Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
 Shoya Zichy heads a New York City-based consulting firm specializing in
 executive coaching and management development seminars based on the
 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and related personality models.  She has also
 developed and implemented programs on the impact of personality on risk
 tolerance and investment behavior.  Her clients include Con Edison, Standard
 & Poor's, The Harris Bank, The Northern Trust Bank, and Deloitte & Touche,
 
 In 1990, she tapped into a long-standing interest in psychology and became
 qualified to administer and interpret the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  
 In fact, she is a past president of the Myers-Briggs Association of New
 York.  Shoya has parlayed her interest in the MBTI into the book _Women
 and the Leadership Q_ which her Web site, www.LeadshipQ.com, describes:
 
 "What do successful women share in common? How do they differ? How do they
 themselves evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses? Combining a
 38-item self-scoring quiz and exercises with 37 in-depth interviews of
 powerful women in finance, business, politics and entertainment Women and
 The Leadership Q presents a hands-a breakthrough system to help readers
 identify and build on their "signature" leadership style. Profiles include
 Diane Sawyer, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Hillary Clinton, Christie
 Whitman, Wendy Wasserstein, Alexandra Lebenthal, Dr.Nancy Snyderman and
 Senator Kay Hutchison."
 
 You can take Shoya's Q Quiz yourself at
 
  http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/Q-test.html
 
 and find the answers at
 
  http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/Q-answers.html
 
 Libbi Lepow, who will lead the discussion, is an Organization Development
 professional with over 20 years experience working with people in both
 corporate and non-for-profit settings.  Currently, she's the People
 Effectiveness Guru at E*TRADE Group in Menlo Park, CA and the President of
 her own consulting company, Westwind Management Consulting.
 
 Libbi has worked with individuals and teams in places as diverse as a
 nuclear power plant and a .com company, and remains constantly intrigued
 by the complexity that comes when working with people. She has used the
 MBTI in her work for over a dozen years and finds it a valuable tool in
 helping people understand themselves and their preferences and, as a
 result, work more effectively and productively.
 
 Libbi has been <paris@well.com> for over eight years.

 Please join me in welcoming Shoya and Libbi to inkwell.vue!
  

    

Thanks for the welcome, Linda!  I was pretty jazzed when you first mentioned
the possibility of my facilitating this discussion and am even more so now
that I've had the opportunity to meet Shoya f2f and read her book.  Let me
encourage everyone who joins in this conversation to go out to her web site
and spend a few minutes completing the questionnaire.  It will make her
descriptions much more impactful, and you can figure out which of the many
leaders she discusses are most like you!  (I'm a Green Advocate, btw.)

Shoya, before we talk about the book itself, and some of the amazing women
whose interviews you've shared in it, would you mind telling everyone a
little more about yourself?  You've had a fascinating career so far, and
the journey that brought you to writing the book is quite interesting.  How
did you end up parlaying  your knowledge of Type and Temperament into a
successful tool in working with clients in financial services?  What value
did this additional knowledge add to your ability to provide quality service
to those clients?  Can you share some of those experiences with us?
  

    
Yes indeed.  First of all, thanks to you both for the introduction. 

Now as to my own background.  Many years ago I started working in the
world of private banking and was sent to the Far East for a four year
assignment to manage the bank's high net worth clients.  One very warm,
humid  night I was at the at the Philippine airport when they
announced that my plane had been cancelled.  Mrs Marcos, then First
Lady of the Philippines, had commandeered the plane to take her friends
to Malaysia.  The airport was essentially closed since we were the
last flight out. Looking for something to do, I suddenly noticed a very
ragged book on the floor.  I picked it up and discovered the
personality model of Carl Jung which is essentially the foundation of
the Myers-Briggs model.  The book described different ways that people
take in information and make decisions.  For the next two hours I sat
and scribbled the names of all my clients and was suddenly amazed at
how clearly it showed why I got along with some better than others. 
The next day, back in my office in Hong Kong I color coded all their
files, left some very simple instructions on how they should be handled
in my absence and to everyone's amazement our new business shot up by
50% over the next few months.  What this said to me was that people do
think in different ways and that if we meet their needs, as opposed to
our own, they like us a whole lot better.  

It was a good 15 years later that I discovered the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator itself and since then have been studying other people's
research and conducting my own on different ways of applying these
ideas to everyday life.    
  

    

Well, it's hard to argue with a 50% increase in business results!

Can you talk a little about what motivated you to begin thinking about
leadership - especially women's leadership styles - in this context?

Oh, and when you're done with that, it would be great if you could give us a
brief run down of the Leadership Q - how you designed it, perhaps, as well
as a brief overview of the four "Color Groups".  If you think this might
influence the way people complete the quiz, let us know, and we'll hold off
on that until folks click on the URL and take the quiz!
  

    
First of all, I define leadership as "the ability to influence the
thoughts, behaviors and actions of a significant number of people. 
This is somewhat of a a broader definition than usually accepted. It
encompasses both people who command massive human and financial
resources and those that influence through the power of an idea.  So my
interest has been what distinguishes those that influence others in a
significant way and those that don't.    

Secondly I also become a member of a group in New York known as the
Financial Women's Association which has some 1200 members .  We started
offering seminars for them on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in which
they did group exercises and posted their answers on flipchart pages. 
I studied these papers and soon noticed that these women did not fit
the norm that is described in the popular literature of say John Gray
and Deborah Tannen .  They were more competitive, interested in numbers
and financial concepts, blunt, more ready to take charge and often
spoke of having experienced a deep sense of isolation as children with
a closer relationship to their father than mother.  Now, this was not
true of all women but to a significant majority.  

Meanwhile, in doing seminars for companies in other sectors, I
observed that there was a percentage of this type of leader in other
fields as well but not as large.  Ultimately, I began to connect this
difference with the dimension of the Myers-Briggs model that is known
as the "thinking and feeling" decision-making process.  Semantically
these terms are somewhat misleading since they do not mean "rational
vs. emotional."  They explain that some people make decisions based
mainly on objective criteria of what is fair and logical while others
place a heavy emphasis on subjective factors such as personal values
and the impact of the decision on people. 

In my sample, women divide 35%/65% (objective vs. subjective) and men
65%/35% which is why people keep writing women are more collaborative.
But this conclusion does not apply to all women, nor are all men more
competitive.  

This difference I believe is innate and predictable from an early age.
 Women that succeed instinctively understand who they are and have
been clever (or in most cases lucky) enough to find situations that
play to the strengths of their style.  Later on we can talk about
specific examples of people in each group and how they view themselves
as leaders and managers.  

Now I could have writtens this book for men or as a general topic and
interviewed 37 leaders of both sexes.  I chose to focus on women
because I found that women have more self confidence issues with power
and influence.  So a book of this type will hopefully give them the
space to explore their innate "signature" style if you will.  Also I
had an excellent network that provided introductions to these people. 
And getting 37 visible people to agree to be publicly analyzed was a
huge undertaking which required some very deep connections.

The LeadershipQ quiz itself is based on the four sets of personality
preferences outlined in the works of Carl Jung and the Myers-Briggs
community.  This Quiz is not the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which is a
highly validated instrument.  But it does seem, as a first cut, to tap
into those differences.  

The dimensions define 
a. how we prefer to take in information 
b. how we make decisions (as discussed above) 
c. how we prefer to structure your life 
d. how we are energized (which, in this book, is deemphasized for
purposes of simplicity.  

The combination of these four elements produce some very interesting
insights into the way people approach many areas of life, from running
a company to parenting their children.  I have grouped these
differences into four main color groups which correspond to the
temperament work of Dr. David Keirsey.  The color groups then expand
into the eight leadership styles defined in the book.  

In brief the four color groups are
The Golds, the organized guardians of society - grounded realistic and
accountable
The Blues, the change agents who challenge the status quo --
strategic, theoretical and always driven to acquire more knowledge 
The Reds, the fast moving troubleshooters and expediters -
spontaneous, action driven and focused on "now"
The Greens, the diplomatic humanists - empathetic, cause-driven and
expressive.  
  

    

One of the things I like about your book, Shoya, is exemplified in the post
above - your ability to present complex concepts in both understandable and
useable terms.  It's both refreshing and informative.

A little more about how you used this model in your business, if you will.
What was the reaction from your colleagues as you introduced the ideas and
(one assumes) changed the way work was done?  Did your clients know about
the construct and how you were using it?  I'd be very interested to know
some examples of the differences in the way you'd work with say a Gold v. a
Green client.
  

    
Fascinating... and let me echo Libbi's question. 

I am very interested how this might affect the way people interact
online> I find people sometime experience online interaction spaces
(like the Well)in very different ways. Maybe if we could recognize via
something like the color groups, we could figure out how to make spaces
work for more people more of the time!!
  

    

choco, have you taken Shoya's Q-test?
  

    

For those of you who have completed the MBTI questionnaire in the past, I
came out exactly the same on the LeadershipQ quiz as the MBTI.
  

    

I just discovered that I'm a Green.  And if I would just get off my ---
and fill out the questionnaire you sent me, Lib, I could find out if I
come out the same way on the MBTI, too.

I find that I am happy being Green.
  

    

<heh>  Well I can sure identify with that, Linda!  ;-)
  

    
In response to your question Libbi of how I used it, I told my
colleagues that I discovered a system that might help us better service
our client and therefore pry their additional assets away from
competing institutions.  I did not explain it further.  Most people in
that industry are very bottom line oriented.  And they figured why not
try it.  

As to how we used it with different groups, here are a couple of
examples.

Bear in mind that we only saw our clients 3-4 times a year so there
were usually many ways of approaching that meeting.  And furthermore,
because of strict laws about taking money out of their respective
countries, they did not receive any mail on their accounts, so we had
all the statements.

So when Golds came in, I told everyone to make sure all their
accumulated statements were organized in date sequential order and that
all the numbers were up to date and 100% correct.  Now you must bear
in mind that this was the pre-computer, pre-fax era, (if any of you can
remember those) and that we were in Hong Kong and a long distance away
from headquarters where this money was managed and the statements
generated.  Therefore their statements were usually about a month old
and the totals were never correct.  Now the clients accepted this
because our competitors had the same problem.  But when we went the
extra step of sending telexes to NY to get the updated totals, and
arranging all their statements so they could follow the investment
progression without flipping back and forth between 50 pieces of paper,
they were ecstatic.  It satisfied their need for order and
organization and they felt we had a control over the process. Then they
were open to other ideas that we were trying to sell them.  

Now for our friends the Blues, they could have cared less.  As long as
the totals were about right, they shoved everything in a big bag and
probably put fire to it back in their hotel room.  Here the
instructions were call NY and get three new investment ideas.   It does
not matter what they are.  They should be fresh, challenging and
preferably with some guru behind them.  Well of course the client
immediately sat up, started picking the ideas apart, and giving you
their accumulated wisdom.  But they were engaged, and at the end of the
meeting usually bought into one of them.  Best of all they walked out
thinking you were the most intelligent person they had dealt with that
day.  

AS for the Greens, usually you checked as to who else in the family
was traveling with them and invited as many members as appropriate for
lunch.  You never talked business until the last sip of coffee.  You
built the relationship.  You got the details on what everyone in the
family was doing.  You offered to have your colleague in New York call
their daughter in her boarding school in MA to find out if she needed
anything.  You asked about their philanthropic activity.  And at the
end of the meal, you brought out one piece of paper prepared by you
with the all the totals.  From there the business just grew all by
itself.

Lastly we have the complicated ones - the REDs.  Instructions were
"clear the decks and free your afternoon.  they will come in with
multiple requests.  They need money in Switzerland by the following
morning.  They need to check why a transfer that went through four
different countries got lost.  They need a letter of credit IMMEDIATELY
to invest in the company of the man met on the plane that morning. 
They need you to break bank rules.  You are going to be hanging around
to get those approvals and you are probably going to have to pull your
bigwigs out of meetings to get those.  So have plenty of coffee, good
cheese and nibblies around.  It is going to be a long day.  Also be
sure to have a couple of good jokes ready for the lulls in between.

So that is a brief summary as to some of the things we did.

Now as far the web experience goes, that is a subject under study at
the moment.  Perhaps, Nancy, after you have had a chance to internalize
some of these differences, you can tell us what you think.  My
experience with my friends in NY now is that the Blues are the most
into the web itself.  They usually have the best understanding of the
technology, and it satisfies their need to continuously get new
knowledge.  The Reds are having fun with email and the ability to
instantly communicate with people.  The Greens love finding a
compatible community like this one.  And the Golds are the most
resistant.  They have certain sites they bookmark to get the
information they need.  They like features like the group mail that
enables them with one button to efficiently announce the latest
committee meeting.  But they don't seem to be surfing at random like
the Blues and Greens.  However, these are my observations only.
  

    
I just finished the book, and it was a  fun  read. I'm a "green-advocate,"
also, and I'd wager a guess that the WELL is full of  that type. I liked the
Hillary (Blue) profile,  & the consideration of the possible 'opposite'
match with Bill (Red).
  

    
Wow, wonderful story. Thank you!(And great use of a story to show an
idea!!)You have given me *all* kinds of ideas for my web work. 

Like offline, I think different web experiences, tools and interaction
spaces draw different types of people. 

My first reaction was to think that blues might be the early adopters
and now we are seeing the transition to other groups, but I checked
myself. Blues might logically be the very early adopters who created a
lot of the infrastructure to the early internet. But the web, with the
graphic interface, probably drew in more diversity of type and
approach. 

It's funny. When I think of the students I've taught online or clients
I've worked with online, the ones I can now most quickly identify in
retrospect were the Golds. If the experience did not work for them
right away, I lost them. I could adapt and adjust things to meet the
needs of the reds, blues and greens (well, the greens were always
helping everyone else adapt!!). But the golds were like an on/off
switch. This makes me wonder if I could design different entryways into
an online interaction space that reflected the different needs and
preferences?

Linda, I immediately took the test (is that a sign?) and I had the
most difficulty with the first section. I could have easily checked
most items from both sides. But in the next section I came out Green. I
think I am a Red/Green schizo! I am not a Blue or a Gold. Of that I am
certain!!! ;-) 

This is fascinating!!! 
  

    

Fascinating, indeed!  And your strategies for working with the different
preferences are perfect (or as perfect as you can be when you're dealing
with human beings!).  I'm especially impressed with your strategy for the
Reds, whom I've always found to be the most difficult =because= of their
unpredictability.  Apparently you've managed to predict unpredictability!

Can you tell us about the impact of these preferences on leadership style
(both positive and negative) and start talking about some of the people you
interviewed for the book?
  

    
Actually, Nancy come to think of it, my neighbor is a sophisticated
web designer who specializes in a lot of graphic activity.  He is a
Red, so maybe with visuals driving many of these sites, the Reds will
become more predominant in the design side of it.  It would be
interesting to test some of your associates.
  

    

I have to say that, even though I most closely associated with the items
that clearly led to my being a Green, in the scenario you describe above,
Shoya, I would have responded best to the one for the Blues.  In fact, I
would have loved it, and would have hated the one you describe for the
Greens.  So I guess I am somewhat schizophrenic myself!
  

    
Okay, let me take the impact of the preferences on the leadership.  

But before I do, perhaps I can respond quickly to Linda's comment
about preferring the Blue meeting.  Would this apply,in your case, to a
meeting that was set up discuss investment issues or to another
meeting that would deal with topics of special interest to you?  The
reason I ask is that, in my experience, money and investments are
usually not topics of great interest to Greens.  They will get as
involved as necessary to make sure the funds are well taken care of,
and can do so very competently if their welfare or that of their family
is at stake.  But if they have an advisor that they trust they will
usually do the minimum.  I have never seen a Green grab the Wall Street
journal from his/ber mate.  

Now for leadership, the key points are summarized as follows.

Golds are decisive and constant and excel in establishing and
enforcing policy.  They run things efficiently - departments, meetings,
volunteer activities.  They accept responsibility freely and serve as
the backbone of corporate and public institutions of all kinds.  They
respect the chain of command and have finely tuned systems for
everything.  Their potential blindspot is that they resist change and
sometimes are too supportive of the hierarchy.  
They are valued because they bring security to those under their care.
 

An example of a Gold in my book is Judge Sotomayor of New York.  She
grew up in a drug infested tenement and became diabetic in her early
childhood.  Around the age of ten, however, she was watching Perry
Mason and decided that becoming a lawyer might be the way of this mess.
 As she continued watching the show, however, she noticed that every
time Mason wanted to do something, he had to ask the Judge.  So that
night, in that dingy room, becoming a judge became her goal.  She never
wavered from it.  As years went by she managed to get into and find
scholarship money for Princeton, then Yale and in 1998, in her 40s,
became the first Puerto Rican woman to be appointed by Clinton to the
nation's second highest court.  You gotta love it!!

Blues are often the most visionary when it comes to systems and
organizations.  They challenge existing authority and have little
interest in routine and established procedure.  They set their own
benchmarks against which they continuously test themselves and others,
setting unusually high standards of performance.  They are highly
precise in thought and language and often see connections others do
not.  Their potential blindspot is that others may find them
intimidating and argumentative and they have trouble expressing
appreciation.  After all, achievement is its own reward and praise is
faintly condescending!!!  

Both Hillary Clinton and Dr Nancy Snyderman, the medical correspondent
of ABC are Blues.  

Greens share a people-centered vision and often have a unique
charismatic quality that pulls others into their cause.  In some it is
outgoing and exuberant; in others more self contained but both are
enthusiastic spokespersons for the cause of their choice.  They see the
best in people, listen intently and appear to almost effortlessly
motivate others.  Their style is democratic and participative and they
genuinely care about the development of others.  Their potential
blindspot is that they have difficulty dealing with confrontation and
will often overpersonalize criticism.

Oprah is a good example of a Green.  While some deride the constant
self improvement focus of her show, few can deny her influence and the
success of her show.

Reds excel as trouble-shooters who get people to cooperate with them
and each other on the basis of expediency.  They observe the system,
figure out where the error is and rapidly introduce the needed
correction.  Under Red leadership change is easy and things happen with
economy of motion.  They don't fight the system, because they know
everything is negotiable.  

Governor Christie Whitman is a Red and her rise to fame is a classic
case of setting short term goals and changing them, when the conditions
were right.  No one, in New Jersey, not even her own party, ever
expected her to get where she is.  Another woman in my book, Cathy
Hughes Chair of Radio One is the first African American woman to have
her company go public.  Only ten years ago, she was sleeping on the
floor of her office because her business debts were so high, she had to
give up her house.  "I never had a long term plan" she said, " I never
even had a five week plan.  My only plan was to meet my payroll and
take care of my son." Today she is worth in excess of $100 million. 
  

    

I can validate your description of Greens vis a vis investments, Shoya.  I
know it's important to invest, but the details make me nuts.  I was lucky
enough to find a patient financial advisor who understands people like me,
and I do, indeed, do the minimum I possibly can to keep things going when I
work with her.
  

    
I'm curious about people who have trouble using the device of the test.
(I love the stories, which leads me to believe that a book with a lot of
anecdotes and portraits would be very useful!)

This kind of testing is interesting to me because I'm so on the fence...
same with MBTI.  And a nine in the enneagram, which sort of fits that same
scenario.  I do a lot of internal "..but on the other hand..." and that is
not great for self-scored tests nor is it a terribly common trait, seems
to me.

I take this test and barely get section I into the B column... then get into
section II and am a total blue-green stalemate.  Now if I go back, 
and change a few answers in the first section, I am a very vivid red.  But
all I know for sure is that I am not a gold.  And it is sobering to 
remember that golds are in the majority.  From the red/blue-green 
(commie algae?) corner, it is incredibly important to remind myself of 
that from time to time.  I can't think I'm typical.  That's a valuable
reminder.

Do you see any patterns with people who find the choices difficult?
  

    

Libbi, please send me the name of your financial advisor!!

Shoya, well, hmmm.  My eyes do tend to glaze over at discussions of
financial details, but I love the Wall Street Journal!  So I continue to
be a contradiction.
  

    

Email to Castle to follow!
  

    
Gail, I play the same game with the tests. "It all depends" seems to
me my mantra!
  

    
Re: testing associates

Shoya, I have the opportunity to ask a new online class worth of
students (prob. around 12) starting on monday to do the self
assessment, then try to see if I can get some (unstructured) feedback.
I'm trying to think of how...

It would be relevant to the course as self-awareness is one of the
topics we start with. I could also link them back to this conversation
if they wanted to. Could be interesting....???? Worth pursuing?
  

    

Nancy, I think it would be very cool if your virtual group participated in
this conversation.
  

    
Well, I took the test, and I was pretty strongly a blue.  

It was 3-6 in Section I, and then 7-0 in Section II.

My Myers Briggs Test that I took a couple of years back showed up as ENTP.

I'm not sure what it all means, as like everyone else I change from time
to time.  In practical terms, having taken this test, is there a "best
practices" way of kicking my weakness's ass?

For example, I'm a good idea man, but I know from a practical perspective
that I need to follow through more.  Is there some good way that people
who score like I score can learn to follow through more?  Or is it just a
proclivity to note, and keep on plugging away at it?