M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

The Hidden Key to Productivity

Beginning at Brigham Young University, for years an unpublished and incompleted manuscript has circulated among those in the know, passed hand to hand like a secret treasure in copies made at Kinkos. While the sale of most published books is fueled by marketers who pay big dollars for advertising and author's tours, this book in its unfinished form has flourished, moved only by ardent word of mouth. "You must read this. It will change your life."

It is that most delicious of treats-the undiscovered cache of knowledge and surprising insights not yet served up to the general public.

The book-which still is not available in a published form-is Bonds of Anguish, Bonds of Love by Dr. Terry Warner, BYU professor of philosophy who was trained at Yale and has been an associate of Oxford University.. It was much to his surprise that he kept hearing about college courses that were using it as a text and copy centers that kept a master for duplication. One day, curious about the phenomenon, he got on the telephone and found that several copy centers kept a master of the book, and they were selling 300 manuscripts a week. Before long, Anasazi was using it as the core material for their work with troubled youth and their parents, and corporations were clamouring for the information to solve their organizational challenges. Trying to track where the book had traveled with and without him, Dr. Warner estimated that scores of thousands of copies-maybe as many as 80,000 copies-have made it into the hands of people.

Clearly this material had legs, and why? Because when people read the book they recognized a rarely spoken truth in it, and they saw themselves and their relationships as they never had before.

Dr Warner said, "The stream of self-help books and tapes is never ending. There's a lot of people telling us what kind of beings we should be and what kind of life we should have together, what our morals should be, and what our habits should be. We can receive advice on how to assert ourselves or how to get along. But nobody is out there telling us how to bring our hearts in line so that doing these things is authentic.

"You can take a successful person's formula and try to apply it, but if your heart remains the same, then nothing has changed. You try the method, and then you say, "That didn't work. My life and my relationships aren't any better." There is this delusion that if you do certain things, you'll get the result, but they don't help us. They just become new expressions of the same old fears and the same old self-absorption. If you carry your old motivations into a new life project, a new strategy for getting on in life, it will just be a variation on the old theme. Until we change from the inside we run up against this reality: Wherever I go, there I am. Our work is about how we go about becoming the kind of people for whom these habits are outflowings of the heart and come across that way.

"There is a lot of teaching done in the world," said Dr. Warner, "and almost all of it presents ideas that may or may not correlate with what you already believe. If it correlates with what you believe, it is just a bit of additional information. If it doesn't correlate, you may not get it or be interested. Then there is a kind of teaching that so deeply identifies the kind of being that you are and what you believe that to hear it is to be jolted with a kind of shock of recognition. To understand it is to change."

Bonds of Anguish, Bonds of Love has been a book that people find filled with that shock of recognition, an articulation of what on some level you know, but have never heard put quite that way before. It introduces the idea that many of the problems that prevent superior performance and happy relationships-including problems at work-- and at home come from a little-known problem called "self-deception." Bonds remains unpublished. Dr. Warner is waiting for that break in his life to finish and refine what has already transported and transformed thousands of people. However, the Arbinger Institute, a management and consulting firm created by Dr. Warner and his associates, have published a book this month, Leadership and Self-Deception, based on Terry Warner's groundbreaking insights. Meridian will be serializing this book, publishing one chapter a week, for the next several weeks to share its startling insights with our readers. The chapters are short, telling through stories about the important concepts Dr. Warner teaches.

Leadership and Self-Deception-Getting out of the Box
The Arbinger Institute

Preface

For too long, the issue of self-deception has been the realm of deep-thinking philosophers, academics, and scholars working on the central questions of the human sciences. The public remains generally unaware of the issue. That would be fine except that self-deception is so pervasive it touches every aspect of life. "Touches" is perhaps too gentle a word to describe its influence. Self-deception actually determines one's experience in every aspect of life. The extent to which it does that, and in particular the extent to which it is the central issue in leadership, is the subject of this book.To give you an idea of what's at stake, consider the following analogy. An infant is learning to crawl. She begins by pushing herself backward around the house. Backing herself around, she gets lodged beneath the furniture. There she thrashes about--crying and banging her little head against the sides and undersides of the pieces. She is stuck and hates it. So she does the only thing she can think of to get herself out--she pushes even harder, which only worsens her problem. She's more stuck than ever.

If this infant could talk, she would blame the furniture for her troubles. She, after all, is doing everything she can think of. The problem couldn't be hers. But of course, the problem is hers, even though she can't see it. While it's true she's doing everything she can think of, the problem is precisely that she can't see how she's the problem. Having the problem she has, nothing she can think of will be a solution.

Self-deception is like this. It blinds us to the true cause of problems, and once blind, all the "solutions" we can think of will actually make matters worse. That's why self-deception is so central to leadership--because leadership is about making matters better. To the extent we are self-deceived, our leadership is undermined at every turn--and not because of the furniture. We have written this book to educate people about this most central of problems--a problem that has been the exclusive terrain of scholars for far too long. But this book is about more than the problem. There is a solution to self-deception as well.

Our experience in teaching about self-deception and its solution is that people find this knowledge liberating. It sharpens vision, reduces feelings of conflict, enlivens the desire for teamwork, redoubles accountability, magnifies the capacity to achieve results, and deepens satisfaction and happiness. We hope that this introduction to the self-deception problem and solution will give people new leverage in all of these areas. In organizations as varied as commercial ventures, neighborhoods, and families, what is needed most is people not just with influence but with influence for good.

Part 1 Self-Deception and the Box

Chapter 1-Bud

It was two months ago to the day that I first entered the secluded campus-style headquarters of Zagrum Company to interview for a senior management position. I'd been watching the company for more than a decade from my perch at one of its competitors and had tired of finishing second. After eight interviews and a three-week period of silence and self-doubt, I was hired to lead one of Zagrum's product lines.

I was about to be introduced to a senior management ritual peculiar to Zagrum--a day-long, one-on-one meeting with the executive vice president, Bud Jefferson. Bud was right-hand man to Zagrum's president, Kate Stenarude. And due to a shift within the executive team, he was about to become my new boss.

I had tried to find out what this meeting was all about, but my colleagues' explanations confused me. They mentioned a discovery that solves "people problems," how no one really focuses on results, and that something about the "Bud Meeting," as it was called, and strategies that evidently follow from it, is key to Zagrum's incredible success. I had no idea what they were talking about, but I was anxious to meet, and impress, my new boss.

I knew Bud by reputation only. He had been present at a product rollout conference I attended, but had taken no active part. He was a youngish-looking 50-year-old combination of odd-fitting characteristics: a wealthy man who drove around in an economy car without hubcaps; a near high-school dropout who graduated with law and business degrees, summa cum laude, from Harvard; a connoisseur of the arts who was hooked on the Beatles. Despite his apparent contradictions, and perhaps partly because of them, Bud was revered as something of an icon in the company--like Zagrum, mysterious yet open, driven yet humane, polished yet real. He was universally admired, if wondered about, in the company.

It took 10 minutes on foot to cover the distance from my office in Building 8 to the lobby of the Central Building. The pathway--one of 23 connecting Zagrum's 10 buildings--meandered beneath oak and maple canopies along the banks of Kate's Creek, a postcard-perfect manmade stream that was the brainchild of Kate Stenarude and named after her by the employees.

As I scaled the Central Building's hanging steel stairway up to the third floor, I reviewed my performance during my month at Zagrum: I was always among the earliest to arrive and latest to leave. I felt that I was focused and didn't let outside matters interfere with my objectives. Although my wife often complained of it, I was making a point to outwork and outshine every coworker who might compete for promotions in the coming years. I had nothing to be ashamed of. I was ready to meet Bud Jefferson.

Arriving in the main lobby of the third floor, I was greeted by Bud's secretary, Maria. "You must be Tom Callum," she said with enthusiasm.

"Yes, thank you. I have an appointment with Bud for 9:00," I said.

"Yes. Bud asked me to have you wait for him in the Eastview Room. He should be with you in about five minutes." Maria escorted me down the hall and left me to myself in a large conference room, where from the long bank of windows I admired the views of the campus between the leaves of the green Connecticut wood. A minute or so later there was a brisk knock on the door and in walked Bud.

"Hello, Tom. Thanks for coming," he said with a big smile as he offered me his hand. "Please, sit down. Can I get something for you to drink? Coffee, juice?"

"No, thank you," I replied, "I've had plenty already this morning."

I settled in the black leather chair nearest me, my back to the window, and waited for Bud as he poured himself some water out of the pitcher in the serving area in the corner. He walked back with his water, bringing the pitcher and an extra glass with him. He set them on the table between us. "Sometimes things can get pretty hot in here. We have a lot to do this morning. Please, feel free whenever you'd like."

"Thanks," I stammered. I was grateful for the gesture but more unsure than ever what this was all about.

"Tom," said Bud abruptly, "I've asked you to come today for one reason--an important reason."

"Okay," I said evenly, trying to mask the anxiety I was feeling.

"You have a problem--a problem you're going to have to solve if you're going to make it at Zagrum."

I felt as if I'd been kicked in the stomach. I groped for some appropriate word or sound, but my mind was racing and words failed me. I was immediately conscious of the pounding of my heart and the sensation of blood draining from my face.

As successful as I had been in my career, one of my hidden weaknesses was that I was too easily knocked off balance. I had learned to compensate by training the muscles in my face and eyes to relax so that no sudden twitch would betray my alarm. And now, it was as if my face instinctively knew that it had to detach itself from my heart or I would be found out to be the same cowering third-grader who broke into an anxious sweat, hoping for a "well done" sticker, every time Mrs. Lee passed back the homework.

Finally I managed to say, "A problem? What do you mean?"

"Do you really want to know?" asked Bud.

"I'm not sure. I guess I need to from the sound of it."

"Yes," Bud agreed, "you do."

Leadership and Self-Deception
© 2000 The Arbinger Institute

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