Lee Hopkins: spontaneous, rapid, decisive

All of the above adjectives describe your humble scribe. At least, that’s the opinion of Nick Tasler, who’s brilliant book The Impulse Factor: Why Some of Us Play It Safe and Others Risk It All is my current ‘cannot put down’ bedside read.

Nick is the Director of R&D for TalentSmart, a thinktank based around the idea that if you have smart employees you grow better and more profitable businesses.

Based on the original findings of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Kahnemann won a Nobel Prize for this work, received a prestigious Lifetime Contributions Award from the American Psychological Association, and together they wrote a stack of publications on hedonism and conditional impulsivity) – that even risk-averse people would take risks if by winning they wouldn’t lose that which they would lose if they didn’t take the gamble – TalentSmart has collected and analysed the responses from over 300,000 individuals as to their risk-aversion or risk-taking preferences and actual behaviours.

In addition, fellow psychologist Marvin Zuckerman (and here) firmly believes – based on four decades of research – that ‘impulsivity’ is an element of sensation-seeking that is closely aligned with Hans Eysenck’s personality dimensions of ‘extraversion and ‘psychoticism’.

All of which does not bode well for me when comparing me to the rest of the human population, for reasons that will shortly become apparent

Here’s what the survey you can take once you’ve bought the book found about me – it makes for air-gulping reading.

Now, you might think that these numbers are slightly alarming. You would not be wrong!

Tasler holds that there are two types of people:

Risk-Managers (75% of the population), and
Potential-Seekers (25% of the population).

Tasler himself recognises that there needs to be both kinds in the world – entreprenurial risk-takers that create employment, drive civilisations forward and quite possibly enabled our ancestors to move out of Africa and across the rest of the globe. That 25% create the paths that the remaining 75% usually end up benefitting from (sometimes more than the 25% do, but that’s another story for another day).

Tasler strongly holds to the view that great management needs both types in their top level management: the ‘go-getters’ who decide first and justify later, and those who stop, think and decide before taking action. If we had only the first, we’d all end up living in a cardboard box, as my youngest stepdaughter infamously said to me and my wife one day (she was pointing out that her mother was a far better money manager than I and that if all the decisions of the house were left to me, a cardboard box would be our new home; “at least it would be a colourful cardboard box” I limply replied).

Equally, if there were only ‘Risk Managers’ in the world, there wouldn’t be the word ‘innovation’ in the dictionary and we’d probably still be living in caves.

But having, over a course of 35 questions, stripped my decision-making and impulsive tendencies bare, Tasler does have the good grace to offer suggestions as to how best to capitalise on my strengths, rather than waste valuable time trying to turn a tiger into a daffodil.

One of the key tasks facing me is to take those I rely on with me on the journey. Whilst acknowledging that I have a very strong tendency to make snap decisions based on ‘gut feel’ (and that I get it right enough times to be happy with that decisional style), he suggests that I at least sit down with my colleagues and work through the decision I made with them – the why’s as to my (il)logic and the payoffs I predict.

Another key task is to find a ‘closer’ – someone who can do the remaining 75% of the job once I’ve done the first 25% (‘getting the client on board’, ‘deciding on the project at hand’, ‘getting everyone excited enough that they want to get on board’, and so on…).

The biggest challenge, as any SOHO (small office, home office) business operator will tell you, is finding the time to do it all – accounts and back-end paperwork, research, product and service development, sales and marketing. On top of that you also have to find the time to actually do the work you’ve just won! Finding others who actually enjoy the stuff I don’t – the back-end paperwork, the accounts, the ‘build and delivery’ – is vital for me if I want to move on to the next phase of my entrepreneurial journey.

So for me, 2009 is the year I need to seriously think about partnering with one or more people – any takers?

Tasler and his team go into much more detail about my strengths and weaknesses; you can download my own report [551k, PDF] if you’d like to see for yourself just how informative the report is…

I remember taking a personality battery at Telstra a few years back. Selected passages in the results include:

Lee is unassuming, unselfish, and has a sincere and genuine interest in other people and a strong, intuitive
understanding of them. Outgoing and friendly, he enjoys working with people and is lively, pleasant company.

A warm and friendly communicator, Lee is able to stimulate and motivate others while being aware of and responsive to their needs and concerns. His outgoing personality and sincere, interested attitude make him easily accessible, and he gets along with a wide variety of people.

His drive is altruistic, directed at working with and for others; for the team, for customers and for the company. A cooperative, willing worker, Lee can be particularly effective as a teacher or trainer, communicating the company’s policies, programs, and systems with enthusiasm and spirit.

And here’s the ‘money-shot’ paragraph:

Working at a faster-than-average pace, he learns quickly. More concerned with effective communication than he is with detail, he is about average in his level of accuracy in handling details and too impatient to work with details as repetitive routine.

See? I hate details and much prefer to leave the ‘dull’, 75% percent of business to those who have a natural gift for such things as follow-through, dedication to detail and ‘getting on with the job at hand’.

Anyway, enough of me talking about me. Tell me, what do you think about me? {author rolls on the floor laughing}

But back to the REAL point of this post – this superbly challenging and thought-provoking book. Allied to the test you can take (and only if you purchase the book, there’s a one-time code in each book that stops anyone else from using the same code once you’ve entered your details and survey responses), there is a goal-setting website that allows you to set yourself goals aligned with the results of the survey, and then (clever bit, this) copy your boss, wife or key others in with your progress. They can even annotate your progress reports and send them back to you as further feedback. Neat, hey?!

That alone is worth the price of admission, but when you tie it in with the fabulous reading and insights you will definitely garner as a result of your reading, you will think, as I do, that this could well be the book that propels you from mediocrity to stardom in 2009. Seriously!

As a way of finding out your decision-making style and level of impulsivity, and then finding the resources to capitalise on them, I reckon you’d be a mug to miss out on reading this book!