With the semester ending soon, things are awfully busy at the university. It’s been challenging to find time to sit down, reflect, and write new posts. Rather than not post anything, I thought I will share some of the interesting articles I read recently.

Today’s New York Times had a couple of articles that provide good lessons in leadership.  One of the articles reproduces an interview with Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney. According to Mr. Iger, optimism is an important part of leadership. In another article, Gregory Spierkel, the CEO of Ingram Micro, shared lessons that have helped him rise during his career. I thought the most notable was the following: “be willing to take an assignment that is less glamorous than you would like, and … make something out of it. You need to surprise your boss or the people around you. Either turn a project around faster or leave it in better shape than it was. People will trust you and give you more responsibility and more interesting work.”

The Scientific American had an interesting coverage of research by Stanford scientists who found that humans have an innate intent to synchronize and cooperate with others. Interestingly, if we are made to engage in collective movement with others (such as march around campus in sync with others or sing the national anthem in unison), we feel more connected to them and trust them more. We may even be willing to incur direct costs to cooperate with others. I thought this this finding has tremendous implications for how we make members of virtual teams collaborate. For instance, as part of team building activities, members of a virtual team could be made to carry out a synchronized action (e.g., swim in unison) in a virtual world. According to the article, such an activity would promote pro-social behavior and trust. Team members would sacrifice self-interest for the good of the group.

Another Scientific American article discussed the use of virtual worlds by therapists to address real problems. For instance, virtual environments have been used to treat troubled teens by letting them role-play and see the impact of their behavior from another person’s point of view. I thought the article provided a good example of the Proteus effect, whereby seeing one’s behavior in a virtual world affects one’s attitudes and, hence, subsequent behavior in the real-world. Virtual world researchers at Stanford have provided us with numerous examples of this from their research (see our past digest where we have covered this).