WEEK 1 Harvard Business review Article summaries PDF

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WEEK 1 HBR Article: Title: HBR Lives Where Taylorism Dies ● HBR outgrew its small headquarters on the HBR campus and landed in an office complex known as the Arsenal on the Charles, a once army site where munitions were manufactured and stored ● The army learned of a clever engineer; Fredrick Taylor (the father of scientific management) ● General William Crozier believed that Taylor’s system might help him deal with his system of arsenals and their high labor costs and powerful unions ● Taylor agreed, they focused first on the big Watertown Arsenal, the least efficient and highest cost in the system ● As the historian Hugh Aitken described, Taylors engineers started by replacing the metal-cutting machines and streamlining the flow of material, eventually, they began time studies of the molders ● Earlier time studies of less-skilled workers had gone smoothly and yielded efficiencies that were appreciated by both labor and management, but the molder resented being monitored by strangers with stopwatches and walked out in protest ● This was the first worker rebellion against Taylorism ● Unsanctioned by the national union - the strike lasted only a week and ended when the Army agreed to investigate the situation ● Marked a decisive shift in the public perception of Taylors system ● What was seen as a progressive “scientific” approach was no cast as mechanical and demeaning ● Arsenal workers lobbied against the system ● The house of representatives formed a special committee to investigate Taylor’s system and its effect on workers ● The investigators went to Arsenal, congressman traipsed through the plant asking questions about how work was done ● Committee heavily publicized work concluded with a report criticizing Taylorism for dehumanizing effect on workers - treating them as automaton whose movement must be preordained by a higher intelligence ● It ridiculed Taylors pretentious of rigor - a charge later echoed by scholars who found his reports on labor productivity to have about the same scientific quotient as a sermon ● Arsenal never resumed time studies, the operational improvements implemented by Taylor’s engineers were maintained, and these made the factory efficient, it became a model for the rest of the army ● People go about their work in habitual ways without having to think about it systematically or analytically ● Then someone steps back and rethinks the process, and big boots in effectiveness follow ● Despite belied that higher productivity benefited workers, Taylor was an elitist who believed that labor had no more ability to tell modern engineers how work should be organized than cogs has the ability to design machines ● Whiting Willam argues in his article that managers are tempted to go overboard in telling workers what to do because it gratifies their own desire for control ● The discipline of management will always benefit from science but can never be scientific itself

WEEK 2 HBR Article: Title: Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills ● At the start of 2020, Google announced that it had discovered the secret ingredients for the perfect team ● After years of analyzing interviews and data from more than 100 teams, it found that the driver’s effective team performance is the group’s average level of emotional intelligence and a high degree of communication between members, Google’s recipe of being nice and joining in makes perfect sense ● Google’s research implies that the kinds of people in the team are not so relevant ● In particular personality affects: ○ What role you have within a team ○ How you interact with the rest of the team ○ Whether your values (core beliefs) align with the team’s ● A useful way to think about teams with the right mix of skills and personalities is to consider the two roles every person plays in a working group ○ 1) A Functional Role: based on their formal position and technical skill ○ 2) A Psychological Role: based on the kind of person they are ● Too often, organizations focus merely on the functional role and hope that good team performance somehow follows ● This is why the most expensive professional sports teams often fail to perform according to the individual talents of each player - there is no psychological synergy ● It was found that psychological team roles are largely a product of people’s personalities ○ Results-oriented: team members who naturally organize work and take charge to tend to be socially self-confident, competitive, and energetic ○ Relationship focused: team members who naturally focus on relationships are attuned to others’ feelings, and are good at building cohesion tend to be warm, diplomatic, and approachable ○ Process and rule followers: team members who pay attention to details, processes, and rules tend to be reliable, organized, and conscientious ○ Innovative and disruptive thinkers: team members who naturally focus on innovation, anticipate problems, and recognize when the team needs to change tend to be imaginative, curious, and open to new experiences ○ Pragmatic: team members who are practical, hard-headed challengers of ideas and theories tend to be prudent, emotionally stable, and level-headed WEEK 3: HBR Article (1) Title: How to Take the Bias Out of Interviews ● If you are a hiring manager you're probably happiest getting a sense of candidate through unstructured interviews (allows you to explore details you think are interesting and relevant) ● Unstructured interviews receive the highest ratings for perceived effectiveness from hiring managers, but studies show they are the worst predictors of n actual on-the-job performance - far less reliable than general mental ability tests, aptitude tests, or personality tests ● Organizational psychologist Scott Highouse called this resistance of sticking to a method that does not work “the greatest failure of I-O (Industrial and organizational) psychology. ● Unwillingness to give up a much-loved evaluation approach seems to be driven by two factors

○ Overconfidence about expertise ○ Dislike deferring to more structured approaches that might outsource human judgment to a machine ● When sociologist Lauren Rivera interviewed bankers, lawyers, and consultants, they reported that commonly looked for someone like themselves in interviews ● Replicating ourselves in hiring contributed to the prevalent gender segregation of jobs, with, for example, male bankers hiring more male bankers ● The state was short on physicians, the legislature required the University of Texas to increase the class size of entering from 150-120 after the admission committee had already chosen its preferred 150 students ● As most students apply to sever medical schools simultaneously, by that time all the top-ranked candidates had already been spoken for, that meant the pool of still-available students was made up of candidates who had previously received a low ranking from the admission committee, of the 50 only seven received an offer from another medical school ● The performance of initially accepted and initially rejected students turned out to be the same, about three-quarters of the difference in rating between initially accepted and initially rejected students was due not to more objective measures, such as grades but rather, but rather to the interviewer’s perceptions of the candidates in unstructured interviews ● Interviews should be replaced by a lottery among other viable applicants ● Interviews should not be your evaluation tool f choice; they are fraught with bias and irrelevant info ● The manager should invest in tools that been shown to predict future performance ● Sample tests, related to the job and its skills ● Companies should rely on a structured interview that standardizes the process among candidates eliminating subjectivity ● Require the interviewer to score each answer immediately after is provided, waiting till the end, makes people forget good early answers or favor those whos speaking style favors storytelling ● Compare candidate response horizontally, when there are 5 candidates do it question by question ● Decreases reflex to rely on stereotypes ● When we vertically evaluate gender biases come into play, “looking the part” can be eliminated through horizontal interviewing processes ● Abandon panel, group interviews, everyone can evaluate the candidates separately and submit assessments before decisions on the applicant ● Data analysis and design innovations such as comparative evaluations help level the field WEEK 3: HBR Article (2) Title: To Reduce Gender Bias, Anonymize Job Applications ● Many organizations are “blinding” their talents selections systems ● Removing the name or simply anonymizing applicants leaders to the selections of more candidates from underrepresented groups ● Women in STEM is still rare ● Can mitigate gender bias, when the name is not provided, has been proven to be true ● For symphonies people audition from behind a screen, women in orchestras increased

exponentially ● Hubble Space Telescope Time Allocation Committee tried this anonymity, and females began to get hired far more, even when they simply did not provide their gender, but when the names and ALL characteristics were removed it was even more successful ● After anonymization, the outperformed rate for men to women dropped from 5% to 3%, after all characteristic and names were removed women actually outperformed men by 1% ● Women are still vastly underrepresented, only 23% of applicants on average, their success rate is growing ● Rose from 185 to 23% after names were removed and 30% when fully anonymized ● Change is a women success rate appears to be driven primarily by changes in ratings from male reviewers ● Men were more likely to let biases affect ratings ● Female viewers - younger than men, they also went to school in a time when more women were doing higher education ● Implement anonymized recruitment, especially at the early stages ● Extraneous info leads to --- bias decisions, influences, unconscious bias ● Women do not receive special advantage or preferential treatment through anonymity, its better for any gender ● The bar is often higher for women than men, do not need to lower the bar but we emphasize processes that ensure the bar is at the same place for any applicant, regardless of gender ● Anonymity can also reduce racial biases, anonymizing an application does not change biases that might affect earlier stages of the application process, such as lack of available role models for women ● Gender diversity promotes scientific creativity and innovation WEEK 4: HBR Article (1) Title: 4 Reasons Good Employees Lose Their Motivation ● Motivation - the willingness to get the job done by starting rather than procrastinating, persisting in the face of distractions, and investing enough mental effort to succeed ● This accounts for 40% of the success of team projects, yet managers are often at a loss as to how to effectively motivate uninspired employees ● Our review of research on motivation indicates that the key is for managers to first accurately identify the reason for an employee’s lack of motivation and then apply a targeted strategy ● These reasons fall into categories, which are called motivation traps ○ 1) Values Mismatch: when a task doesn’t connect with or contribute to something workers value, they won’t be motivated to do it ○ 2) Lack of Self-Efficacy: when workers believe they lack the capacity to carry out a task, they won’t be motivated to do it ○ 3) Disruptive Motivations: when workers are consumed with negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, or depression, they won’t be motivated to carry out a task ○ 4) Attribution Errors: when employees can’t accurately identify the reason for their struggles with a task or when they attribute their struggles to a reason beyond their control, they won’t be motivated to do it How to help employees out of these traps: TRAP #1 - VALUES MISMATCH

● Find out what the employee cares about and connect it to the task ● Too often, managers think about what motivates themselves and assume the same is true of their employees ● Engage in probing conversation and perspective-taking to identify what your employee cares about and how that value links with the task Interest Value: how intellectually compelling a task is ● Find conversations between the task and the things that the employee finds intrinsically interesting Identity Value: how central the skill set is demanded by a task is to an employee’s self-conception ● Point out how the job at hand draws on a capacity that they consider an important part of their identity or role ● Ex: engaging in teamwork, analytical problem solving, or working under pressure Importance Value: how important a task is ● Identify ways to highlight how crucial the task is to achieve the team’s or company’s mission Utility Value: is a measure of the cost of achieving (and avoiding) the task versus the larger benefits of achieving ● Find ways to show how completing this particular task contributes to the employee’s larger goals and avoids blowback ● Sometimes it may be necessary to ask an employee to, essentially, hold their nose while carrying out an undesirable task - making it clear to them the future benefit its completion will yield or the problems it will prevent TRAP #2: LACK OF SELF-EFFICACY ● Build the employee’s sense of confidence and competence ● Point out times in the past when they’ve surmounted similar challenges ● Share examples of others just like them who overcame the same challenges in a way the employee can do, too ● Demonstrate to them that they have misjudged the requirements of the task and convince them that it requires a different approach TRAP #3: DISRUPTIVE MOTIVATIONS ● Begin in a setting where you cannot be overheard ● Tell them you want to understand why they are upset and engage in active listening ● Do not agree or disagree, be non judgemental by asking what the employee believes is causing them to be upset TRAP #4: ATTRIBUTION ERRORS ● Help the employee think clearly about the cause of their struggles with a task ● Attribution errors are often to blame when employees seem to be finding excuses not to carry out a task (ex: calling in sick, pleading overcommitment or “not enough time”, trying to foist the task on colleagues) ● Help the employee identify why the task may seem insurmountable as this can help them move past such avoidance WEEK 4: HBR Article (2) Title: What Maslow’s Hierarchy Won’t Tell You About Motivation ● At some point in their careers, most leaders have either consciously or more likely, unwittingly based (or justified) their approach to motivation on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

● Maslow’s idea that people are motivated by satisfying lower-level needs such as food, water, shelter, and security before they can move on to being motivated by higher-level needs such as self-actualization, is the most known motivational theory in the world ● Despite the popularity of Maslow’s Hierarchy, there is not much recent data to support it ● Contemporary science, specifically Dr. Edward Deci, hundreds of Self-Determination Theory researchers and thousands of studies - instead points to three universal psychological needs ○ ANATOMY - is people’s need to perceive that they have choices, that what they are doing is of their own volition, and that they are the source of their own actions. The way leaders frame information and situations either promotes the likelihood that a person will perceive autonomy or undermines it ○ RELATEDNESS - is people’s need to care about and be cared about by others, to feel connected to others without concerns about ulterior motives, and to feel that they are contributing to something greater than themselves ○ COMPETENCE - is people’s need to feel effective at meeting every-day challenges and opportunities, demonstrating skill overtime, and feeling a sense of growth and flourishing. Leaders can rekindle people’s desire to grow and learn ● The exciting message to leaders is that when the three basic psychological needs are met in the workplace, people experience day-to-day high quality motivation that fuels employee work passion - and all the inherent benefits that come from actively engaged individuals at work ● To take advantage of the science requires shifting your leadership focus from, “What can I give people to motivate them?” to … “How can I facilitate people’s satisfaction of autonomy, relatedness and competence?” WEEK 5A: HBR Article (1) Title: Root Out bias from your decision-making process ● Poor decision making happens in our business, civic and personal lives ● Often we are perpetrators, participating in or making rigged decisions, even if we may not realize it ● Rigged decisions, the most virulent feature the following steps: 1. Make the decision based on some or all of the following; ego, ideology, experience, fear, consultation with like-minded advisers 2. Find data that justify your decisions 3. Announce ad execute the decision and defend it to the minimum degree necessary 4. Take credit if the decision proves, beneficial, and assign blame if not ● Making the decisions is bad before assembling facts, you must have a full view of the situation ● It is hard work, great uncertainty, and time pressure ● Faster is not the same as well-thought-out ● Ask yourself, “Should someone else who has time to assemble a complete picture ake this decision?” ● Ask yourself, “Do I really have a broad enough perspective to make and defend this decision?” - the reasons so many decisions makers take step 2 (seeking data to justify an already-made decisions) is they sense that the answer is “no”, even if they cannot articulate why ● Truthiness: ones preference for concepts or facts one wishes to be true ● There has always been plenty data to support whatever decision one wants to make,

and doing so has grown progressively easier with the rise of the internet and social media ● It is too easy to fall for CONFIRMATION BIAS: where one pays attention to tata that supports a decision and dismisses data that does not ● You must admit your lack of confidence, admit that you are biased “what values or beliefs may be coloring your thinking?” ● Go against your inclinations, go forward in the opposite directions, what would happen? ● Gather data to defend opposite view and compare to original decision, reevaluate ● Try out your decision before announcing and executing on a “friendly”, someone who is on your side and wants you to succeed, and tell you if thinking is incomplete, and to be honest with you if you missed something ● Free people set to make rigged decisions, but when you're pressured to make a choice fast, you may fall victim to a flawed process ● Get the right people involved evaluate and admitting your biases hel eliminate bias ● Subject your thinking to someone who will challenge it and can expose a poor decision making process and correct it WEEK 5A: HBR Article (2) Title: The future of Decision-Making, Less Intuition, More Evidence ● Human intuition can be astonishingly good, especially after it’s improved by experience ● A huge body of research has clarified much about how intuition works, and how it doesn’t Here’s some of what we learned: ● It takes a long time to build good intuition ● Intuition only works well in specific environments, ones that provide a person with good cues, and rapid feedback ● We apply intuition inconsistently ● It’s easy to make bad judgements quickly ● We can’t know tell where our ideas come from ● My conclusion from all of this research and much more I’ve looked at is that intuition is similar to what I think of Tom Cruise’s acting ability: real, but vastly overrated and deployed far too often ● Overall, we get inferior decisions and outcomes in crucial situations when we rely on human judgement and intuition instead of on hard, cold, boring data and math WEEK 5B: HBR Article (1) Title: Figure Out Your Manager’s Communication Style ● Effective communication takes a deft touch when you’re managing up ● If your attempts to persuade are too obvious, they may not succeed ● Yet, you need to be deliberate in your approach ● As you engage with your boss in everyday activities, try to identify the messages behind her speech and behaviour ● The words and deeds matter, of course, but the values that underlie them often mean more ● Liste...