New York Times (Section 3 – Business) (September 19, 2004).
ROSABETH MOSS
KANTER is one confident lady. A reporter invites her to a lengthy luncheon
interview and lets her pick the place. Now, Ms. Kanter certainly knows that
reporters - particularly this one - will print their impressions of people and
places along with whatever facts they glean. Nonetheless, her choice is an
informal self-service lunch at her spacious home in Edgarton, on Martha's
Vineyard. (For the record, the house is gorgeous.)
She also
knows that a photographer is coming along. Less confident people might have
carefully applied makeup, dressed up a bit, certainly styled their hair. Not
Ms. Kanter. It was a lazy Tuesday on the Vineyard, her cocker spaniel puppy was
frisking all over the place, and she wasn't going to spoil it with froufrou (as
opposed to the reporter, who wore a dress, jewelry and face paint).
So who better
to write a book called "Confidence," which was published last month
by Crown Business?
"Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's
not a character attribute,'' said Ms. Kanter, 61. "It's
the expectation of a positive outcome."
As Ms. Kanter
sees it, talent, intelligence and knowledge are nice, but confidence is
essential. Not arrogance or conceit, mind you: those traits lead people to be
complacent, or to overshoot. But she believes that someone with confidence,
defined as a belief that persistence and hard work will yield results, will win
out most every time over equally talented but insecure people.
Ms. Kanter,
who is a consultant and Harvard Business School professor when she's not
writing books - "Confidence'' is her 16th - parses the idea even further.
She believes that self-confidence is less important than confidence that things
will work out, and that the most lasting form of confidence is often not
self-generated, but nurtured by others. She posits that sports teams win
because coaches instill a belief that they will, and that children succeed when
parents and schools create an environment that encourages them to do their
best.
"Confidence
is contagious, but so is failure,'' she said. "Even the Yankees will lose
if you persuade them that they will.''
Ms. Kanter
knows from whence she speaks. She is a frequent and usually facile public
speaker, and a well-credentialed one: she has 21 honorary degrees and numerous
mentions on lists of influential or powerful women. Yet she still winces at the
memory of a talk she gave to a group of Asian chief executives a few years ago.
First, the program organizer warned her that "these people were not
used" to people like her. Then she was preceded by a "rabidly
anti-American and anti-Western'' Malaysian politician. "I felt I was going
to fail - and sure enough, I was awkward, and forgot facts and figures.''
It was an
uncharacteristic - but not isolated - failure in a life generally marked by
success.
Ms. Kanter
was born in Cleveland. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a homemaker. She
and her younger sister, Myra, had a "benign childhood,'' she recalled.
"I have
never blamed my parents for anything that went wrong in my life," she
added. "But they were never as ambitious for me as I was for myself.''
Her ambition
set in early. At 8, she printed business cards that said "child
psychologist''; at 11, she and a friend wrote a mystery novel; at 12, she
learned to type, then entered an essay contest and won a typewriter.
At Bryn Mawr
College, Ms. Kanter earned degrees in psychology and sociology. In her junior
year, she married Stuart Kanter, a psychology student at the University of
Pennsylvania. His career took them to Michigan, where she tried to get a job in
journalism or advertising, but failed. So she went for a doctorate in sociology
at the University of Michigan. "Imagine - if I'd gotten a job I'd probably
be an advertising writer today,'' she said.
The couple
soon moved to Boston, he as a professor of organizational behavior at Harvard,
she as an assistant professor of sociology at Brandeis. Then, what seemed a
charmed life was thrown into turmoil: in 1969, Stuart Kanter died.
MS. KANTER
had a choice. She could spiral down into depression, or she could focus on what
was good in her life. She chose the second option, and decided to build a consulting
practice. A friend introduced her to Barry Stein, a management consultant who
taught her the consulting ropes "and gave me confidence that I could do
this,'' she said. Ms. Kanter soon felt more than gratitude: she and Mr. Stein
have been married since 1972.
Their son,
Matthew, was born in 1979. By that time, Ms. Kanter was teaching at Yale.
"I'd hire students to drive me back and forth from Cambridge to New Haven,
and I'd grade papers on the trip,'' she said. She often took Matt along on
business trips. Letdowns were few - but they did exist. She wrote a book,
"Evolve," about how the Internet was changing corporations. It landed
with a thud. "It was the closest I've come to a true crisis of
confidence,'' she said. She pulled herself out of it by tackling even more
consulting projects, and writing more books. "When you fail at something,
the best thing to do is think back to your successes," she said, "and
try to replicate whatever you did to make them happen.'' Ms. Kanter knows that
this is easier to say than to do. So, over a lunch that included home-grown
tomatoes and basil, she readily offered tips to those whose confidence may be
wavering a bit.
If you've hit
a series of lows, seek out lots of human contact. "It's almost impossible
to break a losing streak on your own,'' Ms. Kanter said. If no friend or
colleague is available to bolster your confidence, find a situation - say, a
book club meeting - where you feel you can shine. "Support can often come
from people you don't know,'' she said.
If you can't
feel confident about a final result, focus on a milestone. Maybe you'll never
beat your athletic best friend at tennis, but if you fine-tune your lob and
drop shot, you can win a few more games. Maybe you'll never turn your child
into a straight-A student - but you can tutor her so she doesn't fail math.
"Small wins can improve the odds of bigger successes later on,'' Ms.
Kanter said.
Don't expect
empathy from losers. Ms. Kanter points to a friend, a freelance writer who was
treated shabbily by editors at a money-losing magazine yet treated well by
those at its healthier rival. "Secure people are emotionally generous,
while people who feel like failures will take their frustration out on you,''
she said. If you must deal with losers, flatter them shamelessly. "If you
build their confidence," she said, "they may stop undermining
yours.''
Compartmentalize
your life. If you are emotionally battered at home, it is hard to feel
confident at work, or vice versa. But it is possible. "Sometimes you can
develop sufficient confidence from your successes in one sphere so that it
spills over to the other,'' Ms. Kanter said. But don't focus all your attention
on the sphere that works well, she cautioned. "Then you'll have a
self-fulfilling prophecy - your marriage is deteriorating, you throw yourself
into work, and the marriage deteriorates even more.''
It may be a
cliché, but living well really is the best revenge. "Anger is not
cathartic, and you won't break a losing streak by exacting revenge on your perceived
enemies,'' Ms. Kanter said.
Take
responsibility for your mistakes. You'll be less likely to repeat them. Ms.
Kanter attributes her Asian fiasco to a lack of preparation. Now, before any
speaking engagement, she finds out everything she can about her audience and
about the other speakers, and thus feels confident that she can handle
hostility. "You can only stop sabotaging yourself if you don't think you
were someone else's victim,'' she said.
The corollary
is that classic psychoanalysis does not work as well as behavioral therapy in restoring confidence.
"Understanding
your deep psychic structure isn't what's important in breaking a
self-destructive cycle,'' she said. "Find someone who will help you use
the talents you have today, rather than focus on what your mother did to you.''