Me: Haha. This needs to go viral on social media! But did you notice the kids are all Caucasian?
KG: Yes — because is it the Caucasians that are causing the problems…
Me: Yeah, I realized that after I emailed you. But not all the problems. My sister dated a Black guy in college and his family threw fits. Taught me bigotry is universal, but white bigotry is more powerful/damaging.
KG: I understand. Humans are the problem, regardless of creed or color. However, white people expect that 400 years of slavery and oppression can just be wiped over and that suspicion of motives, etc. should just disappear. The reality is that we create problems for ourselves and for every other living thing on earth.
The consequences of slavery and oppression will be there for a long time.
Obviously. More than half a century and the things that have changed are the clothes, hairstyles and lack of phones.
Poking through 13+ 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.
Welch is still alive and must love today’s optimized millennials, who were raised to constantly strive and never stop working. Burnout would be no problem, since he could simply fire them.
In spite of that I doubt he could manage them; neither they, nor their elders, would take kindly to his style.
In fact, Welch’s approach is actually the fastest way to produce a bumper crop of weeds.
I’ve disagreed with Jack Welch many times going back to the start of this blog. In December 2006 I wrote Men Want A Life, Too in response to Welch’s comment.
“We do acknowledge that work-life balance is usually a much harder goal for women with children. For them, there is about a 15-year period in their careers in which the choices they make are not about what they want from life professionally and personally but about what is right for their kids. It can be a fraught time, since choices and consequences are more complex. That, however, is a topic for another column.”
It took two-and-a-half years, but he did return to that topic recently at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference telling them that women need to choose between raising kids and running a company.
“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.” (The article is from the Wall Street Journal and is the first link on this Google search page.)
Putting the comments together we have a high profile x-CEO who believes that the way to the top is for both men and women to make the tough choice and put their family second to their career.
Just let relatives, nannies (if you can afford them), daycare, schools, friends, gangs and the internet raise the next generation.
Why do comments like these come primarily from old, rich white guys?
What planet are they living on? More importantly have they bothered listening to today’s workers—and I don’t mean just Millennials.
As long as this is the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that runs companies that attitude will translate to corporate action and companies will face problems staffing. The recession won’t go on forever and demographically there’s a serious people shortage at every level and in every field.
If you really want to attract the best and brightest men and women then you need to recognize that their priorities have changed and if forced to choose the company will, in most cases, come in second.
And those candidates who do choose company over life may lack the empathy needed to innovate and market, let alone lead, the current workforce.
There are plenty of companies that already know this and have adjusted their culture accordingly, but most will be dragged kicking and screaming into the reality once the economy turns around, demographics rears its ugly head and they have no choice.
As you probably guessed, Jack Welch has been on my mind, mainly because I was stuck having lunch with a retired executive who went on and on about what a great role model Welch is.
When I disagreed, with specific examples, he informed me that he expected my reaction because I was a woman.
Huh?
Wow. I’m really glad this guy is retired, because he sure doesn’t relate to today’s workers no matter their age.
But nothing replaces high EQ, empathic, humane (not just human) bosses.
Not processes, not technology, not AI, and definitely not robots.
No matter what big and little tech want, believe or tell us, people are analog and always will be. For that matter, the real world is analog and always will be.
So, for the foreseeable future, the management and leadership skills needed to grow strong, creative, highly productive workers will be found in those who understand the limits of digital and can move freely and successfully in an analog world filled with analog people.
Back when Jack Welch implemented forced ranking throughout GE. was perched at the top of management gurus he
Also known as forced distribution and, derisively, as “rank and yank,” the practice was championed by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who insisted that GE identify and remove the bottom 10 percent of the workforce every year.
Hundreds of companies used it, including tech giants, but most (all?) have stopped. Some took longer than others, Microsoft got rid of it in 2015.
Amazing how it’s only taken 30+ years for management to figure out that setting employee against employee does not foster teamwork.
Having to watch your back, knowing it’s “you or them,” doesn’t foster anything.
But even without a formal forced ranking policy, some managers still believe that pitting team members against each other is the fastest way to boost productivity.
However, it’s a great way to increase your experience hiring
Poking through 13+ 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.
I wrote this in 2012 and reposted it in 2015. The idea behind it is one the most important and viable concepts a manager (supervisor, team lead, executive) will (can, should) learn during their career. It is the difference between good and great.
As companies grow and managers build their organizations they frequently talk about “weeding out” low performing employees—Jack Welch was a ninja weeder.
If that thought has crossed your mind you might take a moment to think about James Russell Lowell’s comment, “A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.”
As with weeds, there are better ways to look at under-performing employees.
95% of the time it’s management failures that create weeds and those failures run the gamut from benign neglect to malicious abuse and everything in-between.
Weeds can come from outside your company, inter-departmental transfers and even from peers in your own backyard.
What is amazing is how quickly a weed will change with a little TLC.
“Weeds can grow quickly and flower early, producing vast numbers of genetically diverse seed.”
People grow quickly, too, and often produce innovative ideas just because someone listened instead of shutting them down.
And while trust that your attitude won’t change takes longer to build, the productivity benefits happen fairly rapidly.
So before you even think about weeding look in the mirror and be sure that the person looking back is a gardener and not a weed producer.
Do you lust for a smart refrigerator, smart doorbell or some other smart product?
Do you want a smart home?
What about a smart city?
We already have a smart electric grid.
What do they all have in common?
They can be hacked.
It’s something to think about.
Smart = hackable.
Hacking a personally owned smart device is bad, but it pales in comparison to what happens if (when) the grid is hacked, whether by a foreign power or civilians for ransom.
Ukraine’s power was hacked in 2015, but old technology saved it from a far worse outcome.
A bill introduced in 2016 has been working its way through the US Congress. It would require similar old tech for US power grids. The bill provides a study period, so it will be 2020 before anything actually happens.
The old tech is actually the only solution that is immune to cyber/digital attacks of any kind.
Can you guess what it is?
If you guessed analog/manual/human give yourself a gold star. If you are under 40 you get five gold stars.
“Specifically, it will examine ways to replace automated systems with low-tech redundancies, like manual procedures controlled by human operators,” said US Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho), who introduced the bill on the Senate floor in 2016. (…) The US is very close to improving power grid security by mandating the use of “retro” (analog, manual) technologies on US power grids as a defensive measure against foreign cyber-attacks that could bring down power distribution as a result.
Are you surprised? I’m not.
I always thought hooking the power grid up to the hackable internet was a dumb idea.
Kind of like locking your house and then taping spare keys to the doorframes.
When a “soft-core pedophile ring” was exposed last February YouTube disabled comments on most videos featuring kids, but only because big advertisers walked.
More recently, in spite of concerns over breeches of child privacy, brands have stayed steady and YouTube has done nothing to change.
Poking through 13+ 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.
We all have visual prejudices that have nothing to do with race, ethnicity, gender anything obvious. It’s important to know your own or you can’t hear past them. I worked hard to be aware of mine. I had no choice, because, back when I was a recruiter, I occasionally met my candidates. I vividly remember two of them, because if I had met them before I presented them and set up interviews I wouldn’t have, which would have cost me dearly, since both were hired (different companies). Why not? Because they both hit my visual prejudices.
All of them are grounded in stupidity, but it’s age and appearance that I want to focus on today.
Layoffs are always a time when age is in the limelight, but this time it’s working in reverse.
“The share of older Americans who have jobs has risen during the recession, while the share of younger Americans with jobs has plunged.”
It seems that at least parts of corporate America have learned to see past the obvious.
“…employees whom companies have invested in most and who have “demonstrated track records…tend to be more experienced and are often older.””
So some companies have discovered that years of experience have substantial value when it comes to the success of the company.
But what about appearance? How much is hearing influenced by how someone looks at first take?
What better venue in which to consider this than the original British version of American Idol where the contestants are mostly young, generally good-looking and always bust their tails to make an impression.
How well do you think a slightly frumpy-looking 47 year old woman would fare under the scathing tongue of Simon Fuller?
How much do you think talent would offset the obvious visual assumptions made by both the judges and the audience?
Watch the judges and audience reaction carefully before Susan Boyle performs and how quickly it changes when she starts singing (embedding is disabled on this video); check out some of the more than 50 thousand comments.
Think about what happens when a “Susan” comes to interview; how well do you hear past her (or his) appearance?
Yesterday you met the founder of a tech company that voluntarily shut down because its app was being abused.
Google, however, is playing its standard game of privacy announcements that sound great, but…
Users can now opt-in to have their location data automatically deleted from Google every three or every 18 months, depending on their preference.
The catch, of course, is the timeframe. If you bother deleting your info daily or weekly, as do many people, especially from their kids phones, Google’s offer of three or 18 months isn’t very attractive.
That’s plenty of time for the data to migrate.
Win-win for Google.
Makes them sound as if they are doing something big for your privacy, without actually costing them anything.
Guess that’s the difference between a company with a real conscience and one with a good feel for PR.
The world knows about tech’s love affair with, and misuse of, personal data. The continual ignoring, minimizing and excusing of hate speech, revenge porn, fake news, bullying, etc.
Then there is its totally irrational attitude/belief that people will be kind and good to each other online no matter what they are like in the real world.
Given the prevailing attitude, would a hot tech startup have a conscience?
So would a founder, a self-described “technology enthusiast,” create an AI app that went viral and then shut it down because of the way it was being used?
DeepNude was built on Pix2Pix, an open-source algorithm used for “image-to-image translation.” the app can create a naked image from any picture of a woman with just a couple of clicks. Revenge porn activists said the app was “absolutely terrifying.”
As to the above question, the answer is “yes.”
The DeepNude team was horrified, believing “the probability that people will misuse it is too high.”
“We don’t want to make money this way. Surely some copies of DeepNude will be shared on the web, but we don’t want to be the ones who sell it,” DeepNude wrote in a tweet. “The world is not yet ready for DeepNude.”
Pix2Pix was developed by a team of scientists, who now believe the industry needs to do better and not just release their work to the world at large.
“We have seen some wonderful uses of our work, by doctors, artists, cartographers, musicians, and more,” the MIT professor Phillip Isola, who helped create Pix2Pix, told Business Insider in an email. “We as a scientific community should engage in serious discussion on how best to move our field forward while putting reasonable safeguards in place to better ensure that we can benefit from the positive use-cases while mitigating abuse.”
One can only hope that the scientific community does, indeed, find a way to do good while avoiding the worst of the negative fallout from discoveries.
And hats off to the DeepNude team.
It’s really inspiring to see such a concrete example of doing the right thing, with no shilly-shallying or dancing around the decision.
But I do wonder what would have happened if either the developers or the scientists were beholden to investors.
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,
