Calculating Woman

Calculating Woman

by | Mar 8, 2022 | Compensation, Data, Innovation, Women's History Month

A is for Ada

And for Algorithm

Algorithm is a word that has gone from the confines of math textbooks to everyday parlance, especially for anyone in computers, finance, or even compensation. 

Did you know that the person credited for creating the first computer algorithm was Ada Knight, Lady Lovelace? 

In a short (1815 to 1852) but rather extraordinary life her passion for mathematics led to a collaboration with Charles Babbage, who many consider the father of the computer. 

Read more about her, her life, her contributions to mathematics, and her rather famous literary parentage.

 

Reach for the STARs

Reach for the STARs

by | Feb 22, 2022 | Competencies, Diversity, Economy, Hiring, Human Capital, Innovation, Jobs, Labor Markets, Recruiting

Our February musings have encouraged looking beyond your own environment — whether a groundhog emerging to see his shadow, imagining beyond deep snow drifts to the intricate physics of a single flake, and now urging you to gaze at STARs …

STARs is an acronym for Skilled Through Alternative Routes.

The Burning Glass Institute recently published The Emerging Degree Reset. While employers are finally understanding that eliminating the degree requirement for some of their jobs will give them access to a broader labor pool, there will be a burden as well: 

“A reset requires employers to be more articulate about the skills they require for the job”

Article after article on this topic concedes that employers have used the degree requirement as a proxy for the competencies that they assume a college degree imparts, versus articulating or probing for those behaviors in the interview process.

How many more workers?

In a recent story on Marketplace, Papia Debroy, who leads research at the nonprofit Opportunity@Work said:

“There are more than 70 million workers in our U.S. labor force today who are skilled through alternative routes — through community college, through military service. Most often they’re learning on the job…”

If you’re wondering what sort of employers might be looking for STARs, the piece interviews Jimmy Etheredge, CEO of Accenture North America, who is an advocate.  

“The assumption has always been, ‘I need to look for people that have a technical background, and then the easier thing to teach is the soft skills,’” “It’s easier to teach them the technology, and they already have amazing skills for doing client-customer interaction,” Etheredge said.

If you’ve ever seen a detailed image depicting the crystal structure of a snowflake, it didn’t come from a college graduate.  Those photos taken under a microscope in the bitter cold were taken by a farmer nicknamed Snowflake Bentley who had all the competencies like curiosity, initiative, and determination – but lacked the technical tool to capture the images.  Once armed with that technology, the sky was his limit, and his laboratory.

by | Nov 1, 2021 | Corporate Culture, Creativity at Work, Future of Work, Human Capital, Innovation, Leadership Agility, Performance Management, Performance Reviews

All the communal handwringing and bickering about:  The Return to the Office

We’ve been using the wrong model.

HINT:  think about the companies that dubbed their office “A Corporate Campus”

For those people that left home after high school to go away to college, what was the single most earth shattering change?

YOU DIDN’T REPORT INTO CLASS SEVEN OR EIGHT HOURS A DAY!

Prior to this, much of your success in education was tied to:  showing up.  If you didn’t, they called home. If you did this A LOT,  there were meetings with your parents, or Saturday detention: [cue the Breakfast Club soundtrack now …]

Heck, the local government even paid people to be Truancy Officers and look for kids playing hooky.

Now, you get to your college and depending on the professor, they might not even take attendance.  You might find out that there was absolutely no credit for attendance or participation.

As a lowly freshman, you got stuck with those 8 am classes MWF … or even worse, a 4 pm on MWF.

By the time you were a senior, you might have a seminar that met once a week.  Once a week? In a small class where you only had, what 12 weeks to impress your professor? Nowhere to hide … had to have all that reading done …

You might find out that you had a class where 100% of your grade was how you did on the final exam.

So how did those professors know if you were doing your work?

  • Did they stop by your dorm room at 2 am?
  • Did they take attendance in the library? Know which carrel was your favorite and check to see if their text book was open and highlighted in the appropriate chapter for that week?
  • In nice weather, did they stop by your spot on the lawn and make sure that you were reading text books?
  • Did they attend parties or scour the local bars to make sure that your reading was done for the next day?

Probably not.

They graded your papers and your tests.

They evaluated your performance.

How is this different from hybrid work?

Connecting the Dots

Connecting the Dots

by | Oct 12, 2021 | Corporate Culture, Creativity at Work, Future of Work, Human Capital, Human Resources, Innovation, Labor Markets, Leadership Agility, Management, Performance Management, Pivoting, Productivity

This chart is eye grabbing.

Most reading this blog will easily recognize the vast majority of these logos.  You aspired to work at some, you DID work for some.

One logo immediately caught my eye.  In my days as a credit analyst, I signaled they were facing headwinds. In return, I got an extreme dressing down. The summation of that boss’s lecture? They were one of the largest companies in the country so how could I possibly even think to suggest that they were anything but stable?

The companies that have fallen off of this chart have done so for various reasons, for some it was hubris, for others an inability to pivot, in other cases, tastes change. A lack of innovation led to the demise of many.

Just yesterday, Jack Kelly had a piece in Forbes about the ultimate innovation: tailoring jobs to the individual needs of the various workers. Given the current labor and talent shortage in the U.S., this is exactly the right sort of solution for many organizations.

When firms can keep a clear focus on the deliverable, the output, where or how something gets done is less important.

Kelly says:

Consider how much better work would be if managers held conversations with their team, actively listened to how they’d like to work and then designed the job around their needs. Morning people could start early. Night owls can begin later in the day.

I lived this. Over 20 years ago at PwC, we had a well-oiled team that knew each other’s bio-rhythms and peak productivity hours.  We joked that there were probably only three hours that someone from our group wasn’t awake and available; one person was an extreme lark that got into the office at 5:00 am, while another was such an extreme night owl that we regularly got emails from him at 2:00 am, working remotely.  That is when I started experimenting with working from home … which one secretary dreaded because in uber-efficiency mode I banged through my To Dos, which then required her involvement.

As so many HR experts have reiterated: there are two ways to measure performance – inputs and outputs.  Do you want to measure the hours that you see someone in (or their jacket on) their chair? Or do you want to measure what they deliver? The RESULTS.

Go back to that left hand side of the graphic.  What happened to the temples those companies built? Big Stan in Chicago? GE Headquarters in Connecticut? The Sears Tower? They filled up with employees each morning and emptied every night.

Big buildings don’t matter.  That S&P graphic is based on results.

 

 

Lovin’ It?

Lovin’ It?

by | Feb 23, 2021 | Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Innovation, Inspiration, Strategy

It’s complicated.

A phrase that we associate with romantic relationships as we close out this month of Valentine’s Day.

But McDonald’s and the African-American community? Oh yeah. 

When Marcia Chatelain published her book, Franchise at the end of 2019, she couldn’t have imagined what 2020 would bring. But for those of us struggling to understand all the complexities of systemic racism, she employed a clever device to convey its many mechanisms.

There are few among us who haven’t tasted, or craved, something from McDonald’s. It’s a fairly universal American icon. Yet in tracing the inception, growth, urban retrenchment, and eventual Black franchise-ownership, she is able to walk us through a journey that few of us know enough about.

There are many aha moments. These insights detail examples from why returning Black GIs weren’t allowed to take full advantage of all that the GI Bill had to offer, to why Black franchise-owners continually had higher per store sales, yet saw those margins erode because of the unfavorable terms McDonald’s “offered” them.  

This book transforms systemic racism from a vague but overwhelming concept to a process outlined with concrete steps for permanence.  It becomes very easy for those of us who understand what the post-WWII boom did for the majority of Americans, to now understand how so much of that economic prosperity was not afforded to a whole group of Americans. 

“Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun!” 

So that special sauce of success? 

Franchise helps you understand a series of decisions that kept the special sauce from all of America.