The Intern Diaries: Week Five

Intern evaluation week, or at least according to the email I got.  No one’s come after me for a formal evaluation and that’s a good thing.  I’m pretty bad at meeting people’s expectations for ratings on their various attributes.  To me that’s too much like rating each note in a piece of music.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think we should be rating people on these things:

1. Willingness to dance with your co-workers.  (I don’t mean samba, I mean move with, against, or around them, as appropriate.)
2. Ability to harmonize with your co-workers.  (I don’t mean you have to hit the high notes.  You just need to not be so dissonant that people grimace.)
3. Making music some new way with your co-workers.  (It doesn’t have to be music, literally.  Just something that didn’t exist before.

Ok, I can rate everyone now.   All A’s, intern team!

Will That Be One Hump or Two?

Jason Zweig (aka WSJ’s Intelligent Investor) had a great article in the weekend Wall Street Journal.  After giving examples of bad group decision making (as they say on Law & Order, ‘ripped from the headlines’) he concludes that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is an illusion, that it depends on the competency of the group.

I’d like to add here that what he’s talking about is entirely measurable.

Ineffective groups (aka committees) start out designing a horse and give you a camel.  Let’s just refer to that as being two humps off.  (This measure, of course, assumes they have designed a bactrian rather than a dromedary.)  You can quantify that in pounds of weight the horse would find burdensome, or the extra expense of feeding the resultant lumpy-backed horse or the lessened productivity caused by the extra weight.

It’s all entrely preventable if you select members of the group for their teaming characteristics and leave off those who are either rigid or diffuse.  It also helps to have Role diversity to avoid the tendency to jump in with agreement too early.

Moral of the story: If you always see things my way, you probably aren’t needed on my team.

We’re Playing Tag!

Bloggers are so much fun!  HR Maven blogtagged me. It’s a new game, at least to me, where you tell your readers six random things about yourself and then pass it on, along with the rules.

Here’s me:

1. Between the old stuff I’ve done and the system I architected (www.RightFitToolkit.com) I’ve assessed over 10,000 people

2. I only like metrics that are meaningful.

3. I really am working on my sixth book.  None of the others have taken this long but I didn’t have a blog then!

4. I did not learn to network until a few years ago.  Better late than never, and now I love it.

5. There is nothing better than a slab of brie and a crisp red delicious apple.  This is equally true whether we are talking about breakfast, lunch or dinner.  And it does not require cooking.

6. My husband is really, really cute.  Sometimes he reads my blog.

And here are the rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I tagged:

Simon Meth

Cathy Martin

Dave Elchoness

Gerry Crispin

Jenn Barnes

Laurie Ruettimann

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

This blog is one year old today.  It deserves some recognition and a bit of celebration, if for nothing else other than surviving and growing.  Not much different than a human being.

People used to have shorter life spans, primarily because infant death was so prevalent.  Now it’s blogs that don’t last.  I don’t know how many abandoned blogs dot the blogosphere but a quick search yielded someone making money from ads on abandoned blogs, which sounds to me like putting orphans out to beg, a la Oliver Twist.  The one piece of data I found measured blog life by any activity in the past 90 days (like a post).  They gave the chance of survival at 50/50.

Survival is an organism’s first expression of power.  It’s power that motivates me more than anything else – the power to make change for the better – so no wonder this mini-obsession with blog survival.

Having gotten through this first year with entries on leadership, including the political and economic, I plan to celebrate this blog’s “terrible twos” by talking about motivation in action – people at work. I’m going to start with the full disclosure of how to measure Quality of Hire using the universal metric.

It seems like the right gift to give a blog.

Holiday metrics thoughts

How far we’ve come in the years since 2001, shortly before 9/11, when we started The Gabriel Institute. It’s all in the metrics, though maybe you’ve never thought of this one: Holiday cards.

The first year, the cards were designed, printed, folded, signed, stamped and mailed – only a handful, really. The next few years there was a steady increase in the length of the list, but we still designed, printed, folded, signed, stamped and mailed. Then last year the printer refused to deal with the slightly heavier card stock (it has to flip them to print both sides) and there was no time so we just did an email version.

This year, the list is so huge, I can’t imagine any other way than either starting the process in January or using email. So we are emailing. But in case you aren’t on our list, here’s our greeting and our wish for you at this time:

If you didn’t receive your own, send me your email (to jpresser@thegabrielinstitute.com) and I’ll add you to the holiday card list for next year and also send you the articles that get published this year on leadership, metrics, etc.  You’ll be contributing to the promotion of the most important metric – how much good will we can create through cyberrelationships!

Metrics, Quantitative & Iconoclastic

I saw a demo today of HodesIQ, a very cool web-based talent management toolbox. Just for the record, I watch demos about as often as I watch sports. Whether it’s a game or something on the web, I’d rather play than be on the sidelines. But this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up since I was invited by a friend who is so interesting at a dinner party and I wanted to see how she would translate this talent to a sales pitch. I was not disappointed, nor should I have been surprised since people are fairly consistent. What surprised me was I actually liked how the product works. Amazing how they fit all those features in without turning it into a clunky mess. And the metrics outputs are actually understandable by the people whose work needs to be shaped by the feedback they provide. Kudos, folks, for that and the Smart Post which suggests sites to post your jobs on and then gives you feedback on how successful your postings were.  Usable, quantitative metrics.  (Not my favorite qualitative ones, but good ones nonetheless.)

And for the iconoclasts, I just finished reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I always believed my husband’s theory on investing (go conservative, especially when you have no idea what’s coming next, but keep some money out to play the long shot), but never understood where he got it from, especially since he is not good at standard math. (I mean things like fractions, not calculus.) But he has always been more right than wrong. Thanks to Taleb’s brilliant follow up to his earlier book, Fooled by Randomness, I now understand why Barry (dear husband) is right. And why the guys who tried to sell me on balanced investment strategies (or whatever they called it) were wrong. That part alone is worth the price of the book, which inexplicably was shelved among the science books in the big chain I bought it at.