Beauty At Your Finger Tips

Have you ever seen a spray painter at work? In a mere matter of 10-15 minutes you will see a masterpiece being born in front of your own eyes. A spray here, a spray there, smudge, touch, sprinkle, turn, adjust, more spraying... I was captivated and mesmerized  by the whole process when I saw it for the first time in my life. Is it art? Maybe. It is well looked upon art? Doubt so. It is easy to understand, it's right in front of your own set of eyes, but can you do it?

Same with HR. There is the Craft, the Science and the Art of the profession. Just like with anything else. Let's try to visualize the process of a painting creation. You may know the basics of mixing the paints, preparing the canvass, positioning the objects, and the like. You have the Science of the subject matter. Furthermore, you may be good in drawing, creating images, transforming your own ideas into a visual form for others to appreciate. You have the Craft of painting. But does it make you a Raphael or a Picasso? Hardly so - and that is the last element - the Art of the profession.

Obviously, you need all three and all three are there in the society, but they are distributed unevenly. How many HR professionals are out there? If we take the average ratio of 1 HR pro per 40 employees, that is a massive army of HRs out there! How many of them have the Art of the profession? Some. But not all.

Once again, we are coming back to the issue of finding what is it that you are really good at and how do you develop it and capitalize on your strengths. What is easiest/hardest to develop: Science, Craft or Art? How? Everything starts with understanding oneself. Once you have a grasp of who you are, you are much closer to understanding your fellow human beings. You don't need to understand Finance as much, for instance. It will get to to a certain point in your life, but to progress from there a deep insight into the nature of yourself and others is crucial.

I am going to write something about Strengths Finder quite soon. I need to make up my mind about that assessment... will let you know...

Nice Standards: Cities as Organizations

I am a social migrant.

I see things from the outside because I don't really belong anywhere. That's why it is easier for me to pick up inconsistencies, things of interest and be much more critical of how life is set up in different places.

Culture is a weird thing. I have been thinking about it a lot. Culture is like Bin Laden: it is there but nobody has ever seen it.

Nice is a city in France on the Cote d'Azur, and it's an homograph with the English word "nice". I felt particularly creative about writing today. Reflecting back on my holidays a couple of weeks ago, I suddenly realized that cities are just like organizations: they have their own corporate citizens, their rules, regulations, and norms (explicit and implicit). Cities go through the same cycles: decline, revival, blooming, and then decline again. How exciting is that? The French Riviera has been a glamorous holiday destination for thousands of French and foreigners for many years. Nearby Cannes and St Tropez can vie with Hollywood for the first place in which city has seen more millionaires per square meter.

What do we see today?

• any language is spoken but French. How disappointing! Russian, English, Italian, but not French! I go to France to be sneered at, to experience that famous shrug Peter Mayle was writing about, and what do I get instead --- the standard smily irritating American service. 
• there are four categories of businesses most popular in town: lawyers, doctors (particularly geriatric services), real estate agents, and funeral services. Just the right marketing mix for a holiday destination.
• people play the accordion on the beach and sing. Maybe I don't understand something, but my idea of high culture is somewhat different. 5% of intellectual elite is our last hope, I guess.

How do you tell a good restaurant from a bad one? The first thing that I always look at is the quality of napkins. When a restaurant opens, they are nice, think and expensive. As time goes by, they become thinner and resemble toilet paper more and more. To me it is an indication that I need to look for a new place to socialize. Same with cities and organizations. Signs of decay, or as Lynda Gratton coins it, "permanent frost" must shun you away like plague. Why do you think Goldman Sachs pays so much attention to recruitment? Because people constitute the culture. Culture is the ultimate driver of any organization.

At the very beginning of this blog post, I mentioned that you can't really see the culture. You are in it, like a pickle in the marinade, and if you are not careful enough, you may just as well get marinated. How do you abstract yourself from what is happening around? How can you keep your immunity to changes happening around you, when they happen for the worse? 

We don't know who discovered the sea, but we are sure that it was not a fish.

Inclusive Language

Ne doesn't like tem zeeself

Aug 16th 2010, 21:02 by G.L. | NEW YORK

VIA Stan Carey's Sentence First we learn that Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has long been interested (some might use a stronger word) in the periodic attempts to institute gender-neutral pronouns in English, for those cases where "he or she" feels cumbersome but "they" is numerically inaccurate.

You might have heard of pronouns like "ze" and "zer" created for the purpose of discussing transgender and genderqueer identity. But according to Mr Baron's count there have been "more than 100 attempts to coin a gender-neutral pronoun over the course of more than 150 years", including heesh, hse, kin, ve, ta, tey, fm, z, ze, shem,se, j/e, jee, ey, ho, po, ae, et, heshe, hann, herm, ala, de, ghach... the list goes on.

Now, for the benefit of us web-rats, he has condensed the fruits of his research into ahighly entertaining blog post, which includes clippings of newspaper articles on the need for such pronouns, going back to the mid 19th century. See, for instance, this one fromThe Atlantic in 1878:

We want a new pronoun. The need of a personal pronoun of the singular number and common gender is so desperate, urgent, imperative, that according to the established theories it should long since have grown on our speech, as the tails grew off the monkeys.

It's nice to see that a scant 19 years after the publication of "On the Origin of Species", Darwinism was already considered "established", whereas today America seem to be moving in the opposite direction. And yet English-speakers have resisted gender-neutral pronouns as stubbornly as the cosmopolitans of the world have resisted Esperanto.

If we continue the natural-selection metaphor, then, this suggests that if words, or indeed whole languages, have an equivalent of evolutionary fitness (an organism's capacity to get its genes into the next generation), then merely being designed to suit a certain purpose is not enough to ensure fitness. Natural selection operates incrementally, after all; new species don't appear out of the blue, but form gradually as adaptations of existing ones that already have a niche in the ecosystem. Refudiate might catch on, because it's an adaptation. Ghach... forget it. Maybe with time "he or she" could gradually turn into "hershee" and then "hersh", or "s/he" become "sehee" and then "se", but coining them from raw metal won't work.

But if they evolve gradually, they're in an evolutionary arms race with "they". And my money would be on "they". It's more of a leap to introduce new pronouns that are gender neutral than adapt an existing one to be number neutral. As Mr Baron points out, "After all, if you, which is also gender neutral, can serve both for singular and plural, why can't they do the same?"

Language Tricks

“Culture is a like dropping an Alka-seltzer into a glass – you don’t see it, but somehow it does something”

One of my favorite professors at university once said, "As many languages you know, so many times you are a man". By "man", she obviously meant "man" or "woman" as she was no sexist for sure, but the message is quite ponderous: your chances of success in the increasingly globalized society depend on your linguistic ability. It so happened that during my summer vacation I ended up travelling three countries in Europe in three days, which speak three different languages: Spain, Germany and France. That was a bit of a overloading for my poor brain, but overall it was an exciting experience, as I made it a challenge for myself to speak those languages with the locals and refuse to admit that I speak English. The French were the greatest surprise. Their level of English was surprising and slightly frightening, since just a couple of years ago I would be struggling to find anyone there who would produce anything but a string of intelligible mumbling clearly identifiable in the whole world as the French language. Maybe I was travelling in the wrong place (Cote d'Azur, after all, is a highly touristic destination and the service industry adapts quicker than all others to the demands of the global community), but hey - those French waiters and shop assistants spoke perfect English (and some of them even Russian) - something I would have not expected merely a couple of years ago. I was not sure how to take it, as the French are known for their puristic stance on the matter of linguistic identity. So have they given in? It has always been an exciting discussion for me whether a country should yield and submit to English as the language of communication or whether it should preserve its culture and identity by insisting on keeping its language and culture "clean" of external influence, but that is a subject for a separate post.

Linguistic competence has been given a justifiably high weighting in the business world. When you put together your CV, the languages section is obligatory. When you apply for specific jobs, you will be given language tests during your recruitment process. If you are an expatriate, your company will make sure that you learn the language(s) of the country you have been deployed to. Reasons for this importance are obvious - if you want to understand how the society operates, you need to learn the language. I do not want to bore you with the intricacies of the Sapir-Whorf  theory, but in a nutshell, a language defines your thinking and perception of the world. Go back to your working environment and think what sort of language is used at the office. How often do people say "thank you"? What about gender-sensitive words? How do you treat those who do not speak the dominant language? Having answered such questions, you will arrive at realization of what the corporate culture is.

Linguistic failures are frequent and the most spectacular ones are well known. Of the more comical was Ford’s introduction of the ‘Pinto’ in Brazil. After seeing sales fail, they soon realized that this was due to the fact that Brazilians did not want to be seen driving a car meaning ‘tiny male genitals’. Here you will find many more examples of the Marketing Translation mistakes: http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html (actually some are HILARIOUS!).

So what are the greatest challenges? There are many... the two that immediately spring to mind are:

- there are 23 languages in the EU Parliament with equal status. How can that institution function effectively?

- emerging BRIC countries with very particular and difficult languages. How do we enter those markets?

Seeing the rising importance of such problems I start thinking... should I drop my MBA classes and go back to my Linguistics degree? :)

No Facebook?

How did people let each other know what was happening in their lives before the social networks were created? I mean - how weird must it have been to write long letters and sit for hours over a kitchen table swapping news, rumors and war stories? Nowadays it is so much easier, faster and non-committing. How non-committing it is is a question, particularly in the light of the recent developments in Germany, where Angela Merkel is planning to put a ban on using information contained in personal social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tuenti) in hiring practices - read the full article here.

However, this is too serious of a topic for a Friday blog post, so have a little fun with this attempt to simulate what Facebook entries might have looked like in the fairly distant past. Have a great weekend!

Are we ready to open our minds?

Yesterday I went to see the Fotopres exposition at LaCaixa in Madrid. I have not been more disturbed in a long while. After genuinely enjoying the exposition dedicated to the professional (and partially personal) life of Federico Fellini, I went to the upper level to make it a well-rounded visit to the gallery... like when they put a scoop of vanilla ice cream next to your brownie - you have not asked for it, but it completes the experience... For a moment I wished I never stepped my foot on that floor. As you enter, you are facing several large scale portraits of women, whose faces and bodies were crippled by acid. Other walls tell you about war atrocities in Kenya in 2008, ravages in Lebanon, alcoholism in Mongolia, terror of Caracas slums, etc.

The video installations shed more light on the issues. The victims of social and political calamities in less developed countries flee to Europe not for a longer euro, but to stay alive. Is Europe ready to accept them? I am posing this question not in economic terms but more from the cultural and social angle. Confronted with the question, any educated person would say that they are open-minded and surely victims of humanitarian disasters must be given shelter, protection and possible help. What happens in reality? Every day on my way to school and back home I pass an area under a viaduct where homeless immigrants (I guess from Maghreb or Middle Eastern countries) live. This is the prestigious and posh area of Salamanca! What happens in the suburban areas of Madrid? Other cities? Countries?

One wall with pictures clearly stands out in the entire exhibition. DubaiLand. Pictures of wealth, prosperity and artificiality. Juxtaposed to all the other photographs, they somehow ridicule and challenge the "first world" and its vanity while there is so much violence and cruelty everywhere else.

You cannot NOT choose. All our life is a consecutive chain of choices. Whom do you go to lunch with? Who are your friends? Who are your suppliers? Whom do you hire? Would you prefer to work with people different from you? How different? Would you shake hands with an HIV-positive person? Would you be comfortable if it is a teacher of your children? There are so many questions which would be answered politically correctly... However, when it comes to brass tacks and real life, so often our espoused values are different from values in-use. How do we break this wall? Just like anything else - one brick at a time.

How to tell when your boss is lying

Corporate psychology

How to tell when your boss is lying

It's not just that his lips are moving

Aug 19th 2010

“ASSHOLE!” That was what Jeff Skilling, the boss of Enron, called an investor who challenged his rosy account of his firm’s financial health. Other bosses usually give less obvious clues that they are lying. Happily, a new study reveals what those clues are.

David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as the euphemism goes. They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.

Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.

When they are lying, bosses avoid the word “I”, opting instead for the third person. They use fewer “hesitation words”, such as “um” and “er”, suggesting that they may have been coached in their deception. As with Mr Skilling’s “asshole”, more frequent use of swear words indicates deception. These results were significant, and arguably would have been even stronger had the authors been able to distinguish between executives who knowingly misled and those who did so unwittingly. They had to assume that every restatement was the result of deliberate deception; but the psychological traits they tested for would only appear in a person who knew he was lying.

This study should help investors glean valuable new insights from conference calls. Alas, this benefit may diminish over time. The real winners will be public-relations firms, which now know to coach the boss to hesitate more, swear less and avoid excessive expressions of positive emotion. Expect “fantastic” results to become a thing of the past.