people & performance / strategy & solutions
Take wrong turns.
Talk to strangers.
Open unmarked doors.
And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing.
Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out.
You’re curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off.
There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan.
To find them, look for tiny interesting choices.
And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
John Naughton is surprised at journalists and commentators being horrified at corporations doing despicable things.
Don’t they understand that a corporations is essentially a superintelligent AI which is entirely focussed on achieving its purpose — which in the case of corporations these days is to maximise shareholder value? That’s why Facebook could be entirely run by clones of Mahatma Gandhi and St Francis of Assisi and would still be a toxic company.
I have been taking an unscientific survey among friends, acquaintances, and clients about the type of manager they have had throughout their careers. No list of types or categories. I just ask. Bob Sutton would not be surprised to learn that most of the answers can be clustered around the concept of asshole.
But Naughton’s idea here is different. He is talking about the corporation as a whole. He calls on John Steinbeck to illustrate his pont:
a passage from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrathin which tenant farmers are objecting to foreclosure:
“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land… We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours…. That’s what makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.”
“We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.”
“Yes, but the bank is only made of men.”
“No, you’re wrong there — quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”
The corporation is something more than the human persons in it. It’s a monster. They made it but they can’t control it.
Again this month it’s a combination of research and practical insights, some timely and some timeless:
– A Microsoft study on the impact of remote work on collaboration among its information workers,
– The best worker not always being the best candidate for manager,
– The real challenge about organizing data,
– Yo should up your hiring game,
– The weakest link in the collective intelligence of a team,
– The full dimension of a meeting’s “check-in”,
– It’s time to re-onboard everyone,
… and more!
Happy reading and feel free to share these management and leadership insights with your friends and colleagues.
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Study: participants had to learn to identify the letters of a language they did not know. The learning was prompted in one of three ways: writing by hand, typing, or watching videos.
“At the end, after as many as six sessions, everyone could recognize the letters and made few mistakes when tested. But the writing group reached this level of proficiency faster than the other groups—a few of them in just two sessions.”
Researchers also wanted to know if and when the three groups could generalize this new knowledge: spell like a pro, write words, spell new words, etc.
“The writing group was better—decisively—in all of those things.
“The main lesson is that even though they were all good at recognizing letters, the writing training was the best at every other measure. And they required less time to get there.”
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Report – https://hub.jhu.edu/2021/07/07/handwriting-more-effectively-teaches-reading-skills-brenda-rapp/
Paper – https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797621993111