scientific research and share some surprising stories that will change the way you think about happiness.
This season, she's tackling topics that affect her own life, like stress, perfectionism, and boredom.
If you struggle with any of those, or if it sounds like you could learn more about increasing happiness in your life,
then listen to the Happiness Lab right here in your podcast player.
People actually follow recommendations more when they're said they're when they're written.
Recent research has shown as a leader, actually making you a more influential leader.
We can get a little bit too obsessed with driving towards the destination and we have lots of
tools for making that as efficient as possible. Talking to somebody who has facilitated the
engagement, going early to the engagement or the room and walking around and chatting with people.
So you have an idea of where people are and what they're most interested in learning so that you
can deliver. So know your audience.
What do you get when you bring together 400 students from all over the world?
Four professors who are in so much for the support of our podcast. And we love getting your
questions, your feedback, your following on LinkedIn and Instagram. Thank you so much.
We wanted today to be very special. So we've invited four of our most popular guests to come talk
with us. So we're going to have fun and we look forward to hearing from you. So let's get into it.
Yes, for we're going to start with you. For those of you who don't know, yes, for
yes, for us a professor in organizational behavior and the senior associate dean of academic affairs.
When yes, for an eye had our conversation on the podcast, he shared how when we think about
strategy, we can think about strategy as making an argument telling a story. And it turned out to be
one of our most popular episodes on YouTube. People really, really got interested in strategy and how
to tell strategy stories and make arguments for your strategy. So yes, for my question to you is,
for all of us, we all have our own personal strategies, our goals for ourselves. Can you give us
some suggestions about how we can tell our own strategy stories? YouTube videos are so popular,
but I think it's because we didn't actually video record. I have a face for podcasts. I think it's
something to sell. Yeah, so when I talk about strategy, I think about strategy as being the narrative,
right, that you have for why it is you're able to accomplish what it is you do. And I think you
can think about that in different kinds of ways as you think about constructing these stories for
yourself. And that's whether you're constructing that story for your company or for your own career.
I think for me, the most important thing to remember is that unless a story is fictional,
you have to give yourself a look for not having the story right at any given point in time. I think
when you think about when people think about their careers, right, and you see young people just
starting out, they have this idea that they should have a very clear trajectory and plan and so
on and so forth. And then they get very anxious and frustrated sometimes when things don't work out
the way that they want it because it doesn't fit that narrative that they had constructed for themselves.
But again, I think the only stories you can tell in advance are fictional. And so that means that
that story was a fiction, right? And that the story is going to be the one that evolves. And I think
when you get to be as old as some of us are up at this panel, right, you realize that really it's
about things that you discover as you go along the way. And so I think where this matters the most
is when you're making big decisions. And I think the thing that I like to think about is you should
always think about a decision where you think about an experiment as being something where you're
testing hypothesis, you're testing a theory. And in particular, you should think about what you
learn from that experiment as being something that informs your understanding of what your story
is going to be and how it's going to evolve. So I think yes, for called me old, I think I just
heard myself. Oh, I see. I see. Okay. I appreciate very much the notion of running those experiments,
new type of exercise that we hadn't done before. And we were a little competitive, but we're
mostly supportive. And when I took away from the episode is when I should best compare myself to
my colleagues and how that can help sustain that motivation. All of us in this room are
endeavoring to lots of different things. So she can you share with us some ways to sustain
that motivation and the activities that we all do? Sure, definitely. And first of all, I'm glad to
hear that you took my advice. I did. Actually, using it. So I have three things to share with you today.
First, we're excited to actually announce that's our goal, get everybody on board. We're not getting
close to the end of the quarter or the year. We are also excited because we will not celebrate and
we think we are winning. It is through the middle stage that things get muddy. When you feel especially
challenged, that's when we hide from social information. We don't want to know what our peers
are doing because of those information is threatening. But what we found is that at those very
moments is exactly when you need social information and social support to get you going either to give
you some competitive motivation or some collaborative energy. So social support is important throughout
and the thing said, ties nicely to what yes per set about running experiments. So if you're
continually thinking about the next step as another experiment, that all of a sudden starts helping
you define that narrative and can help you figure out where you want to go next. So thank you for that.
I'd like to come next to Sarah. Sarah is a professor of organizational behavior. I recently came to
learn about some of your new research that you published and it's about confessions and
months in the United States. A man by the name of George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
Now what you may have noticed, either here in the US or in your whole country, was that many
leaders of organizations, CEOs, organizational leaders of educational institutions and non-profits
and so on, issued racial justice states in the wake of that event. Sometimes these statements
issued support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Sometimes the organization were broad and so on.
And we, I've been by say we, I mean my wonderful PhD student Lambrouwe took notice of this and
decided to collect all of these in some way. We found interest in it because much of the prior literature
which is known as impression management talks about ways in which corporate leaders when communicating
put positive information out. Here we saw something different. A willingness to put forth negative
information about themselves. And so what we did with these statements, one of the first things we've
done with these statements is sent them out all of them. We collected 525 of these statements
and we sent them out to people in an online survey and asked them to tell us what they think about
the leader and about the state unit cell and what they think about the organization in terms of
their corporate social responsibility and their reputation for corporate social responsibility.
We found that in the statements, not all of them had a confession, but those statements which
did have a confession were associated with positive views of the leader and an impression that
that organization was a good corporate social responsible. And it was especially true for
any kind of confession, but for those confessions that involved confessing something negative they
have done. We call this a confession of commitment, right? Those were especially highly rated.
So in terms of thinking about what this might mean, I think importantly what we're seeing at least
with the case of racial justice in the US was that there was something different happening with
impression management. Rather than putting positive information out there, the view that the leader
in the organization is authentic and transparent was what led to more favorable truth.
So it's the organization and especially towards the organization as a responsible in society.
So it's changing the common perception that you've only put out positive information by acknowledging
some negative behavior. It actually has some positive benefit. Well now I'm coming to Jonathan.
Jonathan LeBob, a professor of marketing, the only podcast guest ever to swear he in an episode
or editor had to work extra time on that one. Jonathan, you have some new research out about
giving recommendations and there's a difference between speaking those recommendations versus
actually having them in writing. Can you share a little bit about the results of that study and
what it might mean for us as we give recommendation? I promise to keep it clean because there's no editing.
I don't even remember I cursed. I thought it was a natural course event. In general, my research
is kind of looks at the difference in sort of physical experiences of consuming technology.
And so how those different ways in which we consume technology influence our decision-making process.
And so one of the things that we've looked at is modalities. And so what technology has allowed
you to do is it allowed you to present information in different modalities. So you can read things
and sometimes you can feel things and you can also hear them or say them out loud. And so it turns
out that you would think that whether you read something it should be the same. The recommendation is
the same. But what we're finding is that people actually follow recommendations more when they're
said, they're when they're written. And the effect isn't large but it's very consistent. And we
look at it across lots of different, most consumer products and also different kinds of tasks.
And it's a little bit of a mystery to us and why exactly it's happening. What we're finding is that
it has to do with the ephemerality of the information. When I say something it's gone, when something
is written it's still in front of me. What we're finding is that when people are exposed to
ephemeral information, we also test that by actually showing them sentences of things that go and
disappear. So we can create ephemerality also with written text. It basically creates almost
like an action orientation. Like to be able to hang onto that information, I have to create,
I have to act on it. And so that translates into when you hear a recommendation, you say,
okay, I'm going to follow it. Whereas when you read it, you don't have to sort of engage in that
kind of immediate action moment. And so we find out with a couple of actually I should credit
the grad students, Shweta Maridasu and Chris Becker who co-authored this with me.
Perhaps one of the reasons the podcast has been successful is it's us making recommendations
in the spoken format. So maybe we're on to something. Also your celeb, Matt. Oh yeah, right.
Now that's here from Jesper and startup doing marketing and stuff, you're like, you know,
you're kind of mind kind of shuts that out. And so, but if you get to the evaluation stage,
maybe you have a more well-rounded assessment of what actually the strengths of weaknesses
of an entrepreneur because entrepreneurs are also creative, they're energetic, they are
go-getters and so and so forth. So you would think that employers would want those candidates as
well. So the so what is partially around thinking about how employers process things and then
there's also going to be a set of implications or how you might think about that as an entrepreneur
about how you want to portray your accomplishments. Absolutely. In social media, we have seen so many
people for trade about confessions are wrongdoing and the camp culture. Really good question here.
And I'm going to say that one of the things that we haven't tested in, I'm not sure how to test,
is where this idea of public confessions came from. And I suspect that this came from the MeToo
movement where we saw a lot of male leaders in particular proactively getting ahead of the curve
and confessing before an accusation came forward. And so I suspect sided and again with the
racial justice issue to do this before discoverable information came forward and they were directly
targeted. So I in terms of you know thinking about cancel culture and so on I suspect that this
is exactly a proactive and defensive mechanism prior to the possibility of being quote unquote canceled.
My name is Sangi Taim from Bedia, another hot topic that we have today is AI. My question to
panel is how do you see this AI impacting humanity or all? So I'll start and I would love to hear
from some of you. I interviewed chat GPT. I don't know if you heard that it was it was actually
cool but scary at the same time. So I typed in questions and then we did a text of voice response
and it was really fascinating to have it tell me that I one could keep my job which made me feel
really good but also that for it to explain that it understands that there are ethical and
information biases that it could have and that to me is something to think about. Now as a teacher
I do see value in some of what it can provide. I'm sorry about them supplanting us I guess but like
I think what we have to remember is that everything that it's able to do is based on trying to
recombine everything that's already existed and so that's a limited form of creativity. It's a very
important form of creativity and production certainly and so I can see places where that's going
to matter a lot but I think there's also at the same time lots of room for us maybe free us up to
do other things. My name is Giri Snowalbinkar. So follow up question have you figured out how you are
going to figure identify whether the essay is chat GPTSA versus a genuine essay? This is a really
terrific question and I have one anecdote was a colleague in another at another university was concerned
about students writing their essays for the final exam rather than giving them the question
to answer they calling had chat GPT answer and then the student's assignment was to critique
what chat GPT had come up with by citing material in the class and so on. So there are really
nice and creative ways to lean into what chat GPT is doing and also I think that there are some
nuances that we can pick up on even if we think we can. Family White, a huge fan of yours as you know
I listen to your book I've done a lot in sharing with everyone. So my question is as an educator
the Stanford GSB what's your biggest communication challenge? From me personally it's just getting my
students attention Stanford MBA students and our MSX students and others are they're so amazing
and they're so busy and they're doing so much it's just helping to get that focus so that the
work can be done and that's not I'm not saying anything negative about them the work that they're
doing is phenomenal and I learned so much from my students it's just getting the the mind share
in the moment in the class to do that. I think my biggest challenge with efforts came to Stanford
which was 10 years ago was to learn how to project competence in this environment. So I grow
in Asia and they say Asian female ultimately I might the perception of me that I'm warm approachable
but maybe less confident and I have to learn how to actually understand that you leverage that
you starting from wearing heels to learning how to project my voice and eventually learning how to
actually communicate that through my content as well. I think that was my biggest challenge.
I will just add I think the biggest challenge right now with communications is what the pandemic
has done to all of us but especially some of our learners and part of that I think is getting
the attention but I think part of it's also that you know many people are suffering and most people
I will argue are suffering some of the after effects. Reason research has shown that sharing
goal failure stories as a leader actually make you a more influential leader. It doesn't actually
hurt the perception of your ability they only make you actually better connect feel free to share
goal failure. First let me say thank you Suci I want to talk more about that because that seems
like perhaps some of the mechanism in the public confession and my advice actually comes from Matt
so I had the opportunity to teach with Matt and also to watch Matt teach and listen to his advice
and one of the things that Matt always tells us is to know your audience so in your communication
figure out how to learn who it is that you are about to address whether that is a reading about
them on LinkedIn talking to somebody who has facilitated the engagement going early to the
engagement or the room and walking around and chatting with people so you have an idea of where
people are and what they're most interested in learning so that you can deliver so know your
audience in your communication. I guess what I would say is you know I think it's very important
to have a sense of goals and a sense of purpose I don't think we should be so wedded to that we
are not open something that has been lost with new technologies or anything about Google maps
right so now you go to a new city and you're like okay I want to go visit this cathedral and you
get out your phone and says okay walk this way and again in the old days I'm sounding a lot like
an old man but like you would like get out of map and you try to read and you're like start walking
and then suddenly you'd end up in a totally different place and that would be spectacular you
would eventually make it to the cathedral whatever but it's actually this place you ended up at my
mistake that was much more powerful and I think we can get a little bit too obsessed with
driving towards the destination and we have lots of tools for making that as efficient as possible
and we don't get admire I have to mention that because he's so smooth as silk and flawless with
no fillers but recently I saw the presentation of Brian Chesky CEO of Airbnb I found him to be very
riveting very energetic and he was able to condiment a lot of his accounts with storytelling so
I found it really effective as a communicator. Hello I'm Stefania and the three ingredients first
one for a successful communication would be knowing your audience because this is a very important
thing to know in tailoring your message they can structure but your audience follow your message
and the third one will be clarity like avoiding misunderstandings misinterpretations.
Well there you have it our first ever in-person live podcast episode a big thank you to all of the
people in the audience who participated and to my guests Jesper Sorenson Sarah Suol Su Chi Huang
and Jonathan LaLal I hope you took away some interesting insights and some valuable lessons
to help you be a better leader and a better think fast talk smart the podcast is a production
of Stanford Graduate School of Business this episode was produced by podium podcast company
Jenny Luna and me Madden Brahams find more resources follow and join our conversation on LinkedIn
by searching Think Fast Talk Smart. Hi Matt here for most of us presenting confidently and clearly
in our native language is hard enough but communicating in another language is marked by unique
challenges and opportunities for growth I am super excited to share our new ELL English language
learning web page at fastersmarter.io slash ELL this page is designed to help all non-native
English speakers feel less anxious while being more authentic and successful in their communication
in addition to practical advice you will find Think Fast Talk Smart episode specific ELL content
along with links to my favorite English language learning podcast playlist please check out
fastersmarter.io slash ELL
