Jim's Book Review

Mistakes were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson

2012-01-15T13:43:00.000Z

Similar to some of the material in the Psychopath Test I read in November in a strange way, this book looks at our in-built tendency to judge others by different standards than those we use on ourselves.
How our memory is not what it seems at all, how it reconstructs the past so it fits with our view of the world and of ourselves.
How the well meaning social services teams construct abuse that never happened. How judges and prosecutors cannot accept that innocent men were imprisoned (or given the death penalty)

Perhaps my favourite quote is the last in this blog from a Chinese philosopher more than 2500 years ago - we really haven't come that far since then!

“There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.” It seems unlikely that Newt Gingrich said to himself, “My, what a hypocrite I am. There I was, all riled up about Bill Clinton’s sexual affair, while I was having an extramarital affair of my own right here in town.” Similarly, the prominent evangelist Ted Haggard seemed oblivious to the hypocrisy of publicly fulminating against homosexuality while enjoying his own sexual relationship with a male prostitute.Read more at location 174

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What they do show is that if a person voluntarily goes through a difficult or a painful experience in order to attain some goal or object, that goal or object becomes more attractive.Read more at location 374

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So powerful is the need for consonance that when people are forced to look at disconfirming evidence, they will find a way to criticize, distort, or dismiss it so that they can maintain or even strengthen their existing belief. This mental contortion is called the “confirmation bias.”Read more at location 384

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see.” Self-justification, therefore, is not only about protecting high self-esteem; it’s also about protecting low self-esteem if that is how a person sees himself.Read more at location 612

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people will bend over backward to reduce dissonance in a way that is favorable to them and their team. The specific ways vary, but our efforts at self-justification are all designed to serve our need to feel good about what we have done, what we believe, and who we are.Read more at location 726

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Just as we can identify hypocrisy in everyone but ourselves, just as it’s obvious that others can be influenced by money but not ourselves, so we can see prejudices in everyone else but ourselves. Thanks to our ego-preserving blind spots, we cannot possibly have a prejudice, which is an irrational or mean-spirited feeling about all members of another group. Because we are not irrational or mean spirited, any negative feelings we have about another group are justified; our dislikes are rational and well founded. It’s theirs we need to suppress.Read more at location 998

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Once people have a prejudice, just as once they have a political ideology, they do not easily drop it, even if the evidence indisputably contradicts a core justification for it. Rather, they come up with another justification to preserve their belief or course of action.Read more at location 1073

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reviewing the huge research literature on prejudice, found that whenever people are emotionally depleted—when they are sleepy, frustrated, angry, anxious, drunk, or stressed—they become more willing to express their real prejudices toward another group.Read more at location 1101

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Fortunately, we can also better understand the conditions under which prejudices diminish: when the economic competition subsides, when the truce is signed, when the profession is integrated, when they become more familiar and comfortable, when we are in a position to realize that they aren’t so different from us.Read more at location 1142

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We need a few trusted naysayers in our lives, critics who are willing to puncture our protective bubble of self-justifications and yank us back to reality if we veer too far off. This is especially important for people in positions of power.Read more at location 1152

memory researchers love to quote Nietzsche: “ ‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that,’ says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.”Read more at location 1230

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Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject to confabulation—confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you, or coming to believe that you remember something that never happened at all.Read more at location 1260

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Conway and Ross called this self-serving memory distortion “getting what you want by revising what you had.”Read more at location 1387

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If we are to be careful about what we wish for because it might come true, we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because then we will have to live by them.Read more at location 1588

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Overwhelmingly, the evidence shows just the opposite. The problem for most people who have suffered traumatic experiences is not that they forget them but that they cannot forget them: The memories keep intruding.Read more at location 1879

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McNally. “The basic principle is: if the abuse was traumatic at the time it occurred, it is unlikely to be forgotten. If it was forgotten, then it was unlikely to have been traumatic. And even if it was forgotten, there is no evidence that it was blocked, repressed, sealed behind a mental barrier, inaccessible.”Read more at location 1884

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Their experience and training did not improve their performance. Their experience and training simply increased their belief that it did.Read more at location 2439

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Many judges, jurors, and police officers prefer certainties to science. Law professor D. Michael Risinger and attorney Jeffrey L. Loop have lamented “the general failure of the law to reflect virtually any of the insights of modern research on the characteristics of human perception, cognition, memory, inference or decision under uncertainty, either in the structure of the rules of evidence themselves, or the ways in which judges are trained or instructed to administer them.”Read more at location 2559

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Successful partners extend to each other the same self-forgiving ways of thinking we extend to ourselves: They forgive each other’s missteps as being due to the situation, but give each other credit for the thoughtful and loving things they do.Read more at location 2821

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Social psychologist June Tangney has found that being criticized for who you are rather than for what you did evokes a deep sense of shame and helplessness; it makes a person want to hide, disappear.Read more at location 2848

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In his groundbreaking study of more than 700 couples, whom he followed over a period of years, psychologist John Gottman found that contempt—criticism laced with sarcasm, name calling, and mockery—is one of the strongest signs that a relationship is in free fall.Read more at location 2856

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in the way each side tells the same story. Perpetrators, whether individuals or nations, write versions of history in which their behavior was justified and provoked by the other side; their behavior was sensible and meaningful; if they made mistakes or went too far, at least everything turned out for the best in the long run; and it’s all in the past now anyway. Victims tend to write accounts of the same history in which they describe the perpetrator’s actions as arbitrary and meaningless, or else intentionally malicious and brutal; in which their own retaliation was impeccably appropriate and morally justified; and in which nothing turned out for the best. In fact, everything turned out for the worst, and we are still irritated about it.Read more at location 3248

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The implications of these studies are ominous: Combine perpetrators who have high self-esteem and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals,Read more at location 3314

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The moral of our story is easy to say, and difficult to execute. When you screw up, try saying this: “I made a mistake. I need to understand what went wrong. I don’t want to make the same mistake again.” Dweck’s research is heartening because it suggests that at all ages, people can learn to see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.Read more at location 3855

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As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (“Old Master”) observed more than twenty-five-hundred years ago: A great nation is like a great man: When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.Read more at location 3882

The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else by George Anders

2011-12-12T13:30:00.000Z

A book that looks at how the top talent pickers across education, sport and business use tools to ensure they get the very best candidates that others will often overlook, and these are techniques we can all use.

In fact there are several good ideas for improving your own performance in your own job now, never mind picking your successor.

Time and again those interviewed came back to selecting on character rather than ability - but how much of our selection process tries to ensure their existing experience matches what we need them to do rather than how they did it!

America. It’s not that we don’t know enough about candidates. Today’s dossiers on serious contenders for a CEO’s job frequently surpass what the U.S. Senate knew about Supreme Court nominees a few decades ago. It’s not that there are too few talented people to fill crucial openings. This is a country in which talent proliferates.Read more at location 640

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hire. His advice always flowed from the same starting point. Before you do anything else, he wrote, “Think through the assignment.” That sounds painfully simple. It seems so obvious that many leaders dash past that step.Read more at location 646

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that good teaching is not about charisma. It’s not anything magical or elusive. These teachers set clear goals for their students, motivate people (in this case students and their families) to work hard toward these goals, work relentlessly to accomplish them, and constantly assess their effectiveness and improve their performance over time.Read more at location 794

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The best experts in any field constantly stretch their horizons so they can do something new. That is how they stay sharp. Nobel laureates do this; great composers do this—and so do the savviest judges of human potential. They refuse to become so habit-bound that familiar customsRead more at location 923

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“The best candidates are constantly trying to figure out why they went off the path,” Kiev added. “They’re introspective. They remember every detail. The ones who don’t learn much have hazy memories. They tend to blame external factors. They sound intellectually honest, but they aren’t. Their excuses are plentiful.” In Kiev’s view, the difference between rebounders and evaders is “hardwired into people. If you’re inquiring well, you should be able to get at it.”Read more at location 1078

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Consider this admonition from a popular management primer on hiring: Lou Adler’s Hire with Your Head. The author’s number one precept is as follows: “Remain objective throughout the interviewing process, fighting the impact of first impressions, biases, intuitions, prejudices and preconceived notions of success. This way, all information collected during the interview is both relevant and unbiased.” That’s a fine way to pick out a lawn mower. It’s not a great way to choose people.Read more at location 1360

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One of Dr. Weiss’s favorite ways of spotting the nonobvious winners is to see how candidates answer a quartet of essay questions that are aimed at drawing out students’ character. Those questions ask students to talk about rewarding experiences, overcoming adversity, areas of pride, and moments of exclusion.Read more at location 1544

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Ask audition masters what they are hunting for, and the deepest answers involve subjects’ character. Regardless of differences in the exact ways that talent is expressed, each domain’s underlying quests are strikingly similar: Who tries hard? Who prepares well? Who recovers quickly and calmly from a setback? Who works well with others? Who can size up a turbulent situation and come up with a plan?Read more at location 1627

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What the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team wants is remarkably similar to what Johns Hopkins, Facebook, and dozens of other high-talent organizations are seeking, too. The FBI’s list is as follows: Initiative, perseverance, and compatibility.Read more at location 1776

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Discipline, trainability, and judgment. Loyalty, leadership, and maturity.Read more at location 1779

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Mediocre engineers were seen as silent saboteurs, spewing out flawed computer code that could take years to fix.Read more at location 1877

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xkcd.com. (xkcd is weird but hilarious—take a look.)Read more at location 1910

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For a while, Canfield scouted the world of stand-up comics. As he later explained, they are marvelous storytellers. They hone their material relentlessly, so that it connects with an audience. (If they don’t, they become sit-down comics.) And they are keenly aware of audiences’ short attention span, in ways that other narrators often overlook.Read more at location 2041

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Menkes started running critical-thinking tests for corporate clients. He wrote a book about his approach called Executive Intelligence.Read more at location 3456

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“CEOs who are persistent and proactive get things done. CEOs who are not, do not get things done, even if they are good listeners, team players, etc. And if you do not get things done, the people working for you get frustrated or even leave, particularly the better ones.”Read more at location 3581

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Compromise on experience; don’t compromise on character.Read more at location 3623

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Seek out “talent that whispers.” The world is full of overlooked people,Read more at location 3636

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On the fringes of talent, ask: “What can go right?”Read more at location 3641

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Take tiny chances—so you can take more of them.Read more at location 3645

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Draw out the “hidden truths” of each job.Read more at location 3661

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Be willing to use your own career is a template.Read more at location 3670

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Rely on auditions to see how and why people achieve the results they do.Read more at location 3682

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To learn the most from an audition, pay attention to more than the absolute caliber of the performance. Concentrate hardest on what you can learn about the candidate’s character.Read more at location 3687

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Master the art of aggressive listening.Read more at location 3692

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Be willing to pick one trait that matters more than anything. Often the ability to recover from setbacks is what separates people who surpass expectations from those who disappoint. ResilienceRead more at location 3705

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Be alert to other invisible virtues, too. Curiosity is also invisible on most résumés yet it is a remarkable talisman in many careers.Read more at location 3714

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Push your best candidates to grow even stronger.Read more at location 3736

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accomplish. If you choose to champion great talent, you will be picking one of the most altruistic things a person can do. Making the most of the next generation of achievers is akin to parenting, except on a larger scale. The benefits to society are likely to be much greater than the personal gain.Read more at location 3770

Future Babble by Dan Gardner

2011-11-29T13:12:00.000Z

A book about why we have a desperate need to try and predict the future but why we will always be doomed to fail. Although there are some traits that make some people slightly better at it than others.
A must read book for all those struggling to compose Strategic Plans or Budget submissions.

A really telling insight was that those who are most confident that they are right are the worst at predicting the future with any degree of certainty. Statistically the best prediction is that the future will be the same as today (because for most of the time it is) this will be wrong for sure but more accurate than most forecasters.

The book looks at our evolutionary drive to understand what is going to happen and to the biases this builds into our judgement and our memory.

So how do we get better:

Gather information from as many sources as possible
Accept you may well be wrong and actively seek out views that do not agree with yours. Draft a list of reasons why your belief may be wrong
Display humility, nothing is certain and your predictions should never be so.
Consider how your decisions will play out if your predictions turn out to be wrong. A good decision is robust in the face of various futures.

No matter how often expert predictions fail, we want more. This strange phenomenon led Scott Armstrong, an expert on forecasting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, to coin his “seer-sucker” theory: “No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.” Sometimes we even go back to the very people whose predictions failed in the past and listen, rapt, as they tell us how the future will unfold. This book explains why expert predictions fail and why we believe them anyway.Read more at location 365

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Certain styles of thinking and decision making do a far better job of groping amid the inky blackness of the future to find a path ahead. These styles can be learned and applied, with results that are positive, although far from perfect. And that leads to the ultimate conclusion, which is one we do not want to accept but must: There are no crystal balls, and no style of thinking, no technique, no model will ever eliminate uncertainty.Read more at location 398

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Experts who did better than the average of the group – and better than random guessing – thought very differently. They had no template. Instead, they drew information and ideas from multiple sources and sought to synthesize it. They were self-critical, always questioning whether what they believed to be true really was. And when they were shown that they had made mistakes, they didn’t try to minimize, hedge, or evade. They simply acknowledged they were wrong and adjusted their thinking accordingly. Most of all, these experts were comfortable seeing the world as complex and uncertain – so comfortable that they tended to doubt the ability of anyone to predict the future. That resulted in a paradox: The experts who were more accurate than others tended to be much less confident that they were right.Read more at location 581

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Put all that together and there’s a very clear lesson: If you hear a hedgehog make a long-term prediction, it is almost certainly wrong. Treat it with great skepticism.Read more at location 595

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economists Ron Alquist and Lutz Kilian published a paper in which they examined all the sophisticated methods one could use to determine the price of oil one month, one quarter, or one year in the future. They looked at fancy econometric models. They looked at oil prices in futures and spot markets. They looked at the consensus opinion of oil analysts. And they found that anyone could do better than all these crystal balls, sometimes far better, by applying a mindless rule: Always predict that the price in the future will be whatever the price is now. True, this technique is far from accurate. In fact, it’s pretty awful. But the others are worse.Read more at location 707

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“There’s a demand for the forecasts so people generate them,”Read more at location 1054

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Foxes are okay with that. They like complexity and uncertainty, even if that means they can draw only cautious conclusions and they have to admit they could be wrong. “Maybe” is fine with them.Read more at location 1671

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“This effect contributes to the appeal of scenarios and the illusory insight they often provide,” Kahneman and Tversky wrote. And it’s so easy to do. Just add details, colour, and drama. And pile on the predictions. The actual accuracy will plummet but the feeling of plausibility will soar.Read more at location 2107

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People who try to peer into the future – both experts and laypeople – are very likely to start with an unreasonable bias in favour of the status quo. Today’s trends will continue, and tomorrow will be like today, only more so. With that belief in place, the confirmation bias that so misled Arnold Toynbee kicks in. Evidence that supports the belief is embraced without question; evidence that contradicts the belief is treated with extreme suspicion or, more often, ignored. Steadily, the belief that tomorrow will be like today grows into a strong conviction. Occasionally, a surprise – the decline of Japan, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the crash of 2008 – slaps us in the face and we are reminded that tomorrow may not be like today. Suitably chastened, we get imaginative and think of all the ways the surprise that just happened could happen again … and we are right back in the mental rut of the status quo. Genuinely imaginative attempts to portray change – including scenario planning – may help pull us out of that rut but they may also cause us to develop an unrealistic sense of how likely those imaginative futures really are. And all the while, no matter what happens, we are convinced we are right.Read more at location 2129

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In an unsettling study, elderly residents of a nursing home were placed in rooms where everything was handled by others, right down to the arrangement of the furniture and the selection and care of a house-plant. With no decisions to make, their environment was pleasant but completely out of their control. Other residents of the home were given the same room and treatment, but they were asked to decide how the furniture would be arranged and they were asked to select and care for a plant. A year and a half later, 30 per cent of the residents without control had died, compared to 15 per cent of those with control.Read more at location 2456

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Gilbert noted. “People feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur.”Read more at location 2561

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“Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes,” the review noted, “but it is less urgent with regard to good ones.” People whose brains gave priority to bad news were much less likely to be eaten by lions or die some other unpleasant and untimely death than those whose brains did not, and so “negativity bias” became a universal human trait.37Read more at location 2571

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The experts who dominate the media won’t be the most accurate. In fact, they will be the least accurate. And that is precisely what Philip Tetlock discovered. Using Google hits as a simple way to measure the fame of each of his 284 experts, Tetlock found that the more famous the expert, the worse he did.Read more at location 2721

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In much the same way, a strong, enthusiastic, confident speaking style has a power that transcends mere rationalityRead more at location 2791

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researchers concluded that “persuasion is a function not of intelligence, prediscussion conviction, position with respect to the issue, manifest ability, or volubility, but of the expression of confidence during the discussion itself.” Very simply: confidence convinces.Read more at location 2808

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Robertson doesn’t deny that his story is very simplistic, or that there’s far more to his thinking. But he doesn’t go further because this story is what people want. Anything more is needless complication. “You don’t have to sit there and bring in all these charts and stuff,” he says. “If you don’t trust me, it won’t make a difference.”Read more at location 2925

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For experts who want the public’s attention, Paul Ehrlich is the gold standard. Be articulate, enthusiastic, and authoritative. Be likeable. See things through a single analytical lens and craft an explanatory story that is simple, clear, conclusive, and compelling. Do not doubt yourself. Do not acknowledge mistakes. And never, ever say “I don’t know.”Read more at location 3014

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It’s especially true among those who put together business forecasts; managers and executives know that someone who wishes to keep her job will not announce to a roomful of superiors that the future is complex, unpredictable, and out of her control – no matter how true that may be. But more than all the rest, the news media know the lesson of Paul Ehrlich.Read more at location 3040

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Be simple, clear, and confident. Be extreme. Be a good storyteller. Think and talk like a hedgehog.Read more at location 3129

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the different emphasis we put on predictions that hit and those that miss. We ignore misses, even when they lie scattered by the dozen at our feet; we celebrate hits, even when we have to hunt for them and pretend there was more to them than luck. This discrepancy is so extreme and pervasive it even has a name. It’s the “Jeane Dixon Effect,”Read more at location 3238

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They may be wrong far more often than they are right. They may do worse than flipped coins and stopped clocks. But they never fail to deliver the certainty that we crave. And we never fail to ask for more.Read more at location 3476

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Memory is an organic process, not a recording. While memories can remain sharp and fixed for decades, they can also evolve, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically. These changes aren’t random. Memories serve the present: We misremember in ways that suit the needs of the moment.Read more at location 3778

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Knowing the world is fundamentally uncertain and unpredictable, and knowing that the brains we use to understand this uncertain and unpredictable world contain psychological biases and other tripwires that skew our judgement, a little humility is in order. The future is dark, and much as we might like to see in the dark, we cannot. Imagining otherwise is dangerous. Stride confidently forward in the dark and you’re likely to feel quite pleased with yourself right up until the moment you walk into a wall.Read more at location 4434

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While our decisions have to be made on the basis of what we think is going to happen, we must always consider how our decisions will fare if the future turns out to be very different. A good decision is one that delivers positive results in a wide range of futures.Read more at location 4475

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Recall that people whose thinking style marks them as “foxes,” in Philip Tetlock’s terms, are modest about their ability to forecast the future, comfortable with complexity and uncertainty, and very self-critical – they are always questioning whether what they believe to be true really is. Foxes also reject intellectual templates, preferring to gather ideas and information from as many sources as they can get their hands on.Read more at location 4591

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By grabbing on to whatever information is available, from whatever source, foxes aggregate. They may not do it as well as a prediction market, but the fundamental process is the same, and it helps make their judgement superior to that of hedgehogs who know One Big Thing and aren’t interested in finding out more.Read more at location 4608

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The second element at work is what psychologists call metacognition. This is simply thinking about thinking. Alan Barnes constantly pushes his analysts to reflect on their conclusions, to question them, to ask themselves where they came from and whether they really make sense or not.Read more at location 4616

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A basic method for overcoming confirmation bias, for example, is to draft a list of reasons why your belief may be wrong, but the analysts “are reluctant to use even that extremely simple tool,”Read more at location 4629

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The last of the three key elements at work is humility. “I think when you’re dealing with future events, pretending that you have absolute certainty is doing the reader a great disservice,” Barnes says.Read more at location 4633

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The billionaire financier George Soros is a classic fox.Read more at location 4648

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Anyone who reads history with sufficient imagination to overcome hindsight bias knows this. What appears most likely, or even certain, does not happen, while what happens is something quite unexpected. It was true for my grandfather’s generation. It was true for my mother’s. It is true for mine. And it will be true for my children’s, which is one of the few grand-scale predictions I am comfortable making. As journalist James Fallows observed, “What looks like tomorrow’s problem is rarely the real problem when tomorrow rolls around.”Read more at location 4764

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

2011-11-25T13:01:00.000Z

Quite a disturbing book about how the medical profession have been on a drive to have an easy simple way of detecting psychopaths. Unfortunately most of us display some of the traits on the PCL-R Hare checklist at some point, and once you have been labelled it is very difficult to prove otherwise since the more you deny it the stronger you are seen to be a psychopath.

The actual book is engaging and written as a story of how a journalist investigates a series of particular cases rather than a dry academic text. It doesn't just cover those in mental institutions but also reality TV contestants, ADHD in schools, senior corporate managers, .....

Really made me think - am I a psychopath, how many people I know are psychopaths by these definitions?

They say Hubbard was the very first man to reveal that psychiatrists were dosing patients with massive amounts of LSD and electro-convulsive therapy in secret CIA-funded attempts to create brainwashed assassins. He published his account of the experiments in 1969 and it wasn’t until June 1975 that the Washington Post announced to an unsuspecting world that these programmes (codenamed MK-ULTRA) existed.Read more at location 789

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Their conclusions became the basis for his now-famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this:

ITEM 1: Glibness/superficial charm

ITEM 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth

ITEM 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom

ITEM 4: Pathological lying

ITEM 5: Cunning/manipulative

ITEM 6: Lack of remorse or guilt

ITEM 7: Shallow affect

ITEM 8: Callous/lack of empathy

ITEM 9: Parasitic lifestyle

ITEM 10: Poor behavioral controls

ITEM 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior

ITEM 12: Early behavior problems

ITEM 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals

ITEM 14: Impulsivity

ITEM 15: Irresponsibility

ITEM 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

ITEM 17: Many short-term marital relationships

ITEM 18: Juvenile delinquency

ITEM 19: Revocation of conditional release

ITEM 20: Criminal versatilityRead more at location 1500

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They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain there’s not much left except the will to win.’ ‘Which means you’ll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The higher you go up the ladder the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.’Read more at location 1772

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Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work – co-authored with a psychologist named Paul Babiak.Read more at location 2141

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Practically every peak-time programme is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The people who are the right sort of mad are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as them. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as them. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.Read more at location 3265

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There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.Read more at location 4220

The coming jobs war by Jim Clifton

2011-11-10T00:33:00.000Z

Written by Gallup, the polling organisation the book gives a frankly depressing view of the likely future track of the 'developed western countries' particularly America. In fact the book is a little too xenophobic for my taste, although the messages as the author says could be applied anywhere. What he seems to fail to realise is that there are many other countries in the 'race' he describes and I see no particular reason why the USA should win.

In addition to the well known 12 employee engagement questions (that we really should use at work rather than keep developing our own as there is so much baseline data) the book outlines a set of customer engagement and student engagement questions along similar lines

Six years into our global data collection effort, we may have already found the single most searing, clarifying, helpful, world-altering fact. What the whole world wants is a good job. This is one of the most important discoveries Gallup has ever made.Read more at location 118 •
Humans used to desire love, money, food, shelter, safety, peace, and freedom more than anything else. The last 30 years have changed us. Now people want to have a good job, and they want their children to have a good job.Read more at location 126 •
So what would going broke look like on a national scale? Well, take a look at Detroit, and imagine that economic disaster coast to coast. Look at California. California can’t pay its pensions, it will likely declare bankruptcy, a lot of its employees are going to be out of a job, and its bond holders won’t be able to get their money. The same is true for Illinois and Michigan.Read more at location 187 •
Yet a country’s GDP is its most important leading indicator. So goes its increase and decrease, so goes jobs, spending, tax base, and then everything else. Size matters, but so does direction.Read more at location 280 •
And then there’s this fact, which few people seem to recognize: All money is going to get spent anyway. You’ll spend it, your business will spend it, or your government will spend it.Read more at location 351 •
“My hard-earned government pension has been slashed.” You’ll start hearing this slowly at first, and then all the time. That’s because when the GDP has no growth, there is no job growth, which depletes the once huge tax base that pays for everything. And so the government has to cut services by a third, including government pensions.Read more at location 370 •
With fewer jobs, there are fewer workers to fund Social Security. So payments get cut. And it’s a significant problem for a democratic system that has elected officials who don’t want to address it, because explaining that this program simply cannot continue making the payments the way it does now will cause them to lose elections.Read more at location 390 •
Plato made a very cruel but astute observation: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”Read more at location 766 •
Innovation has no value until it creates something a customer wants. Here is a Gallup economics finding that few leaders anywhere know: Even the best ideas and inventions in the world have no value until they have a customer.Read more at location 894 •
Let me summarize the biggest body of behavioral economic data in the world on workplaces. It comes from a Gallup study on workplace productivity, and it consists of 12 critical elements of work life. Gallup has asked millions of workers worldwide to respond to these items for more than a decade and always finds the same thing: Miserable employees create miserable customers.Read more at location 1048 •
And if you can’t find the misery quotient, I guarantee your accounting department will. It will take a year or two though. I’ve observed that employee misery precedes all the easy-to-find data by one day to two years, depending on the type of business. Somebody in the company needs to treat a customer like hell for between one day and two years before the customer will defect. Customer defections are immediately followed by job loss.Read more at location 1053 •
And then there are the 19% of actively disengaged employees who are there to dismantle and destroy your company. They exhaust managers, they have more on-the-job accidents and cause more quality defects,Read more at location 1082 •
Gallup also found that other apparent key variables (such as “I’m fairly compensated”) outside the 12 didn’t distinguish between engaged and disengaged employees. These 12 items hold up statistically throughout all job variations and throughout business and industry, retail, hospitality, manufacturing, government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the military, education — virtually all jobs everywhere in the world.Read more at location 1097 •

There’s one behavioral economic demand left, and it is big. If you don’t get this one right, everything after it falls apart. Once you have carefully diagnosed an individual’s strengths and given her that near-perfect job that she has real talent to perform with a mission and purpose, make sure she has a great manager. Everything else on The Gallup Path shuts down if an employee has a bad boss.Read more at location 1217 •

A leader’s most defining moment is the decision of whom to name as manager at any level — whom to put in charge of developing the talents and skills of others. If a leader chooses good managers, everything works. If a leader assigns the wrong person as manager, everything fails. Nothing fixes bad managers, not coaching, competency training, incentives, or warnings — nothing works. A bad manager never gets better.Read more at location 1224 •
In fact, one of the biggest blind spots in most American businesses is that they don’t realize how big the emotional economy is within their own customer base worldwide. The best corporate leaders in the United States are still unaware that they are leaving a great deal of money on the table through abysmal execution of the employee-customer links because they are so focused on the “hard numbers,” of which they have already squeezed every dollarRead more at location 1291 •
To measure customer engagement, these are the best 11 questionsRead more at location 1306 •
Gallup scientists have found to ask customers anywhere in the world: CE1. Taking into account all the products and services you receive from them, how satisfied are you with (Company) overall? CE2. How likely are you to continue to do business with (Company)? CE3. How likely are you to recommend (Company) to a friend or associate? CE4. (Company) is a name I can always trust. CE5. (Company) always delivers on what they promise. CE6. (Company) always treats me fairly. CE7. If a problem arises, I can always count on (Company) to reach a fair and satisfactory resolution. CE8. I feel proud to be (a/an) (Company) customer. CE9. (Company) always treats me with respect. CE10. (Company) is the perfect company/product for people like me. CE11. I can’t imagine a world without (Company).Read more at location 1307 •
There are more than 75 million students enrolled in schools in the United States — nearly 50 million in the 5th through 12th grades. They are the successors of today’s business leaders. The problem is, approximately 30% of those students will drop out or fail to graduate on schedule. About 50% of minorities are dropping out. This gives the rest of the developed world a huge advantage over the United States in the upcoming economic wars.Read more at location 1406 •
Gallup continues to find, as we have for more than 75 years, that lots of money is rarely the solution to big problems. Sometimes, in fact, the bigger the problem, the less expensive the solution. What’s expensive is trying to fix after-the-fact outcomes rather than creating strategies that get at the behaviors and cause.Read more at location 1425 •
Gallup Student Poll Items: 1. Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? 2. I know I will graduate from high school. 3. There is an adult in my life who cares about my future. 4. I can think of many ways to get good grades.Read more at location 1481 •
5. I energetically pursue my goals. 6. I can find lots of ways around any problem. 7. I know I will find a good job after I graduate. 8. I have a best friend at school. 9. I feel safe in this school. 10. My teachers make me feel my schoolwork is important. 11. At this school, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day. 12. In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good schoolwork. 13. My school is committed to building the strengths of each student. 14. In the last month, I volunteered my time to help others. 15. Were you treated with respect all day yesterday? 16. Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday? 17. Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday? 18. Did you have enough energy to get things done yesterday? 19. Do you have health problems that keep you from doing any of the things other people your age normally can do? 20. If you are in trouble, do you have family or friends you can count on to help whenever you need them?Read more at location 1488 •
If you were to ask me, from all of Gallup’s data and research on entrepreneurship, what will most likely tell you if you are winning or losing your city, my answer would be, “5th to 12th graders’ image of and relationship to free enterprise and entrepreneurship.” The better the image, the more likely your city will win. If your city doesn’t have growing economic energy in your 5th through 12th graders, you will experience neither job creation nor city GDP growth.Read more at location 1530 •
1. The United States spent $2,500,000,000,000 on healthcare in 2009 — two and a half trillion dollars. Nearly half of this comes from Medicare and Medicaid (taxes). And the other half is private insurance and out-of-pocket spending. 2. This is the biggest price tag for anything in America. War in Iraq and Afghanistan run about $200 billion per year. The healthcare bill per year is 10 times bigger than the annual warRead more at location 1621 •
A hospital is, honest to God, a more dangerous place to be than Iraq or Afghanistan. Over the last eight years, about 6,000 American soldiers have been killed while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the same time, nearly 800,000 American patients have been killed by healthcare mistakes — and about 8,000,000 injured. War fatalities are so small compared to what is happening in hospitals and healthcare facilities. And of course, patients aren’t dying for their country.Read more at location 1666 •

Born Liars why we can't live without deceit by Ian Leslie

2011-11-03T00:23:00.000Z

A book investigating why we are programmed to deceive, most of all to deceive ourselves. Touches on topics from several other books I have read, explaining that what we perceive as reality is actually constructed by our minds some time after the event (so as to best fit with our mental view of the world).

Interesting chapters on child development and at what point they are able to deceive and detect deception.

Looks at how the evolutionary explosion in teh size of our brain can be traced back to having to manage living in larger social groups with an 'arms race' of deception and detection.

Based on the size of our brains, he said, we should be able to cope with a social group – people we would happily meet for a drink, say – of about a hundred and fifty people. Sure enough, when he combed through the anthropological and sociological literature, he found that a hundred and fifty worked as a rough average of the size of many human social groups, from hunter-gatherer societies to modern army units and company departments.Read more at location 215 •
Two-year-olds start to sense that their parents have feelings, and that they can affect those feelings by what they do. They then proceed to test this fascinating insight to destruction.Read more at location 368 •
Great liars tend to be great readers of human behaviour. Think of Iago, a ‘people person’ if ever there was one, subtly drawing out Othello’s rage, or reflect that Bill Clinton is famous for being both a convincing liar and a politician of exceptional empathy.Read more at location 438 •
What’s clear is that, faced with a group of people and asked to identify the liar, you’d be better off picking the most charismatic and fluent person in the room rather than, as we’re inclined to, the shifty-looking mumbler in the corner. Lying requires high cognitive, emotional and social abilities. The best liars tend to be charming, empathetic, and capable of thinking several moves aheadRead more at location 927 •
When you are talking to someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result you tend to judge others on what you see, and ourselves by what you feel.Read more at location 1111 •
This description of memory tallies with the experimental evidence of Elizabeth Loftus, and with the findings of modern neuroscience. Remembering is an act of creative reconstruction rather than simple replaying. Every time a memory is recalled it is re-formed, and in the process it becomes mingled with the stories of others and shaped by our own anxieties, desires and imaginings. As the neurologist Antonio Damasio puts it, the brain carries ‘no hard copies’.Read more at location 1731 •
that our feeling of free will is nothing but a trick of perspective – a deception practised by the brain. A conscious ‘decision’ is merely a story we tell ourselves to explain what has happened to us, or what our bodies have already executed. This is a deeply contentious position, although many neuroscientists agree with him. There is certainly a huge amount of experimental evidence that our unconscious brain guides and determines many of the everyday decisions we think of as conscious ones.Read more at location 1869 •
Anthony Greenwald compressed this even further when he coined the word beneffectance to describe the normal human tendency to interpret reality so as to present ourselves as both beneficial and effective. Whenever either of these propositions are thrown into question, we are good at inventing stories that resolve the inconsistency between our actions and our self-image. Most of the time we’re not aware of doing so.Read more at location 2283 •

scientist Harold McGee has pointed out that the pungent smell of certain cheeses, like Vieux Boulogne, is the smell of decay – something we are hard-wired to find disgusting (and thus to avoid for our own good). That some people, in certain countries – especially France, of course – find such smells appetising is testament to the extent that our senses are in thrall to the beliefs we inherit from the culture in which we live.Read more at location 3071 •
Other studies have shown that green pills are better at reducing anxiety, and white pills are best for soothing ulcers. Patients who take four sugar pills a day clear their gastric ulcers faster than those who take two sugar pills a day. Large pills work better than medium-sized pills, and very small pills work best of all. Placebos that patients believe to be expensive work better than those they think cost less. Fake surgery involving impressivelooking, excitingly-named machines works extremely well indeed.Read more at location 3211 •
The anthropologist Robin Fox put it to me like this: ‘The brain’s business is not to give us an accurate or objective view of the world, but to give us a useful view – one we can act on.’ Its primary job is to help the packet of tissue, bone and muscle in which it’s encased to survive and thrive; reporting reality is an important but secondary consideration. So is telling the truth to others.Read more at location 3570 •

Adapt why success always starts with failure by Tim Harford

2011-10-27T00:10:00.000+01:00

This book looks at how tolerating, in fact thriving on, failure is the best way to make progress and foster innovation. That applying the evolutionary approach to innovative development is the most efficient in the long run. It also covers why our psychology makes it so tough for us to accept this course of action.

It covers three principles:
1) seek out new ideas and try new things;
2) when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable;
3) seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.

Predictions about Russia from experts on Russia were no more accurate than predictions about Russia from experts on Canada.Read more at location 159 •
Most accounts of Tetlock’s research savour the humbling of the professional pundits. And why not? One of Tetlock’s more delicious discoveries was that the more famous experts – those who spent a lot of time as talking heads on television – were especially incompetent.Read more at location 161 •
The market has solved the problem of generating material wealth, but its secret has little to do with the profit motive or the superior savvy of the boardroom over the cabinet office. Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success, as successful ideas take off and less successful ones die out. When we see the survivors of this process – such as Exxon, General Electric and Procter & Gamble – we shouldn’t merely see success. We should also see the long, tangled history of failure, of all of the companies and all of the ideas that didn’t make it.Read more at location 239 •
Astounding complexity emerges in response to a simple process: try out a few variants on what you already have, weed out the failures,Read more at location 246 •
In fact, Stuart Kauffmann and John Holland, both complexity theorists affiliated with the multidisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, have shown that the evolutionary approach is not just another way of solving complex problems. Given the likely shape of these ever-shifting landscapes, the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions.Read more at location 299 •
We should not leap to conclusions based on an abstract mathematical model, but Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Apple might as well replace Steve Jobs with a dart-throwing chimpanzee – even though it would certainly liven up Apple product launches. But the evidence suggests that in a competitive environment, many corporate decisions are not successful, and corporations constantly have to cull bad ideas and search for something better.Read more at location 350 •
We will have to make an uncomfortable number of mistakes, and learn from them, rather than cover them up or deny they happened, even to ourselves. This is not the way we are used to getting things done.Read more at location 369 •
The Soviets failed at both: they found it impossible to tolerate a real variety of approaches to any problem; and they found it hard to decide what was working and what was not. TheRead more at location 415 •
What Palchinsky realised was that most real-world problems are more complex than we think. They have a human dimension, a local dimension, and are likely to change as circumstances change. His method for dealing with this could be summarised as three ‘Palchinsky principles’: first, seek out new ideas and try new things; second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable; third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along. The first principle could simply be expressed as ‘variation’; the third as ‘selection’. The importance of the middle principle – survivability – is something which will become clear in chapter six, which explores the collapse of the banking system.Read more at location 442 •
If we are to take the ‘variation’ part of ‘variation and selection’ seriously, uniformly high standards are not only impossible but undesirable. When a problem is unsolved or continually changing, the best way to tackle it is to experiment with many different approaches. If nobody tries anything different, we will struggle to figure out new and better ways to do anything. But if we are to accept variation, we must also accept that some of these new approaches will not work well. That is not a tempting proposition for a politician or chief executive to try to sell.Read more at location 494 •
There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders really want to hear; and because we know this, most of us sugar-coat our opinions whenever we speak to a powerful person. In a deep hierarchy, that process is repeated many times, until the truth is utterly concealed inside a thick layer of sweet-talk.Read more at location 517 •
All four examples – poker, Paris, Deal or No Deal and share portfolios – show a dogged determination to avoid crystallising a loss or drawing a line under a decision we regret. That dogged determination might occasionally be helpful, but it is counterproductive in all these cases and in many others. Faced with a mistake or a loss, the right response is to acknowledge the setback and change direction. Yet our instinctive reaction is denial. That is why ‘learn from your mistakes’ is wise advice that is painfully hard to take.Read more at location 590 •
The three essential steps are: to try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; to make failure survivable, because it will be common; and to make sure that you know when you’ve failed.Read more at location 604 •
‘In the absence of guidance or orders, figure out what they should have been … ’ – part of a sign on a command-post door in west Baghdad, commandeered by David PetraeusRead more at location 618 •
Friedrich Hayek in an article published in 1945. What Hayek realised, and Allende and Beer did not seem to, was that a complex world is full of knowledge that is localised and fleeting. Crucially, the local information is often something that local agents would prefer to use for their own purposes.Read more at location 1157 •
Return on investment is simply not a useful way of thinking about new ideas and new technologies. It is impossible to estimate a percentage return on blue-sky research, and it is delusional even to try. Most new technologies fail completely. Most original ideas turn out either to be not original after all, or original for the very good reason that they are useless. And when an original idea does work, the returns can be too high to be sensibly measured.Read more at location 1329 •
Grants, unlike prizes, are a powerful tool of patronage. Prizes, in contrast, are open to anyone who produces results. That makes them intrinsically threatening to the establishment.Read more at location 1715 •
‘Your first try will be wrong. Budget and design for it.’ – Aza Raskin, designer at FirefoxRead more at location 3464 •
Disruptive innovations are disruptive precisely because the new technology doesn’t appeal to the traditional customers: it is different and for their purposes, it’s inferior. But for a small niche of new customers the new disruptive product is exactly what is needed. They want smaller, cheaper hard drives, or cameras that produce digital files, or email that you can access on any computer – and they are willing to tolerate the fact that the new product is inferior to the old one along all the traditional dimensions. That foothold in the niche market gives the new technology an opportunity to develop into a true threat to the old way of doing things.Read more at location 3778 •
researchers find that self-employed people tend to be happier than the employed: they receive implicit approval of what they do every time somebody pays their invoice, whereas people with regular jobs tend to receive feedback that is both less frequent and less meaningful.Read more at location 4025 •

The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini

2011-10-15T23:56:00.000+01:00

A book exploring what constitutes the single 'I' that appears to be going on inside our heads. As well as dipping into cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of self, the book looks ate various human case studies of individuals that give us insights into the system from those suffering from dementia, with various brain defects and damage, through to those with depression or undergoing gender reassignment.

In the end the book explains that what appears to us to be a singular self, is in fact just a trick, played on us by our brains as a complicated bundle of mental processes go about their daily function (normally with very little input or control from us).

To underestimate the extent to which the medium of our existence – the particular body each of us is given – shapes the person we become would be folly. But to think the person just is the medium is equally misguided. more at location 252
Unable to write or take notes, he had to think and remember what he wanted to say, and then dictate it to others. As a result, his memory improved considerably. But ‘The pleasures of mental agility are much over-stated, inevitably – as it now appears to me – by those not exclusively dependent upon them.Read more at location 303
The unity of the self is not to be explained in terms of a single, unified brain region, which acts as the master controller.Read more at location 385
Commissurotomy therefore seems to show that selves can be divided – at least temporarily – or that they needn’t have just one centre of consciousness after all.Read more at location 504
The unity and permanence we feel over time largely depends on our ability to construct an autobiographical narrative that links our experiences over time. But individual experiences and sense of self at any particular time can vary enormously. What is more, the autobiographical self is very good at self-revision. In effect, we are constantly rewriting our histories to keep our inner autobiographies coherent.Read more at location 566
To put it another way, the self is a construction of the mind, one flexible enough to withstand constant renovation, partial demolition and reconstruction, but one that can be brought down if the foundations are undermined.Read more at location 574
Many philosophers have argued that we are constituted by a psychologically continuous web of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and memories. Dementia says, well, okay, let’s pick that web apart, piece by piece and see if anything of you remains.Read more at location 630
We all ignore and do not commit to memory facts and events that conflict with the way we see ourselves and the world. We remember selectively, usually without conscious effort or desire to do so. And yet because we believe memory records facts, objectively, we fail to see that all this means that we are constructing ourselves and the world.Read more at location 694
They started from the correct idea that thoughts, feelings and sensations were not physical things. The category mistake was to conclude that they must therefore be a different kind of thing, a non-physical thing. But there is another, more plausible alternative: they are not things at all. Rather, thinking and feeling are what brains and bodies do. Mind should not be thought of a substance, but as a kind of activity.Read more at location 903
It’s a bit like a picture made up of hundreds of black and white dots. It could be that 90 per cent of the dots are identical, but the 10 per cent that differ create a totally different image.Read more at location 1177
‘The point of philosophy,’ wrote Bertrand Russell, ‘is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’1Read more at location 1647
The Ego Trick should be seen in this way. There is no single thing which comprises the self, but we need to function as though there were. As it happens, the mind, thanks to the brain and body, has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve that enable us to do this. Because it succeeds, selves really do exist. We only go wrong if we’re too impressed by this unity and assume that it means that underlying it is a single thing. But the self is not a substance or thing, it is a function of what a certain collection of stuff does.Read more at location 1709
The unity we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I’, is a result of the Ego Trick – the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it.Read more at location 1757
Hobbes’s famous example of the ship of Theseus.21 This vessel is taken into dry dock for repairs. The masts are broken, so these are replaced. The hull is rotting, so that too is rebuilt with new timber. Then it’s noticed the deck is looking a bit worn, so that too is replaced. And so on, until no parts of the ship are the same as when it came in. So is it the same ship? And what if someone took all the old bits and put them back together? Would that have a stronger claim to being the original ship of Theseus?Read more at location 1899
Everyone is familiar, I think, with the realisation that our competence to use a word accurately often exceeds our ability to define it precisely. Wittgenstein’s insight is that this is not paradoxical, but a reflection of the true nature of meaning itself.Read more at location 1953

Relax It's only uncertainty - Randall White

2011-09-28T08:40:00.000+01:00

I heard the author lecture during some management training and when he gave us each a personal copy of the book, I thought I would at leats read it.

Written to accompany a self assessment tool of traits and techniques to manage in uncertain times, the book is readable and usable without completing that exercise.

p18 I liked the quote about the more senior you are and the more power you think you have in effect you have none - people choose to work for you and if you order them about for too long they will leave.

p39 the section about organisations and individuals really growing when they learn (and master) something difficult - something that cannot be easily learnt (copied) by others.

p44 Ask Why (and listen to the answer)

p101/102/103 about simplyfying your communications so that a sensible 7 year old could understand them. reducing your message to <25 words
p157 get someone to summarise back what they think you just presented.

p119 the essecence of strategy is denial - choosing what not to do.

p151 a single day aim card - write down the ONE thing that I must achieve tomorrow to make the biggest improvement and keep the card on your desk during the day.

p193 leaders role as identifying productive areas of uncertaintity and leading teh organistion towards them to gain competitive advantage. In uncertaintity is future wealth.

p194 to encourage learning, start by admitting (publicly) your mistakes.

p196 types of leader compared to star trek leaders

p200 the whole of the final chapter on the future of leadership is worth reading even if you cover nothing else in the book.

The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens by David Brooks

2011-08-12T16:11:00.000+01:00

A very interesting approach to writing a book that looks at what are the secrets for a happy and successful life - it follows teh story of two individuals from birth through to death and how they come from very different backgrounds, eventually marry and spend a life together. The story itself is not a completely happy one (I won't spoil the ending) but it really makes you think about how much we can really mould future generations, given where individuals start from.

It reviews teh evidence about what can (and what cannot) make a difference to peoples lives.

And over the past generations we have seen big policies yield disappointing results. Since 1983 we’ve reformed the education system again and again, yet more than a quarter of high-school students drop out, even though all rational incentives tell them not to. We’ve tried to close the gap between white and black achievement, but have failed. We’ve spent a generation enrolling more young people in college without understanding why so many don’t graduate.Read more at location 127 •
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov of Princeton have found that people can make snap judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly accurate in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right. In other research, Todorov gave his subjects microsecond glimpses of the faces of competing politicians. His research subjects could predict, with 70 percent accuracy, who would win the election between the two candidates.Read more at location 284 •
As Geoffrey Miller notes in The Mating Mind, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary. People with an 80 IQ will know words such as “fabric,” “enormous,” and “conceal” but not words such as “sentence,” “consume,” and “commerce.” People with 90 IQs will know the latter three words, but probably not “designate,” “ponder,” or “reluctant.” So people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person’s level.Read more at location 327 •
It is an elemental fact of life that we get to choose what we will order, but we do not get to choose what we like.Read more at location 332 •
The truth is, starting even before we are born, we inherit a great river of knowledge, a great flow of patterns coming from many ages and many sources. The information that comes from deep in the evolutionary past, we call genetics. The information revealed thousands of years ago, we call religion. The information passed along from hundreds of years ago, we call culture. The information passed along from decades ago, we call family, and the information offered years, months, days, or hours ago, we call education and advice. But it is all information, and it all flows from the dead through us and to the unborn.Read more at location 647 •
This activity of blending neural patterns is called imagination. It seems easy but it is phenomenally complex. It consists of taking two or more things that do not exist together, blending them together in the mind, and then creating an emergent third thing that never existed at all.Read more at location 933 •
If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.Read more at location 1097 •
“All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”Read more at location 1111 •
The people in the executive suites believed that the school existed to fulfill some socially productive process of information transmission—usually involving science projects on poster boards. But in reality, of course, high school is a machine for social sorting. The purpose of high school is to give young people a sense of where they fit into the social structure.Read more at location 1301 •

Of course, Ms. Taylor wanted to impart knowledge, the sort of stuff that shows up on tests. But within weeks, students forget 90 percent of the knowledge they learn in class anyway. The only point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts; it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.Read more at location 1438 •
A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50 percent more time to complete it and makes 50 percent more errors. The brain doesn’t multitask well. It needs to get into a coherent flow, with one network of firings leading coherently to the next.Read more at location 1601 •
“Fake it until you make it.” Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia puts it more scientifically: “One of the most enduring lessons of social psychology is that behavior change often precedes changes in attitude and feelings.”Read more at location 2171 •
top performers devote five times more hours to become great than the average performers devote to become competent.Read more at location 2277 •
There is no one personality style that leads to corporate or any other kind of success. But they found that the traits that correlated most powerfully with success were attention to detail, persistence, efficiency, analytical thoroughness, and the ability to work long hours. That is to say, the ability to organize and execute.Read more at location 2302 •
That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount, and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experience did not correlate well with CEO success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and conscientiousness—being dependable, making plans, and following through.Read more at location 2308 •

Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down by Vineet Nayar

2011-07-28T09:01:00.000+01:00

A story of how a compaby albeit a high tech one, transformed itself and saved the business from a potential terminal decline. It really should be a must-read for today's managers leading organisations where we rely on the intellectual commitment of our teams.

There are echos of the Trust Quotient book I read last year but this one is nore about applying prnciples ina concrete way to a real business.

today the asset base of an organization increasingly resides in the talent and creativity of its employees. Knowledge-based businesses, especially, depend on excited teams of individuals who are eager to take on one challenging task after another and to act as custodians of the tacit knowledge in the organization. To manage them—especially Gen Y employees, and particularly in global organizations—requires a new set of capabilities. Vineet’s story shows how a company can focus on its value creators—the frontline employees—to achieve remarkable growth and profits.Read more at location 35 •
as CEO, or as any leader or manager, you must stop thinking of yourself as the only source of change. You must avoid the urge to answer every question or provide a solution to every problem. Instead, you must start asking questions, seeing others as the source of change, and transferring ownership of the organization’s growth to the next generation of leaders who are closer to the value zone. Only in this way can you begin to create a company that is self-run and self-governed,Read more at location 189 •
Management did not say to the employees in the value zone, “What can we do to help you?” Instead, we wasted their precious time and energy by requiring them to make endless presentations to us about irrelevant things and write reports about what they had or had not done. Not only did we have to stop wasting their time, but we also had to find a way to put the value zone at the center of the organization.Read more at location 473 •
Employees first. Customers second. Management … third?Read more at location 495 •
If your organization has more than a couple of hundred people in it, most of them don’t know you. You know you are trustworthy, but they do not. I believe that your personal trust quotient is lower than you think it is—probably quite a bit lower.Read more at location 712 •
The Trusted Advisor. Maister says there are four dimensions of trust:
Credibility: Credibility comes from professional expertise. If the person possesses deep knowledge and follows good practice, you feel trust in what he or she says and does.
Reliability: Reliability is revealed through actions over time.
Intimacy: This aspect of trust is about emotions. You instinctively feel that you can or cannot discuss many kinds of issues with a certain person
Self-orientation: The self-oriented dimension is Maister’s fourth aspect of trust. This one, though, reduces the trust quotient. It is about your motives and the things you care about. Can I trust you to think beyond your own self-interest?Read more at location 743 •
Opening the Window of Information The idea was to open the window of financial information.Read more at location 836 •
Opening Up the Office of the CEO: The U&I PortalRead more at location 875 •
Catalysts are simple actions, rather than elaborate programs of organizational transformation change that plod on for years and years, and they can help transform a locked-up culture into one that is constantly changing.Read more at location 1028 •
the value zone no longer lay in the technology itself and certainly not in any particular hardware or software technology. Customers could choose among many options, all of which would likely enable them to achieve their goals if implemented well. Something had to be different, then, about the way the technologies were brought together and implemented for each customer. Something more had to be changed about how we delivered our services.Read more at location 1095 •
enabled customers to cut down the cycle times in their most critical business processes, including these: Order to cash: from the moment of accepting a customer order to the receipt of payment for delivery of the order Desire to hire: from the definition of an open job position to filling it Concept to manufacture: from new-product prototype to finished production unitRead more at location 1121 •
And so we designed a survey that asked questions like these: Does this manager help you enhance the value you are delivering to the customer? After discovering that you have a problem, does this manager help you define the problem and help you identify its solution? When you approach the manager with a problem, does he or she respond by offering solutions or resolving the issues involved? If you can’t reach the solutions on your own, does the manager enable you to reach out to other people in the organization who help you achieve the solutions?Read more at location 1422 •
We saw that the EFCS concept, when applied to a large acquisition like the AXON merger, could generate such powerful results that we completed four more successful acquisitions in that year. With each of them, we proved that when a CEO focuses less on governing and more on enabling, the executive can accomplish much that might otherwise have been too risky to undertake.Read more at location 1869 •
The speed of thought, of change, and of implementation gets suffocated by too much hierarchy, wherever it may be. The only way to remove hierarchy in the organization is to recast the role of the CEO as one who asks more questions than he or she answers. The rest of the hierarchy will soon tumble.Read more at location 1880 •

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

2011-07-26T08:53:00.000+01:00

I was intrigued by the title and then started to get put off by the fact that the book was more of a history of technology, the technology of information. But after sticking with it I became more and more fascinated by the strange chances of fate that occured to make the technology possible over many centuries.

Some nice references to Dawkins and Hofstader.

the liar’s paradox: This statement is false. The statement cannot be true, because then it is false. It cannot be false, because then it becomes true. It is neither true nor false, or it is both at once.Read more at location 2897 •
One reason for these misguesses was just the usual failure of imagination in the face of a radically new technology. The telegraph lay in plain view, but its lessons did not extrapolate well to this new device. The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped out by a trained intermediary. To employ the telephone, one just talked. A child could use it. For that very reason it seemed like a toy. In fact, it seemed like a familiar toy, made from tin cylinders and string. The telephone left no permanent record. The Telephone had no future as a newspaper name. Business people thought it unserious. Where the telegraph dealt in facts and numbers, the telephone appealed to emotions.Read more at location 3064 •
He instituted a Noah’s Ark rule, inviting two of each species so that speakers would always have someone present who could see through their jargon.Read more at location 3918 •
Some amino acids correspond to just one codon, others to two, four, or six. Particles called ribosomes ratchet along the RNA strand and translate it, three bases at a time. Some codons are redundant; some actually serve as start signals and stop signals. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors.Read more at location 4803 •
Certain proteins, capable of flipping from one relatively stable state to another, were found to act as relays, accepting ciphered commands and passing them to their neighbors—switching stations in three-dimensional communications networks.Read more at location 4835 •
The Selfish Gene—he set off decades of debate by declaring: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”Read more at location 4874 •
a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.Read more at location 4890 •
The process is blind. It has no foresight, no intention, no knowledge. The genes, too, are blind: “They do not plan ahead,” says Dawkins. “Genes just are, some genes more so than others, and that is all there is to it.”Read more at location 4918 •
Such genes—these replicators, these survivors—know nothing about altruism and nothing about reading, of course. Whatever and wherever they are, their phenotypic effects matter only insofar as they help the genes propagate.Read more at location 4987 •
Whether the population of France is an even or odd number at any given instant is random, but the population of France itself is surely not random: it is a definite fact, even if not knowable.Read more at location 5278 •
Wikipedia also devotes an article to the number 9,814,072,356. It is the largest holodigital square—which is to say, the largest square number containing each decimal digit exactly once.Read more at location 5493 •
He confirmed that a great deal of computation can be done with no energy cost at all. In every case, Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible logical operation.Read more at location 5864 •
We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.Read more at location 6161 •
No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.” The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.Read more at location 6670 •

Incognito, the secret lives of the brain by David Eagleman

2011-06-30T15:36:00.000+01:00

A very readable book outlining the advances in understanding mind and brains. The essence is that the conscious part (the part we call me) is actually a very thin layer on top of our existence. Almost all of what we do is unconscious, our conscious sense of self just rationalises what we have just done to make sense of it for future occasions. The only time we really use our conscious self is when setting goal sor long-term plans, but even then we are driven by our unconscious experience and desires.

The fact that what we think we preceive, is actually a construction of our brains and is quite often not so strongly connected with pyhsical external reality. The book does have some philosophical implications for freewill, mentions them but doesn't really answer the problems it raises.

The first thing we learn from studying our own circuitry is a simple lesson: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control.Read more at location 84 •
Most of its operations are above the security clearance of the conscious mind. The I simply has no right of entry.Read more at location 87 •
Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.Read more at location 113 • You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary.Read more at location 117 •
You gleefully say, “I just thought of something!”, when in fact your brain performed an enormous amount of work before your moment of genius struck.Read more at location 132 •
One does not need to be consciously aware to perform sophisticated motor acts. You can notice this when you begin to duck from a snapping tree branch before you are aware that it’s coming toward you, or when you’re already jumping up when you first become aware of the phone’s ring.Read more at location 169 •
try this demonstration: have a friend hold a handful of colored markers or highlighters out to his side. Keep your gaze fixed on his nose, and now try to name the order of the colors in his hand. The results are surprising: even if you’re able to report that there are some colors in your periphery, you won’t be able to accurately determine their order.Read more at location 391 •
The brain generally does not need to know most things; it merely knows how to go out and retrieve the data. It computes on a need-to-know basis.Read more at location 457 •
You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.Read more at location 522 •
From the natural laboratory of evolution comes a related phenomenon in humans. At least 15 percent of human females possess a genetic mutation that gives them an extra (fourth) type of color photoreceptor—and this allows them to discriminate between colors that look identical to the majority of us with a mere three types of color photoreceptors.36 Two color swatches that look identical to the majority of people would be clearly distinguishable to these ladies. (No one has yet determined what percentage of fashion arguments is caused by this mutation.)Read more at location 692 •
The bottom line is that time is a mental construction, not an accurate barometer of what’s happening “out there.” Here’s a way to prove to yourself that something strange is going on with time: look at your own eyes in a mirror and move your point of focus back and forth so that you’re looking at your right eye, then at your left eye, and back again. Your eyes take tens of milliseconds to move from one position to the other, but—here’s the mystery—you never see them move. What happens to the gaps in time while your eyes are moving? Why doesn’t your brain care about the small absences of visual input?Read more at location 829 •
consciousness tends to interfere with most tasks (remember the unhappy centipede in the ditch)—but it can be helpful when setting goals and training the robot. Evolutionary selection has presumably tuned the exact amount of access the conscious mind has: too little, and the company has no direction; too much, and the system gets bogged down solving problems in a slow, clunky, energy-inefficient manner.Read more at location 1175 •
Our conscious assessment of an activity as easy or natural can lead us to grossly underestimate the complexity of the circuits that make it possible. Easy things are hard: most of what we take for granted is neurally complex.Read more at location 1420 •
We live inside the umwelt of our instincts, and we typically have as little perception of them as the fish does of its water.Read more at location 1433 •
The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzaniga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an “interpreter,” watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events. And the left hemisphere works this way even in normal, intact brains. Hidden programs drive actions, and the left hemisphere makes justifications. This idea of retrospective storytelling suggests that we come to know our own attitudes and emotions, at least partially, by inferring them from observations of our own behavior.Read more at location 2166 •
Minds seek patterns. In a term introduced by science writer Michael Shermer, they are driven toward “patternicity”—the attempt to find structure in meaningless data.42 Evolution favors pattern seeking, because it allows the possibility of reducing mysteries to fast and efficient programs in the neural circuitry.Read more at location 2248 •
Human programmers approach a problem by assuming there’s a best way to solve it, or that there’s a way it should be solved by the robot. But the main lesson we can extract from biology is that it’s better to cultivate a team of populations that attack the problem in different, overlapping manners.Read more at location 2394 •
“Evolution is smarter than you are.” If I had a law of biology, it would be: “Evolve solutions; when you find a good one, don’t stop.”Read more at location 2401 •
Libet’s experiments caused a commotion.15 Could it be true that the conscious mind is the last one in the chain of command to receive any information? Did his experiment drive the nail into the coffin of free will?Read more at location 2702 •
The heart of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology and to what extent was it him?” The question no longer makes sense because we now understand those to be the same thing. There is no meaningful distinction between his biology and his decision making. They are inseparable.Read more at location 2842 •
main difference between teenage and adult brains is the development of the frontal lobes. The human prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the early twenties, and this underlies the impulsive behavior of teenagers. The frontal lobes are sometimes called the organ of socialization, because becoming socialized is nothing but developing circuitry to squelch our basest impulses.Read more at location 2958 •
you choose neither your nature nor your nurture, much less their entangled interaction. You inherit a genetic blueprint and are born into a world over which you have no choice throughout your most formative years. This is the reason people come to the table with quite different ways of seeing the world, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not choices; these are the dealt hands of cards.Read more at location 3478 •
As the quip goes: If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them.Read more at location 3620 •

Viral Loop: The Power of Pass-It-On by Adam Penenberg

2011-06-17T08:23:00.000+01:00

A book that covers the social media explosion, being used by companies to generate demand for thier products. It looks at measurement techniques to track how 'viral' your website is, and how you can make it more attractive (basically content, content, content and connections - provided by the users themselves since you can never scale as fast as they can).

It also looks at how becoming part of such communities is actaully good for you as well, thos ewith more social connections actually living longer.

Somewhere in the world a party occurred just in the time it took you to read this sentence. Almost 120 million people in one hundred countries will attend a product demonstration this year.Read more at location 661 •

Andreessen had uncorked a “network effect,” a term first used to describe the spread of the telephone in the early years of the twentieth century. Simply put, the more people who own a telephone, the more valuable an added line is to each person already on the network. The potential number of connections grows exponentially in relation to the number of people on the network.Read more at location 764 •
In 1992, 4.5 million people were plugged into the Internet and there were perhaps fifty websites. By the end of 1993, 1 million people had downloaded Mosaic, there were 6 million total users, and 623 websites. Within a year the online population jumped to 13 million with 10,000 websites. Web traffic shot up more than 300 percent, with users creating their own home pages, uploading photos, and setting up chat rooms. Today’s Web, with more than 1.5 billion users worldwide and almost 200 million websites, owes its existence to three men: Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, who conceived the Internet; Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; and Marc Andreessen, who figured out how to navigate it.Read more at location 787 •

Andreessen saw it as a simple equation: market share today equals revenue later; without market share, you don’t generate revenue, but whoever achieves and hangs on to it wins.Read more at location 873 •
These viral loop companies provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, relying on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it. The more people, the more content; the more powerful the lure for those sitting on the sidelines, the more value the company has.Read more at location 1069 •
Why do we do it? What explains our BlackBerry-bearing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook friend with the need for constant connectivity? As facile as it sounds, we do it because we are hard-wired to socialize. It’s in our best interests. One reason we gravitate toward communities is because they multiply the impact of each individual to bring greater prosperity, security, and fulfillment to all.Read more at location 1250 •
Research indicates that engaging with friends helps us live longer and better lives, with those with strong friendship bonds having lower incidents of heart disease. They even get fewer colds and flu. A decade-long Australian study found that for the duration of the study subjects with a sizable network of friends were 22 percent less likely to pass away than those with a small circle of friends—and the distance separating two friends and the amount of contact made no difference. It didn’t matter if the friends stayed in contact via phone, letter, or email. Just the fact that they had a social network of friends acted as a protective barrier.Read more at location 1258 •
“When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn’t look are not our ancestors,”Read more at location 1351 •
“The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.”Read more at location 2152 •
Thiel subscribed to a theory of human behavior known as “mimetic desire,” propounded by French historian and philosopher René Girard, who believed that people were essentially sheep who, without much reflection, borrowed their desires from others. This theory has been applied to describe financial bubbles and panics,Read more at location 2773 •
Where would she stash a photo of, say, her best friend on vacation at the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia at sunrise with a monkey nicknamed “Filch” running off with a tourist’s backpack? In a folder labeled Vacation? Angkor Wat? Melinda? Monkey? Tagging allowed the photo to be easily found in all of these contexts. And since anyone could add a tag and a comment, it became a democratic mode of organizationRead more at location 3070 •
This led to MySpace being discovered by a powerfully viral segment of the population: teenaged girls, who joyfully shared coding tips with one another. Because it drained bandwidth and slowed down the site, MySpace engineers proposed putting a stop to this, but DeWolfe overruled them. He realized that fighting users was a useless exercise that would only limit their growth. Let Friendster alienate its user base. MySpace would out-friendly Friendster.Read more at location 3127 •
“People are going to go and socialize where their friends are, and once you have a person’s friends list in a social community locked in, viral growth really happens,”Read more at location 3136 •
Simplifying the instructions also helped. In fact, the rule seemed to be, the simpler he made things, the more viral the site became. People, it seemed, were turned off by anything that required them to think.Read more at location 3244 •
TravBuddy and Travellers-point connect inveterate travelers.Read more at location 3396 •
when the landscape was particularly barren and there was little utility for early adopters. “The value that people get is tied to how much information everyone is sharing,” Zuckerberg says. He and his roommates encouraged the first wave of registrants in the ramping-up period to share information through pictures. The second wave would see the information and attract the first wave back,Read more at location 3459 •
They thought of their target audience and realized that they—and the engineers they were hiring—were out of touch. Most people at Stanford didn’t use MySpace. They thought it was a joke. So before they would release an application, one of them would say, “Let’s hear what Sandi says,” and she would offer her impressions.Read more at location 3614 •
If there is one constant through time, it’s that conventional wisdom often misses the mark, especially in the early days of technological transformation. In 1876, the president of Western Union brushed off Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone as little more than an “electric toy,” and the company called Bell’s proposal to put one in every home “utterly out of the question.”Read more at location 3677 •
Advertisers advance the science of advertising, discovering all manner of ways of reaching us, then consumers become expert at shedding messages they don’t want to hear. In essence, it’s a media version of an arms race.Read more at location 3726 •
If you are in your forties or older, your parents didn’t talk about their feelings; today you can barely stop people from telling you their life stories. And today’s youth, congregating on social networks, share the most intimate aspects of their lives, hewing to an ethos of karmic bulimia. If they don’t announce something on Facebook it’s, like, it never happened. And they are shaping the privacy debate as profoundly as the corporations that mine our data, the banks that sell it, the credit agencies that profit from it, and the government that vacuums it up.Read more at location 3817 •
there is a phenomenon in peoples’ interaction. “The message you get, in a lot of ways, is actually less important than who you get it from,” he says. “If you get it from someone that you trust, you’ll listen to it. Whereas if you get it from someone you don’t trust, you might actually believe the opposite of what they said because you don’t trust them.Read more at location 3885 •
That is the premise of the viral loop application that you will find on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks, or at www.viralloop.com. Download it and it will tell you what your viral coefficient is and your value—in dollars—to Facebook et al., based on the company’s current valuation, your level of activity, and the activity of your friends.Read more at location 3912 •

Reality is Broken (Jane McGonigal)

2011-06-06T21:12:00.006+01:00

An intriguing book written by an ex-computer games designer / psychologist. The premise is that modern computer games encourage cooperation amongst groups of people to succeed at the highest levels. In addition it explains the underlying psychology of why such games can be so compelling (clear goals, clear feedback, difficulty constantly adjusted to be just stretching enough and most important of all - voluntary participation).
The most interesting part for me was looking at how these concepts could be applied to reality - which as the author says is (or should be) the most interesting game of all.
There were many references through the later chapters to novel group games (not played on computers) that encourage more social interaction - I'm sure some of them could be developed for team building activities.

Locn. 144-55 Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are opting out of reality for larger and larger chunks of time. In the United States alone, there are 183 million active gamers (individuals who, in surveys, report that they play computer or video games “regularly”—on average, thirteen hours a week).3 Globally, the online gamer community—including console, PC, and mobile phone gaming—counts more than 4 million gamers in the Middle East, 10 million in Russia, 105 million in India, 10 million in Vietnam, 10 million in Mexico, 13 million in Central and South America, 15 million in Australia, 17 million in South Korea, 100 million in Europe, and 200 million in China.4 Although a typical gamer plays for just an hour or two a day, there are now more than 6 million people in China who spend at least twenty-two hours a week gaming, the equivalent of a part-time job.5 More than 10 million “hardcore” gamers in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany spend at least twenty hours a week playing.6 And at the leading edge of this growth curve, more than 5 million “extreme” gamers in the United States play on average forty-five hours a week.
Locn. 167-70 The truth is this: in today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in ways that reality is not.
Locn. 212-14 Collectively, the planet is now spending more than 3 billion hours a week gaming. We are starving, and our games are feeding us.
Locn. 447-50 When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation.
Locn. 462-66 Finally, voluntary participation requires that everyone who is playing the game knowingly and willingly accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback. Knowingness establishes common ground for multiple people to play together. And the freedom to enter or leave a game at will ensures that intentionally stressful and challenging work is experienced as safe and pleasurable activity.
Locn. 477 Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
Locn. 518-19 What makes Tetris so addictive, despite the impossibility of winning, is the intensity of the feedback it provides.
Locn. 529-33 In other words, in a good computer or video game you’re always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off. When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on. That’s because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability—or what both game designers and psychologists call “flow”.4 When you are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes.
Locn. 597-98 Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves, and it turns out that almost nothing makes us happier than good, hard work.
Locn. 601-2 Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading psychologist of play, once said, “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.”
Locn. 799-802 games become hits and make money in direct proportion to how much satisfaction they provide and how much positive emotion they provoke—in other words, how happy they make their players. As a result, game designers have been taught to relentlessly pursue happiness outcomes, including flow—and they’ve innovated a wide range of other happiness strategies along the way.
Locn. 819-20 Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
Locn. 957-62 The Four Secrets to Making Our Own Happiness Many different competing theories of happiness have emerged from the field of positive psychology, but if there’s one thing virtually all positive psychologists agree on, it’s this: there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness—by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.15
Locn. 979-83 As long as we are regularly immersed in self-rewarding hard work, we will be happy more often than not—no matter what else is going on in our lives. This is one of the earliest hypotheses of positive psychology, and a fairly radical idea. It contradicts what so many of us have been taught to believe—that we need life to be a certain way in order for us to be happy, and that the easier life is the happier we are. But the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments.
Locn. 1010-12 from a neurological and physiological point of view, “intrinsic reward” is really just another way of describing the emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems.
Locn. 1095-98 Playing World of Warcraft is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it. It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing
Locn. 1304-6 Part of me felt like I was accomplishing more in the Kingdom of Azeroth than I was in my real life. And that’s exactly the IV drip of productivity that World of Warcraft is so good at providing. It delivers a stream of work and reward as reliably as a morphine drip line.
Locn. 1468-71 Learning to stay urgently optimistic in the face of failure is an important emotional strength that we can learn in games and apply in our real lives. When we’re energized by failure, we develop emotional stamina. And emotional stamina makes it possible for us to hang in longer, to do much harder work, and to tackle more complex challenges. We need this kind of optimism in order to thrive as human beings.
Locn. 1638-40 If you know how to play Scrabble, then you already know how to play Lexulous—it’s just a slightly modified and unauthorized version of the classic board game, combined with online chat.1
Locn. 1666-69 Because you don’t have to be online playing at the same time, it’s easy to organize a game with anyone else, no matter where or how busy they are. You can easily keep up with the game by playing literally only a few minutes a day. And by keeping running games going with your real-life friends and family, you’re ensuring daily opportunities to actively connect with the people you care about most.
Locn. 1680-83 You’re motivated to act, but you have to wait for your Facebook friends to check back into the game. And because you often have no idea if your friends are still logged on or paying attention to the game, there’s an emotional buildup to waiting for their next moves. As one player puts it, “You have to be addicted AND patient.”10
Locn. 1693-95 Simply put, social network games make it both easier and more fun to maintain strong, active connections with people we care about but who we don’t see or speak to enough in our daily lives.
Locn. 1743-47 The more time we spend interacting within our social networks, the more likely we are to generate a subset of positive emotions known as “prosocial emotions.” Prosocial emotions—including love, compassion, admiration, and devotion—are feel-good emotions that are directed toward others. They’re crucial to our long-term happiness because they help create lasting social bonds.
Locn. 1782-86 Teasing each other, recent scientific research has shown, is one of the fastest and most effective ways to intensify our positive feelings for each other. Dacher Keltner, a leading researcher of prosocial emotions at the University of California, has conducted experiments on the psychological benefits of teasing, and he believes that teasing plays an invaluable role in helping us form and maintain positive relationships.19
Locn. 1790-93 Just like a dog might play-bite another dog to show that it wants to be friends, we bare our teeth to each other in order to remind each other that we could, but never really would, hurt each other. Conversely, by allowing someone else to tease us, we confirm our willingness to be in a vulnerable position. We are actively demonstrating our trust in the other person’s regard for our emotional well-being.
Locn. 2036-37 on the other hand, just because the kills don’t have value doesn’t mean they don’t have meaning.
Locn. 2043-48 How do we get more meaning in our lives? It’s actually quite simple. Philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual leaders agree: the single best way to add meaning to our lives is to connect our daily actions to something bigger than ourselves—and the bigger, the better. As Martin Seligman says, “The self is a very poor site for meaning.” We can’t matter outside of a large-scale social context. “The larger the entity you can attach yourself to,” Seligman advises, “the more meaning you can derive.”8
Locn. 2243-46 The world’s oldest known example of an epic built environment is the Gobekli Tepe. Discovered less than two decades ago in southeastern Turkey, it’s believed to predate Stonehenge by a staggering six thousand years. It’s a twenty-five-acre arrangement of at least twenty stone circles, between ten and thirty meters in diameter each, made from monolithic pillars three meters high.
Locn. 2410-15 Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology and the author of Generation Me, has persuasively argued that the youngest generations today—particularly anyone born after 1980—are, in her words, “more miserable than ever before.” Why? Because of our increased cultural emphasis on “self-esteem” and “self-fulfillment.” But real fulfillment, as countless psychologists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders have shown, comes from fulfilling commitments to others. We want to be esteemed in the eyes of others, not for “who we are,” but rather for what we’ve done that really matters.
Locn. 2513-14 We’re not alone. Chore Wars is one of the best reviewed and most beloved, if little known, secrets on the Internet.
Locn. 3503-6 Because a critical mass is so important to games like the Comfort of Strangers, in 2008 Evans and Johnson cofounded an annual Bristol-based festival called Interesting Games, or Igfest, for innovative outdoor games. The festival is meant to provide support for and exposure to other game developers who are working to make cities more interesting and friendlier spaces.
Locn. 3848-52 The two most frequently recommended happiness activities across the scientific literature are to express gratitude and practice acts of kindness. Recent research has shown that we don’t even have to know someone to experience the benefits of thanking and being nice to them. Even fleeting acts of gratitude and kindness toward strangers can have a profound impact on our happiness. And positive gestures from strangers can make a big difference in how rich and satisfying our everyday lives feel.
Locn. 4028-33 Tombstone Hold ’Em is meant to make remembering death easier and more rewarding, by taking advantage of the largely underutilized social and recreational potential of cemeteries. The central activity of Tombstone Hold ’Em poker is learning how to “see” a playing card in any tombstone, based on its shape (the suit) and the names and date of death (the face value). Once you can read stones as cards, you can spot “hands” all around you. The game works in any cemetery, as long as there are clearly marked tombstones. Here’s how it plays out:
Locn. 4714-19 Free Rice; together, according to the game’s FAQ, their efforts add up to enough rice to feed an average of seven thousand people per day. Why is Free Rice able to capture so much engagement? It isn’t just that it is a force for good; it’s also classically good game design. It takes just seconds to complete a task, meaning you can get a lot of work done quickly. You get instant visual feedback: grains of rice stacking up in a bowl, with a constantly rising total of grains that you’ve earned. Because the game gets easier when you make mistakes and harder when you answer correctly, it’s easy to experience flow: you’re always playing at the limits of your ability.
Locn. 4914-22 these four principles all serve the ultimate goal of building a compelling game world, satisfying game mechanics, and an inspiring game community. The Player Investment Design Lead will design the mechanics that drive in-game player reward and incentives: • So players feel invested in the world and their character. • So players have long-term goals. • So players can’t grief or exploit them, or each other. • So that content are rewards in and of themselves.
Locn. 5009-11 The game’s motto is “Got two minutes? Be extraordinary!” Players can log in to the game from wherever they are and browse a list of “microvolunteer” missions that they can start and finish in literally just a few minutes. Each mission helps a real nonprofit organization accomplish one of its goals.
Locn. 5365-71 Collaboration is a special way of working together. It requires three distinct kinds of concerted effort: cooperating (acting purposefully toward a common goal), coordinating (synchronizing efforts and sharing resources), and cocreating (producing a novel outcome together). This third element, cocreation, is what sets collaboration apart from other collective efforts: it is a fundamentally generative act. Collaboration isn’t just about achieving a goal or joining forces; it’s about creating something together that it would be impossible to create alone.
Locn. 6927-34 We can create any future we can imagine. That is the big idea we started with, fourteen chapters ago, as we set off to investigate why good games make us better, and how they can help us change the world. Along the way, we’ve gleaned industry secrets—more than thirty years’ worth—from some of the most successful computer and video game developers in the world. We’ve compared these secrets alongside the most important scientific findings of the past decade, from the field of positive-psychology research. We’ve identified key innovations in the emerging landscape of alternate reality design. And we’ve tracked how game design is creating new ways for us to work together at extreme scales, and to solve bigger real-world problems.
Locn. 7182-83 visit the website for this book, www.realityisbroken.org.
Locn. 7186-87 world—join the social network Gameful, at www.gameful.org.

Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done (Ron Ashkenas)

2011-05-22T20:53:00.009+01:00

I was recommended this book by a colleague in a work book club and could really see why. I particularly liked the point that most of us, as managers, actually create our own waves of complexity through the organisation whilst simultaneously complaining about everyone else's.
On the positive side this means we can all do something about it, whatever our role we can make our lives easier and the same for those around us.
The book looks a four main categories of complexity and suggests ways to attack them (simply)

Locn. 80-81 Despite our recent economic struggles, the global economy is not going to get less complex. If anything, it will grow more difficult to understand. In addition, the pace of technological innovation and breakthrough will continue to increase, which will also add to complexity.
Locn. 137-41 Trying to get things done in organizations today often feels like walking in quicksand. If you are a manager or an executive who is anxious to get results, you know what I mean. There are too many meetings, too many reports, too much information,   and too many stakeholders-all of whom have different views on what should be done and how. Processes don't work or take too long. Decisions are delayed or unclear. Presentations go on forever. And the boundaries between home and work, online and offline, have broken down with e-mails and cell phones and 24/7 availability.   Complexity is out of control and getting worse-and it compromises   our ability to be effective.
Locn. 211-12 to start developing   a simplification strategy, you need to understand the four sources of complexity in organizations (figure 1-1): 1. Structural mitosis 2. Product and service proliferation 3. Process evolution 4. Managerial behavior
Locn. 587-89 The origin of the Lindex was an article Calhoun had read about the organization structure of the Canadian civil service.' Calhoun adapted this article's formula for assessing functional health (based on the average length of communication chains from the top to the bottom of a hierarchy) so that his managers could compute their own Lindex scores.
Locn. 666-67 managing your organization's product portfolio entails much the same challenge. It is difficult to be selective and to choose between alternatives that all look good. As a result, many organizations get caught up in the trap of trying to manage far too many products and services.
Locn. 678-81 on the one hand, managers are told to be entrepreneurial and creative and stay close to their markets-in other words, drive growth through constantly coming up with new ways of delighting customers. Many companies in fact have incentives for new product ideas and set goals for deriving a certain amount of revenue from new products. On the other hand, managers are also told to increase the sales volume of existing products and services, leverage the existing product and expense base, and build the brand and image of current offerings. So managers and employees (and customers) naturally develop emotional   attachments to current products. With these two sets of messages in mind, most companies avoid making choices.
Locn. 714-16 System complexity is the extent to which your products and services must integrate with those of other suppliers to create value for a customer. Obviously, some products or services are stand-alone and don't need other products to function. But many are components that need to be combined or used with others in some way-and organizations need to pay attention to the complexity   that this can create.
Locn. 745-46 He suggests that product simplification   is a matter of "more is less"-fewer features, fewer buttons,   fewer distractions-so that the customer can get the most out of the product.'
Locn. 886 • Local differences: As organizations evolve, the same processes are often done differently in different places.
Locn. 887-88 • Multiplication of steps and loops: As they encounter unique or recurring problems, processes tend to acquire more steps, more controls, and more people in the pursuit of solutions. Such solutions are rarely abandoned,
Locn. 889-90 • Informality of process: A third source of complexity is lack of rigor about how a process really is supposed to be carried out.
Locn. 891-92 • Lack of cross functional or cross-unit transparency: People naturally tend to focus on their part of the process rather than the whole,
Locn. 939-43 This focus on control is based on the hierarchical notion that all information needs to flow up the chain of command for approval. Often however, the more high-level approvals there are, the further the managers are from the real data and the ability to actually add value. So not only are the reviews and controls not worth much, but they also slow down the process and reduce the empowerment and sense of accountability of the people closer to the decision. In fact, when there are many layers of approval, people on the ground may not give an issue the proper attention, because they assume that someone further up the line will catch anything they miss.
Locn. 1029-31 The main value of process mapping is to allow stakeholders-all   of whom see the process from different vantage points-to develop a common view of what's currently being done and what might be done differently.
Locn. 1086-88 The purpose of the rapid-results approach is to use people's natural bias toward action as a catalyst for immediate process simplification.   In many situations, analysis and study can become excuses for maintaining the status quo and avoiding real process change: the "we can't do anything until we have all the data"
Locn. 1122-24 The key to using these tools to drive process simplification, however, is to make sure to align the what, why, and how: what processes are being addressed, why they have become overly complex,   and how best to tackle them.
Locn. 1183-86 Robert Kaplan and Rob Kaiser, leadership consultants who have studied and worked with thousands of managers, contend that the shortcoming of most managers often is not in what they do-but in what they "over-do." I Managers succeed in their careers by applying certain behaviors and skills that tend to work for them, both in their personal lives and in business. With the reinforcement of success in mind, they continue these behaviors and build on them when moving   into new or more responsible positions. Over time, a manager can become reliant on these behaviors as a core skill set
Locn. 1196-99 Consider the following question. Imagine that your CEO asks you to take on a special one-day-a-week assignment working directly with her. It involves interesting travel and some exciting work-but requires you to do the rest of your job in the remaining time. Would you take the assignment? I've asked this question of thousands of managers over the years, and 99 percent of them say they would take the assignment and figure out a way to do their regular jobs more efficiently. And in discussing why, they acknowledge   that at least 20 percent of their time is regularly taken up with things that keep them busy and comfortable, but that don't add much value.
Locn. 1207-9 Much of the managerially generated complexity in organizations   comes from overdone behaviors-from too much of a good thing and the associated avoidance of its opposite. This dynamic is difficult to see because managers tend to think they are doing the right thing in the right way. But too much of one right thing, coupled   with too little of its opposite, is often wrong.
Locn. 1349-50 a RACI chart-which is a simple way of setting out who has responsibility,   who has ultimate accountability, who needs to be consulted, and who needs to be informed.
Locn. 1382-84 you can build a request for feedback   into the end of your message. With individuals, you can simply ask them to summarize the key points that they heard; in a group, you can ask a few people to do the same; and with a presentation, you can ask for written feedback or have a few volunteers speak out.
Locn. 1389-90 So instead of clear and simple communication, presentations   too often become reports masquerading as slides, or cuteness competitions, or ways of preventing instead of facilitating dialogue. To counter this trend, one firm instituted the "one-minute drill" for presentations-forcing people to reduce their message to its essence, in slides that could be presented in only a minute.
Locn. 1393-96 Meetings are not just a fact of life in organizations; they're a way of life. Some managers can spend up to 80 percent of their time in meetings, particularly in organizations that are heavily matrixed, global, and process focused. Unfortunately, as most managers will attest, much of the time spent in meetings is unproductive, frustrating,   and wasteful.
Locn. 1412-13 E-mail might seem insignificant or innocuous, but inbox overload   is a serious source of organizational complexity.
Locn. 1415-17 For instance, when a manager sends large numbers of people a message on issues that many of them don't need to know about, it just burdens colleagues with low-value information that distracts them from matters more important. A frequent culprit is the "reply all" button, which can create hundreds of e-mails, often about insignificant topics such as meeting schedules.
Locn. 1421-23 If you've read this far-and thoughtfully considered the twenty-two specific behaviors described in this chapter-you now realize that you may be a prime source of complexity in your organization. But if these managerial behaviors and others like them are largely unconscious and driven by psychological factors, how can they be overcome?
Locn. 1440-41 To launch the effort, the managing directors sent a note to all the vice presidents, asking them to identify ways that they could be more effective both individually and collectively.
Locn. 1463-64 Here are a few steps that you can take right now to drive simplicity in your own leadership role: 1. Fill out the questionnaire in table 5-1, and use it to reflect on your own behavior.
Locn. 1465-66 2. Share your questionnaire results and thinking with a few other managers or colleagues who know you well.
Locn. 1468-69 3. From your own reflection and the feedback from colleagues or a coach, select one or two specific ways that you can experiment with making things simpler by changing your own behavior.
Locn. 1469-71 These don't need to be huge changes-start small and gain some confidence. For example, try to change your e-mail patterns or the way that you plan and run meetings. Once you have some success, share what you've done with your colleagues or coach and identify additional simplification opportunities.
Locn. 1471-72 4. If possible, recruit others to go through the same process of reflection, experimentation, and learning-and meet with them as a group to share progress and ideas.
Locn. 1473-74 5. Finally, if you are in a position to drive simplification on a broader basis in your company, you can insist that your management team go through the process of reflection, experimentation, and learning together.
Locn. 1541-45 Lloyd Trotter, a former vice chairman of GE, describes the thought process like this: "We teach managers that they need to start with the `answer,' which is that their business needs double-digit   earnings improvement every quarter and every year. They quickly realize that sales growth without leverage won't do it. So they have to figure out how to drive growth while increasing productivity. We don't complicate it: Material comes in the front door and products go out the back door. We have to get rid of any waste in the middle while also figuring out how to have the products   or services be more valuable for our customers."
Locn. 1699-1700 It might sound obvious, but simplification won't happen if everyone approaches it differently. You need to create a common framework and language for simplification, and then train everyone on it. This not only gets everyone on the same page, but also creates   widespread capacity for action and multiplication of results.
Locn. 1704-5 In addition to being orchestrated from the center, these training   efforts had several other features that turn out to be critical for sustaining simplification over time:
• They propelled people into action to produce real results.
• They deliberately aimed at producing measurable change in a few months or less.
• They were rolled out quickly across the whole company and run largely by in-house people.
• They were so interactive as to be mind-bending.
Locn. 1722-24 In reality, however, organizational   performance and reward systems are usually not so straightforward; they encompass multiple goals, measures that don't always reflect real behavior, and incentives that are not always directly linked to either the measure or the goals. The result is the confused and counterproductive practice that my colleague Steve Kerr refers to as "rewarding A while asking for B."
Locn. 1771-72 Simplification doesn't have to be complex. It doesn't have to be difficult. You can do a lot today and the next day to make your organization simpler for yourself, your colleagues, and your customers-even
Locn. 1777-80 most managers act as though they live in a box-a box that limits what they can do. Obviously, part of the box is determined by official limits set out in job descriptions, hierarchical arrangements, and formal work rules. But a large part of the box, perhaps even most of it, is self-created and self-imposed. We work within our comfort zones, doing what we think we should do or what we think other people want us to do. But most of the time, we don't question, challenge,   or test those limits, which makes them self-perpetuating.
Locn. 1841-43 Most people in organizations want simplicity-it's not a hard sell. If you can help them understand how they can get better results while also making their lives easier, they'll listen. And if you can move them into action, you'll be a hero. The only limitation is you-your own definition of the box around your job. Expand the box. Expand the impact.
Locn. 1863-65 Hold Up a Mirror Much of the complexity in organizations is unconscious and unintentional.   We tend to accept it and learn to live with it, and after a while, we don't even see it anymore. That's why a mirror is a powerful   tool-it helps people see things about themselves that they can't see on their own. The diagnostic instruments included in this book, particularly the questionnaire in chapter 1, will help
Locn. 1868-70 Present a Business Case While complexity is often annoying and uncomfortable, the real reason for attacking it has to be rooted in business results and outcomes.   Otherwise, simplicity will remain a value to aspire to, rather than a real driver of change and improvement.
Locn. 1878-79 Stimulate Fresh Thinking from the Outside In Remember the importance of designing your organization, your products, and your processes with your customers in mind. Simplicity   often directly correlates with your ability to align with what your customers want, when they want it, and how they want it.
Locn. 1888-89 Build a Coalition You can certainly have an impact on your organization by modeling simplification in your own area. Other managers will take notice and your innovations may spread organically,
Locn. 1901-4 Demonstrate That Simplicity Makes a Difference Perhaps implicit in the first four tactics is the idea that you actually have to do something. Simplicity is great to talk about. Most people find it cathartic to share their complexity war stories. But nothing builds momentum for simplification as much as real success. If you're looking for one takeaway from this book, this is it: the way to make things simpler in your organization is to start simplifying.   Just do it.
Locn. 1910-11 tools and approaches (which were first introduced in chapter 1) are listed here again as a reminder (table 7-1).
Locn. 1912-13 As a way of selecting which tool to use, consider the variables pictured in figure 7-2.1 What is the business result that needs to be achieved?

Who: The A Method for Hiring (Randy Street and Geoff Smart)

2011-05-16T12:07:00.002+01:00

A thought provoking book on how to populate your team (or company) with top performing talent. Not just about the selection process itself but it also covers techniques for filling the pipeline so you have candidates when you have vacancies to fill.

The basic premise is that as a manager, your role is to select the team (the who) who do the tasks (the what), not to do the tasks yourself.

The book lays out a structure for defining the characteristics of who you want to hire, then a very structured process to screen and interview and background check the candidates.

A definite must read for anyone hiring staff, or who wants to build a top-performing team.

Locn. 20-22 The most important decisions that businesspeople make are not what decisions, but who decisions. —JIM COLLINS, AUTHOR OF GOOD TO GREAT

Locn. 28-30 Who refers to the people you put in place to make the what decisions. Who is running your sales force? Who is assembling your product? Who is occupying the corner office? Who is where the magic begins, or where the problems start.

Locn. 61-62 “Your success as a manager is simply the result of how good you are at hiring the people around you.”

Locn. 67-68 who mistakes are pricey. According to studies we’ve done with our clients, the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employee’s base salary in hard costs and productivity loss.

Locn. 107-8 One of the basic failures in the hiring process is this: What is a resume? It is a record of a person’s career with all of the accomplishments embellished and all the failures removed.”

Locn. 170-71 We like to see people as fundamentally truthful. We wish that it were so, but one of the painful truths of hiring is this: it is hard to see people for who they really are.

Locn. 177-78 We define an A Player this way: a candidate who has at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of possible candidates could achieve.

Locn. 199-201 In business, you are who you hire. Hire C Players, and you will always lose to the competition. Hire B Players, and you might do okay, but you will never break out. Hire A Players, and life gets very interesting no matter what you are pursuing.

Locn. 270-71 The mission is an executive summary of the job’s core purpose. It boils the job down to its essence so everybody understands why you need to hire someone into the slot.

Locn. 323-24 Outcomes, the second part of a scorecard, describe what a person needs to accomplish in a role. Most of the jobs for which we hire have three to eight outcomes, ranked by order of importance.

Locn. 330-33 While typical job descriptions break down because they focus on activities, or a list of things a person will be doing (calling on customers, selling), scorecards succeed because they focus on outcomes, or what a person must get done (grow revenue from $25 million to $50 million by the end of year three). Do you see the distinction?

Locn. 345-46 Competencies define how you expect a new hire to operate in the fulfillment of the job and the achievement of the outcomes.

Locn. 522-31 HOW TO CREATE A SCORECARD 1. MISSION. Develop a short statement of one to five sentences that describes why a role exists. For example, “The mission for the customer service representative is to help customers resolve their questions and complaints with the highest level of courtesy possible.” 2. OUTCOMES. Develop three to eight specific, objective outcomes that a person must accomplish to achieve an A performance. For example, “Improve customer satisfaction on a ten-point scale from 7.1 to 9.0 by December 31.” 3. COMPETENCIES. Identify as many role-based competencies as you think appropriate to describe the behaviors someone must demonstrate to achieve the outcomes. Next, identify five to eight competencies that describe your culture and place those on every scorecard. For example, “Competencies include efficiency, honesty, high standards, and a customer service mentality.” 4. ENSURE ALIGNMENT AND COMMUNICATE. Pressure-test your scorecard by comparing it with the business plan and scorecards of the people who will interface with the role. Ensure that there is consistency and alignment. Then share the scorecard with relevant parties, including peers and recruiters.

Locn. 556-57 The overwhelming evidence from our field interviews is that ads are a good way to generate a tidal wave of resumes, but a lousy way to generate the right flow of candidates.

Locn. 574-77 You can almost certainly identify ten extremely talented people off the top of your head. Calling your list of ten and asking Patrick Ryan’s simple question—“Who are the most talented people you know that I should hire?”—can easily generate another fifty to one hundred names. Keep doing this, and in no time you will have moved into many other networks and enriched your personal talent pool with real ability.

Locn. 608-10 “We told the employees, ‘If you spot somebody like us, at a customer, at a supplier, or at a competitor, we want to hire them.’ That became very successful. People would say there is a great person there; let’s go after them. Employees referred 85 percent of our new hires!”

Locn. 685-87 The final step in the sourcing process, the one that matters more than anything else you can do, is scheduling thirty minutes on your calendar every week to identify and nurture A Players. A standing meeting on Monday or Friday will keep you honest by forcing you to call the top talent on your radar screen.

Locn. 687 plan for how to use the timr to best efffect

Locn. 907-9 Screening interviews separate the wheat from the chaff, but they are not precise enough to ensure a 90 percent or better hiring success rate. To be more confident and accurate in your selection, you will want to conduct a Topgrading Interview.

Locn. 1350-52 Have you heard the riddle about the five frogs on a log? It goes like this: Five frogs are on a log and one decides to jump off. How many are left? If you answered “five,” you are correct. Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two different things.

Locn. 1463-67 George Buckley of 3M grants freedom by building trust with his employees. “A lot of CEOs think the role of the CEO is to be aloof, like a judge in a courtroom,” he told us. “But the role of the CEO is to inspire people, and you cannot inspire people unless you get to know them and them you. Don’t cut corners on that. It takes energy. CEOs are sometimes afraid to be real people. If you want to extract as much value as possible out of somebody in an organization, you have to let them be themselves.

Locn. 1483-85 Freedom matters to today’s workforce, and especially to the most valuable among them. A Players want to operate without micromanagement, develop their own leadership styles, and prove their own worth. Show them that both you personally and your organizational culture will support their need for freedom, and you’ll go a long way toward sealing the deal.

Locn. 1645-47 HOW TO INSTALL THE A METHOD FOR HIRING IN YOUR COMPANY You have to do ten things if you want to install the A Method for Hiring in your business: (you need to get the book to see the list)

Locn. 1817-19 When we met with General Clark, he said, “What got you promoted to one rank won’t necessarily get you promoted to the next rank.” The scorecard changes the higher somebody climbs in an organization, which means how you think about a person’s capabilities must change.

Locn. 1866 Not everybody was good at everything. They just had to be exceptional at one thing.

Locn. 1902-3 Visit www.ghsmart.com to learn more.

Gamestorming (Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo)

2011-05-16T06:05:00.001+01:00

A fantastic book for anyone interested in facilitating sessions on innovation (or in fact facilitating many other types of teambuilding sessions too). The book starts with the theory of how to construct effective sessions, don't be put off by the title it isn't about games - that's just the term the authors use for facilitated sessions.
Then there is a collection of many types of session to run based on the outcomes you want from your session.

Page 7

Loc. 908-9

A fuzzy goal is one that "motivates the general direction of the work, without blinding the team to opportunities along the journey."

Page 8
Loc. 931-34

Innovative teams need to navigate ambiguous, uncertain, and often complex information spaces. What is unknown usually far outweighs what is known. In many ways it's a journey in the fog, where the case studies haven't been written yet, and there are no examples of where it's been done successfully before. Voyages of discovery involve greater risks and more failures along the way than other endeavors. But the rewards are worth it.

Page 11
Loc. 968-69

The opening is not the time for critical thinking or skepticism; it's the time for blue-sky thinking, brainstorming, energy, and optimism. The keyword for opening is "divergent":

Page 14
Loc. 1027-29

You are searching for something that you may not find. You will almost certainly find things you don't expect. You have only a vague idea of what you will encounter along the way, and yet, like a turtle, you must carry everything you need on your back.

Page 17
Loc. 1077-78

The most common and powerful fire-starter is the question. A good question is like an arrow you can aim at any challenge.

Page 17
Loc. 1081-82

Another common fire-starter is called fill-in-the-blank, in which you craft a short phrase or sentence and ask people to fill in the blank like they would on a test.

Page 21
Loc. 1138-44

Affinity mapping is a common method that uses meaningful space to sort a large set of nodes into a few common themes. It is a way to rapidly get a group of people aligned about what they are working on together. First, generate a set of nodes using the Post-Up game or some other node-generation method (see Chapter 4). Next, create a meaningful space by dividing a whiteboard or other visual area into three columns. Ask people to sort the sticky notes into three columns that "feel like they belong together" without trying to name the columns. It's important that they not try to name the columns. Naming the columns too early will force them back into familiar, comfortable patterns.

Page 23
Loc. 1184-90

I cannot forbear to mention...a new device for study...which may seem trivial and almost ludicrous...[but] is extremely useful in arousing the mind...Look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones... you may discover a resemblance to landscapes...battles with figures in action...strange faces and costumes...and an endless variety of objects.... -- Leonardo da Vinci

Page 24
Loc. 1207-9

Improvisation is a way of thinking with your body. In role play, you take on the role of a character, imagine a situation, and act as you think your character would act in that situation. Putting yourself in another person's shoes helps you to empathize with that person's goals and challenges, and can lead to insights and better solutions.

Page 26
Loc. 1257-58

You don't need to know the final destination; only the next step in the journey. Just keep your eye on the fuzzy goal—the mountaintop, the imagined thing over the horizon—and the next step, the next game, that moves you one step in approximately the right direction.

Page 30
Loc. 1330-32

There are two big questions that are worth asking whenever you come across something new. First, what is it? And second, what can I do with it? The first question has to do with examination, while the second deals with experimentation.

Page 29
Loc. 1299

Opening questions are intended to open a portal into the game world.

Page 29
Loc. 1301

The trick of opening is to get people to feel comfortable with the process of working together while generating as many ideas as possible.

Page 29
Loc. 1309-10

The focus of opening questions is to find things you can work with later.

Page 29
Loc. 1316-18

Navigating questions help you assess and adjust your course while the game is underway. For example, summarize key points and confirm that people agree to ensure that you understand and that the group is aligned.

Page 29
Loc. 1319-20

Is the team fatigued? Are they frustrated or sapped of energy?

Page 30
Loc. 1337-38

Examining questions narrow your inquiry to focus on details, specifics, and observable characteristics. They make abstract ideas more concrete by quantifying and qualifying them.

Page 31
Loc. 1348-50

Experimental questions invoke the imagination. They are about possibility. What can we do with it? What opportunities does it create? Experimental questions are concerned with taking you to a higher level of abstraction to find similarities with other things, to make unlikely and unexpected connections.

Page 32
Loc. 1363-65

Closing questions serve the opposite function from opening questions. When you are opening you want to create as much divergence and variation as possible. When you are closing you want to focus on convergence and selection. Your goal at this stage is to move toward commitment, decisions, and action.

Page 38
Loc. 1481-83

The Graphic Gameplan uses a precisely designed set of meaningful spaces to organize people's thinking and move from ideas to action. Challenges are represented as a rough landscape, actions as an arrow, success factors as wheels, goals as a target, and so on.

Page 42
Loc. 1575-78

Most people draw a stick figure by starting with the head and adding the body afterward. This way of drawing a stick figure will almost always result in a big-headed, stiff stick figure. When drawing a person, you will get a much better effect if you start with the center of gravity and work outward. Draw a rectangle to represent the trunk of the body, trying to keep it at approximately the same angle.

Page 44
Loc. 1594-95

The next most prominent feature is the legs; they connect the person to the ground and have the most impact on the body's position. Draw a line to represent the ground and add lines for the legs and feet to connect the body to the ground.

Page 44
Loc. 1597-1600

The next most important element to conveying attitude is the hands. We use our hands for nearly everything we do. Have you ever heard the advice given to public speakers to use their hands and to gesture to help them reinforce their meaning? The same principle applies to stick figures. Now try drawing the arms in position. A small circle is usually sufficient to represent the hands.

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Loc. 1602-5

Now take a look at the angle of the neck and head relative to the rest of the body. Notice that they are at different angles. Unless you are a soldier standing at attention, this is nearly always the case. We are constantly turning our heads to see better, to listen carefully, and so on. See if you can draw the head and attach it to the body with a single line at the right angle.

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Now that we have finished the figure we can think about the face. Think about the various smiley faces and other emoticons you can make on a computer keyboard. Those same combinations will suffice for nearly any facial expression you want. Adding a short line for the nose will help you show which direction the head is pointing.

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This can be especially important when you want to show two people interacting with each other. You can use the same principles you learned earlier to make the mailbox, by combining basic shapes from the visual alphabet. I live in the United States, where our mailboxes look like R2-D2 of Star Wars fame. Depending on where you live, yours may differ. I hope this short demonstration has convinced you that basic sketching skills are not out of your reach. Once you become comfortable with the preceding exercises, you can use them to help others become more comfortable with sketching

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In numerous workshops, I have found that you can get through these exercises with a group in about 10 to 15 minutes. In the time it takes for a brief coffee break you can familiarize a group with these concepts and get them comfortable enough to begin sketching out their ideas.

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The idea of bringing improv into a business context may seem intimidating, but the challenges are mostly in your mind. You're already improvising at work. In GameChangers: Improvisation for Business in the Networked World, improv expert Mike Bonifer reminds us that all of life is improvisation: from a conversation at the dinner table to the way we respond to unexpected situations, improv is natural; we do it all the time.

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If you have ideas, comments, or questions you can join the ongoing conversation at http://www.gogamestorm.com.

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Card sorting is a practice used frequently by information architects and designers to gather and structure inputs for a variety of purposes.

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Empathy Map OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to quickly develop a customer or user profile.

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Ask the group to describe—from this person's point of view—what this person's experience is, moving through the categories from seeing through feeling. The goal of the exercise is to create a degree of empathy for the person with the group. The exercise shouldn't take more than 15 minutes. Ask the group to synthesize: What does this person want? What forces are motivating this person? What can we do for this person?

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Loc. 2021-24

Creating a forced ranking may be difficult for participants, as it requires they make clear-cut assessments about a set of items. In many cases, this is not the normal mode of operation for groups, where it is easier to add items to lists to string together agreement and support. Getting people to make these assessments, guided by clear criteria, is the entire point of forced ranking.

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WhoDo OBJECT OF PLAY The objective of this game is to brainstorm, plan, and prioritize actions.

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3-12-3 Brainstorm OBJECT OF PLAY This format for brainstorming compresses the essentials of an ideation session into one short format. The numbers 3-12-3 refer to the amount of time in minutes given to each of three activities: 3 minutes for generating a pool of observations, 12 for combining those observations into rough concepts, and 3 again for presenting the concepts back to a group. Essential to this format is strict time keeping. The "ticking clock" forces spontaneous, quick-fire decisions and doesn't allow for overthinking.

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In a typical group setting, extroverts tend to dominate the verbal contributions. And while their contributions are certainly important, it can be difficult to hear from quieter players who also have something valuable to offer. Let the players know that this play is intentionally silent. It affords the quiet people the opportunity to generate ideas without having to verbalize to the whole group, and it gives you certainty that you'll hear from every player in the room. Brainwriting also allows ideas to emerge before being critiqued and creates a space for them to be co-created, with multiple owners, and therefore a greater chance of follow-through.

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This warm-up does not result in a problem definition that will satisfy an engineer; rather, it engages participants in defining the challenge in a simplified form. It is a first step in bringing a group together under a common purpose, elevating the problem above the noise to become something they care to solve.

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People are well versed in having conversations; what most of us aren't used to is listening, observing, and being accountable for our observations. The Fishbowl game, therefore, is about engaging skills that in many of us have become rusty. So, despite the fact that it may look as though the action happens in the players' conversation, the action in this game happens in the outer circle, with the observers.

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Graphic Jam is an all-purpose visualization game that you can conduct before many other games as a warm-up, but it's also a useful game in itself. Visualizing abstract concepts supports logo development, presentation design, website design, metaphor development for e-learning, and so on. It exercises the visual part of our cortex—which accounts for 75% of our sensory neurons—and turns on parts of our minds that don't get much action in a typical business setting.

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History Map OBJECT OF PLAY Organizations naturally look ahead to anticipate progress. But the past can be as informative as the future. When an organization undergoes systemic or cultural change, documenting its history becomes an important process. By collecting and visualizing the components of history, we necessarily discover, recognize, and appreciate what got us where we are today.

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Mapping a history should be an enjoyable experience for the meeting leader and the participants. It's a time for storytelling, reflection, and appreciation of the life and experience of the organization. While you're helping the group document the history, set a supportive tone and encourage camaraderie, storytelling, and honesty—even about the hard times.

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Low-Tech Social Network OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to introduce event participants to each other by co-creating a mural-sized, visual network of their connections.

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Pecha Kucha/Ignite OBJECT OF PLAY These fast, structured talks enable people to share ideas quickly and with a minimum of distraction. In addition, it puts the pressure on the person conveying the information to do so in a concise and compelling fashion.

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The rule of Pecha Kucha is 20 × 20: Presenters are allowed 20 slides, and they can spend 20 seconds per slide. Images are forwarded automatically—they are not under the control of the speaker.

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The goal of a poster session is to create a set of compelling images that summarize a challenge or topic for further discussion. Creating this set might be an "opening act" which then sets the stage for choosing an idea to pursue, or it might be a way to get indexed on a large topic. The act of creating a poster forces experts and otherwise passionate people to stop and think about the best way to communicate the core concepts of their material, avoiding the popular and default "show up and throw up."

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The participants' task is to create a poster that explains their topic. There are two constraints: It must be self-explanatory. If you gave it to a person without walking her through it, would she understand? It must be visual. Words and labels are good, but text alone will not be enough to get people's attention, or help them

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When creating their poster, participants may be helped by thinking about three kinds of explanation: Before and After: Describe "why" someone should care in terms of drawing the today and tomorrow of the idea. System: Describe the "what" of an idea in terms of its parts and their relationships. Process: Describe the "how" of an idea in terms of a sequence of events. Give participants 20 minutes to create their posters. When they have finished, create a "gallery" of the images by posting them on the wall. Instead of elaborate presentations, ask the group to circulate and walk the gallery. Some posters will attract and capture more attention than others. From here, it may be worthwhile to have participants dot vote (see Dot Voting in Chapter 4) or "vote with their feet" to decide what ideas to pursue further. STRATEGY As a variation, the posters may be created in small groups. In this case, it's important for the group to have decided ahead of time what their topic will be, and to give more time to come to a consensus on what they will draw and how they will draw it. On a smaller scale, a group may do this around a conference table. A small group of experts may create posters to explain their different points of view to each other at the start of a meeting, to make their models of the world, their vocabulary, and their interests clear and explicit. Twenty minutes spent in this way may save the group from endless discussion later in their process. The Poster Session game is based on academic poster sessions, in which authors of papers that are not ready for publication share their ideas in an informal, conversational group. Pre-Mortem OBJECT OF PLAY Often in projects, the learning is all at the wrong end. Usually after things have already gone horribly wrong or off-track, members of the team gather in a "postmortem" to sagely reflect on what bad assumptions and courses of action added up to disaster. What makes this doubly unfortunate is that those same team members, somewhere in their collective experience, may have seen it coming. A pre-mortem is a way to open a space in a project at its inception to directly address its risks. Unlike a more formal risk analysis, the pre-mortem asks team members to directly tap into their experience and intuition, at a time when it is needed most, and is potentially the most useful. NUMBER OF PLAYERS Any, but typically small teams will have the most open dialogue DURATION OF PLAY Depends on the scope of an effort; allow up to five minutes for each participant HOW TO PLAY

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A pre-mortem is best conducted at the project's kickoff, with all key team members present and after the goals and plan have been laid out and understood. The exercise starts with a simple question: "What will go wrong?" though it may be elevated in phrasing to "How will this end in disaster?" This is an opportunity for the team to reflect on their collective experience and directly name risks or elephants lurking in the room. It's a chance to voice concerns that might otherwise go unaddressed until it's too late.

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Conducting a pre-mortem is deceptively simple. At the beginning of a project, the forward momentum and enthusiasm are often at their highest; these conditions do not naturally lend themselves to sharing notions of failure. By conducting a pre-mortem, a group deliberately creates a space to share their past learning, at a time when they can best act on it.

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Show and Tell taps into the power of metaphors to let players share their assumptions and associations around a topic. If you see multiple show pieces that don't exactly represent delight around a topic, that's a signal that the players may have some concerns that need to be addressed. Don't overanalyze the objects; pay more attention to the way the players describe the parallels to the topic. As the team leader, encourage and applaud honesty during the stories, and write down every point that players make that seem important to them. Keep the rest of the players quiet while someone is showing and telling.

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Show Me Your Values OBJECT OF PLAY Employees' perceptions of a company's values, whether they're conscious or not, contributes to their morale and their willingness to go the extra mile to support the mission. To get a sense of how employees perceive the values that drive an organization, an initiative, a system-wide change, or any other topic, play Show Me Your Values.

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Your job is to create a space in which people can say something that may be taboo but that everyone is thinking.

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Along with a RACI matrix and other "people + project" activities, stakeholder analysis is a basic framing tool for any project. For leaders and managers, it clearly scopes out who has what level of input and interest in a project, and can help to align decisions appropriately.

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Many of us make the mistaken assumption that others see what we see and know what we know. No one in the world shares your internal system map of reality. The best way to compare notes, so to speak, is to actually draw an external representation of what you think is happening.

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The mapping of an organization's existing business model, including its strengths and weaknesses, is an essential starting point to improve the current business model and/or develop new future business models. At the very least the game leads to a refined and shared understanding of an organization's business model. At its best it helps players develop strategic directions for the future by outlining new and/or improved business models for the organization.

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Employees spend hours sitting in training sessions, sifting through orientation manuals, and playing corporate e-learning games to learn the know-how for their new positions. But the reality is that the bulk of employee knowledge is gained through storytelling. Employees train each other by sharing their personal and professional experiences. Campfire leverages our natural storytelling tendencies by giving players a format and a space in which to share work stories—of trial and error, failure and success, competition, diplomacy, and teamwork. Campfire is useful not only because it acts as an informal training game, but also because it reveals commonalities in employee perception and experience.

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The goal of this game is to improve a product or strategy by thinking through various scenarios and alternatives. By turning the exercise into a competition as well as a storytelling game, players are more likely to get engaged and immerse themselves in the scenarios. Keeping it lighthearted and fun will increase the energy. It shouldn't feel like work.

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Customer, Employee, Shareholder OBJECT OF PLAY The object of this game is to imagine possible futures from multiple perspectives.

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What has been a time-proven exercise in product development applies equally well in developing any new idea: writing the elevator pitch. When developing and communicating a vision for something,

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To set up the generating phase, write these headers in sequence on flip charts: Who is the target customer? What is the customer need? What is the product name? What is its market category? What is its key benefit? Who or what is the competition? What is the product's unique differentiator?

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Five-Fingered Consensus OBJECT OF PLAY Like Red/Green Cards (discussed later in this chapter), this is a technique for managing the feedback loop between a facilitator and a large group. When working in breakouts or as a large group, it may be necessary to periodically gauge the level of perceived consensus, without spending an unnecessary amount of time talking about it.

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Give-and-Take Matrix OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to map out the motivations and interactions among actors in a system. The actors in this case may be as small-scale as individuals who need to work together to accomplish a task, or as large-scale as organizations brought together for a long-term purpose. A give-and-take matrix is a useful diagnostic tool, and helps players explore how value flows through the group.

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Help Me Understand is based on the underlying (and accurate) assumption is that employees come to meetings with widely different questions around a topic or a change. It assumes leadership can anticipate some questions and concerns but can't possibly anticipate them all. No one knows the questions employees have better than the employees themselves, so this game gives them a chance to externalize what's on their minds and have leadership be responsive in a setting outside the once-a-year leadership retreat. It also allows the players to discover overlaps with other players' questions and to notice the frequency with which those questions occur—something

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The Make a World game appeals to visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners because of its layers of interaction. It's useful (and downright fun) because it lets players imagine the future and take action to create a first version of it.

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Open Space technology is a method for hosting large events, such as retreats and conferences, without a prepared agenda. Instead, participants are brought together under a guiding purpose and create the agenda for themselves in a bulletin-board fashion. These items become potential breakout sessions, and participants have the freedom to "vote with their feet" by moving between breakouts.

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Many decisions often boil down to one's basic choices between benefit and harm. By capturing these specifics for a key person, your group may uncover the most relevant points to bring up in presenting or influencing the key person's decision.

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Capture the answers on one side of the person: What does a bad day look like for him? What is he afraid of? What keeps him awake at night? What is he responsible for? What obstacles stand in his way? A persona's gains can be the inversion of the pain situation—or can go beyond. Capture these on the opposite side by asking: What does this person want and aspire to? How does he measure success? Given the subject at hand, how could this person benefit? What can we offer this person?

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Product Pinocchio is a game designed to establish, refine, and evolve the features of a product or service so that it becomes more valuable to the end user. By personifying it, we can better relate to it and better craft it into a "friend" that a consumer might want to take home.

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The object of this game is to quickly diagnose a group's level of understanding of the steps in a process.

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Through this exercise, the group will define an existing process at a high level and uncover areas of confusion or misunderstanding.

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Sometimes responsibilities aren't clear. Nothing erodes morale and performance faster than a difficult problem that belongs to someone else—or to everyone. When these situations raise their head, it may be necessary to call a group together to sort out who does what. By creating a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix,

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Feedback is difficult to manage in large group settings. For the presenter and the audience to track with each other, they need a means to communicate their approval, disagreement, or confusion as the event progresses. Red:Green Cards provide a simple means for channeling this feedback.

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Speedboat is a short and sweet way to identify what your employees or clients don't like about your product/service or what's standing in the way of a desired goal. As individuals trying to build forward momentum on products or projects, we sometimes have blind spots regarding what's stopping us. This game lets you get insight from stakeholders about what they think may be an obstacle to progress.

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Talking Chips OBJECT OF PLAY A recurring challenge in group work is managing discussions so that every individual has a chance to contribute, and no individuals dominate the meeting. By using simple "talking chips" as a currency for contribution, a group can self-manage the flow of participation.

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Understanding Chain OBJECT OF PLAY Communicating clearly and effectively is a challenge when there is a lot to say to a lot of people. It can be tempting to try to explain "everything all at once" to an audience and fail in the process. In the Understanding Chain game, a group shifts from a content focus to an audience focus, and draws out a meaningful, linear structure for communication.

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Value Mapping OBJECT OF PLAY The end goal of value mapping is to build a visual matrix that quickly and clearly defines areas of interest for something—it can be a service, a product, a plan, a website. It consists of asking people to choose a limited number of features from a bigger collection and then plotting their choices against a matrix. The result can be presented back in a template that resembles a light box,

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Loc. 4718-23

The Virtuous Cycle OBJECT OF PLAY The goal of this game is to discover opportunities to transform an existing, linear process into a more valuable and growing process by taking a different viewpoint. This is useful in examining processes that are deemed "worth repeating," such as the customer experience.

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Loc. 4942-44

20/20 Vision is about asking players to thoughtfully evaluate priorities as a group. The first phase of the game—describing and capturing the benefits—is significant because it lays the groundwork for the hard part: determining priorities. It can be challenging to get a group to rank its projects, all of which seem important in some way.

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Loc. 5064-65

Employees are human beings, and every human being likes to be acknowledged. To appreciate employee contributions, celebrate their accomplishments, and build camaraderie among team members, a Memory Wall works wonders.

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Loc. 5135

Plus/Delta

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Loc. 5146

Make two columns: one for "plus" and one for "delta" (the Greek symbol for change).

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This feedback method can apply to any activity, idea, work product, or action. By focusing on change as opposed to direct negatives, the group will be more likely to share its true assessment

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Prune the Future OBJECT OF PLAY People who work in large organizations know that most change doesn't happen immediately or in broad sweeps. It happens incrementally by taking small, strategic steps. Prune the Future uses a tree as a metaphor to show how the future of anything can be shaped, one leaf at a time.

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Loc. 5241

On a flip chart or whiteboard, create a matrix that outlines WHO / WHAT / WHEN.

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this approach starts with the "WHO" (the people who will be taking the actions). Put every participant's name into the matrix in this column. Ask each participant what concrete next steps they can commit to. Place this in the WHAT column.