Number three in our hit parade of these meta biases, these things that we really want to pay attention to, to make better decision is prejudgments. And boy, there's a lot going on here, first of all what is a prejudgment? A prejudgment is when you decide something is the way it is, and you stick to it no matter what, it's as simple as that. We all make prejudgments, we make prejudgments pretty much every day of the week. And why do people decide something kind of quickly and stick to it? Well, because it saves a lot of time, I mean imagine that you had to do a decision making analysis every morning when you got out of bed. Should I get out of bed on the left side, or on the right side? Well the window is open my partners here, the dogs is on the rug. It's stupid, I mean you can't, we need shortcuts for all sorts of things, and those are prejudgments. And they're completely logical, except when those prejudgments become overwhelming, and drive out what should be part of a more, let's call it more reasonable decision making process. And I have a lot of examples of that, because it's just so common in life. So let's start with the business example, Ron Johnson former CEO at JCPenney, who you may know I guess as it was the, I'm not sure if they're ever going to come back. But they were this kind of low end, or low cost department like a Kmart in a sense, another department store chain that's not around. And JC Penney has been struggling for a long time, and Ron Johnson became the CEO of the company, his job was to turn around the company. And so who is he? Well it turns out Ron Johnson was the guy that ran the Apple stores for Steve Jobs. He didn't, it wasn't his idea to come up with the stores, but it was his job to run it as a retailer. And obviously those Apple stores pretty good, they worked great. And that got him a job with lots of compensation, and lots of stock options to become the CEO of JCPenney. What he ends up deciding after a pretty short period of time is that, the way to create a retail store experience is the way that Apple did it. And that the way JCPenney should be set up, should be very similar to how Apple stores are set up. Now I just want to make sure we're all clear on the differences between these two, right? I mean Apple stores, ultra cool lineups out the door, very high price points, electronics, not racks and racks of clothing all over the place, and different types of customers to be sure. JCPenney again as I said kind of a mass market for the everyman or every woman, who wants to get low priced closed, and doesn't mind rummaging through all kinds of things. And what happens is, when you change the entire layout of the stores to resemble something kind of cool like an apple store. You've completely changed the shopping experience for your traditional customers. Somebody actually said that, Ron Johnson and JCPenney through these changes, they fired their customers, which is quite a statement isn't it? Because their traditional customers felt like, this wasn't for them anymore and they found somewhere else to go. And the net result is that, Ron Johnson lasted less than two years, lost the job. The stock options certainly we're not worth anything, because the company went out of business. And it's an example of walking in with a prejudgment, and not being willing to adjust that prejudgment. And then kind of walking off a cliff with it, plenty of other examples. And I said before in everyday life, right? So okay hopefully my wife won't be watching this, so I'll tell you the story. She hates food trucks, I'm a big foodie, I love all kinds of stuff like that. But she will not eat at a food truck, because they are dirty and that's the prejudgment and there's no negotiation, there's no discussion. There's no data that could possibly change her mind, fine I get to eat two tacos instead of one when I go. This whole thing happened to me also, this prejudgment and very different type of scenario, which I think is kind of interesting to share as well. This was way back when I graduated from college undergraduate school, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. And so what I decided to do is, applied to all kinds of things. I applied to business school, law school, PhD programs and even some real jobs just so you know. I was fortunate in the sense that, I had a lot of options and what I did is, I prepared this grid if you can. And along the top I numbered them one through four for each option that I had, going to this school, going to that place, doing this job whatever it was. And down the side A through F were the criteria that I identified, because I was pretty analytical and the criteria where things like, how much money I would make or spend, who I'd be likely to meet. Whether I liked the location that would be in, what the learning opportunity might be, whatever they were. And so I then had this kind of four by six grid, and then in each little box I put a number from one to five, five home run one disaster. And then I added up the columns, and the option that had the highest score. When I saw that I realized, I didn't want to do that at all, and that's when I realized not all criteria are created equal. And what I decided to do is, I decided to wait the criteria because some criteria are more important than others. And when I did this, it was before people were using Excel spreadsheets. And so you can imagine it took me quite a long time to tinker with it, but I made sure I ended up with the answer I wanted all along. And that's what a prejudgment is, we cooked the books so to speak. We kind of figure out a way to get the answer that we want. It's not unrelated to the one plan at a time, that we talked about in the earlier module as well. And it's also very similar, very analogous to how corporate budgeting programs work. As some of you may well know, so how you're framing the situation that you're facing, is it an opportunity? Is that a threat? How do we think about, this is a really big point we'll talk about in Course 3 on super bosses. Where we really lean into this idea about opportunity framing, but the way in which you frame something play such a big role, in whether you're likely to create or have a prejudgment. Let me give you an example, a little bit different, do you sometimes worry if you measure up? Do you have concerns about, whether you really deserve that seat at the table? You sometimes question yourself with that inner voice, that keeps coming back at you questioning whether you're really good enough. A lot of people have that, and it's called imposter syndrome. It's when we believe that, maybe we don't deserve that seat. It's when we underestimate our abilities, and downplay our skills and we're only hurting ourselves. These are emotional tags, and they're not always on our side. That's something we need to fight against, and we can't let that prejudgment that says, hey maybe I don't have that seat at the table, maybe I don't quite deserve to be there. We have to fight against that, I mean there's a lot more I could say about imposter syndrome, it's a big issue, it's a big challenge. But it's something that we need to focus on, because a lot of people, really a lot of people have it. Also related to all this is, when people focus on what worked in the past, the outcomes and results that they've seen in the past. When we talk about the Motorola case study again, for those of you that did have a chance already to do the first course in this sequence, lessons learned from the why smart executives fail project. There's this line by a senior executive at Motorola that said, 43 million analog customers can't be wrong. When somebody says something that you're hearing a prejudgment inaction, aren't you? They're saying, this is the way the world is, this is the way the world was. And we're not going to question, we're not going to analyze, we're not going to do anything else, this is what we're going to do. And that happens a lot, or I've seen this also when somebody comes to you and your team and says, have a great idea and you say, well actually we had the same idea. We tried it five years ago, it didn't work again, we're shutting down creativity. We're jumping the gun and we're quickly making a decision about something, a judgment about something, maybe before we should. So these things happen, but we need to make sure we don't let it dominate, or control our thinking. And that's really the important thing here, let's make sure we really can't do something, before we just write it off as a ridiculous idea. That's not the way to be successful, and that's not the way to have fun at the work that we're doing.
