The Hidden Benefits of Commuting: Finding Serenity in the Space Between

By mikepeleah in Schmooze Cues
A stray dog named “Boji” has become a local celebrity after using buses, subways and ferries to travel across Turkey’s metropolitan city of Istanbul.

I used to hate mornings. Istanbul is a very anisotropic City. Commuting from one neighborhood to another, just two blocks away, could take everything from 5 to 55 minutes. However, I start valuing this commuting time as a “liminal space” between personal and business realms. It helps me to transition between home and work life, to kick start the day, and to finish it.

There are three elements of this transition ritual. First, is physical activity, which fuels my internal engine. I have to walk 10-15 minutes either to the bus or the subway stop. This walk makes me energetic and improves my mood–oxytocin proved to have beneficial cognitive and behavioural effects. Second, I use  walking and commuting time to learn something new, to push my creativity for the day. Podcasts are great, I have some business related–Anecdotally Speaking, Talking About Organizations, or Re:Thinking.  Some pure fun on the bun–Friday Night Comedy or Something Rhymes with Purple. Other good options are Coursera and LinkedIn learning apps, which allow you to save videos to watch off-line.  Third, I use this time to reflect and think things over. I always have a notebook and pen with me, and Google.Docs on my smartphone. (Full disclosure: I drafted and edited this post while enjoying views of Beşiktaş from DT2 bus). This helps me to kick start day or unload business thoughts at the end of the day.

This ritual works very well while working from home or while on a business trip. You could use  a treadmill for a 15 minutes walk, or simply walk around a block–I often enjoyed cities at 6am, empty and quiet. Podcasts are always with you, as well as a notebook and a pen.

Don’t hate mornings, instead embrace an opportunity. By incorporating a simple morning ritual–such as a short walk, listening to something new and interesting, and reflecting on your goals and intentions–you can prioritize your well-being and kick start the day; or close the day, avoiding business spillover to home life. 

Birthday Opportunity: Natural experiment in Cash Transfers Investing in Infants

By mikepeleah in Measuring the unmeasurable

Cash transfers following the birth of a first child can have large and long-lasting effects on that child’s outcomes. Andrew C. Barr and two co-authors made use of natural experiment—the January 1 birthdate cut-off for U.S. child-related tax benefits. Children born in December of previous year are eligible for tax deduction, while children born just a couple of weeks later, in January, are not eligible. As a result, families with otherwise similar children receiving substantially different refunds during the first year of life—roughly $1,300, or 10 percent of income for the average low-income single-child.

Using the careful data connection strategy, authors showed that this transfer in infancy increases young adult earnings by at least 1 to 2 percent, with larger effects for males. Baseline estimates indicate that eligibility for additional resources during the first year of life generates a $319 increase in average annual earnings between age 23 and 25 and a $456 increase between ages 26 and 28. These effects persist to older ages, with 2-3 percent increases at ages 29-31 and 32-34. These estimated effects are larger than those generated by the in-kind support programs. According to calculations, additional tax receipts associated with the increased earnings in adulthood, exceed the amount of the initial transfer, implying a negative net cost to the federal government.

The observed earnings effects appear to be explained by earlier human capital effects. the North Carolina education data showed substantial increases in test scores, reductions in behavioural problems, and a greater likelihood of high school graduation during childhood and adolescence. This chart shows effect of cash transfer eligibility on student outcome index, constructed as the mean of normalized test scores in grade 3-8, high school graduation, and any suspension in middle or high school. Birthdates to the left of the dotted line represent those where the child’s family could have received additional resources from child-related tax benefits in the following year (if eligible based on income).

Andrew C. Barr, Jonathan Eggleston, and Alexander A. Smith (2022) “Investing in Infants: The Lasting Effects of Cash Transfers to New Families”. NBER Working Paper No. 30373, August 2022. http://www.nber.org/papers/w30373

Meet less, write more!

By mikepeleah in Schmooze Cues
Comic Strip Dilbert

We all survived meetings that could be an email. But could we do better? Tremendous summarized its high-documentation, low-meeting work culture in a blog post. Couple of takeaways:

🎯 Every meeting must have a reason—WHY are we meeting?—what Tremendous calls “meeting mindfulness”. Low-meeting culture is giving people the space and time they need to make innovative decisions. Meetings are reserved to discuss particularly heated topics and communicate on projects that require high-bandwidth collaboration

🤪 There are huge hidden costs of meetings, a 30-minute actually takes 68 minutes—15 minutes for preparation, 30 minutes meeting per se and 23 minutes to refocus. When meetings lack agendas, the efficiency cost quickly becomes grave

📑 High-documentation culture is the recipe for more productive, transparent, thoughtful, scalable, and efficient work. Writing a document—instead of shiny slides—forces people to focus on communicating their ideas as clearly as possible. While it comes with cost—time for writing (and editing), the benefits are clear—onboard and scale becoming easy. Thanks to searchable, traceable, public record of all significant decisions, projects, and initiatives across the organization

👩‍💻 Learn from successes. Professional development is a by-product of having access to the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of every impactful decision the company makes. Peer reviews help to learn and grow from the evolution of their own recommendations and proposals. It also teach people to provide feedback in a constructive, consistent and public manner (rather than derisive seagull-like critique)

Read blog https://www.tremendous.com/blog/the-perks-of-a-high-documentation-low-meeting-work-culture

concise (adj.) marked by the use of few words to convey much information or meaning

By mikepeleah in Blah Blah Wow!

“I’ll be brief” adds two minutes to presentation, “we are running late, so I’ll be brief” adds five to ten. What can you do when your presentation space shrinks from decent 15 minutes to five? Be concise not brief

Craft your presentation or speech in a scalable way. Have 🌟 a memorable opening, 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣ up to three points and 🎁 a memorable closing. One way is to have a summary version of presentation at the begging of your slides.

Reiterate your point (but don’t be boring). ☝ Tell them what you are going to tel. ✌ Tell it. 🖖Summarize what you just told.

Focus on the powerful closing. Your goal is not to show the last slide. Your goal is to make your point. So, reiterate it in 🎁 a memorable closing and make a pause 🧘‍♀️ to allow your final point to sink in.

Let me ask you…

By mikepeleah in Blah Blah Wow!

Public speaking could be a misleading term, it is less about speaking and more about communication. Questions are incredibly versatile tools for making presentations more effective and engaging. Questions could be used for building intrigue, inviting audience engagement, helping you remember what to say and even calming your anxiety.

🤩 Rhetorical questions build intrigue and prompts audience to think about the issue. “But why, some say, the moon? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?” asked JFK in his Moon Speech https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/rice-university-19620912

🙋‍♀️ Polling questions make the audience part of your point, shared experience is a great connection builder. It works well both in-person and on-line—”please raise your hand if you ever…” or “please vote with smile emoji if you ever…” Stand up artists and showrunners use it all the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o34HSHzOt5c

🔀 Outline the talk using questions and regulate the flow of the presentation. List questions which could serve as prompts for what you intend to say. It will help you to navigate speech without memorizing it word-by-word. In turn, it makes speech more conversational and engaging—you are simply answering your audience’s unasked questions.

Read more about Questions as a Speaker’s Best Tool here https://www.toastmasters.org/magazine/magazine-issues/2019/jan/19-presentation-skills

Hidden human capital and cost of staff turnover

By mikepeleah in Schmooze Cues

More than century ago Henry Ford made an unusual offer. He guaranteed pay $5 per day (around $150 per day in today’s dollars) for eight hours of assembly line work for all workers at his production plant. At the time the offer was surprising and created a lot of hype. It was quite generous, roughly doubled workers’ pay. It went against common wisdom—labour is abundant, you could fire and replace workers in no time. Ford had his own views, based on the issue he faced. Ford standardised products and production processes at plants. The workers were not, turnover was high, and quality of products varied. Generous wage offer aimed at reducing workers turnover and maintaining this hidden human capital. Arguably, it paid off in a long run.

Century later economists got data to confirm Ford’s intuition and quantify the hidden cost of worker turnover. Recent article in Management Science “The Hidden Cost of Worker Turnover: Attributing Product Reliability to the Turnover of Factory Workers” combined data on weekly workers turnover at major electronic producer plant, and data on field failures of their electronic products. Result? For Each percentage point increase in the weekly rate of workers quitting from an assembly line, field failures increase by 0.74%–0.79%. These extra failures could total to striking 10.2% in the high-turnover weeks following paydays. The associated costs amount to hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars.

The issue seems to be even worse in new sectors economy, knowledge based. Search Cloud provider Sinequa published findings from a survey of 1,000 IT managers at large organizations in the UK and US to explore the impact the Great Resignation has on employee experience, productivity, and organizational risk. It showed that 64% felt that their organization already has experienced loss of knowledge due to people leaving the company. There is a concern that turnover could have a cumulative effect—56% of surveyed managers agreed it will hurt the organization’s ability to onboard new employees. Hidden human capital is not that visible, highly underappreciated, and could be quite costly to replace.

If data are not persuasive enough, here is a nice meme on newbie dealing with legacy products.

Be better, one thing at the time

By mikepeleah in Blah Blah Wow!

“You have to improve structure of the speech, also your body language, and vocal variety, and…” Have you ever felt overwhelmed by suggestions for improvement—clearly, well intentioned? They provide a good map of improvements. You should tackle them one at a time, by focusing on one thing to be improved and letting other things be as they are.

Want to improve vocal variety? Drop the speech writing and read a famous speech or letter. Interpretive reading is a great opportunity to practice your vocal skills and it is fun. Moreover, you could find many examples to learn from. My favourite is Benedict Cumberbatch reading Sol LeWitt’s letter to Eva Hesse, what is yours?

Want to improve speech structure and content? Guineapig it on colleagues, family, your dog! Don’t worry much about other features, like posture and vocal variety. Open Mic is a great model for testing material, which is used by experienced speakers.

Want to pump your impromptu speaking? Volunteer for Table Topic Sessions at Toastmasters Club Meeting, they are often open to guests, or attend (run?) a Table Topic Marathon. Your learning goal is to start speaking on the spot, so practice this and only this.

Want to give a helpful speech evaluation? Limit your suggestions to 1 or 2 points maximum. I prefer “3-2-1” evaluation scheme: three observations on achievements, two suggestions for improvement, one takeaway.

Practice makes you better. Just keep going. One step at a time.

Shades of Informality

By mikepeleah in Measuring the unmeasurable

Informal employment attracts a lot of attention, because it is widespread but associated with risks. It lacks of insurance against shocks, and therefore directly related to vulnerability to poverty. Many Social-Economic Impact Assessments of COVID-19 showed that informal workers were particularly hit hard by turbulence in 2020-21. However, measurement of informality is not that simple. Most often used definition is lack of social and/or health insurance. Meanwhile, research has shown that formalization does not automatically lead to poverty reduction.

While there are many reasons why this link does not work automatically—flexibility of informal arrangements, hidden costs of formalization—one reason could be how we measure informality. We usually measure welfare on the family level, using household income or expenditure and assuming that families share these. However, informality is usually measured and analysed on individual level—individual workers, family firm, the household head—without making assumptions how risks and benefits of informality are shared in family. (There is a rich and growing body of literature on migration as a risk sharing, for instance “Risk Sharing and Internal Migration”) As a result, policies related to poverty reduction and reducing the risks of informality are often designed with different groups in mind—families and single individuals respectively.

This chart of the week comes from a recent paper “Welfare and the depth of informality. Evidence from five African countries”. It shows that there are shades of “informality”, rather than simply “Yes” / “No” dichotomy. The paper further investigates the relationship between welfare and informality at the household level. The findings confirm the nonlinear relationship between welfare and informality—families with some formal incomes are as well off as families with only formal income. Moreover, paper suggests that moving to full formality only translates to meaningful welfare improvements if the household income gain is sufficiently large.

Avoiding ‘Badjectives’ in Communication

By mikepeleah in Blah Blah Wow!

One common comment I usually get from a Grammarian is to replace ‘very’ word with stronger alternatives, and there is no lack of good synonyms. However, it could be vital to avoid “badjectives”—adjectives so generic and broad that they have virtually no impact (as Joel Schwartzberg calls them https://www.inc.com/joel-schwartzberg/improve-communication-by-avoiding-badjectives.html). These are used so broadly, that they are trivialized and lost any meaning—all ideas are “great”, impact is “amazing”, products are “innovative”, name it. We use them for a simple reason, they are readily available, instant and easy to use.

Going from “adjectives” to more impactful adjectives is simple—just to ask and answer WHY? question and then choose the most meaningful. An example:

❌ Great job, Lisa!

❔ WHY was Lisa’s accomplishment “great?” Because it could lead to a new revenue stream.

✔ Wow, Lisa, the new market you discovered could result in an entirely new revenue stream! 👉 https://www.inc.com/joel-schwartzberg/improve-communication-by-avoiding-badjectives.html