Should We Consider Preparation Time When Evaluating Someone’s Performance?

Posted inPhilosophy17 Comments on Should We Consider Preparation Time When Evaluating Someone’s Performance?

Who’s the better competitor — the person who won the championship after spending hours each day practicing or the person who won the championship with very little practice leading up to it? Or are their achievements equal?

How about completion time? Should a student who spends only 20 minutes on a test and gets an A+ be thought of more highly than the student who spends 60 minutes on the same test and gets an A+? Students with learning disabilities sometimes get significantly more time on a test than others, and yet if they get the same final score on a test we treat the outcomes identically.

Would you think more of this blog post if I told you I spent only a minute writing it, versus two hours? Unlike other aspects of performance — such as the NBA, where exceptions notwithstanding players spend around equal amounts of time preparing for games — the blogosphere has a great deal of variance on this front. Some bloggers spend hours on posts; others not much at all. This is one reason why I think it’s difficult to infer too much about someone’s intelligence from a blog. You just don’t know how much time they’re spending. Then again, maybe this doesn’t matter.

Bottom Line: Almost two years ago I advocated for “certainty scales” to be put next to answers spaces on school tests, forcing students to indicate their level of certainty about their answer. I think a similar type of additional label, perhaps around input time required to obtain the output, would give a more holistic perspective on a person’s performance, and not just in school settings.

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Pixar on Creativity (Find Good People, Ideas Will Come)

Posted inBusiness2 Comments on Pixar on Creativity (Find Good People, Ideas Will Come)

I just got off a videoconference with some executives in New Zealand and among other things we discussed creativity. I argued that too many people buy into the “analytical vs. creative” dichotomy of cognitive strengths. When I ask rooms of people, “Raise your hand if you consider yourself creative,” usually about 60% raise their hand. I’m always astonished at how few people self-identify as “creative.” I think it’s because of the stereotype that a creative person must be the ripped-jean starving artist type. If you’re a human being, I think you’re well within your right to call yourself creative, as humans are the most creative creatures on this earth. In any event, if you don’t consider yourself a creative person, you’re not likely to realize creative bursts.

It’s a fascinating topic. Ed Catmull, President of Pixar, has a great essay up today on how Pixar — one of the most successful movie studios in the business — fosters creativity. Pertinent especially for larger organizations. He starts with this:

A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people—it was finding good ideas. Since then, when giving talks, I’ve asked audiences whether they agree with him. Almost always there’s a 50/50 split, which has astounded me because I couldn’t disagree more with the studio executive. His belief is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product. And it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to manage the large risks inherent in producing breakthroughs.

Right on. Anyone who says finding good ideas is harder than finding good people is delusional. Everyone I talk to, in any size organization, for profit or non, all say that finding top flight talent is one of if not the hardest challenge they face. On the other hand, ideas are everywhere.

I also couldn’t agree more on what he calls “the exaggerated importance of the initial idea.” Here’s my original and follow-up posts on the myth of the eureka moment.

Other nuggets. Here’s how they’ve designed their buildings:

Most buildings are designed for some functional purpose, but ours is structured to maximize inadvertent encounters. At its center is a large atrium, which contains the cafeteria, meeting rooms, bathrooms, and mailboxes. As a result, everyone has strong reasons to go there repeatedly during the course of the workday. It’s hard to describe just how valuable the resulting chance encounters are.

On the challenge of being a successful company:

Systematically fighting complacency and uncovering problems when your company is successful have got to be two of the toughest management challenges there are. Clear values, constant communication, routine postmortems, and the regular injection of outsiders who will challenge the status quo aren’t enough. Strong leadership is also essential—to make sure people don’t pay lip service to the values, tune out the communications, game the processes, and automatically discount newcomers’ observations and suggestions.

(thanks to Ramit’s delicious tag of this piece)

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The Best Paragraph I Read Today

Posted inWeb/Tech7 Comments on The Best Paragraph I Read Today

From Clay Shirky, one of the more eloquent commentators on the increasingly participatory nature of the internet:

Digital and networked production vastly increase three kinds of freedom: freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly. This perforce increases the freedom of anyone to say anything at any time. This freedom has led to an explosion in novel content, much of it mediocre, but freedom is like that. Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline. Experts the world over have been shocked to discover that they were consulted not as a direct result of their expertise, but often as a secondary effect — the apparatus of credentialing made finding experts easier than finding amateurs, even when the amateurs knew the same things as the experts.

Also try his speech on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus — this is where he compared time spent watching TV with time spent building wikipedia.

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Try More Stuff Than the Other Guy

Posted inRandom3 Comments on Try More Stuff Than the Other Guy

Here’s Tom Peters on one of my favorite topics (randomness) from the new book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives:

"If I had said ‘yes’ to all the projects I turned down and ‘no’ to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same."—David Picker, movie studio exec

"Mathematical analysis of firings in all major sports has shown that those firings had, on average, no effect on team performance."

And his sum-up:

NB2: If Randomness Rules then your only defense is the so-called "law of large numbers"—that is, success follows from tryin’ enough stuff so that the odds of doin’ something right tilt your way; in my speeches I declare that the only thing I’ve truly learned "for sure" in the last 40 years is "Try more stuff than the other guy"—there is no poetic license here, I mean it.

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Visualizing the Book Review Before Writing Your Book

Posted inWriting2 Comments on Visualizing the Book Review Before Writing Your Book

Kind of a neat approach — visualize the book review you want to read before writing your book:

Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book.

Derek Scruggs adds:

An acquaintance of mine, a direct marketing guru, once told me that he writes the sales letter before he ever creates the product. Only after he’s explained exactly what you’ll get and why you need it does he set about creating the product. (And sometimes, if the sales letter isn’t compelling enough, he just abandons the product altogether, saving him a lot of time and effort.)

The GTD blog also has the helpful reminder that if you don’t know what "done" looks like before starting a task, you won’t know when you are done.

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