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Recent quotes:
You want to be the boss. You probably won’t be good at it. — Harvard Gazette
If you give a manager a team of workers who aren’t very capable, that team is going to do a poor job, and if the workers are all-stars, they will make the manager look good regardless. In other words, when a team succeeds, we don’t know how much credit or blame to assign to the manager compared to other members of the team.
To solve that problem, we bring a bunch of people into a controlled lab setting, and we assign them a group task that they must do together. We randomly assign the role of manager to one of the three people on the team, and we ask them to lead their group in the task, and we see how well they do. Then we randomly assign each manager again to another group of workers. Each time, as a manager, you’re getting a different set of people, so we have a way to account for the quality of the workers you’re getting. And since we’re assigning workers, we can also identify who’s a good worker because we can see their performance with different managers.
You want to be the boss. You probably won’t be good at it. — Harvard Gazette
There are only two things that are: One is IQ as measured by the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, which measures general and fluid intelligence, spatial reasoning, problem-solving, etc. But the one that’s more interesting to me is a measure of what we call economic-decision-making skill, or the ability to allocate resources effectively, that my co-authors and I created in a different paper. We use that very same measure in this experiment, and we found that it is highly predictive of being a good manager.
You want to be the boss. You probably won’t be good at it. — Harvard Gazette
We found that people with the greatest preference for being in charge are, on average, worse than randomly assigned managers. It’s hard to know exactly why because there are a lot of factors in play, but we show evidence in the paper that they are overconfident in their own capabilities, and they think they understand other people better than they do. We all know people like that.
horses for courses - Dan Davies - "Back of Mind"
All of which means that horse racing data has an absolutely massive curse of dimensionality. If you’re trying to estimate a model to use historical race data to tell you which horse out of a field of eight or nine is likely to show up fastest, then you’d have to, at the very least, take into account the course, distance, “going” (ground conditions) and class of each race. Since there are also interaction effects (different courses will suit different horses depending on whether it’s muddy or dry, for example), then you’re eating up degrees of freedom very quickly.
Added to which, there’s a curse of non-stationarity. You want lots of data points to deal with your curse of dimensionality, but very few horses have more than a dozen starts in a season. So the more data you collect, the older some of it is. And a lot can change for a horse in a year – injuries, changes of trainer and the simple effect of maturity and aging.
Promotions and the Peter Principle* | The Quarterly Journal of Economics | Oxford Academic
Using microdata on the performance of sales workers at 131 firms, we find evidence consistent with the Peter Principle, which proposes that firms prioritize current job performance in promotion decisions at the expense of other observable characteristics that better predict managerial performance. We estimate that the costs of promoting workers with lower managerial potential are high, suggesting either that firms are making inefficient promotion decisions or that the benefits of promotion-based incentives are great enough to justify the costs of managerial mismatch. We find that firms manage the costs of the Peter Principle by placing less weight on sales performance in promotion decisions when managerial roles entail greater responsibility and when frontline workers are incentivized by strong pay for performance.
Managing Oneself
As this example suggests, it is rarely possible—or even particularly fruitful—to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific. So the question in most cases should be, Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half? The answer must balance several things. First, the results should be hard to achieve—they should require “stretching,” to use the current buzzword. But also, they should be within reach. To aim at results that cannot be achieved—or that can be only under the most unlikely circumstances—is not being ambitious; it is being foolish. Second, the results should be meaningful. They should make a difference. Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable. From this will come a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set.
When to break from the herd to make a better decision -- ScienceDaily
Researchers found that when people saw others in their group hesitating before making a choice, they were about twice as likely to break from the group and make a different choice.
"When we see other people hesitate before making a choice, that tells us they were conflicted, that they weren't entirely sure they were making the right decision," said Ian Krajbich, co-author of the study and professor of psychology and economics at The Ohio State University.
"That makes people less confident in the group consensus and frees them to make decisions based on their own information. That can help groups to escape bad outcomes."
Drinking Too Much Is an American Problem - The Atlantic
Over time, groups that drank together would have cohered and flourished, dominating smaller groups—much like the ones that prayed together. Moments of slightly buzzed creativity and subsequent innovation might have given them further advantage still. In the end, the theory goes, the drunk tribes beat the sober ones.
Expressing variety of emotions earns entrepreneurs funding -- ScienceDaily
The study showed that those who used a variety of three emotional expressions -- happiness, anger and fear -- had the most fundraising success. The only emotion that had a negative effect on funding was sadness.
Humans tend to make problem-solving unnecessarily complex, new study shows - The Washington Post
The tendency to overlook subtraction may be implicated in a variety of costly modern trends, including overburdened minds and schedules, increasing red tape in institutions and humanity’s encroachment on the safe operating conditions for life on Earth,” the authors write.
The grid problem was one of eight experiments reported in the paper. In another, subjects were asked to stabilize the wobbly roof of a Lego structure by either adding or removing bricks. The easiest solution was to remove a single brick, allowing the roof to lie flat atop the base. But only 40 percent of participants took this route; the others added bricks to create more supports, even when doing so reduced the amount of money they received for completing the task.
Research: Adding Women to the C-Suite Changes How Companies Think
Our study begins to explore those mechanisms, finding that when women are appointed to the C-suite, they catalyze fundamental shifts in the top management team’s risk tolerance, openness to change, and focus on M&As versus R&D.
'Emotional' reviews predict business success, new study shows: That five-star rating? It doesn't say what you think it does -- ScienceDaily
In one study, they looked at the movie industry and examined 13 years of Metacritic reviews from 2005 to 2018. Star ratings, they found, were a significant negative predictor of box office success. Emotionality, however, was a significant positive predictor.
The researchers also were able to predict the success of books on Amazon using the same model based on 20 years of data from 1995 to 2015. They found that 91% of books received a positive rating (four or five stars). The average star rating was an unreliable and sometimes even negative predictor of purchases; however, greater emotionality was predictive of more sales in 93% of genres.
Commuting Hurts Productivity and Your Best Talent Suffers Most - HBS Working Knowledge
When measuring the number and quality of patented inventions by high-tech inventors, Wu and his colleagues found that for every 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) of added travel distance, the firm employing those inventors registered 5 percent fewer patents. The quality of the patents took an even bigger dive, dropping 7 percent with every 6.2 miles added to the inventors’ commute.
The most talented inventors suffered the most; the greatest productivity losses were found among the highest-performing inventors, those among the top 10 percent.
Teen Vogue Editor’s Tweets Aren’t the Whole Story | The New Republic
The danger is it’s the easy narratives—and they are so easy—that tend to catch fire. Cancel culture is quickly being made out to be the problem in society today, and it’s not by accident that the stories that get picked up and picked apart are those of campus activists or young staffers at a glossy magazine, who are easily painted as too privileged and too woke. And now the arguments have become so meaninglessly replicable that they’re echoed by the likes of Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump—some of the most powerful, most protected politicians in the country—as a defense when they are being held to account.
Outgrowing software — Benedict Evans
The car industry probably created more millionaires in retail and real estate than in the actual car industry - making cars was just one industry, but mass car ownership changed everything else. I often think that’s a good way to think about the state of tech today: 80% of the world’s adult population has a smartphone now, so how many things can we do with that? That’s what ‘software is eating the world’ means. But part of that is also that Walmart wasn’t built by car people, from Detroit. It was built by retailers. Sam Walton was born a decade after the Model T, and this year’s MBA class was born the year Netscape launched. At a certain point, everyone has grown up with this stuff, everything is a software company, and the important questions are somewhere else.
Goldman CEO Warns Remote Work Is Aberration, Not the New Normal - Bloomberg
“This is not ideal for us and it’s not a new normal,” Solomon said at a Credit Suisse Group AG conference. “It’s an aberration that we are going to correct as quickly as possible.”
The hazards of second-guessing | Chicago Booth Review
Overall, the participants asked to analyze whether their first guess had been too high or low performed worse on their second prediction—that is, their second guesses were more likely to be more extreme and thus less likely to be in the correct direction relative to the first. The results held across several experiments, both online and in person.
The researchers also wanted to test the phenomenon in a situation without the boundaries of percentages, so they asked another group of participants to look at stock prices for 10 well-known companies and predict what the prices would be two weeks in the future. As before, one group analyzed their first guess before making a second one—and once again, this group produced second guesses that were more extreme than the first, making the average less accurate.
Asking people explicitly to evaluate their first guess may cause them to use that first guess as a reference point, which can lead to a second guess that’s further from the actual target, the researchers explain.
Introducing Working From Anywhere | HR Blog
A flexible working culture is built on trust, communication, collaboration, and connection and acknowledging that we’re all individuals, with different needs and rituals gives us the right frame of mind to let go of a few chosen truths and instead find what’s right for our business and our people. We have considered labour law, tax and insurance readiness for our workforce to be ‘working from anywhere’ – whether that’s working from home, in a café, hotel lounge or a co-working space. And, not forgetting the investment required to make sure the safety and growth of our people.
Part of our DNA has always been controlled chaos. So, in the spirit of this, we’re trying this out knowing that there are likely to be some adjustments to make along the way. By experimenting and unlocking all talent we also enable diversity and inclusion, and making new jobs and markets available.
Hybrid Remote Work Offers the Worst of Both Worlds | WIRED
Hybrid creates two fundamentally different employee experiences to manage. Despite recent successes with remote work, employers are reopening offices to some of their employees to encourage social bonding, reinforce culture, and increase business collaboration. The assumption underlying these reopenings is that some critical things can’t be done as effectively outside of the office. Leaders who built their businesses in offices counted on shared space to act as a glue for culture and as a stopgap for inefficiencies in communication systems and processes. While the office-based model has historically proven to be successful for many companies, it will provide significant challenges for companies committed to also supporting a remote workforce. If an office is the “glue,” and processes and systems don’t adapt for a remote workforce, remote team members will not feel included and will face constant communication barriers. This will make it harder for them to perform at the same level as their in-office peers.
Creating a Best Workplace from Anywhere, for Everyone - Salesforce News
This employee feedback has guided our re-opening strategy and how we’ll work going forward. We learned that nearly half of our employees want to come in only a few times per month, but also that 80% of employees want to maintain a connection to a physical space. So we are giving employees flexibility in how, when and where they work with three ways of working:
Flex – When it’s safe to return to the office, most of our employees around the globe will work flex. This means they’ll be in the office 1-3 days per week for team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations.
Fully Remote – For employees who don’t live near an office or have roles that don’t require an office, they will work remotely full-time.
Office-based – The smallest population of our workforce will work from an office location 4-5 days per week if they’re in roles that require it.
College classrooms are still chilly for women, as men speak more, study finds: Gendered participation has a long way to go to reach equity -- ScienceDaily
Men speak 1.6 times more often than women in college classrooms, revealing how gender inequities regarding classroom participation still exist, according to a Dartmouth study. By comparison, women are more hesitant to speak and are more apt to use apologetic language. The findings are published in Gender & Society.
When students didn't have to raise their hands to participate in class, men spoke three times more often than women. "You would think that it would be more equitable for students to not have to raise their hands to speak in class because then anyone could talk but our results showed otherwise. The higher level of participation relates to the idea of who may have felt like they were entitled to speak or had permission to do so," explains Janice McCabe, an associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. "Once you take away the structure of a professor calling on students, you see more of the cultural expectations that people may have, and the gender hierarchies present in the college classroom today."
Dogmatic people seek less information even when uncertain -- ScienceDaily
Dogmatic individuals and moderates did not differ in their accuracy or confidence of their decisions. However, the researchers found that more dogmatic participants were more likely to decline the helpful additional information.
The differences between more and less dogmatic participants were especially large when participants had little confidence in a decision. Senior author Dr Steve Fleming (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL, Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Ageing Research and UCL Experimental Psychology) said: "Previous work has found that there is a close link between how confident we feel and whether or not we seek out new information. In the current study we found that this link was weaker in more dogmatic individuals."
In general, the reduced search was detrimental, with more dogmatic people being less accurate in their final judgements.
Opinion: COVID-19 is like running a marathon with no finish line. What does sports science say about how we can win it? - The Globe and Mail
It turns out that, if you ask yourself “Can I keep going?” rather than “Can I make it to the finish?” you’re far more likely to answer in the affirmative. That’s the approach the Quarantine Backyard Ultra and events like it force on you.
“The next loop, always the next loop,” French runner Guillaume Calmettes told The Guardian after notching 59 laps in 59 hours to win a similar (but non-virtual) event in 2017. “You’re never overwhelmed by what you have left to run, because you simply don’t know what you have left to run.”
Opinion: COVID-19 is like running a marathon with no finish line. What does sports science say about how we can win it? - The Globe and Mail
By the time Mr. Wardian decided to pull the chute in his ultramarathon, his only remaining competitors were a guy on a treadmill in the Czech Republic and a woman in Sweden who had plowed her loop through several feet of snow. With the dawn of a third day of racing still a few hours off, he wandered over to the tent he’d set up outside his house and told his wife, who was crewing for him, that he didn’t want to continue. “That’s not a good excuse,” she replied. He considered it and decided she was right. He headed back out for another lap.
Paul McCartney reflects on meeting John Lennon and their songwriting partnership
“I think, ‘Wow, how lucky was I to meet this strange Teddy Boy off the bus who turned out to play music like I did, and we get together and, boy, we complemented each other’. They say with marriages opposites attract and we weren’t madly opposites, but I had some stuff that he didn’t have and he had some stuff I didn’t have so when you put them together it made something extra.”
What Donald Trump Could Learn From Playing Poker - POLITICO
In 2004, the game of poker in full boom, Trump once again gave an interview about the game, when he graced the cover of the newly launched Bluff magazine. He still hadn’t found time to play, he admitted. But he did know where he would direct his invitations if he had to pick six historical figures to play with: Winston Churchill, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Moses, Leonardo da Vinci and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He reckoned he would be a favorite in the lineup. “Would I win?” came his musings. “Most likely.”
An interesting assumption, given that at least one of his imaginary opponents, Churchill, was no poker slouch. But that’s the thing about bad players—they always think they’re going to win. Right until the moment they lose.
