Dan Erwin

Intellectually Curious? A Potpourri of Insights for the End of the Year

The Eavesdropper: Saving the lost art of conversation. Sherry Turkle, MIT’s digital psychologist, (an academic interested in the relationship between humans and machines) has an enlightening interview with Atlantic’s Megan Garber. Conversation is messy, full of pauses, interruptions and topic changes, she admits. So Turkle and Garber take us on a tour through a local Apple stores, noting that everybody’s talking, but nobody’s talking about anything except what’s on the machines—to prove her point. My protégé recently responded quite affirmatively to my comment that techies are usually the poorest conversationalists in an organization, especially when compared with folk in, say. . . marketing. But I have no complaints. Their inadequacies brought in big consulting bucks. In her new book she’s going to “out” herself as a “partisan of conversation.” Why do you think that’s actually important? I can give you a pot full of reasons.

In a formal recant, Ross Douthat gives us Confessions of a Columnist. I suspect he’s taking a tip from David Brooks’ paean for humility. Douthat intrigues us with several important big mistakes which he made in 2013. He told us, in effect, that he’s a poor predictor. . .

Why Won’t Executives Believe in Research? And Who Gives a Crap?

Recently I had a conversation with a retired vice-president of a billion dollar company about America’s youthful entrepreneurs. Of course, he mentioned the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Microsoft. He immediately got into his admiration for the youngsters who started their businesses barely out of their teens, commenting that if it wasn’t for youth we wouldn’t have much in the way of new business.

I’m too old to be governed by obviously-wrongheaded ideas, no matter where they come from, even when they’re from major executives. So after he finished, I paused and then started sharing the research on entrepreneurs: in sum, he was dead wrong. The huge majority of successful entrepreneurs are past the age of 40 when they start their first company.

He was silent for a moment. Then he started disagreeing with me, totally ignoring the fact that I’d emphasized the research. I listened quietly, then commented that it was all very romantic to believe in Gen-Yers. They certainly bring a lot of useful stuff to the party. But the facts of the matter just wouldn’t support his notions. He’s a very nice guy who occasionally pays attention to me, not least because I drive a Mercedes (crazy). It was clear, however that his intuition was working overtime, and I wanted to suggest to him that he tell his gut to shut up. . . .

Why Should You Keep Your Friends Close, But Your Enemies Closer?

I first posted this in November 2012, but since I'm working on a blog relating to the upside of Machiavelli's Prince I wanted to prep my readers. It wasn’t the Godfather’s Michael Corleone who first uttered this well-known dictum. Actually, it came from Machiavelli's "The Prince," the definitive primer for how to be a dictator and a politician. As I'm going to say next week, Machiavelli still matters. Furthermore, politics and business demand dirty hands, but there's actually nothing wrong with that. The ethics are simply different. Business execs and politicians shouldn't care. So stay tuned!

As a manager or leader it is inevitable that we’ll want to add to our knowledge base, try to sell ideas, get people on board and even change the direction of our organization. One of the involved persons just might be your enemy. That’s my basic rationale for acting on Machiavelli’s instinct.

In the business setting, I refer to “enemy” as a person you have to interact with, someone who’s competing for your resources, who doesn’t follow through on his commitments, whom you don’t trust, with whom the “chemistry” isn’t there, or who disagrees with your perspective from the ground up. These. . .

What Are You Reading? Here Are Five Especially on Career Development

What’s often frustrating about the plethora of web material on personal development is the difficulty of sorting the highly useful recommendations from the fluff or the just plain wrong-headed. A terrific amount of so-called career research suffers from the halo effect—the bias that because an attribute is productive in one occasion, then the other related attributes will also be productive—and in other situations. The halo effect is also at work in the distinction between cause and correlation. Still, there is far more empirical, social science and humanistic research in the field than most would imagine, so whenever that’s available, I recommend it to my clients. On other occasions, I recommend the work of well-known authorities. Here are a number of potentially useful recommendations.

Stanford’s Bob Sutton, on Five signs that your mentor is giving you bad advice, an expert in the field of career and behavior, supplies us with an unusual, even unique set of valuable insights. Sutton reminds us of the struggle to take something that works well in one place and replicate it in another (the halo effect). As Sutton points out to mentees, they “have to play an active role in judging the advice they get.” Sheryl Sandberg is among those who reveal that mentors have played a key role in her success, but that she’s learned . . .

You Don't Need an IQ Score to Figure Out How Smart That Guy Is

How can you figure out the smarts of a colleague without having a consulting PhD? I shouldn’t be giving this away, but the basics are actually so simple that anyone willing to keep her eyes glued and ears open to another person can figure out that person’s basic work smarts. Quickly and easily. By testing and watching for three simple behaviors.

But first, does it really matter how smart that person is? You bet your sweet bippy it does. You want to know whether you can trust his advice, whether he’ll have much to add to a new team project, whether he can be counted on to meet his objectives, whether he can accept added responsibility and even whether he’ll make an effective manager.

Before I lay out my secret, remember this. . . 

What Are You Reading? Here Are Five for the Intellectually Curious

George Packer at the New Yorker on Black Friday and the Race to the Bottom. Why did Black Friday, beginning on Thanksgiving Thursday this year, and continuing into Shopaholic Saturday and Sunday poop out so badly? And why, with the usual brawls over towels and TVs reported on YouTube, did retailers like Walmart and Target take a total hit of more than $1.7 billion less than last year? Packer answers the question and wonders why, with too many Americans now working low-paying jobs stocking inventory and ringing up merchandise, those same stores don't understand that their workers are too poor to buy the products in the big-box stores. You'd think those same firms would be leading the protests for higher wages. Why, when moderate Southern businessmen spoke up for higher wages during the civil rights era, do you not hear that rhetoric today? It may be that America is still waiting for the first retail C.E.O. to see what’s in front of his nose.

Morten Hansen at HBR.org on How John F. Kennedy Changed Decision Making for Us All.  Many of us know that the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was a fiasco, probably the worst decision he ever made in . . .

The Risks for Gen-Y or Z of Going without Health Insurance

Want to pay $500 for a single emergency stitch of a lacerated knee? Or $12,500 for a single day in the hospital? Inevitably, Gen-Y or Z is now facing an important financial decision: Buy the insurance or simply pay the penalty and take your chances? For many, the issue is one of how much is this going to cost me? Especially if you’re facing a tight budget.

In a well-reasoned article, the New York Times' Tara Siegel Bernard lays out all the issues for making that decision. There’s no question that it’s a huge gamble for some of the younger generation. So plenty of people are going to consider the odds. Here’s the information from Bernard that you need to know.

What percentage of the population actually racks up the medical bills?
It’s a small percent. Furthermore, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, there are no significant distinctions between the young or the old. If the person was between 25 and 34 years old (insured or not), there was a 5% chance of a bill exceeding $27,000 (2011), and a 10% chance of the bill exceeding $13,000.

What will that risk mean to your income? Here are the salary comparisons from the National Center for Educational Statistics.. . .