... the positive-to-negative ratio you’ll arrive at is somewhere between three to one and five to one—three to five moments of appreciative attention for every one piece of negative feedback. While there is no need to obsess over the mathematical precision of the ratios, the science suggests that if you aim for this level of deliberate imbalance you and your team will be well served.

Remember that our students are often surprised when they write down their experiences with each chapter’s credo. You might try the same thing each week. The discipline of analyzing your experiences brings new light.

I do not think my experience is unique. Many scientists, no less than poets or artists, have a living relation to the past, not just an abstract sense of history and tradition but a feeling of companions and predecessors, ancestors with whom they enjoy a sort of implicit dialogue. Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.

I also didn’t appreciate that if you ask ten questions and make ten suggestions, people may take them less seriously, even if they’re all equally good. If you have only two issues or questions, people will take your two more seriously than they may take any of your ten. During my first hundred days in the Harvard presidency, I could have had things I identified as success and could have signaled that it was a new day without dissipating as much goodwill capital, if I had been smarter.” - Lawrence Summers.

Chapter Five: Now Multiply It All by Culture

“Imagine yourself walking around an empty building. The lay-out is intuitive, each room surrendering easily to the next one. You feel strangely reassured, even optimistic. You sit down on a bench that you hadn't really noticed before, but which suddenly seems to be in exactly the right place. And you find yourself lingering, again an unfamiliar impulse. You feel the volume of the noise in your mind start to lower. That's the feeling of great design. When a service model is designed right, it produces the same sensations among the people who interact with it —energy, reassurance, the sense of calm that comes from being deeply respected as a living being. But like an empty building, a well-designed service model is still missing the critical element that brings it to life on a functional level: the people, or more specifically, how the people interact with each other. When we're talking about organizations, we call that element culture. A great service organization needs to get both right, the service design and the culture that animates it.