Isn’t that amazing? The institution of a way to monitor and quantify information ended up leading to the saving of millions (over the years) of lives. Develop a metric that truly measures what you need and then follow its advice.

Digging around in her archives, I found the Evil HR Lady discussing the Apgar score for infants, and why we don’t have something similar for students, despite the fact that most of them have quantifiable and comparable performance metrics.

Categories: Education, Managing, Metrics
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Looks like Warren Buffet is picking a successor. Too bad an expert in Incentive Design didn’t help him come up with his selection criteria:

When I heard about this, the romance died. For all of Mr. Buffett’s reputation as the ultimate nonmutual fund, he may have just fallen into one of the biggest mutual fund traps of all — forgetting how incentives affect fund managers’ behavior.

Winner take all stock market games don’t reward the best investors, they reward the luckiest. It’s a spin-of-the-wheel that determines just which high-risk high-return investment hits pay dirt. Long term success doesn’t matter. The article also discusses the inventives investment managers face to screw their clients.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Managing
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Good writing is one of the most underestimated aspects of professional success. That’s why TheHeadHunter says that you can leverage that Liberal Arts degree into a great job: most people are horrible communicators, especially in writing. I see it every day in e-mails that I get, both personally and professionally. To help solve the problem, Penelope Trunk offers some great tips for professional writing. My favorite is #2:

2. Think on your own time.
Most of us think while we write. But people don’t want to read your thinking process; they want to see the final result. Find your main point in each paragraph and delete everything else. If someone is dying to know your logic, they’ll ask.

I remember reading an e-mail a few weeks ago from a C-level executive that sounded like he sat down at a computer and typed every thought that popped into his head. It was scattered, loopy, and disorganized. Not only did it make it difficult to follow, but it made his ideas seem less credible, no matter how persuasive he tried to be in the e-mail.

Because of that, I have to take issue with her title for number 4:

4. Write like you talk.
Each of us has the gift of rhythm when it comes to sentences, which includes a natural economy of language. But you must practice writing in order to transfer your verbal gifts to the page. Start by avoiding words you never say. For example, you would never say “in conclusion” when you are speaking to someone so don’t use it when you write.

Writing and speaking are different forms of communication, and some people aren’t great talkers in the first place. The key idea here isn’t making colloquial writing, it’s the “economy of language” - keeping things succinct and fluid.

She also advises to keep paragraphs short, maybe 4-5 lines, which I think is great advice for speaking as well. I coach people on what I call the “Three Sentence Rule.” Any time you’re speaking, make sure you solicit some sort of feedback from the audience, whether it’s laughter, nods, suggestions, or input, before continuing on. Preferably, you should let them talk for a bit at that point. People have short attention spans for things that aren’t about themselves, so keeping them focused beyond sentence three is tough, no matter how engaging you are. The three-sentence break gives them an opportunity to recenter the conversation around themselves.

Categories: Careers, Managing
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Jane Galt passes along another look at the power of digital beautification:

Categories: Information Asymmetries, Technology
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Edward Luttwak lays the smack down on the Middle East, Middle East Experts, and the rest of us for caring:

That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts—excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world’s population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia’s 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.

Categories: Israel, Politics
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Gruntled Employees has a two word corporate blogging policy:

“Be professional.”

If your employee-bloggers are posting the secret-sauce recipe, bad-mouthing customers, or distributing NSFW (not safe for work) art, fire them. And if you’re concerned that your employees won’t understand what you mean by “be professional,” then you have a management problem or an employee problem. Or both

Categories: Business and Economics, Governance, Managing, Social Software
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Via Overcoming Bias:

Once upon a time, three groups of subjects were asked how much they would pay to save 2000 / 20000 / 200000 migrating birds from drowning in uncovered oil ponds. The groups respectively answered $80, $78, and $88 [1]. This is scope insensitivity or scope neglect: the number of birds saved - the scope of the altruistic action - had little effect on willingness to pay.

Why?

People visualize “a single exhausted bird, its feathers soaked in black oil, unable to escape” [4]. This image, or prototype, calls forth some level of emotional arousal that is primarily responsible for willingness-to-pay - and the image is the same in all cases. As for scope, it gets tossed out the window - no human can visualize 2000 birds at once, let alone 200000. The usual finding is that exponential increases in scope create linear increases in willingness-to-pay - perhaps corresponding to the linear time for our eyes to glaze over the zeroes; this small amount of affect is added, not multiplied, with the prototype affect. This hypothesis is known as “valuation by prototype”.

An alternative hypothesis is “purchase of moral satisfaction”. People spend enough money to create a warm glow in themselves, a sense of having done their duty. The level of spending needed to purchase a warm glow depends on personality and financial situation, but it certainly has nothing to do with the number of birds.

Categories: Incentive Centered Design, Philanthropy
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Data from the latest National Health Interview Survey suggests that the land line is becoming a thing of the past. Yahoo news has a summary:

One in four people aged 18 to 24 had only cell phones, as did 29 percent of those aged 25 to 29, the study showed. The percentages declined with age after that, with 2 percent of those 65 or over having only cell phones.

The group most likely to have only a cell phone are young people with low incomes. Studies on the subject still conclude that the cell-only population isn’t large enough to skew broad polls, but it certainly has an affect on segmentation, especially towards these target groups.

Categories: Generations, Polling, Technology
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When asked to review some E-Learning software, Ryan Healy tells it like it is:

Eventually, I replied and told her that I hate all e-learning.

She said that most millennials she works with dislike e-learning. So, she only designs e-learning tools that are coupled with personal teaching and discussion.

After mentioning my desire to write a post about doing away with e-learning, J.T gave me some great insight. She told me, “It helps save companies thousands in training costs.”

E-learning doesn’t help companies save money, it helps them lower costs. There’s a difference, because e-learning is effectively wasted dollars. It lets HR and corporate training departments fill their checkbox requirements (”Look, so-and-so should know that, they took the e-learning). Most e-learning programs are just a booklet divided up into sections that they make you click through, followed by an inanely simple and irrelevant quiz. Better to just make a web page and let people read it how they want and when they want. The most effective e-learning I’ve ever seen wasn’t even traditional e-learning. It was just a group of links that said “Want to know more about ____? Click here.” For people who needed more information, it gave it to them, and for everyone else, it didn’t waste their time.

Ryan is right, it’s not just Millennials who hate e-learning, everyone does. It’s a waste of time. Putting a generational qualifier there is a cop-out, and it sounds like the consultant peddling it is using it as an excuse. “Yes, some people hate e-learning, but those are Millenials and we don’t understand them anyways.”

Note: After writing this, I realized I used on-line tutorials for computer programming, like those at http://www.w3schools.com, fairly extensively, but I don’t think they fall into what people think of when they hear ‘e-learning’.

Categories: Education, Generations
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