Changing the game: “How I beat Watson and came out a different player”
Two-time Jeopardy! champ Greg Lindsay knew that beating IBM’s quiz show–playing computer would be hard. What he didn’t expect was how much it would change the way he played.
FEBRUARY 2011 • Greg Lindsay
..When the producers of Jeopardy! e-mailed me in October 2009 to ask if I wanted to spar against Watson, its game show–savvy supercomputer, my first thought was: “I’m going to lose.” My apprehension was reinforced several months later while signing the hefty nondisclosure agreement after noting that no one who had won more than two episodes of the show was allowed to face off against the machine. (I had won twice the previous fall.) It was then that I realized I was the trivia equivalent of chum, fated to be tossed overboard as bait for a still-adolescent Watson.
In the months before Watson faced off against his primary human opponents, 74-time champ Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, the quiz show’s highest-earnings player, IBM recruited several hundred former contestants to playtest it on all of the soft skills required to win at Jeopardy!, including buzzer speed and betting strategy. The sparring matches were staged in a mock studio off the lobby of the company’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center (named after IBM’s founder), in Yorktown Heights, New York, where the real-life Watson’s famous dictum “THINK” is mounted in the lobby. The building’s vintage 1960s, Eero Saarinen–designed interiors are reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which felt appropriate, considering we had come to see a modern-day HAL.
The studio had been hastily constructed in the room adjacent to Watson’s hardware, a cluster of IBM POWER7 servers comprising 2,880 processing cores stuffed full—really full—of facts and algorithms. His brains were hidden behind a curtain and double-paned windows, the dull roar of his cooling fans still faintly audible. As far as actual game play was concerned, verisimilitude was the goal—the contestant podiums and buzzers were near-perfect replicas of those on the show, and IBM had even hired an archly funny host (actor Todd Alan Crain) to stand in for real host Alex Trebek.
What we didn’t know at the time was that IBM and Jeopardy!’s owners at Sony Pictures Entertainment had been battling for months over the details of the televised matches, including whether Watson would need to buzz with an electro-mechanical hand or not (he would). It had been Jeopardy!’s decision to stall Watson’s development by feeding it substandard opponents at first.
How Watson “thinks” has been covered at length elsewhere, most notably in Stephen Baker’s recent book, Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), and in the NOVA episode “Smartest Machine on Earth.” My sparring rounds also make an appearance in Baker’s book, in which he describes me “thrashing” Watson. In fact, I won all three of my matches against the machine—his only opponent to do so.
While I was pleased to win, what stands out for me about our matches is how easily Watson trained me to play the game his way. Yes, I won, but my confrontation with an alien mind changed me as a player.
To beat Watson, I was convinced I’d need to play a perfect game. His speed on the buzzer would be lightning-fast, and with a full 30 seconds to calculate an answer in Final Jeopardy, I feared he would be invincible. My only hope was to steer him into categories where the clues would be full of allusions and wordplay—and pray that the semantic difficulty would trip him up long enough for me to buzz in first and bet big. Otherwise, he would wage a war of attrition, strip-mining clues off the board as I fell further and further behind. I would need to beat him to the Daily Doubles in order to launch the Hail Marys that would keep me in contention—and guarantee a lead going into Final Jeopardy.
The only problem with this strategy is that Watson’s assumed weaknesses were my weaknesses as well. Classic Jeopardy! categories like Rhyme Time and Before & After added an extra cognitive step that usually threw me off. My own style of play, which I had developed over a decade of playing Quiz Bowl (the team trivia format that had evolved from the old “GE College Bowl”), was to read the clues in two seconds or less, and only buzz if I immediately knew the answer, or had a strong guess—in other words, a practically subconscious series of calculations that produced an answer which “felt” right. (For example, during the first of my three televised appearances, I was trailing by a very large margin when I selected the last clue on the board, the final Daily Double. Wagering almost everything on a clue about Colonial Williamsburg, at first I drew a blank. After spending a few seconds desperately probing my memory banks, the correct response, “What is the House of Burgesses?” came to me with the physical sensation of dislodging itself from the roof of my skull and falling onto my tongue. I’ll never forget it.)
While my strategy turned out to be sound (and Watson wasn’t the invincible opponent I had expected), what struck me was how quickly I jettisoned long-established patterns of playing the game against human opponents to grapple with a computer who had no idea how to play “the right way.” This manifested itself during our matches in two ways.
The first was in how he chose clues. Most players start with the easiest, lowest-value ones and work their way down the board, learning from patterns buried in the clues. Not realizing this, or caring, Watson tended to start each new category with the highest-value clue and work his way up. As Baker notes in his book, “There was a logic to this. While humans heard all the answers, right and wrong, and learned from them, Watson was deaf to the proceedings. If it won the buzz, answered the clue, and got to pick another one, it could assume that it had been right. But that was its only feedback. Watson was senseless to all of the signals its human competitors displayed—the smiles, the gasps, the confident tapping of fingers, the halting speech and darting eyes spelling panic.”
My eyes started darting when I realized what Watson was doing—preying on our cognitive blind spot and vacuuming the highest-value clues off the board before we had a chance to gain our sea legs. But my response surprised me—by my second match, I was doing the same thing. Trailing Watson and my fellow human opponent at the start of Double Jeopardy, I chose the $2,000 clue in my category of choice: Nonfiction. As it happened, I had lucked into a Daily Double. I wagered everything on the following clue: “A 2009 biography of this builder of Grand Central Terminal calls him ‘the first tycoon.’” (Answer: “Who is Cornelius Vanderbilt?”) From there, I rallied to win the game.
Trailing again late in my third match against Watson, I abandoned all pretense of trying to beat him outright and began scouring the board for the remaining Daily Double, knowing I had to find it and nail it to have any chance of winning. I had never seen anyone adopt such tactics in all my years of watching Jeopardy!. Against humans, I might have been content to grind it out, but I was on the run, and scared. Once again, the plan worked, as I took the lead just in time for Final Jeopardy. The clue for the category “Olympic Venues,” was: “At above 7,000 feet, this Western Hemisphere city had the highest altitude ever of a Summer Olympics host city.” Correct response: “What is Mexico City?” Both Watson and I got this one right, but thanks to my lead going in, I won the match.
I was hardly the first person to try and beat a computer at its own game rather than stick to a human one. World chess champion Garry Kasparov, in the third game of his match with IBM’s Deep Blue in May 1997, chose to open with the esoteric Mieses Opening1 in a deliberate attempt to drag the computer out of its well-practiced repertoire of openings. It worked, but required Kasparov to abandon his repertoire as well. The game eventually ended in a draw.
Kasparov lost that match three games later in crushing fashion, leading Newsweek to dub his defeat “The brain’s last stand.” Rather than be embittered by his loss and computing’s subsequent hostile takeover of chess, Kasparov has become a proponent of man–machine collaboration. In “freestyle” tournaments, human–computer teams running the most basic commercial software have managed to crush the best chess programs on the market, which in turn had crushed most grand masters. “Having a computer program available during play was as disturbing as it was exciting,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books.
“The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory,” he added. “It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine, and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.”
Ironically, IBM’s rationale for developing Watson was to make computers understand us better—or at least how we use language. What I learned from playing Watson was a better understanding of my own prejudices. In more than a decade of playing trivia games of one kind or another, I had the run of my life against him. He made me a better player.
About the Author
Greg Lindsay is a contributing writer for Fast Company. His writing has also appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, the Daily Beast, Fortune, the New York Times, and Time. Greg speaks frequently about globalization, innovation, and the future of cities, most recently in Shanghai at Expo 2010. His book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, coauthored with John D. Kasarda, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March 2011.
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
BUILDING A JEOPARDY CHAMPION-2011
The programmer’s dilemma: Building a Jeopardy! champion
IBM computer scientist David Ferrucci and his team set out to build a machine that could beat the quiz show’s greatest players. The result revealed both the potential—and the limitations—of computer intelligence.
FEBRUARY 2011 • Stephen Baker
..In 2007, IBM computer scientist David Ferrucci and his team embarked on the challenge of building a computer that could take on—and beat—the two best players of the popular US TV quiz show Jeopardy!, a trivia game in which contestants are given clues in categories ranging from academic subjects to pop culture and must ring in with responses that are in the form of questions. The show, a ratings stalwart, was created in 1964 and has aired for more than 25 years. But this would be the first time the program would pit man against machine.
In some sense, the project was a follow-up to Deep Blue, the IBM computer that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Although a TV quiz show may seem to lack the gravitas of the classic game of chess, the task was in many ways much harder. It wasn’t just that the computer had to master straightforward language, it had to master humor, nuance, puns, allusions, and slang—a verbal complexity well beyond the reach of most computer processors. Meeting that challenge was about much more than just a Jeopardy! championship. The work of Ferrucci and his team illuminates both the great potential and the severe limitations of current computer intelligence—as well as the capacities of the human mind. Although the machine they created was ultimately dubbed “Watson” (in honor of IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson), to the team that painstakingly constructed it, the game-playing computer was known as Blue J.
The following article is adapted from Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, February 2011), by Stephen Baker, an account of Blue J’s creation.
It was possible, Ferrucci thought, that someday a machine would replicate the complexity and nuance of the human mind. In fact, in IBM’s Almaden Research Center, on a hilltop high above Silicon Valley, a scientist named Dharmendra Modha was building a simulated brain equipped with 700 million electronic neurons. Within years, he hoped to map the brain of a cat, and then a monkey, and, eventually, a human. But mapping the human brain, with its 100 billion neurons and trillions or quadrillions of connections among them, was a long-term project. With time, it might result in a bold new architecture for computing, one that could lead to a new level of computer intelligence. Perhaps then, machines would come up with their own ideas, wrestle with concepts, appreciate irony, and think more like humans.
But such machines, if they ever came, would not be ready on Ferrucci’s schedule. As he saw it, his team had to produce a functional Jeopardy!-playing machine in just two years. If Jeopardy!’s executive producer, Harry Friedman, didn’t see a viable machine by 2009, he would never green-light the man–machine match for late 2010 or early 2011. This deadline compelled Ferrucci and his team to build their machine with existing technology—the familiar semiconductors etched in silicon, servers whirring through billions of calculations and following instructions from many software programs that already existed. In its guts, Blue J would not be so different from the battered ThinkPad Ferrucci lugged from one meeting to the next. No, if Blue J was going to compete with the speed and versatility of the human mind, the magic would have to come from its massive scale, inspired design, and carefully-tuned algorithms. In other words, if Blue J became a great Jeopardy! player, it would be less a triumph of science than of engineering.
Blue J’s literal-mindedness posed the greatest challenge. Finding suitable data for this gullible machine was only the first job. Once Blue J was equipped with its source material—from James Joyce to the Boing Boing blog—the IBM team would have to teach the machine to make sense of those texts: to place names and facts into context, and to come to grips with how they were related to each other. Hamlet, just to pick one example, was related not only to his mother, Gertrude, but also to Shakespeare, Denmark, Elizabethan literature, a famous soliloquy, and themes ranging from mortality to self-doubt, just for starters. Preparing Blue J to navigate all of these connections for virtually every entity on earth, factual or fictional, would be the machine’s true education. The process would involve creating, testing, and fine-tuning thousands of algorithms. The final challenge would be to prepare the machine to play the game itself. Eventually, Blue J would have to come up with answers it could bet on within three to five seconds. For this, the Jeopardy! team would need to configure the hardware of a champion.
Every computing technology Ferrucci had ever touched had a clueless side to it. The machines he knew could follow orders and carry out surprisingly sophisticated jobs. But they were nowhere close to humans. The same was true of expert systems and neural networks. Smart in one area, clueless elsewhere. Such was the case with the Jeopardy! algorithms that his team was piecing together in IBM’s Hawthorne, New York, labs. These sets of finely honed computer commands each had a specialty, whether it was hunting down synonyms, parsing the syntax of a Jeopardy! clue, or counting the most common words in a document. Outside of these meticulously programmed tasks, though, each was fairly dumb.
So how would Blue J concoct broader intelligence—or at least enough of it to win at Jeopardy!? Ferrucci considered the human brain. “If I ask you what 36 plus 43 is, a part of you goes, ‘Oh, I’ll send that question over to the part of my brain that deals with math,’” he said. “And if I ask you a question about literature, you don’t stay in the math part of your brain. You work on that stuff somewhere else.” Ferrucci didn’t delve into how things work in a real brain; for his purposes, it didn’t matter. He just knew that the brain has different specialties, that people know instinctively how to skip from one to another, and that Blue J would have to do the same thing.
The machine would, however, follow a different model. Unlike a human, Blue J wouldn’t know where to start answering a question. So with its vast computing resources, it would start everywhere. Instead of reading a clue and assigning the sleuthing work to specialist algorithms, Blue J would unleash scores of them on a hunt, and then see which one came up with the best answer. The algorithms inside of Blue J, each following a different set of marching orders, would bring in competing results. This process, a lot less efficient than the human brain, would require an enormous complex of computers. More than 2,000 processors would each handle a different piece of the job. But the team would concern itself later with these electronic issues—Blue J’s body—after they got its thinking straight.
To see how these algorithms carried out their hunt, consider one of the thousands of clues the fledgling system grappled with. Under the category Diplomatic Relations, one clue read: “Of the four countries the United States does not have diplomatic relations with, the one that’s farthest north.”
In the first wave of algorithms to handle the clue was a group that specialized in grammar. They diagrammed the sentence, much the way a grade-school teacher would, identifying the nouns, verbs, direct objects, and prepositional phrases. This analysis helped to clear up doubts about specific words. In this clue, “the United States” referred to the country, not the Army, the economy, or the Olympic basketball team. Then the algorithms pieced together interpretations of the clue. Complicated clues, like this one, might lead to different readings—one more complex, the other simpler, perhaps based solely on words in the text. This duplication was wasteful, but waste was at the heart of Blue J’s strategy. Duplicating or quadrupling its effort, or multiplying it by 100, was one way the computer could compensate for its cognitive shortcomings, and also play to its advantage: speed. Unlike humans, who can instantly understand a question and pursue a single answer, the computer might hedge, launching searches for a handful of different possibilities at the same time. In this way and many others, Blue J would battle the efficient human mind with spectacular, flamboyant inefficiency. “Massive redundancy” was how Ferrucci’s described it. Transistors were cheap and plentiful. Blue J would put them to use.
While the machine’s grammar-savvy algorithms were dissecting the clue, one of them searched for its focus, or answer type. In this clue about diplomacy, “the one” evidently referred to a country. If this was the case, the universe of Blue J’s possible answers was reduced to a mere 194, the number of countries in the world. (This, of course, was assuming that “country” didn’t refer to “Marlboro Country” or “wine country” or “country music.” Blue J had to remain flexible, because these types of exceptions often popped up.)
Once the clue was parsed into a question the machine could understand, the hunt commenced. Each expert algorithm went burrowing through Blue J’s trove of data in search of the answer. One algorithm, following instructions developed for decoding the genome, looked to match strings of words in the clue with similar strings elsewhere, maybe in some stored Wikipedia entry or in articles about diplomacy, the United States, or northern climes. One of the linguists focused on rhymes with key words in the clue. Another algorithm used a Google-like approach and focused on documents that matched the greatest number of keywords in the clue, paying special attention to the ones that popped up most often.
While they the algorithms worked, software within Blue J would be comparing the clue to thousands of others it had encountered. What kind was it—a puzzle? A limerick? A historical factoid? Blue J was learning to recognize more than 50 types of questions, and it was constructing the statistical record of each algorithm for each type of question. This would guide it in evaluating the results when they came back. If the clue turned out to be an anagram, for example, the algorithm that rearranged the letters of words or phrases would be the most trusted source. But that same algorithm would produce gibberish for most other clues.
What kind of clue was this one on diplomatic relations? It appeared to require two independent analyses. First, the computer had to come up with the four countries with which the United States had no diplomatic ties. Then it had to figure out which of those four was the farthest north. A group of Blue J’s programmers had recently developed an algorithm that focused on these so-called nested clues, in which one answer lay inside another. This may sound obscure, but humans ask these types of questions all the time. If someone wonders about “cheap pizza joints close to campus,” the person answering has to carry out two mental searches, one for cheap pizza joints and another for those nearby. Blue J’s “nested decomposition” led the computer through a similar process. It broke the clues into two questions, pursued two hunts for answers, and then pieced them together. The new algorithm was proving useful in Jeopardy!. One or two of these combination questions came up in nearly every game. They are especially common in the all-important Final Jeopardy, which usually features more complex clues.
It would take Blue J almost an hour for its algorithms to churn through the data and return with their candidate answers. Most were garbage. There were failed anagrams of country names and laughable attempts to rhyme “north” with “diplomatic.” Some suggested the names of documents or titles of articles that had strings of the same words. But the nested algorithm followed the right approach. It found the four countries on the outs with the United States (Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea), checked their geographical coordinates, and came up with the answer: “What is North Korea?”
At this point, Blue J had the right answer. But the machine did not yet know that North Korea was correct, or that it even merited enough confidence for a bet. For this, it needed loads of additional analysis. Since the candidate answer came from an algorithm with a strong record on nested clues, it started out with higher-than-average confidence in that answer. The machine would proceed to check how many of the answers matched the question type: “country.” After ascertaining from various lists that North Korea appeared to be a country, confidence in “What is North Korea?” rose further up the list. For an additional test, it would place the words “North Korea” into a simple sentence generated from the clue: “North Korea has no diplomatic relations with the United States.” Then it would see if similar sentences showed up in its data trove. If so, confidence climbed higher.
In the end, it chose North Korea as the answer to bet on. In a real game, Blue J would have hit the buzzer. But being a machine, it simply moved on to the next clue.
About the Author
Stephen Baker is the author of The Numerati (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) and was previously a writer at BusinessWeek
IBM computer scientist David Ferrucci and his team set out to build a machine that could beat the quiz show’s greatest players. The result revealed both the potential—and the limitations—of computer intelligence.
FEBRUARY 2011 • Stephen Baker
..In 2007, IBM computer scientist David Ferrucci and his team embarked on the challenge of building a computer that could take on—and beat—the two best players of the popular US TV quiz show Jeopardy!, a trivia game in which contestants are given clues in categories ranging from academic subjects to pop culture and must ring in with responses that are in the form of questions. The show, a ratings stalwart, was created in 1964 and has aired for more than 25 years. But this would be the first time the program would pit man against machine.
In some sense, the project was a follow-up to Deep Blue, the IBM computer that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Although a TV quiz show may seem to lack the gravitas of the classic game of chess, the task was in many ways much harder. It wasn’t just that the computer had to master straightforward language, it had to master humor, nuance, puns, allusions, and slang—a verbal complexity well beyond the reach of most computer processors. Meeting that challenge was about much more than just a Jeopardy! championship. The work of Ferrucci and his team illuminates both the great potential and the severe limitations of current computer intelligence—as well as the capacities of the human mind. Although the machine they created was ultimately dubbed “Watson” (in honor of IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson), to the team that painstakingly constructed it, the game-playing computer was known as Blue J.
The following article is adapted from Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, February 2011), by Stephen Baker, an account of Blue J’s creation.
It was possible, Ferrucci thought, that someday a machine would replicate the complexity and nuance of the human mind. In fact, in IBM’s Almaden Research Center, on a hilltop high above Silicon Valley, a scientist named Dharmendra Modha was building a simulated brain equipped with 700 million electronic neurons. Within years, he hoped to map the brain of a cat, and then a monkey, and, eventually, a human. But mapping the human brain, with its 100 billion neurons and trillions or quadrillions of connections among them, was a long-term project. With time, it might result in a bold new architecture for computing, one that could lead to a new level of computer intelligence. Perhaps then, machines would come up with their own ideas, wrestle with concepts, appreciate irony, and think more like humans.
But such machines, if they ever came, would not be ready on Ferrucci’s schedule. As he saw it, his team had to produce a functional Jeopardy!-playing machine in just two years. If Jeopardy!’s executive producer, Harry Friedman, didn’t see a viable machine by 2009, he would never green-light the man–machine match for late 2010 or early 2011. This deadline compelled Ferrucci and his team to build their machine with existing technology—the familiar semiconductors etched in silicon, servers whirring through billions of calculations and following instructions from many software programs that already existed. In its guts, Blue J would not be so different from the battered ThinkPad Ferrucci lugged from one meeting to the next. No, if Blue J was going to compete with the speed and versatility of the human mind, the magic would have to come from its massive scale, inspired design, and carefully-tuned algorithms. In other words, if Blue J became a great Jeopardy! player, it would be less a triumph of science than of engineering.
Blue J’s literal-mindedness posed the greatest challenge. Finding suitable data for this gullible machine was only the first job. Once Blue J was equipped with its source material—from James Joyce to the Boing Boing blog—the IBM team would have to teach the machine to make sense of those texts: to place names and facts into context, and to come to grips with how they were related to each other. Hamlet, just to pick one example, was related not only to his mother, Gertrude, but also to Shakespeare, Denmark, Elizabethan literature, a famous soliloquy, and themes ranging from mortality to self-doubt, just for starters. Preparing Blue J to navigate all of these connections for virtually every entity on earth, factual or fictional, would be the machine’s true education. The process would involve creating, testing, and fine-tuning thousands of algorithms. The final challenge would be to prepare the machine to play the game itself. Eventually, Blue J would have to come up with answers it could bet on within three to five seconds. For this, the Jeopardy! team would need to configure the hardware of a champion.
Every computing technology Ferrucci had ever touched had a clueless side to it. The machines he knew could follow orders and carry out surprisingly sophisticated jobs. But they were nowhere close to humans. The same was true of expert systems and neural networks. Smart in one area, clueless elsewhere. Such was the case with the Jeopardy! algorithms that his team was piecing together in IBM’s Hawthorne, New York, labs. These sets of finely honed computer commands each had a specialty, whether it was hunting down synonyms, parsing the syntax of a Jeopardy! clue, or counting the most common words in a document. Outside of these meticulously programmed tasks, though, each was fairly dumb.
So how would Blue J concoct broader intelligence—or at least enough of it to win at Jeopardy!? Ferrucci considered the human brain. “If I ask you what 36 plus 43 is, a part of you goes, ‘Oh, I’ll send that question over to the part of my brain that deals with math,’” he said. “And if I ask you a question about literature, you don’t stay in the math part of your brain. You work on that stuff somewhere else.” Ferrucci didn’t delve into how things work in a real brain; for his purposes, it didn’t matter. He just knew that the brain has different specialties, that people know instinctively how to skip from one to another, and that Blue J would have to do the same thing.
The machine would, however, follow a different model. Unlike a human, Blue J wouldn’t know where to start answering a question. So with its vast computing resources, it would start everywhere. Instead of reading a clue and assigning the sleuthing work to specialist algorithms, Blue J would unleash scores of them on a hunt, and then see which one came up with the best answer. The algorithms inside of Blue J, each following a different set of marching orders, would bring in competing results. This process, a lot less efficient than the human brain, would require an enormous complex of computers. More than 2,000 processors would each handle a different piece of the job. But the team would concern itself later with these electronic issues—Blue J’s body—after they got its thinking straight.
To see how these algorithms carried out their hunt, consider one of the thousands of clues the fledgling system grappled with. Under the category Diplomatic Relations, one clue read: “Of the four countries the United States does not have diplomatic relations with, the one that’s farthest north.”
In the first wave of algorithms to handle the clue was a group that specialized in grammar. They diagrammed the sentence, much the way a grade-school teacher would, identifying the nouns, verbs, direct objects, and prepositional phrases. This analysis helped to clear up doubts about specific words. In this clue, “the United States” referred to the country, not the Army, the economy, or the Olympic basketball team. Then the algorithms pieced together interpretations of the clue. Complicated clues, like this one, might lead to different readings—one more complex, the other simpler, perhaps based solely on words in the text. This duplication was wasteful, but waste was at the heart of Blue J’s strategy. Duplicating or quadrupling its effort, or multiplying it by 100, was one way the computer could compensate for its cognitive shortcomings, and also play to its advantage: speed. Unlike humans, who can instantly understand a question and pursue a single answer, the computer might hedge, launching searches for a handful of different possibilities at the same time. In this way and many others, Blue J would battle the efficient human mind with spectacular, flamboyant inefficiency. “Massive redundancy” was how Ferrucci’s described it. Transistors were cheap and plentiful. Blue J would put them to use.
While the machine’s grammar-savvy algorithms were dissecting the clue, one of them searched for its focus, or answer type. In this clue about diplomacy, “the one” evidently referred to a country. If this was the case, the universe of Blue J’s possible answers was reduced to a mere 194, the number of countries in the world. (This, of course, was assuming that “country” didn’t refer to “Marlboro Country” or “wine country” or “country music.” Blue J had to remain flexible, because these types of exceptions often popped up.)
Once the clue was parsed into a question the machine could understand, the hunt commenced. Each expert algorithm went burrowing through Blue J’s trove of data in search of the answer. One algorithm, following instructions developed for decoding the genome, looked to match strings of words in the clue with similar strings elsewhere, maybe in some stored Wikipedia entry or in articles about diplomacy, the United States, or northern climes. One of the linguists focused on rhymes with key words in the clue. Another algorithm used a Google-like approach and focused on documents that matched the greatest number of keywords in the clue, paying special attention to the ones that popped up most often.
While they the algorithms worked, software within Blue J would be comparing the clue to thousands of others it had encountered. What kind was it—a puzzle? A limerick? A historical factoid? Blue J was learning to recognize more than 50 types of questions, and it was constructing the statistical record of each algorithm for each type of question. This would guide it in evaluating the results when they came back. If the clue turned out to be an anagram, for example, the algorithm that rearranged the letters of words or phrases would be the most trusted source. But that same algorithm would produce gibberish for most other clues.
What kind of clue was this one on diplomatic relations? It appeared to require two independent analyses. First, the computer had to come up with the four countries with which the United States had no diplomatic ties. Then it had to figure out which of those four was the farthest north. A group of Blue J’s programmers had recently developed an algorithm that focused on these so-called nested clues, in which one answer lay inside another. This may sound obscure, but humans ask these types of questions all the time. If someone wonders about “cheap pizza joints close to campus,” the person answering has to carry out two mental searches, one for cheap pizza joints and another for those nearby. Blue J’s “nested decomposition” led the computer through a similar process. It broke the clues into two questions, pursued two hunts for answers, and then pieced them together. The new algorithm was proving useful in Jeopardy!. One or two of these combination questions came up in nearly every game. They are especially common in the all-important Final Jeopardy, which usually features more complex clues.
It would take Blue J almost an hour for its algorithms to churn through the data and return with their candidate answers. Most were garbage. There were failed anagrams of country names and laughable attempts to rhyme “north” with “diplomatic.” Some suggested the names of documents or titles of articles that had strings of the same words. But the nested algorithm followed the right approach. It found the four countries on the outs with the United States (Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea), checked their geographical coordinates, and came up with the answer: “What is North Korea?”
At this point, Blue J had the right answer. But the machine did not yet know that North Korea was correct, or that it even merited enough confidence for a bet. For this, it needed loads of additional analysis. Since the candidate answer came from an algorithm with a strong record on nested clues, it started out with higher-than-average confidence in that answer. The machine would proceed to check how many of the answers matched the question type: “country.” After ascertaining from various lists that North Korea appeared to be a country, confidence in “What is North Korea?” rose further up the list. For an additional test, it would place the words “North Korea” into a simple sentence generated from the clue: “North Korea has no diplomatic relations with the United States.” Then it would see if similar sentences showed up in its data trove. If so, confidence climbed higher.
In the end, it chose North Korea as the answer to bet on. In a real game, Blue J would have hit the buzzer. But being a machine, it simply moved on to the next clue.
About the Author
Stephen Baker is the author of The Numerati (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) and was previously a writer at BusinessWeek
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
How CFOs can keep strategic decisions on track-Interview-2011
How CFOs can keep strategic decisions on track
The finance chief is often well placed to guard against common decision-making biases.
February 2011 • Bill Huyett and Tim Koller
Source: Corporate Finance Practice
When executives contemplate strategic decisions, they often succumb to the same cognitive biases we all have as human beings, such as overconfidence, the confirmation bias, or excessive risk avoidance.1 Such biases distort the way we collect and process information. Even in the rarefied context of the executive suite, judgment can be colored by self-interest leading to more or less conscious deceptions—for example, around the assumptions critical to the valuation of potential capital projects, M&A targets, divestitures, or joint ventures.
CFOs are often the most disinterested parties to such decisions. They seldom chair the relevant meetings, are often highly critical of decision-making dynamics and biases, and can cite examples of past successes and failures. With the technical support of the finance staff, they can also provide hard data to counter the inherent biases of other executives. Yet only a minority of CFOs are fully leveraging their position to change the dynamics of decision making—to promote institutional learning in the interest of better strategic decisions.
To figure out why that might be so—and to look for techniques CFOs can use when playing this critical role—McKinsey’s Bill Huyett and Tim Koller recently talked with Olivier Sibony, a director in McKinsey’s Paris office and a coauthor of numerous articles on the subject of cognitive biases in business decision making.
The Quarterly: Why aren’t CFOs better at using their position to improve the quality of decision making?
Olivier Sibony: CFOs often struggle with a confusion of roles. They’re expected to be both the impartial challenger and an important player in getting things done. They advise the CEO on M&A, but they also drive the discussions with the targets. They have to make sure that the company has the right financing structure, and they’re also supposed to negotiate with the banks. Resolving that tension between roles is where the CFO can do a better job.
The way to do that, I would argue, is for the CFO to view herself not only as the impartial, cool-headed adviser of the CEO, nor just as the executor of the mechanics of a decision, but primarily as the owner of a safe and sound decision-making process—which is a role that no one else plays. And if there is one thing that we take away from the study of behavioral economics, it is that this role is vital. You need to have better processes to make decisions, because people can’t make better decisions alone, but good processes can help if they build on the insights and judgment of multiple people. I’m not saying the CFO is the only person who can build such a process, but she’s in a uniquely good position to build one.
The Quarterly: Why does process matter so much?
Olivier Sibony: Process matters in decision making because we can’t learn from our mistakes the way we think we can. Cognitive biases are everywhere, we all have them, and we pretty much know what they are. We know we’re overconfident, we know we’re susceptible to anchoring, we know we underresearch things that disprove our hypotheses and overresearch things that confirm them, and so on. But these biases are hardwired, and there’s not much we can do about them as individuals. So we can will ourselves to not be overconfident until we’re blue in the face; we’ll still be overconfident.
You can test this yourself. Ask a group of people if they think they are above-average drivers. In the United States, nine out of ten will tell you they’re in the top 50 percent. Now, they all laugh when they get that feedback, but you ask them to do it again and you get the same results. They all think that it’s all those guys around them who are overestimating themselves.
It’s the same in business. We may agree with the proposition that businesspeople in general are overconfident. We may even accept that we’ve been overconfident ourselves in our past decisions, but we always think that this time will be different. Here I’m using the example of overconfidence because it’s easy to demonstrate, but the same is true of other biases. Biases are very deeply ingrained and impervious to feedback.
The Quarterly: So you depend on a multiperson process to control bias?
Olivier Sibony: Exactly. You build a multiperson process where your biases are going to be challenged by somebody else’s perspective. And as CFO, if you manage this process, your goal is to ensure that the biases of individuals weigh less in the final decision than the things that should weigh more—like facts. In other words, you can’t improve your own decision making in a systematic way, but you can do a lot to improve your organization’s decision making through a good process, and that’s what CFOs are uniquely well placed to do.
The Quarterly: It sounds like you’re drawing a contrast between the processes of human interaction and decision making and the more obvious technical systems that the CFO runs—for example, around valuation procedures and merger-management procedures.
Olivier Sibony: There is a contrast and there is also a synergy. The contrast is that CFOs already rely on processes to manage, as you point out, the technical systems. But it’s very easy for people to subvert technical systems to get the answer they want. The typical example of this in M&A is when deal advocates work backward from the price demanded to determine how much in synergies the deal would require to make sense.
What people spend a lot less time thinking about are the interpersonal interactions—the processes of debate—that ensure high-quality decision making. And that is where the synergy lies for CFOs: if you already own the technical processes, you can build on them to improve the quality of debate, for instance by adjusting the agenda, attendees, and protocols of key decision meetings.
The Quarterly: What are some examples of process changes that companies can use?
Olivier Sibony: Let me start with an analogy. Imagine walking into a courtroom where the trial consists of a prosecutor presenting PowerPoint slides. In 20 pretty compelling charts, he demonstrates why the defendant is guilty. The judge then challenges some of the facts of the presentation, but the prosecutor has a good answer to every objection. So the judge decides, and the accused man is sentenced.
That wouldn’t be due process, right? So if you would find this process shocking in a courtroom, why is it acceptable when you make an investment decision? Now of course, this is an oversimplification, but this process is essentially the one most companies follow to make a decision. They have a team arguing only one side of the case. The team has a choice of what points it wants to make and what way it wants to make them. And it falls to the final decision maker to be both the challenger and the ultimate judge. Building a good decision-making process is largely ensuring that these flaws don’t happen.
The Quarterly: How do you build a process that has these features?
Olivier Sibony: My coauthor, Dan Lovallo, and I did some quantitative research on this.2 We asked executives to tell us about their investment decisions—which ones worked and which ones didn’t and what practices made the difference—and we reviewed over a thousand of them.
One of the practices that we found made the most difference was having explicit discussions of the irreducible uncertainties in the decision. Notice the difference between that kind of conversation and the one elicited by the typical slide in a PowerPoint presentation, with the title “Risks we identified and risk-mitigating actions we will take.” That’s the way you frame it if you want to look like a confident presenter and want the meeting to go smoothly: you suppress the discussion of uncertainties. Instead, you should be emphasizing them to make sure you have a debate about them.
Executives reported some other things making a big difference—for example, whether the discussion included points of view contradictory to those of the person making the final decision. In other words, did anyone voice a point of view that was contrary to what the CEO wanted to hear or to what they thought he wanted to hear? And did the due-diligence team actually seek out information that would contradict the investment hypothesis, as opposed to simply building a case for it? These types of things can be hardwired into the process to make sure that they happen, and some companies do this routinely.
The Quarterly: Let’s talk about specific techniques. Take M&A as an example—does it help to assign people ahead of time to argue either side of a decision, regardless of what they actually believe?
Olivier Sibony: When evaluating an acquisition, there is of course the issue of impartiality—as Warren Buffett said, relying on one investment bank to tell you if you should do a deal is like asking your barber if you need a haircut. And there is the more subtle issue of motivated error: even people who sincerely believe that their assessments are objective are in fact often biased in the direction of their own interests.
So in this case, it can help in some settings to field two deal teams, at least at some stage in the process: one to argue for the deal and a second to argue against it. In other settings, if companies find that people avoid the direct confrontation that two deal teams imply, managers might prefer to ask the same people to argue both sides of the case or to make the uncertainties explicit. There are many different techniques to foster debate.
The Quarterly: What other techniques come to mind as effective in M&A situations?
Olivier Sibony: Another technique we find useful addresses the overconfidence bias. It is the “premortem,” invented by psychologist Gary Klein, whom we interviewed in 2010.3 In a premortem, you ask people to project themselves into the future and to assume that a deal has failed—not to imagine that it could fail, but to assume it already has. Then you ask them to write down, individually and in silence, the three to five reasons why it failed. And that forces people to speak up about the risks and the uncertainties that they’ve kept to themselves for fear of appearing pessimistic, uncommitted to the success of the proposal, or disloyal to the rest of the deal team.
A third technique is, at some point in the process, to write a memo explaining why the CEO should not do a deal, including the things the CEO would need to believe to not do it. Because by the time companies get to the actual decision meeting, everybody has forgotten about those reasons. So unless they’ve actually been recorded, no one’s left to argue the negative case. Everyone’s framing the positive case, and all the reasons you used to be worried about the deal have disappeared.
Here’s an example: when one company did a retrospective analysis of a deal that went wrong, it looked at a series of memos from the deal team to the investment committee, two months, one month, and two weeks before the deal was actually approved. The firm found that the top three things on a long list of worries in the first memo fell to the bottom of the list in the next memo and in the final memo had completely disappeared. Apparently, those concerns had been resolved to the team’s full satisfaction. But when the deal was done and the acquirers prepared to take possession of the company, guess what were the top priorities on their agenda: the same three things that had been swept under the rug in order to do the deal in the first place. This illustrates the dynamics of deal frenzy: when you sense that everybody around you wants to do a deal, you’re very prone to suppressing evidence that might lead you to not do it.
Another technique we’ve used is to develop a taxonomy of deals and a checklist for each type of deal. Companies that do a lot of deals, especially private-equity companies, tend to function by association and by pattern recognition and to look at a deal and say, “Oh, this one is just like this or that previous deal.” But usually the deals they’re reminded of are not the failures but the great successes. And once they latch onto that pattern recognition, it’s very difficult to see the broad range of things that actually can make the analogy irrelevant.
What you can do to remedy this bias is to use techniques such as multiple structured analogies or reference class forecasting.4 The names sound complicated, but the techniques are actually simple to apply. Essentially, they are ways of making sure that you look at a range of examples, not just one, and to explicitly analyze what makes those examples relevant and what could make them less relevant.
If you do enough deals so that you can actually recognize the different patterns, the way to use this technique is to identify the different types of deals and the things that matter for each. For instance, the things that we need to check in a deal where we acquire complementary product lines are not the same ones that we needto check for when we are doing a cross-selling kind of deal or a geographic-expansion kind of deal. So we will have different deal processes and different due-diligence checklists.
The Quarterly: What advice do you have for CFOs who want to incorporate these techniques into their decision-making processes?
Olivier Sibony: The crucial thing to keep in mind is that there isn’t one magic technique that will strip out all biases. This is more about putting in place a process that includes techniques to correct for the biases to which you’ve been susceptible in the past: probably not 20 techniques but 2 or 3 that you can use to help you avoid those biases in the future.
And once you put a process in place, it’s only valuable if it’s used consistently. First, because you’re going to learn and become better at using the process. Second, because it is precisely when you’re about to make a big mistake that you’re likely to have made an exception. The temptation, when you have a decision-making process, is always to say that for a really exceptional, difficult decision, we’re going to bypass the process, since the decision is an unusual one.
That’s precisely what you want to avoid. That’s why you need a process and the habit of following it, not just a tool kit of practices that you use from time to time. That’s why in areas where we don’t tolerate failure, we have routines. If you fly an aircraft, you don’t say, “The weather is really bad and we’re already behind schedule, so let’s skip the takeoff checklist.” You say, “This is a flight like every other one, and we’re going to use the checklist—that isn’t negotiable.”
About the Authors
Bill Huyett is a partner in McKinsey’s Boston office, and Tim Koller is a partner in the New York office.
The finance chief is often well placed to guard against common decision-making biases.
February 2011 • Bill Huyett and Tim Koller
Source: Corporate Finance Practice
When executives contemplate strategic decisions, they often succumb to the same cognitive biases we all have as human beings, such as overconfidence, the confirmation bias, or excessive risk avoidance.1 Such biases distort the way we collect and process information. Even in the rarefied context of the executive suite, judgment can be colored by self-interest leading to more or less conscious deceptions—for example, around the assumptions critical to the valuation of potential capital projects, M&A targets, divestitures, or joint ventures.
CFOs are often the most disinterested parties to such decisions. They seldom chair the relevant meetings, are often highly critical of decision-making dynamics and biases, and can cite examples of past successes and failures. With the technical support of the finance staff, they can also provide hard data to counter the inherent biases of other executives. Yet only a minority of CFOs are fully leveraging their position to change the dynamics of decision making—to promote institutional learning in the interest of better strategic decisions.
To figure out why that might be so—and to look for techniques CFOs can use when playing this critical role—McKinsey’s Bill Huyett and Tim Koller recently talked with Olivier Sibony, a director in McKinsey’s Paris office and a coauthor of numerous articles on the subject of cognitive biases in business decision making.
The Quarterly: Why aren’t CFOs better at using their position to improve the quality of decision making?
Olivier Sibony: CFOs often struggle with a confusion of roles. They’re expected to be both the impartial challenger and an important player in getting things done. They advise the CEO on M&A, but they also drive the discussions with the targets. They have to make sure that the company has the right financing structure, and they’re also supposed to negotiate with the banks. Resolving that tension between roles is where the CFO can do a better job.
The way to do that, I would argue, is for the CFO to view herself not only as the impartial, cool-headed adviser of the CEO, nor just as the executor of the mechanics of a decision, but primarily as the owner of a safe and sound decision-making process—which is a role that no one else plays. And if there is one thing that we take away from the study of behavioral economics, it is that this role is vital. You need to have better processes to make decisions, because people can’t make better decisions alone, but good processes can help if they build on the insights and judgment of multiple people. I’m not saying the CFO is the only person who can build such a process, but she’s in a uniquely good position to build one.
The Quarterly: Why does process matter so much?
Olivier Sibony: Process matters in decision making because we can’t learn from our mistakes the way we think we can. Cognitive biases are everywhere, we all have them, and we pretty much know what they are. We know we’re overconfident, we know we’re susceptible to anchoring, we know we underresearch things that disprove our hypotheses and overresearch things that confirm them, and so on. But these biases are hardwired, and there’s not much we can do about them as individuals. So we can will ourselves to not be overconfident until we’re blue in the face; we’ll still be overconfident.
You can test this yourself. Ask a group of people if they think they are above-average drivers. In the United States, nine out of ten will tell you they’re in the top 50 percent. Now, they all laugh when they get that feedback, but you ask them to do it again and you get the same results. They all think that it’s all those guys around them who are overestimating themselves.
It’s the same in business. We may agree with the proposition that businesspeople in general are overconfident. We may even accept that we’ve been overconfident ourselves in our past decisions, but we always think that this time will be different. Here I’m using the example of overconfidence because it’s easy to demonstrate, but the same is true of other biases. Biases are very deeply ingrained and impervious to feedback.
The Quarterly: So you depend on a multiperson process to control bias?
Olivier Sibony: Exactly. You build a multiperson process where your biases are going to be challenged by somebody else’s perspective. And as CFO, if you manage this process, your goal is to ensure that the biases of individuals weigh less in the final decision than the things that should weigh more—like facts. In other words, you can’t improve your own decision making in a systematic way, but you can do a lot to improve your organization’s decision making through a good process, and that’s what CFOs are uniquely well placed to do.
The Quarterly: It sounds like you’re drawing a contrast between the processes of human interaction and decision making and the more obvious technical systems that the CFO runs—for example, around valuation procedures and merger-management procedures.
Olivier Sibony: There is a contrast and there is also a synergy. The contrast is that CFOs already rely on processes to manage, as you point out, the technical systems. But it’s very easy for people to subvert technical systems to get the answer they want. The typical example of this in M&A is when deal advocates work backward from the price demanded to determine how much in synergies the deal would require to make sense.
What people spend a lot less time thinking about are the interpersonal interactions—the processes of debate—that ensure high-quality decision making. And that is where the synergy lies for CFOs: if you already own the technical processes, you can build on them to improve the quality of debate, for instance by adjusting the agenda, attendees, and protocols of key decision meetings.
The Quarterly: What are some examples of process changes that companies can use?
Olivier Sibony: Let me start with an analogy. Imagine walking into a courtroom where the trial consists of a prosecutor presenting PowerPoint slides. In 20 pretty compelling charts, he demonstrates why the defendant is guilty. The judge then challenges some of the facts of the presentation, but the prosecutor has a good answer to every objection. So the judge decides, and the accused man is sentenced.
That wouldn’t be due process, right? So if you would find this process shocking in a courtroom, why is it acceptable when you make an investment decision? Now of course, this is an oversimplification, but this process is essentially the one most companies follow to make a decision. They have a team arguing only one side of the case. The team has a choice of what points it wants to make and what way it wants to make them. And it falls to the final decision maker to be both the challenger and the ultimate judge. Building a good decision-making process is largely ensuring that these flaws don’t happen.
The Quarterly: How do you build a process that has these features?
Olivier Sibony: My coauthor, Dan Lovallo, and I did some quantitative research on this.2 We asked executives to tell us about their investment decisions—which ones worked and which ones didn’t and what practices made the difference—and we reviewed over a thousand of them.
One of the practices that we found made the most difference was having explicit discussions of the irreducible uncertainties in the decision. Notice the difference between that kind of conversation and the one elicited by the typical slide in a PowerPoint presentation, with the title “Risks we identified and risk-mitigating actions we will take.” That’s the way you frame it if you want to look like a confident presenter and want the meeting to go smoothly: you suppress the discussion of uncertainties. Instead, you should be emphasizing them to make sure you have a debate about them.
Executives reported some other things making a big difference—for example, whether the discussion included points of view contradictory to those of the person making the final decision. In other words, did anyone voice a point of view that was contrary to what the CEO wanted to hear or to what they thought he wanted to hear? And did the due-diligence team actually seek out information that would contradict the investment hypothesis, as opposed to simply building a case for it? These types of things can be hardwired into the process to make sure that they happen, and some companies do this routinely.
The Quarterly: Let’s talk about specific techniques. Take M&A as an example—does it help to assign people ahead of time to argue either side of a decision, regardless of what they actually believe?
Olivier Sibony: When evaluating an acquisition, there is of course the issue of impartiality—as Warren Buffett said, relying on one investment bank to tell you if you should do a deal is like asking your barber if you need a haircut. And there is the more subtle issue of motivated error: even people who sincerely believe that their assessments are objective are in fact often biased in the direction of their own interests.
So in this case, it can help in some settings to field two deal teams, at least at some stage in the process: one to argue for the deal and a second to argue against it. In other settings, if companies find that people avoid the direct confrontation that two deal teams imply, managers might prefer to ask the same people to argue both sides of the case or to make the uncertainties explicit. There are many different techniques to foster debate.
The Quarterly: What other techniques come to mind as effective in M&A situations?
Olivier Sibony: Another technique we find useful addresses the overconfidence bias. It is the “premortem,” invented by psychologist Gary Klein, whom we interviewed in 2010.3 In a premortem, you ask people to project themselves into the future and to assume that a deal has failed—not to imagine that it could fail, but to assume it already has. Then you ask them to write down, individually and in silence, the three to five reasons why it failed. And that forces people to speak up about the risks and the uncertainties that they’ve kept to themselves for fear of appearing pessimistic, uncommitted to the success of the proposal, or disloyal to the rest of the deal team.
A third technique is, at some point in the process, to write a memo explaining why the CEO should not do a deal, including the things the CEO would need to believe to not do it. Because by the time companies get to the actual decision meeting, everybody has forgotten about those reasons. So unless they’ve actually been recorded, no one’s left to argue the negative case. Everyone’s framing the positive case, and all the reasons you used to be worried about the deal have disappeared.
Here’s an example: when one company did a retrospective analysis of a deal that went wrong, it looked at a series of memos from the deal team to the investment committee, two months, one month, and two weeks before the deal was actually approved. The firm found that the top three things on a long list of worries in the first memo fell to the bottom of the list in the next memo and in the final memo had completely disappeared. Apparently, those concerns had been resolved to the team’s full satisfaction. But when the deal was done and the acquirers prepared to take possession of the company, guess what were the top priorities on their agenda: the same three things that had been swept under the rug in order to do the deal in the first place. This illustrates the dynamics of deal frenzy: when you sense that everybody around you wants to do a deal, you’re very prone to suppressing evidence that might lead you to not do it.
Another technique we’ve used is to develop a taxonomy of deals and a checklist for each type of deal. Companies that do a lot of deals, especially private-equity companies, tend to function by association and by pattern recognition and to look at a deal and say, “Oh, this one is just like this or that previous deal.” But usually the deals they’re reminded of are not the failures but the great successes. And once they latch onto that pattern recognition, it’s very difficult to see the broad range of things that actually can make the analogy irrelevant.
What you can do to remedy this bias is to use techniques such as multiple structured analogies or reference class forecasting.4 The names sound complicated, but the techniques are actually simple to apply. Essentially, they are ways of making sure that you look at a range of examples, not just one, and to explicitly analyze what makes those examples relevant and what could make them less relevant.
If you do enough deals so that you can actually recognize the different patterns, the way to use this technique is to identify the different types of deals and the things that matter for each. For instance, the things that we need to check in a deal where we acquire complementary product lines are not the same ones that we needto check for when we are doing a cross-selling kind of deal or a geographic-expansion kind of deal. So we will have different deal processes and different due-diligence checklists.
The Quarterly: What advice do you have for CFOs who want to incorporate these techniques into their decision-making processes?
Olivier Sibony: The crucial thing to keep in mind is that there isn’t one magic technique that will strip out all biases. This is more about putting in place a process that includes techniques to correct for the biases to which you’ve been susceptible in the past: probably not 20 techniques but 2 or 3 that you can use to help you avoid those biases in the future.
And once you put a process in place, it’s only valuable if it’s used consistently. First, because you’re going to learn and become better at using the process. Second, because it is precisely when you’re about to make a big mistake that you’re likely to have made an exception. The temptation, when you have a decision-making process, is always to say that for a really exceptional, difficult decision, we’re going to bypass the process, since the decision is an unusual one.
That’s precisely what you want to avoid. That’s why you need a process and the habit of following it, not just a tool kit of practices that you use from time to time. That’s why in areas where we don’t tolerate failure, we have routines. If you fly an aircraft, you don’t say, “The weather is really bad and we’re already behind schedule, so let’s skip the takeoff checklist.” You say, “This is a flight like every other one, and we’re going to use the checklist—that isn’t negotiable.”
About the Authors
Bill Huyett is a partner in McKinsey’s Boston office, and Tim Koller is a partner in the New York office.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
TOEIC-Exam Tips-2011
TOEIC- Introduction
TOEIC is an acronym that stands for Test Of English for International Communication. It is the most widely used English language exam taken by more than 4 million business professionals worldwide. The TOEIC test measures your ability to use English in daily business situations covering such topics as corporate development, finance and budgeting, corporate property, IT, manufacturing, purchasing, offices, personnel, technical matters, health and business travel. A growing number of international companies recognize the TOEIC as an objective indicator of a person's proficiency in business English. It is important to understand that the TOEIC does not measure what have you learned in one particular English class but evaluates your general command of the English language in a business setting. This means, you have to use and explore as many materials, resources and methods as possible in order to improve your English. You should create an environment in which you are exposed to the English language on a daily basis. For example, you can listen to the Voice of America, watch television on CNN, SkyNews or BBC, read newspaper articles in English and write emails. In addition, the Internet provides you with a wide variety of learning tools such as electronic newsletters, discussion groups and forums. On english-test.net you will find a large number of interactive tests that help you learn the core vocabulary of the TOEIC test. There is a total of 684 tests with 10 questions each. If you take all of our tests you will have learned 3420 words that frequently occur in the TOEIC.
TOEIC
Test of English for International Communication
TOEIC is a standardized test that measures your listening and reading skills, and or your speaking and writing skills. This exam evaluates your ability to function in international business and real-world settings rather than in an academic setting. Some students take the TOEIC because they want to improve their English. Other students take the TOEIC because they need it for an intensive English course or they want to apply for a job that requires a TOEIC score. Every institution expects a different standard of proficiency from its employees or students.
Here are some of the topics on the TOEIC:
Typical TOEIC Topics
Banking
Entertainment
Health
Housing
Industry Jobs
Offices
Restaurants
Transportation
Travel
Here is the format of the TOEIC:
TOEIC Format
Listening and Reading Test
Listening
100 questions, 45 minutes
Part I: Photographs (10 questions)
Part II: Question-Response (30 questions)
Part III: Short Conversations (30 questions)
Part IV: Short Talks (30 questions)
Reading
100 questions, 75 minutes
Part V: Incomplete Sentences (40 questions)
Part VI: Text completion (12 questions)
Part VII: Reading Comprehension-Single Passages (28 questions) Double Passages (20 questions)
Speaking and Writing Test
Speaking:
About 20 Minutes, 11 Questions
Various tasks including describing a photo, expressing an opinion, and providing a response or solution
Writing:
About one hour, 8 questions
7 written responses and 1 opinion essay
The TOEIC is developed in the United States, but is used throughout the world. The test developers use American language and spelling. The voices in the listening section are American, European countries or Australian accents.
I. Overview of the New TOEIC® Test
Over ten years of research on the English language and how people actually communicate confirmed the need for a new proficiency test that better reflects English language tasks likely to be encountered in business contexts. Therefore, the TOEIC® Test has been redesigned to include authentic reading and listening tasks in addition to new Speaking and Writing sections.
The improved TOEIC® Test assesses proficiency by aligning questions with everyday language scenarios that happen in today’s workplace. Tasks are now more authentic. Not all tasks have been changed, but some tasks give test-takers the opportunity to respond with language that is appropriate to the situation; in other words, how would someone at work respond in this particular situation? The difficulty range is the same. Many of the question types are the also the same.
Changes to the Listening section:
A decrease in the number of photograph questions in Part I.
The use of recorded as well as written questions in Part 3 (short conversations) and Part 4 (short talks).
A shift from individual questions to sets of questions in Part 3 (short conversations).
The use of different English accents, such as those spoken in the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, are used in the recordings.
Changes to the Reading section:
The elimination of Part 6 (error recognition questions) of the current test.
The inclusion of passage-based sentence completion questions (Part 6) to sentence completion items (Part 5).
The inclusion of some reading sets of questions based on two inter-related passages (Part 7).
The new Speaking test will measure a test taker’s ability to speak English in business contexts. Test-taker responses will be rated by online scorers who will evaluate the test taker's ability in language areas such as pronunciation, intonation, grammar, vocabulary, relevance, and completeness of response. The test will take 20 minutes to complete. Eleven questions will be used to measure different aspects of speaking ability.
The new Writing test will measure a test takers’ ability to use written English. The responses will be evaluated by raters who will consider overall organization, appropriate and precise use of grammar, and vocabulary. The test has eight questions and will take 60 minutes to complete.
The scoring system for the revised TOEIC® Test will remain almost the same: 5 to 495 for each section of the test and 10 to 990 for the total test score. However, a new scoring scale for the Speaking and Writing sections will be introduced. Additional improvements to the TOEIC® Test include enhanced score reports that will provide performance feedback within a test section and identify strengths and weaknesses in specific skill areas.
TOEIC is an acronym that stands for Test Of English for International Communication. It is the most widely used English language exam taken by more than 4 million business professionals worldwide. The TOEIC test measures your ability to use English in daily business situations covering such topics as corporate development, finance and budgeting, corporate property, IT, manufacturing, purchasing, offices, personnel, technical matters, health and business travel. A growing number of international companies recognize the TOEIC as an objective indicator of a person's proficiency in business English. It is important to understand that the TOEIC does not measure what have you learned in one particular English class but evaluates your general command of the English language in a business setting. This means, you have to use and explore as many materials, resources and methods as possible in order to improve your English. You should create an environment in which you are exposed to the English language on a daily basis. For example, you can listen to the Voice of America, watch television on CNN, SkyNews or BBC, read newspaper articles in English and write emails. In addition, the Internet provides you with a wide variety of learning tools such as electronic newsletters, discussion groups and forums. On english-test.net you will find a large number of interactive tests that help you learn the core vocabulary of the TOEIC test. There is a total of 684 tests with 10 questions each. If you take all of our tests you will have learned 3420 words that frequently occur in the TOEIC.
TOEIC
Test of English for International Communication
TOEIC is a standardized test that measures your listening and reading skills, and or your speaking and writing skills. This exam evaluates your ability to function in international business and real-world settings rather than in an academic setting. Some students take the TOEIC because they want to improve their English. Other students take the TOEIC because they need it for an intensive English course or they want to apply for a job that requires a TOEIC score. Every institution expects a different standard of proficiency from its employees or students.
Here are some of the topics on the TOEIC:
Typical TOEIC Topics
Banking
Entertainment
Health
Housing
Industry Jobs
Offices
Restaurants
Transportation
Travel
Here is the format of the TOEIC:
TOEIC Format
Listening and Reading Test
Listening
100 questions, 45 minutes
Part I: Photographs (10 questions)
Part II: Question-Response (30 questions)
Part III: Short Conversations (30 questions)
Part IV: Short Talks (30 questions)
Reading
100 questions, 75 minutes
Part V: Incomplete Sentences (40 questions)
Part VI: Text completion (12 questions)
Part VII: Reading Comprehension-Single Passages (28 questions) Double Passages (20 questions)
Speaking and Writing Test
Speaking:
About 20 Minutes, 11 Questions
Various tasks including describing a photo, expressing an opinion, and providing a response or solution
Writing:
About one hour, 8 questions
7 written responses and 1 opinion essay
The TOEIC is developed in the United States, but is used throughout the world. The test developers use American language and spelling. The voices in the listening section are American, European countries or Australian accents.
I. Overview of the New TOEIC® Test
Over ten years of research on the English language and how people actually communicate confirmed the need for a new proficiency test that better reflects English language tasks likely to be encountered in business contexts. Therefore, the TOEIC® Test has been redesigned to include authentic reading and listening tasks in addition to new Speaking and Writing sections.
The improved TOEIC® Test assesses proficiency by aligning questions with everyday language scenarios that happen in today’s workplace. Tasks are now more authentic. Not all tasks have been changed, but some tasks give test-takers the opportunity to respond with language that is appropriate to the situation; in other words, how would someone at work respond in this particular situation? The difficulty range is the same. Many of the question types are the also the same.
Changes to the Listening section:
A decrease in the number of photograph questions in Part I.
The use of recorded as well as written questions in Part 3 (short conversations) and Part 4 (short talks).
A shift from individual questions to sets of questions in Part 3 (short conversations).
The use of different English accents, such as those spoken in the U.S., Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, are used in the recordings.
Changes to the Reading section:
The elimination of Part 6 (error recognition questions) of the current test.
The inclusion of passage-based sentence completion questions (Part 6) to sentence completion items (Part 5).
The inclusion of some reading sets of questions based on two inter-related passages (Part 7).
The new Speaking test will measure a test taker’s ability to speak English in business contexts. Test-taker responses will be rated by online scorers who will evaluate the test taker's ability in language areas such as pronunciation, intonation, grammar, vocabulary, relevance, and completeness of response. The test will take 20 minutes to complete. Eleven questions will be used to measure different aspects of speaking ability.
The new Writing test will measure a test takers’ ability to use written English. The responses will be evaluated by raters who will consider overall organization, appropriate and precise use of grammar, and vocabulary. The test has eight questions and will take 60 minutes to complete.
The scoring system for the revised TOEIC® Test will remain almost the same: 5 to 495 for each section of the test and 10 to 990 for the total test score. However, a new scoring scale for the Speaking and Writing sections will be introduced. Additional improvements to the TOEIC® Test include enhanced score reports that will provide performance feedback within a test section and identify strengths and weaknesses in specific skill areas.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
HOW "OK" TOOK OVER THE WORLD-2011
How 'OK' took over the world
OK is everywhere, used every day
It crops up in our speech dozens of times every day, although it apparently means little. So how did the word "OK" conquer the world, asks Allan Metcalf.
"OK" is one of the most frequently used and recognised words in the world.
It is also one of the oddest expressions ever invented. But this oddity may in large measure account for its popularity.
It's odd-looking. It's a word that looks and sounds like an abbreviation, an acronym.
We generally spell it OK - the spelling okay is relatively recent, and still relatively rare - and we pronounce it not "ock" but by sounding the names of the letters O and K.
Visually, OK pairs the completely round O with the completely straight lines of K.
International OKs
• Native American Choctaw: Okeh - it is so
• Scottish: Och aye - oh yes
• Greek: Ola kala - all is right
• German: ohne Korrektur - without [need for] correction
• Finnish: Oikea - correct
• Mandinka: O ke - that's it
So both in speech and in writing OK stands out clearly, easily distinguished from other words, and yet it uses simple sounds that are familiar to a multitude of languages.
Almost every language has an O vowel, a K consonant, and an A vowel. So OK is a very distinctive combination of very familiar elements. And that's one reason it's so successful. OK stands apart.
Ordinarily a word so odd, so distinctive from others, wouldn't be allowed in a language to begin with. As a general rule, a language allows new words only when they resemble familiar ones.
Clever coinages may be laughed at and enjoyed, but hardly ever adopted by users of the language.
So it was in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, in the late 1830s, when newspaper editors enjoyed inventing fanciful abbreviations, like "WOOOFC" for "with one of our first citizens" and OW for "all right".
Needless to say, neither of these found a permanent place in the language. But they provided the unusual context that enabled the creation of OK.
On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.k. (all correct)".
OK may have originated from a comical misspelling
How this weak joke survived at all, instead of vanishing like its counterparts, is a matter of lucky coincidence involving the American presidential election of 1840.
One candidate was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and there was a false tale that a previous American president couldn't spell properly and thus would approve documents with an "OK", thinking it was the abbreviation for "all correct".
Within a decade, people began actually marking OK on documents and using OK on the telegraph to signal that all was well. So OK had found its niche, being easy to say or write and also distinctive enough to be clear.
But there was still only restricted use of OK. The misspelled abbreviation may have implied illiteracy to some, and OK was generally avoided in anything but business contexts, or in fictional dialogue by characters deemed to be rustic or illiterate.
Indeed, by and large American writers of fiction avoided OK altogether, even those like Mark Twain who freely used slang.
But in the 20th Century OK moved from margin to mainstream, gradually becoming a staple of nearly everyone's conversation, no longer looked on as illiterate or slang.
Its true origin was gradually forgotten. OK used such familiar sounds that speakers of other languages, hearing it, could rethink it as an expression or abbreviation in their own language.
Thus it was taken into the Choctaw Native American language, whose expression "okeh" meant something like "it is so".
“Start Quote
Modern English translations of the Bible remain almost entirely OK-free”
US President Woodrow Wilson, early in the 20th Century, lent his prestige by marking okeh on documents he approved.
And soon OK was to find its place in many languages as a reminder of a familiar word or abbreviation.
But what makes OK so useful that we incorporate it into so many conversations?
It's not that it was needed to "fill a gap" in any language. Before 1839, English speakers had "yes", "good", "fine", "excellent", "satisfactory", and "all right".
What OK provided that the others did not was neutrality, a way to affirm or to express agreement without having to offer an opinion.
Consider this dialogue: "Let's meet again this afternoon."
Reply: "OK."
Compare that with: "Let's meet again this afternoon."
Reply: "Wonderful!" or "If we must."
Martin Van Buren was a big part of OK's initial takeoff
OK allows us to view a situation in simplest terms, just OK or not.
When someone falls down, the question is not "how well are you feeling?" but the more basic "are you OK?".
And any lingering stigma associated with OK is long since gone. Now OK is not out of place in the mouth of a US president like Barack Obama.
Speaking to schoolchildren in 2009 he said: "That's OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures."
The word would also easily slip from the mouth of a British prime minister like David Cameron.
And yet, despite its conquest of conversations the world over, there remain vast areas of language where OK is scarcely to be found.
You won't find OK in prepared speeches. Indeed, most formal speeches and reports are free of OK.
Modern English translations of the Bible remain almost entirely OK-free. Many a published book has not a single instance of OK.
But OK still rules over the vast domain of our conversation.
Allan Metcalf is the author of OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word.
OK is everywhere, used every day
It crops up in our speech dozens of times every day, although it apparently means little. So how did the word "OK" conquer the world, asks Allan Metcalf.
"OK" is one of the most frequently used and recognised words in the world.
It is also one of the oddest expressions ever invented. But this oddity may in large measure account for its popularity.
It's odd-looking. It's a word that looks and sounds like an abbreviation, an acronym.
We generally spell it OK - the spelling okay is relatively recent, and still relatively rare - and we pronounce it not "ock" but by sounding the names of the letters O and K.
Visually, OK pairs the completely round O with the completely straight lines of K.
International OKs
• Native American Choctaw: Okeh - it is so
• Scottish: Och aye - oh yes
• Greek: Ola kala - all is right
• German: ohne Korrektur - without [need for] correction
• Finnish: Oikea - correct
• Mandinka: O ke - that's it
So both in speech and in writing OK stands out clearly, easily distinguished from other words, and yet it uses simple sounds that are familiar to a multitude of languages.
Almost every language has an O vowel, a K consonant, and an A vowel. So OK is a very distinctive combination of very familiar elements. And that's one reason it's so successful. OK stands apart.
Ordinarily a word so odd, so distinctive from others, wouldn't be allowed in a language to begin with. As a general rule, a language allows new words only when they resemble familiar ones.
Clever coinages may be laughed at and enjoyed, but hardly ever adopted by users of the language.
So it was in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, in the late 1830s, when newspaper editors enjoyed inventing fanciful abbreviations, like "WOOOFC" for "with one of our first citizens" and OW for "all right".
Needless to say, neither of these found a permanent place in the language. But they provided the unusual context that enabled the creation of OK.
On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.k. (all correct)".
OK may have originated from a comical misspelling
How this weak joke survived at all, instead of vanishing like its counterparts, is a matter of lucky coincidence involving the American presidential election of 1840.
One candidate was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and there was a false tale that a previous American president couldn't spell properly and thus would approve documents with an "OK", thinking it was the abbreviation for "all correct".
Within a decade, people began actually marking OK on documents and using OK on the telegraph to signal that all was well. So OK had found its niche, being easy to say or write and also distinctive enough to be clear.
But there was still only restricted use of OK. The misspelled abbreviation may have implied illiteracy to some, and OK was generally avoided in anything but business contexts, or in fictional dialogue by characters deemed to be rustic or illiterate.
Indeed, by and large American writers of fiction avoided OK altogether, even those like Mark Twain who freely used slang.
But in the 20th Century OK moved from margin to mainstream, gradually becoming a staple of nearly everyone's conversation, no longer looked on as illiterate or slang.
Its true origin was gradually forgotten. OK used such familiar sounds that speakers of other languages, hearing it, could rethink it as an expression or abbreviation in their own language.
Thus it was taken into the Choctaw Native American language, whose expression "okeh" meant something like "it is so".
“Start Quote
Modern English translations of the Bible remain almost entirely OK-free”
US President Woodrow Wilson, early in the 20th Century, lent his prestige by marking okeh on documents he approved.
And soon OK was to find its place in many languages as a reminder of a familiar word or abbreviation.
But what makes OK so useful that we incorporate it into so many conversations?
It's not that it was needed to "fill a gap" in any language. Before 1839, English speakers had "yes", "good", "fine", "excellent", "satisfactory", and "all right".
What OK provided that the others did not was neutrality, a way to affirm or to express agreement without having to offer an opinion.
Consider this dialogue: "Let's meet again this afternoon."
Reply: "OK."
Compare that with: "Let's meet again this afternoon."
Reply: "Wonderful!" or "If we must."
Martin Van Buren was a big part of OK's initial takeoff
OK allows us to view a situation in simplest terms, just OK or not.
When someone falls down, the question is not "how well are you feeling?" but the more basic "are you OK?".
And any lingering stigma associated with OK is long since gone. Now OK is not out of place in the mouth of a US president like Barack Obama.
Speaking to schoolchildren in 2009 he said: "That's OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures."
The word would also easily slip from the mouth of a British prime minister like David Cameron.
And yet, despite its conquest of conversations the world over, there remain vast areas of language where OK is scarcely to be found.
You won't find OK in prepared speeches. Indeed, most formal speeches and reports are free of OK.
Modern English translations of the Bible remain almost entirely OK-free. Many a published book has not a single instance of OK.
But OK still rules over the vast domain of our conversation.
Allan Metcalf is the author of OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word.
Electronic Waste-Article & Videos-2011 (Sp/Eng)
THE LIGHT BULB CONSPIRACY (Trailer)
http://www.youtube.com/v/p2CUVZYu6tI&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedd
http://www.youtube.com/v/p2CUVZYu6tI&rel=0&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedd
Friday, February 18, 2011
TIGER MOTHERS-2011
Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior
Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?
By AMY CHUA
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.
I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.
All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.
When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.
Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job.
" Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.
First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.
For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.
If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.
Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)
Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.
By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.
Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.
Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.
Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.
Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.
"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.
"You can't make me."
"Oh yes, I can."
Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.
Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?
"You just don't believe in her," I accused.
"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."
"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."
"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.
"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."
I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.
Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.
Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.
"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."
Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.
There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.
Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.
—Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Day of Empire" and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." This essay is excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua, to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Amy Chua.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids? And what happens when they fight back?
By AMY CHUA
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:
• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.
I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.
All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough.
When it comes to parenting, the Chinese seem to produce children who display academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success - or so the stereotype goes. WSJ's Christina Tsuei speaks to two moms raised by Chinese immigrants who share what it was like growing up and how they hope to raise their children.
Despite our squeamishness about cultural stereotypes, there are tons of studies out there showing marked and quantifiable differences between Chinese and Westerners when it comes to parenting. In one study of 50 Western American mothers and 48 Chinese immigrant mothers, almost 70% of the Western mothers said either that "stressing academic success is not good for children" or that "parents need to foster the idea that learning is fun." By contrast, roughly 0% of the Chinese mothers felt the same way. Instead, the vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be "the best" students, that "academic achievement reflects successful parenting," and that if children did not excel at school then there was "a problem" and parents "were not doing their job.
" Other studies indicate that compared to Western parents, Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children. By contrast, Western kids are more likely to participate in sports teams.
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.
Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.
As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)
Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.
I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.
First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.
For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.
If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.
Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)
Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.
By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.
Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.
Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.
Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.
Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.
"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.
"You can't make me."
"Oh yes, I can."
Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.
Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?
"You just don't believe in her," I accused.
"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."
"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."
"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.
"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."
I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.
Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.
Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.
"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."
Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.
There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.
Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.
—Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of "Day of Empire" and "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability." This essay is excerpted from "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua, to be published Tuesday by the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Amy Chua.
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Spousonomics-Economics & Marriage-Video
http://online.wsj.com/video/not-having-enough-sex-economic-theory-may-help/77423DBC-8239-4AF4-86FD-57FB94854052.html
February 14, 2011
The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much..
Paula Szuchman, an editor at the Wall Street Journal and co-author of the new book “Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes” (Random House, 2011), will be guest blogging this week on Ideas Market.
This Valentine’s Day, skip the chocolate, lingerie and jewelry. Instead, practice talking less, doing the dishes and putting out. Romantic? Maybe not. The secret to a life of wedded bliss? Quite possibly.
A little background. I just co-wrote a book called “Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage & Dirty Dishes,” in which I take some well-established ideas from the dismal science and use them to show couples how they can improve their marriages. One of the first things people say when they hear about the book is something to the effect of, “Isn’t that kind of unromantic?” Well, yeah. But what’s romantic about dishes, laundry, diapers, bills, mortgages, in-laws, TiVo, company picnics, circular arguments, BlackBerries, hamsters, PTA meetings, and all the million other little things that go into a marriage and detract from the actual romance between two people who once loved each other so much they decided to keep each other company for the rest of their lives?
All that stuff is the business side of marriage, and to navigate it successfully, you don’t need chocolate hearts. You need sound reasoning. You need to be practical and efficient. You need to allocate your scarce resources wisely and make smart trade-offs, so that at the end of the day, you can enjoy the company of that person you promised to have and to hold until death (death!) do you part.
Herewith, five somewhat regressive, not very romantic, yet extremely effective lessons from economics for a happy marriage with long-term prospects:
1. Talk less.
Well okay, talk all you want about your dreams, ambitions and Egypt’s future. But when it comes to nagging reminders about what your spouse still has to do after a long day working for the man—take out the recycling, walk the dog, write a thank-you letter, defrost the chicken, fix the stereo—keep a lid on it. Economists talk about “information processing costs,” or the costs incurred from processing, absorbing and filtering information. When information processing costs get too high, we tend to become paralyzed. Like when we get to the kitchen-cabinet department at IKEA, and we’re so overwhelmed that we decide to skip the whole thing and just have a plate of meatballs at the café then head home for a nap.
Overloading your spouse with what you consider to be perfectly valid information is a bad idea. One thing at a time, friends, and the most important thing first. Same rule applies when you’re arguing. Stick to the point—he didn’t call to say he was running late—and don’t tick off the long list of sins he’s committed since last Tuesday.
2. Lose weight.
Married people exercise less than single people do. I know this because married couples have told me so—56% of people we surveyed said they gained weight after they got married. Everyone has their excuses: They’re too busy with their demanding jobs, too exhausted by their demanding children, too lazy to get off their demanding couches. But the real reason is moral hazard, or the tendency to take more risks and behave more irresponsibly when there are no consequences. Moral hazard is one reason the country’s biggest financial firms bet the house on subprime mortgages—they knew if worse came to worst, Uncle Sam would be there to bail them out.
Similarly, why bother working out and staying fit when you’ve already snagged your man—or woman—and you’ve got a license from the state to prove it? After I got married, one of my single friends told me I was lucky because I didn’t have to go to the gym anymore. I was no longer “posin’ to be chosen.”
So go ahead, challenge your own moral hazard and try losing that post-marriage weight. While you’re at it, don’t wear sweatpants around the house all the time.
3. Do the dishes.
Here’s where I’m really going to get skewered by my sisters for setting women back 50 years: Do the dishes because you just might be better at them, and faster, and less likely than your spouse is to leave them out overnight. You might think a 50/50 marriage is the way to go, but if you’re like so many other couples in the year 2011, your quest for egalitarianism means you’re more likely to pick a fight when you sense things are getting into the 60/40 range—or worse.
Better to have a system where each of you specializes in what you do best, relative to other chores. It’s a system based on the notion of comparative advantage, which (as every Wall Street Journal reader knows) is the foundation of free trade. And what’s marriage, if not a union between two trading partners? So if you really are better at the dishes than remembering to call the in-laws, then that should be your job. It’ll take you less time than it’ll take him, and it’ll take him less time to have a quick chat with mom than it would take you, which means in the end, you’ve saved quite a bit of collective time. Use that time for fun stuff, like, for example, sex.
4. Put out
Which brings me to my fourth point: Put out. I know, it seem ridiculous to tell married people they should have sex (with each other)—but then why do so many people seem to forget this is a key part of the job of being married? Some 54% of married people, according to our research, wish they were having more sex, and the people who are doing it more also report being happier in their relationships. Not saying one causes the other, but there’s a definite correlation, for what it’s worth. The #1 reason people say they don’t do it more: They’re too tired.
The only solution to this problem is to wake up and do the job—the same way you wake up every morning and go to your actual job. No reason why you can do one and not the other. In “Spousonomics,” we suggest people lower the costs of having sex in order to up demand. Keep it simple, fast and fun. Some people even say the more they get in the habit of doing it, the more they want to do it. Kind of like flossing.
5. Scheme
And finally, start scheming, or thinking strategically. Being strategic might sound cold and calculating, but it’s something you probably already do with your spouse, whether you admit it or not. For example, if your friends invite you for a weekend away, no spouses, and you want to go, you naturally start thinking about how you can make this happen with minimal fuss, what you can offer your spouse in return, how to bring it up, when to bring it up, and what type of flowers to present as graft when you’re in the midst of bringing it up.
Thinking ahead, learning from past experience, putting yourself in your spouse’s shoes—these are all strategies straight from the game-theory playbook (game theory being the study of behavior in strategic situations). In fact, if you think like a game theorist, you’ll find that marriage is really just a two-person repeated game. In the game, each person is trying to achieve the best results possible, given the limitations that there’s another person involved. Think of that other person and you’re being strategic. You’re also being pretty romantic.
February 14, 2011
The Secret to a Happy Marriage: Do the Dishes, Put Out, Don’t Talk So Much..
Paula Szuchman, an editor at the Wall Street Journal and co-author of the new book “Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes” (Random House, 2011), will be guest blogging this week on Ideas Market.
This Valentine’s Day, skip the chocolate, lingerie and jewelry. Instead, practice talking less, doing the dishes and putting out. Romantic? Maybe not. The secret to a life of wedded bliss? Quite possibly.
A little background. I just co-wrote a book called “Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage & Dirty Dishes,” in which I take some well-established ideas from the dismal science and use them to show couples how they can improve their marriages. One of the first things people say when they hear about the book is something to the effect of, “Isn’t that kind of unromantic?” Well, yeah. But what’s romantic about dishes, laundry, diapers, bills, mortgages, in-laws, TiVo, company picnics, circular arguments, BlackBerries, hamsters, PTA meetings, and all the million other little things that go into a marriage and detract from the actual romance between two people who once loved each other so much they decided to keep each other company for the rest of their lives?
All that stuff is the business side of marriage, and to navigate it successfully, you don’t need chocolate hearts. You need sound reasoning. You need to be practical and efficient. You need to allocate your scarce resources wisely and make smart trade-offs, so that at the end of the day, you can enjoy the company of that person you promised to have and to hold until death (death!) do you part.
Herewith, five somewhat regressive, not very romantic, yet extremely effective lessons from economics for a happy marriage with long-term prospects:
1. Talk less.
Well okay, talk all you want about your dreams, ambitions and Egypt’s future. But when it comes to nagging reminders about what your spouse still has to do after a long day working for the man—take out the recycling, walk the dog, write a thank-you letter, defrost the chicken, fix the stereo—keep a lid on it. Economists talk about “information processing costs,” or the costs incurred from processing, absorbing and filtering information. When information processing costs get too high, we tend to become paralyzed. Like when we get to the kitchen-cabinet department at IKEA, and we’re so overwhelmed that we decide to skip the whole thing and just have a plate of meatballs at the café then head home for a nap.
Overloading your spouse with what you consider to be perfectly valid information is a bad idea. One thing at a time, friends, and the most important thing first. Same rule applies when you’re arguing. Stick to the point—he didn’t call to say he was running late—and don’t tick off the long list of sins he’s committed since last Tuesday.
2. Lose weight.
Married people exercise less than single people do. I know this because married couples have told me so—56% of people we surveyed said they gained weight after they got married. Everyone has their excuses: They’re too busy with their demanding jobs, too exhausted by their demanding children, too lazy to get off their demanding couches. But the real reason is moral hazard, or the tendency to take more risks and behave more irresponsibly when there are no consequences. Moral hazard is one reason the country’s biggest financial firms bet the house on subprime mortgages—they knew if worse came to worst, Uncle Sam would be there to bail them out.
Similarly, why bother working out and staying fit when you’ve already snagged your man—or woman—and you’ve got a license from the state to prove it? After I got married, one of my single friends told me I was lucky because I didn’t have to go to the gym anymore. I was no longer “posin’ to be chosen.”
So go ahead, challenge your own moral hazard and try losing that post-marriage weight. While you’re at it, don’t wear sweatpants around the house all the time.
3. Do the dishes.
Here’s where I’m really going to get skewered by my sisters for setting women back 50 years: Do the dishes because you just might be better at them, and faster, and less likely than your spouse is to leave them out overnight. You might think a 50/50 marriage is the way to go, but if you’re like so many other couples in the year 2011, your quest for egalitarianism means you’re more likely to pick a fight when you sense things are getting into the 60/40 range—or worse.
Better to have a system where each of you specializes in what you do best, relative to other chores. It’s a system based on the notion of comparative advantage, which (as every Wall Street Journal reader knows) is the foundation of free trade. And what’s marriage, if not a union between two trading partners? So if you really are better at the dishes than remembering to call the in-laws, then that should be your job. It’ll take you less time than it’ll take him, and it’ll take him less time to have a quick chat with mom than it would take you, which means in the end, you’ve saved quite a bit of collective time. Use that time for fun stuff, like, for example, sex.
4. Put out
Which brings me to my fourth point: Put out. I know, it seem ridiculous to tell married people they should have sex (with each other)—but then why do so many people seem to forget this is a key part of the job of being married? Some 54% of married people, according to our research, wish they were having more sex, and the people who are doing it more also report being happier in their relationships. Not saying one causes the other, but there’s a definite correlation, for what it’s worth. The #1 reason people say they don’t do it more: They’re too tired.
The only solution to this problem is to wake up and do the job—the same way you wake up every morning and go to your actual job. No reason why you can do one and not the other. In “Spousonomics,” we suggest people lower the costs of having sex in order to up demand. Keep it simple, fast and fun. Some people even say the more they get in the habit of doing it, the more they want to do it. Kind of like flossing.
5. Scheme
And finally, start scheming, or thinking strategically. Being strategic might sound cold and calculating, but it’s something you probably already do with your spouse, whether you admit it or not. For example, if your friends invite you for a weekend away, no spouses, and you want to go, you naturally start thinking about how you can make this happen with minimal fuss, what you can offer your spouse in return, how to bring it up, when to bring it up, and what type of flowers to present as graft when you’re in the midst of bringing it up.
Thinking ahead, learning from past experience, putting yourself in your spouse’s shoes—these are all strategies straight from the game-theory playbook (game theory being the study of behavior in strategic situations). In fact, if you think like a game theorist, you’ll find that marriage is really just a two-person repeated game. In the game, each person is trying to achieve the best results possible, given the limitations that there’s another person involved. Think of that other person and you’re being strategic. You’re also being pretty romantic.
AOL to buy Huffington Post for $315m
AOL to buy Huffington Post for $315m
By Matthew Garrahan
February 7 2011
AOL, the US internet company, is making a big bet on the viability of free online content by agreeing to buy the Huffington Post, the left-leaning web operation started by Arianna Huffington, for $315m.
The deal, which was announced late on Sunday night, is the latest and most significant step AOL has taken to becoming a serious player in advertising-supported internet content.
“The acquisition of The Huffington Post will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community, and social experiences for consumers,” said Tim Armstrong, chairman and chief executive of AOL.
The deal represents a big pay-day for Ms Huffington, a popular political pundit who owns a significant stake in the Huffington Post. Under the terms of the acquisition, she will run a new AOL division which will integrate all AOL and Huffington Post content. “Arianna is a singularly passionate and dedicated champion of innovative journalistic engagement,” said Mr Armstrong.
AOL has been building a network of specialist sites, including TechCrunch, the technology news and reviews site, Endgadget and Patch. But the Huffington Post acquisition is the biggest yet and will give AOL access to one of the web’s largest audiences for a news web site.
The Huffington Post was started with backing from several liberal supporters, including the comedian Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, and David Geffen, the film and music billionaire. Since the site was launched in 2004, it has built a monthly audience of nearly 25m monthly unique users who visit the site for its blend of comment, blogs and news – which often comes from other sources around the web.
“By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform,” Ms Huffington wrote on her site on Sunday.
AOL came to prominence in the internet boom of the 1990s, offering dial-up internet and email services. But those businesses have matured since the advent of broadband internet, which has forced the company to change tack.
Mr Armstrong, a former Google advertising executive, was appointed chief executive in 2009 and under his leadership the company has been trying to re-invent itself as a hub of specialised online content. “When people think about Google for search and Amazon for commerce, I think they’re going to end up thinking about AOL for content,” he said at a conference last year.
However, AOL has a patchy track record in mergers and acquisitions: it sold ICQ, the instant messaging service, last year for $187.5m – less than half of what it paid for it in 1998. It also made a big loss on Bebo, the social networking site it bought for $850m in 2008, reportedly selling it for less than $10m.
The company’s biggest deal was also widely regarded as the worst in history. It acquired Time Warner in an all-share deal worth $164bn in 2001. It was supposed to marry the best of old and new media but anticipated synergy failed to materialise and a string of write-downs followed – including an eye-watering $100bn charge only a year later. AOL was eventually spun out of Time Warner in 2009.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
By Matthew Garrahan
February 7 2011
AOL, the US internet company, is making a big bet on the viability of free online content by agreeing to buy the Huffington Post, the left-leaning web operation started by Arianna Huffington, for $315m.
The deal, which was announced late on Sunday night, is the latest and most significant step AOL has taken to becoming a serious player in advertising-supported internet content.
“The acquisition of The Huffington Post will create a next-generation American media company with global reach that combines content, community, and social experiences for consumers,” said Tim Armstrong, chairman and chief executive of AOL.
The deal represents a big pay-day for Ms Huffington, a popular political pundit who owns a significant stake in the Huffington Post. Under the terms of the acquisition, she will run a new AOL division which will integrate all AOL and Huffington Post content. “Arianna is a singularly passionate and dedicated champion of innovative journalistic engagement,” said Mr Armstrong.
AOL has been building a network of specialist sites, including TechCrunch, the technology news and reviews site, Endgadget and Patch. But the Huffington Post acquisition is the biggest yet and will give AOL access to one of the web’s largest audiences for a news web site.
The Huffington Post was started with backing from several liberal supporters, including the comedian Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, and David Geffen, the film and music billionaire. Since the site was launched in 2004, it has built a monthly audience of nearly 25m monthly unique users who visit the site for its blend of comment, blogs and news – which often comes from other sources around the web.
“By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform,” Ms Huffington wrote on her site on Sunday.
AOL came to prominence in the internet boom of the 1990s, offering dial-up internet and email services. But those businesses have matured since the advent of broadband internet, which has forced the company to change tack.
Mr Armstrong, a former Google advertising executive, was appointed chief executive in 2009 and under his leadership the company has been trying to re-invent itself as a hub of specialised online content. “When people think about Google for search and Amazon for commerce, I think they’re going to end up thinking about AOL for content,” he said at a conference last year.
However, AOL has a patchy track record in mergers and acquisitions: it sold ICQ, the instant messaging service, last year for $187.5m – less than half of what it paid for it in 1998. It also made a big loss on Bebo, the social networking site it bought for $850m in 2008, reportedly selling it for less than $10m.
The company’s biggest deal was also widely regarded as the worst in history. It acquired Time Warner in an all-share deal worth $164bn in 2001. It was supposed to marry the best of old and new media but anticipated synergy failed to materialise and a string of write-downs followed – including an eye-watering $100bn charge only a year later. AOL was eventually spun out of Time Warner in 2009.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
Dan Ariely-Irrationality in the workplace-Video Interview
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Dan_Ariely_on_irrationality_in_the_workplace_2742?pagenum=1#daninteractive
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
TOEFL Video-Different instructors and students´ comments-2011
http://www.toeflgoanywhere.org/enewsletter/february2011/TOEFL-Passport.html
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Heather Russell-The Soulful Girl
http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/soulful-girl-sings-original-piece/20yumcy7?
Sunday, February 13, 2011
THE FUTURE SUCCESS OF CHINA COMPANIES + Manchester Business School-Video
Manchester Global MBAManchester Business School – Management Ideas Online Forum
The aim of Manchester Business School - Management Ideas Online Forum is to provide a platform in which our readers can share what they learn from school and how to apply them in the real business world.
You are invited to share about a current management topic with less then 150 words. If you are good enough, your comment will be short-listed and published online. And finally, in order to consolidate learning, we will have a debriefing video given by the professor from Manchester Business School on Nov 12.
Current Topic
THE FUTURE SUCCESS OF CHINA COMPANIES AS "GLOBAL" BRANDS IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS
W.W Rostow summarised all societies into five stages of economic growth: the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass-consumption. It has been argued that China is in its ‘take-off” stage, and is experiencing rapid growth. But how sustainable it will be, depends very much not on the Chinese economy as a whole, but on the performance of individual companies, and how well they go global.
Here are some questions for your thoughts:
What determines the success of a mainland Chinese company to become a global brand?
What hurdles do they need to overcome?
What mainland companies today do you think will become a global brand and why?
Is merger and acquisition the best strategy to expand overseas?
How does the history of a company, and the history of China as a whole, which is characterised by periods of ‘luan’ or chaos (e.g. foreign aggression during the late Ching Dynasty), shape these companies’ quest in going global?
The aim of Manchester Business School - Management Ideas Online Forum is to provide a platform in which our readers can share what they learn from school and how to apply them in the real business world.
You are invited to share about a current management topic with less then 150 words. If you are good enough, your comment will be short-listed and published online. And finally, in order to consolidate learning, we will have a debriefing video given by the professor from Manchester Business School on Nov 12.
Current Topic
THE FUTURE SUCCESS OF CHINA COMPANIES AS "GLOBAL" BRANDS IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS
W.W Rostow summarised all societies into five stages of economic growth: the traditional society, the preconditions for take-off, the take-off, the drive to maturity, and the age of high mass-consumption. It has been argued that China is in its ‘take-off” stage, and is experiencing rapid growth. But how sustainable it will be, depends very much not on the Chinese economy as a whole, but on the performance of individual companies, and how well they go global.
Here are some questions for your thoughts:
What determines the success of a mainland Chinese company to become a global brand?
What hurdles do they need to overcome?
What mainland companies today do you think will become a global brand and why?
Is merger and acquisition the best strategy to expand overseas?
How does the history of a company, and the history of China as a whole, which is characterised by periods of ‘luan’ or chaos (e.g. foreign aggression during the late Ching Dynasty), shape these companies’ quest in going global?
Thursday, February 10, 2011
McKinseyQuarterly-2011-Interview&Case study-Audio
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Digital_Marketing/The_power_of_storytelling_What_nonprofits_can_teach_the_private_sector_about_social_media_2740
javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$GridContainerPlaceHolder$inThisArticle$_audioDownloadLink','')
The power of storytelling: What nonprofits can teach the private sector about social media
Learn how to harness the power of social media in this case study excerpted from The Dragonfly Effect, by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith. Then hear more from the authors in a conversation with McKinsey’s Dan Singer.
FEBRUARY 2011
Source: Marketing & Sales Practice
In This Article
Social-media engagement: A case study from The Dragonfly Effect
Applying the lessons beyond the social sector: McKinsey’s Dan Singer talks with the authors of The Dragonfly Effect .Audio
Download MP3
..Companies are spending countless hours and millions of dollars trying to master social media. Is this a revolutionary platform that can drive everything from customer relationships to product development—or just another form of marketing? In a new book titled The Dragonfly Effect, Stanford University marketing professor Jennifer Aaker and marketing strategist Andy Smith seek to answer these questions by examining numerous examples of social media at work, distilling a framework for inspiring infectious action.
One of the four “dragonfly wings” that comprise the authors’ framework and give the book its name is engagement, which they define as “truly making people feel emotionally connected to helping you achieve your goals” through storytelling, authenticity, and establishing a personal connection. Presented here is an excerpt adapted from the book, followed by a discussion between the authors and Dan Singer, a director in McKinsey’s New York office. The conversation focused on lessons useful for leaders seeking to boost their organizations’ marketing effectiveness by engaging customers through social media. The bottom line: using social media to capture people’s attention is different from traditional advertising, and companies that measure the effectiveness of these new channels by simply counting Facebook fans should rethink their approach.
Social-media engagement: A case study from The Dragonfly Effect
Scott Harrison was at the top of his world. The 28-year-old New York–based nightclub and fashion promoter excelled at bringing models and hedge-fund kings together and selling them $500 bottles of vodka. He had money and power. Yet his lifestyle brought something else: emptiness. Harrison felt spiritually bankrupt.
So he walked away, volunteering to serve on a floating hospital offering free medical care in the world’s poorest nations. Serving as the ship’s photojournalist, Harrison was quickly immersed in a very different world. Thousands would flock to the ship looking for solutions to debilitating problems: enormous tumors, cleft lips and palates, flesh eaten by bacteria from waterborne diseases. Harrison’s camera lens brought into focus astonishing poverty and pain, and he began documenting the struggles of these people and their courage.
After eight months, he moved back to New York, but not to his former life. Aware that many of the diseases and medical problems he witnessed stemmed from inadequate access to clean drinking water, he decided to do something about it. In 2006, he founded charity: water, a nonprofit designed to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.
Harrison launched the organization on his 31st birthday by asking friends to donate $31 instead of giving him a gift. It was a success—the birthday generated $15,000 and helped build charity: water’s first few wells in Uganda. In the three years that followed, Harrison’s simple birthday wish snowballed into donations that today total more than $20 million, translating into almost 3,000 water projects spanning everything from hand-dug wells and deep wells to protection for springs to rainwater harvesting. The organization has now provided clean water to more than 1.4 million people spanning 17 countries. Its success can be explained through four design principles for generating engagement with a brand through social media.
Tell a story. Harrison’s personal journey—evoking themes of redemption, change, and hope—engaged others on an emotional level. By candidly discussing in media interviews and YouTube videos why and how he started charity: water, the thoughtful, accessible, and youthful Harrison helped viewers fall in love with him and his cause.
Empathize with your audience. Let people engage with your brand to learn what’s important to them and how it relates to your campaign. charity: water evoked empathy through the use of photographs and videos that revealed the urgency of the water problem in the developing world. Instead of relying just on statistics, the organization promoted compelling stories that forced people to think about what it would be like to live without access to clean water.
Emphasize authenticity. True passion is contagious, and the more authenticity you convey, the more easily others can connect with you and your cause. Because of charity: water’s commitment to transparency, donors not only understand the history that gave rise to the organization but also know exactly where their money goes. Reports and updates on the charity’s Web site connect donors directly to the results of their generosity.
Match the media with the message. How and where you say something can be as important as what you say. charity: water has a staff member dedicated to updating various social-media platforms and creating distinctive messages for Twitter and Facebook fan pages. The organization also relies heavily on video. One of charity: water’s most effective video projects involved convincing Terry George, the director of the film Hotel Rwanda, to make a 60-second public-service announcement in which movie star Jennifer Connelly took a gasoline can to New York City’s Central Park, filled the can with dirty water from the lagoon, and brought it home to serve to her two children. The producers of the reality TV show American Idol agreed to broadcast the spot during the program, ensuring that more than 25 million viewers saw it.
Applying the lessons beyond the social sector: McKinsey’s Dan Singer talks with the authors of The Dragonfly Effect
Dan Singer: If you look at powerful social-media campaigns or initiatives, what’s the essence of good storytelling?
Jennifer Aaker: Good stories have three components: a strong beginning, a strong end, and a point of tension. Most people confuse stories with situations. They’ll tell about a situation: X happened, Y happened, Z happened. But a good story takes Y, the middle part of the story, and creates tension or conflict where the reader or the audience is drawn into the story, what’s going to happen next.
Treating stories as assets is an underrealized idea right now. Stories serve as glue to unify communities. Stories spread from employee to employee, from consumer to consumer, and, in some cases, from employee to consumer or consumer to employee. Stories are much more memorable than statistics or simple anecdotes and are a mechanism that allows communities to grow. Strong stories can be told and retold. They become infectious.
There are at least four important stories that all companies should have in their portfolio. The first is the “who am I?” story—you know, how did we get started? The second is the “vision” story, the “where are we going in the future?” This may or may not be connected to the “who are we?” story. A third is the “apology and recovery” story. In any long-term relationship, there is inevitably going to be transgression. But it is remarkable to see how few companies have thought through what a transgression is for them and how they might respond to it. The final type of story that becomes really important for corporations to have in their bank is the “personal” story: what are the personal stories that are being incubated and cultivated within the organization? This is a very different type of story. This shines a light on people rather than the organization.
Dan Singer: Is it the story that resonates? Or is it the storyteller?
Andy Smith: The story is the most important thing. You don’t have to be famous to tell a good story. Where it really does come back to the storyteller is authenticity. People have to believe you. And you have to believe in the story yourself in order to be effective.
Jennifer Aaker: The reason authenticity becomes important in social media is that as you think about customers or employees stepping toward a cause, it’s oftentimes done when they trust the entity. When they step away from an organization, cause, or goal, it’s often because they feel it’s overly manufactured, overly professional, something to potentially distrust.
Dan Singer: What can businesses learn from folks in the social sector who use social networks and social media?
Jennifer Aaker: All four “wings” of the dragonfly act in concert. The first wing is focus: what is your single small, concrete goal? That goal should be measurable over time so you see how close you’re getting to it. The second wing is grabbing attention, making people look. That is very similar to more traditional means of marketing. The third wing is engagement, telling the story, which also has been important in the past. But how do you enable action on the part of employees and customers? That is very new to the social-media world. When you execute on these four wings—when four small acts are taken in concert—that’s when you get amplification or infectious action.
Dan Singer: So how do you assess companies’ efforts to date against the dragonfly framework? Are we in the early days?
Andy Smith: It’s not exactly the earliest day. There’s this hangover effect from traditional media. You can call it “campaign thinking.” Companies are pretty slow to take ownership of the ongoing back and forth with consumers that’s required to build a relationship. As public companies, they have whole departments devoted to nurture relationships with, say, financial analysts. They need to apply the same kind of approach to their social-media constituents. The platform itself is relatively straightforward. The mind-set needs to come with it.
Dan Singer: How do you think companies should measure their success in deploying social media or engaging with customers? You’ll hear companies talk about the number of Twitter followers or the number of Facebook fans they have. Are those the right measures?
Andy Smith: It reminds me of the early days, when people counted hits on your Web site. With each new media comes different meaningless statistics. It goes back to wing one: before you deploy an effort, you need to be thinking about your goal. That’s been a challenge for brand builders. Setting those goals and actions and measuring yourself against them is the way that companies configure the clearest path forward.
Dan Singer: An unstated assumption is that the medium through which the communication happens is electronic—Facebook, e-mail, Twitter. As those platforms become mature and probably fairly cluttered, will people get social fatigue?
Andy Smith: Oh, I think people have already started to show plenty of fatigue. It seems like the more things change, the shorter the life span between early adopters and people burning out. How many Twitter people can you follow?
Jennifer Aaker: There’s one study that we’re running right now that looks at the degree to which a subject gets asked to contribute some money or time to a cause. The number of people who delete something like this immediately from their inbox is somewhere around 95 percent. So you’re already seeing people feeling inundated by “asks,” especially in the social-good realm. Then there’s another big group of people who feel that social media is overhyped and has gotten too much attention.
Dan Singer: This is eerily reminiscent of traditional forms of advertising. In television, there’s so much clutter that what differentiates the effective from the rest is the quality of the story and the resources of the advertiser. Would you say the same is true here? What’s going to differentiate the 5 percent that get read from the 95 percent that get deleted?
Andy Smith: For advertisers, [it will be] creativity and the depth to which they really apply the principles of understanding what’s going to make people go. You literally just can’t throw a switch and write a check and buy it. But you can certainly get more airplay and more attention if you nurture your community and build your followers, build your fan base, build the things that matter, and then activate them.
Jennifer Aaker: It’s about the people driving the technology. You have to be cognizant of where the true power of social technology lies. It’s not in the technology—it’s in the people using it.
About the Authors
Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business; Andy Smith is a marketing strategist and principal at Vonavona Ventures. This article is adapted from their book, The Dragonfly Effect (Jossey-Bass, September 2010). Dan Singer is a director in McKinsey’s New York office.
javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$GridContainerPlaceHolder$inThisArticle$_audioDownloadLink','')
The power of storytelling: What nonprofits can teach the private sector about social media
Learn how to harness the power of social media in this case study excerpted from The Dragonfly Effect, by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith. Then hear more from the authors in a conversation with McKinsey’s Dan Singer.
FEBRUARY 2011
Source: Marketing & Sales Practice
In This Article
Social-media engagement: A case study from The Dragonfly Effect
Applying the lessons beyond the social sector: McKinsey’s Dan Singer talks with the authors of The Dragonfly Effect .Audio
Download MP3
..Companies are spending countless hours and millions of dollars trying to master social media. Is this a revolutionary platform that can drive everything from customer relationships to product development—or just another form of marketing? In a new book titled The Dragonfly Effect, Stanford University marketing professor Jennifer Aaker and marketing strategist Andy Smith seek to answer these questions by examining numerous examples of social media at work, distilling a framework for inspiring infectious action.
One of the four “dragonfly wings” that comprise the authors’ framework and give the book its name is engagement, which they define as “truly making people feel emotionally connected to helping you achieve your goals” through storytelling, authenticity, and establishing a personal connection. Presented here is an excerpt adapted from the book, followed by a discussion between the authors and Dan Singer, a director in McKinsey’s New York office. The conversation focused on lessons useful for leaders seeking to boost their organizations’ marketing effectiveness by engaging customers through social media. The bottom line: using social media to capture people’s attention is different from traditional advertising, and companies that measure the effectiveness of these new channels by simply counting Facebook fans should rethink their approach.
Social-media engagement: A case study from The Dragonfly Effect
Scott Harrison was at the top of his world. The 28-year-old New York–based nightclub and fashion promoter excelled at bringing models and hedge-fund kings together and selling them $500 bottles of vodka. He had money and power. Yet his lifestyle brought something else: emptiness. Harrison felt spiritually bankrupt.
So he walked away, volunteering to serve on a floating hospital offering free medical care in the world’s poorest nations. Serving as the ship’s photojournalist, Harrison was quickly immersed in a very different world. Thousands would flock to the ship looking for solutions to debilitating problems: enormous tumors, cleft lips and palates, flesh eaten by bacteria from waterborne diseases. Harrison’s camera lens brought into focus astonishing poverty and pain, and he began documenting the struggles of these people and their courage.
After eight months, he moved back to New York, but not to his former life. Aware that many of the diseases and medical problems he witnessed stemmed from inadequate access to clean drinking water, he decided to do something about it. In 2006, he founded charity: water, a nonprofit designed to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.
Harrison launched the organization on his 31st birthday by asking friends to donate $31 instead of giving him a gift. It was a success—the birthday generated $15,000 and helped build charity: water’s first few wells in Uganda. In the three years that followed, Harrison’s simple birthday wish snowballed into donations that today total more than $20 million, translating into almost 3,000 water projects spanning everything from hand-dug wells and deep wells to protection for springs to rainwater harvesting. The organization has now provided clean water to more than 1.4 million people spanning 17 countries. Its success can be explained through four design principles for generating engagement with a brand through social media.
Tell a story. Harrison’s personal journey—evoking themes of redemption, change, and hope—engaged others on an emotional level. By candidly discussing in media interviews and YouTube videos why and how he started charity: water, the thoughtful, accessible, and youthful Harrison helped viewers fall in love with him and his cause.
Empathize with your audience. Let people engage with your brand to learn what’s important to them and how it relates to your campaign. charity: water evoked empathy through the use of photographs and videos that revealed the urgency of the water problem in the developing world. Instead of relying just on statistics, the organization promoted compelling stories that forced people to think about what it would be like to live without access to clean water.
Emphasize authenticity. True passion is contagious, and the more authenticity you convey, the more easily others can connect with you and your cause. Because of charity: water’s commitment to transparency, donors not only understand the history that gave rise to the organization but also know exactly where their money goes. Reports and updates on the charity’s Web site connect donors directly to the results of their generosity.
Match the media with the message. How and where you say something can be as important as what you say. charity: water has a staff member dedicated to updating various social-media platforms and creating distinctive messages for Twitter and Facebook fan pages. The organization also relies heavily on video. One of charity: water’s most effective video projects involved convincing Terry George, the director of the film Hotel Rwanda, to make a 60-second public-service announcement in which movie star Jennifer Connelly took a gasoline can to New York City’s Central Park, filled the can with dirty water from the lagoon, and brought it home to serve to her two children. The producers of the reality TV show American Idol agreed to broadcast the spot during the program, ensuring that more than 25 million viewers saw it.
Applying the lessons beyond the social sector: McKinsey’s Dan Singer talks with the authors of The Dragonfly Effect
Dan Singer: If you look at powerful social-media campaigns or initiatives, what’s the essence of good storytelling?
Jennifer Aaker: Good stories have three components: a strong beginning, a strong end, and a point of tension. Most people confuse stories with situations. They’ll tell about a situation: X happened, Y happened, Z happened. But a good story takes Y, the middle part of the story, and creates tension or conflict where the reader or the audience is drawn into the story, what’s going to happen next.
Treating stories as assets is an underrealized idea right now. Stories serve as glue to unify communities. Stories spread from employee to employee, from consumer to consumer, and, in some cases, from employee to consumer or consumer to employee. Stories are much more memorable than statistics or simple anecdotes and are a mechanism that allows communities to grow. Strong stories can be told and retold. They become infectious.
There are at least four important stories that all companies should have in their portfolio. The first is the “who am I?” story—you know, how did we get started? The second is the “vision” story, the “where are we going in the future?” This may or may not be connected to the “who are we?” story. A third is the “apology and recovery” story. In any long-term relationship, there is inevitably going to be transgression. But it is remarkable to see how few companies have thought through what a transgression is for them and how they might respond to it. The final type of story that becomes really important for corporations to have in their bank is the “personal” story: what are the personal stories that are being incubated and cultivated within the organization? This is a very different type of story. This shines a light on people rather than the organization.
Dan Singer: Is it the story that resonates? Or is it the storyteller?
Andy Smith: The story is the most important thing. You don’t have to be famous to tell a good story. Where it really does come back to the storyteller is authenticity. People have to believe you. And you have to believe in the story yourself in order to be effective.
Jennifer Aaker: The reason authenticity becomes important in social media is that as you think about customers or employees stepping toward a cause, it’s oftentimes done when they trust the entity. When they step away from an organization, cause, or goal, it’s often because they feel it’s overly manufactured, overly professional, something to potentially distrust.
Dan Singer: What can businesses learn from folks in the social sector who use social networks and social media?
Jennifer Aaker: All four “wings” of the dragonfly act in concert. The first wing is focus: what is your single small, concrete goal? That goal should be measurable over time so you see how close you’re getting to it. The second wing is grabbing attention, making people look. That is very similar to more traditional means of marketing. The third wing is engagement, telling the story, which also has been important in the past. But how do you enable action on the part of employees and customers? That is very new to the social-media world. When you execute on these four wings—when four small acts are taken in concert—that’s when you get amplification or infectious action.
Dan Singer: So how do you assess companies’ efforts to date against the dragonfly framework? Are we in the early days?
Andy Smith: It’s not exactly the earliest day. There’s this hangover effect from traditional media. You can call it “campaign thinking.” Companies are pretty slow to take ownership of the ongoing back and forth with consumers that’s required to build a relationship. As public companies, they have whole departments devoted to nurture relationships with, say, financial analysts. They need to apply the same kind of approach to their social-media constituents. The platform itself is relatively straightforward. The mind-set needs to come with it.
Dan Singer: How do you think companies should measure their success in deploying social media or engaging with customers? You’ll hear companies talk about the number of Twitter followers or the number of Facebook fans they have. Are those the right measures?
Andy Smith: It reminds me of the early days, when people counted hits on your Web site. With each new media comes different meaningless statistics. It goes back to wing one: before you deploy an effort, you need to be thinking about your goal. That’s been a challenge for brand builders. Setting those goals and actions and measuring yourself against them is the way that companies configure the clearest path forward.
Dan Singer: An unstated assumption is that the medium through which the communication happens is electronic—Facebook, e-mail, Twitter. As those platforms become mature and probably fairly cluttered, will people get social fatigue?
Andy Smith: Oh, I think people have already started to show plenty of fatigue. It seems like the more things change, the shorter the life span between early adopters and people burning out. How many Twitter people can you follow?
Jennifer Aaker: There’s one study that we’re running right now that looks at the degree to which a subject gets asked to contribute some money or time to a cause. The number of people who delete something like this immediately from their inbox is somewhere around 95 percent. So you’re already seeing people feeling inundated by “asks,” especially in the social-good realm. Then there’s another big group of people who feel that social media is overhyped and has gotten too much attention.
Dan Singer: This is eerily reminiscent of traditional forms of advertising. In television, there’s so much clutter that what differentiates the effective from the rest is the quality of the story and the resources of the advertiser. Would you say the same is true here? What’s going to differentiate the 5 percent that get read from the 95 percent that get deleted?
Andy Smith: For advertisers, [it will be] creativity and the depth to which they really apply the principles of understanding what’s going to make people go. You literally just can’t throw a switch and write a check and buy it. But you can certainly get more airplay and more attention if you nurture your community and build your followers, build your fan base, build the things that matter, and then activate them.
Jennifer Aaker: It’s about the people driving the technology. You have to be cognizant of where the true power of social technology lies. It’s not in the technology—it’s in the people using it.
About the Authors
Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business; Andy Smith is a marketing strategist and principal at Vonavona Ventures. This article is adapted from their book, The Dragonfly Effect (Jossey-Bass, September 2010). Dan Singer is a director in McKinsey’s New York office.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
TED-2010-An ukelele version of Bohemian Rapsody (Queen) by Jake Shimabukuro
It´s not all about business, technology and the like.Enjoy this too.
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1346082-los-mejores-videos-insolitos
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1346082-los-mejores-videos-insolitos
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