According to Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times, pessimism is good for business.  The thinking behind this statement seems to be that pessimists are better prepared to deal with the world as it is rather than how we would like it to be.  I find her suggestion interesting that an organisation should have a mixture of the two types if it is to function with maximum effectiveness.

This notion is not unique to her.  Apparently uber guru Tom Peters recently tweeted his appreciation for a book by Julien K Norem called The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak.  This book is a recent edition to a selection of authors who either warn against the dangers of the positive psychology movement (Barbara Ehrenreich) or positively (!) extol the virtues of pessimism (Roger Scruton).

I find myself conflicted.  On the one hand, I like the idea of using what you are, playing to your own strengths.  So, if you’re an introvert, discover or invent ways to turn this to your advantage.  Likewise if you are a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) in the workplace.  On the other hand, I believe that key business skills such as motivation and resilience are largely due to your ability to initiate ‘growth mindsets’ or positive ‘explanatory styles’ in order to interpret goals and setbacks to yourself.

I suspect that an answer lies in the notion that optimism and pessimism, introversion and extroversion, sensitivity and thick-facedness, are different strategies or tools the skillful businessperson employs as the context requires.  None binds; none defines.

Do you agree?

The relationship between optimism, pessimism and the economic downturn is a fascinating one.  I’ve blogged before about how some American thinkers have tried to blame the recession on a surplus of optimism, untempered by the sense of realism that pessimism brings.  But it now seems that too much pessimism is bad for you too.  In fact, increasingly, the US is positively – or should that be negatively? – drowning in it.

A recent article in the business section of the Wall Street Journal warns that a polarised and pessimistic US is a big threat.  Hardly a major insight.  What is informative, however, are the reasons why US economic pessimism is on the increase.  Two reasons are suggested:

“The big question is why have Americans become so pessimistic? The most striking explanation is political polarisation. Many Americans at both ends of the spectrum are actually hoping for a double dip, since this will discredit the Obama administration … Another reason for US pessimism is that national prosperity is dependent on the world economy as never before, and acknowledging this is proving traumatic.”

National party politics and American stress due to globalisation – not much we can do about either of these, is there?  Go here to read the perspective of British journal Mark Mardell.  If you want to get a taste of how sharply divisive all this is, take a read at the hundreds of comments.

Or maybe not.  Reading the might make you, well, pessimistic…

Whatever, it seems that from the far side of the Atlantic, we’re not done with (the) depression yet.

Image credit: Beverly & Pack.

An Australian psychologist has claimed that feeling grumpy ‘is good for you’.  At least that’s the spin the popular media put on the findings of Professor Joe Forgas of the University of South Wales.  What the guy actually says is a little more nuanced.  His claim is that there are some advantages to negative moods, just as there are to positive moods.

For instance, negative moods foster these sort of effects:

• attentiveness
• careful thinking
• paying greater attention to the external world

Positive moods are valuable to promote:

• creativity
• flexibility
• co-operation

He actually claims that mildly negative mood may promote

“…a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style… Positive mood is not universally desirable: people in negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages.”

This is interesting to me due to my recent rant on one Americans journalist’s attempt to blame the recession on optimism.  It seems she might at last have some scientific backing from this study.

My own viewpoint is to wonder whether there is a key distinction missing here between optimism as an emotion and optimism as a thinking strategy.  Forgas talks about mood, which is nothing other than a relatively long lasting emotional state.  Martin Seligman’s version of optimism is as a habit of mind that is learnable rather than an emotion.  In the jargon, optimism is an ‘explanatory style‘ or a way of explaining your successes and failures to yourself.  The opposite of this learned optimism is learned helplessness rather than pessimistic feelings.

It’s worth noting that Seligman recognises the limits of optimism by itself and prefers to advocate what he calls and flexible optimism.  John Braithwaite, an academic at the Australian National University, suggests that in modern society we undervalue hope because we wrongly think of it as a choice between hopefulness and naivete as opposed to scepticism and realism.  It depends how you define your terms.

So perhaps we can admit that a naive optimism, with its risk-taking abandon, unbalanced by realistic worst-case scenario planning and black-hat thinking, might have been a factor in the recession.  (My money is still on a mixture of natural economic cycles and the emotion of greed as the prime causes.)

It hardly follows from this at all optimism is bad, or that optimism has no part in getting ourselves out of recession!

True, optimism doesn’t in itself change reality.  But it does help your resilience to reality, and drive your motivation to go on and change it.  Pessimism asks ‘why?’  Optimism asks ‘how?’  There’s a worldview of difference between the two.

Image credit: dabert.

In Cutting the Crap of Recession-Speak (Part 1) I contrasted the advice of entrepreneur Sir David Tang with our Prime Minister Gordon Brown.  Tang urges small-but-optimistic thinking, whereas Brown preaches a kamikaze imprudent doctrine of spend, spent, spend.

Now it seems that Gordo has got on message.  For this new attempt to harness positive psychology in the name of politics, see Brown warns against ‘pessimism’.  But even here, he can’t resist the use of that histrionic, grandiose language that may well be one of the causes of the recession in the first place!  For instance, he claims that the economic crisis should be treated as “the difficult birth-pangs of a new global order”.  I find this kind of overtly Orwellian language disturbing.   

Now, in the same vain, Brown urges global ‘confidence’.  Wow.  First optimism, now confidence.  You’d think the economy was like a person, with feelings and self-esteem problems.  And Brown is like a life-coach, whose task it is to work  through the issue involved and recommend a personal development plan.  I’ve talked before about the different metaphors employed to illustrate business, from game to war to adventure.  Here’s another one: business as therapy.

So what’s my point about this recession-speak?  In sum:

(1) People can be confident or optimistic; businesses or economies  or states cannot.  To state that they can is a form of madness confuses the issue.

(2) The best formula for a healthy economy is to have individuals within it who are economically healthy.  This means encouraging self-reliance and entrepreneurship, at the same time as discouraging debt and government regulation.  Brown only does talks of doing the first, and even then it’s a complete disaster half-heartedly.

(3) Brown talks up the downturn in order to talk up himself.  He is the One Who Saved the World (or that’s the perception he wants anyway).  The modern state has a messiah complex, often creating crises in order to then be seen as a saviour.  This recession is a case in point.  Hence the ridiculous language.

The state creates nothing, it produces nothing.  People do these things, people in business, in industry, in manufacturing, in commerce.  People like me.  And what I want from super-Gordon is this – cut the crap, stand aside,  and let us get on with it!

]]> http://www.sensei-winbeforehand.co.uk/2009/02/25/cutting-the-crap-of-recession-speak-part-2/feed/ 0 http://www.sensei-winbeforehand.co.uk/2009/02/13/cutting-the-crap-of-recession-speak-part-1/ http://www.sensei-winbeforehand.co.uk/2009/02/13/cutting-the-crap-of-recession-speak-part-1/#comments Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:00:50 +0000 Allen Baird, Partner http://senseilearningandperformance.wordpress.com/?p=1548

I’ve just read the best article yet only article worth reading on the current recession.

I’m no macro-economist, so I’ve found it hard to follow some of the more technical melodramatic discussions so beloved by the media.  How did this global economic tsunami downturn come about?  An over-inflated property market?  A housing crisis?  Banks too eager to lend?  Stock market greed and irresponsibility?  Premiership footballer wages? Or – my opinion for what it’s worth – is it part of a natural cycle?

I couldn’t give a stuff. I’m not sure it really matters.  The point is – What do we do about it?

So far I’ve heard two different pieces of advice.  The first comes from an academic economist, socialist, and politician.  So it’s suspect to start with. Name?  Gordon ‘Golden’ Brown.  Occupation?  Unelected British Prime Minister.  Advice?  Spend more money than we have.  Chances of success? Nil point!

Like I said at the start, I’m no academic economist.  So you’ll forgive me if I scratch my head a this one.  But isn’t it bad to get into debt?  Isn’t is irresponsible to spend what you don’t have?  Doesn’t this come under the heading of patently idiotic short-term thinking?

Again, my opinion – for what it’s worth, blah, blah – is that there must be a barkingly obvious connection unless you’re as think as champ direct correlation between micro-economics (how individuals and their families run their finances) and macro-economics (how nations and governments make a mess of run theirs).  In fact, this correlation is a cornerstone of modern economic theory, which says that the macro is/should be build on the micro (this is called ‘common sense’ ‘microfoundations’).

So what Gordo is saying is this.  Someone up to their eyes in credit card debt has their best hope of recovery by getting their hands on even more plastic to pay it off.  No wonder the mood is gloomy.  If reasoning so stupid as this is the best we’ve got, then we might as well admit defeat right now.  As Monty Python would say -  ‘Stop it!  You’re being silly!’ And now for something completely different.

Out if this mist rides forth Sir David Tang, Entrepreneur!  In an article entitled Optimism is the cure for the downturn, Sir David slays Gordon the Goliath with the sling of positive psychology.  ‘Pessimism has an uncanny knack of being self-fulfilling,’ he says.  Even – especially? – on a global scale.  Supporting small business is key, along with ‘solid business sense based on the fundamentals of supply and demand, with particular reference to the efficiency of the workforce.’  Although the collapses are big, the solution is to ‘think small’ in these ways.

But my favorite quote is this, and with it I’ll end.  I promise.

“It is only with a sense of optimism, preferably accompanied by a sense of energy and laughter, that we will be able to pick ourselves up from a broken Humpty Dumpty.”

Politicians and media and other scare merchants – are you listening?

Laughter, not fear, is the key!

Image credit: fuzzbabble.