Change, Repent, or Progress?

I have a problem with the word "evolution". The way it is being used in the popular science press is a bit disconcerting. It can be used to mean "change", "progress", "adaption", or in the worst cases "God" or "Providence". It can be fun to take an author's words and start substituting potential synonyms. However, this doesn't tell us what the author intended.

Here is the proposal - the popular press stops using the word "evolution" and all of its derivatives like "evolve" and "evolutionary". Instead, I challenge authors to use the word they mean. Substitute progress, adapt, change, or repent. Choose the word that makes the most sense.

Day 100!

William did it! 100 days straight playing the violin. And he had a great recital today as well! Not bad for someone who just turned 8... Woohoo!

Social Recruiting

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.
Find me a find, catch me a catch.
Matchmaker, matchmaker, look through your book
And make me a perfect match. (Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler on the Roof)

There is a new way to find employees - social recruiting. The basic idea is an employer would interact with a community of potential employees to see how/ if their skills/personality would match the corporate culture. This would give visibility to an individuals professional life and provide a more complete picture than the regular three or four hand picked references.

This sounds like information overload - too much. Already we have an environment where it is not unusual for an organization to take 8 to 12 weeks to find and recruit an employee, and that is just for collecting resumes and interviewing. If you are required - like public institutions, to complete a background investigation and verify education it can take considerably longer. For example, I am just now hearing back from institutions that posted positions in June that they are starting the interview process.

Of course, there is a group of people social recruiting really works for - recruiters. A recruiter can use a social website like LinkedIn or Facebook to find people - especially people who may not be currently looking for a job. It is very clear why recruiters would like to connect to as many people as possible through social networks. This is especially important for LinkedIn users because the site limits your searches to three degrees of contact - you can see the people you know, the people they know, and the people who know someone you know.  For recruiters, adding more people - even people with the wrong skill set or industry - adds all of those people's colleagues and contacts.

This raises a dilemma for the individual - are you connecting to the right set of recruiters? Are you going for find a job offer that is right for you? Or are you just going to get offers?

100 Days

It's day 88. William has not missed an evening of practicing in 88 days. He decided he wanted to play for 100 days - if he doesn't break his streak, he will make complete day 100 on December 1. It takes a lot to get into the habit of doing something for 100 days - especially something that takes effort. 100 days, wow.

Why Companies Can't Innovate

Why nations fail : the origins of power, prosperity and poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson should be required reading for most corporate managers. I could see a sequel applying the same contingency theory of history to corporations - Why companies can't innovate.

Acemoglu and Robinson's book is very readable and makes a very strong case that countries are not poor because of location, resources, or cultural heritage, but rather are poor as a legacy of the political an economic institutions they inherited. If these institutions are designed to extract wealth to enrich a small group of people at the expense of the rest of society, the society will be extremely poor and there is a good probability it will remain poor or become poor without radical change. Societies with inclusive institutions that allow mobility and the rise of new interest groups will innovate and there is a good probability the society will experience sustained economic growth.

Companies have many of the same challenges to innovation - if a company's business model is designed to maximize profits in its existing businesses, there is going to be a lot of institutional resistance to any changes that might threaten those businesses. If a company's business model is designed to include the decisions of as many people as practical, I suspect it is much more likely to innovate and be able to react to a changing environment.

And of course, because the economy is an open system there is always a third option - buy your innovative competitor and make his innovation yours.

Why nations fail : the origins of power, prosperity and poverty

Improving Job Search Engines

Most job search engines use keyword searching. Because of this choice by job sites, search results are often meaningless. Usually this occurs because the search engine:

• Searches keywords in all parts of the job posting
• Uses unspecified boolean logic
• Offers filters that are not meaningful to the target users - job-seekers

Each of these could be easily remedied without making major changes to the sites or their search engines:

• There is no reason to not have an advanced search which allows the searcher to direct keywords to specific parts of a job posting - and no reason to not require job postings to have a well-defined structure. You should be able to specify search words for requirements, description, and job title.
• Allow users to specify phrase searching
• Clearly explain the default logic for multiple word searches - getting more results is less desirable than getting good results
• Allow users to specify the search logic in an advanced search - enough people understand set theory to use AND, OR, NOT; there are another large group that could correctly select the same logic when presented as "search for all of these terms", "search for any of these terms", "exclude results containing these terms".
• Add meaningful filters - date posted, closing date and location are meaningful. Industry is not. I would like to see the following: 
• If there is a place for job applicants to enter a security clearance - then include a filter in the search that allows users to exclude jobs that require security clearances above their level
• If there is a place for job applicants to enter skill tags - then include a filter in the search for skills that allows users to select jobs that match identified skills

Job sites could also ask employers to use standard job titles. It is not uncommon for a job seeker to need to search multiple job titles to find the right job function. An "analyst" or "researcher" may have the exact same job, but the titles are different. Variation in job titles becomes even more enigmatic when you consider most salary comparisons are based on job titles. It the job title doesn't match comparable jobs it is not clear what a fair market salary is. Or even if someone is qualified to fulfill the position.  And that can't be good for either the job seeker or the employer. 

Improving STEM Education

Both of the professional organizations I currently belong to - ACM and ASQ, are deeply concerned with science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education - particularly how to include more women. Including more women in the education hopefully will also include more women and leaders in the professions and will help the professions become more flexible and innovative by widening the pool and variety of talents and experiences. Usually the proposed solution is to encourage more women by offering more female role models and removing barriers such as the stereo-types portrayed in the xkcd comic: How it Works.

I would like to suggest a complimentary strategy - make STEM careers more family friendly. Having parents in the home that value STEM could be one of the most effective ways to encourage more young people to pursue STEM education. Among my contemporaries that chose STEM education, the vast majority had at least one parent who already had an interest in these areas. Most had two. Richard Feyman pursued physics in part because his Father was willing to explain things. I have a niece pursuing paleontology because both her mother and father are interested in living things.

Here is my list of things that would make STEM careers more family friendly, and get individuals with STEM careers interacting with their children:

1. Allow flexible hours - stop concentrating on the amount of face time spent in the lab/office/server room and start worrying about the work being done. There are several studies that illustrate more hours at work don't equate to more productive hours at work.
2. Allow remote work when/where possible. With the available communications many jobs do not require someone to be present. You can teach from a home office; you can research from a home office; you can program from a home office. For many people just removing out the time to go to and from the office gives them hours with their family.
3. Respect family time. I had a fantasy for years about becoming my senior manager's boss. In my fantasy, I made him check in his laptop and cellphone when he scheduled vacation. He was notorious for keeping the stream of emails and phone calls up during his vacations as if he were in the office. I can't imagine he spent much time paying attention to his family. Just because someone can be connected 24/7 don't expect them to be. If they are needed for emergencies then schedule them to be on call. If not, then leave them alone.
4. Allow people to easily exit and reenter roles. One of the most frustrating things that parents face is the prospect that you need to fill a specific role now. There is a perception that we steadily climb hierarchies and the rise to the top of our professions is somehow a race. Someone who is perfectly capable of being the dean of a department at 45, may wish to delay that position until children have graduated, or may want to take a lesser position to allow a spouse to advance in a career. Should that individual be penalized because the timing wasn't right for a family's needs? Why can't we allow sabbaticals to raise children, or allow a spouse to work? How could we manage periods when individuals are in the "work" force? 

The Mormon Way

I just finished Jeff Benedict's The Mormon way of doing business. I picked the book up because of some reviews coming out because of the Romney Campaign. Based on the online reviews, the book incited two responses - this it the best book ever because it shows good Mormons succeeding by being good Mormons, or this book sucks because it isn't a business how to book.

The Mormon way is not a business book in the sense of how to do business. It is not a religious book in the sense of how to live successfully. It is an interesting piece of investigative journalism. The basic premise sounds like the plot of an epic novel: five relatively high-powered businessmen and their wives living parallel lives in the same congregation, the New Canaan Ward. They work in New York City and Boston, and travel the world. They lead their organizations through the attacks on the World Trade Center while keeping family first. The and their organizations persevere and thrive.

We have ten extremely driven competitive individuals who also had a no compromise attitude when it came toward family life and religious devotion. The no compromise attitude tended to moderate destructive business practices. The competitive drive can be a very ugly side to North American Mormon culture - I've lived in locations where Mormon church basketball had a reputation for being the roughest and meanest in town - too much trying to win, not enough trying to play well.

I really doubt The Mormon way is representative of how Mormons do business, or don't do business. I remember my mission president's wife sharing that her grandfather who was not Mormon, wouldn't do business with a Mormon who was not in good standing with the Church. He had been cheated too many times - he didn't feel they were trustworthy. In my professional life, I've encountered Mormons apparently in good standing, I would not do business with. I suspect there are people from other religious faiths may have a similar approach to balancing family and business.

The Mormon way offers no insight into small business owners. There are plenty of Mormon entrepreneurs, if only because more than half the population of Utah is Mormon. We have no idea how Mormons balance family life when working for themselves. We don't know if they share the same traits as the ten people in the book, or if they've found other solutions or made different choices.

The Mormon way is worth reading. It is a good piece of investigative reporting and it describes an interesting group of people brought together at a very interesting time.

The Mormon way of doing business : leadership and success through faith and family, Jeff Benedict, New York : Warner Business Books, 2007.

You are what you measure

Weight is a wonderfully loaded measure. It is very concrete - concrete generally weighs between 110 and 150 pounds per square foot.

Weight is something most people have direct experience with. We know from a very early age what heavy and light are. It is our window into gravity and mass, our connection to the earth, our reminder that we are earthbound even if we can temporarily leap into space.

Body weight is considered a proxy for health. In the west, we've come to associate it as a measure of health, but it is really only an indicator of health: weight doesn't tell you a lot of important things. For example, generally losing weight is considered a good thing, but that would ignore causes. Anorexia, amputation, and starvation could all be causes of weight loss. None of these are associated with good health.

Weight gain is associated with ill-health, but is considered an indicator of proper growth and care for small children. There are deep concerns when a small child isn't gaining enough weight. And concerned for future eating disorders if the child is gaining too much. Weight gain is expected for pregnant women, with an expectation that it would only be healthy to lose weight should the woman be severely obese and be closely monitored to ensure proper nutrition for the woman and the baby.

Ideal weight is generally given as a range and needs additional measurements like height and age. A healthy weight range for a 6 foot tall, 50 year old male, is different than the healthy weight range for a 4 ft 6 in tall eighty year old woman.

Weight might be viewed as a success measure for a change in diet or increased exercise, but generally the results will not be seen immediately, or may not be seen at all. For example rapid weight loss is often associated with dehydration, not health. And there are benefits to a good diet and adequate exercise that go beyond weight loss, like more energy, better mental health, and potentially longer life.

So before you get on that scale think about what you are measuring and why. Think about the context for the measurement. Think about what you are trying to accomplish. Think about what your long term goals are. And remember there is more to health than weight. And weight is just a number.

Taking Shortcuts

Shortcuts can cause a lot of problems. William and I had a small conflict. We disagreed on whether or not he should be able to use a shortcut for reading music.

His teacher and I are trying to teach William to read music. This is extremely hard because William has a great ear, if he hears something he can play it. So getting him to read music is a challenge - it's hard and he doesn't see a need for it yet. We've been trying a three pronged approach -

1. He has flash cards that have all the notes that can be played on a violin in first position. When we flip the cards he needs to recall two pieces of information - the name of the note and how to play it on the violin. 
2. He has been going through rhythm excesses calling out the rhythm of written notes. 
3. He has been playing easy fiddle pieces by reading the sheet music. The fiddle tunes are interesting and offer some variety to the classical pieces he is playing.

About two weeks ago, I noticed a problem with the latest fiddle piece William was working on - he was getting the notes right, but the rhythm was wrong. I pointed it out to him referring to the music, I thought he was reading. We counted the music. He kept making the same mistake. I diagnosed the problem as concentrating on getting the right note and ignoring the time value. It took a lesson to actually find out the problem - William was taking a short cut.

On the pages of the fiddle book we're using there is encoded in letters and number the finger an string that needs to be played for each note. Of course there is no rhythm encoded in the coding. William was using the encode letters and number as a short cut to play the right notes. I covered the letters and numbers. William couldn't play. He was frustrated and insisted reading the actual sheet music was too hard. I over reacted and started an unnecessary lecture. And we took some time away from each other to cool off.

Here is what I learned:

• Make sure you have the right diagnosis - counting the rhythm didn't solve the problem, because I had the wrong diagnosis - the problem was not that he was struggling with the notes on the staff line - he was ignoring them all together.
• Be careful with the shortcuts you offer - you may be undermining your long term goals.
• Make sure you communicate intermediate and long term goals - William was focused on the short term goal of playing a single piece of music. His teacher and I are focused on the intermediate goal of giving William the skills to learn music in three different ways - by having some teach it to him; by hearing it and working it out himself; and by reading sheet music. He could be successful with only one of the three, but we would really like him to be able to do all three. And my long term goal is for William to learn that hard things become easy with practice, and hard things are often worthwhile and enjoyable things.
• Remember your long term goals and don't over react. 
• Admit when you are wrong and make corrective adjustments

White space time - Fallout

White space time is on of the most powerful ways to foster innovation in an organization. This post mortem with Tim Cain - the lead developer on the the computer role playing game Fallout, is a prime example for why white space - letting people choose what to work on, fosters great work and innovation.

If you are a gamer, or a serious computer geek, listen to all 58 minutes. If not listen to the first 10 minutes and the last 5 minutes where Tim Cain describes how the team worked - he was a team of one and had to get after hours volunteers, and how he felt about the team - they were great to work with.

Teaching William

My son is easily distracted. School is starting next week. This could be a challenge. Or may be not. The downside is if there is a television on anywhere in his vicinity, he will turn into a mindless zombie. But he also will pick up a book, magazine, or graphic novel and be equally engrossed. Legos have the same effect. Amazingly creative ideas come spilling out when he is playing.

So here is my observation from the summer - if we want my son to learn and to love learning, drop a pile of engrossing books on his desk relevant to the subjects he needs to learn, and leave him alone. He will be more engrossed and learn far more than he would if we tried to teach him.

Risk Adverse

In the movie (and book) Moneyball, Billy Beane is faced with the task of replacing an all star with a limited budget. His recruiting staff is looking for  ways to assess players (workers) and have a list of requirements. The requirements they are coming up with are absurd and don't deal with the reality that the team doesn't have the money needed to hire an all star. Billy Beane tried with limited success to use different requirements to replace one all star with other players using on base percentage (OPB) to evaluate potential candidates.

Think of it this way, your team needs a 40/40 man who can compere for the batting title. This is someone with the speed and power of Barry Bonds on steroids, and with the finesse and patience of Ichiro Suzuki or Derek Jeter. And you want him to take the minimum salary and be a proven performer. In reality if such a player exists, he's going to be expensive, or cheating, or be unknown. Or  you are going to need to use Billy Beane's strategy and hire three players, all of who will be a bit more than the minimum salary but less than your all star.

In a way the player I've described is like the job ads my Father used to make fun of -

Entry level engineer. Mechanical or Structural. Must have ten years experience with ISO9001. A proven leader. Be able to lead projects. Background reviewing architectural drawings and CAD preferred. Management experience preferred.

Of course there are no entry level engineers with 10 years experience. I have heard recruiters have taken to calling these kinds of jobs - unicorns or purple squirrels - things that don't exist. Apparently the issue is some employers don't know what they want or are looking for "perfect" instead of "good enough". Businessmen don't like to take risks, and taking anything less that perfect is a risk. It's also a risk to leave a position unfilled and work undone. People don't get fired until something critical breaks. Or as the saying goes no one ever got fired for buying IBM. No one gets fired for not hiring a good enough candidate, but plenty get fired for hiring people that aren't good enough. So the message is clear, if you want to keep your job, play it safe.

Billy Beane's thinking could suggest some alternatives to stay in business and keep competitive. Here are some ideas:

1. Remember people can learn. What appear as gaps may be opportunities that can be filled quickly with a little training. Make certain minimum requirements reflect needs and not wants. You may want someone with experience in your industry, or someone who knows your particular brand of software. Both of these can be filled quickly if the individual can learn and if you are willing to teach.
2. Be realistic about costs. You may not be able to offer better than average wages, but you can offer a good work environment, and a good community. You may find if you live in a relatively low cost community and can offer a good work environment, candidates would consider to work for you. What may appear to be a pay cut, can work the other way if the candidate receives something of value. I have seen people take apparent pay cuts for  things like better schools for their children, shorter commute times, or more autonomy in when and how they do their work.
3. Consider hiring more than one person. If you can't find some one with all of your requirements you may be able to find more than one person with some of your requirements. 

Do you have any other ideas that could help hiring managers find better candidates?

More on how companies could be creating a skills gap:

Search for the Perfect Job Candidate an Imperfect Strategy
Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It

Feedback Loops

One of the main challenges to the Theory of Evolution is Spontaneous Generation. Not the largely discredited folk theory that life pops up out of nothing, but the nearly undefinable moment when un-living matter becomes Life. It is that instant when some process becomes self-sustaining, self replicating and separate from its environment. Right now for chemical based life, the best guess hypothesis involves the idea of auto-catalytic loops. Auto-catalytic loops are the bio-chemical equivalents of placing a microphone too close to a speaker. If they don't have some sort of regulation, the process soon spins out of control consuming all the available resources, and dies from starvation. So at some point a collection of interconnected loops might have been separated out of the primordial goo, and could have started self replicating and had enough regulators to respond to external conditions. In essence you want feedback loops that create enough, not too much, or too little of something.

Only recently bio-chemists have been understanding the importance of regulators. Some cancers can be thought of as poorly regulated loops. People have long observed patches of DNA that were considered "junk" that produced small RNA strings, or microRNA. It turns out microRNA can act as a regulator for some processes. And some cancers have a genetic origin in these bits of microRNA, either because the microRNA is not restricting the process enough or the microRNA is over restricting the process.

In some ways this is analogous to the ways we communicate in organizations. If leaders under regulate communications, you may compromise your clients' or employees' privacy, or your organizations security. If leaders over regulate communications, leaders may not get important information and may unintentionally foster a culture of blame. I have observed the following unintentional bad communication policies:

Don't tell me you have a problem unless you have a solution. I remember a quality initiative that wanted to include employees. There were two important caveats. First, employees need to solve the problems and second, any problems that involved the provided software tools were off limits. I'm sure the corporate leaders thought they were sending the following message - we care about your work and want to empower you to make it better and easier. The message many employees received was - we won't invest time or money in you, fix your own problems. The end result was employees lost interest in the quality initiative, and stopped telling their managers about problems.

The Performance Improvement Plan is a tool managers use to salvage an employee who is not performing adequately. It is a way to clearly communicate expectations and required actions. It is a way to reform a "bad" employee into a "good" employee. Typically, when an employee is under a performance improvement plan, they are not permitted to apply for any other jobs in the company. The manager is hoping to communicate - we care about your contribution to our organization and would like to help you continue to make a contribution in your current role, and I'm going to be committed to working with you until that happens. The message the employee may receive is - it's my way or the highway. Generally, employees either leave the organization, or stop communicating honestly with their managers and become compliant yes men.

I've also observed some really good practices that regulated communications.

Periodically attend team meetings. Several years ago, I had a vice-president who would attend product review meetings. He didn't attend every one - there were over 20 departments with 3 teams each, but he attended often enough that everyone in the lab knew who he was. This sent two strong messages - I care about what you are doing and regardless of your positions you can talk to me.

Eating in the common Cafeteria can be another effective way to regulate communications. It makes a leader visible. The same vice-president ate at least two days a week in the lab cafeteria. At least two days a week, the vice-president was sending the message, I'm just like you and you can talk to me.

Get rid of the executive bathroom. My Father has a friend who is a plumber. He's a very down to earth guy who speaks in a very direct manner. This is the advice he gave to mutual acquaintance who was starting a machine shop with two partners. If you want to know what your people are doing, don't have an executive bathroom. The message sent when you don't have an executive bathroom, is I'm no better than you, you can talk to me.

What good practices have you seen? Leave a comment.

More information about microRNA:

High Hopes for a New Kind of Gene, Sylvia Pagán Westphal, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2009

Improving Quality in Education

I have a love hate relationship with  formal education. I am very grateful for the things I have learned through my public school, state university education. Formal education is also the reason I absolutely despise James Joyce and John Lloyd Wright. Any desire I may have had to be an English teacher, or an architect was soundly beaten out of me.

I was not a straight A student in High School. If my memory serves me correctly, my worst grade my Senior year was in French. I do remember one meaningful assignment. In the French language there is an archaic verb tense that is only currently used in literature - everyone can read it but almost no one speaks it. It is used for writing certain types of literature, including fairy tales. As part of studying this tense, we were given the very practical assignment to write a fairy tale. I wrote a fairy tale, a three page, complete sentence, fully developed fairy tale. There were grammar errors; there were faulty constructions. There were all the faults you would expect from someone working with only a partial knowledge of a language. But it was a story, and it worked. My assignment floored the French teacher - it was so unexpected.

I think my relationship with that teacher changed after that assignment. Until that assignment, I think I was in her mind a mediocre student who had little potential. (Of course, this may not be fair, she may have been far more aware than my 18 year old mind gave her credit.) There were nine students in the class. I had the lowest grade in the class - I was the bottom. I speculate the teacher had expected me to drop out for three years - it wasn't helping my grade point average, I had met the two year language requirement for some universities. I knew something the teacher didn't - I expected I would need the skill later, I was doggedly working at it because I felt I needed to. And the assignment appealed to me. I have speculated since then with other students from that class about how that teacher would react knowing, I alone remained functionally fluent. I still make mistakes, but I can read and write and make myself understood. That assignment alone was worth the other four years of slogging through.

I currently have two children in the local public schools. Like me, they are not particularly "good" students. They are not very responsive to outside motivation, get frustrated, are prone to day dream, need to move to process some information, and don't complete assignments on time. However, both are very curious, voracious readers. When they have free time, they are likely to be reading a comic book, magazine, newspaper, or novel. And if they aren't reading they are building, drawing, or creating something.

As a parent I want specific things for my children. Call them my "critical to quality" items. You may or may not agree that these are important. I want two things for my children from the public education system:

1. I want my children to love learning at least as much as they did when they entered the school system. I want may children to remain curious, so that they will be life long learners. I can't predict what they will need to know ten years from now, let alone what they will need to know fifty years from now, when I will likely not be around to help them. I can help them acquire the skills that will allow them to find out what they need when they get there, if they have the desire and the skills to be life time learners. I would appreciate if the schools don't beat that desire out of them in the name of education.
2. I want my children to have their specific needs met. Both of my children struggle with small motor skills - this will impact writing, drawing, and keyboarding. One is struggling with the concept of meaningful practice. While, I understand the primary responsibility to provide for their specific needs remains with me as their parent, I would appreciate if the schools could allow the time and flexibility to meet the individual needs of each student.

Here are three modest proposals that I feel would go a long way toward improving the quality of education to meed my critical to quality items:

1. Start classes two, three, or four times per year. I just spent a week walking around with cub scouts as a parent "den walker" volunteer. I observed two excited boys that both interacted with their surroundings in very similar ways. Both boys had trouble following directions - they were excited. Both were trying to follow directions, but often reacted before they had complete information. Both needed to be reminded to wait in spite of their excitement. One child had a disability label, the other did not. One difference was one boy was born before the annual cut off date for school, and one was born after the cut off date for school. They were a year apart in school. One boy was expected to act like boys almost a year older, while the other was being compared to students almost a year younger. While I don't want to discount that disabilities do exist, I am concerned that younger children are more like to be labeled as having a behavior problem. Each month of maturity makes a big difference when you are 5, 6, or 7. How is a student supposed to continue to love learning when they lack the maturity of their "peers" and can't keep up? Similarly, why should a student who is mature enough to be in school have to wait almost a year to start school and risk boredom when they get there? 
2. Encourage different styles of learning. I am an introvert. Often, I need quiet time to quietly work through something to learn it. However, I also benefit from listening to the questions other have and engaging in discussions. When I was in graduate school, I found I benefited greatly from the discussions. I found the things that helped me the most were the questions someone else asked. Teachers need to have the latitude to create crazy tumultuous time with active discussions and confusion, and quiet time for reading and reflecting.
3. Abolish, or at least reduce the number of standardized tests. As part of "no child left behind" in Virginia we have the Standards of Learning (SOL) tests. These tests tell us very little. They don't record any of the factors outside of school that contribute to the score. They don't encourage lifetime learning. They don't tell us which schools or teachers are giving individualized education.  The don't teach meaningful practice or small motor skills. All the SOL tests tell us is how well students can regurgitate bits of fact someone thought was important enough to put onto the test. I suspect we as parents and tax payers can access our schools more readily by walking around a school building while school is in session. You would be surprised at how much you can learn by just listening.

I would love to state these ideas are totally original and I am brilliant, however here is a list of some of the sources for these ideas. Check them out:

• Outliers : the story of success By Malcom Gladwell
• Punished by rewards : the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A's, praise, and other bribes By Alfie Kohn
• Never too late : my musical life story By John Caldwell Holt
• Drive : the surprising truth about what motivates us By Daniel H. Pink
• Quiet : the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking By Susan Cain
• Bounce : Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the science of success By Matthew Syed

Do well or win?

Chris Kearns has this wonderful analogy to describe life. Think of life as a sports event - he used soccer, we were in europe after all. There are two teams with two different goals. Your team has a very wise coach - he has set the goal for your team - become the best player you can. He is actively working to help each play improve. The other team has a different kind of coach with a different goal - win. So when these two teams play there are some predictable things that happen. First, the players on your team are trying really hard. Second, your coach is giving everyone  a chance to play regardless of skill or experience. Third, the other team is cheating.

It doesn't matter the other team is cheating. If you believe in karma, the other team will eventually receive a penalty for cheating. And remember, your team's goal is to become the best possible players. If you lose today, there is another game tomorrow. And another on the day after. And another. As your team gets better, they start to win more often. And the other team is isn't learning as fast and doesn't have a deep bench, because only their best players are in the game. This presents an apparent paradox - in order to win in the long run, you have to avoid focusing on winning.

This paradox is important in business. The team that is interested in winning - in business terms, the results oriented team, is not the team that is going to be successful for the long term. The team that will do well for the long run will have leaders that are actively allowing people to develop. Of course this is a scary prospect because it means giving up control. It means you will no longer be the smartest person in the room. It means stepping back from reports and looking at behaviors. It means stepping back from behaviors and looking at motives. And it means you will need to create novel solutions to difficult, perhaps intractable problems. Or as it was put so succinctly, "whosoever shall be great among you, ... be [the] servant of all."¹

1 Mark 10:43,44 KJV

Two Leadership Styles

Several years ago, James D. Fife assigned me to oversee a small team of six. When he gave me the assignment he sat me down and discussed two styles of leadership. I don't know if he did this every time he made assignments or if he correctly saw my brittle personality and recognized I needed extra counsel. Regardless the message was clear and made an impact. You can issue orders, or you can spend time with people and collaborate. The first style of leadership is appropriate in an emergency. If you are not in an emergency you should use the other. After explaining this he asked the question - are you often in an emergency?

So if you lead people before you start issuing demands ask yourself the question, is this an emergency? If it isn't then ask yourself why you're acting like it is.

Cheers.

Thought for the day

Management is like fertilizer. If you use it too often, you get a lot of growth, but no production.

Fantasy Finance Postscript

So the game is over - I didn't win the bazillion dollars. I managed to finish in the top 11% and only lost around $3,000. The statistics from my earlier post held true - I made more/lost less than most other players 28 days out of 48 , roughly 60% of the time, and I made more/lost less than the S&P on 23 days out of 48. I was approaching half for beating the market - may be I can trade as good as the market - but that still doesn't change the analysis - I should buy a market based mutual fund.

Search or Derive

I was helping my son study for his Standards of Learning tests (known affectionately as SOLs - who thought that was a good idea?) He was a bit concerned because the study was around using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. So, we went through different ways you could navigate the problems. Here are three of them:

• You could go with intuition - you could think in Celsius. Having lived in Europe - this is fairly easy for me - single digits is cool; 20° is comfortable; 30° is hot; 45° drink plenty of water and take steps to avoid heat prostration. If the temperature is below zero wear a coat.
• You could use derive a heuristic to get the temperature in Fahrenheit - double the temperature in Celsius and add 30° will get you close enough for temperatures in weather reports. You can derive the exact conversion formula if you know the freezing point and the boiling point of water in each scale. (The formula for the conversion is  F° = 9/5C° + 32°)
• You could look up an answer on the Internet.

We did not use the third method. So, thinking about Knowledge Centered Support:

• On every contact there is a decision point - do I search for an answer or do I derive an answer? 

When your body of knowledge is stable, your inquiries predictable, and your search tools are effective a decision is easy - search and only start deriving when you can't find the answer. When all three of these are present the decision becomes different - deriving may actually be the better approach. I know this first hand from supporting Macintosh products. 

At that time, Macintosh computers were losing market share. The Macintosh teams had a couple of teams of ten to twenty agents. There were dozens of windows teams. The knowledge base was predominantly windows solutions. (Apple snobs would point to the superiority of the Macintosh Operating System.) I didn't search much for solutions - I derived them. I had a mental check list of things I could do to isolate and diagnose a problem, and more than likely find a solution. In rare instances - mostly printing issues, I knew I could find a solution in the knowledge base and I would search. For the most part, I knew in 95% of my calls, I could derive a solution 100% of the time. At best, I could find a solution 30% of the time - the content was limited, the search engine was tricky, and I couldn't contribute to the knowledge base, and  there was no way to flag content gaps.¹ I really had only two choices: derive the answer or find a subject matter expert to ask.

Effective agents derived answers. The others struggled. Ironically, there was a woman who was struggling that I admired. She had derived her own rudimentary form of KCS - each time she encountered a call where she didn't know the answer, she would ask for help and carefully write the answer on an index card that she kept in a rolodex. She drove the subject matter experts nuts, because she was always asking for help - but she never asked the same question twice. If the answer was in her rolodex she used it.

If you are in an environment where agents or engineers need to derive answers because of the body of knowledge what should you do to encourage knowledge sharing? My best guesses at this time are:

1. Acknowledge the value of deriving answers - your new solutions are going to be derived. Reinforce the rewards for contributing creatively derived responses.
2. Remove obstacles to searching effectively, make sure your agents and engineers can easily give feedback, and communicate back the changes that are being made.

Is there anything I've missed?

¹ To be fair there was one feedback method - an annual survey sent out by the database administrator. I was very open with my critiques of the knowledge base. When I met the database administrator he recognized my name. Fortunately he didn't take the critique personally.

A Different Kind of Diversity

I've been reading a lot of job requisitions lately. I've noticed they tend to be narrowly focused. The educational background is limited to a narrow range of related degrees and experience. This being the United States - that last statement is always "this company is an equal opportunity employer and hires with out regard to" followed by the list of protected classes. Companies need diversity of out look to make good decisions. They need people with diverse experiences who can bring in different ways of looking at things. Diversity matters - it helps uncover blind spots in the way people view the world. Differences in religion, ethnic background, and region can be a proxy for differences in worldview. So is education and experience. My impression is back in 1950's and 60s, there was a different kind of diversity in play. I read somewhere, back in the sixties NASA was in many ways more divers than it is now. NASA is currently a very diverse place in terms of protected classes, but for the most part all the employees went to the same schools and received the same degrees. It is self selecting for a certain type of worldview. Twenty years ago, I knew corporate managers who had Fine Arts degrees, English degrees, and History degrees. In this day and age, you could get a job as a store clerk, not as a corporate manager. These days, you need a business degree. And that poses a problem. If everyone of your managers has the same education, the same type of personality, the same worldview - how can they expose blind spots in the corporate plans? How can they create the contingency plans that ensure success? Does it really matter if they all look different, but they all think the same?

Fantasy Finance

I've been playing the Fantasy Finance game on Yahoo Finance sponsored by Ameritrade. The rules are simple - start with 100k in play money, buy publicly traded securities traded on the big exchanges, make the most play money in 12 weeks, win $5000, and Ameritrade reaches a large group of potential customers. Easy? Right... I started in the middle of week 3 with $100000 in play money a proceeded to lose money climbing into the 40th percentile with a fairly conservative strategy. So how am I doing? I've lost money - I would have done better with just the 100k and the $100 per trading day you can earn by answering questions about market history. I'm in the 122 percentile. I've done better than most of the other players 60% of the time. I've done better than the S&P 17 times or 40% of the time. So short answer - I can beat most aggressive day traders. I can't beat the market. I should probably invest in an index fund and move on.

Proxy Vote

I've been voting proxies for various corporations. It's that time of year again. And I consistently vote against Board recommendations. Generally, Boards have a good idea how to best govern a corporation. I believe they take their fiduciary responsibilities seriously, but in one thing, I am appalled - allowing the sitting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) sit on the Board. Often this individual is also the Chairman of the Board. It's arrogant. I have no problem with former CEOs sitting on the  Board, or current CEOs retiring to the Board. It's the current, CEO sitting on the Board. Don't do it. Don't allow it. Vote against it.

It's a conflict of interest. The CEO is an employee. The only check on his behavior is his employer - the representatives of the shareholders - the Board of Directors. They determine is pay. They determine his performance. What if it's not in the interest of the Shareholders to increase a CEOs pay? Is the Board really going to vote against a bonus?

I vote against the CEO. He doesn't belong there. Of course, institutional investors apparently don't care. My protest is like a rodent giving a raptor an obscene gesture. It's not going to change the outcome, but it's an act of defiance that feels good. Or as the representative of a corporation told my Grandfather, it doesn't matter how you vote the principle shareholder has decided to endorse the sale.¹

Cheers!

¹ My Grandfather received a trust fund from his Grandfather. His Grandfather worked as an investment banker and was very successful acquiring holdings in the companies his Bank lent money to. (Is that another conflict of interest - probably not.) In any event, my Grandfather held significant holdings in many small regional companies. He was in the hospital at the time this particular statement was made - when he hadn't voted his shares, there was a concern on the Board that he was going to start a proxy fight. Of course, it didn't matter - the organization that was the principle shareholder had a controlling interest.

Soup Nazi

I am told there is a TV comedy called Seinfeld. I've always doubted the comedy designation, in spite of the fact that I find Jerry Seinfeld's stand up routines hilarious. At one point, I was strong armed into watching an episode with a character called the "Soup Nazi". The Soup Nazi runs a restaurant that serves only soup. The soup is great and there is a line around the block to get soup. At the point of buying, the Soup Nazi decides if you get soup or not. If you are not worthy you go hungry - No soup for you.

So there was a great debate last year among the business pundits about Apple. Did Steve Jobs listen to his customers? Or more importantly does Apple listen to it's customers? The debate seems to seesaw between to propositions:

• Apple designs products that it's potential customers haven't imagined
• Apple continually surveys its customers to identify "net promoters"

These two propositions are true. The classic example of why a business shouldn't design for potential customers is the Edsel. Ford did the "right" market research and still lost money. Apple buys into the net promoter world view that there are "good" profits derived from people who promote your products, and "bad" profits from people who don't promote your product. This is snob appeal. The special people understand and buy your products and the rest don't matter. Apple is very profitable selling electronics this way. This is the Soup Nazi - make a really good product. Ignore your customers except to verify they are lining up. Only sell to those who are worthy.

• Want a dumb phone - no soup for you.
• Want a $200 tablet - no soup for you.
• Want a computer assembled in North America - no soup for you.

Is it fair? Probably not. Is it profitable - so far. Does Apple listen to it's customers - only when it has to.

Disclaimer - I own shares of Apple Stock.

The Best of the Soup Nazi
Another Myth Bites The Dust: How Apple Listens To Its Customers
Jobs Steps Down at Apple, Saying He Can’t Meet Duties

Replay

In the December Communications of the ACM republished Judy Robertson's blog from November of 2010: Game Design through Mentoring and Collaboration. It's apparent creating games and simulations can be an effective way to teach. So let's get people creating.

Game Design through Mentoring and Collaboration.Judy Robertson retrieved 15 December 2011. http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/101956-game-design-through-mentoring-and-collaboration/fulltext

Blog Spam

It's funny, I've been watching my readership rise and was curious why I was getting my views were coming from Russia. A little research and low and behold, there is some advertising/phishing strategy out there to monitor new posts and use the source info to lead back to an advertising site. Hopefully, I didn't get anything from Russia with love.

This brings up the question of why write if no one is reading? Because it is good practice at the very least it lets me retain my touch typing skills.

Cheers

Strange Brew

This has been a strange week. I read Eric Jackson's The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives on Forbes.com the day after watching this little gem from Dan Pink speaking to RSA: RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.

So take some time watch and read. Then think about this, are we paying our top performers stupid?

We Believe in Meetings

We're very very busy and we have a lot to do and we haven't got a minute to explain it all to you...
 Sandra Boynton ¹  

We believe in meetings - all that have been scheduled, all that are now scheduled, and we believe that there will yet be scheduled many great and important meetings. We have endured many meetings and hope to to be able to endure all meetings. Indeed we may say that if there is a meeting, or anything that resembles a meeting, or anything that we might possibly turn into a meeting, we seek after these things.
Mary Ellen Edmunds ²

Several years ago, my friend Walt, told me in disgust there were members of the church council who used meetings as a way to get away from their wives, the way other men went to the bar. This was a socially acceptable way to avoid responsibilities that made them feel uncomfortable.

I think there may be managers doing the same thing. Rather than spend time with their employees they have meetings to cultivate a sense of importance. I can't make that decision right now. I'm busy. I get this feeling even though I work for a company that has very good guidelines around business meetings:

• If you go to a meeting and you don't know what the meeting is about in the first 10 minutes ask. If no one can tell you leave.
• If you don't receive an agenda, refuse the meeting.
• If you receive a meeting invitation and you don't think you should be there, refuse the invitation.

Is it just me?


1. BusyBusyBusy,  Rhinoceros Tap, 1996 - Available here
2. 14th Article of Faith, Retrieved from http://www.byhigh.org/Alumni_A_to_E/Edmunds/MaryEllen.html 3 January, 2012