Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
It’s been nearly five years since I wrote about “Rick” and in spite of everything that’s happened in those years, including inheriting his grandmother’s large estate, Rick still doesn’t consider himself privileged. Not surprising, considering the American belief that anybody can bootstrap their way to success all on their own. That includes people like Kylie Jenner, who brags about being self-made, since she bootstrapped her company using her own money — all by herself. No question, bootstrapping is far easier when you are privileged.
If you’re an outsider, or even an insider prone to objectivity, Silicon Valley’s culture is a mess.
When I said as much to “Rick” his response caught me off guard — although it shouldn’t have.
“I wish they would just give it a rest. I am sick and tired of all the crap about wealth inequality, lack of diversity and privacy rights. That stuff is not my responsibility. I’ve worked hard and deserve my success; nobody went out of their way to help me. I’m sure not privileged and I figure if I can do it so can they.”
I’ve heard this before, but it still leaves me speechless.
Rick is tall, white, nice looking, middle class family, raised around Palo Alto, and graduated from UC Berkeley; his dad worked for Intel.
Yet he doesn’t see himself as privileged.
Over the years I’ve known thousands of Ricks.
And therein lies the true problem.
Because it’s hard to change that which doesn’t exist.
The media loves attaching the “self-made” label, shining a spotlight and making it seem that anyone willing to work hard enough can become a billionaire, or at least a multi-millionaire.
It’s not just all the people along the way, but also where you come from and how privileged your background.
The latest self-made billionaire is 21-year-old Kylie Jenner who claims the self-made title, because she didn’t inherit her company, i.e., bootstrapped it using her own money.
No help, did it herself.
Of course, that self-made label ignores a few significant factors.
Still, it’s obviously absurd to attach the phrase “self-made” to Jenner, who is part of the wildly successful Jenner-Kardashian clan. While she is clearly savvy about marketing and promotion, Jenner grew up in one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the world with access to every advantage money could buy ― including years of self-promotion on a successful reality television show. The value of her makeup company lies in the celebrity she accrued via her family.
So is “self-made” more nature or nurture? According to new research from Sandra Black, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the answer is nurture.
The environment you grow up in ― the quality of education your parents can afford to give you, the investments they make in you, the relative affluence of your neighborhood ― is almost twice as important as biology.
It’s not a case of denying the success of Kylie Jenner, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Nick Woodman.
It’s a case of recognizing how the advantages they enjoyed reduced risk, lowered barriers, smoothed the road, and made the journey easier.
If you still doubt that parents aren’t a big deal and nurture doesn’t carry all that much weight, take a look at a currently breaking scandal over the lengths to which parents will go to get their kids into a top university.
Words are tossed around today with little consideration for their actual meaning, let alone accuracy of usage.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter, but misusing others can be the basis for serious errors, while treating words as interchangeable, as if they are synonyms, can have dire consequences.
This is especially true when the subject is emotionally charged or carries a lot of baggage — such as diversity, the great catch-all.
I can also say that I, too, have used the following incorrectly: privileged, underrepresented, marginalized, diversity, and inclusion.
It’s always gratifying when something I wrote in years past, based on my own experience, is validated by current research. Yesterday’s Oldie about privilege is no exception.
There are lots of people held back by bias. And that means that some of the people at the top have advanced partly through privilege.
Our research finds the idea of being advantaged to be uncomfortable for many senior leaders. We interviewed David, a senior executive who recognizes both having benefited from unfair advantages and the injustice of bias. He’s tall, middle-aged, well-educated, heterosexual, able-bodied, white, and male — and these provide David with unearned advantages that he intellectually knows he has, but that in practice he barely notices. He tells us he feels an underlying sense of guilt. He wants to feel that his successes in life are down to his abilities and hard work, not unfair advantage. “I feel like a child who discovers that people have been letting him win a game all along,” he says. “How can I feel good about myself succeeding if the game was never fair?”
Over the years, I’ve found the idea of ‘fairness’ and ‘unfairness’ deeply embedded in people’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) where it has a major impact on all three MAP components.
In speaking with leaders about their built-in advantages, we have seen that David’s experience is widely shared. Acknowledging these advantages can challenge their very identities and sense of worth.
As is often the case, normalcy erases awareness.
Our research on speaking truth to power shows there is often a blind spot among the powerful, preventing them from seeing their impact on the less powerful. We call this advantage blindness. When you have advantage blindness, you don’t feel privileged. You don’t notice a life of special treatment; it’s just normal. You don’t think about your physical safety most of the time; you don’t worry about holding hands with your partner in public; when you get angry, no one asks you if it’s because of your hormones; and people in power generally look like you.
The results of the researchers interviews list three negative reactions
Denying the playing field is unlevel.
Focusing on one’s own disadvantages.
Denying the playing field is unlevel.
And three positive ones
Owning personal prejudice and bias.
Empathy from connecting with people who are “other.”
Putting personal advantage to collective good use
The one problem with the research is it’s focus on executives, which is to be expected from Harvard, but the same advantages, bias, guilt, and negative reactions can be found at all levels.
The good part is that the positive approaches discussed also work at all levels.
While you can’t eliminate societal advantages, you can put them to work for the greater good. Doing so will go a long way to validating your advantaged success.
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Privileged is different than entitled. Entitled mindsets believe the world owes them, whereas privileged is often unconscious — a matter of birth. Not necessarily born to great wealth, but being born with fewer challenges, such as white instead of black, brown, yellow, red, or any combination thereof; male, instead of female. Interested/knowledgeable parents. Average-to-good schools. Etc.
Most don’t see themselves as privileged, like Rick, in the story below.
If you’re an outsider, or even an insider prone to objectivity, Silicon Valley’s culture is a mess.
When I said as much to “Rick” his response caught me off guard — although it shouldn’t have.
“I wish they would just give it a rest. I am sick and tired of all the crap about wealth inequality, lack of diversity and privacy rights. That stuff is not my responsibility. I’ve worked hard and deserve my success; nobody went out of their way to help me. I’m sure not privileged and I figure if I can do it so can they.”
I’ve heard this before, but it still leaves me speechless.
Rick is white, nice looking, middle class family, raised around Palo Alto, graduated from UC Berkeley; his dad worked for Intel.
Yet he doesn’t see himself as privileged.
Over the years I’ve known thousands of Ricks.
And therein lies the true problem.
Because it’s hard to change that which doesn’t exist.
From religious leaders to politicians; corporate titans to everyday folks; glitterati to moguls; intelligentsia to idiots; there seems to be no action that elicits societal condemnation, let alone punishment, for anyone except getting caught.
That’s right, getting caught.
If a societal no-no, first vehemently deny it and/or claim you didn’t realize anybody actually minded. If that doesn’t work, apologize profusely using language that changes the focus from what you did and who you hurt to you, i.e., how sad you are for them and how your big sister broke your GI Joe when you were a kid, so it’s not really your fault.
Another approach is to buy their silence, but if that doesn’t work, you can claim that the devil led you astray, you were weak, but you’ve preyed a lot, God forgave you and so should those you mislead/hurt.
Enterprise and Internet companies emote about how important user privacy is and how hard they try to protect it every time they’re hacked or their hands are caught in the cookie jar.
Worse, repercussions of serious criminal actions, especially murder, are relativity easy to avoid as long as you’re white and well-healed — or in law enforcement.
It used to be that people talked of someone having a “strong moral compass.” I suppose many still do, but that’s not worth much when “true north” is portable, shifting with the trends on social media and shoved around by rigid ideologies.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
I had a $15 K lesson in founder ego when I lived in San Francisco. That’s how much I lost when I invested in a startup run by a guy with a bad case of it.
The only thing to do when that happens is to move forward and forget it. Money is replaceable — your sanity isn’t.
Using facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) as a proxy for pubertal testosterone, we show that high-testosterone hedge fund managers significantly underperform low-testosterone hedge fund managers after adjusting for risk. Moreover, high-testosterone managers are more likely to terminate their funds, disclose violations on their Form ADVs, and display greater operational risk. We trace the underperformance to high-testosterone managers’ greater preference for lottery-like stocks and reluctance to sell loser stocks. Our results are robust to adjustments for sample selection, marital status, sensation seeking, and manager age, and suggest that investors should eschew masculine hedge fund managers.
“For years I thought it was a pipeline question,” said Julie Daum, who has led efforts to recruit women for corporate boards at Spencer Stuart. “But it’s not — I’ve been watching the pipeline for 25 years. There is real bias, and without the ability to shine a light on it and really measure it, I don’t think anything’s going to change.”
Conscious, intentional bias is bad enough, but girls also have to contend with an unconsciously biased society and a dearth of powerful role models.
Women rarely consider themselves experts, unlike men, who will claim expertise on any subject, no matter how ridiculous.
A presenter asked a group of men and women whether anyone had expertise in breast-feeding. A man raised his hand. He had watched his wife for three months. The women in the crowd, mothers among them, didn’t come forward as experts.
Ellen Kullman, the former chief executive of DuPont sums up a large piece of the problem.
The UK’s advertising industry regulator has announced that portrayals of little girls aspiring to be, say, a ballerina while boys hope to be, for instance, a scientist or doctor will be banned from the country’s ads. Many of these air during kids’ programs and target teens through social media.
And if you think this example is extreme it is actually drawn from this Aptamil baby formula ad.
Can bias actually be addressed beyond training and conversation?
Join me tomorrow for a look at how a corporate sexist poster child became a lodestar for gender equity.
Yesterday we looked at the hypocritical nature of Walmart’s culture, but perhaps it’s a reflection of what’s happening across the US, as opposed to an attitude unique to Walmart.
In the last half century, economic, political and social changes have altered not only the makeup of the workforce, but also what it takes to get a job and support oneself, let alone a family.
Public policy does little to mitigate what’s happening, and much of enterprise is retreating.
“You end up with this perfect storm where workplace and public policies are mismatched to what the workforce and families need,” said Vicki Shabo, vice president at the non-partisan National Partnership for Women & Families (NPWF). (…) Overall progress for workers has been slow, because the country is attached to an “ideal myth of America.” One where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps [emphasis mine].
Assuming bootstraps were once real, do they still exist?
Of course, there is no doubt that privilege is real — no matter how often and how much people deny it.
We all need to remind ourselves of our advantages: whether it’s straight privilege, or financial privileges, or able-bodied privilege, or whatever extra boost we’ve gotten. Humans are prone to credit our successes to our own ingenuity, true or not. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, asked randomly selected subjects to play Monopoly. But the game was rigged. The winner of a coin toss got twice the starting cash and higher bonuses for passing Go.
Not surprisingly the advantaged players won. But as they prospered, their behavior changed. They moved their pieces more loudly than their opponents, reveled in triumphs and even took more snacks. Some, when asked about their win, talked about how their strategy helped them succeed. They began to think they earned their success, even though they knew the game was set up in their favor [emphasis mine].
Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899 and in it he coined the term “conspicuous consumption” — no definition required.
Although you still find that in the 1%, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a sociologist, has a new book, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class — a new term that better represents the far-reaching consequences of what’s happening today.
Who is the aspirational class?
Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption—like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children’s growth [emphasis mine], and to practice yoga and Pilates.
These kids grow up with better health, better education, more enrichment, a solid belief of their place in life.
No matter how liberal their parents’ politics, they consider the world they inhabit the norm.
Few consider it privileged — after all, their parents aren’t actually rich.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,