Change is a constant force in both personal and professional growth. Join us for another episode of The Entrepreneurial Mindset Project as we sit down with Richard Boyatzis, a renowned psychologist and leading expert in emotional intelligence—an essential aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset. Drawing from his latest book, The Science of Change, and over 50 years of research, Boyatzis explores the five core elements of lasting change. Together, we discuss how his Intentional Change Theory connects to entrepreneurship, emphasizing the power of vision in driving transformation and the pitfalls of conventional goal-setting.
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The Science Of Change With Richard Boyatzis
I am speaking with Richard Boyatzis, a renowned Psychologist who is best known for his work in Emotional Intelligence, which I see as a vital aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset. As an aside, I met Richard back in 2008 as a part of a research project I did for the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute. Now, many years later, Richard and I got back together to discuss his most recent book, The Science of Change, in which he draws from more than 50 years of research to define the five core elements to lasting change.
We covered a lot of ground in this episode, yet what struck me the most were the similarities between what he refers to as Intentional Change Theory and my own observation and analysis of everyday entrepreneurs. Most notably, the idea that a compelling vision is the initial driver of change, be it in an individual or an organization.
We also discussed the ways in which goal-setting and problem-solving can thwart the opportunity discovery process. This will come as no surprise to those of you who know I’m vehemently opposed to business planning as the starting point for entrepreneurship education. Nevertheless, without any further ado, I hope you enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Richard Boyatzis.
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Before we get started, I want to tell you about my new book The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage: The Hidden Logic That Unleashes Human Potential. In this book, I combine the insights gleaned from everyday entrepreneurs with motivation research to create a practical how-to guide that not only shows us how to be more innovative and entrepreneurial in own lives, but also how to unlock the entrepreneurial potential in others.
This book will certainly help those who want to start and grow new businesses. Ultimately, The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage exposes the underlying logic that has become essential for individuals, organizations and communities to adapt and thrive in today’s rapidly changing world. The book is now available for pre-order wherever books are sold.
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Richard, thanks for being a guest on my show.
Sure, Gary. I’m glad to be.
I came across your book in social media. I was excited to learn more about your new book, The Science of Change: Discovering Sustained Desired Change from Individuals to Organizations and Communities. I want to talk a little bit about the intersection between your work Intentional Change Theory, which seems utterly fascinating to me, and how this might relate to the entrepreneurial mindset.
Motivation Behind “The Science Of Change”
I just want to tell our audience briefly, we met in 2008 at Case Western Reserve University when I was doing a bunch of interviews for the Cisco Entrepreneur Institute on my quest to decode, deconstruct the entrepreneurial mindset. It’s been a long time. Anyway, thank you. I want to start by asking you’ve written a lot of books. You’re well known for your work in Emotional Intelligence, which I think is also very much a part of the entrepreneurial mindset. What prompted you to write this book, The Science of Change?
This is my magnum opus. It is my attempt to integrate 58 years of my work on how do we produce sustained desired change at any level. I wrote it as a scholarly book. The audience are researchers and scholars and advanced professionals who know the difference. They may not do research themselves, but they’re good consumers of research. In that sense, it’s not an airport book thing. It’s not just my work that I’m integrating, because when I turned the manuscript into my editor at Oxford University Press on February 2nd, I blew them away because I had 100 pages of references. It runs about 25 articles or books per page. That’s a lot of references. It’s looking at a sustained desire change, which has been my path all along.
The Science of Change: Discovering Sustained, Desired Change from Individuals to Organizations and Communities
You mentioned that you have known me from my work in Emotional Intelligence. There were people in the ‘70s who knew my work on motivation and there were people in the ‘70s who knew my work on alcoholism and alcoholism treatment and the effect of alcohol in aggression. There were people in the late ‘70s and into the ‘80s who knew me from my early work on competencies. There were the people who knew me for the work I started in the ‘70s, but really got into heavily in the late ‘80s on outcome assessment in higher education. How are students different than when they come in?
Somewhere in there, leadership and management started as a focus somewhere in the late ‘70s. Now, there are people who only know me for my methodological textbook that came out in ‘98. There are other people who only know me for my work on coaching or my work in neuroscience. Part of the dilemma is because I’ve worked in organizational change, team change, community change, individual change, all these different fields, seldom to people know more than one of my areas.
One of my compulsions was to correct that because from spring of 1967 when I discovered the field of psychology, it was an initial study that started out as a class project and ended up publishing it with Dave Kolb. This has been my life’s work. All the other things are ancillary or tangential to sustain desired change. That’s the main thing that I’ve been studying all along at all these levels. Although I’ve done a lot more at the individual dyad team level, I have done certain research and published at the organization change and community and country level. That was really the compulsion. My sense is I still have some research studies I want to do, but I don’t think I want to do another book. I’ve had it with that book writing. It’s not easy.
I have a new book coming out in December 2024. It took me ten years. I fully understand. I’m reminded of this conversation that Thomas Friedman laid out in Thank You For Being Late with Eric Teller. He nicknamed it Astro Teller’s Graph. Teller wrote out on a napkin a hockey stick. It’s like a curve and he’s saying that the rate of change, like technological advancement, it accelerates. It’s going up like a hockey stick, but the human ability to adapt is more of a slope.
It’s actually worse than that. Actually, I published a paper years ago, which is a feature in one of the chapters in my book.
Does it go downhill?
No. Let me explain. Most of the time, when we think about human performance or human change, if we actually look at surveys, questionnaires, we get normal distributions of the answers. If you actually look at output, so when I was studying with McClellan entrepreneurship in various countries of the world in the ‘60s and into the ‘70s, it was very clear that there are very few entrepreneurs and we’ve become very generous with the label just being nice or politically correct to make sure that people don’t feel offended. The definition of entrepreneurship in the work that I came out of was pretty clear. How many businesses did you start? How many jobs did you create? How much net tax revenue did you create? Those are the three measures that travel across all the countries of the world.
Other measures don’t quite work. The whole idea of entrepreneurship or entrepreneurs in large corporations, that’s an oddity. If you want to do it, it’s playing word games but they’re not really entrepreneurs because people who are entrepreneurs are driven by an unconscious drive called need for achievement, which is they always measure output to input. We’ve known this for many decades. We’ve known that that predicts business success in at least 140 countries and it can even do it over several hundred years in various countries.
Entrepreneurs are driven by an unconscious need for achievement. They measure output to input. Share on XThe thing that’s fascinating is that this unconscious drive also makes you a pain in the ass in working with others, because you, on the whole, don’t like to work with other people. People with this high motivation, for example, in sports, are going to prefer to play golf or bowling, depending on social class, because they like to measure their output. They don’t like team sports. They don’t even like books about teams. They like biographies about one person. That’s why sales is a job that, historically, might attract those people but it doesn’t mean that just because you’re in sales, you have this high achievement motive because we know sales performance isn’t that good.
When you actually look at the number of businesses started, the number of jobs created, or other measures of actual performance for a faculty member, number of papers published for an NBA player professional, the number of points scored, career points, it doesn’t come out as a normal distribution. It comes out as a power curve. Most people are close to zero or nothing and then there’s a long tail. The people that do the most contribution are the people at the end of the tail.
Now, in most Gaussian distributions, the average is useful. It’s not in a power curve. It’s meaningless. Secondly, in a power curve, the points way out are where you get the best performance, or in my case, the most change, stable change, but in normal distributions there, it’s discarded as an outlier. It all rests on the fact that normal distributions mathematically assume that every data point is independent of the others. When it deals with humans, your book is affected by how you felt. You haven’t finished it yet, have you?
Yeah. It’s December 3rd. It’s right over my shoulder.
That’s a function of how you felt last year. It’s not independent of it. It’s a function of what you wrote before. It’s a function of what other people that you respect have been writing. All of a sudden, we realize that our behavior, our actual output is a function of all sorts of things about ourselves and others and it’s not independent. The same thing with change and that’s the point I make in the book. We think change happens a lot. It doesn’t. This idea of this exponential thing about the speed of change, it’s a little bit of marketing hype.
In the history of civilization, there have been periods in which humans see this degree of change. 1450 to 1550 is an example. There is so much about the world, and science and arts changed in that 100 years. I have a quote from a monk talking about the disaster of technological change and how it’s going to ruin the soul, Bishop Trithemius and he’s talking about the movable printing press. Now, let’s go back further. 500 BC, 100 years plus or minus, 4 or 5 major religions of the world that still exist now were founded in that era. You want to talk about big change.
First, I don’t think the amount of change we’re experiencing is unusual, but it is dramatic because for many of us, especially at your or my age, I assume you’re younger than I am, but it you’re not that much younger, I would assume. We look at these things and say, “It was twenty years ago that there were no smartphones.” You had cell phones, but you didn’t have smartphones. What smartphones did to change our lives was nothing short of revolutionary, and it started in 2007.
It’s hard for us to think about that. Many years ago, we didn’t really have access to the internet. I agree with the notion that there is a lot of change going on and that it’s escalating because some things allow other things. The invention of the transistor allowed computers to be smaller than the size of a room. When I was at MITI remember going and looking at some of the early computers that literally were the size of a whole room filled with test tubes.
What the transistor did was break open the space issue. When that started, it changed the entire computational industry from a slow adding machine to all sorts of stuff. There’s a chain reaction. To say that it feels like change is happening at an amazingly huge pace, I think it’s true. To go back to this issue, part of the realization that I think is very important is that actual change happens more like a power curve. If you look at the number of efforts people put into trying to learn something, people trying to get healthier as a result of an injury or a disease, it’s abysmal how many people change. The result of higher education, the result of training, and corporate training are horrible.
Interventions aren’t very effective.
You then get into this paradox, “Does that mean it’s nature not nurture?” That’s not quite right either, because a lot of what we may label as nature, a person was like this as an adult may have been because of their family acculturating culturing them or socializing them. It could be because of their religion. They learned some of these things, but they learned them in an early age. Now, are there some things that may have been physiologically driven? Yeah, but where do they come from?
We now know that the amount of stress that a pregnant woman experiences affects the degree of protein misfolding in the mitochondria of your cells. If I translate that into English, that predicts how quickly you get neurodegenerative disorders. It compromises your immune system, so you get all sorts of other diseases.
Once the baby is out, once the fetus is out and if the fetus is in a certain kind of environment and is able to access things like protein-rich rather than fat-rich foods and they’re not in an environment where people are shooting at them or stealing things all the time, then they actually have the opportunity to reverse that because we know about the neuroplasticity. However, if they are in a hostile environment, it’s going to get worse. There are things that look like they’re nature, but they could be nurtured just at a very early stage.
Years ago, I read Nisbett and Ross’s book, The Person and the Situation, which helped me understand what you’re talking about, that this constellation of cognitive situational, motivational factors to the casual observer, they appear to be dispositional. It’s a fundamental attribution error.
You work in the domain of entrepreneurs. McClellan showed in no uncertain terms by the time his 1961 book came out from all this research that people who grow up in certain faiths are more likely to start businesses and be entrepreneurs. What are those faiths? They’re the ones that are not deterministic.
I remember you and I talked about this in ’08.
Protestants do better than Catholics. Both will do better than Muslims or Shintos. A lot of this has to do with some of these belief systems that you get trained as an early stage. McClellan also showed that the number of imagery around achievement orientation, this desire to do better unconsciously, in children’s readers predicted economic development in countries 25 years later. That tells you that if they were in kindergarten, they got this, by the time they’re 30, they’re actually starting businesses. Since 78% of the jobs in the world, nevertheless, the US, come from small businesses, the issue of starting small businesses is the driver of economies. It’s not the big businesses. This becomes a key part of it.
That said, one of the things that you look for is, if I was in venture capital and I wanted to decide who I was going to invest in, I’d want to know what they did in high school. I’d want to know what they did in college. I want to know what they did after college because the kid who opened up a little lemonade stand, the kid who found thrown away magazines, ripped the cover off and resold them, a nickel for the dollar, those are all entrepreneurial activities.
Difficulty Of Change
It’s interesting. In my work, Richard, I’m fascinated with the underdog entrepreneur. The Elon Musk story, that’s all fine and good, but how do people that have nothing? I’m more interested in that. The question I have for you is, why is change so hard for humans?
First, let me go back to the underdog. Most successful entrepreneurs, now I’m talking about entrepreneurs, I’m talking about the successful one, came from working class or poor backgrounds.
Most successful entrepreneurs came from working-class or poor backgrounds. It weeds out people who think of themselves as victims because they will never be entrepreneurs. Share on XI’ve seen that. To my perspective, the adversity works to their advantage.
That’s a part of the struggle.
It’s a part of the situation that people don’t see.
It weeds out the people who think of themselves as victims because those people will never be entrepreneurs. Certainly not to get political, but it affects political philosophy in the sense that if you’re more entrepreneurial, you’re more pragmatic. If you’re more pragmatic, you tend to be more individualistic, so you don’t like big government. I’m not saying you have to be a libertarian, but you’re going to basically not like almost anything that does regulation.
That certainly rings true for me. One of the things that you talk about in your career is this study of alcoholism. I got a personal dog in this fight and I probably shouldn’t say this on this show, but I’m about 2 weeks shy of 39 years sober.
Congratulations.
Thank you. I have experienced a profound change in my life. I’m coming at this from a perspective where I look at other people like, “Come on, why can’t you do this?”
There’s an ego defense mechanism called projection in which we take something we’re feeling and we project it onto another person. Projection is useful as all the ego defense mechanisms are at enabling us to start a conversation with somebody we don’t know. If they remind us of our brother-in-law that we like, we’ll approach them with a smile. If they remind us of our sister that we don’t like, we’ll approach them at a distance. The ego defense mechanisms work, but they quickly get to be a problem. Projection is where, “I’ve been able to do it. Why can’t you?” The real answer to that is not what most people go to, which is there’s some character flaw in you. What you really have to ask is, “What is it about you, your upbringing and your current social groups and your beliefs that reinforce you not thinking about your independence?”
Intentional Change Theory
Richard, I want to dig into Intentional Change Theory because that’s what happened in 12 Step. We weren’t calling it Intentional Change theory, but I’m looking at these five pillars or whatever of the Intentional Change Theory. That’s exactly how I did it.
Believe me, one of my earliest studies was AA in the ‘60s. In fact, when I developed my group therapy technique, it was picked up by first the VA, then different states’ drunk driver programs and then the Feds had me training people all over the United States because there was a group therapy program that complimented medical treatment and AA.
I spent a lot of time going to meetings in all different parts of the country. It was very clear that, as I look back and look at the most harsh critique of even AA is that it still was better than most things, but a lot of people never made it. The recidivism was very similar. What was it that really made a difference? It’d be interesting for me to test this with you, but I think there were two factors. One was, if you believed in a higher power, the adding of the HP to your vision as captured by the Serenity Prayer and faith, faith becomes a shared vision.
All of a sudden, that brings you above yourself. Even something like A Day at a Time says, “Let’s not try to leap too far,” so the higher power created a larger vision, which allowed, at moments, for hope, but it was the relationship to the sponsor, I believe, and occasionally, if you went to the same meeting repeatedly, the other re people you got to know, the relationships, that I think were the major telling issue.
I remember what some psychologists might call the relatable social model. That’s a term Bandura was used frequently. I remember my first AA meeting up in Cleveland Heights at Lee in Coventry in St. Ann’s Church. I was feeling low, like my life was just a total mess. I was in a lot of pain socially and emotionally, but I remember seeing a guy who looked like he had it together. He was wearing a sweater. His eyes weren’t bulging out of his head, telling his story. I thought, “This guy must be an actor.” After a while I realized like, that relatable social model, like these people, understand me.
In some of the research that I’ve been hopefully invoking some of my current Doctoral students to do on peer coaching in groups, which I think has a huge potential to democratize development for people who aren’t a part of organizations that it can afford one-on-one coaching, the model for how to pull it off is AA. It still is AA because when I observed people who were able to maintain sobriety and have that effect on more others than not, it was often because they went to the same meeting and they became a social identity group. They weren’t just helping people with a day at a time. They were helping people with anything in life. That is a key part of the fractal level, the multi-level aspect of Intentional Change Theory. It is building social identity groups.
Can you walk us through Intentional Change Theory?
Sure. What I’m after is sustained desired change. This is very important. That’s the purpose. Sustained. It lasts more than 3 weeks to 3 months and desired. I’m not chasing after negative stuff. Now, first you have to at least accept, if not adopt, Complexity Theory, because as we’re just talking about, the change is not a normal distribution and change is not linear. As you well know, people in meetings would periodically fall off the wagon. It didn’t mean they were dead forever, but it would, unless they were in a group. You have these discontinuities. When you embrace that, you start to realize that change, if in the individual or in a country and any grouping in between, has fits and starts to it. It’s not smooth, it’s not linear.
It’s very messy.
That’s right. Second, when you look at the moments of emergence when something pops and really the pop is into consciousness, there seem to be always five of these discoveries, epiphanies, if you will, for the people who are effective or successful at sustained change. One is a purpose in life, I call the ideal self, in groups. It’s shared vision in communities. In teams, it’s shared vision, but it’s not a goal. It’s a bigger picture.
Richard, can I just double-click on that with you for a minute? I’ve now interviewed maybe 600 to 700 entrepreneurs all over the world. The underdogs. The misfits and the ne’er do wells. I don’t know if you’ve looked at Seligman’s Prospect Theory.
I cover it in chapter three a lot.
I think that vision is the single most important cognitive factor, a distinguishing factor, let’s say.
It’s more than cognitive. It’s cognitive and emotional. It’s the whole thing. You’re right and the research supports that. We have a number of FMRI studies that I and Professor Tony Jack and various doctoral students have done that support that notion. Talking about the dream or your vision activates these networks in which you open up. Talking about solving certain problems, you close down so down. Why does that happen? It happens because it invokes a very primary emotion. Hope.
I love that word. I like Shane Lopez’s definition of hope, which is the belief that the future will be better than the present, coupled with the belief that I have the power to make it so.
I think that definition contaminated hope. It’s the same problem I have with Seligman’s definition of optimism. I think a lot of these people had the characteristic of hope or optimism or efficacy and then they added agency to it, or action. I actually think the agency or action is another characteristic, because you can have hope without knowing what to do to it, Scarlet O’Hara, at the end of Gone With The Wind. To go back to your observation, I think without that, people will not be able to bounce back when they’re brought to their knees.
Change: Without a vision, people cannot bounce back when they are brought to their needs.
We’re all brought to our knees. I remember when John Kotter did a twenty-year follow-up of the graduating class of Harvard Business School in 1974. He found that every one of them had failed. Yet, collectively, they were creating millions and millions of dollars of net worth and all that stuff. The ones that had succeeded the most had failed several times.
In Seligman’s Prospect Theory, what he’s postulating is that it’s the compelling goal, the vision, enables us to access unprecedented problem-solving ability. I think you talk about that in your book.
I think I make a more precise link. I think that when you think about the vision, the purpose, the meaning when you engage in what he called prospection, you open up and activate a neural network that allows you to be open to new ideas. I actually don’t think it means you will, but I think it means you might. That’s a key difference because the other thing that is absolutely imperative besides vision are key relationships. When I was doing ‘70 through ‘76 or ‘77, I was averaging 17 or 18 days of group therapy a month because when you train therapists and various VA hospitals and cities around the US, you do group therapy with a group of patients with them and you do it several times. They get it and they go on and do it.
I had five other psychologists working with me that were doing the same thing, but we were dealing with mostly returning veterans from Vietnam. These folks did not have just alcohol problems. They had alcohol and, very often, heroin before the popularity of cocaine. A lot of people that were really messed up, if it wasn’t for the quality of the relationships, they’d go off the deep end. In the jargon nowadays, because I have a few executive doctoral advisees, one that I was just talking to who did fourteen tours in Afghanistan in the Rangers in Iran and Iraq. Another one who was in the Army infantry. He’s trying to create programs for returning veterans because he himself has continued struggles with PTSD. That’s not something you get over by yourself.
It’s the same with 12 Steps.
One of the dilemmas is that the entrepreneur looks at individualism and thinks that a person should have the drive to pull it off. When they don’t, they tend to make this characterological fallacy that there’s something wrong with the person but it could be that they haven’t found those relationships or they chased them away, which is where you make the link to emotional intelligence.
One of the things I advocate for creating grassroots entrepreneurial communities is for the nascent entrepreneur to find or to create an intentional support community of other entrepreneurs. That’s what Bandura might call more capable peers.
When I was a senior at MIT and I made the conversion, I was going down this path. I was finishing my degree in Astro, but I had already decided I was going to go to get a Doctorate in Psychology at Harvard. For the year and a half after that, I, Dave Kolb, who created Experiential Learning Theory, and an economist by the name of Dave Taylor, were trying to help the Black small business community in Boston. Just because I was the low man on the tow pole, I was the one who actually took the subway, put the tee into those parts of town. Also, at the time, I thought I could run faster than the other two because I did have a few cases where people threw bottles at me and chains and chased me and all that.
The Roxbury Businessman’s Association were very open to and had made an overture to somebody and we responded and we said, “We talked to him and we talked to his reading of a lot of their members.” This is 1968, ‘69 in Boston. There were neighborhoods that were still burning. This is where Muhammad Elijah had the Nation of Islam based and Muhammad Speaks. Even within the Black community, there was a lot of controversy.
Together, we laid out a whole bunch of nitty-gritty things that the small business owner in Roxbury didn’t really have a handle on, like in those days, how to get the authority to take credit card payments, how to get appropriate levels of insurance, how to approach a bank about a cash loan, things like that. Very nitty gritty. We came up with a bunch of topics.
We went to their membership. I think we invited 30 of the people that had small businesses at a time. They would come once a week for an evening over to the Sloan School building at MIT, and they could either drive over or take the subway because it was right off the red line. We had experts from each of these topics come in one a week, talk about it in a very how-to level, but also at the conceptual level. We would spend at least half of the time with people in small discussions groups. It was absolutely amazing how much it helped. Part of it was that we could take an existing social group, if you will, a social identity, a social support group, or the Roxbury Businessmen Association, and add techniques to what they needed that made people feel more hopeful.
What happens to go back to the vision is when you step out of the day-to-day problem and think about the purpose, “Why am I doing this?” It does a couple things. First, it lifts you out of the current day-to-day miasma, which is never hopeful. You start to feel, “There’s a bigger thing going on here.” I use a case analysis than teams in my book of the Allegra Everest Expedition versus the Adventure Consultants Expedition. The Allegra, 21 of them went to climb Everest, 19 of them made the summit and they all came back alive.
On the Adventure Consultants, 18 of them went to climb the summit, 3 made it, 4 died on the way back, and that’s not counting the number that lost noses, ears, toes and fingers to frostbite. What were the differences? The Allegra Expedition was all built around Erik Weihenmayer who was blind because they wanted to show the world that people who were labeled as having physical disabilities didn’t and Erik made it to the summit. A blind guy making it to the summit of Everest. They trained for over a year as a team, not just because of Erik, but to build their relationships.
The other group were a group of very wealthy businessmen who each paid, in 1996 terms, $85,000 to summit. They were all experienced mountaineers, but they were all individuals. They trained a little bit. Rob Hall, who was one of the best guides on Everest at the time, died. By the time they reached Base Camp 4, and then 5 and 6, they were told, “Turn back. The weather had changed. The front’s coming in. You’re not going to make it.”
Three times, he told everybody they were turning back and they argued with him that they would make the summit and a few did. That’s when all the people didn’t. All of a sudden, you see big picture versus very individual narrow goal. The difference of you learn to really care about each other and depend on each other versus very individual. We see those themes reverberating again and again.
I see it in entrepreneurs. Part of what I’m loosely calling Entrepreneurial Mindset Theory is the idea that that as Marx himself pointed out, like the desire to fulfill human needs through our own effort and initiative is an essential part of what makes us human. It’s purpose. Richard, I want our readers to be able to understand Intentional Change Theory. The ideal self.
Ideal Self
The ideal self and vision was the first discovery. If you have a psychophysiological experience that I call the PEA, Positive Emotional Attractor, it becomes a tipping point that you can then go to the second discovery, which is the real self, which is not what you think of yourself because that’s delusional. It’s how other people experience you.
If you have a burst of PEA, you might get to the next discovery, which is your learning agenda, which is not a performance improvement plan. As soon as you define it in terms of negatives, you’re down the slippery slope into the quagmire of quicksand. Usually, when it works, it is the joyful articulation of what you want to try to get closer to your vision.
This is what I’ve seen in entrepreneurs. Learning and work become entangled together in a joyful, fulfilling, compelling process. It’s not laborious. It’s not tedium. It’s not a necessary evil.
The next discovery is when you experiment, try something on, new thoughts, feelings, behavior, mindset and then you practice it a lot. All of that happens around the fifth discovery, which I’ve already talked about, which are the relationships. You’ve got this all going on, but you have to hit these tipping points each way because the very nature of change is stressful, which means you close down. Stress is useful, but it’s not good for you. You close down. What you have to do is periodically open up and that’s where these positive versus negative emotional attractors come into play or what I call for shorthand renewal moments versus stress moments.
The very nature of change is stressful, which means you close down. You have to periodically open up. This is where short renewal moments versus stress moments come into play. Share on XCan you talk about that a little more? That’s interesting. The entrepreneurial journey is full of both.
We have a tremendous number. Anybody who’s in a professional, administrative, executive or leadership role has a lot of moments of stress in a normal day. I’m not talking about COVID or a product recall. That’s acute stress. I’m talking about your cell phone drops a call. I’m talking about annoying stress. It turns out that the annoying stress builds up hormonally and cognitively in your system, such that you’re in tough shape. While you need stress, the sympathetic nervous system, to wake up in the morning to decide what you’re going to have for dinner to solve a problem, it hurts you because it limits your field of vision. One set of scientists did this. They sprayed epinephrine into your nostril, which is the endocrine that you get when you’re in stress goes into your bloodstream. Right away, people’s peripheral vision, which is usually about 180 degrees, went down to 30 degrees. That’s all they could see.
They gave them a squirt of oxytocin, which is the endocrine that helps with the parasympathetic or the renewal process, and it went back out. Literally, when you’re under annoying stress, you can’t see the stuff. That’s where most entrepreneurs fail because they get so narrowly focused, they miss what’s going on with their competitors, with the market, with their customers, with their suppliers, with their employees. In strategy terms, it’s called competition neglect. That’s why I contend in a key part of the book that the motivation and inspiration to change in a way that serves the organization’s purpose does not come from strategic planning.
Rational strategic planning convinces the bank to lend you money and you use it for resource allocation. Rational strategic planning does not motivate anybody to change or continue a change. It’s all swarming, which is, again, out of complexity theory. What’s the swarm about? It’s an emotional swarm about an idea or a concept, or for many people, entrepreneurial things or service. I see that this service I could provide to these people would help them. It helps in this this notion.
There are a lot of things people can and should do to keep their renewal and stress in balance each day. We published a paper of a whole series of studies years ago, Dan Goleman and I, Udayan Dhar and John Osiri on what you really want to do is do a variety of these renewal activities in small doses, like fifteen-minute doses, scattered throughout the day. Not only do you want to do that every day, but over a week, you want to do a number of different things. You don’t always want to do renewal meditation. You don’t want to always go to a meeting because, at some point, it gets a little boring.
For me, in my own entrepreneurial journey, Richard, sometimes I just have to go for a walk and reorient myself towards the vision. Just as an example of what you’re saying, 2010, part of that Cisco research, I interviewed the guy that did that started 1-800-GOT-JUNK? He was trying to pay for college, $1,000, $700 on used trucks, $300 on flyers. He said eight years in, he wasn’t going anywhere. It was like he had a couple trucks on the road, but he wasn’t really growing.
Richard, he said this to me. It was a summer afternoon, he went out and sat on the dock on the edge of a pond with a legal pad. He just said, “I don’t think I’m smart enough. I don’t have the resource. I never led big teams, but what could this be? Let me let go of what I don’t have. What could this be?” He started writing, “We’re going to become the FedEx of junk removal. I’m going to be on Oprah Winfrey.” I talked to him a couple of years ago. He was at over $500 million in revenue. He was the only entrepreneur that was able to articulate what you are saying to me now in a scientific way. It was the vision.
The vision gives you the sense of purpose and meaning. You need the meaning and the sense of purpose. What I often tell people is if you are in a leadership position, you want to remind everybody that reports to you or everybody in your organization about the vision or the purpose every week. Every meeting should start with something about that.
The vision gives you a sense of purpose and meaning, which are two things you need. Share on XThat’s so good. That’s such a good tip. It’s a reminder. That’s what leadership is really all about.
You don’t do it the same way. Sometimes, you talk about values. Sometimes you just say, “What’s our purpose?” Sometimes, you tell a story of a customer. I remember once, I was doing this three-hour leadership session. It was after Resonant Leadership came out on resident leadership and emotional intelligence. It was for this one of the largest investment banks in the world. They had developed one of the most impressive executive development programs. Three five-day sessions spread out over a year with individual coaching. Really good. Really well done.
They used to have me come in and kick off the second session of the three and they had the president of the whole company come in for about 30, 45 minutes before and introduce me, but kick it off. He was brilliant because he would sit there. It’s an investment bank, they were all VPs or senior VPs. He said, “What’s our purpose?” Somebody said, “To make money.” He said, “No.” “To make money for our clients?” “No.” He’s listening to them, bounces around and finally leans over and he says, “Freedom.” They all went, “What?”
They look at each other and they said, “Is this guy off his meds or what?” He said, “It’s freedom of choice. Our purpose is to help our clients have more freedom of choice, whether it’s an individual, a family, an organization or company, or a sovereign wealth fund, if we’re doing our job well and suiting our purpose, we’re helping them have increased freedom of choice. Now, we making money is the way we measure how well we’re doing it but let’s not confuse the purpose and the measure.”
Goal Setting And Openness To New Ideas
Richard, I know you’ve got to jump at the hour. I’ve got one more question I saw in your book that I can’t wait to just get it out of you. You said in your book that goal setting and problem-solving suppress openness to new ideas in people in the early phases of any change process. Next time I see you, I’m just going to give you a big hug for writing that. I want to understand the science behind it. One of the things I attempted to do in my new book about the entrepreneurial mindset is put the final nail in the coffin as to why business planning is not prudent for the typical entrepreneur in the beginning.
Among other things, most of the time in the early stages, which could be the first 5 to 8 years, because remember, as you said, it’s discontinuous. In the early stages, a person with a lot of efficacy is not somebody who makes things happen. It’s somebody who notices opportunities. You can’t notice them unless you’re scanning a very broad environment. That’s where it turns out that there is one neural network that enables you to scan the environment and be very creative. That’s technically called the default mode network. Tony Jack, neuroscientist, calls it the Empathic Network.
Change: A person with a lot of efficacy is not somebody who makes things happen. They are somebody who notices opportunities.
The problem is that the other network that allows you to solve problems and make decisions, the task-positive network, he calls the analytic, is very often set off by anything that’s numeric or specific. When you focus in on a problem, task-positive network, when you focus in on a specific goal, task-positive network. What happens is you miss the stuff. “Our goal is to summit Everest.” “Weather’s coming in, you’re not going to be able to make it down.” “Our goal is to summit Everest,” and then you die. It’s not that goals aren’t useful. Of course, they are.
They’re premature.
That’s exactly right. That’s the way I wrote about it in the book. The whole idea of smart goals was a travesty. What I hear, especially in board meetings, is that people say, “Let’s motivate the executive in the workforce. Let’s help get over this engagement crisis by putting some more metrics on their dashboard.” That’s the exact opposite. What I was talking about of seeing opportunities, you have to be open to them. That’s where the essence of adaptability, innovation, openness to new ideas and diversity of thought when people are narrow-minded, they’re not going to adapt. You remember the Codex story.
Of course. This is such a fantastic book, Richard. I can’t wait to dig into this. I didn’t come at it the same way you did, but it there’s so much overlap here. It’s really fascinating. I can’t wait to read the book. Richard, thanks so much for spending your time with me.
Gary, please, after you read the book and if some of your readers react to the ideas, if you develop some questions, topics, or groups of your readers that have some questions, we get them another session.
We probably have a friend in common. The guy that wrote the foreword to my book is Dr. Steven Post. Do you know him? He was at Case for a while.
He was at Case for a long time. He went to Long Island University, I think, wasn’t it?
Stony Brook. I’ll just end here. I think the intersection of our work and I won’t open with this Richard, but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that ultimately, my interest in entrepreneurial mindset development is all about human flourishing.
I called the article titled the article on the PEANEA and the renewal stress Thriving and Surviving. In my model, because one of my colleagues, Chris Laszlow, writes books about leadership and flourishing organizations. He knows because he’ll say it at times, that when I talk about PEA, it’s the same as flourishing. It’s just he’s better at marketing than I am. This is delightful. I think that if we could get more people to grasp what you are talking about, we would have not the battle of entrenched opposites in our national political scene. We might actually make some progress by people talking about ideas.
However, everybody is so closed and is so busy trying to label and negate the existence of others that there’s not the openness. The funny thing is you don’t get openness and adaptability and innovation, IE entrepreneurship, without diversity of thought. You don’t get diversity of thought without people who are different and listening to them and having the ability to talk.
That’s so needed. Richard, thank you so much for taking your time. I’m going to take you up on your offer for a follow-up a year from now.
Even if you have a small group of your readers who would like to join you, like a Q&A live session, that could be fun.
I’m going to be all over that, Richard. Thank you.
Thanks, Gary.
Important Links
- Richard Boyatzis
- The Science of Change
- The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage: The Hidden Logic That Unleashes Human Potential
- Thank You For Being Late
- The Person and the Situation
- Resonant Leadership