Quentin Tarantino films have reached cult status, with universities now offering courses based on issues ranging from race to his use of pop culture references.

We spoke with Robert J. Thompson, professor of Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, and Todd Dewett, a management professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and Tarantino film fan, about what makes Tarantino films so popular, which business lessons his movies teach us, and what we can learn from his career.

"[Tarantino's] characters are so compellingly flawed," Thompson says. "They speak in the language regular people understand, dripping in popular culture references people are going to get." While Tarantino films are controversial for their violence, language and subject matter, business lessons can be extracted from them such as what to look for when hiring, how to work with others, and what to look for in training programs.

Here are four business lessons for Quentin Tarantino movies:

1. Find the right training to get to the top of your game.
In Kill Bill: Vols. 1 & 2, Uma Thurman's character, The Bride, seeks revenge against the group who destroyed her life and left her for dead on her wedding day. Her singular focus on getting revenge against Bill and his team fuels her martial arts makeover and she is transformed into a force to be reckoned with. 

While revenge isn't the best motivation in business, Thurman's character shows what's possible when effective training programs are implemented. According to Dewett, many training dollars are wasted each year because businesses don't bring in the right person to train their employees. Companies need to find a great teacher, make sure their employees have the motivation to learn new skills, then provide them with an opportunity to use their new skills.

2. Assemble a strong team.
Tarantino creates a team of actors that work well together, Dewett says. Other movie producers believe hiring one major movie star will be enough to carry a film to box office glory and are surprised when the movie flops.

Similarly, many companies believe success is achieved by hiring a marquee talent. A fundamental mistake companies make is they look at a candidate's resume and how they perform in an interview with one executive, when they should really see how that individual fits within the existing team, says Dewett. Many times, companies hire someone who looks great on paper, only to discover later they don't mesh well with the rest of the team.

3. Choose quality over quantity.
Tarantino decided to make one movie every few years, allowing him to be fully invested in each endeavor, Dewett notes. He assembles a stellar cast, develops a script with great writing, and takes his time with each project.

Many businesses are in a race with their competition, and "change too much instead of just enough," says Dewett. "A company has a finite capacity for change," he says. He advises against the impulse to 'keep up with the Joneses.' "The best practice for [one company] may not be the best for your company," Dewett cautions.

4. Surround yourself with top talent.
Tarantino has chosen really good projects, most of which he's generated himself, as writer, director, producer and actor, Thompson says. He's known for quirky, but excellent casting, and he's surrounded himself with a team of top-notch talent and production groups, many of whom he's worked with throughout his career, and with good reason, says Dewett.

Directors like Tarantino love candor, useful feedback, and aren't afraid to have difficult conversations. Likewise, in order to run their business successfully, leaders need to surround themselves with employees they can depend on who aren't afraid of conflict.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/225626

BY AMBER RAE

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JANUARY 30, 2013

Reimagining the words we use to define work--and ourselves--is a powerful exercise.

If I see one more article or blog post about how you should never be "critical" or "negative" when giving feedback to an employee or colleague (or, for that matter, your children), I think my head will explode. It's incredibly frustrating. This kind of advice is surely well meant, and it certainly soundsgood. After all, you probably don't relish the thought of having to tell someone else what they are doing wrong — at minimum, it's a little embarrassing for everyone involved.

But avoiding negative feedback is both wrong-headed and dangerous. Wrong-headed because, when delivered the right way, at the right time, criticism is in fact highly motivating. Dangerous because without awareness of the mistakes he or she is making, no one can possibly improve. Staying "positive" when doling out feedback will only get you so far.

Hang on, you say. Can't negative feedback be discouraging? Demotivating?

That's perfectly true.

And don't people need encouragement to feel confident? Doesn't that help them stay motivated?

In many cases, yes.

Confusing, isn't it? Thankfully, brilliant new research by Stacey Finkelstein (Columbia University) and Ayelet Fishbach (University of Chicago) sheds light on the seemingly paradoxical nature of feedback, by making it clear why, when, and for whom negative feedback is appropriate.

It's important to begin by understanding the function that positive and negative feedback serve. Positive feedback (e.g., Here's what you did really well....) increases commitment to the work you do, by enhancing both your experience and your confidence. Negative feedback (e.g., Here's where you went wrong....), on the other hand, is informative — it tells you where you need to spend your effort, and offers insight into how you might improve.

Given these two different functions, positive and negative feedback should be more effective (and more motivating) for different people at different times. For instance, when you don't really know what you are doing, positive feedback helps you to stay optimistic and feel more at ease with the challenges you are facing — something novices tend to need. But when you are an expert, and you already more or less know what you are doing, it's negative feedback that can help you do what it takes to get to the top of your game.

As Finkelstein and Fishbach show, novices and experts are indeed looking for, and motivated by, different kinds of information. In one of their studies, American students taking either beginner or advanced-level French classes were asked whether they would prefer an instructor who emphasized what they were doing right (focusing on their strengths) or what they were doing wrong (focusing on their mistakes and how to correct them). Beginners overwhelmingly preferred a cheerleading, strength-focused instructor. Advanced students, on the other hand, preferred a more critical instructor who would help them develop their weaker skills.

In a second study, the researchers looked at a very different behavior: engaging in environmentally friendly actions. Their "experts" were members of environmental organizations (e.g., Greenpeace), while their "novices" were non-members. Each participant in the study made a list of the actions they regulatory took that helped the environment — things like recycling, avoiding bottled water, and taking shorter showers. They were offered feedback from an environmental consultant on the effectiveness of their actions, and were given a choice: Would you prefer to know more about the actions you take that are effective, or about the actions you take that are not? Experts were much more likely to choose the negative feedback — about ineffective actions — than novices.

Taken together, these studies show that people who are experienced in a given domain — people who already have developed some knowledge and skills — don't actually live in fear of negative feedback. If anything, they seek it out. Intuitively they realize that negative feedback offers the key to getting ahead, while positive feedback merely tells them what they already know.

But what about motivation? What kind of feedback makes you want to take action? When participants in the environmental study were randomly given either positive or negative feedback about their actions, and were then asked how much of their $25 study compensation they would like to donate to Greenpeace, the type of feedback they received had a dramatic effect on their motivation to give. When negative feedback was given, experts gave more on average to Greenpeace ($8.53) than novices ($1.24). But when positive feedback was given, novices ($8.31) gave far more than experts ($2.92).

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that you never tell the rookie about his mistakes, or that you never praise the seasoned professional for her outstanding work. And of course negative feedback should always be accompanied by good advice, and given with tact.

But I am suggesting that piling on praise is a more effective motivator for the rookie than the pro. And I'm saying, point blank, that you shouldn't worry so much when it comes to pointing out mistakes to someone experienced. Negative feedback won't crush their confidence, but it just might give them the information they need to take their performance to the next level.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/sometimes_negative_feedback_is.html

Great job Growthinkers Antonio Barzagli and Ishan Jetley !!  Check out this great testimonial from a current client.  Outstanding work!

BY KATHLEEN DAVIS

It's no secret that happy, satisfied employees are a key ingredient to a successful company. But what really motivates people? Traditional thinking follows that the more you pay someone the more loyal and satisfied they are in their job.

But, the truth behind employee motivation is a more complicated mix including praise, autonomy, and leadership opportunities. Take a look at the infographic below for more on the many factors involved in motivating employees. 

Probably the single most destructive characteristic of businesses today is that they over-emphasize short-term results, often completely ignoring the long-term consequences.

Short-termism is the “HIV” of modern business thinking. Difficult to cure, it eats steadily away at a company’s immune system, infecting its incentives and organizational structure, weakening its customer relationships and employee loyalty, undermining its ability to compete, threatening investor confidence, and ultimately endangering the firm’s prospects for survival.

The 2008 financial meltdown stemmed directly from rampant short-termism, as bankers did deals and packaged up bundles of securitized mortgages that many of them knew full well weren’t very sound in the long term, but would generate lucrative fees in the short term. There was even a text-messaging acronym associated with it: IBGYBG. If a banker doing some deal stopped to worry about its long-term consequences or stability, his colleagues would console him with the advice not to worry about the long term, because in the long term IBGYBG – “I’ll be gone; you’ll be gone.”

But short-termism infects much more than banking. Almost every senior manager at any public company has had the experience of attending a meeting called for the express purpose of hitting year-end numbers, or even quarter-end numbers. You’ve probably attended this kind of meeting yourself. Perhaps at this meeting you decided to put off an important but costly service improvement, or to reduce spending on a program that didn't generate immediate profits. In one 2005 study, four out of five CFOs said they are willing to destroy shareholder value when necessary to meet quarterly stock market expectations. And one manager at a magazine publisher, for instance, actually said that whenever his company faced a bad quarter they stopped their subscriber reactivation campaigns. (Excuse me, but this is just insane.)

Unfortunately, Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ("GAAP") aren't much help here. GAAP emphasizes tangible, “dirt world” assets like lease holdings, inventory, or equipment. If you carry a piece of depreciable equipment on your balance sheet and a fire renders it unusable, the write-down must appear in your current period’s income statement, according to GAAP. That's good. But GAAP leaves a whole heck of a lot to be desired when it comes to similar problems with intangibles, such as customer relationships.

Suppose a valuable customer, for instance, were to complain and for some reason you didn't resolve the issue satisfactorily. Didn't your business just lose some its value? In economic terms, your value as a going concern is equal to your discounted future cash flow, and after that mishandled complaint your likely future cash flow is a little bit lower, right? Moreover, because customers are increasingly connected with each other, sharing reviews and opinions about your business, losing one customer’s trust or confidence can have ramifications that go far beyond that customer’s patronage.

Since the most important assets at a firm are usually intangible, it would serve investors’ interests if accounting principles could hold management responsible for husbanding these assets. The traditional argument, of course, is that intangible assets are too economically squishy to value accurately. But this argument is based on 20th century thinking. With the kind of computer analysis and statistical modeling available today, for instance, customer lifetime values can be estimated and managed at many companies in a variety of industries, and not just for high-volume consumer marketing firms. The problem is, because they don’t figure in a company’s financial statements, at many firms it’s hard to get the CFO to pay attention.

But think about this: If you were to measure and track changes in your customers’ lifetime values, then you'd actually know whether your business is generating a profit today by cannibalizing its future or by building solid customer equity.

Customer relationships are the bridge between current profits and future shareholder value. Customers have memories. They remember you whether you remember them or not. If customers are well served today, your business will be more profitable tomorrow, irrespective of today’s numbers.

Companies can deal with the disease of short-termism with several tactics:

Use statistical modeling to measure and track changes in customer lifetime values, and devise a plan for sharing this information regularly with investors
Incorporate some plainly non-financial metrics that strongly correlate with creating long-term customer value (Net Promoter Score would be one example)
Change sales incentive programs to ensure that managers participate in the long-term outcomes of their actions (many banks now do more of this)
Reduce or eliminate incentives based on how well short-term stock-market expectations are met (use restricted stock rather than stock options, for instance)
Stop providing "market guidance" to analysts, to de-couple your firm's long-term performance from its quarterly numbers (Google and some others do this)

It won't be easy to defend your business from the HIV of short-termism, but if you act deliberately, you can minimize the damage.

What tactics has your own company used or considered to prevent short-term thinking?

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130130125543-17102372-don-t-let-short-termism-kill-your-business

Everybody complains that people shouldn't talk on cellphones while driving. And yet it seems pretty much everybody does it.

That may be because so many of us think we're multitasking ninjas, while the rest of the people nattering away while driving are idiots.

But scientists say that the better people think they are at multitasking, the worse they really are at juggling.

Researchers at the University of Utah wanted to find out which personalities were more likely to try to do two tasks at once. They're keenly interested in people who talk on the phone or text while driving, since there's plenty of data that even using a hands-free phone boosts the risks of accidents.

That bit isn't exactly breaking news.

For quite a few years, researchers have been making the case that people who drive while using phones drive as badly as people who are legally drunk. But we persist in thinking we can handle it.

How come? The Utah folks speculated that multitaskers would be more apt to test high for traits like risk-taking, sensation-seeking and impulsivity. Turns out the researchers were right.

They asked student volunteers whether they used cellphones while driving, and whether they were good at multitasking. Then they tested the students' multitasking ability by asking them to solve math problems while remembering random strings of letters.

They found that the people who multitasked the most in real life — the impulsive risk-takers — were actually much worse at juggling tasks than people who rarely drove while phoning.

Even worse, these demon multitaskers thought they were terrific at it, though the cold, hard data proved they weren't.

"People don't multitask because they're good at it," says David Sanbonmatsu, a professor of psychology at the University of Utah and lead author of the study, which was published online in the journal PLOS One. "They do it because they are more distracted. They have trouble inhibiting the impulse to do another activity."

Seventy percent of the study participants, all college undergraduates, said they thought they were better than average at multitasking. Of course, that's statistically impossible — a drivers' ed version of Lake Wobegon, with all multitasking drivers above average.Texting drivers aren't the only ones who think they're aces at jobs they're actually flubbing. There's plenty of other research showing that people tend to overestimate personal attributes like attractiveness and talent. That proved true in this study, too. It was the non-risk-taking non-texters who actually turned out to be better at multitasking.They could maintain focus and get the job done.

"People sometimes think multitasking means greater productivity," Sanbonmatsu told Shots. "That's not what the findings in the literature say at all. A lot of times people multitask because they can't focus on the task that's most important to them."

Sanbonmatsu and his colleagues are now going to look into why we keep driving while texting, even though we know it's dangerous. Maybe it's because we think that, unlike the other mopes on the highway, we're just darned good at it.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/01/24/170160105/if-you-think-youre-good-at-multitasking-you-probably-arent?live=1

Who is getting advice from whom? 

I love Scott Kveton, the CEO of Urban Airship. He and his team are building an amazing company in Portland. If you do anything mobile-related and use push notifications of any sort, or real-time location targeting, you need to be talking to them. But even more impressive is how Scott leads his company.

The other day, I got an email from my partner Jason with a photo of the Urban Airship Meeting Rules posted on the wall. They are so logical as to be rules that should apply to every meeting at every startup from now until forever.

0. Do we really need to meet?

1. Schedule a start, not an end to your meeting – its over when its over, even if that’s just 5 minutes.

2. Be on time!

3. No multi-tasking … no device usage unless necessary for meeting

4. If you’re not getting anything out of the meeting, leave

5. Meetings are not for information sharing – that should be done before the meeting via email and/or agenda

6. Who really needs to be at this meeting?

7. Agree to action items, if any, at the conclusion of the meeting

8. Don’t feel bad about calling people out on any of the above; it’s the right thing to do.

I particularly love 0, 1, and 4. I rarely walk out of a meeting when I’m not getting anything out of it. I’m going to start paying more attention to this one.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/22/8-unusual-rules-for-meetings/?sf8871577=1