"You're Not That Great" by Dr. Daniel Crosby

Imagine, if you will, your sales and marketing team making broad claims of success for your organization - gaining significant market share, increasing sales volume, what have you.  However, at the end of the year, not only were they wrong, the were widely off the mark.  

What do you do?  Fire them?  Pat them on the back and say better luck next time?  What is their responsibility for their inaccurate claims?  Do they remain credible?

With that in mind, its been interesting to see the fallout from the 2012 election of a similar group of claim makers - the political pundit.  Think about it - their one job during an election year is to analyze the race.  They have the inside connections, the ear to the ground, the background that should be able to make more accurate predictions than simply throwing a dart at a dartboard.

On the one hand, you have Nate Silver, whose fivethirtyeight.com blog at the New York Times. Using statistical analyses and poll averaging on a daily basis, he laid out the likelihood of the outcome of the Presidential outcome as well as who would win the electoral votes in each state.  He was pilloried, particularly in the last few weeks of the race.  Joe Scarborough, on the Morning Joe show on MSNBC, took particular offense, stating on October 29, “Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they’re jokes.”

Mr. Silver was more than willing to back up his claims, offering Mr. Scarborough a bet on Twitter of $1000 on the outcome of the race.  

On the other hand, take Peggy Noonan, for example.  In her Wall Street Journal blog on November 5, she wrote:

Who knows what to make of the weighting of the polls and the assumptions as to who will vote? Who knows the depth and breadth of each party’s turnout efforts? Among the wisest words spoken this cycle were by John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate, who said, in a conversation the night before the last presidential debate, that he thought maybe the American people were quietly cooking something up, something we don’t know about.

I think they are and I think it’s this: a Romney win.....All the vibrations are right.....

On Tuesday, the monthly #SHRMChat focused on the vexing topic of chapter programming - where do you find your speakers?  The lack of collaboration among chapters sharing information about successful speakers was noted as well as a desire for a Yelp-like tool where chapters could identify good (and not-so-good) speakers.  Hearing about this, the St. Norbert College SHRM chapter sprung into action and put together a tool using list.ly for chapters to utilize in addressing the programming issue.  Sharing the details is guest blogger, Jenna Ray Hines, President of SNC SHRM: 

Have you ever had a difficult time finding a quality speaker in your region for your SHRM Chapter or Conference event? 

We have created Crowdsourcing SHRM Chapter Speakers for that exact reason. 

We wanted to create an outlet for chapters to find and recommend quality, cost efficient speakers within their respective regions. After a chapter has a quality speaker, they can post on their list.ly regional page to promote the speaker and presentation topic as well as mention if it was HRCI-approved. 

This social media tool will be useful for chapters to collect ideas, collaborate, and share successes. 

We are using list.ly, a social media website that allows users to create and share lists that other users can build upon, to host our five regional lists. Each one of the regional pages represents one of the five SHRM HR regions and can be used by them to collect their list of recommended regional speakers:

Dear Target Employees,

We hear you (as well as your friends at Toys R Us and Wal-mart) are upset about the possibility of working on Thanksgiving day, taking time away from your families.

If Target corporate backs off, will you be joining us for some popcorn and a showing of "Life of Pi" or "Red Dawn" that evening?

Regards,

Your local movie theater employees

One of the classic pieces of management literature is Steven Kerr's 1975 (updated in 1995) piece, " On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B."  Kerr's central point is that the behavior that is often desired is not necessarily the one that is rewarded.

Kerr highlights a number of examples:
*War - In World War II, soldiers did not return home until the war was won.  In Vietnam, soldiers had the same goal - to get home - but that reward was earned when the tour of duty was over, not with a victory

*Health care - As costs continue to rise, we want doctors to look at providing health care more efficiently and effectively.  However, physicians over test and overserve, perhaps in fear of malpractice suits.  Similarly, what incentive is there as consumers to keep costs down and demand less testing, particularly when they bear so little of the costs with insurance.

*Universities - The job responsibilities for a professor are to teach and advise students, conduct research/engage in scholarship, and serve the community.  While the student probably values the first option most highly, the route to tenure and promotion is through successful research.  Hence, when time is tight, the astute professor will dedicate his or her time to research at the expense of quality teaching.  Further, mediocre teaching is rarely punished.

Which brings us to this week's topic - politics.  Kerr writes:

The American citizenry supposedly wants its candidates for public office put forth operative goals, making their proposed programs "perfectly clear," specifying sources and uses of funds, etc.  However, since operative goals are lower in acceptance, and since aspirants to public office need acceptance (from at least 50.1 percent of the people), most politicians prefer to speak only of official goals, at least until after the election.....Instead, however, the American voter typically punishes (withholds suport from) candidates who frankly discuss where the money will come from, rewards politicians who speak only of official goals, but hopes that candidates (despite the reward system) will discuss the issues operatively.

Yesterday's post dealt with the issue of why we vote on Tuesday and its impact on the workplace.

Another challenge is simple voter participation - how do we increase the number of people turning out to the polls?  Civic duty has long been perceived as the reason most people vote.  Yet, a significant portion of individuals choose to ignore this duty; an estimated 50 million Americans won't vote today.  Only 56.8 percent of the voting age population cast a ballot in 2008.

Beyond changing the date, what might increase that participation?  In "Get Out the Vote," Donald Green and Alan Gerber found that automated calls only generate one vote per 900 calls (yet, the constant ringing at my home this past week suggests campaigns haven't learned this lesson).  Campaign flyers, they suggest, are not much more effective than doing nothing.  E-mails are useless.

If those don't work...what does?  

Shame.

In "Social Pressure and Voter Turnout:Evidence from a Large Scale Experiment," Gerber, Green, and Christopher Larimer sent out four different pieces of campaign mail to nearly 300,000 people urging them to vote in the 2006 Michigan primary. All four treatments carried a similar message - "DO YOUR CIVIC DUTY  - VOTE," but differed as follows:

• "Civic Duty" - Households receiving this type of mailing were told, “Remember your rights and responsibilities as a citizen. Remember to vote.”
• "Hawthorne Effect" - Households receiving this mailing were told “YOU ARE BEING STUDIED!” and informed that their voting behavior would be examined by means of public records.
• "Self" - The “Self” mailing exerts more social pressure by informing recipients that who votes is public information and listing the recent voting record of each registered voter in the household. The word “Voted” appears by names of registered voters in the household who actually voted in the 2004 primary election and the 2004 general election, and a blank space appears if they did not vote.
• "Neighbors" - The fourth mailing ratchets up the social pressure even further by listing not only the household’s voting records but also the voting records of those living nearby. Like the “Self” mailing, the Neighbors” mailing informed the recipient that “we intend to mail an updated chart” after the primary,showing whether members of the household voted in the primary and who among their neighbors had actually voted in the primary.

With the U.S. national election tomorrow, its going to be politics week on the blog.

Today - Why do we vote on Tuesday?

According to whytuesday.org:

In 1845, before Florida, California, and Texas were states or slavery had been abolished, Congress needed to pick a time for Americans to vote. We were an agrarian society. We traveled by horse and buggy. Farmers needed a day to get to the county seat, a day to vote, and a day to get back, without interfering with the three days of worship. So that left Tuesday and Wednesday, but Wednesday was market day. So, Tuesday it was. In 1875 Congress extended the Tuesday date for national House elections and in 1914 for federal Senate elections.