Hiring Based on What People Can Do, Instead of Their Credentials

(p. B4) Compose Inc. asks a lot of job applicants. Anyone who wants to be hired at the San Mateo, Calif., cloud-storage firm must write a short story about data, spend a day working on a mock project and complete an assignment.
There is one thing the company doesn’t ask for: a résumé.
Compose is among a handful of companies trying to judge potential hires by their abilities, not their résumés. So-called “blind hiring” redacts information like a person’s name or alma mater, so that hiring managers form opinions based only on that person’s work. In other cases, companies invite job candidates to perform a challenge–writing a software program, say–and bring the top performers in for interviews or, eventually, job offers.
Bosses say blind hiring reveals true talents and results in more diverse hires. And the notion that career success could stem from what you know, and not who you know, is a tantalizing one.
. . .
“We were hiring people who were more fun for us to talk to,” says Mr. Mackey. Trouble was, they were often a poor fit for the job, according to the CEO.
So the company, which was acquired by International Business Machines Corp. last year, added an anonymous sample project to the hiring process. Prospective hires spend about four to six hours performing a task similar to what they would do at Compose–writing a marketing blog post for a technical product, for example.
. . .
The sample projects have unearthed hires who have turned out to be top performers, says Mr. Mackey.

For the full story, see:
RACHEL FEINTZEIG. “Why Bosses Are Turning to ‘Blind Hiring’.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Jan. 6, 2016): B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Jan. 5, 2016, and has the title “The Boss Doesn’t Want Your Résumé.”)

Open Offices Are “an Absurd Attack on Concentration”

(p. A11) Mr. Newport acknowledges the good intentions behind open offices: They are meant to encourage serendipity and teamwork. But he argues that burdening workers with perpetual distractions constitutes “an absurd attack on concentration” that creates “an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously.” Sure, there’s collaboration–not least the unspoken camaraderie among coworkers who have shared in the cringe-inducing experience of hearing a colleague castigate her spouse over the phone.
Mr. Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, is the unusual academic who will sully himself with matters as practical as: How can a talented employee rack up the rarefied and acute skills–writing, coding, scouring the latest mergers and acquisitions–that make someone indispensable? His answer? Expanding your capacity for “deep work,” ruthlessly weeding out distractions and regularly carving out stretches of time to sharpen abilities. Mr. Newport explains why honing an ability to concentrate can yield enormous professional payouts. Then he lays out rules for becoming one such rare bird.
Most corporate workers, Mr. Newport argues, don’t have clear feedback about how to spend their time. As a result, employees use “busyness as a proxy for productivity,” which Mr. Newport describes aptly as “doing lots of stuff in a visible manner”–blasting out emails, for instance, or holding meetings on superficial progress on some project.
. . .
The book’s best example is the Pulitzer Prize winning Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert A. Caro, known for working on a meticulous schedule in his Manhattan office dressed in a coat and tie “so that he never forgets when he sits down with his research that he is going to work,” as one profile of Mr. Caro put it.

For the full review, see:
KATE BACHELDER. “BOOKSHELF; Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?; Yes, open offices cultivate camaraderie–among coworkers who all cringe as a colleague shouts at her soon-to-be ex-husband over the phone.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Jan. 20, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added, italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 19, 2016.)

The book under review, is:
Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016.

Recording a Pain of “5” and Then Leaving Without Relieving

If health care was provided by free market companies whose success depended on voluntarily attracting customers, instead of by bureaucratic, hyper-regulated, CYA incentivized, and competition-insulated bureaucracies, would the surreal experience reported below be as common as it is?

(p. 11) A FRIEND was recently hospitalized after a bicycle accident. At one point a nursing student, together with a more senior nurse, rolled a computer on wheels into the room and asked my friend to rate her pain on a scale of 1 to 10.

She mumbled, “4 to 5.” The student put 5 into the computer — and then they left, without further inquiring about, or relieving, my friend’s pain.
This is not an anecdote about nurses not doing their jobs; it’s an illustration of what our jobs have become in the age of electronic health records. Computer documentation in health care is notoriously inefficient and unwieldy, but an even more serious problem is that it has morphed into more than an account of our work; it has replaced the work itself.
Our charting, rather than our care, is increasingly what we are evaluated on. When my hospital switched to bar code scanning for medication administration, not only were the nurses on my floor rated as “red,” “yellow” or “green” based on the percentage of meds we scanned, but those ratings were prominently and openly displayed on printouts left at the nurses’ station.
. . .
We need to streamline our records so that they serve just one master: the patient. We should focus on the most important information in guaranteeing accuracy of diagnosis, efficacy of treatment, continuity of care and patient safety. Otherwise the content of our care will be increasingly warped by the demands of our e-record systems — and patients like my poor friend will lie in hospital beds in pain, uncomforted by the knowledge that the electronic record of that pain is satisfyingly and exactingly complete.

For the full commentary, see:
THERESA BROWN. “Patients vs. Paperwork.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., DEC. 20, 2015): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 19, 2015, and has the title “When Hospital Paperwork Crowds Out Hospital Care.”)

“Hey You, Get Busy” Bolted in Place

(p. D8) Most scientists rely on grants from the federal government and private foundations to finance their work. Michael W. Davidson turned to neckties.
Mr. Davidson, who died on Dec. 24 [2015] at 65, used sophisticated microscopes to create stunning, psychedelic images of crystallized substances like DNA and hormones, and he contributed to Nobel Prize-honored research about the inner workings of cells. His images were on the covers of scientific journals and, as unlikely as it might seem, on neckwear.
They found their way into men’s apparel in the early 1990s, when Mr. Davidson called Irwin Sternberg, the president of the necktie company Stonehenge Ltd., proposing a series of ties using his ultramagnified, wildly colorful images of vitamins. Mr. Sternberg, though skeptical, agreed to take a look.
“When I saw Michael’s work, I started to think I couldn’t get a designer more talented,” Mr. Sternberg said in an interview.
Stonehenge released a line of “vitamin ties” in September 1993. A year later, neckties with Mr. Davidson’s images of moon rocks were released on the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first manned lunar mission. Ties with images of cocktails, beer and wine followed. Millions of ties were sold, and a slice of the profits — millions of dollars — went to charity. Mr. Davidson’s share went to his laboratory work at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
. . .
Mr. Davidson started college at Georgia Southern University, then attended Oglethorpe University in Georgia before earning a chemistry degree at Georgia State.
He arrived at Florida State in the early 1980s as a graduate student. He quit to start a business chrome-plating auto parts.
A few years later, Mr. Davidson returned to Florida State as a microscopy technician for a materials research laboratory. “He just came in and said, ‘I think there are things we can do,’ and he got hired,” said Kirby Kemper, a retired Florida State physics professor who was then associate chairman of the physics department.
To produce his work, Mr. Davidson hired an army of assistants. Some were undergraduates. Others were out of school with no credentials in the field. But the work helped propel many of them to successful jobs in academia and industry.
Eric Clark had been a nurse when Mr. Davidson hired him as an assistant in 1999. Now, as an application developer, he is continuing Mr. Davidson’s educational website and scientific illustration operations. (The molecular biology laboratory was disbanded.)
Mr. Davidson worked seven days a week, and he expected the same of the people who worked with him. On his door was a large metal sign that said, “Hey you, get busy.” MagLab officials told him to take it down. Mr. Davidson bolted it in place, and it is still there.

For the full obituary, see:
KENNETH CHANG. “Michael W. Davidson, 65, a Scientist Who Had an Artist’s Eye for Detail.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 16, 2016): D8.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 12, 2016, and has the title “Michael W. Davidson, a Success in Microscopes and Neckwear, Dies at 65.”)

Cooking Over Indoor Wood Fires Kills Millions

(p. A13) Indoor air pollution, caused mainly by cooking over wood fires indoors, is the world’s biggest cause of environmental death. It kills an estimated four million people every year, as noted by the nonprofit science news website, SciDev.Net. Getting fossil-fueled electricity and gas to them is the cheapest and quickest way to save their lives. To argue that the increasingly small risk of dangerous climate change many decades hence is something they should be more worried about is positively obscene.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY. “The Green Scare Problem; Raising constant alarms–about fracking, pesticides, GMO food–in the name of safety is a dangerous game.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Aug. 13, 2015): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 13, 2015.)

Regulations Slow Eradication of Cancer

(p. D3) . . . the triumph of chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s and then for many other tumors opened an interlocking series of dilemmas. In the clinic and the hospital, the new protocols demanded that doctors muster the courage to make their patients very sick in order to make them well. But how sick was too sick? The risks and benefits of the powerful treatments now needed careful, deliberate assessment at every stage of the disease.
Similar questions dogged those who developed, evaluated and regulated the drugs. How poisonous could these agents safely be? How assiduously should desperate patients be saved by their government from pharmaceutical risk?
Dr. DeVita stands firmly among those affirming cancer patients’ right to aggressive treatment. One particular exchange summarizes his philosophy: “Do your patients speak to you after you do this to them?” one skeptic asked him early on. “The answer is yes,” he replied, “and for a lot longer.”
The regulatory caution of the Food and Drug Administration has been a thorn in his side for decades: “I’d like to be able to say that as cancer drugs have become increasingly more complex and sophisticated, the F.D.A. has as well. But it has not.” In fact, he writes, “the rate-limiting step in eradicating cancer today is not the science but the regulatory environment we work in.”

For the full review, see:
ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. “An Unbowed Warrior.” The New York Times (Tues., Dec.. 1, 2015): D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date NOV. 30, 2015, and has the title “Review: Science and Politics Collide in ‘The Death of Cancer’.”)

The book under review, is:
DeVita, Vincent T., and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn. The Death of Cancer: After Fifty Years on the Front Lines of Medicine, a Pioneering Oncologist Reveals Why the War on Cancer Is Winnable–and How We Can Get There. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2015.

Anti-GMO Chipotle No Longer Wears Health Halo

(p. A13) . . . if you need an anecdote for how the year unfolded for the anti-GMO movement, look no further than Chipotle. Last spring the fast food company announced with great fanfare that it would take GMO ingredients off its menu. It was all downhill after that. As was quickly pointed out, Chipotle wasn’t being fully truthful, since its soft drinks and cheese contain genetically modified ingredients, and its meat comes from animals fed genetically modified grains. A lawsuit filed in California, which is pending, accused Chipotle of false advertising and deceptive marketing.
Then cases of food-borne illnesses hit Chipotle locations across the country. Supporters of traditional agriculture, who have felt maligned by the burrito company, started keeping a tally of the number of people sickened by Chipotle’s food (ongoing, but more than 300) versus the number sickened by GMOs (zero). As the year winds to a close, the company that once wore the restaurant industry’s health halo is apologizing, preparing for lawsuits, recentralizing its vegetable preparation and cutting locally sourced ingredients.

For the full commentary, see:
JULIE KELLY. “The March of Genetic Food Progress; ‘Farmaceuticals’ and other GM products are slowly being approved, despite political scare campaigns.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Dec. 30, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 29, 2015.)

In Poor Province, Chinese Communists Spend Over $400,000 Building Giant Golden Statue of Mao, Starver of Millions of the Proletariat

(p. B1) ZHUSHIGANG, China — Just two days after images of a giant gold-colored statue of Mao in the bare fields of Henan Province spread across the Internet, the statue was gone — torn down apparently on the orders of embarrassed local officials.
Villagers said demolition teams arrived on Thursday morning [January 7, 2016], and by Friday morning [January 8, 2016], only a pile of rubble remained.
The 120-foot-tall statue, which local media reports said cost $465,000, had been under construction for months and was nearing completion when it began to attract attention.
Some commenters on social media denounced the extravagance of the colossus in a poor, rural part of China, where the money might have been better spent on education or health care.
. . .
Others pointed out the historical irony of erecting the statue in one of the provinces worst hit by the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.
. . .
Statues of Mao, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, were once ubiquitous in China, and many survive. President Xi Jinping has often praised Mao as a model for China today, saying Mao’s era was one when officials were selfless and honest.
But some of his policies were disastrous, including the forced agricultural collectivization and industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, which historians blame for a famine in which tens of millions of people died.

For the full story, see:
DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW. “An Outcry Helps Topple a Mao Statue 120 Feet Tall.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 9, 2016): A4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 8, 2016, and has the title “Golden Mao Statue in China, Nearly Finished, Is Brought Down by Criticism.”)

Private Start-Ups Pursue Fusion Approaches Ignored by Government

(p. B5) Fusion reactions release no carbon dioxide. Their fuel, derived from water, is abundant. Compared with contemporary nuclear reactors, which produce energy by splitting atoms apart, a fusion plant would produce little radioactive waste.
The possibilities have attracted Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. He has invested in General Fusion, a start-up in British Columbia, through Bezos Expeditions, the firm that manages his venture capital investments. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, is betting on another fusion company, Tri Alpha Energy, based in Foothill Ranch, Calif., an hour south of Los Angeles, through his venture arm, Vulcan Capital.
Peter Thiel — the co-founder of PayPal, who once lamented the superficiality of the technology sector by saying, “We were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters” — has invested in a third fusion start-up, Helion Energy, based near Seattle, through Mithril Capital Management.
Government money fueled a surge in fusion research in the 1970s, but the fusion budget was cut nearly in half over the next decade. Federal research narrowed on what scientists saw as the most promising prototype — a machine called a tokamak, which uses magnets to contain and fuse a spinning, doughnut-shape cloud of hydrogen.
Today’s start-ups are trying to perfect some of the ideas that the government left by the wayside.
After earning his doctorate from the University of California, Irvine, in the mid-1990s, Michl Binderbauer had trouble securing federal funds to research an alternative approach to fusion that the American government briefly explored — one that adds the element boron into the hydrogen fuel. The advantage of the mixture is that the reaction does not fling off neutrons that, like shrapnel, can wear down machine parts and make them radioactive.
Mr. Binderbauer, along with his Ph.D. adviser, Norman Rostoker, founded Tri Alpha Energy, eventually raising money from the venture capital arms of Mr. Allen and the Rockefeller family. The company has raised over $200 million.

For the full story, see:
DINO GRANDONI. “Start-Ups Take on Challenge of Fusion.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 26, 2015): B1 & B5.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 25, 2015, and has the title “Start-Ups Take On Challenge of Nuclear Fusion.”)

Madison Revised Notes to Aid Jefferson’s Attack on Hamilton

C-SPAN Book TV today played an extended interview with Mary Sarah Bilder about her book on James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention. Madison revised his notes to share with Jefferson, who had not been present during the convention. Chernow, in his biography of Hamilton, reports how Jefferson criticized Hamilton for aristocratic tendencies. What is most surprising about Bilder’s comments is that Madison had made comments at the convention similar to Hamilton’s discussing whether there might be merits to monarchy. But in his revision of the notes, he deleted those comments before passing the notes to Jefferson, presumably as part of his desire to ally himself more closely with Jefferson and to join in Jefferson’s vilification of Hamilton.
This is not an earth-shattering finding, but it adds support to Chernow’s defense of Hamilton. Jefferson was the slave-holding aristocrat in practice, while Hamilton opposed slavery, and Hamilton’s intellectual speculations on the best form of government were not notably monarchist within the context of the time.

The book discussed on C-SPAN, was:
Bilder, Mary Sarah. Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

The Chernow book I mention above, is:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

A More Dynamic Labor Market May Be the Answer to Italy’s “Quo Vado?”

(p. A19) ROME — A balding government clerk in his late 30s has one true love: “il posto fisso,” a job for life. He doesn’t want to compete in the labor market; he has no urge to move on. He doesn’t even want to earn more. Give him a desk, a chair and a 9-to-5 job in the “pubblica amministrazione,” and he’s happy. Clocking in late, chatting with colleagues, accepting small bribes from taxpayers (most favored: quail), a regular salary — that’s life!
And, of course, there are rubber stamps. The clerk loves them. Slam! Slam! Slam! When his boss, who wants to get rid of him, asks angrily: “What have you contributed to this department?” he shows her his stamping prowess, and almost demolishes her glass table.
This is, more or less, the story of “Quo Vado?” a new comedy that has smashed Italian box office records. It had its premiere on Jan. 1, and in its first week made $39 million; “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” in three weeks, reached just $23 million. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Quo Vado?” — or “Where Am I Going?” a modern spin on the Latin question “Quo vadis?” (“Where are you going?”) — is on course to beat the box-office record for an Italian film in the country, currently at $56 million, set by 2013’s “Sole a catinelle.”
. . .
Italians aren’t afraid of a more dynamic labor market. There is still the dream of making it in the private sector, even if it is less secure than the public-sector jobs that have long been the backbone of the Italian work force. Two out of three workers, according to a recent survey in the Turin newspaper La Stampa, wouldn’t mind taking a risk, as long as it meant the prospect of career advancement.
To foster this more proactive mood, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi — who has seen “Quo Vado?” with his family — last year introduced labor-market legislation known as the Jobs Act (in English, mysteriously). It makes hiring and firing easier, but only in the private sector. For state jobs, like Checco’s, things stay the same. Once you’re in, you’re in.

For the full commentary, see:
Severgnini, Beppe. “More Popular than ‘Star Wars’.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 16, 2016): A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JAN. 14, 2016, and has the title “The Secret Behind Italy’s Favorite New Film.” Where there are minor differences between the print and online versions, the version above follows the online version.)