404: Overcoming Your Creative Blocks with Michael A. Roberto

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Michael A. Roberto
Thanks Pete. It’s great to be with you today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to start maybe early on in your life and hear about your childhood dream as it relates to Monday night football.

Michael A. Roberto
I love this. People ask me this, say, “What did you want to be when you grew up?” I said, “My gosh, believe it or not, I wanted to be Howard Cosell’s successor.” I grew up listening to Don Meredith, Frank Gifford, and Howard Cosell doing Monday night football. I thought, “I could do that.” That didn’t quite work out. But some would say there’s some similarities between being a professor and being a color commentator.

Pete Mockaitis
Was it the specific love of football or something about his style in particular that resonated with you?

Michael A. Roberto
I do love football. I am a fan – I know the rest of the country probably doesn’t want to hear this – of the six-time Super Bowl champion, New England Patriots. Sorry, Pete.

But honestly I loved that Meredith, Gifford and Cosell, just had this rather odd sort of but amazing chemistry. Meredith would start singing. Cosell was super serious. Gifford was the former player. It was just this kind of real mix that I just loved. Back then Monday night football was a major event. I was lucky if my parents would let me stay up to halftime and then send me to bed. That’s probably why. It was kind of a thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, that’s fun. That’s fun. Well, I want to hear a little bit about one of your latest things, which is your book, Unlocking Creativity. What’s the main message here?

Michael A. Roberto
The main message, Pete, is that I talk to companies and say the question around creativity and innovation, which I think they all want more of it. Many of them feel they desperately need more of it. The question is “Why don’t you have enough creativity in your organization? What stands in the way?” I say, “Do you have a people problem or a situation problem?”

I don’t think it’s a people problem. I think there’s plenty of creative talent in organizations. It’s a situation problem, meaning there’s something in the environment in these firms, in these enterprises that is inhibiting the creativity of these very talented people that are already there.

The job of leader is to clear away these obstacles, these paths. The obstacles I focus on are not things like bureaucracy and hierarchy, although they are obstacles, but instead a set of mindsets that I think are getting in the way of creativity in organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
You mentioned six in particular mindsets. Could you orient us to each of those six and how we can escape?

Michael A. Roberto
First mindset is the linear mindset. We’re taught many times in school to approach problem solving in a very linear way, research and analysis, the generation of options, the choice of a course of action, and then the execution of that plan.

But the creative process is fundamentally nonlinear. It involves a fair amount of iteration. Great creative ideas don’t just drop from the sky like a bolt of lightning. They often emerge through a challenging process of trial and error and of getting feedback from customers or users and iterating. It’s nonlinear. Unfortunately, we don’t really like to iterate. That linear mindset, trying to force things through a very linear process is the first obstacle I talk about in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to get your take, you said we don’t like to iterate and maybe that’s because we’re impatient. We want a result, whether that’s revenue or something right away. But what are some of your pro-tips for iterating quickly instead of investing a boatload of resources into something and then being disappointed months later when it’s not quite hitting the mark?

Michael A. Roberto
I think one of the big things is getting comfortable with this idea – I had a chance to interview Ed Catmull for the book, the long-time president of Pixar and then head of Disney Pixar animation. He talks about this idea of letting people call your baby ugly, which I love the phrase.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very visceral. I have a one-year-old and I don’t like that idea.

Michael A. Roberto
The way I like to interpret what he means is that when you have that new baby and you’re a new parent, you are really careful about unveiling the baby to the world because you want everyone to say your baby is handsome or beautiful. You don’t want anyone to call your baby ugly.

But the key to the creative process is to get your idea out there raw early so that you can get feedback. You need to be willing to let people call your baby ugly so you can make the baby prettier. But that’s hard for us to do. We don’t like feedback. We fall in love with our original idea. Psychologists call this the sunk cost trap. We throw good money after bad because we fall in love with what we’ve already invested all our time and energy in.

It’s difficult to iterate for a variety of these reasons. We look for data that might confirm what we already believe instead of being open to perhaps disconfirming feedback or data. Getting that baby out there, I know it’s hard to think of it that way. It’s a powerful, powerful image, isn’t it? Letting people call your baby ugly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You’re putting out an early version in terms of a prototype or a concept or a pitch and getting some trusted advisors to poke all sorts of holes and then you can iterate and make it better. Very nice.

Michael A. Roberto
And Pete, it helps to put more than one idea in front of them because it turns out there’s some research suggesting that people will be more candid with you if you ask them “Which do you like better A, B, or C?” versus if you say, “Do you like A?” Then they’re hesitant to say they don’t like it because they don’t want to crush your feelings. If you give them some choices, “Here’s a few rough ideas,” they can compare and contrast them, you’re more likely to get productive feedback, by the way.

Pete Mockaitis
That is brilliant. I think I’ve known that, but I haven’t heard it articulated and I haven’t used it with consistency. I’m a part of a number of Facebook groups and folks might want some feedback on say a logo.

If you just have one logo, it really is, you get a lot less as opposed to when you say, “Okay, I’ve got three choices,” and then boy, people just light it up in terms of “I like A better because of this,” “I like C better because of that,” Hey, can you take the colors from B and use it with these icons of A.” It really does get flowing.

I think maybe, if I were to speculate, some of the psychology behind that is it’s like, “Well, hey, well if you’re not too committed to one of them, then I can tell you what I really think instead of worrying about whether I’m hurting your feelings by unloading on your one option that I hate.”

Michael A. Roberto
That is exactly the mechanism. It’s exactly right. If you keep a few options alive, you also protect yourself from falling in love too much with one of them. If you put all your eggs in one basket, you’re likely going to fall in love with your idea and stop listening to others too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve been guilty of falling in love with my ideas.

Michael A. Roberto
We all have.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re so fun. If everyone else would just realize, Mike, how brilliant they were, then we’d be fine. Okay, so that’s a mindset, linear. How about a second?

Michael A. Roberto
Second is what I call the benchmarking mindset. In organizations, we’re obsessed with the competition. We need to keep abreast of them and one of the key ways we do that is benchmarking. I’m not against. I think you do need to keep your eye on your rivals obviously and study them. But it turns out that in many cases, unfortunately, studying your rivals closely leads to copycat behavior.

What we really want to do when we benchmark is learn from others and adapt those lessons to our own context, to our own culture, our own industry, our own strategies, etcetera. But it turns out we get a lot of copycat behavior.

I kind of pick on Hollywood a little bit in the book and talk about how you get a lot of copycat behavior in Hollywood. Survivor spawned 300 imitators. The emergence of cop shows in the late ‘60s spawned a million imitators. We see retreads, bringing back the same show again 20 years later.

This happens when we benchmark. We study. This mindset of studying the competition leads to what psychologists call fixation. When we study something closely, unfortunately we fixate. We get a little closed-minded and we copy even though we don’t intend to copy.

Worse than that, in many cases in business we copy badly because we don’t actually understand what made the success, what were the real causes of the success we see. We’re just superficially really studying them. Not only do we engage in copycat behavior, but we copy badly and get poor results.

We’ve got to be able to overcome this. One trick – I talk about a couple of tricks in the book – but one of them is to study related industries or fields or analogous experiences, where because it’s not your industry, you’re forced to adapt and learn. You can’t copy.

An example, if you’re a hospital trying to improve the inpatient experience, you could go study the Four Seasons hotel. You’re not going to copy the Four Seasons because you’re not in that business. You’re not a luxury hotel, but you might learn something, so you put yourself in learning mode and not in this mindset where you could get fixated. But, boy, benchmarking – there’s so much pressure to keep abreast of your rivals, but it really does crimp creativity in so many ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. I’m intrigued. You said hospitals to the Four Seasons. Can you share some additional ideas with regard to benchmarks? I guess in a way you could almost benchmark anything to anything, although you might have mixed results, like a hospital will benchmark a dishwasher manufacturing plant.

Michael A. Roberto
Right, right.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess if you’re trying to make your processes efficient, that may very well spark some cool ideas. But any other kind of excellent, unique stimuli comparison points that have proven fruitful?

Michael A. Roberto
Well, it’s interesting. I tell the story of the Reebok Pump sneaker.

What they did there, it wasn’t so much that they went and said “Let’s go study a bunch of –“ what they did is they brought a bunch of designers in who had experience in health care, people who’d worked on things like splints and other things. They used what they knew about those things and they drew ideas and inspiration from it and that helped them build this better sneaker and the pump idea.

That’s an example of one where really was just tapping into people who had some experience in another field and say, “Hey, can you help us think about how to build a different kind of sneaker?” They were able to take some related knowledge and apply it to this other thing they’d not worked on in the past. It worked.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you still get pump sneakers? I haven’t seen them lately.

Michael A. Roberto
I don’t know. The story I wrote about, obviously, is from 20 – 30 years ago when it first premiered in response to Air Jordan taking a lot of market share away from Reebok. Reebok rather than copying the Air Jordan, came up with this pretty creative innovation of the pump and it took off. It took off.

Some people have talked about examples of if you’re trying to speed up service, if speed really matters, you’re running a fast-food drive through, for example, go study race car pit crews because they have to be able to turn something around really fast. Again, it’s not to say you’re not studying your direct competitors, but you’re just also reaching beyond for some new creative ideas in a way.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. How about a third mindset there?

Michael A. Roberto
The third one I talk about is prediction. Especially, in large companies, someone has a cool new idea, we say, “How big is the idea? Is it a big market?” Basically making people predict. Tell me how big this is going to be. The problem is we’re terrible at prediction. There’s a lot of data showing that even the best of experts are pretty bad at predicting the future.

We’re putting people in a – when they’ve got this really nascent idea that’s not well formed, we’re asking them to predict. Because the idea is we’re a big company. We’re really only going to invest if it’s going to move the needle. If it’s a niche product, we’re not interested because we’re a 20 billion dollar company and we’re going to grow 20% a year, 10% a year. We need billions of new revenue. We’re not investing in your product if it’s going to be a 10 – 20 million dollar niche product.

The problem with that logic is in history the research is clear, in the early stages, people are terrible at predicting how big a product is going to really be. I argue instead stop worrying about predicting how big it will be, go nail a niche, nail the niche. Then often, you can find ways to take that brand and take that experience you’ve created and broaden it to a broader target market.

The one that I’ve been following lately actually is Yeti, who started out making this niche product, these immense incredible coolers for really avid fishermen and hunters, an incredibly narrow target market. Not even all fishers and hunters, but really people who are out in the wilderness for a long period of time, really need to be able to keep something cold for extended periods of time. Wildly expensive coolers. Way cooler than everything else on the market.

But what happened? They nailed that niche. Now every kid at every high school is walking around with a Yeti water bottle in their hand. In a big corporation, that original business plan would have probably been killed because they would have said “Yeah, 700 dollar coolers for avid fishermen and hunter? We’re a 20 billion dollar company. That might be a cool idea, but that’s not going to move the needle here,” and it gets quashed.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. That’s intriguing how one thing can very much lead into many. Boy, I guess I could really see it both ways in terms of you don’t want to get involved in something that’s a dead-end with regard to the maximum revenue opportunity, but you just have no idea where you can take it.

Michael A. Roberto
The data is incredible. I cite some studies, for example, in a variety of industries, pharmaceuticals, others, where people’s ability to predict how big it’s really going to be is just so wildly off. What ends up happening is you’re asking the creative purpose to either over promise and then they run the risk of under delivering or they are modest in their prediction, and you give them no resources because you say it’s not worth it. It’s tough.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood.

Michael A. Roberto
The next one is the structural mindset. This is the notion that people have come to believe in this very simplistic formula that says just change the organizational structure and you’ll get more innovation. You’ll get more creativity, particularly, the flatter the organization, the better.

Basically, the argument I make is that that is a very simplistic view, that it’s not nearly as deterministic, that structure doesn’t drive performance in that kind of clear cause and effect manner. In fact, there’s some research that shows there’s benefits as well as costs to hierarchy. It’s not simply something that’s always evil. Some level of hierarchy and structure can be important in a company.

But more importantly than that, what I say is really all the focus on structure is because it’s so easy for leaders to move boxes and arrows on an org chart.

People had this view that says I try to drive more performance. I want more creativity, I’ll reorganize. I argue they fall back on it because it’s an easy solution to reorganize, but it often doesn’t work. In fact, again, the data is littered with the pre orgs that don’t lead to higher performance and don’t lead to innovation.

What I argue it’s the harder stuff, changing the climate of the organization, creating a safe environment where people will speak up, where they were willing to experiment where they’re not afraid of failure, building shared norms, enhancing the intrinsic motivation, building a better culture and climate is really where you’re going to drive creativity, not moving boxes and arrows. But the boxes and arrows get a disproportionate amount of the attention from top leaders often.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. This notion of the climate and this psychological safety and ability to speak up has come up again and again. I’d love your take on what are some of the top do’s and don’ts for if you’re the individual contributor or the manager of a team to shift that climate in some good ways?

Michael A. Roberto
One of the biggest things I think that you can do as a leader is that you can show some vulnerability yourself. If you’re willing to sort of acknowledge what you don’t know about a topic, acknowledge where you might have failed in the past, show a little bit of humility and vulnerability, people get a lot more comfortable speaking up.

If you come across as infallible, if all you do is talk about your success, it’s unlikely you’re going to create a safe climate where people are willing to speak up. But also, making sure you exercise some restraint. Don’t put your ideas out there first. Ask some of the junior people, who might be hesitant, ask them to speak first. Bring their ideas out before you dispose what your thoughts are. Give people a little room to generate their own ideas.

These are the kind of things it’s important to do. Then if somebody is bold enough, courageous enough to speak up, applaud them, celebrate it, welcome it, even if you don’t agree. It doesn’t mean you have to do what they said, but you can express your appreciation for diverse ideas and talk about how important it is that you get those. It’s not a one-off.

Then, of course, the don’ts, the most important thing is don’t shoot the messenger when someone comes to you with an idea you don’t like or tells you some bad news because you only have to do that once and you’ve tarnished your reputation as a leader for a long time and destroyed any kind of climate that you’ve been trying to create.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. The next one?

Michael A. Roberto
The next one is what I call the focus mindset. There are lots of companies where the mindset starts out correct, which is boy, multitasking is getting in the way. It’s true. We don’t multitask well. The research is clear.

What we must do is focus. We’ll create an innovation hub or we’ll create a war room and we’ll put a team in there and we’ll strip away their duties and just ask them to focus intently because boy that’s the way for us to get some breakthrough solutions. I think the image – I  talk about the image in people’s head is of a rock band holed up on a mountain top or in a castle or in the basement somewhere isolated from everybody recording this incredible revolutionary album.

I actually talk about how U2, the Irish rock band led by Bono, when they recorded the Unforgettable Fire, they actually went off to Slane Castle in Ireland and isolated themselves, living there, recording there, eating there, sleeping there. The idea was to kind of get away and really focus and really experiment with a new musical style.

But actually, the research shows that in fact, breakthrough solutions often come about not through simply intense focus, but through oscillating, if you will, between periods of intense focus and occasionally some unfocus, if you will. Sometimes you need to get some distance from a problem to really be more creative.

Mark Twain once said, “When the tank runs dry, that’s when I leave the manuscript, put it away for a bit, so as I can go and develop some new ideas.” He would go off and do some other things.

This runs counter to sort of the notion I think a lot of companies and a lot of people have begun to believe. Well, multitasking’s bad and it is bad. I’m not talking about multitasking. I’m talking about periods of intense focus and then intentionally stepping away in some way and gaining some distance from a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m intrigued then, what are some of the best ways to step away?

Michael A. Roberto
It turns out one of the ways that’s really interesting is being able to imagine someone else facing the same problem or imagine yourself as someone else. Roleplaying the competition or roleplaying how someone with different functional expertise would face the same problem, turns out to be really effective in doing this.

We call that social – psychologists call this social distance. Getting out of your own skin and getting in someone else’s shoes in a way or walking a mile in your customer’s shoes.

An example I give is of am IDEO designer who in designing a new wing in a hospital didn’t just interview patients, he actually pretended to be a patient, faked a foot injury and checked himself into the ER, and then experienced the hospital as a patient. By stepping into the patient’s shoes in that way, sparked all kinds of new ideas. That’s one.

Another one is temporal distance, sort of imagining yourself in the future, not today. Stepping out of the moment, can help you be more creative. Amazon actually kind of does this. They’ve kind of invented time travel, if you will.

What they do is they ask teams at AWS, which is their cloud business, when they’re working on a new product or service, they ask them to imagine when this thing would be – they haven’t started yet. They’re just kind of beginning to work on the idea – they say, “Imagine you’re done and you’re rolling it out. What will the press release look like?” and actually write the press release.

Then they work backward they call it, back to today to kind of develop their idea. Imagining themselves out there, they have to imagine what need are we solving for the customer, what are we saying to the customer, what is this about, what’s the value we’re creating, now let’s go make this work, let’s deliver that. Pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is cool. We talked a little bit about some have called it red team thinking or a time machine approach in that sometimes that can really help you anticipate obstacles in a great way, like, “Hey, let’s go back in time and imagine if we have a real mess on our hands, what happened?” It’s like, “Oh, well, we didn’t check in with so-and-so.” It’s like, “Okay, well, let’s make sure we check in with so-and-so.”

It can work well when you’re imagining an exciting positive future or a dystopian-worst-case scenario future.

Michael A. Roberto
The name is pre-mortem. Gary Klein coined the term, where you imagine that what we’re going to do today is going to fail. What does that future scenario look like? It’s exactly right, Pete, it can indeed spark some new ideas and really help you.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. Cool, all right. Then we’ve got five mindsets down. One to go.

Michael A. Roberto
Last one is the naysayer mindset. We’re all familiar with this. Finding naysayers in organizations who can always find a reason why a new idea won’t work rather than asking why might it work.

What I talk about is the fact the difference between a constructive devil’s advocate and a dysfunctional naysayer. Devil’s advocates can be good for organizations. They can help sharpen our thinking, but when they become the chronic naysayer, then we tune them out. They become a broken record and they’re not very effective for us.

I’d argue that what we really need is constructive devil’s advocates, not dysfunctional naysayers. Constructive devil’s advocates are people who first of all, don’t weigh in too early with their criticism. They give ideas room to breathe. They let people generate some options before they start attacking them.

They practice what in improv comedy we call yes and rather than yeah but. They build on ideas rather than saying, “Yeah, but that will never work,” or, “Yeah, but we don’t have the resources to do that,” or, “Yeah, but the boss will never go for that.”

They ask questions more than they pound the table and put forth their own plan. They’re really teaching more about the Socratic Method rather than lecturing at people about what’s wrong with their ideas. If we can make that shift, I think we can really help spark creativity, but unfortunately, we’ve all heard the broken records. We’ve all had the naysayers get in the way in our organizations at times.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued then. What is the appropriate time and place and approach to provide the critiques, the feedback and the concerns about the genuine shortcomings of an idea.

Michael A. Roberto
Yeah, so my earlier work I talk a lot about the value of constructive conflict and debate, so I’m a big believer in conflict debate. But I’m a believer that in the early stage when you’re doing alternative generation, when you’re trying to generate a series of options, that’s where you’ve got to keep the devil’s advocate at bay.

Once you’ve got a set of options, then yeah, it’s time to critique those options. Then it is time to probe the assumption and the like, but we’ve got to do it in a constructive way. It can’t just be why those ideas won’t work. It’s got to be asking also, how might we alter those ideas to make them work.

We’ve got to have that positive spin, not just the negative spin of let’s explain all the reasons why that will never solve our problem because you really beat people down if all you do is poke holes. It’s important.

Also the other job of that devil’s advocate is not just to tell me what’s wrong but also say, “Okay if these options are not attractive, then help the group generate some new ones and ask some questions and probe a little.”

It’s not just about tearing down the plan that’s on the table, it’s about saying to the group, “Hey, here’s another way of thinking of this that might help us generate some new options,” or maybe the devil’s advocate can help the group reframe the problem at times, which can be really helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I like it. Well, so Mike, I’d love to get your take if you right here right now needed to generate a bundle of options what would be some of the top tactical things you’d do to spark some stuff right away?

Michael A. Roberto
Well, one thing is I’m a big believer in empathy. Get out there and find ways to empathize with the customer, to really stand in their shoes. Get out of your own shoes, go somehow stand in their shoes in some way to really alter your perspective. I think that’s so important.

I think look for related fields and industries or analogous experiences for inspiration. That’s really important too as well. I think that can help generate some new ideas. But the other one I want to share with you, Pete, is one that I really like is – I thought of this as I was studying the company, Planet Fitness.

Pete, I don’t know if you belong to a fitness center or if you follow the industry at all, but it’s a terrible – it’s a very unprofitable industry it turns out. It’s just really unprofitable. It’s really tough for a variety of reasons.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just thinking about all the gyms. That’s just so depressing because gyms already the majority of their members, subscribers don’t actually use it very much, so even with all of the money they’re earning from people who don’t show up and use it-

Michael A. Roberto
They’re still can’t make money.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a bummer.

Michael A. Roberto
There’s a whole lot of reasons for that. Part of the reason is there’s no barriers to entry. Anybody can open a gym. They do all the time. There’s always competition. Customers are incredibly fickle. One year they’re obsessed with SoulCycle. Now they’re obsessed with Orangetheory. Two years from now they’ll be obsessed with the next big thing and that’s another problem.

This could be a longer conversation of this very strange industry. But what’s interesting about Planet Fitness is if you watch their commercials, they mock the bodybuilders.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Michael A. Roberto
It’s the judgment-free zone.  What they’re CEO says is that their competition – they’re not going after the 20% of people that go to their competitors. They want the 80% of people who’ve never belonged to a gym. He says, “We don’t think about it as who our competitors are.” They think instead about who their substitutes are. A substitute is what’s the alternative to joining a fitness center. It’s working out at home.

Pete Mockaitis
Do it yourself.

Michael A. Roberto
Right. But he defines the substitutes much more broadly. This is a cool technique. He says, “Wait, is it really just working out at home or is it the movie theatre and Chili’s and Uno’s?” Is it these other things?

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds nice right now, Mike.

Michael A. Roberto
They’re a hell of a lot more enjoyable than going to the gym, Pete, right? So how do you convince people to do something that for many of them doesn’t appear to be very enjoyable? They’re choosing these other more enjoyable experiences. What could we do to create an environment that might attract these people? What a cool idea, define your substitutes broadly.

Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher used to say, “My competition isn’t the other airlines. My competition is the automobile.” How to create an airline where I can fly someone from Austin to Dallas cheaper than they can drive. A-ha. Pretty cool. This idea of thinking about your substitutes, not just your competitors, I think is a pretty cool idea for sparking some creative ideas in a company.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Mike, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael A. Roberto
No, I think this has been a great conversation. I would just say that one of the things we all have to overcome – I use this example a lot. It’s actually not in the book. It’s one I’ve begun to use in presentations. I was sparked by this because with my kids we were watching the movie Matilda.

If you’ve watched the movie Matilda or if you’ve read the book by Roald Dahl, the great book, you know that there’s this mean headmistress, Miss. Trunchbull. I found this picture of her in her classroom. She’s got this set of rules: sit still, be quiet, etcetera.

I think in some ways companies have emulated the mean headmistress, which sort of create environments where we say we want creativity, but we’re really looking for compliance and conformity. Then we’re shocked when we don’t get creative ideas and innovation.

I kind of think we need to think back and go, “Huh.” Think of ourselves as some of our favorite teachers and not the mean headmistress and say, “Hm, what kind of environment do I want to create that sparks intellectual curiosity of my employees rather than asks for strict compliance and conformity?” Just a parting thought maybe for people to think about in terms of creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely, thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michael A. Roberto
“If you have a yes man working for you, one of you is redundant.” It’s a quote from Barry Rand, who sadly just died this year, a long time CEO of AARP and Avis Rental Car. Boy, is it right on the money. You’ve got to have somebody who’s willing to tell you that you’re all wet sometimes. That’s hard to hear, but just surround yourself with people who agree with you, not very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michael A. Roberto
One of the early things that I read in graduate school that I still found to be some of the most influential work was Irving Janis’ great work on groupthink. I just think that – that was not experimental studies. He did do some other kinds of studies, but he wrote these great case studies of very famous historical decisions and looked sadly at how group think had led to some really flawed choices. I always found that to be pretty incredible to see.

On the experimental side, not on the experimental side, but on the more modern side, we mentioned psychological safety. I’ve had the privilege of getting to work with Amy Edmondson a few times. Amy’s work on psychological safety is just top rate. She really has had a tremendous impact in fields like health care, getting to really rethink the climate of hospitals by studying them closely, doing many studies in health care showing how having a climate where people fear speaking up can literally cost lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Thank you. Tell me, how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Michael A. Roberto
I love podcasts, Pete. How’s that?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good one.

Michael A. Roberto
I spend a lot of time when I’m on flights, this is when I read and I read voraciously. I’m a professor. That’s what we do. Podcasts have been great in terms of using my commute more efficiently to hear new ideas. I love doing that. It’s been really great.

But I think the other thing at my job as a professor, what I benefit from in many ways, which I think business leaders could benefit from is I get to spend my days around 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. While they can be a real pain in the butt sometimes, they give you new perspective. They look at the world differently.

I sometimes think that would be really good for CEOs to go spend some time with their frontline employees who are 22, 23, 24, get some fresh perspective. They know things that 60-year-olds don’t know. They look at the world differently. I have this great tool at my disposal, which is I get to talk to 20-year-olds all the time. I don’t think we should mistake that. There’s some real benefit to that.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Michael A. Roberto
I am a coffee addict, Pete. Oh my goodness. I gave up caffeine many years ago, but I just love coffee as a routine in the morning, so I’ve made the folks at Starbucks very wealthy I think because I do enjoy my coffee. It’s a great habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with your students or readers?

Michael A. Roberto
I tell my students this little anecdote that my father used to share. My dad was an immigrant from Italy. He’s 91 now. When we were young he used to say that he came to America to provide us greater opportunity and education being the avenue to get there. He was going to do whatever it took, work as hard as he could to give us those educational opportunities. We didn’t have to pay him back.

He said we just had to return home and knock with our feet someday. I didn’t really know what that meant. What he meant, which I learned over time, was that our arms should be full such that we had to knock with our feet. At first our arms had to be full because we were carrying a loaf of bread or a bottle of wine to go share with him. Later it had to be because we were carrying our children to go share with him.

And if we knocked with our feet, that’s all the gratitude we needed to express. That’s all we needed to give back to him. I tell my students. I tell them that there’s actually research that says expressing gratitude can be a powerful positive thing for people and not to forget to do that. It’s easy to kind of get so busy that you don’t take enough time to do that.

Anyway, knocking with your feet is my favorite little nugget I like to share with my students. Many of them remember that years later. It’s unbelievable. I had a student just a short time ago show up at my office door and kick it with his feet. He had a bottle of wine for me. I was just blown away.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. That’s a good setup you’ve got there with people coming bringing you wine.

Michael A. Roberto
Yeah, how about that? I didn’t really think about it that way, but it’s worked out okay.

Pete Mockaitis
If folks want to learn more, get in touch, where would you point them?

Michael A. Roberto
Sure. They can visit my website at www.ProfessorMichaelRoberto.com or I’m on Twitter @MichaelARoberto. It’s a great way to get in touch as well. They certainly can drop me a line and either via the website or directly through Twitter. I love to interact with readers and hear their questions, hear their comments and feedback. I promise to get back to people as much as I can.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Yeah, do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael A. Roberto
Boy, I think if I could say one thing about this, I’m fortunate in that I do something I love. Getting up and teaching every day is something I really love. But the one thing I would say is I have this little quote on my shelf, my bookshelf in my office. It’s in Italian. It says “Ancora imparo.” It’s purportedly said by Michelangelo centuries ago. It means I am still learning. I think that’s – I don’t think I need to say anything more. I think the meaning is evident. But I look at it every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Mike, this has been a lot of fun. I wish you the best with your Unlock Creativity and students and all you’re up to.

Michael A. Roberto
Thanks Pete. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate it.