Explaining Stuff in Early-2023
January 28, 2023
Top News
Another Saturday newsletter means a delayed blog post. In fact, this time it’s two.
I did as one of my listeners would do and listened to my latest podcast in the car. The information is good, but the delivery was boring.
So, I rewrote my blog post. It will be out later today.
For this reason, I’m bumping up my Explaining Stuff section to the Top News this week.
Explaining Stuff
Purity of interest. That’s a great way to describe my interest in business. It’s not everyone’s. That’s for sure. And, when listening to my own podcast this week, I realized that purity patinas poorly.
Going forward, I want to change my delivery.
Back to that purity, what I gleaned from my listening experience is putting myself in my readers’ and listeners’ shoes. They’re lucky they have me - I could be a resource, I could be a joke, or I could disregard both in order to be an example.
Making sense of the workplace and improving others’ careers means putting oneself out there to help others. That’s what I’m blogging to do.
Supporting the Ambitions of Others
January is my birthday month. I’ve asked my family for a Parker Safety Razor. So why not combine my wishlist with supporting the ambitions of others? This entire month I will feature Parker Safety Razor (their facebook page).
What I Learned This Week
Supporting Others With Imposter Syndrome
I read a terrific article in MIT Sloan Management Review. ‘How to Help High Achievers Overcome Imposter Syndrome’ (link) by Morela Hernandez and Christina Lacerenza flips the script on imposter syndrome. Instead of the afflicted, they focus on those who can support. A line that summarizes the article well is, “There are clues that managers can look for to try to figure out which of their employees might be dealing with a false sense of fraud — rooted in a misestimation of their own competence.”1 Do you have employees who exhibit imposter syndrome? Do you, yourself, have imposter syndrome?
How Artificial Intelligence Generation Thrives In the Market
My upcoming blog post is about ChatGPT. Maybe you’ve heard of it. That’s an artificial intelligence software that generates written answers to questions. Something that struck me about this type of software was a reporting made by Darrell Etherington, Managing Editor of TechCrunch. He said, “when it comes to generative AI, it’s quickly becoming apparent that how a user interfaces with generative models and systems is at least as important as the underlying training and inference technology.” Similar to my mea culpa in the Top News, explaining things is more than just the expository. It’s how the material is packaged.
Successful Managers Let Their Employees Thrive
A discussion this week with a Director-level manager was revealing. She is successful as a team leader and manager, she said (and I paraphrase), because she let her team members do what they do best. My interpretation was an allowance for agency and fitness for ambition. She let her staff have agency, or what Merriam-Webster.com defines in part as “the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.”2 In my own blog post about fitness for ambition, I wrote about the individual's ambition - it must be activated, not realized. That manager with whom I spoke allows for both - agency and fitness or ambition. The result is success for all, the team and those who comprise it.
Upcoming Quotes and/or Graphics
My upcoming blog post on ChatGPT is an interesting one. Check out this quote:
ChatGPT will be invisible, background communication that drives business with only a fraction of the effort by users or humans. AI will handle almost everything….Business will be different than anything we can practically imagine. We'll be like a nervous person taking a photograph wondering what to do with our hands. What should we do with our jobs, our employers, our employees,…?
Lacerenza, Morela Hernandez and Christina. “How to Help High Achievers Overcome Imposter Syndrome.” MIT Sloan Management Review, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-help-high-achievers-overcome-imposter-syndrome/. Accessed 27 Jan. 2023.
Definition of AGENCY. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agency. Accessed 28 Jan. 2023.