Sharing Info, Workloads, Positive Feeback Boosts Productivity

Successful Entrepreneurs Leverage Knowledge and Motivation

By Daniel Butcher

Successful entrepreneurs focus on what they know best and care most about when brainstorming and evaluating business ideas, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.

“Entrepreneurs often say, ‘Where do I look for an opportunity?’ Now, I always try and say, ‘We’ll look internally first at your own history,’” Shepherd said. “‘What is unique about you? What unique knowledge do you have?’

“My path is unique, just like every person’s path is unique, and it’s given me knowledge that other people don’t have,” he said. “If I can think about things from that perspective, then I’m more likely to come up with an opportunity that other people haven’t thought of in the past.

“In thinking about it that way, I’m more likely to see opportunities related to my motivation, something that I’m passionate about, and so opportunities are often identified at the intersection of my knowledge and my motivation.”

People who are knowledgeable in a particular field are better equipped to spot signals of potential opportunities in that area. Experienced entrepreneurs can also gauge the chances of success of a particular idea, even if it’s just a rough estimate, to decide whether it’s worth pursuing.

“If I’m highly motivated by certain things, then I’m more likely to see signals in the environment that relate to that motivation, and so it’s the combination of those two that allows me to identify opportunities,” Shepherd said. “I also evaluate opportunities in a similar way.

“I say to myself, ‘Do I have the knowledge, the skills, and the ability to be able to execute this opportunity? Is it feasible?’” he said. “And I also asked myself, ‘Is it desirable? Is it something that I want to do? If I do it and exploit this opportunity, does it give me the things that I want to have?

“And so it’s really that intersection of knowledge and motivation that is the how do we identify opportunities, and also whether we want to exploit those opportunities or not and what would be required to do so.”

The Secrets to Success for “Metacognitive” Entrepreneurs

By Daniel Butcher

Despite being dyslexic, Richard Branson co-founded Virgin Group in 1970 and eventually became a billionaire, British knight, and celebrity. He has speculated that his dyslexia was actually an asset by forcing him to think in less conventional ways when brainstorming, as well as launching and running businesses.

Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame said that research by him and his colleagues shows that more “metacognitive” entrepreneurs are, the more adaptable they are and the more likely they are to pivot, ultimately achieving better results. Metacognition is about understanding how your own brain makes sense of the world, how your learn, and how you solve problems.

“Branson, who founded the Virgin Group, has dyslexia, and in an interview he was saying it was because of that dyslexia that he had to learn how to think in a different, more deliberative way, rather than rely on intuition,” Shepherd said. “He attributes his success as an entrepreneur to his dyslexia, because he engages in metacognition, thinking about the way that we think about things—we often just make decisions based on intuition.

“We don’t think about things; we just make an automatic decision, and sometimes our intuition is right, but sometimes it can be wrong, and if we’re not thinking about it, we don’t question it,” he said. “And with dyslexia, he learned these learning skills, which made him more metacognitive, so he thought more about the way that he thinks about things.”

Research on primary schools found that children who are taught metacognitive skills perform significantly better in reading and mathematics. Those metacognitive skills can be applied to entrepreneurship and leadership as well.

“Rather than just assuming that they’ll figure it out intuitively, practitioners of metacognition ask themselves four questions: ‘What is the problem really asking? What are we really facing here? How is this similar to something that we’ve faced in the past? And how is it different from what we’ve faced in the past?’” Shepherd said. “It stops us from doing this automatic thinking, then we say, ‘What’s the best way to approach this problem? What are the different ways that we can approach this situation?’ and choose one.

“As we’re engaged in that, we stop ourselves to reflect and we say, ‘How am I doing? Am I heading in the right direction?’” he said. “When you use metacognition, you interrupt your intuition at different periods just to remind yourself to be a little bit more deliberative in the way that you think now.”

Intuition is important, Shepherd stressed. It’s an effective way to make quick decisions that is especially effective when it’s based on expertise. But problems arise for those who never question that intuitive decision-making process.

“There are some people who rarely question those assumptions based on intuition, but as we engage in metacognition, we start to question them,” Shepherd said. “And when you have dyslexia, it forces you to have that sort of thinking discipline in order to be more deliberative in the way that you think.

“That’s my that was my interpretation of Branson’s statement,” he said. “While I’m not sure if he would necessarily agree with all of that, he did say that it forced him to be more disciplined in the way he thinks.”

Entrepreneurial Success Requires Luck as Well as Hard Work

By Daniel Butcher

There’s a dirty little secret about what separates successful entrepreneurs from those who fail: Many of the winners have luck on their side, and many of the failures work just as hard but don’t succeed through no fault of their own, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.

Shepherd said that stories of entrepreneurs who have failed quite a bit are common. There’s often a disconnect between how investors and other entrepreneurs view them and how they are portrayed in the media.

“You sometimes see it in Silicon Valley, where they say, ‘I’ll only invest in in entrepreneurs who have failed before, because it means that they’ve learned and they know to make tough decisions,’ whereas you see press reports in other parts of the world, or even other parts of America, where they really penalize an entrepreneur who’s failed, despite the fact that they tried their best,” Shepherd said.

“They lost their own wealth, but the media ridicule people who have failed,” he said. “I see that in the press sometimes, where they attribute success to the person’s skills and experience, but then when someone fails, they say that there’s something fundamentally wrong with that person, and the press has an anti-failure bias, which doesn’t help.”

Luck be a lady

Unsuccessful entrepreneurs may have had to deal with a challenging external environment or competitive landscape or face any number of variables beyond their control—regardless of their skills, experience, and effort.

“They could have done everything right and then had bad luck, and the other person could have done everything wrong, and just by luck, they ended up being in the right place at the right time, and they were successful,” Shepherd said. “In either case, you don’t actually learn much from those instances, because luck played such a large role, but then they’ll attribute the person who was successful to their decisions and actions, even though it wasn’t the case, and they’ll attribute failure to the person’s decisions and actions, but it wasn’t the case.

“And so it’s really like a form of superstitious learning,” he said. “We’re learning something, but actually not gaining any knowledge from it. We’re learning something that’s wrong.”

The Disconnect Between Leaders and Patients on Healthcare

By Daniel Butcher

Many people hurt by the high costs and insurance denials plaguing the U.S. healthcare industry might have been hoping that the response to the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson would lead to reforms. However, most industry executives have tried to go back to business as usual, except with heightened security for senior executives, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

In response to the waves of criticism directed at U.S. health insurance and benefits-administration executives in the wake of Thompson’s killing, most industry leaders followed a typical crisis-management playbook, including a predictable public-relations script, he said.

“They’ve been saying all the things that they always say: that they’re beholden to achieving financial goals and medical providers’ increasing costs—‘medical costs go up, and so the insurance premiums have to go up’—and that they’re doing their best to provide coverage, and all these sorts of things, the usual platitudes that they roll out,” Pollock said. “But in terms of actually making some substantive changes, they don’t do much.”

“We’re one of the only countries in the world where healthcare coverage is privatized, and we’ve got the most expensive healthcare in the world with the 44th-best health outcomes,” he said. “It’s hard to justify the status quo on any rational basis.

“So if they want to repair and protect their reputation with customers and avoid this kind of backlash in the future, they have to understand where the customer is coming from and then find ways to speak to those problems and offer up a set of policies or practices they’re going to engage in—changes they’re going to make—to make this easier and better for customers.”

Health industry executives who try to defend the status quo of the U.S. healthcare system come off as tone-deaf at best, and uncaring or willfully dismissive of people’s suffering at worst.

“One of the mistakes that a lot of CEOs make is they try to defend the status quo, instead of saying, ‘You’re right; we’re not doing what we should be doing,’ and then, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do to make it to make it better,’” Pollock said. “There’s a whole other set of issues related to whether or not these things get implemented, but at least symbolically acknowledging their pain, their anger, taking some responsibility for it, and then saying, ‘We’re going to make changes that will address these problems and make things better going forward’ counts for something.

“But if they come out and talk about profitability, that their responsibility is to shareholders, or that this isn’t really a problem, or try to downplay the challenges that people have with high costs, denials of coverage, and administrative burdens, there’s a disconnect from patients’ experiences,” he said. “This is the issue you run into when leaders and customers are coming at a problem from opposite sides or completely different perspectives.”

Why Many Leaders Ignore Criticism

By Daniel Butcher

In the wake of the U.S. public’s reaction to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of suspect Luigi Mangione, some CEOs in the health insurance industry downplayed the tragedy, rather than thinking about the root cause of people’s anger directed toward them.

Keeping blinders on is a red flag for narcissism, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He and Arijit Chatterjee of ESSEC Business School researched narcissistic CEOs and found that the more narcissistic the executives are, the more likely they are to ignore critical messages, and surround themselves with yes-men.

“Many CEOs, especially narcissistic ones, surround themselves with people who say, ‘No, don’t listen to the critics. You’re great. You’ve done nothing wrong. Everything’s wonderful,’ as opposed to saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a real problem that we need to fundamentally think through and deal with,” Pollock said. “So there’s nobody to rein in CEOs when they’re making bad decisions or alert them to a blind spot that they have.

“We all have good ideas and bad ideas, but leaders need people to tell them when they have a bad idea and to stop them from from acting on it,” he said. “When you don’t have those people in place telling the CEO to tap the brakes, the bad ideas just spread, and a narcissistic CEO doesn’t want to hear the negative stuff, whereas a less narcissistic CEO who really wants todo the best job possible will actually cultivate that and make sure they have people around them who will tell them the truth, even if it’s something that they don’t really want to hear, but that they need to hear.

“But a narcissistic CEO will fire truthsayers; they’ll get rid of people who they perceive as disloyal for telling them negative stuff or telling them that they’re wrong.”

Elon Musk Turned Celebrity to Infamy

By Daniel Butcher

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is a case study of a business founder typecast as a traditional creator, who altered his reputation by not playing to type.

Previously known for cofounding SpaceX, Tesla, the Boring Company, Neuralink, and OpenAI, Musk changed how the media covered him and how the public saw him after buying Twitter, changing the social media’s company’s name and policies, thwarting Tesla workers’ efforts to unionize, and becoming an outspoken supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump and far-right political parties in other countries.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has done extensive research on the media’s tendency to typecast CEOs as either a traditional founder/creator or a reformer/rebel, said that most people thought Musk was the former initially, but that he’s revealed himself to be more of the latter.

“For a long time, Elon Musk was considered a creator, and he still has his fans and people who think he’s great, but he’s become a little bitless of a celebrity and a little bit more infamous to a larger segment of the population, especially with what he did with X,” Pollock said. “So there’s an example of somebody who was a creator—he made his original fortune when the online banking and payments company he founded, also called X.com, merged with Confinity to form PayPal,he played a key role in cofounding Tesla and SpaceX and is now CEO of both, and he’s started a number of other companies.

“We saw him pushing against industry norms and breaking new ground and creating these new businesses and, in some cases, new industries like privatized space travel that his companies were at the forefront of, and he got a lot of credit for that,” he said. “But then, when he goes in and buys Twitter and changes it in ways that upset many employees and users of the social-media platform, he thinks he’s engaged in the same kinds of things that made him popular—‘I’m going to turn this company around’—but made things much worse.

“As a consequence, that hurt his reputation, because he wasn’t being a creator—he was taking something that a lot of people liked and broke itfor his own ends, and that would be an example of somebody who acted against type, because we saw him as being in the creator role, then he acted like a rebel, and it’s backfired on him.”

Goodbye Twitter, hello X

Musk fired most of Twitter’s content-moderators and fact-checkers and rebranded the social-media platform X in 2022. During the 2024 U.S. election cycle, he made “false or misleading claims about the U.S. election” that were viewed billions of times on X, according to a report by nonprofit group Center for Countering Digital Hate.

“Whether or not you share his political views, the way he stripped down the company [X, formerly Twitter], he took away safety protocols, changing the way that they did the blue checkmark verification—he started selling X Premium subscriptions as a requirement to get verified,” Pollock said. “It made Twitter—now X—less trustworthy as an online community, as a social media site, and then predictably, we saw more conspiracy theories, disinformation, bots, trolling, hate speech, and so on popping up on X, with no guardrails.

“It just became a less credible place to get information, because a lot of people used it for their news andmany don’t anymore because they can’t trust the site,” he said. “As the owner and CEO of X, they blame him for it, and rightly so.”

Risks and Rewards of CEOs Getting Typecast

By Daniel Butcher

Celebrity CEOs are often typecast in the media as either traditional founders/creators or reformers/rebels. Those who live up to their reputation while running successful companies are lionized as heroes, but those who break the expectations of their type or face failure or scandal can be portrayed as villains.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that he has done extensive research on the media’s tendency to typecast CEOs.

“As far as the typecasting, we first researched factors that make them a celebrity, and we looked at different kinds of celebrity, so we so we had people who were creators,” Pollock said. “These are basically the company founders, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, the folks like this who started and founded these businesses and grew them as the CEO—that’s one kind of celebrity.

“Then there are rebels, who come in and do things that are contrary to the industry norms and really stand out and shake things up,” he said. “And there are those reformers who can look over the horizon and say, ‘This is a company is doing well right now, but I know that there are fundamental problems in the company that will likely cause its performance to go down unless we make these changes,’ so they change before things get bad to save the company.

“And then they’re the CEOs who go into a really bad situation and pull the company back from the brink to sit and save the company, and so, depending upon those kinds of non-conforming behaviors they engage in, they get typecast as a certain type of CEO.”

The first type of CEO, either founders or cofounders who are typecast as creators, include familiar names such as:

• Mark Zuckerberg of Meta
• Michael S. Dell of Dell Technologies
• Jensen Huang of Nvidia
• Marc R. Benioff of Salesforce
• Bom Kim of Coupang
• Jack Dorsey of Block (who also cofounded Twitter and Bluesky)
• Brian Chesky of Airbnb
• Tony Xu of DoorDash
• Robert Greenberg of Skechers
• Charles Liang of Super Micro Computer
• Sam Walton of Wal-Mart
• Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Blue Origin
• Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway

As for the rebel CEOs, Ralph Nader wrote The Rebellious CEO: 12 Leaders Who Did It Right, in which he praised:

• John Bogle of Vanguard
• Anita Roddick of The Body Shop and Natura
• Ray C. Anderson of Interface
• Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines
• Jeno Paulucci of Luigino’s and Totino’s
• Sol Price of FedMart, Price Club, and Costco
• Robert Townsend of Avis
• Andy Shallal of Busboys and Poets
• Bernard Rapoport of American Income Life Insurance
• Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia
• Gordon B. Sherman of Midas International
• Paul Hawken of Project Drawdown, Erewhon Trading Company, Smith & Hawken, and OneSun

“Once we know CEOs’ leadership style, we’d like to see them live up to their reputation, and we have these tropes about what these sorts of people do,” Pollock said. “We like to see them keep doing the same stuff over and over.

“And so, if they try to behave in a different way than the public role they’ve been cast in, if a creator CEO tries to move in a different direction and acts like a reformer, they get penalized for it, because that’s not what we want from that kind of a hero or celebrity,” he said.

“We want to see them do these creator things and not do these reformer things.”

The Toxic Trait that Sunk South Korea’s President

By Daniel Butcher

South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law on December 3, 2024, sparking a national political crisis.

That tone-deaf declaration of martial law, recommended or enabled by the people he chose to surround himself with, could indicate narcissism, according to Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“Look at who President Yoon appointed, who his close advisors were, how so many of his political appointees to the Defense Ministry and elsewhere on the State Council were not people with depth of experience, but rather were people he went to high school with,” Pollock said. “He surrounded himself with this close coterie of yes-men and yes-women who are going to tell him what he wants to hear and who don’t have strong credentials, so they’re even more reliant on him for their position.

“This is the kind of stuff that can happen to leaders who insulate themselves from criticism like what we saw in South Korea, where President Yoon decided to declare martial law, and it blew up in his face so spectacularly,” he said. “It wasn’t well-thought-out; even if he was trying to do what he thought was best, he didn’t even manage it very effectively, because he didn’t know that he wasn’t talking to everybody and didn’t have widespread support.

“He was more isolated by his core group of underqualified advisers who were out of touch with public opinion.”

A symptom of narcissistic leaders surrounding themselves with yes-men and ignoring other perspectives is a lack of connection with their broader communities and key audiences, Pollock said.

“Narcissism is leading them to take actions that are really hurting them and that hurt their country and create these giant crises,” he said. “Choo Kyung-ho, the Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Economy, and member of the National Assembly of the Republic of South Korea is from the president’s party, and they used to be close.

“They were both prosecutors together, but then they had a falling out and President Yoon saw him as an enemy because he was no longer following along with everything that Yoon wanted to do, and narcissists can’t tolerate criticism.”

How CEOs Can Help Fix U.S. Health Insurance

By Daniel Butcher

In the aftermath of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of suspect Luigi Mangione in December 2024, it’s crystal clear that many people are deeply dissatisfied with the U.S. health insurance industry. With no realistic hope for legislative reform on the horizon, though, the onus is on employers to ease the administrative burden on employees and go to bat for them when health insurers or third-party administrators (TPAs) deny coverage of their doctor-recommended procedures, medications, and other medical services.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that whenever he’s spoken to people who work in human resources (HR) about this issue, they often say that they don’t have sufficient staff members to handle benefits-administration oversight. In that case, it’s up to C-suite executives to come up with a solution for proper oversight of insurers and TPAs.

“HR people often say that’s the responsibility of the insurance companies, and many organizations outsource benefits administration,” Pollock said.

“Part of what they should be doing, though, is tracking this stuff and saying, ‘Okay, are we getting what we’re paying for?’ because things like health-insurance costs and benefits are hugely important to their employees, but they’re treated as a fringe benefit by the company,” he said.

“It isn’t a primary focus for CEOs—they don’t consider it to be part of what they need to be doing, but that would be a great thing for them to do.”

A coordinated effort to prioritize oversight of health insurance and benefits administration among senior executives at U.S. companies could help employees’ well-being and healthcare outcomes.

“Even a Walmart or some other company that employs millions of people, they’re one company in the face of a huge [healthcare] industry, but if you had a bunch of CEOs of big companies band together and say, ‘This is not adequate. This is not sufficient. We aren’t happy with the services that we’re being provided,’ and they make it public, that could bring about change,” Pollock said.

“Going public has to be a big part of it; that’s going to help bring pressure to bear on health insurers and TPAs, because one of the challenges they face is the U.S. insurance company playbook as well, which says, ‘Okay, fine, then go work with somebody else,’” he said.

“But they’re all doing the same stuff, so employers don’t really have an alternative, and it’s to the extent that either somebody can come along and provide a different kind of service, which is going to be very hard, or employers are going to have to try to find ways to put pressure on insurers and TPAs collectively, publicly, building on the emotional reaction that people in the U.S. have had to high healthcare costs, administrative burdens, and frequent denials of medical services.”

Getting Followers Is One Thing, Inspiring Engagement Another

By Daniel Butcher

To expand the reach of your social-media footprint, you need to attract more followers. But it’s trickier to encourage people to share, repost, or comment. Some types of content are more likely to get people to click the follow button, other types drive engagement better.

Academy of Management Scholar Tim Pollock of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville said that gaining followers and getting them to actually engage with you are two different things, and they require different levels of commitment by the follower.

“If you’re scrolling on Instagram and see something that looks interesting, you think, ‘Here’s a cool picture—I’m gonna hit follow,’” Pollock said.

“That doesn’t take a whole lot of commitment, but to look at their other posts, to comment on their piece, perhaps, if you get a reply, to reply to the influencer’s reply, those kinds of things—that’s a much higher level of engagement,” he said.

“To share to your site or repost to your followers, those are higher levels of engagement and commitment, and they’re influenced by different things, because we’re looking at both the images and the words that were used in the influencer’s post.”

Pollock’s research on this topic focused on fitness influencers. He and Ashley Roccapriore of Auburn University found that the images, particularly those conveying “competence,” attracted more followers than the positive emotional nature of the words that they used. Positive emotional words, however, were more effective at stimulating greater engagement. That said, you don’t want to come off as braggy and self-absorbed if the goal is getting shares and comments.

“Positive emotion in your words that focus on other people are more effective than just having it be all about yourself and how great you are and how much you know,” Pollock said.

“Rather than crowing about hitting your new PR [personal record] in the deadlift or whatever, it stimulates more engagement when you show warmth by praising others for hitting their goals or telling them what they can accomplish,” he said. “This is what stimulates higher-level engagement and gets them to repost or comment on your posts.

“So, images and words, and the competence and warmth they convey, function in different ways—we process them differently and they they stimulate different levels of engagement.”