November 27, 2023
Good morning!
And, just as suddenly as the holy days began last week, they have faded away come today.
Back to work — or, if you never left work or didn’t get a break, dangit!
Back to work — or, if you never left work or didn’t get a break, dangit!
How many people do you know by name and by some sort of personal relationship?
A sociologist from somewhere has invented a quasi-scientific method of accurately estimating the number if you don’t have and maintain your own rolodex.
The average is around 400 people, maybe a few more.
Remember your etiquettes: Don’t bring cheap wines.
- Only fifteen percent (15%) of people were happy with their marketing performance/ experience this past year. (Salesforce)
- Is it time yet for black ink?
- Will you buy stuff? On purpose? Beyond the mortgage and groceries, that is?
- Sixty-six percent (66%) of consumers rank better prices and promotions as their top consideration in the holy day season, far out-pacing product availability, convenience, and better quality.
- Concerns about prices are most pronounced among those aged 60-80. (Robinson, 2023)
- We haven’t observed this specific term used in awhile: Burnout — or, is it boreout?
- A researcher (Ungerman, 2023) devised a quantitative scale to measure this qualitative phenomenon.
- He used a matrix to measure cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual exhaustion.
- “Although the global level of burnout is about twenty percent (20%), cognitive and emotional impairment, exhaustion and mental distance vary by country.”
- India reports the greatest levels of burnout, with Saudi Arabia in second place — with Cameroon reporting the least amounts.
- Working Definition: A chronic imbalance between your job demands and your job resources.
- United States workers report relatively less burnout compared to other countries worldwide.
- It’s possible Generation Z, which reports the most burnout, might be conflating it with boreout, which is quite different, such as suffering through endless ZOOM meetings.
- A primer on Generative Artificial Intelligence (Informed by Samuel, 2023):
- Friend or foe? (We’ll never know, but probably both.)
- “Because Artificial Intelligence (upper case?) makes it so easy to try new things and acquire new skills, it’s easy to take on too many projects or fall down rabbit holes.” (Samuel, 2023)
- Ask for a quick prototype
- Remember your grade #9 English teacher? Make a rough draft before even thinking about a final draft
- Rethink your limits
- Could ChatGPT maybe solve a problem — or help shed some light on it — which has eluded you to-date?
- Resist distractions
- Make a rule: You have to finish one project before you start a new one.
- Get help, not homework
- Treat ChatGPT as a helper or a tutor — not a provider of your homework… it won’t do it for you.
- Think in sequences
- Generative Artificial Intelligence works best when it’s interactive with you, not used for the one best answer… use it to chat back and forth… and to make improvements on the margins.
- Pretend it’s sentient
- Counterintuitively — but stay away from HAL 9000 — treat it with the same emotions you would a mentor or a partner or a friend.
- Fact check everything
- Do NOT rely on supposed facts Generative Artificial Intelligence will produce; trust and verify (where have we heard that?!).
- Remember when we were first taught to be very skeptical about Wikipedia? (No longer, probably.)
- Enjoy your super powers
- Impostor Syndrome is sort of a reverse Peter Principle popularized more than fifty years ago.
- The Peter Principle (Peter, 1969) was a pejorative term coined to refer to the phenomenon of managers being promoted to levels of incompetency… and there they stayed.
- No one wanted to be accused of having it.
- Impostor Syndrome refers to the manager or executive doubting her/ his competency based on her/his own perceptions of ability and experience.
- Now, along comes Impostorization —
- — which refers to the policies, practices, and seemingly innocuous interactions in the workplace that make (or intend to make) individuals question their intelligence, competence, and sense of belonging.
- The tactics often recommended to help individuals counter impostor Syndrome — such as standing power poses, reciting positive affirmations, or taking an inventory of past successes —
- have limited value in countering impostorization. (Gutierrez, 2023)
- Strong performers can start to doubt their own competence when managers fail to recognize the impacts of harmful workplace practices and policies. (Ibid.)
- The only cure? Changes in the work place that are the root cause of the problem.
- “I think the biggest thing from my past which shaped me as a leader is being calm and resilient… One of the things you learn when you’re at sea in life-threatening situations, which I was multiple times, is you can’t panic when you’re under threat.” (Heywood)
