Posts from — September 2009

Frequent past contributor and my best man, JMMJ, is celebrating a milestone birthday. Now you are finally old enough for this image to make sense.

So have a pint with the lads tonight, my old friend. Happy Birthday!

Pressure Cooker by Wmfesp

There’s an interesting bit of research that New Scientist reported. (Tip of the hat to Thinking Meat Project for the link.) It may be that people with verbal smarts are less likely to perform well in pressure cooker environments. The gene has also been linked to mental illness, anxiety and emotional vulnerability, which seems to reduce your ability to perform under pressure.

There are serious implications for business, not the least of which is that if you are in an industry where high verbal skills count, eschewing the normal MBA-oriented pressure cooker environment will allow you to have better performance than you hyper-competitive competitors.

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click to CalculatedRisk articleCalculatedRisk reports on some interesting new findings that (in the U.S.) people with jobs are actually earning more. They are also much less likely to get fired than they were before.

However, those without jobs are likely to be without for a very long time. No jobs are being created, and the usual pipelines are clogged with people all trying to use them to find jobs that just aren’t there.

This is good news if you are still employed, bad news if you aren’t.

If you happen to be one of the many people who are now out of work, I’m not sure what exactly the solution. But I do know what is not the solution: finding a new job the way everyone was doing it two years ago. This includes Monster and even TheLadders.com.

You’re going to have to tighten the belt and probably make a move.

More on that topic in the newsletter.

I’m working through an interview I did with Jack Fallow awhile back. Really it’s me getting Jack talking and having the good sense (mostly) to shut up. When I do say something I sound like a complete doofus. Really. More or less I just wanted to hear more. “What do you mean by that?” and “Can you tell me more about that?” are great probing interview questions to hear stories.

Jack was talking about his experiences with GasForce, an employee-owned company for which he was the founding director that in six-years returned 15x initial shareholder outlay. Or 25x. “It depends on how you measure it,” he said.

Here’s a quick taste, Jack Fallow on Managerial Authority:

Managers lose their authority because they make daft decisions and they don’t ask people whether the decisions are okay. It’s managers who make decisions in a vacuum who lose authority. That’s my experience. I’ve never seen a credible manager in any situation lose their authority because the employees have been too strong, or the trade unions have been too strong, or anything.

What happens is that if a manager wants to do something and everyone can see that it’s wrong, then that manager may well feel usurped.

Imagine it said with a Scottish accent.

He’ll also talk about how they used the Glacier Works Council model of unanimous vote (single veto) on policy at the Board level.

He was apparently saving up a lot to put down on this recording, because it’s full of strong wisdom from deep experience. You’ve got to hear it when I get it done.

One of the remarkable things that Carol Dweck showed is that students who thought that they succeeded because they were smart did more poorly in new tasks. They wouldn’t ask for help because they were supposed to be able to figure it out themselves, or perhaps because they thought that if they asked for help they would be shown as not being smart.

Of course, this can be mixed with a DIY attitude, to make it even worse. I’ll chime in here with a personal story: when I was in college, I wouldn’t go to the math profs’ office hours because I somehow believed that I shouldn’t ask for help. It could have been a result of believing I succeeded because I was smart. It was at least also a part of “don’t ask for help” that was a cultural thing with my family. Compound the latter with the former and you get someone who could have done much better in differential equations than he did. (It didn’t help that I really don’t have a strong aptitude for mathematical thinking, arriving at most of my conclusions through intuition and guesswork.)

So internally you need to think that you succeed because of effort.

Lots of people ignore this advice. This leaves them open to being manipulated by you to your advantage, as long as you are willing to not be the smartest person in the room.
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