Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Stever's comments regarding Heskett's question -  can getting things done be taught. http://www.venturecoach.com/resources/ ================================================== Execution can certainly be taught, though not necessarily using current business school methods. There's a world of difference between asking someone, "Tell me what you would do" and handing them a task and saying, "Go." First-person learning engages a learner in ways that produce behavior change. Third-person discussion teaches students to discuss (the activity they're "first-person" engaged in), but doesn't produce behavior change in the area being discussed. That may be one reason so many B-school grads are so like consultants--that's the first-person skill they've practiced for the last two years! Give student teams tasks to complete that require the kind of coordination and planning that they'll encounter on the job. Then, as they struggle to complete the tasks, drop in project management tools, interpersonal communalization tools, etc., so the learning becomes linked directly to context where it's most needed. Stever Robbins President Leadership Decisionworks, Inc. 6:23:45 PM     First, the science of networks has taught us that distance can be deceiving. The first evidence in support of this observation came in the late 1960s in the form of a remarkable experiment conducted by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Milgram devised an innovative message-passing technique in which he gave a few hundred randomly selected people from Boston and Omaha letters to be sent to a single target person -- a stockbroker who worked in Boston. But the letters came with an unusual stipulation: They could only be sent to a personal friend, preferably one "closer" to the target than the current holder. Each subsequent recipient received the same instructions, thereby forcing the letters to traverse a chain of social acquaintances from initial sender to target. Milgram's question was, how many people would be in a typical chain? The answer was six -- a surprising result that led to the famous phrase (and John Guare's 1990 play) "Six Degrees of Separation." That someone on the other side of the world, with little in common with you, can be reached through a short chain of network ties -- through only six degrees -- is an aspect of the social world that has fascinated generation after generation. Now the science of networks gives us an explanation in terms of the multidimensional nature of social identity -- we tend to associate with people like ourselves, but we have multiple, independent ways of being alike. And because we know not only who our friends are, but also what kind of people they are, even very large networks can be navigated in only a few links. 1:02:00 PM

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