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People have lots of reasons for hoarding information, mostly bad ones. But sometimes it’s good to keep quiet. After all, you want information to get where it’s needed, in a way that serves everyone involved.
Our daily job as managers is simple. We observe, taking in information. We think about it, make decisions, and then act.1 In the past, observation created a bottleneck. Information was hard to find, hard to duplicate, and it traveled slowly—often by ship, train, or horseback.
Information was also scarce, and that made it valuable. Power was gained by hoarding information and being shrouded in mystery. That was then, this is now. Hoarding information used to be a show of power, now it’s just annoying. The bottleneck has moved, and with it, the dynamics of who wins and who loses.
Most of us are flooded with too much information. What we need is time and space to think and act. Now, power comes to those who can harness information by getting it to the right people at the right time, so they can move the organization forward.

Which brings us to confidentiality. Imagine a Powerful Executive Team (PET) that keeps things confidential unless there’s a need to know. The PET graces employees with the nuggets of wisdom needed to do their job. This scheme demands that the PET know enough about their employees to judge who needs what information and when. If the PET is hiring right—that is, hiring people smarter than they are—then they can’t predict who will need what. Innovation and creativity often come from someone using information in novel ways. The information-hoarding PET may strut around feeling powerful, but with China, Singapore, and Silicon Valley nipping at its heels, its days are numbered.
A better, twenty-first century strategy is making information part of your business infrastructure. Let go of information-as-power, and instead embrace information-as-lifeblood. You must channel it well, but if you make the right information pervasive, you’re building for strength.

Spread knowledge about strategy to set direction

Our brains are learning machines. If you imagine a goal, gather feedback, and allow flexible action, then performance improves almost without effort.2 Business is made of people—make goals and feedback the most important information to share.
Your goals are your vision, mission, and the subgoals they create. Everyone in your organization should know your vision and mission—your C-level team, VPs, managers, and line workers. The vision and mission become the ultimate “why” of everyone’s job. By knowing the larger vision, people know what they’re working toward. They can feel proud to be part of something large, even if their job is small.
And of course your vision and mission are goals to achieve. “We improve the quality of healthcare by providing doctors, nurses, and hospitals scientifically proven medical devices” is one company’s vision. You can bet every researcher, salesperson, manager, and customer service person can use the vision to decide daily if they are advancing the company. If not, they can make course corrections on the fly.

Strategy helps people link their job to the vision. One financial services company’s strategy is to be a “trusted friend” to its customers. If everyone at the company lives and breathes this, they’ll work to establish relationships rather than cutting customer calls short to meet call-length quotas.
“But wait,” you say, “you can’t have call reps on the phone for hours gabbing with customers!” Quite right. That’s where feedback comes in. People need to know their performance metrics (with as little delay as possible!) and how they link to the goals, so they can make their own corrections.
When personal finance software maker Intuit was small, Monday morning was time for the Metrics Meeting. Every department presented their critical measurements to the assembled crowd. Everyone was welcome, and when everyone knew sales, support call volumes, etc., the staff could brainstorm when something drifted off track.
Your most global measurements are your financial statements. If all employees know your business model and can read the financial statements, they can make informed judgment calls. Your call center customer reps quickly decide: “It’s not worth spending all day with a customer whose lifetime value is $500. My job is to resolve or let the customer go.” Or, if you are a fractional jet ownership company where customer lifetime value is in the millions, your reps can decide to hand-hold a single customer for the better part of their natural life.
(It may take tweaking to discover the best level of information sharing, but the rewards are great. For teaching people to link financials to their job, Profitability Business Simulations (www.profitability.com) has one of the best programs I’ve ever found.)

Spread knowledge about the organization to build efficient operations

It always amazes me how few people in business—other than the managers who institute a reorganization—understand their organization’s structure and processes. Yet that understanding is critical to making things happen.
The larger your business, the smaller the jobs. In a fifty-person company, one person might handle accounts receivable and be an account manager. Since they deal with customers as an account manager, they can mention receivables issues as part of that relationship. In a 5,000-person company, however, receivables may take four full-time people, each doing just part of the job.
In a really specific job, people lose the big picture. They don’t know where work comes from or where it goes next. And they rarely know why it matters.

So give them that knowledge! Make sure everyone knows where they are in the business, and why what they do matters. Then when they meet others in the process they can devise ways of making things run more smoothly. And besides, it helps people feel more meaning in their jobs. Gallup surveys say roughly 70 percent of workers are disengaged from their jobs. Do you doubt it? If your job were double-checking line 4 of form X3/J eight hours a day, you wouldn’t be champing at the bit, either. Help people know their contribution is meaningful by spreading the word about how everything works. Tell them. Show them. Remind them.

Not only must people know what they do, they must know what they don’t do. Don’t waste time and money duplicating effort. Let everyone know where responsibilities begin and end. If marketing chooses final product features, make sure product development knows so the groups don’t step on each others’ toes. While boundaries are easily set early on, make sure they’re emphasized at all times to keep a lid on turf battles.

Spread your reasoning to improve morale and buy-in

Everyone agrees salaries should be kept confidential. Why? Obviously, because people will compare. If they feel underpaid, they’ll complain, hurt morale, and maybe leave. Ditto for promotions.
If people think you promote and pay unfairly, everyone will assume you have the worst possible motives. The gossip mill will kick into overdrive, and morale will kick into underdrive. Help people understand why decisions are made and you can head off the worst of the problems.
Transparency can be risky! If salary information creates conflict, maybe the managers aren’t paying fairly. Maybe they really need an engineer when engineers are in great demand, so the company will pay the new engineer more than current engineers. Market reality? Yes. Fair? Of course not. In companies where salaries are public, these issues surface and get discussed. But these discussions should be based on sharing the real reasons and criteria behind salaries. People may not agree with the logic, but the undercurrent of betrayal and intrigue can vanish. It’s a tricky discussion. So much so that W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality movement, believes there should be no pay for performance, only flat salaries.
Personally, I like public salary data. It makes life harder for me, and that’s a good thing. I’m forced to justify salaries and make my expectations and pay policies crystal clear to everyone I hire. You may decide differently. Just make sure people understand the “why” behind your policy and they’ll be more likely to agree.

Spread reasoning about promotions to improve morale

Keeping promotions confidential may also be a disaster waiting to happen. When an individual gets promoted, everyone who wanted the job gets upset. They take that person’s promotion as a personal insult.
In an ideal world, everyone knows what’s expected of them. They knew where they still need to develop, and what the criteria are for the next promotion. But what happens when many people are qualified for one job? Face reality: We only choose one person over another because someone must be promoted. Bring up the possibility before it happens and you might head off a rebellion. If you wait until the promotion is announced, your hands are tied and everyone else has an unpleasant shock.
We don’t live in an ideal world. Sometimes we offer a promotion to keep an essential employee. Or a merger eliminates a redundant product line, and we must promote that project’s members to entice them to stay. Depending on your culture, these situations may be discussable, or not. The key is to share the reasoning and gain buy-in on the process behind promotions before promotions happen.

Share knowledge about critical events to preserve trust

Some business events change everyone’s lives. Layoffs, mergers, acquisitions, and C-level changes make an entire organization’s life uncertain. Uncertainty breeds fear. Fear breeds suspicion—and people will be suspicious of you, of “them,” and of everyone they suspect of being a mastermind behind the disruptive event.
Share knowledge about such events long before the rumor mill takes over. The rumor mill makes circumstances more dire than they really are. The rumor mill reinforces people’s wildest nightmares, and ensures any momentary comfort is properly interrupted by fear, uncertainty, and doubt. “Sure, management says your group will survive, but I hear AcquisitionCo already has a competing group. But you’ll survive the cut. Probably…”
Open discussion can head off the worst fears. Sometimes, details must be kept confidential. Sometimes, you actually don’t have the answers. Say so. “We are in merger talks with XYZ Co. We don’t yet know which groups will stay and which will go.” As long as you’re telling the truth, people will trust you. They’ll still be stressed out over the uncertainty, but you can offer them the certainty of knowing where you are. And that will preserve trust.

Keep a firm knowledge boundary at the company walls

Though information is your company’s lifeblood, you need to keep it inside your walls. Information about critical customers, mergers, and reorgs can jeopardize success if leaked to competitors or the media. Steep your culture in information sharing, and have people place a premium on confidentiality. Tell everyone what must be kept secret, and make sure they know what that means. Yes, it’s breaking confidentiality to tell your best friend, even if he crosses his heart and swears not to tell.

Information keeps people going. It helps people do their jobs, it feeds morale, and it lets everyone bring their full creativity towards common goals, rather than acting randomly. Share strategy, the “hows” and “whys” of how the organization works, and address uncertainty around major events. The goal is always to get everyone thinking together around creating the best results. Confidentiality has a place, but the question “what should be kept confidential?” has an important complement: “what must we share to become a breakthrough organization?”

© 2005 by Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

Workers in the United States put in more hours at work and take fewer vacation days than those in most industrialized countries. But the U.S isn’t the most productive country in the world. When it comes to full productivity, according to an article in The Economist, France wins, working only forty hours a week with lots of vacation. Conversations with clients and friends suggest we’re working hard, but, well, stupidly. We’re busy, but our important priorities are falling by the wayside as we work hard when we should be working smart.
Working smart means getting the same results in less time. To do that, you must change how you work. You’ll get the most by changing your speed, increasing focus, and organizing to do things in parallel.

Start with your eyes open

Before you read on, I must warn you: Working smart is risky. If you work smart, you’ll have more free time. That means more leisure, shorter work hours, or . . . more work. If you use the free time to take on more commitments, you’re just as busy as before, but now you are so tightly scheduled that a slip in one project can cascade to many more projects. Happiness happens when productivity enables a higher-quality life, not frantic overachievement.
Right now, we get more productive by working longer. But how about working faster? To work faster, you’ll have to get into the zone. In the zone, you’re running a marathon. You bring your full focus to one task and build momentum until you’re producing results like nobody’s business.
Key to entering the zone is eliminating distraction. Your major distractions—let me guess—are e-mail, telephone, visitors, and yourself. One of my clients, a high-tech CEO, blocks out four hours each day for focus time. He closes his door, forwards the phone to voice-mail, and starts working to build up his rhythm. He rarely works the entire four hours, but by having the time blocked out, he’s sure to get a couple of hours of solid work under his belt. And without distractions, he can spend time doing big-picture thinking, instead of being pulled into details. After five years, he considers this one of the best habits he’s ever developed.
Your biggest distractions will come from you, though. You’ll multitask. And sadly, you’ll believe you’re getting more done as you do. Face reality: People are less productive when multitasking, and that’s been shown in many studies over the last few years—check out “Juggling Too Many Tasks Could Make You Stupid” by Sue Shellenbarger in the Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2003. We feel busy, but most of that busy-ness is spent switching from task to task, not making forward progress on any one task.

Increase focus

If you’re like me, you hardly ever procrastinate—except for the really important stuff. The rubber bands get dutifully sorted by size, but that client proposal? Not so much. Another way to work smarter is by distinguishing busy from productive. Oh, we’re busy, and we feel productive, but we’re only productive if we’re producing the results that are most important to moving the company forward.
E-mail is a great way to waste time feeling productive. And we get so much of it, so surely those two hours a day reading and replying is time well spent. But if you spend two hours of an eight-hour workday on e-mail, that’s 25 percent of your time. Unless that 25 percent of your time is producing at least 25 percent of your total income, it’s a low-value-added activity, no matter how many one-shot, ad hoc contracts you get that way.
The same applies to any activity. The 80/20 rule says that 80 percent of your results come from just 20 percent of your efforts. Companies find most profits come from a few customers. And you’ll find most of your output comes from a few of your tasks. So what? Well, look at the math. If you double the time you spend on real-output-producing activities and stop doing the others, you’ll double your output and spend 60 percent less time! If you started with a ten-hour workday, you’ll get twice as much done, working just four hours.
Consider Nancy. Nancy is a self-employed sales trainer. In a typical day, she might write her electronic newsletter, deliver a one-hour training, make a dozen prospect calls, categorize her receipts, and straighten her office. These all must get done, yet only delivering the training and making prospect calls directly bring in business. Nancy’s hidden productivity opportunity comes in making more prospecting calls, and spending less time categorizing receipts. In fact, she can hire a bookkeeper for a year with the extra money she makes from one additional sale.
Once you’re concentrating on your high-output work, you can get another boost by streamlining. If Nancy gets 10 percent better at prospecting, that adds more to her bottom line than anything she can do in other areas.

Say no

My favorite 80/20 principle is saying “no.” Most of us take on more than we can handle. Then our companies lay off 30 percent of the work force and expect the same output from the survivors. Our overwork gets compounded by dumb high-level decision making.
If you’re working at capacity, say “no” to that new client. If someone proposes a project that will fall in 80 percent-work-for-20 percent-results category, just say “no.” Face facts, my friend: There’s a limit to how much you can do. You can manage that limit and do things well, or you can ignore the limit and do a lousy job on everything. The choice is yours.

Work in parallel, but don’t multitask

When you multitask, you do many things at once. Bad idea. But you can find ways to arrange work so many things are happening at once. Good idea. If you are collaborating on a report and writing a marketing plan, you could write the plan and then work on the report. But look closely! Your colleague must review the report. So first draft your report and send it to your colleague. While she’s reviewing, you get to work on the marketing plan. Work moves forward on both at the same time.
While we all work this way to some degree, a little thought can find golden opportunities for parallelism. Delegation is a great tool here. When you delegate a task, it keeps moving while you’re working on something else. Just make sure you are delegating to someone with the time, tools, and resources to do the job. Otherwise, you’ll find the task coming back to bite you.
Another great source of time delays is when something’s being produced or shipped. Will your prospectus be going to the printer? Great! Use that time to hammer through your high-leverage tasks. The product is en route to your customer? That means more time for you to do other things. But if you putter around with low-priority tasks until you ship last minute via Federal Express, you lose the chance to work in parallel.

Combine and think

You can get very creative in how you use these principles. A partner in a new private equity firm wanted to buy and run a company. He realized he would say “no” 99 percent of the time, and “yes” only once or twice. To speed things along, he got very clear on the criteria to disqualify a deal as quickly as possible. He said “no” a whole lot. His ability to quickly weed out the duds ultimately led to a deal that’s showing gains of $170 million in thirteen months. If he hadn’t streamlined his low-leverage activity (saying “no”) so he could reach his high-leverage “yes,” he would likely have invested in one of his earlier, not-so-great deals.
Have you noticed a pattern? Working faster, identifying your 80/20 opportunities, and using opportunities for parallelism all take thought and planning before you reap the rewards.
So your highest-leverage activity is taking regular time to reexamine and tweak how you work. This year, I’m spending a half-day every two weeks to build a life and business that are productive. And to me, productivity means producing maximum happiness for me, my family, and friends. I entreat you to do the same. Give it a shot. You’ll be happier, you’ll get more done, and you’ll get to see your kids for dinner. And that’s what I call working smart.

Letters from last month’s column Productivity Means Working Smarter, Not Longer have been gratifying and surprising. Most unexpected was a theme I heard over and over: “My manager won’t let me work smart. What do I do?” That’s a real problem. Let’s start by facing reality: In larger companies, your personal success doesn’t necessarily depend on doing what’s best for business.
Long-time readers will know your bosses should be setting direction, giving feedback, and helping you tap your internal motivation—but most don’t. So take charge of yourself, face the reality of organizational life, and do what it takes to get your needs met.

You’re there for the cash

Why do you go to work? If you’re one of the lucky few, your work ignites your passion. It challenges you. It lets you accomplish what you find most worthwhile, provides community, and helps you contribute in a meaningful way. You’d keep working even if you won the lottery. Chances are, that’s not you. Even if your job does some of that, you wouldn’t do it if it weren’t for the paycheck. That’s fine. Almost everyone works for the money. So face that. Roll it around in your brain for a few minutes. Repeat after me: At the end of the day, even if you enjoy your job, you’re there to get paid. So “working smart” means working in whatever way gets you paid.
Understand first that people decide what you get paid.
You’ve heard managers say they’ll heap riches on those who do a good job. Ignore their words; watch their actions. Who do they really reward? Why? Mostly, we reward those who meet our needs, first and foremost. If you know what your managers really want, you can meet their needs while meeting the needs of the business. The late Harvard psychology professor David McClelland had an easy framework you can use.
McClelland said motivation comes in three flavors: power, affiliation, and achievement. Power People want things to happen their way. Affiliation People want to be popular and liked. And Achievement People want results. We’re all part power, part affiliation, and part achievement.
Take Mary. Mary wakes up thinking, “What can I do today?” Her day isn’t complete unless she finishes something, preferably working at least a few hours with others. She tells her employees the outcomes she wants and lets them figure out the “how.” That makes Mary about 60 percent achievement, 30 percent affiliation, and 10 percent power.
Interestingly, we are taught that American business is all about achievement; it’s all that matters. When we talk “productivity,” “efficiency,” “goal-setting,” we’re swimming in achievement language. We set achievement goals and base bonuses on achievement measures. But guess what—people don’t actually behave that way, as your letters clearly show. They’re also driven by power and affiliation. “Working smart” means getting results, but even more, it means satisfying your boss’s needs for power and affiliation as well.

Manage your boss’s real needs

If your boss wants you to get results, my advice on “working smart” holds. Get stuff done. Measure what you get done. Discuss the measures with your boss. Do, do, do. Your boss will be thrilled that by working smart, you can get more stuff done in less time. Then go home early, and have a life.
If your bosses want power, they want things done their way. Like bureaucrats, Power bosses often work this way. Following procedure and doing things the right way is more important than doing the right things.
Your job for a Power boss is helping her empire-build and/or helping her get things done her way. Be careful, though. Your boss may be bad at figuring out what needs to be done. So even if she’s getting her way, her way just might hurt the business.
You often find this power game happening when a new executive arrives to take over the show. They axe old projects and start their own. But if the outgoing exec was doing great, maybe no changes need to be made. To an incoming Power Person, this won’t do. They must change things simply to have the organization reflect their desires.
An affiliation-oriented boss wants to be homecoming king. He wants to be liked. Your job becomes helping smooth out relationships, being friendly with your boss, and helping him manage the people relationships. Emotional intelligence helps you meet the needs of an Affiliation boss.
When you hear “we’re one, big happy family,” that’s affiliation talking. Affiliation puts relationships first. I like that; relationships bind organizations together. But affiliation can go too far. Keeping incompetents in powerful positions just because they’re friends may honor relationships but tank the company. Even though your boss may not value it as much, make sure the work still gets done so you have someplace to work come next year.

Work smart by balancing all needs

All this comes back to working smart. If you’re trying to work smart and your boss says sorting paper clips is more important than crafting a distribution strategy, you need to know what’s happening inside your boss’s head and find the real motivation. Is your boss usually an achievement junkie? Then maybe she has a real reason paper clips are important. Talk to your boss. Make sure you both understand and agree on priorities, based on what it will take to get the job done.
If you have a Power boss, she may be more concerned with having you sort paper clips her way than doing your job your way. You need to choose to own the business priorities yourself. Figure out those priorities and ask your boss how you can meet them. Since your boss needs to dictate the “how,” you choose the right “what.”
The affiliation-oriented boss may have relationship concerns. “We can’t alienate our existing distributors. They’ve been with us for years! Joe and I go golfing every Wednesday.” Here, you must factor the relationships into account. Approach your boss with a positive attitude and make sure you approach your distribution with the relationship goals in mind as well.

Line up your compensation

Even though you’ll meet your boss’s motivational style, you still need to get paid. Socially, we rarely acknowledge power and affiliation goals out loud. Those goals are considered unprofessional, even though they drive so many of us. So you need to frame your job in terms of achievement goals that will get you paid, while making it clear that you’ll meet your boss’s power and affiliation needs along the way. Trust me—as long as you’re helping a power-oriented boss expand their empire, you’ll be able to find a meeting of the minds about what you need to do to get paid and move ahead.
Notice that I’ve said very little about meeting the organization’s needs. That’s because only an executive who understands the link between their own needs and the organization’s needs will value your attempts to do the right thing for the business. In the final analysis, it isn’t between you and the company; it’s between you and the people who will promote and pay you.
That group consists of more than just your boss. Your boss’s boss and other senior managers may be watching. Your Power boss may report to an Achievement executive. If your efforts are visible to the exec, helping your boss achieve in a way that her boss recognizes might be your best strategy.

You can’t have it all

At this point, you might be thinking that with all this strategizing about satisfying the three needs of management, it will be a miracle if you can juggle it all. Welcome to organizational life. If you have family or community needs, you can toss those into the mix. (This balancing act drives some people to self-employment. It was sure a factor when I set out on my own.)
The bad news is that you can’t satisfy your needs, your boss’s, and your organization’s. After all, it’s in the organization’s best interest for you to forgo a raise while working an extra ten hours a week. You’ll almost certainly need to sacrifice something. But the good news is that it’s your choice. Choose wisely

I’ll bet I know why you’re reading this: You want the secret of success. And today, I plan to deliver. But the secret isn’t what you think. It’s not a practice, business model, or trend. Those are all just by-products of the real secret. All the “best practices” in the world won’t bring you results unless you understand what really drives success. What is it? Simple: belief.

Beliefs are where it all starts—they determine everything. Beliefs about what’s possible guide the goals you’ll set. Beliefs about human nature guide whom you hire, how you pay them, and how you promote them. Beliefs about the future have an impact on your strategy. In short, your beliefs become policies that become results. As much as we love to think we’re logical, beliefs don’t come from logic. Beliefs aren’t about what’s true; they’re about what we happen to absorb from family, friends, and culture. When I was seven, I was happily singing away when my dad told me to plan on a different career choice. Wham! For thirty years I believed I couldn’t sing. (Six months with a voice teacher revealed a very nice singing voice, thank you very much. Who knew? Not my dad.)

So-called conventional wisdom is just beliefs. Everyone knows this is true, and no one questions it. Growth is good. Sure it is. I always love hearing Warren Buffett discuss See’s Candies, a business that funded some of his early acquisitions. Warren is keenly aware that See’s has a natural limit to how big it can get without hurting its business. So he lets it stay small (small by his standards). As the second richest man in the world, his beliefs about growth catch my eye.

(Note the hidden belief there? Do you believe being rich means someone is smarter, or that their opinions are worth listening to? That’s just a belief. It could be wrong.)

Beliefs are sticky. Once you have a belief, you’ll interpret the world to match the belief. You’ll throw away or discount evidence against the belief. Just listen to any political debate. When data supports a point of view, the proponents leap. When data doesn’t, they try to discredit the data. It’s the belief driving, not reality.

Drive your business by driving your beliefs

If beliefs drive everything else, you owe it to yourself to know your own beliefs and choose them carefully. You just need to decide what to believe and then use the real belief-creating methods to drive the belief home. Oddly, you don’t have to choose beliefs that correspond to reality. You can choose any beliefs at all, as long as they drive you to create the world you want to create. For example, you can believe people basically want to show up and do a good job. If you do, you’ll create structures and systems that support people doing so. In turn, people will show up and do a good job. The belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Next time you study the people you admire, ignore the details of what they think made the difference in their success. Instead, listen for their beliefs. When you see a company succeed by having dual career tracks for managers and scientists, the key isn’t so much the specific program. Try on the belief that there are multiple forms of excellence and you should offer multiple forms of success to celebrate them all. That underlying belief may well lead to more innovation than just dual career tracks.

Old beliefs get in the way

Even if you identify great new beliefs, your existing beliefs will fight back. You might decide to believe that organic, self-funded growth is the healthiest. Yet your dot-com-fueled fantasies of Google’s IPO keep insisting at the back of your mind that high-growth, high-profile is the path to a great company. Your old beliefs put up a formidable roadblock to the new.

When you start fighting yourself or saying, “Yes, but . . . ,” congratulate yourself! You’ve found a limiting belief. If you preface it by saying, “Of course, it’s human nature that . . .” or “Everybody knows . . . ,” then you know you’ve found a really powerful one.

So kill it. Mull your conventional wisdom over in your mind, and start taunting it. “Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. You’re a limiting belief. Get lost!” If you have fun with your belief, you actually weaken its hold. Slowly start playing “what if” and make them wilder and wilder. You’ll find yourself slipping outside the box of your own thinking.

Want some good ones to start with? Try challenging some of my favorite conventional wisdoms:

• the goal of business is to make money for shareholders
• growth is good
• quarterly results matter
• the size of my office matters
• pay should be related to performance

people are our most important asset (if you’re in Houston, air conditioning is your most important asset, and don’t you forget it!)

Use emotion and selective attention to solidify the new belief. Remember that logic is the quickest way not to change a belief. Beliefs, like significant others, are impervious to logic. So go straight for emotion.

Contemplate something you believe is true. Notice the emotions you feel, “rightness,” or a confidence. And now hold that feeling while you start repeating your new belief to yourself. You literally want to start transferring your feelings of certainty to the new belief.

But feeling isn’t enough! You also have to train yourself to filter reality, just like your current beliefs filter reality. So start reviewing in your mind every example you can think of where your new belief held. If you’re adopting the belief, “we can find ways to partner with competitors,” start searching for every example you can find where competitors have partnered. For examples, read Co-opetition. Meditate on Microsoft buying a hundred-million-dollar chunk of Apple as the latter struggled for growth. Think about research joint ventures like the MIT Media Lab, where all partners pony up the bucks, and all share the results.

When you come across a counter-example, simply ignore it. “Gee,” you think, “my dad did business with a competitor and got wiped out.” Forget Dad’s two decades of bankruptcy and depression. Just focus on the times when partnering worked. Remember, you’re building a castle in the sky here. This isn’t about accuracy, it’s about training your emotions to act differently.

It’s OK to have an unreal belief—your current beliefs are just as unreal, only in the other direction. Remember: Beliefs just act as filters that help you direct behavior; they’re not about what’s real. You’re adopting beliefs because they will lead you to do different things, build different structures, and get different results than your current beliefs.

Regardless of belief, you still need a high-quality decision-making process. Making decisions should include a thoughtful phase where you leave beliefs behind and bring in data, real-world considerations, and lots of alternative viewpoints. That’s when you have the chance to avoid Dad’s fate, while still getting the benefits from “co-opetitive” innovations. You take reality into account in your decision-making process, not in your underlying beliefs.

There is a lot more to beliefs. They form the box that everyone seems to want to think outside of. They turn into organizational behavior, and they also have a deep impact on your own actions, your feelings, your family, and your culture. They’re one of the most powerful forces I know, and we’ve just scratched the surface here. I will be discussing beliefs on my blog and in my newsletter in weeks to come. Because the more you design your beliefs, the more you can create the results that you want in the world. Or at least, that’s my belief