Global Human Capital

The Death of Peer Review...?

2010-08-23T21:03:00.001-07:00

For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.

Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.

"What we're experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”

Obama to Offer Benefits to Gay Partners of Federal Employees

2009-06-17T20:18:00.001-07:00

The decision comes as many in the gay community have voiced disappointment with the president, especially after the administration filed a legal brief defending the Defense of Marriage Act.

(Reporting from San Francisco and Los Angeles) - Faced with growing anger among gay and lesbian supporters, President Obama is expected tonight to extend healthcare and other benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees.

His action is a significant advance for gay rights and comes days after the Obama administration sparked outrage by filing a legal brief defending the law forbidding federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Obama opposed the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act during his presidential campaign.

It was not immediately clear whether Obama's latest decision would mollify his critics. Some offered only grudging support Tuesday night after learning of the president's intentions. "This is a good thing for the small percentage of . . . people that work for the federal government, but it leaves out the vast majority of people who are in same-sex relationships," said Geoff Kors, head of Equality California, one of the state's largest gay rights groups.

As a candidate for president, Obama was a staunch supporter of gay and lesbian rights. He called for repealing the federal Defense of Marriage Act and also the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which forbids openly gay men and women from serving in the armed forces. He promised to help lead the fight.

Since taking office, however, Obama has disappointed many gay activists by not just keeping silent but, lately, by defending some of the policies he criticized. After months of grumbling, the anger exploded in public denunciations this week after the administration filed its legal brief in Orange County federal court.

"Anyway you cut it, it is a sickening document," David Mixner, a longtime gay rights advocate, wrote in a blog posting that echoed the sentiments expressed by many in the gay community. "What in the hell were they thinking?" In a statement the day of the filing, administration attorneys said Obama considered the marriage ban discriminatory and wanted it rescinded but was legally obligated to defend the law as long as it remained in force.

Mixner, one of several gay activists who withdrew support from a big Democratic fundraising bash next week, offered a measured response to Obama's planned announcement. "I am thrilled for the federal employees," he said. "I also will be especially thrilled when [the Defense of Marriage Act] is repealed."

Although there is some sympathy for the president's position -- "he has enormous stuff on his plate that requires a lot of political capital," said Steve Elmendorf, a gay Democratic strategist -- many think the concerns of gays and lesbians are once again being shunted to second- and third-tier status.

Ken Sherrill, a Hunter College political scientist and gay activist, recalled how the Clinton administration started with great hope but ended in disappointment when the president, for tactical reasons, retreated on gay rights. President Clinton approved both the marriage bill and the policy preventing gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military.

"There's a fear that Obama will prove to be a heartbreaker as well," Sherrill said. A White House spokesman said Tuesday that the president was not retreating from his campaign promises. "The president remains fully committed to the . . . proposals he made," Adam Abrams said. "We have already begun work on many of these issues."

Tonight's Oval Office ceremony casts an especially bright light on the president's action and seemed intended to tamp down anger within the gay community. The extent of the benefits coverage and the cost to the government were not immediately available.

Obama has reached out in other ways. He named openly gay men to head the Export-Import Bank and the Office of Personnel Management. The State Department promised to give partners of gay and lesbian diplomats benefits such as diplomatic passports and language training. In April, gay parents were invited for the first time to bring their children to the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.

But critics say those gestures are meager beside the stack of grievances that started accumulating even before Obama took office. Many were angered when he picked pastor Rick Warren, a prominent opponent of same-sex marriage, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Then came the decision to discharge Army linguist Dan Choi after he declared in a cable television interview that he was gay.

The administration also intervened with the Supreme Court and opposed efforts to overturn the law forbidding gays from serving openly in the military. The justices sided with the president, declining to hear a constitutional challenge. White House officials say they want Congress to repeal the policy outright instead of having to intervene on a case-by-case basis.

Nothing, however, matches the outrage provoked by last week's court filing in Santa Ana supporting the Defense of Marriage Act. The fact that the brief was filed during Gay Pride Month, which Obama saluted with a formal proclamation, only compounded the sense of insult.

"You have some appointments that have been good and a proclamation," said Sherrill, who has written extensively on the history of the gay rights movement. "And then two tangible areas where the administration has done something wrongheaded and offensive. Doing nothing at all would have been a helluva lot better."

Obama's approach to gay issues seems guided by the unhappy experience of Clinton, who started his administration with an unsuccessful fight to open the military to gay and lesbian service members. Clinton lost the battle -- the result was "don't ask, don't tell," which allows gays to serve so long as they keep their sexual orientation a secret. The outcome angered many on both sides of the issue. Worse, Clinton squandered much of the goodwill that followed his election.

Now, however, many feel Obama may have learned the lesson too well. "Things have changed in the country," said Paul Begala, a top advisor during Clinton's early White House years. "I think some of the people in the White House are slow to apprehend that."

He cited gays in the military as a good example. When Clinton was pushing his overhaul policy, only 43% of Americans backed the change. Today, nearly 70% of Americans favor military service by openly gay men and women. Others noted that there are no openly gay men or women among Obama's top advisors, and suggested that may result in a certain political tone-deafness. In many ways, some said, it appears as though Washington is lagging the rest of the country in the debate over gay rights.

"They're talking about hate-crimes legislation and 'don't ask, don't tell' while people are getting married in Iowa," said Elmendorf, who spent years as a top aide on Capitol Hill. "It seems on this subject the politicians are a little bit behind where the American people are."

Source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-na-obamagays17-2009jun17,0,1003868.story?track=rss

Tags: Obama, Gay Pride Month, Bill Clinton, Defense of Marriage act, Same-Sex partners, Employee Benefits, Military, Gays in the military, Don’t ask don’t tell policy, Capitol Hill, HR, Human Capital,

Posted via web from Human Capital

U.S. Military Tweets News From Afghanistan

2009-06-06T21:43:00.001-07:00

KABUL — U.S. and Afghan forces killed four militants in Wardak province, the U.S. military tweeted on Monday.

That's right. The military "tweeted" the news, sending it worldwide on Twitter, the social networking site, hours before making the formal announcement to the media.

The U.S. military is putting Twitter, along with Facebook and YouTube, into its arsenal of weapons for getting out its side of the Afghan story, reaching the online generation and countering the Taliban's own fast-growing Web and text-messaging skills.

"Afghan & coalition forces killed four militants & detained two suspects in a Wardak Province operation targeting an IED-network commander," said a military's tweet Monday, coming in just under the 140-character limit for such messages. IED is shorthand for a roadside bomb.

Got a comment? sign up with twitter.com and then go to www.twitter.com/usfora. On the military's Facebook page, tinyurl.com/nz3xam., launched on a test basis in April, you can talk to U.S. spokespeople, while its YouTube postings on www.youtube.com/usfora. will feature original material such as video news stories.

"There's an entire audience segment that seeks its news from alternative means outside traditional news sources, and we want to make sure we're engaging them as well," said Col. Greg Julian, the top U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan. But the limitations of military tweeting were quickly laid bare when it was announced Monday that four U.S. troops were killed in two separate roadside bombings. Those troops were under NATO command, which would have to approve an announcement on the U.S. military's Twitter page.

Besides tweeting, the brass are also encouraging troops to post stories and photos on Web sites to portray daily life in Afghanistan and highlight development projects that may not have made the news. Julian described it as "an unfiltered opportunity" for public interaction with troops.

Many military commands and individual troops already use social networking sites. But the effort in Afghanistan is the first to harness the power of such sites for spreading information from an active war zone. Not all the Facebook posts have been pro-military, and officials say no criticisms will be suppressed provided they are free of hate speech, sexual or otherwise offensive material.

A team based in Kabul will update and maintain the sites and watch for false postings that evade the password protections. U.S. troops already scour Web sites, respond to questions from individuals and rebut what the military considers to be false information.

The military has recruited professional journalists for their effort, including Matthew Millham, 31, of New Paltz, N.Y., a former reporter for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. Now an Army staff sergeant, he reads blogs several hours a day and responds to posts.

Navy reservist Lt. j.g. Tommy Groves, 33, of Jacksonville, Fla., is a former CNN producer who helps update Twitter. "When you're able to connect with the people directly, out of the mainstream, it can be powerful," Groves said. Asked if this was a way of bypassing mainstream media, he said: "I don't think we're bypassing anything. This is just another avenue to reach another audience."

U.S. officials here have long fretted that the military is losing the information war to the Taliban, who they say routinely inflate their own successes, and American failures, on Web sites with chat rooms frequented by Taliban sympathizers.

Much of the new plan was hatched by Navy Lt. Adam Clampitt, a 34-year-old reservist from Washington, D.C., who notes that 74 percent of Americans ages 18 to 35 use Facebook. The Pentagon now spends more than $550 million a year — at least double the amount since 2003 — on public affairs, not including personnel costs.

Tags: al jazeera, us military, twitter, soldiers, taliban, us navy, facebook, pentagon, hr, career development, human capital, human resources, global human resources, global human capital, global career development, global hr, afghanistan, youtube,

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_12498088?source=email

Posted via web from Human Capital

Ellison Tells Developers Oracle Will Continue to Support Java

2009-06-06T21:37:00.001-07:00

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said today that he wants to promote wider use of Sun Microsystems' Java software in both consumer and business products — possibly including netbooks or mobile devices — once his company completes its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems later this year.

In his first public comments since announcing the purchase in April, Ellison assured several thousand software developers attending Sun's annual JavaOne conference that he plans to continue investing in Java and promoting its use.

"I don't expect a lot of changes, just expanded investment and a lot of enthusiasm coming from Oracle," said Ellison, who noted that much of Oracle's business software is already based on the Java development platform.

Ellison also made a vague reference to the possibility that Oracle might produce consumer products such as netbooks or mobile devices based on Java. He has previously indicated that he plans to use both companies' expertise to develop new appliances for commercial data centers that integrate the companies' hardware and software.

In his remarks today, Ellison mentioned that other companies are thinking of building netbooks based on Google's Android software and added that he expects to see a variety of devices based on Java, some of them built by Oracle. He also said he expects to be "very agressive" about developing new Java software applications for things like mobile phones and netbook computers.

Tags: Oracle, Larry Ellison, Java, Sun Microsystems, Software Developers, Acquisitions, Silicon Valley, Global Career Development, Global HR, Global Human Resource, Global Human Capital, HR, Human Capital, Human Resources, Career Development, Java One, Java One Conference,

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_12502531?source=email

Posted via web from Human Capital

Stanford: Research Surpasses Investments as Top Revenue Source

2009-06-06T21:31:00.001-07:00

By Lisa M. Krieger

Scientific research is re-emerging as the leading contributor to Stanford University's budget, surpassing income from its multibillion-dollar endowment and other investments. The collapse of Wall Street — and Washington's sudden enthusiasm for research — reverses a recent trend, where investment income led all other sources of Stanford's support, according to Stanford Provost John Etchemendy.

Next year, federally funded research — including an infusion of stimulus dollars — will account for the largest share of the university's revenue, 30 percent. Investment income will contribute only 24 percent. The changing money sources mean the university will have funds to build science and medical research, but hinders other programs that do not have a dedicated source of funds and have historically been paid for by earnings off the seven-figure endowment.

Income from medical, engineering and physics research is expected to grow 10 percent to $1.13 billion in fiscal 2010, compared with $1.03 billion this year. By comparison, investment income is expected to fall 16 percent to $886 million in fiscal 2010, compared with $1.06 billion this year.

"The science budget this year is tremendous. Thanks to this administration, it is a whole new dawn for science," said Persis Drell, director of SLAC. SLAC has already been awarded $68 million of stimulus money, which it will use to upgrade its facilities and fund its Linac Coherent Light Source project to generate the world's brightest X-rays when it opens for business in September. The Stanford School of Medicine was recently awarded $15 million to study flu vaccines, $1.5 million to study the genetics of cancer progression and much more.

University spokeswoman Lisa Lapin said the stimulus money and boost of NIH funding was fortuitous. "Federal research funding has flattened out in recent years, and to see an uptick is extremely welcomed," Lapin said. But she cautioned that research funding, unlike investment income, generally stays within the labs and cannot be used to support general campus functions.

"It has a specific purpose, so does not translate into a boon for the entire university," she said. "It is very targeted." While 350 jobs have been eliminated in recent months as a result of budget cuts, Stanford anticipates adding positions to support research projects. Stanford's total head count is expected to remain flat — about 11,270 staff and 1,880 faculty — next year.

"But unfortunately, these will be different people," said Etchemendy, the university's chief academic and budgetary officer.

So far this year, Stanford's endowment dropped 30 percent — the largest drop in the last four decades. Previously, the largest decline was 8 percent. Valued at $17.2 billion in 2008, the endowment is expected to drop to $12 billion this year.

Stanford is "spending down" its endowment and other investments by $1.1 billion to help pay for a variety of expenses, such as faculty salaries and student financial aid. The university has also issued a $1 billion bond to borrow money.

But other programs are being cut. The "First Generation Program," which connects first-generation and low-income students to campus resources, is canceled. The Bridge Program, designed to help students from weak high schools, is on indefinite hold.

"As you can imagine, it has been a tremendously difficult year for budgeting at the university," said Etchemendy, adding that there are no expectations for the endowment to quickly return to its stratospheric 2008 level.

Because of rigorous budget-cutting steps now under way, he predicted recovery over the course of the next two to three years.

"The good news is things will be looking up as we go forward," he said. "We will be back in a growth mode in a couple of years."

Tags: stanford, stanford university, global career development, global hr, global human capital, hr, human capital, research, endowments, Linac Coherent Light Source project, Stanford Provost John Etchemendy, Stanford Provost,

Source: http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_12505712

Posted via web from Human Capital

Time Spent On Social Networks Almost Doubles In A Year

2009-06-06T21:25:00.001-07:00

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Spending more time on social networks and blogs? You're not alone, with the latest figures showing the number of minutes spent on social networking sites in the United States has almost doubled over the past year.

Nielsen Online, which measures web traffic, said the number of minutes on social networks in the United States rose 83 percent in April from the same month a year ago, but found users were quick to move on and sites could quickly fall from favor.

Nielsen Online spokesman Jon Gibs said a major trend had been the continuing popularity of Facebook, which has more than 200 million active members and has become so mainstream it now hosts Pope Benedict and a list of world leaders.

The total number of minutes spent on Facebook surged 700 percent year-on-year to 13.9 billion in April this year from 1.7 billion a year ago, making it the No. 1 social networking site for the fourth consecutive month.

News Corp's MySpace was second most popular but the number of minutes spent on this site fell 31 percent to 4.97 billion from 7.3 billion a year ago, although it remained the top social networking site when ranked by video streams.

Blogger, Tagged.com and Twitter.com came third, fourth and fifth respectively, with the number of minutes spent on Twitter -- that lets people send 140-character messages or Tweets -- rocketing 3,712 percent in April from a year ago.

"We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace," said Gibs in a statement.

Facebook came second to MySpace in rankings of video streams followed by Stickam, FunniestStuff.net and Funny or Die. Gibs said Twitter had also come on the scene in an explosive way, perhaps changing the outlook for the entire social networking business.

"The one thing that is clear about social networking is that regardless of how fast a site is growing or how big it is, it can quickly fall out of favor with consumers," said Gibs.

"Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune. Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment's notice."

Figures from Nielsen released in April shows that more than 60 percent of Twitter users stopped using the free site a month after joining.

Facebook and Twitter are privately owned, although Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in the company in 2007 and both are constantly the source of investment and buyout speculation.

Tags: global human resources, facebook, twitter, employee behaviour, hr, human capital, social networks, nielsen online, myspace,

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090603/wr_nm/us_internet_social_net_3

Posted via web from Human Capital

U.S. Inquiry Into Hiring at High-Tech Companies

2009-06-06T21:20:00.001-07:00

By MIGUEL HELFT

Published: June 2, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — The Justice Department has begun an investigation into whether the recruiting practices of some of the largest technology companies violated antitrust laws, according to several people with knowledge of the investigation.

Companies including Google, Yahoo, Apple and Genentech have received formal requests for documents and information related to the inquiry, these people said. Antitrust lawyers said companies that receive such requests are not necessarily targets of an investigation.

The exact focus of the inquiry is unclear, but the people familiar with it said Justice Department lawyers appeared to be looking into whether the companies involved agreed to not actively recruit employees from each other. Other companies that have received requests for information include Microsoft and Intel, according to these people, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because the investigation is confidential.

Spokesmen for Google and Genentech confirmed that they had been contacted by the Justice Department and said they were cooperating with investigators. But the companies declined to comment further. Representatives for Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and Intel declined to comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

The inquiry, which was first reported on the Web site of the Washington Post late Tuesday, appeared to be in its early stages, said the people familiar with it. The market for technology workers and executives in Silicon Valley is very competitive, with employees frequently leaving a company to work for a competitor.

Some companies have even sued rivals who hired employees. The investigation confounded some antitrust experts. But they said that it would be improper for companies to agree not to go after each other’s top talent. Antitrust suits against companies for restraining the movement of skilled employees are by no means unprecedented.

In 2001, for example, in a federal appeals court decision written by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, the court upheld a complaint by a group of oil geologists and petroleum engineers who sued Exxon and other oil companies for colluding in hiring decisions and thus suppressed wages.

“If there is a naked agreement by companies in an industry not to hire each others’ employees or an agreement to fix wages, that would be an antitrust violation,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at the University of Iowa College of Law.

The investigation is the latest aimed at Google and other technology companies to have surfaced in recent weeks and suggests that the Obama administration was taking a more aggressive stance toward antitrust enforcement.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department opened an inquiry into a settlement of a class action lawsuit between Google and publishers and authors. The Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether the close ties between the boards of Apple and Google amount to an antitrust violation.

Tags: google, yahoo, genentech, apple, anti-trust, justice department, silicon valley, HR, human capital, hiring practices, collusion, hiring collusion, talent,

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/technology/companies/03trust.html?_r=1

Posted via web from Human Capital

India Elects First Woman Speaker

2009-06-06T21:16:00.001-07:00

India's lower house of parliament has elected Meira Kumar as the first woman speaker to run its male-dominated chamber. Her appointment as presiding officer was announced in New Delhi, the capital, on Wednesday.

Kumar, 64, was elected unopposed by India's 543-seat parliament, which has only 59 women members. Kumar's nomination was put forward by the Congress party following their recent victory in general elections.

The motion to elect Kumar was also supported by members of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

'Historic occasion'

Neerja Choudhury, a political analyst based in India, said Kumar's nomination was a"conscious decision" on the part of Congress to strengthen its support base among India's 160 million Dalits, also known as "untouchables".

Shunned by higher castes, Dalits generally perform the lowliest occupations, including scavenging on rubbish dumps, and are the poorest in terms of income, literacy and land.

As the daughter of Jagjivan Ram, a prominent Dalit leader and former deputy prime minister, Kumar replaces Somnath Catterjee, a communist lawmakrer who held the post for the previous five years.

Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, declared her appointment as an "historic occasion". "For the first time a woman member has been elected speaker and that too a woman from the Dalit community.

"In electing you ... we members of parliament pay tribute to the women of our country and the great contribution that they have made," he said.

Tags: India, Indian Politics, Indian Government, Meira Kumar, Manmohan Singh, Neerja Choudhury, Dalits, Indian Parliament,

Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/06/20096382757888606.html

Posted via web from Human Capital

Blind Japanese Woman Receives IBM's Top Award

2009-06-06T21:13:00.001-07:00

TOKYO (AFP) -

US computer giant IBM has named Chieko Asakawa as the first blind engineer -- as well as the first Japanese female -- to receive the company's highest technical honour.

Asakawa, 50, was named this week as one of eight Japanese to win the title of IMB Fellow for her achievements in making the Internet widely accessible for visually impaired people.

It is the company's most prestigious honour for an engineer, a title given to only 218 technicians in the company's more than century-long history.

"Asakawa's crucial contributions in the area of accessibility technology have enabled IBM to become a worldwide leader in the field," the US-based company said in a statement.

"She has helped to establish awareness, both within and outside IBM, while leading the creation of technologies that have changed the way disabled individuals communicate and interact."

Asakawa developed accessibility software called the "Homepage Reader" which reads aloud words that appear on an Internet window and is now available in 11 languages including English and Japanese.

"I am very happy about the nomination," Asakawa said in a statement. "I will continue working hard towards an even more accessible society."

Asakawa, who lost her vision as a teenager, joined the computer maker in 1985 and has since worked to increase computer accessibility not only for the disabled but also for the elderly and novices.

Tags: chieko asakawa, ibm, ibm fellow, blind engineer, homepage reader,

Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090605/tc_afp/japanusinternetcomputercompanyibmpeople_20090605093358

Posted via web from Human Capital

The Lear Jet Repo Man

2009-06-06T21:10:00.001-07:00

Business has never been better for the fearless pilot who takes back millionaires' expensive toys.

By Marc Weingarten

June 6, 2009 |

It was snowing hard when the bank called Nick Popovich. They needed to grab a Gulfstream in South Carolina now. Not tomorrow. Tonight. All commercial and private planes were grounded, but Nick Popovich wasn't one to turn down a job. So he waited for the storm to clear long enough to charter a Hawker jet from Chicago into South Carolina. There was just one detail: No one had told Popovich about the heavily armed white supremacist militia that would be guarding the aircraft when he arrived.

But then again, no one had told the militia about Popovich, a brawny and intimidating man who has been jailed and shot at and has faced down more angry men than a prison warden. When Popovich and two of his colleagues arrived that evening at a South Carolina airfield, they were met by a bunch of nasty-looking thugs with cocked shotguns. "They had someone in the parking lot with binoculars," Popovich says, recalling the incident. "When we went to grab the plane, one of them came out with his weapon drawn and tells us we better get out of there." Undeterred, Popovich continued toward the plane until he felt a gun resting on his temple.

"You move another inch and I'll blow your fucking head off," the gravel-and-nicotine voice told Popovich.

"Well, you better go ahead and shoot, 'cause I'm grabbing that plane."

A shot was discharged in the air. The gravel-and-nicotine voice again. "I'm not kidding."

"Then do it already."

Popovich's first rule of firearms is pretty simple: The man who tells you he's going to shoot you will not shoot you. So without so much as looking back, he got on the plane and flew it right to Chicago. "My job is to grab that plane," Popovich says. "And if you haven't paid for it, then it's mine. And I don't like to lose."

Nick Popovich is a repo man, but not the kind that spirits away Hyundais from suburban driveways. Popovich is a super repo man, one of a handful of specialists who get the call when a bank wants back its Gulfstream II jet from, say, a small army of neo-Nazi freaks.

For the past three decades, Popovich has been one of a secret tribe of big game hunters who specialize in stealing jets from the jungle hideouts of corrupt landowners in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and swiping go-fast boats from Wall Street titans in Miami and East Hampton. Super repos have been known to hire swat teams, hijack supertankers and fly off with eastern bloc military helicopters. For a cut of the overall value, they'll repossess anything.

But Popovich is the most renowned of them all -- the Ernest Hemingway of super repo men. "Nick is the best of the best," says Doug Lipke, head of the bankruptcy group for the law firm Vedder Price, who has called Popovich on numerous occasions to retrieve jumbo jets from fat cats with thinning balance sheets. One time, Lipke needed a plane repo-ed from Michigan and flown to Chicago. "All the electrical went out on the plane and Nick was flying at night," he says. "He flew that plane back with zero electricity -- no lights, nothing. There aren't many guys that would be able to do that."

Today Popovich, 56, is co-partner of Sage-Popovich, a repossession firm. (Sage is his wife, Pat, also the firm's president.) Their clients include Citibank, Transamerica and Credit Suisse, and the firm annually earns, Popovich says, "into the low-to-mid seven figures." That estimate isn't ridiculous when you consider that the most difficult jobs can net Popovich anywhere from $600,000 to $900,000. Popovich's specialty is big planes, jumbo jets, mostly; he's repo-ed 1,300 of them in his career. And that's just the solo gigs. Throw in the 65 repo men who work for him, and the number reaches closer to 2,000.

His mandate is simple. Someone misses a few payments. The bank wants to recover its plane. There will be an attempt to set up some kind of debt payment plan. Failing that, collateral has to be ponied up. If there is none, then an account executive reaches out to Popovich. But Jumbo Jets are expensive -- a 747 will run you anywhere from $125 million to $260 million -- and people who try to acquire such toys are loath to give them back. If the deadbeat gets wind that the bank is sniffing around his plane, he's likely to spirit it away before anyone has a chance to grab it, and then it becomes a cat-and-rat game that can take months to complete. And times have never been better. When lenders opened the sluice gates of easy credit throughout the last decade, high rollers went out and splurged on Gulfstreams and yachts. When the job goes away, the bonuses dry up and the stock market tanks, it's a long and nasty downward spiral that leads to Popovich's door. "Oh, those guys are a real piece of work," says Popovich of the fallen Masters of the Universe. "We've had to fly halfway around the world just to find a plane we were told would be in Dallas. You have to think like a crook to find them."

These days, Popovich is fielding assignments as fast as he can handle them. "We've got a lot of business right now," he says. "We recently recovered planes from Okun and Nadel." Popovich is referring to Edward Okun and Arthur G. Nadel, two Bernie Madoff-manqués that have been accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from unsuspecting clients who thought they were safely investing their money ($300 million in Nadel's case, the largest alleged hedge fund fraud in Florida history). Among the booty that Popovich was hired to return were two Gulfstream IIs and a Lear Jet.

A good super repo man has a skill set that's some mad hybrid of cat burglar, F.B.I. agent and con artist. And there's real danger that comes with the job, not just ticked-off homeowners wielding baseball bats. According to the American Recovery Association, there are, on average, one or two repo-related deaths a year.

In 2006, a Czechoslovakian-made Albatross L-39 combat jet lifted off from Sitka, Alaska, and crashed into a trailer park in the small community of Ketchikan, Alaska. The pilot was found dead 100 yards from the destruction, still strapped into his seat.

He had no identification on him. His profession was listed as repo man. In Minnesota, a boat repo specialist named Kim Zarbinksi was repelled when the angry owner of a 40-foot yacht refused to give him his boat. So Zarbinksi resorted to sterner measures. He hired a SWAT team to help him grab the rotten booty.

You want stories? Popovich has volumes. And tells them without a note of bragging or conceit. On a recent warm afternoon, the unfailingly polite repo man and I are strolling through his cavernous warehouse in Gary, Ind. It feels like browsing a Costco run by the Pentagon. There are airplane parts as far as the eye can see -- jet engines sit on shelves next to wheel casings and propellers. The detritus of a recent job sits in gigantic vats -- hundreds of headphones in one, telephones in another.

Right now the warehouse is overflowing thanks to his most ambitious job to date: "stealing" a fleet of 240 corporate helicopters from a chain of flight schools for a tidy six-figure fee. Nevada-based Silver State was one of the country's fastest growing companies, mainly because its owner Jerry Airola was constructing a pyramid scheme as tall as the Cheops. When everything collapsed, Popovich was hired to retrieve 240 copters from 51 locations around the country. In 24 hours, Nick and his 125-member crew had to change the locks at all 51 Silver Star schools, then move in 125 flatbeds to haul not only the copters but everything else they could carry -- furniture, spare parts, computers, simulators.

"The copters were a mess," says Popovich. "Some of them hadn't been flown in months. Once we shipped them all back to the warehouse, we stripped the worst ones for parts for the bank. I figured that at least we were putting them to good use that way."

Inside his 120-acre, ranch-style compound in rural Valparaiso, Ind., Popovich recalls some of his most notorious adventures in disarmingly soft-spoken and courtly tones. There was the time in the '80s when he was thrown into a Haitian jail cell. Jail stints came with the job, but this time was different.

Inside the cell, Haitian cops had turned Popovich's face inside out. The pain was ungodly. His shoes were gone. He was starving. And Popovich was sitting in a cage surrounded by 35 prisoners spitting epithets in his face. His only priority was to avoid getting hurt any worse than he already was. In his experience, that meant behaving like a total maniac, lashing out at the nearest prisoners and threatening to kill anyone that came near him.

The charge was the attempted theft of a 707 jumbo jet and he was facing 20 years to life. The jet in question belonged to a Caribbean tour company that went bust. After a few missed payments, the bank had called Popovich, who had tracked the plane from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. The gig promised to be simple. Popovich even spotted the battered silver-and-blue jet on the tarmac as he taxied into Port Au Prince's Toussaint L'Ouverture airport on a sweltering February afternoon. All he needed was an hour to check the avionics, an open runway and a flight plan. It hadn't worked out that way.

By the third day of his imprisonment -- sometime after the American embassy politely informed him that the bank employing him wouldn't put up $100,000 in bail -- details started to come back. The tracer fire pinging the plane's wings like popcorn kernels. Men with bayonets slamming on the fuselage. A police cruiser skidding to a halt right in front of the jet, blocking the runway and preventing Nick from taking off. The cops beating him senseless and throwing him in Penitentier National prison. And now, here he was.

On the seventh day of his incarceration, Haitian President Baby Doc Duvalier was overthrown and the rioting masses swung open all of the cell doors. Bruised, bloody and sleepless, Popovich hobbled out of his cell. As he taxied down the runway for the second time. he couldn't help thinking that what they said was true: Flying home is always the easy part.

Reared in Hammond, Ind. -- just a few miles from his current Valparaiso home base -- Popovich got his pilot license when he was 16 because his father thought it might be useful some day. It was the only time he ever said "yes" to Dad. He tried Indiana University for a semester but it didn't take.

Then in 1975 he met two men named Toby Howard and Billy Day in Wichita while hanging with some mutual friends. A pair of hustlers, they had all kinds of ideas for how to get rich quick. Popovich followed them for six months, hawking faulty tire repair kits that would explode in winter and some multilevel marketing schemes. The contacts he'd make through Howard and Day led him into small-time arms dealing. Popovich bought out a Utah company that had been indicted for weapons violations and turned it into a thriving business. "We built .22 caliber weapons into briefcases with micro switches and laser sightings," he says. He sold his guns to the Canadian Special Ops and maybe to a few places he shouldn't have. He mentions something about being "in South America at the wrong time." He also drops a hint about conducting business in Iraq.

Popovich became a Braniff pilot in 1976. But that was boring. So he quit. He wouldn't find his true calling until 1979, when a banker friend asked for his help getting back a Cessna 310 from a small-time chartering business. "I flew down there, grabbed it and got paid for it. I didn't think anything of it," he says. "I dropped off the plane and the guy calls yelling his head off. He says, 'You didn't ask for enough money! Send me a new bill but multiply it by three!'"

A few days later, Popovich found $145,000 in his checking account. A super repo man had been born.

Sage-Popovich now has 65 super repos, ranging from former crop-dusters and commercial pilots to Marines and airport mechanics. One of Popovich's aces, Ed Dearborn, flew for Air America, the CIA's covert Vietnam-era airline, and even helped build landing strips in remote jungle outposts in Southeast Asia. A good year is five popped planes; Kevin Lacey, one of Popovich's best men, grabs 10 when he's on a roll.

Now that Popovich has worked with some of his guys for 20 years or more, he has learned to take good care of them. When Lacey was imprisoned while attempting to snatch a jet in Brazil a few years ago, Popovich made sure the local hotel shipped edible food to his cell until the legal mess could be cleared up. It was the least he could do, given the fact that Lacey had been dragged in humiliating fashion right through the passenger terminal in handcuffs. "The inmates in Brazilian jails have more guns than the police," said Lacey. "It's best to make friends with them quickly."

Because Lacey is a master mechanic, he is an invaluable resource for lenders. If a plane is sitting on blocks, its windows cracked and its avionics blown out, Lacey can fix it and fly it out. He's also pretended to be a mechanic on numerous occasions; it gets him inside the plane and up in the air a lot quicker. That plane in Brazil required the use of a "claw hammer and rusty pliers" for Lacey to fix it.

Like most super repo guys, Lacey works freelance and flies just about everything with two wings. He's certified in eight types of aircraft. The Air Force would be lucky to have him, but the repo game is far more thrilling. And a lot more lucrative.

The money is pretty good, depending on the size of the plane and the complexity of the repo. But for Lacey, the job is its own reward, despite the fact that many pilots consider it an unseemly profession. "My tact and my diligence are my greatest weapons," he says. "I have to think and react before someone else does, or I'm sunk. Often, they will be on the lookout for you, so you find yourself chasing something while someone else is chasing you."

The super repo business is extremely time-sensitive; Popovich must calibrate his maneuvers with military precision or else the entire operation crumbles. The minute Popovich gets a call, he has his team prepare a "Repo Book," which contains all of the relevant documentation necessary to take back a plane. An airport won't let you fly off with a jumbo jet without all kinds of paperwork: lease terminations, powers of attorney, customs bonds and certificates of insurance. (There's a reason Sage-Popovich has eight lawyers on retainer.) Within an hour of the initial contact, everything is accounted for, all the way down to the catering for the crew.

While the Repo Book is assembled, Popovich will get his scouts on the ground to figure out where the plane is. The company has people all over the globe who are more than happy to track down an item for him for a small fee. More often than not, the aircraft will turn up in a major airport or commercial hub, and from there it's easy sailing: Show up, hand over the documentation, get in the cockpit and fly away. Popovich estimates that three-quarters of his jobs go off exactly that way.

The rest are stickier affairs -- starring angry owners, armed security, even intransigent airport workers, who will be out tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid fuel, landing fees and maintenance costs if a plane suddenly goes missing. In that case, half the game for Popovich is sneaking on to the aircraft and flying it out before anyone's hip to what he's doing. "That's why you never, ever use the plane's two-way radio," says Popovich with a laugh. "People might get wind of your plans before you even have a chance to secure your seat belt. If you need to file a flight plan, you use your cell phone to call the tower."

One time, he pretended to be a limo driver picking up a client. When airport security turned its back, Popovich slipped off his black overcoat and eight-point chauffeur cap and finagled his way onto the plane.

Aircraft on a runway is a lot easier to grab, but the walk to the cockpit is longer than the Bataan Death March. You might as well radio the tower before walking up to a vacant jet without permission, because you're inevitably going to get busted. For a repo job in Miami, Popovich commandeered a catering truck from a friendly driver and the crew let him on board unbidden. On numerous occasions he has loaded his guys into a baggage cart, dropped the curtain and driven up to the cargo hold. From there, it's a slinky stretch on hands and knees from the luggage compartment into the cockpit.

Really tough targets require sterner measures. In 1998, Popovich was hired to repo two jets in the possession of Francois Arpels, scion of the Van Cleef and Arpels jewelry empire. Arpels had leased two Boeing MD-81s for a charter service he started called Fairlines, but failed to make his payments.

"I landed in Paris and contacted Arpels to see if we could work something out," says Popovich. "Arpels tells me, 'I'm Francois Arpels and this is Paris. You will never find the planes.' I looked him right in the eye and told him, 'Frankie, they are all but gone. Trust me.' He hated the fact that I called him Frankie. That really got under his skin."

Using his European scouts, Popovich tracked one plane in Milan; the other was sitting on the tarmac near Terminal One at Charles DeGaulle Airport. The MD-81 was covered in official-looking documentation written in French, so Popovich just ripped everything off and hopped in. Big mistake. The airport cops stopped him as he was taxiing and threw him in a cell overnight. The next day, a French magistrate had handcuffs slapped on Popovich and ordered him returned to Chicago. "I was more determined than ever to grab those damn planes," he says. "You push me, I push back harder."

A few weeks later he snuck back into the country, convinced a captain with an Air Afrique fuel bus to fill up Arpel's Boeing and flew it out. But the Milan plane was trickier. The engine was behaving erratically, and no sane person should fly a bird with a hinky engine. Popovich had a replacement engine in Munich (engine-swapping is a common occurrence in the business) and the only way to get it would be to make the 50 minute flight and pray.

As his pilot Ed Dearborn climbed to altitude, Popovich remembers sitting in the back, furtively stealing looks at that shaky equipment. "The whole time I sat there thinking, 'If that engine lets go, I'm fucked.'" When they got to Germany and opened it up, the mechanics estimated that another couple of hours of airtime and the thing would have melted down. Along with Nick and his guys.

Popovich even met his wife on a repo. He was casing an exotic car company in Chicago when a leonine blond walked in to the dealership. "We all looked at each other and said, 'A hundred bucks for the first guy that nails her,'" he says. "Twenty million dollars in business together later, here we are." The couple's two boys, Zachary, 18 and Max, 20, work for Sage-Popovich when they can. Zachary attends college and does repos in his spare time.

Popovich's daredevil days are behind him for the most part; now he's working with a new generation to do the job. He would like his two sons to go about it a little differently than he did. Maybe a bit more cautiously, for starters. He wants his son Zach to take over the business one day, but "he wants to open a bar in Sun Valley instead." He has in mind an exit strategy, though he's not sure when, if ever, he'll implement it. Life is too good to stop now. Just pick up the paper -- every day word breaks of another investor, another pyramid scheme, another crook who has a date with Popovich.

Tooling around Valparaiso in his Bentley, with Bob Dylan playing softly in the background, Popovich tries to put into words just how great it feels to pull off a big repo job. "It's like a giant chess game, and the stakes can be your life," he says. "It's always a different challenge, a test of how smart you are. Can you outfox someone else? There's always going to be some covert action involved. And you throw a big payoff in there, well, it's just intoxicating." He pauses. "Repossessing a giant, gleaming multimillion dollar plane is kind of like courting a beautiful woman. Sometimes the chase is better than the catch." And the chase is never complete.

Tags: salon, lear jets, lear jets repo man, repo man, sage-popovich, Chicago, Haiti, baby doc duvalier, gulfstream jets,

Source: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/06/06/lear_jet_repo_man/index.html?source=rss&aim=/news/feature

Posted via web from Human Capital

The Global CIO 50: IT Leaders Changing the Business World

2009-05-26T12:26:00.001-07:00

These leaders and their teams are ready to take on the world -- and the perception that tech's more about cost than innovation.

By Bob Evans - InformationWeek
May 23, 2009 (From the May 25, 2009 issue)

This is a fascinating but also precarious time to be a CIO, particularly one with global responsibilities. CIOs are being given more strategic roles than ever before, yet they're simultaneously seeing their budgets cut while expectations remain unrelenting, and of course the global recession only complicates the situation.

CIOs are being asked to drive business change while at the same time many are trying to replace old and inflexible infrastructures with modern and flexible ones. They're being given responsibility for establishing global standards in applications and related processes, but sometimes without the organizational authority to enforce those new standards. And across the globe, CIOs are fighting the stubborn perception that IT in general and CIOs and their teams in particular are cost centers rather than creators of value and accelerators of innovation.

In this best-of-times, worst-of-times scenario, CIOs can find enormous value in seeing how their peers around the world are dealing with these difficult and urgent imperatives. So InformationWeek's Global CIOhas developed a couple of projects to give you some of that global peer-level perspective:

• In the Global CIO 50, we've identified 50 of the top CIOs from around the world and profiled them and the strategic contributions they're making to their companies.

We selected CIOs and their companies based on market leadership, innovative IT-enabled business practices and results, and the achievement and impact of the individual CIOs.

• The Global CIO research report, "Small World, Big Opportunities,"is based on an exclusive, primary-research survey conducted across multiple countries to determine top priorities, approaches, and attitudes for CIOs around the world. We received more than 2,000 completed surveys, but because we wanted to focus on CIO-level reactions, we culled the 861 responses from CIOs and VPs of IT and built our study on their input. The entire study is available for sale here.

Among the key findings from our Global CIO best practices report are the three top priorities cited by CIOs from around the globe: working to spend less money on internal IT issues and more on external, customer-facing projects (our old friend, the 80/20 ratio); developing and refining new ways to capture and communicate the business value of IT efforts and expenses on global projects; and shifting the internal outlooks of worldwide IT organizations to reflect global perspectives rather than domestic ones.

And you'll see those themes reflected in the achievements of the Global CIO 50: UPS CIO Dave Barnes noting that UPS aircraft now fly more miles outside the continental United States than inside; Coca-Cola, recognizing China as its third-largest and perhaps fastest-growing global market, opening a $90 million innovation and technology center in Shanghai; LG Electronics CIO Kim Tae Keuk leading an effort to replace more than 80 different ERP systems around the world with a single, global system capturing 440 business processes; and more.

So please come meet the Global CIO 50. While it's up to you to act locally, we hope this package helps you think globally.

The Global CIO 50
Select a name below to read their profile
Jean-Michel Arès	Coca-Cola	New tools help teams borrow what works
Laxman Badiga	Wipro Technologies	Building IT for scalable software services
Dave Barnes	UPS	Technology is built from the start to be global
David Briskman	Ranbaxy Laboratories	Priorities include speeding products to market
Rob Carter	FedEx (NYSE: FDX)	Standard tech at hubs in China, Germany, U.S.
Gilberto Ceresa	Fiat Group	Digital design-to-production for speed
Laércio Albino Cezar	Banco Bradesco	Testing biometrics on its ATM machines
Ashish Chauhan	Reliance Industries	ERP used across the conglomerate's units
Chen Jinxiong	Fuzhou General Hospital	IT helps serve booming patient demand
Guy Chiarello	JPMorgan Chase	Integration and innovation drive his team's agenda
Sumit Chowdhury	Reliance Communications	Leads the telecom's IT and its IT services arm
Jody Davids	Cardinal Health	IT-driven transformation with customer focus
Dorival Dourado Jr.	Serasa	Data-driven innovation key to credit data growth
Dan Drawbaugh	Univ. of Pittsburgh Medical Center	Defies IT boundaries by driving global expansion
Feng Taichuan	Xian-Janssen Pharmaceutical	Controls cost and risk, making data accessible
Vikas Gadre	Tata Chemicals	Works with groups outside India, especially on ERP
Arun Gupta	Shoppers Stop	Leads IT for retail stores and heads a business unit
Michael Heim	Eli Lilly	R&D portfolio now managed globally, centralized
Mark Hennessy	IBM (NYSE: IBM)	Global IT plan: Simplification before automation
John Hinshaw	Boeing	IT critical to complex global supply chain
Yasuyoshi Katayama	NTT Group	Focused on next-gen networks and new businesses
Kim Tae Keuk	LG Electronics	Business needs process expert, not "technician"
Daniel Lebeau	GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals	Getting vaccine test data out of Africa -- faster
Li Hong	Sinosteel	IT key to move to services and related businesses
Liu Zhixuan	Shenzhen Airlines	Data helps segment customers, offers new services
Alan Matula	Royal Dutch Shell	Innovator in unified communications worldwide
Sunil Mehta	JWT	Brings innovations of global ad company to India
Jai Menon	Bharti Enterprises	IT leader on businesses from wireless to agriculture
Jedey Miranda	Eaton Latin America	IT innovation is part of growth plan
Jonathan Mitchell	Rolls-Royce	CIO and director of business process improvement
Randy Mott	Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ)	After transformation, pushing to the next level
Tania Nossa	Alcoa Brazil	Network reaches mines in the Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) forest
Filippo Passerini	Procter & Gamble	IT "consumption reports" saved $3.5 million
Christopher Perretta	State Street	Align IT with customers, not "the business"
Steve Phillips	Avnet	From regional IT teams to a unified, global team
Wilson Maciel Ramos	Gol	Innovation's baked into the tech strategy
J.P. Rangaswami	BT Group	Has brought people in from beyond telecom
Haider Rashid	ABB Group	Driving to make a more simplified organization
Toby Redshaw	Aviva	Web 2.0 push typical of "big and agile" philosophy
Anantha Sayana	Larsen & Toubro	Measures business-IT alignment in each division
Manjit Singh	Chiquita	Bottom-line discipline, SaaS believer
David Smoley	Flextronics	Connecting global supply chains, driving SaaS
Song Shiliang	Giant Interactive Group	Tech is central to online game company's strategy
Ralph Szygenda	General Motors	Rewriting the rule book for outsourcing
Steve Tso	Taiwan Semiconductor	Experience from marketing to R&D to IT
Patrick Vandenberghe	ArcelorMittal	After megamerger, apps need consolidating
Pravir Vohra	ICICI Bank Group	Leading IT and process automation strategy
Wu Dawei	JuneYao Group	Modernized call center, infrastructure, services
Zhang Jun	Li Ning	Retailer integrates design, supply chains, retail
Zheng Jiancheng	Belide Group	Sales data drives short fashion product cycles

Source : http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217600529&cid=nl_IWK_report_html

Posted via email from Human Capital

Longer Working Lives Expected

2009-05-26T12:02:00.001-07:00

Opinions shift as longer working lives favoured
By Norma Cohen
Published: May 26 2009

A majority of Britons now favour longer working lives if it means a more generous pension in retirement, a significant shift of opinion in the few years since the subject was raised by the Pensions Commission report in 2005.

A Financial Times/Harris survey of 1,126 adults in Britain conducted in early May, found that 60 per cent of respondents would support working beyond the current state pension age in order to receive a bigger pension.

Moreover, the survey found, only 13 per cent of respondents described themselves as "strongly opposed" to such a policy, suggesting that the nation may finally be ready to debate one of its long-cherished pillars of the social safety net: retirement at age 65.

If so, it would be good news for a government whose official estimate of the amount it needs to borrow this year is £175bn and whose credit rating received a negative outlook from Standard & Poor's, a warning sign that Britain's triple A rating may be under threat.

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research recently estimated that adding five years to working lives by raising state social security ages could help the UK return to a level of debt below the "golden Rule" of 40 per cent of gross domestic product by 2023.

However, retirement ex-perts say there is much more at stake than simply restoring the nation's finances to a sound footing. Ros Altmann, a specialist in pensions economics, said Britain needed a rethink that goes well beyond the state pension.
"Pensions alone cannot solve the pensions crisis," she said. "We need to rethink retirement".

For one thing, Britain's demographics point towards the path of economic decline unless older people can be kept in the workforce because the country is not producing enough young workers to keep the nation economically productive.

Ms Altman said part of the problem was that the concept of retirement was viewed far too rigidly, with the expectation people go from full employment on a Friday and zero employment by the following Monday.

Reforms were badly needed, she said, to make it easier for older workers to slip into part-time from full-- time employment and to re-train. The best model, she said, was the flexible rules that now made it possible for mothers of young children to stay out of employment temporarily but still be reassured they could return.

"Age policy and retirement policy are stuck in the 1940s," she said.

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/de0d9964-498d-11de-9e19-00144feabdc0.html

Posted via email from Human Capital

Federal Workers Value Bosses Who Listen

2009-05-23T12:37:00.001-07:00

WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) -- A boss who listens is better than higher pay, U.S. federal workers indicated in a study.

A new comprehensive survey of the federal workforce performed by the Partnership for Public Service, described as a non-partisan group devoted to improving public service, indicated strong leadership and straight answers from bosses are the biggest keys to a successful U.S. government workplace, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The study found government workers were happiest at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with the Government Accountability Office, NASA, the intelligence community and the State Department also scoring high on the list.

The staff at the NRC "are the real human resourcesmanagers," Jim McDermott, director of human resources for the commission, told the Post. "I lead a lazy life."

Meanwhile, the agencies with the least satisfied workers include the Transportation Department, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Homeland Security Department and the Education Department, the newspaper reported.

Source: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/05/20/Federal-workers-value-bosses-that-listen/UPI-94681242844761/

Posted via web from Human Capital

How David Beats Goliath

2009-05-23T12:13:00.001-07:00

A non-stop full-court press gives weak basketball teams a chance against far stronger teams. Why have so few adopted it?

ANNALS OF INNOVATION

When underdogs break the rules.

by Malcolm Gladwell

When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself.

A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley.

These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time.

The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south fromDamascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.

But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina “on the defensive, immobile.” There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection toDamascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.

The Bedouins under Lawrence’s command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them “an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle.”

But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer.

“Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,” Lawrence wrote. “Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.”

The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, andLawrence’s troops were all legs. In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited eleven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twice on April 6th.

Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom” of one stage in the journey:

We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks, and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence’s great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

Vivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine-boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous walk. His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of India’s planes. Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.

In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as “real time” processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he’s “batch processing.” There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé’s company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBCO’s software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two.

“Everything in the world is now real time,” he said.

“So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.”

Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.

Is it any wonder that Ranadivé looked at the way basketball was played and found it mindless? A professional basketball game was forty-eight minutes long, divided up into alternating possessions of roughly twenty seconds: back and forth, back and forth. But a good half of each twenty-second increment was typically taken up with preliminaries and formalities. The point guard dribbled the ball up the court. He stood above the top of the key, about twenty-four feet from the opposing team’s basket. He called out a play that the team had choreographed a hundred times in practice. It was only then that the defending team sprang into action, actively contesting each pass and shot.

Actual basketball took up only half of that twenty-second interval, so that a game’s real length was not forty-eight minutes but something closer to twenty-four minutes—and that twenty-four minutes of activity took place within a narrowly circumscribed area. It was as formal and as convention-bound as an eighteenth-century quadrille. The supporters of that dance said that the defensive players had to run back to their own end, in order to compose themselves for the arrival of the other team. But the reason they had to compose themselves, surely, was that by retreating they allowed the offense to execute a play that it had practiced to perfection. Basketball was batch!

Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent. “And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine,” the Bible says. “And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead.” The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. “The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.” Pinsky calls David a “point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there.” David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

Ranadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division, representingRedwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a series of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, the former all-pro running back for the San Francisco 49ers, who is also TIBCO’s director of business development. As a football player, Craig was legendary for the off-season hill workouts he put himself through. Most of his N.F.L. teammates are now hobbling around golf courses. He has run seven marathons. After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who played Division I basketball at Duke and U.S.C. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to shut her down. The girls loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”

Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end.Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball.

The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”

The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.

“What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. She helped out onceRedwood City advanced to the regional championships. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defense we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said.

Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—the railroad—and not where they were strong, Medina.Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one.Lawrence extended the battlefield over as large an area as possible. So did the girls of Redwood City. They defended all ninety-four feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence . . . courage.”

“It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a TIBCO conference room, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.

“My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadivé said.

“He used to make them run,” Craig said, nodding approvingly.

“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.”

He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?” The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison, “One, two, three, ATTITUDE!”

That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

“One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not One, two three, ATTITUDE. It’s One, two, three, attitude HAH ’ ”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.

On January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn’t lost since December of 1969.

Their record was 11–1. The Redmen’s star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five.

Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. “We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way,” Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. “These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack.” Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn’t matter. Fordham won, 87–79.

In the world of basketball, there is one story after another like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. People look at upsets like Fordham over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers—and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing insurgent basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath. If Fordham had played UMass the conventional way, it would have lost by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the basketball establishment.

What did Digger Phelps do, the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not.

The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn’t play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, thirty-eight years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. “They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I’d ever seen,” Pitino said. “Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage.”

Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop,Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams.

They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. At the University of Kentucky, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to the Final Four three times—and won a national championship—with full-court pressure, and then rode the full-court press back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No. 1 in the land. College coaches of Pitino’s calibre typically have had numerous players who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the professional level. In his many years of coaching, Pitino has had one, Antoine Walker. It doesn’t matter. Every year, he racks up more and more victories.

“The greatest example of the press I’ve ever coached was my Kentucky team in ’96, when we played L.S.U.,” Pitino said. He was at the athletic building at the University of Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he watches tapes of opponents’ games. “Do we have that tape?” Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close to one of the monitors. The game began with Kentucky stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.’s end. Immediately, the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to the basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back.Kentucky stole it again. Another easy basket by Walker. “Walker had almost thirty points at halftime,” Pitino said. “He dunked it almost every time. When we steal, he just runs to the basket.” The Kentucky players were lightning quick and long-armed, and swarmed around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was mayhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking.

Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state. “See if you find one play that L.S.U. managed to run,” Pitino said. You couldn’t. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-court, and on those occasions when they managed both those things they were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. “We had eighty-six points at halftime,” Pitino went on—eighty-six points being, of course, what college basketball teams typically score in an entire game. “And I think we’d forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime,” twenty-three turnovers being what college basketball teams might force in two games. “I love watching this,” Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “Every day, you dream about getting a team like this again.” So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does?

Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times.

In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless.

In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence’s long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.

“I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press,” Pitino said.

Louisville was the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. “Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can’t do it. They don’t know if they have the bench. They don’t know if the players can last.” Pitino shook his head. “We practice every day for two hours straight,” he went on. “The players are moving almost ninety-eight per cent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections”—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instruction—“they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working.” Seven seconds! The coaches who came to Louisville sat in the stands and watched that ceaseless activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David’s rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.

In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”

Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.

The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.

Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences “Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison,” but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—“Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted.” Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko’s victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.

“Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.

This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.

T. E. Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one one all his life. And David, let’s not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn’t know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords.

“When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches,” David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.

The trouble for Redwood City started early in the regular season. The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn’t playing fair—that it wasn’t right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City’s lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.

“There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot,” Ranadivé said. “He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up.”

Roger Craig says that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. “The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs—‘That’s a foul! That’s a foul!’ But we weren’t fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense.”

“My girls were all blond-haired white girls,” Ranadivé said. “My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she’s half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn’t even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get.” Ranadivé shook his head: never, ever raise your voice. “Finally, the ref physically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn’t stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them.”

At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o’clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six, to beat the traffic. It was downhill from there. The referee did not believe in “One, two, three, attitude HAH.” He didn’t think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.

“They were touch fouls,” Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.

“My girls didn’t understand,” Ranadivé said. “The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team.”

“People were booing,” Craig said. “It was bad.”

“A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?” Ranadivé shook his head.

“One girl fouled out.”

“We didn’t get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But . . .”

Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end, and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. They did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and they lost—but not before making Goliath wonder whether he was a giant, after all.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

Neurologist Offers Guide to Healthier, Smarter Brain

2009-05-22T12:15:00.001-07:00

Putting on extra pounds can negatively affect brain health

By Faiza Elmasry
Washington, D.C.
22 May 2009

Did you know that your brain gets better the more you use it? Throughout your life, it undergoes changes in structure and function, in ways that are influenced by your life experiences.

In Think Smart, Dr. http://richardrestak.com/');">Richard Restak - a clinical professor of neurology at the George Washington University Medical School who has written more than 18 books about the human brain - takes a fresh look at this wondrous and mysterious organ. He says we've learned more about the human brain in the last decade than we have in the previous two centuries.

Obesity: Bad for body, brain

For example, it's long been common knowledge that what's good for your heart is also good for your brain. Now, Restak says, recent studies have shown why obesity - already a known danger to the heart - is also bad for the brain.

"Obesity is now recognized as the No. 1, if least high up on that list of the causes of dementia that will lead to loss of brain functions," he says. "So it's important to get one's weight under control, to keep blood pressure under control, as well as cholesterol, and all these things because they create problems with the blood vessels feeding the brain."

So Restak recommends a variation on the Mediterranean diet, which is rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, cereals, fish and olive oil. Restak says physical activity is also important.

"You have to think of something that you really like doing, because exercise creates new path lines, new vessels around the neurons and increases interconnections," he says. "It also elevates what's called the nerve growth factor, which is a tonic, you can think of, which helps brain cells growing and be nurtured. It doesn't have to be any great amount of exercise. Walking a mile two or three times a week will decrease your chances of Alzheimer's about 30 percent."

Another recommendation on Restak's brain-enhancing plan of action: taking short naps.

"It's been found that napping in the afternoon during the workday for about half an hour is tremendously a rejuvenating ability force that enables us to restructure the brain, make consolidation and enhancement of new knowledge," he says. "So things like that are new and were not really recognized previously."

Rewire your mind

And just as you can improve your brain's health, Restak says you can improve its function. He says we're not born with a fixed level of intelligence. People can raise their IQ by reading great works of literature, expanding their areas of interest or simply increasing their vocabulary.

In his new book Think Smart, Dr. Richard Restak explains how we can increase brain health and function

"You get new words every day," he says. "For instance, my word of the day is 'evadible,' meaning it's something that can be avoided. So, you can use that and work it into a sentence: It was an evadible situation."

The human brain, Restak says, is able to continually adapt and rewire itself. He points to multitasking as a good example. Our brain's neural wiring is not designed to perform two different tasks at the same time and with the same level of efficiency. But it can, with training.

"It's already being seen as a change factor in the military where people who have had a lot of experience with video games are moving rapidly in the military in terms of doing things that require a lot of eye-hand coordination, which the younger person has achieved through their video game experience," he says. "And they are so good at this that they have been able to outperform someone who is of a higher rank and a longer military experience."

Mapping a path to better health

Keeping your mind active and flexible has long-term benefits, too. Restak says working to improve your memory may be crucial in preventing Alzheimer's disease.

Keeping your body active and your mind sharp can help you as you age

He says people can sharpen their memory by doing mental exercises and games, such as visualizing a map of their surroundings.

"I just go through my house, local library, I see it in my mind," he says. "So as I walk [mentally] from one place to another, I see the objects that I'm trying to remember. So it's as simple as it can be. You need just to set your own 10 places. See them clearly. Then try to remember. Take one object and exaggerate it, whether it's your house or a library or whatever it may be."

Restak presents several other brain exercises.

"Let's say I ask you about the presidents of the country, a number of prime ministers or presidents as far as you can recall," he says. "Then, I would ask you to recite them in terms of their political affiliation. Then recite them in order according to alphabet staring with A and going as far as you need."

In Think Smart, Restak emphasizes that while severe mental decline is usually caused by disease, age-related memory loss can be the result of inactivity and a lack of mental exercise and stimulation. He urges readers to pay attention to everything they see, hear and do, and continually try to learn new skills. Restak's main message is a simple one: The best way to keep your brain healthy is to use it.

Source: http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2009-05-22-voa18.cfm

Posted via web from Human Capital

China Answers Global Crisis with New Labor Market Policies

2009-05-21T07:49:00.001-07:00

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Many countries have adopted plans designed to help their economies recover from the global financial crisis. Unfortunately, those have mostly concentrated on saving banks and companies on the one hand, and on stimulating consumption on the other. Amazingly, there has been relatively little emphasis on the labor market policies needed to save jobs and protect wages. One wonders who is meant to do all the consuming if unemployment keeps rising and wages keep falling (at least in real terms)?

The FLA has been drawn to the impact the crisis is having at the bottom-end of the global supply chain, far from the banks and brokerage houses where the crisis first erupted. The countries that make the consumer goods that our consumption-driven economic bubble fed on have experienced a tsunami of factory closures and layoffs. In an attempt to help buyers, suppliers and worker representatives deal with that tsunami, the FLA has been on the ground in a few locations convening meetings to see how governments, employers and trade unions can work together to handle retrenchments in a socially responsible way.

Recently, the FLA was in Guanzhou, China, where we conducted a meeting that brought together a major brand-name buyer, its local suppliers and representatives from the Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) for this purpose. This type of discussion has really been eroded in many countries around the globe, but in China the crisis is strengthening this collaborative process.

Protecting jobs to preserve social harmony

In China, 20 million migrant workers had no jobs to return to after the Chinese new year, creating social pressures that could not be ignored. The government and social partners have adopted a two-prong strategy to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs and loss of wages in order to maintain social stability. One prong involves measures to reduce employers' statutory labor costs. The other involves increased vigilance by local authorities and trade unions toward companies who are not paying wages or are closing their doors without meeting their legal obligations. New regulations and policy statements from the government feature a carrot and sticks approach.

Tripartite cooperation has been very much in evidence in the Chinese response. On January 23, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and the China Enterprise Association issued a joint statement urging employers to avoid or reduce mass layoffs by reducing wage costs, placing workers on leave or adopting flexible working arrangements. This was followed on February 3 by a notice from the State Council that advised local governments to cut employment costs through temporary measures such as reducing social security rates or even suspending the payment of social security premiums altogether. Tax breaks are to be offered to companies in economic trouble.

Labor law enforcement and labor relations also feature prominently. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security has advised local governments to establish a wage arrears reporting system: if a company finds itself constrained to pay wages, then it is obliged to negotiate an agreement with its union or workers’ representatives and to file a report with the local labor and social security office.

Local authorities also have been instructed to crack-down on companies that are not paying wages, as reflected in new rules issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security in January. The measures go as far as stating that shareholders or holding companies will be held liable if the company is shuttered without meeting the company's liabilities to workers. Foreign-owned companies may even be pursued in countries that have reciprocal agreements with China.

Handling retrenchments in a socially responsible way

At our meeting in Guanzhou, we learned more of the nuts and bolts of how China was managing the crisis. Contrary to speculation, representatives from government agencies explained that China was not permitting the highly protective provisions of the Labor Contract Law and Minimum Wage regulations to be breached. The ACFTU representatives pointed out, however, that the Minimum Wage is based on an 8-hour day and if companies put workers on short time, they only need to pay a proportional share of the minimum wage. The law allows companies to go down to 75% of the minimum wage. They also noted that workers who are on short time, forced holidays or alternative work arrangements, such as job sharing, can receive training paid for by the Government.

The company participants were surprised to learn that employers facing economic difficulties could apply to the Government for a moratorium or reduction in Social Security payments. No one could tell us, however, whether the employer would have to pay the backlog when the moratorium is lifted.

The ACFTU representatives were very engaged and stated that they were open to negotiating (or re-negotiating) collective bargaining agreements to reflect such new arrangements. The ACFTU had already negotiated a number of short-time agreements with foreign-invested companies, we were told, and was open to approaches from employers. Their only concern was that any changes to work arrangements (and hence wages) be negotiated.

As one would expect in China, the negotiation approach had been piloted in a designated area before being applied more widely. A city in Guangdong Province had been chosen to test out collective agreements with special provisions regarding wages, working hours, labor protection, women workers and work-related welfare. Agreements were negotiated at a select group of enterprises and then submitted for a number of rounds of broader consultation before being finalized. Draft agreements were then distributed to enterprises for their use. One of the provisions relates to transparency about the financial and business situation of the enterprise. Once an agreement has been concluded it is registered with the local labor office.

The FLA has agreed to continue to bring together the parties concerned at both the provincial and the national level to discuss socially responsible retrenchment. The next such meeting will be held in Jiangsu province in June. You can read more China’s National and Local Labor Market Policies on the FLA website.

Source: http://flaglobalaction.blogspot.com/2009/05/china-answers-global-crisis-with-new.html

Posted via web from Human Capital

Asians Not Rising To Heights Of Silicon Valley

2009-05-20T19:09:00.001-07:00

By Mike Swift

Mercury News

Posted: 05/19/2009

In Silicon Valley, "Asian" and "success" often seem synonymous.

Asians lead all racial groups in levels of education and income, and they are a quarter or more of undergraduates at elite universities like Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley. Last week, the Census Bureau said Santa Clara County had the largest annual Asian population growth in the United States — for the third successive year.

But an eye-opening first-of-its-kind "census" of local executives shows that while Asians make up more than a third of the work force at some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies, they are far less prominent in the boardroom or the highest executive offices: Asians represent about 6 percent of board members and about 10 percent of corporate officers of the Bay Area's 25 largest companies.

Among the 25 largest Bay Area companies by revenue, 12 had no Asian board members, and five had no Asian corporate officers, according to the new study. Despite the growing prominence of Asians at Silicon Valley tech companies — Asians are least 23 percent of the work force at Cisco Systems, Intel, Sun Microsystems, eBay and Advanced Micro Devices, according to a Mercury News review of documents filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — they have made no gains in the share of seats on the boards of large tech companies since 1999.

"There is an underlying belief in the Asian community that there is a corporate glass ceiling," said Buck Gee, a retired Cisco vice president and former Silicon Valley CEO who co-authored the study. He and Wes Hom, a retired IBM vice president who was also the senior chair of the company's Asian Diversity Task Force program, built their survey from company data on Web sites and SEC filings from the third quarter of 2008. "This has been talked about in the Asian community for a long time."

Gee began asking where all the Asian CEOs were back in 2006, when the resignation of two Chinese vice presidents caused him take a look around at Cisco. To his shock, he realized he was the only Chinese vice president in the San Jose networking giant's product development organization.

"I thought, 'That can't be right,' " Gee said. But it was.

Asians are better represented among the leadership of Bay Area companies compared with all Fortune 500 companies, Gee and Hom say, but the Bay Area also has the highest percentage Asian population among the nation's big metro areas. They place much of the blame for Asian non-advancement not on big companies, but on limiting factors within Asian culture and the failure of Asian executives to mentor talented younger colleagues.

"It's mostly our fault,"

Gee said of the small numbers of Asians at the helm of the Bay Area's biggest companies. "It's mostly up to us to figure out the skills we need to develop, and to get those skills."

The issue is front and center at a forum today at The Indus Entrepreneurs in Santa Clara, featuring a panel including Gee and executives from Cisco, Intel and Nektar. The forum, along with Gee and Hom's research, is a joint program with the Asia Society of Northern California and Ascend, an Asian business group.

Gee and Hom and a small group of executives are organizing a Corporate Executive Initiative, hoping to work with Bay Area companies to foster the career development of promising younger Asian workers.

The executive census and a related paper — "The Failure of Asian Success in the Bay Area" — say several social factors hold Asian managers back, including cultural deference to superiors, which U.S. managers may view as a worker lacking confidence or knowledge; a lack of strong English skills; and a failure of some Asian workers to invest enough effort in networking.

While East Asian cultures and educational systems tend to encourage technical excellence and respect for authority, they may not do as good a job developing leadership and communication skills, Gee and Hom say.

"The culture says you don't have to raise your hand — just do a good job," Hom said.

Among the 100 largest Bay Area companies, Gee and Hom found 13 Asian CEOs. But six were the founders of their company.

The list of companies without Asian corporate officers includes Apple, AMD and Symantec, according to the study. The list of companies without an Asian board member includes Intel, Oracle, Chevron, eBay and Symantec.

Given the high-profile successes of a few Asian entrepreneurs like Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, and with so many Asians who are mid-level managers, the lack of top executives is "a problem hidden in plain view," the study says.

"Everybody agrees this is the case, but very few Asians are willing to come out and make a stink about it," said Jane Hyun, an executive coach and multicultural leadership strategist, and the author of "The Bamboo Ceiling," a 2005 book about the limits on Asian career advancement. "You don't see an Asian Al Sharpton-type figure out there. You don't see people making waves that we haven't really reached these positions."

Cisco, which has one Asian board member, is trying to unearth the management talents of its Asian workers.

The company has created a "Cisco Asian Affinity Network," which helps employees develop their business, communication and influence skills. "Diversity and inclusion is a top priority for Cisco," said spokesman Ken Lotich, echoing the statements of many companies.

Hyun and others say the situation is not limited to business. At Stanford University, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate Class of 2008. But university officials acknowledge they have no record of having an Asian academic administrator above the level of department head in the school's history.

Gee and Hom say their goal is to launch a dialogue about how Asians can fully contribute their business talents.

Nevertheless, Hyun said U.S. business culture can limit Asian advancement if existing leaders are unfamiliar with leadership styles from other parts of the world.

"Organizations want you to demonstrate leadership in a certain way," Hyun said.

"There is definitely a pressure to be like the senior leaders that are already in place."

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_12404879?nclick_check=1

Posted via web from Human Capital

Google Searches for Staffing Answers

2009-05-19T18:10:00.001-07:00

Associated Press-

Current and former Googlers said the company is losing talent because some employees feel they can't make the same impact as the company matures.

By SCOTT MORRISON

Concerned a brain drain could hurt its long-term ability to compete, Google Inc. is tackling the problem with its typical tool: an algorithm.

The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.

Applying a complex equation to a basic human-resource problem is pure Google, a company that made using heavy data to drive decisions one of its "Ten Golden Rules" outlined in 2005.

Edward Lawler, director of the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, said Google is one of a few companies that are early in taking a more quantitative approach to personnel decisions.

"They are clearly ahead of the curve, but a lot of companies are waking up to the fact that there is a lot of modeling that can provide you with critical data on human capital," Mr. Lawler said.

The move is one of a series Google has made to prevent its most promising engineers, designers and sales executives from leaving at a time when its once-powerful draws -- a start-up atmosphere and soaring stock price -- have been diluted by its growing size. The data crunching supplements more traditional measures like employee training and leadership meetings to evaluate talent.

Google's algorithm helps the company "get inside people's heads even before they know they might leave," said Laszlo Bock, who runs human resources for the company.

Concerns about a talent exodus have revived in recent weeks amid the departures of top executives, including advertising sales boss Tim Armstrong and display-advertising chief David Rosenblatt. Meanwhile, midlevel employees like lead designer Doug Bowman, engineering director Steve Horowitz and search-quality chief Santosh Jayaram continue to decamp to hot start-ups like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.

Current and former Googlers said the company is losing talent because some employees feel they can't make the same impact as the company matures. Several said Google provides little formal career planning, and some found the company's human-resources programs too impersonal.

"They need to come up with ways to keep people engaged," said Valerie Frederickson, a Silicon Valley personnel consultant who has worked with former Google employees. "If Google was doing this enough, they wouldn't be losing all these people."

Google spokesman Matt Furman said the chance to contribute to "constant and often amazing innovation" keeps employees engaged. The company is determined to retain top product managers and engineers.

Google wouldn't say how many people have left, but says it has managed to hang on to its most important staffers. "We haven't seen the most critical people leave," Mr. Bock said.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124269038041932531.html

Posted via web from Human Capital

Stanford's Free iPhone Course Hits 1 Million Downloads

2009-05-19T18:08:00.001-07:00

May 18, 2009 12:43 PM PDT

by Jim Dalrymple

Stanford University on Monday said its free iPhone Application Programming course has been downloaded more than 1 million times since being uploaded to Apple's iTunes U--a learning-focused area of iTunes--seven weeks ago.

The course is a series of classroom videos taken from the live lectures at Stanford. Apple engineers teach the course to students in an auditorium at Stanford's Quad--the videos are uploaded to iTunes U two days after every class, giving the public free access to the material. The university even makes copies of the slides shown during the class available to the public.

Jason Ediger, Apple's director of iTunes U and Mobile Learning, said this is the fastest any course hit the million download mark on iTunes U. Certainly a testament to the amount of interest from would-be iPhone developers

Apple currently has over 40,000 apps available for download from the App Store, according to numbers from 148 Apps, an enthusiast Web site that monitors the number of apps on the store.

iPhone Application Programming is a 10-week course and can be downloaded free from iTunes U. Only students enrolled in the classroom course will receive credit, according to the university.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10243639-37.html

Posted via web from Human Capital

Should Google Just Keep Hiring?

2009-05-19T18:06:00.001-07:00

May 18, 2009

Earlier this year, much hullabaloo was made about Google’s capital allocation decisions. While the traditional acquisitions, cash used in investing activities, and minimum guaranteed payments for ad inventory (i.e. MySpace) were scrutinized, particular media attention was placed on Google’s rate of hiring.

Well, according to recent analysis done by Pingdom, maybe the headcount worries were a little premature. In fact, while overhead costs may be increasing, Google remains the most profitable business on a per employee basis amongst all of its peers thus proving out the scalability of a web services business model.

While the fact that Google is remarkably profitable on a per-employee basis is somewhat reassuring, attention must still be paid to how well the Company is able to maintain this level of profitability. The law of diminishing marginal returns dictates that eventually new hires will become less and less profitable. Moreover, the value of investing in the overhead necessary to support new employees may no longer be worth the return. From the looks of it, Google is nowhere near confronting this dilemma as of yet, but clearly market participants were on edge over the idea of hiring during a recession.

Why would investors worry about investing in human capital for earnings growth? Remember, stock ownership represents a claim on the residual cash flows of a business. That means that as an investor, you have an indirect claim to the money a business makes. Now, because public companies are owned by many decentralized shareholders, decisions are made by a representative board of directors and a management team entrusted to make decisions on your behalf.

For many businesses, a significant portion of earnings is reinvested in the business to promote future growth. In the case of Google, a non-dividend paying stock, this means that all the present value you could derive from holding the stock is being reinvested rather than delivered directly to you in the form of a dividend. Since you could just as well have taken that money and invested it elsewhere for a given return, management at Google must prove that it is using your money wisely by reinvesting in various areas.

Profitability per employee is just one metric that you can use to gauge the successfulness of a management team. More interesting might be profit margin percentage per employee which would be an interesting approximation of return on human assets.

More traditionally, investors are interested in more holistic measures like Return on Invested Capital or Return on Equity. To read more about how to properly assess management capital allocation decisions check out my post on, “Finding Stocks with Great Management Teams.”

Source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/138184-should-google-just-keep-hiring

Posted via web from Human Capital

70% of Employees Work Overtime, Skip Lunch

2009-05-18T22:40:00.001-07:00

Friday, May 15, 2009

Boston Business Journal - by Crystal Jarvis Bizjournals Staff

More American workers are skipping lunch breaks and working longer hours to boost their careers, according to a survey published by the Society for Human Resource Management.

About 72 percent of employees across the nation said they work through lunch, while 70 percent report working beyond a 40-hour workweek and working at home on the weekends, according to the survey dubbed “Pressure to Work: The Employees’ Perspective.”

The poll, which questioned U.S. workers about sick leave, flex time and work arrangements, found that more than half, about 52 percent, of participants admitted that “self-imposed pressure” was the main reason for working overtime, while 44 percent cite “meeting project or performance goals.”

Only 21 percent of people polled said pressure from their immediate supervisor was the reason for working extra hours. Even fewer, about 12 percent, said pressure from top management executives as a source of pressure. Another 12 percent said advancing their individual career goals was the motivation for working extra hours.

Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2009/05/11/daily52.html

Posted via web from Human Capital

Towers Perrin Launches Global Human Capital Metrics Database

2009-05-18T22:27:00.001-07:00

GETTY IMAGES

Towers Perrin announces the launch of a global Human Capital Metrics Database to support human capital decisions

TORONTO, May 14 /CNW/ -

In today's challenging economy, as companies seek ways to reduce labour costs while improving productivity and performance, many are struggling to find meaningful data and insights to support their human capital decisions. Although the business risks of making the wrong decisions are significant, there hasn't been a source of global, industry-specific data, benchmarks and analytics to support such decisions.

To help close this gap, Towers Perrin, a global professional services firm, is launching a global Human Capital Metrics Database. This database will provide benchmarks and metrics in such areas as talent, rewards and the HR function, as well as industry-specific productivity measures, such as sales per square foot for retailers and premiums per employee for insurers.

"Organizations are moving beyond the 'thousand points of data' approach that has traditionally been used to assess the efficiency of the HR function, and are now seeking sophisticated business tools to provide precise and reliable data to support strategic human capital decisions," said Keri Alletson, Towers Perrin. "People practices and investments are fundamental to business' long-term health and bottom-line. In this economic environment, more than ever, the provision of actionable data is critical."

The Human Capital Metrics Database will focus on four key areas to support enhanced decision making for participating companies:

- Human Capital Productivity - financial and industry-specific workforce

productivity measures

- Talent Management - talent measures for key industry-specific

workforce segments and the overall employee population, covering such

areas as attraction, retention, engagement, leadership development,

wellness and safety

- Total Labour Costs - efficiency of reward programs

- HR Function Performance - efficiency and effectiveness of HR service

delivery.

“Being able to more precisely quantify workforce cost and value relative to business outcomes can provide companies with a real competitive advantage," said Alletson.

"New technology and sources of data provide focused information to support short- and long-term business decision making. Companies are able to make more informed and strategic decisions to improve performance by understanding the real business value of human capital investments. In today's economy - this could provide a head start when the economy turns around."

Organizations interested in participating in the 2009 Human Capital Metrics database can learn more by visiting www.towersperrin.com downloading our brochure or emailing the firm at HCM@towersperrin.com.

About Towers Perrin

Towers Perrin is a global professional services firm that helps organizations improve performance through effective people, risk and financial management. The firm provides innovative solutions in the areas of human capital strategy, program design and management, and in the areas of risk and capital management, insurance and reinsurance intermediary services, and actuarial consulting. Towers Perrin has offices and alliance partners in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Latin America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East. More information about Towers Perrin is available at www.towersperrin.com.

Source: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/May2009/14/c3973.html

Posted via web from Human Capital

Help Wanted: Top Managers in China

2008-06-03T22:47:00.001-07:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120940666051950223.html?mod=djemasialinks

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/18/business/wbjoe19.php

How Google Fuels Its Idea Factory

2008-05-03T21:33:00.000-07:00

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_19/b4083054277984.htm?chan=rss_topEmailedStories_ssi_5