Trust in and among organizations; impact of technology on Trust, particularly the Internet.
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Friday, December 30, 2005
NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION 2006: GAIN MORE TRUST - Vero Labs LLC: "NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION 2006: GAIN MORE TRUST
(PRLEAP.COM) NEW YORK, Dec. 26, 2005 – Scientists have known for quite some time about Oxytocin, a chemical produced by the brain that enhances social bonding. But what they have just proved is that it also controls who we trust. People who inhaled the hormone while listening to a sales pitch were significantly more likely to hand over their cash to a stranger with no guarantee of a return on investment.
Now, for the first time, a mass-marketed formula of oxytocin spray is available for U.S. consumers. Vero Labs, based in New York, unveils their flagship product, Liquid Trust, for anyone looking to gain more trust from others. And this, says Vero Labs, is something everyone wants. Liquid Trust is a sleek, colorless, odorless oxytocin body spray with a light alcohol-base, small enough to carry around in a purse or pocket.
The groundbreaking research that led to the formulation of Liquid Trust was published in Nature in June 2005. A study led by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich investigated whether the suspected “trust effect” could be produced simply by getting people to inhale oxytocin in a sales interaction. Of the subjects given oxytocin, 45% handed over all of their cash. Since the release of this study additional studies have been released around the globe, including a brain imaging study published in the December 7, 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. This study conducted by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) revealed that Oxytocin boosts trust and reduces the functioning of amygdale (fear circuitry) and disrupts its relay station as a response to the fear stimuli.
Liquid Trust is the first product to take advantage of the latest research in the effects of Oxytocin. Useful in a wide variety of social situations, Liquid Trust is promising to give professionals the added edge they need to increase their sales and win over new and prospective clients.
Liquid Trust is now available for purchase worldwide and can be ordered online at www.verolabs.com or by phone (800) 507-3718. Vero Labs headquarters are at One Penn Plaza in New York City. "
(PRLEAP.COM) NEW YORK, Dec. 26, 2005 – Scientists have known for quite some time about Oxytocin, a chemical produced by the brain that enhances social bonding. But what they have just proved is that it also controls who we trust. People who inhaled the hormone while listening to a sales pitch were significantly more likely to hand over their cash to a stranger with no guarantee of a return on investment.
Now, for the first time, a mass-marketed formula of oxytocin spray is available for U.S. consumers. Vero Labs, based in New York, unveils their flagship product, Liquid Trust, for anyone looking to gain more trust from others. And this, says Vero Labs, is something everyone wants. Liquid Trust is a sleek, colorless, odorless oxytocin body spray with a light alcohol-base, small enough to carry around in a purse or pocket.
The groundbreaking research that led to the formulation of Liquid Trust was published in Nature in June 2005. A study led by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich investigated whether the suspected “trust effect” could be produced simply by getting people to inhale oxytocin in a sales interaction. Of the subjects given oxytocin, 45% handed over all of their cash. Since the release of this study additional studies have been released around the globe, including a brain imaging study published in the December 7, 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. This study conducted by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) revealed that Oxytocin boosts trust and reduces the functioning of amygdale (fear circuitry) and disrupts its relay station as a response to the fear stimuli.
Liquid Trust is the first product to take advantage of the latest research in the effects of Oxytocin. Useful in a wide variety of social situations, Liquid Trust is promising to give professionals the added edge they need to increase their sales and win over new and prospective clients.
Liquid Trust is now available for purchase worldwide and can be ordered online at www.verolabs.com or by phone (800) 507-3718. Vero Labs headquarters are at One Penn Plaza in New York City. "
Friday, October 21, 2005
Designing Systems That People Will Trust
by Andrew S. Patrick, Pamela Briggs, and Stephen Marsh
in
Lorrie Faith Cranor & Simson Garfinkel (Eds.)
Security and Usability: Designing Secure Systems that People Can Use
O'Reilly, 2005
ISBN: 0-596-00827-9
Riegelsberger, Jens (2005). Trust in Mediated Interactions.
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/J.Riegelsberger/PhD_JensRiegelsberger_Web.pdf
Egger, F.N. (2003). From Interactions to Transactions: Designing the
Trust Experience for Business-to-Consumer Electronic Commerce.
http://www.telono.com/egger2003trust.pdf
by Andrew S. Patrick, Pamela Briggs, and Stephen Marsh
in
Lorrie Faith Cranor & Simson Garfinkel (Eds.)
Security and Usability: Designing Secure Systems that People Can Use
O'Reilly, 2005
ISBN: 0-596-00827-9
Riegelsberger, Jens (2005). Trust in Mediated Interactions.
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/J.Riegelsberger/PhD_JensRiegelsberger_Web.pdf
Egger, F.N. (2003). From Interactions to Transactions: Designing the
Trust Experience for Business-to-Consumer Electronic Commerce.
http://www.telono.com/egger2003trust.pdf
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
DAVID YOUNT: Praise the Lord and pass the oxytocin
Scripps Howard News Service
Published 12:51 pm PDT Monday, October 3, 2005
(SH) - Attention, all used-car salesmen, televangelists and producers of infomercials and snake-oil remedies. Science has come through for you. Researchers at the University of Zurich have discovered a hormone that supposedly will make people trust you. It's called oxytocin, can be dispensed by a spray can and works within 50 minutes, they say.
Among other advantages, lusty males will no longer require clever pickup lines to score with women when just a sniff of oxytocin will do the trick. The effects don't wear off for two hours.
Theologian and pastoral psychologist David A. Hogue of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago acknowledges the possibility of abusing oxytocin, but prefers to see the hormone's usefulness in reconciling enemies. "While spraying oxytocin on one's political or religious adversaries may be strategically difficult," he told Shankar Vedantam of The Washington Post, it "could conceivably offer promising avenues for reassessing and reconciling conflict."
Note to Pentagon procurement: please dispatch large batches of oxytocin to Iraq, and save some for Congress.
While we're on the subject of chemicals and character, things might possibly even out if we treated all hucksters with truth serum and all suckers with oxytocin. Not a likely scenario.
Novelist Jonathan Franzen reminisces in a recent New Yorker about how, as a ninth-grader, he learned to trust others the old-fashioned way. In his hometown of Webster Groves, Mo., the First Congregational Church and the Evangelical United Church of Christ offered junior-high-school students something called Fellowship.
"We met on Sundays at 5:30. We chose partners and blindfolded them and led them down empty corridors at breakneck speeds, as an experiment in trust," he said. Franzen was painfully shy as a kid. Once on the way to a Fellowship retreat in the Ozarks, he discovered, to his "ornate self-disgust," that he had forgotten his bag supper and would go hungry during the long trip.
"But the mustached seminarian," the Fellowship youth minister, "almost welcomed my loss. He said that each person in the car could give me a small piece of dinner, and nobody would be hungry, and everybody would be fed. In the gathering dark, as we drove south out of the city, girls kept handing me food. I could feel their fingers as I took it."
David Yount's latest book is "Celebrating the Rest of Your Life: A Baby Boomer's Guide to Spirituality (Augsburg)." He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount@erols.com.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Science & Theology News - C’mon, you can trust me…:
To study trust, researchers look at its role in financial transactions and relationship formation.
By Mike Martin
(August 22, 2005)
With digital dollars that move every second between numbered accounts — not through human hands — society has become obsessed with trust.
To study the concept, economists are unlocking the role of trust in financial transactions, while neurobiologists have located centers of the brain responsible for trusting cooperation. Psychologists, meanwhile, now believe that happiness, altruism and mood-elevating neurochemicals all enhance trust behaviors."
To study trust, researchers look at its role in financial transactions and relationship formation.
By Mike Martin
(August 22, 2005)
With digital dollars that move every second between numbered accounts — not through human hands — society has become obsessed with trust.
To study the concept, economists are unlocking the role of trust in financial transactions, while neurobiologists have located centers of the brain responsible for trusting cooperation. Psychologists, meanwhile, now believe that happiness, altruism and mood-elevating neurochemicals all enhance trust behaviors."
Sunday, August 21, 2005
American Scientist Online - In the News
A nasal spray that washes away protective suspicions sounds too full of insidious potential to be true, but it's not some villainous comic book fantasy. Researchers report that the hormone oxytocin promotes trust among human beings. They extracted the hormone into a nasal spray, and set up an experiment in which subjects were given money to invest. Half of the investors were dosed with the oxytocin spray; half were not. The result: Those exposed were twice as likely to risk all of their money with strangers, and in the end had invested 17 percent more of their money than the control subjects. However, their inhibitions dropped only in face-to-face encounters.
Kosfeld, M. et al. Oxytocin increases trust in humans, Nature 435:673-676 (June 2)"
"Smells Like Liquid Television: Oxytocin Promotes Human Trust
A nasal spray that washes away protective suspicions sounds too full of insidious potential to be true, but it's not some villainous comic book fantasy. Researchers report that the hormone oxytocin promotes trust among human beings. They extracted the hormone into a nasal spray, and set up an experiment in which subjects were given money to invest. Half of the investors were dosed with the oxytocin spray; half were not. The result: Those exposed were twice as likely to risk all of their money with strangers, and in the end had invested 17 percent more of their money than the control subjects. However, their inhibitions dropped only in face-to-face encounters.
Kosfeld, M. et al. Oxytocin increases trust in humans, Nature 435:673-676 (June 2)"
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Link to Article
Ricardo Semler: Set Them Free
April 1, 2004
By Brad Wieners, ExtremeTech
Ricardo Semler had the sort of reckoning at 21 that most executives don't face until middle age. Fresh from law school, where he'd been a restless underachiever, Semler took over his father's business, which manufactured pumps and propellers for the world's merchant marine. He was awfully young, but his dad sensed that if he didn't give his son a chance, he'd lose him to another career. Besides, Semler Sr. was a pragmatist. "Better make your mistakes," he told his son, "while I'm still alive."
Straightaway, Semler Jr. spearheaded an ambitious plan to diversify his dad's ship-parts company, which, like the Brazilian economy in the mid-eighties, was sinking. At Semco headquarters, in São Paulo, he tried to learn everything there was to know, and, while a quick study, he irritated plenty of the old hands with his precociousness and micromanaging. Working from 7:30 a.m. to midnight every day, or jumping planes overseas to raise capital and find new partners and companies to buy, his live-to-work lifestyle seemed ripped from the pages of John Grisham's The Firm.
Then one afternoon, while touring a pump factory in Baldwinsville, N.Y., Semler collapsed on the shop floor. After resting in a doctor's office for a few hours, he traveled on to his appointments in the Boston area. Once there, he took the advice of the Baldwinsville doctor, and checked into the Lahey Clinic for some exams. "After amortizing all of their machinery, they told me I had nothing," Semler recalls. "But the doctor told me that if I kept going like I was, I would soon be using their brand-new cardiac wing. He walked me through it and showed me how good the hotel structure of that wing was, how much I was going to like it. I got the message."
In the months that followed, Semler determined to balance his work and personal life more carefully, and to do the same for his employees—all while improving Semco's fortunes. To his great relief, he discovered he didn't have to reconcile these two goals: The more freedom he gave his staff to set their own schedules, the more versatile, productive and loyal they became, and the better Semco performed.
Nor did he stop with flextime. He did away with dedicated receptionists, org charts, even the central office—it now resembles an airlines' VIP lounge, with people working in different areas each day. He encouraged employees to suggest what they should be paid, to evaluate their bosses, to learn each other's jobs, and to tolerate dissent—even when divisive. He set up a profit-sharing system and insisted that the company's financials be published internally, so that everyone could see how the company was doing.
Semco hit some bumps and yet, despite a recession and staggering inflation in Brazil, the company grew, and, by 1993, Semler had a spirited turnaround story to tell. His first book, Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, became an international bestseller (it's more Rocky than The Firm), and laid out his unorthodox, if strikingly commonsense approaches—no dress code, voluntary meetings, mandatory vacation time.
Skeptics of Semler's CEO-who-manages-least-manages-best approach suggested that the cheerful tyro might be taking a victory lap too soon. Or, they said, maybe it works for you, but you can't generalize it.
Well, a decade later, Semler, now 44, is back to answer his critics. In his new book, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works (Portfolio), due out in May, he argues that his approach to management is precisely what sclerotic corporations and the stressed-out leaders who run them need if they're to avoid Chapter 11—or the Lahey Clinic, as the case may be.
Click here for this month's Web Extra on MIT Sloan Professor Tom Malone and the advent of a values-based, 21st-century organization.
How has he fared? Semco's revenues have jumped from $35 million to $212 million in the last six years, and the firm grew from several hundred employees to 3,000—with employee turnover of about 1 percent. The privately held firm has eight businesses, or, says Semler, "nine, depending on the week," having expanded into outsourcing management (for four of Brazil's five biggest banks), to environmental site remediation and engineering risk management.
Semler, who will be a guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School this summer, relishes the role of provocateur. "The desire for uniformity is a major problem with IT," he says. "But it is a subproduct of the same problems that plague management, which is the need to feel in control, that we're all on the same page, and everyone is being treated equally. But what I want to ask is, 'Why do we all need to be on the same page?' And you realize, of course, that no two people are equal in any respect."
Semler's rhetoric will likely elicit some groans from the gallery—as in, "Didn't we choke on enough of this business revolution gas in the '90s?" But Semler makes a compelling case for his methods, as Executive Editor Brad Wieners discovered over sandwiches in CIO Insight's New York offices.
CIO Insight: How do you convince someone your approach isn't just a nice idea, but a good idea?
Semler: There are three things people have always asked. One, is it really true? Is Semco operating the way he says? And, two, how has Semco done with it? Then we'll get to three: "So what?" And that's the difficult one, because the first two are easy. We've been at it now for 25 years, and probably everyone who cares in the world has come down to see if it's true or not. And our numbers are indisputable.
But if you ask, "So what?"—well, I think what we've done is being emulated because of the amount of dissatisfaction that is rampant among workers, but also among stakeholders. Basically, most career opportunities are fraudulent. The idea that I will hire you, I will train you, I will want to know where you want to be in five years, and then I will give you that better job is totally out of the question. And the other things [besides offering job security] corporations are supposed to do well like innovation, or customer service, they don't do those well, either.
Can you give some examples?
Microsoft is a very good example because Microsoft, let's say 15, 20 years ago, came up with a solution that was really groundbreaking. There was a fundamental change in paradigm. That took a couple of guys in a very unstructured atmosphere to do.
If you were to draw a graph of innovation and Microsoft's wherewithal in terms of people, capacity, recruitment, training and salaries, you would find that the more Microsoft hired the best minds at the highest salaries, and so forth, the less innovation it got. For a user, there are no substantial changes whatsoever between the various versions of Microsoft Windows. For anybody who's used a 1990 version, a '96, '98, 2000 or XP version, it just seems like the color of the icons changes. Does it take 5,000 engineers with postgraduate degrees to change the color of icons?
Or another example I particularly like is Gillette. Does it take $600 million to stick another blade between the other two? Or consider the airline industry—I think that is the only industry so far that has managed to make all of the stakeholders lose. The shareholders don't make any money. The executives don't last. The planes don't get better. The air-traffic controllers have the worst job in the world. The crew is never happy. The pilots are on strike. The food is just awful. There's not a good thing you can say about the business of flying. So I think the answer to "So what?" is that if people look closely, they'll see that the traditional model isn't working. And there's incentive there to start looking for something else.
When I hear that a company's employees set their own hours, I imagine it being better suited to some tasks than others.
The first anxiety executives have about workers setting their own hours is that people are going to suggest that they come in as late as possible, leave as early as possible, make as much as possible—end of story. And in 25 years we've never heard that. I don't think [that sort of behavior] comes to people as naturally as the anxiety about it comes to the [manager] who's thinking about it. [At Semco,] we always assume that we're dealing with responsible adults, which we are. And when you start treating employees like adolescents by saying that you can't come late, you can't use this bathroom—that's when you start to bring out the adolescent in people.
Is it true Semco buys or leases whatever technology the employees want?
It's more like expense reports. We don't want someone going to another city to negotiate something for us, or trying to sell something for us, who doesn't have the good sense to choose a rental-car company, the hotel where they'll stay, or whether they're going to take a bus or a cab. Because if they don't know how to do that, chances are very slim that they'll know how to negotiate our contracts. So we don't want to control their technology either. They will fill it in themselves, ask for reimbursement, and there is no approval process there.
Now chances are that every one of the new notebooks our staff buys are probably the best available, because the decision to buy the new one is going to be an analysis based on talking to 15 people and finding out what is considered hottest and most coveted—that's the one you're going to buy because you're not under a restriction. Now we didn't talk to Dell and to Compaq and to IBM to decide what they want for us, and there's never a meeting to discuss an upgrade of anything because it's already upgraded.
But you do have someone in charge of IT?
No, we don't—and the issue goes away, doesn't it? You could say, well, someone just joined and they decided to buy a very, very fancy notebook that's terribly expensive. It's like deciding to stay in a five-star hotel when all your colleagues stay in a three-star. You're subject to peer pressure. People are going to say, okay, well, the guy plays golf three times a week all morning. If he sells 512 widgets a month, really, who cares, right? If he sells 400 widgets a month instead of 512, it won't do him any good to be the first one in and the last one out, because it's performance-based. So the notebook's the same thing. Say the guy decides to buy a really expensive one—and it's happened many times. What happens is the peer pressure increases. You better be as good as the laptop you choose, right?
Okay, but who deals, for example, with network security?
Firewalls to me are much less essential than the IT people think they are, but let's assume that they are critical. For example, we're online with some of our partners that are Fortune 500 companies. So if Johnson Controls or the Rockefeller Group are sensitive, we're sensitive—but only as a subproduct of our relationship with them. We'll put in all the servers they want, and somebody will be there protecting it with their lives. But we wouldn't do it on our own.
Is there industrial espionage or hackers? Sure. But I think there's a lot of mythology about this, and I think IT people get overexcited about making their system the most secure this and that and so forth. I'm not sure it's that essential for the business per se. It's just essential for them to feel that they're exercising their technical capacity to its limit, which is not my main concern as a business.
Flexibility= Loyalty
Ricardo Semler is far from the only executive to find that a little flexibility leads to longer-term loyalty. Take Intertech Plastics, a $12 million, Denver-based manufacturer of consumer, automotive and industrial plastics. Intertech offers its 110 employees somewhat fluid schedules, and trusts them with the company’s financial performance data.
Its annual rate of staff turnover:
2%
One of the things I've noticed with this security issue is that IT people want to make sure that their systems are intact, private, confidential—blah, blah, blah—but they think nothing whatsoever of invading the e-mail privacy of their own employees. That's very interesting to me, because it's not only a double standard, but a violation of constitutional rights. Companies have taken the blind assumption that because the system is theirs, then anything that people do on it has to be available to them. I think it's a very hypocritical mode, and it deals with fundamental freedom issues that I don't think people have completely thought through.
I take it, then, employee e-mail at Semco is private?
Yes. And what's most interesting is that we searched far and wide for anybody who could tell us what kind of software or system could be installed on our [server] that would make it impossible for our own IT people to spy on people's e-mail. We did not find one. We had to customize one.
Tell me about hiring at Semco.
When you want somebody hired, let's say it's for a leadership position of some kind, you go to the system and you advertise that you think someone is needed. Then on a given day—say, Wednesday at 4 o'clock, meeting room 11—you say we're going to discuss this, whoever's interested. Because of the fundamental tenet that we don't want anyone involved in anything that they really don't want to do, all of our meetings are on a voluntary basis, meaning that the meetings are known, and then whoever is interested can and will show up, and should also leave the moment they become uninterested. It is a bit unnerving to watch these things, because people come in, plunk their things down, and then 15 minutes later somebody else says "Bye bye, see you." But the fact is that whoever is left there has a stake in the decision being made, and the decision is final in the sense that it's going to be implemented after the meeting.
You mentioned that the meeting gets announced on a system. What's that?
A central Web site, which is the way in which everyone communicates or knows what's going on.
Okay, so there's a voluntary, Wednesday, four o'clock meeting about the new position and . . .
The people who show up put together a template of what are the characteristics that person needs to have, and what is the weight of each of these characteristics. They'll then go looking for that person by putting an ad in the paper, or through a headhunter. And when the resumes come in, basically, whoever started the whole thing will distribute packs of these resumes to people, because there's no HR department to do it. You'll take ten home, I'll take ten home and Andrew will take ten home, and whatever I wrote A-plus on, for example, I'll give to you, and the rest, we'll just send a thank you.
Now a lot of things happen in this process. Because 40 of us are looking at ten resumes each, or ten of us are looking at 40 resumes each, I'm going to locate people who are not ideal for this job but that could be ideal for another job, and that's something that disappears completely when an HR department does this, because they're basically screening between yes and no—it's a digital response. With our system, we're creating an analog response, meaning, maybe this person would be great for I don't know who, and then we send that curriculum vitae on to someone else.
Once we've found ten who had an A-plus out of the 400, we will do a collective interview of all the candidates, which most people don't like, and which I found very strange in the beginning.
Wait. All the candidates get interviewed together?
Together.
I'd hope my voice was strong that day.
In a system like this, let's say two out of the ten don't speak at all because it's not their nature to interrupt. Well, the other five, ten, 15 on our side will want to hear from those two. So at a certain point they'll say, "Brad, you haven't spoken at all, what do you have to say?" If what you say is thoughtful, you might be, with your one minute's worth, ahead of everybody else.
Under your set-your-own-hours policy, do employees work fewer hours, or longer and harder?
Last week CNN spent four days with a bunch of our guys probing in all directions, and they concluded that our people balance their lives much better, and that there's an unusually high number of people who take their kids to school, etc. But a recent statistic of ours shows that 27 percent of our people are online on Sunday at 8 p.m.—27 percent. So they probably do work hard.
In some ways it's an unforgiving system, because you have to figure out your own answer for how to best spend your time. When you don't come in on Monday morning, absolutely nothing happens. But when you're sitting on the beach Monday morning at 11 o'clock, and you're the only one on the beach—that's a different story. Maybe then it's worth it to work a little harder. No one really knows how to measure the value of that moment.
Copyright (c) 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Ricardo Semler: Set Them Free
April 1, 2004
By Brad Wieners, ExtremeTech
Ricardo Semler had the sort of reckoning at 21 that most executives don't face until middle age. Fresh from law school, where he'd been a restless underachiever, Semler took over his father's business, which manufactured pumps and propellers for the world's merchant marine. He was awfully young, but his dad sensed that if he didn't give his son a chance, he'd lose him to another career. Besides, Semler Sr. was a pragmatist. "Better make your mistakes," he told his son, "while I'm still alive."
Straightaway, Semler Jr. spearheaded an ambitious plan to diversify his dad's ship-parts company, which, like the Brazilian economy in the mid-eighties, was sinking. At Semco headquarters, in São Paulo, he tried to learn everything there was to know, and, while a quick study, he irritated plenty of the old hands with his precociousness and micromanaging. Working from 7:30 a.m. to midnight every day, or jumping planes overseas to raise capital and find new partners and companies to buy, his live-to-work lifestyle seemed ripped from the pages of John Grisham's The Firm.
Then one afternoon, while touring a pump factory in Baldwinsville, N.Y., Semler collapsed on the shop floor. After resting in a doctor's office for a few hours, he traveled on to his appointments in the Boston area. Once there, he took the advice of the Baldwinsville doctor, and checked into the Lahey Clinic for some exams. "After amortizing all of their machinery, they told me I had nothing," Semler recalls. "But the doctor told me that if I kept going like I was, I would soon be using their brand-new cardiac wing. He walked me through it and showed me how good the hotel structure of that wing was, how much I was going to like it. I got the message."
In the months that followed, Semler determined to balance his work and personal life more carefully, and to do the same for his employees—all while improving Semco's fortunes. To his great relief, he discovered he didn't have to reconcile these two goals: The more freedom he gave his staff to set their own schedules, the more versatile, productive and loyal they became, and the better Semco performed.
Nor did he stop with flextime. He did away with dedicated receptionists, org charts, even the central office—it now resembles an airlines' VIP lounge, with people working in different areas each day. He encouraged employees to suggest what they should be paid, to evaluate their bosses, to learn each other's jobs, and to tolerate dissent—even when divisive. He set up a profit-sharing system and insisted that the company's financials be published internally, so that everyone could see how the company was doing.
Semco hit some bumps and yet, despite a recession and staggering inflation in Brazil, the company grew, and, by 1993, Semler had a spirited turnaround story to tell. His first book, Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, became an international bestseller (it's more Rocky than The Firm), and laid out his unorthodox, if strikingly commonsense approaches—no dress code, voluntary meetings, mandatory vacation time.
Skeptics of Semler's CEO-who-manages-least-manages-best approach suggested that the cheerful tyro might be taking a victory lap too soon. Or, they said, maybe it works for you, but you can't generalize it.
Well, a decade later, Semler, now 44, is back to answer his critics. In his new book, The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works (Portfolio), due out in May, he argues that his approach to management is precisely what sclerotic corporations and the stressed-out leaders who run them need if they're to avoid Chapter 11—or the Lahey Clinic, as the case may be.
Click here for this month's Web Extra on MIT Sloan Professor Tom Malone and the advent of a values-based, 21st-century organization.
How has he fared? Semco's revenues have jumped from $35 million to $212 million in the last six years, and the firm grew from several hundred employees to 3,000—with employee turnover of about 1 percent. The privately held firm has eight businesses, or, says Semler, "nine, depending on the week," having expanded into outsourcing management (for four of Brazil's five biggest banks), to environmental site remediation and engineering risk management.
Semler, who will be a guest lecturer at the Harvard Business School this summer, relishes the role of provocateur. "The desire for uniformity is a major problem with IT," he says. "But it is a subproduct of the same problems that plague management, which is the need to feel in control, that we're all on the same page, and everyone is being treated equally. But what I want to ask is, 'Why do we all need to be on the same page?' And you realize, of course, that no two people are equal in any respect."
Semler's rhetoric will likely elicit some groans from the gallery—as in, "Didn't we choke on enough of this business revolution gas in the '90s?" But Semler makes a compelling case for his methods, as Executive Editor Brad Wieners discovered over sandwiches in CIO Insight's New York offices.
CIO Insight: How do you convince someone your approach isn't just a nice idea, but a good idea?
Semler: There are three things people have always asked. One, is it really true? Is Semco operating the way he says? And, two, how has Semco done with it? Then we'll get to three: "So what?" And that's the difficult one, because the first two are easy. We've been at it now for 25 years, and probably everyone who cares in the world has come down to see if it's true or not. And our numbers are indisputable.
But if you ask, "So what?"—well, I think what we've done is being emulated because of the amount of dissatisfaction that is rampant among workers, but also among stakeholders. Basically, most career opportunities are fraudulent. The idea that I will hire you, I will train you, I will want to know where you want to be in five years, and then I will give you that better job is totally out of the question. And the other things [besides offering job security] corporations are supposed to do well like innovation, or customer service, they don't do those well, either.
Can you give some examples?
Microsoft is a very good example because Microsoft, let's say 15, 20 years ago, came up with a solution that was really groundbreaking. There was a fundamental change in paradigm. That took a couple of guys in a very unstructured atmosphere to do.
If you were to draw a graph of innovation and Microsoft's wherewithal in terms of people, capacity, recruitment, training and salaries, you would find that the more Microsoft hired the best minds at the highest salaries, and so forth, the less innovation it got. For a user, there are no substantial changes whatsoever between the various versions of Microsoft Windows. For anybody who's used a 1990 version, a '96, '98, 2000 or XP version, it just seems like the color of the icons changes. Does it take 5,000 engineers with postgraduate degrees to change the color of icons?
Or another example I particularly like is Gillette. Does it take $600 million to stick another blade between the other two? Or consider the airline industry—I think that is the only industry so far that has managed to make all of the stakeholders lose. The shareholders don't make any money. The executives don't last. The planes don't get better. The air-traffic controllers have the worst job in the world. The crew is never happy. The pilots are on strike. The food is just awful. There's not a good thing you can say about the business of flying. So I think the answer to "So what?" is that if people look closely, they'll see that the traditional model isn't working. And there's incentive there to start looking for something else.
When I hear that a company's employees set their own hours, I imagine it being better suited to some tasks than others.
The first anxiety executives have about workers setting their own hours is that people are going to suggest that they come in as late as possible, leave as early as possible, make as much as possible—end of story. And in 25 years we've never heard that. I don't think [that sort of behavior] comes to people as naturally as the anxiety about it comes to the [manager] who's thinking about it. [At Semco,] we always assume that we're dealing with responsible adults, which we are. And when you start treating employees like adolescents by saying that you can't come late, you can't use this bathroom—that's when you start to bring out the adolescent in people.
Is it true Semco buys or leases whatever technology the employees want?
It's more like expense reports. We don't want someone going to another city to negotiate something for us, or trying to sell something for us, who doesn't have the good sense to choose a rental-car company, the hotel where they'll stay, or whether they're going to take a bus or a cab. Because if they don't know how to do that, chances are very slim that they'll know how to negotiate our contracts. So we don't want to control their technology either. They will fill it in themselves, ask for reimbursement, and there is no approval process there.
Now chances are that every one of the new notebooks our staff buys are probably the best available, because the decision to buy the new one is going to be an analysis based on talking to 15 people and finding out what is considered hottest and most coveted—that's the one you're going to buy because you're not under a restriction. Now we didn't talk to Dell and to Compaq and to IBM to decide what they want for us, and there's never a meeting to discuss an upgrade of anything because it's already upgraded.
But you do have someone in charge of IT?
No, we don't—and the issue goes away, doesn't it? You could say, well, someone just joined and they decided to buy a very, very fancy notebook that's terribly expensive. It's like deciding to stay in a five-star hotel when all your colleagues stay in a three-star. You're subject to peer pressure. People are going to say, okay, well, the guy plays golf three times a week all morning. If he sells 512 widgets a month, really, who cares, right? If he sells 400 widgets a month instead of 512, it won't do him any good to be the first one in and the last one out, because it's performance-based. So the notebook's the same thing. Say the guy decides to buy a really expensive one—and it's happened many times. What happens is the peer pressure increases. You better be as good as the laptop you choose, right?
Okay, but who deals, for example, with network security?
Firewalls to me are much less essential than the IT people think they are, but let's assume that they are critical. For example, we're online with some of our partners that are Fortune 500 companies. So if Johnson Controls or the Rockefeller Group are sensitive, we're sensitive—but only as a subproduct of our relationship with them. We'll put in all the servers they want, and somebody will be there protecting it with their lives. But we wouldn't do it on our own.
Is there industrial espionage or hackers? Sure. But I think there's a lot of mythology about this, and I think IT people get overexcited about making their system the most secure this and that and so forth. I'm not sure it's that essential for the business per se. It's just essential for them to feel that they're exercising their technical capacity to its limit, which is not my main concern as a business.
Flexibility= Loyalty
Ricardo Semler is far from the only executive to find that a little flexibility leads to longer-term loyalty. Take Intertech Plastics, a $12 million, Denver-based manufacturer of consumer, automotive and industrial plastics. Intertech offers its 110 employees somewhat fluid schedules, and trusts them with the company’s financial performance data.
Its annual rate of staff turnover:
2%
One of the things I've noticed with this security issue is that IT people want to make sure that their systems are intact, private, confidential—blah, blah, blah—but they think nothing whatsoever of invading the e-mail privacy of their own employees. That's very interesting to me, because it's not only a double standard, but a violation of constitutional rights. Companies have taken the blind assumption that because the system is theirs, then anything that people do on it has to be available to them. I think it's a very hypocritical mode, and it deals with fundamental freedom issues that I don't think people have completely thought through.
I take it, then, employee e-mail at Semco is private?
Yes. And what's most interesting is that we searched far and wide for anybody who could tell us what kind of software or system could be installed on our [server] that would make it impossible for our own IT people to spy on people's e-mail. We did not find one. We had to customize one.
Tell me about hiring at Semco.
When you want somebody hired, let's say it's for a leadership position of some kind, you go to the system and you advertise that you think someone is needed. Then on a given day—say, Wednesday at 4 o'clock, meeting room 11—you say we're going to discuss this, whoever's interested. Because of the fundamental tenet that we don't want anyone involved in anything that they really don't want to do, all of our meetings are on a voluntary basis, meaning that the meetings are known, and then whoever is interested can and will show up, and should also leave the moment they become uninterested. It is a bit unnerving to watch these things, because people come in, plunk their things down, and then 15 minutes later somebody else says "Bye bye, see you." But the fact is that whoever is left there has a stake in the decision being made, and the decision is final in the sense that it's going to be implemented after the meeting.
You mentioned that the meeting gets announced on a system. What's that?
A central Web site, which is the way in which everyone communicates or knows what's going on.
Okay, so there's a voluntary, Wednesday, four o'clock meeting about the new position and . . .
The people who show up put together a template of what are the characteristics that person needs to have, and what is the weight of each of these characteristics. They'll then go looking for that person by putting an ad in the paper, or through a headhunter. And when the resumes come in, basically, whoever started the whole thing will distribute packs of these resumes to people, because there's no HR department to do it. You'll take ten home, I'll take ten home and Andrew will take ten home, and whatever I wrote A-plus on, for example, I'll give to you, and the rest, we'll just send a thank you.
Now a lot of things happen in this process. Because 40 of us are looking at ten resumes each, or ten of us are looking at 40 resumes each, I'm going to locate people who are not ideal for this job but that could be ideal for another job, and that's something that disappears completely when an HR department does this, because they're basically screening between yes and no—it's a digital response. With our system, we're creating an analog response, meaning, maybe this person would be great for I don't know who, and then we send that curriculum vitae on to someone else.
Once we've found ten who had an A-plus out of the 400, we will do a collective interview of all the candidates, which most people don't like, and which I found very strange in the beginning.
Wait. All the candidates get interviewed together?
Together.
I'd hope my voice was strong that day.
In a system like this, let's say two out of the ten don't speak at all because it's not their nature to interrupt. Well, the other five, ten, 15 on our side will want to hear from those two. So at a certain point they'll say, "Brad, you haven't spoken at all, what do you have to say?" If what you say is thoughtful, you might be, with your one minute's worth, ahead of everybody else.
Under your set-your-own-hours policy, do employees work fewer hours, or longer and harder?
Last week CNN spent four days with a bunch of our guys probing in all directions, and they concluded that our people balance their lives much better, and that there's an unusually high number of people who take their kids to school, etc. But a recent statistic of ours shows that 27 percent of our people are online on Sunday at 8 p.m.—27 percent. So they probably do work hard.
In some ways it's an unforgiving system, because you have to figure out your own answer for how to best spend your time. When you don't come in on Monday morning, absolutely nothing happens. But when you're sitting on the beach Monday morning at 11 o'clock, and you're the only one on the beach—that's a different story. Maybe then it's worth it to work a little harder. No one really knows how to measure the value of that moment.
Copyright (c) 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Link to CNN article
(AP) -- Swiss and American scientists say they have successfully manipulated subjects in an experiment to take risks they might not otherwise take by giving them a squirt of the hormone oxytocin to stimulate trusting behavior.
Their finding could have beneficial applications in treating mental disorders, but they acknowledge the possibility of abuse.
"Of course, this finding could be misused," said Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, the senior researcher in the study, which appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "I don't think we currently have such abuses. However, in the future it could happen."
Other scientists say the research raises important questions about oxytocin's potential as a therapy for conditions like autism, in which trust is diminished.
Or, perhaps the hormone's activity could be reduced to treat more rare diseases, like Williams syndrome, in which children approach strangers fearlessly.
"Might their high level of trust be due to excessive oxytocin release?" asks University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio, who reviewed the experiments for Nature.
"Little is known about the neurobiology of trust, although the phenomenon is beginning to attract attention."
Oxytocin is secreted in brain tissue and synthesized by the hypothalamus. This small, but crucial feature deep in the brain controls biological reactions like hunger, thirst and body temperature, as well as visceral fight-or-flight reactions associated with powerful, basic emotions like fear and anger.
For years oxytocin was considered to be a straightforward reproductive hormone found in both sexes.
In both humans and animals, this chemical messenger stimulates uterine contractions in labor and induces milk production. In both women and men, oxytocin is released during sex, too.
Then, elevated concentrations of the hormone also were found in cerebrospinal fluid during and after birth, and experiments showed it was involved in the biochemistry of attachment.
It's a sensible conclusion, given that babies require years of care and the body needs to motivate mothers for the demanding task of child rearing.
In recent years, scientists have wondered whether oxytocin also is generally involved with other aspects of bonding behavior -- and specifically whether it stimulates trust.
Trust is the glue of society and human interactions. Erase it, and you compromise everything from love to trade and political order.
"I once likened trust to a love potion," Damasio writes in Nature. "Add trust to the mix, for without trust there is no love."
In the experiments, the researchers tried to manipulate people's trust by adding more oxytocin to their brains.
They used a synthetic version in a nasal spray that was absorbed by mucous membranes and crossed the blood-brain barrier. Researchers say the dose was harmless and altered oxytocin levels only temporarily.
A total of 178 male students from universities in Zurich took part in a pair of experiments. All the volunteers were in their 20s. They got the oxytocin or a placebo.
In the first experiment, they played a game in which an "investor" could choose to hand over to a "trustee" up to 12 units of money that are each equal to .40 Swiss franc, or about 32 cents. The trustee triples the investor's money, then gets to decide how much of the proceeds to share.
Of 29 subjects who got oxytocin, 45 percent invested the maximum amount of 12 monetary units and, in the researchers' words, showed "maximal trust." Only 21 percent had a lower trust level in which they invested less than 8 monetary units.
In contrast, the placebo group's trust behavior was reversed. Only 21 percent of the placebo subjects invested the maximum, while 45 percent invested at low levels.
Overall, those who got oxytocin invested 17 percent more than investors who received a placebo.
In a second experiment, investors faced the same decision. But this time, the trustee was replaced by a computer program in an effort to see whether the hormone promoted social interaction or simply encouraged risk-taking.
With the computer, the oxytocin and placebo groups behaved similarly, with both groups investing an average of 7.5 monetary units.
"Oxytocin causes a substantial increase in trusting behavior," Fehr and his colleagues reported.
Researchers said they are performing a new round of experiments using brain imaging.
"Now that we know that oxytocin has behavioral effects," Fehr said, "we want to know the brain circuits behind these effects."
(AP) -- Swiss and American scientists say they have successfully manipulated subjects in an experiment to take risks they might not otherwise take by giving them a squirt of the hormone oxytocin to stimulate trusting behavior.
Their finding could have beneficial applications in treating mental disorders, but they acknowledge the possibility of abuse.
"Of course, this finding could be misused," said Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, the senior researcher in the study, which appears in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "I don't think we currently have such abuses. However, in the future it could happen."
Other scientists say the research raises important questions about oxytocin's potential as a therapy for conditions like autism, in which trust is diminished.
Or, perhaps the hormone's activity could be reduced to treat more rare diseases, like Williams syndrome, in which children approach strangers fearlessly.
"Might their high level of trust be due to excessive oxytocin release?" asks University of Iowa neurologist Antonio Damasio, who reviewed the experiments for Nature.
"Little is known about the neurobiology of trust, although the phenomenon is beginning to attract attention."
Oxytocin is secreted in brain tissue and synthesized by the hypothalamus. This small, but crucial feature deep in the brain controls biological reactions like hunger, thirst and body temperature, as well as visceral fight-or-flight reactions associated with powerful, basic emotions like fear and anger.
For years oxytocin was considered to be a straightforward reproductive hormone found in both sexes.
In both humans and animals, this chemical messenger stimulates uterine contractions in labor and induces milk production. In both women and men, oxytocin is released during sex, too.
Then, elevated concentrations of the hormone also were found in cerebrospinal fluid during and after birth, and experiments showed it was involved in the biochemistry of attachment.
It's a sensible conclusion, given that babies require years of care and the body needs to motivate mothers for the demanding task of child rearing.
In recent years, scientists have wondered whether oxytocin also is generally involved with other aspects of bonding behavior -- and specifically whether it stimulates trust.
Trust is the glue of society and human interactions. Erase it, and you compromise everything from love to trade and political order.
"I once likened trust to a love potion," Damasio writes in Nature. "Add trust to the mix, for without trust there is no love."
In the experiments, the researchers tried to manipulate people's trust by adding more oxytocin to their brains.
They used a synthetic version in a nasal spray that was absorbed by mucous membranes and crossed the blood-brain barrier. Researchers say the dose was harmless and altered oxytocin levels only temporarily.
A total of 178 male students from universities in Zurich took part in a pair of experiments. All the volunteers were in their 20s. They got the oxytocin or a placebo.
In the first experiment, they played a game in which an "investor" could choose to hand over to a "trustee" up to 12 units of money that are each equal to .40 Swiss franc, or about 32 cents. The trustee triples the investor's money, then gets to decide how much of the proceeds to share.
Of 29 subjects who got oxytocin, 45 percent invested the maximum amount of 12 monetary units and, in the researchers' words, showed "maximal trust." Only 21 percent had a lower trust level in which they invested less than 8 monetary units.
In contrast, the placebo group's trust behavior was reversed. Only 21 percent of the placebo subjects invested the maximum, while 45 percent invested at low levels.
Overall, those who got oxytocin invested 17 percent more than investors who received a placebo.
In a second experiment, investors faced the same decision. But this time, the trustee was replaced by a computer program in an effort to see whether the hormone promoted social interaction or simply encouraged risk-taking.
With the computer, the oxytocin and placebo groups behaved similarly, with both groups investing an average of 7.5 monetary units.
"Oxytocin causes a substantial increase in trusting behavior," Fehr and his colleagues reported.
Researchers said they are performing a new round of experiments using brain imaging.
"Now that we know that oxytocin has behavioral effects," Fehr said, "we want to know the brain circuits behind these effects."
Friday, December 17, 2004
Fascinating look at trust in journalists - viewed through Kohlberg's developmental stages of moral values. - Read on.
Sri Journalists: More Ethical than People Realize? Gallup finds journalists not trusted, but research indicates some highly developed moral reasoning.
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First the studies. The American public doesn't trust reporters. This according to Gallup's most recent poll rating of perceived honesty among certain professions. Less than 25 percent of the people who responded the survey rated reporters' ethical standards as high or very high.
This is really nothing new. Frank Newport, the editor-in-chief of The Gallup Poll, points out that journalists have been rated low since his organization began asking this question in 1974.
The numbers have bounced around, all the way down to 16 percent in 2000 and as high as 33 percent in 1976.
But for the most part, according to Newport, the conclusion has been the same: "Americans are suspicious of the news media."
Other Gallup studies suggest this distrust is greater among people who are politically moderate and conservative, he said.
The Gallup poll stands in contrast to another study that suggests that journalists have higher than average abilities when it comes to moral reasoning.
Journalism professors Renita Coleman of Louisiana State University and Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri set out to test the moral development of a large group of journalists.
They gathered a sample of 249 reporters from print and broadcast newsrooms across the country, and discovered that journalists look pretty good on Kohlberg's moral development scale. As a whole, journalists rank fourth among the ranked groups, behind seminarians, physicians, and medical students.
Published in the Autumn, 2004 issue of Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly, the journal of the AEJMC, the study is not yet available online.
Coleman and Wilkins also found:
- No significant differences between men and women, broadcast and print or managers and non-managers.
- The more autonomy a journalist reported, the higher his or her score.
- The more highly journalists rated the importance of laws and rules, the lower their scores. (Some researchers suggest a strong deference to the law indicates rule obedience, rather than critical thinking.)
- Journalists who do investigative work tend to display higher levels of moral reasoning.
- Journalists who said civic journalism was part of their work also had higher scores.
- Journalists were particularly adept at thinking through the ethical dimensions of journalism problems. (Which discounts the theory that journalists can apply moral thinking to others but not to themselves.)
Newport, the Gallup editor, points out another gap: the one between perception and reality. "Perception is as important as reality," he says. "Regardless of reality, if readers and viewers are suspicious of journalists they are going to treat what they write with skepticism."
And it's not as if we haven't handed the public some reasons to distrust us. Journalism's recent shame includes circulation scandals at the Dallas Morning News, Newsday and Hoy; plagiarism and fabrications scandals at The New York Times and USA Today; and such shoddy reporting on big issues as the CBS pursuit of President Bush's National Guard records.
If you look at the two studies and all the recent scandals as sections of a puzzle that somehow fit together, the trick is to find the missing pieces.
Here are a couple possibilities:
The assembly line nature of putting out a newspaper or producing television news is a process built on production, not the values of journalism. It encourages speed and volume, rather than reflection. Often, when we want to think about the values that underpin our work, we have to deliberately stop the process and step back. Many journalists are good at doing this, but they do so in spite of the nature of the work. Some newsroom leaders have been successful at infusing values into the routine, making sure new hires get a decent orientation, building time for questions into the daily or weekly schedule and deliberately connecting decisions to values. But they are the exceptions.
Newsroom culture can contribute to sound and unsound ethical reasoning. In some newsrooms employees are encouraged to challenge authority, collaborate on decisions and seek contrarian voices. On the other hand, in the wake of the ethical failures at The New York Times and USA Today, investigative reports described a climate of fear in both newsrooms. Newsroom staffers expressed fear of questioning their bosses and peers about ethically suspect practices and behavior.
Economic pressures can interfere with journalists' efforts to live up to their professional ideals. Staff cutbacks and the pressure to reach new audiences have combined as a sort-of one-two punch.
Coleman and Wilkins point out that the current collision of values in the newsroom could represent an opportunity for journalists to rethink how they do their jobs. As technology provides new opportunities for delivering different kinds of news, the systems of gathering information will also change, possibly for the better.
Kohlberg argued that wrestling with especially vexing problems presents individuals with a chance to develop more sophisticated coping skills and move to a higher stage of moral behavior.
Kohlberg theorized that, from infancy, most people climb a ladder of moral development with six stages. At the bottom is the childlike obedience stage, where morality is viewed as an external force. (You do what you're told, as you're being told).
At the second stage, called individualism, morality is relative. (What's right for me might be wrong for you.)
The third stage is characterized by good personal relationships (live up to others' expectations) and the fourth stage of social order (do what's right for the group) is characteristic of teenagers and young adults.
In the fifth stage, called social contract/individual rights, a person strives to improve upon the social order, rather than just maintain it. In the sixth stage, universal principles, an individual seeks just solutions based on accepted values.
Journalism frequently operates at stage four and sometimes at stage five. In most decisions, we base our values on the current community standards. (We usually don't show images of dead Americans because our audience considers it disrespectful.) But on some stories journalists have managed to move up to stage five, as many newsrooms did in the course of covering Civil Rights and the Vietnam War.
It could be that ongoing changes in newsrooms will eventually force us to see the work we do in a different light, elevating our core values above the pressures of profit and competition.
Functioning as a good journalist takes more than the ability to focus a camera or turn a phrase. The profession requires sophisticated moral reflection. The Wilkins-Coleman study shows that individually, journalists have the ability.
What do you think stops journalists from infusing more of their ethics into their work?
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
CNN.com Link:
POLL RESULTS
Americans ranked public service professions highest in honesty and ethics.
1. Nurses
2. Grade school teachers
3. Druggists, pharmacists
4. Military officers
5. Medical doctors
6. Policemen
7. Clergy
8. Judges
9. Day care providers
10. Bankers
11. Auto mechanics
12. Local officeholders
13. Nursing home operators
14. State officeholders
15. TV Reporters
16. Newspaper reporters
17. Business executives
18. Congressmen
19. Lawyers
20. Advertising practitioners
21. Car salesmen
Source: Gallup Poll"
POLL RESULTS
Americans ranked public service professions highest in honesty and ethics.
1. Nurses
2. Grade school teachers
3. Druggists, pharmacists
4. Military officers
5. Medical doctors
6. Policemen
7. Clergy
8. Judges
9. Day care providers
10. Bankers
11. Auto mechanics
12. Local officeholders
13. Nursing home operators
14. State officeholders
15. TV Reporters
16. Newspaper reporters
17. Business executives
18. Congressmen
19. Lawyers
20. Advertising practitioners
21. Car salesmen
Source: Gallup Poll"
Friday, December 10, 2004
A healthy scepticism about information is needed in a world where production of gobs of information is enabled and widely distributed - but the refinement, enrichment techniques are not wide practiced. So a lot of what goes in the web is "turd" that gets mistaken for "gold". Take this phenomenon of blogging itself in which I am a particpant. Who would take the trouble to find out if the article I am excerpting (a) is really there and not a figment of my making; (b) that what the article says about students and information sources is true. - Sri
Link to Article
The truth is out there -- thanks to Google, mobile devices, and always-on Internet connections -- but often it's determined by the links at the end of the search engine.
AP Internet Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- Go to Google, search and scroll results, click and copy. When students do research online these days, many educators worry, those are often about the only steps they take. If they can avoid a trip to the library at all, many students gladly will.
Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at least one book for a September class project.
She wasn't prepared for the response: "Someone raised their hand and asked, "Excuse me, where would I get a book?"'
While the answer might just have been a smart aleck's bid for laughs, Bruckman and other educators grapple daily with the challenge of ensuring their students have good skills for discerning the truth. Professors and librarians say many come to college without any such skills, and quite a few leave without having acquired them.
Alex Halavais, professor of informatics at the University at Buffalo, said students are so accustomed to instant information that "the idea of spending an hour or two to find that good source is foreign to them."
In a study on research habits, Wellesley College researchers Panagiotis Metaxas and Leah Graham found that fewer than 2 percent of students in one Wellesley computer science class bothered to use non-Internet sources to answer all six test questions.
And many students failed to check out multiple sources. For instance, 63 percent of students asked to list Microsoft Corp.'s top innovations only visited the company's Web site in search of the answer.
It's a paradox to some that so many young Americans can be so accepting of online information whose origin is unclear.
"Skepticism…is part of their lives, yet they tend to believe things fairly readily because it appears on the Internet," said Roger Casey, who studies youths and pop culture at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.
One concern is commercial influence online; some search engines run ads and accept payments to include sites in their indexes, with varying degree of disclosure.
"If I'm going to go to the library, chances are somebody hasn't paid a librarian 100 bucks to point me to a particular book," said Beau Brendler, director of the Consumer Reports WebWatch.
Another potential minefield is the growing phenomenon of collaborative information assembly. The credentials of the people authoring grassroots Web journals and a committee-written encyclopedia called Wikipedia are often unclear. Nevertheless, some Internet users believe that such resources can collectively portray events more accurately than any single gatekeeper.