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?
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.
How do you hire? What do you focus on? What carries the most weight with you? How do you decide what is most relevant to your situation? Do you look hardest at what they’ve done or concentrate on what they could do in the future. And the key question, is your approach successful?
We see the idiocy of assuming that past performance is always a good predictor of the future all the time, but it seems especially true at senior levels.
First, there is the penchant for identifying ‘high potential’ starting in kindergarten and providing lots of extra training and coaching, while ignoring those who may be late bloomers or less obvious (read quieter).
Then there’s the Peter Principle, which is not only alive and well, but functioning even more efficiently today than it was when Laurence J. Peter first described it back in 1970.
We relish looking at the past to predict the future, thus choosing to ignore all extenuating circumstances and surrounding factors that played a role in the person’s performance.
We forget, or ignore, that
one manager’s star is another manager’s bomb;
the skills needed to take advantage of an economic expansion are very different from those needed in a downturn; and
turmoil or an ongoing crisis in a person’s personal life often impacts their performance at work.
Last, but not least, we need to get over our love affair with the idea of the hero-leader who, with a wave of the hand, can part the seas and eliminate obstacles.
A few days ago another story popped up condemning tech’s fixation on “easy to use.”
These days, the gold standard for tech is whether or not it’s “easy to use.” (…) So easy a five-year-old could do it. That is a nice ideal.
But simplicity comes at a cost, and five-year-olds are not very smart. A simple tool is, by definition, inflexible. Software that boils everything down to one button needs to make a lot of assumptions about what the user is trying to do. If you don’t agree with those assumptions, too bad.
Too bad is right.
While the author was focused on software programs, assumptions are found everywhere.
I hate those assumptions. Windows 10 doesn’t like how I personalize my computer, so it just goes ahead and changes everything back to what some damn 25 year old thinks it should be.
And it’s not just software.
Surveys and questionnaires are terrible, especially those in healthcare.
Even multiple choice offers absolute choices, with little flexibility; how often have you seen ‘sometimes’?
The problem is that, for most of us, true answers are more nuanced.
Sure, sometimes the nuances and subtleties don’t really matter, but too often they make the difference between an accurate picture and one that is distorted, or, at the least, blurred by the creator’s bias (as opposed to one’s own).
Bottom line: tech dumbs us down with “ease of use” and everyone limits us with lack of choice.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
If you were sitting in Starbucks and heard the following from a man and a woman you couldn’t see, what would your reaction be?
If we can get every business in the world to adopt a global problem, get slightly smaller businesses to adopt a national problem, get smaller businesses still to adopt local problems, then we can get on top of pretty well every problem in the world.
Snicker at their naiveté? Wonder how they would monetize the idea? Drool a bit over the enormous trove of data they would have? Maybe give some thought on how you could get into the action?
Not that you would admit those thoughts in public.
But in the end, you would probably just shrug and write them off as a couple of idealistic dreamers who were unlikely to get anywhere with ideas like that.
Why?
Because they didn’t sound as if they had the passion, the drive, the pure grit, to pull off a truly world-changing idea.
All these scenarios are predicated on the assumption that the people talking were just people.
A few days after Donald Trump was elected, 35-year-old Eric Tucker saw something suspicious: A cavalcade of large white buses stretched down main street near downtown Austin, Texas.
Tucker snapped a few photos and took to Twitter, posting the following message:
Tucker was wrong — a company called Tableau Software was actually holding a 13,000-person conference that day and had hired the buses.
OK, a wrong assumption by a social guy who had to tell his network.
But why didn’t the actual facts refute it when they were tweeted?
Economists concluded that it comes down to two factors. First, each of us has limited attention. Second, at any given moment, we have access to a lot of information — arguably more than at any previous time in history. Together, that creates a scenario in which facts compete with falsehoods for finite mental space. Often, falsehoods win out.
Also, people consider the source of information more than the info itself. Trusted source = valid info.
The tweet was shared 350,000 times on Facebook and 16,000 and Trump added his two cents.
The corrected information was shared only 29 times.
Why didn’t Tucker tweet his network a correction when he it turned out to be false?
“I’m … a very busy businessman and I don’t have time to fact-check everything that I put out there, especially when I don’t think it’s going out there for wide consumption,”
In other words, he couldn’t be bothered.
Research and economists aside, Tucker provided the real key.
People aren’t bothered whether it’s true or not.
They just care that they get their 15 seconds of fame.
Even after working decades with bosses at all levels, from CEOs to team leaders and first-time supervisors, their ability to make inaccurate, let alone stupid, assumptions based on nothing solid still astounds me.
The smartest/most creative people only attend top tier universities. No they don’t. The wealthiest/most indebted, unless they were on scholarship, attend those schools.
I can spot instantly talent, even with just a casual conversation. No you can’t. What you can spot are people like yourself.
Hiring/poaching top talent always pays off. Not hardly. Consider JC Penny, Bob Nardelli, Marissa Mayer and thousands more at every level and in every field.
Or that a birdbrain, even the smartest, could figure out the eight steps it took to get a reward, with no coaching?
As opposed to the wisdom of crowds, assumptions are more often the bias of crowds.
Both created cultures that incorporate a critical attitude — paranoia — although they look very different.
Andy Grove:“When I came to Intel, I was scared to death. I left a very secure job where I knew what I was doing and started running R&D for a brand new venture in untried territory. It was terrifying.”
Zhu Zhu:“The day we released this application to the market we realized it was never going to take off. It was doomed to be a failure.”
Musical.ly’s first pivot went from a video education app to a combination music/videos/social network that was catnip to their target early-teen demographic.
That led to growth, but it was slow growth, which the founders knew was leading to a slow death.
The a-ha tweak happened when they moved the logo and growth exploded.
They had realized that when people shared the music videos, the logo was cropped out on Instagram and Twitter. They repositioned it so now it was easy to see that it was a Musical.ly video.
Zhu Zhu is far from complacent and keeps pushing and iterating faster.
“I think we have these scary moments all the time because you’re never safe. Even if you have tens of millions of users, you have to keep them always engaged. I think it’s better for us to be scared all the time rather than feel content that we built a successful product and now we can lay back.”
If you don’t care for paranoia, you can substitute a combination of never-ending mindfulness, objective reality as opposed to comforting assumptions and unremittingly honest feedback.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Why is it that we assume the people in our own little bit of world see/do/think as we do.
Think about it.
Do you assume that when faced with choices they will choose as you would?
Do you assume the visions presented by your leaders are honest, true and in your best interest?
Do you assume your religious leaders practice what they preach?
Do you assume your spouse/partner/friend will like the movie/book/people that you like?
Do you assume your team will tackle work/projects in the same way you do?
Think about it.
For any of these assumptions to be true, the people involved would have to have exactly the same MAP and life experience that you have—which is impossible.
So the next time you find yourself assuming stop and remind yourself that they are not you.
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
Pretty sad, but what happened to bring us to this sorry state?
Not what, but who.
Disengagement was born in 1776 with Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, became the father of industrial capitalism, and gave birth to the belief that “people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay.”
When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things.
To be sure, people should be adequately compensated for their work. (…) But in securing such victories for working people, we should not lose sight of the aspiration to make work the kind of activity people embrace, rather than the kind of activity they shun.
For decades, study after study and survey after survey have placed money (assuming a living wage) around number five on what’s important to workers.
How can we do this? By giving employees more of a say in how they do their jobs. By making sure we offer them opportunities to learn and grow. And by encouraging them to suggest improvements to the work process and listening to what they say.
Work that is adequately compensated is an important social good. But so is work that is worth doing. Half of our waking lives is a terrible thing to waste.
Autonomy. Challenge. Learning and growth. The chance to make a difference. Compensation.
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,
Even after working decades with bosses at all levels, from CEOs to team leaders and first-time supervisors, their ability to make inaccurate, let alone stupid, assumptions based on nothing solid still astounds me.
Why is it that we assume the people in our own little bit of world see/do/think as we do.
Gallup regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey last year found that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.
