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Streamline Training & Documentation
Streamline Training & Documentation
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Francis Bacon on Discourse
Francis Bacon first published "Of Discourse" in 1597 in a collection of short essays, and then in somewhat expanded form in subsequent 1612 and 1625 editions. Here, to give you a sense of Bacon's view of how to converse well, is the conclusion of the 1625 version: I knew two noblemen, of the west part of England, whereof the one was given to scoff, but kept ever royal cheer in his house; the other would ask of those that had been at the other’s table, Tell truly was there never a flout or dry blow [scornful jest] given? To which the guest would answer, Such and such a thing passed. The lord would say, I thought he would mar a good dinner. Discretion of speech is more than eloquence; and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal, is more than to speak in good words or in good order. A good continued speech, without a good speech of interlocution, shows slowness: and a good reply or second speech, without a good settled speech, showeth shallowness and weakness. As we see in beasts, that those that are weakest in the course are yet nimblest in the turn; as it is betwixt the greyhound and the hare. To use too many circumstances ere one come to the matter, is wearisome; to use none at all, is blunt.
One of my pet peeves is the poor deal broadband customers in the US are offered relative to what they could get if they lived in some other market-oriented democratic country, such as France or South Korea. Thus I was quite interested to learn that the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School today sumitted to the US Federal Communications Commission its final report on broadband deployment and usage — both current and planned — around the world.
The Berkman Center began work in July 2009 and had a draft of its report ready for public comment in October 2009. In the report's preface (pdf), Yochai Benkler, a professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard who served as the principal investigator, summarizes the changes that were made in response to comments. The preface sheds light on some of the more controversial issues relating to analysis of the efficiency of the US market for broadband services.
The body of the report is quite lengthy. Here I'll draw on the executive summary and introduction (pdf), to provide an overview of the report's main findings, which are:
A multidimensional approach to benchmarking broadband availability and quality helps distinguish countries whose experience is exemplary from those whose experience indicates pitfalls to beware of.
The United States is a middle-of-the-pack performer on most first-generation broadband measures, and a weak performer on prices for high and next-generation speeds. (see the graphic below.)
(click to enlarge)
Comparison of broadband providers: Best price for highest-speed offering
Transposing the experience of open access regulation from the first broadband transition to next generation connectivity occupies a central role in other nations' plans.
The Berkman Center's "most surprising and significant finding": (1) Open access policies in other countries have sought to increase levels of competition by lowering entry barriers;1 (2) Other countries aim to use regulation of telecommunications inputs to improve the efficiency of competition in the consumer broadband market. (3) This emphasis on open access policies appears to be warranted by the evidence.
Large, long-term government investments have played a role in some of the highest performing countries.
In Europe, substantial effort has been devoted to delimiting when government investment, both national and municipal, is justified and will not risk crowding out private investment.
Several countries engaged in a range of investments to support broadband demand, including extensive skills training, both in schools and for adults.
Also of note for someone taking an abbreviated look at the report are the "Core lessons from international strategies" tabulated in Part 4 (pdf) of the report (p. 84):
Open access policy, in particular unbundling, played an important role in facilitating competitive entry in many of the countries observed. In many cases, where facilities-based alternatives are available [e.g., use of existing cable systems to provide broadband Internet access], open access-based entrants played an important catalytic role in the competitive market. In some cases competition introduced through open access drove investment and improvement in speeds, technological progression, reduced prices, or service innovations.
An engaged regulator enforcing open access policy is more important than the formal adoption of the policy.
Broadband providers are regulated as carriers, and their carriage function is regulated and treated separately from their retail service function.
Access rules are now being applied to the next generation transition, particularly to fiber.
The goal of achieving ubiquitous access has led regulators to accept increased vertical integration between mobile and fixed broadband providers. In some places this has also led to application of open access requirements to mobile broadband platforms.
In the two earliest instances where functional separation was introduced [the UK and New Zealand], it had rapid effects on competitive entry, penetration, prices, and/or speeds.
Functional separation is increasingly adopted or considered as a way of achieving open access into the next generation of broadband.
Facilities-based competition usually complements, rather than substitutes for, access-based competition.
Entrepreneurial competitors have tended to enter through bitstream and unbundling access.
Unbundled access can also be used by incumbents from neighboring countries or regions to enter adjacent markets and introduce competition; in some cases they do so by acquiring initially entrepreneurial entrants.
Where unbundling was formally available, but weakly implemented, competition was limited to facilities-based entrants, with weaker results.
The anticipated high costs of next generation transition are pushing countries and companies to seek approaches to share costs, risks, and facilities, rather than focusing primarily on creating redundant facilities to assure facilities-based competition; they aim to mitigate the loss of facilities-based competition with a range of new models of open access and shared facilities, tailored to fiber.
__________ 1 "Open access" refers to such policies as unbundling the supplying of physical infrastructure from the supplying of Internet services, allowing competitors bitstream access, co-location requirements (e.g, requiring that competitors be allowed a physical presence in telephone company substations), wholesaling and/or "functional separation," i.e., separation of the unit in an Internet company that provides data carriage from the unit that provides retail services.
Make it clear how what you do adds value for others — Have a compelling one-sentence explanation at the ready.
Make it hard to be forgotten once you've been introduced at any event, such as a networking event. — Share interesting information about yourself without going into a hard sell.
Practice what you preach. E.g., "If you're in finance make sure your own accounts are in order."
Be ready to share success stories.
Be proud of what you do — When talking about your job, whatever it is, sound a positive note.
Even when you are facing someone who doubts your ability, stay positive. You can be confident that they will be proved wrong.
People buy because you are offering something that will benefit them. This is fundamental to actually adding value, which is always assessed from the customer's point of view.
People make buying decisions emotionally, so tell your success stories in a way that brings out the challenges you faced, the intensity with which you attacked them, and the satisfaction your successful results produced.
Don't stint in explaining what you have to offer. There's a tendency to take one's own expertise for granted because what you do has come to feel very natural. This can lead you to understate what you bring to the table. Be sure you explain fully how necessary your expertise is for creating value in the situations you're discussing with a customer.
Keep building your brand — "Broadcast your personal brand in every possible way. Make it clear and consistent."
I've paraphrased Hood's tips above. They don't take long to read, so I encourage you to have a look at the original list as she wrote it.
I can't say I'm sold on the broad feasibility of "reality mining," a quantitative technique for tracking people's relationships and behavior developed by Alex (Sandy) Pentland, a professor of media, arts, and sciences at MIT. Reality mining uses electronic sensors to collect the data, which is then analyzed to identify patterns that are influencing performance.
The two videos below provide an overview. The first explains how "honest signals" — defined by Pentland as "unconscious human behaviors that give reliable insight into our relationships and attitudes" — are gathered and analyzed electronically. For more detail, you can turn to Prof. Pentland's 2008 book, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World .
The second video presents clips of Prof. Pentland responding to questions concerning Honest Signals.
Data collection via sensors that record a person's location, body movements, tone of voice, etc., raises obvious privacy concerns. In an article published in 2007 in Booz Allen's strategy+business magazine, author Mark Buchanan lists Pentland's suggestions for dealing with the privacy issue in a business firm, which include:
... that the technology ought to be used on a voluntary basis, with individuals adopting it because they learn the benefits that it brings for both themselves and the company. An organization could store information on individuals’ own personal computers, rather than in a central location. It might also give people the opportunity, at the end of each day, to review the data that’s been recorded about their activities. They could have the option of deleting anything they’d prefer to keep private. The devices might be fitted with an additional button that would erase, say, the last 10 minutes of data, or data collection might be strictly limited to teams, time frames, and workplace settings where there has been explicit agreement in advance to allow the analysis. Although all these possibilities reduce the amount and quality of data that would be gathered, some steps along such lines will be crucial for giving people confidence that their privacy is being protected.
I leave it to you, after watching Prof. Pentland in the videos, to decide whether or not he oversells his concepts. As I indicated at the beginning, I am not convinced that his "sociometric" techniques have the broad application he claims. For instance, any alert business manager knows, without checking data collected by electronic sensors, that employees often need help in matching their styles to the expectations and preferences of those with whom they work, both internally and externally. On the other hand, I find Prof. Pentland's description of an application like the fuel economy game quite credible.
Don Vandergriff II: Developing Adaptive Leaders at West Point
A couple of earlierposts discussed John Boyd, who served as an Air Force officer from 1951 to 1975. Among his notable contributions to military thinking is the "OODA loop," aka the "Boyd Cycle," a decision-making process summarized in the graphic below.
Adapted from ""No 'Approved Solutions' in Asymmetric Warfare" (pdf), by Maj. Chad Foster. The Orientation phase is highlighted because the orientation process is emphasized in West Point's military science classes that use the Adaptive Leadership Methodology.
The OODA Loop is now embedded in military science courses taught to cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point. This is part of a broader framework designed to develop students' adaptive leadership skills.
As Maj. Chad Foster explains in a brief article (pdf) published in the August 2009 issue of West Point's Assembly magazine, Don Vandergriff's Adaptive Leadership Methodology (ALM) is now used in Academy military science classes in order to nurture "effective decision-making and adaptability through experiential learning."
The graphic below shows how ALM governs the flow of a class. The OODA Loop comes into play at the points where students need to reach decisions on how to handle scenarios the teacher presents.
The emphasis is on the Orientation phase of the OODA Loop
because this is when the cadet attempts to make sense out of the information at hand. The decision is important, but how the cadet arrived at it is just as important.
In concluding his article, Foster notes that implementing the Adaptive Leadership Methodology at West Point involved considerable effort, but that the results — in terms of student engagement and learning — have clearly made the effort worthwhile.
"The Great Influenza" VI: Keeping the Public Informed
In a 2009 afterword to his 2004 book, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, John M. Barry reiterates one of his main themes: ... of all the lessons from 1918, the clearest is that truth matters. A specialty among public relations consultants has evolved in recent decades called “risk communication.” I don’t much care for the term. It implies managing the truth. You don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.
In the first months of this [2009 H1N1] pandemic that does not seem to have been a lesson well-learned, The U.S. government and the World Health Organization have told the truth candidly, as soon as they have learned it. But other countries have been less forthright. Perhaps the worst offender has been China, whose Health Minister Chen Zhu declared, “We are confident and capable of preventing and containing an H1N1 influenza epidemic.”
This impossibility brought to mind uncomfortable echoes of 1918. Fortunately, as the pandemic has progressed, even China has at least incrementally approached telling the truth, and perhaps Chinese citizens read between the lines. [p.460]
Back when I was in fourth grade, I got a homework assignment that involved writing about Abraham Lincoln. I loved Mr. Lincoln and plunged right in.
The result was a nice long text, largely cribbed from our family's encyclopedia, that I proudly showed my mother. Instead of being bowled over by my dedication and industry, she read the first few sentences and then looked at me and said, "Karen, you know, when you write something, it's supposed to be interesting."
I was mightily taken aback. The idea of being interesting had never crossed my little nine-year-old mind. However, as soon as my mother brought it up, it became firmly implanted. I've been highly conscious of the "make it interesting" criterion ever since.
This idea applies to just about everything one writes, including, for instance ... cover letters.
At the beginning of the month, Dan Heath wrote a brief column, "How Do I Make My Resume Stick?" for FastCompany.com. The whole half-page is worth reading. Let me just note his key point:
... the cover letter is the hero of our story. It's the place where you can make yourself memorable. Ideas stick because they are full of concrete details, emotion, surprises, etc.
Heath provieds a two-item checklist:
Give headlines.
Defend the headlines with stories.
Clearly, the task confronting a jobseeker trying to create a sticky cover letter / resume combo is not conceptually difficult. What's needed is plenty of practice in meeting the requirements for stickiness.
You can think of such practice as a convenient by-product of the job search process itself. The important thing is to set a firm standard for yourself of being not only responsive to individual employers' job specs, but also of presenting your match to those requirements in compelling fashion. Dashing off formulaic cover letters is not going to do make you stand out. Presenting a vivid, concise, and engaging pitch for yourself will.
Another, somewhat longer set of guidelines for making winning pitches is available in a short Hewlett-Packard Learning Center course called Marketing Writing Tips: Five Mistakes to Avoid. Though the course is addressed to product marketers rather than job seekers, much (not all) of the advice it offers is applicable to written communications with prospective employers.
There is a short section for each of the five mistakes alluded to in the course title:
Writing headlines that fail to lead (Recall that headlines are item 1 on Dan Heath's checklist.)
Taking the wrong tone (The course text reinforces Heath's advice to combine use of a prospective employer's preferred vocabulary — even if it includes buzzwords — with concrete detail concerning how you fit the employer's needs.)
Creating content without focus
Using too many words, too few details
Failing to include a clear call to action (Something to be appropriately restrained about in a cover letter to an employer.)
I'd mention that there are a couple of typos to overlook in the course text, and a quote attributed to Einstein that is usually credited to Edison, but these are minor miscues. In terms of overall quality, I rate the advice in the course as well-presented and well-modulated.
Productivity is in the news these days as people take note that it is rising impressively in the US even as unemployment remains high. What lies behind the ability of companies to maintain needed output levels with fewer employees?
One known source of productivity gains is investment in information technology. But some companies do markedly better in realizing productivity gains from IT than others. Why?
Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and Adam Saunders, a lecturer at UPenn's Wharton School, have been investigating this question. The answer they offer in a recently published book is that
companies with the highest level of returns to their technology investment are doing more than just buying technology; they are inventing new forms of organizational capital to become digital organizations. These innovations include a cluster of organizational and business-process changes, including broader sharing of information, decentralized decision-making, linking pay and promotions to performance, pruning of non-core products and processes, and greater investments in training and education.
You can access the introduction and first chapter of Brynjolfsson and Saunders' book here.
[Earlier reference to the points Brynjolfsson and Saunders make in their book can be found in a post from July of last year. Brynjolfsson's views (along with those of co-auther Andrew McAfee) concerning measurement of economic activity that improves on the standard GDP measure are discussed in a post from last month.]
Thanks to the Greater Good blog, I have been alerted to a study that suggests people can learn to be more emotionally intelligent.
The study was conducted by four Belgian researchers — Delphine Nelis, Jordi Quoidbach, Moïra Mikolajczak, and Michel Hansenne. Nelis, Quoidbach, and Hansenne are at the University of Liège; Mikolajczak is at the Université Catholique de Louvain.1
The construct of emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the individual differences in the perception, processing, regulation, and utilization of emotional information. As these differences have been shown to have a significant impact on important life outcomes (e.g., mental and physical health, work performance and social relationships), this study investigated, using a controlled experimental design, whether it is possible to increase EI. Participants of the experimental group received a brief empirically-derived EI training (four group training sessions of two hours and a half) while control participants continued to live normally. Results showed a significant increase in emotion identification and emotion management abilities in the training group. Follow-up measures after 6 months revealed that these changes were persistent. No significant change was observed in the control group. These findings suggest that EI can be improved ...
Because the text of the study is not available for free online, you might want to turn for additional detail to the description of the research Timothy A. Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University, provides at www.PsychologyToday.com:
The EI training intervention consisted of 4 sessions of 2.5 hours each over 4 weeks with participants divided into two smaller groups (10 and 9 participants, respectively). The training was based on Mayer and Salovey's model of EI,[2] with an emphasis on: 1) perception, appraisal and expression of emotion; 2) emotional facilitation of thinking; 3) understanding and analyzing emotions; 4) reflective regulation of emotion. During the program, particular emphasis was placed on techniques to enhance emotional regulation and emotional understanding. These sessions were based on short lectures, role plays, discussions and readings. Participants also completed a daily dairy of emotional experience that they analyzed in light of the theory explained in class as part of their learning.
The moral for corporate trainers is that well-designed coaching and training in the interpersonal skills that reflect emotional intelligence can equip people to do a better job of communicating with each other and managing conflict — assuming training participants are willing to learn.
(I will be on the lookout for further information on the exact nature of the training the Belgian researchers used in their experiment. I am also interested in anything I can find about their thoughts concerning how to improve the specifics of their training in light of their experience with their initial group of subjects.)
__________ 1 Delphine Nelis, Jordi Quoidbach, Moïra Mikolajczak, and Michel Hansenne, "Increasing Emotional Intelligence: (How) is it possible?" Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 47, No. 1 (July 2009), pp. 36-41.
2 John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey, "What is Emotional Intelligence?" (pdf) in Peter Salovey and David J. Sluyter (eds.), Emotional Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications (Basic Books, 1997), pp. 3-31.
Back in June I wrote a post about David Kennedy's approach to deterring criminal offenders, who had not yet perpetrated violent crimes, from continuing their illegal activities. Now, thanks to a book review, also dating from June, I've become aware of an approach to reducing recidivism among jailed offenders that seems to be attracting increasing attention in the US after being used successfully in San Francisco since 1997.1
Schwartz is a program administrator in the San Francisco Sheriff's Department who co-founded the department's Resolve to Stop the Violence Project (RSVP), along with Assistant Sheriff Michael Marcum and Captain Rebecca Benoit.
Participants in the RSVP Expressive Arts program learn about replacing the macho image of superiority that contributed to their violent behavior, with a more humane view of the male role in society. The theater program also helps participants learn ways of expressing their feelings and needs in a nonviolent manner. (sunnyschwartz.com)
RSVP is a version of what has come to be known as restorative justice, which is most simply defined as:
all approaches to crime that attempt to do justice by repairing the harm crime causes.2
RSVP's founders made a point of designing the program based on input from an advisory committee made up of representatives of a broad cross-section of law enforcement and community stakeholders, including crime victims. The program was the 2004 recipient of the Innovations in American Government Award, presented by the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
You can get a quick overview of RSVP in the 3:08 video below.
A longer account of the program is offered in the 28:23 video below, which ran on PBS in 2005 as part of the Visionaries series hosted by Sam Waterston.
Among those interviewed are Sunny Schwartz; Michael Hennessey, Sheriff of San Francisco; Ronald Rosado, a Deputy Sheriff working in the dormitory where the RSVP program is based; George Jurand, RSVP Program Coordinator and Manager; Sheryl Corke, Principal of Five Keys Charter School (see below); Teresa Camajani, a history teacher at Five Keys; Delia Ginorio, Survivor Restoration Coordinator; and Jean O'Hara, a former Victim Impact Coordinator, who lost her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson to murder.
There is also footage of unnamed inmates participating in RSVP discussions, including a victim impact presentation by Jean O'Hara.
Using data from a two-year period beginning nine months prior to the inception of RSVP, and continuing for fifteen months after its launch, James Gilligan, then a visiting professor of psychiatry, criminology, and public policy and practice at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bandy Lee. a clinical professor of law and psychiatry at Yale, evaluated the program's effects on inmate behavior. Their hypothesis:
... the dormitory in which violence-prevention skills are taught through RSVP would create a cultural environment that would generate fewer violent incidents than the dormitory without such a programme, [which] turned out to be the case.3
The effect on the frequency with which ex-offenders were re-arrested for violent crimes was also positive: Among jail inmates who took part for a full sixteen weeks, the reduction was over 80% for the first year after release, compared to a control group of non-participants.4
Gilligan and Lee argue that
The seeds of a change in [the in-jail] culture can be seen in some of the principles that characterized the in-house version of RSVP: (1) redefining the male-role image of superiority; (2) holding oneself accountable rather than minimizing or blaming; (3) offering peer-directed guidance and having avenues for promotion; (4) verbalizing rather than acting out: (5) expressing emotions as needs; and (6) offering intimacy rather than offence. ... Finding violence to be not only an ineffectual but counterproductive means of gaining respect in [the] new culture, the inmates would quickly search for other means, which facilitated their compliance and adaptation.
I was particularly interested in the nature of the integrated pre- and post-release services provided to inmates to assist in their transition back into the community, services which bear a not surprising resemblance to those offered in various programs around the country directed at populations with employability barriers.5
The services include:
Core RSVP curriculum designed to change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors — includes male role re-education (using the Manalive curriculum), victim impact presentations, drug and alcohol recovery, theater, and release planning (further details below).6
A propos of the victim impact presentations, Gilligan and Lee comment that "we have been astonished by ... how little awareness most of these men had had as to how much power they had to hurt others, until they listened to ... victims describe their own reactions to being victimized by others." 7
Community meetings — held weekly in the RSVP dormitory to allow participants to discuss day-to-day issues they are coping with.
Loss of Innocence class — participants can explore and address trauma and victimization they experienced in childhood.
Fatherhood curriculum — a twelve-week program in which participants "discuss the father's role in a child's life, the importance of providing children with a consistent and supportive environment, and issues children face as they grow up in a single parent's home."
Young Adult class — inmates twenty-eight and under address their violence, drug dependency, and recidivism problems.
Creative writing — participants contribute to the dormitory's newsletter, with the aim of strengthening writing skills and exercising creativity.
Transfer planning — produces an exit plan spelling out the steps and tools the inmate will continue to employ in order to maintain a life free of violence and substance abuse.
The transfer planning includes plans for restoration of victims and the community. For details of RSVP's services for crime victims and survivors, see here. For services to communities, see here.
Post-release programs — designed to assist ex-offenders in maintaining behavior changes learned in the in-jail program. Include the Post-Release Education Program (PREP), which continues, at least for the first year, participation in Manalive discussion groups and weekly facilitated support groups. PREP also includes a Life Skills program with three components, the first dealing with job readiness, exploration of career opportunities, and apprenticeship programs; the second involving resume preparation and practice employment interviews; and the third covering tracking of ex-offenders' progress and ongoing support with work-related issues. Participants get counseling and support in such areass as substance abuse avoidance and parenting.
Internship Program — for select participants, a four- to six-month training program that prepares them for employment as peer counselors in the jail or at human services agencies.
Community advocacy programs — ex-offenders can give back to the community in such ways as leading Manalive groups, performing in theater programs for the public, counseling youth groups, and engaging in victim restitution programs.
I'll wrap up with a summary comment from Sunny Schwartz, et al. that indicates why emulation of RSVP elsewhere is important:
As an affirmative crime prevention tool that actively engages inmates, RSVP has been successful in giving participants, collaborators, and the community a greater understanding of the nature and dynamics of violence, including the spectrum of abusive behavior, the importance of gender-role training, the significance of learned behavior, the methods for unlearning violence, and the criminal implications and consequences of violence.8
__________ 1 Helen Epstein, "America's Prisons: Is There Hope?" The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56, No. 10 (June 11, 2009).
As an example of the spread of the RSVP program, see this report by Kate Stone Lombardi in the July 6, 2008 edition of the New York Times, which describes the introduction of the RSVP approach to Westchester County.
2Restorative Juvenile Justice: Repairing the Harm of Youth Crime, Bazemore and Walgrave (eds.) (Criminal Justice Press, 1999).
3 James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, "The Resolve to Stop the Violence Project: Transforming an In-house Culture of Violence through a Jail-Based Programme," Journal of Public Health Vol. 27, No. 2 (June 2005b), pp. 149-155.
4 James Gilligan and Bandy Lee, "The Resolve to Stop the Violence Project: Reducing Violence in the Community through a Jail-Based Initiative," Journal of Public Health, Vol 27, No. 2 (June 2005a), pp. 143-148.
5 Some of these programs have been the subject of previous posts. See here, here, here, and here.
6Sunny Schwartz, Michael Hennessey, and Leslie Levitas, "Designing: Not Business as Usual," American Jails, Jan-Feb 2005, pp. 10.
Now-retired professor Geert Hofstede of the Netherlands is renowned for his development of a five-dimensional model of culture at the national level. His model is based on research he conducted while employed at IBM (the first four dimensions) and on subsequent research done by Chinese scholars (the fifth dimension).
It is important to note that Hofstede's data are averages across individuals within a particular country. He readily acknowledges that any given individual may depart significantly from the averages for his/her country.
Hofstede's five dimensions are:
Power Distance Index (PDI) — "... the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally."
Individualism (IDV) vs. Collectivism — "... the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty."
Masculinity (MAS) vs. Femininity — "refers to the distribution of roles between the genders ... The IBM studies revealed that ... men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called 'masculine' and the modest, caring pole 'feminine'. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values."
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) — "deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity ... It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. ... Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth ... The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side."
Long-Term Orientation (LTO) versus Short-Term Orientation — "Values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one's 'face'."
If you visit www.geert-hofstede.com, you can review graphs of how various countries stack up on Hofstede's dimensions, some assessed using the four-dimensional model, others using the five-dimensional model.
The graph directly below shows the overall average levels, on a scale of 0-100, for the five-dimensional model. Then, as examples of the national readings, I've reproduced the graphs for China and the USA, two countries increasingly involved in bilateral dealings, both commercial and governmental.
I'm usually not up late enough to watch Charlie Rose, and I'm not particularly fond of his interviewing style anyway, but I happened to have him on in the background last night. When Frank Bruni came on, I suddenly found myself riveted.
Bruni was the restaurant critic of the New York Times from April 2004 to August 2009. He has included his experience in that job, along with an account of growing up in a loving family that attached great value to good and ample meals, in his recently published memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater."
What had me so entranced by his conversation with Charlie Rose was not the subject matter of his book per se, but rather his manner of conversing, which had the most gracious air that I personally could remember witnessing on TV.
Bruni seems such an exemplar of graciousness that I want to pass along links for watching and listening to him in action. The Rose interview isn't yet available online, but I did locate the video below, a portion of a September 1 interview with Leonard Lopate on WNYC. The audio of the full interview is available here.
Another interview is from Thursday, when Bruni sat down with Stephen Colbert. You can watch it here.
You can also get a clear sense of Bruni's manner and conversational tone from reading transcripts of interviews, such as his September 14 interview with Julia Reed. One final sample of his style is the online Q&A the Times ran in October 2008, which you can read here.
The subject of electronic medical records (EMR) is much in the news nowadays, and I know from one recent project I worked on just how complicated implementing a new or upgraded system is for a hospital. (I haven't had any direct experience with getting EMR up and running in a medical practice, but I have no doubt that the complexity and resource demands are daunting.)
The payoff from adopting a well-designed EMR system is also substantial, including as it does, more rapid. complete, and accurate communication among providers; better support of diagnosis and treatment planning; and reduced treatment errors. This is not to overlook caveats relating to privacy, security, and lack of standardization. It's simply to say that medicine needs to keep moving in the direction that other types of enterprises have gone, namely, taking advantage of the power of well-managed IT to increase productivity and quality.
(click to enlarge) An example of a structured radiology report (StructuRad)
As just one concrete example, I'd cite what is happening in the field of radiology. For some years now, radiologists have been moving toward use of computer-based structured reporting. A 2009 special report (pdf) from the Radiology Reporting Committee of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)1 explains:
Construed narrowly, structured reporting means the use of predefined formats and terms to create reports; in this sense, structured reports are those based on templates or checklists. In a broader sense, however, structured reporting can integrate additional information collected during the imaging procedure, such as clinical data, technical parameters, measurements, annotations, and key images.
Not only does structured reporting help communicate findings clearly, but it also makes the information in reports searchable, which can assist with research, teaching and clinical quality improvement. Structured reports also help with regulatory and billing compliance. Finally, as the RSNA report notes:
Because information in a structured report adheres to predefined format and vocabulary, it is easier to integrate that informtion with generalized knowledge-based resources. Thus, one can more easily integrate structured reporting process with clinical guidelines, collaborative staging tools, educational resources, and decision support.
To stay apprised of developments in structured radiology reporting, you can follow the RSNA Reporting Wiki.
__________ 1 The RSNA's definition of professionalism was the subject of yesterday's post.
It seems that John Baldoni is a man after my own heart. In a June 22 blog post, he argues that
Explanation is a key attribute of leadership communications. Leaders know to inject their communications with verve and enthusiasm as a means of persuasion, but they also need to include an explanation for the excitement. What does it mean and why are we doing it are critical questions that every leader must answer with straightforward explanations.
Not only does Baldoni recommend taking a straightforward tack, the approach I myself consider most appropriate when making an argument or launching an initiative, but he goes on to suggest the Is/Is Not way of clarifying what one is saying, also an approach I endorse for its effectiveness is helping people grasp what they need to understand in order to coordinate their efforts with others.
Finally, Baldoni points out that you, in the role of leader, need to tell people what action you expect them to take so that they are contributing to advancing the new initiative, solving the problem the organization is facing, or otherwise addressing the issue you have been discussing.
In the surprisingly fluffy Summer 2009 issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review — they seem to have been sucked into the camp that swears by abridgement and abbreviation (the curse of Twitter) — an article I found appealingly substantive addresses the question of how to manage virtual teams.
As summarized in their first exhibit, the benefits (somewhat edited) are:
Heterogeneous knowledge resources
Utilization of cost advantages
Access to diverse skills and experience
Knowledge about diverse markets
Ability to have people working more or less around the clock because they are in different time zones
The liabilities (somewhat edited) are:
Language differences
Cultural differences
Difficulties in establishing common ground
Fewer face-to-face interactions
Greater difficulty in achieving good teamwork
The key finding Siebdrat, Hoegl, and Ernst (SHE) report, from their research into the workings of twenty-eight software development teams in Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, and the US, is that the balance of benefits vs. liabilities tends to favor dispersed teams under certain important conditions.
These conditions are that a team's task-related ("hard") and socio-emotional ("soft") processes be well-managed. SHE report:
"[T]hose processes that are directly task-related are the most critical for the performance of dispersed teams. Specifically, virtual teams that had processes that increased the levels of mutual support, member effort, work coordination, balance of member contributions and task-related communications consistently outperformed other teams with lower levels. ... Moreover, dispersed teams that had high levels of task-related processes were notably able to outperform colocated teams with similar levels of those same processes despite the physical separation of their members."
On the other hand, "dispersion carries significant risks: Those teams with poor task-related processes suffered heavily with increased dispersion."
With respect to socio-emotional processes, "organizations must ... ensure that team members commit to the overall group goals, identify with the team and actively support a team spirit." The quality of these processes, in and of themselves, does not differentiate performance of dispersed and colocated teams. However, SHE suggest that building robust socio-emotional processes supports achieving high quality of task-related processes. For example, with good team cohesion, it is probably the case that knowledge is transferred more completely, and conflicts within a team are more readily resolved.
SHE describe five dos and don'ts of managing dispersed teams:
Don't underestimate the significance of small distances. E.g., team members located on different floors of the same building actually tend to be less effective and efficient than teams whose members are on the same floor and than teams more widely dispersed. Only teams with members on different continents perform worse on average.
Emphasize teamwork skills. This means recruiting people who are inclined to play well with others, and providing training to help team members strengthen their teamwork skills.
Promote self-leadership across the team. This is necessary because of the difficulty a designated leader is likely to have in intervening effectively when members of a dispersed team are experiencing conflict or other difficulty. "For a virtual team to succeed, members generally need to be aware of the difficulties of dispersed collaboration and find effective ways to overcome those obstacles on their own." Training can help.
Provide for face-to-face meetings. For instance, a project kickoff meeting in which team members are all assembled in one place can make a real difference in how quickly they begin to function effectively.
Foster a global culture, a mindset "in which people see themselves as part of an international network. ... [M]anagers and team members need to recognize and frame their company as such, communicating the international nature of the organization's operations and markets."
SHE cite practices of companies like Nestlé, General Electric, IBM and SAP, such as sending staff on assignments in foreign countries. SHE also suggest providing inter-cultural training. The intended outcome of such measures is "development of diversity-friendly attitudes and the ability to work in different contexts, which in turn help employees cope with the challenges of distance when working on virtual teams."
I'll close by noting that this research, while quite interesting and suggestive, needs replication in order for an organization to draw on its findings and recommendations with full confidence.
__________ 1 WHU stands for "Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Unternehmensführung” — Scholarly/Scientific University for Business Management.
The MIT OpenCourseWare site recently added materials for a Sloan School of Management course in Communication for Managers, taught by Neal Hartman during the Fall 2008 semester.
Though the materials are not complete — lecture notes for nine of the fourteen class meetings are missing — there are a number of items that anyone interested in this particular skill area will find helpful, even if only as a refresher.
I'd suggest starting with the notes for the course wrap-up (pdf), which provide an overview of the principles Hartman emphasizes in the course:
Four types of leadership:
Visioning.
Relating.
Inventing.
Sensemaking.
How to do a situation analysis as the basis for devising a communication strategy:
Define your purpose.
Analyze your audience.
Assess your credibility.
Analyze the cultural context.
Factors to consider in deciding on your communication strategy:
Managerial style — distinguished in terms of writer/speaker control and the degree of audience involvement.
Structure of the communication — direct statement of your main points or recommendation, followed by rationale vs. indirect approach that begins with subsidiary points or with arguments that set the stage for your recommendation.
Liking — People are inclined to say yes to requests of a person they know and like.
Reciprocity — People repay in kind.
Social proof — People follow the lead of others who are similar to them.
Consistency — In response to personal and interpersonal pressure, people tend to follow through on their clear commitments.
Authority — People defer to experts.
Scarcity — Opportunities seem more valuable when their availability is limited.
The Minto Pyramid (see graphic below, which you can click to enlarge) is a good device for organizing your ideas when you are recommending a change of some sort.
Principles of effective design of visual aids:
Consistency in formatting.
Appropriate titles.
Purposeful use of color and special effects.
Clear and uncluttered layout.
Principles of effective document design:
Use of subheads to show structure.
Use of lists to highlight important and conceptually parallel information.
Use of white space to highlight material and to create transitions through indenting, columns, and lines.
In-text highlighting of key words and phrases.
Use of tables and graphs to make evidence more legible.
Principles of effective cover letters for resumes.
Importance of awareness of values and perceptions that differentiate cultures around the world.
Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, La Moskitia, Honduras (Erika Nortemann)
Map of the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve in northeastern Honduras (click to enlarge) (Smithsonian Institution)
A non-profit organization called Rare includes the Río Plátano Reserve among a wide range of conservation projects it has undertaken in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific in which Rare pursues its mission "to conserve imperiled species and ecosystems around the world by inspiring people to care about and protect nature."
A major element in Rare's efforts is training of local people in effective promotion of conservation, including through sustainable tourism.
For instance, Rare runs a Nature Guide Training Program for local residents of areas visited by ecotourists such as the Río Plátano Reserve. The guides' training involves "three months of coursework, learning the natural and cultural history of the region and gaining the necessary skills to translate their knowledge to visitors from around the world."
A similar program has trained guides employed by La Ruta Moskitia, "a locally-run ecotourism operation launched in early 2006, which includes six indigenous communities from the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve ..." This training involved "eight weeks of intense classes and field study in ecosystems ranging from coastal lagoons to highland cloud forest to learn about the dramaticaly different ecosystems and natural history of the areas in which they will be leading their visitors."2
Rare's general approach to promoting conservation is to use marketing techniques to achieve the attitudinal and behavioral changes needed at the local level for conservation objectives, such as rainforest preservation, actually to be met. You can read more about Rare's social marketing approach here.
Of particular interest are the details of the Masters in Communication program that Rare offers to individuals who undertake two-year Pride Campaign projects. The curriculum, accredited by the University of Texas-El Paso, is impressive in its comprehensiveness, as you can see by reading the program brochure (pdf).
Rare assesses project success by monitoring relevant metrics. In general terms, the organization watches the "3 C's": the capacity for conservation that a project builds, the constituency that is built, and the conservation that is actually achieved.
__________ 1 As defined (pdf) by UNESCO, "Biosphere reserves are areas of terrestrial and coastal ecosystems promoting solutions to reconcile the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use. They are internationally recognized, nominated by national governments and remain under sovereign jurisdiction of the states where they are located. Biosphere reserves serve in some ways as 'living laboratories' for testing out and demonstrating integrated management of land, water and biodiversity. ... There are over 500 biosphere reserves in over 100 countries."
"Each biosphere reserve is intended to fulfil 3 basic functions, which are complementary and mutually reinforcing:
a conservation function — to contribute to the conservation of landscapes, ecosystems, species and genetic variation
a development function — to foster economic and human development which is socio-culturally and ecologically sustainable
a logistic function — to provide support for research, monitoring, education and information exchange related to local, national and global issues of conservation and development
2 As explained in a 2008 press release, "La Ruta Moskitia was established by Rare ... and the Small Grants Programme (SGP)/GEF/ Honduras United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in an effort to link sustainable tourism, biodiversity protection, and poverty alleviation in the [Río Plátano] Reserve."
The wikiHow site is a trove of how-to articles on a wide range of subjects:
Arts & Entertainment
Cars & Other Vehicles
Computers & Electronics
Education & Communications
Family Life
Finance & Business
Food & Entertaining
Health
Hobbies & Crafts
Holidays & Traditions
Home & Garden
Personal Care & Style
Pets & Animals
Philosophy & Religion
Relationships
Sports & Fitness
Travel
Work World
wikiHow (e.g., how to contribute)
Youth
Other
I find wikiHow useful for browsing for ideas on how to handle various situations, such as preparing for a behavioral interview (one of the items cited below), and for advice that reflects "on the ground" experience.
The articles vary in quality, as you would expect, but they are also easy to scan, so you can quickly decide what you want to pay attention to, and what you want to ignore.
I've listed below some examples of articles I found useful, taken from the Education & Communication, Finance & Business, and Work World categories.
The May/June 2009 issue of Communication Arts presents the results of the magazine's fifteenth Interactive Annual competition. Editor Patrick Coyne introduces the thirty-five winners with an Editor's column that is basically an anthology of comments on likes and dislikes from the competition's jurors.
Coyne's thought-provoking column doesn't seem to be available online so, with the advice that you try to get your hands on a copy of the May/June issue, I'll provide something of a teaser by citing some of my favorite passages.
"A common thought that pervaded all discussion among the judges was that we really appreciated the minimalistic approach to design, user experience and navigation this year." (A comment from Amber Bezahler, managing director of an ad agency in Vancouver.)
"I was really excited to see some of the mobile stuff, like the iPhone Apps and the smaller Web sites, because they take the other extreme [from info- and media-heavy sites]. They're very small, very efficient experiences, and some are really beautiful and meticulously done." (A comment from Michelangelo Capraro, co-founder of an interactive design firm in San Francisco.)
The dramatic increase in the use of video has been the big topic over the last several years, and this year's jury was particularly critical of its overuse. . . . "People still don't know how to handle [video] properly because we're experiencing these crazy-long wait times. For what? As a user, the impact that you're getting in terms of what you're investing timewise isn't quite there yet." (A comment from Stacey Mulcahy, a Flash designer)
"A lot of companies are trying to engage audiences and they thought games would be a good way to do it. In the end I voted most of them out because they were trying too hard, and the amount of fun that you actually were able to have wasn't worth the effort." (A comment from Jason Ring, creative director of an ad agency in San Francisco)
"It goes back to that basic question we ask ourselves a lot, 'Why does this brand need a Web site and who would ever want to go there?' That's not to say that people don't want to interact with the brand or the brand doesn't have something to say to them, but it's really looking at where the right place is for that interaction to take place — with the idea of reaching people where they already are as opposed to driving them to a place where they're not." (A comment ftrom Jay Zasa, executive creative director at a New York ad agency)
You can see the winning interactive projects here.
In the June 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Roderick M. Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, explains a concept that he refers to as "tempered trust." This is an attitude toward trusting people that is prudent, rather than being either unduly credulous or unduly suspicious.
Kramer argues:
We can never be certain of another's motivations, intentions, character, or future actions. ... That said, there is much that you can do to reduce the doubt — in particular, by adjusting your mind-set and behavioral habits.
Kramer offers seven rules for tempering trust:
Know yourself. Ask yourself what your disposition toward trust is.
Someone who tends to trust people too readily must work on improving his/her ability to interpret the cues people send out, bearing in mind that just about "any indicator of trustworthiness can be manipulated or faked."
On the other hand, a person who is good at reading cues, but still hesitates to form trusting relationships, needs to develop more receptive behaviors.
Start small. Take incremental steps, with further steps contingent on reciprocity. This way, you control the risk that the other party will exploit your good will. On an encouraging note, Kramer advises that "Salting your world with lots of small trusting acts sends a signal to others who are themselves interested in building good relationships ..." This leads to more positive interactions.
Write an escape clause. Kramer argues, "With a clearly articulated plan for disengagement, people can trust more fully and with more commitment."
Send strong signals. Kramer emphasizes the importance of sending clear and consistent signals of your interest in dealing with people who will trust you and be trustworthy themselves. He says, "Most of us tend to underinvest in communicating our trustworthiness to others ..."
The signals need to be unambiguous so that you attract other tempered trusters, while deterring predators, who need to recognize that you are not someone to be trifled with. The idea is to develop a reputation for fair dealing with those who reciprocate, and for retaliating strongly, but proportionately, against those who violate your trust.
Recognize the other person's dilemma. Kramer points out that "the people we're dealing with confront their own trust dilemmas and need reassurance about whether (or how much) they should trust us. Good relationship builders are proactive at decreasing the anxiety and allaying the concerns of others."
Look at roles as well as people. Kramer explains, "A person's role or position can provide a guarantee of his expertise and motivation" even when we have not had the opportunity for personal contact with the individual. "Role-based trust is trust in the system that selects and trains the individual."
Remain vigilant and always question. Kramer's admonition is to keep one's due diligence concerning others' bona fides up-to-date. Admittedly, this can feel awkward because it involves regularly checking up on people with whom you have an established relationship of trust.
