Monthly Archives: March 2009

Predicative Index Behavioral Assessment

Posted inLife16 Comments on Predicative Index Behavioral Assessment

There are many different personality and behavior assessment tools. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and DISC assessment are two of the most popular. Managers use them to understand their employees better. Individuals use them to understand themselves better. The idea is you learn about personality traits and tendencies so that you can be smarter about matching those tendencies with situations which play to your strengths. In other words, these assessments tend to treat revealed tendencies as innate and therefore permanent.

One reason I've held off taking such a test is that I am intuitively skeptical of how effective any survey or test can be at accurately capturing the nuances of a person. Also, I've seen these tests be overinterrepted by managers. For example, manager adminsters a test to subordinate, the test suggests subordinate avoids exerting authority and is introverted, manager concludes he's not fit to be a leader, and the subordiate defers to the test and shelves any leadership aspiration. These broader concerns aside, I do think that if one treats personality test results with appropriate distance, they can be a useful check on intuitions and a good starting point for a conversation.

Yesterday I took the Predicative Index test. Frederic Lucas-Conwell studied all the various tests for his PhD and now administers and consults around the Predictive Index, which he believes is the best. He was kind enough to do my test for free. It is remarkably short — it only takes about 10 minutes to complete, as you check off adjectives that describe how you believe others expect you to act and then adjectives that you think really describe who you are. After entering my results into a computer, Frederic displayed the following three charts. They're meaningless unless you know how to interpret this particular test.

Piscreenshot  

Below the fold is the automated written report that accompanies my results (ie, "Ben" is plugged in a blank space for a pre-written report for my type). I think it underplays my introverted streak and underplays my interest in details and precision. Otherwise it emphasizes pretty typical entrepreneur traits. Note it focuses solely on professional and management issues, no "personal" situations or attitudes.

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Love Is Something You Do

Posted inRelationships12 Comments on Love Is Something You Do

Paul Spinrad, in a guest post at BoingBoing, asked himself the question, "Did I want to occupy myself playing a big version of Solitaire to prove I could win, or did I want to open up and love?" What follows is his brief, wise reflection on love and relationships:

During our courtship, my wife Wendy challenged me again and again, with firmness and understanding, to engage with her honestly and completely, no matter what it meant. She led me to the promised land where we could be ourselves fully while delighting in and being committed to each other– all those things that people wisely recite as their wedding vows. If you want more detail, buy me a beer.

An essential part of this happy destiny is that Wendy is not what I had hoped for, i.e. not simply a hot girl version of the man I wanted to be. I've read memoirs by successful men where the chapter on love runs: "I met the girl who was obviously perfect for me, and then I applied all my power and craft to win her over. It was tough going, and she tested me, but I succeeded." That's it. You learn nothing about her, and the guy seems to learn nothing about himself. Yawn! For some men, maybe the pride of that conquest is enough to keep a fire burning, but given what Wendy and I have now, it sounds like dullsville. When I contrast it to the dynamic collaboration that I have with Wendy, who shares my values but is otherwise so fascinatingly different, I just smile at how much we have to look forward to.

I did want to be famous once– what if I had succeeded and then used that power to win someone to whom this mattered? I would deny that she was just a trophy based on how smart and accomplished people considered her to be, conveniently avoiding the underlying question of her real role in my inner life: a prop for my self-image. I like to think that I'm deep enough that we may have eventually found true intimacy anyway, but I can't be sure. Considering the effort it took Wendy to bring me out, I wonder whether I would have just lived my entire life in fabulous black-and-white, believing that emotional availability meant simply choosing someone rather than taking the ongoing risk of sharing emotional truth. But mastering the art of surfing the truth together is exhilarating, a connection out to the universe that makes me feel alive. Thank you, Wendy, my love, for saving me from a caricature of life!

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Scalable vs. Non-Scalable Careers

Posted inCareers30 Comments on Scalable vs. Non-Scalable Careers

Professions where you are paid by the hour are not scalable. A prostitute who charges $100 an hour only has 24 hours in a day. At some point, she will hit a ceiling on her earnings. Similarly, dentists, lawyers, contractors, bakers, and consultants can see only so many clients at a time.

By contrast, scalable professions allow you to make more money without an equivalent increase in labor / time. An author writes a book one time and his effort is the (basically) the same whether he sells 500 or 500,000 copies. A Hollywood actress need not show up at every screening of her movie to make money off it.

Career experts generally favor scalable professions.

Nassim Taleb, in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, offers the opposite advice: pick a profession that is not scalable.

A scalable profession is good only if you are successful; they are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities, and are far more random with huge disparities between efforts and rewards — a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving others out entirely at no fault of their own.

One category of profession is driven by the mediocre, the average, and the middle-of-the-road. In it, the mediocre is collectively consequential. The other has either giants or dwarves — more precisely, a very small number of giants and a huge number of dwarves.

In other words, the scalable professions tend to be winner-take-all-markets. J.K. Rowling makes a ton of money, but most authors make a pittance, whereas almost all dentists can etch out a good living that’s similar to most other dentists.

Put yet another way, scalable careers produce extreme outcomes (fat tails both left and right), whereas non-scalable professions tend to have a higher expected value with lower variance.

Taleb advises non-scalable careers because he attributes so much of one’s success in scalable careers to randomness and luck, much more so than your typical career advisor who will talk endlessly about how hard work and persistence can make any dream come true.

So what’s your risk tolerance? Are you looking for massive professional and financial success or would you be happy with a surer small slice of the total pie? Do you see huge success as significantly dependent on circumstances out of your control?

This is related to my old post on parenting styles. If you want to guarantee your kid is not a fuck up and leads a productive and “successful” life, be totally overbearing and induce lots of stress early on. If you want to give your kid a chance to end up in the history books, give him a long leash and excessive freedom to explore, but be aware that with freedom comes risk — he could more easily get into drugs and alcohol, for example.

Bottom Line: If you swing for the fences, you’ll either hit a home run or strike out. If you swing for a single or double, you’ll probably get there, but no farther.

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Observations on Restaurants, Tips, and Bread Baskets

Posted inBusiness12 Comments on Observations on Restaurants, Tips, and Bread Baskets

21 million Americans eat at a full service restaurant every day, so I suspect some of these observations on the dining out experience will resonate:

# After I gave my order to my waiter, he said, "Good choice, you're going to love it." Ill-advised, right? Satisfaction with an experience depends significantly on our expectations going into it, and by telling me I'm going to love the food before I've tried it, I have very high expectations. However, with food I believe there's more of a self-fulfilling prophecy dynamic, and our enjoyment of food isn't even mostly dependent on the quality of the food itself. For this reason I think the waiter's statement works.

# Restaurant etiquette dictates that you are not supposed to use your hands to break off a piece of bread and put the other half back in the basket. Also, no one wants to be seen as selfish by taking the last piece of bread or the last appetizer. My advice: take the initiative. Break the bread in half (even with your hands) and offer it to the other person. Offer the last bit of appetizer to your partner, and if he declines, eat it. Many a good piece of bread and appetizer have been left in the center of the table due to excessive deference or fear of perceived selfishness. (For better or worse I'm not blessed with such selflessness — I crush bread baskets, especially if there's olive oil nearby.)Breadbasket

# Why do waiters ask if you want to see the desert menu? This requires two "Yes" affirmations from the patron to place an order. Just give the desert menu and make the person say "No" to desert after seeing the description of chocolate cake.

# I have laughter control issues when eating at a high end restaurant where the waiter offers a range of meaningless adjectives to describe the food. The cheese is subtly fruity. The fish is prepared with a punchy tang to give it just a bit of Alaskan kick.

# The next time you eat at a restaurant with a friend who's been there before and chose the place, ask him, "What do you recommend?" I guarantee you the response will be, "Oh, everything's good here." Really? Have you tried everything on the menu?!

# If I were a restaurant manager I would spend 30 minutes with each of my waiters explaining the research around how to maximize tips from patrons. For example, leaving a mint with the bill or drawing a smiley face on the bill have been shown to increase tip. Research also suggests that the tip amount is only marginally connected with the actual quality of wait service. Bottom line is that many waiters miss out on easy psychological hacks that would increase their tips.

# Does disclosing your newness to a job help or hurt you? "It's my first day." Is this is a smart thing to say? Declared preemptively, no. If the waiter happens to mess up the order, then it might be a good explanatory device to win sympathy. But before anything happens, it's irrelevant and might even offend (I've been assigned the new waiter — I must not look like a high roller). Elsewhere in the world of sales, regardless of whether an error is committed, be wary of disclosing your newness. I was recently helping a salesperson on his pitch and in response to a question for which he didn't know the answer he said, "Sorry, it's my first week, I'll get back to you." Again — the prospect feels like he's been assigned the junior rep.

Since we're on the topic, here are Tyler Cowen's tips for ordering in a restaurant:

  • At fancy and expensive restaurants, order the item that sounds least appetizing and the dish you're least likely to want to order. An item won't be on the menu unless there is a good reason for its presence. If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good. Most popular-sounding items can be just slightly below the menu's average quality. Beware roast chicken. Too many people like roast chicken, so it will be on the menu, but it doesn't hit the highest peaks of taste. The flip side: when cooking at home, be wary of trying something new.
  • When at a restaurant, ask a waiter, "What is best?" Don't ask, "What should I get?"
  • Tips for ethnic restaurants: appetizers are often better than main courses; avoid desserts at ethnic restaurants in America.
  • Eat unhealthy food outside the home. Restaurants know how to make good unhealthy food. At home, eat healthy. And don't take recipes too seriously.
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