Kenneth Andersson FOR HBR

In our hyper-connected, 24/7 world, many of us are losing sleep — literally. Our own survey of more than 180 business leaders found that four out of 10 (43%) say they do not get enough sleep at least four nights a week. Such sleep deficiencies can undermine important forms of leadership behavior and eventually hurt financial performance. This article will explore the link between sleep and leadership before discussing solutions that can improve both individual well-being and organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

The link between sleep and organizational leadership

The last part of our brain to evolve was the neocortex, responsible for functions such as sensory perception, motor commands, and language. The frontal part of the neocortex, the prefrontal cortex, directs what psychologists call executive functioning, including all the higher-order cognitive processes, such as problem solving, reasoning, organizing, inhibition, planning, and executing plans. These processes help us get things done.

It’s long been known that all leadership behavior relies on at least one (and often more than one) of these executive functions, and therefore, in particular, on the prefrontal cortex. Neuroscientists know that although other brain areas can cope relatively well with too little sleep, the prefrontal cortex cannot. Basic visual and motor skills deteriorate when people are deprived of sleep, but not nearly to the same extent as higher-order mental skills.

Previous McKinsey research has highlighted a strong correlation between leadership performance and organizational health, itself a strong predictor of a robust bottom line. In a separate study of 81 organizations and 189,000 people around the world, we found that four types of leadership behavior are most commonly associated with high-quality executive teams: operating with a strong orientation to results, solving problems effectively, seeking out different perspectives, and supporting others. What’s striking in all four cases is the proven link between sleep and effective leadership.

Operating with a strong orientation to results. To do this well, it’s important to focus and avoid distractions while at the same time seeing the bigger picture — that is, whether your company is heading in the right direction. Sleep deprivation impairs the ability to focus attention selectively: Research shows that after roughly 17 to 19 hours of wakefulness (say, at 11 PM or 1 AM for someone who got up at 6 AM), individual performance on a range of tasks is equivalent to that of a person with a blood alcohol level of 0.05%. That’s the legal drinking limit in many countries. After roughly 20 hours of wakefulness (2 AM), this same person’s performance equals that of someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.1%, which meets the legal definition of drunk in the United States.

Solving problems effectively.Sleep is beneficial for a host of cognitive functions that help us solve problems effectively, including insight, pattern recognition, and the ability to come up with innovative and creative ideas. One study has shown that a good night’s sleep leads to new insights: participants who enjoyed one were twice as likely to discover a hidden shortcut in a task as those who didn’t. Likewise, an afternoon nap has been found to aid creative problem solving: subjects who took a nap after struggling on a video game problem were almost twice as likely to solve it as subjects who had remained awake. Other research has established that creative thinking is especially likely to take place during dream sleep, enhancing the integration of unassociated information and promoting creative solutions.

Seeking out different perspectives. A wealth of scientific studies have highlighted the impact of sleep on all three stages of the learning process: before learning, to encode new information; after learning, in the consolidation stage, when the brain forms new connections; and before remembering, to retrieve information from memory. These processes are critical to the ability to seek, encode, and consolidate different perspectives. Another important consideration is the ability to weigh the relative significance of different inputs accurately, to avoid tunnel vision, and to reduce cognitive bias. Sleep has been shown to improve decision making in such situations — in tasks that mimic real life, for instance, which require integrating multiple emotional responses. Science supports the commonly heard advice that rather than making an important decision or sending a sensitive email late at night, you should sleep on it.

Supporting others.To help other people, you must first understand them. Doing so may require interpreting the emotions on their faces or their tone of voice. But in a sleep-deprived state, your brain is more likely to misinterpret these cues and overreact to emotional events, and you tend to express your feelings in a more negative manner and tone of voice. Recent studies have shown that people who have not had enough sleep are less likely to fully trust someone else. Another experiment has demonstrated that employees feel less engaged with their work when their leaders have had a bad night of sleep.

What organizations can do

How can organizations improve the quality and efficiency of sleep to ensure that their leaders attain — or recapture — the highest performance levels? At McKinsey, we’ve been working on this issue with our own colleagues as well as with business leaders (look here for a deeper examination of the problem and solutions). Among our recommendations leaders. Among the solutions we recommend are these two:

• Develop training programs focused on increasing awareness and creating long-lasting behavioral change. Our experience is that blended learning programs on the importance of sleep can have a positive effect on well-being.
• Evaluate and rework company policies to ensure that they encourage — or at least don’t discourage — a good night’s sleep. Look at policies covering travel, email (e.g., blackout time on email, after which no emails can be sent), team working (creating tag teams that enable employees to hand work to each other across time zones), work-time limits (setting limits on hours or creating blackout periods), mandatory work-free vacations, predictable time off, napping rooms, and smart technology that improves sleep management.

As we are the first to admit, our own people do not always practice what we preach. In any case, certain types of organizations cannot implement these ideas without an accompanying change in the underlying culture.

Beyond having more rested and therefore more effective leaders, another argument for focusing on sleep is that it prevents burnout in leaders. A recent Harvard Medical School study of senior leaders found that 96% percent reported experiencing at least some degree of burnout. One-third described their condition as extreme. There is now a large body of evidence on the bi-directional relationship between sleep and stress: a lack of sleep creates heightened emotional reactivity, and the experience of stress results in worse quality of sleep. In addition, poor sleep has been found to be a major predictor of reduced engagement at work. It’s time for organizations to find ways of countering the employee churn, lost productivity, and increased health care costs resulting from insufficient sleep.

Key performance indicators have become a misused and misunderstood concept that in many firms are at best not helping and, at worst, harming corporate performance. At the root of the problem is confusion over what is really “key” (most KPIs are backward looking), whether KPIs are “goals or gauges” and how to use them to improve decision-making and overall employee behavior.

Like many things, their current purpose has changed from the original idea. KPIs were developed as a way of measuring whether a company is on track (performing at the right level) to hit a particular goal, and to guide it in the right direction. They allow managers to make adjustments or “course corrections,” to use the business phrase.

The danger comes when KPIs aren’t key, are used as targets or goals (instead of measurements), or aren’t used in context. The following will be familiar to many managers.

• Sales, driven by “revenue KPIs,” begins selling to customers that will reduce the company’s margins, and guide it away from the direction of its long-term strategy.

• IT, driven by “business partnering KPIs”, invests in a new mobile sales app to support a small group of commercial staff that costs money and has little impact.

• A regional general manager, driven by “customer KPIs”, customizes a highly profitable core product line to meet local needs, and so reduces the margins that the product earns everywhere else.

• Procurement, driven by “cost KPIs”, switches to a new lower-cost, but lower-quality, provider while the company’s strategic goals include a move up market.

• Marketing, driven by “social media KPIs”, doubles the firm’s digital investment on a set of core, declining customer segments, when it should be looking at new high-growth groups.

In short, the wrong KPIs exacerbate a classic problem in business. Managers pursuing narrow interests that they can control but that can harm the broader collective effort of a large global firm. This is exactly the same problem that strategists run into when they try to get senior managers to stop thinking about their “operational” issues and devote some time to “strategic” thinking instead.

Fixing the Problem

The right KPIs will certainly help employees and teams reach their goals, will work as present and future gauges of performance, and can be used in context to make decisions and guide employee behavior.

But at many firms most of what are called KPIs are indicators of any kind of important performance and often exist because “we’ve always had them”, “the CEO wants it”, or “these are the metrics we had to choose from in our ERP”.

Two fundamental questions to assess how useful your KPIs are, is to ask, “Does this help me make good decisions?” and, “What behaviors are we encouraging because of them?”.

You may be able to answer this quickly but, more likely, it will take time and numerous conversations. Which is okay, because this is something all companies cannot afford to get wrong. Take a step back and ask the right questions, and then answer them in narrative form, before you even entertain setting any kind of measurement. These questions should be things like:

• What overall outcomes are we trying to achieve?

• What influences those outcomes?

• Of those influences, what are the most important?

• What “sub-drivers” sit behind those influences, and in what proportion?

It’s important to describe all of these without numbers because numbers are really a lazy way to describe what drives outcomes, and many senior management teams end up in the “choose your best number” situation, rather thinking about what they’re trying to achieve.

To test your logic, start from the bottom and test “if X, therefore Y” all the way to the outcome that you want to achieve (increase the number of customers aged 25-40, for example). If that narrative makes sense – it can be a lot more in-depth than this – then you’ve got things to measure and decide upon.

After you decide on what you could measure, then you can make decisions about what you will measure, how you use them, in what ratios, and test what behaviors they encourage.

This week, from February 1 – February 4, museums and libraries worldwide are taking part in #ColorOurCollections. As part of this campaign, these institutions have made available free coloring books, letting you color artwork from their collections and then share it on Twitter and other social media platforms, using the hashtag #ColorOurCollections. At no cost, you can download coloring books from:

• The New York Public Library (PDF)
• The Bodleian Library (PDF)
• The Smithsonian Libraries – (PDF)
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library
• The Folger Library
• The Huntington
• The New York Academy of Medicine
• The Open Library
• The Digital Public Library of America
• The Dittrick Medical History Center Rare Book Collections, Case Western Reserve University (PDF)
• James Madison University (PDF)
• The Wangensteen Historical Library, University of Minnesota – @umnbiomedlib
• Special Collections and Rare Books, University of Missouri Libraries (PDF)

You can find a list of other participants on Twitter. The image above comes from The Huntington. Happy coloring.

H/T goes to Heather for making us aware of this project.

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Download Free Coloring Books from World-Class Libraries & Museums: The New York Public Library, Bodleian, Smithsonian & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Pierre-August Renoir, La Tasse de chocolat

Last year we told you about the importance of messy desks and walking to creativity. This year, the time has come to realize how much creativity also depends on boredom. In a sense, of course, humankind has utterly vanquished boredom, what with our modern technologies — computers, high-speed internet, smartphones — that make possible sources of rich and frequent stimulation such as, well, this very site. But what if we need a little boredom? What if boredom, that state we 21st-century first-worlders worry about avoiding more than any other, actually helps us create?

Even if we feel no boredom in our free time, surely we still endure the occasional bout of it at work. “Admitting that boredom to coworkers or managers is likely something few of us have ever done,” writes the Harvard Business Review‘s David Burkus. “It turns out, however, that a certain level of boredom might actually enhance the creative quality of our work.”

He cites a well-known scientific experiment which found that volunteers did better at a creative task (like finding different uses for a pair of plastic cups) when first subjected to a boring one (like copying numbers out of the phone book) which “heightens the ‘daydreaming effect’ on creativity — the more passive the boredom, the more likely the daydreaming and the more creative you could be afterward.”

Burkus also refers to another paper documenting the performance of different subjects on word-association tests after watching different video clips, one of them deliberately boring. Who came up with the most creative associations? You guessed it: those who watched the boring video first. Boredom, the experimenters suggest, “motivates people to approach new and rewarding activities. In other words, an idle mind will seek a toy. (Anyone who has taken a long car ride with a young child has surely experienced some version of this phenomenon.)”

Writing about those same experiments, Fast Company‘s Vivian Giang quotes researcher Andreas Elpidorou of the University of Louisville as claiming that “boredom helps to restore the perception that one’s activities are meaningful or significant.” He describes it as a “regulatory state that keeps one in line with one’s projects. In the absence of boredom, one would remain trapped in unfulfilling situations, and miss out on many emotionally, cognitively, and socially rewarding experiences. Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and projects.”

“Boredom is a fascinating emotion because it is seen as so negative yet it is such a motivating force,” says Dr. Sandi Mann of the University of Central Lancashire, one of the masterminds of the experiments with the phone book and the plastic cups, quoted by Telegraph science editor Sarah Knapton. “Being bored is not the bad thing everyone makes it out to be. It is good to be bored sometimes! I think up so many ideas when I am commuting to and from work – this would be dead time, but thanks to the boredom it induces, I come up with all sorts of projects.” (This also manifests in her parenting: “I am quite happy when my kids whine that they are bored,” she said: “Finding ways to amuse themselves is an important skill.”)

David Foster Wallace took on the relationship between boredom and creativity in an ambitious way when he started writing The Pale King, his unfinished novel (which he privately called “the Long Thing”) set in an Internal Revenue Service branch office in mid-1980s Peoria. The papers related to the project he left behind included a note about the book’s larger theme:

It turns out that bliss – a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

This, as well as the more everyday suggestions about working more creatively by doing the boring bits first, would seem to share a basis with the ancient tradition of meditation. If indeed humanity has gone too far in its mission to alleviate the discomfort of boredom, it has produced the even more pernicious condition in which we all feel constantly and unthinkingly desperate for new distractions (which Shop Class as Soulcraft author Matthew B. Crawford memorably called “obesity of the mind”) while knowing full well that those distractions keep us from our important work, be it designing a scientific experiment, coming up with a sales strategy, or writing a novel.

Maybe we can undo some of the damage by deliberately, regularly shutting off our personal flow of interesting sensory input for a while, whether through meditation, data entry, phone-book copying, of whichever method feels right to you. (WNYC’s Manoush Zomorodi even launched a project last year called “Bored and Brilliant: The Lost Art of Spacing Out,” which challenged listeners to minimize their phone-checking and put the time gained to more creative use.)  But we all need some high-quality stimulation sooner or later, so when you feel ready for another dose of it, you know where to find us.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Ah, The Tale of Genji — a veritable Mount Everest for students of the Japanese language, and a fixture on so many reading lists drawn up by fans of world literature in translation as well. This formidable story of an emperor’s son turned commoner, written mostly or entirely by Heian-period noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu (also known as Lady Murasaki) in the early 11th century, makes a credible claim to the status of the very first novel (or, as more timid boosters might claim for it, the first psychological novel, or the first “classic” novel).

It has thus had plenty of time to get adapted into other forms: translations into modern Japanese and other currently understandable languages, annotated versions by later generations of writers, live-action movies, and animation and comic books — anime and manga.

Many of those Genjis appeared in the past hundred years. Much closer to Murasaki’s own time is the Genji Monogatari Emaki, commonly called the Tale of Genji Scroll, created about a century after the Genji itself, sometime around 1120 to 1140. Here you see pieces of the scroll’s surviving sections, thought to constitute only a small portion of the original work meant to depict and explain some of the events of the novel. Art historians haven’t pinned down the identity of the artist, but they do know that the style of these images, created with the female-dominated tsukuri-e (or “manufactured painting” process), which involves layering a drawing over pigment itself painted over a first drawing, strongly suggests a woman artist.

The Genji Monogatari Emaki fits into the longer Japanese tradition of picture scrolls, which first combined images and text in a groundbreaking way in the ninth or tenth century and, one could argue, continue to influence Japanese art today.

That goes especially for popular Japanese art: in Japan, where you can see thousands of comic book-readers of all ages on the trains each and every day, people take the union of words and images more seriously than they do in the West — or at least Western comic art enthusiasts see it that way. So if these evocative images from the Genji Scroll make you want to pick up the novel, but you still don’t know if you can handle it straight, start with one of the manga adaptations, which, as you can see, have more historical legitimacy than we might have assumed.

It’s worth noting that Oxford has a site where you can download a complete English translation of The Tale of the Genji. A new translation by Dennis Washburn also came out in the last six months.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Splendid Hand-Scroll Illustrations of The Tale of the Genjii, The First Novel Ever Written (Circa 1120) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.