While playing the new Sims game Spore, a game where you get to make your own species to compete against others, my evolving species of Bloopies encountered a much tougher group of Stingfangs (lions to my puppies). But when I commanded my lead Bloopie to roar, guess what happened? The Stingfangs, as a pack, turned and fled! Surprise: even the toughest creatures and managers out there are vulnerable to panic from time to time. We're social creatures and we are built to feel panic simply because others around us are, regardless of what's really going on in the world.

Often panic is more dangerous than whatever the original threat was. When FDR said in his first inaugural address in 1933, in response to the great depression, "all we have to fear is fear itself", this is exactly what he meant.

Panic is extremely old. The fight or flight response is so deep in our genes, that like the Stingfangs, we don't have control over the response. And what's going on in the financial markets has many people panicking well beyond the reality of what has happened so far.

Here are three steps to get back to reality:

1. Do not face panic alone: find a partner. Head to happy hour with a co-worker, friend, or family and talk about what's going on. The wider your network to vet out your fears, the more balanced your view of the world will become. The worst thing in the world to do is pretend to the world you're not afraid, and try to manage it all alone. Any irrational fears will fester and grow, slowly eroding your ability to take smart action.
2. Make three plans. Pick one or two wise friends or colleagues and sit down for a planning session. Make three plans: Worst case, moderate case, best case. For each plan imagine out 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months. Don't worry about how accurate these forecasts are: the goal is to get you proactive. Instead of obsessing about what might happen (defensive) you are taking action to carve out possible futures and anticipate them. As more bad or good news comes in, adjust your plans and reconvene with your crew.
3. Redouble your stress relievers. Whatever you do for stress relief, going to the gym, playing X-box, playing with the kids, plan to add 10-20% more of that activity to your schedule. Build in some extra buffering into your daily psychology to balance out the added stress. If your panic is based on a truly serious issue, it will be something you will have to deal with over the long haul. Build in support for yourself to handle that long-term stress now. Physical stress relief is often better than mental: we experience stress physically and need physical activity, even walking, to help relieve it.

How do you as a manager or individual handle panic and intense stress? Let me know.

One trick to creative thinking is to explore different ways to express an idea. Instead of just writing it down, why not make a sketch? Or draw a diagram? There are thousands of ways to represent an idea, and representing it in the most effective way can make the difference between getting the green light, and going back to the drawing board.

I have a background in design, which means I compulsively pick up most books on visual thinking and brainstorming. I was recently quite pleased to discover Dan Roam's book, The Back of the Napkin.

The premise of the book, which I agree with, is a pen and paper are enormously powerful tools for exploring ideas. Through various examples and stories, he makes the point that simplicity works in favor of good ideas and effective communication. If you're terrified of drawing by hand at a whiteboard, and want some tricks for making as much use as possible from your limited artistic skills, this is the book for you. It falls short in some places (an extended case study takes up more than its worth), but it's an easy read and will give you more choices the next time you have a dry erase marker in hand.

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas With Pictures (Amazon). Companion website here.

As bad as your day might be, no matter how difficult your company politics or how annoying your coworkers are, this story makes it all seem not so bad.

Times Online reports from Delhi, India:

Lalit Kishore Choudhary, 47, the head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, an Italian-headquartered manufacturer of car parts, died of severe head wounds on Monday afternoon after being attacked by scores of laid-off employees, police said...

Other executives said they were lucky to escape with their lives. "I just locked my room's door from inside and prayed they would not break in. See, my hands are trembling even three hours later," an Italian consultant, Forettii Gatii, told a local newspaper.

Full story here.

User reviews are the lifeblood of many great websites, from amazon.com, to yelp.com, and even Apple iTunes. What we don't often here are stories from the people who manage these user generated comments and the challenges of depending on the crowds.

Check out this informal, but good analysis by Scott Ruthfield, former manager of the amazon.com customer review business:

All of this sounds good, of course, but then people get involved. And customer service reps are trying to interpret the philosophies (if they can find them among hundreds of pages of other rules), and some of them are judgment calls (what is "demonstrably false?" If I say "the defibrillator didn't work and my dad died," is someone going to check? are comments on voting records trustworthy? etc.) that different people will make, and of course you don't want Jeff or Steve Jobs or anyone making every decision. So it's messy, and when it's messy, strange things happen - reviews appear and disappear,

Read his full post here. Also read his excellent advice on what to do when you're stuck.

One great way to find management insights is to study a field other than your own. By becoming a tourist, a traveler, it's easier to be curious. You can ask big questions since you're free from the baggage of your own ego. It's one reasons movies like Apollo 13, Hoosiers, and Miracle are popular films among management types looking for inspiration, rather than stories pulled directly from the business world.

One recent find is the story of the Polaris nuclear missile management team. Could you design a breakthrough technology, under competition, short deadlines and the defense of the free-world at stake? These guys did.

The story is told by the boringly titled book The Polaris System Development. Although published by Harvard University Press, its not easy to find. The best summary I've found is from, of all places, Budapest University. Here's an excerpt:

Once given the mandate and start-up funds, the SPO had an enormous task - to bring into being an entirely new weapons system. This included nuclear powered submarines, then in their infancy, global navigation and communication systems, missile systems, launching systems, fire-control systems and maintenance, support and training programs. Most of these components did not exist at the time - many were still only on the drawing board. All had to be designed, built, tested and integrated into one workable unit and made operational, from scratch -- within five years! Building a weapons system based on the promise of one or two technologies was not unusual, but doing it on a dozen technologies was.

Read the entire summary/analysis of the book (PDF). It's an easy read and I promise will have you thinking more deeply about your own business than your standard case studies will.

Hat tip to Steven Smith for recommending the Polaris story.

Have other great stories of management and innovation from unusual projects? Leave a comment.

Back when I was teaching at the University of Washington, one surprise for the students of my creative thinking course (PDF outline) was the importance of pitching ideas in the history if innovation. We like to think great innovations happen because of how wonderful the idea is - that somehow it sells itself to investors, VPs and customers. But the true story of every great innovation involves many failed pitches, in ratios of dozens or more to one.

One key text for the course was Ira Flatow's excellent book They All Laughed: Fascinating Stories Behind Great Inventions. Flatow digs into the true history of how world changing inventions like copy machines, lasers, light bulbs and Velcro came to be, including the various ways their inventors tried, and mostly failed, to pitch their ideas.

Nearly a third of my own course involved pitchwork, breaking down how to express ideas you've developed in ways most likely to generate interest. This included the discussion of this favorite essay of mine: How to pitch an idea.

What is the best pitch you've ever seen in person? What made it so good? How about the worst pitch?

Google's long awaited web browser was released to the world on Tuesday. The hype and speculation glands of bloggers everywhere are in overdrive, despite few commentators actually using the new browser, nor stopping to consider what we can learn from how browser wars in the past were won and lost. (Disclosure: I worked on IE 1 to 5 for Microsoft, and am currently a happy Firefox 3.0 user).

Here's a quick rundown of what I've read about Chrome, with insights added:

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington writes:

Chrome, the Webkit-based Google browser that launches tomorrow at Google.com/chrome, will give them a real foothold on the desktop and way more control over how web applications perform. While it seems that Chrome is aimed at IE and Firefox, the target is really Windows... Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows... I love Chrome already and I haven't even tried it yet (nor will I be using it much soon, since it will only work on Windows for now). But Google's days of unchecked growth may soon come to an end. They are quickly becoming the new Microsoft.

For starters, Google does not want to be in the Operating System business. They do not want to be responsible for device drivers and hardware compatibility issues that are the bane of the Windows team's existence. They are more than happy to have Windows continue to be blamed for all the crashes and pains caused by those problems, while they work to render the Operating system irrelevant. Netscape had the exact same battle plan in 1996. Microsoft, in response, followed suit in 1997, with it's DHTML platform running on browsers for the Mac, Windows and Unix. If the browser war does rage again, we are fighting over already bloody ground. And its worth reviewing the playbook used then, as its likely to come up again now.

But more to my point, there is no war yet. This is a shot across the bow. They've done the minimum required to make a point, see the response, and repeat. That is all that has happened so far. It has been a bargain for Google; a small team working for 18 months has achieved more attention in a week than many companies will get in a lifetime. But until we see how Microsoft, Firefox and web developers respond, there's not much of a story.

Fellow Harvard blogger Anthony Scott writes:

Of course, it is far too early to make definitive proclamations about Chrome. The most critical question from a disruptive perspective is the degree to which Google is able to obtain differentiated performance by integrating together its applications and its browser. If one plus one really equals something that is meaningfully more than two, Microsoft will struggle to match Google's performance, let alone deal with the ramifications of a disruptive business model.

Jargon alert: Anthony is a smart guy but he gets the award for most jargon in a post on Chrome. Differentiated performance? Disruptive business model? I'm not smart enough to figure out what he's trying to say. It's a stretch to call a new kind of web browser that runs CSS, HTML, Javascript disruptive by any definition, as most of what it does, and how it works, is exactly the same from the customer's perspective, by design. And as far as disruptive business model, the browser has no business: it's given away for free like most browsers are.

As best I can understand his point, we have to wait and see if Google Docsdemonstrate superior performance on Chrome. Good point. But if they do, why isn't it mentioned anywhere? And even if they do in a future release, we're back to the real test of disruption: what will it be about a faster Google Docs or G-mail that gets Outlook and Office users to switch? Chrome, for end-users, is largely the same as existing browsers. The difference is in performance and architecture, features that developers need to choose to take advantage of: an unpopular choice for a browser with less than 1% market share.

A better question is how far is Google willing to go to bleed Firefox, a project they still fund, but now compete with, of its market share to drive Chrome? The Firefox blog is dead silent this week. As is Opera's blog, Opera being the ever-hardworking but often forgotten player in the field.

The most sensible commentary came from Nick Carr:

Although I'm sure Google would be thrilled if Chrome grabbed a sizable chunk of market share, winning a "browser war" is not its real goal. Its real goal, embedded in Chrome's open-source code, is to upgrade the capabilities of all browsers so that they can better support (and eventually disappear behind) the applications. The browser may be the medium, but the applications are the message.

Browsers earn no revenue. When Netscape fell apart in 1998/9, Microsoft disbanded its Internet Explorer team within a year to put engineers on projects that earn money. There is little money in browsers, and Google doesn't need to be the market leader. All it needs, as Carr points out, is to get the features in needs into browsers so it can do its thing. The question is how much market share does a Chrome or Chrome-comparable Firefox need to attain before Microsoft swallows hard and enters another browser feature war? If it doesn't, it risks a slow market share drain. And if it does, it supports Google's other ambitions.

If you want more analysis on Chrome as a browser, read my full review of Chrome here.

Gina Trapani is the lead editor at one of the most popular blogs in the world, lifehacker.com, offering daily advice on how to work smart, not just hard. She is also the author of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster Better. I had the chance to ask her some tough questions I've always wanted to ask a productivity guru, and loved her smart insightful answers.

1. Most MBA types out there are obsessed with productivity, and your website lifehacker.com and book, Upgrade Your Life, are two of the most popular places for learning tricks for working smarter. If you could have a Lifehacker course become a mandatory part of an MBA program, what sorts of things would it include?

My mandatory MBA Lifehacker course would cover three things: how to install a personal organization system into your life, automate and streamline repetitive tasks, and firewall your attention. In school we learn facts and figures and problem-solving and case studies, but not how to manage our own time and attention and the best ways to turn inputs into output.

2. One trap I know I run into is over-hacking. There are so many ways to optimize work and habits, that it's easy to get lost, or to spend as much time seeking out new hacks as using the old ones. Are there meta-hacks, or hacks for managing all of the hacks out there?

The hack is simple: pick a system and stick with it. The irony of productivity media is that it gives you an excuse to put off actually doing the stuff on your to-do list by trying out a new way to keep track of your to-do list. (This is the reason why sites like Lifehacker even exist!) But the reality is that, like humans, every task manager, calendar, smartphone, or productivity tool is flawed.

Once you invest the time to choose and implement a system to get organized, it's a matter of working it to get the benefits (and that means dealing with its imperfections at times). There's no one hack or tool that's going to save you -- YOU are going to save you by sticking with it.

Of course, the value of reading and researching new ways to get organized is the inspiration and insight it provides. I love hearing about people who have solved a problem by using a particular tip or trick. Sometimes it's worth just the delight of the "What a great idea!" moment; other times I learn something that I can incorporate into the way I do things. (Though I think long and hard about whether the cost of changing up my method will yield enough of a benefit.) But like any hobby -- whether it's checking sports scores, reading celebrity gossip, cooking, alphabetizing your book shelves -- everything in moderation. Just because you're trying out another piece of software doesn't mean you're being productive.

3. I often think the best hack of all is concentration -- that's when the magic happens for me: when I can focus all of my attention on a person, a project or an activity. And I see the value of gadgets and technologies as things that can help provide me with uninterrupted time. What is your take on multitasking? And what are your primary tools for dividing, or focusing, your attention?

There's good multitasking and there's bad multitasking. The good kind involves running background tasks while you do something else -- like the washer doing a load of laundry while you're straightening up the living room, or your computer backing up its data while you answer email. The bad multitasking is the constant scanning and switching from one thing to another -- like checking email every three minutes while you're writing a report. The cost of switching between those too tasks is high, and the quality of your work suffers.

Focus is underrated in too many work environments today; instead we hop from one thing to the next like coked-up bunnies wearing Bluetooth headsets and thumbing our BlackBerries, and then at 7PM we realize the research article we needed a few hours of uninterrupted time to complete didn't happen.

I agree with you that the value of technology and gadgets is how much they can provide me with uninterrupted time, but I don't think that's the popular viewpoint. I think most people see the value in gadgets and tech as things that keep them constantly connected and bathed in up-to-the-second information wherever they go, whatever they're doing -- which is only a good thing to a point.

4. One challenge in the workplace is that the hack that works for you, might not work so well for coworkers. One study I've seen on programmers, who have the reputation for working alone, suggested they spend at least 50% of their day working with at least one other person. How does working with other people change the nature of productivity? Or the value of most lifehacks?

I think there can be a huge amount of value in cross-pollinating people's work styles. A few years back I did a fair amount of pair programming, and while it was at times frustrating and awkward, I learned a lot from seeing how someone else does things and thinks.
The key is finding and working with the people who help you and don't slow you down. My racquetball coach always told me to "play up" -- meaning, always try to play against an opponent who's better. No matter how bad getting beaten by that person feels, it still raises your game. I think that's true at work as well.

5. Are there any common work/productivity challenges that are unhackable? Problems or situations where none of the current technologies really help much? What is your wish list of problems in need of solutions?

Technology's never going to replace or improve the experience of sitting down in front of another human being, making eye contact, focusing fully on that person, and having an authentic conversation.

That said, my frustration right now with consumer tech is the focus on more features and more connectivity, versus simplifying and protecting users from unnecessary distractions. Power users on the front lines are dealing with all kinds of overload, but mainstream users are still having the "Oh look! I can get email in my pocket even on the weekends!" revelation. I can't wait for those folks to catch up, and things to balance out more.

You can read more of Gina's advice every day at lifehacker.com.

One of the great sagas of the internet age is the story of Tim Westergren and his company, Pandora. They've been around since 1999 and have faced nearly every challenge there is for a start-up company. And while they might be on the ropes, as of today they're still standing, and helping thousands of people find new music they love.

Their story makes an excellent case study in understanding innovation, better in many ways than the Google/Apple/Pixar triumvirate so often used today (I'm guilty of it too). First, the story isn't over yet: you have to figure this one out for yourself. No cheating by flipping to the end. Second, there are many forces involved that the bright minds at Pandora do not control and those forces explain their misery. Every successful, and failed, invention depends on dozens of factors the inventor does not control, a fact we often discount when trying to understand why some things take off and others do not.

To use Pandora as a case study, start with this excellent Inc. article, Pandora's long strange trip , play with the free version of Pandora yourself, and then pick up on the latest news on Pandora from the Washington Post.

Bloggers run into trouble when they forget writing can be more than monologue. To help balance my own echo chamber, I'm seeking out the smart and the savvy for interviews (aka, dialogues). First up is author and anthropologist, Grant McCracken. I'm a fan of his blog, where he writes fun missives that blend pop culture, storytelling, business theory and anthropology (start with Aftermath or Voice Over. His is a voice I wish I'd discovered long ago.

1. What do you think executives and middle managers in business should know about anthropology? If you could add any required course to MBA programs, what would it be?

Anthropologists specialize in the study of culture, and culture matters in marketing because it supplies the infrastructure for thought and feeling in America. How consumers see the product, the service, or the pitch, these are largely shaped by the culture in their heads. The marketer who understands this culture has an advantage. The marketer who understands culture very well has an extraordinary advantage.

This reminds me of a course I gave at Coca-Cola some years ago for a group of summer interns. One of the students was a Harvard Business School student. He was an arrogant kid and he started the course in a deeply skeptical frame of mind. He wasn't buying what I was selling. But as the course went on, he seemed to come round and see the value of studying culture.

I didn't realize how much he had converted until we held a little graduation dinner for the class. He ended up sitting beside a high ranking marketer at Coke, and for reasons of his own, the marketer decide to ask the HBS student a patronizing, "so what did you do in school today" kind of question.

The HBS kid looked at him coolly and said, "If you understood this method, you would own your market." "OK, then," I thought to myself, "the kid's on board." The good news is this kid now holds one of the big jobs in marketing today. And, yes, I take full credit. (I am of course kidding about the credit. This kid was (and is) massively talented and unstoppable.)

If I could add an MBA course, I would call it "Anthropology and Ethnography In Business," and it would lay bare the culture that shapes how consumers think and feel and how culture determines what they want. It would teach students how to do "ethnography" which is the method anthropologists use to study culture, and in our case to extract the parts of the culture that matter so that these can be built into product development, innovation, promotion, advertising, direct marketing, digital marketing, new media, and the rest of the marketing package.

2. Corporate PR departments often talk about their "company culture". What can leaders do to create a positive or creative culture in their organizations? Or is it something that only evolves from the personalities of the people hired into the organization?

There are two cultures at issue here: the one the consumer occupies and the one the corporation builds for itself. And, yes, anthropology is keenly interested in corporate culture. One of the ways to think about this problem is to think about the difference between the cultures of Google and Apple. The first is messy, multiple, bottom up, and incredibly innovative. The second is orderly, focused on Steve Jobs, top down, and incredibly innovative.The point being that there are lots of ways of making a corporation work.

And what I think everyone is now trying to have it both ways. We want to be maximally messy and multiple to be really responsive and harvest lots of good ideas AND we want to be elegant and perfectly defined as things work their way to market so that what goes to market is everything the consumer wants in exactly the form and function the consumer wants without a single extra thing.

As usual, we are asking the corporation to be X and not-X, but the magic of the corporation (and the thing that makes the corporation the best problem-solving machine we have at our disposal) is that it can be all things to all people. Anthropology can help here because it understands that the intelligence of this complicated creature exists not just in the formal procedures and divisions of labor of the organization, but in also in the less official ideas and practices that make up the corporation. Once again, anthropology is about culture, but in this case the culture is the particular ideas and practices of a particular organization. Anthropology can help senior managers re-engineer their organizations.

3. There is currently a backlash, which I confess I'm fond of fueling, against the use of the word innovation. These days the word is often used to signify creativity, even if no creativity is actually supported in the organization by the people using the word. Have you seen this phenomenon, perhaps with words other than innovation?

Yes, we do have a tendency to over-correct in the corporate world. It was exactly right to see that the world was becoming more dynamic and unpredictable from almost every point of view. Technology was changing at light speed. Consumers were diversifying. Channels were in an uproar. The promotional world was being rearranged. Markets were churning. It was like someone had put us on "spin cycle." We were right to say, "OK, darn, this means we need to be ready with a new order of creativity and preparedness."

But of course this can't be the only thing a corporation does. Some of the gurus make things worse by saying stuff like "everything you know is wrong." This helps them sell books and get consulting gigs. But really, it creates a kind of problem-solving hydroplaning that is bad for business. Put this another way, when it comes to gurus we may be a little too responsive. The trick is to take what we know with us as we enter the new world. It's complicated engineering. We have to decide what stays and what goes. It is easy sometimes just to start again. But then we get the backlash you are talking about.

This is one way anthropology can serve the corporation. Hire someone to go in and document all the assumptions at work in the corporations, the official ones and the unofficial "this is just the way we do things" assumptions. And then see which of these needs to change now that there is a new idea in town like "innovation." The point is not to dismantle ideas unless they stand in the way of what the new idea is. We don't want to forget what it is we know, the knowledge we have build up of our markets and our industries over many years of expensive trial and error.

Want more interviews instead of monologues? Or know an interesting voice you'd love to see in this space? Leave a comment.