Thought Leadership from Ben Baran Ph.D., top management consultant in Ohio, educator, speaker. Expert in high reliability organizations, organizational agility, leadership training based on military, leadership methodologies, human resource strategy, human resource management, latest science on human resources.
Feel free to check out any of the content I have here, but also be sure to check out my newest content at Reckoning and Elevating What Works.
One increasingly common trend is, well, trend reports. Professional organizations, research firms and consultancies frequently publish what they see as the latest developments or top predictions for the future. Depending on the source, these trend reports can be thought-provoking and insightful.
At the very least, I find it interesting to see what various leaders see on the horizon.
Recently, three
Read MorePositive thinking is sometimes overrated. In fact, too much positive thinking can be disastrous. While optimism can help people and organizations bounce back from tough times, when allowed to dominate the psyche during good times, it can blind us to the possibility of what could go wrong.
It’s important, periodically, to think creatively about potential doom.
Read MoreDuring a recent conversation I had with a senior executive, I brought up some of my efforts to promote strategic thinking and using data to guide decision-making among human resources (HR) professionals. She nodded in agreement, but then she interrupted.
“You know, there’s one thing I hate about our HR department,” she said. “They think like gate keepers, when they should be thinking like service providers.”
She went on to describe how
Read MoreRecently, I did something that changed the world. It might have been an encouraging word, a provocative question, a smile.
But honestly, I have no idea what it was.
Recently, you did something that changed the world. It might have been an offer to help, an attentive ear, a cup of coffee.
But you, like me, probably don’t know exactly what you did either.
You see, everything we do can either
Read MoreSome parts of life are easy to dislike. World hunger and terrorism come to mind.
For many people, so do workplace meetings.
But the startup Gild Collective—comprised of three cofounders, Jessie Deye, Kelsey Pytlik, and Rachel Bauer McCreary—has realized that meetings can not only be helpful, but they can be essential for driving alignment and productivity.
Read MoreIn the American television comedy series "The Office," the hostility between Michael Scott, regional manager of the mythical paper company Dunder Mifflin’s branch in Scranton, Pa., and Toby Flenderson, the branch’s human resources director, is a recurring theme.
During one particularly humorous scene, Michael learns suddenly that Toby—who had left the office previously—has returned.
Michael’s reaction?
Read MoreWe are creatures of habit. We continually seek—or create—routines. The structures of our days and our weeks give us predictability, and that makes us comfortable.
None of this is inherently bad. In fact, routines and habits let us free our minds to work on other, more complex problems. If we had to think actively about everything in our day, deliberately evaluating every decision from the time we roll out of bed until we return to the pillow, we’d be overwhelmed.
What does this have to do with agility, human resources, leadership and change?
Everything.
Read MoreWhen the unexpected strikes, our brains often start working like we’re being chased by a wild animal. Levels of hormones—specifically, adrenaline, norepinephrine and cortisol—increase, resulting in a range of reactions including increased heartrate, elevated blood pressure and tunnel-vision like focus on the threat.
This is great if you actually are being chased by a lion. The threat is singular, and your immediate actions are likely singular as well (for example, run fast to shelter).
But it’s not so great if you’re facing a complex problem in your organization.
Read MoreOn August 5, 1949, a team of 15 smokejumpers parachuted into the Mann Gulch near the Missouri River in Montana to fight a fire that had started the previous day. At first appraisal, fighting the fire seemed a simple task. But thus began one of the worst disasters in the modern history of wildfire suppression in which all but two of the team members lost their lives.
Immortalized in Norman Maclean’s book Young Men and Fire[i], in the folk song Cold Missouri Waters by James Keelaghan and in famed organizational scholar Karl Weick’s scholarly analysis[ii], the incident is a tragic-yet-fascinating account of a team attempting to sense and respond to a rapidly evolving environment. It’s a story of improvisation, counter-intuitive action and collapsed team structures.
According to Maclean’s account, the team
Read More“Hey, you did a really great job in a tough situation. They’re lucky to have you.” I heard the gentleman in front of me say these two simple sentences to the United Airlines flight attendant as we exited the plane. It was a flight that normally takes about one hour, but it turned into more than three hours for all of us aboard the aircraft due to weather considerations. The flight attendant’s reaction to this unsolicited positive feedback, as you can imagine, was one of delight and appreciation.
Read MoreIt seemed like a good idea at the time. And I think it was. Using Excel 2007 to organize all of my research references worked very well during my time in graduate school. But that was in 2009. The world—and its technology—have changed. So now I’m happy to tell anyone and everyone to NOT follow the advice I presented in my 2009 blog post about using Excel to organize all of your research articles.
Instead, use Zotero.
Read MoreAttention all college students: Your professors, like all other people on the planet, form impressions about you based upon your behavior. And yes, we may sometimes talk about the worst of you with each other, shaking our heads in disbelief. We may wonder about your ability to become productive working adults and contributing members of society.
But it gives us no greater joy than to see you thrive and to play a small role in helping you succeed.
Read More“I f&#$ing love squats,” snarled the bald, 6-foot-3-inch, 240lb-plus, weight-belt wearing U.S. Army soldier, who resembled Shrek minus the green hue. I watched as he then proceeded to balance about 100lbs less than his bodyweight on his big shoulders and … “squat.” Only it wasn’t a squat.
It was what I see about 99 percent of the guys in the gym do when they think they are “squatting.” Instead of lowering himself until his hips descended just below his knees, he maybe came down about 12 inches, making about a 20-degree bend in his knee, before returning to an upright position. Sorry folks, that’s not a squat.
Read MoreIf you’ve ever wondered what those “funny-looking weights with a handle on top” sitting in the corner of your gym are, here’s a quick introduction. Those are kettlebells. And they’re not funny looking. Kettlebells are the gym-equipment equivalent of an AC/DC rock song. They’re a United States Marine Corp KA-BAR® fighting knife. They’re black coffee; they’re straight whiskey. Kettlebells are bare-bones, stripped-down hunks of cold steel that provide endless opportunities for the user to become stronger physically and tougher mentally.
I’ve been rather active most of my life, but the most prominent exercise to which I’ve devoted myself during most of those years has been running.
Read MoreIn 2010, my co-authors and I published this paper in the Journal of Business and Psychology: Shanock, L. R., Baran, B. E., Gentry, W. A., Pattison, S. C., & Heggestad, E. D. 2010. Polynomial regression and response surface analysis: A powerful approach for examining moderation and overcoming limitations of difference scores. Journal of Business and Psychology, 25: 543-554.
IMPORTANT NOTE: We recently submitted a correction regarding a few technical details presented in the original article.
Read MoreExpectancy theory is one of the most well-known theories of work motivation. It takes a rational approach toward human behavior, assuming that people make conscious decisions among alternatives. In this clip, I explain the basics of expectancy theory and some of the potential implications it has for managers.
Derek Sivers is an interesting guy--entrepreneur, speaker, musician, performer, writer, programmer, and more. I first heard him speak at a music business conference in 2004, when he was running CDBaby, the wildly successful online music store that catered to independent musicians. Sivers made a video a few years ago called "Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy." I think it's great. As a management professor, I've used it in class numerous times as a great way to spark discussion about leadership, followership, risk taking, creativity, and other related topics.
Check it out below and see what you think.
It’s the “American dream:” a nice house, white picket fence, two-car garage—and, of course—the family dog. Pets are an almost ubiquitous aspect of American culture. But pet overpopulation in the United States makes the euthanasia of more than 3 million dogs and cats every year a tragic necessity. And conducting animal euthanasia takes its toll on those charged with this gruesome responsibility.
In a special report published July 1 in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, my coauthors and I tackled one part of the animal euthanasia issue.
Read MoreIf the renowned organizational sociologist Charles Perrow had a classic-rock theme song, it just might be “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” the 1974 hit song by Bachman Turner Overdrive. Let me explain. In his classic book, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, Perrow discussed the numerous high-risk technologies that pervade modern life and the dangers they pose for society.
First published in 1984 with an updated version released in 1999, Normal Accidents presents an argument for the inevitability of large-scale disasters such as nuclear meltdowns, petrochemical-plant explosions, maritime accidents, and so forth.
Read MoreOnce you’ve set up your SPSS data file, created variable and value labels to aid in interpretation of future analyses, and cleaned the data as necessary, it might be time to recode and compute new variables. You may also want to calculate some basic descriptive statistics regarding key variables in your data set. All of these tasks are remarkably simple using SPSS syntax. As a reminder, this forum focuses on common analyses performed by researchers and practitioners within organizational behavior, industrial/organizational psychology, and human resource management. An in-depth explanation of everything SPSS syntax can possibly do is far beyond this forum’s scope. The focus here is on practical issues and no-nonsense knowhow to bolster your productivity.
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