Tag: China

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Depression and Executive Overload: We’re In Over Our Heads So We Better Learn to Cope Better

Andrew Weil has been making the media rounds with his new best seller, Spontaneous Happiness. His exploration of depression as a rising global phenomenon caught my attention.

Weil, an M.D. with an interest in wellness, points to the growing body of research on links between rising global wealth – and the adoption of the modern Western lifestyle (sedentary, solitary, stimulus-overloaded, indoors, technology-filled) and diet (processed and engineered) that goes with it – and higher global rates of depression.

I look at Leslie Chang’s award-winning Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China and see a case study of what he means (and one way to understand China’s distinction in having the highest female suicide rate in the world).

Closer to home, 1 in 10 people in the U.S. today are on depression medication. This includes millions of children. The World Health Organization projects by 2030, more people world-wide will be treated for depression than any other health condition.

Plain and simple, countries with the least developed lifestyles have the lowest rates of depression. “There seems to be something about modern life that creates fertile soil for depression,” says Martin Seligman, father of the field of positive psychology (and author of Flourish, discussed in an earlier post).[1]

Concludes Weil: our “ancient brains” just aren’t equipped for 21st century life (and we’d better start doing something to keep them and the bodies that fuel them in good working order).  Amen. 

So are you going to do anything different in your life for knowing this?  I ask because Weil’s message isn’t really new.

Fourteen years ago, Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan warned us[2] that modern living is just too darn hard – that over an increasing portion of our lives, there’s a mismatch between the complexity of what we need to know and understand to function productively and the human capacity to grasp it all. The result: increasing stress and a struggle to develop more sophisticated ways of thinking and learning to respond.  The flattening of the world has only magnified that.

Seven years later, psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell offered a different slant in Harvard Business Review in “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform” – an article that remains one of the most read HBR reprints today. Hallowell spoke of an increasing number of patients reporting symptoms similar to those of attention deficit disorder without having that disorder. Their symptoms were merely the brain’s natural response to stress, stimulus, and overload: impatience, as well as diminished capacities for problem-solving, resilience, focus, memory, and creativity. Talented executives became “frenzied underachievers.” 

We can all do better than that – and have to, given today’s fast-paced world. Suggestions for how from my most recent book, Reframing Academic Leadership.[3]

Learning to Cope in a World on Over-drive

Healthy leaders care for themselves and build vitality by attending to five key areas: boundaries, biology, balance, beauty, and bounce.

Boundaries: Got to have ’em, got to maintain ’em. Human are programmed to take in the emotions of others. That’s why we feel better around positive, high energy people. Negative emotions hamper brain functioning. Don’t dwell on them. Hallowell suggests interacting with folks you like every 4 to 6 hours, especially during stressful periods, to promote positive feelings. 

Biology: Take better care of your body, and it will take better care of your brain. Increase aerobic exercise, eat better (more fruits, vegetables, lean proteins; less sugar, white flour, processed foods), stay hydrated, limit caffeine and alcohol, improve sleep patterns. The evidence for these is overwhelming, and neuroscience confirms that healthy brains develop new circuitry to compensate for the normal loss with aging.

Balance:  Balance flows from willingness to attend to the diverse needs of mind, body, and soul. Try mindfulness to train the brain to focus amid distraction. Stress is eased with learned relaxation. Negativity is countered by conscious focus on positive sentiments (empowerment, love, care, appreciation, forgiveness, compassion). Deal with fears of overload by remembering you can handle it – and you will. Weil suggests cultivating times of silence and limiting email, television, disturbing noise, and internet use.

Beauty: Find it for yourself: it feeds the soul. Nature and the arts are obvious choices. “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable,” said playwright George Bernard Shaw. Weil touts the added physical benefits of time spent outside, including Vitamin D (which is vital for brain health).

Bounce: Resilience comes from recognizing that we always have choice in interpreting and responding to events, keeping things in perspective, trusting one’s instincts, practicing new behaviors and responses, and reflecting on the consequences. It is helped by learning to “wear life loosely” and by reaching out to others for social connections. Weil reminds us that social interactions are a powerful safeguard of emotional well-being. 

[1] Andrew Weil (2011). “Don’t Let Chaos Get You Down.” Newsweek. Double Issue (November 7 and 14), pp. 9-10.

[2] Robert Kegan (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[3] Based on materials in Lee G. Bolman and Joan V. Gallos (2011). Reframing Academic Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Chapter 12.

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The 14 Biggest Ideas of the Year

A former student keeps me up on the popular press. His recent send is from the Atlantic Monthly: “The 14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” The article is well worth a read.

The list will be fascinating to anyone interested in social change and modern times. It’s invaluable for understanding evolving and under-served markets and for developing new products and services for them. Here’s the list – in descending order for drama – and a few comments on each item for clarity.

What are the implications for your organization? For your career? For our collective future?

14. The Green Revolution Is Neither: Solutions are expensive. Progress has been slow. We’re still too dependent on fossil fuel. In 2010, only one-tenth of our electricity came from renewable sources. Kermit the Frog got it right. It’s not easy being green.

13. The Maniac Will Be Televised: In a world of expanding social media, it takes something pretty wild and loud to cut through the noise. Charlie Sheen. Donald Trump. Colonel Qaddafi. Bottom-line, “the electronic brain of the new media has an affinity for suspicious minds.” Amen.

12. The Players Own the Game: Think LeBron James. Superstar and media darling at age 18. His move to the Miami Heat was a big deal and a sign of change in athlete culture: players realizing their power and fans wanting them to have and leverage it.

11. Gay Is the New Normal: In 2010 and for the first time, a majority of Americans (52 percent) called homosexuality morally acceptable. Will opponents of gay rights now be an oppressed minority?

10. Bonds Are Dead (Long Live Bonds): Long-term interest rates are rising slowly. The Fed has been propping up bond prices, as the government keeps selling them off to pay for the stimulus. Bonds aren’t going away, but if the Fed wishes it were out of the bond market, what does that say for the rest of us?

9. The Next War Will Be Digitized: The controller of “the cloud” controls the world. Geostrategy looks to an opponent’s vulnerabilities and seeks to concentrate damage in places that do the most harm. Controlling everyone’s data is a lot more powerful than a few harbors, office buildings, or airports.

8. Grandma’s in the Basement (and Junior’s in the Attic): Census figures show the number of Americans ages 25 to 34 living with parents up to 5.5 million or 13 percent of that age. Grandparents are moving in with children, propelled by everyone’s need to save in tough times. The multi-generational family household is back in numbers not seen since the 1950s – and the American family is redefined.

7. Public Employee, Public Enemy: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has led the charge, and public unions are on radar screens now for conservatives out to bust them and liberals surprised they care.

6. Wall Street: Same as It Ever Was: So what’s changed if: (a) the big banks are bigger than ever; (b) “interconnectedness” has increased – financial assets are moving in conjunction with one another and  rising together. Another crisis, everything falls at once; and (c) Wall Street pay is back at record highs?

5. The Arab Spring Is a Jobs Crisis: Euphoria has turned to depression. Uprisings did little to improve daily life. Emigration is up. Tourism down – by 75 percent in Egypt. No workable strategies are easy for economic security or social justice anytime soon. Unemployment is huge. One hundred million – 1/3 of the Arab world – are in the job-hungry age range of 15 to 29. Can new crises be far away?

4. Elections Work: Whether you agree with the Tea Party or not, they have brought activism and excitement onto the U.S. political stage – and a reminder that our actions at the polls mean something.

3. The Rich Are Different From You and Me: Super rich is a global phenomenon. We see it in developed economies like the U.S., United Kingdom, and Canada, and in developing economies like China and India. The very, very rich are leaving the rest of us behind. Income inequality is increasing at a rapid rate, especially for minorities and the U.S. and European middle classes hit hard by the recession.

2. Nothing Stays Secret: Internet. Facebook. WikiLeaks. Transparency is in. No one is spared. Too risky to say more.

1. The Rise of the Middle Class—Just Not Ours: The middle class in the U.S. and Europe are “squeezed.” The economy isn’t rebounding, incomes for most are not rising, and median household income has declined in real terms. But it’s a different story for the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Income per capita has soared. Jobs are increasing. Education improving. The bright side to this story: rising affluence means rising consumption. Do we have our products and services ready?

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Hot News: What Are People Reading — China Tops the List

The online Economist has a nifty feature that identifies what people are reading and thinking about. Their opinion clouds are constructed so that the larger the bubble and bigger the font, the more interest.

I offer two below. The first gives an overall feel for topics of interest. China leads, followed by Israel and then economic issues in Europe. The U.S. makes the list largely through President Obama’s recent comments on the requirements for an Israeli-Palestinian accord and peace in the Middle East.

 

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The second diagram identifies what people focused most on in their reading about China. Their biggest topics of interest? Internal issues in China, followed by China’s relationship with Tibet, India, and the European Union.  

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I’m struck by two things in the visual. One, how much overall news about China is available to the average reader. Two, the broad range of topics and issues, including some pretty folksy stories (e.g., expensive chefs and busybodies); issues that are controversial to China (like the imprisonment of artist and activist Ai Weiwei and the activities of Fa Lun Gong); and insights into China’s evolving version of socialist capitalism and its relationships with a variety of other nations.    

For most of the last 18 years, we’ve taken our Bloch School Executive MBA students to China for their international residency. As recent as three or four years ago, students struggled to get any news on China from the popular press beyond sanitized press releases telling the official party line. Western scholars and policy types wrote books of analysis on big topics – and we could parse and compare their perspectives. Novels, histories, and Chinese films provided insights into culture and traditions – and offered another lens to inform analysis. But getting a real feel for day-to-day issues and happenings on the ground and in real time from the daily press just didn’t happen. That’s not true any more. China’s in the press everyday, and average readers are forming their opinions about the country – and about the policies and relationships we want our country to have with China — from what they read and see.

All this reflects China’s willingness to open its borders in multiple ways.

It also underscores the importance of good journalism – reporters who know China, its traditions and history, patterns and predispositions; who have the trust of and good guanxi with the right sources – and the experience to recognize the slips and screens. The press has a role to play in educating the world on a complex and important world power like China that has been so hard to know for so long.

How ironic that newspapers and services are cutting costs by shrinking and closing their foreign news desks, my colleagues in the newspaper business tell me, just at a time when we need them most.

As a child of the Watergate era, I saw the importance of deep thinking and investigative reporting that reflect strong journalistic field work and speak truth to power. I still want that. Don’t you?   

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Top Ten List: Executive MBA Learnings about China Today

The China trip is over, and we’re home tired but transformed. You can’t study and travel in China and feel otherwise. The world never looks as big nor China as overwhelming again. 

China is an amazing country where you taste the pace of change and development – and it is both exhilarating and exhausting.  Anything is possible; but the efforts required to navigate the culture, infrastructure, and realities of the country’s transition daunting. Recognizing all this at the core of one’s being is the purpose of the Executive MBA residency and the power of experiential learning. Translating that into executive judgment and rules for informed action comes with time and reflection. Students have been journaling to facilitate the process. I’ve been doing my own.

Below, my Top Ten list of what I hope students experienced in China. There are important learnings  embedded in each for their careers, leadership effectiveness, and global citizenship. 

1. If they were energized by the pace of action, the palpable excitement of our distinguished speakers (Chinese and ex-pats), and the sense of infinite (and prosperous) possibility, they learned something important about China today.

2. If they were exhausted by the pace of the action; the daily multi-layer challenges business and life require; the amount of information – sometimes conflicting – and planning needed to inform simple actions; and how plans changed, speakers cancelled, substitutes came, and traffic and government policies altered schedules despite high levels of planning, they learned something important about China today.

3. If they felt confused and awkward in knowing what rules (cultural, social, political, economic, ethical, governmental) applied when, they learned something important about China today.

4. If they were frustrated by a slow, erratic internet in a well-wired nation where cell phones work in  subways, in deserts and on mountains, along the Great Wall, and in the highest of skyscrapers, they learned something important about China today.

5. If they were surprised that Shanghai could differ so markedly and in so many ways from Beijing and both cities from Tianjin and the country side (and how different a 5 star hotel in each could be), they learned something important about China today.

6. If they were surprised (or shocked) by differing industry standards, safety measures, pollution levels, and technologies, they learned something important about China today.

7. If they experienced the predilection for luxury brands and shopping as the national pastime among China’s rapidly rising affluent — and were intrigued by their own feelings of winning through their wiles in the shops and markets, they learned something important about China today.

8. If they saw a blind eye turned so as to turn a profit, they learned something important about China today.

9. If they heard every speaker – whatever their assigned topic – touch on the importance of talent development and new HR policies to attract, retrain, and train China’s young, eager, and mobile workforce, they learned something important about China today. 

10. If they felt they learned a lot about China through this residency, but now feel how little they really know about this rising economic and political giant, they learned something important about China today,  about the demands of global leadership, and about the role of lifelong learning for leadership effectiveness.

BONUS:  The Bloch Executive MBA on a company visit to Lights Medical Manufacture Co., Ltd. in Tianjin pictured with the company’s founders, Dr. Li Shaobo and Ms. Wang Jinping, and senior leadership. (Photo compliments of Lights Medical.) 

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Global Leadership: Conquering the Fear of Differences

Days have been filled preparing for our Executive MBA international residency which begins in three days.  We’re going to China. Part of my preparation involves enabling 40 experienced leaders, most with little international experience, to appreciate and respond to cultural differences without paralysis. 

It’s key to their career advancement and professional development. It’s essential for all in a global world. 

As we move closer to the departure date, students have begun acknowledging their fears of anticipating a vastly different world and of the unknown. Some report dreams of not knowing what to do or of being lost in the China-size crowds, others feelings of losing the control over their lives that they have at home.

These are powerful admissions – and they are right on. We all fear the unknown. Human nature loves predictability, and we all want to believe that everyone thinks and sees things just like us. They don’t and that’s OK – and we’ll be OK in a world where that is true. Accept that, and you’ve got the global citizen piece down cold.

How do we take in and use all the knowledge about cultural differences that we can gain through reading and studying without freezing our capacity to act?  The quick answer: with patience, persistence, and humility. It’s like learning and integrating anything new into effective practice.

Preparation helps – the better you know something, the better able you are to call it into play when you need it. So does remembering the Joan Gallos 2 Rules of Thumb for Learning Any New Behavioral Skill:

  1. 1.  go slow. Add anything new and you’ll need to be more deliberate – less automatic – in doing it. It will feel awkward, and you will feel clumsy and ineffective. It may be counter-intuitive – to slow down and to do something that’s awkward and uncomfortable in order to be more effective. But it’s the only way.
  1. 2. be patient with yourself. This is especially hard for successful people: you’ll make mistakes, feel lost, or be scared. It’s OK. Stay open. Figure out what works and doesn’t. Keep trying. And have a sense of humor. You are the only one taking yourself so seriously!

And remember: people are people are people.  When we talk about an increasingly diverse and global world, we tend to focus on differences. Comparing and contrasting how other cultures are different from ours is a good way to recognize and break out of our narrow mindsets about life and the world.  But bottom-line: people share a common humanity. 

Approach any meeting with authenticity and an open heart, and you will connect well with others – even if you struggle with language or customs. Be curious – ask. Relationships are built on connection and conversation.  Make a mistake?  Step on a cultural toe?  Stay alert and respond as you would to any friend.  An honest and humble “Oh, my apologies, please” will go far.

You know more than you may realize about conquering the fear of differences. 

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The Sexual Politics of Materialism and the Good Life: The Case of the Little Third

Along with growing economic and social opportunities in China is the rise in divorce and philandering. There’s an equal opportunity explanation for both.

A mistress – or a “little third” as she is known in China – now seems de rigueur for men of rising affluence and status. China Daily and the New York Times reported, for example, that 90% of provincial- or ministerial-level officials found guilty of corruption in the past seven years also confessed to having engaged in extra-marital affairs – and some cities have even ordered their officials to stay faithful to their wives.

Young women see a married lover as a way to a better life: cash, a car, and a condo. The stars have aligned for trysts – but wives are finding out, getting mad, and wanting back their fair share of their misspent common assets. Rapid social change and economic gains are making for strange bedfellows in China today, literally.

China is in the process of revising its marriage law in response; and we’ll soon know the soap opera-like details as to whether a wife can sue her husband’s mistress to recover goods, the mistress can sue her lover if he reneges on financial promises, or the wayward husband has any recourse in any of this.

It’s an interesting case history about culture and change in China, but the story also raises larger questions for us all. Why the interplay between materialism and sexual politics?  What does it mean? Where have we seen it before?  And how in our own countries and cultures do we play out the same dynamics in our bedrooms? In our boardrooms?

Are sexual liberation and exploitation bourgeois sports: predictable activities fueled by affluence and the growing desire to consume – things and people? Do they feed the development of a distorted sense of power, property, and entitlement – or vice versa? Do they warp our shared views of responsibility, professionalism, and an ethic of care?

The case of the “little third” is raising debate across China about the erosion of traditional values with the pursuit of materialism — about the definition of a good life and the costs to a nation and a culture in pursuing unbridled economic prosperity and material comforts at a head-spinning pace.

What’s the good life for you today? What are the costs? Any internal debates about that?

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Enhancing Global Leadership: Studying China I

All interested in contemporary business leadership need to study of China, not just stay abreast of current events on the front page of the newspaper.  The business landscape is rapidly changing, China is at the center of the changes, and we had best recognize that and be prepared.     

Yesterday was our first global leadership class, and the course is off to a good start.  China is our living case study this semester (and we will travel there together in spring) for building cultural intelligence; expanding international business acumen; and learning about shifting global powers, economies, and marketplaces.  Some observations over my next few posts from our discussions.

China’s complexity:  China is a complex country, with a complex history and culture that infuse its current political, economic, and policy choices in ways a casual observer might miss.

Recognizing what it means, for example, to have been one of the most advanced and innovative nations on the planet – gunpowder, the compass, moveable type, paper making, silk production, nutrition studies, veterinary studies, metallurgy technologies, rice cultivation, pasta, paper money, pharmacology, and more trace their origins to ancient China – gives us clues to the urgency in China’s national aching to be a strong and dominant world player again.  It also enables us to appreciate why and to reconcile the seeming dichotomies in China’s mix of communism and capitalism – its “Socialism with Chinese character.”   

Read about the history of the Opium Wars, the relationship between mainland China and Taiwan, and China’s loss of territories and land over the ages by invasion or as a result of internationally-supported fiat using a cultural lens of face-saving.  You learn something important about the power of trust in foreign relations – and why transparency in China’s contemporary global diplomacy might not come easy.  

Look at the behavioral and philosophical foundations of Legalism in China and of how that can help account for the authoritarian and brutal aspects of the Cultural Revolution or for incidents labeled in the West as human rights violations. 

Combine Confucianism, Daoism, Communism, and Capitalism for a feel of the complexity and variety of personal ideologies and ethical frameworks in China today.   The list could go on. 

I’m not a history buff, so I always appreciate the reminder of how much nations are like people. 

Research — and any good psychiatrist — will tell you that we all come by our behaviors and worldviews  honestly as a result of a combination of early life experiences and what nature has given us.  Thinking deeply about China’s history and its given natural givens – including an isolating physical terrain with huge mountains on three sides and an ocean on the fourth – puts the country’s actions today in a new perspective.   

We can’t know China today without understanding its past.    We can’t know business leadership without knowing both.     

The magnitude of the task:  For those new to the task of studying China — of learning to see China, past and present, through Eastern and Western eyes — it is a big task. 

It will take time, effort, and patience to fully wrap minds around the complexity of a nation that can traces its history hundreds of thousands of years.  The speed of the transitions occurring in China today only magnify the challenge of sorting all this out for business and for policy.    

Where to start:   Read and talk. 

For readings, begin with Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones.  Hessler is a journalist and a beautiful writer.  He seamlessly weaves contemporary stories of a variety of compelling characters in China today with gripping vignettes and snippets of history.  How everything connects is mastery, and every word or fact is essential to Hessler’s narrative.  High praise for the book’s artistry, and it is still a hard read for many.  But the reasons why are exactly why you need to read it.  The mix of history, unknown places, names we can’t easily remember or that require us to sound out every syllable, characters that challenge stereotypes, mini-language lessons, and the backs-and-forths between stories of now and then create a visceral feel for readers that mirrors the experience of China today.   

And talk to everyone.  African cab drivers in Washington, D.C. have given me insights into China’s investments and strategies better than any journalist or researcher. Ex-patriots who have successfully lived and worked in China can identify cultural elements like few else.  Look around. You’ll be surprised how many people you know have links, experiences, and connections to China. 

We’ll bring in diverse speakers over the semester – economists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, Midwestern governs, scholars, citizens interested in cultural relations, consultants, artists, Chinese students studying at our university – to share their take on the complexity.  We’ll get very different perspectives from the different vantage points and as a result of the unique experiences of different professionals.  And we’ll learn from sorting through the differences and inevitable contradictions.  Simply speaking, China today – and yesterday – is just not simple.   

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Educating global leaders, global citizens–learning to see through cultural lenses

Business leadership today is global. There’s no debate on that. Not everyone will become a player in a multi-national company – and some may never do any business outside the United States. However, we are all global citizens in an increasingly flat world who need to appreciate that our leadership decisions and choices may be local in operation, but they are always global in impact.

How do we teach people to be productive global citizens? Do we even know what being a good global citizen today means?

The questions have been on my mind all week as I prepare for the first class in Global Management, the course surrounding our international residency. I’m taking our second year Executive MBAs to three cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin) this spring, and the course is designed to enable them to make the most of that learning experience.

The syllabus and mechanics are in order. My scholarly area is management education; and I’ve got enough experience, pedagogical savvy and developmental theory under my belt to design a pretty integrated and nifty course.

China is a rapidly changing nation of great accomplishment, influence, mystery, and paradox to the Western eye. I’m no China scholar, so I’ve asked distinguished professionals with on-going, hands-on experiences in China to join me in helping students unravel the paradoxes  and mystery as they learn about China’s history, culture, economy, law, and business environments.

I’m sure students will enjoy and learn from this. But I have bigger goals for them – and figuring out how to accomplish those is what’s kept me on edge.

I want our students to learn to see China through Eastern and Western eyes. More important, I want them to understand why that’s so important, so difficult, and so vital to their professional development in an increasingly diverse work world.  All that is not going to come simply from reading cases and articles,  interacting with our distinguished guests, or even travelling abroad.  It’s going to require time, a new level of openness to experience, self-reflection, and some deep digging to identify their own lenses and cultural blinders.  Oy! And I only have five class sessions in KC and eleven days in China to accomplish this.

I know only too well these are high expectations. Some twenty plus years ago, Jean Ramsey and I joined with colleagues to explore how to create educational experiences that broaden others’ understanding of and comfort with diversity and differences, as well as how to deconstruct the dynamics in the learning. We wrote about that in Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart; and we concluded that exploring differences, working to build emotional and cultural intelligence, and getting people to a place where they can name differences without triggering the human urge to evaluate (or devalue) them is complex and emotion-laden teaching.  And developmental growth of this kind takes time.

Activities, for example, can seem touchy-feely for those who live in their heads and are anchored in their local worlds, threatening to those with quick evaluative and ethno-centric lenses, or simplistic to people who just don’t get it. In those cases, primitive displacement can get triggered – along with some nasty comments come course evaluation time!

But hey, every professor knows if you’re looking for love in the classroom, you’re looking in the wrong place.  Good teaching challenges like nothing else, and sometimes it takes years for students to realize what they really learned from their work with you. 

So, wish me luck. Class is Friday, 8 am.  I’ll keep you posted.