Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End [平装]

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		Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End [平装]
		Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End [平装]

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A Business Week Bestseller

“Confidence . . . makes the compelling argument that the people who succeed are the people who expect to succeed.” —Elle

“A successful book on leadership that illuminates the underlying principles applicable to teams and small businesses as well as schools, corporations, and countries.” —Washington Post

“Well-researched and engaging. . . . Kanter is a witty and entertaining writer.” —Miami Herald

“Finally, there’s a powerful book that digs out the truth about winners in every walk of life.” —David Gergen, editor at large, U.S. News and World Report, and presidential counselor  

作者简介

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. Kanter is the author of such groundbreaking books as Men and Women of the Corporation, When Giants Learn to Dance, and Evolve!

文摘

1


The Locker Room and
the Playing Field:
Booms, Busts, Streaks, and Cycles


Sometimes it seems as if there are only two states of being: boom or bust. When things are up, it feels as if they will always be up. People come to believe they can succeed at anything they try; companies proffer grand visions of innovative futures; and investment is easy to attract. When things are down, it seems as if they will always be down. That's how depressed people feel; that's why recession-dominated economies find recovery elusive; that's why teams or businesses or schools can stay in decade-long slumps.
Any company, any group, any person can be swept along by one of these fortunate or unfortunate cycles. What causes them to rise or to fall is often a matter of confidence. Confidence is the bridge connecting expectations and performance, investment and results. It is a familiar term used every day to indicate future prospects in a wide variety of circumstances--the self-confidence of athletes, consumer confidence in the economy, public confidence in leaders, or votes of no confidence at board meetings. But there is remarkably little understanding of what lies behind it. Consider the following dramatic examples, and the questions they raise about how confidence builds or erodes.
The women's basketball team at the University of Connecticut consistently broke records, winning ten Big East conference championships and chalking up a seventy-game winning streak. For the 2002-2003 season, the individual talent level of the team was well below that of its predecessors and many of its opponents, yet the team of valiant women continued to rack up victories. They were confident that they could win, even without the very best players. Why?
Although its competitors canceled hundreds of flights and lost millions of dollars during America's Great Blackout of August 2003, Continental Airlines kept flying and even made money, despite power outages at its Newark and Cleveland hubs. Within minutes after the Northeast electric power grid went down, employees were on cell phones sharing ideas about dealing with the crisis. Far from losing money and passenger goodwill, Continental increased both, exceeding forecasts by $4 million for the two days following the blackout. The company's employees had confidence in one another that enabled them to spring into action as a team. Where did it come from?
The Philadelphia Eagles were roundly booed by fans for picking rookie quarterback Donovan McNabb over a more highly rated running back who was seen as a better athlete. The mayor of Philadelphia even introduced a city council resolution urging the other choice. Recruiting players such as McNabb for "character," not just for raw athleticism, gave the once-mediocre Eagles the confidence to bounce back from losses and win more regular season games from 2000 to 2003 than any other professional football franchise. The New England Patriots were even better at converting character into championships. In terms of individual ability, quarterback Tom Brady was not considered the best in the National Football League, yet through strength of character he led his team to two Super Bowl wins in three years and an almost-unprecedented fifteen-game winning streak in 2003. What was the connection between character, team culture, and top performance?
After one of the highest-performing decades in its hundred-year history, Gillette, the global consumer products company, slipped badly in the mid-1990s. Poor business practices and over-promising to Wall Street resulted in fifteen quarters of missed earnings estimates before a new leader turned the company around and restored accountability. Gillette once had confidence, then lost it, then got it back. Why did they fall into a "circle of doom" in the first place, and how did they break out of it?
At De La Salle High School in Concord, California, successive generations of student athletes won every single football game for over twelve years, even when they faced the toughest national competition. But at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, no matter how hard the spunky student athletes tried, or how much talent was on the team, they lost all but a mere handful of games over the same period. What happened to confidence during these winning or losing streaks to make further success or further failure seem inevitable?
On January 29, 2004, thousands of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) employees mobbed the streets outside television studios in one of Britain's largest industrial actions ever. But this wasn't a protest of labor against management--far from it. The crowds were protesting the resignation of their boss following a report faulting a BBC News account of British government intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Over a four-year period, the BBC's chief had moved a demoralized organization to renewed initiative and innovation through leadership actions that his now-empowered executive team vowed to continue and extend. What had awakened the passion of the people and produced this unusual show of commitment and confidence?
Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison under the apartheid government of the old South Africa. Yet, after being released and becoming the new South Africa's first democratically elected president, he resisted the temptation to take revenge. Instead he led the divided country out of a cycle of decline to one of hope and enterprise. He extended his personal confidence in people, even those who had wronged him, into a national culture of respect and inclusion. How did he do that?


In this book I go inside these stories, and many others, to show how confidence shapes the outcomes of many contests of life--from simple ball games to complex enterprises, from individual performance to national culture. I describe what confidence is and where it comes from. I explain the culture of success and failure, why winning streaks and losing streaks perpetuate themselves, and how to shift the dynamics of decline to a cycle of success.
Confidence helps people take control of circumstances rather than be dragged along by them. By illuminating the roots and role of confidence at many levels--confidence in oneself, in one another, and in the system--I offer insights and tools for guiding people and organizations onto productive and healthy paths.


CYCLES OF CONFIDENCE


On the way up, success creates positive momentum. People who believe they are likely to win are also likely to put in the extra effort at difficult moments to ensure that victory. On the way down, failure feeds on itself. As performance starts running on a positive or a negative path, the momentum can be hard to stop. Growth cycles produce optimism, decline cycles produce pessimism. These dispositions help predict the recovery of problem-ridden businesses, low-performing urban schools, or even patients on their deathbeds. We encapsulate this in slogans. When people or groups are "on a roll," they go "from strength to strength." "Losers," on the other hand, seem doomed always to lose, because no one believes in them, no one invests in them, no one helps them improve. That's how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer--or the sick get sicker, the vulnerable become victims, and things start looking rundown because momentum is running down.
Persistent patterns of winning and losing are familiar in sports as well as business. When I was a young baseball fan, the New York Yankees always seemed to win, and the New York Mets always seemed to lose. It didn't matter who the particular players were, or even that legendary Yankees manager Casey Stengel moved to the Mets. Winning teams become "dynasties" that seem to win most of the time regardless of who is on the field--the Yankees in professional baseball, Miami of Florida in college football, North Carolina in women's college soccer, the Australian national team in international cricket. Teams that lose most of the time can start sliding into patterns of perpetual disappointment--the Chicago Cubs, for example, didn't have back-to-back winning seasons in over fifty years.
As patterns develop, streaks start to run on their own momentum, producing conditions that make further success or failure more likely. Winning creates a positive aura around everything, a "halo" effect that encourages positive team behavior that makes further wins more likely. Winning makes it easier to attract the best talent, the most loyal fans, the biggest revenues to reinvest in perpetuating victory. Losing has a repellent effect. It is harder for the team to bond, harder for it to attract new talent, easier for it to fall behind. Winners get the benefit of the doubt. Losing breeds qualms. In the midst of a winning streak, winners are assumed to have made brilliant moves when perhaps they were just lucky. In the midst of a losing streak, if losers eke out a victory, sometimes they are assumed to have cheated.
In short, confidence grows in winning streaks and helps propel a tradition of success. Confidence erodes in losing streaks, and its absence makes it hard to stop losing.


CONFIDENCE AND SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES


Confidence consists of positive expectations for favorable outcomes. Confidence influences the willingness to invest--to commit money, time, reputation, emotional energy, or other resources--or to withhold or hedge investment. This investment, or its absence, shapes the ability to perform. In that sense, confidence lies at the heart of civilization. Everything about an economy, a society, an organization, or a team depends on it. Every step we take, every investment we make, is based on whether we feel we can count on ourselves and others to accomplish what has been promised. Confidence determines whether our steps--individually or collectively--are tiny and tentative or big and bold.
Confidence is a sweet spot between arrogance and despair. Arrogance involves the failure to see any flaws or weaknesses, despair the failure to acknowledge an...

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