The LIFT Blog

We are going to take a two-week holiday break from posting entries on The Lift Blog. We hope all who read our blog have a wonderful holiday season and return to read our posts in the new year. Before we sign off for this break, we have two links to share.

First, we wanted to share a wonderful review of our book Lift: Becoming a Positive Force in Any Situation, written by an award-winning leadership blogger, Michael McKinney.

Second, Ryan has an op-ed piece on culture and policy, written with Angela Manese-Lee, a former business writer with The Roanoke (Va.) Times and a student at the Darden School of Business, that appeared in The Washington Post today.

Please enjoy these links and have a wonderful holiday.

Robert E. Quinn

This week I had the opportunity of working for an hour with a group of ten high school kids.  I knew they were used to being bored, expected to be bored, and planned to be bored.  So I asked myself what they most cared about.  I went into the room and made it possible for them to talk about the feelings of insecurity and loneliness in high school, and I asked them to consider some alternative realities.  No one was bored. Read more »

By Robert E. Quinn

I have been around some interesting people lately.  One was a leader in a huge global organization.  He spoke about transformation.  He said that a problem in the organization was that most people “view the future through yesterday’s eyes.” Read more »

By Ryan Quinn

I have a friend who is an entrepreneur and spent most of the past decade building up a company that did work in real estate financing. I probably do not have to tell you the rest of the story. Looking back, he can see the signs of the impending financial collapse of 2008, but at the time it seemed too improbable to believe. He kept running his business until circumstances forced him to shut down. Since then, he has been struggling professionally. While he is more than competent to get work of some kind in the financial industry, he does not have all of the necessary formal credentials to do so. He is mid-career, has children who are or soon will be going to college, and a mortgage to pay. And now he is trying to re-invent himself professionally.

I have had a number of conversations with this friend, and I continue to be amazed by his resilience. He has decided that he wants to go into the advertising business. He has no training and little experience in advertising, but he believes  he has some skills and predilections that will help him to succeed in that business. In our most recent conversation, he updated me about his progress. Each time I meet with him, I begin the conversation by thinking, “How is he ever going to pull this off?” Then, as we talk, he tells me some of the ideas he has tried out. I think to myself, “That’s not a bad idea–I could see that working.” I throw in a few ideas of my own, and he has already thought of or even begun working on most of them. By the time we end our conversation I find myself thinking, “I’ll be surprised if this man does not succeed in the long run.” Read more »

By Robert E. Quinn

I have been reading a book called The Power of a Positive No: Save the Deal, Save the Relationship – and Still Say No. The book is written by William Ury, one of the cofounders of the Harvard Program on Negotiation. In the book, Ury tells a story about a session he was asked to facilitate between the leaders of Chechnya and Russia. The objective was to end the war between the two countries.    The vice president of Chechnya began the session with an attack on the Russian leaders.  He accused them of war crimes and indicated they would be tried for their crimes.  He then turned to Ury and said; “You Americans have been supporting the Russians in their war crimes!  And, what is more, you are violating the rights of self-determination of the people of Puerto Rico!” Read more »

By Ryan Quinn

Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) is the type of research that scholars do when they study organizational phenomena with explicitly positive questions. For example, rather than ask, “What are the effects of power on silencing in organizations?” a POS scholar might ask, “Under what conditions do even those with low power in organizations feel empowered to voice their thoughts and concerns?” Or, rather than ask, “What makes accidents inevitable in complex organizations, and POS scholar might ask, “How do some organizations achieve such extraordinary levels of reliability, that accidents are extremely rare?”

By asking questions like these, POS scholars are making two conscious choices. First, they are acknowledging that many, if not most, research questions about the behavior of organizations or of humans in organizations have ethical implications–whether the issue involves the pressures that silence employees, the responsibility to create safe and reliable organizations, or any other issue. Second, rather than focus on ethical problems, ethical dilemmas, and ethical failures, they are making an explicit choice to study exceptionally ethical behavior–whether it comes in the form of relational affirmation, pragmatic adaptation, practicing virtue, or market performance. Read more »

By Ryan Quinn

My brother, Shawn, told me some stories recently, that shed some light on the power of feedback and what we pay attention to. One of these stories was about a woman who was assigned a project at work. When she went to assemble a team with people from the different units that needed to be involved, the managers from those units only allowed her to select “mediocre” employees to be on her team because they could not spare their best employees. This woman was concerned about how having a team full of mediocre employees would affect the quality of the work her team would be able to do. To her surprise and delight, her team members exceeded her expectations on every dimensions and delivered a fantastic project. When the project was done, this woman was left to wonder how her company’s performance management system was creating “mediocre” employees out of people who were not “mediocre” at all.

Read more »

By Robert E. Quinn

Recently I met with a group of people who are leading a company that one year ago was very prosperous.  In the last twelve months the company has been battered by four major external jolts.  I was invited to meet with them because there was a “high level of discouragement” and it was hoped that I might be able to alter what they were thinking, feeling and seeing.  It was hoped that I might help them better energize the organization. Read more »

By Ryan Quinn

My family and I have been participants in a bit of an odyssey. Our children attend Greer Elementary School. A little over two years ago, we found out that Greer was failing to meet some of the standards set by the No Child Left Behind Act. As a result, there was a possibility that Greer would become a “school of choice,” meaning that parents would be able to choose to send their children to other schools. This could lead to more loss of already-scarce resources, and a spiral of worsening performance. Read more »

By Robert E. Quinn

I once read an account of an entrepreneur who went bankrupt.  He describes the experience as follows:

I could no longer say that I ‘was’ my job, because I had none.  I couldn’t rely on my wealth to create a sense of worth and identity, for I had no money and loads of debt.  I could not look to social standing, for a fail entrepreneur has no social standing.  And the failure of my love relationship, a month earlier, ensured that I could not find myself through the love of another.  I had nothing, therefore I was nothing.  And I had died. [1] Read more »