Education

American Society / Education / Ethics / law / Management / Political — 0 Comments
25
Nov 11

Cheating

An ongoing cheating scandal in the affluent suburbs of New York City now stains our headlines.   Students in several outstanding academic high schools paid test takers to take their college entrance exams.  Six students were arrested in September, and earlier this week an additional 19 students either surrendered to the police or were arrested.  Students paid these test takers $500 to $3500.  See More Arrests in SAT Cheating Investigation.

It is too easy to blame this behavior on the decline in morality evinced by Wall Street scandals and the behavior of our political class.  A deeper point needs to be addressed.  We have become a society of numbers and meaningless symbols.   How much do you make per year?  What school did you attend?  How much is your house worth?

Hiring by the Numbers

For much of my career, a significant part of my responsibility was the hiring and supervision of attorneys in a large legal department.   At best, hiring is a crap shoot.  Despite a glossy resume, one can never tell why someone is in the job market at any given time, or how that person will actually meet the standards and fit the profile of the job for which they are interviewing.  Usually complicating the decision making process is  the legal department’s need to hire  experienced attorneys with a minimum ten years experience. In this environment a new hire was expected to perform at an extremely competent level with little or no training or supervision, the proverbial “hit the ground running” paradigm.

One of my peers hired strictly by the numbers.  A candidate had to be a graduate of one of the top 41 law schools, and had to have more than a 700 LSAT.  My colleague preferred a candidate to have a background as a prosecutor with US Attorneys’ Office or the Judge Advocate General.

After a while, I broke the code on my colleague’s idiosyncratic requirements.  I discovered that he used the Gourman Report of Graduate Programs.  Dr. Gourman does not reveal his exact methodology or statistics.  Generally, the Gourman Report methodology asks university graduate departments to rate each other, and assess which they think are best in their field.   By definition then, this questionable methodology yields a self-reinforcing cycle of the top programs continuing to nominate each other in a reciprocal and mutual admiration society.  See Caveat Emptor: The Gourman Report for a critique of the report’s methodology.   The same large prestigious universities continue to populate these lists.  Page 1 of the Gourman Report list of law schools had exactly 41 names; my colleague’s law school alma mater happened to be number 41.  Thus, I deciphered my colleague’s “scientific” method of hiring and the inherent folly of using numbers to find good people.  (Soon thereafter, for amusement I confronted him and pointed out that to be really scientific he would have to find the Gourman report related to the year that the candidate graduated law school to really ascertain whether he was hiring a true “top 41” candidate.)

In another example of this folly, we later merged with a company which would only hire candidates who had combined SATs over 1500, LSATs over 700, a top 15 law school degree (thank goodness for Gourman) and experience in a prestigious law firm or prosecutor’s office.

I am still amazed that I was ever hired, promoted or retained after we completed several major mergers.  I fit none of these criteria nor did many of the best attorneys in our legal department.

The Hard Work of Hiring; the Harder Work of Assessing Job Performance

The SATs are primarily predictors of how well one will perform on tests like the SAT’s.  Since they were instituted as a method of evaluation, they have been repeatedly called into question as predictors of college success. Further, how well one performs in college and law school is not a total predictor of how well one performs in that first law job.  At each step, real life intrudes, essential character and temperament inserts itself into the process, and a lawyer has either learned to practice law competently or not.

No short cuts or quantitative formulas exist in making hiring decisions.  Generally, every candidate I interviewed had a good academic and work record.   Intelligence, analytical prowess and certainly test numbers were merely table stakes to get in the door.  Other more important factors determined whether or not an attorney would be successful in a corporate environment.  In evaluating candidates, I tried to ferret out the following:

  • Can they work under pressure, or under attack?
  • Can they take on a project with minimal supervision?
  • Are they willing to put in long hours, including nights and weekends, to accomplish the job?
  • Are they patient and persistent; can they see a project to its conclusion?
  • Are they creative; have they ever displayed ingenuity? Can they work with and lead a team of lawyers and business people?
  • Do they communicate clearly in speech and writing?
  • Can they accept criticism?
  • Do they respect subordinates as well as superiors?
  • Do they display emotional intelligence; can they intuit the atmosphere as well as the facts of a situation?
  • Is integrity clearly a part of their makeup?  Has it ever been tested?

The Education Testing Service and testing results cannot measure any of the above-listed factors.  And in my 32-year corporate career I firmly believe that one cannot be successful on a long-term basis without meeting the above criteria.

Despite conducting rigorous interviews and extensive background checks, an honest hiring supervisor will admit that it is difficult to judge these non-numerical factors.  Further, if a hiring supervisor is correct 50% of the time, he or she has beaten the odds.  I was lucky and was able to hire many attorneys who rose through the corporate ranks and became senior corporate leaders.  Some went to the “best” law schools, some did not. I was also required to ask some of my hires to leave.  While difficult each time, that too is the nature of hiring and corporate management.

Looking for the Easy Way Out

This returns us full circle to the Long Island SAT/ACT cheating scandal.  As a society we look for the easy way out in decision making.   Perhaps those Long Island students were thinking: if I can just achieve a high enough test score, I can attend a prestigious university which will guarantee me access to a great job or graduate program, which in turn will assure my success in life.  Success is more complicated than that.

We have deteriorated to a society of numbers and brands.  The ideal political candidate goes to the right schools, has the right tickets punched on his or her resume, gets elected to the right office and now is the right candidate for higher office.  We fail to delve into the more important factors of character, grace under pressure, emotional intelligence and integrity.  The epiphany, long since necessary for all of us, is that we entrusted our money and our government to Wall Street and Washington charlatans who went to all the right schools, held  all the right jobs and had all the right  connections.  And look what happened.

Given all of this, it is no surprise we now have a group of students on Long Island willing to sell their souls for $3500 or less.

 

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27
Dec 10

Life Lessons From It’s a Wonderful Life

One of the pleasures of the season is the classic film “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  The story is a virtual cinematic Rorschach test.  Each viewer can find a personally resonant message: the love of a good woman, the evil of greed, the importance of community, faith or thrift.  Angel Clarence helps our hero George Bailey realize that every life is precious, we are all connected to each other and each of us makes a difference.  These are certainly valuable lessons.  However, some of the film’s equally important lessons in George’s story are sometimes overlooked.

Should We Ever Question Authority? Young George Bailey’s boss, the pharmacist Mr. Gower, learns of his son’s death and accidentally puts poison in a prescription.  Realizing this dangerous mistake, George disobeys Mr. Gower and does not deliver the prescription.   He returns to the pharmacy and receives physical abuse from the distraught and distracted Mr. Gower.  Ultimately George convinces his boss that the prescription is lethal, and Mr. Gower is forever in George’s debt.

Should We Work in a Family Business and Delay College? After high school, George must work in the family building and loan and save money before going to college.  George has the opportunity to learn the savings and loan (S & L) business directly from this father. The experience is probably an education and valuable apprenticeship that George could not replicate in college or an MBA program.

How do We Lead in a Crisis? Just as George is preparing to leave for college, his father dies unexpectedly.  The evil and greedy Mr. Potter convinces the S & L board to close the business.  The directors rebuff Potter, but inform George that the business will stay open only if he agrees to succeed his father.  George must weigh his college career and dreams of adventure against his father’s dream of providing decent housing for his community.  Further, George knows that leaving for college now would mean loss of employment for his uncle and others.  Displaying leadership and courage, George gives up college and assumes the leadership of the savings and loan.

What Skills Get Us Through a Business Crisis? On his wedding day and in the taxi to leave on his honeymoon, George witnesses a run on his S & L bank.    Potter calls in the bank’s loan, imperils the business and threatens to close it permanently if it cannot remain open until the close of that very day.

At the gated door of the savings and loan, George calmly speaks to his angry depositors.  George opens the doors and invites everyone inside.  First, he reasons with the crowd, explaining that each depositor is invested in the other’s home, and there is little actual cash on hand.  Second, he points out their depositor agreements require sixty days notice before a withdrawal.  Third, when the depositors still demand their money he does not panic.  Rather, with his new bride Mary by his side, he begins to negotiate with his depositors.   Fourth, the new Mrs. Bailey devises a creative solution.  To allay the concerns of the depositors she waves $2000 of wedding gift money.  Fifth, while George agrees to give the first depositor all his money, he does not permit the man to close his account:  “Your account’s still here. That’s a loan.”   Sixth, he finally turns the tide, and convinces the next few depositors to withdraw only a small fraction of their accounts,  that is, only what they need immediately.  Everyone makes it through the business day, even though the bank has but $2 left in the safe.  This one scene is a veritable training film of management ethics, courage, improvisation, knowledge of customer base, negotiating skill and emotional intelligence.

Should One Change Jobs for More Money? Recognizing that George represents a long-term threat, Potter makes him a spectacular job offer.  Potter offers George almost tenfold per year with the promise of travel to New York and Europe.  Overwhelmed by the offer, George is on the verge of accepting.  But he realizes that this is another of Potter’s evil plans to destroy the savings and loan and keep more community neighbors in substandard rental housing.   Ever his father’s son, the principled George turns down the offer and speaks truth to power, berating Potter for unethical business practices.

Clearly, George has compared his current and prospective work environments and considered intangibles such as respect, responsibility, ethics and the reputation of the employer.  For George, success and job satisfaction is not defined by money alone.

How Do Managers Make Difficult Personnel Decisions? Uncle Billy loses $8,000 on his way from the S & L to deposit the funds at Potter’s bank.  George has witnessed Uncle Billy’s drinking and forgetfulness.  Banking requires sobriety and attention to detail.  Should George have terminated Uncle Billy years before?  George suffers the consequences of this personnel decision, and sets up the arrival of Clarence the Angel in the climactic scenes of the movie.

Do Big Bad Banks Get Away with Bad Behavior? Potter winds up in possession of the lost $8000 and he never returns it to Uncle Billy, George or the savings and loan. In fact, he swears out an embezzlement complaint against George.  Potter is never punished for his misdeeds.

How Important Is Family and Community? Faced with ruin George panics and flees. But Mary recognizes the enormous social capital that she and George have built up in their small town.  She gets on the phone and gets help.   Her former boyfriend authorizes up to $25,000 to help George.  Both rich and poor citizens and even the bank examiner contribute to save George, Mary and the savings and loan.

The overarching quote and lesson in this film, in business and in life, explicitly and elegantly stated, is “Remember George: no man is a failure who has friends.”  The unrecognized good that we do during our lifetime returns to us in ways that we may never expect.

Happy Holidays to All!

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5
Dec 10

Mission Creep

A common subversive phenomenon of corporate behavior is “mission creep.”   The behavior is subtle and almost undetectable to all but the most expert students of organizational behavior.   Let’s examine some concrete examples.

Human Resources is fertile ground for mission creep. HR generally is a staff function hierarchically below the CEO, Business Heads, the Chief Financial Officer, the General Counsel and other corporate functionaries.  What better way for an ambitious human resources executive to rise in that hierarchy to achieve importance and responsibility than by unilaterally expanding his mission into functions beyond his expertise.  So the formally humble human resources executive “volunteers,” “takes on” tasks beyond the traditional (and boring) hiring, compensation and labor relations functions, and thereby finds new more important missions.

Several employers ago, the head human resources executive evolved from the mundane, to run internal communications (and implicitly controlling external public communications), a portion of real estate and strategic planning, corporate surveys and an information technology complex. He also sat on the executive committee of the company.  So from humble beginnings our enterprising human resources executive created a veritable empire – mission creep, mission accomplished.

Education is another enterprise ripe for mission creep.  Enterprising administrators can expand their empires so that more than 50% of a public school district is comprised of highly paid administrators rather than direct classroom teachers. See Mission Creep: How Large School Districts Lose Sight of the Objective – Student Learning

Creep is not limited to corporations and school systems.

Pharmacy Creep

As we get older we also encounter pharmacy creep.   We may start with a multivitamin in young adulthood.  But by the time we reach our 50’s we may have acquired prescriptions for a statin, a blood pressure drug, niacin, an anti anxiety drug, and for males perhaps some Cialis or Viagra.  Each specialist we visit is more than happy to prescribe even more drugs to add to the medical arsenal. In addition to greater cost, eventually, the drugs start to interact with each other in unforeseen ways, usually with unpleasant, unintended consequences.

Modern Governments

Federal government mission creep makes the above examples look harmless.   It is easy to blame the Obama Administration for the current mess we are in.  But the seeds for governmental mission creep were planted eight decades ago during the New Deal.  However, mission creep thrives under both Republican and Democratic administrations.  We should highlight some areas where government has directly usurped the private sector:

-          The auto business through GM and Chrysler

-          Lending and insurance through AIG, Ally(GMAC) and Citicorp

-          Security through TSA

-          The mortgage market through Fannie Mae, FHA, GNMA and Freddie Mac

-          Interest rates, fiscal policy and even the stock market through Federal Reserve intervention

Indirectly, the government is well on its way to controlling (1) the workplace through detailed labor and employment legislation and regulation, (2) healthcare through Obamacare, and (3) the financial industry through recent legislation.  The defense complex with massive purchases and 750 overseas bases is almost an industry unto itself.

Every time a private enterprise or a state or municipality goes hat in hand to Washington for “assistance” or a bailout, we invite the government to expand its mission.

Finding a Proper Role for Government

What is missing from public discourse is a little humility.  Perhaps we cannot have it all, and asking the government to get it or do it for us is the road to diminished freedom.  We have discussed re-engineering government before.  See Why not Reengineer Government? Re-engineering is a sophisticated way of saying that we need to rethink the role of government. We need to focus on core functions of government such as physical protection of our population, and privatize what we can.   The powers that be need a little more humility, and recognize that government cannot and should not accomplish everything.

Our current economic quagmire is a message that mission creep is costly and in the long-term unsustainable.  Mission creep diminishes private sector creativity and wealth creation.

The current huge deficits and economic misery are symptoms of a government mission that has gone way off course and cannot be accomplished.

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22
Sep 10

In Praise of a Liberal Arts Education

Years ago I sat at another boring business dinner.  One of my colleagues, a president of one of our larger subsidiaries, leaned over and asked me what her freshman son at the University of Texas-Austin should major in to get ahead in the business world.  I was surprised at the question and even more surprised at my response.  I replied that he should get a well rounded, liberal arts education and major in something he loved.

Higher Education at the Crossroads

While no one wishes for bad economic times, these events have a way of provoking thoughtfulness, values clarification, and ultimately a crossroads.  Many pundits now question the value of a college education.  With the cost for higher education rising dramatically, some professionals in the education and business communities now question its value.  Are students wasting their time taking art history or gender studies?   Should emphasis be on skill-specific, career-oriented majors that will result in good jobs and rapid loan payback?  Should we be guiding young people into applied scientific, computer and accounting majors rather than the traditional liberal arts?

The Meaning and Purpose of Education

Like many high school seniors, I had no real idea about what I wanted to do.  I did know that I wanted to go to a four-year college, and I attended and graduated from the large state university where I was resident.  Luckily, the school had distribution requirements (a few colleges refer to these as core courses) which required freshmen and sophomores to complete two full years of a foreign language, basic science and mathematics, humanities, English, the social sciences and the history of western civilization. I clearly remember not having elective courses until my junior year.

College is not a trade school.  A good college education exposes a student to a broad range of intellectual thought and dialectic.  Knowledge of art and its context, the rise and fall of governments and cultures, nuances and idioms of English and a foreign language, creative and expository writing, economics, mathematical history and theory and various theories of science all contribute to the thinking of an educated, well-rounded individual.

So why is this valuable?  Because all this teaches a student to think critically about issues.  It emphasizes written and oral communication skills, and the ability to express ideas in clear and concise language.  Context and nuance matter when discussing an idea, and  great ideas did not just spring forth in the last fifty years.  We are part of an inexorable march of history, culture and progress.  Translate all this to the adult working world, and we have critically thinking and appropriately expressive citizens, parents, executives, and employees.   In essence, this type of education should be the first act in the play of lifelong learning.

What Should I Major In?

The answer to “what should I major in” is “anything that is a pleasure to learn.”  My daughter recently graduated from a prestigious eastern college, magna cum laude.  She majored in history.   Her history department, one of the great history departments in the country over the past one hundred years, invited parents to a post graduation collation.   The head of the department earnestly thanked the parents for permitting their children to major in her department.  She clearly had had experience with parental resistance, mild disdain and at best rolled eyes when students declared a history major.  After the speech, I went up to this noted professor and thanked her for teaching my child.  To me it was a privilege to be a history major in this prestigious program.  Moreover, my daughter excelled and thrived;   she was mentored, she learned much about many things, and she learned to create, criticize and be criticized for her ideas and writing.  What more could a parent ask for?   What we saw for ourselves, and what her professors all said, was that she had grown into a thinker, a writer and a scholar.  As an aside, she has not had a problem obtaining several excellent job offers upon graduation.

Education for the Workplace and for the Self

The benefits of a liberal arts education became obvious only when I entered the workforce. When I went to school, with a major in economics and labor studies, computers were for a select group of scientists working in the computer science labs.  However, from my math and science background, I was able to teach myself computer skills, perform actuarial calculations although I was not an actuary, and master complex industrial processes.  I learned management, accounting and business processes although I never had a college business course.  In contrast, most of the practical subjects I learned in college and even in law school were outmoded within five years of working.   Without the ability to learn new ideas, the specific processes, equipment and modalities of the workplace would have been much more difficult to master.  Learning the new was all grounded in a solid liberal arts education.

In the midst of a recession, with college costs soaring to more than $200,000 for a four year private college, the temptation is to gravitate to a “practical major” such as applied engineering, accounting or computer science.  In a rapidly changing economy, I would suggest that even the most career oriented students would profit from the broader perspective obtained from knowledge of history, foreign language, mathematical concepts, English and humanities.   The essential paradox is that a narrow, technical, vocationally oriented education may provide the skills for today’s job, but not for tomorrow’s careers.

For those who are intellectually talented, a liberal arts education is a great boon to future business or government pursuits.   It can also provide the intellectual underpinnings of all kinds of professions:  medicine, nursing, law, architecture, engineering, education and others.   As we enter this challenging environment we need more leaders who can think critically and communicate clearly.  Perhaps we all need a more liberal definition of what constitutes a good education.

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21
Sep 10

Clean Hands and a Weak Economy

“…America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.” The Genteel Nation

England Forty Years Ago

In the early 1970’s I was a graduate student in London.  One of my fellow students was a 40-year-old senior government official specializing in trade.   His ministry was paying for his degree, as well as giving him a full year’s paid leave.  His father was a coal miner; he was the oldest of eight children.  His parents sacrificed to send him to public school (what we would call private school) and then Cambridge.  His siblings remained in the village and became coal miners.  He asked me what I intended to do after completing my master’s program; I told him that most likely I would return to the states and work in private industry.  He pointed out that “this was just not done” in England as government service was prestigious while business was a pursuit of the uneducated classes.  It was not work for a gentleman.

During the year, I also had lunch with the head of DCL, the predecessor company to Diageo.  Clearly a bright man from a lower middle class background, he never “went to university” or had any formal business training.  He apprenticed at DCL and worked his way up from the shop floor to management.   The prevailing attitude in England was that business was dirty and was not a worthy pursuit of the upper class.  The state of the British economy in the 1970’s was deplorable, a mix of inefficient state run enterprises, internationally uncompetitive private companies, and labor strife everywhere.

The Genteel Nation: America Today

Fast forward to the present day American economy, and consider some insightful comments by David Brooks of the New York Times.  Americans believe their country is in economic decline, faced with declining real wages and a jobless recovery.  We have missed a key cultural pivot point; that is, we have departed from the hard headed practical mentality that built the country.   Graduates from Ivy League institutions overwhelmingly select careers in finance and consulting.  Taking a manufacturing job in Akron would be “embarrassing” or “countercultural.”

Disdain for business is reinforced by the First Lady:

The shift away from commercial values has been expressed well by Michelle Obama in a series of speeches. “Don’t go into corporate America,” she told a group of women in Ohio. “You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. … Make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry.” See The Genteel Nation

We spawned a service economy of junior and mid level office workers.  To sustain a lifestyle comporting with a management image, we went into debt, produced too little and imported too much.  The economy adjusted “underinvesting in manufacturing and tradable goods and overinvesting in retail and housing.”  We now have a nation of too many mortgage brokers and too few mechanics, an explosion of communications majors and too few high-skill technical workers.  To the detriment of the nation we have a “gentility shift.”

We Need to Get Our Hands Dirty

In a 30-year span, I witnessed the dissolution of manufacturing in this country.  My job took me to the factories of upstate New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New England.  Today many of those factories are empty or converted to condominiums, shopping centers or museums.  Left behind are job training centers, a WalMart, nursing homes and numerous drug stores to service an aging population.

During law school, I lived in a dorm with MBA students.   Unlike my English colleague with his fully paid government year-long leave, it was manufacturing companies, International Paper, GE, Ford and others, who were paying for their best and brightest managers to obtain an MBA and return to run a plant or a manufacturing division.

We have been gulled by the seemingly easy money of Wall Street.  We are woefully uneducated about the economy.  As I have pointed out, service and government jobs are a derivative of a productive economy.  See, e.g. It is All a Derivative of Productive Enterprise. We perpetuate many economic illusions.  One illusion is that we can all work for the government as suggested by our First Lady.  This advice will lead our economy to ruin.

It is time for our elite graduates to recognize the need to work in private productive enterprise.   When working for a manufacturing company holds as much allure as Volunteers for America, collectively we will all do better.

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