Positioning by Al Ries & Jack Trout

• “Failure to communicate” is the single, most common, most universal reason given for problems that develop.
• Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first over communicated society. Each year, we send more and receive less.
• Positioning starts with a product.
• To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the reality that really counts is what’s already in the prospect’s mind.
• Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the pase. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise.
• In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, “positioning”.
• The min, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered it. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience.
• Millions of dollars have been wasted trying to change minds with advertising.
• Once a mind is made up, it’s almost impossible to change it.
• Not unless they repeal the law of nature that gives us only 24 hours in a day will they find a way to stuff more into the mind.
• You have to jettison the ambiguities, simply the message, and then sigmoid it some more if you want to make a long-lasting impression.
• Truth is irrelevant. What matters are the perceptions that exist in the min. The essence of positioning thinking is to accept the perception as reality and then restructure those perceptions to create the position you desire.
• It may be cynical to accept the premise that the sender is wrong and the receiver is right. But you really have no other choice. Not if you want to et your message accepted by another human mind.
• In communication, more is less.
• Our extravagant use of communication to solve a host of business and social problems has so jammed our channels that only a tiny fraction of all messages actually get through.
• Scientists have discovered that a person is capable of receiving only a limited amount of sensation. Beyond a certain point, the brain go blank and refuses to function normally.
• Ironically, as the effectiveness of advertising goes down, the use of it goes up.
• The easy way to get into a person’s mind is to be first.
• If you didn’t get into the mind of your prospect first (personally, politically, or corporately), then you have a positioning problem.
• In today’s marketplace the competitor's position is just as important as your own. Sometimes more important.
• To find a unique position, you just ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says you find your concept inside yourself or inside the product. Not true. What you must do is look inside the prospect’s mind.
• More than anything else, successful positioning requires consistency. You must keep at it year after year.
• In truth, outright failure is often preferable to mediocre success.
• A company stick with a losing position is not going to benefit much from hard work.
• At almost every step of the way, the leading brand has the advantage.
• Leaders can do anything they want to. Short-term, leaders are almost invulnerable. Momentum alone carries them along.
• Leaders should use their short-term flexibility to assure themselves of a stable long-term future. As a matter of fact, the marketing leader is usually the one who moves the ladder into the mind with his or her brand nailed to the one and only rung.
• As long as a company owns the position, there’s no point in running ads that scream, “We’re No. 1.”
• The essential ingredient in securing the leadership position is getting into the mind first. The essential ingredient in keeping that posisint is reinforcing the original concept. The standard by which all others are judged. In contrast, everything else in an imitation of “the real thing”.
• Getting to the top is tough. Staying there is much easier.
• What works for a leader doesn’t necessarily work for a follower. Leaders can often cover a competitive move and retain their leadership. But folders are not in the same position to benefit from a covering strategy. When a flower copies a leader, it’s not covering at all. It’s better described as a me-too response. Sometimes a me-too response can work for a follower. But only if the leader does not move rapidly enough to establish the position.
• Most me-too products fail to achieve reasonable sales goals because the accent is on “better’ rather than “speed”. That is, the No. 2 company thinks the road to success is to introduce a me-too product, only better.
• It’s not enough to be better than the competitor. You must launch your attack while the situations is fluid. Before the leader has time to establish leadership. With a more massive advertising and promotion launch. And a better. Name.
• “Look for the hole” in the prospect’s mind is one of the best strategies in the field of marketing.
• Too often greed gets confused with positioning thinking. Charging high prices is not the way to get rich. Being the first to establish the high-price position with a valid product stori in a category where consumers are receptive to a high-priced branch is the secret of success. Otherwise, your high price just drives prospective customers away.
• Your high price must have a real difference to justify the price. If nothing else, it rationalizes the spending of more money.
• The bulk of the business is in one direction, but the opportunity lies in the opposite.
• A product is something made in a factory. A brand is something made in the mind. To be successful today, you have to build brands, not products. And you build brands by using positioning strategies, starting with a good name.
• The biggest single mistake that companies make is trying to appeal to everybody. The everybody trap.
• In other words, to move a new idea or product into the mind, you must first move an old one out.
• Once an old idea is overturned, selling the new idea is often ludicrously simple. As a matter of fact, people will often actively search for a new idea to fill the void.
• Never be afraid of conflict either. The crux of a reposisinting program is undercutting an existing concept, product, or person. Conflict, even personal conflict, can build a reputation overnight.
• People like to see the high and mighty exposed. Thye like to see those bubbles burst.
• Tase, esthetic or gustatory, is in the mind. Your eyes see what you expect to see. Your tongue reacts the way you expect it to react.
• To be successful in this over communicated society of ours, you have to play the game by the rules that society sets. Not your own.
• Shakespeare was wrong. A rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. Not only do you see what you want to see, you also smell what you want to smell.
• What worked in the past won’t necessarily work now or in the future. In the past when there were fewer products, when the volume of communication was lower, the name wasn’t nearly as important. Today, however, a lazy, say-nothing name isn’t god enough to cut into the mind. What you must look for in  anime that begins the positioning process. A name that tells the prospect what the product’s major benefit is.
• A strong, generic-like, descriptive name will block your me-too competitors from muscling their way into your territory. A good name is the best insurance for long-term success.
• No brand will live forever. Products get out of date, services get out of date, even names get out of date. The smart company will not waste money defending the past, but rather will launch new brands to take advantage of the opportunities created by change.
• One of the things that makes positioning thinking difficult for many people is the failure to understand the role of timing.
• In naming people or products, you should not let your competitors unfairly preempt words that you need to describe your own products.
• When you want to change a strongly held opinion, the first step to take is usually to change the name.
• The first step in overcoming negative reactions is to bring the product out of the closet. To deliberately prioritize the situation by using a negative name.
• Special-interest groups recognize the power of a good name.
• A better tactic is to turn the name around. That is, to reposition the concept by using the same words to turn the meaning inside out.
• Even better is to rename the opposition before the powerful name takes root.
• The name is the first point of contact between the message and the mind. It’s not the goodness or badness of the name in an esthetic sense that determines the effectiveness of the message. It’s the appropriateness of the name.
• A bad name doesn’t get any better no matter how many years you have been using it.
• There is only negative equity in a bad name. When the name is bad, things tend to get worse. When the name is good, things tend to get better.
• But to be well known, avoid using initials. A fact known by most politicians.
• You can’t make a set of initials famous unless you first make the name famous.
• The primary reason name selection errors are so common is that executives live in an ocean of paper. Letters, memos, reports. Swimming in the Xerox sea, it’s easy to forget that the mind works aurally. To utter a word, we first translate the letters into sounds.
• When words are read, they are not understood until the visual/verbal translator in your brain takes over to make aural sense out of what you have seen.
• The mind works by ear, not by eye. This is one of the most useful conceptual ideas in the entire book. Before you can ile away a picture in the mind, you have to verbalize it.
• Radio is really the primal media. And print is the higher-level abstraction. Massages would “sound better” in print if they were designed for radio first. Yet we usually do the reverse. We work first in print and then in the broadcast media.
• One reason why the principles of name selection remai so elusive is the Charles Lindbergh syndrome. If you get into the mind first, any name is going to work. If you didn’t get there first, then you are flirting with disaster if you don’t select an appropriate name.
• When a really new product comes along, it’s almost always a mistake to change a well-known name on it. The reason is obvious. A well-known name got well known because it stood for something. It occupies a position in the prospect’s mind. A really well-known name sits on the top rung of a sharply defined ladder. The new product, if it’s going to be successful, is going to require a new ladder. New ladder, new name. It’s as simple as that.
• In politics, in marketing, in life, anonymity is a resource, easily squandered by too much publicity.
• Inside-out thinking is the biggest barrier to success. Outside-in thinking is the biggest aid.
• The consumer and the manufacturer see things in totally different ways.
• One of the reasons for the continuing popularity of line extension is that in the short term, line extension has some advantages.
• One of the keys to understanding the line-extension issue is to separate the short-term effects from the long-term effects.
• The pattern of early success followed by line extension followed by disillusionment is fairly common.
• So we offer some rules of the road that will tell you when to use the house name and when not to.
• Expected volume. Potential winners should not bear the house name. Small-volume products should.
• Competition. In a vacuum, the brand should not bear the house name. In a crowded field, it should.
• Advertising support. Big-budget brands should not bear the house name. Small-budget brands should.
• Significance. Breakthrough products should net bear the house name. Commodity products such as chemicals should.
• Distribution. Off-the-shelf items should not bear the house name. Items sold by sales reps should.
• It’s hard to change a mind once a mind has been made up.
• You can position anything. A person, a product, a politician. Even a company.
• A company may be able to make more money by diversifying. It should think twice, however, about trying to build a position based on that concept.
• A good place to start a corporate positioning program is with clear, concise definition of what a company is. But the best corporate positioning programs go beyond just a definition. The best programs do the job with actions, not just words. Or sometimes the words themselves represent the action.
• It’s a basic principle of positioning to avoid the areas that everyone else is talking about. The fas, if you will. To make progress, a company has to strike out on its own into new, unexplored territory.
• In the business of corporate positioning, the perception of leadership is something you can cash at the bank. Whether you’re a chemical company, a bank or an automobile manufacturer, when your customers are impressed, you will always do better than your competitors.
• The perceptions of people living in a place are often different from those visiting it.
• Pictures alone won’t build a position in the mind. Only words will do that. To create an effective positioning program, you have to “verbalize the visuals”. Alliteration can also be an effective memory device in this process.
• In this over communicated society, the only hope is the simple idea.
• The lesson here is that positioning may require you to oversimplify your communications. So be it. There is no other way. Confusion is the enemy. Simplicity is the holy grail.
• The solution to a positioning problem is usually found in the prospect’s mind, not in the product.
• It doesn’t really matter what customers think about your company and your products or services. The thing that counts is how your company compares with your competitors.
• The best positioning ideas are so simple that most people overlook them.
• The human mind tends to admire the complicated and dismiss the obvious as being too simplistic.
• The start of any major communication efort often needs some drama to get people’s attention. The emotion of the film medium is ideal for this kind of effort. (Which is also why television is so powerful a tool for new product introductions.)
• The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one species concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect’s wall of indifference.
• Anything worthwhile doing is worthwhile doing lousy. If it wasn’t worthwhile doing, you shouldn’t have done it at all. On the other hand, if it is worthwhile doing and you wait until you can do it perfectly, if you procrastinate, you run the risk of not doing it. Ever. Therefore, anything worthwhile doing is worthwhile doing lousy.
• Your reputation will probably be better within the company if you try many times and succeed sometimes than if you fear failure and only try for sure things.
• Trying harder is rarely the pathway to success. Trying smarter is the better way.
• The truth is, the road to fame and fortune is rarely found within yourself. The only sure way to success is to find yourself a horse to ride. It may be difficult for the ego to accept, but success in life is based more on what others can do for you than on what you can do for yourself.
• No matter how brilliant you are, it never pays to cast your lot with a loser.
• You can’t do it yourself. If your company is going nowhere, get yourself a new one.
• “Hitch your wagon to a star,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Good advice then. Even better advice now. If your boss is going places, chances are good that you are too.
• Most of the big breaks that happen in a person’s career happen because a business friend recommended that person.
• The more business friends you make outside of your own organization, the more likely you are to wind up in a big, rewarding job.
• It’s not enough just to make friends. You have to take out that friendship horse and exercise it once in a while. If you don’t, you won’t be able to ride it when you need it.
• Everyone knows that an idea can take you to the top faster than anything else. But people sometimes expect too much of an idea. They want one that is not only great, but one that everyone else thinks is great too. There are no such ideas. If you wait until an idea is ready to be accepted, it’s too late. Someone else will have preempted it.
• To ride the “idea” horse, you must be willing to expose yourself to ridicule and controversy. You must be willing to stick your neck out. And take a lot of abuse. And bude your time until your time comes.
• Positioning is thinking in reverse. Instead of starting with yourself, you start with the mind of the prospect. Instead of asking what you are, you ask what position you already own in the mind of the prospect.
• Changing minds in our over communicated society is an extremely difficult task. It’s much easier to work with what’s already there.
• What you must do is to find a way into the mind by hooking your product, service or concept ito what’s already there.
• Too many programs set out to communicate a position in that is impossible to prompt because someone else already owns it.
• If your proposed position calls for a head-to-head approach against a marketing leader, forget it. It’s better to go around an obstacle rather than over it. Back up. Try to select a position that no one else has a firm grip on.
• A big obstacle to successful positioning is attempting to achieve the impossible. It takes money to build a share of mind. It takes money to establish a position. It takes money to hold a position once you’ve established it.
• The noise level today is fierce. There are just too many me-too products and too many me-too companies vying for the mind of the prospect. Getting noticed is getting tougher.
• With rare exceptions, a company should almost never change its basic positioning strategy. Only its tactics, those short-rem maneuvers that are intended to implement a long-term strategy.
• Owning a position in the mind is like owning a valuable piece of real estate. Once you give it up, you might find it’s impossible to get it back again.
• Creativity by itself is worthless. Only when it is subordinated to the positioning objective can creativity make a contribution.
• To be successful today at positioning, you must have a large degree of mental flexibility. You must be able to select and use words with as much disdain for the history books as for the dictionary.
• You must select the words which trigger the meanings you want to establish.
• Words are triggers. They trigger the meanings which are buried in the mind.
• Most people are insane. They’re not completely sane and they’re not completely insane. They’re somewhere in between.
• The sane person constantly analyzes the world of reality and then changes what’s inside his or her head to fit the facts. That’s an awful lot of trouble for most people. [...] It’s a whole lot easier to change the facts to fit your opinions.
• Unsane people make up their minds and then find the facts to “verify” the opinion. Or even more commonly, they accept the opinion of the nearest “expert”, and then they don’t have to bother with the facts at all. (Word of mouth.).
• Language is the currency of the mind. To think conceptually, you manipulate words. With the right choice of words, you can influence the thinking process itself.
• To be successful in the positioning era, you must be brutally frank. You must try to eliminate all ego from the decision-making process. It only clouds the issue.
• One of the most critical aspects of positioning is being able to evaluate products objectively and see how they are viewed by customers and prospects.
• Only an obvious idea will work today. The overwhelming volume of communication prevents anything else from succeeding.
• Often the solution to a problem is so simple that thousands of people have looked at it without seeing it. When an idea is clever or complicated, however, we should be suspicious. It probably won’t work because it’s not simple enough.

Words Like Loaded Pistols by Sam Leith

• Rhetoric is, as simply defined as possible, the art of persuasion: the attempt by one human being to influence another in words. It is no more complicated than that.
• When we think we’re speaking plainly, we’re in fact filling our every sentence with rhetorical trickery. All of us are rhetoricians by instinct and training.
• Language happens because human beings are desire machines, and what knits desire and language is rhetoric.
• The whole art of oratory was the most and greatest writers have taught, consists of five parts: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. These five parts roughly correspond to the sequence in which you might imagine putting a speech--or, more broadly, any persuasive appeal--together.
• Invention is doing your homework: thinking up in advance exactly what arguments can be made both for and against a given proposition, selecting the best on your own side, and finding counterarguments to those on the other.
• There will almost always be more lines of argument available than it will be possible or prudent to use. The skill is to find the ones that will hold most sway with your intended audience.
• The ethos appeal is first among equals. How you present yourself--ordinarily the job of the opening few moments of your address--is the foundation on which all the rest is built. It established the connection between the speaker and the audience, and it steers how that speech will be received.
• Your audience needs to know (or to believe, which in rhetoric adds up to the same thing) that you are trustworthy, that you have a locus standi to talk on the subject, and that you speak in good faith.
• Your arguments will tend to prosper if they are founded on the common assumptions of your audience--or, in special cases, if the audience is minded to defer to your authority. Likewise, your hopes of stirring the audience to anger or pity depends on the extent to which they are prepared to identify with the anger or pity yourself seem to feel.
• The most effective off-the-cuff speeches are premeditated, and the best premeditated speeches appear off the cuff.
• If this is the ground on which your argument stands, logos is what drives it forward: it is the stuff of your argument, the way one point proceeds to another, as if to show that the conclusion to which you are aiming is not only the right one, but so necessary and reasonable as to be more or less the only one. If in the course of it, you can make your opponents sound venal or even deranged, so much the better.
• The syllogism is a way of combining two premises and drawing a fresh conclusions that follows logically from them.
• The enthymeme is like that, only fuzzier. It is, if you like, a half-assed syllogism; typically one that, rather than having its premises right out in the open, has a hidden assumption somewhere.
• Another extraordinarily common, effective persuasive appeal in logos is analogy.
• It can’t be repeated too often: what you’re talking about when you talk about logos in persuasion not proof absolute. That is why, when you look at judicial rhetoric in the UK and US, the standard stipulation is that “proof” means not certainty, but the ability to demonstrate a set of propositions “beyond reasonable doubt”.
• For the conspiracy theorist, the very paucity of evidence to support their contention is what passes as proof. The lack of evidence is evidence of a cover-up.
• The wise persuader starts from one or two commonplaces he knows he has in common with his audience--and, where possible, arrives at one too.
• Pathos is the appeal to emotion--not just sadness or pity, which is what a film critic will tend to mean when describing this or that scene as “full of pathos”, but excitement, fear, love, patriotism, or amusement.
• Emotion in a persuasive appeal is only effective inasmuch as it is shared emotion. One of the reasons laughter is so effective as a tool for persuasion--and any stand-up comic who has ever seen off a heckler with a zinging one-liner knows this--is that laughter is involuntary assent.
• It’s worth saying: an appeal to pathos is not in and of itself a “cheat”. Feeling--and through it, fellow feeling--is the basis of pretty much everything that most of us regard as important in being human. Without is, we wouldn’t fall in love, nurture children, build communities, enact laws, remember our dead, or throw dinner parties. Feeling may not be logical, but to sway feeling is every bit the legitimate object of rhetoric.
• Logos usually takes its place as number three in the trinity of persuasive appeals--the small voice of reason blown hither and thither by the emotional muddle of ethos and pathos.
• Successful persuasion depend on an audience’s being able to identify with the speaker--and we are much more often like the devil than we are like the almighty.
• Ad Herennium sets the parts of a speech out as follows:
• Exordium: This is where you set out your stall. It’s the point at which you establish your bona fides as a speaker, grab the audience’s attention, and hope to keep it. The strongest up-front ethos appeal will tend to come here.
• Narration: This is where you levelly and reasonably set out the area of argument, and the facts of the case as generally understood.
• Division: Here’s where you set out what you and your opponents agree about; and the areas on which you disagree.
• Proof: This is where you set out the arguments supporting your case. Here’s where logos comes to the fore.
• Refutation: More logos. This is, as the name suggests, the part of an orations in which you smash your opponent’s arguments into little tiny pieces.
• Peroration: The grand finale. If you have flourishes, prepare to flourish them now, and if you have tears, prepare to shed them. In the peroration, you sum up what has gone before, reiterate your strongest points, and drive to your conclusion. It’s usually the place for the pathos appeal to reach its height.
• The purpose of the exordium is to put the audience into a receptive and attentive frame of mind. It’s helpful to tell them--like the nightclub host who greets you, “Ladies and gentlemen: have we got a show for you tonight!”--that important, new, and unusual matters will be offered to their ears. And it’s helpful to make clear why it’s you who will be discussing them.
• Ad Herennium want the narration to have three qualities: brevity, clarity, and plausibility. Note above all others the third of these. When setting out the facts of the case, the orator is no less able to shape the debate this purposes than he is when openly mounting an argument--indeed he is probably more so because he speaks under cover of ostensible neutrality.
• Narration is the who, what, when, and where of the case--the solemn reading from the policeman's notebook before he fur begins to fly.
• The narration is one of the prime areas of a speech in which you are able to spin, and framing the terms of the debate is half the battle won.
• As this squirm-making instance illustrates all too well, the time to define your terms is in advance, not as part of a rear-guard action. Narration isn’t the most exciting part of a speech--but it can be subtly influential on its outcome.
• Technical proofs are the arguments that the orator contrives. Nontechnical proofs are there already: available to be sued rather than needing to be invented.
• Rhetoric is about connecting with an audience; that means finding shared assumptions. And those shared assumptions are usually pretty conservative: we don’t reinvent the world from scratch every time we float a theory.
• Proof and refutation are another of these linked pairs: In most adversarial situations, to prove your own case is to disprove your opponent’s--through rhetoric being as slippery as it is, the task is seldom precisely symmetrical.
• The skilled orator is out not necessarily to knock down his opponent’s case tout court--but to misrepresent his opponent's case in such a way as to make it easier to attack.
• You can indignantly answer a charge nobody made, or fiercely deny something adjacent to the truth.
• If your own case is weak, you may even want to reverse the order in which proof and refutation come: reduce your opponent to smoldering rubble in the hopes that nobody then notices how feeble the case you mount afterward is.
• The nature of the Western tradition in rhetoric (as in dielectric) is adversarial: it is better at dealing with either/or propositions then and/also possibilities or neither/nor.
• Recognize which battles you have no choice but to lose; then lose them on your own terms.
• As Aristotle tells us, pithanon tini pithanon: “What is convinginc is what one is convinced by”.
• The key thing about invective or ad hominem attack is that it is a sort of reverse ethos appeal: the purpose is to isolate your opponent from the community.
• As a rhetorical concept, decorum encompasses not only the more obvious features of style, but kairos, or the timeliness of a speech, the tone and physical comportment of the speaker, the commonplaces and topics of argument chosen, and so on. It is a giant umbrella concept meaning no more nor less than the fitting of a speech to the temper and expectations of its audience.
• Linguists talk about the phenomenon of “accommodation”--which is the way in which we seek to adapt our own language to fit into a speech community.
• Subcultures spawn languages, and there is decorum to how those languages are used.
• So decorum is, literally, speaking your audience’s language.
• Humor can be very persuasive.
• How a piece of rhetoric sounds--and this applies just as much whether it is heard out loud or scanned by the inner ear while being read on the page--is vital to its effectiveness. Here, again, we see where rhetoric and poetics share territory. Why does sound matter? It matters in rhetoric for the same reason that it matters in poetry.
• Poetry comes out of oral tradition, and it has long been suggested that most of the effects of sound and rhythm that characterise formal verse--from the alliterative and stress-based forms of anglo-saxon poetry, to end-rhymed classical prosody--originated as devices to make long poems stick in the mind.
• Repetition (because rhyme, alliteration, and the tick-tock of a pentameter are all, at root, no more than forms of respiration) makes things memorable, as we know from learning our times tables.
• Public speaking, like writing, is in many ways a confidence trick.
• One of the ways of harnessing that feeling of connectedness to history, as we’ll see later in the discussion of American political rhetoric, is to borrow and repurpose the resonant phrase of the past. This differs from ordinary plagiarism in that to be detected--subliminally at least--is half the point. Echoes of orators past are a way of taking possession of them--of implying that you are channeling those orators and all they represent.
• In most cases, with written rhetoric, the writer is remote from his or her audience so that dialogic aspect of the exchange is different. The audience's reaction is anticipated and hopefully shaped by the writer, but it can’t be taken into account during the event. A writer “reads” his audience in advance, not in real time.
• For someone giving a speech in person, however, reading the audience is a constant process.
• The question of delivery--it’s called actio in Latin and hypokrisis in Greek-is traditionally subdivided into control of the voice and control of physical gesture.
• For most of those of us who really are unaccustomed to speaking in public, probably the single most important point about delivery is pace. Most people, particularly when nervous, talk too fast. Slowing it down until it’s on the verge of feeling unbearable is just about the way to go.
• “Never laugh at your own jokes” is usually good advice.
• Even the professional die on stage from time to time.
• The best advice remains: be yourself--but that injjunction, as the commerce between rhetoric delivery and acting suggests, can be unpacked. The good speaker plays himself--and does so using the total immersion technique of a dedicated method actor. Good delivery ensures that what the orator is saying seems to come from his heart. Fool yourself first, and the audience will follow.
• Finally, be mindful that, though nobody wants to hear you announce, “I shall be brief”, they will want you actually to be brief.
• Aristotle said there were three types of rhetoric--widely known now as the three branches of oratory--and his distinction between them remains a useful one. One type seeks to persuade people about a course of action in the future, one seeks to persuade people of a version of events in the past, and one seeks to delight and impress in the present.
• The language of the speech is a tissue of allusion and quotation, drawing on stores of common knowledge and idiom that will resonate with the several audiences to whom the speech is addressed.
• The importance of staying in control of where you stand vis-a-vis your audience is vital if what you want to convey about the points at issue is to come across. That’s the truth. Handle it with care.
• Before it is anything else, a speech needs to be suited to the moment of its speaking.
• A good speechwriter doesn’t put words into a politician's mouth, and an effective politician won’t let one do so: for the former, the task of writing against character is too difficult; for the latter, the risks of putting someone else in charge of your mouth are too high.
• Rhetoric is everywhere language is, and language is everywhere people are. To be fascinated by rhetoric is to be fascinated by people, and to understand rhetoric is in large part to understand your fellow human beings.
• The Three Appeals
• Ethos
• Pathos
• Logos
• The Three Branches of Rhetoric
• Forensic (Judicial) -- Associated with the past
• Deliberative (Political) -- Associated with the future
• Epideictic or Display Oratory -- Associated with the present
• The Five Canons of Rhetoric
• Invention--Discovery of proofs
• Arrangement--Shaping of argument
• Style--Giving argument a form in language
• Memory--ABsorbing the argument
• Delivery--Putting the argument across
• The Six Parts of a Speech
• Exordium
• Narration
• Division
• Proof
• Refutation
• Peroration

Programming Embedded Systems by Michael Barr & Jack Ganssle

• Each embedded system is unique, and the hardware is highly specialized to the application domain. As a result, embedded systems programming can be widely varying experience and can take years to master.
• Forth is efficient but extremely low-level and unusual; learning to get work done with it takes more time than with C.
• The first thing to notice is that there are two basic types of hardware to which processors connect: memories and peripherals. Memories are for the storage and retrieval of data and code. Peripherals are specialized hardware devices that either coordinate interaction with the outside world or perform a specific hardware function.
• Memory-mapped peripherals make life easier for the programmer, who can use C-language pointers, structs, and unions to interact with the peripherals more easily.
• For each new board, you should create a C-language header file that describes its most important features. This file provides an abstract interface to the hardware. In effect, it allows you to refer to the various devices on the board by name rather than by address. This has the added benefit of making your application software more portable.
• There are two basic communication techniques: polling and interrupts. In either case, the processor usually issues some sort of command to the device by writing--by way of the memory or I/O space--particular data values to particular addresses within the device, and then waits for the device to complete the assigned tasks.
• If polling is used, the processor repeatedly checks to see whether the task has been completed.
• When interrupts are used, the processor issues commands to the peripheral exactly as before, but then waits for an interrupt to signal complexion of the assigned work. While the processor is waiting for the interrupt to arrive, it is free to continue working on other things. When the interrupt signal is asserted, the processor finishes its current instruction, temporarily sets aside its current work, and executes a small piece of software called the interrupt service routine (ISR) or interrupt handler. When the ISR completes, the processor returns to the work that was interrupted.
• When you are designing the embedded software, you should try to break the program down along device lines. It is usually a good idea to associate a software module called a device driver with each of the external peripherals. A device driver is nothing more than a collection of software routines that control the operation of a specific peripheral and isolate the application software for the details of that particular hardware device.
• Expect that the initial hardware bring-up will be the hardest part of the project.
• A popular substitute for the “Hello, World!” program is one that blinks an LED at a rate of 1 Hz. Typically, the code required to turn an LED on and off is limited to a few lines of code, so there is very little room for programming errors to occur. And because almost all embedded systems have LEDs, the underlying concept is extremely portable.
• One of the most fundamental differences between programs developed for embedded systems and those written for other platforms is that the embedded programs almost always have an infinite loop. Typically, this loop surrounds a significant part of the program’s functionality. The infinite loop is necessary because the embedded software job is never done. It is intended to be run until either the world comes to an end or the board is reset, whichever happens first.
• A debug monitor, also called a ROM monitor, is a small program that resides in nonvolatile memory on the target hardware that facilitate various operations needed during development. One of the tasks that a debug monitor handles is basic hardware initialization. A debug monitor allows you to download and run software in RAM to debug the program.
• Debug symbols associate variable and function names with their addresses, as well as include type information about the symbol. This allows you to reference a particular variable by using its symbol name.
• One of the most primitive debug techniques available is the use of an LED as an indicator of success or failure. The basic idea is to slowly walk the LED enable code throughout the larger program. In other words, first begin with the LED enable code at the reset address. If the LED turns on, you can edit the program--moving the LED enable code to just after the next execution milestone--and then rebuild and test.
• DMA is a technique for transferring blocks of data directly between two hardware devices with minimal CPU involvement. In the absence of DMA, the processor must read the data from one device and write it to the other, one byte or word at a time
• Here’s how DMA works. When a block of data needs to be transferred, the processor provides the DMA controller with the source and destination addresses and the total number of bytes. The DMA controller then transferred the data from the source to the destination automatically. When the number of bytes remaining reachers zero, the block transfer ends.
• Endianness doesn’t matter on a single system. It matters only when two computers are trying to communicate. Ever processor and every communication protocol must choose one type of endianness or the other.
• One of the first pieces of serious embedded software you are likely to write is a memory test. Once the prototype hardware is ready, the designer would like some reassurance that he has wired the address and data lines correctly and that the memory chips are working properly.
• The purpose of a memory test is to confirm that each storage location in a memory device is working.
• The first thing we want to test is the data bus wiring. We need to confirm that any value placed on the data bus by the processor is correctly received by the memory device at the other end.
• A good way to test each bit independently is to perform the so-called walking 1’s test. The name walking 1’s comes from the fact that a single data bit is set to 1 and “walked” through the entire data word. The number of data values to test is the same as the width of the data bus.
• To perform the walking 1’s test, simply write the first data value in the table, verify it by reading it back, write the second value, verify, and so on. When you reach the end of the table, the test is complete.
• After confirming that the data bus works properly, you should next test the address bus. Address bus problems lead to overlapping memory locations. [...] You need to confirm that each of the address pins can be set to 0 and 1 without affecting any of the others.
• To confirm that no two memory locations overlap, you should first write some initial data value at each power-of-two offset within the device. Then write a new value--an inverted copy of the initial value is a good choice--to the first test offset, and verify that the initial data value is still stored at every other power-of-two offset. If you find a location (other than the one you just wrote) that contains the new data value, you have found a problem with the current address bit. If no overlapping is found, repeat the procedure for each of the remaining offsets.
• Once you know that the address and data bus wiring are correct, it is necessary to test the integrity of the memory device itself. The goal is to test that every bit in the device is capable of holding both 0 and 1. This test is fairly straightforward to implement, but it takes significantly longer to execute than the previous two tests.
• How can we tell whether the data or program stored in a nonvolatile memory device is still valid? One of the easiest ways is to compute a checksum of the data when it is known to be valid--prior to programming the ROM, for example. Then, each time you want to confirm the validity of the data, you need only recalculate the checksum and compare the result to the previously computed value. If the two checksums match, the data is assumed to be valid.
• An embedded processor interacts with a peripheral device through a set of control and status registers. These registers are part of the peripheral hardware, and their locations, size, and individual meanings are features of the peripheral.
• Memory-mapped control and status registers can be made to look just like ordinary variables. To do this, you need simply declare a pointer to the register, or block of registers, and set the value of the pointer explicitly.
• In embedded systems featuring memory-mapped I/O devices, it is sometimes useful to overlay a C struct onto each peripheral control and status registers. Benefits of struct overlays are that you can read and write through a pointer to the struct, the register is described nicely by the struct, code can be kept clean, and the compiler does the address construction at compile time.
• When it comes to designing device drivers, always focus on one easily stated goal: hide the hardware completely. This hiding of the hardware is sometimes called hardware abstraction. When you’re finished, you want the device driver module to be the only piece of software in the entire system that reads and/or writes that particular device’s control and status registers directly. In addition, if the device generates any interrupts, the interrupt service routine that responds to them should be an integral part of the device driver. The device driver can then present a generic interface to higher software levels to access the device.
• The philosophy of hiding all hardware specifics and interactions within the device driver usually consists of the five components in the following list. To make driver implementation as simple and incremental as possible, these elements should be developed in the order they are presented.
• An interface to the control and status registers.
• Variables to track the current state of the physical (and logical) devices.
• A routine to initialize the hardware to a known state.
• An API for users of the device driver.
• Interrupt service routines.
• Interrupts allow developers to separate time-critical operations from the main program to ensure they are processed in a prioritized manner. Because interrupts are asynchronous events, they can happen at any time during the main program’s execution.
• An interrupt controller multiplexes several input interrupts into a single output interrupt. The controller also allows control over these individual input interrupts for disabling them, prioritizing them, and showing which are active.
• Interrupts can be either maskable or non maskable. Maskable interrupts can be disabled and enabled by software. Non Maskable interrupts (NMI) are critical interrupts, such as power failure or reset, that cannot be disabled by software.
• It is critical for the programmer to install an ISR for all interrupts, even the interrupts that are not used in the system. If an ISR is not installed for a particular interrupt and the interrupt occurs, the execution of the program can become undefined.
• The inclusion and use of a watchdog timer is a common way to deal with unexpected software hangs or crashes that may occur after the system is deployed.
• One way to ensure the instructions that make up the critical section are executed in order and without interruption is to disable interrupts. However, disabling interrupts when using an operating system may not be permitted and should be avoided; other mechanism should be used to execute these atomic operations.
• The atomicity of the mutex set and clear operations is enforced by the operating system, which disabled interrupts before reading or modifying the state of the binary flag.
• Mutexes are used for the protection of shared resources between tasks in an operating system. Shared resources are global variables, memory buffers, or device registers that are accessed by multiple tasks. A mutex can be used to limit access to such a resource to one tasks at a time.
• Mutexes should exclusively be used for controlling access to shared resources. While semaphores are typically used as signalling devices. A semaphore can be used to signal a task from another task or from an ISR--for example, to synchronize activities.
• An operating system is said to be deterministic if the worst-case execution time of each of the system calls is calculable.
• The mmap function asks the kernel to provide access to a physical address range contain in the hardware.
• Serial buses can be either asynchronous or synchronous. In an asynchronous serial connection, the data is sent without using a common timing clock signal. To align the receiver with the sender, there is some sort of start condition to signify when the transmission begins, and a stop condition to indicate the end of the transmission. Asynchronous serial connection typically uses a separate clock signal to synchronize the receiver with the sender.
• Some embedded systems don’t have hardware dedicated to performing all of the interface functions of a serial interface. In this case, general-purpose I/O signals are connected to external devices, and it is up to the software to implement the communication protocol. Bit banging is a slang term for the process of transferring serial data under software control.
• An analog signal has a continuously variable value, with effectively infinite resolution in both time and magnitude.
• In a nutshell, PWM is a way of digitally encoding analog signal levels. Through the use of high-resolution counters, the duty cycle of a square wave is modulated to encode a specific analog signal level.
• The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been the standard for monitoring and controlling networked devices.
• Most of the optimization performed on code involve a tradeoff between execution speed and code size. Your program can be made either faster or smaller, but not both. In fact, an improvement in one of these areas can have a negative impact on the other. It is up to the programmer to decide which of these improvements is most important.
• To speed things up, try to put the individual cases in order by their relative frequency of occurrence. In other words, put the most likely cases first and the least likely cases last. This will reduce the average execution time, though it will not improve at all upon the worst-case time.
• Unless your target platform features a floating-point processor, you’ll pay a very large penalty for manipulating float data in your program.
• One of the best things you can do to reduce the size of your program is to avoid using large standard library routines. Many of the largest routines are costly in terms of size because they try to handle all possible cases.
• Power consumption is a major concern for portable or battery-operated devices. Power issues, such as how long the device needs to run and whether the batteries can be recharged, need to be thought out ahead of time.
• There are several methods to conserve power in an embedded system, including clock control, power-sensitive processors, low-voltage ICs, and circuit shutdown.

Ethics for the real world by Ronald A. Howard & Clinton D. Korver

• The gist is this: We must master ethical distinctions to enable clear ethical thinking. We must commit in advance to ethical principles. And we must exercise disciplined decision-making skills to choose wisely.
• It is useful to clarify a few issues that often come up in ethics. The first is the distinction between moral and ethical. Although many people use the words interchangeably, we do not. For us, moral refers to behavior customary in our culture or society--or someone else’s culture or society. Ethical refers to behavior considered right or wrong according to our own benefits--no matter the culture or society.
• Ethical compromises both big and small hurt us, and we underestimate how much. For one thing, one compromise can lead to another as we let our standards slip. Once we cross the line, we may find it hard to resist crossing the next. We can get started going downhill on the proverbial slippery slope, where each compromise becomes easier, and we fall asleep to their consequences. As we develop bad habits, no matter our accomplishments and virtues, we may find ourselves in shocking situations.
• What causes most people the greatest pain is that compromises create barriers in relationships.
• Most ethical transgressions fall into roughly three categories: deception, stealing, and harming. Although there are many variants, these three encompass most wrongdoing. They also tempt us like the Sirens in Greek mythology: we find it hard to escape all their seductions.
• Lying, a form of deception, plays a central role in ethical compromise. We single it out for separate treatment because it appears so commonly in ethical thinking.
• Lying is defined as telling someone something we know not to be true with the intention of misleading them.
• One indication of the central role of lying in our lives is the number of words we have to describe it.
• There is a psychological cost to lying. Even if no one else discovers our lies, we know. Our lies often clash with the people we would like to be.
• We routinely face ethical decisions in which we make thinking errors just like those of Gerstein.
• Distinctions are the keys that unlock understanding. They give us the power to separate the issues of the world into new and useful parts. The better we can discriminate between the parts, the more skillfully we can function as ethical thinkers. Each time we fail to discriminate, we hamper ourselves with a lack of clarity.
• In decision analysis, the most basic distinction we make is simply our choice of words, the building blocks of our thinking. They are the basic units for helping us to discriminate between one thing and another. Learning and using words precisely fosters skillful thought.
• Word choice matters. It highlights some elements of a thought and disguises others. If we can agree that words paint pictures, we also have to agree that they put some things in the foreground, some in the back, some in the sunlight, some in the shadows. Often, the trick in making a good decision is finding the right words to paint a situation. The reverse is also true. If we paint carelessly, we make distinctions unwisely.
• To asses the ethics of any action, it is useful to separate three dimensions of the action: prudential, legal, and ethical. Within the prudential dimension, we distinguish between what is prudent or not prudent,; within the legal dimension, between what is lawful and unlawful; and within the ethical dimension, between what is right or wrong. Ethically sensitive situations are often confounded by prudential and legal issues we fail to see.
• An action raises questions in the ethical dimension when it pertains to our predefined standards of right behavior. An action in accord with our code of behavior is obviously ethical, and in conflict, unethical. As we saw in the last chapter, the principle issues in the ethical dimension are lying, deceiving, stealing, and harming.
• An action raises questions in the prudential dimension when it pertains to our self-interest, as in whether we should brush our teeth or refinance our house. An action that is prudential accords with such issues as our notions of financial gain, loyalty to others, friendless, thriftiness, or just being “nice”. We can usually tell we’re dealing with the prudential dimension when we balance one issue with another, trade off pluses and minuses, and weight opposing risks, to decide what the “smart” thing is to do.
• An action raises questions in the legal dimensions if it pertains to the law in the prevailing social system.
• When we become practiced at drawing the distinction between prudential, legal, and ethical dimensions of decisions, we notice something surprising: we encounter ethical dilemmas--situations in which two ethical principles conflict--only rarely. We do not routinely have to decide between two wrongs--for example, between lying and stealing, or cheating and hurting.
• In other words, we get ourselves into most ethically questionable situations when we are simply tempted to do something wrong.
• The second useful distinction for skilled ethical reasoning is the difference between negative and positive ethics. Negative ethics are prohibitions that take the form “You shall not…” Negative ethics take little or no energy to fulfill.
• Another characteristic of negative ethics is that they create bright lines. We can easily determine whether we have cheated on a test, killed an innocent person, or lied about having an affair.
• Positive ethics are obligations that take the form “You shall…” Positive ethics require virtuous behavior, and energy, to fulfill.
• A key characteristic of positive ethics is that they create blurry lines. We often have trouble knowing whether we have fulfilled them.
• The third distinction we must draw for skilled ethical reasoning is perhaps the best known in ethics: the difference between action- and consequence-based decisions.
• The fourth distinction we must draw for clear ethical thought is the difference between reasoning and rationalization. Reasoning is a process of analysis for forming judgements. It clarifies the distinction between right and wrong action. Rationalization is a process of constructing a justification for a decision we suspect is really flawled--and often one that was arrived at through a mental process characterized by contrivance and self-dealing. Rationalization purposefully blurs right from wrong.
• We can fool ourselves into thinking something is justified when it isn’t.
• With practice, we can ethically desensitize ourselves to the point that we are likely to repeatedly do the wrong thing.
• When we rationalize, we devise specious but self-satisfying reasons for acting. Or ascribe our actions to high-mindedness when our motives are actually otherwise. Or employ a faulty analogy or wishful thinking. In effect, we create a story that holds together but, upon examination, doesn’t hold up.
• We commonly rationalize to avoid embarrassment, get ahead, or be kind.
• We are especially vulnerable to rationalize and poor ethical thinking when our situation encourages it. Separating our acts from the stage on which we’re acting can be difficult. The influence of surroundings--people and place--can push us into doing things that, to observers, appear out right idiotic.
• The ultimate danger is that we put ourselves on a slippery slope, and we wake up after having slid much farther downward than we would like.
• For many of us, the most prominent strains of ethical guidance come from religion. Whether we have chosen to or not, we have soaked up all manner of principles and rules of thumb from scripture, parables, and stories, derived from prophets, disciples, and sages. Even is we are atheists, we have absorbed teachings woven into our social and cultural fabric.
• No matter what our faith, we need additional thought about the deeper issues of ethical behavior to make the right decision.
• It [the Golden Rule] doesn’t actually bar unethical acts by both sides. It doesn’t define who the “other” is when the recipient of our behavior is not a specific person. And in religious scripture, the Golden Rule comes in many forms, some with different meanings.
• The lesson: our religious touchstones simply don’t offer an ethical algorithm to give us easy answers--or at least ones that are easy to live by. They aren’t a perfectly polished touchstone to support clear decisions. We have to do some thinking ourselves. We have to reflect.
• Next to religion, perhaps the most prominent strain of ethical guidance comes from our upbringing--from family, school, friends, community, and nation. When we look to these secular influences, the difficulty of coming up with solid personal principles actually becomes harder--and yet more important--because so many nuances and conflicts emerge.
• If we are to look to “great leaders” for touchstone material, we learn an old lesson: popularity is no indicator of character. Leaders sometimes follow the old adage: “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.” And that goes for leaders from all walks of life.
• A successful code helps you clarify for yourself your ethical principles. It helps you resist temptations, especially those most relevant to you, your profession, your weaknesses, and your aspirations.
• The three steps we follow to write our code are (1) drafting standards, (2) testing standards, and (3) refining the code to make it practical. While we don’t need to do the steps in order, each one adds to a more thoughtful code--and lays the basis for more skillful decision making.
• To get started with our code, the easiest approach is to focus on the three principal categories of ethical wrongdoing: deceiving, stealing, and harming.
• Small things, no less than the big ones, reveal unresolved conflicts. In fact, the big ethical topics of the day often figure far less into our daily lives than a host of small persnickety ones.
• The issue that figures most prominently in our daily lives is usually deception.
• Two principles of logic guide the construction of durable, thoughtful codes. The first is universality. The second is reciprocity. When we draft an ethical standard, we should ask, “Would I want everyone to follow this?” And “Would I want other people applying the same rule to me?” We need to shift our perspective in the same way we would with the Golden Rule--to a person in another set of shoes.
• Many people accept fuzziness when they draw their lines. This leaves them unsure of compliance with their standards. So when we refine our codes, the rule is, the more specific our positive injunctions, the better.
• The first hurdle in making high-quality ethical decisions is simply overcoming the tendency not to think. Most of the time, we remain numb to critical issues, ignorant of our biases, and guided in decisions by age-old ruts.
• It’s hard to overestimate how much shifting the question can reshape our perspective.
• Satisficing is a reasonable strategy for low-stakes decisions--where to eat lunch or what book to buy. But when relationships and character are at stake, it often leaves much to be desired. We then need a better way to think.
• Critical thought quickly shuts down creative thought.
• Long-term consequences are often not given enough attention. Simply picking an appropriate time horizon can be difficult.
• An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The best way to deal with many unethical or ethically debatable situations is to avoid them. Avoidance is much easier than blundering into an awkward situation. So always try avoiding before transforming.
• One of the most useful decisions we can make is to refuse to join causes, groups, and organizations whose ethics are inconsistent with our own. Once we are inside a group, we can’t easily walk out an our obligations.
• Too often we encounter bad organizational fits. Feeling trapped, we may fashion rationalizations that lead us to break our ethical code.
• Keeping secrets can radically change our relationship with those who might benefit from knowing them, so we must accept them and handle them with care.
• Loyalty has a strong hold on all of us because it stems from primeval tribal emotions. We are essentially hardwired to think first of kin, clan, caste, and class. We raise arms against others to protect our tribe from interlopers, outsiders,, and barbarians.
• A simple technique too often gets overlooked: ask the people with whom we made the commitment what they think. The act of renegotiate is an opportunity to build an even stronger relationships. This principle works the same as in our personal lives.
• Commitments to keep secrets are among the most difficult to maintain.
• In every profession, the issue of exposing incompetent peers is taboo. No one wants to out the charlatans of our own kind.
• In ethics as in everything else, developing habits requires repetition and reinforcement. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect--or more accurately, perfect practice makes perfect.
• If we are to make the most of skillful ethical decisions making, we must turn it into a habit.
• Ethical compromise comes from thinking errors.
• Do not blindly use others’ ethics; develop your own.
• Ethics is about actions, not thoughts.
• Lying is telling someone something we know not to be true with the intention of misleading them.
• Deception is intentionally giving a false impression with or without telling a lie.
• Stealing is appropriating the property of others without permission.
• Physical harming is the use of or threat to use violence against another person.
• We numb ourselves to harm more easily than we think.
• The lesser of two evils is still evil.
• To make the best decisions, we need to follow a three-step process:
• Clarify the ethical issue.
• Create alternatives.
• Evaluate the alternatives.

Leadership BS by Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Myths and inspiring stories can be comforting, but they are worse than useless for creating change.
• Much of the oft-repeated conventional wisdom about leadership is based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science.
• The way leadership gurus try to demonstrate their legitimacy is not through their scientific knowledge or accomplishments but rather by achieving public notoriety-be it the requisites TED talks, blog posts, Twitter followers, or books filled with leadership advice that might or might not be valid and useful.
• The leadership industry is large and prominent, but, notwithstanding its magnitude and reach, workplaces in the United States and around the world are, for the most part, filled with dissatisfied, disengaged employees who do not trust their leaders; leaders at all levels lose their jobs at an increasingly fast pace, in part because they are unprepared for the realities of organizationational life, and thus, the leadership industry has failed and continues to fail in its task of producing leaders who are effective and successful, and it has even failed to produce sufficient talent to fill leadership vacancies.
• One big problem is that much leadership training and development has become too much a form of lay preaching, telling people inspiring stories about heroic leaders and exceptional organizations and, in the process, making those who hear the stories feel good and temporarily uplifted while not changing much of what happens at many workplaces.
• Then I lay out the evidence for and logic of why sometimes doing the opposite of what has been prescribed makes sense, at least for leaders seeking to advance their own careers. And this fact is at the core of the argument--that the qualities we actually select for and reward in most workplaces are precisely the ones that are unlikely to produce leaders who are good for employees or, for that matter, for long-term organizational performance.
• If these recommendations were comfortable and easily implemented, they already would have been.
• One critical time for derailment is when, in their first jobs post graduation, people move from positions where they can succeed mostly on the basis of their individual performance and into more interdependent roles where political skill become more important. The next critical time comes around twenty years later, when, if successful, people have reached very senior hierarchical levels where everyone around them is smart and accomplished. At that point, the differentiating factor is the ability to navigate increasingly politically charged environments that are peopled by those who mostly do not fulfill the leadership industry’s prescriptions.
• The simple but important point: the oft-observed divergence in interests between individual leaders and the organizations they lead means that any prescription of what one should do has to begin by both acknowledging the trade-offs and soothing through that person’s real priorities and the multiple, often poorly correlated measure of a leader’s outcomes.
• Individuals maximize their own survival chances by acting selflessly to acquire, at all costs, the resources necessary for their survival. Group survival, however, often depends on individuals sacrificing their own well-being for that of the group.
• The leadership industry is so obsessively focused on the normative--what leaders should do and how things out to be--that it has largely ignored asking the fundamental question of what actually is true and going on and why.
• Unless and until leaders are measured for what they really do and for actual workplace conditions, and until these leaders are held accountable for improving both their own behavior and, as a consequence, workplace outcomes, nothing will change.
• And as near as I can tell, there is not much of a connection between actually knowing something about leadership and being successful as a leadership guru.
• Measure and hold people accountable for workplace outcomes.
• One of the core principles coming out of the quality movement is that what gets inspected gets affected. Measurement focuses attention and, if nothing else, makes problems salient.
• Measuring the wrong thing is often worse than measuring nothing, because you do get what you measure.
• Improvement comes from employing measurements that are appropriate, those that are connected to the areas in which we seek improvement. In the case of leadership, that appropriate measurement would include assessing the frequency of desirable leader behaviors; actual workplace conditions such as engagement, satisfaction, and trust in leadership; and leaders’ careers--measures that are notable by their absence not only in ue byt even from much of the discussion of leadership-development activity.
• Measuring results, measuring leader behaviors, and assessing whether or not prescriptions get implemented would go a long way to both highlighting and then altering the current sad state of affairs in most workplaces. WIthout baseline measurements of leader and workplace conditions, it is simply impossible to understand what to do to make improvements.
• Use more-scientific methods and worry about credentials.
• Sometimes--not always, but some of the time--doing precisely the opposite of what the leadership industry prescribes produces better outcomes. What’s more, doing the opposite of what the leadership industry advocates is sometimes a much better, more reliable path to individual success.
• If you are a leader seeking to actually change a workplace’s conditions so as to improve employee engagement, satisfaction, or productivity, or if you are an individual seeking to chart a course to a more successful career, inspiration is not what you need. What you need are facts, evidence, and ideas.
• To build a science of leadership, you need reliable data. To learn from others’ success, you need to know what those others did. The best learning, simply put, comes from accurate and comprehensive data, either qualitative or quantitative.
• Motivated cognition is one factor that explains the unreliability of the stories we read. Not surprisingly, people are motivated to think well of themselves. Therefor, not only do individuals perceive themselves to be above average for most positive attributes and believe that the qualities in which they excel are the most important--the so-called above-average effect--but individuals will also selectively remember their successes and forget their failures or shortcomings.
• In general, leaders want to remember their accomplishments and not remember some of their most negative behaviors, let alone disclose such things even if they did remember them--so they don’t.
• The problem is that the leadership stories are often exaggerated or fabricated out of whole cloth, and their listeners don’t bother to do any fact-checking.
• If you are a mythical, heroic, larger-than-life figure used to getting your way, rules and social conventions and corporate governance tenets don’t apply.
• Mythical, heroic leaders become vulnerable to losing their jobs because after a while, regardless of their business skills and leadership capabilities, they find it impossible to live up to the hype, as it would be for anyone. With great expectations and high hopes comes, naturally enough, great disappointments.
• A second problem that arises: In the desire to learn only from success, people miss the opportunity to learn from failure, which is often a more promising and interesting teacher.
• The admonition to “learn from failure” is common and well known but mostly ignored.
• Of course, precisely because inspiration does not work very well to produce tangible change, one can make a good living doing it again and again.
• Systematically and regularly reflecting on behavior, and even better, measuring such behavior, is much more likely to produce substantive change than mere storytelling and emotional uplift is.
• All this sanctimonious talk about great leadership creates one additional problem: people, overconfident in their leadership abilities, let talk about leadership substitute for action.
• Because talking often substitutes for reality, one ought to be quite skeptical about what actually goes on at places run by people who think they are leadership experts.
• ONe ought to be skeptical, for instance, about taking advice on leadership and human resources from someone from the senior leadership of a firm with a turnover rate hovering around 30 percent--a rate that characterizes some consulting firms offering leadership advice.
• Simple put, the motivation to believe in heroes and a just world circumvents people’s critical faculties. Do people join organizations and sign up with leaders only to be disappointed, or worse.
• Do some research before you believe, and, more important, act on your beliefs, about leaders and leadership. And in your research efforts, try to use multiple, independent sources. Confirm the information you receive, just as you would do if you were reference-checking a prospective employee. You are reference checking someone much more important--someone you are possibly going to work for--so do the task well.
• The prescription for leaders to be modest is also consistent with the principle that people do not like others who self-promoted and are self-aggrandizing. Research shows that people who self-promoted are perceived negatively by others, and those who are modest about their ability and performance are better liked than individuals who boast about their accomplishments.
• One reason people leave companies is because they do not feel acknowledged or recognized for their contributions, and one behavior that provokes irritation is when others take credit for another’s work.
• Modest leaders are less likely to claim credit for the accomplishments of others and also are more prone to acknowledge what others have done--so modesty should reduce voluntary turnover.
• The evidence suggests that modesty may not be such a good thing for getting to the top or staying there.
• Many, possibly most, leadership roles are ambiguous--there is uncertainty about what the leader should do, uncertainty about who would be best in that position, and frequently even a lack of clarity about how people are performing in their leadership roles.
• In order for you to be selected for a leadership role, either by peers or by bosses, it is necessary, albeit insufficient, that those doing the selecting notice you. No one who is unmemorable is going to be chosen for an important job, because one cannot select what one cannot remember.
• It helps to be known, to have a brand, to, simply put, stand out.
• Research consistently shows that self-promotion is positively correlated with interviewers’ evaluations of job candidates as well as with hiring recommendations. THis is not surprising. Self-promotion is one manifestation of self-confidence, and self-confidence frequently leads others to share the confidence that someone exudes.
• The extensive and eve-growing research evidence is overwhelmingly clear--narcissists are more likely to be selected for leadership roles and also to seek such psotiions in the first place.
• One reason women are less frequently chosen for leadership roles has to do with their unwillingness to display confidence.
• Leaders must be able to put on a show, to display energy and pay attention to others, regardless of how they ay feel at the time.
• In fact, being authentic is pretty much the opposite of what leaders must do. Leaders don't need to be true to themselves. Rather, leaders need to be true to what the situation and what those around them want and need from them. And often what others want and need is the reassurance that things will work out and the confidence that they are on the right track.
• The ability to not succumb to personal feelings or predilection seems like a crucial trait for high performers in many domains.
• The idea that one would and could be trained to become or at least appear authentic oozes with delicious irony.
• The idea of authentic leadership epitomizes almost everything that I believe characterizes the leadership industry generally, much of which does not help either science or practice: (1) a well-intentioned, values-laden (2) set of prescriptions--los of “shoulds” and “oughts”--(3) that are mostly not representative of most people in leadership roles, and (4) are recommendations that are almost certainly not implementable and may be fundamentally misguided.
• Leaders need to be and do what their followers and society require, not what the leader feels like being or doing at the moment.
• Learning and adapting to what we do never stops.
• People need to figure out how to be effective, regardless of their wants, needs, upbringing, and so forth. They need to learn how to be successful in the environments they confront, or they must learn how to find different and better environments.
• People need to grow, develop, and change, not get stuck in their temporarily authentic selves.
• People make and remake themselves all the time and adjust their behaviors to the situations they face.
• One of the most important leadership skills is the ability to put on a show, to act like a leader, to act in a way that inspires confidence and garners support--even if the person doing the performance does not actually feel confident or powerful.
• Acting is essential to effective leadership.
• Act powerful and you become powerful.
• Not only is authentic leadership often not very useful, it may be almost impossible to do. If we have learned anything from all of the social science research over the past several decades--and actually we have learned quite a bit--it is that people’s attitudes and behaviors are profoundly affected by the situations in which they are embedded. So to the extend that being true to oneself entails ignoring or resisting situational constraints, the prescriptions of authentic leadership are at variance with how people act.
• Research show that “people view duplicity as one of the gravest moral failings”.
• There’s only one problem with the admonitions in favor of truth-telling: lying is incredibly common in everyday life and rampant among leaders of all sorts of organizations, including some of the most venerated leaders and companies. It logically follows that if some specific behavior is pervasive, that behavior must confront few sanctions, or else it would be rarer.
• One of the reasons lying persists is that there are few adverse consequence for it; and as we will see, positive results very often come from not telling the truth.
• My conclusions: if we actually want to build more truthful organizations, we need to understand some of the empirical realities about lying, including its startling pervasiveness and efficacy.
• One of the reasons leaders lie is that they seldom face serious consequences for doing so.
• The lesson: sometimes survival demands that you do what prevails in the ecosystem in which you are competing.
• One reasons why lying is common is that the ability to lie or deceive others offers evolutionary benefits and, as a consequence, has increased over time. A second reason is that “manipulative ability is a foundation of social power and the ability to lie successfully is an important skill linked to personal and professional success.”
• Simply put, lying is useful for getting ahead. There is a reciprocal relationship between power and lying: the powerful deceive more often, and the ability to deceive effectively creates social power.
• Because lying produces few to no severe sanctions, lying increases in frequency. Because lying is then common, it becomes normative, in the sense that norms describe common behavioral patterns. Because lying becomes normative, it isn’t sanctioned, because it makes no sense to try to punish widespread, almost taken-for-granted behavior.
• Lies, told often enough and convincingly enough, can become the truth--sometimes with positive effects. That is because what people say, whether truthful or not, helps construct a social reality that then becomes real.
• Leaders also affect companies’ ability to survive difficult economic circumstances. If employees believe that a company is going to fail, they will leave--and the best ones, who have the greatest chance of finding other good jobs, will leave first. As talent drains out, the odds of turning the company around are reduced. Thus, on important task of leaders is to convince their employees that success is possible.
• In many instances, leaders convince customers to buy their products, investors to part with their money--a particularly important task for star-ups--talented employees to join, and stay, and suppliers to work with their company by presenting the organization as more successful than it really is. By so doing, leaders enlist the resources and support that will ultimately make the organization successful.
• If you don’t feel confident, or competent, thaen getting and keeping a good job entails misrepresenting your true feelings--being able to lie convincingly about your ability to do the job. But often, if people believe you can do the job, you can, because they will give you the advice and support to make you successful.
• But there is no question that sometimes lies become the truth for the very fact of their being told and believed--with, on occasion, positive consequences for companies and leaders.
• A lie typically involves two parties who are in interaction with each other--the person who tells the tlie and the person who signals that he or she wants to hear it.
• In many ways, people are complicit in their own deception. That is certainly true in the case of the leadership industry as well. People, wanting to believe the best about others and the world, not only fail to do due diligence but signal that they want to hear the myths and tales that have become so much a part and parcel of leadership lore. So that’s what they get.
• Ignoring the frequency of lying, the fact that it is positively associated with both having and acquiring power, and the possibility that lying is a behavior that is often quite effective won’t change any of these oft-documented facts.
• Trust is more efficient and cost-effective in coordinating and ensuring collaborative behavior than the financial incentives or contracts that, as Oliver Williamson, a Nobel prize winning economists, first pointed out decades ago, are difficult to write in ways that cover every possible future contingency.
• Trust is the glue of many social relationships, and organizations are essentially all about social relationships.
• People expect trustworthy, honest behavior and react when they don’t see or recieve it.
• But I no longer believe that trust is essential to organizational functioning or even to effective leadership. Why? Because the data suggest that trust is notable mostly by its absence. Nevertheless, organizations continue to roll along, as do their leaders who seemingly suffer few consequences for being untrustworthy.
• First because trust is essential for human survival, it is hardwired into us so that in many cases we are predisposed to trust too much and the wrong people. Second, we are likely to trust those who are similar to us, something that the Edelman surveys also confirm. Third, and most important, our ability to accurately discern who is taking advantage of us is remarkably poor.
• We are predisposed to trust and have an evolutionary need to do so. Therefore, people are motivated to overlook a violation of trust as a one time thing that won’t occur again, or at least won’t happen to them--because they are, after all, above average in their ability to detect people who shouldn’t be trusted.
• Trust-breakers for the most part retain their networks and social relationships because others in their orbit haven’t been harmed by their actions, so they don’t feel compelled to redress the harm. Trust-breakers frequently maintain their financial resources.
• Instead, carefully, systematically investigate what the people you are going to entrust with important dimensions of your future well-being have actually done.
• People will frequently act in their own interests, and if those interests involve breaching commitments made to you, then you should probably kiss those commitments goodbye. And often there won’t be sanctions for violating trust, the experimental research notwithstanding.
• It’s pretty clear how to build or destroy trust. Trust implies that others know that someone or some company will honor their commitments and promises. Therefore, trust requires consistency and predictability. Because building trust entails, most fundamentally, keeping one’s word and honoring promises, including the promises--either explicit or implicit--that are made to employees and customers, building and maintaining trust necessitats honoring commitments and obligations.
• Leaders, who first and foremost are responsible for ensuring their organization’s well-being, sometimes have to take tough actions.
• The simple fact is that maintaining trust requires honoring commitments, but commitments constrain.
• Power is positively correlated with hierarchical rank, and senior people mostly use their power to protect both their jobs and their salaries and perquisites.
• CEO pay is well known as being untethered from what happens to regular employees, a fact that explains why the multiple between CEO pay and that of the average worker continues to widen to nosebleed levels.
• For the most part, leaders just take care of themselves, regardless of what they should do either to adhere to moral strictures or to make their organizations perform better.
• Research shows that people are more likely to help those who are similar to them, even in trivial, unimportant, and random ways--a finding that suggests identifying and helping similar others is an almost automatic, mindless behavior.
• Leaders share little or nothing in common with those they lead.
• Research shows that leaders take credit for good company performance and attribute poor performance to environmental factors over which they have no control, to predecessors, to macroeconomic issues, or sometimes to other organizational interests, particularly frontline employees.
• So when senior leaders complain about the competitiveness problems stemming from high labor costs and excessive staffing, they are mostly referring to the costs of frontline salaries and the number of people actually doing the work.
• Leaders who have come up through the ranks and have done many if not most of the organization’s jobs are much more likely to look out for the interests of those they lead because they have been there themselves.
• Outside succession, and particularly succession by industry outsiders with limited frontline experience, exacerbates the tendency for leaders to not give the interests and well-being of others much priority.
• Expecting reciprocity, generosity, and selflessness is a wonderful sentiment but will almost certainly produce disappointment in many if not most organizational situations. That does not mean, however, that there is nothing that might be done to induce leaders to be more concerned with the well-being of those they lead.
• Agency theory is a formal, analytical exploration of a pervasive, important, and profound problem: Owners delegate operational control to managers and managers delegate responsibility in turn to lower-level managers. But owners and leaders at all levels often have difficulty monitoring and therefore controlling or even evaluating what the people to whom they have delegated power are doing. Consequently, the problem that agency theory addresses is how to align incentives and develop contracting arrangements, including optimal compensation schemes, so that in the course of pursuing their own narrow interests, agents, the people to who power has been delegated, will also wind up serving the interests of the principles who have delegated that decision-making authority to them.
• The point of agency theory is that with the right measurements and incentives, many of the problems entailed in aligning otherwise conflicting interests can be solved.
• If leaders are expected to take care of and develop their people, then it is essential to measure whether or not they do, and then hold them accountable for those measurements.
• Measurement and incentives won’t solve everything, but they might solve quite a bit. When leaders’ own jobs and salaries depend on how well they look after others, they will do so. Until then, relying on leader’s generosity of spirit or the exhortations of the leadership literature is an ineffective and risky way to ensure that leaders take care of anyone other than themselves.
• If we really want leaders to look out for others, companies and maybe even the larger society need to give them some pretty concrete reasons to do so.
• You may think your employer owes you something for your past contributions and good work--but most employers don’t agree.
• Nice speeches and noble sentiments notwithstanding, leaders mostly take care of themselves first--and maybe second and third, also--regardless of what they are supposed to do. The obvious conclusion: you should do the same.
• Data show that companies violate implicit contracts with their employees all the time.
• The logical conclusion form systematic data and countless cases in multiple environments, ranging from college and professional athletics to corporations to universities: relying on the good behavior and positive sentiments of work organizations for your career well-being is singularly foolish.
• For the typical work organization, or for the typical individual in a social relationship, the question posed by the counterparty is typically not “What have you done for me in the past that deserves repayment?” but rather, “What can you do for me in the future that warrants spending any time or resources on keeping you happy or keeping you at all?”
• No one can count on stability in companies these days, so you need to be prepared.
• Workplaces are primarily instrumental, calculative settings largely free of moral sentiments and even normative constraints.
• In a nutshell, companies will treat you well as long as you seem as though you are going to be useful in the future, and companies will probably be less inclined to treat you well or to repay past contributions the minute you are perceived as being less useful in future endeavors.
• Autonomy seems great until you have it, and then many people want the reassurance and even guidance that comes from belonging to a larger entity like a workplace that will provide at least some minimal sense of security.
• People are social creatures, which is why one of the first things done to break prisoners of war--or for that matter, prisoners in general--is to isolate them from social contact. We are afraid of being ostracized, of being excluded from the group--something that accounts for a lot of teenage behavior, including teen bullying. We can seemingly avoid ostracism by joining a group with a strong leader that includes and incorporates us.
• Put simply, attack the problems by fixing the system, not scapegoating the necessarily fallible human beings working in and operating that system--whether or not they deserve it.
• Try doing precisely what companies have told you to do for decades, and what the fundamental principle of economics has advocated since the time of Adam Smith. Take care of yourself and assiduously look out for your own interests in your life inside work organizations.
• The practical advice that emerges from the copious amounts of research on self-interested behavior is the same: presume that others are acting on the basis of their self-interest, and you will be better equipped to forecast and understand their actions.
• Competitive markets require only that there may be many participants in the market and that each participant vigorously pursued its own interests. In such a system, the best possible outcomes occur, as much economic analysis demonstrates.
• The bottom line: If you have a beneficent environment and a leader who actually cares about you, enjoy and treasure the moment, but don’t expect it to be replicated elsewhere or to even persist indefinitely where you are.
• The world is often not a just or fair place, our hopes and desires notwithstanding. Get over it. Take care of yourself and watch out for your interests.
• To the extent you develop self-reliance and cease relying on leadership myths and stories, you will be much better off, and substantially less likely to confront disappointment and the career consequences that develove from relying on the unreliable.
• Averting our eyes from the facts may provide solace, but it does so at the price of progress. There is no theory or evidence that suggests that improvement comes from ignoring bad news, paying inordinate attention to rare, exceptional cases, or from failing to measure base rates for how often something occurs.
• By leaving people feeling good while somewhat uninformed about reality, the leadership enterprise helps produce people happily oblivious to many important truths about organizational life in the real world. In this zoned-out, semiconscious, blissful state, people are insufficiently prepared for what they will encounter at work and, most important, insufficiently energized to accurately diagnose and change that world of work.
• To get from one place to another, you need to know as best as you can where you are, where you want to go, and, most important, the obstacles and barriers you will likely encounter en route.
• The list of leaders who, on the one hand, earned vast sums and retained power for decades while, on the other hand, being in almost every way contradictory to the customary bromides about modesty, serving others, and being truthful is almost endless, and it’s a list that grows longer all the time.
• First, in the real world, almost no one lives a perfect life, perfectly happy with everything going perfecting all the time. Second, and more importantly, although one can debate how truly successful these leaders were, there is no denying one fact: that each of them and the multitude of others who do not fit the leadership models so often proffered reached great heights and positions of power in the first place. So instead of attempting to reconstruct perceptions to make reality fit your view of a just and fair world, it might be more helpful to understand why and how people who don’t fit the visions of what leadership should entail reached such powerful positions. Such understanding is the fundamental prerequisite for altering the dynamics that produced these people, whether you like them or not.
• Wanting to believe in fairy tales, people avert their gaze and often actively avoid evidence that challenges their worldview.
• If we want to change the world of work and leadership conduct in many workplaces, we need to act on what we know rather than what we wish and hope fore.
• Simply put, in a world where people can’t handle the truth, they don’t get the truth--and they suffer in numerous ways as a result.
• Pay attention to what is really going on and to people’s real behavior and performance. Become a skilled and unbiased observer, and, to the extent you can, eliminate hopes and expectations from your observations.
• You would be well served to pay attention to what you see and not to what people are saying and the the lovely values and sentiments they are expressing.
• Rhetoric and reality are often decoupled in social life, and in leadership it is almost the norm.
• Simply put, there are occasions when you have to do bad things to achieve good results.
• The point is that sometimes to do good, you have to have the courage and wisdom to perform harmful, painful, actions.
• Making change, improving situations, getting things done, winning in very competitive environments, often requires being willing and able to engage in behaviors and exhibit qualities that some people might find repugnant. Maybe that’s why there is such a leadership shortage and why the leadership industry, with its failure to acknowledge this fundamental truth, continues to fail.
• Everyone wants advice, which is why the “how-to” industry, covering topics for losing weight to getting your finances under control to being a better leader, is so large. The advice business is also largely impervious as to whether or not the advice actually gets implemented, since the profit comes from selling the advice.
• People do deserve second, and maybe third, fourth, and fifth, chances. But not to recognize that the past often predicts the future, and therefore, not to remember people’s histories in their leadership roles and not to use that history in making decisions, and instead somehow presuming better behavior in the future than was exhibited in the past, is just asking for trouble.
• The most fundamental principle of learning theory is that behavior is a function of its consequences. When behavior is rewarded, that behavior gets repeated with even greater frequency. When behavior is ignored or punished, the frequency of the behavior diminishes.
• In the world of leadership, what seems striking is how few consequences there are for all varieties of bad behavior, ranging from underperforming in one’s job role to serious ethical lapses to treating employees badly. Consequently, even as leaders aren’t trusted and workplaces remain toxic, not much changes, because often leaders are able to get away with doing a great deal of harm.
• The problem with leadership is at its core a story of disconnections:
• The disconnect between what leaders say and what they do
• The disconnect between the leadership industry’s prescriptions and the reality of many leaders’ behaviors and traits
• The disconnect between the multidimensional nature of leadership performance and the simple, noncontingent  answers so many people seek
• The disconnect between how the leadership industry is evaluating and the actual consequences of leader failures
• The disconnect between leader performance and behavior and the consequences those leaders face
• The disconnect between what most people seem to want and what they need
• The disconnect between what would make workplaces better and organizations more effective, and the base rate with which such prescriptions get implemented
• The remedy for the many leadership failures seems simple, and it is: to restore the broken connections, the linkages between behavior and its consequences, words and actions, prescriptions and reality.
• Leaders love the disconnect that leaves them unaccountable for the workplaces they mess up and their poor performance and bad behavior. And worst of all, lots of people are complicit in the disconnect between the reality that exists and what they would prefer to believe and the stories they want to and often pay to hear.
• One of the important but troubling phenomenon that occur in organizations of all types so that the higher you rise, the more that people will tell you how smart and right you are, and the less connection you will have to the realities of organizational life. So good leaders seek to keep themselves grounded in the realities of what they are doing and, more important, why they are doing it.
• In the end, people can handle the truth, and the sooner they confront those truths, the batter off everyone will be. And until then, everyone, not just leaders, but everyone, will have to keep working away, until we get it.