interiors

Two responses to the Jay Goltz post in the NYT, The Dirty Little Secret of Successful Companies : Response 1 Pfeffer is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford GSB. In The Human Equation, he lays out 7 principles of successful companies, two of which are obviously relevant: Selective hiring of new personnel Extensive training The entire list: Employment Security Self-managed teams and decentralized decision making Relatively high compensation contingent on organizational performance Reduced status distinctions Extensive sharing of financial/performance information Response 2 Evaluations can be very arbitrary. In one former position at a major bank, I was rated excellent year after year by various 'handlers'; I was never really managed. Well, a competing bank bought one of the trading desks, and then the management went with them. I was still excellent with the replacement managers, but my most senior supporter was shipped off to Europe to m...

Two responses to the NYT's Social Scientist Sees Bias Within : Response 1 I went through the recommended posts to see if my premise based on facts, that openness (big-five) correlates with intelligence and 'liberal-ness', was repeated, and found it was, as well as the occasional flip-side, that business people are typically conservative. Gee, smart people identify as liberal or independent, and conservatives are typically middle class and concerned with money. Although intelligence and personality explain much of the difference, it doesn't explain why the US is so politically and socially backward, as compared to other developed countries. Response 2 Your weakness is your strength. It is what you make of it. Rather than looking at the distribution of political stances as a problem, one could try to see it as a positive feature, provided you are a conservative. My sense is that greatness, e.g., Nobel's in Economics or Einstein, is not the province o...