Social Insanity

I came across this statement the other day – ‘ Stop asking blind people to proofread your vision ’ – keeping the egoistic, self-serving and somewhat quote nature of the statement. I wanted to decipher a logical question – Feedback is ALWAYS useful and it does unmitigated and unalloyed GOOD? Let’s look into the science of Feedback to assess this statement. Feedback is about telling people what we think of their performance and how they should do it better—whether they’re giving an effective presentation, leading a team, or creating a strategy. And on that, the research is clear: Telling people what we think of their performance doesn’t help them thrive and excel, and telling people how we think they should improve actually hinders learning. More on that later. Underpinning the current conviction that feedback is an unalloyed good are three theories which the business world commonly accept as truths. I personally find all of them fascinating but it’s important we assess them to judge t...

Image: Instachaaz I came across a ground breaking research piece from Harvard Business Review (HBR) which really hit home for me and evoked a lot of introspection around ‘werk, werk, werk, wellbeing and life’ titled ‘If you are so successful, then why are you working 70 hours a week? Soundbite was its due to ‘insecurity’. Analogous to the problems we solve in investment consulting, there are new and profoundly complex leadership challenges that professional firms (e.g. accounting firms, law firms, consulting firms) and other white-collar jobs are facing. We hear like this over and over again from people in noted white-collar jobs - that chronic overwork is bad for our mental and physical health and can seriously jeopardize the quality of our work (operational/business risk). We wish we could change the way we work, but we don’t really know how?? The new research on professional organizations, shows that our tendency to overwork and bu...