Ball Hogs and Blowhards

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Anyone who knows anything about me will know why I'm writing about a Freakonomics blog post that uses basketball to help explain why meetings are long – I love hoops and hate long meetings. From the post:

On the surface, ball hogs and endless meetings might seem unrelated.  Research, though, indicates that players chucking shots at a basket and people prolonging a meeting with endless comments may actually be a function of something similar.  Specifically, how do we know someone is “competent”?..

A couple of years ago Cameron Anderson and Gavin J. Kilduff published a studyexamining how people in meetings evaluate each other.  Obviously we would like people in meetings to think we are competent.  And one might think, the best way to get people to think you are competent is to just be competent.  But that is not what Anderson and Kilduff found.  In a study of how people in a meeting – a meeting designed to answer math questions — were evaluated by their peers, these authors f0und (as Time reported) that actual competence wasn’t driving evaluations:

Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they’d even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers — period. 

“Dominant individuals behaved in ways that made them appear competent,” the researchers write, “above and beyond their actual competence.” Troublingly, group members seemed only too willing to follow these underqualified bosses. An overwhelming 94% of the time, the teams used the first answer anyone shouted out — often giving only perfunctory consideration to others that were offered.

This makes so much sense to me. I can't tell you how many times in my life I've been on a team with superior talent, including the guy who's obviously the best player in the gym, only to lose handily.  It happens because too many guys view themselves as the best shooters in the gym, so they make bad decisions about when to shoot because in their mind them shooting a bad shot is better than a less gifted player taking a good shot. Ask any basketball coach in the world and he'll tell you the good shot from an average player is better than a bad shot from a great player.

As far as meetings go, who among us hasn't been stuck in a meeting with a blow hard who thinks he knows everything and somehow convinces others in the room that he does? Anyone who wonders what's wrong with any company need only find the conference room and hang out for a while. It won't take long to identify the problem.

Ball hogs and blowhards – hate 'em both.

Two Ears, One Mouth

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Kim Williams, a friend I met through the local social networking scene, has written a very thought provoking piece at his blog Wishful Preaching:

One day a religion professor – a educated, kind and openly Christian man – suggested I take the risk and talk with one of the better known atheists on campus. He suggested I NOT talk with him with the intent of changing his mind, but rather seek to listen and understand why and what he believed. I forced myself to listen, to ask questions and allow myself to hear another point of view.  At one point he said, "I don't believe in God." Seeking to be open, I asked him, "Tell me about this God you don't believe in." He talked for an hour or more . When he was done I could honestly say to him, "It is interesting. I don't believe in that god either." When spent many hours together over the following years talking about our personal beliefs and similar hopes and fears. He never came to believe as I did (perhaps he did admit a few times he had grown to be more agnostic than atheist),  and I never lost my faith (although I did learn some difficulties with my beliefs). We would both agree, however that we were better because of the friendship.

Perhaps there is something to fear in the failure to listen to others of different beliefs and traditions – that's scary!

Reading this I had multiple thoughts, the most prominent being a question I first asked in my late teens/early adulthood – how is it that the people I find most personify the positive qualities associated with religion are often atheist or agnostic? If being a "believer" is a prerequisite for being a good person then my eyes and ears were lying to me, because I could see for myself that it wasn't true. Heck, some of the nastiest people I've ever met have never missed a day of church so obviously the reverse could be true as well. Over time my belief system evolved to incorporate this bullet point – The fact that people without faith in a higher being could be among the great people in the world is in itself proof of some kind of higher being. 

I know that last sentence sounds like a pretty lame piece of philosophy that your average 14 year old would come up with, so maybe it would be better to explain it this way. I think it's a mistake to say that an atheist or agnostic is not a believer. They simply don't believe in God or a higher being the way I do; I think they believe in humanity, in the basic goodness of people, in the idea that mankind is a net-positive for the world. If you think about it their faith, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary (war, capable people parking in handicapped spaces, reality TV), is as great or greater than the faith of those of us who believe in a higher being. In the end their faith in humanity affirms my faith in a higher being.

The other thought I had while reading Kim's post related to the old saying "you have two ears and one mouth for a reason, and you should use them accordingly" and with the propensity of some folks to constantly proselytize. What I truly loved about Kim's post was that he engaged in the conversation with his friend without the intent to "convert" him or to convince him of anything. Instead Kim engaged him to listen and to learn and in the end I think they both gained immeasurably from it. By using his ears Kim did more to exhibit his faith than he could have done with a million hours of proselytizing, and I think there are quite a few folks out there who could learn from his example. 

What Reality TV Hath Wrought

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Every decade or so – maybe more often, but I'm too tired to research it – a movie comes out that seems to capture the zeitgeist in America. Good examples would be 1987's Wall Street or 1993's Falling Down and   after seeing the trailer for Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America (definitely NSFW with a few f-bombs and mega violence) I'd say it captures our current reality-tv-fueled society quite well.

Come to think of it MIchael Douglas seems to be in a lot of zeitgeisty movies.

An Alternative View for Malls

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We've all seen them – dying malls that blight suburban landscapes. According to this article in the New York Times the high vacancy rates at the country's malls have led planners to envision some creative uses for America's retail monoliths:

So, as though they were upholstering polyester chairs from the 1960s with Martha Stewart fabric, urban planners and community activists are trying to spruce up and rethink the uses of many of the artifacts.

Schools, medical clinics, call centers, government offices and even churches are now standard tenants in malls. By hanging a curtain to hide the food court, the Galleria in Cleveland, which opened in 1987 with about 70 retailers and restaurants, rents space for weddings and other events. Other malls have added aquariums, casinos and car showrooms.

Designers in Buffalo have proposed stripping down a mall to its foundation and reinventing it as housing, while an aspiring architect in Detroit has proposed turning a mall’s parking lot there into a community farm. Columbus, Ohio, arguing that it was too expensive to maintain an empty mall on prime real estate, dismantled its City Center mall and replaced it with a park.

Even at many malls that continue to thrive, developers are redesigning them as town squares — adding elements like dog parks and putting greens, creating street grids that go through the malls, and restoring natural elements like creeks that were originally paved over.

Capitalism and Its Discontents

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This is a very interesting interview with economist Richard Wolff (h/t to Ed Cone for the link).  A couple of excerpts provided below, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Barsamian: There’s a certain market fundamentalism in the U.S. that equates capitalism with freedom.

Wolff: Yes, employers are free, in this system, to stop raising workers’ wages. But their exercise of that freedom has deprived the mass of Americans of a rising standard of living to accompany their rising productivity. Employers have kept all the benefits of the productivity increase in the form of profits. So one sector of our free economy has deprived another sector of its due. It’s the paradox of a democratic society: the freedoms of one group limit the freedoms of another. To face this fact requires a more critical notion of freedom and democracy than the happy, cheerleader mentality we have today.

How do you talk about freedom to the 20 to 30 million Americans who currently have no job? Are they free? They’ve been denied a living through no fault of their own. When 20 million Americans suddenly can’t find jobs, that isn’t a problem of individuals being lazy. That’s the problem of an economic system that isn’t delivering the goods…

Barsamian: You mentioned earlier that, although wages became stagnant in the 1970s, American workers continued to become more productive. So someone has benefited from the past thirty years.

Wolff: Yes, it’s been the best thirty years that employers in this country have ever had. More product was being produced, but employers didn’t have to pay workers more. This was impossible before the 1970s, because the labor shortage meant employers had to keep paying more, which is why we had that wonderful growth period from 1820 to 1970.

So after the 1970s profits went through the roof. What I find funny — because I don’t want to cry — is the story the business community told about these profits. They probably knew they were getting the benefit of stagnant wages and rising productivity, but they developed a kind of folklore that said the reason profits were so big in the 1980s and 1990s was that executives were geniuses. We made folk heroes of Lee Iacocca at Chrysler and Jack Welch at General Electric. They became icons, as if some mystical ability of theirs accounted for the profits.

Every economist who looks at the numbers knows executives didn’t suddenly become geniuses — as if they’d been dumb before. Shifts in the economy enabled them to stop raising workers’ wages yet keep getting more out of them. No mystery there. Of course, there was a reason for this fairy tale about ceos: if the executives could convince everyone that they were responsible for the profit increase, then they could demand higher salaries. 

 

Bird Bangers – The Best Work Related Email I’ve Received in Ages

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Today I received this email from the management company responsible for our office park. It truly made my day:

Dear Customers:

It’s that time of year when the geese are choosing where they want to take up residence to start their families.  To help motivate them to choose another property we will be using pyrotechnics and bird bangers which makes shot gun noises and blasts.  These will be fired off in about 20 minutes.  We also notify the police department because of the sound similar to a gun report.

We will also be setting out dog silhouettes around the property on a post and spring and they will be moved frequently.  These have shown to be successful in deterring the geese to land.

Saving the ACC from Itself

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Dan Collins shares a great plan to help the ACC restore some of its historic luster:

But there’s still a way to retain the rivalries that have made the league what it is—or at least what it was before expansion. I wish I could say the idea was mine, but really I stole it from my buddy Al Featherston, the long-time ACC writer and historian. Like is said in songwriter circles: amateurs borrow, but professionals steal. Featherston’s proposal is to divide the conference into seven-team divisions, as is done for football. That would allow at least most of the rivalries to remain intact.

Each team would play teams in its division twice, of course, for a total of 12 games. And each would play the teams in the other divisions once, for seven more games. That’s 19 games, if my public school education hasn’t failed me.

The one flaw in the system could become its biggest selling point. The seven games against the other division would leave some teams with 10 home conference games and others with only nine. That is, unless one of the games against the other division was played at a neutral site.

So the way to make it all work for everybody—the fans, the media, the league and of course the television networks—would be to set aside a long weekend between mid-December and Christmas when all 14 ACC teams would congregate at a neutral site. One year it could be Greensboro, the next Atlanta, the next Charlotte, and the next Madison Square Garden. And over those three days the odd game against the other division could be played. It could be marketed and sold as an Early Bird Special of what fans can expect to see over the next 2 1/2 months and it would build up tremendous energy and enthusiasm at a time of the year any league—even the ACC—could use all it could get.

What Did You Do With Your College Acceptance Letter?

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I have no idea what I did with my college acceptance letter, but knowing me I probably lost it within ten minutes of receipt. One thing's for certain, I didn't do anything near as cool as what this young lady from Georgia did with her acceptance letter from MIT (found via BoingBoing):

Chris sez, "My name is Chris Peterson. I run web communications for MIT Admissions and have been a loyal BB reader for years. For the last several years we have been sending our admitted students their acceptance letters in cardboard tubes. First because we sent a poster, but now it's its own thing. 2012 is the anniversary of an old MIT balloon hack, so we put a letter in all of the Early Action admit tubes telling them we wanted them to hack the tubes somehow, and set up http://hackthetubes.mitadmissions.org to collect responses. Lots of them are great, but this one, from Erin King (MIT '16) in Georgia, is the best."

Historical Marker Database

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I use Google Reader to follow the Google alerts I've set up for various topics and a few of those topics are things like "Lewisville + North Carolina", "Foryth County + North Carolina", "Winston-Salem + North Carolina", etc. Over the weekend I noticed a lot of headlines like West Salem Historic District Marker showing up and decided I needed to take a look. That's when I found what promises to be a huge timesuck, the Historical Markers Database, an online database of historical markers from around the country that provides a separate page for each marker that contains the GPS location, inscription, a list of other nearby markers and a map. Way cool.

The Giants and the BCS

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Last night I joked that the Giants winning the Super Bowl was proof that the NFL needs its own BCS system. I mean is it really a good thing that a team that barely had a winning record in the regular season was able to win a few games in a row and become Super Bowl champs?  Actually, as much as it pains me to say this since I truly can't stand the Giants, it's a great thing and here's why:

  • The Giants spent much of the season weakened by injuries to key players.  They got a lot of those players back towards the end of the season and I don't think it's a coincidence that's when they started to roll. If they'd been a college team subject to the BCS system they'd have been relegated to one of the bowls sponsored by a company no one outside of Tennessee has ever heard of and would have had zero chance of playing their way to a championship.
  • If the Giants had been subjected to an American Idol type system for selecting finalists the way colleges are there's no way they'd have been be selected.  Sure there are a ton of New York gomers who'd vote for the Giants even if they went 0-16 (unlike Eagles fans, who seem to enjoy hating their team more than supporting it, the fans in New York are completely incapable of being objective about the Giants) the rest of the country would see what I see – a team that wins "ugly" and has you convinced that if they weren't so "lucky" they'd be fortunate to beat a Pop Warner team. If we'd had to vote for a championship game at the end of the season we'd have probably had a Patriots-Packers game, which might have been a great game but wouldn't necessarily reflect which were the two best teams at the end of the season. 

So while it's easy for someone like me who truly despises the Giants, who can't stomach watching them win ugly time after time and who can't stand the fact that they're too stuck up to be named the New Jersey Giants as they should be (total aside – I believe my beloved Redskins should be the Subarban Maryland Redskins until they do the right thing and move back to the confines of DC) to joke that they're the best argument for a BCS system, the reality is that they're the best evidence I can think of that the BCS system needs to be blown up and major college football needs a playoff system.