition of leadership is? Your definition is as legitimate as anyone else’s. Actually, it’s more because you’re acting on the definition, whether you realize it or not. The idea in Choosing Leadership is that leadership can be with a lowercase l or a capital L. Most of us think leadership has to be big transformational Leadership. And that’s one of the reasons why we have all these myths also around leadership.
But actually, lowercase leadership are small changes you could make in a day, in a week, in a month to create a better future. So again, the question is: When do you decide?

So we’re gonna move to the last activity. And let me tell you another Drucker label: zero draft. I’m going to ask you to write down a zero draft. Now some of you may have thought a lot about leadership, what’s your definition, and you’ve already written it down. Some of you may not have ever even thought to write it down. We’re all in different places. Wherever you are today, you’re gonna write a zero draft in your book. You can even put today’s, a little date there to remind you when you come back to it that this is today’s date.

Let me show you where it is in the book, where we’re going to go. It’s page 20. Your zero-draft definition of leadership. But let me first tell you what is a zero draft. This is another label, like center’s child or you know, middle versus center. Draft versus zero draft.

So I work with . . . I work with various, you know, the undergrads at the University of Chicago are like smarter than graduate students at most other institutions, really. They’re incredibly smart. I have the privilege of working with undergrads as research assistants. They are really, really, really good. So I had this situation that used to happen to me that I would chat with them and I’d say, you know, here’s what I’m thinking. I don’t really know exactly what I want, but I kinda want, I wanna do this. And here’s, so can you, can you look into this? Can you maybe like, you know, come back with something next week and kind of move us forward on these. You know, just drafts, put a draft together.

They come back and they give me a thesis because they don’t want to give me something that they’re not, that isn’t their best work. They wanna help me. They wanna show me that they, they are good students, that they’re, that they’re good employees, that they are smart and capable, and they wanna do the best job they can. And then I look at what they send me and I’m like, “My God! I’m so sorry you spent all that time and did all that effort. It wasn’t exactly what I meant. I was kind of thinking about kind of this way a little more. Let’s just move a little bit in that direction for next time, OK?” And then everyone feels horrible. Everyone feels horrible. You know what I started saying? “Just give me a zero draft. Just a zero draft, OK. Just like jello on the wall. Let’s just, something to get us started.”
Now they still bring me back something of beauty. But it’s not a thesis because I have just given them permission to put jello on a wall. And they are not going to put jello on a wall ’cause that’s just not what they do. But this has saved this, this little change in my vocabulary has changed . . . has made me much more productive, and my students, my research assistants also feel more, more like they’re succeeding. It’s a simple, small change.

So wherever you are in your journey in defining leadership, I’m gonna ask you to write your zero draft. So I’m gonna give you two minutes. You have to write something down. It doesn’t have to be a lovely sentence It doesn’t have to be . . .you don’t have to show it to anybody. It is simply yours. It is on page 20. I want you . . . It’s the second activity in the book, I think, after writing your earliest leadership experience.

What is today’s date? May 4. Oh right. “May the Fourth Be with You.” I have to say something about that. Two minutes. Two minutes. Two minutes.

(timer rings)

OK, that’s your . . . that’s your two minutes. Let me get back and shut this off so it doesn’t ring again in two more minutes. Alright, so we have five minutes left. And I wanna try to go back to where we started. So you have your zero draft. We thought about myths. You’re gonna do your homework on what’s your earliest leadership assignment. In the . . . at least that’s my fantasy of what you’re gonna do. What you’re gonna do, I don’t know.

(chuckles)

My fantasies are very low level, so I’m hoping that you will, will oblige. But the idea is that there’s a zero-draft definition, which you just did. Then you have a little bit . . . you do some things, and then there’s a first draft. And then at the end of the book, for this time, whenever is the first time you go through the book, is your current definition. So that’s on page 129.
And my current definition is: “Behavioral choices we make in order to create a better future.” That’s my current definition. Now you see there’s nothing there about followers. There’s nothing there about any of that other stuff because this is the gist of my definition.

I would encourage you to continue to evolve and think about the implications of your definition and what’s kind of the essence of what you think leadership is.

So let me finish by reading this last paragraph in the book. We opened with John F. Kennedy’s quote, “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” Well, Kennedy never had the opportunity to deliver these words. They were written as part of the speech he planned to give on the day of his assassination, which is why many of us have not heard this quote. I should have said “we.” We have the opportunity to live these words by making learning indispensable to leadership in our lives. So as long as we are alive, we have an opportunity to make better decisions, to build a better future, to make better choices. My hope is that Choosing Leadership this small . . .

(timer rings)

It even did it again! I even shut it off, right? Cancel, OK, OK, OK. That’s two minutes, OK.

My . . . see it was so beautiful, wasn’t it? That was like . . . I was almost there with the close.

(students laugh)

My hope is that this little gift to you will serve you well in your efforts, in your journey and that you’ll be able to create a better future by building your courage, your capacity, and your wisdom. And you know, again, no matter how old you are, there’s a future self that is, is possible.

So we have two minutes left, and I just have to show you something that is, that reminded me when I asked you. I completely forgot until I knew what day it is. So in my classroom, I always do use Star Wars analogies. I always talk about there’s every decision you make there’s a force, and each force has a light side and a dark side. And then what we can do is make decisions that have more light side and less dark side. And today happens to be the fourth of May. And so there’s something called “May the fourth be with you” for Star Wars fans. And, may the fourth be with you. And my understanding is that there are two videos that are out live now on Twitter, from Booth, Booth social media for “May the Fourth Be with You.” And I happen to have one that was sent to me, you know, as a preview, and it’s live on Twitter, but I don’t do Twitter. I’m sorry. You can do Twitter, but let me show you. I will show you this, and then you can go to Twitter. Let’s see if we can do it on here.
Linda E. Ginzel: “The green pen, it’s a symbol. The idea is that I wanna help people, my students to become their own coach. You might be wondering why green. So Pablo Neruda, he said that he himself wrote his poetry in green ink ’cause green is the color of esperanza. It means hope. But what some people don’t know is this.

(students laugh and clap)

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being with me today. I will stay after. It’s very . . . Thank you, thank you. Thank you for being here. Please spread the . . . please join the mission to help people to take more responsibility for their growth, for their development. I am so thrilled that we had Vesna from one year and my friends here from 45 years.

Student: Forty.

Linda E. Ginzel: Forty. Forty. Oh, 45 is five more years from now. Alright. One and 45, that’s amazing. Thank you for building community and creating collective wisdom for all of these years and for the years to come.