Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

Author:Carol Dweck [Dweck, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781588365231
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2006-02-28T07:00:00+00:00

GROUPTHINK VERSUS WE THINK

In the early 1970s, Irving Janis popularized the term groupthink. It’s when everyone in a group starts thinking alike. No one disagrees. No one takes a critical stance. It can lead to catastrophic decisions, and, as the Wood study suggests, it often can come right out of a fixed mindset.

Groupthink can occur when people put unlimited faith in a talented leader, a genius. This is what led to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, America’s half-baked secret plan to invade Cuba and topple Castro. President Kennedy’s normally astute advisers suspended their dgment. Why? Because they thought he was golden and everything he did was bound to succeed.

According to Arthur Schlesinger, an insider, the men around Kennedy had unbounded faith in his ability and luck. “Everything had broken right for him since 1956. He had won the nomination and the election against all the odds in the book. Everyone around him thought he had the Midas touch and could not lose.”

Schlesinger also said, “Had one senior advisor opposed the adventure, I believe that Kennedy would have canceled it. No one spoke against it.” To prevent this from happening to him, Winston Churchill set up a special department. Others might be in awe of his titanic persona, but the job of this department, Jim Collins reports, was to give Churchill all the worst news. Then Churchill could sleep well at night, knowing he had not been groupthinked into a false sense of security.

Groupthink can happen when the group gets carried away with its brilliance and superiority. At Enron, the executives believed that because they were brilliant, all of their ideas were brilliant. Nothing would ever go wrong. An outside consultant kept asking Enron people, “Where do you think you’re vulnerable?” Nobody answered him. Nobody even understood the question. “We got to the point,” said a top executive, “where we thought we were bullet proof.”

Alfred P. Sloan, the former CEO of General Motors, presents a nice contrast. He was leading a group of high-level policy makers who seemed to have reached a consensus. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.… Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., reported that the ancient Persians used a version of Sloan’s techniques to prevent groupthink. Whenever a group reached a decision while sober, they later reconsidered it while intoxicated.

Groupthink can also happen when a fixed-mindset leader punishes dissent. People may not stop thinking critically, but they stop speaking up. Iacocca tried to silence (or get rid of) people who were critical of his ideas and decisions. He said the new, rounder cars looked like flying potatoes, and that was the end of it. No one was allowed to differ, as Chrysler and its square cars lost more and more of the market share.

David Packard, on the other hand, gave an employee a medal for defying him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.