Can One Positive Person Turn a Dysfunctional Team Around?

The Team Battle

No matter what havoc Nik wreaked, one group he was part of did not go down in flames. The other members kept their eye on the goal eventually succeeding with flying colours on the task. But, when he tried the same tactics in other groups, they struggled. What was the magical juice of the first group?

Negativity is highly infectious. It travels fast below our level of consciousness affecting behaviour in all realms of our lives, shutting down the relationship parts of our brains. In any team or group environment, one negative member can “infect” teammates with the same vibe. Productivity suffers. Trust plummets. Tribalism takes over because it is no longer safe to be in the group. This is a common story that most teams struggle with either all the time or occasionally when team membership changes.

But is the opposite true? Can one positive team member resuscitate the team’s culture despite the pervasive negativity? In that the root cause of “culture” is derived from the Latin word ‘cultus’ which means care, team leaders and members alike know intuitively that constant negativity is a detriment to success. Better to have a ‘caring’ or benign environment at the least because it is less stressful, more relaxing. This switch from fight or flight to rest and relax allows members to listen to each other and dare to share. Positivity literally and automatically opens up our connecting minds stoking idea flow and creativity.

The Magic of Positivity

Daniel Coyle’s most recent book, The Culture Code, describes an experiment in which an actor with the pseudonym “Nick” deliberately plays three different roles in up to forty small groups:

•         Jerk – aggressive, defiant and argumentative
•         Slacker – a with holder of effort
•         Downer – negative type

The group is tasked with developing a marketing plan for a start-up. In the majority of the groups, performance drops 30% to 40%. Team member energy, interest in the task and caring about succeeding take a hit. In almost every group, Nick’s negativity is picked up by everyone as evident by various signalling such as heads on table, crossed arms and other negative non-verbal behaviours. But, in one group, despite Nick, team members stay engaged and the group overall does well. Why?

The researchers solve the mystery by viewing the video of the outlier group. One group member (assigned the name “Jonathan”) always deflects Nick’s negative moves with body language that conveys warmth making the “unstable situation feel solid and safe”. He asks “simple” questions to elicit viewpoints. He smiles, listens closely and acknowledges the ideas. The result is higher energy levels, riffing with the ideas cooperatively and eventually achieving a quality outcome. 

The Win-Win Bonus

Decades of research on social conflict point in the same direction. For example, when group members who play the prisoner’s dilemma game eventually ‘get’ that sharing in the bounty creates a win-win for all, they see the limitations of win-lose (tit-for-tat). By dialing up a group mindset of inclusiveness, prosperity for the many overtakes prosperity for the few or as economists put it – win-win instead of zero-sum. In an organizational environment, this also applies to sharing and communicating among teams. The positive culture helps people to cooperate leading to higher quality decision making.  This is a universal effect.

If the “secret juice” is positivity, what are the ingredients? According to MIT’s Alex Pentland, two factors are critical:

Switching out status or power differentials, even temporarily, creates an atmosphere of  equality (everyone matters)

Social sensitivity, especially positive signaling, as our ancestors did before language emerged, kick starts mutual sharing and the vetting of ideas. The vibe of “it’s safe to say something” permeates the team. All ideas are worthy for consideration.

Positive “social physics” according to Pentland and his book of the same name, generate higher performance returns by enhancing the flow of ideas and by association the “collective intelligence” of the team. Special Ops teams in the military know this well.

Two-Way Street

Team conflict has a healthy and unhealthy side. On the healthy side, differing opinions enable an environment of challenging assumptions and digging deeper. But non-respectful conversations simply escalate bad feelings. The good news is that one person can make a difference one way or the other.

In Thinking Fast and Slow, page 54, Daniel Kahneman explains how “simple, common gestures” “unconsciously influence our thoughts and feelings”:

If you “act calm and kind…you are likely to be rewarded by actually feeling calm and kind.”

Consider this - every member of a team imagines this mindset in advance of each team meeting and during tumultuous times in team meetings. Even visualizing a positive scenario seems to help!

Tips for building positive conversational intelligence in a team:

·         Be curious – ask lots of open-ended and clarifying questions.

·         Watch your non-verbal signaling – no rolling of eyeballs, crossing your arms in disgust or defiance, ignoring other members, glaring and checking your smart phone.

·         Convey respect in both your verbal and non-verbal signals– inject humor, laugh appropriately, smile, acknowledge good ideas, give your full attention in the moment (as if you are in an improv class).

·         Guide the group to dig deep, challenging conventional wisdom and assumptions.

·         Let go of being right.

  

Feeling "Sandwiched in Your Work? There are Tools to Ease the Pressure.

It’s not getting any easier for managers to manage. The younger generations want agile, open, engaging tech-savvy workplaces where legacy bureaucracies reign. The front-line is seldom satisfied. An economic environment in perpetual turmoil yields no promises for stability. Politicians and bosses from above don’t always consult and make good policy or strategy. Managers are truly the “sandwich generation” no matter their age.


But, good news: the fog around what works in management is less dense. Precision tools with a proven track record are beginning to proliferate.

Here are two top tools from 2011:

The Three to One Rule – Three Positive Emotions to One Negative

If you want employees to be open to change, generate creative ideas on the fly, make good decisions and generally be more productive, put away your negative, anxious self (even if you have good reason to be so). Sprinkle positive ideas and comments three times as often as negative. The latter spread faster than the former. Positive emotions that are genuine also build trust.

The Progress Principle – Small Wins

Black holes and snails leave burned out people in their wake. There is nothing worse for morale than a team having worked night and day on a project only to see it stalled somewhere up the line. Our brains like rewards. The size doesn’t matter. No rewards – funkiness sets in.

Managers who take pushing the fly wheel seriously also continuously re-generate team energy.

Both of these tools radiate results in all directions. Like compound interest, such multi-purpose instruments are cheap ways to develop increasing returns.


For more information, check out these researchers on YouTube:

Barbara Fredrickson, Positive Emotions and Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle.

While Rory McIlroy Had "Stack Attack", I Washed Floors

The father of the 2011 Masters winner Charl Schwartzel usually takes a pill and goes to sleep instead of watching his son battle it out in the last round of a tournament. “Wake me up when it’s over” he tells his wife who has no problem with the uncertainty and the tension. I can identify with the father. I felt so badly for 21 year-old McIlroy at the tenth hole and thereafter that I had to channel my emotions elsewhere (washing floors).


After a brilliant three rounds and being atop the leaderboard each day, to topple to a final round 80 to a tie for 15th is excruciating. Young McIlroy must have felt the weight of Northern Ireland on his shoulders when the wheels started to fall off.

Sports psychologists understand the phenomenon and how to treat it. The unpredictable event (which most athletes fear) triggers a chain of events because the athlete gets distracted with negative thoughts. That, in turn, causes loss of confidence, shallow breathing, emotional anxiety and a tightening of all the muscles. Not ideal for a fluid golf swing. The good news is that the “yips”, “meltdown” or “paralysis” can be prevented at best and managed before a “death spiral” ensues. No doubt, Rory will become a keen learner of avoiding this scary phenomenon and will be better for it.

But, this can happen to anyone in the workplace too when the pressure is on to perform and the situation is not totally controllable. That is, it depends on many variables and sound decision-making along the way.

What are some of the tips for working through situations when you are thrown a curve?

1. Prepare for each inevitability. Have a game plan;

2. Practice deep breathing and meditate daily (even for 10 minutes a day) as they develop frontal lobe resilience in the face of adversity;

3. Turn a negative thought about the situation into “what is the silver lining here?” thought. Optimism generates mindfulness (and clarity about the next action) whereas pessimism causes mindlessness (and confusion).

4. Use the time gaps in-between having to perform to stay in the present and not dwell on what just happened. For example, if we simply tune into our surroundings (sights, smells, sounds), we automatically remain in the present. Better still to view nature as it calms all of us down.

Positive psychology researchers have a mantra: emotions drive thoughts and thoughts drive motion. What we can control is our thoughts: what we think when an event is not to our liking occurs. It takes practice but eventually becomes ingrained (to change our thoughts into more positive and productive ideas).

Neuroscientists also have a mantra: What we pay attention to grows (more connections in our brains) with the corollary that our brains know how to start something (a new neural network), not stop (untangle a dense network). That means, we can change the automatic pathways in our brains (eventually) in reaction to challenges: when we work on starting something new (or improving a thought process), the new grows and the old wastes away.

Ironically, the military understands this as men and women subjected to their boot camps and who make it through the various stages typically become “mentally tougher”. I’ve been reading about the Green Berets’ training in Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces by Linda Robinson. The grueling conditions under which men and women are subjected and the practice for any imagined possibility builds confidence and adaptability.

In ordinary life, anything that makes us stretch has a similar effect: marathons, tri-athlons, iron mans, meditation, yoga, goal-setting, journaling, learning a new language, etc.

“Educating our emotions” is a life-long process. Rory found that out the hard way, very publically at the 75th Masters tournament. He has the money and the maturity to obtain good coaching and practice new ways. But, money is not needed to toughen a mind nor is it necessary to join the military or run marathons. The basis requirement is the resolve to do so and the belief that it works.

Inside the mind of the motivated: Five factors re-visited

The upheaval in the Middle East (out with the dictators!) reminds people everywhere: we are no longer going to put up with being viewed as monkeys or dogs who are trained to respond to the “carrot or the stick”, a form of behavior modification. Social media and other sophisticated technologies have re-awakened the human spirit because they relieve us from the routine and bring us more equally into a rich, shared world of information. Now we can use our minds to the fullest, focusing on the interesting and complex. Or can we?

Much has been written of late about “drive”, engagement and humans’ inherent tendency to seek novelty and challenge. We like to explore and learn. We get excited about a cause or purpose beyond making money. In that we are social beings, group problem-solving generates energy, positive emotions and feelings of pride in having cracked the puzzle. But, we are still having difficulty in organizations understanding the subtleties of enabling people from the inside-out rather than outside-in.

Let’s look at the newer twist on five common “motivating” factors to cut through some of the fog:

Recognition

Praise for hard work, persistence and working through difficulty appeals to our inner motivations. Less so for what we have accomplished. Praise for results tends to short-circuit the decision-making process, potentially cutting off creativity. Hard (and smart) work is within our control and we like it that way. In that the intended results often have to change because of the journey toward them (unexpected shifts in the environment), how we adapt is a much better measure of “success”.

Incentives

Similarly, for non-routine jobs, pay-for-performance and other related rewards tend to narrow people’s focus on the results, which encourages short-term thinking. Fair wages are better. It seems that pay-for-performance works best for non-routine jobs to make the drudgery worthwhile. But, that approach can actually do more harm than good for more complex assignments, reducing the success of the desired outcomes.

Interpersonal Support

Feelings and compassion for and understanding the other, otherwise known as emotional intelligence or educating emotion, fuel this factor. Sure constructive feedback still works but it should be to help individuals find the right roles that build on their strengths first and foremost. If we are square pegs in round holes and those we report to only focus on our weaknesses, we retreat and defend. There is little energy left for innovation. For managers: be interested rather than interesting!

Clear Goals

Goal-setting is vital in any circumstance to frame issues and provide the impetus to work toward something beyond the present. Our brains respond well to images of a new horizon, an improvement on our current circumstances. However, particularly in non-routine jobs in which the problems are well-known but not the solutions, people are more successful in finding good solutions if they set and adjust the goals themselves. Goals imposed by others (read: managers and the top leadership) tend to yield dangerous side-effects such as unethical, short-term behavior. Better to share in the goal-setting (called “buy-in” in the old behavioural world).

Support in Making Progress

This is the most powerful motivator: being in an environment where managers provide the right resources, take down the roadblocks and creatively facilitate the journey. Any progress sparks emotions that are the most positive and a drive to succeed that is in high gear. In essence the manager’s responsibility is to create a coaching culture wherein people have the opportunity to reach for their best.

We are all “tinkerers” at heart, so those who study evolution contend. We get great joy out of inventing often from “spare parts”. We do our high fives when the seemingly unsolvable has been solved. We love to celebrate together. It’s the only way to go. Finally.

"Broaden-and-Build": Positive Emotions are a Means to Many Useful Ends

Nothing is good or bad.
But thinking makes it so.

---Shakespeare

 

Shakespeare’s astute observations of the impact of how we think are as relevant today as four centuries ago. The “good” or “bad” show up as positive or negative emotions about an event. As thoughts determine our emotions and emotions drive motion, how we think matters. Good decisions depend on how we deal with the emotions associated with the issues at hand. Managers beware! You hold the emotional environment in your hands. Individuals beware! Your personal success depends on seeing the glass half full.

 

Environmentalists know this so well. Despite the proven reality of global warming and the detrimental impact of our throw-away society on the environment, our concerns far outstrip our actions to save the planet. The problem, according to branding experts, is that we don’t respond well to negative messages, especially those that seem beyond our reach. Futerra Sustainability Communications in its “Branding Biodiversity: The New Nature Message” offers these key messages to justify a positive approach to engaging people to act responsibly with respect to the environment:

• Loss is all about extinction.
• Love is all about awe and wonder at nature.
• Need is the economic benefit of nature.
• Action is messages that ask us to do something.

Futerra emphasizes that people have to be inspired and to see how they can act locally, within their own day-by-day realms.

 

Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory of positive emotions speaks to this. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher argues that “positive emotions… produce optimal functioning, not just within the present, pleasant moment, but over the long-term as well”. Positive emotions help people to engage and by association to produce more satisfactory, quality outcomes.

 

Harvard’s Teresa Amabile, who specializes in creativity (what it is, how it is squelched or nurtured), would agree. Her considerable research on how “affect” relates to creativity at work points over and over again to the same conclusions: “Creative activity appears to be an affectively charged event” influencing “task quality, productivity and efficiency”. Why? The positive feelings make us more open to exploring novelty.

 

While there is a role for negative emotions in our lives (for example, spurring us to quick action under sudden life-threatening situations), positive emotions build our personal resilience and resources. They literally widen our moment-by-moment array of thoughts-to-actions tool kit. Hence they increase the probability of achieving better results at whatever we are up to. Fredrickson calls this ability of positive emotions to open us up to more possibilities “the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions”.

 

What are the positive emotions that make up a “broaden-and-build” supply? Four primary ones stand out:

1. Joy spurs us on to play (unscripted), to reach beyond what we know and to look for creative options. It promotes skill acquisition.
2. Interest urges us to explore, be open to new experiences, possibilities and information. It spurs us on to investigate. Interest adds to our knowledge base.
3. Contentment is related to tranquility and serenity, savouring current life circumstances and recent successes. We feel more "together". The result is often a new sense of self and a new world view.
4. Love, which is a combination of many emotions sparked by safe, close relationships, generates the joy and interest precursors of action.

Fredrickson also mentions pride and gratitude as important catalysts of broadening and building enduring adaptability. The latter can be developed simply by writing down each day three to five reasons why we are grateful.

 

The impact of positive emotions are their greatest legacy: when life takes a turn for the worst, as it does on a regular basis, the personal resources accrued from practicing and creating positive emotions enable us to face any “threats” and “survive” well through the event.

 

Fredrickson sees this durability as evolutionary. When our ancestors faced threats to life and limb their greater individual resources improved their odds of survival and thus the opportunity to reproduce.

 

What is the key message for individuals? Work hard every day at seeing the silver lining in life’s encounters. The subsequent thought-to-emotion-to-motion chain reaction will build personal resilience and as a consequence a path of greater success and satisfaction than not.

 

Organizational survival is no different. Managers play a huge role in creating the context for positive emotions to take hold, multiply and feed innovation and well-being. One easy way is to support employees in making progress in their work every day. That feeling of progress produces “powerfully positive emotions”!

The "Tender Beast" in Stephen Harper---His "Big Shaggy"---Isn't Being Felt Much

You can’t understand twenty-first- century politics with an eighteenth century brain.

---George Lakoff, The Political Mind

Descartes’ theory of humans wasn’t quite right. We use emotion to reason and we can’t always be reasonable. How we emote and reason---about 98 per cent--- happens unconsciously. Seasoned political and non-political leaders know this well. But, it can backfire.

As a presenter at the 20th World Conference on Disaster Management on the interplay of charisma, character and confidence in defining a leader’s impact, I conducted an informal survey of my audience. I asked participants to rate on a scale of ten the charisma of ten well-known political leaders, six men and four women, eight of whom are still alive.

Although I flashed a PPT slide of Harper smiling and holding a cuddly kitten, he came in dead last with an almost unanimous rating of zero. Well a couple of people gave him a 1. All others were rated four or better no matter their political persuasion. What’s going on?

George Lakoff in The Political Mind argues that “conservatives” generally operate in a strict parent mode: obedience, authority, discipline and punishment. They value order and don’t like ambiguity. On the other hand, “progressives” on the whole appeal to the nurturing parent model: empathy, responsibility for oneself and empowerment to carry out those responsibilities. They don’t mind chaos and see complexity a lot. Of course there are many who are in-between too. Prime Minister Harper comes across more “conservative” than “progressive”. This despite having implemented what some believe on both sides to be “progressive” policies in certain areas.

In this “Contextual Age” in which we now live, as coined by Daniel Pink where collaboration reigns supreme out of necessity, Stephen Harper’s mindset and subsequent style appear to be out of synch. Sometimes, striking the fear of reprisal into the hearts of people is necessary, especially in an emergency. But, as a daily default, “Big Shaggy” style---not effective.

The participants, from a variety of disciplines, were adamant: Harper is rigid, cold, inflexible, controlling and so on. If charisma is about being “inspiring”, “passionate”, “visionary” and “having a cause”, Stephen Harper simple does not rate.

I don’t think he’s worried either. But, maybe he should be. The management literature is replete with failed leaders who did not connect with people on a positive emotional level. Like damaging the environment, in the long run, it is unsustainable.

Related resources and Blog:

David Brooks (June 7, 2010). “History for Dollars”, New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/opinion/08brooks.html 

Daniel Pink (2005). A Whole New Mind.

Linda Pickard. (July 29, 2009). “The Jen Ratio: A More Nuanced View of Emotional Intelligence for Leaders”. http://nkleadership.blogspot.com/2009/07/jen-ratio-more-nuanced-view-of.html

Avoiding the Slippery Slope of Negativity: Rebounding from What Life Throws at Us

During the Olympics, we lived in a surreal world. There were so many moments of joy and lots of disappointments too. Overall, the experience was uplifting as we celebrated the efforts of athletes to better their best. We were on a high, especially when Canada beat the US for hockey gold.


It was a welcome relief from the downbeat news that dominates our media. Positive experiences and messages have a hard time surviving among the weeds of travail and suffering. According to Tal Ben-Shahar, who lectures on positive psychology, articles about anger, anxiety and depression outnumber those on joy, happiness and satisfaction by a factor of 21:1!

Yet, to be creative and push the edges of our minds, inspiration partners better with perspiration than negativity. Inspiration opens us up to generating possibilities and seeing opportunities despite difficult circumstances. In evolutionary terms, it’s the only way to go for individual and group survival.

Imagine if each one of us were a little bit better at fending off the negative and cultivating the positive. It’s not easy as the reality of life is that failure, frustration and suffering abound. Nevertheless, if more of us can improve how we rebound, then maybe we will have more shared Olympic moments.

One way is to alter how we think about or evaluate our thoughts in response to an event. Cognitive scientists tell us that our thoughts drive emotions and emotions drive motion. It follows then that we have the power to change the meaning we attach to the event and thus our actions. We can cope up or down. Our choice.

The “3Ms” serve as a mirror for our unrealistic or realistic reactions to the unfolding of life’s events:

# 1: Magnifying the Failure. Avoid over-generalizing (“No one liked my idea therefore they won’t like any of my ideas.”)

# 2: Minimizing the Success: Avoid tunnel vision, focusing on the one thing that went wrong rather than the nine that went well (Giving undue attention to the one bored or disengaged person rather than the nine excited people).

# 3: Making Up Meanings: Avoid personalizing or blaming (beating yourself up instead of problem-solving your way out, taking charge).

The Olympic athletes are proof positive of the power of thoughts driving emotions and emotions driving motion. No reason why we can’t practice that too.

The "Jen Ratio": A More Nuanced View of Emotional Intelligence

Think of the jen ratio as a lens through which you might take stock of your attempt at leading a meaningful life.

---D. Keltner, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Did you know that if you engage in five acts of kindness a week, you can elevate your personal well-being in lasting ways? You might think this is obvious. Try doing it while coping with the real world of chaos, much uncertainty for many, and news that is more bad than good. It’s a job to be kind and compassionate.

Think of how any organization would benefit from acts of kindness coursing through it hourly and daily. The rise of its positive emotion quotient would directly affect the quality and quantity of innovation!

“Jen” science, the study of positive emotion, has been hinted at for centuries by various philosophers and scientists such as Confucius, Socrates, Plato and Darwin. But “jen” has only come into its own recently in the shadow and dying embers of the industrial revolution.

As elite athletes have known for some time, we do not rise to our best through fear. The latter helps us survive under dire circumstances but it is not sustainable as a way of being.

The latest financial global crisis has demonstrated that Adam Smith’s “Homo economicus” has its limits. The pursuit of self-interest which does not focus on bringing out the good in others can lead to serious destruction. As Dacher Keltner, author of Born to be Good reiterates, self-interest, competition and vigilance have been built into our evolutionary makeup in order to survive, but these tendencies are only “half the story”. “Homo reciprocans” is a more apt description of our reciprocating nature and the importance of emotions when making economic or any other kind of decisions.

The good emotional side of humanity, called “jen” by Confucius, has always been with us. It is gaining ground in our consciousness globally as we become more connected and better informed. We were reminded of our good side by Henry Patch, the last surviving soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War, who died at age 111 on July 25, 2009. In his memoirs, written after he turned 100, he described the pact he and his fellow soldiers made: avoid killing the enemy if possible. Aim for the legs instead. Academics have picked up on this theme of our good emotional side for a number of decades.

In the 1990’s, Daniel Goleman and other researchers revived the rightful place of emotional intelligence as a driver of great leadership—the higher you go in an organization, the more important it is.

Not long after, Marcus Buckingham through his Gallup research of over 80,000 managers found that building on strengths of employees is a faster route to a positive climate and employee success than trying to change what isn’t there (transforming weaknesses).

Of late, even strategic planning has had a facelift with the introduction of the process called “Appreciative Inquiry” or “AI” for short. Like elite athlete practices, AI takes the high road by working on creating more of the exceptional performance of an organization through aspirational discovery, dreaming and design.

Since the late 90s, Martin Seligman, who became famous for his “learned helplessness” theory in the 1970s and 80s, started a growing worldwide movement called “positive psychology”. It builds on the works of famous humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Erich Fromm.

Recently, neuroscience is lending credibility to the value of “jen” (meaning “humane”), long ago advocated by Confucius. We are hard-wired to give to others and to act cooperatively. When we do so, the reward centers of our brains dense with dopamine receptors light up and hum with activity. Confucius recognized that cultivating “jen” developed character in self and others, led to the meaningful life and offset violence, materialism and needless hierarchy.

What is the “jen ratio”? The numerator refers to acts of kindness, compassion, awe, love, gratitude and even embarrassment. The denominator embodies the “bad” action when instead of establishing one’s own character by bringing the good of others to completion, a person is disdainful, critical, condescending and contemptuous (all the elements that make for “bad” relationships). It is well-documented that these actions do not lend a helping hand to anyone anywhere.

Researchers are now taking stock of the “jen ratio” of individuals, married couples, nations, cultures and different age groups. As Keltner remarks, “nations whose citizens bring out the good in others to completion thrive” as “trust (a key result of “jen”) facilitates economic exchange with fewer transaction costs, adversarial settlements, discrimination and economic inequality”.

Winners of a number of Nobel prizes in Economics concur. Cooperation beats cut-throat, winner-take-all competition in a complex societal system where trust ultimately must be a guiding principle. New research from the Center for Neuroeconomics further substantiates the value of trust to yield economic and well-being benefit.

Scandinavian and East Asian countries fare better in this regard than those in South America and Eastern Europe. Even poorer nations like India generate a higher trust level than wealthier nations like the United States. “Jen” trumps money!

The “jen ratio” is a simple measure and another tool for leader-managers. Acts of “jen” and “not jen” can be counted (see Buddhist “Pebbles in a Bowl” story below, as a simple method). With some deliberate practice, managers can generate higher “jen” ratios leading to higher performance all round---hard and soft--- underpinned by the increasing momentum of the “flywheel of progress” through good acts.

Links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6xYmh4Y-w

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology.html

http://www.neuroeconomicstudies.org/

http://www.myleadership.com/index.php?title=Pebbles_in_a_Bowl