Yesterday, a massive tornado hit the Oklahoma City area, concentrated on Moore, OK. This just one day after a tornado ripped through Edmond and other cities. We think about these things because my wife is from OKC, and she had family in Moore and Edmond. Today, we’re just thankful that everyone is safe. Her brother-in-law was able to clean off …
Why Your Boss Won’t Kill His Pet Project
People fall in love with what they work on, or so research by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and the ubiquitous Dan Ariely reports. They discovered that when people have to work to create something — like an IKEA bookshelf — they see it through rose-colored glasses. It’s not that you do what you love but that labor leads to loving …
Does Fluid Intelligence / IQ Matter?
(This continues our discussion about intelligence / IQ testing. Read part 1, Intelligence Testing & IQ: What it is, isn’t.) The big issue with intelligence tests is this general mental ability (GMA or g) that they measure. This is mostly “fluid intelligence”. It means how quickly you can solve a unique problem. You would think that it would correlate with …
Intelligence Testing & IQ: What it is, isn’t
I’ve been studying the world of “intelligence testing” for some work I’m doing. Other than my own experience as a small child being subjected to what I recall as two days of evaluation far from my home (actually i had a lot of fun and my mother recalls it as only a few hours), I really knew almost nothing about …
Tell me your favorite posts and you could win an hour of consulting worth $200!
UPDATE: Contest extended until Tuesday, 2013 March 26, at 11:59 PM Chicago local time. ALSO! Votes by email and Facebook now allowed by popular demand! To all my readers: I’ve been asked to provide a professional society with three or four great blog posts for them to repost. It gives them some nonstandard content and gives me some exposure so …
Get Your Staging Right to Get Your Expertise Heeded
Presentation matters. A lot. Whether you are trying to get a job, sell a point, or get some respect in your house of worship, you need to spend some time on how the “you” you present to other people makes it easier or harder for them to believe in you. We co-create social realities. The “presentation of self”, as Erving …
Luck Does Not Determine Your Essential Character
I like to point out idiocy by “experts” when I see it. And management writing in Harvard Business Review is usually such a fertile field! Today, let’s look at idiocy about luck and being a great strategist from Hans H. Hinterhuber and Wolfgang Popp (“Are You a Strategist or Just a Manager?”, Jan-Feb 1992). As Moltke observed, the good strategist …
Mary McQueen on Dragon’s Den: 2HiPo on National TV
Did you know that one of my raving fans and frequent commenters, Mary McQueen, appeared on the CBC show, Dragons’ Den? It’s like the American Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs make a pitch before a team of investors trying to get money. Mary pitched her brilliant Hand & Beak business: she makes greeting cards with her lovebird partner, Luigi. No, he’s …
Why Time Span of Discretion Works
Timespan of Discretion is the biggest point of complaint that the old folks in the Glacier Metal related work (Requisite Organization, Stratified Systems Theory, Career Path Appreciation, work levels or worklevels, etc.). If you’re new, you may be scratching your head about this Time Span of Discretion. Elliott Jaques claimed to have discovered that you could determine the complexity of …
That Bad Job Can Destroy You. Forever.
Did you ever stop and think of what that bad job, the one where you don’t fit and is so stressful, is doing to you long term? You should. Because it could be destroying any future you have, even your very soul. After the second Great War, many of the orphanages were severely understaffed. A researcher studied what happened when …