Monthly Archives: July 2008

July 14, 2008 · 3:22 pm

EdPsych

When I meet young folks for informational interviews (and with a daughter whose class just graduated college, there are a lot of them!), I’m often asked about what I studied to move ahead in my career.  I usually tell them that the most important class I ever took was Educational Psychology.  Ed Psych, as we called it, is about how people learn.   Sure, you learn more about how that process occurs in early childhood than adulthood, but Piaget and Bloom aside, you learn quite a bit about motivation (and motivating) and how to move people’s thought processes forward.

What is sales if not education?  What is management if not, at its core, motivation?  EdPsych laid the foundation for my management abilities and helped me understand a lot of the great business writing I read later on.

I’m not suggesting you run right out and read a textbook, but I am suggesting that maybe applying Bloom’s Taxonomy is just as valuable to business as it is to the classroom.

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July 11, 2008 · 6:44 am

Teammates

Today, my buddy Tommy and I are beginning play in a three day golf tournament.  We play as a team and I can’t imagine a better example of what a team should be about.  Each of us can play golf reasonably well.  When we go bad, it’s because either something has changed in our swing or something has changed in our heads.  The challenge, as a teammate, is to spot it when it happens and help correct it.  While it’s true that either one of us, in theory, could post a great score on our own, the reality is that each of us has to contribute to the scoring as well as to the karma if we’re to do well.  We need to recognize changes in conditions (wind, green speed, etc.) and alert the rest of the team.  We need to make adjustments in our game plan based on observation, feedback, our own mental states, and what our competition is doing.

Vince Lombardi said that “people who work together will win.”  It’s always surprising to me how little attention is paid in many businesses to that.  In speaking with folks who reported to me over the years I always tried to help them understand that their development and success was tied to the growth and success of the team.  Over the years, that notion seemed very distant from the attitudes of the newer staff.  I don’t know if that was a generational thing but it became something that I looked for when hiring: how well will this candidate play with the other kids?  Do they speak in “we” when talking about their past accomplishments?  As Casey Stengel said, “Gettin’ good players is easy. Gettin’ ’em to play together is the hard part.”  I always found that you can make it easier if you define part of “good” as knowing how to play as a team.

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July 9, 2008 · 10:48 pm

Asking the right question

Interesting article out of Purdue U on golfers’ perceptions of hole size while putting.

46 golfers were asked to estimate the size of the hole after they played a round of golf. The diameter of a golf hole is 10.8 centimeters. The golfers selected from a poster one of nine black holes that ranged in size from 9-13 centimeters. Those who selected larger holes were the same players who had better scores on the course that day.

They did some further testing in a lab and found participants who putted closer drew the circle to be bigger than those who putted farther away.

This goes to one of my favorite points – asking the right question is more important than getting the right answer since you’ll NEVER get the latter without the former.  In this case, maybe someone should have asked the good putters (who may or may NOT be the better golfers) what they were looking at while putting.  I can tell you from a lot (way too much, probably) of time spent putting that one really doesn’t look at the hole while putting.  Great putters know that all putts are straight if they’re hit properly- it’s the green that makes them move.  Because of that, one judges the line and speed and picks a spot to which you putt – it’s usually NOT the hole.  Pelz Golf Institute research shows that less than five per cent of all putts are perfectly straight (the green moves them!) so you’re not aiming at the hole 95% of the time.

Another, smaller point is that of COURSE the hole looks bigger when you’re closer to it!  (As an aside, as the parent of a Michigan grad, I’m really holding back on the Boilermaker comments right now…).  Chances are the the better golfers were the ones putting closer to the hole as well.

Ask the right questions and if you’re in unfamiliar territory as these researchers seemd to be, ask a native for directions.

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