Dan Erwin

Experience Rules in Today's Job Market

Even recent college grads had better be able to put experience on their resume and be able to talk about what they've gotten out of their experience. So says Katherine Brooks' latest blog. And she knows what she's blogging about. She has a most uniquely titled position at the University of Texas Austin: Director of Career Services for Liberal Arts Graduates. Don't concern yourself thinking she's just another ivory tower type. She wears the hat, but it doesn't fit her blogging.

When I first stumbled on Brooks' blog, Career Transitions,a couple weeks ago, her name grabbed me. I realized that she was the author of that fine book for graduating seniors with a liberal arts degree, grads looking for a job that'll provide a decent living. Her book has the catchy title, You Majored in What? And it gets right to the issues, deciphering the job market and relieving stress from grads in humanities and social science. I wrote a review of her still very timely book nearly two years ago. My blog, You majored in what? provides a bit more background for you.

There are a lot of things right about a liberal arts degree, if. . . you graduated from one of the most selective schools in the nation. Or, if you have the wherewithal and support to go on to graduate school. And if you fill in your liberal arts with a year of computer science, economics, communications, etc. If you were smart enough to get summer internships, work experience build a network. And if you got a STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) liberal arts major.

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Many liberal arts faculty don't want to become vocational school teachers. That makes sense, but it overstates the case. As a nationally-experienced executive coach, I've learned that liberal arts grads tend to be the better thinkers in business, know how to learn, are adaptable and, typically, have solid communication skills. That means they can come up to speed quickly. Just exactly what firms are looking for. So if you're thinking about liberal arts, a recent liberal arts graduate or are not certain about your major's financial future, here's the jobs' blogger for you.

Prof. Brooks' blogs are filled with great stuff, solid research and spot-on recommendations. What I most appreciate about her blogs is not the intense relevance or even her smart use of statistics, but the fact that she has a bias toward evidence-based recommendations. Brooks blogs regularly on the Psychology Today site. Here are the titles of just a few of her most recent posts:

• Employers seek proof of your skills
• Five steps for improving your job search
• The question isn't "Are resumes dead?" The question is "Are resumes enough?"
• Are you T-Shaped? The most sought after candidates are.
• How to benefit from losing the lottery.

Brooks provides a fascinating stream of research on careers and jobs. She also has her own website, Wise Wanderings, filled with practical, highly useful stuff. Her website strategy is straightforward:

Welcome to CareerArtistry, my website dedicated to helping liberal arts students and alumni (and just about anyone who is seeking a new way to earn a living) navigate their way through the 21st century job market, where linear systems are fading away and chaos reigns.

Check out Brooks' blog. I'm certain you'll find it exceptionally valuable.

"How to Be Brilliant." It's All About Discipline, Not Giftedness.

Who would think that a single book review could garner so much attention? The blog, originally published in March 2010, continues to garner weekly attention. Both the book and the issue are groundbreaking. The issue is just as important today, so here's the original blog. . . . 

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Forget about genes as "unchanging" "blueprints" and talent as a "gift," all tied up in a bow. The review of David Shenk's new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've been told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ is Wrong, in today's NYTimes Book Review summarizes much of the important research findings over the past ten years.

Reading over the review a couple times, I hooted with laughter remembering the old saw from music school about how to get to play at Carnagie Hall: practice, practice, practice. That's exactly what Anders Ericsson has learned about development, the notion of deliberate practice.

Shenk sets out to overthrow the conventional ideas surrounding the words, "nature" and "nurture." But he also recognizes that you can't overthrow the conventional ideas and images that have been accumulating for more than 125 years. In fact, as I've argued in numerous places, old dogma dies hard. Once concepts are deeply embedded, a superstructure of assumptions and ideas grows around it. Rejecting a dogma means that many ideas are now questionable, more research could be invalid, and that the reputation and contribution of many scientists might be questioned. As you can guess, old dogma rarely gets challenged.

Still, two significant and distinct lines of psychological research have been built up over the last fifteen years. One body of research shows that intelligence is fundamentally a competence that can be developed. A second line of research shows that supervised coaching, maintained at high levels for extended time periods, along with disciplined learning, can be far-reaching.

I draw two very important conclusions from this research. First, the next time you pick up the Wall Street Journal and read an article by Charles Murray (of the Bell Curve) and his ilk, remember that he's either BSing or clueless. Here's a copy of a letter by Robert Sternberg of Yale and Tufts, which I've posted on my website, challenging Murray's archaic ideas.

What the research also reveals is that we need not be stuck in careers and vocations that go the way of the Dodo bird as a result of technology and innovation. If we are willing to persist in continual growth, we can create new opportunities for ourselves. I've seen clients do that very thing for years and years.

Oh yeah. What Shenk seems to be unfamiliar with is the notion of small wins, the best way to persist and grow in the face of failure. You can find my basic discussion of the process and the research here. Why small changes work. . . . and Motivation and small wins . . . .

Flickr photo: by Vladsun

Is Leadership Passé?

Not quite, but you’d better start learning how to “do” collaboration. Competency needs grow out of cultural, economic and organizational demands. And today’s world, more and more, needs the skills of collaboration.

Recognize this!
The manufacturing age, which began with Henry Ford in the early 1900’s, focused on manufacturing’s needed competency: managing. Employees weren’t knowledge agents. They pounded widgets and followed orders, and everyone, bosses and ordinary employees, was fairly clueless about leadership. The only related term was “leader.”

A leader was the next rung up the manufacturing ladder from us peasants (I spent my year off from college—summer 1957 to spring 1958—in a Detroit manufacturing plant. And I was one of those peasants. But, since it was Detroit at the height of the manufacturing age, I made a huge pot of money, got my shit together, and went back to college and graduate school. Astute move.) The ascending order of company hierarchy was peasant (or whatever), leader, foreman, supervisor, then white collar executives who drove big Detroit cars. The leader was merely a very low level manager, responsible for five to ten people and their widget production. He usually drove a little Detroit Chevy, Plymouth or Ford. I had a great leader for my manufacturing education. You might find my experience very enlightening, here.) But the leader was totally a very controlling manager. He wasn’t interested in your ideas. He was not what we think of today as a leader.

By the 1970’s there was a fair amount of clarity on managing. When the explosion of technology in the 1980s demanded a different kind of smarts—Drucker’s knowledge worker—leadership was required to manage those people. Unlike my experience in Detroit, organizations began to realize that we humans weren’t merely peasants or robots. So the talk circled around the need for leadership, the definition of leadership, the differences between leading and managing, and questions of whether leaders are born or made. (They’re made!)

But society, economics and business continue their volatile move into the future. And in today's world, the great need for competency is the discipline of collaboration.

What’s collaboration?
Don’t be too quick to say that you know how to collaborate. Few do. It’s a tough skill to navigate. Like leadership, there are no born collaborators. And it’s very easy to go off the rails when you’re attempting to “do” collaboration, wondering what the hell just happened.

The first major shot across the bow on the subject of collaboration is Morton Hansen’s Collaboration: How leaders (there’s that word again) avoid the traps, create unity, and reap big results. It’s exceptionally good for the first pass at a major business subject. (Although not nearly as much fun as the first major shot at leadership by Warren Bennis. But no business writer can match the fun in Bennis and I’ll be very sorry to see his smarts and literary brilliance pass off the scene. God, what a well-rounded, well educated, highly practical, humanistic thinker!)

But back to Hansen. It takes him 14 pages to get around to defining his subject (He needed a better editor). He talks about it as the process by which people from different units work together in cross-unit teams on a common task or provide significant help to each other. Though accurate, his definition is pretty flat, lacking pizzaz. But, as I said above, there ain’t many Bennises.

Where Hansen is especially useful is his in analysis of what is and is not collaboration, when to use it and when not to use it, and what it can do for an organization.

Why collaboration?
In chapter 2, Hansen lays out his case for collaboration. Though his rationale is simple-minded and obvious, it’s exceptionally important and highly reflective of business needs today. Don’t forget, everything is obvious once you know the answer (see Duncan Watts). Hansen sees better innovation, better sales, and better operations providing a huge rationale for the competency. And he supplies a superb set of examples to explain his rationale. Every organization from P&G and Norwest Bank to British Petroleum.

Hansen needs to make much clearer that because of the knowledge explosion, no single person in business today, no single division or group, has the intelligence to create a product or service ready for the consumer to buy. You’re simply going to have to access a lot of smarts, from more than one place, or else you’ll get beat up badly by the companies that do understand and act upon the knowledge explosion. I wish that was obvious, but sadly, it isn’t. That’s one of the reasons many companies go bankrupt and disappear from the stock market.

Why so tough?
Though I have both extensive education and extensive experience in the field of collaboration it's still tough as nails to pull off. For a number of reasons. We have all these business silos still very much in place and their members aren’t interested in cross-silo collaborating, even when needed. Indeed, collaborators often find themselves in hostile territory attempting to pull off collaboration. Hansen’s comparison of Sony and Apple makes the point exceptionally well.

Another related issue, just as important, is that a huge portion of the business population is congenitally incapable of collaboration. It seems not to be in the genes. It's like strategic thinking. Ninety-five percent of business folk are incrementalists and can't think strategically. The training in collaboration, thus far, is also piss-poor. And long term, when organizations get around to recognizing the absolute necessity for the competency, they may have to terminate some of their folk to fulfill their organizational needs and succeed financially.

Collaboration relationships between business people and their clients is just downright terrifying to many. They have no models for collaboration, no personal experiences of the subject, and frankly, don’t really believe it can be pulled off. But as Apple has proved exceptionally well (in spite of their fascist leader, Jobs), great success in the knowledge economy absolutely requires the competency of collaboration.

It’s plainly obvious that long term, collaborative abilities are going to be more important than leadership. Besides, if you can “do” collaboration, you can "do" leadership. Leadership is merely (that’s right, “merely”) a subset of effective collaboration.

Photo fm Flickr: by starheadboy

Forget What You Think You Know About Gen-Yers

Five Millennial Myths
The conventional wisdom that Millennials--all those under the age of 30--are needy and narcissistic is deeply flawed, says Jennifer Deal.

Deal, a research scientist at the Center for Leadership in San Diego, has a book on the subject. Based on extensive survey research, she says that the stereotypes of Millennials are "inconsistent at best and destructive at worst."

Deal's summary in the latest issue of Booz-Allen's Strategy+Business challenges the five millenial myths that have been going the rounds for several years. My own extensive experience with the youngest generation supports her conclusions. Here's a thumbnail sketch of her conclusions:

Myth #1: Millennials don't want to be told what to do.  The unexpected conclusion is that they're exceptionally deferential to authority. More than the other work generations: Baby Boomers--30%, Gen Xers--30%, and Millennials--41%. The obvious implication is that managers can readily shape millennial employees' behavior. That is, if the millennials understand the culture and know the expectations. Her suggestion is almost too funny, but very true: Millennials even appreciate being told what time to arrive at the office. (The flip side will also come up. "If I've worked 12 hours or more, several days in a row, do you think I can go home early?")

Myth #2: Millenials lack organizational loyalty. Deal's research finds that the group has about the same amount of organizational commitment as the other generations. Her explanation of the myth is that Gen-Yers, who are at the lower levels of the organization, are paid less and have less responsible positions. Their elders are likely to be more invested in the organization because of income and responsibility. It's all a matter of the fact that in your 20s is liable to be the best and only time that you can try on new jobs and careers. Loyalty is a characteristic of age, not generation.

Myth #3: Millennials aren't interested in their work. This is new to me, but evidently the mythology is out there. As the research shows, my experience has been that all people at the lower organizational levels are slightly less motivated by the content of their jobs than higher-ups. They're just not that motivated to do grunt work. This is true of all of us, and especially in our early career years. Most understand that grunt work is part of a job, but a reasonable portion of the job should be interesting. If not, why not find a new job?

Myth #4: Millennials are motivated by perks and high pay.  No more, the research says, than Boomers and Gen Xers. And although you think that handing them an iPad will increase their dedication to the job, it won't. As one of my Gen-Yer friends said, "cool," but it didn't increase his overall motivation.

Myth #5: Millennials want more work-life balance. This myth is "marginally accurate." But as Deal points out, society as a whole now believes that life is about more than just work. Policies such as flex schedules, part of a work-life balance, are perceived to be important by both Gen Xers and Yers. 

Ensuring that workers of all generations are "engaged contributors to the workforce" is far more critical in this world than in the last century. Knowledge is the key corporate equity, not bricks and mortar. Deal has given us a highly useful understanding of the Millennial generation.  

Jennifer Deal, Retiring the Generation Gap (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2007)
Photo fm flickr: Ali Goldie

"How to Be Irresistible to Women"

It's not coincidence. With Virginia Rometty as IBM's new CEO and Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, my wife and daughters will be proud. So it's not surprising that the exceptionally knowledgeable Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid have just published a book on why women are the solution to winning the war for talent.

In a blog published in strategy + business, Sally Helgesen set the book's context and printed an excerpt from the new book. Helgesen points out that though the first efforts to increase the number of women in the workforce were spurred by a compliance mind-set and given little support.

By the 1990s, companies realized that the resulting attrition was a waste of valuable resources. Furthermore, the war for talent heated up and companies began to become more strategic in their recruiting and retaining of women in the workforce.

In a very cool excerpt from the new book, the authors relate the strategy created by Infosys, the Bangalore based information technology giant. Here's the situation: Like every other company in the burgeoning field, it [Infosys] was engaged in a fierce war for the best and brightest university graduates. Unlike many of them, Infosys specifically targeted women as a solution — not only to expand the potential pool of top talent but also to tap in to a wider range of intellects.

So Infosys developed a strategy to achieve their objective.

The Infosys Women’s Inclusivity Network (IWIN) was launched in 2003, when 17 percent of the Infosys employees were women. Today, 34.1 percent of the workforce is female — in absolute numbers, more than thirty-six thousand women. Women make up 40.3 percent of entry-level workers, 24.2 percent of midlevel managers, 6.5 percent of senior managers, and 6.2 percent of top-tier leaders, nearly double the number of six years ago.

The key reason for those impressive figures is IWIN. The program has three aims: to persuade more high school girls to study engineering in college; to attract more female engineers to Infosys; and to make it easier for women to maintain their careers at the company after having children.

They were strategically smart.

They identified the stress-points for women and created policy to manage those very stresses. For example, expectant mothers asked for parenting workshops and health programs. Infosys provides daily Pregnacare yoga and fitness classes on the main campus. There’s an online referral service for hospitals, pediatricians, day care centers, nannies, and schools. Nursing stations supported by women lactation experts and a doctor on call are set up in all the offices. Similarly, all the offices have day care centers within four kilometers; most are equipped with Web cameras so that mothers can check in remotely throughout the day. Employees use office shuttle buses to drop their children at day care free of cost.

And the result of all that? Whereas prior to the program only 59% of women returned to work after maternity, over the past five years the figure has gone to 88%, and the total number of working mothers tripled during the same time period.

The company’s ultimate goal is to have women make up at least half of the workforce, if not more. By creating a work environment that both attracts and retains them, IWIN helps make Infosys a magnet for women.

This is a book not merely for men, but for corporate America.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid, Winning the War for Talent: Why Women Are the Solution. (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011)

Boomerang: Crooked Greeks, Anal Germans, and Brain-Dead Californians

Michiko Kakutani, easily the most ruthlessly critical book reviewer in the world, puts it this way about Michael Lewis’ latest book, Boomerang: No one writes with more narrative panache about money and finance than Lewis. . . . [An] entertaining new book. That’s an understatement. 

I first wandered into Michael Lewis writing in Liar’s Poker, his early semi-autobiographical depiction of the 1980s Wall Street bond traders. I was initially resistant to reading the book, but one of my best friends insisted that in spite of my lack of interest in Wall Street I’d find this book intriguing. After nearly having to pick myself up off the floor—backdrafts from all the laughter—I’ve become a devoted reader of absolutely anything Lewis writes and says. Ummmm. This is not a book review. Just a dedicated . . . ummm, well. . . response.

The dust jacket explains the hilarity. The trademark of Michael Lewis’s best-selling books is to tell an important and complex story through characters so outsized and outrageously weird that you’d think they have to be invented. (You’d be wrong.)

What’s really frustrating about Lewis' writing is that he teaches me finance by osmosis, even though I’m certain I don’t want to learn it--or be bothered by the insights. Still, it’s tough not to be curious and intrigued by finance with all the mess of recent years. So, for my money, he’s the best teacher in the world. He seems to recognize that seduction works better than any other strategy. Lewis’ books are always page-turners.

Having consulted for a still unnamed sub-prime lender, I was especially curious about this new book. Lewis doesn’t let me down. He explains what the hell went on in the global financial markets, but he does it through the unique, national character of the players. Though cartoonish, they’re too real to reject. 

If you want to gain intercultural insight, this book is better than any grad class on the subject. Yeah, I know. What he writes may not be politically correct, but, god, it’s very accurate. I’ve worked with endless internationals over the years. And Lewis’ insights inevitably ring true. 

Since I’ve got family memories from Greece, Germany and California, I’m pretty comfortable with the title of my blog. I learned about a dozen years ago that when it came to the Greeks and Greece, they were all living on hot air. I had to insist again and again that my ex-son-in-law step outside Greek practice and report all his earnings. Uncle Sam actually enforces the rules. Married to one of those Germans, I’ve always celebrated her “orderly” (nice term, but “anal” is probably more accurate) ways. Her order always seemed to make life easier for me. And when it comes to Cal-i-for-ni-a, well. . . having lived there for a couple years in the ‘sixties, and consulted there more recently, and with a kid who lives there, I’m well aware of its plastic ways. Lewis got it right. 

You can be damned certain that Lewis gets it all very, very right. He’s also a weird one—with a degree in art history from Princeton, a master’s in econ from the London School of Economics, and Wall Street experience in bond trading.  Where do these occasionally strange, delightful writers really come from? Is it in the genes? Or what? This is a book that will make for some of the most delightful, hilarious reading of the year. But if you don’t believe me, you’ll want to read why he could have made a fortune in business, but instead, made a fortune writing about it.

"Blindspots: The 10 Business Myths You Can't Afford to Believe."

I wish I had written this book. It’s desperately needed, has a built-in audience, and is written by a Gen-Yer for business Gen-Yers on the make for business success. My friend, Alexandra Levit, challenges the big ideas that so many believe, but are so damned wrong. She does it in a gracious, thoughtful, reasonable fashion, with illustrations that are eye-popping, leading-edge research, and a great deal of fun. Her delicious writing just sneaks up on you. Furthermore, she focuses on what will make you successful in today’s world, not yesterday’s. 

I think it was Lindsey Pollak, the well-known career blogger, who’s written that Gen-Yers lack street smarts. Well. . . in this book, Levit goes a long way toward resolving that problem. And before I sign off on this paragraph, I need to emphasize that though she’s written to her youthful audience, her ideas are just as needful and just as relevant to all the generations. And yeah . . . all the professions. I’ll allude to that in a few paragraphs. 

As the title reveals, she deals with those silly ideas that some, perhaps most believe are gospel truth. Let’s look briefly at a few of them without spilling the beans. Hopefully, it’ll entice you to run to Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com before the sun sets. 

Alexandra begins with the historically monstrous, American myth that “overnight success is possible.” She went right for the illustrative jugular by demythologizing Susan Boyle’s first round performance on television and YouTube that pumped the “overnight success” of a singer who supposedly had never sung in public before. Sounds fascinating, says Alexandra. But that wasn’t exactly the way it happened. Susan attended the Edinburgh Acting School and sang at churches and karaoke bars, and trained with a professional voice coach before auditioning for musicals. But Alexandra’s recommendations for achieving success flow right out of the same research of the more academic works of Jeff Pfeffer’s reality stuff on power and Teresa Amabile on small wins. But Levit is immediately practicable, providing some very concrete recommendations for setting goals, coping with setbacks and keeping your goals from getting the best of you. 

In another chapter she completely discredits that nauseating Midwestern and Geek belief that if you work hard at your job and are good at it, it’ll be the key to success. There are a number of reasons for success, but the reality is that there’s a very weak link between job performance and career outcome. Among the sub-topics for that chapter are, Why knowledge isn’t power, The popularity factor, Getting on the executive radar, and Promoting yourself without bragging.  Here Alexandra recommends, among other things, that one way to establish that needed public persona is by becoming the go-to person on a particular subject. Be a perpetual learner and showcase your knowledge by serving as an organization spokesperson and creating a convincing online brand. 

In today’s economy, her debunking of the myth that really essential people don’t get laid off is exceptionally valuable. The driver for job security isn’t necessarily that of taking on the role of essential employee. It’s rather easy to confuse the good work you’re doing with the organization’s bigger picture. Those two don’t inevitably overlap. It’s not just essential businesspeople that get laid off. If you’ve been around medical clinics and law firms, you should know that both essential physicians and lawyers have gotten laid off. And essential teachers? Well, ‘nuff said. You hope that lay-offs just happen to poor performers, but the truth is that even top performer get laid off. Especially useful in this chapter is a long set of clues that your demise is imminent. 

I was curious to find out whether Alexandra would deal with the “passion” myth. Yep. There it was in the place of honor. Last on the list, the most prominent place to put an important chapter. Do what you love and the money will follow is a swell way for a title to get at the real issue. It’s a set-up for both debunking passion and reframing strengths into more useful recommendations, and Alexandra succeeds at both. I had to chuckle at her comment that passion is not a panacea. The cliché, “starving artist,” she writes, came about because the dream of millions to become an artist results in only a lucky few being able to make a living off their job. Their passion got them nowhere. 

While reading Blindspots, I couldn’t help but think of that study at Google that demonstrates the fallacy of deeply held beliefs—and the power of accepting and acting on evidence, even when that evidence clashes with ingrained beliefs. Like most tech companies, Google believed that the most important quality for managers is deep technical expertise. They believed the best bosses left people alone and mainly, when needed, helped people with technical problems. That’s not what the research showed at all. When Google examined what employees valued most in a manager, technical expertise ranked last of eight attributes they examined. What did employees value most in a manager? Google found that the keys were asking good questions, taking time to meet with people, and caring about those employees lives and careers. They’d been hiring on the basis of their beliefs, but their beliefs were dead wrong. And the employees suffered as a result. 

Studies show that we see what we believe.  In other words, believing is seeing and not the opposite. Alexandra Levit’s book challenges many, perhaps most, of our beliefs with great research, enticing illustrations and a great deal of reasonable sense. This is a book that’s chock full of great ideas and practicable recommendations. It’s an ambitious career work containing a striking series of vignettes illuminating how to become a successful businessperson today’s world. It provides the kind of intelligence and street smarts needed for careers in the New Economy. It shrugs off the irrelevant, the obvious and the trite, landing us squarely in reality. Michael Port’s comment is right on: “Hard-hitting, honest, and course correcting . . . What it really takes to be successful in business.”

See my list of "Good Books" on the left margin

How to Be Halfway Intelligent About School Reform

You know the line: you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. The opinions about school reform are all over the map. The real problem with school reform is that there are too many issues and too many facts. Some are “true facts” while some are suspicious facts.

School reform has been a major issue since that landmark 1983 policy report by Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation on the high school and secondary education in America back in 1983. For many of us, that was an eye-opener. School issues have become more complex since then—and also more numerous. Easily, 30 to 40 major issues impinge on school reform, varying from teacher education and quality to funding, global competition, alternative education forms and nonschool factors like poverty and parent illiteracy.

Thankfully, we know a lot more about problem solving and decision making today than in the 1980’s. Grasp the relevant facts from the experts, figure out whether the people making recommendations are intentionally clouding the facts, and finally, apply our experience knowledge, and reasoning to decide whether recommendations are right. Sounds easy, eh? Not so. The process is fraught with potential for distortions in judgment that result from biases at every stage of the process.

High-stakes decisions, when the issues are numerous and complex, do not respond to a few simple solutions. There is no silver bullet. Solutions will have to be found piecemeal. And for a decent batting average, we’ll have to pilot them. The Gates Foundation has been doing just that. They’ve learned that a lot doesn’t work. Not surprisingly, many people believe the research failures indicate that Gates is wasting his money. That’s a dumb response. Any research scientist will tell you that learning what doesn’t work is just as valuable as learning what does work. There are always a finite number of potential solutions. For research to be successful, usually you’ll have to go through most of the options to find some positive results. You may also need to completely reframe the problem several different times.

Since reforms will need a lot of popular support, we’re all going to have to have a basic understanding of the issues—not just flagrant opinions. Which brings me to my blog’s question: How can you begin to be halfway intelligent about school reform? Here’s a step in the right direction.

Though I’m not at all impressed by Steve Brill’s, Class Warfare, Sara Mosle’s review of the book in Sunday’s NYTimes Books is highly illuminating. No, her review is a fabulous take on the majority of the issues school reform faces. Those two-and-one-half pages will give you more insight into our problem than three or four books. The review, Steve Brill’s Report Card on School Reform, frames the issue superbly. Furthermore, the research Mosle brings to the review is impeccable.

Brill, a Yale lawyer, mounts a zealous case against teachers’ unions. As Mosle writes, at the heart of his book is a belief that “truly effective teaching” can “overcome student indifference, parental disengagement and poverty.” Brill cites policy advocates and research for his case.

But, Mosle reminds us, Brill . . . glosses over an important qualifier to such research. Teacher quality may be the most important variable within schools, but mountains of data, going back decades, demonstrates that most of the variation in student performance is explained by nonschool factors: not just poverty, but also literacy (and whether parents read to their children), student health, frequent relocations, crime-related stress and the like.

Mosle’s conclusion is worth remembering: Brill likens the battle over the nation’s schools to “warfare,” but the better analogy may be to the war on cancer. For years, scientists hoped a magic pill would cure this ravaging disease. But increasingly, doctors have recognized that they will have to fight a multifronted war, as cancers (like failing schools) aren’t all alike. Each comes with its own complex etiology. Improving teacher quality and working to create better schools, like charters, are part of the arsenal. But such efforts, alone, are unlikely to boost long-term survival rates without a continual, dispassionate look at the incoming data, no matter how counterintuitive, and a willingness to revise tactics midtreatment as we pursue multiple paths in a race for the cure. Although Brill doesn’t say so until the book’s last few pages, he finally acknowledges just how much we still have to learn.

 Mosle’s analogy puts school reform into a highly appropriate focus, giving us a realistic perspective of the difficulties we face. It challenges the easy opinions and so-called facts that glide from talk radio and cable. 

Memo to America: Time to Let Go of the Fairy Tales?

I have been fatigued for a number of years by America's idiocracy. The seeming unwillingness or perhaps inability of some of its political leaders and far too much of the population to engage in a genuine conversation. You know. . . a conversation where people talk, advocate, inquire, clarify, rethink, argue, ask for evidence, display reasoning, analyze ideological perspectives and dump the ones that once made sense but are now out of date.

I suspect, and here I always appreciate other perspectives, that we are neither trained nor do we have models for thinking together. It's rare for a conversation on talk radio. There are a few exceptions on NPR, but that seems about where it ends.

Bill Isaacs puts it together rather well in talking about our inability to think together:

This is not an unusual situation. It is so embedded in the very fabric of present-day human interaction. This kind of inability to think together has become so familiar that it might seem strange to talk about it as a deficiency. "That is just how human beings are," most people would suggest. It is actually counterproductive, the skeptics among us might argue, to get too close to one another's thoughts. To do so is to risk losing our objectivity, our distance, our cherished beliefs.

Of course, the fact that most of us live in very homogenous neighborhoods doesn't help the conversation much either. Just yesterday I was talking to an astute Gen-Yer from my apartment who's moving into the city near her work at a half-way house. My comment was that our neighborhood was "too white," and that on occasion my upbringing in the 1940's and early 1950's in metropolitan Detroit caused me to be uncomfortable in our nearly all white, culturally homogenous neighborhoods of the Minneapolis suburbs. What you need, she commented was a community like the one in which she worked at the half-way house--and I laughed in agreement.

Still, today's NYTimes Magazine has what amounts to a conversation that I found deeply gratifying. The article by Rebecca Traister, aptly titled, If Hillary were president. . . we would still be in this mess, is actually a conversation. Ignore the "liberal politics," and look at the conversation. It reminds me of Tevye's conversations with himself (Fiddler on the Roof): On the one hand, but on the other hand. The article is delightfully filled with questions, answers, disagreements, hopes, skepticism, etc.,etc.,etc. It's a glorious model for renewed conversation, an art desperately needed in today's idiocracy.

Beware of the Leadership Literature: It's Hazardous

One of the big obstacles most business people have to overcome is the leadership literature. Books by well-known execs and most lectures, courses and even media pronouncements about leadership should be stamped: CAUTION: THIS MATERIAL CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL HEALTH.

Here’s why. Mainstream leadership books, writers, the media, and even studies tend to privilege and separate leaders from followers. Think Jack Welch, Jon Kotter, CNN , Fox or MNBC and even Warren Bennis, and you’ll understand what I’m saying. What these people preach is that real leaders have a great deal of power and that leadership is about using that power to achieve personal and organizational objectives. So leaders today are viewed as either heroes or villains, elevated or blamed, either the solution or the barrier to organizational success. Indeed, 95% of the population seems to believe that complex organizational problems should be solved by the leaders themselves. Amusing, but largely nonsense. It’s just not possible. 

If it’s true that leaders have all the power and followers are merely their lackeys to get things done, well. . .  you can see the consequences. On the one hand, some will do what they’re told—and probably no more than that. And others, who don’t like what they’re being told will gripe, complain and eventually sabotage. Plenty of leaders, even in the old industrial world, are brought down by the sabotage of their “passive” followers. That’s far more prevalent than most think. If in contrast, leaders understand that they’re highly dependent upon their followers, that their followers have a lot of power, you can be damned certain that with a modicum of gray matter they’ll treat their followers a lot differently. . . even as partners. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise that sabotage is prevalent in companies like the old General Motors. My brother, a retired GM plant foreman, recently described in colorful detail how subordinates got rid of leaders who were control nuts. They had a number of execution strategies in their toolkits. Workers would stage, one-by-one conversations with HR, mixed with both truthful and false info. But, he went on, more often than not, the workers would simply sabotage the objectives of their boss. In both cases the higher-ups would move the person around a few times until he got the message and left the firm. “There are,” my brother went on to say, “limitations as to how much control any boss or leader has. And that,” he said, “goes all the way to the top of the organization.”  With flatter hierarchies, knowledge workers have even more power. It’s more and more obvious that today’s leaders have shared power. . . or no power at all. 

Terrific research dating from as recent as 2008 confirms my notion. David Collinson, in Dialectics of Leadership, completed what amounts to a mega-study on the same issue in 2005. His conclusion is that leader-led relations, contrary to the traditional view, always contain the potential for conflict, dissent and resistance, making the whole notion of leadership an overblown idea. Though the idea of leader and follower identities are deeply embedded in Western society, they simply are no longer sustainable.

PERSONAL HISTORY 

Because I started my career in the protestant church ministry, I realized from nearly the first month that my role of leader had huge constraints and controls placed upon it at all times. Power, insight, intelligence, expertise is distributed throughout the congregation. And if I was to become a successful leader, I had a lot of talking to do. I learned early on, as a result of a number of very caring parishioners, that I needed to talk, talk, and talk some more with all my constituency in order to achieve any kind of measurable objectives. I also learned that if I attempted to make significant decisions of any sort without those conversations, negotiations, agreements, changes, readjustments and sign-offs from 40 or 50 different people with leadership power, I would be in deep shit. 

So, years later, when I was invited into a consulting conversation by the CIO of the Pillsbury Company, he asked a telling question of me. “You come highly recommended, but what does being a pastor have to do with working for me?” I asked whether he had church experience, and he responded affirmatively. “Tell me, “I asked, “how many political factions were there in your church?” He was silent for a few moments, and then he responded with no other questions, “I understand your value. You have the job.” 

On another occasion, he dealt with the notion of distributed leadership better than anyone I’ve ever heard. I happened to sit in on a conversation between him and one of his directors, who was asking for a promotion. The C IO clarified the matter most eloquently: “I don’t promote you. Your subordinates, your peers and your clients promote you. I merely confirm what they tell me about you.” That director changed his ways fast, sharing his power, insights and resources with the relevant constituency. There were a lot of changed conversations and behaviors taking place as a result of that straightforward message. He didn’t learn ‘till late in his career that in his business, everyone had leadership power. 

SO HOW DOES THIS IMPACT YOU? 

First, recognize that all this business about McConnell, Obama, Pelosi, Boehner and Cantor and their leadership successes and failures being ultimately determinative for our country is loaded with a fair amount of bullshit.  John Boehner of the House has gone from being a great success, to under attack, to a failure, to a great success. Will Eric Cantor eventually take control? And President Obama has gone from being a great, cutting edge success to a wimp, to a compromiser and to a failure. The assumptions of leadership—followership are sacrosanct. But you’re going to have to look a lot deeper than at the top to figure out what’s going on. And all five of those guys are going to have to have a lot of conversations with their constituency--and create more constituency--to get anything done. The subterfuge of the Tea Party in the House ought to have made that clear to everyone by now. But just in case, I’ve written this for you, dear reader. 

Second, be aware that most anyone in your firm that wants it, can develop leadership power of one sort or another. It’s merely the power to get things done through other people, and there plenty of workers with no vested power who use all kinds of leadership power in achieving their objectives. 

This entire business of leadership and leadership notions is a big balloon that needs to be punctured. Nahhh.  It really needs to be exploded. It’s largely nonsense that makes for great press, creates conflicts that the media can pay attention to, and sells a lot of books. But be very careful. The belief in leaders and leadership as it’s usually discussed is very bad for your health. 

The truth is that though leaders have considerable power, their control over subordinates is just as often shifting, paradoxical and contradictory.  Followers are frequently proactive LEADERS for themselves, knowledgeable and opposed to their bosses and their objectives. Leadership control is shaped by the resistance and the conversations of direct reports and the organization. The communication in organizations is a dynamic knot of contradictions, ceaseless interplay between contrary and opposing tendencies. Subordinates, like their bosses, selectively disclose, exaggerate, conceal and/or understate information. And that’s very much reality. With the knowledge revolution, it becomes even more so. 

So leadership roles are a lot more fuzzy than perhaps most of us want to believe. And the power of leadership is never distributed clearly or definitively. That’s organizational reality. It galls me, for example, that guys who’ve never been invested with power or given direct power, like Russ Limbaugh or Grover Norquist, can simply take on leadership power in the GOP at their own will. But I know it happens just as much down the totem pole as with the so-called higher ups. But them’s the facts of life, buddy, and the sooner we acknowledge them, the better off we’ll be.