Because the killer app is us.

Might not be the best person for the job. Then again, she might.

We all want to be happy. At least in the States, being happy is the closest thing to Nirvana. But it turns out that research has shown that sad workers will often out-perform happier ones.

Two psychologists at the University of Alberta, Professor Robert Sinclair (now with Laurentian University in Sudbury, ON) and PhD student Carrie Lavis, published some research in 2001 on work they did with workers in a printed circuit board factory. They made some of the workers sad, about as sad as one would get after watching a sad movie. These workers didn’t make more boards, but had fewer errors, and therefore made more usable product (less rework).

It seems that sad people use work to distract themselves from their sadness. They may also be more reflective. Happy workers see work as a distraction, too, but from their happiness.

Of course, there are several caveats.

[Read more →]

Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news

“Broader Measure of U.S. Unemployment Stands at 17.5%”

The New York Times reports today on the situation of unemployment in the United States. The numbers, which I have been mentioning, differ from the standard ones issued by the government because they include those who have stopped looking for work, or who have part-time work but want full-time work. This does not include those who consider themselves “underemployed” while working full-time.

The Times notes that had we been keeping records that far back, this number would surely be the highest since the Great Depression.

At the end of the article — interestingly placed — the author mentions some of the most troubling aspects of today’s unemployment:

One of the more striking aspects of the Great Recession is that most of its impact has fallen on a relatively narrow group of workers. This is evident primarily in two ways.

First, the number of people who have experienced any unemployment is surprisingly low, given the severity of the recession. The pace of layoffs has increased, but the peak layoff rate this year was the same as it was during the 2001 recession, which was a fairly mild downturn. The main reason that the unemployment rate has soared is the hiring rate has plummeted.

So fewer workers than might be expected have lost their jobs. But those without work are paying a steep price, because finding a new job is extremely difficult.

Second, wages have continued to rise for most people who still have jobs. The average hourly wage for rank-and-file workers, who make up about four-fifths of the work force, actually accelerated in October, according to the new report.

This is has not happened since the Great Depression, which was a time of foment for various movements for change in how America was run. Since official unemployment is expected to continue to remain above 10% through sometime in 2011, I would imagine that this army of forgotten men and women will be fodder for similar movements here.

What would the feds do if 1 million unemployed people, most of whom will have lost their homes, decide to march on Washington?

Last I found it interesting that all of this gets reported on Saturday, when almost no one reads the paper.

The old research has been pretty consistent: optimists are lousy at predicting what will really happen because they always assume “happy day”. But no one has ever seen how optimists predictions change as they get more information.

Until now.

A recent study (currently a working paper) tracked MBA students performance predictions across semesters. It turned out that the students more who had more optimistic projections in the beginning (and were wrong) got much more accurate over time as they got more information and feedback. Pessimists, oddly, got less accurate as the semester progressed. Apparently having the initial optimism about success (when they have no data) doesn’t color their ability to make more accurate evaluations as they get more data.

However, we all know stories about business leaders who kept on thinking that things were going to go their way when they clearly weren’t. There is probably a nuance that needs to be addressed here that is being missed by everyone.

I’d also be interested in how level of capacity affects these findings. Were the “pessimists” simply working at the wrong level? I think MBA work, even at Duke, is level 2 or less.

Read the whole working paper:

Ron Kaniel, Cade Massey & David T. Robinson. 20087/8. “Optimism without illusion: The impact of experience on expectations“. Yale Working Papers.

Maybe I can convince Alan, our resident recruiter, to chime in on this, but I’m pretty sure that the rule is this:

If you have to pay for placement, it’s a ripoff.

“Job Search Firms: Big Pitches and Fees, Few Jobs“, New York Times, 2009 Aug 17.

I meant to post something more on this, but you should read it if you are using job search firms or thinking about it.

I don’t do job placement. I don’t even promise people with whom I work will get a better job. I can only promise that they will understand what will work and what will not. If I know some people who can use you, then, sure, I’m going to want to try and connect you with them. High potentials are hard for other people to find, so connecting you may help my reputation with these other people.

Which is always good.

Of course, many of you also have some wickedly weird coping mechanisms that we have to disable so that you can do the work at the level you are capable. It’s just a matter of giving you new techniques that work when you are working at the right level, and helping you identify the situations where those old techniques are still useful.

Don’t ever give money to anyone who says that they can get you work. It’s almost always a ripoff. Where it’s not, it’s usually just luck that you get the work.

Besides, most job placement people do not have any idea to help hidden high potentials find work in good times, much less when the economy is a mess and unemployment is still rising. Because being unemployed means that you will be more unemployed these days, you can’t do things they way that you have been doing them. Or the way that everyone else is doing them.

You probably can’t really look for a job. You have to meet people while seeming to be gainfully employed.

I’ll talk more about this later. It’s a trick that many of you can deploy.

Here’s a repost of something from 2004 about what job posting are best for learning how to be a manager. It’s still relevant.

Philippines Marine Corps parachuting.

Morgan W. McCall, in Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job
(1988), cites the following as the Top 5 job assignments to produce learning:

• Project / Task Force: limited duration assignments to complete either a goal or solve a project. I would imagine that special projects are what he is talking about and not the “project-oriented” organization where everything is projectized.
• Line-to-Staff switches: where you go from working within a Line of Service (LoS) to a cross-departmental position. This is pretty obvious: staff positions require you to know about the business as a whole instead of just your little part. They also have you work on a variety of problems under greater pressures, much like projects.
• Start-ups
• Fixits / Turnarounds: I’ve worked on several of these and I doubt that someone who can’t learn quickly could survive. One of the issues with a Fixit is that the common knowledge doesn’t work. You have to listen to the system and just try things until something works. You often have no idea why it worked, only that it did. Which may not really be learning.
• Leaps in Scope of Responsibility: Although if you leap beyond your actual level of Competence (as defined by Jaques in Requisiste Organization) you may end up learning to fail. In a wretching, awful way.

[Read more →]

I’ve been writing about work levels and stratified systems theory since 2003, just after I started writing this blog. Some of these older posts are great, full of wonderful information that you’ll no doubt find useful. Other posts are clearly wrongheaded: I had much to learn.

My clean up is just to get rid of some of the problems in the text: bad characters, formatting that failed to make some conversion to a newer version, dead links, etc. I’m thinking about putting together some ebooks that would aggregate the better ones, clean them up and make the necessary corrections. It might be more useful than having to trawl what was at the time simply a place to put notes on what I was reading. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much what I still do half the time.

I don’t do as much reading any more. Maybe it was a phase, but I rather think that it was a time to shove a massive amount of information into my head as quickly as possible. These days I’m trying to assimilate all this information and figure out how to deliver it. My work with Warren Kinston taught me something relevant to this: most of the time, you have to present information that challenges preconceptions several times and in several different ways for it to be useful. It means fewer posts, because there is a few number of things to say or simple things to think through.

Anyway, if you see lots of updates coming on the RSS feed, it’s because I’m continuing to clean up these old posts.

“He’s such a cold bastard! Even the room gets a chill when he walks in!”

We’re weren’t even out of the room and my consulting pal was already berating our client. He had point: it had been chilly in there, and the client — never someone who filled your heart with bonhomie — was in particularly icy form that day.

I’d always laugh when my pal said these things, of course: we all know that the “cold bastard” was (a) statistically likely born in wedlock given where he came from and (2) had a body temp around 98.6°F (37°C), give or take.

It turns out that my colorful pal was onto something. Temperature really does affect one’s affect, changing the emotions considerably, and even affects one’s intellectual performance.

[Read more →]

Tom Foster has a post recently about what to do when your manager starts to give your management tasks to a coworker, all the time saying that you are still the boss.

I’ve had this happen and I wish that I had known this bit of advice back then. It wouldn’t have helped any — but I would have perhaps resolved things earlier. It also complements some things I’ve been telling my private clients in my coaching of Hidden High Potentials.

Politics uncovered. This is a script from Dunder Mifflin, but it’s not funny when it’s your job being worked around. You are either already out and your boss doesn’t have the guts to tell you or the “substitute” project manager has an alternate agenda, probably hidden.

Either way, your response is still the same. As you enter this conversation with your boss remember this:

The person who can best describe reality without laying blame will emerge the leader.

I’ll add something that Tom would probably not recommend but that the research shows is highly effective: angry outbursts. It’s amazing how effective doing this sporadically can be. People respond to this, partly because it makes you unpredictable, which is an effective trait when it’s a small part of your reactions. You have to figure out how to pull it off, whether to do it on your boss or the usurper.

People who worked with him commented that George Washington always seemed to be controlling a massive temper bubbling just below the surface, ready to explode at almost any time. It made people fear him a bit, and that’s useful. It’s amazing how many of his “You dishonor me!” outbursts worked, even early on when there was considerable bad talk about him. But it showed that he was willing to actually fight to defend his honor.

You have to seem like you could come across the table and rip someone’s head off but be totally controlling it. So it’s a limited outburst.

Psychopaths pull this off really well. When you are confronted with someone doing the outburst thing, a good technique is to stand your ground and be levelheaded, just like Foster recommends. This disables one of the psychopath’s most effective manipulations and shows you as someone who is fearless when everyone else, including the managers, is cowed by this person.

I should emphasize that I’m saying follow Tom’s advice first and most often. Outbursts can be very useful when they are seen as you defending your honor. Tricky to pull off.

Anyone else used angry outburst to good effect at work?

I’ve finally figured out that Google Custom Search hates my weblog templates: it’s been broken, apparently for months.

I’ve now replaced it with Bing! from Microsoft. Give it a try and see if you don’t get much better search results than you had been getting.

There is still some integration work to be done. It would be nice to be able to go back to the search page easily. I’ll partly solve that by adding “related files” to the posts when you come in from a search engine.

But it is such a wonderfully elegant solution. It was hard not to like. And, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t currently come with ads. Plus, I find Bing to give me better results, almost as good as I get with DEVONagent.

(Yes, I know it’s from Microsoft and I’m a Mac & RedHat user. Don’t go hatin’.)

Ever wonder if timespans has any practical usefulness? Here is how I used timespans to clear up a communication problem in a global IT architecture group for an international bank.

Awhile back I worked with a group of IT architects at an international bank. The group, although “headquartered” in the US, had members in each of the bank’s regions.

This group had been trying to develop a Architectural Strategy. In that, they had some elements that were predetermined by the relationship they had with the outsource company that was handling IT support. They decided together that their Architectural Strategy would include:

• Technology Refresh Plans (TRP) which were part of the budget, done annually, and handled by the IT management company that had the outsource contract
• Current State Architecture (CSA) which would detail what was currently in-place
• Future State Architecture (FSA) of where the bank should be heading to achieve its business goals in the future
• Long-Range IT Plans (LRITP) that would help the bank achieve certain parts of its goals from “plateau” to “plateau”. These were semi-stable points that would achieve the goals of the Future State in small chunks.

But they couldn’t come to an agreement as to what any of these terms meant.

I was tasked with writing all of this stuff up. Try as I might, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

Until I realised that timespan theory could unlock the whole problem. [Read more →]

For my American readers, you may be interested in a recent post on CalculatedRisk where CR graphs the recent BLS data on unemployment. The interesting things for you are the positive states: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Virginia. And possibly Vermont.

Oklahoma looks pretty good to me too, having just talked to my old friends in Michigan.

Another interesting place is ShadowStats to see what the “real” unemployment picture looks like. It puts Michigan much higher than 25%. Which exceeds the Great Depression rates.

Then again, according to Shadow Stats, the US as a whole is pretty much already there.

[Read more →]

Dancing can work, though

Job hunters often get depressed from their hunt, and it’s probably even worse in a stagnant, depressed economy like we’re in today. One of the coping techniques that misguided but well-meaning people teach them is to use Positive Thinking. People regularly use these techniques and believe strongly that they are effective.

Nice, except that it will often backfire.

ScienceDaily reports that three Canadian researchers — Joanne V. Wood and John W. Lee (University of Waterloo) and W.Q. Elaine Perunovic (University of New Brunswick) — “found that individuals with low self-esteem actually felt worse about themselves after repeating positive self-statements.”

Even people with high self-esteem didn’t get much benefit from repeating “self-affirming” statements.

Good grief! If something as beloved as Self Affirmation doesn’t work, can anything work?

It turns out the answer is “yes”, and luckily for us, it’s not that hard. It’s just a bit more complex than telling yourself “I’m a likeable person”.

It comes with some caveats.

[Read more →]

Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends north of the border.

If your holiday is as great as ours, here’s SCTV’s “20 Depressing Hits by Connie Franklin” to help you celebrate.

Here’s a quick tip that I learned a few years ago to help you figure out what people in your company are making. This only works for US sites with foreign national workers.

It seems that whenever an H-1B visa is renewed or changed, the company has to post this information or make it available. I discovered this while working with a high-level corporate technical group of a massive, international company. I was having a coffee in the breakroom and, bored, was perusing the bulletin board. There was always someone selling something interesting, especially since so many of these people made high salaries and were often moved across the world. It was there that I saw my first H-1B declaration. I mentioned it to one of the guys I talked with in the group, who promptly got bent because the foreigner (an Australian) was pulling down $40k more than he was for the same job.

It looks like some obscure government document — which it is since the US has some of most nightmarish and stupid immigration laws of the developed world — but don’t let this fool you. Take a long look through it and, abracadabra! a salary number.

Of course, you may also get the shock that some of my friends at another company got when they discovered that the H-1Bs had multiple degrees and were working for half their salary, doing the same level work. Probably good to know, though.

I’ll close by saying that I’m all for foreign nationals coming to work in America, especially high level ones. Companies like Microsoft are finally wising up to America’s horrid immigration laws and moving highly technical centers to Canada. Screwing the foreigner or non-resident is the only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on, albeit showing it in different ways.

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.

[Read more →]

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.
[Read more →]

Adam does some naming. Aberdeen Bestiary. Public domain.

If you want to succeed at a creative project — and all change projects are — you will need to be particular about naming. As Dr. Warren Kinston has shown in his (please oh please soon) to be published framework on Creative Team Endeavors, naming is key. Wilfred Brown and Elliott Jaques emphasized in their works about Glacier Metal Company. Management is full of bad, fuzzy terms. Real science knows that you have to get particular in order to get something controlled.

(Yes you can take this too far. That’s for a later post.)

It was a ironical email from Warren that got me thinking about this again. He was looking for some copyediting of some of his documents. One of the replies was fascinating:

[Read more →]