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Well, I collected two more higher mode thirtysomethings yesterday. I gave a guy who does conceptual abstratct — or strategic — thinking (which makes him at least Mode 7) and a 33 year-old who is at least Mode 5 (obvious) and I'm afraid is Mode 7 or 8, which I hope to know after I code the interviews. Why does everyone say that these people are so hard to find? They're like weeds, growing all over the organization, especially in low levels. I think I could walk in a large company at random and find high mode, severely underemployed people.
I think that you can't understand what it feels like to be a high-mode young person in a lower mode community (whether work or one's nonwork life) unless you've seen it. The younger guy and I met last night. He let me do a CIP interview with him for my PeopleFit class. We ended up talking about his career and where he is right now for about 2½ hours afterwards. He told me that he's been so concerned about his inability to focus on the details of work that he was going to schedule an appointment with his doctor to see if he had ADD. If you have never seen this, I seriously doubt that you can understand. It's like experiencing the death of someone close to you: until you go through it, you are not even all that good at imagining what it would be like. He thinks that he can't communicate, that he's got attention problems, that he is stupid. This is what I've been talking about as High-Mode problems.
Wood, Robert E. (2002). "Self-versus others' ratings as predictors of assessment center ratings: Validation evidence for 360-degree feedback programs". Personnel Psychology, Dec. 22, 20002: pp.?. From the HiBeam Online Research Library
Another item from this BIG gig.
While at the PeopleFit "Assessing Raw Talent" class this last week, I heard that it is common for people to overestimate the CIP (Elliott Jaques's idea of Complexity of Information Processing) of persons who have a lower CIP and to underestimate their subordinates who have a higher CIP than they do. I figured that they were simply citing Wood's article. Nope, it turns out that they've seen this in evaluations.
Wood's article is pretty interesting. He tested employees' self-ratings, their managers' ratings of them, and their peers' rating of them against an assessment center's rating of them. It turns out that the people who have the very highest opinion of themselves were the worst in assessment. But the best performers consistently underrated themselves.
Not only that, but peers were likely to overrate underperformers within their own group, while managers were likely to underrate high performers.
...those who rated themselves in the mid-range of the scale were more likely to be high performers than those who rated themselves at the top or bottom ends of the scale. Furthermore, those who rated themselves most highly tended to be the poorest performers... [S]upervisor ratings successfully discriminated between overestimators but were not as successful at discriminating underestimators, suggesting that more modest feedback recipients might be underrated by their supervisors... Perhaps, like feedback recipients themselves, peers were conscious of the evaluative nature of 360-survey feedback and felt the need to exaggerate the performance of poor performers in order to boost ther overall evaluation.
My goddaughter's favorite group has a new album, mmhmm coming out November 2 and they are releasing one of the tracks into the wild.
Hey Relient K fans. Download the new song "More Than Useless", from the upcoming album "mmhmm", available November 2nd.
click here to download for free: http://www.mmhmm.com
I'm sure that everyone is thrilled. But I confess to liking "Sadie Hawkins Dance" and "(Marilyn Manson Ate My) Girlfriend". These kids! Soon they'll get me listening to their rock and/or roll!
Since I have blasted the current President Bush in a recent comment for apparently not having any regrets over the events of the last four years, let me take my "undecide voter" against Senator Kerry and his weasel answer about abortion in the town-hall format debate.
Mr Kerry was asked:
[Sarah] DEGENHART: Senator Kerry, suppose you are speaking with a voter who believed abortion is murder and the voter asked for reassurance that his or her tax dollars would not go to support abortion, what would you say to that person?
KERRY: I would say to that person exactly what I will say to you right now.
And that person would have kneed him for it.
Since the President appeared to be flustered by the question in the last debate about "name three mistakes that you have made", so much so that he did not even name the first mistake. To help the nominee along, I am providing the answer that he obviously meant to give, an answer that is politically savvy and to the point. I'll start with the actual question and then give the response.
[ Continue reading "Mr Bush's Three Mistakes Answer" ]GRABEL: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you. [from transcript of the second debate at the Commission for Presidential Debates]
MY MADE-UP RESPONSE FOR MR BUSH
BUSH: [pauses] That's a hard question, Linda. I want to answer you honestly, so I'm going to tell you the truth. No prepared answer. Only the truth.
Three mistakes? Linda, every morning that I wake up, I think about over 3.000 mistakes, deaths that should never have occurred, deaths in the twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. I wake up every morning and know that I have to do everything possible to make sure that this never happens again.
People tell me that there was no way to predict that attack, that sooner or later this determined group of killers would get beyond our excellent law enforcement and intelligence communities. But I am the President of the United States, and when the system fails under my watch, the buck stops with me.
I'm not about to get into the morality of killing Osama bin Laden. I would like to point out that if he is Stratum VII now, it may be pretty important to get rid of him quickly. If he's Stratum VIII, we're going to have a much harder fight.
In that, President Bush is wrong when he says that finding bin Laden is not the principle aim of his war on terror. True in a way, but not in much of a way. Getting bin Laden out of the leadership circle would cripple al-Qaida. Not immediately. But it would prevent the group from having a coherent policy set for the next twenty years. It should also make the group easier to catch. There are not that many folks who equal Mr bin Laden's complexity, which may make finding him after the US botched the job of getting Mr bin Laden when they had him in Tora Bora.
We need a variety of plans. And we really need to have the best and brightest of America dedicating their lives to government service. We also need to hunt down and capture Mr bin Laden. Leaders are important. Not perhaps as important as Americans are wont to think, but important nonetheless.
It also would behoove us to begin to remove the potential future leadership of the terrorist organizations. For too many years, we have ceded the front position on humanitarian issues in the Muslim world to terrorist organizations. That must end. We must find the high mode youngsters and educate them differently. Palestinian Christians (and they make up a large minority) have been crying out over the many young Christians who convert to Islam because the Muslims are doing something about the Israeli oppression.
Our three month plans about terrorism — or any matter — must be extended to handle a much greater distance into the future. Bin Laden has succeeded in humbling a superpower because he thought out decades instead of months. To be his enemy, I must match him; I must out think him.
Terrorism, as one American counter-terrorist observes, is a thinking man's game. It's past time for us to start out thinking them.
Again, just so I can keep track later of what I've read:
Huckman, Robert S. and Gary P. Pisano (2003). "The Effect Of Organizational Context On Individual Performance: Evidence From Cardiac Surgery". Preprint of article, available at Harvard Business School, Harvard University.
Adler, Paul S. and Kim B. Clark (1991). "Behind the Learning Curve: A Sketch of the Learning Process". Management Science, 37(3): 267-281.
Some more articles I reviewed for BIG. These are here so that I don't lose track for work that I've read before.
Baster, Greg; Prabhudev Konana; and Judy E. Scott (2001). "Business Components: A case study of Bankers Trust Australia Limited". Communications of the ACM, 44(5): 92-98. [ACM 0002-0782/01/0500]
Gordon, Jack and Ron Zemke (2000). "The Attack on ISD". Training, April 2000: 43-53.
Fitzgerald, Edmond P. and Aileen Cater-Steel (1995). "Champagne Training on a Beer Budget". Communications of the ACM, 38:7: 49-60. [ACM 0002-0782/95/0700]
Towler, Annette J. and Robert L. Dipboye (2003). "Development of a learning style orientation measure". Organizational Research Methods, 6(2): 216-235.
Since I'm about to roll off my contract at BIG, here's a list of some of what I've read for them. This doesn't count anything I simply read online. Also, in no particular order. I must be nuts...
Nelson, Kay and Mehdi Ghods (2002). "Evaluating the Contributions of a Structured Software Development and Maintenance Methodology." Information Technology and Management, 3:11-23.
Watts, Stephanie and P.J. Guinan (1997). "Software Development Under Conditions of High Task Complexity and Ambiguity". Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. IEEE Computer Society.
Chung, WooYoung (1994). "Effects of participative management on the performance of software development teams". ACM SIGCPR 94 (03/1994), 252-260.
Corritore, Cynthia and Susan Wiedenbeck (2000). "Direction and scope of comprehension-related activities by procedural and object-oriented programmers: an empirical study". IEEE Computer Society. [0-7695-0656-9/00]
To make all my conservative friends happy, I give you my estimation of last night's Vice-Presidential debate. I think that VP Cheney won the debates. But he also came off knowing more about what was going on than did President Bush. I couldn't help but think of the Bentsen - Quayle years ago, although this wasn't quite the cakewalk that was. Poor Dan: he got eaten alive by the dodger.
Cheney came off very poised and prepared, even though he needed to stop covering up his microphone with his lapels and hands. Edwards stayed more "on message" but Cheney actually answered the questions fielded to him. I especially admired his "I support the president" on issues of gay marriage, but not rising to the bait to say something that he didn't believe. Be he right or wrong on this, I admired his walking that hard balance between supporting the president's position and denying his own beliefs.
He's quite evidently the bigger guy on stage. He didn't do a debate, didn't run it like most other debaters would. He addressed answers that didn't sound too rehearsed; some that even sounded like he was answering off the cuff. Edwards sounded scripted and rehearsed. Competent, but not quite in Cheney's league.
If the issue of "defending marriage" is a must have for you, you've got to think twice about Cheney as VP, I'd think. Should he rise to the presidency, I can't imagine him following the same positions as the current President.
The trip through the roundabout is coming on faster than I had thought: the client has ended my contract early. My last working day is Oct. 29.
I'd go back to school, but seeing the mileage that we got out of L's University of Chicago PhD, I can't see it doing much more than making getting work even harder.
I always did like that roundabout. Now I have time to work on that list of fun things for JMMJ's process group.