Engineered

Trends in data science

I often tell students who ask me what skills they should focus on acquiring to look up job postings in their fields and read the list of required and preferred qualifications. Of course some of those lists amount to wishful thinking, especially for Big Data which is a relatively recent field (and so it can be rare to find an applicant with the years of experience that a job posting mentions), but they provide good insights into what companies are looking for. A particularly easy way to look up relevant job postings is to browse through the amazon.jobs website. 

So below are some skills that seem particularly relevant today. They're obviously not all from the same job posting and, also obviously, not all job postings mention all of those, so students really should browse through postings appropriate to their interests to get a good idea of the skills they should gain. Since the course Analytics for Decision Support that I am teaching has no prereq, students typically don't have the background to be introduced to the topics below besides basic techniques (many have never used R before and/or never written an optimization model), but I'll try to discuss some of those in this blog throughout the semester, and perhaps some of my readers who already have preliminary knowledge of analytics will find those posts helpful. So I won't define the terms below today but I am just using the post to make a preliminary list of some topics I could cover. Browsing through more job postings, whether at Amazon.Jobs or elsewhere, may uncover more ideas but the list below is a good start.

• experience of Python and/or R
• knowledge of SparkML
• experience using libraries such as scikit-learn, caret, mlr, mllib
• experience using terabyte size datasets 
• familiarity using data visualization tools
• experience using SQL
• knowledge of AWS AI/ML services, platforms and frameworks and AWS technologies such as Redshift, S3, EC2, Data Pipeline and EMR
• skills in Java or C/C++
• working knowledge of smooth and non-smooth optimization methods and associated technology (CPLEX, Gurobi, XPRESS) as well as high-level modeling techniques (AMPL, R, Matlab)
• experience coding in traditional programming languages such as C++, Java, Clojure or Python
• familiarity with writing scripts (Perl, Ruby, Groovy)
• experience with large distributed datasets (Spark, Hadoop, MapReduce)
• also mentioned sometimes are: Weka, SAS, Hive, Pig and time series forecasting

The Anti Commencement Speech

As a faculty member at a top research university who just last week listened to the Southern Methodist University Commencement speech by the CEO of AT&T, I wonder what Commencement speakers see when they look at the sea of graduates in front of them. They see happy graduates, for sure. They see graduates who hope that their brand new degree will open the doors to a better future. Yet if those men and women delivering Commencement speeches have been paying attention to the world around them while they ascended to the top, they know that career success doesn’t always reward the employees that deserve it and not all graduates hoping for a fulfilling (or simply bill-paying) career will achieve it. So when they look at the crowd of capped-and-gowned graduates in front of them, they must also see young adults about to have a rude awakening, no matter how well-meaning and talented they are.

A student asked me the other day what advice I had for new graduates. It is a harder question to answer than it seems. I have been doing this job for almost fifteen years now and the graduates who have had the most success have not been the superstar ones who believed they were awesome and any company would be lucky to have them (in general those students could have attended better schools but had chosen mine for the financial aid package, and throughout college they kept an attitude that they were simply better than their classmates; later they tended not to find many allies in the workplace and their careers languished). The graduates who have had the most successful careers have not been either the lackluster students who kept repeating that grades don’t matter in the workforce (because at the end of the day, knowing what you’re talking about does help your getting promoted). Instead, they have been the students who weren’t overly rigid in their view of what the degree meant, and could adapt to their changing circumstances while always striving to do well.

I answered that people change a lot after they’re twenty-two, and while they certainly achieve a milestone when they graduate from college, it is only the first milestone in a career that will literally count dozens. Deep down, people wish they could be guaranteed success if they did all the right things and checked them off a success checklist. Going to college is one of those supposedly right things. But the four years coming up after graduation are far more important than the four years of college that students have had so far. The biggest mistake I’ve seen my former students do is not to keep their eye on their career goals while they were entering their first job. Some have associated with the wrong crowd, enjoying life as a paycheck-earning young adult a little too much, hanging out with recent graduates who weren’t good role models. Some allowed themselves to stay in jobs that didn’t utilize their talent.

The thing is, if your career fails to lift in your first job, it’s going to be hard to convince anyone else to give a chance to you rather than to a brand-new graduate who hasn’t had an underwhelming first job experience. If you’re spending your days making photocopies and bringing coffee, you’ve either given someone the impression you couldn’t do any better or you’re in a toxic work environment where entry-level hires are being taken advantage of. Either way, you’ve got to make a change. So either ditch the fair-weather friends you’re having too much fun with at happy hour (because people who aren’t succeeding in their career love nothing more than seeing their pseudo-friends’ careers stall as well) or ditch the manager, also known as: go back on the job market.

A career may last forty years, but the first years are critical in either achieving the momentum that will pull you up through the ranks toward high-performer status or being pulled down to earth by the forces of bad luck and surrounding mediocrity. It’s great that you got your Bachelor degree, but the hard work is yet ahead.

Of course, that’s not the sort of speech the graduates in formal attire and their proud parents in the audience want to hear on Commencement Day.

Turning Potential Into Success

The November-December 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review has an interesting article about how to launch successful leaders, given that less than a quarter of executives at organizations that have corporate leadership development programs thing they're effective. Much of the article reflects pure common sense but it is a good read because of the structured process it offers in assessing and developing leaders. 

It identifies 5 predictors for success: motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement and determination, advises to map people's potential to the competencies required in various roles (this also requires top management to determine the most important competencies for leadership roles), and give emerging leaders the opportunities and coaching they need to strengthen the critical competencies.

Nothing in this is earth-shattering, but the details of the approach are worth noting. The authors, all at the global executive search firm Egon Zehnder, evaluate executives on their mastery of eight leadership competencies: 

1. results orientation
2. strategic orientation 
3. collaboration and influence
4. team leadership
5. developing organizational capabilities
6. change leadership
7. market understanding
8. inclusiveness.

While the evaluation is made on a scale from 1 to 7, they advise against the unrealistic expectation of looking for future leaders who would score high across all dimensions. They state: "C-level positions typically require a rating of at least 4 in the competencies critical for those roles, and CEO positions a rating of at least 5." In fact, "in a study of more than 5,000 executives at 47 companies [they] conducted with McKinsey, we found that only 1% had an average proficiency score of 6 or better, and just 11% had an average score of 5."

They give examples of how two very different candidates for the CEO job were assessed and given opportunities for growth in a trial year while the current CEO agreed to postpone his departure by one year (it will come as no surprise that the candidate with the highest potential for growth and slightly lower level of competence before the trial year ended up with the job, and did superbly in it). The authors also provide specific kinds of stretch assignments to develop competencies, and include a side bar about capturing the female advantage. They said that in their global database of executives' potential and competence, women's score trailed men's in five of the competencies, with differences particularly large in strategic orientation and market understanding, but "scored higher than men on three of the four hallmarks of potential - curiosity, engagement and determination - while men have a slightly stronger level of insight." They conclude that "women are typically not given the roles and responsibilities they need to hone critical competencies." Hopefully their model provides a quantitative framework to identify and remedy this deficiency. 

The one criticism I had of the article was that it is focused on CEOs and perhaps C-suite executives, due to the nature of the authors' expertise. While the core competencies are important at the C-suite level, they take on more importance at different stages of an employee's career, and I would have wanted to know more about the trajectories of successful leaders. For instance, if you don't exhibit a talent for inclusiveness from the start, will you ever be able to successfully develop this skill or will you only ever pay lip service to the need for diverse points of view? When in a career does it become important to exhibit market understanding or change leadership? In which order should young employees seek to develop those competencies. Perhaps it will be the basis for another HBR article.

"The Skill that Industry Hires Need"

According to this post in Science magazine (geared toward PhD students and academics in science), industry employers particularly value project management skills in new hires, "including working in a team and delivering on schedule and on budget". I found this particularly striking because project management is perhaps the least used skill in graduate school. There is no timeline in submitting a research paper or getting a degree. Some doctoral students take five years to graduate; other take eight. There is little concept of a schedule to be kept, research-wise. In a way, not only are graduate students not taught project management, they are taught the opposite: it takes the time that it takes; what matters is the end result. No wonder then that graduate students with industry internships have an advantage over the competition when they seek industry positions.

(As a side note, this got me thinking about the skill that analytics students need the most, since I teach analytics rather than science. Of course project management is important for analytics students too, but based on my experience, students struggle the most with the idea that there might not be a single best model to be created from their data. You can create, say, a linear regression keeping only the coefficients that are significant at the 95% level, or you can focus on the 99% level, or you can have categorical variables, with some labels being very significant and others not as much, or you can have a logistic regression model and a classification tree model to predict a binary outcome, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. Students are disappointed sometimes when it feels like there isn't a unique best answer. But you create your models based on the data you have, and the process is necessarily imperfect. You can still get good insights from your model. )

Going back to the theme of this post, I think that undergraduate students learn more about project management through their capstone project at the end of their studies than doctoral students do. It makes sense, given that most undergrads go on to industry positions right after graduation (only a few get a Master's degree before starting work), but it is time to recognize the changed job prospects for PhDs too. Could we bring project management to academic research itself? Grant proposals ask us principal investigators to do as much, with budget justifications, deliverables and intermediate milestones, but graduate students are rarely involved in defining those. Maybe universities should provide more training on those matters.

Or maybe this could motivate a stronger emphasis on doctorate programs with time-constrained "praxis" capstone projects rather than dissertations, such as D.Eng. rather than PhDs. Perhaps it is even time for a renaissance of doctoral students that aren't PhDs in order to better meet industry needs, or the creation of an intermediary degree between Master's and PhDs. When I was at MIT, my department (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) had a degree of Electrical Engineer, which was aimed at doctoral students who had completed all coursework in the PhD program: the All But Dissertation folks. Obviously most A.B.D.s don't plan on working in academia and maybe an advanced degree geared toward industry would be better suited for their career goals. This raises the issue of degree visibility and name recognition, if only a handful of universities deliver the new degree, but given today's pace of change, it'd make sense to introduce new degrees more suited to the needs of the workforce.

We could even imagine a system where students get credentials for each year of graduate study (or some number of credits to account for part-time students), with "Graduate Credential Level 1" being received at the end of the first year (maybe similarly to a Master of Engineering), "Level 2" at the end of the second year (equivalent to a Master of Science), and then adding "Level 3", "Level 4" etc, with the student being able to stop for a few years in-between if he so wishes. There is a lot of talk on campuses these days about continuing education, but it is unrealistic to expect these trends will fit neatly within existing degree programs. It is time for new graduate degrees.

First Quarter: Is your story limiting you?

I was chatting with some graduating seniors the other day and they asked about the ways I'd seen previous grads fall short of their potential. This is probably going to take several posts but one thing that came to mind is how people sometimes end up limiting themselves (or self-sabotaging) based on the story they have in their mind about themselves. This can take low-key dimensions: an A+ student is so used to being praised for doing a perfect job that he selects situations in the workforce where he will also be able to do a perfect job, not realizing that those situations require little growth and learning, which should be two primary considerations in work after college. Or a student who was used to getting good grades without much effort clings to assignments (or jobs) where he doesn't have to work very hard because he has no idea whether he can even succeed otherwise.

But this can also have farther ranging implications, especially given the importance of personal essays to get into college. Admissions committees often like seeing stories of resilience, and who doesn't want to be resilient, really? A student who has been able to defy the odds and overcome poverty, a single-parent family or various personal hardships had much to be proud of. At some point, though, it is important for those students who have defined themselves as outsiders to find their community and rewrite their story. At some point anyway, you realize that few people go through life without any hardships, whether those hardships happen early in life or later.

If they don't, they may only relate to, say, other people from poor backgrounds without realizing that maybe their supervisor with the fancy car has overcome much personal struggle as well, or overly focus on another employee as a father figure because they grew up without one. (While mentoring is an important component of personal growth, my take on failed parental relationships is that you never find a replacement for good parents outside the family, there is much potential for meaningful personal relationships among friends of all ages - just not surrogate parents.) They may also focus on minor issues that trigger them because of their childhood, or may be taken advantage of by people who want to get ahead without being quite technically competent for it but have the street smarts to detect weaknesses in others and exploit them.

You can tell if you're clinging to a story if (1) you bring up the same components of your past again and again to people, who gently comment they've heard this before or (2) the same things or people keep annoying you, to a degree far disproportionate to the actual offense or (3) different people keep providing the same feedback to you and you keep finding "excellent" reasons why their advice doesn't apply in your case. 

If you think you might be in this situation, I'd say you should first honor the story you've told about yourself so far, because it has helped you bring you to the point you are at. Then you have to focus on changing your self-image and telling a more empowering story about yourself, to match your new situation. Pick a new affirmation, like "I relate well with all kinds of people" (instead of only connecting with only outcasts who match your story of outsider-ness) or "I display grit and resilience at work" (instead of coasting through assignments by giving them your minimal effort), and find 5 things to do each day to express this new truth about yourself. If you want to relate better to others, this might be as simple as replying promptly to an email from someone you view as the quintessential insider. If you want to learn grit or resilience, you might simply take a colleague for coffee and ask them how they worked through this high-stakes project you've been hearing about, or watch 1 video on a topic you know you should learn but don't know how. You do not have to volunteer for a make-or-break-your-career assignment this very minute. Pick 3 easy things a day, then 1 slightly more difficult thing, then 1 thing that stretches you more. And of course you can do fewer than 5 things a day, but each thing can be short and part of a bigger whole, and 5 little things will help you reinforce your behavior from different perspectives.

Beware of friends or relatives who want to keep you in the role they have known you. Often people are very comfortable with the role you have been filling and have some personal interest in keeping things the same. (For instance, if you've coasted through college, then your old roommate might want you to stay the same because he's worried about having to display grit and resilience himself and it's safer if he keeps you down in the pits with him.) Sometimes you have to loosen old ties to make progress. Finally, it helps to pick a symbol of the new story or identity you're trying to create, and keep it somewhere you can easily see it.

What made you successful in college isn't necessarily what will help you succeed after it. Plenty of outside factors explain why a promising career might get derailed: a company that suddenly declares bankruptcy, an egomaniacal boss, an important project that fails for reasons outside your control but brands you "bottom line poison" for a year - don't add your own inner issues to it. 

First Quarter: Lesson in Success (It's the Little Things)

This is going to seem like a minor post, but the matter is important nonetheless because it affects how you are perceived and the post gains weight toward the end. I swear it does. But first, the minor part. All together now: It's the little things. If you are sending an email to someone, don't reply to the latest email they sent you (the one that has a totally different title and subject than the one you're writing about). Create a new email, with a title that matches what you're writing about (so that they know if they're busy whether they should click on it now or not, and how they should file it, and they will have a much easier time finding it later when they scroll through all your emails). Just replying to the first email of that person that you can find even if the topic is wildly different just makes you look sloppy.

Also, while we're on the subject of little things, if you're given instructions on how to submit, such as "the title of your project report should be titled Report_YourFirstName_YourLastName.docx", and you upload "Report.docx", then the recipient may not make a comment but won't think more highly of you because you made that person's task more difficult in actually finding your report next time she looks for it. So now she has to rename it for you the way she wanted it. Always put yourself in the shoes of the person you're communicating with. 

This actually also crossed my mind at the wonderful Alpha Omega Epsilon panel discussion a few weeks ago. One of the AOE ladies asked about work-life balance, and three of the panelists started expounding at great lengths, with minor variations, on their awesome husband who cooks and helps with child care. Well... my guess is that the AOE ladies ranged in age from 18 to 22. While it is wonderful to hear about happy marriages with shared responsibilities, it would perhaps have been more helpful to answer from the perspective of a 21-year-old. If you want to talk about relationships, then I guess something along the lines of "be careful not to get into a pattern of doing all the chores at home for your boyfriend in addition to trying to succeed at your job" might have been more suitable for that audience. Then one person started praising organization, but in the context of child care and her husband picking up the kids when she has a faculty meeting. Which is a very valid and important point for that person, and perhaps not something the audience could implement right away.

I'm the one who threw a wrench into the whole pretty picture by saying something along the lines of "you know, work-life balance is always going to be tough, and of course it matters to be organized because if you aren't you will struggle mightily for sure, but it's a matter of picking your fights because you won't be able to do all the things you want to do." And then I said more, but there needs to be an advantage to being a AOE sister and taking part to the actual panel discussion, so I won't share everything here. Plus, the AOE ladies sent me a wonderful thank you card signed by all the sisters, which I put right away in my Box Of Important Things (this is how free-spirit me manages my organization.) All this to say, it is hard for everybody to put herself in other people's shoes, even long past college age. I also do it sometime. It is a tough skill to master but if you do, you will be ahead of the game!  

I also would have wanted to turn the question around and asked the AOE sisters how they thought professors perceived their work-life balance. One point I made was that I wished we professors knew more when students had a lot of school commitments because it is hard to know otherwise whether people are spending their time surfing the web or trying to finish the assignment for another class. Some other panelists seemed to be of the opinion that students would be on Facebook or Amazon.com.

I am of the opinion (being a goody-two-shoes at heart, of the kind who believes that most people start nice and then become mean and bitter when life disappoints them, although someone argued convincingly the other day that some people are just mean at heart and show their meanness when they get power, even when they're not old yet, but more on that some other day) that students try to enjoy college and also do well in school and when they're in class they might try to finish other assignments or projects or email about an event they're organizing as extra-curricular activity, in addition to answering their texts on their phone.

Of course, part of the reason I think that is that if students actually use in-class time to surf Facebook or buy stuff on Amazon, I wouldn't think very highly of their self-discipline, and the Stanford Marshmallow Project has shown that such students don't do very well in life later on (although admittedly the SMP studied the consequences into adulthood of self-discipline for four-year-olds). 

This is all about thinking about the image you want to project and seeing yourself from the perspective of the other person to evaluate whether s/he perceives you the way you want. 

First Quarter: Q1 2016

Today marks the end of the first quarter of 2016. Yes, I'm probably the only person in academia who notices things like that. But I've been reading books on onboarding for the "First Quarter"(insights for new grads on taking a good start in the workforce) part of my blog, and the business focus in The First 90 Days has convinced me to try planning my goals in terms of quarters. I like the concept because 3 months is long enough that you can have concrete, meaningful achievements, but short enough that you - hopefully - see a clear path to get there from the beginning. Fear not, this is not going to be a post where I drag you through my to-do list and give myself public kudos for how many items I've crossed off (although I was tempted - it's been a very good Q1!). But if you haven't tried planning your year in quarters, you might want to try. Then you can break your big quarterly goals into smaller monthly mini-goals, and even smaller weekly micro-goals, and maybe even daily nano-goals. The quarterly goal might be something not directly in your control, such as get promoted, but the daily and weekly goals should be things you can control. The quarterly horizon allows you to stay focused on a goal that is both meaningful and achievable.

Because so many (all?) universities have their fiscal year start July 1, the end of Q1 also means there is only one quarter to go before the end of the year in higher ed, and while just about every media outlet will talk about New Year resolutions when January 1 approaches, I haven't seen anything about New Academic Year resolutions. Why would you want to have July 1 resolutions if you're not in academia, you might ask? Because (1) late November and December are usually so full of family drama or celebrations (your pick) that many people don't have the energy required on January 1 to start tackling high-impact change projects and (2) people usually take some time off over the summer too, so they might be better able to take a head start on tackling their resolutions. And if you've just graduated and only starting work in the fall, this might be the longest vacation you'll have in many years to come. Make it count. 

If you're in academia, then it makes sense to have New Academic Year resolutions because you're probably starting a new year of employment with your university and a new year on your clock to promotion, tenure or reappointment - if you started work during the summer like most faculty - and because your students (especially the doctoral students on your research team) also count their seniority in terms of academic years, so your plan would be aligned with their development. 

While you can never plan your life according to a rigid timeline (unless your work doesn't involve you interacting with other people in any way...), reviewing quarterly and yearly goals helps you remember what you want to achieve instead of getting distracted by low-value daily commitments. It is easy to get sidetracked and hard to get back on track.

The best part of making monthly, quarterly and yearly goals, I think, is to keep all those lists together and review them periodically to see what you have accomplished and how your objectives evolve over time. I have sometimes carried to-do items over from a monthly list to the next several times in a row, and when I just can't manage to get something done, there is usually more to it than a simple time management problem. So it is worth also using the lists to take a step back and wonder if you see a pattern in the things that you just never get around to getting done. 

Finally, I'll end this post, since it is part of my First Quarter series, by mentioning the David Allen bestselling book Getting Things Done. Often the time management systems students have developed in college aren't enough to handle the variety of projects and tasks they have to tackle in the workforce, and it might be worthwhile thinking about better systems to put in place before you start. Getting Things Done will prove full of excellent ideas in that regard.

HBR on Learning to Learn

What is it with Harvard Business Review that it publishes lots of beginner-level articles these days? The feature in the March issue of HBR on "Learning to Learn" is a very basic feature advocating for aspiration (wanting to learn), self-awareness (understanding your level in the skill you want to learn), curiosity (trying something until we succeed) and vulnerability (accepting you may be bad at something for months). This is the sort of cutting-edge thinking that get you published in HBR these days.  

Here is what I would've added to it, taking a manager's or would-be manager's perspective, since after all this is HBR's target audience. First, do you really need to learn the skill or are you reacting like the employee you were in your previous role? Maybe you did a lot of data analysis before you were promoted to manager, and now your direct reports are talking about R and Python. Do you actually need to learn the software, or are you just a little nostalgic for your old job? Let's assume you actually need to learn a new skill for your new job. There will be two types of skills you have to learn: (a) skills you know you don't have or have a lack of, and (b) skills you don't realize you don't have, like those people who think they have amazing interpersonal skills because they ask their employees how they're doing once every six months.

Obviously, identifying (b) skills is tricky. So you should make a list of the top skills you (and anyone you use as sounding board - mentors, advisors, former colleagues, new boss, new colleagues) think you will most need in the new job, and evaluate your blind spots. Why did the person who used to have your job (in case of a promotion) succeed, or fail? What are the skills you didn't need as much in your previous job? We often develop skills to the level we need to function in our current role, and not much above. (Unused skills tend to atrophy.) Where will you need to stretch? Are you really that good? What stories are you telling yourself that may no longer serve you? For instance, you may work in Division A, where the one thing you know for sure is that Division B is full of the people no other division wants and everything wrong in the company is their fault. If you're promoted to leading Division A and the role calls for a close interaction with Division B's manager, you will achieve whatever goals you have a lot more easily if you change the story you tell yourself about Division B to something more empowering.  

As you move up the ranks, learning shifts away from technical to personal/interpersonal content, from tactical to strategic issues, from direct contributor to delegator, from one-way communication (to one's immediate supervisor) to matrix collaborations with one's team and other units. If you can't think of a skill you need to learn, think about situations in your work life that keep repeating themselves. That will probably give you a clue.

For instance, if you were very successful early on when you took the helm of a company in trouble, but have been struggling with getting your team to follow you now that the company is on surer footing, maybe you have a "savior" leadership style that works well in times of crisis but not as well in less troubled times, where employees seek more autonomy. (This also begs the question: do you need to learn more consensus-based leadership styles, or do you need to find another company in trouble?)

When were you last wrong? If you can't remember when you were last wrong, then you have the issue you need to learn served to you on a platter, because no one is never wrong, and being convinced you're never wrong will only stifle dissent and discourage your colleagues or direct reports to be honest with you. If you've had even a moderate amount of success in your career so far and been promoted at least once (or been put on the fast track to promotion), it is also worth thinking about who might be wanting you to fail. People have the most irrational reasons for wanting others to fail, and people who succeed have such a different outlook (focusing on improving themselves, seeking role models, etc) than people who try to make others fail (obsessed with pulling others down to their level) that you might not identify potential troublemakers by reasoning alone. Yet, those people leave clues - they badmouth you to others, or make subtle digs at you. Lyndon Johnson is famous for saying that you don't belong in politics if you can't walk into a room and say immediately who is for you and who is against you. Once you start moving up the ranks, this is true of the business world too.  

Finally, you need a learning plan. What will the outcome look like when you have achieved your learning objective? Say you want to learn a new language because you're being transferred overseas. Do you want to have a basic conversation around the water-cooler on Monday morning, speak enough to go and buy groceries, be fluent enough to understand your new colleagues when they speak in their mother tongue? What are reasonable time commitment and timeline to achieve your objective? Has someone done something like this before? Who will you enlist to achieve your goals? What are your intermediary milestones and your weekly goals? 

An issue with academia is that new Assistant Professors get hired at research universities on the basis of their research but are expected to also teach. Quite a few, at least in engineering, have not taught during their doctoral studies and were only Teaching Assistants. These professors have to be "good enough" teachers to get tenure, but not exceptional. Hence, some of them don't see the value in learning how to be a great teacher given the time pressure to produce enough high-caliber research by the time they come up for tenure. They make the calculation, unconscious or not, that on-the-fly teaching (the "let's get the slides from my colleague and hope for the best" approach to teaching) will be good enough. They have few role models beyond the professors they remember from their early years in graduate school (later years are usually devoted to research), since professors rarely attend each other's lectures.

Learning to be a good teacher then is something that only professors genuinely interested in how to make their students best learn the material (whether for the good of their students or as an intellectual challenge but not primarily out of desire to gain tenure at a research university) learn how to do. This doesn't mean that professors who aren't good teachers don't want to be good teachers, but they may not find the time to become good ones - or they may be delusional about their abilities, as the HBR article suggests, in the one interesting stat the author quotes: in a Cornell study, "94% of college professors reported that they were doing above average work." (We will note that median and mean aren't the same thing, which the HBR article doesn't point out, and that the stat isn't solely about teaching-related work.) 

For my readers serious about developing their leadership skills, I recommend the unfortunately titled Primal Intelligence: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, which is a must-read. I also highly recommend The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, where I first read the LBJ quote.

First Quarter: Book Review of New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan

Today's post is a review of another well-known book about "onboarding", i.e., transitioning into a new job: "The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan: A Comprehensive Onboarding Strategy for Leaders at Every Level" by George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check and Jorge E. Pedraza. What I like most about the book is the specificity of the questions the authors ask and action steps they recommend - because so many business books are puffed-up magazine pieces that drum up revenue for the authors' consulting practices, I tend to prefer books with concrete, tangible advice that demonstrates clear knowledge of the subject matter on the authors' part. The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan delivers. Not only is it full of valuable content for the leader "at every level", the print version of the book has many fillable forms that are also downloadable for free on the Internet. 

Of course, not every single piece of advice the authors give will be applicable to the new graduate or entry-level hire. This is because the entry-level hire won't have any subordinate, or "follower", so how to deal with direct reports and related topics such as how to craft a burning imperative for one's unit and communicate the vision to one's team don't apply. Yet, many of the tasks the authors recommend for the new leader would be of benefit to the new graduate, in particular (I've put my comments in italics, the rest is from the book):

• Define your new role (map and avoid the most common land mines, do your due diligence with a risk assessment checklist before accepting the job)
• Choose the right approach for the business context and culture you face (while the entry-level grad won't define the strategy or the mission, understanding culture and context can only help her do her job and position her for advancement.)
• Craft your message. (Obviously, the message an entry-level hire wants to communicate won't affect the direction of the company the way the CEO's message would, and it will be inner-focused rather than oriented toward the company as a whole. Yet, it is always good to articulate this message clearly so that you can then run everything you do against it and check if your actions are aligned with the impression you want to give of yourself. If you're at a loss for what your message would be: I am a team player who remains calm under stress and gets the job done by the deadline and within specs while maintaining and fostering good relations with my colleagues.)
• Deploy an information gathering and learning plan. 
• Make a powerful first impression on your first day. (Think carefully about how you are going to spend Day One. Pay attention to signs and symbols.)
• Embed a Burning Imperative by Day 30. (For an entry-level hire, this burning imperative will most likely be a goal she alone has to achieve, rather than something a team must execute, but it is possible the new hire would enter a company with a whole cohort of new entry-level colleagues and would take the lead among that group.)
• Exploit key milestones to drive team performance by Day 45. (Most likely a team of one for a new hire, but on some occasions, new hires have shown enough leadership potential to be given someone to supervise, such as a co-op or intern.)
• Overinvest in early wins to build team confidence by Day 60. (I can't praise early wins enough, especially for entry-level hires, i.e., people with no track record in the workforce. Early wins show your boss, who often has very little information about you unless you interned for him the previous summer, that he was right in hiring you. Once you have shown he made the correct decision, you will have established yourself as someone who belong in the company. You will be more easily considered for the next step up or forgiven for your mistakes. First impressions matter, and that means first achievements matter too.)

The book's appendices alone more than make up for its price (at $14.28 on Amazon.com, the book is already a steal).  I particularly recommend the six basic elements of leadership, the situational assessment using the 5Cs framework: customers, collaborators, capabilities, competitors and conditions and the toolbox on how to be a great communicator.

Just go and buy the book already!