The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Being a Better Manager & Understanding the Past — with Dolly Chugh

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Dolly Chugh, a social psychologist and management professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, and author of the new book, A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change, joins Scott to discuss what makes a good manager, her thoughts on cancel culture, and working in higher education. Follow Dolly on Twitter, @DollyChugh, and check out her newsletter, Dear Good People.  Scott opens with his thoughts on the recent layoffs in the tech sector, as well as the latest on Elon Musk and Twitter (what a shocker).  Algebra of Happiness: Step up to the plate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to the 211th episode of The Prop G Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Dolly Chug, a social psychologist and management professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, and author of the new book, A More Just Future, Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change. We discuss with Dolly what makes a good manager, her thoughts on cancel culture and working in higher education. I have known Professor Chug for the better part of 15 years. What happens at a business school is there's 200 faculty or at NYU Stern there's 200 faculty

and there's basically five people who are sort of your must-take courses. Aswath Damodaran's in there. Sonia Marciano's in there. A tall, angry, balding or bald professor's probably in there. And a guy named Glenn Okun, who teaches this fantastic course on entrepreneurship. Anyways, not that any of this is relevant to you, but Dolly is in that group of people where everyone just knows that they have to check that box and take her.

She's a fantastic professor and teacher. Anyways, what's happening? What's the 411? Well, several months ago, the dog predicted that the tech sector would face massive layoffs as the US enters a recessionary-like economy. Recessions always hit one sector or one type of cohort or one cohort harder than others. It's either a white-collar

recession or a blue-collar recession. This is definitely a Patagonia Vest recession. And sure enough, that's what we're seeing play out now. Stripe is laying off 14% of its workforce. Opendoor is letting go of 18% of its staff. By the way, I think Opendoor is ultimately going to let go 100% of its staff. I'm convinced that company is beginning to reek of rigor mortis, and we're starting to hear a death rattle there. Lyft is laying off 13% of its employees. By the way, Lyft cannot survive as an independent company. That thing will be acquired within the next 12 months. Get this. Meta, it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that in the next couple of years, Meta might shed 30,000 or 40,000 employees. Why does that matter?

We're obsessed over Musk and Twitter and how he's laying off 50% of his staff, which is of the staff there, which is 3,750 people. But get this, Meta could lay off 37,000 people. We're going to see massive layoffs. How do you figure this out? How do you predict the future? It's easy. You look at SG&A, specifically how much SG&A has increased over the last couple of years. SG&A at a tech

company is, generally speaking, labor. That's the expensive part of running a growth technology firm. It's mostly about people. And then you look at revenue growth, right? And then you look at number of employees or number of employees they've grown. SG&A and employee growth are sort of similar or going to be largely similar. But what you see in some of these companies is that their SG&A has doubled in 24 months and their revenues are down, which all leads to the same place. And that is significant layoffs. What I've seen happen on boards, I serve on a couple boards of public and private companies, is that we go through these stages of denial. The first stage is, oh, wait, we're in the midst of a V and it's going to snap back as violently as it went down.

Well, no, that's not happening. And then the next stage is, okay, let's go to a hiring freeze. And the next stage, a layoff. And then the next stage, a second layoff. And here's my advice to entrepreneurs. Skip right to the second layoff. Go deeper than you want. Why? Why? You need to get to the other end with a stronger company where your company's expenses and labor force foot to the reality of the economy at that moment, and you can start playing offense again. Instead, companies sort of slow roll it and end up on their heels for a year and 18 months explaining to their investors and their employees why they are continuing to shrink their employee base and continue in the

state of consensual hallucination. It is especially rampant among this generation of growth companies, the majority of whose leaders are under the age of 45 and haven't really experienced a downturn. They were so young when the great financial recession hit, they don't really understand what it means to be in a structural decline or an economy or a bear market. They believe that every dip has been just that, a dip, because they have been over the last 13 years. It's been a buying opportunity and you rip back. So we have overhired massively in the part of the economy that has kept on giving or has been the gift that keeps on giving. If you want to understand where there's going to be literally several hundred thousand layoffs, maybe even

millions, maybe even millions, look at the growth part of the economy. Why? It's very boring and it's very basic. And that is interest rates have gone up 400 bps in the last, call it, five months. What does that mean? It means the cost to finance the growth got more expensive, right? The coal we shovel into the furnace just tripled or quadrupled in cost, and the steam it produces to push the train forward. I'm really happy with this analogy. I just thought of it. That motion isn't as much because the cash flows that this growth company is projected to earn in the future get discounted back at a higher rate. When we were borrowing money at 1% or it was 1% interest rates, $100 in 10 years was equal to like 90 now. Now at 4% or 6%

discount, it's worth 40 or 50 bucks. So what do we have? What do we have in the growth market? We have companies that cost more to get to cash flows that are worth less. And what is the body bag? What is the punching bag that takes both, absorbs both those blows? The stock price. And we've seen it. We've seen an unbelievable, unprecedented loss, $3 trillion total market cap loss just among big tech. This is an absolute correction, and it's largely driven on a variety of factors in the market itself or amongst these companies themselves,

Apple specifically shutting off or kneecapping companies that use an ad model or tracking. They call it, they do it under the auspices of privacy. That's bullshit. They want everyone to move to an app economy so they can take 30% of everything. But who knew that would be such a kick in the nuts for Meta? Oh my God. Oh my God. Stop it. Stop it. Some people might say, stop it. It hurts so good. All right, what else is happening? I don't know. Who else has been in the news? Jesus Christ. I haven't been this exhausted by an individual since another guy with a freaking bad hair transplant. More Elon. What a shocker. So as we mentioned earlier, Twitter laid off half its staff and then decided it had screwed up and asked a bunch of them to come back.

That's got to be an awkward call. Hey, remember me? I'm your manager that fired you yesterday. Just kidding. Just kidding. So clearly they figured out that some of these people were mission critical and they've asked them to come back. Also, Elon tweeted that the massive layoff staff reduction was unavoidable as the company is losing over $4 million a day. So in addition to using Twitter to tweet out company news, Elon has also decided that he's a political activist and tweeted the following asinine tweet

to independent-minded voters. Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties. Therefore, I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the presidency is Democratic. I mean, this is just so wrong on so many dimensions. One, it makes no fucking sense. Does that mean if you live in Florida or Texas, which is dominated by Republican leadership, that you should vote Democratic to bring back that balance of power? What on earth is he doing? In addition, until now, the owners of the means of distribution stayed the hell out of politics. A, it was the right thing to do, and B, it was smart economically. And you say, well, Scott Fox is a means of distribution, and they're very partisan. CNN is a means of distribution, as is MSNBC. Not really. They're the content that flows through

the means of distribution. The means of distribution is iOS, Android, Comcast. It's the big cable companies, the guys that deliver the bits, the gals that deliver the content, the infrastructure you get. And so imagine pulling MSNBC and perhaps your local cable provider is Comcast. And before you even get to MSNBC, it says vote Republican or vote Democratic. You just don't do that. What if iOS, every time you fired up your iPhone, said, vote blue? You don't do that. It makes no sense. It doesn't work for him, and it doesn't work for the populace. And it shows that he has absolutely no idea how government works. My friend, Dov Seidman, wrote a book called How, and I think about this a lot. And it's not

what you do, it's how you do it. So let's go broad brush. Buying a company that was underperforming, that's a good idea. Overpaying for it, okay, bad idea, fine. Coming up with a bunch of new ideas, some old, some new. Trying to inject some life into the company. Stabbing an EpiPen into the heart of this thing. I think that all makes sense.

Laying off people, quite frankly, I hate to say it, but given some of the economics we talked about, C above, SG&A up 100%, revenues flat, makes sense. Doing it decisively and quickly, I think that makes sense. All of these things you could make an argument for that there is some legitimate cause justification for these decisions. They might even be the right decisions, but it's about how you do it. You don't walk into headquarters carrying a sink and make jokes when you're about to lay off 3,700 people in 72 hours. You don't lay off people without thinking through,

do we really need this person? Such you might have to call them back and eat crow. You absolutely don't move to this blue check shadow banning strategy. Subscription is absolutely the right way to go. We've been talking about this. But if everybody that has a blue check signs up, they get $40 million. Look at the shitstorm and the controversy they've created

through the shadow banning. For $40 million, what if they got 10% of people to pay $10 a month based on surplus economic value? That's $23 million. That's $230 million a month. That is $3 billion a year. That is $3 billion a year. That buys you a lot of Alpo. That gets you a lot of Kong balls. But instead, they've decided to create a shitstorm for a possible incremental increase in $40 million, and it makes no sense. In subscription, you go to where the incremental value is. What else has he decided? He's decided that everyone's Twitter experience must be his experience. This guy literally defines, it is hard to read the label from inside of the bottle. What's he done? He's decided that going forward, this is a quote, open quote, going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly

specifying parody will be permanently suspended because all of a sudden a bunch of people changed their handles to Elon Musk impersonator or Elon Musk 2, and he got upset about it, so he passed this ridiculous blanket law. Well, guess what, you fucking idiot? Parody. You are a self-absorbed, narcissistic weirdo, parody, that wants to send people to another planet, parody, rather than focus your genius and resources on making this planet more inhabitable, parody. Stop bringing in your Joey Bag of Donuts, fucking idiot, sycophantic, right-wing, trolling, abusing friends to help you fix Twitter. Parody. I have never seen anyone more ripe for a fall. Parody. Again, again, Elon has no idea what he's talking about. In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agreed in the Hustler v. Falwell case that a parity, which no reasonable person expected to be true, was protected by free speech.

Does that mean he has to put up with parity? No, it's a private company. But, boss, stop the whole free speech First Amendment blather, which you have absolutely no understanding of. You have the right to do this, but weren't you supposed to be the free speech, First Amendment, public square guy? Everything here is inconsistent. Everything here reeks of hypocrisy. Hello, First Amendment.

Freedom of speech is fundamental. This all comes down to the same thing. I've been thinking a lot about power recently. The universe at a very core level, at the most core level, we're talking big, big things that are difficult to wrap our brain around. By the way, I still can't understand, even begin to understand how space never ends. That makes no fucking sense. What if it ends? What's on the other side? How can it not

end? Anyway, supposedly if space never ends, which most people believe it doesn't, or most astrophysicists believe, that means everything has already happened. I learned that from my favorite scientific program, Modern Family. Anyways, the universe does not want absolute power. The universe clearly values diversity. What do I mean by that? The moment any apex predator gets too powerful, something happens. It gets fat and lazy, and then other people start eating it. The moment any ecosystem invades any other ecosystem, eventually that ecosystem is battled back. At any point when a company becomes too powerful, and granted the ceiling has been raised and some companies have gotten way too powerful, eventually they fall. Rome eventually falls. Unfortunately, everything everywhere ends, including the United States at some point. Although,

I'd like to ride out this whole United States thing, so please stop with the election disinformation. I'd like to see America go for another century or two until at least my kids are gone. I think it's a wonderful construct. Anyways, that's not why we're here. Everything everywhere ends eventually. So just some data here. Democracy of thought and governing is a good thing. MIT researchers who studied 184 countries in the period from 1960 to 2010, 50 years, found that countries switching to democratic rule experienced a 20% increase in GDP over a 25-year period compared to what would have happened had they remained authoritarian states. In other words, diversity of thought and competition is good for the economy. At a corporate level, the combination of risk blindness and a lack of inhibition creates a

vicious cycle. People begin to yes-man you, to share in your power, and as a result, you start receiving false signals, which artificially inflate confidence, leading you to believe even more firmly in the notion that you are an all-seeing, all-knowing, divine-even person. What's left is a hypersonic missile with a broken GPS. Musk is Latin for broken GPS. We'll be right back for our conversation with Dolly Chug. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances, marketing is the last thing on your mind. But if customers don't know about you, the rest of it doesn't really matter. Luckily, there's Constant Contact.

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Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca. You'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea. Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. welcome back here's our conversation with dolly chug a professor at nyu stern and author of the new book a more just future psychological tools for reckoning with our past and driving

social change dolly where does this podcast find you, it finds me in my office at NYU Stern. Nice. Near your office. That's right, back at school. Good for you. So let's jump right into it. We'll start with a scene from your book in which you describe your family's 2011 summer road trip

through South Dakota, Minnesota. You write that when you look back on this, you feel a nostalgia and a sweet regret. Can you walk us through what is behind your feelings of regret? Absolutely. Well, like so many things, regret was preceded with euphoria. It was a parenting euphoria where I had spent a whole year reading aloud to my two daughters the Little House on the Prairie book series. Every night, as many millions of people have enjoyed these books, little Laura Ingalls and her family, their adventures in the 1800s in these difficult conditions as they built a home and a life for themselves

in the middle of what we now call the United States. And I remember standing, literally standing on a prairie, looking at the little house that the actual Ingalls family lived in, and having this, like, nudgy, back-of-my-head question of, wait a minute, whose land was this before the Ingalls lived on it? Like whose prairie was this? And of course we know it was Native Americans, that millions and millions of Native Americans lived on that land, built lives and families and communities and cultures. And when the land was colonized, their lives were taken, their land was taken. And I remember kind of literally pushing that thought out of my head. It had come up briefly when I was reading to them over that year, pushed it out of the

conversation then too, and had the great week, the great vacation 10 years ago. And then in the 10 years since have just time and time again, wondered why I did that, why I didn't share with my kids the fuller version of American history in which this Ingalls family was truly a hardworking, amazing family. And they were also part of a colonizing effort that led to a genocide of Native Americans. And I realize now I just didn't know how to think about it. And I didn't know how to deal with my own emotions about it. I felt quite ashamed and guilty that it actually took me a year to even really reflect on it. And so I look back with regret because I realized I missed an opportunity and I left my kids with a lot to unlearn because I didn't know how to unlearn it myself. I think it's a common tension that parents feel, the tension between wanting your kids to understand history in an unvarnished, raw way. Because the American story is one that's fascinating,

but it has its dark chapters, whether it was, like you said, the genocides or internment camps of the Japanese. I mean, we've had some pretty, pretty ugly moments. And at the same time, not wanting your kids to feel as if they're born guilty or as if they have responsibility for it or somehow that by virtue of their legacy, they themselves are oppressors. I think we all struggle, or most of us struggle with that balance. But I think about that a lot, especially about, there's a wonderful series, I don't know if you've seen it, from Ken Burns talking about America's role in World War II. I love this notion you describe, or this notion of a gritty patriot, which encompasses conservative patriotism with a progressive critique of injustice. What do you mean by this? Yeah, and thank you for sharing what you just did. I very much relate to it, and I think this book comes from exactly the place you just described so beautifully. Well, I feel sometimes a little flummoxed because I love my country so much. I'm sure you do. I'm sure your listeners do. And there's also, you know, there's this Instagram version of my country that doesn't, as you said, kind of cover the full story. And so there's places where I feel the need to try to make my country better, to criticize my country,

to look for ways in which I can love my country, but not always like everything that happens. And I think there's this kind of caricature that's developed of conservative patriotism is about love of country and progressives are about critique of country, I see myself as doing both of loving my country and critiquing my country. And in trying to find a space for that or even a word for that, I've been describing it as gritty patriotism, building off the work of Angela Duckworth, the psychologist with the bestselling book and the very popular TED Talk about grit. In her research, she defines grit as passion and perseverance in pursuit of a meaningful long-term goal. And that strikes me as exactly what, you know, we as Americans are excellent at, pursuing meaningful

long-term goals. And what if that meaningful long-term goal was, in fact, our love of country, our desire to help our country sort of live up to its values more consistently? And what if we required passion and perseverance, not just red, white, and blue clothes or celebrating certain holidays? In order to do that, we apply grit in our hobbies, in our work lives, in our families. And I can imagine us doing that in how we think about our country and our love of country. So I've been talking about gritty patriotism to capture that juxtaposition. Yeah, it doesn't have to be binary, right? It doesn't have to be blind acceptance of everything and, you know, love it or leave it. And it doesn't have to be binary, right? It doesn't have to be blind acceptance of everything and, you know, love it or leave it. And it doesn't have to be, you also have to acknowledge, it helps to acknowledge that our incredible accomplishments. What is your, what's your take on cancel culture or what some people would as, as, um, it's the accountability we're holding other people to is as high for ourselves. So that's what I would like to see. I actually think cancel culture in

many ways is helped us have accountability, uh, take accountability, um, have other people take accountability where I get frustrated is when it's one way, when we're canceling others, but not reflecting on ourselves. And we know from personal observation, and we know from research by psychologists, myself and many, many others have shown that there is a gap between how we see ourselves and how we behave, sort of our explicit beliefs and our implicit biases. And acknowledging that gap seems really important if we're to be credible in canceling others. Yeah, I don't, I would argue that there's, it's, it would be difficult to hold ourselves to the standards that sort of this mob or this, I don't know, this general orthodoxy

that's emerging wants to hold people to. It's definitely, I mean, if that were the case, we would hold ourselves to a pretty high standard. Yeah, exactly. Can you walk us through the notion of connecting the dots? You write that we are psychologically wired to downplay the past and overplay the future. I love that. I'm going to repeat that.

We're psychologically wired to downplay the past and overplay the future. And then in order to overcome this, we should connect the dots. What do you mean by this? This was such cool research that I wasn't aware of until I was writing the book. Eugene Caruso and colleagues describe it as wrinkles in time, that the way we look at time in the future and the way we look at time in the past is actually not symmetrical. One way to think of it is that it's blurrier in the past. Even if it's a year ago or a year in the future and you were comparing those two, we actually see the future with more clarity, even though it hasn't happened yet. And we see the past in a more blurry way.

And some of the implications of that are that we tend to, let's say something terrible, harm was done to someone in the past, we actually tend to blame the victim more if that event happened in the past than if it was an event that was described to us in the future. We also have more muted emotions about things that happened in the past than things versus things that could happen in the future. So it's so counterintuitive to me because it seems like things that have already happened should be clearer and more emotional, but our minds actually find a way to kind of, this is my word, not the researcher's word, but kind of almost like rationalize it and

blur it if it's already happened. And as a result, as you said, it makes it really hard for us. We're not really wired to easily see how the past connects to what we're seeing in the present. And as parents, as you were describing, when we're trying to help our kids have that balance that you described in the beginning, I think connecting the dots is where the real meat of that is because what we are trying to do is help our kids understand the present, to look around with the questions they ask us and be able to offer some answers and clarity about it. And so the connecting the dots becomes a key tool to doing that. It makes sense. I'd never thought of that. It's an interesting, it's a really interesting

insight, but you can see how it happens because you can't change the past. And if there have been wrongs and you played some role in that, or our society played some role in that, we immediately start rationalizing or blurring it because we're just not comfortable with the notion that there's nothing we can do about the fact that we screwed up and we did something wrong. Whereas in the future, if you imagine something wrong, you see it clearly because maybe that's a means of avoiding it. You can be much more judgmental because the future is flexible. Whereas you're kind of, it's like why we can't imagine death.

We would just, it's just too upsetting. So we can't wrap our heads around it. A lot of your research focuses on the gap between how we view our own ethicality and how ethically we actually behave. Can you explain the psychological reason for that? Yeah. Well, where I focus is particularly, to be honest, I focus on the stuff that I grapple with in my own self. Like, how do I see myself or not see myself falling short of, you know, my sort of idealistic view of what it means to be a good person. So what I'm interested in is that gap where we are not always consciously

aware of our shortcomings, for lack of a better word. So I like to say I study the psychology of good people. And what that describes is the data that says most people see themselves and want to be seen as a good person. We all define good person differently. There's white nationalists see themselves as good people. Black Lives Matter activists see themselves as good people. There are widely different definitions of a good person, but what's similar is that it's an identity that many people care about. What makes it difficult to live up to that identity, particularly if your version, your definition of good person is that you don't want to be sexist or racist or homophobic or ageist or ableist, is that the human mind relies on a lot

of shortcuts to do its work. That, you know, in the time that I snap my fingers, one study says that my mind has 11 million thoughts in just the snap of a finger. And those are like little t thoughts, right? The idea that I kind of know to sit up and not lie down. Now I can feel the temperature of the air around me. I can understand the words you're saying. And I'm saying those are little T automatic autopilot thoughts. Only 40, four zero of those thoughts in that snap of the fingers are conscious thoughts, capital T thoughts. And that huge gap, 11 million versus 40, means there's a whole bunch, 99 point a zillion percent of our thinking that's happening in a way that we're not fully aware of, relying on those shortcuts, the kind that help us brush our teeth without thinking about it in the

morning or drive home after a long day at work and not remember if we hit red light or a green light. That's autopilot. And so what I'm interested in is the psychology of good people refers to what's happening in that autopilot mode that perhaps runs against what we define ourselves individually as being a good person. So everyone has this fear, I think, of being called an ist and being sanctioned by their colleagues. And we have a lot of it at NYU. And I always say that I'm not immune to it, but I can be a little bit more courageous around speaking my mind under the threat of sanctioning because I'm economically secure and I'm older. And I'm, you know, I have people in my life who are going to want me to take them to school tomorrow, regardless of what someone calls me. But there's definitely feels

like there's an orthodoxy emerging where the boundaries of what you can even have a discussion about risk this, what I'll call sanctioning. And I'll give you an example. I have said publicly that I just think it's ridiculous, the notion that the last time if Biden is reelected, the Marine one leaves the West Lawn, he'll be 86. And I've also said that an 82-year-old obese man, if President Trump is reelected, is not much better. And you get immediately, I think a lot of people are thinking what I'm saying and are afraid to say it. And as a result, it builds up this tide

of resentment and it turns off moderates. And we actually on the left end up hurting ourselves because there's a lot of people that are sympathetic and want to be seen as good people but feel like the flag bearers here won't even have a conversation when it gets difficult or questionable so a couple of thoughts are swimming through my mind um one is that i i um i appreciate the metaphor of heat and light i don't know who to credit. I haven't been able to find the source of it, but the metaphor speaks to the idea that there's different ways to sort of challenge the status quo. One is heat, which is pushing the envelope, like disruption, you know, making people uncomfortable by design. Another method is light, which is meeting people where they are. It's more education and discussion-based. It's incremental. It's working within people's comfort. And my personality is a more light-based personality. And I have come to appreciate the data from historians that have said that when there's

challenges to the status quo that are heavily light-based without heat or heavily heat-based without light, those challenges are not as effective as when there's elements of both heat and light. So to me, that helped me think more about the value of heat, even though I'm not very good at bringing it and not always very good at taking it, at least appreciating it that there are those willing to do it. Now, again, the imbalance, though, can be a problem. And what you're describing may be a gross imbalance of more heat than light in the

process. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future?

In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge,

to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. So you teach management at Stern. Are there any, and there may not be, are there any, someone's listening to this podcast thinks I'm just starting out as a manager.

I have my first direct report and I want to know the basics. I want to know the ABCs. Is there any way you can take our $7,000 class, which is what we charge for people to take our course, and trying to distill it down to the Old Navy, 40, 60, 80% of the value for 0% of the price, two or three best practices that you should always have in the back of your mind when you think of yourself as a manager? Well, I mean, I'm pulling my syllabus out, Scott. So glad you asked. Yeah, I do teach a class.

It's got a terrible title. It's called Developing Managerial Skills. I refer to it as how to be a great boss and how to be the kind of boss that your team will walk through fire for and that you will appreciate and not exploit their willingness to walk through fire for you.

And so I think the punchline is that being a better boss is being a better human. And so the things we cover in the course are things like cultivating self-awareness, things like listening to others, receiving feedback, different than giving feedback, receiving feedback, stimulating positivity, expressing appreciation, leveraging your own stress rather than dumping it on others. These are the kinds of things that make us easier to live with, make us better parents, and it turns out make us better bosses too. Yeah, I love these. And I find that management, as someone who's

managed small and medium-sized companies my whole life, I find that just because people feel that because they watch advertising, that they're a mild expert on advertising. And 80% of people think they're above average drivers. I find the same is true of management. Until you realize how hard it is in your 40s and 50s, I used to grade myself like an A minus as a manager. And now I realize I was a D. And I've gotten much better. I'm almost to a B again. But when you're young, you think if I'm a decent person, that means I'm a good manager. No, it doesn't. I mean, it's a real effort and skills. And an observation I have around who I think is arguably one of the most talented managers I've worked with is my business partner

and she's what I call a player coach. She's direct and provides feedback, but the way she kind of, the way she provides feedback is she pulls her chair up next to the person and says, let's work on this together. And she's so talented that she said, okay, you edited this video incorrectly.

Let's sit down and let's edit it together. And they learn and it shows concern. It shows a certain kind of maternal, paternal, whatever you want to call it, concern for your excellence at work. I'm investing in you. But I like this notion of a kind of a player coach as a manager.

And then there's sort of the inspiring manager that gets up in front of people and sets a goal and gets everyone on the same. I find that person is over the long term less effective because people start to get cynical. It's like, oh God, I've heard this rap again. But it is one of those things. It's strange. People immediately assume they're a good manager. Why do you think that is? Well, I think they actually, I agree that many people do that. And then there's this other version of people who just shy away from it and assume they'd be terrible managers, maybe weighted down by the responsibility it implies. So they don't even go near it. They might have that, you know, mountaintop inspiration version of management in their head

that they don't see themselves as that person. But I think that for those who overestimate, who are overconfident in this area, I suspect a big part of it is the asymmetry in the information we get, right? We give feedback down, we don't get it back up. You know, something like 80% of managers think they're running effective meetings, yet the data says something like, I'm making up these stats, but they're approximately right. 94% of us think most meetings are a waste of time. So how can both of those things be true? Well, as we wrap up here, I want to talk a little bit. I'd love to hear more about the work you've done at the NYU Prison Education Program, at the Wallkill Correctional Facility,

where you ran a book club. What have been your biggest learnings from that experience? I ran a book club and I also taught a full course there, going there every week. I've lost track of the years pre-COVID. Here's my biggest learning, Scott. You and I both teach fantastic students at NYU. They're smart, they're motivated, their personalities vary. Some are quiet, some are chatty, some are funny, some are serious. Some work really hard, some just get by, right? The exact same thing was true of my students in the prison. Like, exactly the same.

The variance was the same. The smartest students at Wallkill were as smart as my smartest students at NYU. The only difference was the uniform they were wearing and the institution they were in and perhaps, you know, actions they had taken or not taken that landed them in that prison to begin with. So that was really, I don't know why I expected something different, but I really expected something different. Did you come out of it more hopeful about our society or just that, you know, the dire cast are so many people and the system is intractably broken? How do you come away from it?

I came away more, maybe more pessimistic about the system, but more optimistic about human beings. And I think even the system, I think, you know, I have to say I was very ignorant of the system and ways in which it doesn't work well and have gotten more and more educated through teaching in the prison and then reading as much as I can around how the system works. So I think a lot of us are on that path of trying to educate ourselves. And there are some reforms that are addressing that. So I will also say this. I love to teach. I suspect you do too, Scott.

You're certainly renowned as a teacher here at NYU. So I've had many, many amazing teaching experiences. I've taught thousands of students. That said, my most joyful teaching experience was at Wallkill. And I'm not going to say the word rewarding. It was very rewarding, but I think people expect that because there's this idea that I'm some savior that's swooping in. I don't think I was any sort of savior swooping in. I think I brought the value I put on great teaching and great learning, just like I do at NYU's traditional

campus. I brought it to our campus at Wallkill. But what I didn't expect was the joy factor. This is a difference between my students on our traditional campus and at Wallkill. The students at Wallkill were better prepared for class very consistently. And it's not because they had so much free time. They don't have a lot of free time. They work to pay for things like toothbrushes and stuff. They have to work for jobs that pay somewhere around 10 to 15 to 30 cents an hour. That's a real number. So they're quite busy managing their course load, managing the responsibilities they have within the prison, but they prioritize the work and they were prepared for class.

Last thing, Dolly, I've always thought, I've always said, I think being an academic, I think what we do is a wonderful career. And do you have any advice? And I find very few young people, I meet very few young people who say, oh yeah, I'm planning to be an academic. Do you have any thoughts on academia as a career

and any advice for young people who are contemplating going into education or higher education, would you say? Well, I think, but also you and I, if I remember your trajectory, I didn't even think about becoming a professor until I was in my 30s, like 33 was the first time I thought about it. So it took a while to see a place for myself in this world. I also, you know, you and I could probably, you know, have a good conversation. Another point about our views on higher ed right now, I worry about higher ed. So I don't know that I also would fully recommend the career path. I think if you love teaching, being at a research university is sometimes challenging because the balance between research and teaching isn't quite the way I would love to see it. Dolly Chug is a social psychologist and management professor at the New York University Stern School of Business where she teaches MBA courses in leadership and management.

She also writes a newsletter, Dear Good People, and is the author of two books, including her latest, A More Just Future, Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change. Prior to becoming an academic, Dolly worked at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Simpson & Company, Scholastic, and Time, Inc. She joins us from the wonderful campus of NYU Stern in Soho, New York, in the greatest country in the world. Dolly, it's wonderful to speak to you. You are an icon at NYU. You do a tremendous amount of good and have a tremendous amount of value. So thank you for taking the time to come on the Prof G pod.

I'm honored. Thank you, Scott. Algebra of happiness. How do we reverse engineer? What is the learnings from Elon Musk? Other than start an EV company or try to put people on Mars, what can you learn if you're a young man or woman? What's the takeaway here?

Luck in the universe is perfectly symmetrical, meaning there is the exact same amount of bad luck as good luck. And you need to be humble and grateful when you're killing it. In other words, a lot of your success, whether it's financial or personal or emotional, is not your fault. When good things happen to you, it's easier to be successful. It's easier to be emotionally secure. It's easier to have good relationships. A lot of your success is a function of being in the right place at the right time. So when you're doing well, you want to do a couple of things. One, you want to be grateful. I think that makes it easier to continue to make good decisions, recognizing a lot of

that is not your fault. And two, you want to bring your horns in. What do I mean by that? You are never more susceptible to a really bad decision as you are after coming off a big win. Why? You start to believe that it's you and not the universe. And sure, your grit and your character played a big role in it, as did your talent. But a lot of it was luck.

You'd rather be lucky than good, quite frankly. So when you have a stock that triples, recognize you got lucky and maybe you want to take risks down. When you're killing it at work, be grateful, try and help others. And here's the hard part. You want to do the same on the flip side. What do I mean by that?

When someone breaks up with you, when you've had a big hit professionally, you get fired or you get passed over for a promotion or you get a shitty raise or you've had an investment not work out. Sure, mourn, mourn, but then forgive yourself because a lot of your failure isn't your fault. And if you can, try and figure out the behavior modification that convinces you that you are awesome, that you should stay in the market, that you should continue investing. Even when you feel like you're cursed, you're not. Again, see above,

same exact amount of good as bad luck. When you have a relationship go poorly, convince yourself, look in the mirror and convince yourself you have a lot of value. You have a lot to offer and get out there and try and get in situations where you're going to get asked out or you're going to ask people out or you're going to find coffees or you're going to create moments of serendipity where you can connect with others. When you get beamed in the face in life, it means that if you can get up and dust off your pants, the odds have never been greater. If you get back to the plate and you're optimistic about the world and you're good and you're kind

and you have confidence that you are on the verge of a grand slam. And at the same time, when you're killing it, be humble, be grateful, because a lot of that isn't your fault. Dust off your pants, get back to the plate, and be humble. Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. Sammy Resnick is our associate producer. If you like what you heard,

please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to The Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week. Thank you. these by reading Alex Partners' latest technology industry insights, available at www.alexpartners.com slash vox. That's www.alexpartners.com slash vox. In the face of disruption, businesses trust Alex Partners to get straight to the point and deliver results when it really matters. email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com

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