Dan Erwin

How to Evaluate an Artificial Intelligence Tool

Anybody can do it. Here's the basic model, along with my reasoning for its value for every business person or professional in law, medicine and architecture.

Artificial Intelligence tool evaluation is an issue that just about every professional needs to start thinking about. More and more the corporate and professional worlds are being marketed  for AI tools, some worth purchasing and others a waste of money. Appropriately, these decisions should be made by people with a lot of relevant background.

But nearly every work person, business or professional should have a basic understanding of AI. Yet recent conversations with a number of colleagues reveal that AI is dark hole for the majority  of people. So in this blog, I want to offer the underlying thinking about AI from the standpoint of theory construction, and offer two straightforward suggestions.

My first suggestion starts at a different place than you might expect--with the actual background of AI thinking: argument theory. I’m quite certain that most in technology aren’t familiar with argument theory, but actually it’s the basic background of AI tools. In fact it’s the basic background of all human reasoning—sophisticated and unsophisticated.

“Sure you’re smart, but. . .”

A fascinating interview of Duke Energy's Lynn Good: “Effectiveness comes from those qualitative things that give you the ability to network, communicate and lead people toward an outcome they can’t see.”

Lynn Good
I regularly read interviews of senior officers and CEOs in newspapers and magazines. As often as not, my responses follow a number of critical patterns. The most typical response to the interview is so what else is new? Not that insights necessarily need to be new to be valid or significant. But just as often I respond with thoughts like, that’s really off focus, that wouldn’t make much sense in most companies, that’s not a transferable principle, you really don’t get it, why did you go there, or. . . well, you get the point.

But I found myself nodding in high agreement, even delight, with the comments of Lynn Good, the CEO of Duke Energy. It started out with the focused, analytical thoroughness of her answers to questions. The naturalness of her business identity as CEO, the straightforwardness with which she responded to the interview and her insistence upon the nuances and complications of business leadership are unusual in today’s business world.

Family of origin
Lynn Good obviously comes from superb parenting with a father as a marine turned high school principal and a mother who also taught school, both with a solid work ethic. You recognize her intense, almost matter-of-fact sense of accountability in the answer to questions about what she learned from her parents: They demonstrated accountability to me through actions. When I was growing up, we had a widow living next door to us. So the habit was that if we went to the grocery store, we called her first. If we cut our yard, we cut her yard, no questions asked.

Leadership
Yet unlike many of these interviews, this is not a “look at me.” It is an inquiry into the nature of leadership, enhanced by intimacy and a rich knowledge of the task. Intriguingly, the vocabulary reaches a level of emphasis that is rare: There is a comfort level with people you’ve known for a long time—when you’ve been in the foxhole with them. But when you bring an organization together (she led the merger of Progress and Duke Energy), you need to be agnostic about background, and to interview on capabilities and track record.

Good’s support of her work force is not a hollow, thoughtless allegiance. Rather, she demonstrates the ability to express solidarity and criticism simultaneously. With people at this level in their career, it’s no longer about whether you are the smartest subject-matter expert in the room. It’s whether you can be effective in leading a diverse team. Can you adapt? As you think about developing people through their careers, you’re looking for that transition from being the smartest person in the room — and caring so much about that — to being the most effective. It’s about how to develop a team. It’s about how to solve something where the solution isn’t obvious.

Career focus
Predicting career success, like predicting organizational success, can be delusional. . .

The Flip Side of Happiness

Too much of a good thing can backfire. And that, research reveals, includes happiness. It’s intriguing to find significant research explaining the downside of emotions. Not least because I’ve always been intrigued with the upside of bad emotions and the downside of good emotions. Anger, for example, has an upside. And, in a never forgotten experience with a client, paranoia—at least for a lawyer—can have an upside too.

American culture is all about the pursuit of happiness. We’ve institutionalized that pursuit in the Declaration of Independence. But we understand the governmental caveats to that pursuit to assume also that we don't do anything illegal or violate the rights of others.

Still, I’m not a happiness-hater. Normally I have more than my fair share of happiness...

Is Your Thinking About Success Shaped by Delusion?

More than most other cultures, personal and organizational success are immensely important to Americans (You can toss the Chinese in with the Americans). Celebrity status, personal book sales, organizational profit and individual power and finances are inevitably touted—and by a lot more than the media. So I was amused by research focusing on theTiger Mother concluding that the theory of why people thrive is “finally rigorously debunked. 

Chua and Rubenfeld argued that three traits predicted personal success. . .

When Should You Start Your Own Company?

One of my very bright young friends in his early thirties occasionally worries that he's let too much time go by and that he should have started his own company several years ago. It's a very prevalent idea, but it's pure myth. So what is the average age of the typical entrepreneur when he/she starts the business?

Debunking the entrepreneurial myth. 
With all the hype about successful 20-somethings, you’d think that they had entrepreneurialism all sewed up. Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, Paul Allen and Bill Gates with Microsoft, as well as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with Apple are often touted as typical entrepreneurs. And that once you break 30. . .

Why Are the Most Successful Entrepreneurs Older Than Age 40?

Debunking the entrepreneurial myth. 

So why did Mark Zuckerberg hire Sheryl Sandberg? 

With all the hype about successful 20-somethings, you’d think that they had entrepreneurialism all sewed up. Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, Paul Allen and Bill Gates with Microsoft, as well as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with Apple are often touted as typical entrepreneurs. And that once you break 30, it’s all over for you. Sorry, but that’s not at all the case—and those innovators are not the typical.

A New Way to Catch a Thief

New research, based on big data, is proven to be a highly accurate—and certainly unique—means for catching a car thief: quantify and tabulate a car owner’s posterior.

Since Aristotle there have many efforts to come up with new ways to understand and predict human behavior. But over just the past few centuries, we’ve begun to “mathematize” the subjective. We’ve tried to predict human behavior by means of (little) data.

The Six Key Competencies for Career Success in the 21st Century

Dissect America’s corporate strategies and needs throughout the past 12 years, sort through the business-related research and anecdotal material, engage executives and entry-level employees, study the best journals and books, engage the top consulting firms and storied business school faculty and you’ll find a phenomenal consensus on the needed competencies for career success. Though these competencies are oriented to parents and college students, they also provide a relevant perspective on learning and career pathing for those already in the workforce.

 

Reduced to the most basic elements, here’s the list of key competencies: 

1.    A technology background or related expertise in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors. You want to major in a liberal arts program outside those technologies? Excellent, but make sure you get four to six STEM courses. (Major in sociology, but add statistics, computer science, etc. Or, major in English lit, dance, German studies, or archaeology, but pick up some STEM background along the way.)

The actual value of the STEM competencies is that they provide the primary means for innovation for both business as well as the nation. They are our ultimate competitive advantage in the global marketplace. In short, without a robust STEM workforce, we will become less competitive in the global economy. However, without the broadly educated liberal arts grads, including those with liberal arts STEM majors—not mere technicians--we lose much of the creativity and intuition crucial in the workplace where fuzzy issues and dense problems, clashes of ideas and deep-seated ambiguities are the status quo.     

 2.    Complex thinking and problem solving. If the faculty in your college major is half-way decent, the subtext, often unstated, is that your major discipline works on the basis of a specific set of cognitive models. My undergrad history major forced me to think big picture, look closely at data and analyze potential causes underlying historical events. Applied to business, I found myself with superb analytical, tactical, cause-effect and strategic competencies. Translated into business categories, here is what one English major learned. In the global marketplace, however, these are merely foundational competencies. You’re going to have to constantly build upon thinking skills. That will include the ability to evaluate evidence, to see patterns in recurring problems, to draw adequate inferences and conclusions, to think metacognitively and to use relevant vocabulary.

3.    Written and oral communication. The demand for communication competencies in the 21^st century profoundly outpaces that of the last century. It’s not merely the multi-lingual nature of a diverse global world or the emphasis upon service economies and face-to-face relations. At bottom it’s the flattened hierarchies with individual responsibilities for every person. Thus, success now requires the ability to use communication to bridge gaps between interdependent groups, to build and use networking intelligence, manage relationships, and create a motivational environment that will inspire the cooperation and contribution of others.    

In this new economy, the majority of more experienced, older workers struggle to communicate effectively. But Gen-Yers seem to have special needs at this point. As a warning, Arthur Levine, former president of the Columbia Teacher’s College and now president of The Woodrow Wilson Foundation, puts it this way: This generation is not very good at face-to-face relationships. The image that comes to mind is two students, sitting in the room they share, angrily texting each other, but not talking. They all want to have intimate relationships, they want to get married and have kids, but that’s hard to do if you don’t know how to talk with another person.

4.    Adaptability, which includes the abilities to respond to and manage change, and know how to learn. Few companies have a career ladder and few careers are linear. Instead, employees will need to adapt to a market which is a dynamic, evolving system in which the further you try to assess the future, the more difficult it is to predict the outcomes. At its heart, adaptability is about the skills of change. It implies the ability to get from where you are now to where you want to go--and along the way, deal competently with the miserable middle between now and then. It also implies focus, constant learning and political smarts.

Adaptability is built upon the recognition that our world never stays the same, that dynamic change, not stability and permanence, is constant. Adaptable people understand that experience and work are chaotic, fragmentary, deviate from cherished values and is given to imponderable ambiguity. Adaptation, itself, comes out of encounters with novelty that may seem chaotic. In trying to adapt, we often have to deviate from cherished values, behave in ways that we’ve barely glimpsed and seize on clues that are merely fragmentary.

5.    Creativity. Most people tend to think of creativity as beautiful designs such as great art, architectural masterpieces or the Apple iPad. The fact of the matter is that though business always needs creative masterpieces, business needs far more creativity and innovation in mobilizing talent, allocating resources, developing processes and building strategies.

 But the most important fact about creativity is that at its heart it is a highly collaborative enterprise, not the lone genius in his/her workroom. The unifying idea about creativity, which debunks a mile-high stack of creativity myths, is that even seemingly solitary artistic pursuits involve improvisation, collaboration and communication. The surprising reminder for many is that nothing is perceived to be creative unless people can communicate that insight to others. One of the more fascinating insights I gained from consulting at 3M, one of America’s greatest creative firms, is that a creative team often searches for others who can communicate the value of their creation. Otherwise, their work is dead in the water. Surprisingly, the keys to creativity are going to be collaboration and communication, making this competency available to anybody who’s willing. Once more: the eccentric, lone genius is the exception, not the rule.

6.    Entrepreneurialism. The first thing most think about this subject is of a business person who builds a business from scratch. That’s merely one very minor reflection of an entrepreneurial, adventuresome spirit. A more generic perspective of entrepreneurialism includes the ability to take initiative and risks in order to put new ideas into play. In short, it’s finding useful and/or profitable solutions to problems. Furthermore, in today’s world the entrepreneurial person regularly rebuilds his job and career in order to adapt to business needs or change jobs.

Entrepreneurialism is tightly related to creativity, especially to its communication side. A study by Hargadon and Sutton showed that the entrepreneurial process was remarkably similar across all companies. It included the ability to capture good ideas, keep the ideas alive, imagine new uses for old ideas, and put promising concepts to the test. One of the fascinating things we know about entrepreneurs is that they are good “noticers.” The Wall Street Journal’s Shellenbarger, for example, writes that entrepreneurs notice “unmet needs and ways to fulfill them.”

What’s most obvious about this new competency set is that a high school degree gets you nowhere, that a bachelor’s is merely foundational and that success in the new economy will require constant learning and growth. Initially, you might think the academic portion of these demands to be a bit much. I’ve found that a typical liberal arts bachelor’s degree, requirements, major and all, provides space for meeting these basic expectations. However you read this blog, don’t miss the point that these competencies form the backdrop, indeed, the new normal for career success. So, go on about the business of acquiring and honing these skills, regardless of where you are in your career.

Flickr photo: city college

Once More on the "What Are You Going to Do With That Major?" Question

Since everyone and his brother believe this dumb-ass question is both important and intelligent, one of my missions in life is to put the lie to it. As a former university professor and long-time management consultant, I can’t emphasize enough how limiting and actually harmful this question is. The notion of a linear career relation between college and work is false from the get-go.

But first, a caveat. If you or your kid majored in sports rather than academics, I recommend you skip this blog. I seriously doubt that more than 5% of those who majored in sports, instead of viewing it as merely a recreational outlet, do well in academics. And if you or your kid fits in the sports major group and failed to develop academic tools, then go ahead and major in a subject focused on gaining immediate entry to the current job market. Of course, you’ll quickly learn that won’t provide much more than an entry-level salary for most of your life. But them’s the choices.

Understanding the question’s power
Fortunately, just this year a thoughtful piece of research by Daniel Lair and Stacey Wieland addressed that dumb ass colloquialism, finding that though it is a near all-powerful ideology, it understands neither work nor education. The research confirmed the pervasiveness of the question--more than ever in today’s economy—and that it is widely recognized by all students. On top of that, it is inevitably an emotionally charged question—and nearly half the time negative, functioning as a judgment about the choices a person is making about the relationship between work and his or her education. As a consequence, students readily recognize that their ability to answer the question is high-stakes and anxiety-producing. They also know that it is about whether a major will provide merely a sufficient or a substantial income. The obvious implication of the question that the major a person chooses is tightly coupled with the selection of a job.

Wrong about work
What’s clear from the research is that students and the public ground their belief in a linear career model: this major, for example, will make possible this career. The fact of the matter is that those implications simply do not align with the realities of the global economy.

First, the shelf life of a linear, vocational degree is no more than five years. Furthermore, there is no longer a social contract between employer and employee, and neither expects that relationship long term. That means that there’s a very high likelihood that what got you a job right out of college will be completely obsolete within five years. On top of that, people will be changing employers and careers many, many times over their lives. To a surprising degree, those changes are becoming more and more true of even the so-called permanent vocations in engineering, law and medicine. To quote the researchers: The permanent view of career that is perpetuated through the colloquial question, “What are you going to do with that major?” conflicts with what students are likely to experience post college.

Wrong about education
The consequence of this wrongheaded ideology is that it keeps students from approaching higher education in a way that will equip them better for the long term. The ideology forces students and their parents to focus on college education, narrowly, and solely from the job perspective. No question that business loves this and emphasizes this approach. But the business approach to college is like a stock market approach: it’s liable to be valid no more than three or four quarters. And sadly, in my work with leading executives around the country, I’ve experienced few who think about education on a long-term basis, and outside the stock market box.

So, given that jobs, employers, careers and professions are going to be changing many times in our lives, how should we look at education? What should students really gain from a college education? The answer is straightforward. While education plays a role in equipping the student for career, students need to also wrestle with questions of how to live a meaningful life. Specifically that includes questions about the roles they will play in society, such as citizen, parent, partner, volunteer or community member.

So what’s an intelligent student to do?
Given the realities of our world, we need a holistic perspective on the role of education and the recognition that the decision about what to study and what to do with one’s life has no unique permanent answer. The competencies that the best organizations are asking for are the same competencies that students will need for all of life: creative thinking, managing complex problems, making informed decisions, learning, adapting and maintaining an open entrepreneurial, adventuresome relationship to life.

What a career edge implies for students is that they ought to at least make space for a couple courses in technology, economics and communication--and learn how to work social and organizational systems that are hierarchical and authoritarian. In today’s world they’re liable to be creating their own jobs, even inside the company, and viewing learning as a life-long process. That also means that they will need the oral and written smarts to get around the recruiter’s template when they set out for the next job. With that background most any liberal arts major will work just fine. The current mayor of Chicago, for example, holds an undergraduate liberal arts degree in dance from Sarah Lawrence College.

In sum, the “What are you going to do with that major?” question is typically insulting, demeaning and stupid.

Lair, Daniel J. and Stacey M.B. Wieland, "What are you going to do with that major?" Colloquial Speech and the Meanings of Work and Education, Management Communication Quarterly, 26(3), 2012, 423-452. 

Flickr photo: Waad Alsulaim

The New Career Paradigm: Matt Damon vs. Johnny Depp and Steve Jobs

Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne is the classic reflection of the American career--linear and mechanistic. Bourne, like many business professionals, focuses on the choices and the actions available to achieve his objective. Driven by incentives and desires, he focuses on a single objective and takes the necessary actions to achieve that objective. Ten minutes into the movie you’ve got a pretty clear lay of the land and where it’s liable to be going. Laying out the sequences of the movie on a storyboard would be simple. It is a very traditional, linear plot.

In stark contrast, last week I went to see Johnny Depp in The Rum Diary. Both my movie storyboards and career models got waylaid. Badly.

The movie, a semi-autobiographical depiction of the early years of the life of Hunter Thompson—the famous journalist and novelist—got underway with Thompson’s alter ego Paul Kemp (played by Johnny Depp), coming to consciousness, having ravaged the minibar in a dark, trashy Puerto Rican hotel room, overlooking a glorious beach. It’s the 1950s, and his bleary disorientation is accentuated by the small plane that flies by with the banner, “Puerto Rico Welcomes Union Carbide.” Yep. Pave paradise with parking lots! Ugly Americans infest the bowling alley. Right wing capitalists plan vulgar resorts on the unspoiled army testing range at Vieques.

Aside from the enjoyable script, filled with absolutely hilarious, cynical, insolent patter, after the first twenty minutes, I was stymied. Where the hell is this going? The only objective in sight was that the young Kemp (Depp), newly arrived from New York, got a job at the San Juan Star, a newspaper edited by a lunatic. The movie quickly introduced a garrulous, frustrated news photographer and a brain-damaged crime writer that initiated him into a round of barhopping, alcohol-soused benders, and cockfighting that result in a trip to the slammer. At the end of the first thirty minutes, two things were obvious: I couldn’t storyboard the plot like a Bourne movie if I tried, and I was the only person laughing in an audience of about 50 people. But just one thing was clear about the plot: it was jumbled and chaotic, not linear.

Even the ending failed to tie the threads together. The newspaper collapsed, and Kemp (Depp) got out with his life still intact, though flawed and, I assume, made even more cynical by his experiences.

Initially, I thought, rather superficially, that it was a crappy way to begin a career. Still, the movie wouldn’t let go of me. The audience didn’t give evidence of liking it--but I couldn’t let go of it.

Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I decided that rather than a crappy way to begin a career, it was a highly auspicious beginning for a brilliant career. The Rum Diary, in contrast to the Bourne trilogy, depicts human experience in all its warts: chaotic, fragmentary, deviating from cherished values and given to imponderable ambiguity. Thompson was a successful writer, at the least, because of his rich exposure to a variety of encounters and involvement with the discomforting unfamiliar.

Johnny Depp’s Rum Diary was a classic break with the past. In profound contrast to the calculated, linear life of choice, the sense of Rum Diary is its focus upon the vagaries of human experience. Like real human experience, the Diary is messy and filled with misadventures.

The 21^st century is going to require competencies that are not easily derived from our incrementalist business schools and linear developed careers. Think about it. The key expertise for success in a globally volatile marketplace includes adaptability, exploration and entrepreneurialism.

Take adaptability as an example. Adaptation comes out of encounters with novelty that may seem chaotic. In trying to adapt, we often have to deviate from cherished values, behave in ways that we’ve barely glimpsed and seize on clues that are merely fragmentary. What better teacher than novel experiences?

It’s obvious today, that careers and work are experiencing a break with the past as significant as that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when parts of the world began the long process of industrialization. The twentieth century mindset ruled our careers. It was, as the Bourne movies revealed, a highly calculating, narrow, specialist’s view of career. And though I’d be the last person to reject that career model, I’m also very certain that, of itself, it’s inadequate for the demands of the 21^st century.

It was Steve Jobs, of all people, that brilliant, painfully difficult and dysfunctional executive, who pointed to the same problem when discussing professionals in the technology industry.

A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

It’s this journey of experience that The Rum Dairy so eloquently points to. And it’s this very important career shift that businesspeople, desirous of a career future, had best pay attention to. When someone can’t adapt to changes, lacks creative insight, has difficulty resolving complex problems or making decisions, one important conclusion becomes obvious: he (or she) doesn’t have enough dots to connect.

Picture: Flickr..Celine Q.