My Latest Podcast: Goonj
Every once in a while, we come across individuals who march to a different drum. They devote their lives to making a difference, instead of self-aggrandizing or focusing only on their own happiness.
I had read a lot about the Goonj organization in India, which collects almost anything people have to give – shoes, clothes, utensils, pretty much anything you can think of, and transforms these items into useful kits for people in their time of need. But equally importantly, Goonj has a unique and simple business model that places human dignity and self-actualization center-stage in large scale development, while using the world's waste as a nudge for getting there. Goonj optimizes the utilization of things, instead of letting them end up prematurely in landfills or polluting the environment. It’s a different kind of sharing economy, where you share an asset not to make money, but to make a real difference in peoples’ lives.
So, check out my conversation with Anshu Gupta, founder of Goonj. He has won numerous awards for his work, which should also be available shortly as a Harvard Business School case study.
I’ve Been Going Through Life With the Wrong Face
I connected recently with a former research assistant, Jessy Hsieh, from over ten years ago. I recall that at her going away party, she and my other research assistant, Charles Pensig, gave me a present: a memory stick featuring a Star Wars logo with “Darth VDhar” emblazoned across it.
Huh? Darth VDhar? I had no idea they had such a flattering nickname for me.
“You always look so serious,” I recall Jessy saying. “From your facial expression, I always feel a little concerned that I haven’t made sufficient progress on our research.” We had a good laugh. But it wasn’t lost on me that other friends had also told me that I always seemed deep in thought walking down the street with a furrowed brow, so they were reluctant to disturb me. Even my daughter would often say “Dad, un-scrunch.” To which I’d smile as widely as I could to undo the furrow.
The COVID era has been an eye opener into my furrows. I’ve recorded over fifty episodes of my Brave New World podcast since December of 2020, five of which have been face to face, but the rest have been on the Internet, where my guest and I can see each other during the conversation.
During the last few recordings, I’ve found myself observing my reflection on the screen while my guest is speaking. During the last recording, which was about CRISPR and the human genome, was my brow was so furrowed in concentration and my face so intense, I was scared by the character who stared back at me. Fortunately, I warn my guests to ignore my facial expressions, which they do, thankfully.
Clearly, I need to do this prior to every class or speaking engagement, otherwise I can’t blame people for nicknaming me Darth.
My larger realization is that my face is so much at odds with my self-perception. My friends and family know me as a jokester. I’ve been told that I’m very easily amused, and spend a large part of my life laughing. My friends often ask me whether I’ve got any new jokes. My kids sometimes roll their eyes and beg me to stop. I go through some business meetings trying to contain myself. I once asked a former client, a CEO of a financial services company, why he always looks so pissed off. I remarked that he reminded me of a Seinfeld episode – where George finally gets a job with the Yankees – and decides to “always look annoyed because people think you’re busy.” Fortunately, my CEO client had a sense of humor. Or did he?
I’m a data guy, which got me thinking about whether all the data out there could be analyzed systematically by a machine. I looked at all the data I could get my hands on, including my media appearances. One CNBC clip from ten years ago with Becky Quick and Brian Sullivan was especially revealing, which featured the Dotcom analyst Henry Blodgett and myself discussing whether Facebook should pay its users in exchange for monetizing their data. I was so serious, it was scary. In contrast, Blodgett wouldn’t stop smiling even when the camera was not on him. Sure, his smile seemed a little rehearsed, but I thought “Jeez V, smile, lighten up, engage in some banter, like telling Henry that you’d pay money for his smile.”
Have you ever thought about how you present your face to the outside world? Not your dress or your hairstyle or body language, but your facial expressions? It must be one of the most critical things in your life. If life is about maximizing serendipitous encounters, as the President of Wesleyan University, Michel Roth remarked during our conversation, your face might be determining the most important outcomes in your life without your realization.
We’ve got a “management communications” group at Stern that helps you with things like presentations, etc. But I’m not sure how much they are willing to say about your face, perhaps out of fear of offending you, or, these days, of being reported to HR for setting off some hidden trigger. Humans will only say so much, and it’s not enough.
As a speaker, I’ve always focused on content, and how to communicate it. I never seriously thought about my facial expressions, and whether I can do anything about them. The other day at lunch, a colleague told me that my face looked really pained as I shared my opinion about about something called “grounded theory.” What I recall saying about it, in humor, was that it was a presumptuous label, which implied that theories that preceded it have been “ungrounded.” I was totally unaware about the pained expression on my face.
Can an AI Coach Help?
Coming back to data, consider all that visual and text data sitting with Zoom or Teams from the millions of meetings they’ve hosted. Isn’t that an incredibly rich data source, where the computer can automatically label the data and use it to assess the impact of different kinds of presentation, and give us a scorecard along various attributes that we could reflect on?
I would wager that AI can be an effective coach when it comes to facial expressions and presentation styles across a variety of contexts. While human experts can be great at providing broad strokes advice on effective communication, no human coach has all the data being collected by machines or the ability to analyze it like machines can. I can envision a future version of Zoom or Teams giving you a scorecard at the end of a session, if you opt-in, of course. Could you use such feedback to hone your face? I think so. It’s no different than learning how to write effectively.
In one of my previous episodes of Brave New World with Daniel Kahneman, he pointed out why machines would surpass humans at many things, like medical diagnosis, due to the sheer volume of data available to them relative to even the most experienced humans. If machines are almost as good as the best humans now, he said, it is only a matter of time before they will be so much better by virtue of all the data available to them. I feel the same about human facial expressions. Given how much data machines are seeing about our expressions and their impacts, I think it is a matter of time before they advise us what works best when it comes to “making friends and influencing people.”
It’s a whole brave new world emerging.