How to find Happiness at work 10-15

Image: Shyam's Imagination Library

Happiness is in short supply at work these days. Deadlines, staff shortages, productivity pressures and crazy stress push even the most talented and temperate people to want to quit their jobs. But that’s not a realistic option, even for folks in the C-suite. Annie McKee, director of the Penn CLO and Medical Education programs at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches leadership and emotional intelligence, has a better idea. In her book, How To Be Happy At Work, she outlines three requirements that workers need to feel more fulfilled on the job. McKee spoke about the concepts in her book on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

 The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Knowledge@Wharton: How many people do you think are not happy at work?

Annie McKee: I don’t think we even have to guess. Gallup has been studying people for years, and upwards of two-thirds of us are either neutral, which means we don’t care, or we’re actively disengaged. Disengagement and happiness go hand in hand, so an awful lot of people are not happy at work. Unhappy people don’t perform as well as they could. When we’re negative, cynical, pessimistic, we simply don’t give our all, and our brains don’t work that well just when we need people’s brains to be working beautifully.

Knowledge@Wharton: Has this problem ramped up in the last two decades or so? As much as digital is phenomenal for us, a lot of people feel under pressure because of what digital does to accelerate change.

McKee: The world is changing at a rapid pace, obviously. As much as we love our always-connected world, it can mean that we work all of the time. We’re always one minute away from that next email that’s going to bring tragedy or crisis to our working lives. Some of us never turn it off, and that’s not good for us.

Knowledge@Wharton: Where did your idea for the book come from?

McKee: I’ve worked in organizations all over the world for decades now. I’ve looked at leadership practices, emotional intelligence, culture and all of those things that impact the bottom line and people’s individual effectiveness. I decided to take another look and see what people were trying to tell us. All of these studies that we did around the world were practical studies. People were telling us, “I want to be happy, I want to be fulfilled, I want to love my job, I’m not as happy or as fulfilled as I could be, and here is what I need.” And then they went on to tell us what they need.

Knowledge@Wharton: Are executives aware of their employees’ problems? Are they also aware that they may susceptible to this?

“Unhappy people don’t perform as well as they could.”

McKee: It doesn’t matter where you sit in the organization, you are susceptible to disengagement and unhappiness even at the very top. We think if you’re making all of that money and you’ve got all of that power and that great job, it’s going to be perfect. The best leaders in our organizations, at the very top and all the way down to the shop floor, understand that people matter, feelings matter, and it’s job number one to create a climate where people feel good about what they’re doing where they’re happy, engaged and ready to share their talents.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the key ingredients to finding that happiness?

McKee: From my work, I’ve discovered three things. Number one, people feel that they need to have impact on something that is important to them, whether it’s people or a cause or the bottom line. They need to feel that their work is purposeful, and it’s tied to values that they care about.
Number two, we need to feel optimistic that our work is tied to a personal vision of the future. The organization’s vision isn’t enough. As good as it may be, we have to know that what we’re doing ties to a personal vision of our future.

Number three, we need friends at work. We’ve learned over the course of our lives you shouldn’t be friends with people at work, that it’s dangerous somehow, that it will cloud your judgment. I don’t agree. I think we need to feel that we are with our tribe in the workplace, that we belong, that we’re with people that we respect and who respect us in return. We need warmth, we need caring, and we need to feel supported.

Knowledge@Wharton: I would think most people looking for a job, whether they are coming out of college or shifting careers mid-life, are looking for that area that would make them happy. When you have that expectation of being in the right sector to begin with, you hope that you have the happiness to go along with it.

McKee: We do hope that we get into the right organization and there’s a good fit between our values and the organization’s values. We really try hard. But we get in there and the pressures of everyday life, and the crises and the stress can really tamp down our enthusiasm and our happiness.

Also, a lot of us are susceptible to what I call happiness traps. We end up doing what we think we should do. We take that job with that fancy consulting firm or that wonderful organization not because we love it and not because it’s a fit, but because we think we should. Frankly, some of us have ambition that goes into overdrive. Ambition is a great thing, until it’s not.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is that part of the reason why we see more people who have been with a company for 20 years, 25 years and suddenly pivot? They may be going to work for a nonprofit. You see these stories popping up, especially with people in the C-suite.

McKee: You do see that. You see senior leaders all of a sudden saying, “Enough is enough, I [want to do] something different.” But I really want to be clear, you don’t always have to run away. In fact, you want to run towards something. If you feel you’re not happy in the workplace, quitting your job is probably not the first answer, and some of us can’t. What we need to do is figure out what we need, what we want, how to have impact, what will make us feel hopeful about our future, what kind of people we want to work with and for, and then go find that either in our organization or elsewhere.

Happiness starts inside each of us. It’s tempting to blame that toxic boss or that horrible organizational culture, and those things may be true. But if you want to be happy at work, you first have to look inside and ask what is it that you want? What will make you feel fulfilled? Which happiness traps have you fallen prey to? And get yourself out.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the happiness traps?

McKee: There’s what I call the “should” trap. We do what we think we should do. We show up to work acting like someone we’re not. That is soul-destroying, and it’s fairly common. [There’s also] the “ambition” trap. When our ambition drives us from goal to goal and we don’t even stop to celebrate the accomplishment of those goals, something is wrong.

Some of us feel helpless, stuck. The “helplessness” trap may be the most serious of all. It’s really hard to get out of because we don’t feel we have any power. My message is we have a lot more power and control over not only our attitude but what we do and how we approach our work on a daily basis and in the long term than maybe we think we do.

“Ambition is a great thing, until it’s not.”

Knowledge@Wharton: Earlier in your life, you found yourself fitting into these patterns as well.
McKee: I did. Early in my life I wasn’t teaching in a wonderful institution like Penn. I didn’t even have what you would call a professional career. I had jobs like waiting tables and cleaning houses and taking care of elderly people. I was making ends meet. And it wasn’t easy.

I had two choices, I could either say to myself this is miserable and I hate it, or I could look for something that was fulfilling in what I did. I tried to do that. I did find aspects of my job, whether it was cleaning houses and feeling like I was doing a good job or finding a mentor in some of these workplaces, that really made it worthwhile to me.

Knowledge@Wharton: Do you have to be 100% happy all of the time? I think if you can find areas of happiness, it can make your job or your life so much easier to go through.
McKee: Happiness isn’t just about feeling good every moment of the day, and it’s not just about pleasure. That’s hedonism, and we’re not seeking that. Frankly, a little bit of stress is a good thing. It pushes us to be innovative and to do things differently and to push harder. So, it’s not about just feeling good. But we do need a foundation of purpose, hope and friendships. We do need to know that what we do matters at work, that we are doing something that is tied to our future, and that the people we work with are great.

Knowledge@Wharton: You mentioned taking the time to recognize your accomplishments, but there are companies that want you to push on to the next project. They don’t give you the opportunity to slow down even for an hour to enjoy it.

McKee: Most of our organizations are really hard-driving, especially publicly traded organizations. I’m not even sure they’re that different than other institutions these days. The pressure is on everywhere, and the reality is we do move from project to project, goal to goal. What choices can we make in the middle of that culture? We don’t have to be victims of our organizational culture, and we don’t have to be victims of that bad boss you might have or maybe you’ve had in the past. We can make choices about what we do with our time, our energy and our emotional stance.

Knowledge@Wharton: Going back to the friends component in the workplace, does it matter where those friends come from within the structure of the company? A lot of people say you have to be careful if you want to try to be friends with the boss.

McKee: It doesn’t matter where your friends are, but it does matter whether or not you have your eyes open and recognize what people are thinking about how you are behaving and who you are friends with. You’ve got to be aware of your organization’s culture and the rules of the road.
If you’re violating some of those rules — for example, going up the hierarchy and building friendships with people who are a couple levels above you or maybe in another division — you need to understand what the implications of that are. And you need to be maybe a little bit careful.

Knowledge@Wharton: How does the middle manager deal with this?

McKee: Middle managers get it from all sides. They are pulled in every direction, and it is probably the hardest job in any organization. They, more than anybody, need to hear this message. Life is too short to be unhappy at work. Middle managers have a tremendous impact on the people who work for them, and recognizing that you more than anybody are the creator and the curator of the culture in the organization is an important place to start.

Knowledge@Wharton: Sometimes managers forget about the life people have outside of work.
McKee: We’re here at the Wharton School, and we’ve been studying management now for over 100 years. Some of the early approaches to managing organizations are really destructive, and one of the aspects of that early research has been the attitude that people don’t matter and that private lives ought to be left at the door of the office. It’s impossible to leave our private lives at the door of the office. It doesn’t mean that we talk about it all of the time, but we bring our experiences with us and we bring our feelings with us. Managers need to recognize that.

It’s also hard to find what is commonly called work-life balance. By the way, I don’t like that phrase. I think it’s a myth. I don’t think there is any magic formula that says if we get it just right we’re going to be happy at work and happy at home. It’s more about understanding that the lines are blurred between work and home now, and we need to learn how to manage our choices and our attention.

Knowledge@Wharton: What about those who work remotely and can feel very isolated and disconnected?

McKee: I understand the isolation and feeling kind of left out. The reality is that it takes a lot more effort to build relationships when we work remotely. We need to take time. When we’re working remotely, we get on the phone, we do the work that needs to be done, we talk about the project, and we get off the phone. That leaves us feeling kind of empty. We need to take that extra five minutes to have a chat, have a laugh, feel like we are in a relationship with somebody. It takes effort and self-management because the temptation is to just do the work. You talk about the gig economy, right? We’re all sort of working in a portfolio manner these days. We take on this bit of work and that bit of work, and much of it is virtual.

“Life is too short to be unhappy at work.”

I think we need to figure this out because the bottom line is that we have not changed as human beings. We still need to feel like we belong, we need to feel that we’re cared for, and we need to be able to care for others in return. If we’re working far away, we’ve got to take extra time and make a concerted effort to build those relationships in a different kind of way than if we’re in person.
I’m a big proponent of working from home or working remotely. I think it’s really helpful to individuals and companies. People who are able to work at home feel trusted, and when you feel trusted you are more committed to your organization. A lot of people report being able to get more done away from the office because you don’t have the interruptions. The downside is that you have to find a way to keep the relationships fresh and alive because that’s as important as getting that project done.

Knowledge@Wharton: Companies seem to be more aware of employee happiness than they used to be, which is a good thing. Do you think we’re going to continue down that path?

McKee: Companies are more aware, so are enlightened CEOs and enlightened leaders. I think we will continue down the path for the following reasons. It’s not just nice-to-have, and it’s not just about feeling good. We’ve got solid research coming out of positive psychology, neuroscience and management that tells us that feelings matter. When we feel good, we’re smarter. And we need smart employees now. We need people who are committed, who are engaged. The research is pretty clear. Happiness before success. If we want our employees to be at their best, we need to care about their emotional well-being as well as their physical well-being.

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How America Can Bring Back Manufacturing 10-15

Smokestacks belching hazardous gases, rivers so polluted they catch fire, workers in identical overalls turning bolts with wrenches: For many Americans, the word “manufacturing” conjures up negative, old-fashioned images. Or, we think of it as something that takes place in less-developed nations, as has increasingly been the case. Many have said that factories will continue to locate wherever the work can be done most cheaply, despite political messaging about bringing back manufacturing jobs.

Manufacturing accounts for about 13% of the U.S. economy. Should we even focus on trying to “bring it back,” now that information and services — the “knowledge economy” — seems a more promising path? Andrew Liveris firmly believes we should. In fact, he said in a recent talk at the University of Pennsylvania that manufacturing is essential to our knowledge economy, and to America’s competitiveness on the global stage.

Liveris is the executive chairman of DowDuPont, a $73 billion holding company (the two giant chemical companies merged in September), and Chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company. He has advised both the Obama and Trump administrations on manufacturing issues. (Liveris was head of Trump’s now-defunct American Manufacturing Council.)

The author of Make It in America: The Case for Reinventing the Economy, in which he writes that America’s economic growth and prosperity depends upon a strong manufacturing sector, Liveris was interviewed at Penn’s Perry World House during Penn Global Week by Wharton School Dean Geoffrey Garrett. Garrett referred to Liveris “the cheerleader of advanced manufacturing.”

A Key Difference

Garrett stated that President Trump has been talking about bringing U.S. economic growth back up to the level it was before the 2008 Great Recession. Since World War II the economy has typically increased about 4% a year, but in 2016, the economy grew just 1.6%. What would it take to see those higher numbers again, he asked?

Liveris commented that the very nature of growth has changed dramatically because human civilization is going through “one of its every-few-hundred-years massive tipping point,” due to digitization. He said this phenomenon was as disruptive as Ford’s introduction of mass-produced cars in the horse-and-carriage era. This tipping point is causing enormous dislocation, including the elimination of jobs and the loss of meaningful work. Moreover, he said, “the job of 20 or 30 years ago is paying less — wage rates are down and all of that — so there are a lot of unhappy and angry people out there.”

And America is under-prepared, including from a policy point of view, he said. Liveris talked about the profound implications for business leaders as the forces of globalization collide with the forces of digitization. He said most corporations are not yet nimble enough to re-design themselves to accommodate these trends.

Yet, he said, substantial economic expansion is possible. “In the immediate term, can we get 3.5% growth in this country? You bet we can,” said Liveris. He noted that instituting policies to spur foreign direct investment would help as they did in the Clinton and Reagan eras. He also cited tax reform, infrastructure spending and business deregulation as important factors. He added, though, that the U.S. currently has “a massive, massive issue in how our government is functioning,” so change is not likely to happen overnight.

According to Liveris, there is a widespread lack of understanding among the public of what today’s manufacturing — which he referred to as advanced manufacturing — actually consists of. (Definitions vary, but the OECD defines advanced manufacturing technology as computer-controlled or micro-electronics-based equipment used to make products.) Liveris stated, “We are generating a new wave of technology to generate a knowledge economy. And a knowledge economy will need things made. They’ll just be made differently.”

Advanced manufacturing might include making smartphones, solar cells for roofs, batteries for hybrid cars, or innovative wind turbines. Liveris said he had visited a DowDuPont factory the previous week that is working on advanced compasses to enable wind turbines with blades the size of football fields. The goal is to produce blades light and efficient enough to make wind power a viable reality. “That’s technology. That’s advanced manufacturing,” he said.

“In the immediate term, can we get 3.5% growth in this country? You bet we can.”

He asked the audience to envision “a knowledge economy based on the collision and intersection of the sciences.” Those who think the tech revolution is only about “the Facebooks and the Googles, connectivity and all that,” are dead wrong, he said.

Not Enough Work, or Not Enough Workers?

Doesn’t the use of more robotics and automation lead to job loss? Garrett asked. Or, is the problem that workers aren’t appropriately skilled to fill new kinds of jobs? Liveris said he was firmly in the second camp. “I have job openings now at Dow and at DuPont that I can’t get the skills for. And engineering jobs open.”

He elaborated that the way machines provide insights is changing, and noted, “We humans will have to read those insights. I can’t [find] enough of those humans. That’s the issue we’re dealing with in this country.”

Liveris said that 7.5 million technology jobs left America between 2008 and 2016 because the country wasn’t supplying appropriate candidates. The reaction of many businesses was to re-locate to “the Chinas, the Indias, the places that were supplying that sort of skill.” In the United States right now, he said, there are half a million technology jobs open, but American educational institutions are only graduating roughly between 50,000 and 70,000 candidates per year, so there’s a “massive under-supply.” In the next three years, there will be 3.5 million jobs created, and Liveris said the U.S. might only be able to fill about 1.5 million of them through a combination of graduation and immigration. “Unless immigration is fooled with, which is a whole other issue.”

According to Liveris, a critical reason for America to revive its manufacturing sector is to promote innovation. “Something that we at Dow and many of us in manufacturing know: If you have the shop floor, if you make things, you have the prototype for the next thing, so you can innovate.” Conversely, if you stop making those things, your R&D diminishes dramatically, he said.

Liveris said that 7.5 million technology jobs left America between 2008 and 2016 because the country wasn’t supplying appropriate candidates.

The U.S. should be incentivizing the technologies that America is good at, said Liveris. Everybody knows about Silicon Valley, Liveris noted, but fewer know that the U.S. is prominent in advanced sensors, which are critical to the progress of the Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Other areas in which America stands out are lightweight compasses and 3D printing. He noted that technologies like these have been developed at various institutions “in a somewhat haphazard way, which is very American. That’s great. That’s creativity.” But, he said, shouldn’t we as a country double down on the things we do best and become the world leader?

Liveris called advanced manufacturing “the best path for the United States” and said, “We’re so naturally suited for it if we’d just get the policies to help us.” He believes that the U.S. should already be at the most advanced layer of economic development based on technology. “We have cheap money, we’ve got skills, we’ve got low-cost energy. We should be having an investment boom in this country,” he said.

He noted, though, that we have created barriers to investment that are preventing this from happening. Borrowing an expression from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Liveris said that there were two kinds of countries in the world: red tape countries (hampered by bureaucracy and over-regulation) and red carpet countries (welcoming to investors). The U.S. has unfortunately become a red tape country, he said.

He called investment “the biggest job creator out there,” and stated that Germany for example has figured out how to do this. “It’s the poster child of investment in Europe.” China, too, has mastered it, and “other countries who want to trade with the United States are mastering it because they incentivize it.”

“If you have the shop floor, if you make things, you have the prototype for the next thing, so you can innovate.”

Closing America’s Education Gap

A big proponent of STEM education, Liveris said that American schools are not graduating the workers we need. “We have convinced ourselves that a four-year college degree of the skills we used to have in the last century is what we should still keep producing.” He said that re-tooling American education needs to happen immediately, with STEM education incorporated at every level including elementary school.

Liveris said DowDuPont is funding a STEM-dedicated school, in conjunction with Michigan State University, in Dow Chemical’s home base of Midland, Michigan. The school will offer curricula for kindergarten through 12^th grade, with MSU course offerings for college students, according to the Michigan news site MLive.

The pilot school will also provide teacher enrichment programs. Liveris said that American teachers need to be better trained and rewarded. “We do something very bad in this country, which is we don’t celebrate teachers at the elementary, middle and high school level. We should be putting them on pedestals. And giving them the skills to teach STEM.”

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What Ants Mice Monkeys can teach us about the impact of stress 10-13

Stress is a common feeling, and it seems we’re dealing with more of it in our lives than ever before. Work, finances, relationships — all have the ability to create chronic stress that can lead to anxiety, depression and other issues. Two Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) professors — Michael Platt, a Wharton marketing professor and professor of neuroscience and psychology at Penn, and Shelley Berger, a Penn professor of cell and development biology and director of The Epigenetics Institute, have teamed up in an interdisciplinary approach to learn more about how stress affects individuals.

Platt and Berger recently spoke about their research and its implications on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111. 



Following is an edited transcript of the conversation. 

Knowledge@Wharton: Tell us the background behind this research.

Shelley Berger: It’s something we’ve been interested in for some time. The research I’ve been doing is focused on epigenetics, which has led into this interest in the environment and how it affects behavior. But in recent years, we’ve become very interested in the brain from work we started on the ant system. We actually have an ant lab at the Perelman School of Medicine. We’ve been interested in ants and studying their behavior. They’ve been a great model for behavior. Recently, we became interested in mouse behavior and studying the brain and epigenetics in the brain. Through conversations with Michael, that led to how this whole thing began on crossing species and studying mouse, primate and even human.

Knowledge@Wharton: Give us a better understanding of epigenetics.

Berger: Epigenetics is the study of how the environment affects the way genes are expressed. We commonly think about mutations affecting genes and gene expression. But epigenetics is the study of how the environment can affect the way genes are turned on and off without mutation. Specifically, it’s the effect of how chemicals coming in from the environment through our bodies can sort of decorate the proteins that associate with the DNA and change the way genes are turned on and off. That’s of great interest because many things are coming in from the environment, including stress. We’re talking about psychological effects and stress, and that can lead to changes in the brain. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a great example.

“Burnout is the number-one topic that I hear about from our MBA students, and they want to do how to deal with that…. Stress is everywhere.” –Michael Platt

Knowledge@Wharton: Michael, tell us about your interest in this research?

Michael Platt: We have been interested in behavior for a long time. We got interested in how genes affect the development of the structure and function of the brain and nervous system to ultimately produce behavior. Of course, that equation leaves out the central role of epigenetics that Shelley just described, which is that the same genes in the same body in a different environment can lead to very different outcomes. If you imagine yourself living with lots of family support, for example, you might respond better to the stresses of the environment — to a stock market crash, to problems in the economy, etc. But if you are living alone without any social support, then that stressful event or the long-term stress can be much more impactful on your body and your brain.

Shelley and I met two years ago, when I had just arrived here from Duke University…. As we were talking, we began to realize that we were interested in very similar things, although our expertise is very complementary. We had been working on the neurophysiology of behavior, the neurophysiology of social behavior and how genetics might influence that. But we had really no expertise in epigenetics at all.

Knowledge@Wharton: How will this research lead to a better understanding of the human brain and how it reacts to stress from environmental factors?

Berger: We’ve been studying mouse behavior for the past five years, and you can model stress in mice. There’s a method called “fear conditioning” by which you subject the mouse to stress, and then you can study what happens to the brain. How are learning and memory affected by the stress of fear conditioning?

We had been working with post-mortem human brains from people who had suffered neuro-degeneration from Alzheimer’s Disease, so we’d been developing a lot of methodology to study parts of the brain. Humans are difficult because, of course, they’re not experimental animals. We have to work out all the methods to carry out high-resolution studies of these chemical marks in the brain from human post-mortem samples. Then, starting to get interested in some results we had in mouse, we thought that the crossover between fear conditioning in mouse and PTSD in human could be really interesting. We got in touch with a guy who has a bio-bank of humans who had suffered from PTSD. We can take these methods that we’ve developed in mouse, then fine-tuned in human post-mortem brains through our work on Alzheimer’s, and now we can look at PTSD in humans. Michael filled in the middle part with primate research, which is a great link between the two.

Platt: Right. As useful as a mouse is for understanding a lot of the basic processes that we think are involved in the response of the human brain to stress, sometimes that translation is not perfect. That reflects the fact that mice and humans last shared a common ancestor much longer ago than humans and monkeys. For that reason, the human brain and the monkey brain are much more similar than the human brain and the mouse brain. There are certain aspects of behavior, in terms of behavioral complexity and social complexity, that are shared between humans and monkeys, that are less well-paralleled in the mouse.

The monkey gives us the capability to look at some of these other issues like social support and how that might help with the problems that one encounters with social competition. This is very different from what mice experience. People and monkeys live in groups for a good reason. It allows you to do things that you can’t do alone, like evade predators or chase away other groups and get resources. On the other hand, when you’re living in a group, you have to compete with everybody else. That’s a source of stress that I think we all can easily identify with.

This is a beautiful partnership because it has the potential to lead to understandings that can lead to new treasuries. Also, putting my Wharton hat on, this kind of project can potentially illuminate ways in which we might be able to mitigate stress, say, within the workplace. That’s a huge problem these days. Burnout is the number-one topic that I hear about from our MBA students, and they want to do how to deal with that. You hear the same thing from residents who are training in medicine. Stress is everywhere.

Berger: The beautiful thing about the primates, with respect to humans, is that humans are not an experimental animal — we don’t know exactly what their social situation is in its entirety. But scientists watch [primates] all the time. Michael has scientists working with him, watching these animals in their natural habitat, so they know exactly what sort of place they have in the social spectrum. We can’t know all that about humans. As much as we get metadata about humans — that we can get information about their background — they’re not experimental animals. We can’t control and know.

“We’re not talking about the kinds of stresses our kids go through over smartphones. We’re talking about the kinds of things that really impede your ability to function.” –Shelley Berger

Knowledge@Wharton: That space between mouse and monkey feels like it’s very important because there’s more of a more recent link between monkey and human than human and mouse.

Platt: I think that’s why these studies need to be done. There are very few places where you can really do them and where people will collaborate to try to discover those links and make the connections. I think what Shelley can do in her lab, with really exquisite techniques and technologies that allow you to hone in on the mechanism, we can closely approximate in primates. But it’s not the same kind of thing that we can do.

On the other hand, what we can provide is a much richer understanding of the social environment and all of the other factors that might affect an individual in how they respond to stress and how that ultimately leads to changes in behavior. The particular population of monkeys that we study evolves. This is a population in which individuals are free to fight and to flee and to breed. Some monkeys do better than others. That means that whatever traits those individuals have — traits that allow them to offer stress, to make alliances and connections — can be passed on to the next generation. We can see these kinds of changes in the population over time. That’s almost impossible to see in people.

Knowledge@Wharton: If you find enough links, you’re talking about being able to deal with a lot of prevalent medical issues — burnout, depression, suicide, PTSD.

Platt: It’s really compelling to see the data. There has been a lot of attention paid to a new report that analyzed the incredible increase in depression and anxiety, especially in teenagers, after the introduction of smartphones in the 2000s. There does seem to be, potentially, some link to the kinds of technological environments in which we find ourselves. I think one implication is that it leads to social disconnection, which I think reinforces what we’ve learned both in people and in monkeys that having social support is really critical. If you don’t have it, then things really fall apart.

Knowledge@Wharton: The social support is not as much of a factor when you’re talking about mice. But perhaps it is for ants because of how they live in colonies, correct?

Berger: That’s an astute observation. Ants are a great model for complex social interactions, and there are very few models like that. That’s why the medical school supports us to have an ant lab. They see the great translational aspects of studying ants and their social interactions.

Knowledge@Wharton: How do you think that information could play out when you’re talking about dealing with stress?

Berger: I’ll go back to our mouse research, which we’re translating both ways to the ants and would love to translate it to the monkeys and definitely to humans. We discovered that the machinery to make one of the chemicals that’s placed on the genes to regulate them is associated with the genes. It’s an enzyme that makes this chemical, and that enzyme can be inhibited. We think if we inhibit that enzyme, we can alter learning and memory in mouse. This is the kind of experiment you can do in mouse. We can’t do it in primates because they’re too complicated.

One of the things we’ve been talking about is whether an inhibitor like that could be relevant to humans. We’re not talking about the kinds of stresses our kids go through over smartphones. We’re talking about the kinds of things that really impede your ability to function.

Knowledge@Wharton: Going back to the business aspect, if these discoveries lead to treatments down the road, that could chip away at some pieces of the health care problem in this county.
Platt: Sure, and hopefully down the road is not so far down the road. The enzyme that Shelley’s talked about, it’s quite clear that one could imagine developing a drug to target that specific mechanism. If you had a combat veteran who was exposed to a blast or something else incredibly stressful, you could potentially deliver that drug at the right place and the right time and block the formation of bad memories. That would be an incredible opportunity.

“If you had a combat veteran who was exposed to a blast or something else incredibly stressful, you could potentially deliver [a] drug at the right place and the right time and block the formation of bad memories.” –Michael Platt

The other extension of this are ways of trying to mitigate stress before it leads to something. We’re talking about chronic stress rather than acute stress. Are there ways that we can prevent it? There are a lot of options that people are exploring, such as improving your social connections, mindfulness and meditation, exercise. We know those things are all really good. We just don’t know how they work.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is there a difference between people who handle stress really well and those who don’t?

Platt: This is a really tricky and interesting and important question. Is it something you’re born with or something you can teach? There is fabulous work from Penn professor Angela Duckworth on grit, which is this resilience. It seems like some people have a great reservoir of grit, while it’s harder for others to demonstrate it. That leads to the question of whether you can develop it. Can you train it? Can you educate people to display that grit more often? If so, then that’s another approach to dealing with life stress.

Berger: It seems to me that the monkeys are the place to study that because Michael’s group sees which monkeys are accepted.

Platt: One thing that’s really fascinating about the monkeys that we study is that they have personalities, just like people do. The big five personality instruments that you would apply to a person, you could do the same with a monkey. We’ve done that, and their personalities are consistent over time. A monkey who’s very timid and anxious when he’s 6 months old is going to be similarly timid and anxious when he’s an adolescent. A monkey who is very bold or very aggressive, you’ll see those patterns continue. It’s not 100%. It’s not like it’s genetically determined. I think that’s where the fascinating thing is. Maybe 25% or 50% is purely genetic, and the rest is environment in how they respond to it. That’s why this is so important.

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How Anticipating Future Variety Curbs Consumer Boredom 06-29

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If your favorite chocolate brownie ice cream were on sale, then surely buying a few containers to stock in your freezer would makes sense, right? Surprisingly, the answer may be no, according to recent research from Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn, who also serves as director of the school’s Jay H. Baker Retailing Center. In a paper titled “Anticipation of Future Variety Reduces Satiation from Current Experiences,” Kahn and her co-authors — Julio Sevilla from the University of Georgia and Jiao Zhang from the University of Oregon — debunk the notion that consumers respond positively to an endless supply of the exact same product.

Through controlled lab experiments, Kahn and her team found that when consumers are offered more variety for future consumption, their perception of present satisfaction changes. The paper was published in the Journal of Marketing Research. Kahn spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about what the research means for marketers. 

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Knowledge@Wharton:  Could you give us a summary of your research?

Barbara Kahn: What the research shows is that if you anticipate consuming a variety of things in the future, you will satiate slowly on what you’re consuming now.

Knowledge@Wharton: This sort of sounds like the reason why we all overeat at the buffet.

Kahn: Except overeating is consumption, and this is about eating the same thing over time, how fast you get bored with it or how fast you satiate with it. The reason it’s interesting to marketers is, of course, that marketers want you to consume as much as possible of their product. But the problem is when you consume a lot over time, you get bored, or satiate. This is not just for food; it could be for music or for anything else that you consume over time. Is there a way to reduce the boredom so that you’ll enjoy what you’re consuming for a longer period of time?

What we found was that some of that boredom and satiation is cognitive. It’s not all physical. If we can encourage you to think about something in the future that’s related to what you’re consuming now, and that will offer more variety, then you’ll satiate more slowly.

In an article you wrote for the American Marketing Association on this research, you introduced the example of yogurt, which I think helps to clarify this. Could you explain that example?

Kahn: Say you’re eating vanilla yogurt every single day for lunch for a week, two weeks, three weeks. You could imagine over time that you’d get bored with vanilla yogurt. What can we do to make you less bored?

Knowledge@Wharton: If you went to Costco or BJs or some warehouse and bought a whole pallet of yogurt, and it was all different flavors or some flavor different from vanilla, and you knew in the future you would consume that, it would make you satiate more slowly with the vanilla yogurt you’re eating over time today. That’s the idea.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the implications for retailers like Costco, for example?
Kahn: It’s that selling a variety of things has a benefit over and above what you might think. Just having the variety in the refrigerator will make the enjoyment of a single flavor more pleasurable.
Knowledge@Wharton: What is the biggest surprise that came out of this research?

Kahn: We’ve always known a lot about anticipation; a lot of past research has shown that you should savor the anticipation of something good. There’s an advantage in planning for a vacation or a wedding or something that’s really fun. You might actually enjoy the anticipation of the event more than the event itself. That’s something that’s been shown before.

But what’s different about this research is that we show that anticipating variety in the future affects your current consumption. That’s somewhat surprising because you wouldn’t think that just thinking about something in the future could affect how you’re enjoying something today.

Knowledge@Wharton: One of the other interesting examples you brought up in your AMA article was the idea that maybe it’s not always best to keep a surprise gift a secret from a significant other. Could you explain that?

“You wouldn’t think that just thinking about something in the future could affect how you’re enjoying something today.”

Kahn: The point is that if people can anticipate something that’s going to happen in the future, not only do you savor the excitement of the future, but it also can affect your current consumption, so that’s a little counter-intuitive.

Knowledge@Wharton: If someone’s going to give you a surprise vacation, for example, knowing about it earlier helps you to anticipate and actually enjoy something else in the present, correct?

Kahn: Right. You know you’re going to have a lot of varied activities — you’re going to go skiing and mountain climbing or whatever you’re going to do in the future — so maybe you won’t be as bored with what you’re doing right now.

Knowledge@Wharton: There are all sorts of implications for this. What are you going to look at next?

Kahn: It’s interesting to think about how consuming variety can affect things besides the actual utility you have for the variety. One of the projects I’m working on with a doctoral student at Drexel University is how consuming variety can make you feel less guilty or more fulfilled when you’re in a self-regulatory mode — like when you’re trying to like control your weight or eat more healthily. Sometimes, using variety as a cue for doing more of a good thing or less of a bad thing can alleviate guilt. That’s kind of an interesting thing — that variety in and of itself can affect these other kinds of feelings or emotions.

Reproduced from  KNOWLEDGE@WHARTON

Mastering the Art of Communication: What Big Data Can Tell Us 06-15

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There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence about what makes a good communicator, but Noah Zandan is
more interested in the science behind it. That’s why he co-founded Quantified Communications, a firm that helps business leaders remake and refine their messages.

Zandan spoke recently to Cade Massey, Wharton practice professor of operations, information and decisions and co-director of the Wharton People Analytics Initiative, about how he applies research to the art of communication. Massey is co-host of the Wharton Moneyball show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111, and this interview was part of a special broadcast on SiriusXM for the Wharton People Analytics Conference.

An edited transcript of the conversation appears below.

Cade Massey: Let’s understand what Quantified Communications is and how you got going in that direction.

Noah Zandan: The idea behind it is that communications has always been considered an art. How people talk to each other, how executives communicate, how we relate to other people, how we connect to the world around us, has always kind of been this art. Academics have been studying it for years, which is really exciting, and what we are trying to do at Quantified Communications is bring some of that research and apply it to a business environment. We work with corporations and organizations to really help their leadership, help the people moving the message of the business to deliver that message, and do it in a way where they are using objective data to know whether or not it works.

Massey: What is your background?

Zandan: I studied economics in college. Econometrics. I showed up on Wall Street, bright-eyed, and realized pretty quickly as I got further and further into Wall Street that we were modeling everything — obviously looking at risk and trying to make $1 billion decisions — off of data. But there was a missing factor from our model, and that was the people: The way that the executives communicate, the way they told the story, how confident they were was really one of the critical success factors on Wall Street. But there was no data behind it, and I’m an econ guy. [I thought,] “This isn’t rational.” I started looking and found some amazing research. Folks like James Pennebaker at the University of Texas, people who have been measuring this stuff for years, but nobody in the business environment knew this existed.

“We thought visionaries would really be complex thinkers, but in fact what they’re really concerned with is making things simple and breaking it down into steps.”

And so from there, we started. Our co-founder [Peter Zandan] has a Ph.D. in evaluation research and started finding all of this great stuff and then built a big database and a big platform to measure it. All of the big presidential speeches, all of the TED talks, media interviews — you name it, we’ve tried to go find it.

Massey: What are you doing with it?

Zandan: Well first, you have to be able to process it. So you’ve got to tag it; you’ve got to organize it; you’ve got to make sure that it’s useful. The New York Times calls it being a data janitor. It is a huge part of the job for a data scientist. We spent a long time doing that, and then we had to go understand it. Was it successful or not? Did it accomplish its purpose? Did the audience react to it in the appropriate way? Go out and ask a bunch of people what they think. Do you trust this person if they did this? Do you believe them? Do you want to engage with them more? And then measure the factors of the communication. What types of words did they use? Were they making eye contact? What were they doing with their hands? Then you can understand the factors that correlate with success.

Massey: How did you decide what factors to look for?

Zandan: Again, academic research. Folks in academics have been doing this for years. One of the best guys out is Albert Mehrabian out of UCLA. He created this model called the Three Vs — verbal, voice and visual. It breaks down someone’s communication into some of the important elements, and he did a bunch of research as to how those are correlated with whether or not I like you. You go talk to communications folks and researchers, and they understand eye contact, facial movement, features.

There are factors behind all this stuff.

Massey: As you said, it’s historically been an art. What is the disparity between what you’re bringing to this conversation versus what’s been in the conversation before? When you come to these academics with this unbelievable database and say, “I’ve run some tests of these ideas,” are they saying, “This is different than anything we’ve seen before?” Or is this just a bigger version of what they’ve done?

Zandan: I would probably say it’s just a different use case. The academics are doing it from a great research standard, really thinking about how to apply it for research validation. What we’re doing is trying to bring it in a more applied way — looking at how leaders can communicate, really thinking carefully about what their purposes and audience types are. And then we can also go a little bit further, in that we can build predictive models and just run them over and over, given that we’re a business and not held to kind of the research standards.

Massey: One question you’ve looked at is, what do visionary communicators or visionary leaders do? Can you give us a recap of your findings?

“If you think about Elon Musk talking about Tesla, he always talks about what it’s like to drive in the car, what it’s like to look at the car, how the doors work.”

Zandan: We looked at hundreds of transcripts of visionary leaders. It was just a linguistic analysis. We didn’t look at their faces or voices or things like that. What we identified was what separates these people who we consider to be visionaries, everybody from Amelia Earhardt to FDR to Elon Musk to TED Talks on innovation. What separates them from the average communicator? What distinguishes them from a factor model perspective?

There were three main findings that we had. One: We thought visionaries would talk a lot about the future, but in fact they talked about the present. Two: We thought visionaries would really be complex thinkers, but in fact what they’re really concerned with is making things simple and breaking it down into steps. Three: We thought that visionaries would be really concerned with their own vision, but in fact they’re more concerned with getting their vision into the minds of their audience.

Massey: What does that mean?

Zandan: That means using second-person pronouns and using a lot of perceptual language, talking about look, touch and feel. It really brings the audience into the experience with you. So if you think about Elon Musk talking about Tesla, he always talks about what it’s like to drive in the car, what it’s like to look at the car, how the doors work. It’s really less about the future of energy and transport. As this kind of theoretical vehicle, he really brings it and makes it tangible.

Massey: One thing that jumps out to me about that research is the present tense versus the future, especially when you’re talking about visionary leaders. You would have expected that to go the other way. Why do you think they are so much more effective?

Zandan: We saw it highly correlated with credibility. I think that people think if you’re talking so much about the future, then it’s going to be less credible. People aren’t going to believe you as much. So, you really want to [apply it to] today.

“The data can lead you down a path of replication. We don’t want to do that, because so much of what you communicate is your personality.”

Massey: How do you apply this research for your clients?

Zandan: What we often get asked to do is help people improve their communications, use the technology, use the analytics, allow them to make data-driven decisions on how to better impact their audiences. The No. 1 question Oprah Winfrey gets when the lights go off after her interviews with all of these amazing world leaders and celebrities is, “How did I do?” That’s what these people want to know. We can answer that not in a way that their team is going to — which is, “Hey, boss, you did great.” We can actually give them a lot of truth in the data — talk about how they are perceived, talk about how they can get better, and give them a very prescriptive plan to better impact their audiences and achieve their purposes.

Massey: When you work with people in that role, what data do you collect?

Zandan: We look at text, audio or video, which we can take in. We’ll break those down into the elements. So text is what you say, the words. For audio, we’ll look at the words as well as your voice. And then for video, which is our favorite, you’ve got the face and the gestures. You break down all of those into different behavioral patterns, you measure all of them, you benchmark them against what they would consider to be a measure of success. That could be themselves, that could be someone who is best in class, that could be a competitor they aspire to be. And then you could give them a road map for how to achieve that. We’ll give them some guidance on that, but a lot of times they know. The White House came to us and said, “We want to replicate one of Obama’s best speeches. We know which one was our favorite, and we want to understand the different factors behind that.”
Massey: Can you speak about what you found?

Zandan: No. But the speech was a eulogy in Arizona, which they considered to be one of the best ones he has given during his tenure.

Massey: Let’s put it this way, did you find anything interesting when you looked at that kind of speech from that level? That’s really championship-level rhetoric.

Zandan: Of course. You uncover stuff, but what’s worth saying here is that there is also the other side of the equation, which is authenticity. I am not President Obama. I do not speak like President Obama. If I did, it would seem very strange to an audience. Everybody has their authentic tone. We work really hard to measure authenticity. It’s one of the hardest problems.

Massey: Being able to do something like that would be a real advance.

Zandan: It would. And there is obviously authenticity to the way you deliver the message, and there are words that are considered authentic. But what we’re careful on is we don’t want to push people to be something that they’re not. The data can lead you down a path of replication. We don’t want to do that, because so much of what you communicate is your personality.

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