Work Naturally.
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. [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 …
There’s an interesting bit of research that New Scientist reported. 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.
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. READ MORE….
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 …
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.
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.
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:
Are you going to a job interview sometimes soon? Have a meeting with a prospective client? The other person will like you more and think the meeting went more smoothly if you subtly mimic their body language. This has long been a part of the salesman’s Influence bag, of course, and is even a goodly part of the original neuro-linguistic …
Why was I a big success consulting with an international investment bank but considered an idiot when consulting for a national insurance company doing the same type of work? If you are a hidden high potential, the fact that the company is international vs. national matters more than raw company size because of issues of complexity.
