Updated from original post that was published on 05/07/2020.

We're living in extraordinary times right now ⁠— times that demand thoughtfulness, strength, and maybe above all, preparedness. An MBA can be a powerful way to meet this demand. In a strong economy, an MBA readies you for top roles in your field. But in an economy like the present one ⁠— with industries transforming before our eyes ⁠— an MBA can help you flourish in opportunities that previously didn’t exist.

Unlike stock portfolios or restaurants, a business education that's strong on fundamentals such as finance and accounting can’t be drained or shuttered by outside events. It's a long-term asset ⁠— and a valuable one, as Rice Business professor James Weston shows in a popular video. Weston calculated, the ROI on a business degree comes out to 20 percent.

Quality in Addition to Quantity

A business school degree also equips graduates with less quantifiable assets:

• Leadership skills
• Business judgment
• Mentor relationships
• Experiential learning in all kinds of new fields.

For many employers, in fact, the credential itself is a kind of short-hand for a high performer.

"There's nothing about getting an MBA that doesn't require initiative from that point all the way through your career," Elissa Sangster, CEO of the Forté Foundation, told U.S. News and World Report. The nonprofit Forte Foundation, with which Rice Business is a partner, focuses on encouraging women to attend MBA programs and pursue ambitious career goals.

In particular, Sangster said, an MBA can clear a path to hard- to -access industries such as Silicon Valley or Wall Street. It can also be helpful for candidates who want to work with major employers outside their own communities.

Building Connection

There's another reason to invest in an MBA: the wide-ranging, ambitious network of students and alumni that will now be your peers. In business, just as in other fields, job boards and public announcements only account for a fraction of important hires. The quality and reach of your personal network will likely offer you far more opportunities. At Rice Business, over 82 percent of graduates’ jobs last year were generated by the school community.

In fact, most graduates find, some of the most educational business school experiences happen after graduation. Top MBA programs take their alumni seriously, inviting them to collaborate, support recent graduates – and keep acquiring business skills as permanent members of the school community.

“Business school emphasizes working in groups, and MBA students often learn as much from their peers as they do from faculty,” executive coach Ed Batista pointed out in Harvard Business Review. “Those same people will become your fellow alumni, and access to that network is one of the most valuable benefits an MBA program can offer.”

Looking Ahead: The Future of Business School

Business schools themselves have changed. Top business schools have been changing their models, adding more leadership and critical thinking courses to core subjects like finance, accounting and marketing. According to the Princeton Review, 71.1% of MBA applicants surveyed were aiming for senior leadership positions, and 94.4% were considering changing industries.

Rice Business alumna Marjorie Ma was one such candidate. Working as a consultant in China for Deloitte, she enrolled in the fulltime class of 2012 to prepare for a different type of corporate job. “I wanted to do an MBA program to enrich my experience,” she said. It worked. After graduating from Rice Business, Ma pivoted from both her job title and her firm itself, and now is Vice President of product management and market intelligence at AIG.

How Rice Business Sets Up Students For Success

With its small classes and supportive culture, Rice Business is designed to help that kind of career change. You can see the results in recent class profiles. After decades of heading to energy and financial services sectors, in 2021-22 Rice Business MBAs gravitated instead to consulting jobs. Over a third of them  ⁠— 34.6 percent ⁠— took consulting positions, earning an average of $166,646. Overall, members of the class of 2022 reported an average base salary of $142,212 ⁠— a boost of over $10,000 from the year before. 

To ensure that graduates have these kinds of choices throughout their careers, a top business school invests enormous attention on both its curriculum ⁠— and each student as an individual, Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez said.

“In the past, we thought a lot about deep quantitative skills and core competencies. All that is still very necessary,” Rodriguez said. “But today you also need enhanced skills around being a leader. Those skills will help you make great decisions, express wisdom, show empathy, lead organizations through tough times. They will help you give purpose to work.”

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It’s one of our first human experiences: the smell of something sweet in the air followed by the overwhelming desire to gobble it. Imagine now that you’re six years old, and your dad is taking warm chocolate chip cookies out of the oven. Not one nibble before dinner, he says, otherwise you’ll lose your appetite. Then, before dashing out for a meeting, he gives a warning: “If even one cookie is missing, no TV for a week.”

What will you do? Dutifully wait? Or grab a cookie regardless of the threats?

Rice Business professor Marlon Mooijman and colleagues Wilco W. van Dijk and Eric van Dijk of Leiden University along with Naomi Ellemers of Utrecht University studied 883 people to understand the links between deterrence, threats and rule following. In layman’s terms, they wanted to see how policies and punishments affected the choice to steal cookies. To reach their conclusions, they conducted a series of games in which participants reported or hid taxable income depending on whether they were threatened with fines, fined with an explanation, or fined with no explanation.

With adults as with children, the researchers found, threats and punishments often backfire. This is because they signal distrust by the authorities of the very people they're supposed to control. Often, the response to that distrust is rebellion. The more perceived distrust people feel, the less likely they are to follow the rules. 

So if your dad simply tells you to lay off the cookies – that is, deterrence but no justification – you won’t assume he distrusts you. If, on the other hand, he says, “Don’t eat those cookies before dinner because you’ll spoil your appetite” – offering justification – or “If one cookie’s missing, no TV for a week,” you’re inclined to think he doesn’t trust you. Human nature being what it is, that feeling may send you straight to the cookie sheet as soon as he turns his back.

The perception has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your dad doesn’t have faith in you, who cares about disappointing him?  

In general, the researchers discovered, justifications and threats of punishment leave a bad taste. Instead, we respond better to rules with no justification.

At the same time, the authority who is making the rules is important. What happens when an older sister or babysitter lays down the law? Authorities who want subordinates or constituents to follow their rules, Mooijman and his colleagues found, need to be seen as legitimate: that is, possessing the right to govern and to have others comply with their rules. 

In our family scenario, this might mean that once your mother gets involved, the fun and games are over. Because you believe she’s legit, you’re more likely to follow her rules. Your older sister might have rank because she is older, but she’s not a parent, and you know she’s likely to sneak a cookie or two along with you. 

Even so, you might be more prone to listen to her than to the babysitter. Your parents don’t know that the babysitter spends most of her time on the phone with her boyfriend while watching reality TV and periodically raiding the fridge. You have little respect for her; as an authority, she is illegitimate. If she instructs you not to eat cookies, they’re as good as gone.

Our first contacts with authority, legitimacy and deterrence usually occur at home. But the same principles apply in adult organizations, from education and penal correctional systems to finance, judicial and legislative bodies to the corporate world. Regardless of industry, if you want subordinates’ to keep their hands out of the cookie jar, don’t try to justify your rules. Just tell them what not to do.

Emphasize, though, that these rules are spelled out for wrongdoers, not the conscientious individuals who might hear them as well. Finally, sprinkle a little sugar on top. For best results, always sweeten new rules and procedures with assurances of trust.

Marlon Mooijman is an assistant professor in the management department of organization behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Mooijman, M., van Dijk, W., van Dijk, E. & Ellemers, N. (2016).  On Sanction-Goal Justifications:  How and Why Deterrence Justifications Undermine Rule Compliance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,112(4),577-588.

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If you voiced your support for Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders on social media during the March Democratic primaries, you’d have gotten a quick lesson in how rampant name-calling has become. Bernie’s fans called Biden supporters “racist trash” and labeled the former Vice President “a guy with Jell-O for brains.” Biden boosters called Bernie bros “thugs” and “little turds.”

This internet trend crosses party lines, of course: President Donald Trump routinely tweets derogatory names for his political opponents — many of them height-based, such as “Mini Mike” Bloomberg and “Liddle’ Adam Schiff,” in which the superfluous apostrophe is apparently meant to magnify the insult.

As the dust from Super Tuesday settled, Trump used the phrase “Mini Mike” more than half a dozen times in less than 24 hours. Bloomberg, meanwhile, has called the president a “carnival barking clown.” 

It’s not every day that you see the nation’s top leaders hurling playground-style epithets at each other. Except that these days, it is.

The rest of us are doing it, too, as the recent Democratic infighting reveals. Research shows that Americans have become increasingly antagonistic toward people they disagree with. Gone are the days of agreeing to disagree: When we differ with someone, we let them know — and we let them have it. Whether or not this constitutes an unprecedented crisis in civility, as some have argued, it’s clear that abusive language pervades the public discourse, much of it in the form of name-calling.

Rudeness, naturally, is nothing new. The problem is that name-calling, especially very public name-calling by very high-level figures, is contagious. A study by University of Florida researchers found that when we see other people being rude, we’re more likely to behave similarly. What’s more, it’s an automatic response that happens outside our awareness, making it difficult to consciously curb our own rudeness. We become carriers of a highly infectious agent: Each time we’re rude to someone else, we spread our vitriol to them and, potentially, to anyone in earshot.

The effects are surprisingly long-lasting, too. The University of Florida study measured the perceived rudeness of students in a series of negotiations. When one student sensed that their partner had behaved rudely, they themselves were more likely to be perceived as rude by their next partner.

“Some of the negotiations took place one after another, and some took place up to seven days apart. We found that the time between negotiations didn’t seem to matter,” writes Trevor Foulk, one of the researchers, who is now a management professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Even if negotiations were a week apart, the rudeness experienced in the previous negotiation still caused participants to be rude in their next negotiation.”

The likelihood of contagion is even higher when the person behaving badly is in a position of power, says Marlon Mooijman, a professor of organizational behavior at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

“Some research has shown that abusive practices (such as bosses humiliating others and using degrading language) tend to trickle down in organizations. For instance, if the CEO treats the managers poorly, the managers tend to treat the supervisors poorly, and the supervisors treat the subordinates poorly, who in turn treat each other poorly,” Mooijman says.

Incivility on any level can lead to serious problems in the workplace, including reduced performance, creativity and retention, according to Christine Porath, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Researchers estimate that workplace rudeness, and the resulting negativity, costs organizations about $6 billion per year.

It costs us all a lot more in terms of the quality of our relationships and our own well-being. So how can we break the cycle? Luckily, kindness can also be contagious: Research shows that seeing someone behave generously or altruistically makes it more likely that we’ll behave likewise.

In a recent UCLA study, some people watched a popular Thai commercial featuring a man who helps people in his neighborhood (by giving money to a panhandler, feeding a stray dog, and helping a street vendor lift her cart, for example) while others watched a parkour video. The participants were then given $5 for their time and told they could put as much of that money as they wanted into an envelope that would go (anonymously) to charity. Those who watched the video about the helpful man gave significantly more than the parkour viewers — in fact, some of the envelopes contained more than the $5 they earned in the study.

When people in power show kindness, it can have an outsized trickle-down effect, just as unkindness does, according to Mooijman. In organizations, the entire culture can change depending on whether the CEO is respectful or rude.

“Some of my research shows that when bosses trust others, their power tends to be an asset instead of a liability, as people react more positively to being respected and trusted by those with power than those without,” he says. “This suggests that change should start at the top.”

These effects can be amplified by how much exposure we have to the actions, and the language, of our leaders. If the boss tweets a lot, we become near-constant witnesses to their courtesy or their cruelty.

Incivility has always existed, after all, but social media hasn’t — and in an increasingly connected world, rudeness spreads like lightning. But kindness can, too. Even if name-calling is unconsciously contagious, we can still make a determined effort to put down our poison pens and say something nice — or nothing at all.

Jennifer Latson is the editor of Rice Business magazine and the author of “The Boy Who Loved Too Much,” a nonfiction book about a genetic disorder that makes people incapable of unkindness.

This op-ed originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle.

Welcome to the first-ever online only issue of Rice Business magazine — one of the many ways we’ve improvised recently to stay connected during a time of physical distance. 

All these weeks of working from home and staying out of public spaces have tested our stamina like no other crisis. But in some ways, the Rice Business community has grown even closer. I’ve been in touch with a number of alumni and I know you are reaching out to each other as well, offering a helping hand and moral support in weathering not only the health crisis but the economic fallout from the pandemic and the downturn in the oil and gas industry. We are thinking of everyone who’s suffered losses. And we’re here to remind each other that things will get better. 

This is the strength of our Rice Business community: We’re here for each other when times are tough, and there’s nothing we can’t get through together. 

Despite the disruption to our schedules and the personal toll, we are seeing good things come out of this challenge, and we’re hopeful for the future. I am confident we will be ready and fit for a gradual return to campus and for a strong start for our next academic year. We expect and are planning for an in-person kickoff for new fall cohorts, and a combination of in-person and live online course delivery for continuing students. That combined capacity supports remote course participation for those who may need it and ensures we are prepared for the possibility of future limitations to our ability to gather on campus. We are also preparing for a gradual return to normal campus operations this summer. We will take it one day at a time, like everyone else.   

I feel a little promise in the air, along with spring. I hope you do too. Continue social distancing. Wear face coverings in public. Stay safe and stay positive. Together we’ve made this work, and together we’ll see it through. 

— Peter

Growing up in Hangzhou, China, Coco Ma kept changing her mind about what she wanted to be. One day she dreamed of becoming a lawyer; the next, a TV show host, then a journalist — or maybe an IT expert. All she knew for sure was that she wanted a challenge.

Her career arc has followed a similarly winding route. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in energy engineering from Penn State, she got her start helping Volvo reduce its environmental impact before transitioning to a sales job with a Swiss tech company. The decision to earn an MBA at Rice Business was another twist, motivated by her interest in starting her own jewelry line, Azuco Jewelry, which she launched during the program.

And she has a new gig lined up for after graduation, when she’ll relocate to Austin to work for Apple on its supply chain operations. “I have established a great relationship with the Rice Business career service advisors,” she says. “I wouldn’t have been able to get the offer from Apple without their help and encouragement.”

In business, as in baseball, there’s an intense focus on winning. But what happens when the drive to do well becomes an imperative to succeed — and at all costs? As the recent Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal illustrates, it can lead to ethical lapses, a toxic culture and, ultimately, a systemic level of corporate corruption. But the case of the Astros, as well as recent events at Boeing and Wells Fargo, also offer an opportunity to examine how the seeds of corporate corruption often get planted and grow, how they can be rooted out, and how organizations can recover.

“There’s a sense in a really competitive environment that being corrupt can be the right thing,” says Dean Peter Rodriguez of Rice University’s Jones School of Business, an economist who studies corruption. In an intensely driven corporate culture, when a certain task is especially hard, the feeling can arise that achieving success — getting that win — requires cheating. And not only that, but that cheating is actually the correct thing to do, Rodriguez explains. “This proves how devoted I am to my tribe, to my group of people,” he says, characterizing employees’ rationale for cheating.

And while we may think of corruption as coming from the top, Rodriguez’s research has found the opposite is more often the case. “It’s not the CEO who develops the scheme,” he says; instead it’s “usually some VP who has enough shelter from the public eye but also enough power to say, ‘We’ve got to win this, and my team, we’re the best. We deserve to win. We’re going to tip the scale and run with it.’ ” They may know it’s wrong, he notes, “but they decide it’s right in the larger sense — or even that it’s just the way the game is played.”

The folks in the corner offices aren’t blameless, however. Wells Fargo executives may have insisted that it was just a few bad apples (5,300 of them) that caused the company’s retail banking arm to open millions of unauthorized accounts.  Boeing, meanwhile, may hold that damning emails suggesting that the 737 MAX disasters stem from lack of concern about safety simply weren’t representative of the company. And Major League Baseball may have found Astros owner Jim Crane innocent — or at least ignorant — of the sign-stealing scheme his management and players used to help the team win the 2017 World Series. But, says Rodriguez, although “it’s not the top saying ‘Let's cheat,’ it is the top that’s giving this ‘Win at all costs’ directive. That trickles down.”

Corruption Rolls Downhill

If an organization’s culture is created at the top, MLB’s one-year suspensions of Astros manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow may not be enough to root out the underlying causes of corruption — even though they were subsequently fired by Crane.

“It’s scapegoating,” says Ann Skeet, a senior director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “When you have the level of involvement that you seem to have here” — with the players themselves participating in the technology-assisted signal stealing banned by the league — “you have a much more systemic problem,” she notes. “And I haven't heard anything to suggest [Crane] is holding himself accountable for the culture of the team. Without that at the leadership level, it’s hard to expect that people south of him are going to get it right.”

Skeet sees the seeds of corruption sewn even higher than ownership, too, at the level of the league and its commissioner, Rob Manfred, who she thinks haven’t made clear what their expectations and standards are going to be for the game.

“There are some inherent conflicts of interest,” she notes. “The commissioner works for the owners, so the fox is in the henhouse, and it makes it hard to feel confident that sanctions and rulings at any time are in the best interest of the sport.” It’s an observation that echoes the arguments critics have made about government regulators of the industries they oversee: an EPA in the palm of fossil fuel companies, for example, or an FDA beholden to big pharma.

In addition to the suspensions, MLB fined the Astros $5 million — the highest sum allowed under the league’s constitution — and will make them forfeit their first- and second-round draft picks for the next two years. But if MLB really wanted to send the strongest signal possible to everyone in the sport, Skeet says, they would vacate the Astros’ World Series title. “That would have been the most significant sanction and gotten players’ attention,” she says. Instead, she worries the message being conveyed is that cheating is acceptable as long as you win, not that it’s how you win that matters.

And that, Skeet says, is a classic case of “ethical fading,” a term that refers to an organization or individual losing sight of the fact that they even have an ethical issue in front of them. “You recast it as something else,” she says: a business decision, a hit to your bottom line, or a necessary step in the process of winning, whatever the cost.

Building a Better Culture

So how does an organization rebuild its moral code after the ethical equivalent of a fade to black? According to Skeet, it takes much more than the firing of some supposed “bad apples,” even if those apples are at the top of the food chain.

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Much of her recent work has focused on creating good corporate culture, rather than penalizing the bad. What happened with the Astros, she continues, “suggests the culture of the team isn’t terribly healthy, and they could use realignment. But if leadership isn’t committed to changing culture, or even acknowledging there’s a problem, it’s going to be very challenging for them.”

She and her colleagues at the Markkula Center have developed recommendations for building healthy cultures. These range from the morally minded (nurture empathy, for example, and create an organization-wide framework for ethical decision-making) to those that are less so (tell stories, connect silos to work across functions). “Our goal here is to be as practical as possible,” says Skeet, “to take ethics out of the realm of the theoretical.”

The scandals facing the Astros, Boeing and Wells Fargo are also potential opportunities, says Rice Business strategic management professor Anastasiya Zavyalova. They can be the impetus that drives troubled companies to engage in the sort of corporate introspection and soul searching that lead to improved practices. “These crises are not just a blow to the company but a chance to learn something and maybe come back better at the end of it all,” she says.

Competence vs. Character

Zavyalova’s research focuses on negative events in organizations and the ways in which stakeholders — largely fans in the case of the Astros and customers in the case of Boeing and Wells Fargo — identify with and support the company in the aftermath.

She looks at these events through the lens of an idea in reputation research that suggests any given company has two types of reputation. One is for competence: How good is it at producing what it makes or doing what it does? The other is for character: How does it do what it does, and with what values?

When a scandal is one of competence — a product fails, say — then a company’s constituents, assuming it has reasonably loyal customers, tend to be more forgiving, she explains. But if it’s a breach of character, compromising the organization’s underlying moral code, a company risks losing even its most loyal customers.

These two buckets, competence and character, do bleed into each other, of course. We now know that the deadly crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX resulted from mechanical and training issues — that is, failures of competence — but the aftermath has revealed a serious crisis of corporate character. Customers were left wondering, “What did the company know about design flaws and when did they know it?” Did “winning” for Boeing get redefined from “ensuring safety” to “pursuing profit”?

The Astros scandal, meanwhile, may at first seem to be purely one of character: Cheating represents a moral failing, a decision to care more about winning than how they won, as Skeet observed. But the decision to cheat also calls into question the Astros’ capacity to win a World Series on their own merits — a question the team and its leaders have wrestled with in press conferences since the scandal became public.

Looking at these two cases, Zavyalova notes that the Astros’ ability to recover — even from a complex crisis of both character and competence — should be enhanced by the fact that “sports, unlike many other contexts, is one where there are really loyal constituents for the organization.” And Astros fans are particularly loyal, even among sports fans, because the team’s 2017 World Series win helped pull Houstonians out of the funk that followed the horrors of Hurricane Harvey.

In sports, fans come to define themselves by their alliances; it becomes part of their identity in a way that few consumer products ever do (except maybe those made by Apple). As a result, they find themselves unable to make a complete break with a team — their team — even after a scandal.

Instead, Zavyalova explains, the scandal leads to fans’ experiencing a phenomenon known in organizational theory as “split identification”: In contrast to more conventional business cases, like that of Wells Fargo or Boeing — where customers can abandon the brand, simply changing banks or flying on Airbus planes — sports fans continue to identify with the organization overall even as they disassociate themselves from certain leaders and certain players wrapped up in a scandal. “It’s a very difficult state to be in,” Zavyalova says. “It’s like you’re in love with someone, but that person loses your trust, and the reason they lost it is all over the news.”

Beyond the world of sports, split identification can also affect members of religious groups and alumni of colleges that have been rocked by crisis. After all, one can’t very easily convert or select a new alma mater. In the case of the Catholic Church, that has led to parishioners keeping the faith even while castigating the church leaders involved with sexual abuse and its cover-up. Similarly, Penn State alums and fans decried the sexual abuse committed by assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, as well as the perception that a beloved head coach, the late Joe Paterno, let him get away with it, but they stayed loyal to the school — so much so that donations to the football program quadrupled in the year after the scandal.

Given our ability to rebuke bad actors without cutting ties to the organization, removing the apparent ringleaders of the sign-stealing scheme may be all it takes for the Astros to maintain fan loyalty. But it won’t remedy the more systemic problems in the team’s, and perhaps even the league’s, corporate culture.

Zavyalova, like Skeet, doesn’t see firing the top-level people associated with a scandal as the best way to deal with a crisis. “That’s a short-term reaction,” she says, “not a solution.” It doesn’t answer the existential questions the organization should be asking itself: How do we come back in the long term? How do we regain trust, loyalty? How do we change the culture? “It's not one manager, one exec, just a few bad apples,” Zavyalova adds. “It’s everyone going along with a plan to break the rules and behave unethically.

“Management change can be a start,” she concludes, “but the future will depend on how the new leaders can reshape the culture.”

Andrew Sessa is a Boston-based writer and editor.

In their new book, “Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life,” tidying expert Marie Kondo and organizational psychologist Scott Sonenshein, the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management at Rice Business, offer tips for decluttering your work — literally and figuratively. What follows is a section from the book on how to triage your tasks so you don’t waste valuable time on urgent assignments that aren’t truly important.

Instead of making time to dive deeply into our work and experience the joy that can come from tackling an important task, we jump from one seemingly urgent task to the next. That leaves us with very little time to think or grow. Research finds that half of an executive’s activities last less than nine minutes, leaving them without much time for deep thought. Factory foremen average 583 discrete activities for an eight-hour shift. Mid-level employees average only one thirty-minute or greater uninterrupted time block about once every other day.

If you’re like most, you work on autopilot, accepting and completing assignments based on what appears most urgent, rather than what’s actually most important. It’s no surprise, then, that more than 50 percent of people feel overwhelmed at least some of the time, which leads to mistakes at work, anger at employers, and resentment toward coworkers.

Guided by psychological quirks that make us think the most urgent activities are also the most important, we often prioritize the wrong ones. Don’t confuse urgent and important tasks. They’re not the same.

Urgent tasks are those that must be done by a certain time. If not, they can’t be done at all — joining a client for dinner on the only day she’s in town, helping a colleague meet a project deadline, or attending an annual team retreat.

Important tasks are different. There are big positive outcomes for performing them or big negative consequences for not performing them. Examples include personal development, for instance, through reading and education; updating a product; and developing a good relationship with colleagues.

Some tasks are both important and urgent, and most people prioritize them — whether filing taxes, responding to a job offer, or smoothing things over with an upset customer. Not surprisingly, we usually and correctly deprioritize non-urgent, non-important tasks — whether it’s mindlessly checking social media or shopping online during work hours (at least most of the time!).

What about tasks that are urgent but not important, such as attending a weekly company gathering or answering a phone call from a colleague, or that are important but not urgent, such as long-term career planning? Think about it for a minute: What are you likely to work on today? Probably the urgent tasks.

There’s a reason why we usually prioritize urgent tasks over important ones. Important tasks tend to be more difficult to complete than urgent ones, making us more reluctant to start them. Urgent tasks have a more immediate payoff, making them more enticing to start and pleasing to finish. If you’re trying to feel good — at least in the short term — checking off an urgent task makes sense. In the long term, however, you’re not doing the type of work that really matters to your career and company.

We also get tricked into focusing on urgent tasks through artificial deadlines. There’s a lot of “fake urgency” at work. After a coworker or client asked you to get back to them within a week, have you ever wondered where the week deadline came from? Too often, it’s completely arbitrary. Double-check to make sure a deadline is really the deadline.

And it turns out when we think we’re busy with other stuff even if we’re not, we’re even more prone to being pushed around by fake urgency. With so much to do and now another pressing deadline before us, who has time to figure out which “important” task we should complete first?

Excerpted from JOY AT WORK © 2020 by KonMari Media Inc. and Scott Sonenshein.
Used with permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York. All rights reserved.