Pay Attention to Bad Vibes, with Max Bazerman | Big Think

Pay Attention to Bad Vibes, with Max Bazerman

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Harvard Business School Professor Max Bazerman discuses how important it is to not just to be able to focus, but to be a good noticer as well. Bazerman is the author of The Power of NoticingWhat the Best Leaders See ().

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MAX BAZERMAN:

Max Bazerman has authored or co-authored 19 books in the field of decision making, negotiation, and ethics. Bazerman’s latest book, co-authored with Ann E. Tenbrunsel, called Blind Spot (2011) is the main source of material for this interview. Bazerman and Tenbrunsel argue that expensive ethics interventions within organizations will always fail because they are predicated on the faulty assumption that individuals always recognize an ethical dilemma when it is presented to them. Bazerman argues that, in fact, we often behave contrary to our best ethical intentions without knowing it. In Blind Spot, Bazerman points to case studies that illustrate ethical lapses such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster, steroid use in Major League Baseball, the crash in the financial markets, and the energy crisis, as well as numerous case studies that informs his current research. What all of these catastrophes teach us is that decision makers can be blinded by self-interest or “Group think” or other psychological motivations and commit ethical lapses without realizing it.

This idea of a blind spot has also informed previous books on the subject of negotiation, in which Bazerman argues that a negotiator’s failure to see and use accessible and perceivable information while seeing and using other equally accessible and perceivable information hinders value in negotiations.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Max Bazerman: I’ve spent the last dozen years thinking about what I consider to be one of the fundamental challenges of leadership and that is the challenge to notice critical information in your environment. There are so many interesting stories of the new millennium, of situations where there were people who behaved inappropriately and they get an awful lot of attention in the headlines from Madoff to J.P. Morgan’s recent problems to Enron. And across the hundreds of scandals there are often some bad people doing some bad things. My focus is not on those individuals but the fact that in each of those cases there are so many other people who should have noticed something was wrong and they didn’t.

Warren Bennis the leadership scholar talked about one of the characteristics of an excellent leader as somebody who is a first class noticer. And my book on The Power of Noticing is really an attempt to help MBA students, executives to become first class noticers so that they can be aware of problems, challenges and opportunities that would allow them to be more effective. The truth is I don’t consider myself to be a particularly effective noticer. I’ve been working on it a lot in the last dozen years but I always took pride in my ability to focus as opposed to my ability to notice. And some of us who focus very, very effectively might want to think about the question of whether they can develop the skills of noticing to go along with their skills of focusing.

A number of years ago I had an opportunity to notice and I failed to do so and it’s been an obsession with me ever since. On March 10, 2005 I was hired by the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark case that they were fighting against the tobacco industry. I was hired as a remedy witness. That is, I was hired to provide recommendations to the court about what the penalty would be if, in fact, the Department of Justice succeeded in its trial against the tobacco industry. I had spent a couple hundred hours working for the Department of Justice including submitting my written direct testimony which had been submitted to the court.

I was scheduled to be on the stand on May 4 where the tobacco industry attorneys would be asking me a series of questions. On April 30, a number of days before my May 4 testimony I was in Washington D.C. to meet with the Department of Justice attorneys to prepare for my time on the stand. When the day started the Department of Justice attorney that I had been working with said to me, “Professor Bazerman.” This occurred long after he had learned to call me Max. He said, “Professor Bazerman, the Department of Justice requests that you amend your testimony to note that the testimony would not be relevant if any of the following four conditions existed.”

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