Big change in DU

Delhi University VC makes his case for shift to four-year undergraduate courses

Shekhar Gupta Posted online: Mon May 13 2013, 03:33 hrs

In this Walk the Talk on NDTV 24x7 with The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta, Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Dinesh Singh makes his case for the shift to four-year undergraduate courses and says there was “no railroading” I am at Delhi University’s Vice-Chancellor’s office and my guest today is eminent mathematician Prof Dinesh Singh. It is one thing to teach mathematics, it’s quite another to balance all these complex equations of politics, policy and change. I agree with you entirely. It’s almost impossible to do that but there is a mathematical theory called complexity theory. Maybe that will help me. How does that help? Explain that to somebody who never got more than 33 in math and gave up from Class 10 on. It’s not mathematics that works here in the university. It’s really about administering a large institution in which there are all kinds of pulls, pressures, needs, requirements and, really, balance. One needs to balance all of these so that the the university moves in the right direction. The symbol that represents this university is an elephant. And India also is often regarded as an elephant. You are not getting into the beehive equation just now... No... One of my predecessors used to say that (the university) is like the republic of India. And it is. But then the republic is also moving in some ways and so are we. You have the advantage of being a mathematician. And mathematics has the beauty and elegance of logic. So use that power of logic and your mathematical training to explain the new four-year-degree course to me. Because that is the new sort of war that has broken out right now. Unfortunately, it seems to appear that there is a war. It’s happening more outside the university, not as much inside. If you look at systems within the university, they are working in harmony. Our institutions—the academic council, the executive council, our faculty bodies—all of them are working in harmony to create this system. So there is not so much trouble here. But as luck would have it, many external forces seem to be interested in what is happening and there are some here also. So how does your four-year course help? Let’s come to brass tacks. So here is how it works. We assume that generally...students in school begin to get some idea of what they are interested in. So suppose you are a student in school about to leave and you are interested in history and you will seek some sort of major course in history to enable you further. Students would seek admission into the history Honours programme of the University of Delhi. A small number would get that. Others would be shunted into the BA Pass programme. And they are deprived of this major exposure to history. Now, in this four-year programme, every student has got a much larger chance of getting an Honours degree in the subject that she/he has displayed interest and ability in at the school level. Now that’s some harmony with your inner calling. So you are banishing the distinction between Honours students and Pass students, which is a caste system in a way. Yes, we have banished that. Now you have to perform and earn your Honours degree. Everyone has an even chance. Two, you have chosen history. But along the way, is it only history that will enable your inner calling to be manifested in the real world? So how do we ensure that? In addition to what you have chosen as your Honours discipline at the entry level, you will be exposed to a set of foundation courses. Eleven of them... Yes, but not all together. They kick in the first and second years. These foundation courses enable you in different ways. So there is a foundation course on philosophy, psychology, communication and life. This really enables any student. Who would not want to be a good communicator in life, whether you study mathematics or physics or history? There is a foundation course on mathematical ability. That’s not about proving mathematical theorems. It is about recognising the importance of data in our everyday life. And it has been tried and tested. Elaborate that a little bit. If you have read this Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure Of the Dancing Men, there is this person who consults Sherlock Holmes. He says every morning I wake up and I find a bunch of handwritten pieces of paper on which there are dancing figures inscribed and I can’t make head or tail of it. So what does Holmes do? He figures these are encrypted. So how does he crack them? I read this story in the ninth grade and that’s when I understood what data means. That’s when I learnt that the letter ‘e’ in the English language is the most frequently used letter for words. So Holmes looks at that dancing figure which occurs most often in the messages and puts that down as ‘e’. Then he looks for two-letter words and three-letter words...and decrypts the whole message. Now that’s called understanding data. About a 100 years ago, there was an Englishman by the name of Grierson. He came to India and he surveyed large tracts of land in north India. And he recognised how language changes. The data he produced was amazing. He said after every 10 kos—a unit of measurement a little more than a mile—the language changes. That is an enormously interesting piece of data. And I am told that no one has ever constituted a similar survey after that. What’s missing in our daily life is this importance of handling data and using it to our benefit in many ways. But tell me, why the foundation courses? Are you aiming at employability? Are you aiming at the discovery of the inner self which, I suspect, is not going to cut much ice with people who are in the debate? It may or may not cut ice, but it will work for sure. These are means of enabling students. There is a foundation course on business and entrepreneurship. These are short courses, one-semester-long courses. Do you have teachers to teach these courses? Yes, we have teachers. We have identified teachers in every college. And they are beginning to face orientation courses, starting May 20. So all these teachers will go through rigorous orientation programmes for two months running. So they will be better enabled to teach. This is the finest university in the country. Why should it need drastic change? Isn’t the DU degree itself a ticket to jobs and recognition? For a bunch of students from elite institutions, and not all from the elite as well, it’s okay. Life is hunky dory for all kinds of reasons. You could put them in a well and they would still do well. But if you look at the ground reality... Just four to five weeks ago, I called a major corporate institution from Mumbai. They flew an entire team down here and that means they were dead serious about it...It was a major multinational finance institution, India-based. They wanted to hire and they had lots of openings. And I arranged for a blind interview with 1,100 potential graduates of this university whose names and data for marks were supplied. No college and no social background was given. And they spent much effort and time. Out of these 1,100, they chose only three. That’s a telling comment. We are sitting on a time bomb. So they found only three students employable out of the 1,100? Absolutely. They said that we don’t think we will come back again, it was quite a waste of time for us. They said that off the record, but they said it. That’s very disturbing. So that was a problem. What about your elite colleges? St Stephen’s, SRCC, LSR? I have looked at some of these elite colleges. They do hire and campus placements take place. They hit the headlines (when they say) we got so many people with the pay packet... Rs 10 lakh, 12 lakh... Yes, but that’s for a handful. The rest are not even picked up by the institutions. So they are left unemployed. The college that gets talked about all the time is SRCC. Do you have any data there? It is your college with the highest employability. This is not hard data but data that you get in conversations—I am very sure that about half the graduates from Shri Ram College of Commerce are not picked up in the campus placement. So you are trying to get employability. Absolutely. That’s one of the games here. To get our students to be employable. You don’t mind if it takes a year longer? Oh no, I don’t mind at all. Because then it makes the student’s life a little better. Let me put forward some points of criticism. One, that you have not done adequate preparation. It’s a good idea but you don’t have teachers, you are carrying thousands of vacancies. Estimates vary between 3,000 and 5,000. Second, you don’t have physical infrastructure. Three, there is not sufficient choice. Four, you are allowing too many exits. It’s like a train that stops at 10 stations on the way. So you can get off anywhere, so you don’t get to any real destination. Like a hop-on, hop-off or a ‘Ho-Ho’ bus. When it comes to infrastructure, we have been working hard at this. We have been talking to every college principal and almost all of them have clearly mentioned to us in writing that they can handle this issue. Teaching positions: certainly, some more positions will be needed. But colleges are well prepared to start the programme and we have enough positions now. We have begun to allocate them college by college. Not many of these positions will be needed immediately. They will kick in after a year or so and by then, we will make the appointments. Our orientation programmes are kicking in, plus our faculty are fairly good. These are knowledge-based courses. They have been brought about by the faculty themselves. It isn’t the vice-chancellor who drives the effort. It comes from the ground upwards. A very conservative estimate tells me that more than 2,500 faculty have participated in creating these courses from January till today. So, that’s a large number. And physical infrastructure? In terms of space etc, the colleges are ready. Just one thing that’s going to happen—generally, colleges tend to finish their teaching in most of the courses, except science, by about 1 or so. Now, colleges will have to more or less have teaching organised from 9 to 5. This doesn’t mean every student sits everyday from 9 to 5 and not every teacher sits everyday from 9 to 5. But different times have to be utilised for different teaching. But this will definitely increase teachers’ workload... The workload will be exactly as per UGC norms. The workload doesn’t increase. That has to work exactly the way we have worked this out. But how do you manage if you don’t increase your faculty? You don’t increase your workload, you increase your teaching time, you increase your degree duration—I mean this is magic... It’s almost that. At least for a mathematician, it doesn’t work. Because in math, the numbers have to add up. I have information from all colleges. Typically, a college says that in the course of the four-year programme, we will have 16 new positions and the others are already in place. They have worked out their time-tables. Each teacher has to teach, if I remember correctly, 16 hours a week. So we have 16-20 positions and so many hours get added up and that’s the extra teaching load that kicks in. Otherwise, all these positions are in place. Aren’t you getting into esoterica sometimes when you talk about Sanskrit and math etc? This is a time when people do BBA, MBA, MCA—all these degrees that pay lots of money. Parents sell their homes just so that children can get jobs. And you are saying Sanskrit, math, foundation level... They will all help them get jobs. Let me explain. Sanskrit students can work in many ways. I learnt, incidentally, that there is a significant demand in some European nations for teachers of Sanskrit. And these students want to go. You can be a student of Sanskrit, but you can work in the area of linguistics. That’s a huge area. And, when you do that, you need exposure to some other subjects. Now, a Sanskrit student in the earlier system had no option. He was straight-jacketed. Now, if he wants, he can pick up a minor in mathematics, he can pick up a minor in computer science, all of these will increase your employability, not just in Sanskrit, but with a minor, you could take a masters in mathematics if you want it. Because many global scholars in many disciplines have also studied Sanskrit... Oh yes. I read Frits Staal’s work on the Vedas and he writes that when he attended (Noam) Chomsky’s lectures at MIT, it became immediately apparent to him that the reason why Chomsky brought about this revolution in linguistics was because he knew the Paninian system of grammar and he knew mathematics. So he understood the grammatical principles, put it into a mathematical framework and created a revolution. Our Sanskrit students have never been exposed to mathematics. I have no idea how many Chomskys we have lost. But why are so many followers of Chomsky against your change? There is a strong Left opposition to this change. I seem to think so. And they are all decent people. Oh, certainly. Some of them are the best teachers in the university. I respect them. But change has never been easy. I understand it. It’s also good to be resistant to change. You cannot immediately allow everything to happen. It can be dangerous. But this change is being called dangerous and hasty. You are going from three to four years, you have not given more than one year of consultation. Of course, we are a country that loves committees and endless deliberation. We have done more than one year of consultation. When I became V-C, I consulted about 4,000 students. I called all 4,000 into a single auditorium and we took written feedback from them. I stayed with them for eight hours. And I talked to so many of them to figure out what they felt was wrong with the system, what would they like. The next day, I met 800 teachers. And this process has continued over two years. It wasn’t just me, my colleagues too. You don’t see any merit in a one-year postponement now? Oh no. It won’t bring any more benefits. Everyone recognises, I most of all, that there will always be some teething troubles. But that will happen whether we do it this year or next. All preparations that we feel need to be taken care of seem to have been taken care of. Nandan Nilekani once said that the challenge of working in Delhi was how to carry out big change in a minimally invasive manner. Have you been minimally invasive or could you have handled it better? Minimally invasive versus railroading? Rest assured, there was no railroading. We followed all processes. There was resistance even to the semester system... Yes, there was a huge resistance at that point in time. And the semester system has benefited students like anything. And in the end, a one-year postponement was demanded… Yes, it was. And they didn’t do anything for a year when they were given a year’s time, no major changes came about in the framing of the syllabi. Eventually, at the last moment, these departments just bifurcated the annual syllabi and converted to semester mode. That was a huge let down. The fact is that IITs already have a four-year undergraduate degree with semester system. Why just IITs? I looked at a list of universities. Ambedkar University has a four-year programme. The Indian Institute of Science has one, the University of Allahabad has. There are many universities with a four-year programme. Tell me this, this two-year drop off, three-year drop off, four-year drop off... I looked at the figures. Each year, about 25,000 students drop out of the university without a piece of paper that recognises that. Out of about 2 lakh? More than 12 per cent drop out? That’s a lot. Yes. From the numbers that are admitted, about 30 per cent drop out. And they don’t get a piece of paper that says they spent so much time in the university. I am encouraging them to stay on by offering them a chance to get an Honours degree. That’s a huge incentive. But, suppose they do drop out after two years, what do we do? In two years’ time, we also give them some knowledge-based skills, at least their employability goes up. So they get a diploma in two years? Yes. And they can come back within a 10-year period and complete a degree. So that option is there. And they get yet another one if they do three years? If they stay for three years, they get a Bachelor’s degree with a major subject. So it says Bachelors with Major in history. So, it’s not as if the three-year degree course has disappeared. No, it hasn’t. It’s better than the BA Pass. Except for Honours, which you have to get in four years. Also, the three years is better than the BA Pass degree. Now there is a Bachelors with a subject major, which the past degree didn’t allow. So what is it that you wish you had told your critics in time or something that you would tell them now? Because this die is cast. Yes, this die is cast. And, I would tell them to recognise that there is a little wisdom on this side as well. It isn’t just one person alone. Look, there are 51 of my finest faculty. These are people who got Bhatnagar prizes, there are Humboldt Fellows, there are Fellows of our academies. All our deans, almost all our heads, they have jointly written a statement saying that all of us have worked in this system, all of us have participated, we recognise the merits of the system, it’s a good system. They also mention that there will be pitfalls. But which system will not have pitfalls? So you understand the sense of responsibility. Because if you botch up, then it’s a botch, nobody changes anything for a very long time. God forbid that this will be a botch-up. Now here it is what I call project management work. Based on our own estimates, our review system, there will be no botch-up. There will be some glitches. This is the city of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. Don’t go forward and come back. Hopefully, that’s not going to happen. What’s next for you? Will you start focusing on your Masters programmes and PhDs now? What we will do now is once this programme kicks in and has stabilised, we will work with our faculty to relook the Masters programme. It will be largely credit-based. So if you come from this system after a four-year degree, you will need about a year’s credit to get the Masters degree. If you come with a three-year degree, roughly two years’ credit will have to kick in before you get it. So the number of years studied will remain the same. Yes. And your parting words to those teachers who think that with this additional load, they will not have time for research? On the other hand, every college teacher now will have time to do more research because research is part of the undergraduate curriculum. So he will have a chance to mentor and guide these really bright students. ...she will have a chance. I agree with you. Again, we are trying to get data recorded, but I think lady teachers are in a majority in this university. As time passes, so will the students be. Oh, yes. They are certainly more than half now in our university, the lady students. They will all have a chance to do research. All the undergraduates who get into the Honours programme and all our faculty in the colleges. I am not sure if they will all be convinced listening to you, but you have made a very good case. And since you have embarked on change now, good luck to you...But you are a brave man to do this.

How Big Data Is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers

April 27, 2013

How Big Data Is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers

By MATT RICHTEL

WHEN the e-mail came out of the blue last summer, offering a shot as a programmer at a San Francisco start-up, Jade Dominguez, 26, was living off credit card debt in a rental in South Pasadena, Calif., while he taught himself programming. He had been an average student in high school and hadn’t bothered with college, but someone, somewhere out there in the cloud, thought that he might be brilliant, or at least a diamond in the rough.

That someone was Luca Bonmassar. He had discovered Mr. Dominguez by using a technology that raises important questions about how people are recruited and hired, and whether great talent is being overlooked along the way. The concept is to focus less than recruiters might on traditional talent markers — a degree from M.I.T., a previous job at Google, a recommendation from a friend or colleague — and more on simple notions: How well does the person perform? What can the person do? And can it be quantified?

The technology is the product of Gild, the 18-month-old start-up company of which Mr. Bonmassar is a co-founder. His is one of a handful of young businesses aiming to automate the discovery of talented programmers — a group that is in enormous demand. These efforts fall in the category of Big Data, using computers to gather and crunch all kinds of information to perform many tasks, whether recommending books, putting targeted ads onto Web sites or predicting health care outcomes or stock prices.

Of late, growing numbers of academics and entrepreneurs are applying Big Data to human resources and the search for talent, creating a field called work-force science. Gild is trying to see whether these technologies can also be used to predict how well a programmer will perform in a job. The company scours the Internet for clues: Is his or her code well-regarded by other programmers? Does it get reused? How does the programmer communicate ideas? How does he or she relate on social media sites?

Gild’s method is very much in its infancy, an unproven twinkle of an idea. There is healthy skepticism about this idea, but also excitement, especially in industries where good talent can be hard to find.

The company expects to have about $2 million to $3 million in revenue this year and has raised around $10 million, including a chunk from Mark Kvamme, a venture capitalist who invested early in LinkedIn. And Gild has big-name customers testing or using its technology to recruit, including Facebook, Amazon, Wal-Mart Stores, Google and Twitter.

Companies use Gild to mine for new candidates and to assess candidates they are already considering. Gild itself uses the technology, which was how the company, desperate for programming talent and unable to match the salaries offered by bigger tech concerns, found this guy named Jade outside of Los Angeles. Its algorithm had determined that he had the highest programming score in Southern California, a total that almost no one achieves. It was 100.

Who was Jade? Could he help the company? What does his story tell us about modern-day recruiting and hiring, about the concept of meritocracy?

PEOPLE in Silicon Valley tend to embrace certain assumptions: Progress, efficiency and speed are good. Technology can solve most things. Change is inevitable; disruption is not to be feared. And, maybe more than anything else, merit will prevail.

But Vivienne Ming, who since late in 2012 has been the chief scientist at Gild, says she doesn’t think Silicon Valley is as merit-based as people imagine. She thinks that talented people are ignored, misjudged or fall through the cracks all the time. She holds that belief in part because she has had some experience of it.

Dr. Ming was born male, christened Evan Campbell Smith. He was a good student and a great athlete — holding records at his high school in track and field in the triple jump and long jump. But he always felt a disconnect with his body. After high school, Evan experienced a full-blown identity crisis. He flopped at college, kicked around jobs, contemplated suicide, hit the proverbial bottom. But rather than getting stuck there, he bounced. At 27, he returned to school, got an undergraduate degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, and went on to receive a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon in psychology and computational neuroscience.

During a fellowship at Stanford, he began gender transition, becoming, fully, Dr. Vivienne Ming in 2008.

As a woman, Dr. Ming started noticing that people treated her differently. There were small things that seemed innocuous, like men opening the door for her. There were also troubling things, like the fact that her students asked her fewer questions about math then they had when she was a man, or that she was invited to fewer social events — a baseball game, for instance — by male colleagues and business connections.

Bias often takes forms that people may not recognize. One study that Dr. Ming cites, by researchers at Yale, found that faculty members at research universities described female applicants for a manager position as significantly less competent than male applicants with identical qualifications. Another study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that people who sent in résumés with “black-sounding” names had a considerably harder time getting called back from employers than did people who sent in résumés showing equal qualifications but with “white-sounding” names.

Everybody can pretty much agree that gender, or how people look, or the sound of a last name, shouldn’t influence hiring decisions. But Dr. Ming takes the idea of meritocracy further. She suggests that shortcuts accepted as a good proxy for talent — like where you went to school or previously worked — can also shortchange talented people and, ultimately, employers. “The traditional markers people use for hiring can be wrong, profoundly wrong,” she said.

Dr. Ming’s answer to what she calls “so much wasted talent” is to build machines that try to eliminate human bias. It’s not that traditional pedigrees should be ignored, just balanced with what she considers more sophisticated measures. In all, Gild’s algorithm crunches thousands of bits of information in calculating around 300 larger variables about an individual: the sites where a person hangs out; the types of language, positive or negative, that he or she uses to describe technology of various kinds; self-reported skills on LinkedIn; the projects a person has worked on, and for how long; and, yes, where he or she went to school, in what major, and how that school was ranked that year by U.S. News & World Report.

“Let’s put everything in and let the data speak for itself,” Dr. Ming said of the algorithms she is now building for Gild.

Gild is not the only company now scouring for information. TalentBin, another San Francisco start-up firm, searches the Internet for talented programmers, trawling sites where they gather, collecting “data exhaust,” according to the company Web site, and creating lists of potential hires for employers. Another competitor is RemarkableHire, which assesses a person’s talents by looking at how his or her online contributions are rated by others.

And there’s Entelo, which tries to figure out who might be looking for a job before they even start their exploration. According to its Web site, the company uses more than 70 variables to find indications of possible career change, such as how someone presents herself on social sites. The Web site reads: “We crunch the data so you don’t have to.”

This application of Big Data to recruiting is “is absolutely worth a try,” said Susan Etlinger, an analyst of the data and analytics industries at the Altimeter Group. But she questioned whether an algorithm would be an improvement over what employers already do: gathering résumés, or referrals, and using traditional markers associated with success.

“The big hole is actual outcomes,” she said. “What I’m not buying yet is that probability equals actuality.”

Sean Gourley, co-founder and chief technology officer at Quid, a Big Data company, said that data trawling could inform recruiting and hiring, but only if used with an understanding of what the data can’t reveal. “Big Data has its own bias,” he said. “You measure what you can measure,” and “you’re denigrating what can’t be measured, like gut instinct, charisma.”

He added: “When you remove humans from complex decision-making, you can optimize the hell out of the algorithm, but at what cost?”

Dr. Ming doesn’t suggest eliminating human judgment, but she does think that the computer should lead the way, acting as an automated vacuum and filter for talent. The company has amassed a database of seven million programmers, ranking them based on what it calls a Gild score — a measure, the company says, of what a person can do. Ultimately, Dr. Ming wants to expand the algorithm so it can search for and assess other kinds of workers, like Web site designers, financial analysts and even sales people at, say, retail outlets.

“We did our own internal gold strike,” Dr. Ming said. “We found this kid in Los Angeles just kicking around his computer.”

She’s talking about Jade.

MR. DOMINGUEZ grew up in Los Angeles, the middle child of five. His mother took care of the household; his dad installed telecommunications equipment — a blue-collar guy who prized education.

But Jade had a rebellious streak. Halfway through high school, Mr. Dominguez, previously a straight-A student, began wondering whether going to school was more about satisfying requirements than real learning. “The value proposition is to go to school to get a good job,” he told me. “Philosophically, shouldn’t you go to school to learn?” His grades fell sharply, and he said he graduated from Alhambra High School in 2004 with less than a 3.0 grade-point average.

Not only did he reject college, he also wanted to prove that he could succeed wildly without it. He devoured books on entrepreneurship. He started a company that printed custom T-shirts, first from his house, then from a 1,000-square-foot warehouse space he rented. He decided that he needed a Web site, so he taught himself programming.

“I was out to prove myself on my own merit,” he said. He concedes that he might have taken it a little far. “It’s a little immature to be motivated by proving people wrong,” he said.

He got a tattoo on his arm in flowery script that read “Believe.” He sort of laughs about it now, though he still feels that he can accomplish what he puts his mind to. “It’s the great thing about code,” he said of computer language. “It’s largely merit-driven. It’s not about what you’ve studied. It’s about what you’ve shipped.”

When Gild went looking for talent, it assumed that the San Francisco and Silicon Valley areas would be picked over. So it ran its algorithm in Southern California and came up with a list of programmers. At the top was Mr. Dominguez, who had a very solid reputation on GitHub — a place where software developers gather to share code, exchange ideas and build reputations. Gild combs through GitHub and a handful of other sites, including Bitbucket and Google Code, looking for bright people in the field.

Mr. Dominguez had made quite a contribution. His code for Jekyll-Bootstrap, a function used in building Web sites, was reused by an impressive 1,267 other developers. His language and habits showed a passion for product development and several programming tools, like Rails and JavaScript, which were interesting to Gild. His blogs and posts on Twitter suggested that he was opinionated, something that the company wanted on its initial team.

A recruiter from Gild sent him an e-mail and had him come to San Francisco for an interview. The company founders met a charismatic, confident person — poised, articulate, thoughtful, with an easy smile, a tad rougher around the edges than other interview candidates, said Sheeroy Desai, Mr. Bonmassar’s co-founder at Gild and the company’s chief executive.

Mr. Dominguez wore a vibrant green hoodie to the interview. He asked pointed questions, like this one: Did the company worry that it would be perceived as violating privacy by scoring engineers without their knowledge? (It didn’t believe so, and he didn’t, either. Gild says it uses only publicly available information.)

They asked him some pointed but gentle questions, too, like whether he could work in a structured environment. He said he could. The company made Mr. Dominguez a job offer right away, and he accepted a position that pays around $115,000 a year.

“He’s a symbol of someone who is smart, highly motivated and yet, for whatever reason, wasn’t motivated in high school and didn’t see value in college,” Mr. Desai said.

Mr. Desai did go to college, at M.I.T., one of those schools that recruiters value so highly. It was there, he said, that he learned how to cope with pressure and to work with brilliant people and sometimes feel humbled. But while one’s work at school isn’t inconsequential, he said, “it’s not the whole story.” He asserts that despite his degree in computer science, “I’m a terrible developer.”

David Lewin, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert in management of human resources, said that asking what someone could do was an important question, but so was asking whether the person could accomplish it with other people. Of all the efforts to predict whether someone will perform well in an organization, the most proven method, Dr. Lewin said, is a referral from someone already working there. Current employees know the culture, he said, and have their reputations and their work environment on the line. A recent study from the Yale School of Management that uses Big Data offers a refinement to the notion, finding that employee referrals are a great way to find good hires but that the method tends to work much better if the employee making the referral is highly productive.

For his part, Dr. Lewin is skeptical that an algorithm would be a good substitute for a good referral from a trusted employee.

One of Gild’s customers is Square, a San Francisco-based mobile payment system. Like many other high-tech companies, Square is aggressively hiring, and it’s finding the competition for great talent as intense as it was during the dot-com boom, according to Bryan Power, the company’s director of talent and a Silicon Valley veteran. Mr. Power says Gild offers a potential leg up in finding programmers who aren’t the obvious catches.

“Getting out of Stanford or Google is a very good proxy” for talent, Mr. Power said. “They have reputations for a reason.” But those prospects have many choices, and they might not choose Square. “We need more pools to draw from,” he said, “and that’s what Gild represents.”

Gild’s technology has turned up some prospects for Square, but hasn’t led directly to a hire. Mr. Power says the Gild algorithm provides a generalized programming score that is not as specific as Square needs for its job slots. “Gild has an opinion of who is good but it’s not that simple,” he said, adding that Square was talking to Gild about refining the model.

Despite the limited usefulness thus far, Mr. Power says that what Gild is doing is the start of something powerful. Today’s young engineers are posting much more of their work online, and doing open-source work, providing more data to mine in search of the diamonds. “It’s all about finding unrecognized talent,” he said.

MR. DOMINGUEZ has worked at Gild for eight months and has proved himself a talented programmer, Mr. Desai said. But he also said that Mr. Dominguez “sometimes struggles to work in a structured environment.” His co-workers try not to bug him when he’s sitting at his computer, locked into that work zone.

In meetings, Mr. Dominguez speaks his mind. He’s happier, he said, “as long as I can have a say in how the system is built,” or it’s just another system he would have to conform to. He bristles slightly at the growth of the company, which has expanded to 40 people from 10 in the last six months, adding layers of management and bureaucracy.

“The truth is that’s in my nature to do stuff in my own way; inevitably I want to start my own company,” he said, but he’s quick to add: “I do appreciate and the respect the opportunity the company’s given me because I think it’s very clear they hired me on merit. I will always appreciate that.”

Dr. Ming says the young man is both a great find and still an unknown. Of course, he is just a single example, one heralded by the company, but who cannot alone either validate or disprove the method.

“He’s got the lone-wolf thing going on,” Dr. Ming said. “It’s going well early but it could get tougher later on.”

The algorithm did a good job measuring what it can measure. It nailed Mr. Dominguez’s talent for working with computers. What is still unfolding is how he uses his talent over the long term, working with people.

Source: The New York Times (and once again why it is the best newspaper in the world, period.)

 

March 27, 2013

Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?

By SUSAN DOMINUS

 

Just after noon on a Wednesday in November, Adam Grant wrapped up a lecture at the Wharton School and headed toward his office, a six-minute speed walk away. Several students trailed him, as often happens; at conferences, Grant attracts something more like a swarm. Grant chatted calmly with them but kept up the pace. He knew there would be more students waiting outside his office, and he said, more than once, “I really don’t like to keep students waiting.”

Grant, 31, is the youngest-tenured and highest-rated professor at Wharton. He is also one of the most prolific academics in his field, organizational psychology, the study of workplace dynamics. Grant took three years to get his Ph.D., and in the seven years since, he has published more papers in his field’s top-tier journals than colleagues who have won lifetime-achievement awards. His influence extends beyond academia. He regularly advises companies about how to get the most out of their employees and how to help their employees get the most out of their jobs. It is Grant whom Google calls when “we are thinking about big problems we are trying to solve,” says Prasad Setty, who heads Google’s people analytics group. Plenty of people have made piles of money by promising the secrets to getting things done or working a four-hour week or figuring out what color your parachute is or how to be a brilliant one-minute manager. But in an academic field that is preoccupied with the study of efficiency and productivity, Grant would seem to be the most efficient and productive.

When we arrived at Grant’s office on the Philadelphia campus, five students were waiting outside. The first was a student trying to decide between Teach for America and a human-resources job at Google. Grant walked her through some other possibilities, testing her theories about potential outcomes. Although she was aware of the crowd, she seemed to be in no hurry to leave, in part because Grant was so clearly engaged. A second student came in. Then a third. Someone dropped off a bottle of wine to say thank you; another asked for a contact (Grant pledges to introduce his students to anyone he knows or has met, and they shop his LinkedIn profile for just that purpose). For every one of them, Grant seemed to have not only relevant but also scientifically tested, peer-reviewed advice: Studies show you shouldn’t move for location, since what you do is more important than where you do it. Studies show that people who take jobs with too rosy a picture get dissatisfied and quit. If you truly can’t make a decision, consider delegating it to someone who knows you well and cares about you. Is there anything else I can help you with? How else can I help? He was like some kind of robo-rabbi.

Grant might not seem so different from any number of accessible and devoted professors on any number of campuses, and yet when you witness over time the sheer volume of Grant’s commitments, and the way in which he is able to follow through on all of them, you start to sense that something profoundly different is at work. Helpfulness is Grant’s credo. He is the colleague who is always nominating another for an award or taking the time to offer a thoughtful critique or writing a lengthy letter of recommendation for a student — something he does approximately 100 times a year. His largess extends to people he doesn’t even know. A student at Warwick Business School in England recently wrote to express his admiration and to ask Grant how he manages to publish so often, and in such top-tier journals. Grant did not think, upon reading that e-mail, I cannot possibly answer in full every such query and still publish so often, and in such top-tier journals. Instead, Grant, who often returns home after a day of teaching to an in-box of 200 e-mails, responded, “I’m happy to set up a phone call if you want to discuss!” He attached handouts and slides from the presentation on productivity he gave to the Academy of Management annual conference a few years earlier.

For Grant, helping is not the enemy of productivity, a time-sapping diversion from the actual work at hand; it is the mother lode, the motivator that spurs increased productivity and creativity. In some sense, he has built a career in professional motivation by trying to unpack the puzzle of his own success. He has always helped; he has always been productive. How, he has wondered for most of his professional life, does the interplay of those two factors work for everyone else?

Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other peoples’ lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.

“Give and Take” incorporates scores of studies and personal case histories that suggest the benefits of an attitude of extreme giving at work. Many of the examples — the selfless C.E.O.’s, the consultants who mentor ceaselessly — are inspiring and humbling, even if they are a bit intimidating in their natural expansiveness. These generous professionals look at the world the way Grant does: an in-box filled with requests is not a task to be dispensed with perfunctorily (or worse, avoided); it’s an opportunity to help people, and therefore it’s an opportunity to feel good about yourself and your work. “I never get much done when I frame the 300 e-mails as ‘answering e-mails,’ ” Grant told me. “I have to look at it as, How is this task going to benefit the recipient?” Where other people see hassle, he sees bargains, a little work for a lot of gain, including his own.

The message sounds terrific: Feel good about your work, and get more of it done, and bask in the appreciation of all the people you help along the way. Nice guys can finish first! (Now there’s research to prove it.) But I couldn’t help wondering, as I watched Grant race through his marathon day (even one of his mentors admitted, “He can be exhausting”), about the cost of all this other-directedness. If you are devoted to being available to everyone, all the time, how do you relax? How can you access the kind of creativity that comes from not being on task every waking moment? How do you make time for the more important relationships in your life?

As Grant’s office hours came to an end four and a half hours later, he patiently continued offering help until he finally had to close the door and tell a student to try him by phone; he would squeeze him in on his commute or by e-mail. But he would not say no.

The study of job design in the middle- and late-20th century focused on how to improve the drudge work of manufacturing: Grant is credited with reviving the field, shifting the thinking toward the more modern conditions of a service and knowledge economy. He first realized that his ideas about giving at work might actually yield quantifiable results when he was a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan, and he proposed a study set in a university fund-raising call center. Call centers, even on college campuses, are notoriously unsatisfying places to work. The job is repetitive and can be emotionally taxing, as callers absorb verbal abuse while also facing rejection (the rejection rate at that call center was about 93 percent).

The manager, Howard Heevner, did not have a lot of faith that Grant would be able to motivate his student-employees. He had already tried, in a previous job at a call center, the usual incentives — cash prizes, competitive games — and was generally unimpressed with the results. But Grant had a different idea. When he was an undergraduate at Harvard, he took a job selling advertisements for the travel guide series “Let’s Go,” but he was terrible at it. “I was a pushover,” he says in “Give and Take,” “losing revenues for the company and sacrificing my own commission.” Then he met another undergraduate whose job at “Let’s Go” was helping her pay her way through college. Suddenly the impact of his role became clear to him: without advertising revenues, the company could not make money, which in turn meant it couldn’t provide jobs to students who needed them. With that in mind, he was willing to make a harder sell, to take a tougher line on negotiations. “When I was representing the interests of students, I was willing to fight to protect them,” he writes. It would not be a mass-market psychology book if every anecdote did not have a dramatic ending: Grant eventually sold the largest advertising package in company history and less than a year later, at 19, was promoted to director of advertising sales, overseeing a budget of $1 million.

As a psychology major, Grant always hoped to do a study on the “Let’s Go” staff, in which the books’ editors and writers would meet with or read letters by people whose travels had been enhanced by their work. Would knowing how the books benefited others inspire them to work harder? Now, at the call center, Grant proposed a simple, low-cost experiment: given that one of the center’s primary purposes was funding scholarships, Grant brought in a student who had benefited from that fund-raising. The callers took a 10-minute break as the young man told them how much the scholarship had changed his life and how excited he now was to work as a teacher with Teach for America.

The results were surprising even to Grant. A month after the testimonial, the workers were spending 142 percent more time on the phone and bringing in 171 percent more revenue, even though they were using the same script. In a subsequent study, the revenues soared by more than 400 percent. Even simply showing the callers letters from grateful recipients was found to increase their fund-raising draws.

When Grant went back and talked to the callers about their improvement, many actively discounted the possibility that the brief encounter with a scholarship student helped. “Several of them were stunned,” Grant said. “Their response was, ‘Yeah, I knew I was more effective, but that was because I had more practice,’ or, ‘That was because I had a better alumni pool in that period — I got lucky.’ ” Eventually, having replicated the test five times, Grant was confident that he had eliminated other explanations. It was almost as if the good feelings had bypassed the callers’ conscious cognitive processes and gone straight to a more subconscious source of motivation. They were more driven to succeed, even if they could not pinpoint the trigger for that drive.

The study quickly raised Grant’s profile in his field, partly because it relied on hard data: dollars, as opposed to manager assessments or self-reports. “I don’t know the last time there was a study in our field that had such striking results,” says Stuart Bunderson, a professor of organizational behavior at Washington University. “In terms of an intervention that has practical significance and moves the needle on employee behavior — you don’t see them that often.” The intervention was also a manager’s dream: fast and practically free.

Over the years, Grant has followed up that study with other experiments testing his theories about prosocial motivation — the desire to help others, independent of easily foreseeable payback. In one study, Grant put up two different signs at hand-washing stations in a hospital. One reminded doctors and nurses, “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases”; another read, “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.” Grant measured the amount of soap used at each station. Doctors and nurses at the station where the sign referred to their patients used 45 percent more soap or hand sanitizer.

These studies, two of Grant’s best known, focus on typically worthy beneficiaries: needy students and vulnerable patients. But some of his other research makes the case that prosocial behavior is as applicable in corporate America as it is in a hospital or a university. “Think of it this way,” he said. “In corporate America, people do sometimes feel that the work they do isn’t meaningful. And contributing to co-workers can be a substitute for that.”

Take, for example, Grant’s study of workers at Borders who contributed to an employee-beneficiary fund managed by the staff, with Borders matching donated funds. The money was set aside for employees in need — someone facing a pregnancy that would put a strain on their finances, for example, or the funeral of a loved one. Interestingly, Grant found that it was not the beneficiaries who showed the most significant increase in their commitment to Borders; it was the donors, even those who gave just a few dollars a week. Through interviews and questionnaires, Grant determined that “as a result of gratitude to the company for the opportunity to affirm a valued aspect of their identities, they developed stronger affective commitment to the company.”

The study is uplifting and troubling at the same time: even Grant acknowledges the possibility of corporations playing off their employees’ generous impulses, as a sop to compensate for other failings — poor pay or demeaning work. (After all, if the employees at Borders had better benefits and pay, they might not have needed the emergency fund.) Jerry Davis, a management professor who taught Grant at the University of Michigan and is generally a fan of his former student’s work, couldn’t help making a pointed critique about its inherent limits when they were on a panel together: “So you think those workers at the Apple factory in China would stop committing suicide if only we showed them someone who was incredibly happy with their iPhone?”

Grant’s answer to these questions is academic: he tries to understand how these mechanisms function but does not necessarily advocate implementation. “I am also skeptical about the motivations of corporations,” he said. “My concern is ultimately for the success and well-being of people in organizations. To the extent that individual and group accomplishments and quality of work life contribute to profits, I’m happy, but that’s not my primary goal.”

For all his general interest in psychology, Grant doesn’t seem interested in digging too deeply into the origins of his own psyche. About his all-consuming desire to help, he says simply: “My mother has what she calls the fix-it gene. Maybe I just inherited it.”

He grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, raised by a lawyer, his father, and a teacher, his mother. He was an upbeat boy, though socially awkward and burdened by numerous food allergies and strong aversions — to haircuts, to bluejeans, to chocolate. He felt things deeply; those aversions were matched by equally consuming passions. An aspiring basketball player, he would not allow himself to go inside until he made 23 consecutive free throws, even if it meant missing dinner. (That he never made the high-school team is the one failure that still pains him.) On weekends, he played video games for so many consecutive hours — 10 was not unusual — that his mother called the local paper to complain about what the paper called, in the subsequent article, “The Dark Side of Nintendo.”

Grant started significantly losing his hair in his 20s, as if his head were trying to keep pace with his overall precociousness. Now almost entirely bald, he has a striking, monklike look. Though he comes across as charming and agreeable, there are still traces of the awkward boy he says he once was, a hint of discomfort in the smile he gives a student he runs into unexpectedly, a longstanding dread of parties (“unless they like psychology or magic tricks, in which case I’d come alive,” he said). He is aware of his own introverted tendencies, and some of his research involves the strengths of introverts at work.

For the most part, Grant has more than compensated for the shyness he felt growing up. Once phobic about speaking in public, he forced himself to lecture as much as he could as a graduate student, handing out feedback forms so he could methodically learn from his weaknesses. He developed strategies for socializing comfortably, even though, he said, “I feel uncomfortable when I’m in a situation and I don’t know what people want or expect of me.” Giving, he eventually realized, was a reliable way of mediating social interactions.

On the day I followed Grant as he hurried to his office hours at Wharton, I read something on his face that registered as more than just busyness; he seemed anxious. I wondered whether Grant was driven by the desire to help or a deep fear of disappointing someone.

“That is one astute observation!” Grant said when I asked him about that by e-mail. (With Grant, every observation is an astute one.) Grant often starts his research with observations about himself — “me-search,” they call it in the field — and he had conducted a study trying to determine which of those two impulses was more motivating. The answer turned out to be a combination of the two. “Givers motivate themselves to avoid complacency by focusing on the benefits to others if they succeed and worrying about disappointing them if they fail,” Grant wrote.

One of Grant’s roommates, he went on, once joked that he had a productive form of O.C.D. “He noticed that when I was anxious about something, I had a habit of throwing myself single-mindedly into tasks in which I felt responsible to others,” he said. “A few days later, my mentor, Brian Little, sent me an article by Ian McGregor, one of his doctoral students, who studied ‘compensatory conviction’: anxiety in one domain motivates people to dive into passionate pursuit in another. It was one of those crystallizing moments that triggered a ‘Yes, I want to be a psychologist!’ reaction — I was fascinated by how closely his theory and findings mapped onto my own experience.”

It’s not hard to imagine a pop-psych interpretation of Adam Grant: that his generosity might have its roots in some kind of need — maybe a need he feels, even more than the rest of us, to be liked. Or perhaps that he is channeling his extreme ambition into a feel-good form of achievement. Productive and happy, Grant could even be seen as a paradigm of Freud’s definition of mental health: aggression sublimated into work.

But he has never put much stock in psychoanalysis — if the work is not data-driven, he’s skeptical. “I think a lot of it is baggage that goes back to Freud, and Freud would always say that whatever is going on with you can be traced back to something that happened early in childhood with your mother,” he told me, by phone, as he was driving to work one day. “You can either accept that or be in denial. You can’t win!” He would rather simply understand himself as someone who gets a lot out of giving, then harness that feeling, study it and see how the mechanisms involved can inspire others to succeed.

One night Grant forwarded me a grateful e-mail from a student whose life, the student said, changed because of some advice Grant gave her. I commented that most people would be thrilled to receive one note like that in a lifetime. “I get several dozen a week,” Grant said. He agreed to send some my way. That evening, at around 8:30, the e-mails started coming — Thank you for our conversation the other day and for your genius. . . . I couldn’t have done this without you. . . . I cannot thank you enough for your time and insight. . . . I’m thrilled. And I have you to thank. . . . After the first 10, I was impressed; when they kept arriving, I was surprised. On and on, until almost 11, my e-mail kept pinging; when I awoke the next morning, I saw that he had forwarded me 41 e-mails from the preceding week, each one of them numbered for my convenience.

Was this compulsive behavior? “Not really,” Grant said. “I would see it as goal-oriented and focused.” He said the question had generated a new research idea for him: “How Prosocial Behavior Can Mitigate O.C.D. Tendencies.”

Grant’s book, incorporating several decades of social-science research on reciprocity, divides the world into three categories: givers, matchers and takers. Givers give without expectation of immediate gain; they never seem too busy to help, share credit actively and mentor generously. Matchers go through life with a master chit list in mind, giving when they can see how they will get something of equal value back and to people who they think can help them. And takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf. Most people surveyed fall into the matcher category — but givers, Grant says, are overrepresented at both ends of the spectrum of success: they are the doormats who go nowhere or burn out, and they are the stars whose giving motivates them or distinguishes them as leaders. Much of Grant’s book sets out to establish the difference between the givers who are exploited and those who end up as models of achievement. The most successful givers, Grant explains, are those who rate high in concern for others but also in self-interest. And they are strategic in their giving — they give to other givers and matchers, so that their work has the maximum desired effect; they are cautious about giving to takers; they give in ways that reinforce their social ties; and they consolidate their giving into chunks, so that the impact is intense enough to be gratifying. (Grant incorporates his field’s findings into his own life with methodical rigor: one reason he meets with students four and a half hours in one day rather than spreading it out over the week is that a study found that consolidating giving yields more happiness.)

The studies are elaborate, the findings nuanced — but it is easy to walk away from the book forgetting the cautionary tales about people who give too much and remembering only the wash of stories about boundless generosity resulting in surprising rewards: a computer programmer who built a Web site at no cost for music fans (one of whom turns out to be an influential figure in Silicon Valley); a financial adviser who travels to take on a client thought to be impoverished (only to find that person sitting on a significant fortune); the writers who start out working free on a project for a friend (and somehow end up among the most successful in Hollywood).

I had assumed that Grant, and the other examples of extreme givers in his book, were simply superhuman in one way or another — not only in the acute empathy that makes giving so rewarding for them but also in their unusual focus and stamina and mental-processing speed, traits that allow them to bend time and squeeze in more generosity than the rest of us. Grant, clearly, has some advantages beyond his propensity to help: more than one of his colleagues told me, for example, that when they cannot find the citation for a particular paper, they simply e-mail Grant directly, who is more reliable than Google and almost as fast (his childhood friends called him Mr. Facts).

But Grant believes that in terms of giving, we all have the same muscle; it’s just that he and the other givers in his book have exercised it more. In “Give and Take,” he cites a study that found that most people lose physical strength after enduring a test of will, like resisting chocolate-chip cookies when they are hungry. Typically, the study’s subjects could squeeze a handgrip for only 25 seconds after an exercise in willpower. But one group distinguished itself, squeezing the grip for 35 seconds after the test of will. They were people who were on the giving end of the other-directedness scale. “By consistently overriding their selfish impulses in order to help others, they had strengthened their psychological muscles, to the point where using willpower for painful tasks was no longer exhausting,” writes Grant of the study, conducted by researchers at Northwestern University. It seems too simple to assume that Grant just happens to be capable of great discipline across all facets of his life; all those exercises in will, he would argue, feed each other, with one making the others possible.

I like to think I am a typically helpful person, but after reading Grant’s book, I found myself experimenting with being more proactive about it. I started ending e-mails by encouraging people to let me know if I could help them in one way or another. I put more effort into answering random entreaties from students trying to place articles. I encouraged contacts seeking work or connections to see me as a resource.

And I did notice that simply avoiding the mental lag of deciding whether to help or not was helpful. At a minimum, Grant’s example presents a bright-line rule: Unless the person on the other end is a proven taker, just do it — collaborate, offer up, grant the favor.

The first time I exchanged those e-mails, I usually felt good; after the second exchange on a given topic, I thought perhaps I had done my duty. But I noticed that every offer of help I initiated or granted engendered four or five e-mails, at the end of which I sometimes felt surly and behind on my work — and then guilty for feeling that way. Worse, those exchanges often even ended with the person on the other end wanting to meet for coffee. Coffee! Now I struggled to find a way to say, gracefully, that there was no way I could meet for coffee — not this week or next or the week after that, because there are only so many hours in the day, and if I do not get home in time to make dinner, my children will dine on Pirate’s Booty and Smarties, which would not make me feel helpful or productive or good.

Children. It must be said that in the middle of a national debate about flexible hours and telecommuting, there is precious little in Grant’s book about work and family balance. The division of labor in Grant’s own marriage is very traditional; his wife, who has a degree in psychiatric nursing, does not work outside the home, devoting her time to the care of their two young daughters and their home. Grant would be an extraordinary giver under any circumstances; but it can only help that he doesn’t have to worry about running to the grocery store or renewing the car registration.

“Sometimes I tell him, ‘Adam — just say no,’ ” his wife, Allison, told me, referring to the hundreds of requests he gets every day. “But he can’t say no. That’s what he is. That’s his way.”

Grant is devoted to his family — he has dinner most nights at home and takes his daughter to a preschool activity on many afternoons. But he also works at least one full day on the weekend, as well as six evenings a week, often well past 11. Once, when Grant was asked to give a talk on productivity, he confessed to a mentor that for all his research, he was still not sure what he did that was any different from anyone else. It wasn’t exactly a mystery, his mentor told him: He worked more. “I made a commitment to talk about that more,” Grant said. He did not mean to suggest that everyone should work on weekends; he wanted them to be aware that they were making a choice, maybe even one they felt good about.

“The way I see it, I have several different roles,” he told me: teacher, scholar, adviser, friend, to name a few. “I’d be concerned if any of those roles took more of my time than my family.” Grant, of course, has conducted a study investigating whether giving behaviors at work translate into happiness at home. He found that people who felt they had contributed to others’ well-being at work did not always feel great at the end of the workday; but they usually did by bedtime, especially if they had reflected about their contribution in the intervening hours. It turns out that bringing your work home with you can be beneficial after all — if you’re thinking about it the right way.

A skeptic might read Grant’s book and conclude that extreme givers are just matchers who are in it, maybe even subconsciously, for the long run. Eventually, in ways that are predictable and unpredictable, the bounty returns to them. Grant’s giving instincts might be reflexive, but they do clearly contribute to his success. “The entire world feels like it owes him a favor — including me,” says Justin Berg, a doctoral candidate who studies creativity at Wharton and who has collaborated with Grant. “People rush at the opportunity to work with him.” And one round of giving enables another: when Grant calls on a work contact and asks her to meet with an undergraduate seeking work, chances are that contact is more than happy to enable Grant’s favor, because she has already been the beneficiary of more than one from him herself. The path to success is filled with people helping to clear the way.

From the point of creativity, Grant’s undiscriminating helpfulness also reaps professional benefits, Berg says. “The best ideas occur to people who are touching multiple worlds and domains. And in our field, he’s at the nexis of a lot of them.”

Because one study found that old friends and connections can be even more valuable as resources than current ones — because they intersect with different worlds and therefore have more fresh ideas — Grant has a tickler built into his calendar reminding him, once a month, to get in touch with a contact he likes but with whom he has temporarily lost touch. And he is highly efficient about his giving: he virtually never says no to the five-minute favor, something that will help someone out — an introduction, a quick suggestion — but cost him very little, relative to impact.

We were sitting in Grant’s office one afternoon talking about efficiency, when he said: “The truth is, I don’t care how many articles I publish or how many words I write. Productivity is an imperfect way of indexing how much I’m contributing, how I’m using my limited time to make the most difference.”

It wasn’t until I was transcribing the conversation a few days later that I realized that when he referred to his limited time, he wasn’t just talking about a busy schedule; there was a more existential tug in the phrase. I brought it up with him by phone.

“It’s the kind of thing I almost never talk about,” Grant said. “But my responsibility is to be open.” Mortality, he said, was the one subject that gave him something like panic attacks. He had always felt that way, since he was a brainy, sensitive kid playing basketball in his driveway, staring at the sun, suddenly terrified of what would happen when it burned out. That was why he first wanted to be a scientist — before he realized biology bored him and he would never reinvent physics — so he could help figure out how to extend life, or at least design the spacecrafts that he is sure, even now, will take us to safer planets if this one runs dry. Mortality, he said, is “something I can’t fix. I can’t do anything with or about it.” He can’t let himself think about it too much; he has lost days at a time to his anxiety, “to the point that it’s the equivalent of extreme physical pain.”

It struck Grant as odd that no one had ever tried to figure how the awareness of death motivates people’s behavior at work, and in 2009, he published a paper trying to understand the link between mortality and productivity: “The Hot and Cool of Death Awareness at Work: Mortality Cues, Aging and Self-Protective and Prosocial Motivations.” The study walks the reader through the fascinating field of death awareness, which measures how people respond to reminders of death, like a news clip about a deadly car crash. When and how, he asked, does the prospect of death become relevant to employees at work? Grant argued that when people’s reactions to reminders of death are “hot” — anxious and panicked — those workers tend to withdraw. But when they are “cool” — more reflective, as in response to chronic reminders, the kinds, for example, firefighters face — those workers would be more likely to “reflect on the meaning of life and their potential contributions.”

Grant wrote the paper, in part, to try to sort out his own hot and cool feelings on the subject. Contemplating the meaning of life doesn’t make him want to relax and work less. “I always go back to William James,” he said. “ ‘The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.’ A big part of it is being remembered.” Besides, relaxing stresses him out. “For me, in my moments of idleness, I experience the most existential anxiety, so I like that every moment is scheduled, even when it’s having on my calendar that I’m going to watch a television show with my wife. It means my brain is engaged in other things, and it’s not going to be a terrifying evening.”

Grant would be the first to say that he is not purely altruistic — that pure altruism, giving without regard for one’s self-interest, perhaps does not even exist. When he writes those 100 student recommendations, he says, he gets the satisfaction of helping them succeed. But there are other happy byproducts of that work as well: he might end up the beneficiary of those students’ good will later on and possibly inspire them to try to do right by those who will eventually ask them for help. He will also have kept himself busy enough that he won’t have much time to spend agonizing over what happens when he can’t give anymore.

As he left the office after one of our meetings, Grant headed for his car, carrying another gift of gratitude: a twiggy box filled with organic jellies and dried fruit from the Environmental Defense Fund, to which he had recently spoken about how to motivate their fund-raisers.

On the way to the garage, Grant told me the story of a time that someone asked quite a lot from him. “So I got an e-mail out of the blue from a recent Ph.D. who wanted career advice,” Grant said. “And I spoke to him for a while on the phone — twice. But then, after that, he asks me if I could give him comments on his dissertation, and he sends me this thing that was like 300 pages long. It was one of those moments — yikes!”

Grant did not know this academic and was not an expert on the subject. This, I thought, was the long-awaited last straw, an occasion when Grant not only said no but also perhaps found the request itself galling. Surely he did not shun his family, his students, his ultimate Frisbee game, his research and his never-ending list of e-mail requests for the hours that it would have taken him to analyze a 300-page dissertation. Even Adam Grant must say no sometimes.

Grant said that he rarely feels resentful of such requests. “It’s on me if I want to say no,” he said. “I own my guilt.”

He did decide that in this case, the time it would take to read the paper would be excessive — and that indulging the impulse to read it all would be tantamount, in the logic of Grant’s thinking, to letting himself down, flouting his own rules of efficient giving.

“So I just skimmed it for the most important parts,” he said, and gave general feedback on those points. The author then reworked the paper completely and sent it back to Grant to read again. Grant, of course, complied.

“And guess what?” Grant said, breaking out in a smile. “The paper was great!”

Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about the actress Connie Britton.
Editor: Lauren Kern

Rubin's follow up

Well, well! A day after I post my views on the US fiscal situation citing Robert Rubin's 2003 book, the man himself comes out with an Op-ed on the same subject in NYT.  And we both think the issue needs to be addressed by President BO decisively in his 2nd term.  Here is the complete op-ed.

November 12, 2012

The Fiscal Delusion

By ROBERT E. RUBIN

NOW that the election is over, Washington’s attention is consumed by the looming combination of automatic spending cuts and tax increases known as “the fiscal cliff.” That combination poses risks, including economic contraction and erosion of confidence in government. But it also offers a chance to address our unsustainable and dangerous fiscal trajectory.

Much of the current energy around establishing sound fiscal conditions is focused on plans that theoretically would both contribute revenue to deficit reduction and significantly reduce individual income tax rates. Though hugely appealing, that’s a tall order.

These plans rely on reducing or eliminating many tax deductions, exclusions and the like, known collectively as tax expenditures. Reducing tax expenditures to pay for both lower personal income tax rates and deficit reduction may seem like a politically attractive alternative to raising tax rates or cutting entitlements or other spending.

However, many of these tax expenditures are important and popular policy programs on which people now rely. They include the deductibility of mortgage interest, charitable contributions and the exclusion from income of employer-provided health insurance. Some tax expenditures should be cut back and reformed. But when the substantive effects and political realities of large-scale reductions are examined, it becomes clear that there would not be sufficient savings to reduce tax rates and also cut the deficit.

Not long ago, a former senior official involved in the federal budget process told me that various senators used to meet with him periodically and argue for reducing tax expenditures. He would say that was a good idea, and then go down the list of large tax expenditures. At each one, the senator would say, “Oh no, we can’t do that,” and at some point the senator would repeat his proposition and the conversation would end.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service examined the full range of existing tax expenditures and concluded that, “Given the barriers to eliminating or reducing most tax expenditures, it may prove difficult to gain more than $100 billion to $150 billion” a year. But most plans based on reducing tax deductions and other expenditures project revenues of three to four times that amount. And the 1986 Tax Reform Act, cited as an example of lowering rates through tax expenditure reductions (called base broadening), left all of the major individual tax expenditures largely unchanged.

The plans that reduce both tax rates and deficits, like the impressive work by the Simpson-Bowles commission, have served a great public service — raising awareness of our fiscal risks, bringing Democrats and Republicans together, providing a framework aimed at stabilizing debt at an acceptable level, and recognizing the need for substantial revenue increases and spending cuts.

However, these same plans also pose a serious risk to achieving the very objective they seek. If we invest too much time and effort pursuing plans that ultimately prove undesirable and unworkable, we may go down a road that leads nowhere. Then we would be forced to search for a new solution when it will almost surely be too late. In effect, we will have pursued the policy equivalent of a wild-goose chase only to discover that, to mix metaphors, the tax expenditure goose doesn’t have enough golden eggs.

Advocates of extensive tax expenditure reduction argue — correctly — that all deficit reduction choices involve substantive costs and are politically difficult. They then suggest that, when compared to other possibilities, substantially more cuts may be doable than the Congressional research numbers suggest.

Maybe, but I think that’s unlikely when compared to the alternative of restoring the topmost tax brackets to their Clinton-era level.

Raising tax rates for those with the highest incomes challenges the supply-side proposition that even moderately higher rates would hurt growth. President Bill Clinton’s 1993 deficit reduction plan increased income tax rates for roughly the top 1.2 percent of incomes. Opponents said this would lead to recession. Instead, we had enormous job creation and the longest economic expansion in our history.

A recent report by the Hamilton Project, an economic policy project on whose advisory council I serve, reviewed 23 studies of the impact of tax-rate changes on the propensity to work and found that most of them concluded there was no meaningful effect. Tax expenditure reductions, on the other hand, will not raise nearly the revenues needed for sufficient deficit reduction without increasing taxes on the middle class significantly and are likely to disrupt important social and economic goals, though many economists don’t acknowledge that.

When you compare raising the marginal rates for roughly 2 million Americans to phasing out health insurance exclusions that would affect 150 million Americans — even if some reform should be done — I don’t think it’s a close call substantively or politically.

We should let the Bush high-end tax cuts expire, with an achievable, progressive reduction in tax expenditures. And we should have spending cuts, including entitlement reforms, equally matched by revenue increases. The entire program — including budgetary room for public investment and a moderate upfront jobs package — could be enacted now and deferred for a limited time with a serious mechanism to guarantee implementation.

For plans that both reduce deficits and lower rates, some suggest that, instead of raising the top two brackets to Clinton-era levels, we can find the same revenues by limiting tax expenditures for those groups. That would have some meaningful negative policy impacts, unlike increasing the top rate. The bigger problem is that such a step would yield only a fraction of the necessary revenue, requiring higher taxes on the middle class.

The pressure of the fiscal cliff, the fact that doing nothing is not viable, and the distance to the next election all combine to make this a special opportunity to meet our fiscal imperative. We need an open, cleareyed debate so we don’t squander it. 

Robert E. Rubin was Treasury secretary from 1995 to 1999 and is a co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Rubin's In an Uncertain World

               Just finished reading “In an Uncertain World” by former US Treasury Secretary and later Citigroup Chairman, Robert Rubin.  After the 2008 Crisis burst on the international scene, alongwith former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan Rubin had come in for criticism that he had helped engineer the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act which allowed commercial banks to undertake investment banking business.

This book however was published much before (2003) the GFC 2008 and essentially is an account of Rubin’s time in Goldman Sachs and later as Treasury Secretary in Clinton Administration from 1995 till 1999. It was certainly an eventful period in the annals of modern finance and would be remembered for a chain of economic crises which started in Mexico, followed by East Asia, then Argentina and finally the Russian default which also led to the failure of the LTCM hedge fund in the US.

Rubin provides details of how the Clinton Administration dealt with each one of these crises and more often than not the global economy came out more bruised than before from each one of them.  Given that Obama got re-elected as President just last week, I will discuss and record two themes here from the book.

1.       The Uncertain World: Rubin analyses his ideas about uncertainty and how he understood it and coped with it in life.  Following are his “principles” as framed by him:

                                 i.            The only certainity in life is that nothing is ever certain.

                               ii.            Markets are good, but they are not the solution to all problems.

                              iii.            The credibility and the quality of a nation’ policies matter for its prospects than anything United States, the G-7, or the international financial institutions can do.

                             iv.            Money is no substitute for strong policy, but there are times when it is more costly to provide too little money than too provide too much.

                               v.            Borrowers must bear the consequences of the debts they incur – and creditors of the lending they provide.

                             vi.            The United States must be willing to be defined by what it is against, as well as what it is for.

                            vii.            The dollar is too important to be used as an instrument of trade policy.

                          viii.            Optionality is good in itself.

                             ix.            Never let your rhetoric commit you to something you cannot deliver.

                               x.            Gimmicks are no substitute for serious analysis and care in decision making.

 

I quite like the last idea.

2.       The other theme is the US fiscal deficit.  The deficit which had come in to existence after the dot com bust (the US actually had a fiscal surplus by the end of the Clinton presidency)  has continually ballooned and thanks to the Bush wars and the GFC US today is battling with the worst ever fiscal deficits in history.  After Obama’s re-election the debate rather the battle over deficit reduction is now out in the open.  Over the last decade, the Republicans have taken complete leave of their senses on this subject.  The Party of No, as they are now called, have applied all sorts of perverted logic in order to preserve the tax cuts for the rich while at the same time calling for cuts in the welfare programmes which largely benefit the poor.  Rubin has very cogently explained the Clinton Administration approach towards the reduction of deficits and once again it is up to a Democrat president to stand up to the combined idiocy of the Republicans who seem to have learnt no lessons despite overwhelming evidence that the Reagan’s supply side economics regarding (also known as Dynamic Scoring) tax cuts for the rich is not working.

Thus I feel that Obama has the weight of history behind him and in the coming months we may witness bloody battles with the GOP over deficit reductions.  As Obama has clearly been handed a clear victory by the Americans, Republicans would be fighting with their backs against the wall.  If Obama succeeds in getting his plans through, there would be an adverse impact on the risk markets. But as was shown in the recent fall in Dow and which did not translate in a similar fall in the Indian equities, I think this was a small trailer of the movie that I expect to play out between mid-December till mid-January but an Obama victory will over the next 4 months to 6 months would be clear boost for the risk markets.