A few days ago CB insights shared a link to their collection of quotes about disruption from big name corporate leaders; they called it Foot In Mouth.
I sent it to my “list” with the following comment.
Ignorance? Idiocy? Arrogance?
All of the above?
The replies I received, one from my sister, a retired IT head, and the other from KG, were far more insightful than the queries I sent.
I thought both were worth sharing, so here they are.
From my sister.
Do you know of Joel Barker, the futurist? He’s been around since the mid-70s. I saw a video of his at a conference once, where he talked about paradigm shifts. His example then was Swiss watch makers. When two young kids brought the quartz watch to the Swiss watchmaking community for funding, the Swiss said, “No one will ever want a watch that doesn’t wind.” The kids went to the Japanese and the rest was history. Barker says that when humans have a paradigm, they automatically filter OUT anything that doesn’t support their paradigm. The Japanese had no watch paradigm and so could see the potential. I think those examples from CB are as much paradigm lock-in as stupidity. Or put another way, paradigms lead us to make dumb choices sometimes.
From KG
Upton Sinclair famously stated, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” We may call it stupidity, but it really is vested interests. That’s why innovation comes from those who have little to lose or have no other alternative. No one thinks of vested interests when they work in our favor, only when (usually in hindsight) they are show to have caused loss are they called stupid.
In a time of proven global warming, the US has chosen, as the only nation in the world, to reject the potentially cataclysmic consequences of a warmer globe and have invested $4 trillion to develop the domestic oil & gas industry rather than investing these monies in future technologies that can save the planet. These vested interests are causing an existential crisis, and all the systems we’ve built.
There are so many areas that we are struggling with as a species due to vested interests — things that threaten our survival. These range from the ones that are commonly spoken about, like global warming and environmental destruction. They also include synthetic chemicals and nano materials that are giving us cancer and making us sterile, an economic system that ignores externalities and the tragedy of the commons, and our challenges with making sustainable decisions in an increasingly complex World.
Do you hire based on grades and/or the college attended?
If so, give yourself an F — for being a hiring dinosaur and ignoring the data.
Way back in the 1980s, when I was a tech recruiter, one of the best/smartest engineering vps I ever worked with told me he didn’t care about GPAs or college attended. He said that the value of a technical degree lost approximately 20-25% of its value each year, because the tech world changed so fast.
He also said that grades were more the result of a good memory and the ability to regurgitate information on demand than actual knowledge.
Fast forward to Adam Grant’s most recent column. Grant is one of the smartest people I read and I read a lot. Not because he has a PhD, but because he has more common sense than almost any other three (four? five?) combined.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. (…)
Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence.
Take a good look at that list. It encompasses all the skills that bosses, no matter their level, claim they want, but frequently pass on.
Why? Because candidates with those qualities don’t as easily “fit” into rigidly framed jobs.
Whereas one thing that can be said for straight A students is that they are expert at coloring inside the lines, so are usually easier to manage.
Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.
“Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
Moreover, hiring with the assumption that you can reshape their embedded code when it is convenient for you is totally unfair and sets you both up for frustration, at the least, or outright failure.
This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.
So the when you go to fill your next opening give serious thought to what you are really looking for.
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.
This post dates from 2013. I think it’s a safe bet that the number of half-assed things being done now vs then have increased by several orders of magnitude. The year is nearly over, so this may be a good time to take a step back and ask yourself, “am I whole-assing my life or…”
LikeHack founder Jane Smorodnikova pointed me to an excellent video about productivity on a blog called Sparring Mind that is owned and written by Gregory Ciotti, the marketing director of a Boston startup called Help Scout.
Some of what’s included
Why worrying about having “more willpower” is a fool’s game
How world class experts stay productive… and what they do differently
The science behind why better energy management = a more productive you
Big pitfalls that lead to busywork and procrastination
I especially like Ciotti’s closing line, “Multitasking is your enemy: Treat it as such. Block out unwanted distractions and as Ron Swanson would say, “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
Based on today’s love affair with multitasking, the number of half-assed things being done could fill the cloud.
Back in 2010, Standard & Poor’s predicted that the biggest influence on “the future of national economic health, public finances, and policymaking” will be “the irreversible rate at which the world’s population is aging.”
As usual, our governments at all levels are doing little more than funding studies, wringing their hands and making dire predictions. In all likelihood they will continue doing more of the same, since constructive efforts would require bipartisan cooperation, and politicians aren’t known for their willingness to bite unpopular bullets — as our country’s aging/decrepit infrastructure proves.
Companies, by contrast, are uniquely positioned to change practices and attitudes now. Transformation won’t be easy, but companies that move past today’s preconceptions about older employees and respond and adapt to changing demographics will realize significant dividends, generating new possibilities for financial return and enhancing the lives of their employees and customers.
Companies might be in a better positioned, but rampant cognitive bias, whether unconscious or conscious, often prevails, resulting in a preference for hiring “people like me.”
Soon, the workforce will include people from as many as five generations ranging in age from teenagers to 80-somethings.
Are companies prepared? The short answer is “no.” Aging will affect every aspect of business operations — whether it’s talent recruitment, the structure of compensation and benefits, the development of products and services, how innovation is unlocked, how offices and factories are designed, and even how work is structured — but for some reason, the message just hasn’t gotten through.
So forget companies.
Current bosses, as well as bosses-to-be, have the great advantage of being able to do it now themselves, rather than waiting for their companies to act.
And it’s to their advantage, assuming they want to keeping their teams humming, well-staffed and highly productive.
But, depending on your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), don’t expect it to happen overnight or minimize the amount of work that may be required.
To get started, click the link at the link. It will take you to a seven part series in the Harvard Business Review called The Aging Workforce. It’s probably the fastest way to wrap your mind around what’s happening in all its complexity — or at least a lot of it.
And join me tomorrow for a closer look at cognitive bias, which affects the entire human race — including you and me.
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.
I wrote this post in 2008, midway through the Great Recession (2007-2009), which lowered demand for talent and mitigated the expected people shortage. It took a decade, but the talent shortage is here with a vengeance — at all levels. Moreover, birth rates have fallen below replacement needs creating a demographic time bomb. One result is that bosses at all level need to become expert at managing a multigenerational workforce — not just managing, but also hiring outside their comfort zone if they want to stay staffed. More on that tomorrow.
Great post by Steve Roesler over at All Things Workplace on How Age Impacts Your View of Life. It focuses on satisfaction and expectations at various stages of life. Click over, it’s well worth reading.
But what I wanted to discuss here today appeared near the end of the post.
“During the past few years we’ve seen the headlines for Talent Wars, Saving Institutional Knowledge and Learning, and Diversity. My experience so far with recent layoffs has been that workers nearing retirement are being offered packages to accelerate their decisions…I wonder if the decision-making maturity and collective knowledge of these newly “retired” workers will be irreplaceable and actually prompt a lengthening of the recovery process.”
Steve’s got a point about the recovery, but what if this mess hadn’t happened?
What if a normal down cycle had occurred? One that didn’t go global with the same vengeance; one that required only spotty realignment as opposed to wholesale layoffs.
Worker demographics have been a global concern for over a decade, but the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and the corresponding skills needed to manage a multigenerational workforce haven’t improved nearly as much as was hoped.
Why? Is there a root to the problem (challenge, if you prefer) that should be addressed, but isn’t?
I have an idea about the root, tell me what you think.
I believe that one large piece of this problem stems from the relationship of parents and children and the difficulty of letting go and changing the paradigms.
Notice that ‘paradigm’ is plural, since there are several going on simultaneously; the major ones are
older (parent), younger (child);
peer (siblings/relatives) to peer;
older (sibling/relative), younger (sibling/relative) and vice versa,
but there are multiple other minor configurations.
What I’ve found is that although there is no family involved, for many people the interaction styles are habitual, unconscious and happen across all ages with no discernible pattern.
If, in fact, this is a root problem how do we fix it? Other than a one-at-a-time approach I have no idea.
What are your thoughts regarding the validity of my hypothesis? What ideas do you have to address it?
I had something else planned for today, but two things, took precedence.
First, I had coffee with some guys and they started in about how overblown the whole “he touched me” thing had gotten. There were five of them, two said it had been blown up by the media, two thought the women had a point and the fifth said it was all feminist crap from a bunch of man-haters.
I accidentally spilled my coffee on him (it really was an accident; I choked on the sip I was taking when he said that and spilled it), which broke up the party.
So I came home, looked at some news articles and found one that was so relevant I had to share it with you.
For the project, titled “The Dress for Respect,” researchers built a dress embedded with sensor technology that tracked touch and pressure. The information was then relayed to a visual system so that researchers could essentially track harassment in real time. (…) In just under four hours, the women are touched a combined 157 times.
Two news stories have been running through my mind this week.
A few weeks ago Amazon announced their two new locations for HQ2. Queens and Northern Virginia. Both are already heavily populated and expensive places to live.
And, if we are being fair, those cities may not truly benefit from Amazon arriving. Time will tell of course, but a greater impact might have occurred had Amazon chosen a medium sized city.
I recall the madness/hope by city leaders all around the nation. They lobbied, made promises and petitioned for Amazon to arrive and help their city thrive.
I live in St Petersburg, FL and we have a growing tech scene. We also have an MLB baseball stadium with low attendance and in a prime part of the city. Our proposal to Amazon included tearing that park down and leasing the 80 acres at a reduced cost to Amazon. I’m sure other cities made comparable offers.
All in an effort for salvation from one company.
You hear the other side of it too. GM is closing five plants. Tens of thousands of skilled employees are now laid off. Those were good jobs, too, for the area.
They are the anchor companies that allow the baker, the book store and the banks to survive. When those plants came to those cities it was salvation. People had a job, benefits and could raise a family.
I understand that companies come and go. I firmly believe in the free market and realize that companies are not charities. They are profit driven and make decisions based on the bottom line.
My point to all of this is that cities cannot rely on one industry alone. They need diversity. Salvation is not found in any one company.
In the intro to yesterday’s post, about how boredom often triggers creativity, I referred to the hoops being jumped through to foster creativity in the workplace.
Unfortunately, it’s not working and that’s what to day’s post is about.
You may have noticed that creativity is all the rage—and not just among artists. American culture, and indeed the world, has become obsessed with manufacturing creative kids, who will turn into inventive workers, who will then become the innovative leaders we need in these rapidly-changing times. (…) As creativity is increasingly touted as the “premiere skill” of our time, [Diane] Senechal argues, there’s little interest in just letting this ability develop independently. Instead, it is being quantified, dissected and tested, taught and measured.
That approach may work on some talent, but developing creativity isn’t one of them.
In reality, that approach does more to destroy creativity than almost anything else.
The enormous number of major discoveries grounded in serendipity should be enough to convince people that structure and pressure don’t work.
If institutions really want to encourage creativity, in other words, they’ll have to develop the requisite patience to wait for it—and the ability to recognize what inventiveness is really made of. Insisting on innovation will never work, according to Senechal. “Perhaps the worst thing for creativity is dogma,” she argues. “Dogma delights in nothing; it insists on its own rigid ways.”
Of course, humans are notorious for believing they can improve any process by structuring it — even when it goes against research and proven results.
Bottom line, if you want your people to be more creative you need to let go, not hold on.
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,
