Bold Words

Last October, The Economist published a piece titled “The Battle for Brainpower.” Based on my experiences, tales of friends, and even what I read in major publications, business is scrambling for capable, talented people. I’ve seen firsthand how HR and department heads have rushed to fill a position, settling for any warm body out of fear someone else won’t come along

“[An] international poll of senior human-resources managers, three-quarters of them said that “attracting and retaining” talent was their number one priority. The article highlighted the words of Winston Churchill from an address he gave at Harvard in 1943:

…the empires of the future will be empires of the mind.

It takes brains to make our technology based lives work, so why do we still pick on the geek, the egghead, the dork? I for one am tired of the grief I get if I show my brain cells do more than sit around taking it easy. I’ve watched with dismay as my fellow citizens have shown preference for political candidates that don’t show their intellect but make good beer-drinking buddies. I may not personally care for Barack Obama, but are people really willing to say they won’t vote for the man because he’s “too smart?”

Elite is often substituted for smart, somehow implying that by wanting more or acting differently than the majority, you can no longer mingle with the group. The business world can work this way, too. How many people do you know that are in their positions because they played toadie to the right individual, not necessarily because they can do the job? It isn’t enough for people to be smart and talented. I’ve seen firsthand how people have to play the game if they want to get ahead. I know some will say, “That’s just the way it is,” but I say why is that the way?

Why are we threatened by people being smarter or more talented than ourselves? I’m not innocent of this trait. Depending on the person I sometimes struggle being fair to an individual who is clearly smarter than myself. What I’ve found, however, is that I usually learn so much by being open to these individuals and swallowing some pride. I don’t know everything. Do you?

Our world demands that we produce people with the brainpower to keep things running. When will we stop punishing people for having brains and wanting to use those brains?

Recent research indicates that more than company profits fuel the stock market.

In a new study [John Coates] reports that traders who start the workday with high testosterone levels make more money on that day than their low-testosterone colleagues do. A hot day on the market sends their levels of the natural steroid up even more, Coates says; under the influence of their own hormones, they start to take bigger risks in hopes of bigger rewards.

Classical economic theory assumes that people make financial decisions in a rational way. But Coates’s finding is part of a growing body of work explaining why, in reality, they often don’t: they’re at the mercy of their biology. This school of thought helps illustrate how economic trends can get out of control, ballooning until they burst. It also suggests one reason why central banking is so tricky: policymakers don’t often take hormones into account. “[Former Federal Reserve chairman] Alan Greenspan spent his whole career trying to control economic bubbles,” says Coates. “I don’t think he realized he was up against steroids.”

…Anecdotally, Coates says that during his Wall Street days he thought that “women traders didn’t seem to be as affected” by irrational exuberance. A 2001 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics backs up that observation. “In areas such as finance,” it found, “men are more overconfident than women.” As a result, male stock traders tend to do more buying and selling than female traders do. Each trade costs money, and over the long term that money adds up. In the final calculus, according to the 2001 paper, it’s men, not women, who underperform. (link)

This study highlights one of the overlooked aspects in the gender debate: men and women DO respond to things differently and acknowledging these differences does not make one a gender basher. I know there are individuals who are resistant to this part of the gender equality debate because they feel it undermines their position.

The idea that recognizing the validity of an opponent’s position is a bad thing has hindered so many issues. Employees vs. companies, Israelis vs. Palestinians, citizens vs. governments, rich vs. poor. When we’re in a fight, why are we so unwilling to see the other’s side? Doing so doesn’t require that we agree 100% with our opponent. If anything, knowing and acknowledging the other side’s position puts one in a position of strength. Isn’t knowledge power? When did we decide that this wasn’t the case?

If, as Elie Wiesel says, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference,” I wonder why some people inspire equal parts adoration and loathing. The current presidential race, for example, highlights the almost 20-year love/hate affair the American public has with the Clintons. Individuals seem to either love Hillary or despise everything she represents.

Ayn Rand

Hillary is hardly the first person to inspire such strong feelings. History is littered with individuals who generate powerful emotions, both positive and negative. Without realizing it, I stumbled onto one of the more divisive figures when I was 11. An aunt, only six years older than I, was a fan of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Wanting to follow in her footsteps, I located a forgotten copy of Rand’s Anthem in my middle school library. At my age, the philosophy portion went right over my head, but it didn’t stop me from moving on to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

I know there are critics who have no liking for Rand’s writing, and I’ll admit to skipping over some of the individual soliloquies. However, on the whole, I enjoyed the stories for themselves, philosophy aside. I loved The Fountainhead because the main character, Howard Ruark, was an architect, a career I planned to pursue until the realities of calculus and physics intruded. In Atlas Shrugged, I found myself wishing I was the strong female lead, Dagny Taggert. I quietly enjoyed rereading these books throughout high school, even if I didn’t totally understand them. My classmates had no idea what I was reading, and the only comment the books seemed to generate was related to their size. Then, I got to college.

Why Hate?

In my philosophy 101 course, I asked about Rand’s role in modern philosophy. My professor made no effort to conceal his loathing of Rand and also made it clear he thought less of me for asking the question. His reaction made me curious and eventually led to a research paper I did on Rand’s life in a writing course. While I don’t subscribe to or agree with all aspects of Rand’s philosophy, I’m still baffled by the anger often directed at Rand, which takes me back to Mr. Wiesel.

For instance, the loudest critics still generate attention for the individuals or causes they dislike the most. What would our world be like if we showed indifference to the people and the things we didn’t love? How would it change the marketing appeals made to consumers? What about parents and teenagers? How much of the behavior is driven by the idea that the kids know the parents hate it? Indifference carries a power of its own, one that we often overlook in our search for solutions.

Flexible Indifference

Indifference leaves us with the time and energy to put into the things that actually counter the people and the causes we don’t agree with. Subscribing to indifference also leaves you room to change your mind, to refine your opinion. While love can be equally blinding, hate carries its own peculiar baggage. From my experience, it’s incredibly difficult to back away from hating something, less so to fall out of love. If the world only appears black and white, love and hate make sense, but the shades of gray that invade my daily life have made it clear that I need the option of indifference.

(Image by NickStarr. Some rights reserved.)

This morning, I’m sitting in the Denver airport, waiting for my flight to Austin and SXSW. Sitting here, I’m reminded of how relatively easy we find it to come and go. I’m also reminded that there’s a potential price for all the coming and going. For example, I’m not a morning person, both mentally and physically. Events that require me awake and going before 7 or 8 in the morning, like catching a plane for SXSW, leave me drained and sometimes make me ill. For these same reasons I prefer to to work or to exercise in the afternoon or evening versus first thing in the morning. If you’re wondering where I’m going with this train of thought, hold on for just a second longer.

To be a part of the coming and going, we make compromises and choose options that we might not otherwise select. Perhaps the commonality of these compromises has made us immune to wondering if we really need to make them. In my case, I know that flying early in the morning has physical repercussions for me, but in my desire to get to Austin as early as possible, I made a compromise. There are later flights at times that would better fit my body clock, but I chose misery for several hours to get in several hours earlier. I’m still debating if it’s worth it.

In a recent edition of The Atlantic, I saw an article about the issues associated with multi-tasking. Multi-tasking requires several compromises that, again, we often give little thought to. On the one hand, we’re told we can do it all, particularly with the help of technology, and on the other, we don’t realize we’re about to be hit by the truck until it happens:

We all remember the promises. The slogans. They were all about freedom, liberation. Supposedly we were in handcuffs and wanted out of them. The key that dangled in front of us was a microchip.

“Where do you want to go today?” asked Microsoft in a mid-1990s ad campaign. The suggestion was that there were endless destinations—some geographic, some social, some intellectual—that you could reach in milliseconds by loading the right devices with the right software. It was further insinuated that where you went was purely up to you, not your spouse, your boss, your kids, or your government. Autonomy through automation.

This was the embryonic fallacy that grew up into the monster of multitasking.

Human freedom, as classically defined (to think and act and choose with minimal interference by outside powers), was not a product that firms like Microsoft could offer, but they recast it as something they could provide. A product for which they could raise the demand by refining its features, upping its speed, restyling its appearance, and linking it up with all the other products that promised freedom, too, but had replaced it with three inferior substitutes that they could market in its name:

Efficiency, convenience, and mobility.

For proof that these bundled minor virtues don’t amount to freedom but are, instead, a formula for a period of mounting frenzy climaxing with a lapse into fatigue, consider that “Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”? Did anyone boldly ask, “What business is it of yours?” Was anyone brave enough to say, “Frankly, I want to go back to bed”?

What compromises do you make to keep going? Even more intriguing have you found a place where you’re content to be, regardless of the people telling you that you should always be going?

Comments?

I’m in the middle of reading Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an absolutely fascinating book that has me thinking a lot about luck. One of the main premises addressed how we try to attribute skill or intelligence to events that are due more to chance. In actuality, we often have very little to do with our supposed success. Sometimes, events just happen outside of our control, both good and bad.

In spite of this reality, it doesn’t keep us from trying to arrange circumstances to our advantage. How much time do you spend trying to control the world around you versus enjoying the experience? In some respects, I think we give too much power to this idea that we have control. As Taleb does an excellent job of pointing out, not only in Fooled but in his more recent The Black Swan, all it takes is one event to shift the balance or change the outcome.

I think that’s why we’re inclined to laugh, even if only on the inside, when individuals purport to control events. For example, the guy who things he can control a viral event makes me shake my head. I think a successful viral is all about this idea of chance and the random event that triggers the spread of an idea. Otherwise, how is it any different from a traditional campaign?

Now it’s confession time…I’m a bit of a control freak. My inner self would love to believe that it can manage and maneuver in such a way to successfully predict every outcome. Reality has proven otherwise, and I’m coming to terms with my failure to control life. It’s a work in progress.

I think that’s why I enjoyed Taleb’s description of humankind:

“…there is the Tragic Vision of humankind that believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act…the ideas of this book fall squarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws…Perhaps ridding ourselves of our humanity is not in the works; we need wily tricks, not some grandiose moralizing help.”

Anyone willing to share their wily tricks?

Comments?

Sigh. I love new technology, but… Today I tried to do another Utterz, and while attempting to avoid a collision with an individual pulling out in front of me, I hung up. However, my Utterz was incomplete, and I didn’t hit the (3) button, so I figured my Utterz was either lost or hanging out until I could call back. Wrong.

My Utterz posted, and my incomplete call doesn’t communicate what I’d hoped. So new users beware—even if you hang up without pushing (3), your Utterz is captured for posterity. For the record, I deleted both the post and the Utterz, however, if you subscribe to my feed, I didn’t catch it quite fast enough, so my apologies for wasting 38 seconds of your time.

As a side note to Sim, the guy behind Utterz, perhaps hanging up shouldn’t constitute and automatic post.

Comments?