Posts from — December 2008

I hope that y’all who have been celebrating holidays have been having a great time. We’ve been sidelined here with the Xmas Plague (motto: “Pass it on!”) so I’m not going to post again until the new year.

Best wishes for a prospering 2009.

NCH’s Express Scribe Transcription Playback Software is digital transcription software that plays the audio file back while you type, at varying speeds. The speed thing is the trick: I’ve not seen a lot of software that does this.

This is barebones software but it is available free for Windows, Mac and Linux. Even though there are problems on Mac (I needed to move my files to “Documents” from “Music/Audio Hijack”), Express Scribe is thoroughly worth downloading.

I transcribe my own CIP interviews along with needing to transcribe a variety of other interviews for repurposing to print and web. Express Scribe is great, and will lead me to investigate their full software later.

Warning: Some folks have complained that Express Scribe encourages you to install trialware for other products. On the Mac this didn’t seem to happen. But then again, it’s not much of a Mac software: really feels like a Windows app ported to Linux and then ported to Mac. Not Cocoa, if that bothers you.

Still it is doing what I needed it to do.

Express Scribe is free professional audio player software for PC, Mac or Linux designed to assist the transcription of audio recordings.

The program is installed on the typist’s computer and can be controlled using a transcription foot pedal or keyboard (with ‘hot’ keys). This computer transcriber application also offers valuable features for typists including variable speed playback, multi-channel control, file management and more.

Express Scribe is completely free and can be used without any restrictions. We make it free with the hope you will like it so much you will recommend our commercial digital dictation suite to others. Please visit our Dictation Software page.

For everyone who thinks that my economic outlook has been bleak, I offer you Saxo Bank’s (Switzerland) predictions that 2009 is when we will see the worst. Their 10 Outrageous Predictions are unfortunately within the realm of reasonable speculation at this point.

No one can predict the future. However, we can say that the level of uncertainty has increased to a point where outlier arguments have less risk.

Saxo Bank predicts 2009 will hit all economic lows

London and Copenhagen – 17 December 2008: Crude trading at $25. S&P 500 falls 50% to 500. China’s GDP growth falls to zero. EURUSD falls to 0.95. Italy to leave the ERM. If Saxo Bank’s 10 outrageous claims for the year ahead transpire, economic conditions will worsen dramatically in 2009. “The good thing is, overall, we predict 2009 will be a turning point because it can’t get much worse” says chief economist David Karsbøl.

The Copenhagen-based online trading and investment specialist’s predictions are compiled as part of the 2009 Outlook and thought exercise, and are an annual attempt to predict ‘black swan’ sightings in the global markets, and this year present a dismal view. Black swan events are high impact, rare occurrences that are beyond the realm of normal expectations.

Full Story

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I recently ran across Barbara Kellerman’s Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Leadership for the Common Good) (2004, Harvard Business School Press). Kellerman makes the argument that the current thinking on leadership is that it is always positive. Hitler is a bad leader because he did evil. People don’t talk about bad leadership and have focused almost entirely on positive leadership.

As she points out, what is bad to you might not be bad to me.

She creates a typology of 7 Types of Bad Leadership, with four for ineffective leadership (a quatrile!) and three for evil leadership.

Most of the book is not worth the price of admission, frankly. She ignores a massive amount of work in genetics that studies on antisocial tendencies (it seems that this is a spectrum) and how leaders tend to have some of these to be effective.

But she did show me that most people think leadership is good.

It’s not: leadership is amoral.
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Ben Levisohn, “How To Make A Madoff“, Business Week, December 16, 2008.

You don’t have to do anything to get a Madoff. They are always with us, like the poor. The question is whether or not you will create the social structures that detect them early. In evolutionary psychology, this is called cheater detection and it makes up a major component to most primate life.

I think that the final quotation may be more interesting:

Says Marwil, who has worked on recovery at [Samuel Israel's Bayou Hedge Fund Group, which created a dummy accounting firm to cover up trading losses]: “I don’t think you can reach a conclusion other than they are bad guys.”

Some people are just evil. Really. They are called sociopaths and if you lump in borderline personalities and psychopaths (if there is a difference between psycho- and socio- here) you end up with a number that is close to 4% of the population. Just sociopaths, according to some estimates, make up 1 in 25, but I think that the number is inflated by bad methodology. Throw in people with aggressive conduct disorder and you get some great things.

Does power corrupt? Yes. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Yes.

That’s why the Reformation said that Christ had three roles, not two. “Prophet, Priest and King”, said John Calvin, a triple cure.
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At the last GO Society conference in Toronto, Owen Jacobs of the US Army talked about how the MCPA (Modified Career Path Assessment) didn’t actually measure capability but more potential. (See video of Owen Jacob’s presentation) Well, duh, of course.

Experience is the key to capability. If you have high capacity but not chance to gain experience, your level of capability (what you can do now) will lag behind your level of capacity (what you have the capacity to do, if you had the knowledge and skills [experience]).
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“The combination of arrogance and stupidity that would prompt him to continue in these types of behaviors is just stunning,” Dr. [Kent Redfield, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield,] said . “There’s no feedback loop or reality check.” [source]

If you haven’t been following it, Illinois Governor Rob Blagojevich (known widely as “Blago”) has been arrested by the United States Depart of Justice. He stands accused of, among a laundry list of corruption charges, trying to sell the U.S. senate seat that President-elect Obama has vacated. Illinois law says that the Governor has sole discretion in this, and he wanted to make some money off of it.
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Yesterday we looked at an ancient story. Here’s a more modern discussion from humorist P. G. Wodehouse’s first “Blandings” novel, Something Fresh [Something New] [1915]:

“…I think I have it now. My life has been such a series of jerks. I dash along–then something happens which stops that bit of my life with a jerk; and then I have to start over again–a new bit. I think I’m getting tired of jerks. I want something stodgy and continuous.

“I’m like one of the old bus horses that could go on forever if people got off without making them stop. It’s the having to get the bus moving again that wears one out. This little section of my life since we came here is over, and it is finished for good. I’ve got to start the bus going again on a new road and with a new set of passengers. I wonder whether the old horses used to be sorry when they dropped one lot of passengers and took on a lot of strangers?”

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This is a followup to my earlier post (“Transitions Are Like Being Lost In The Pacific“) on high potentials and the number of transitions they go through in life, and how that increases their risk for massive failures. Here’s a story about a high potential who screwed up and failed completely.

Ah, yes. We come to your typical remark from a pragmatist CEO of a mid-sized firm. Although this cigar-chomping associate is a caricature in walking flesh, the opinion is shared by others. Lots of others. I can go into the psycho-sociological explanation for these opinions but instead, let me tell you a story from another land (I live in the U.S.) that I first heard years ago. It shows why I believe in hidden high potentials (HHPs), and although the story is somewhat dated, it shows what happens to HHPs even today.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, there were two types of people living in the same country. One dominated the economic, social and political life. It’s fair to say that they ran everything. The other type of people were a different ethnicity. Like many minorities before and since, during hard times they found themselves getting the shaft from the ruling ethnic group. But they persevered. Let’s call the ruling ethnic group “Greens” and the oppressed minority, “Blues”.

Now the Greens ran a country that was the envy of the entire world. All the nations acknowledged their power. Indeed, the land of the Greens was mighty and all their neighbors feared their great might and learning. This great wealth and learning did not trickle down to the Blues, however,

One of these Blues, a young man we can call “Fred” — old names from far away are hard to pronounce, don’t you think? — who by a stroke of good fortune found himself adopted by a rich and powerful Green family. His face and color was not quite as blue as other Blues, and he could successfully pass as a bluish Green.
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I’ve been talking about how Wilfred Brown, management (heck, all-round) genius, made this series of films in the 1970s. Here’s an excerpt I pulled from the first film:

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When you f**k up one of them, it’s like you get unmoored. You can’t go back but you aren’t going forward either. After you’ve f****d up enough of these, it’s like being in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. There may be land somewhere, but you can be pretty sure that it’s a long ways away. You’ve got limited water, the sun is beating down, and you have to come face-to-face with the fact that you can’t get out of this alive by yourself. Even with someone else looking for you, it’s going to take a miracle. You are absolutely f****d.

Butch, a mode 9, describes what it feels like to have messed up three consecutive transitions.

When you go through a transition, you have to leave behind what had worked and move towards something new. I have talked about it before as the feeling that even though you might have a great job and a great personal life you have to move. You don’t know where you want to go but you know that you can’t stay here.

Sometimes you miss a transition and don’t navigate it properly. If you are Mode 7+, the risk of this is incredibly high. And let’s be honest here: most people who are reading this and think that they are mode 7 aren’t, and many of the people who are bewildered and why I’m now looking at them in the audience are. I run into a very large number of people mode 7 and above, but they are rarely people who want it. For good reason, because the higher modes have more chances to screw up a stratum transition (they have more of them) and are less likely to get support through them, since almost no one in power is mode 7 or above.

So what can you do?
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Michelle Malay Carter of Mission Minded Management has let out that PeopleFit will put on another public seminar to introduce interested folks in the organizational theories that come out of Stratified Systems Theory / Requisite Organization:

On January 7th, I’ll be co-leading a short course on some of the basics of the model and their implications for organizational structure, employee engagement, leadership, talent management and systems design.

PeopleFit have always put on Best of Breed seminars. I know since I’ve gone to a few, and they were always beyond worthwhile. (I’ve stated before that their class on CIP was the best course I’ve ever taken.)

Read more about this short seminar.