Monthly Archive for September, 2010

From Nathan Collins, Science Now

Narcissists, new experiments show, are great at convincing others that their ideas are creative even though they’re just average. Still, groups with a handful of narcissists come up with better ideas than those with none, suggesting that self-love contributes to real-world success.

Narcissism and creativity seem to go hand in hand. Creative people often appear self-important, hungry for attention, and unconcerned with others’ ideas and opinions— all traits narcissists share. Think of Pablo Picasso, famous for his iconoclastic paintings but infamous for declaring, “I am God.” Like Picasso, narcissists often rise to positions of importance in art, business, and other endeavors, suggesting that they have ability and ideas that others do not.

But do they really? Psychologists Jack Goncalo and Sharon Kim of Cornell University and Francis Flynn of Stanford University paired up 76 college students and asked one person to develop and pitch a concept for a movie to the other. The ideas were not stellar; one of the more creative, Goncalo says, involved a mafia family run by a young woman. But when pitched by the most narcissistic students (as evaluated by a 16-item questionnaire called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory), the ideas impressed the person evaluating the pitch roughly 50% more than did those from the least narcissistic pitchers. (The researchers judged the response to the ideas by how strongly the evaluator agreed with statements such as “it is unlikely that anyone has come up with a movie idea like this before.”)

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From The Economist,

In the run-up to the climate-change conference in Copenhagen last year, a curvy graph was passed around by policymakers and NGOs. It showed various options for cutting carbon-dioxide emissions. At one end of the chart were simple efficiency improvements which would both cut CO2 and save money; at the other end were costly technologies like nuclear power and carbon capture. Climate-watchers found the graph useful for demonstrating how many money-saving or cheap technologies there were. As one veteran put it, “We all speak McKinsey’s language now.” The graph was indeed put together not by a tree-hugging NGO, but by the for-profit consultancy.

All consulting firms seek to provide what they annoyingly call “thought leadership”. McKinsey’s rival, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), became well known in part by distributing its ideas freely. Consultancies now put out short opinionated papers as well as data-laden reports such as BCG’s recent one on wind power in China or PricewaterhouseCooper’s on electronic health records. Fiona Czerniawska of Sourceforconsulting.com says the number of such reports from the top 25 firms has quintupled since 2004. Free reports are expensive to produce: Tom Rodenhauser of Kennedy Information, a firm that monitors consultancies, reckons they cost up to 5% of gross revenues. Are they worth it?

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From The Economist

It can be surprisingly hard to tell when an organisation has failed. Businesses have products that never quite got off the ground, investments with ugly returns and once-promising managers languishing ineffectively for years. But when outside observers, including well-intentioned researchers, come calling, companies are not in a hurry to talk about it.

Peter Madsen, of Brigham Young University in Utah, and Vinit Desai, of the University of Colorado at Denver, ran into this problem while trying to investigate how organisations learn from both successful and failed ventures, and how that knowledge is retained over time. Their solution was to examine firms, private and public, that launch rockets designed to place satellites into orbit around the Earth. As the authors explain in a recently-published paper in the Academy of Management Journal, when a satellite fails it is easily identifiable (either the rocket makes into space, or it doesn’t); costly; and “often very loud”.

Moreover, the pair were able to take a large sample: all orbital launch attempts between October 1957 (the deployment of the first Sputnik) and March 2004. They wanted to see how, for any given company, its successes or failures, and those of its rivals, influenced its ability to get subsequent rockets into space. The authors also wanted to measure whether success depended on how long had passed since the previous launch. This, they hoped, would measure of whether the company was retaining the lessons that needed to be learned.

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