Continuing from yesterday.

Two of the hardest things you need to do to start acquiring wisdom are

1. Investing the time, energy and discomfort in getting to actually know yourself — the real you that may only exist in private at 3 AM and that you rarely if ever talk about.
2. Choosing (yes, it’s your choice) to reduce your intake of social media or not, you do need to reduce your reliance on it. At the same time you want to strengthen your objectivity

The absolute requirement of the first is to get to know your opinions, biases, prejudices, etc., sans outside influences. You can’t be objective until you know your subjective viewpoint.

That said, today’s world of distractions, intentionally addictive social media, and extended working hours doesn’t lend itself to self-reflection. That means you need to consciously set aside the time to do it and then follow through — same as any get healthy program.

Developing your objectivity requires you to do some very uncomfortable things, such as reading/listening to material outside your worldview, belief system and comfort zone.

Then researching sources recognized as objective to determine the validity of the information.

You should know that the odds are against your accomplishing this.

Research has shown that no matter how much incontestable proof people rarely change their mind.

But perhaps you can be one of the exceptions.

Image credit: Katherine McGittigan

The above image was yesterday’s Oldie from 2009.

What’s changed (or was off in the first place) since then?

Let’s take them one-by-one.

Data: data, since “facts” are often historical and the historical info is often biased.

Information: Think bias and fake news, neither is new, but the quantity has exploded.

Knowledge: Same as original.

Understanding: Too often why or any questioning is asked only if the facts and information run counter to our beliefs, opinion, and worldview.

Wisdom: Unlikely.

Wikipedia describes wisdom as follows:

Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight.^[1] Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment,^[2] and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.^[3][4]

Much of the ability to think according to the above description has been either voluntarily turned over to, or co-opted by, social media.

Considered actions often must pass an “Instagram/Twitter filter;” those that don’t aren’t acted upon.

If there is anything social media can not be blamed for it’s a proliferation of wisdom.

Join me tomorrow for a look at ways and means to acquire wisdom.

Image credit: Nick J Webb

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.

Jerks, by whatever name, have been on the rise for awhile, but that seems to have escalated in the last couple of years, especially in the workplace. Not that jerk bosses are anything new, but they are getting more blatant.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Although both articles I refer to are aimed at startup founders, I believe they are applicable to bosses at any level and in any company.

First, no boss ever accomplished their goals by being a jerk.

As Bob Sutton explains in The Asshole Survival Guide, treating people like dirt hurts their focus and saps their motivation. (…)

In the podcast, Reid [Hoffman] describes his test of a great culture: Does every employee feel that they personally own the culture?

Most jerks, no matter how unlikely that the comparison is valid, point to Steve Jobs to justify their actions, but consider how much more he could have done if he had been a better leader/manager..

It’s hard to find any boss who doesn’t recognize that culture is the most critical element in a company’s success.

However, what “culture” is has been twisted and warped out of all recognition.

These days “cultural fit” is the excuse of choice to indulge whatever biases, prejudices, and bigotry moves the hiring boss.

So, what does cultural fit really mean?

To answer that you have to understand what culture really is.

Culture is a reflection of the values of the boss.

Values have nothing to do with perks, food, or office buildings and everything to do with attitudes such as fairness, merit, transparency, trust, etc.

The point of cultural fit is to hire people whose personal values are, at the least, synergistic with the cultural values of the company.

Period.

That means that if the boss is biased, bigoted or a jerk, they will hire people who have similar values.

Image credit: Matthias Forster

I’ve always been a Dilbert fan, probably because in the course of my career first as a recruiter and then at my company, RampUp Solutions, coaching managers on culture, hiring, retention, etc.,

I’ve spent a lot of time with pointy-haired bosses.

Pointy-headed, actually.

I’ve sat and listened to some of the weirdest, silliest, and just plain stupidest reasons for a hiring decision than you can imagine.

Over the years I’ve shared these stories with KG and several years ago he sent me a Dilbert that summed it up nicely — except that pointy-hair’s reasoning was more valid than some of what I’ve heard from real bosses.

Maybe it will resonate the next time your normal reasoning slips, since it can happen to even the most well-balanced boss.

Have you ever wondered why bias is so deeply ingrained and prevalent?

The answer is simple.

The datasets are biased.

For humans

Psychologists from Northwestern University have found that children as young as four show signs of racial bias, suggesting they pick up on cues to act intolerant from the adults around them from a very early age.

For AI.

The digital world is an incredibly biased place. Geographically, linguistically, demographically, economically and culturally, the technological revolution has skewed heavily towards a small number of very economically privileged slices of society.

Knowing the datasets for both are biased for the same reason, it is the wise boss, from team leader to CEO, who takes time to learn their own biases and also understand the various biases of their team.

Only then can they develop approaches and work-arounds.

The bottom line in business is that you don’t have to change minds, you just have to create processes that neutralize the effects.

Image credit: Paul Downey

(click to enlarge)

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Bias is in our heads. Bias is in our MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

Bias totally permeates us and the rest of society.

It’s embedded in our schools, our religions and all forms of AI.

Experts, educators, gurus, and pundits analyze it, write about it, consult about it, and coach on it.

And often contradict each other.

If bias is this pervasive, the experts so ineffectual and management so ambivalent, what can one person do on their own?

You can access your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) where bias lives.

No one else can, only you.

That means you can change your MAP.

No one else can, only you.

One bias at a time.

Image credit: School of Thought

Everybody is biased one way or another. Some biases are minor and have little impact, while some can overpower rational thought/action.

Before you can choose which you want to adjust/change/disable you need to know what the choices are.

So I found fairly comprehensive list for you to review.

I’ve also found there is one thing you can do that is very effective.

It’s one of those things that is simple to understand, but takes resolve and effort to put into practice.

I’ll explain more on Friday.

Image courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Last year I had an argument over lunch with a woman friend who insisted that women in tech, especially in Silicon Valley, don’t face the same kind of difficulties career-wise that other women do.

She based her argument on the successful technical careers of a number of women friends and she became increasingly an4gry when I kept disagreeing with her.

I didn’t realize until several days later that we were both right.

Her friends did indeed build successful tech careers during the 1970s and 80s — predating the dot com era.

I, however, was focused on post dot com attitudes in the wake of the rise of bro culture.

Anyone around tech these days either recognizes the bias against women or lives in deep denial.

The latter apparently includes the editors in charge of Wikipedia, who didn’t think much of Donna Strickland’s work.

Prior to winning the Nobel Prize, Strickland’s only previous mention on Wikipedia was in an article about Gérard Mourou, her male co-inventor. On May 23, a Wikipedia editor rejected a draft of an article about Strickland, claiming that it failed to “show significant coverage (not just passing mentions) about the subject.” The rejected draft noted that she was at that time the associate chair of the physics department at Waterloo, and a past president of the Optical Society.

Not surprising when you consider that 90% of Wikipedia editors are young, college-educated males. Not a group exactly known for their pro-diversity stance.

As for Waterloo, Strickland says she never applied for a full professorship, but one has to wonder why the school didn’t notice her work.

Of course, if one is going to choose who notices their work, most would prefer the Nobel Committee to the editors of Wikipedia.

After the Prize was announced, Wikipedia finally created an article about Strickland.

But in what seems like an effort to disparage her accomplishment those same editors added a “personal life” section to her page.

Strickland is married to Douglas Dykaar, also a physicist.^[7] They have two children.^[7]

Information that is conspicuously absent from her male co-winner’s page.

Finally, the video on Strickland’s page talks about a childhood trip to a science fair, while Mourou’s features his post award speech.

How’s that for bias?

Image credit: Susan Young

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Early this year I wrote Convenience is Killing Creativity and today is a sort of follow-up to that post.

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.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Founders are a breed apart, especially young founders, with little to no business experience, let alone leadership/managerial experience.

I got a call from one I work with occasionally. After getting the information he had called for he took me to task over Monday’s post.

In short, he said that founders don’t have much time to spend on culture, let alone do the people-managing stuff I’m always writing about.

He went on to say that’s why people in young companies tend to be so similar. It’s far easier, not to mention more comfortable, to get stuff done when everyone has a similar mindset.

My response was that his mindset would do much to limit his market, so he would do well to plan on being a nitch player.

It was not appreciated.

Curating a team creates the same problem that curating freshmen roommate assignments created.

There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.

Curation, whether of roommates of team, has no positive effect, which is why colleges are going back to random freshman matching and companies are striving for more diversity. Duke eliminated curated matching.

Freshman year of college, Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke explained, is about students “engaging with difference and opening their eyes to opportunities, and meeting entirely different people than the ones they grew up with or went to high school with.”

What this 26-year-old founder didn’t say (and may not even realize) is that some things, such as successful managing, are the result of hard-won experience, not “vision.”

There is a reason that more diverse companies have better results.

Just as there is a reason that managers who practice good customer service on their teams attract the best people, have lower turnover, and enjoy better personal career growth / stronger startup success (if founders).

Image credit: HikingArtist