To think of...
Subscribe to this page via RSSPresupposition # 15 – Hiring overqualified workers?
A hyponym (sub part) of the hypernym (umbrella term) presupposition is our prejudices. Apparently the prevailing presupposition in companies – irrespective of continent – is; don’t hire an overqualified employee since the person eventually will get bored and quit. At first glance the presupposition is true according to an article in Harvard Business Review: ‘The Myth of the Overqualified Worker’, however as the name of the article states it’s a myth. The myth has unfortunately led numbers of experienced, highly skilled people into the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Someone has set the myth and some have kept it but now it’s time to change the myth and set a new frame. The article clearly shows that it’s profitable to employ overqualified workers. As always it boils down to how the workers are managed and if they experience that they are empowered or not.
So, what kind of myths or prejudices do you have that are hinders for progress? Can you set new ones?
Leave a comment!How to create a compelling presentation.
Each and every day – managers, sales persons and specialists of any kind hold presentations where the purpose is to convey messages which hopefully will lead to some sort of change. Most of the presenters are prepared in that sense that they have their speaker aid i.e. Powerpoint or Key Note-presentation. Unfortunately, they have forgotten that the slides are there to help the audience to understand the message. In other words it’s an aid for the audience – not a an aid for the speaker. However in reality, the slides truly become an aid for the speaker since it’s more or less his/her script that’s on the slides. We don’t present better today than we did 25 years ago. Most things in the corporate world have developed over the last years – but not how we present.
There are of course some brilliant exceptions. Benjamin Zander, the speaker, teacher and the former conductor of Boston Philharmonic Orchestra really knows how to convey a message and most importantly how to let his audience understand the message, internalise it and remember. In this TED-talk he doesn’t use any visual aid (Ppt or Key Note) but we guarantee you’ll remember his main points. Just watch and listen and reflect upon: how he sets communicative frames, how he changes presuppositions, how he uses metaphors, how he uses not just our left part of the brain in his communication and how he communicates with other channels than the devastating Powerpoint. Brilliant and intriguing!
Leave a comment!To experience or not experience – that is the question.
We sometimes tend to downgrade our sensory experiences by using a lot of different devices that determine our experiences. We have a lot of gadgets that measure one thing and another such as pulse watches, scales, sleep tracking, temperature, GPS tracking etc. Most of these things are really valuable aid for us in different situations. However, when do we reach the tipping point where these tools, these aids becomes real dangers to us?
Gary Wolf contributing editor at Wired gives in this short TED presentation (5 minutes) his view of how to use the tools for self improvement, for self discovery, for self awareness and for self knowledge. ’If we want to act more effectively in the world we had to get to know ourselves better’ says Gary Wolf at the end of the presentation. We definitely agree with him however the first question that arises is: do we want to act more effectively? If yes why don’t we start by shaping our senses and pay attention to what we experience instead of shutting our senses down and put ourselves in a state of unconsciousness of our senses?
Please watch the video and judge for yourself; do I need more data, do I need more things to stimulate my cortex to be happy or do I need to pay attention to how to be more accurate when I experience with my senses?
Leave a comment!Presuppositions # 14 – Mapping stereotypes
A stereotype is definitely a chunk or a sub part (hyponym) of the umbrella term (hypernym) presupposition – which is a thing tacitly assumed beforehand. There are a lot of other things one can put under this umbrella such as: beliefs, values, attitudes, preconceived ideas, views, notions, premises etc.
A fun way of expressing different views or to put it another way; to cement stereotypes is made by the visual artist and graphic designer Yanko Tsvetkov. He has drawn different maps of e.g. Europe and South America but with perspectives such as: ‘Europe according to USA’, ‘Europe according to the Vatican’ etc. Please watch and smile and think of which stereotypes you have that help you in your daily life and if you have any that prevent progress.
Leave a comment!Do you see what I see?
Most businesses try to move themselves in the value chain to offer something more than just a product. What companies offer their customers is something intangible something with an extra value added. The intangible is sometimes referred to as an enhanced experience.
An experience is something I as a person experience and we tend to be pretty convinced about what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste. However please watch the monkey business illusion – an experiment made by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. They met at Harvard University in 1997 and started to collaborate on research. Mr Simons is at present a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois. Mr Chabris is is now Assistant Professor of Psychology at Union College in Schenectady, New York and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Neurology at Albany Medical College.
So next time you’re absolutely sure of what you’ve seen please remember that when you’re looking for a gorilla you often miss other unexpected events.
Leave a comment!The boom and the bust – Keynes vs Hayek
Our human brain seems to be especially adapted to understand the world through stories. Most of us remember and has learned important things just because we could associate something with a story or simply because we remember the story. Those of us that struggled with the economic theories of Keynes and the Austrian school during long boring lectures at the university, wished that the professors could have been better story tellers. But there’s hope for us; a video made by producer John Papola and economist Russ Roberts, and backed by the Mercatus Center of George Mason University is really describing the differences between Keynes and Hayek in a simple, straight forward and brain friendly way of learning. It’s a rap and within 5 minutes one understands what differ the economic theories, something some professors couldn’t explain during a whole term. To enhance the experience it can be good to read Jeffery A Tucker’s article (editor at http://mises.org/ ), where you also can watch the video.
Wild and good ideas struck each and everyone of us. The combination of good ideas and how to carry them out distinguish if things become a success or if things become something ordinary or commonplace. Judge for yourself if Papola and Roberts have succeeded – however we find this video and the story intriguing.
1 CommentThe role of the Western world in 2050.
Hans Rosling has become well-known for his intriguing presentations where he dismisses presuppositions like pre conceived notions or ideas. His presentation skills is compared to most, just brilliant.
In June 2010 he held a presentation where he in 10 minutes not only describes how to stop global population growth but also predicts the role the Western world will play in the year 2050. He has earlier illustrated this phenomenon by using Lego.
Just watch the TED-video and enjoy the brain friendly way of learning.
Leave a comment!Increased demand for premium products or is it just compelling costs?
In many countries in the western world you’ll find more and more companies going up market and into the “premium segments” of the market. One might wonder if it’s an increased demand from consumers that drives this development or if it’s something else that’s the driving force. For the last decades there have been a lot of different programs that companies have run to improve the operations. Six Sigma, Balanced Score Cards, Lean Production and other sorts of continuous improvement programs. The companies’ operations have in general definitely become better due to these programs. However, over time things happen within lines of businesses and disruptive innovations occur. Do companies then have the skills to act according to these innovations, or are they caught in their focus on improving the existing operations – just like our old friend Narcissus? Sometimes, one might ask oneself if the increased complexity and the lack of having an overview of the operation force us to go up market? Do we really need all these extra features, all these small enhancements on the products or phrased another way do these features really add value?
In some cases one can identify that the increased complexity in the development- and production processes have forced companies to go up market and into the premium segments, and not surprisingly they aren’t prosperous. The compelling and increasing costs and the believe in improving what they already are doing make the company blind and they miss the disruptive innovations just around the corner.
So:
Is there a true increasing demand for premium products or is it just an excuse when costs force us to sell our products at a higher price?
Is there a pattern emerging, that threats the competitiveness of successful companies?
How do we combine the ongoing improvement of our processes with disruptive innovations?
How do we combine the enhancement of our products with the disintegration of these products to create something ingenious?
Do our products take future customer values – different values – into consideration?
Are we as managers and employees rigid or flexible?
One thing is for sure; the cycle upon cycle of change will continue. That’s paradoxically, the only thing that remains in the state of status quo!
Leave a comment!Theory and practice 2
Wal-Mart prefers practice before theory (see below “Theory and practice”) and has recently started to learn from Patagonia’s experiences. Patagonia has been a pioneer in the field of producing sustainable products for the last 25 years. They show that it’s possible for a medium sized company to influence on a large scale. As Jill Dumain, Patagonia’s environmental-strategy director put it when explaining the companies co-operation with their competitors North Face and REI: “We’re not big enough to make this the industry standard on our own…” referring to the use of Bluesign Technologies, a Swiss firm, to grade dyeing and finishing by textile suppliers.
What would we – as a company – like to pass on to future generations?
Leave a comment!Multitasking
Multitasking or the almost simultaneous execution of more than one thing at the same time e.g. watching TV, Facebooking, playing on your cell phone etc. has definitely grown the last decade. Many of today’s teenagers can’t understand how their parents could sit for a whole evening just watching TV. The teenagers claim that they compared to older generations, are more skilled and clever when it comes to handle a lot of things and often feel very productive. There are adults who also feel they’re really productive and live their lives multitasking all day long. Of course there are those who don’t think it is like this at all. David Meyer at the University of Michigan has studied the phenomenon and he definitely claims that we’ll have an attention crisis to be. To learn while you’re not focused i.e. distracted, fundamentally changes the brain systems that are involved in learning. We’ll perform worse according to David Meyer. He also makes the comparison with how our attitude towards smoking was in the 50′s and multitasking today; in those days it was cool to smoke, today it isn’t. Others claim that David Meyer is like all adults who don’t understand the youth of today and claim that judgement day is near. If multitasking is a myth or not, if we won’t get any seminal ideas of people born in the 90′s and in the 00′s we’ll see. However, pay attention to the phenomenon and make your own conclusions.
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