A couple of weeks ago, I posted on Geoff Colvin's new book, "Talent is Overrated", in which he points to recent research that indicates that stars are usually not born, but developed through a process called "deliberate practice".   Check that post out if you haven't already; the concept is pretty compelling.

Colvin's a name that most of you probably won't recognize unless you are hard core readers of Fortune magazine, where he has a column called "Value Driven" - also a good read.  With that in mind, maybe you'll read Colvin's thoughts on deliberate practice being the key to success, maybe you won't. 

What if I told you that Malcolm Gladwell (books including Blink, Tipping Point) has a similar book scheduled to come out called "Outliers"?  Would you be interested in that?  I thought so.  In Outliers, Gladwell explores the concept of people who are outliers - men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are puzzling to the rest of us from a performance perspective.

Gladwell points to a few things as being key - the 10,000 hour rule, cultural differences, and opportunities others don't have based on the environment you grew up or matriculated in.

More on the concept of Outliers from a Fortune Interview with Gladwell:

"F: How did you become interested in this topic?

G: I was interested in writing about success. I just became convinced that our explanations [of what drives it] were lacking. We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves. And we have a series of other beliefs that say that our personality, our intelligence, all of our innate characteristics are the primary driving force. It's that cluster of things that I don't agree with.

The premise of this book is that you can learn a lot more about success by looking around at the successful person, at what culture they belong to, what their parents did for a living. Successful people are people who have made the most of a series of gifts that have been given to them by their culture or their history, by their generation.

F: Talk about Bill Gates. The mythology is that he was spontaneously drawn to computers. But you say that's not the case.

G: Bill Gates has this utterly extraordinary series of opportunities. When he's 13, it's 1969. He shows up at his private school in Seattle, and they have a computer room with a teletype machine that is hooked up to a mainframe downtown. Anyone who was playing on the teletype machine could do real-time programming. Ninety-nine percent of the universities in America in 1969 did not have that.

Then, when he was 15 or so, classmate Paul Allen learned that there was a mainframe at the University of Washington that was not being used between two and six every morning. So they would get up at 1:30 in the morning, walk a mile, and program for four hours. When Gates is 20, he has as much experience as people who have spent their entire lives being programmers. He has this incredible headstart.

F: What link does practice have to success?

G: The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.

F: You also talk a lot about culture. How does it affect math skills, for example?

G: We give kids from around the world the same set of math tests, and every time we get the same results: America is just below average, and then at the very, very top are Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. It occurs again and again.

There's an ultimately unconvincing argument that this has to do with IQ. I think what it has to do with is culture. Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.

Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.

I argue that this has to do with the kind of agriculture pursued in the West and the East going back thousands of years. I have ancestors who were peasant farmers in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. They probably worked 1,000 hours a year, if that. In the winter, they slept. They drank a lot of beer.

These Asian cultures are all wet-rice agricultural economies. Growing rice is this extraordinarily complex, labor-intensive activity that requires not just physical engagement but mental engagement. So a farmer in 14th-century Japan or 14th-century China was working 3,000 hours a year - three times longer. I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.

Fascinating stuff.  Most of you probably won't be compelled to Colvin's book, but many of you will buy Malcolm's.  Enjoy it.

Want to see a HR Pro judge another HR Pro?  Tell them you've got 64% turnover.  Resist the urge to slash tires when they respond that they've got 8% turnover.  I mean that - resist the urge to cause bodily harm as they crinkle their nose, because they know not what they speak of.

Most don't get the business behind the turnover numbers.  Here's my list of pet peeves regarding HR pros and turnover:

1.  Turnover is relative, and most HR Managers in organizations don't understand that, especially if they've never worked in a high turnover business.  Retail, big box call centers and hard knock life production environments are all examples of places where 40% turnover can mean you're best in class.

2.  HR Pros don't understand that money drives turnover.  Do the jobs you have lead or bring up the rear of the market with turnover?  If you pay $9/hour in your call center and the market says $10.50, budget for turnover and evaluate your business plan for talent costs at least annually.  Still want to pay $9?  OK, just make sure everyone knows that turnover is going to run 70-100%.  It's a business decision. Maybe not a great business decision, but a business decision, nonetheless.  Sue Messinger couldn't get turnover below 60% under those $$ circumstances.

3.  HR pros really don't have a great understanding of how to calculate turnover.  I send my turnover calculator out about 20 times a month on email request, and let's just say the fact that you need to annualize your turnover to give people an accurate understanding of how many bodies are flowing out of the building is not a well known fact.  Example - if you have 100 people in your company, and you lost 2 this month, your annualized turnover is 24%, not 2%.  You have to annualize it to understand if the trend doesn't stop, annualized turnover is the number you'll lose once the year ends.  I'm not being crtical of those who haven't been exposed to that, just don't judge those with higher numbers who report it accurately.

What's got me thinking about Turnover?  I picked up the following Newsweek interview with Brian Dunn, CEO of Best Buy.  64% turnover among camera and phone jockeys sounded pretty good to me.

NEWSWEEK: What do you recall of your first day at Best Buy?
DUNN: It was a Saturday. I hit the sales floor and proceeded to not really understand all the items I was trying to sell to the customers, and it was a series of very difficult exchanges. At the end of the day, the store manager came up to me and said, "How did it go?" I told him in very direct terms it was a lousy experience. The manager proceeded to talk to me about the Minnesota Twins, the Minnesota Vikings, fishing … He made it personal right away, and then he said, "Why don't you come in next Saturday morning and I'll teach you a little bit about how I operated on the sales floor." And it really made a difference. What stuck with me from that was that the store manager was talking to me about what I was capable of doing here, and was willing to give of himself to help.

Exactly how high is your turnover?
It's about 64 percent annually, and that's a number we're quite proud of. Four years ago it was over 100 percent, and we've been very systematically working on improving our employee experience and engaging our employees in a way that can bring those numbers down. Embedded in that big number are pretty interesting smaller numbers. Our store-manager turnover is in the teens. That's really important because the store managers are the architects of the environments they lead. Our full-time employee turnover is in the high 30 percent range, and that's a really important number because they're doing a lot of training.

Those Dunn guys always sound credible, don't they? 

Retail's a hard knock life, and 64% isn't bad.  To channel Jeff Foxworthy, "if you've ever judged a turnover statistic without first thinking about the business or department in question, you might be a non-business savvy HR administrator dressed as a HR pro".

I’ve learned a lot from the people I’ve met and interacted with at The HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent – so much that I’m going to launch a blog specific to the benefits space.  I’m doing my best to locate real practitioners in the field to be recurring contributors who will write on a weekly basis.   It should be a good product, and I’m looking forward to learning more about acquiring and managing benefits in organizations from the people who sign up to contribute – and those who subscribe/comment as the opinions go up on the site.

Here’s the problem – I have no clue what to name the site.

I’ve used the best technology available (Google) and comprehensive market research (thumbed through some magazines, asked some of you and my kids) to figure out the best name. The top choices I’ve come up with are listed on the page linked below.  Can you click through and vote for a name as a trusted friend?  If they all are lame to you, please pick the least lame.The naming burden is such that I’m tempted to christen it “Benefits Albatross” and check it off my list. (wait… is that domain available?)

Your opinion matters, and if you come up with a better name for a multi-contributor Benefits blog written by pros in the field, use the box underneath the choices to write in your idea.  Remember, no one is critical when you are brainstorming on the whiteboard…. Plus, I’ll be the only one to see your brilliance.  If your brainstorm ends up being selected, you’ll win a free lifetime subscription to the blog, plus a mention in the “history” section once the site reaches its 10^th anniversary.  Heady stuff indeed…

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=8TT4U6HNPlE1fjVxQ6DMSw_3d_3d

Thanks in advance for your help...

So, the economy stinks.  That's pretty much a given, and most of us have stopped watching CNBC during the day and stopped opening our 401k statements.  It's like 1929, 1987 and 2000 all rolled into one, with the Dow falling from 14,000 to 8,000 in a year. 

Me?  I've got my own leading economic indicators, and they've got nothing to do with the "Money Quotes from Alan Greenspan" tear-away daily calendar on my desk.

I don't need Greenspan to figure this thing out.  Here's my leading economic indicator:

1.  We're officially in a slowdown when Google starts cutting perks.

2.  We're officially in a recession when Google does a hiring freeze.

3.  We might be in a depression if and when Google does layoffs.

Here's the rundown....

1.  It's definitely a slowdown. From the New York Post:

"Google is going on a diet when it comes to spending on a smorgasbord of food perks for employees living high on the hog in its New York office.  The online search giant issued a memo to its Big Apple workforce earlier this week noting slimmed-down cafeteria hours and food selection as part of an effort "to find areas where efficiency can be improved."

The advertising business is expected to be hit hard by the ongoing credit crunch and Google CEO Eric Schmidt said earlier this month that the company would be operating more carefully as ad budgets come under pressure.

Gone are exotic treats like afternoon tea on Tuesdays, which has been suspended indefinitely. However, the company said there still may be "occasional surprise 'snack attacks' in the future" - similar to what employees get in Google's Mountain View, Calif. offices."

2.  I lied before.  I'm still watching CNBC, and it's officially a recession. From CNBC's David Faber:

"Google, one of the nation's great growth engines for employment, has essentially stopped hiring for the last month, according to several executives at the company.

A spokesperson at the company says there has been no freeze on hiring, but several executives I have spoken with who have hiring responsibility said it was made clear to them one month ago they were to make no new hires, including at the secretarial level and they were

directed to fill all vacancies with internal candidates. In effect, they term it an unofficial hiring freeze.

The good news?  Nothing to report on the depression!  No layoffs at Google, at least yet.  If that happens, it trims 1,000 points off the Dow by itself.....

I know - I'm a ray of sunshine...

Bschool.com recently published this list of the top 50 HR blogs.  Find what you like and subscribe!

If you're like me as a recruiter, one of the things you aim to do every time you pick up the phone to do a phone screen with a candidate is "the dance".  The dance is a pretty simple act, and deals with two items related to money - 1) finding out where the candidate has been related to money and what they need moving forward, and 2) managing expectations about what the position you are working on might pay.

At the end of the call, what drives whether the candidate will move forward in the process? Knowledge, skills and abilities, and whether or not you can afford the talent for the slot you currently have open.  If you don't have a fit on the money side and you move the candidate forward, you're just asking for a train wreck when it comes time to cut an offer.

For smooth HR pros and recruiters, you've always had what I'll call "first strike capability".  You control, for the most part, when you bring it up on the call and how it's positioned when you talk compensation.  Candidates, for the most part, wait for you to bring it up, and it's a moment of truth.  Sure, the uber-aggressive ones could go out and pull some data on Salary.com and hit you with that, but most don't.

You control the conversation and the resulting expectations.  At least until Monster launches their new site in early 2009.  From ERE's John Zappe:

"In three steps, a worker could learn what rungs others in the occupation have taken up as they worked their way up the ladder. Using the benchmarking tool, a candidate can learn how they stack up against others. Using the Career Snapshot, a worker could research related occupations by title, skills, and the like.

Just like a quality talent management system, Monster’s tools will help career-minded workers do a gap analysis and see what they need to do to ready themselves. The advantage Monster has over any single company is that it taps a database of millions of resumes to create aggregate pictures of career movement for nearly any occupation and industry that exists.

Where it doesn’t have the data, it reaches out to get it, pulling in things like average salary for a searched occupation in the specific geography. Every job, Winegardner tells us, will have salary data — if not from the employer, then salary ranges Monster will provide."

Here's a thought - that sounds like Monster is going to have me pay for a job posting, then if I opt not to share salary data for the position, they'll do a feed from salary.com or a similar property and slap external salary data next to the job that I posted.

If that's true, I hope that's configurable.  There are a couple of big ways that could hurt employers.  First, I want to be the one to set expectations on the salary side.  What happens when you share the range?  Does the candidate and employee automatically think that they belong at the bottom or the top?  Right - next question..

Additionally, I really don't need someone lining up all my jobs, doing a 40% average match on the responsibilities and industries, and making that broadly available for the world, including my employees to see.  Garbage in, garbage out, but then, you and I are the ones left to deal with it, right?

It'll be interesting to see the new Monster.  If they hose the people who pay the bills and don't make features like that optional, it'll also be good for CareerBuilder.

Want to know why your company is currently blocking social media sites?  Look no further than this article at the Economist, which riffs on the fact that progressive Virgin Airlines recently canned 13 people for making fun of customers and doing cockroach sightings via Facebook:

"On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.

Some airline customers may not be fragrant paragons of exquisite taste, but attacking them online is a public-relations (PR) disaster that raises the question of whether the two firms have done enough to educate staff about acceptable use of the internet. BA says employees sign a policy that forbids them from posting information about the firm online without specific authorisation. But it clearly needs to do more to reinforce that message. Virgin points out that it has several internal channels through which staff can vent frustrations. But if these were effective, why would employees feel the need to moan on Facebook?"

Nice case study with this one.  First up, I'm not sure that the employee relations channels would be open to mocking customers - that's just me, last time I checked, making fun of customers wasn't part of the Ombudsman service.  Also, could we have a sequel to "Snakes on a Plane" with cockroaches?  Is Samuel Jackson available?

All kidding aside, what I like about this case study is the line between private and public.  Can you complain about where you work and your customers?  Sure, but if you put your name on it, you own it - even in your personal account on Facebook, where you might think you can do anything you want.

Transparency is good.  That's the message we should send to employees, and we can start by trusting them with access to everything at work, with guidance on their own accountability with the tools....

Trick question....

-On one hand, if your company has had to lay off people, you probably need to be careful on the extravagance level of any party you hold...

-On the other hand, just because you have had some layoffs doesn't mean you stop attempting to get people engaged in the mission of the company.  Parties serve that end in some cultures, so it's probably unrealistic to think parties will be eliminated in corporate America?

Want a good example of the considerations?  Look no further than Yahoo, which annouced layoffs of over 10% of it's workforce, but channels the artist formerly known as Prince in deciding to party like it's 1999. (Hint - it's 2008, and didn't Prince record that in the mid-80's?  Unrelated shoutout to SHRM Florida for having Morris Day at their state convention)

But I digress. More on Yahoo from Valleywag:

"We haven't yet heard who will be the entertainment at Yahoo's Christmas party, scheduled for December 6, four days before the company proceeds with mass layoffs. Yet again, it's being held at a convention center by a racetrack — this year, with a Vegas theme. 2007's party featured a Neil Diamond cover band. For this year, how about Money For Nothing, the Dire Straits tributaries? We're sure they're cheap. Good thing, because a tipster familiar with Yahoo's budget says the company will spend $8 million to $10 million this year on holiday parties alone.

Not just the bash in San Mateo, but also festivities for Yahoo's offices in Los Angeles, New York, and around the world. Oh, and more for the divisions. "Each department below Jerry has a party, so you end up going to at least four parties, all for the same company," says our source. For Yahoo, this is just business as usual. "The company leadership is in denial and there are parties every week," our source continues."

What do you think?  For a number like $8 to $10 million, I guess I expected more than a cover band playing "Money for Nothing" multiple times in the same night.

I'd vote to ditch the parties, at least for the year...

Are the great ones born or developed?  That question has always been of interest to me since I saw an early Eddie Murphy movie called "Trading Places", in which one rich brother picks nature as the answer, the other picks nuture.

More recently, Fortune's Geoff Colvin has released a book titled "Talent is Overrated", in which he points to recent research that indicates that stars are usually not born, but developed through a practice called "deliberate practice". 

More on the theory from Colvin via Fortune:

"So if specific, inborn talent doesn't explain high achievement, what does? Researchers have converged on an answer. It's something they call "deliberate practice," but watch out - it isn't what most of us think of as practice, nor does it boil down to a simplistic practice-makes-perfect explanation.

It isn't just hard work, either. Deliberate practice is a specific and unique kind of activity, neither work nor play. It's characterized by several elements that together form a powerful whole. The greatest performers have consistently combined these elements, sometimes just by luck.

But now that researchers have decoded the pattern, the path to top performance is becoming much more accessible. The elements of deliberate practice are each worth examining:

1) Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance. The key word is "designed." The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. That may sound obvious, but most of us don't do it in the activities we think of as practice. At the driving range or at the piano, most of us are just doing what we've done before and hoping to maintain the level of performance that we probably reached long ago.

By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. Tiger Woods - intensely applying this principle, which is no secret among pro golfers - has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie.

The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they're improved; then it's on to the next aspect. In most fields, years of study have produced a body of knowledge about how performance is developed and improved, and full-time teachers generally possess that knowledge.

At least in the early going, therefore, and sometimes long after, it's almost always necessary for a teacher to design the activity best suited to improve an individual's performance. It's striking how many great performers had fathers who started designing their practice activities at early ages; Tiger, Picasso, and Mozart are perfect examples.

So is the New York Giants' Super Bowl MVP quarterback, Eli Manning, whose father, Archie, was a successful NFL quarterback. Archie was always ready with instruction for Eli (and for his brother Peyton, Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts). Eli always seemed clear that intense practice was key. According to a new biography, Eli Manning: The Making of a Quarterback, "Eli never bought into the gene theory."

Fascinating stuff.  Watch the video and think about it the next time you're shooting hoops with your kid or watching them play an instrument...

So, Washington is pretty much a Democratic town these days.  The name of this site is the  CAPITALIST, so you can probably guess that I'm leery of too much government in anything in my life.  Still, I'm willing to be open minded about most things and give ideas a chance.

But, history has a way of showing that whenever the Democrats or the Republicans hold both houses and the White House, over-reaching the mandate given by the people is usually right around the corner.

For example, would you believe that eliminating the 401k Tax Benefit for employees is under consideration in the newly blue Washington?

From the Philadelphia Bulletin:

"Congressional Democrats might enact legislation taxing 401(k) plans if they obtain a supermajority in Congress after the next election. They have shown an interest in revamping the current system and in eliminating the current tax exclusion from contributions.

During the past two weeks, U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee's Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support have entertained proposals that would tax 401(k) plans.

Both held hearings laying the groundwork for future legislation that could eliminate most of the $80 billion in annual tax breaks that investors receive by placing their money in the $3 trillion 401(k) system. The plan, which may serve as a model for this change, is by Prof. Teresa Ghilarducci, professor of economic-policy analysis at the New School for Social Research in New York. It is similar in ways to some European systems.

"Actually there are two plans, said Prof. Ghilarducci, "a short-term one and a long-term one. As part of the bailout, I would include a provision for individuals to be able to swap their 401(k)s at its August 2008 value for special issue government bonds paying 3 percent plus inflation."  Her long-term plan is to rethink the concept of 401(k)s and eliminate the tax deductibility of contributions to them. For example, she said, a person making $40,000 per year who contributes 5 percent of their income to a 401(k) currently receives a tax savings of $560.

For a person making $60,000, who contributes 5 percent of their income to a 401(k), they would have a tax savings of $900. She is proposing that the tax subsidy is eliminated completely. In its place everyone gets a $600 federal income tax credit. This would benefit those who make less.

But in the case of the aforementioned example, while people making $40,000 a year would see a net gain; people earning $60,000 per year would experience a net loss.  A tax increase by Democrats on those making $60,000 per year would not be in line with the  presidential nominee U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's pledge to only increase taxes on those making $250,000 per year."

Wow.  There are two things beyond increasing Federal payroll taxes on normal people that the Democrats could do to ensure Republicans take back seats in Congress in 2010 and 2012.  One is to eliminate or limit the tax benefit for interest payments on mortgages.  The other is workplace related, and that's to eliminate the tax benefit of the 401(k). 

The definition of over-reaching.  Surely that wouldn't happen, would it?  Wow.