Education News has put together an video and accompanying infographics about the Education Bubble Crisis. They don’t separate out undergraduate from graduate education, but the basic principle the cite still applies: you need to do some real research into what your potential field actually pays. 25 years ago when I went to university these numbers were a bit harder to find, since you had to know to track down the US Dept. of Labor Statistics book hidden somewhere in the governmental reference section of the stacks.
If you not from the U.S., you may find all of this a bit bewildering. It’s the same process as in medical care, where Americans spend massively more on medical care than the rest of the G8 only to get much lower average health statistics. The other G8 systems get more overall for their money.
The video is at the bottom, after the jump. read more…
John Fea was a Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso University back when my wife was. He has always been interesting — his book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? was a George Washington Book Prize finalist — and recently he has commented about graduate school in the humanities on both his Facebook page and his weblog. Darren Grem, on of his commenters, compared humanities graduate school to being in a rock band:
When students have inquired about grad school in the humanities, I’ve likened it to trying to break into the music industry as a start-up band. It’s about talent, connections, self-promotion, and hard work, to be sure. But it’s also about structural obstacles, timing, previous trends and predicting trends (and how you fit or don’t into them), money, and sheer luck.
Adding to that, I’ve often wondered what the comparative percentages are between landing a TT job for entry level grad students and landing the quasi-equivalent in the music industry – the record deal at a major label. I’d be willing to be they’re roughly in the same ballpark.
The analogy sounds nice, except that all the pros collapse. read more…
A big congratulations to commenter (and all around cool person) Mary McQueen for making the cut onto Dragon’s Den. DD is kind of the Canadian version of Shark Tank for the Americans. If you’re not in North America, I really don’t know what it compares to. Hopefully I will be able to point Witopia to a Canadian VPN access point and watch the show when it comes out.
A hearty congratulations to both Mary and her avian colleague and partner in bispecial card making, Luigi! Mary’s by far the most talented person I’ve ever known to be featured on reality TV.
Ever wonder whether Apple has a case against other “tablet” makers?
The Atlantic today has a blog post about how the patent office rejected a “scrotal support” by referencing the movie Borat, showing that he had already invented it. Madrigal went on to point out that using pop culture in movies was not just a feature of frivolous filings: “Part of Samsung’s recent response to an Apple patent suit over the iPad was to argue that Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey prefigured Apple’s tablet.”
Here’s another example, from the very best story arc from Peter Davdison’s run on Doctor Who (“The Caves of Androzani”, 1984):
Flattery really does work and it works in real life and not just for politically savvy types. We’ve seen that flattery works, that flattery has no upper limit and works even when they know you have an ulterior motive, and that the people who poo-poo flattery as only useful for the politically savvy are full of it.
I told you that was last part was bull pucky and here’s why.
Let’s look at IT people sucking up to their manager to train him to be a decent person. In this other post by Phil Factor the SQL maven, a “Comms” (probably networking) group who is used to having a swell manager who even takes them out for pints on Friday, at one of the several watering holes for IT people in the City of London. Their manager gets promoted and a fire-breather comes in, a real sourpuss.
Now these are technical staff, people who don’t want to manage but be technical experts. And they’re IT staffers. Worse, they do networking.
And they got it to work.
Flattery Only Works For the Politically Savvy, Which Is All of Us: Flatter 4 Success, Part 3
I’ve been telling you this week that flattery works, and that it’s not just researchers who believe that flattery apparently has no real upper limit. Most of you haven’t really believed this and you’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop.
So here’s those caveats I’ve been talking about:
I know that flattery doesn’t work on you, as you some of the world’s more intelligent people who see right through such things. But the rest of the world isn’t as savvy as you. You can get much more and be seen as much more effective at work by simply flattering your boss.
Yesterday we saw how Prof Chatman’s unpublished research showed the massive effectiveness of flattery, and, most surprising, that there was no upper bound to how much flattery you can slather on before being known as a obsequious pig. Today, let’s look at a real-life example of someone who flattered and made a difficult position work.
“Phil Factor” has mentioned it a few times in his pseudonymous blog on IT. In a post on “How to Insult People in Forums“, he mentioned a famous consulting pediatrician for whom he had worked. The doctor had the difficult job of pointing out medical failures to referring doctors, people about whom privately “he would wax vitriolic about [their] dangerous incompetence”, yet he always seemed to be getting more referrals.
Phil eventually asked what was going on:
“Nobody is immune from politeness and flattery”, he told me. “In fact, there seems to be no upper-limit to the amount of flattery that a person can absorb. If you can compliment and encourage the person that you must instruct, then any reproach is accepted more readily.”
You’re a smart person with great ideas. Other people may not see this but I do. It’s because of this that I want to tell you about a key way to get your boss to like you. Because a boss who likes you will give you better assignments, more time off, and better pay. Even for the same performance.
It turns out that flattering the boss is one of the best things you can do. And there’s no upper limit beyond which he will see you as a blatant ass-kisser. (Caveats below!)
It’s weird, because you know that if someone flatters you insincerely, you see right through them. You’re smarter and more savvy than most people. You see right through this type of thing. This causes you to not want to be a suck-up at work, since you don’t want to be known as an insincere brown-noser.
Except that, as Jeffrey Pfeffer points out in his book, POWER: Why Some People Have It — And Others Don’t, the research shows that ass-kissing (the technical term) gets results. And you need to know what to do to get ahead of those losers you work with. read more…
Japanese workers call their executives “tea drinkers”I got some strong comments regarding my post that executives are boobs. I probably should have said “worthless drags on shareholder value who ought to be golden parachuted into a live volcano that resembles the eternal hell they deserve for being lazy good-for-nothings.” But let’s not quibble.
Let’s instead deal with what real executive work looks like. And, yes, I’ve seen it. I even consult with people who want to move from Idiots to Executives. Unfortunately, the people who actually do executive work often don’t last at their companies as they make the Country Club Executives look bad by (gasp!) actually doing work.
And when we are constantly teetering on the brink of financial collapse, having idiots at the stern of the economy is something that we can ill afford. Let’s not even talk about how they destroy shareholder value.
There are even whole companies with upper managers doing actual executive work.
Really.
Here’s what it looks like. read more…
If you are banking on corporate executives to make the high-level market decisions that will pull the world out of this spiraling recession, you’re betting on a nag. Most executives not only don’t know how to do executive-level work, they couldn’t do it if they did.
Executive work is not line work, nor is it very similar to that of lower-level managers. Executives should be looking out past two years — out beyond to five, ten, even twenty years out — looking at how to manage the strategic uncertainty of the corporation. It’s a tough job that requires a type of thinking that few can do. Current executive managers, even C-level ones, are simply not up to the challenge. read more…
Back in 2008, I wrote an “anonymized” story about meeting up with a very high potential and our conversation. Although I wrote it a long time ago, it recently had two interesting comments from Alex and Ken Shepard. Alex I don’t know but Ken is the leader of the GO Society and has been a long-time proponent in my life. It’s always great when people of his caliber and prestige read my stuff. They both wrote with some advice for this guy, but years too late. I wrote in 2009 about the death of this high-mode individual, being a bit more honest than I had been.
I thought that I would address some of their points.
Because I believe that intelligence above a certain point is not only not helpful to you, it’s maladaptive. “Tim’s” experience is illustrative of what I have learned about high mode individuals, people who have an excessive capacity for work. read more…
Make Money with Executives by Preying on Ideologies, Not Profit Motive
You would think that given the choice between following a belief and following a (and this is important) sure thing to make money, that business people would chuck out toss their beliefs in an instant if they could make a buck. Business is business, after all.
And you’d be entirely wrong.
One of the weirdest things about reading real research on business is how much of what you are told is Absolutely True turns out to be Fabulously False. It turns out that contrary to what business managers and entrepreneurs tell us, they are not all about the money. At least not when it comes to the firm making money.
It’s all about ideology.
And if you’re smart, you can use this to manipulate them into doing what you want them to. read more…
Michael Bates, who has been a frequent commenter on this blog, was recently given the nod by the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza as one of the best State bloggers. Michael’s blog, Batesline, covers the goings on in Tulsa and the greater state of Oklahoma. I met up with him when I was down in Tulsa last month, but nary a peep about this!
Congratulations for another nod for all your hard work in keeping Oklahoma informed!
If you’re old enough to bother reading this, you likely can look over your life and see the points at which you have changed your mind. Or finessed one of your pet theories of life. To you this seems like a normal process, one that comes with aging and growing.
It’s not.
You’re weird.
And it makes people see you as wishy-washy or “compromising”. More after the jump. read more…
Like everyone else, I do a good deal of summer reading on the way to here or there. Or simply waiting for my baby to stop screaming. (Poor GERDy kid!) In addition to the mindless Kindle reading, which I’ll have to list elsewhere simply because I have no idea how to pull off my list from it, I’ve been busy with a bunch of research for a book I’m working on for someone else and some stuff that I’m trying to move off my own plate (finally).
The partial list, in no particular order, after the break. read more…
Back in season one of his show, The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling penned a prophecy of GenX’s end. By taking a look at it, you GenXers can see what lies in store for you at the end of your life.
The episode is “One For the Angels” starring the incomparable Ed Wynn as Lew Bookman, a barely making it, apparently single, aged, Lost Generation sidewalk peddler who gets a visit from Death.
I’ll be doing spoilers. The episode isn’t available online, although pieces are on YouTube. I invite you to watch, and then meet me below the summary that follows.
- “One of the Angels”, Part one (poor)
- “One of the Angels”, Part two (good)
- “One of the Angels”, Part three (good)
Hulk misunderstood. Puny humans always trying to kill Hulk. Hulk smash puny humans!When you are bigger than everyone else, you are much more likely to get hammered for irritating people. It doesn’t matter if that’s physical size or “work” size, where you have the capability to do a larger job than the people around you.
This is one of the key problems of Hidden High Potentials (HHPs). Work comes in different sizes, and people’s capability comes in different sizes to match it. When someone who is bigger comes into the room, people can sense it. It’s not as immediate as when a beautiful person comes in the room, but it’s pretty quick that people know that the warp of the room has shifted.
And that can cause you a lot of problems.
People get threatened by things that are bigger than they are. They are afraid that they can’t control you when you start going off about something. Even more frightening, they see that you are “bigger” than they are and know that people have a tendency to follow bigger people. That makes you a double threat.
Take a look at what happens when you are physically bigger.
Awhile back, a guy in my neighborhood had to be down in the courthouse. His wife works a different shift, and he brought his three year old boy down with him. The boy isn’t bad for a three year old, but he’s really big — like his dad — and looks like he’s five. The boy was simply being a boy, according to all accounts, but was noisy.
Dad is six foot, six inches (~ 2m) and probably weighs 230 lbs (104 kg) when he’s down to nothing but muscle. This is a very big guy. I like him, but he is very imposing.
And that’s the problem. read more…
In my lessons on the Tao of Joe: Redeeming Our Stories, I’ve pointed out that the patriarch’s model was to forget well before he ever forgave. Forgetting not only the wrongs, he forgot those who had wronged him (in his case, his brothers).
Joseph named the firstborn Manasseh (Forget), saying, “God made me forget all my hardships and my parental home.”
[Genesis 40, The Message]
It’s important because if you’ve a Hidden High Potential, you’ve likely got a lot of resentments. And not just about work.
It wasn’t just the Jewish Bible. Will Shakespeare agreed, often enough to use the formulation several times over the years. Take, for example, King Lear’s words: read more…
My RSS feeds have been down for awhile, apparently, depending on how you access them. And the earlier fix took down all the category pages, archive pages and even individual posts. Yikes! Should’ve seen it but didn’t. Your RSS feed should be http://feeds.feedburner.com/RequisiteWriting regardless.
This is a good argument for outsourcing your IT.
I’ve been reading the fascinating You’re in Charge, Now What?: The 8 Point Plan
The passage that struck me today is a short one about how a marketing guy, Jeff Killeen, handled the culture shock of starting as CEO at GlobalSpec. GlobalSpec is an engineering-focused company, and here he talks about the struggles he had both in developing a relationship with technical genius & founder, John Schneiter, and the engineers of the company. If you work with engineers or developers, this is relevant. read more…
