WHAT’S YOUR DAILY OFFERING?

December 27th, 2011

I sip my lemongrass tea and watch with divine curiosity. Like hundreds of thousands of her fellow island people, the elderly Balinese woman places a series of daily morning offerings (known as Canang Sari) at strategic places around the home. The tropical scent of frangipani and incense wafts throughout the indoor/outdoor living room surrounded by verdant rice paddy fields. Even though no one other than me is watching, she bows with respect each time she places the palm leaf-based offering on the ground. These daily devotional gifts are a way of life in Bali and part of their Hindu/animist belief system dedicated to pleasing the gods and warding off demons with this ritual.

Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our work and personal lives are made up of daily rituals including when we eat our meals, how we shower or groom, or how we approach our daily descent into the digital world of email communication. Our habits comfort us much like the Balinese feel reassured by their morning offerings. But, have you ever taken an inventory of your daily rituals and how they’re serving you? And, have you ever imagined what daily rituals could make you a better leader or a happier person?

About a decade ago, I experimented with a daily offering at the worst of times for my company. As CEO, I could see that the dot-com bust was taking a huge toll on the psycho-hygiene of our hotel company. Knowing that creating a culture of recognition was one means of developing a ripple of positivity in an organization, I made it a practice of giving a minimum of two heartfelt expressions of recognition to two different people in the company each weekday. My rule was that it had to be unexpected by the recipient, it had to be specific in terms of what I was thanking them for, it needed to have a level of detail that was more like a paragraph than a sentence, and – if possible – it needed to be done in person. I tried this for a month and found that like a stone falling into a pond, the reverberating effect of people feeling significant by being caught doing something right helped change the mood and morale around the offices. My daily offering was the American workplace equivalent of a Balinese gift to the gods.

The Balinese could teach us a few things about how to create the conditions for a happy culture. One of my favorite Emotional Equations is the one about Happiness which is defined by Wanting What We Have divided by Having What We Want. The numerator of this equation is all about Practicing Gratitude, finding the time to really want we have rather than take it for granted. A daily offering is one means of doing that. The denominator – having what we want – is the act of Pursuing Gratification. When we jump on that never-ending treadmill of aspiring to have what we want in life, it can create a momentary adrenaline high but it also can distract us from all that we already have in our lives. Some dictionaries define “pursuit” as “to chase with hostility.” At work, do we chase happiness with an edge of hostility? I saw some of that at the mall this holiday season.

We can either be conscious or unconscious about our personal daily rituals as well as our organizational rituals. I just finished reading a groundbreaking book by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer called “The Progress Principle.” Based upon giving a large sampling of employees in seven diverse companies a daily journal along with precise instructions about how to review their work experiences of the day, the authors were able to create one of the most authoritative studies of the inner emotional life of American workers. And, they were able to show that the most fruitful means of managing or leading a work group is to give them a meaningful sense that they were making progress and had the resources and encouragement to feel like they were living up to their potential. It’s a very instructive read that I highly recommend. But, one of the most interesting lessons of their study was just how much the employees got out of their daily ritual of reflecting on their work day. Here’s a quote from one manager who was disappointed that the daily journal study was ending: “I am sorry this is coming to an end. It forced me to sit back and reflect on the day’s happenings. This daily ritual was very helpful in making me more aware of how I should be motivating and interacting with the team.”

Starting tomorrow, what offering, ritual, or habit are you going to start practicing that is going to serve you in your personal or work life?

Posted by Chip Conley      Comments (0)

Mastering the Anxiety Equation: A Remedy for Fearful Times

November 18th, 2011

Has Anxiety become your middle name? No doubt, we’re living through unpredictable times and this is taking a toll on our physical and emotional health. This is becoming most pronounced in the context of the workplace which is having disastrous impacts on employee engagement and such prized qualities as innovation and creativity which wither in a fear-based corporate habitat. Some of us resort to tribal, “Lord of the Flies” behaviors to get by, while others of us just retreat to our cubicle in hopes that invisibility is our best means of saving our jobs. Somehow, the contagious emotion of fear has eroded our fundamental trust in our co-workers and the company. In the past few years, the Center for Work-Life Policy (according to Bloomberg Businessweek) says the percentage of Americans who trust their organizational leaders has dropped from 79% to 37%.

The fact is that almost all anxiety can be distilled down to two basic variables: what we don’t know and what we can’t control. So, the Emotional Equation for Anxiety? ANXIETY = UNCERTAINTY x POWERLESSNESS. You may have heard about the social science experiment in which people were given the choice between an electric shock now that’s twice as painful as one they would receive randomly in the next 24 hours. As you can imagine, the vast majority of people chose more pain now as opposed to less pain at some unpredictable time in the near future. Mystery creates anxiety, especially when we feel we have no influence on the situation.

Once you know the emotional building blocks of Anxiety, you can influence them. Take out a piece of paper and label it “The Anxiety Balance Sheet.” Create four columns with the first one being a list of what you DO know with respect to this issue that is giving you anxiety. Then, in the second column, write down what you DON’T know. In the third column, list what you CAN influence with respect to this issue and, finally, in the fourth column, write down what you CAN’T influence. Most people’s experience of this exercise is enlightening as they have more items in columns one and three (what they do know and what they can influence) than they expected. But, the magic comes from looking at what you don’t know  and what you can’t control. Often, you can move an item from column two to column one by just asking a few knowledgeable people on the subject whether it’s regarding your likelihood of a promotion or your job security. And, I’ve often seen people review column four and realize that they may have a little more influence over some of these items than they’d previously considered.

In sum, the lessons for leaders are simple. Even if you have bad news, it’s better than no news. Transparency is the leadership equivalent of giving people that electric shock early. It may be painful, but the uncertainty creates an even more distracting and debilitating environment. And, as a leader, one of the most effective steps you can take in harrowing times is to help your people steer away from what psychologist Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness.” Great leaders help their people see how they can directly impact the company’s objectives and their own personal goals. The more externally chaotic the world becomes, the more we need sound internal logic, especially when it comes to our emotions.

Posted by Chip Conley      Comments (0)

Palo Alto is the New Hollywood

October 17th, 2011

Years ago, young Lana Turner skipped her typing class and bought a Coke at the Top Hat Café in Hollywood where she was discovered by the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter and soon became a celebrated movie star. A couple decades later in a hilarious episode of I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball hung out at Schwab’s Pharmacy in Hollywood hoping to be discovered. Over the years, aspiring entertainers from Warren Beatty to Ben Affleck have dropped out of college to try their hand at acting in order to become a star and move to Hollywood.

The entertainment industry has been gravitating north for years as companies like Netflix, Apple, and Pandora in the San Francisco Bay Area have been reshaping the film and music industry. Facebook, which was chronicled in the film The Social Network, has been talking with former My Space co-President (and former MTV exec) Jason Hirschhorn about spearheading the company’s outreach to Valley media companies. And, the entertainment industry’s largest talent representation firm, CAA, has been mulling the opening of an office in Palo Alto.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent four days in a row in downtown Palo Alto right in the midst of the news that Steve Jobs had passed away. As I walked by his home just south of downtown with hundreds of candles and thousands of flowers lovingly placed there, a neighbor remarked that “this is the kind of reception America used to give to its film heroes.” The next day, as I sat in a local café and overheard young entrepreneurs hawk business plans to angel investors like screenwriters might do the same to an agent, I was struck with by the electricity in the air. Young people – many of them college dropouts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg before them – are streaming to Palo Alto hoping to be the next Steve Jobs (another dropout) with the desire to invent something incredible that might change the world. And, yes, they are looking to be “discovered,” or at least, funded.

Palo Alto doesn’t have a Schwab’s or a Top Hat Café (both of which no longer exist), but it does have Palo Alto Creamery, a soda fountain full of aspiring entrepreneurs comparing notes on the Valley’s  powerful players just like struggling actors did in Hollywood years ago. Having spent a few days hanging out in the collegial environment of a few Palo Alto start-ups, it struck me that the optimism, curiosity, and vitality of this tech eco-system is probably not nearly this pure or potent anywhere else in the world. Just eavesdropping on the heady conversations made me giddy! I’m sure a half-century ago, being in Hollywood must have felt quite similar as the entertainment industry gained a global foothold.

And, while Palo Alto is the celebrated place of the moment, there’s a legacy of thinking big and different in this community. Taking a walking tour with a partner of the world-famous IDEO design firm (headquartered in downtown Palo Alto), I saw that the roots of this entrepreneurial gold rush have a storied legacy. There were the first offices of Google and Intuit on University Avenue. And, next door to where my company aspires to create a luxury boutique hotel is where Facebook got started (across the street from the Creamery). But, no tour of Palo Alto could be complete without a visit to mecca, the famous garage (now a historical landmark) where Hewlett and Packard got started just a five-minute walk from where Mark Zuckerberg first started paying office rent for Facebook. There is no star Walk of Fame in Palo Alto (yet), but there’s an unmistakable spirit that the world is counting on this little community to chart a path of hope and renaissance for the world, just like Hollywood did in our darkest days of the past.

Posted by Chip Conley      Comments (0)

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