Book: Top Dog

In today’s post, I’m going to put down my notes on Top Dog by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. This post took me way longer than I had expected as I went through my highlights to refresh my memory and figured out what exactly I want to note in this post. That whole process took me two evenings and then the actual writing of the post another day. I’m not going to jot down all of my highlights here because then this post would be extremely long, maybe 4000+ words. I’m going to try to keep it shorter than that.

This book is full of interesting research studies but I think I will just focus on those things that one can actually use. There is some research on genetics and hormones, and those are things I feel you can’t do anything about. I’d rather focus on things we can use (although I’m having problems eliminating notes down to the most interesting and most useful).

Okay, let’s give this a shot. Here are 6 noteworthy things to know.

Playing to Win versus Playing Not to Lose

When in competitions, playing to win is the stance you want to choose because here you take risks to pursue your goal of winning. Playing to not lose is a conservative stance where your goal is to not make mistakes. This avoidance of mistakes is called a prevention-oriented mode. Paradoxically though, playing to not lose actually predisposes you to make more mistakes. To get into the playing to win mode – a gain-oriented stance – you have to change your framework from viewing the situation as a threat to a seeing the situation as a challenge. A threat situation is where you are being judged and you cannot make a mistake whereas a challenge is where you are not expected to make no mistakes or expected to win and you have a fighting chance to win. Under a challenge situation you have the freedom to take risks. So somehow you have to view the situation as a challenge.

The interesting thing is that in today’s work world, most jobs are prevention-oriented rather than gain- oriented. Think accountant, firefighter, nurse, police officer. But in order for companies to grow, you need gain-oriented mode.

Positive Thinking is Not the Way to Go

Apparently, research shows that all of that positive thinking really does not help you during competitions or help you recover when you make mistakes during high pressure moments. Positive thinking is really only useful for boosting or reviving your motivation when things are down. The way this works is when things are down, you think back to your peak moments in the past with the idea that if it happened in the past, it can happen again in the future.

What does work? Using additive thinking.

There’s subtractive thinking which is something like “I wish I hadn’t done that” whereas additive thinking is along the lines of “I wish I had done x”. It might be something similar to what I do when I drive home after a long day. During the drive, my mind sometimes goes over the day and it starts to tell a story about the day I had or what I’m working on. Usually I’m thinking about a problem I’ve been working on and my mind kind of tells a story where I am relaying to someone my ideas on the work I’m doing. And typically, the story goes off in a new direction with a new approach to the problem.

Teamwork: It’s Not What Everybody Thinks

Teamwork is really popular and our culture thinks there is some kind of magic going on when everybody gets together as one jolly team and wins. Teamwork is the answer to all of our problems!

Um, not necessarily. Sometimes we just waste a lot of time and energy being in teams. For one thing, it takes a lot of coordination to get everybody on the same page. Another is a typical office worker is actually on multiple teams so he can’t devote his energy on one thing; his focus and energy is often split. There is evidence that seems to suggest the teams are no more productive or a big money maker than otherwise. Teams are nice – I actually enjoy in being on teams – but they do take work to make teams succeed.

Then there is something called the 60/30/10 rule: 60% of the team’s fate is already decided before the team meets. That 60% is due to the leader’s “efficacy”, the attainability of the goal, and the ability of the teammates. 30% of the team’s fate is decided during the initial launch of the team by meeting where tasks and responsibilities are divvied up (or they should be divvied up). So fully 90% of the team’s fate happens before the team starts doing the work. The upfront work is really key to the team’s success. Trying to change the success of a team in mid-stream is nearly impossible; you practically have to relaunch a new team.

One key component of teams is that everybody must have a clear role in the team. It can’t be a free for all when people just chip in to do whatever needs to be done. There has to be clear roles that fits each person’s temperament and expertise; otherwise, some critical component of the teamwork may not get done, especially during the heat of an intense crisis.

And, there is an interesting opinion that not everybody on the team has to be a “team player”; sometimes you want someone to be a “reactive”. Most people, as part of the socialization feature of humans, absorb what the general mood or behavior that society or team is displaying. It’s like a generally agreed upon and unspoken consensus on how everyone should act. Researchers call this “mirroring”. A simple example of mirroring happens when one person yawns, another person will do the same. Or if one person crosses his legs, the other person will unconsciously mimic that action. When we get into a team, there is a lot of mirroring going on which is part of our strong socialization feature. But there are some people who are immune to this and they are called “reactives”. They have a strong subconscious desire to not be controlled by others and sometimes you want those people on your team, especially when the team has lost the desire to do the work or the energy level is low. These reactives can rebel against the general poor mood and try to turnaround things and move the team forward.

How to Handle Stars

So, teamwork is a big buzzword in the working world but use that word in job advertisements, you end up driving away talented people. Talented people are not attracted to “teamwork” because they fear that the work environment will not be personally challenging and will lack potential for growth, learning or skills development.

Think of it this way: they have always been stars since a young age, so asking them to blend into a team is going to make them miserable.

To attract the stars you are going to have to convince them that a team will achieve more than they can achieve alone. You will have to assure them that you will recognize them for their individual achievements. And most importantly, let the stars be the stars, as long as they treat others nicely and with respect. Allow their performance to flourish, thus forcing others on the team to catch up with the stars and eventually moving the team to greater heights.

East Germans: Why Some Failed Upon Reunification with the West

I think this section is going to be really pertinent to our situation in the future, once we get to the other side. Here’s the background:

When the Berlin wall fell and East Germany joined with West Germany, the East German industries needed to ditch the communist system and join the modern world, but there was a disturbing trend. Those who were highly educated took low paying jobs rather than engineering or technology jobs. The East Germans couldn’t make themselves over for the new world. They had been trained to wait for their bosses to tell them what to do; they had no initiative.

I will say this is frightening because I think a lot of our citizens are like the old East Germans: we tend to wait until our leaders tell us what to do rather than thinking for ourselves. Of course, we have to be able to think critically and I fear a lot of us are unable to do so (I’m thinking about the Fox viewers who are unable to discern the lies coming out of certain opinion makers). However, the world on the other side of this current crisis will be changed and we must be able to critically think and find our way in this new world.

The ones who succeeded in East Germany are those who had what the authors call agency.

“Agency is the capacity to act independently, to make one’s own free choices, and to make decisions quickly. Agency is the core inside self-starters, the trait that grows into personal initiative. Those low in agency don’t trust themselves, and they are more reliant on others’ leadership. They give up easily…Those succeeding in the new East didn’t need to wait for approval to move forward. They believed they could put their ideas into practice. These were the men and women who overcame job layoffs and became the Jena start-ups.” Top Dog, PO Bronson and Ashley Merryman, 2013, p. 226

The authors say that in order to instill agency in children, you have to allow them to make their own decision and their own mistakes. Children then learn how to make decisions, how to recover from their mistakes, and get comfortable with making decisions under ambiguity.

But as adults long past childhood, how do we develop this agency? I don’t know and that’s troubling.

Competition Breeds the Creative Mindset

Finally, I come to creativity, the other hot buzzword. The main takeaway I got from this section is that competition forces you to get creative as you try to outcompete the others to win. It is very similar to the idea that competition in the market brings in innovation so that makes sense. Innovation is a very close cousin to creativity that I tend to interchange them.

And creativity entails a lot of agency. You have to be independent minded because creative ideas will likely face pushback from the general populace. You can’t just follow the crowd if you want to be creative or innovative; you have to follow your own path and that’s scary.

And that’s it. Those are the 6 interesting things I found in the book. Now I’m ready to move on, as you can probably tell.

Wow! Just wow! The Republican state legislature made the people either choose to forego the in-person vote (in effect be disenfranchised) or risk their life by voting. I believe the issue went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Assembly Speaker, Robin Vos, located at some voting precinct in full PPE, was telling the people that it was safe to vote.

Yeah, so why aren’t you out there without the PPE, Vos?

Other states have been postponing their primaries so why can’t Wisconsin do the same?

This is just stunningly bad.,

My impression is that Wisconsin in recent years had turned to voting Republican and voted in Scott Walker as governor. Then, maybe in 2018, the voters turned Democratic and voted out Scott Walker.

Kansans of the tax debacle fame still haven’t learned their lessons. They once voted in Sam Brownback who proceeded to introduce large tax cuts and the people were all in favor (or that was my impression). The problem was the tax cuts were so huge that the state government lost revenue and had to institute spending cuts – some will say that was the actual plan all along. A big portion of the spending cuts was education.

Lo and behold, a few years later, the Kansans realized what a mistake the tax cut and thus the education cuts was and voted him out. They voted in Laura Kelly, a Democrat, as governor.

But Kansas still has a lot of Republicans in their legislature and recently, they overruled the governor’s order to restrict church gatherings to 10 people or less: basically, the churches could not perform Easter Service, unless they could have 10 or less, with social distancing, inside the church. The Republicans overruled

this and said that the churches have the right to perform these Easter services; the churches are exceptions to the stay-at-home rule.

That’s a disaster.

Fortunately, most churches have been level-headed and recognized the importance of the social dancing. They have been creative in coming up with solutions to their dilemma but there are a few holdouts. I feel sorry for the denizens of those churches: they are going to suffer the consequences of attending Sunday sermons during the pandemic. These will be superspreader events.

It looks like Kansas is going to have to go through a couple of rounds of these kinds of disastrous decisions before they learn that the current Republicans in America do not have the average person’s best interest in mind.