There is an interesting study published in the journal Injury Prevention on behavior change among skiers and snowboarders when they wear a helmet.

What would you guess?

• Option A:  Would you think that a person who wears a helmet would think they are better protected from injury and be more risk inclined?
• Option B:  Or would you think their decision to wear a helmet suggests they are more safety conscious and less risk inclined?

If you guessed Option B, you are correct. The study tells us that helmeted skiers and snowboarders appear to ski or snowboard more safely.

So, what does this tell us about human nature and intelligent risk-taking in an organizational setting?  The logical conclusion is that the better you prepare for the risk or initiative you are pursuing, the more comfortable you will be going forward.

The lesson:  prepare well before getting started.  One thing you can do is utilize the six steps of intelligent risk-taking presented in my books The Power of Risk (Maxwell Press), Business Lessons from the Edge (McGraw-Hill) and The First-Time Manager (AMACOM).

The second lesson:  Preparing well and proceeding intelligently is not likely to make you more risk-inclined and more prone to lapse into poor decisions.

Both good outcomes.
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The study was conducted by researchers at San Diego State University.  The full paper on the study is available on the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website at:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2598370/pdf/173.pdf.  (The NCBI is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.)

We all know that meetings are necessary … and at times significantly longer than necessary or productive.

Andy Kessler had a brilliant piece recently in the Wall Street Journal that offers that some excellent insights and suggestions for making meetings more productive and shorter. His ideas are too good not to share. Here are some.

• Apparently some executives at Twitter and Apple allow meetings only on Mondays. The rest of the week is meetings free. (I will bet that this results in a lot of issues that surface on Tuesdays and Wednesdays being resolved without meetings.)
• The president of BuzzFeed is a little looser. He dictates that meetings are prohibited on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
• An innovative tech entrepreneur running a start up limits meetings to a single topic, does not allow any electronics (computers, projectors, PowerPoint), and limits them to ten minutes.
• Kessler reports that Amazon chief Jeff Bezos starts executive meetings with thirty minutes of silence while all read a “carefully crafted six-page report.” (I love the idea of the person who called the meeting being subjected to the discipline of presenting his or her ideas in writing.)
• Another creative executive has all meetings recorded on video with the videos available all in the organization indefinitely. (I think we would all be a bit more thoughtful and measured in our comments at a meeting if we knew all we said would be available to all indefinitely.)
• Finally, my favorite. One clever executive has had all the conference tables and chairs removed from the conference rooms. They have been replaced with bar-height tables but no chairs. (Does anyone question that meetings will be briefer when all have to stand?)

​Kessler gave us some wonderful ideas. I encourage you to try some to see what results you get.