Use Positive Optimism to Expand Your Career Opportunities

Optimism attracts people and those who can gather together the greatest amount of people enhance their social influence. Those who are in business can enhance their social networks and attract more people to their cause simply through being more positive about life. Positive contacts not only help build your social networks but also enhance future career opportunities.

Positive impressions helps others to feel good about themselves and their prospects. If people are willing to spend millions on cosmetic products, tickets for sports games, branded clothing, and the other luxuries of life to feel good they will also be attracted to a positive person who helps them feel this way. For the low price a few moments of time they can walk away with positive impressions for a while without experiencing buyers remorse.

It is important to be a rational optimist to ensure you maintain your credibility. Optimism should be based on understanding challenges as they actually are but focusing on those solutions which are most likely to produce a positive outcome. People will follow an optimistic person that can see the challenges people face but enlightens them to stronger paths.

Optimism helps people feel as though they can master challenges in work, family, or daily living. People love to feel as though they are strong enough to master their environment. When someone is optimistic they are able to attract others to them precisely because people want to feel more confident about their prospects. Positive feelings encourages people to come back again and again for many years.

People who are positive are also more approachable than those with negative dispositions. You may remember a time when you were attracted to a person who had a positive disposition. When someone is smiling and jolly others feel it is easy to approach that person. Their body language tells others "come talk to me I am a friendly and open person".  It doesn't take long before someone takes notice and make steps to meet you.

The impression a person leaves after leaving someone is just as important for attraction them as the initial contact. Positive and optimistic people leave a positive impression on people that influences how they remember the experience. Happy memories lead to word-of-mouth introductions through character references and future opportunities to connect to their social networks.

Birds of a feather flock together. Both optimism and pessimism are contagious. If people are negative about their lives and others around them it becomes likely that negativity will begin to influence their way of thinking. Surrounding yourself with positive people will attract additional positive people and protect you from negative thinking.

Optimism is a way of looking at the world and it has a euphoric effect on the people you meet. They are naturally attracted to people who help them feel good and enjoy the positive side of life. Creating positive impressions among people also helps you develop your personal and career networks in a way that leads to additional opportunities in the future. Use the power of positive optimism to expand your career influence and raise the quality of your life through the power of your mind is a skill learned over time.

You may be interested in a CNN article on how Optimism improves your cardiovascular health.

Guarding the Mind for Better Business Strategy

Strategic decision making is not easy and comes with a number of fallacies that blind us to the actuality of the world around us. Executives should be aware of their bias and how this impacts their strategic decision-making. Using a few critical thinking tools helps to guard the mind from bias and ensure that decisions are more likely to be successful and have the largest impact.

Executives are faced with all types of different types of pressures that range from investors to employees. Each person comes with their own influence and opinion. At times a presiding opinion forms and this puts pressure on everyone else to accept the premises of those opinions without providing critical thought. When you are at the top and your decisions impact a large group of people you don't have the luxury of making momentous mistakes. 

The mind is seen as a manufacturing unit that results in the product of thoughts. These thoughts help us to reach conclusions about varying topics, beliefs, debates, and strategies. Like a factory your mind has inputs that come through the senses, previous understandings, and others opinions that make their way into the production process. 

Strategic decisions are well thought out and often tested conclusions about how a business should proceed. The best business decisions are something more than opinion and based upon a level of fact that reflects the environment in which the business succeeds. Executives are required to provide the rationale and then the supporting evidence to their decisions. 

From a philosophical vantage point few people can step outside themselves to formulate a true opinion based upon actual observation and fact. The same process applies in many ways to forming a strategic opinion without the bias of ones past. Nietzsche once said, 

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
  
The mind is full of fallacies that we pick up from the world around us and social networks in which we exist. Our thoughts are constructed from previous thoughts and ideas based in our childhood experiences, parents beliefs, friends, family and social networks. We are embedded in our social world around us. 

Strategic decisions should free itself from these biases as much as possible. This is where the concept of guardians of the mind come into play. By using a few tips it is possible to help avoid disastrous mistakes that cost companies millions of dollars in poor decision making and strategy implementation. Before making an important decision try and consider the following guardians:

-Scientific Management: Use literature, science, and the scientific method to help make your decisions. Look at what has been discovered and what other studies have concluded before finalizing your decision. Basing your decision on sound scientific findings helps to ensure a higher likelihood of success. 

-Listen to Your Stakeholders: To be successful a strategy will need a wide group of supporters. This means understanding stakeholders opinions will be important to ensuring that the strategy is designed in a way that is most likely to lead to a successful outcome. The more you listen the more you can create win-win situations. 

-Review Your Bias: It is important for the executive to understand the bias he/she has and ensure that those bias are not making their way into the decision-making process. Every person has some level bias based on their background and it is important to ensure the strategy isn't damaged by limited thinking. 

-Avoid Group Think: The worst decisions are often made from group think where people in the same social group reaffirm each others beliefs even though these beliefs are no longer rational. Step outside your social group and look for alternative opinions to make sure you are not simply just pleasing your friends and colleagues. 

-Rearrange the Data: Sound decisions are based upon data. However, people often take data and jam it together in a way that confirms their pr-existing beliefs. Rearrange the data to find alternative explanations and explore those explanations to ensure they are not more logical and sound.

-Create Feedback Loops: Once a strategy has been implemented it is important to have feedback loops to ensure it is fulfilling its objectives. Feedback loops will help adjust and change the strategy before major damage is sustained. Most strategies will need to be changed at some point.

Social Networks Percolate Products and Opinions

Word of mouth fosters social learning about issues, products, and opportunities.  Friends that act and think alike often create clusters and these clusters can influence the purchasing choices as well as the decisions members make. Economists often have difficulty formulating how social networks formulate and influence people’s impressions of products and services. Research by Arthur Campbell (2013) sheds light on how word of mouth in social networks influences perception of value. 

When individuals are interested in a concept or product they are naturally more willing to engage in word of mouth. Generally, as a product’s price is lower it raises the interest level and the potential discussion of the product leading to more word of mouth activity. It is this interaction that brings to the forefront ideas, concepts, and discussions on products that are settled within a group. 

One of the difficult aspects of understanding social networks and diffusion is the complexity of the system.  Despite this complexity, it is known that as activity increases information is spread out to a wider group of people thereby creating more advertisement. The complexity has made chasing down the pieces of information and how they spread difficult.  Yet through models it is possible to understand the process of information peculation in an imperfect manner.

One potential way to look at how information is transferred is in a formula:

Ξ ⊆ { ( i, j ) | i ≠ j ∈ N }

Everyone is connected to a social network = ( N, Ξ )

Nodes = n

Relationship between individuals i and j = ( i, j ) ∈ Ξ

The probability of a person i passing out information = ν ( θ i , P )

The model is undirected in the sense that information can percolate anywhere. All of the consumers are uninformed and the chance that people will buy a product is based on a percentage of the amount of people that become informed. The timing of the model can be seen as-

(i) Each person in the population becomes informed with independent probability

ε ≈ 0 (later they may also become informed through advertising).

(ii) Informed individuals tell all their friends about the product through WOM

with probability ν ( θ i , P ) and purchase the product if θ i ≥ P.

(iii) Step 2 is repeated for newly informed consumers until there are no more

consumers being informed.

The model is impacted by availability of competitive products, information, pricing, and a whole array of other factors that go into the process. When a competitive product or alternative explanation is not available it will naturally impact the options and choices within the social network. Likewise, if more information about a product is available it can impact the eventual agreement and promotion of such products with the group. 

When companies advertise they often seek to hit specific components within the social networks. Those persons that are more socially connected will likely spread their impressions of the products or services more widely. This is a simple function of connectivity to other members and the ability to be an influencer within the network. Most of us would recognize the superstar promoters of products and services.

The paper finds a number of interesting associations of price, information/advertisement, and the connections of the network. Generally, as information passes through the network in “buzz” and in tight clusters the prices remain higher. However, if the information passes more slowly or in dispersed networks the prices will remain lower. Word of mouth is a medium that could be positive or negative in its impact. 

Thinking about how information moves through networks it is important to remember that members will engage in social learning based upon how they evaluate the products against each other. If popular opinion is that the product is not desirable it will hamper others from buying that product. It means that we are social creatures that evaluate the work of products based upon how others view those products within our networks. If their feedback is negative we will come to the conclusion that a product is less worthy. 

Such a model does not necessarily need to work with products alone but could be used within an organizational setting to understand how information moves quickly among members. Each person who obtains the information, evaluates it based upon their social schemata, and then promotes that viewpoint to others. If the information is of significant worth it will move faster while if it is of little worth it will spread slower.  One must have an internal gauge to think independently from their clustered networks and this is unlikely for the majority of the population as they are connected to clusters who think alike.  Thus, our opinions are often a direct result of our social networks.

Campbell, A. (2013). Word-of-mouth communication and percolation in social networks. American Economic Review, 103 (6).