360 degree feedback: is there a trade-off between usefulness and transparency?

The company I work for has a well-entrenched culture of 360 degree feedback. Five years ago, this feedback was often pointed and tended to emphasize the negatives. But it was genuinely helpful in helping managers poinpoint the skills/ behaviours their people needed to develop. Today, the same process spews out feedback that rarely rises above the level of anodyne praise.

What’s changed?

Five years ago, feedback was typically anonymous. Today, the norm is to copy the subject of the feedback on the feedback. Could that be the culprit?

I was around when the culture of copying the subject in on feedback started. The Senior Vice President who ran our department believed “if you’ve got something to say about a colleague, be man enough to tell him face-to-face.” That made sense. It prevented people from abusing the system by using feedback to vent, or to settle personal scores. It felt right. Initially, it seemed to be working well, because some old habits persisted and the feedback remained pointed. We didn’t imagine that the quality of feedback would diminish. But five years later, feedback clearly is a blunter instrument.

The other plausible explanation is a change in the company’s life stage. Five years ago, we were a young, fast-growing company. Employees were paid stock options. Promotions happened frequently. Now, we are a mature company that pays dividends, growing at about the same rate as the economy, where promotions are rare and precious.

So why would the slower corporate growth impact the quality of feedback? It takes a fair bit of work to write accurately-observed, balanced, insightful, constructive feedback. That effort is worth it if the feedback is acted on, and colleagues change their behaviour for the better. In a slow growth environment, improved behaviours don’t materially change the likelihood of getting promoted. With small or no incentives, people don’t respond to feedback with behavioural change. And so the effort that goes into writing high-quality feedback becomes as futile as writing a well-reasoned blog.

The loss of anonymity makes feedback risky. And the slower career trajectories make feedback futile. Which effect is more real? Without any scientific analysis, the loss of anonymity feels more specific/tangible and therefore more real. I suspect there is a grain of truth in both arguments.

Despite feedback becoming a blunt instrument, I still think it has a ton of value. My company has virtually no disrespectful or abusive bosses. People tend to treat each other as social equals across the hierarchy, despite very substantial differences in income. That is partly because a culture with 360 degree feedback self-selects leaders who conduct themselves in a particular way. 360 degree feedback just goes from being a tool that effects fine changes in behaviour, to being a tool that prevents grevious abuse. Sounds a bit like democracy.

Tear-free shampoo and the frightening guest

Took my daughters swimming on Sunday. Showered many blessings on the wonderful person who invented tear-free shampoo. And reflected that the history of science is obsessed with boring things like penicillin and does not celebrate genuinely great advances like tear-free shampoo.

This blogger is not alone in trying to set right this historic injustice. The late Viktor Schreckengost - whose name means "frightening guest" in German - is the grand-daddy of the sort of scientist who invents tear-free shampoo. Dan Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek thinks Mr Schreckengost has "done more for humanity than any single politicican in the twentieth century". Homage is in order.

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/01/viktor-schrecke.html

Fixing match fixing

This is absurd. The organizers of the French Open are sueing online betting sites (including Betfair - the site I use) to prevent betting on the French Open.

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/tennis/news/story?id=3225440

Yes, match-fixing in tennis is a serious problem. Tennis matches are easy to fix. But surely, major branded sites like Betfair and Ladbrokes are part of the solution. These sites are dependent on the trust of millions of small time punters. They have the data needed to spot odd betting patterns and extra-big bets.

This could actually be counter-productive. Betting on sport is great fun. It will always be a part of sport. Driving good, clean, fun betting underground will only bring in sleaze and increase the likelihood of match fixing.

Tintin

Found a superb article on Tintin in a back issue of the New Yorker, by Anthony Lane. The highlights:

- General de Gaulle declared that Tintin was his only international rival. He was envious, perhaps, of not just of Tintin's fame but of his defiantly positive attitude. Both figures can be recognized by silhouette alone

- Stimulation in Herge's solid, Catholic, bourgeois youth in Belgium came from his exploits as a scout. There remain in Tintin traces of the try-anything, do-gooding spirit of the scout troop

- Tintin was first serialized in 1925 in a daily newspaper which was described in it's masthead as a "Catholic and National Newspaper of Doctrine and Information". The editor had a framed picture of Mussolini on his desk

- Tintin in Congo (1931) is an unmitigated parade of racial prejudice, with bug-eyed natives swaying between ignorance and laziness. Herge later redrew the comic...and claimed that his concept of the Congo was no different from that of his compatriots at the time

- A crucial happening was Herge's encounter with Chang Chong-chen, a student at the Brussels Academy of Fine Arts. Chang suggested using real events as the inspiration for his adventures...the ouevre would have a historical value...The Blue Lotus (1936) was born

- Chang returned to China and lost touch with Herge. Tintin in Tibet (1960) showed Tintin searching for a lost friend called Chang. In 1981, two years before Herge died, the real Chang came to Belgium for a tearful reunion. Chang had shown Herge how to beat back prejudice: just tell the truth

- Herge's principle: the further your reach, the more compelling your duty to get it right. Herge knew he would not be able to emabrk on Tintin in Tibet without amassing photographs of monastries, lamas and chortens, all of which would be copied in fanatical detail in his book. I was thrilled to read Hindi in Tintin which was real

- Belgium was occupied. Herge - like Wodehouse, who was interred as an enemy alien - not only survied but bloomed into one of his most flourishing periods. Once the war ended, both were interrogated about the nature and intensity of their collaboration. Both pleaded guilty of innocence; neither ever dispelled the shadow of suspicion. Herge's (and Wodehouse's) ability to avert his gaze from evil verges on the chronic

- Commentators are both enticed and exasperated by how little he gives away. In particular, the Tintin who gazes out from the cover of The Castafoire Emerald (1963) shushing the reader with a finger held to his lips

- There is no sex. Tintin passes increasing portions of his time with an unmarried seaman, yet it seldom occurs to us to question their rapport. He never has a girlfriend, and never expresses the need for one. He has no parents or siblings. We are unsure whether he counts as a child himself. He reminds me, if anyone, of Charlie Brown. Enid Blyton, and maybe even JRR Tolkien, would be at home in this beautiful, adventure-filled, but asexual world

- Tintin may be too constrained for American tastes, being posessed of no superpowers. He is Clark Kent without the phone booth, although Clark at least had a paying job , wheras Tintin, nominally a reporter, never receives a paycheck or files a story

Guru

This movie is about Bollywood telling India what Deng Xiaoping so successfully told China: "to get rich is glorious." Bollywood shapes India's attitudes. Bollywood delivering this message - to an India that has been wallowing for decades in the Gandhian mythology of self-denial, and in the consequent hypocrisy, mediocrity and poverty - just the concept makes this film a winner.

At heart, this is a thinly disguised Bollywood style documentary on Dhirubhai Ambani. There's a great item number with Mallika Sherawat, set in Istanbul. Aishwarya Rai plays Kokilaben (I'm sure Kokilaben is flattered) and is introduced to the film in a peppy dancing-in-the-rain sequence. Dhirubhai makes a big speech in the courtroom denouement, kind-of-sort-of comparing himself to Gandhi. It's fun to watch.

But the film never goes from being visually interesting to being viscerally compelling. There is no knot, no conflict, no tension that drags to plot forward until it is resolved. Nor is their any character development. Dhirubhai seems to have been born being Dhirubhai. For instance, there is no conflict between Dhirubhai's high aspirations and the sordidness of the bribes he needs to give out to meet those aspirations. The only attempt to create inner tension was with Nanaji, a Ramnath Goenka like character, who starts off as a father figure to Dhirubhai and then proceeds to wage a crusade against him. That storyline didn't really work.

That might be why Guru was not a box office blockbuster. It's not going to have a Sholay or Lagaan-like impact on India's psyche. A pity. Because the "to get rich is glorious" message really is reshaping India.

Safe in the warm after glow of victory...a gentleman's agreement?

Of all the daft things that have surfaced in this India-Australia series, the daftest has to be the gentleman's agreement between the captains about taking the fielder's word on catches. Kumble should have figured out that the agreement would break down at the pivotal moment when a catch made a vital difference. That’s exactly what happened. It’s common sense.

And if this were about the mythic spirit of cricket, why should a gentleman’s agreement be limited to claiming catches? Why not nicks? One can't blame umpire Benson for asking Ponting if Michael Clarke's catch was clean. That is what the captains had agreed to.

Kumble was naive (or gullible) to have agreed to Ponting's proposal. Jayawardene, one of the most gentlemanly modern players, was smart enough to turn down the same proposal.

The more interesting question is around why Ponting is proposing this agreement. It feels out of character. He has also made his team sign up to a spirit of cricket pledge. Which, in addition to feeling out of character, is bureaucratic and suggests Ponting does not understand that spirit describes what can't be codified.

What's going on here? Is Ponting trying to capture a special place cricket's pantheon that his gracelessness on the field just doesn't support?

Ronting's Australians are the easily the least loved champions in the history of cricket. Just think back to the reverence Clive Lloyd's West Indians inspired to get that into perspective. One of the defining memories of Ponting will be his spontaneous and passionate swearing after being run out by Gary Pratt at Trent Bridge in the 2005 Ashes. The day after the Sydney test, the BBC quoted a poll which showed 82% of Aussie cricket fans rating Ponting a bad captain, despite having delivered 16 wins on the trot. Does this lack of respect hurt prickly little Ponting?

The comparison that hurts Ponting most is with Steve Waugh. Like Ponting, Steve Waugh inherited a great team. Like Ponting, Steve Waugh played to win: his most important contribution to cricket's lexicon was the "mental disintegration" which did not happen to Saurav Ganguly. But Steve could take the Aussie team to lay a wreath at the ANZAC memorial at Gallipolli and look authentic. He raises money for Udayan, a charity for the children of lepers, without provoking a snigger. He won a special place in my heart when we spoke of how cricket would be poorer with Zimbabwe, deprived of quality players like Neil Johnson (one of my obscure personal favourites). Steve Waugh didn't do spin. He meant what he said. He cared. It showed. The gravitas came naturally.

Waugh's nicknames are Tugga and Iceman. Ponting's nickname is Punter. Maybe Ponting fears that he is destined to be a Miandad...snapping away in the shadows the the Imran like figures - Border, Taylor, Waugh - who came before him. Maybe an Indian captain can sense that insecurity, and twist a dagger into that chink in the armour, and engineer a "mental disintegration" at Adelaide that would make even Steve Waugh cringe.

Hope springs eternal :)

Betfair on Perth

Established behavioural economics finding: people are willing to pay more for insurance against death caused by an airplane accident than for insurance against death by any cause. Clearly death caused by an airplane accident is a subset of death by any cause. But when thought of a dramatic cause of death like an airplane accident is planted in the mind, the imagination takes over and makes that cause feel more real, tangible and likely than it actually is.

I have a hunch the same cognitive bias is happening on Betfair in assessing the odds of an Australian victory at Perth. Betfair thinks the likelihood that Australia will win is ~30%.

The point is: it is easy to imagine the Australian batsmen playing out of their skins to steal a memorable win. I remember Ponting's innings in the 2003 World Cup final, Gilcrist's innings in the 2007 World Cup final, Symond's innings in the first innings at Sydney...it's easy to imagine something like that happening again. The sheer ease of imagining another breathtaking, match winning performance from Australia might make the market over-estimate the odds of an Australian win.

What is critical is that India channel their imaginations into just putting the ball in the right areas and holding their catches. Think about nothing else. That's the action which will make the odds on India shorten.

BTW...writing this post hasn't quite given me the courage to go and bet on India. Not yet, anyway.