Brain Over Brawn

What to do if your boss yells at you If someone is screaming at you at work, just imagine him or her as a 2-year-old.   What seems like a funny idea has serious science behind it.

What scientists call metacognition, or the ability to change the way you’re viewing a situation, allows you to If I can step back and see my big boss screaming at me as just a kid having a tantrum, it will empower me.”

In other words, you might not be able to change his bad behavior, but you can change how upset you get and whether you feel like a victim. You can take that lesson home from the workplace too. “We all have our personal narratives that we keep repeating over and over again about where we are in the world or who is to blame for different situations,” Anne says. “But as you get older, you realize you can change your view of yourself and your window on the world.” It’s not easy, and we don’t do it a hundred percent of the time, she says, but it helps us weather crises and move on gracefully.

How One CEO Grows Her Business with Feeling

What do you think causes millions of people to miss work and school in developing economies? Illness? Lack of childcare? Minimal professional training? Insufficient infrastructure? While all of those certainly play a role, I'm guessing that what Elizabeth Scharpf stumbled across as a critical factor in absenteeism wasn't on your radar. While interning in Mozambique in 2005 for the one-person (!) private-sector development division of the World Bank — studying how small and medium-sized businesses can play a role in developing economies — Scharpf, now a 34 year-old graduate of Harvard's graduate schools of business and government, happened to overhear a local colleague complaining that her employees often missed work because they were menstruating.

Elizabeth Scharpf

Seriously?

Perplexed and intrigued, Scharpf thought this might represent a business opportunity, and decided to dig deeper.

A study fielded by the Council on Foreign Relations, "Addressing the Special Needs of Girls," underscores why missing school matters in a big, long-term way. The research found that each extra year of secondary education increases a woman's potential earnings by 25% on average. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, another long-term study found that "more equal education between men and women could have led to nearly 1 percent higher annual per capita GDP growth" in each country. Beyond the humiliating difficulties for millions of impoverished individual women trying to improve themselves and support their families, this is a global issue with significant consequences for the economies of developing countries.

Scharpf was passionately determined to find a solution, tackling the problem the way she always does — by talking with people. "And when you talk to people," she says, "you discover what's missing. It's that simple." Those conversations revealed that it was the economy, stupid. A study found that 18% of school age girls in Rwanda, for instance, miss school because menstrual pads are too expensive. In countries like Mozambique and Rwanda, where the per capita GDP is under $1,000, the average annual cost of $33 (12 months x 5 days x 5 pad/day x .11/pad) for the cheapest imported sanitary pad can often be simply unaffordable. Because the "unmentionable" subject of menstruation is taboo, the market failure — supplying cheaper pads — had never received the attention it deserved.

Scharpf found that absorbent wood pulp was the biggest raw material manufacturing expense for pads, and wondered if cheaper indigenous materials could be used for local production, and if also coupled with a more efficient distribution network, there might be a real business opportunity given the huge underserved populations.

Successful Social Entrepreneurship Combines Mind and Heart

Scharpf did all the traditional MBA number-crunching and analyses, but recognized that tapping into emotion — the incredulity, outrage and fellow-feeling aroused in industrialized countries by the discovery that 21st century working women are routinely reduced to sometimes using ineffective rags, or even bark or mud in rural areas, for feminine hygiene — would be essential if a fledging enterprise were to succeed. "I have empathy with these women," she told me, "because I don't think where you are born should be the biggest indicator of your potential for health, wealth and happiness. I want to change that dynamic."

Rwanda was a good place for Scharpf to launch her first initiative because local female entrepreneurs had already established their integral role to the economic renewal of the country in the years since the genocidal 1994 civil war. In 2009, with $60,000 in seed money from the not-for-profit VC organization Echoing Green, and with the Harvard Business School's first social entrepreneur fellowship, Scharpf founded Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE).

Instead of simply raising charity cash to import finished pads, Scharpf and her organization are inventing a whole new system of community-based education, business training, manufacture and distribution from locally-sourced banana fiber — that is, solving this serious problem and creating a sustainable regional business. SHE has created a franchise model — providing business skill training, technical expertise, and co-investment — to partner with women in Rwanda and other developing-country communities to distribute and ultimately manufacture and launch their own SHE LaunchPads franchises. As product is sold, some of the initial working capital that SHE puts up is paid back, with the entrepreneurs eventually owning their local franchises. In turn, SHE reinvests its profits in new geographies or other disruptive enterprises.

Emotion Creates a Common Language

Scharpf says her challenge in dealing with scientists, academics, businesspeople, community activists and policy wonks "is always, 'How do I speak in the same language to each of these different constituencies each with their unique language and objectives?'"

Scharpf and the SHE team, for example, first identified in banana-plants a local agro-waste fiber, and after experimenting, concluded that it had the potential to be an absorbent, cheap, safe material. They then approached MIT to partner on enhancing the process to make it more absorbent. She didn't initiate the conversations by tugging on the professors' heartstrings, highlighting SHE's efforts to improve girl's and women's lives, but rather by challenging the scientists to help her solve a complicated new chemical engineering problem. But she realizes that it was the practical need to pioneer new materials technology under strict cost constraints in tandem with improving lives that really accelerated the innovation process. "I've found," says Scharpf, "that the common language is the one of emotion."

Emotion Attracts Good People

Scharpf told me she recently ran an ad for SHE's first job opening in New York. "If you read the job description," she said, "beside the intro and stuff about the need to financially analyze the potential to grow a business in x y and z ways, it was very dry stuff, but when we added the emotional elements around that factual description — that we are trying to basically change the paradigm of how international development is done, that we're trying to work with communities to help improve lives, that we want to be disruptors — all those good things — well, the response was overwhelming."

Scharpf has experienced firsthand that what inspires people — a mission to improve lives — is also good for business. This elusive component is something that behavioral economists are beginning to document. As Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath reported in a recent issue of HBR, for organizations to prosper today, their employees need to feel as if they are "engaged in creating the future — the company's and their own." Research is also demonstrating that basing performance purely on beating the competition or making money can actually decrease employees' intrinsic motivations to pursue a goal. In her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher cited a study in which "college students who were paid to do a puzzle were significantly less motivated than those who worked for free."

Emotion Inspires Ongoing Development and Builds Community

Scharpf intends for Rwanda to be just a phase-one proving ground. "We're looking at Costa Rica and India to explore how we can technologically and operationally increase distribution either through new natural fiber based lines and/or by distributing other sorts of products via our network." She was recently contacted by entrepreneurs from Zambia and Zimbabwe who were interested in starting SHE franchises. While doing a typical needs assessment, the first question Scharpf asks is "who is the person and what is driving them" — and then she explores the local raw materials and local business conditions. Scharpf ardently believes that SHE's performance is influenced not only by the through-put of their machines and the efficiency of their distribution network, but by their ability to align people's interests and passions with their roles.

Managing Emotion Effectively Keeps Business On Track

Scharpf says being attuned to the emotional aspect of work keeps her sensitive to issues that otherwise might not be immediately obvious — allowing her to pre-emptively deal with challenges before they grow disruptive. "The biggest challenges I have on a daily basis are with regard to human emotions," she says. "They should have a psychology class at the business school because I am finding I am most effective when I understand what drives people to do what they do, whether it's what they are passionate about, or what makes them feel insecure, or what makes them feel good about themselves, or what makes them have confidence, or what they can be proud of — keeping in mind all of those things."

The bottom line is that empathy without rigorous, rational analysis solves no important problems — but rationality without empathy simply misses plenty of important and soluble problems. To be a responsible human and to be a successful entrepreneur requires both, working in tandem.

Workers, Take Off Your Headphones

Technology, for a free-lancer like me, creates a powerful and not entirely mad illusion that we work in a peopled environment of rich diversity and experience. As I sit to write each morning, I draw upon the vast network of people (many in active chat windows) with whom I've worked in the trenches over the course of a 35-year career, while also having the benefit of opinions and insight by expert strangers a click away. I sometimes even wear earplugs that allow me to immerse more deeply into my subject matter, creating a bubble that blunts distractions and sharpens my focus. For me, it's the best of both worlds. Alone, and yet truly interacting with people, even if they are across town or in a different country.

But what about younger people just entering a traditional office environment? The necessary and artful tango between inner-directed and outward-focused, first chronicled in David Reisman's landmark 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, has been problematically transformed by technology. There's a new lonely crowd in the workplace.

My informal survey of a dozen people I know under the age of 35, working in a range of desk jobs, all in the U.S. — law firms, big entertainment companies, small start-ups, publishing houses — revealed that whatever the design of their office spaces, most younger people in our increasingly post-telephonic office world wear headphones about half of the time they're working. And all but one of those I interviewed said that they had at least one G-chat or Skype window open throughout the day, every day — some of them checking in with as many as five non-work friends or family members every hour. And the majority of these young workers said that they felt far more connected moment to moment with people outside their workplaces than with any co-workers — the nearby colleagues, including bosses, with whom they communicate primarily through e-mails or chat programs.

This is very much a new world with myriad legal and security issues for both employer and employees, which are beyond the scope of this post. My focus, rather, is on the profound impact these new 21st century forms of divided attentions and isolation have on the psychology of individuals and company cultures, how they make people more than ever all alone among a group of nominal comrades.

Missing out on opportunities to contribute and advance

One person with whom I spoke told me that "wearing headphones actually makes me feel anxious a lot of the time, because I'm always worried that someone might ask me a question or say something to me and I'll miss it." This person is right to be concerned. Over the course of my earlier professional incarnations I worked in mission-driven organizations with more or less open office plans — Sesame Street, SPY magazine, Nickelodeon — where much of our successes were driven by the invisible but powerful sense of shared purpose generated by the news and information that was simply overheard. If I'd had headphones on, exclusively aware of the work in front of me, I would have missed out on important details, let alone the collective high that was experienced when a good piece of news rippled through. The more I participated in the ambient, informal life of the office, the more committed I became to the work of the company. A company spirit formed and evolved, and I shared in it unconsciously and consciously.

These days, by contrast, as one young interviewee put it, "usually whoever is talking to me will make sure they get my attention if I didn't seem to hear the first time. I've never missed something urgent, usually just part of a conversation that was going on in the office." Precisely. It's just that kind of loss of daily osmotic information exchange and collaborative bonding that ought to concern 21st century employees and employers. It's about information exchange, resource exchange, idea generation and on and on. If an employee is glued to her desk with headphones on, immersed in music and G-chatting with her best buddy, she is missing the opportunity to create relationships with people on the job who might be launching a project for which she'd be perfect, or who's kicking around the idea to launch a new firm that needs precisely her talents. It's a huge and real loss in terms of career development.

Companies also lose some of the opportunity to have employees contribute new ideas that might be percolating within the larger culture but under the radar of the organization. Because actionable cultural knowledge is now so diffuse, to remain competitive companies need all employees to bring fresh thinking into the workplace. Imagine an employee who happened, say, to be the roommate of someone launching a startup in 2010, and missed out on overhearing a colleague ask if "anyone knows anything about this new app that colorizes photographs so they look old-fashioned" — extreme, yes, but even short of missing out on an early partnership with Instagram, every company must be configured to into tap a workforce's collective informal knowledge base as much as possible.

Eroding employee loyalty

The image of legions of headphone-wearing employees sitting silently at their workstations, oblivious to the flesh-and-blood community around them but actively engaged with a virtual world, seems like a dystopian future envisioned in movies like Minority Report. But that future is here. A Wall Street Journal piece on the "officeless office" had a sidebar with six new rules for office etiquette which included #1, no sneaking up; #5, limit chit-chat; and #6 use headphones. That may increase a certain kind of productivity, but at what cost?

Management professors Sigal Barsade at Wharton and Hakan Ozcelik at Cal State Sacramento are among the pioneers in studying how employee isolation correlates with organizational outcomes. In a recent study, they found "because they feel more estranged and less connected to coworkers, lonelier employees will be more likely to experience a lack of belongingness at work, thus decreasing their affective commitment to their organizations." Something to think about before you decide to limit social chit-chat or put those headphones back on.

A drain on innovation

Isaac Kohane, co-director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, has studied if and how scientists benefit from close physical adjacencies at work.

Even though scientific research obviously has been enhanced by internet connectedness (the web, after all, began 23 years ago as a vehicle for scientific collaboration), Kohane and his researchers found "striking evidence for the role of physical proximity as a predictor of the impact of collaborations." As Kyungjoon Lee, a research assistant on the study put it, "science is all about communicating your ideas so others can build on them." It seems obvious to me that not just science but most professional pursuits significantly benefit from this kind of perpetual accidental physical-world collaboration. But as my interviews revealed, when we put on our headphones and fire up our messenger client of choice, we effectively make ourselves remote telecommuters even when we are physically present.

Is there an upside?

Headphones can operate as a visual "do not disturb, I'm working" signal for employees who, in open-plan offices, need solitude in order to execute their work. As one interviewee told me, her headphones "put me in a 'get stuff done' frame of mind" and others reported that headphones made them "more focused" and that work was "more fun." Being able to achieve that sense of solitude when necessary is clearly important.

Organizational psychologists such as K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State and Adrian Furnham at University College London have studied the phenomenon. "If you have talented and motivated people," Furnham says, "they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority."

And instant messaging at work can have its uses. As my editor at HBR says, "I instant-message with colleagues who sit next to me. It seems the best way to brainstorm headlines." IM can also cut down on the number of time-consuming emails sent and received, and help employees who are actually physically remote communicate more easily with people in the office.

But organizations need to develop protocols that avoid making isolation the universal default office norm, and that encourage face-to-face interaction. Some personal-bubbledom is necessary. But too much creates a lonely crowd.

How can you find the right balance? Accept the reality of our electronically networked workplaces and private digital media consumption. The new workforce, raised on perpetual multi-screen multi-tasking, would not be able to function well in a closed, 20th-century-style environment. Rather than creating unenforceable rules, employees and organizations should be helped to understand what's being lost in the process of mindless, unplanned mass capitulation to the machines. Create working environments that encourage physical interaction; have small lunches that cut across hierarchical levels; include people who tend to shy away from group activities to participate in the softball team or fantasy football or Oscar pools. And keep managing by walking around, even though text-messaging and email seem to make real-world encounters unnecessary. As Rachel Silverman and Robin Sidel reported in their piece on the officeless office, GlaxoSmithKline, which has saved $10 million in annual real estate costs by shifting 1,200 employees at one New Jersey site to unassigned seating, found that decision-making among their staff had risen by 25% primarily because e-mail exchanges had been replaced by good old-fashioned face-to-face conversations — conversations that never would've happened had all their employees been wearing headphones.

Why You Really Shouldn't Curse at Work (Much)

The media brouhaha over Carol Bartz's coarse language in the wake of her firing was telling. Rather than responsibly assessing her merits as the chief executive of Yahoo!, the conversation instantly devolved into what kind of woman swears on the job. That, to me, is so twentieth century. When we've reached a point in our anything-goes culture that the anchors of the most important newscasts (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert) curse nightly, and public figures like prime-time teenage role model Lea Michele, the actress who plays a goody-goody(ish) character on Glee, talks (as we used to say) like a stevedore in interviews, it strikes me that managers and executives need to seriously rethink the words they choose to communicate displeasure.

In fact, we're now so inured to vulgarity that it takes something really over-the-top — say, the baby doll being sold this holiday season that apparently curses — to make us stop and take notice. Taboo words, with a couple of true taboo exceptions, have always been used sparingly to communicate powerful emotions, but when swearing becomes simply reflexive and ubiquitous — as it is today — those words cease to have much power or meaning. And when crude words do shock, the language deflects our focus from the serious issues at hand.

Take, for instance, the internal Goldman Sachs e-mail that Senator Carl Levin read aloud last year during a Congressional hearing: "Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal.'" Hard to tell without more context whether the guy who wrote that e-mail (now a Bank of America division president) was proud of the group for pulling the wool over the public's eyes, or just candidly stating the facts. But one thing became clear pretty quickly — to the American public, the language made what looked like double-dealing cynicism more memorably rotten. And the immediate consequence? Rather than suggest to their employees that they not sell bad deals to their clients, Goldman Sachs chose to focus on the language and its potential for embarrassment, instructing their employees to stop using profanity in e-mails. The emotionally laden words that communicate our more powerful feelings are particularly slippery at work, where we spend the majority of our waking hours and where our livelihoods hang in the balance.

How we choose to interpret hyper-charged no-longer-taboo words changes from moment to moment and office to hallway, according to permutations of status, gender, ethnicity, education, age and the particular setting — one person's obscenity is another's spicy punctuation. "In-house" language is often at odds with public norms. I was talking with a female partner in a New York corporate communications company that advises companies on critical communications challenges. "I think of swearing," she told me, "the way I think of Yiddish. It's very expressive." But she also asked to be quoted anonymously, perhaps anxious that her cheerful acceptance of workplace swearing might be seen as an endorsement — and might offend clients, current or prospective. And yet many of the people I spoke with about this subject, men as well as women, suggested that swearing was a strategic part of the lexicon they developed to be taken seriously as potential alphas of their organizations. I can relate. My first jobs were in banking and then media sales — businesses at the time completely dominated by men and fueled by a backslapping, crude-joke-telling camaraderie. Swearing definitely helped me come across as one of the guys, and thereby granted me access to the kind of casual gossiping and information-trading upon which deals are sometimes built. "Swearing," as one senior female attorney told me, "gives others, men and women, reciprocal permission to let their hair down and feel comfortable sharing revelations." This approach — swearing as an effective social tool that can enhance work relationships and allow women in particular to present an equal-to-men or even crypto-masculine identity — has been documented by psychology and linguistics researchers.

But not all swearing is equal. Take swearing in anger. Swearing is positively correlated with extraversion and Type A hostility and many scholarly studies (Jennifer Coates, 1993, Vivian de Klerk, 1991, 1997) identify swearing as intrinsically aggressive. Take Dick Cheney's unapologetic snarling at Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor, or Serena Williams's outburst to a ref about a foot-fault call. Their curses were meant to take charge, to intimidate. And swearing men and swearing women are perceived differently. De Klerk discovered that women risk being viewed more negatively than men when using obscenities. Elizabeth Gordon, who studies speech and gender stereotypes at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has found in her research that women who were "non-standard" speakers — that is, foul-mouthed — were judged to be of lower social and moral strata. We've seen this play out in public. Cheney refused to apologize for his f-bomb and reported that he felt "better" after his exchange with Senator Leahy, whereas at Serena Williams's next press conference, she was subdued and entirely contrite. These days, it's practically meaningless and way too easy to say something "sucks," or (much) worse. And the rough waters in which we all now work makes it increasingly important to be clear and precise about what is going on emotionally inside and around us — not to be milquetoasty, but to be calibrated. As a person who allowed (and, I confess, still occasionally allows) herself to resort to default swearing, it seems to me that in this laissez faire age, and as we start a new year with new intentions, that it's a good idea — indeed, a damn fine notion — for business leaders to get more truly creative about their language and use the various linguistic bombs only sparingly.

What Do Glenn Beck, Jim Cramer, Rush Limbaugh and most bosses have in common?

They don’t understand their anger. “In a culture where it’s easy to fire of a snippy e-mail or text,” reported Elizabeth Bernstein in her Wall Street Journal column ‘Friendly Fight:  A Smarter Say to Say I’m Angry,’  “most of have a hard time honestly expressing anger face to face.  If someone upsets us, often we shout, stomp off, roll our eyes, refuse to speak to the person or complain to everyone else.  Or we kid ourselves that we aren’t upset and subconsciously fume – until one day we explode over the seemingly littlest thing.”  And no one likes to be on the receiving end of explosive anger.

Sound familiar?  I bet it does.  In the research I conducted for my book, 60% of all Americans reported seeing their boss get angry with someone on the job during the past year.  And yet, none of us are ever taught how to deal with managing our anger or how to deal with others.

Anger is a biologically driven response to threat.  When threatened, we release the hormone epinephrine, followed by norepinephrine (noradrenaline), prepping the body to react – increasing our heart rate and blood pressure, and narrowing our focus as we prepare to flight or flee.  And this is what is at the crux of the issue for modern homo sapiens in the workplace:  pretty much as they did 200,000 years ago, our bodies continue to automatically process psychological threats as physical threats.  Deep inside we are all irredeemably very old school.  But the reality is that reacting to a psychological threat with a physical response is wildly inappropriate.  And this disconnect – this evolutionary lag in the development of more emotionally calibrated or sophisticated responses to psychological challenges – is a huge contributor to what makes navigating modern life so incredibly hard.  As the economist Terry Burnham, the author of Mean Markets and Lizard Brains:  How to Profit From the New Science of Irrationality, put it, “The caricature view would be, the caveman wins the battle, has more babies, crushes his enemies, then puts on a suit 10,000 years later and goes into a boardroom and still wants to crush his enemies.”

To be effective at work we need to learn how to handle this evolutionary gap in responding to non-physical threat.  I have created many tools to aid us in developing this challenging skill and one of the best is something I call DING.  Which relates to the concept of self-reflection or meta-cognition, which I’ll address in another post.

Big Boys Should Cry

I’m no John Boehner fan.  And I’m even less of a Mitch McConnell fan.  But as a person who chokes up at a movie or book or a news story most days and full-on cried during Toy Story 3, as tough as it is for me to admit it, I feel for both of them right now. Crying politicians are nothing new. Remember Democratic Presidential candidate Ed Muskie, who lost the 1972 nomination after he teared up during a press conference in New Hampshire while defending his wife? And Hillary Clinton, who also famously choked up, in 2008, also while campaigning for President in the New Hampshire primary?

House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio, left, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. (Photos by AP Photo)

I understand the modern default assumption that a politician is using emotional displays cynically. (See Clinton, Bill.) And I understand why women, especially women who politically oppose the un-compassionate conservatives Boehner and McConnell, are tempted to revile them for tearing up, which Senator McConnell did this week delivering a farewell speech to his friend Judd Gregg (of New Hampshire -- again New Hampshire!) while Boehner apparently gets weepy on a daily basis. But I’m made uncomfortable that these apparently authentic emotional displays by powerful men are fair game for ridicule.

Men completely controlled the workplace when women first went into the labor force in significant numbers during the late 60s and 70s, so we females believed that to be successful we had to “man up,” and emulate their emotional restraint. For forty years women have had to adhere to a poker-faced workplace persona that denies essential aspects or our emotional wiring.  Nancy Pelosi said of Boehner in The New York Times magazine, “You know what?  He is known to cry.  He cries sometimes when we’re having a debate on bills.  If I cry, it’s about the personal loss of a friend or something like that.  But when it comes to politics – no – I don’t cry." But a hard outer shell of pseudo-invulnerability comes at a cost to both genders.

Women cry, on average, four times as often as men – according to neurologist William Frey, an average of 5.3 times per month, compared with 1.4 times for men. And this isn't just a function of cultural training – women generate far more prolactin, the hormone responsible for milk production that also controls the neurotransmitter receptors in our tear glands, and women’s tear ducts are anatomically different from male tear ducts, resulting in a larger volume of tears. In a 2009 survey I conducted with J. Walter Thompson probing the nature of emotion in the workplace I discovered that *both* women and men divide themselves into two large camps:  those 25% who cry regularly and those 75% who tend not to cry frequently.  McConnell, Boehner and I are part of the 25% of us who are members of the “crying tribe.”  We also discovered in our survey that when we do tear up on the job, women can be our own worst enemies – a plurality of women consider people who cry at work  "unstable," whereas roughly that same fraction of men see tears on the job as only "slightly unprofessional."  In other words, women see tears at work as some kind of moral/psychological failure, but men don’t.

“We will stop here briefly to contemplate what would happen if she [Nancy Pelosi], or any female lawmaker, broke into loud nose-running sobs while discussing Iraq troop funding or giving a TV interview,” Gail Collins wrote in her December 16th New York Times Op-Ed column about Boehner. But instead of decrying (no pun intended) the operative gender double standard, and suggesting that the no-crying rule be enforced equally for male and female Speakers of the House, I think it would be much better to allow McConnell’s or Boehner's tearfulness to abolish the no-cry rule for *both* genders.  Women (and men) who are belittling Boehner and McConnell for getting emotional are not helping humanity’s larger cause – that all people should feel comfortable being as authentically themselves as possible. We can continue to despise their politics and cynical maneuvers but still grant them their humanity.

Emotion and the Markets

David Brooks was onto something interesting in today's op-ed column in The New York Times. This was the first piece I've come across addressing how emotional distance may have contributed to the financial crisis. He wrote: The economists talk about mispriced risk and illiquidity in the system. But many economists are trained to downplay emotion, social psychology and moral norms, and so produce bloodless and incomplete descriptions of what's going on. The truth is, decision-making is an inherently emotional process, and the traders in charge of these trillions become bipolar as a result of their uncertainty.

Brooks point?

1. Traders don't see reality directly they view its shadow in technical models on their computers. 2.  Social and emotional contagion fuel increasingly irrational decisions.

It's time to get real. Maybe we should stop looking at complex financial scenarios and start using common sense. Maybe we should stop listening to on-air hysteria-inducing bloviators and start trusting our emotional gut if it feels too good to be true, that's probably the case. And if you're frightened out of your wits, step back, and take a deep breath before jumping.

Can Women Grow Success at Work?

Michael Gurian and Barbara Annis reported the following in their book Leadership and the Sexes, Catalyst Corporation has found that the group of companies with the highest representation of women on their top management teams experienced better financial performance than the group of companies with the lowest women's representation. This finding holds for both financial measures analyzed: Return on Equity (ROE), which is 35.1 percent higher, and Total Return to Shareholders (TRS), which is 34.0 percent higher.

Do you know any companies where this might be true?

The Female Brain At Work

I've always thought of myself as a pretty well informed progressive woman. But reading Louann Brizendines, The Female Brian, my sense of self-awareness was blown right out of the water. We are all aware of the prevailing viewpoint that men and women respond to events in different ways the whole men-from-mars-women-from-venus dichotomy. But I was unaware of the profound neurological and biochemical differences between the genders. After all, I came of age in the feminist 70s, when we were meant to understand and spread the word that women were not inferior to and therefore, more or less, the same as -- men.

According to Brizendine, The female and male brains process stimuli, hear, see, sense, and gauge what others are feeling in different ways. Our distinct female and male brain operating systems are mostly compatible and adept, but they perform and accomplish the same goals and tasks using different circuits Under a microscope or an fMRI scan, the differences between male and female brains are revealed to be complex and widespread. In the brain centers for language and hearing, for example, women have 11 percent more neurons than men. The principal hub of both emotion and memory formation the hippocampus is also larger in the female brain, as is the brain circuitry for language and observing emotions in others. This means that women are, on average, better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events. Men, by contrast, have two and half times the brain space devoted to sexual drive as well as larger brain centers for action and aggression.

Have you ever had an experience when you knew that a negotiation was falling apart because you correctly read the emotional character of the room but your male colleagues thought you were over-reacting?

What Does It Take to Make a Great Movie?

Anne Kreamer meets Harvey Weinstein, cochairman of Miramax Films.

Anne Harvey, you could argue that Miramax's films have been leading indicators for what's happening at the upper end of the mass-media cultural landscape. What are the quirks of your sensibility that led you to make or distribute such disparate films as The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Sling Blade, Good Will Hunting, Life Is Beautiful, Princess Mononoke, and In the Bedroom?

Harvey I don't think that there is a specific quirk or sensibility that guides our selection of projects. My brother, Bob, and I have a deep passion for movies. We have definitely learned to appreciate innovative writing and to recognize that two of the most important ingredients for success are well-written scripts and the passion of the filmmakers. You were able to cite the above films because they did work, because audiences did respond to them. But for every Shakespeare in Love there is The Shipping News, Get Over It, or All the Pretty Horses -- films I loved that audiences just did not respond to.

Anne What do you think really made the difference between the hits and the, um, not hits? Were the big, commercially unsuccessful films ones where you gave too much rein to the filmmakers?

Harvey Each film presents a unique set of circumstances, but typically, the quality of the writing is the most consistent indicator of whether a film will "succeed." There have been projects where we may have overlooked flaws in the script, thinking that a great director or a great cast would solve the problem. We can work with the filmmaker by offering all sorts of suggestions to resolve issues, but sometimes you just can't overcome them. Cultural differences across borders factor into how American audiences will respond to those films. After we acquired In the Bedroom, which received an Academy Award nomination for best picture last year, we reviewed the film with its director, Todd Field, and discussed some minimal editing. But we ultimately decided that the film would work with no changes at all. And it did.

Anne On a different note, for quite a few years, you've tried and not really succeeded at TV. How come?

Harvey Whenever you move into a new arena, there are growing pains and lessons learned. While we are very proud to have received our first Emmy nomination for Project Greenlight [for HBO] this year, we recognize that this is a slow process and that success will not come right away. We're excited about Project Greenlight 2 [also for HBO], our current animated TV series, Tokyo Pig [for ABC Family], our upcoming miniseries, A Wrinkle in Time [for ABC], and a TV film based on Miramax Books's best-selling Icebound, the Jerri Nielsen story [for CBS].

Anne Speaking of TV programs such as Tokyo Pig and A Wrinkle in Time, you have kids under 10 years old. Do you think that entertainment companies are doing right by them? Would you let your kids see Jackass or let them play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City?

Harvey Trust me: Watch-ing my girls grow up has definitely provided me with perspective. I am even working on my own adaptation of a children's book for a future project. But freedom of expression is certainly something that I treasure, so I'm not going to sit here and pontificate about how people shouldn't be making violent films or video games. I do think that the recent focus on not marketing R-rated films to kids has been constructive. And I will say that over the years, the story lines of those types of films have definitely suffered. I like a great action movie as much as anyone -- but there has to be a real plot.

Anne About that adaptation of a kids' book: What kind of a project is it? Animation? Live action? And you're the one writing the script?

Harvey I'm writing the script. As for the medium, I'm at the mercy of my production executives.

Anne That should be an interesting process: Your executives giving "notes" on your script. Over the past 20 years, you've moved from Sex, Lies, and Videotape to your own adaptation of a children's book. There's a natural progression!