robert

Don’t just do something, stand there

by

By Larry Gennari
Boston Business Journal
July 7, 2022

Silence is more than the absence of noise. In negotiations, it can be strategic, and for those practiced in the art of patience, useful and important.

As humans, we are uncomfortable with gaps in conversation. We rush to fill the lull or, instead, we use it to prepare for what we’ll say next, not really listening or processing what might be right in front of us. Silence is hard when we want to get things done. Beyond the conference room or call, we know this impulse too. We check our phones first thing, convert conversations to text acronyms and emojis, and during the day, check in for news snippets and “likes” to validate our comments meant to save the Internet or at least some subset of friends and strangers alike. Technology enables faster communication, better analytics, efficient commerce, and the building of ties and communities far beyond our own. Why not lose a bit of silence to get a quicker deal, comment on just-released data, or complete a conversation that would take too long in-person? Noise means faster progress and we all need that, right?

Not necessarily and not all the time, according to the authors of Golden: The Power of Silence in a World Of Noise, an incredibly absorbing and insightful new book by leadership experts Justin Zorn and Leigh Marz. Noise is all around us, according to Zorn and Marz — in our ears, on our screens and in our heads. And as we try to pay attention to it all, we often lose ourselves. At work, the average person spends one full hour per day to reset after interruptions from phones and social media. At home and beyond, the level and consistency of auditory, informational and internal noise impacts cognition (especially for kids), raises stress and cardiovascular risks and heightens depression. Our brains need silence to regenerate and refresh. Beyond meditation and mindfulness, thinking and conversation, we need many more moments of deep, immersive experience that can come from outside walks, a lunch-time museum tour, or a game of Jenga with our kids. From the outset, Zorn and Marz press us to answer: “What’s the deepest silence you’ve ever known?” Readers will value their countless examples and practical tips on recognizing those opportunities every day, every week, and all the time.

For me, fishing in Minnesota’s boundary waters provided some of the deepest silences I’ve ever known. That’s why I was so eager to read The Eloquence of The Sardine: Extraordinary Encounters Beneath The Sea, the captivating recent book by marine scientist Bill Francois, who holds a Ph.D in fish hydrodynamics. Francois urges silence too. How else can we observe and learn from the conversations of the sea, whether that’s whales connecting at long distances on a channel all their own or a school of herring clustering and “talking” — the Swedish military mistook for a fast- approaching enemy submarine during the Cold War? I loved how Francois weaved history, marine science and anecdote — beyond the raw data — to get at the stories underneath. Readers also will learn how communication challenges above mirror the emerging problems below. The cacophony resulting from expanded shipping lanes, trawlers overfishing, and diminishing habitats now shared by an expanded number of species complicates the ability of aquatic animals to hear and be heard. More silence truly matters, there too and especially now.

Finally, with the benefit of silence, we’re better able to connect the dots. Consider The Eye Test: A Case For Human Creativity in The Age of Analytics, the recent book by journalist Chris Jones.  Data matters and technology allows us to consume and process more of it than ever before. Yet, Jones urges us to step back from “data deluge,” focus deeply, and apply our human imagination and the occasional unshakeable hunch to make decisions. With compelling examples ranging from serial killer investigations, Derek Jeter’s sub-par fielding stats, and tips from The Price Is Right, Jones explains that data alone can be noisy and point in the wrong direction until we lean in with intuitive reflection.

So what’s the best strategy for considering alternatives, balancing social media and sanity, and implementing go-forward plans in business and in life. My take: pay more silent attention, practice giving yourself more reflective space, and resist the familiar urge to just get it done right now. After reading these thought-provoking books, you may decide that more often than not, “don’t just do something, stand there” is the best advice of all.

Read in the Boston Business Journal

 Authors & Innovators is an occasional column by Larry Gennari, a transactional lawyer, law professor, and chief curator of Authors & Innovators, an annual business book and ideas festival.  Gennari also teaches Project Entrepreneur, a business fundamentals bootcamp for returning citizens, at BC Law School.

Is it all about the Benjamins?

by

By Larry Gennari
Boston Business Journal
June 17, 2022

Graduation season is upon us and this one will be satisfying and consequential, especially for the more than 3 million U.S. high school students who navigated the perils of the pandemic for the last two years. We all have high hopes for these graduates and a stake in the future they will help build. No doubt, many commencement speakers are advising them to follow their passion, commit to hard work, and build a productive life of connection and meaning. Some grads will embark on those tasks by beginning college program while others instead will find a full-time job or join the gig economy. So what useful advice can we offer to a generation of young adults who want to make a living and also make a life?

Let’s start with a bit of entrepreneurial wisdom from 1790.

Ben Franklin, one of the nation’s founders, was a mercurial and creative polymath with boundless energy and curiosity.  During his illustrious and long life, he was a writer, inventor, scientist, diplomat, and entrepreneur, and when he died in 1790, he left a legacy that continues to influence our economy today. Franklin was a member of an elite, educated class that crafted the U.S. Constitution. Yet, even more so than his peers, he also believed that skilled workers would shape the foundation of American democracy. In the new book Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet, University of Pittsburgh professor Michael Meyer lays out the fascinating story of how Franklin, on his death, gifted 2,000 pounds to each of his hometowns of Boston and Philadelphia to establish microloan funds to jumpstart the careers and businesses of coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters and others in the “leather apron” class. Meyer meticulously details the earliest loans, the growth of the two parallel funds through the Industrial Revolution and both world wars, and ultimately the political and legal squabbles around how each city would invest the substantial monies accrued as an intended distribution more than a hundred years later. Boston’s Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology continues to trace its skill-training roots to his legacy today. Franklin’s advice to recent grads: A master plumber can make as much as a primary-care physician — consider the pathway of a learned trade.

Franklin knew that skilled people create businesses, support themselves, hire others and center communities. In fact, as we fast-forward to 2022, Franklin’s perspective that essential skills aren’t just those taught in elite college classrooms remains prescient. Professor Danny Warshay, founding director of Brown University’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, undoubtedly agrees and in his terrific new book: See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn An Unsolved Problem Into A Breakthrough Success, he urges us to think of entrepreneurship as a process that anyone, anywhere can learn. It starts, Warshaw argues, as an “anthropological approach” centered on three fundamental principles: seeing an unmet need, solvingthat need with a developed solution, and finally, scaling that solution to have big, long-term impact.

Warshay takes the reader step-by-step through a variety of examples in different sectors ranging from Imperfect Produce, which is solving the problem of food waste, to The Louverture Cleary School Network, which now is providing quality education to thousands of students in Haiti. Indeed, Warshay’s practical framework can help how both growth oriented and non-profit entrepreneurs — regardless of formal academic training and initial resources — take on some of the world’s biggest problems. Danny’s advice for new grads: find where your genuine joy meets a real need, then focus on sustainable change.

Of course, Franklin famously commented that our democracy will survive so long as we recognize our collective effort to keep it. He would want our new grads to connect their private ambitions to our common good. Free education, clean water, safe highway travel, and our system of justice are among the public goods that bind us together as a nation. In their important, new book The Privatization of Everything, researcher Donald Cohen and NYTimes editor Allen Mikaelian provide countless examples of how easily communities can lose when private interests take over day to day essential services. Their advice to new grads: be informed, get involved, and always read the fine print.

Franklin dispensed plenty of advice during his life: “Early to bed, early to rise makes one healthy, wealthy, and wise,” “Fish and visitors both stink after three days,” and other time-tested gems. As we celebrate the new graduates in our lives, we should all give Franklin’s life and legacy a thoughtful second look.

Read in the Boston Business Journal

 Authors & Innovators is an occasional column by Larry Gennari, a transactional lawyer, law professor, and chief curator of Authors & Innovators, an annual business book and ideas festival.  Gennari also teaches Project Entrepreneur, a business fundamentals bootcamp for returning citizens, at BC Law School.

For the Sake of Argument

by

Every lawyer knows the old adage: “When the law is on your side, argue the law; when the facts  are on your side, argue the facts; when neither the law nor the facts are on your side, just argue!” 

Memorable, sardonic, and a nod to the very human condition of wanting to “win,” this tip can frame  a negotiating strategy. However, for most decision makers, arguments should yield to demonstrable  facts, mutual understanding, and logical compromise, given that winning means closing a deal.  That’s challenging when people make up their minds quickly based on what they already “know.”  So, in an age when data and information are ubiquitous, how can CEO’s advocate and win when otherwise reasonable people take hard positions and believe unreasonable things? As always, they can start with a few good  books. 

Productive negotiations start with agreement on basic facts. We take for granted that smart people on “the other side” understand  our goals, their own incentives, and the field of play for discussion. Increasingly, however, some conversations need to start at  an even more basic level: can we agree that COVID is not a hoax or even that the earth is round? (Yes, you read that right.)  Journalist Kelly Weill, author of the fascinating and unnerving new book, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture and Why People Will Believe Anything, a fascinating and unnerving new book, helps explain why. We humans always have sought  patterns to explain the inexplicable and Weill traces the roots of today’s conspiratorial movements back to Flat Earth theory in  the 1830’s. She does a masterful job of explaining how social media companies have learned how to combine basic human  instincts with AI driven algorithms to keep us online longer even if the deeper we go and the questionable content we encounter  leads to our own unraveling. This book is a must for tech leaders, especially anyone involved in designing ethical AI driven  customer engagement. 

Even if we can agree on basic facts, we still need to work through what they mean to both sides. That’s hard, especially now, and  according to journalist/social entrepreneur Monica Guzman, we all need a strategy for intentional listening in our business and  personal lives. In her insightful new book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, Guzman tells us how. I especially liked her “four things to try” formulation centered on: getting  hypothetical, presenting the strongest argument for the other side, acknowledging your own attachments, and assuming absolutely  nothing. As Guzman illustrates by interactions with her own strong-willed family and work colleagues, listening can be challenging, hearing even harder.  

Yet, for most business leaders, the hardest challenge of all may be re-thinking what winning actually means. For more on that,  I’d recommend the forthcoming book, Results: Getting Beyond Politics to Get Important Work Done, by Governor Charlie  Baker and his former longtime chief of staff, Steve Kadish. Unlike many books by political figures, this isn’t a tell-all, nor does  it focus on settling scores or framing a narrative for an upcoming campaign. Instead, Republican Baker and Democrat Kadish  share what they have learned over the course of their private and public lives by distilling an incisive four-step framework based  on competence, fact-based decisions, and measuring of results. 

Notably, for Baker, the former CEO of Harvard Pilgrim, leading a state involves different priorities than heading a private  company, but the challenge of finding solutions that work across conflicting, entrenched, and often distrustful constituencies is  the same for many organizations, whatever the industry. I enjoyed learning how the team tackled day-today challenges ranging  from the disfunction at the MBTA, human tragedies at the DCF, and the scramble to address the Pandemic and the rollout of the  life-saving vaccines. Their disarming candor about what worked and what didn’t and their esemplastic methodology will be  incredibly useful to any business leader. I certainly came away from the book with gratitude for a hard-working team committed  to showing how government, although imperfect and bureaucratic, can “win” by making positive change and a real difference in peoples’ lives. This is tough, important, and ongoing work.  

As for achieving goals when we seem so far apart? Maybe we need to refocus on the basics of finding common ground and  understand that the opposite of losing often is not winning, but finding. In fraught and volatile times, starting with that definition  of “success” can make all the difference in the world.

Read in the Boston Business Journal

 Authors & Innovators is an occasional column by Larry Gennari, a transactional lawyer, law professor, and chief curator of Authors & Innovators, an annual business book and ideas festival.  Gennari also teaches Project Entrepreneur, a business fundamentals bootcamp for returning citizens, at BC Law School.