Managing Leadership^®

We’re going to take a break, today, from the “random facts” series; I know it’s been a strain on everyone. We’ll pick it up again on Monday.

Sometimes it appears as though we are being overwhelmed by revolutions in the way the world works, and other times it seems as though things never really change at all. It’s the river of time: we look at ever-new water passing by, but it takes the same old form. Let’s review some examples:

“Drag-and-Drop Worlds” A fascinating piece in the current Business Week explains how technologies like those of Google Earth and Second Life are combining to create virtual worlds in which we can interact in meaningful ways – and even do business. Consider this excerpt:

In this future scenario, you could go mall shopping with a gang of friends during a lunch break, even while you remain miles apart. In reality, you’d all be pinned to your work terminals, but on that screen you would be transported to a digital replica of the shopping center. As you walk by a sale at a virtual jeans store, Web cameras in the real store let you see how crowded it actually is, in case a popular item is selling out. Your avatar, set to your body’s measurements, tries on the jeans and spins around to show them to your pals. You might buy the pants online or visit the physical store later. Either way, you’d have had a fun afternoon without leaving your cubicle.”

Whether in the real or virtual worlds, we’re still spinning around in front of the mirrors, aren’t we? But this is coming, and it opens up wonderful possibilities. It’s time to start thinking about it.

Legislating ethics. We’ve talked a lot about the dangerously vague and seductive temptation to require businesses to be “good corporate citizens.” We touched on the subject most recently in this post: Social engineering and genius, but also in a popular series about Karma Capitalism. And we’ll get to hear more on this topic soon enough: according to this WSJ item, the world’s first corporate social responsibility law has been passed, in Indonesia. Read the piece for news of the gathering storm; here’s a bit of the Journal’s take on the topic:

But the most important way most companies serve their communities is by creating jobs and contributing to economic growth. The late Nobel economist Milton Friedman once argued that the social responsibility of a firm is to make a profit. A corporation, after all, is just a legal designation; it’s individuals, not paper firms, who have moral responsibilities.

Stacking the deck. Sales people have long known that we draw first impressions of people – and what they want from us – based on an initial glimpse of the “tells” in their attitude, dress, and the accouterments they carry. A recent NYT article reports on some research that purports to discover this anew. One experimental result: people found a person who had a cup of hot coffee to be warmer and friendlier than one with iced coffee. Another is that when there is a whiff of cleaning solution in the air, people tend to tidy up their areas.

Anyone really surprised by this? Understanding and manipulating subconscious cues to produce desired conscious reactions has been a staple of everything from sales to magic for centuries. When you walk through that shopping mall and its stores – real or virtual – you are being constantly bombarded with visual, audio, and olfactory subliminal messages. Understanding the brain science behind this has value. But, in this case, it represents the policing up of old news – not revolutionary insight.

Women and science. The infamous Larry Summers incident at Harvard has become an iconic symbol of the difficulty of discussing openly the issue of differences between men and women. But the BBC offers a good discussion of why women remain under-represented in key fields of scientific research.

Some experts assert that there are reasons originating in brain structure and functioning that explain this. Others insist that even if that is true, the percentages in such findings would suggest there should still be vastly more female research scientists than there are – gender-based prejudices must account for the rest. One expert quoted in the item, Dr. Helena Cronin, has this to say about the nature of the debate:

If you want to change the world, first you have to understand it.”

Indeed. We should try to imagine (and legislate) it the way it is, not the way we want it to be. And the more it changes, the more we can see what really always stays the same.

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